Permanent Changes
Chapter Five: In Time, the Mind Follows
Henry made a trip to his car when he woke the next morning. He hated leaving his charge alone but it couldn’t be helped. He needed food and he needed it badly. He had passed out the night before, shortly after putting Sarah to sleep. He slept for almost 12 hours, the mental exhaustion having completely overwhelmed him. Fearing her resistance, he had constructed an awfully detailed dream for her, but it had taken the last bit of his energy.
Dreams were a necessary part of his long-term conditioning process. The beauty of dreams is that the dreamer is almost entirely defenseless. While dreaming, your own mind often creates a new past and present for you and it rarely revolts at the changes. In her dream, Sarah was already a slave who loved her life. Those feelings were the ones Henry hoped to instill in her permanently. He was counting on the remembered pleasure of the dream to help him with it.
Henry had learned about the power of dreams early. He had tried to make permanent changes to one of his first conquests after the two-years of celibacy he spent honing his powers. She was just barely an adult, a high school senior at a local school Henry saw one day in a mall.
He had taken her back to his apartment and fucked her silly, of course. Then he really got into her head while she slept next to him. Her name was Jessica and she was a nice girl with a bright future and he had fixed that.
Thinking about that bothered him now, on many levels. One was the crudeness of his methods. Henry had read her mind as she slept and he whispered dreams for her to have, dreams in which she was a slut and a whore and a stripper, in which she dressed like a porn star and fucked whatever moved. They spent a day like that, Henry acting as a tour guide through an increasingly twisted version of her mind in which she loved her new life.
Then he let Jessica go. He followed her, pleased that his initial suggestions worked. She stopped going to school, she blew all her money on trashy clothes and trashier lingerie. He watched her blow a stranger behind a grocery store for $10 while he masturbated and came thinking about how much control he had.
But after about a week things stopped working the way they were supposed to. Jessica started resisting. When Henry would check in he could easily nudge her back on track, but one day when he walked into her house—he always walked in unannounced and simply made himself unseen by her family members—he found her spilling her guts to her family, telling them she had been abducted and describing what Henry looked like.
Henry panicked, projected strongly that they all forget everything, and fled. He left the country even, spent some time in Europe. That was where he met Sergei and learned he was not alone in his powers and particular tastes.
Another thing that bothered him about the whole Jessica incident was how senseless it had been. There was no reason to alter her that way, no reason to turn Little Miss Wholesome into Little Miss Whore. Altering others just for the heck of it was classless, Henry eventually decided. If he saw somebody he wanted, sure, sometimes on an impulse he’d enjoy a weekend of her servitude now and again. But nothing permanent unless there was an end goal.
He set the cardboard box he retrieved from his car on the floor next to his suitcase and shut and locked the motel room door. From inside the box he withdrew a liter of water and several energy bars. He consumed them, glad to feel his strength returning. Henry would have liked a proper breakfast, but he was not about to leave the motel for an extended period of time. His commands for her to sleep were strong, but they would not last forever.
Feeling closer to himself once more, he sat down on the bed next to Sarah. Henry had slept naked next to her the whole night, but he had been so exhausted he didn’t have a chance to appreciate it. In the late morning light that streamed through the edges of the window she looked as lovely as ever sleeping peacefully.
He took his clothes off again and laid down next to her. He rolled her onto her back and ran a hand across her chest, admiring the feel of her firm tits. They were natural D-cups, something he appreciated. One of the nice things about carefully picking a subject was that she could match exactly what he wanted.
Henry squeezed one of her breasts and flicked his tongue over her nipple. She tasted a little saltier than he expected and he wondered if perhaps she had not cleaned herself off properly from last night’s fun. She would learn, he thought. He rolled on his side and put a hand between her legs. Sarah squeezed her thighs together and moaned softly and he smiled. He glanced into her mind.
And he was immediately shocked by what he found. She was begging her dream-master to fuck her anally. He had not told her to do that! Most interesting, he thought. He wandered a bit inside her head, careful now not to disturb anything. He was simply gathering data for later. He then whispered to her to wake up slowly, telling her again that she was not to make any loud noises or attempts to harm him or to escape. Finally, he told her to wake up.
Sarah came to slowly, shaking her head in an attempt to clear the mental fog that had been so prevalent in sleep. She rolled over, saw Henry smiling at her and recoiled. Pushing his hands away from her she stood up quickly, covering herself with a sheet. “You bastard,” she said. She found herself again unable to speak above a hush.
Henry’s smile only broadened. “Did you have pleasant dreams, my dear Sarah?” he asked, the tone of his voice as real as artificial sweetener.
Her mind recoiled as it half-remembered the dreams she had all night. She realized she was wet once again for reasons beyond her control.
“You always get wet for reasons beyond your control,” Henry said. If she wasn’t going to talk out loud, he’d respond to what she was saying in her mind. “That’s why my method is so effective, you know. Conscious decisions are difficult to control, but automatic responses are simple. I can manipulate your senses, your motor functions, even your arousal much easier than I can your actual thoughts. I get to talk to your brain on a deeper level than you’re even aware exists. In time, the conscious mind follows.”
“No,” Sarah said. Mustering up a bit of courage, she was able to put a touch of defiance in her voice. “No, it won’t.”
“It always does. My method is based around basic laws of behavior. The mind is a system that seeks to maximize pleasure and happiness. All I have to do is change what makes you happy and you do the rest.”
“You’re wrong. I would never be happy as a slave.”
“What about last night?” he asked. “What about your dreams?”
The memory of her dreams both terrified and aroused her. “That was fake. And even if I,” Sarah fumbled for the exact words, “even if I liked some of the sensations, that wasn’t happiness.”
“Tsk-tsk. You’re making the same mistake everyone does. There is no difference between the two.”
Engaged in an actual conversation for the first time since her abduction, Sarah’s mind came to life. She was smart, a woman who had always done well in philosophy courses in school. “Pleasure is temporary,” she said. “Happiness is about something more. And humans can deny ourselves pleasure to achieve happiness.”
Henry laughed. “Humans can deny themselves small pleasures for short periods of time, but if something is pleasurable enough and a person is deprived of it long enough, he or she will give in. As you will find out.”
Sensing he was wrapping up the conversation, Sarah changed topics. “So, what? You’re gonna rewire me and sell me off as a whore?”
“Hardly. My business is not about that. There is an unending supply of beautiful women who willingly become prostitutes.”
“Some sort of mindless sex slave then?”
“Not exactly that, either,” Henry said. “The men I sell to are extremely wealthy. They are capable of getting laid without my assistance. No, what they want is companionship without all the demands a companion places on them. I picked you because you are intelligent and would be a good wife, capable of running a household for some wealthy gentleman. You will be, in fact, the perfect wife; drop-dead gorgeous and always accommodating of any request and never complaining about a thing.”
“That’s sick.”
Henry chuckled a bit. “Perhaps so. But we cannot chat all day, no matter how much you may wish. We have a busy agenda!”
“Wait,” she said. “One more question. Why would you do all of this? If you can control minds there must be easier ways to make money.”
“Oh, of course there are. But none of them are nearly as much fun.”