The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The front of the truck burst through the chain-link gate. I blinked involuntarily at the impact, but didn’t slow down. Mike sat expressionless in the passenger seat as I accelerated the semi up Ferry Point Drive, and swung west onto Tower Avenue. The buildings of the defunct Alameda Naval Air Station flew by the tinted windows.

“Hurry, Alex! They’ve reached the bottom of White Building. He’s going into the cafeteria! He just keeps shooting while they sit there!” Lani’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Even through the tiny speaker in my ear, I could hear her sobbing.

“Lani, baby,” I tried to break through her hysteria. “Let’s concentrate on our own people. How’s the evacuation going?”

“It’s...it’s—”

“We’re almost clear from Orange Building, Alex,” Vivian’s voice cut in. “Everyone’s moving in a very orderly fashion out the back. We don’t have enough vehicles to drive this many, so we have them walking east. There’s a bowling alley less than two kilometers away, and they’ve been instructed to gather there.”

“Good job, beautiful,” I said. “Keep watch on the Sentinel, and if he even looks toward your location, you get out of there as fast as you can. Hear me?”

“Yes, Alex. Be careful out there.”

The cluster of administration buildings appeared in front of me, and I swung the truck into the driveway, then bounced up the curb, and onto the wide dirt path that headed around the rear of the largest structure. The trailer zig-zagged in our wake, and threatened to jackknife, but I slowed down enough to recover, and we slid to a stop near the back doors.

I jumped down too quickly from the cab of the truck, and my boots skidded on the loose gravel. The weight of my pack had upset my balance, but I was being too hasty as well. I needed to calm down, and think through the possible scenarios, even if it cost me precious time—time in which the Sentinel was calmly walking through the buildings of Rollins-Chiu, killing everyone in sight.

Mike was out of the cab, waiting for orders. He handled his bulky pack with an ease that made me jealous. I waved him to the side, to cover me as I approached the building.

The metal double doors were rusted, but fresh scratches showed that they’d been used recently. I pressed the explosive charge against the seam, and pulled the switch from the recess in the side. A telltale blinked, showing me it was armed. I jogged behind the truck, and waved at Mike to take cover.

“Blowing the doors now,” I said over the comm.

The explosion was almost anticlimactic, as most of the force and the noise was carried inward by the shaped charge. Which was fine, since that was exactly what I wanted—for Albert the Alien to know that we were here, and had come with dangerous intent.

“Alex! They’re leaving!” Lani’s voice sounded relieved. “The Sentinel just picked up the Arbiter and carried her out to the car. They’re probably headed your way. Get ready.”

“Yes, baby. Just get all of our people away from there. I’ll see you soon.” I switched channels on the comm. “Kara, how are things coming?”

“I don’t know, Alex,” she answered. “We’re testing as we go. There’s no guarantee that the interface will work like we discussed.”

“What does Anatoly say?”

“He says of course it will work because he built it.”

I had to smile at that, even under the circumstances.

“What about Mateo?” I asked. “Is he ready?”

“Ready? He’s practically foaming at the mouth with anticipation.”

“Well don’t let him get too excited. I’m releasing our package in five minutes. That should give him some time to test his reflexes.”

“OK, Alex, we’ll try to be ready.”

I moved to the back of the truck, and opened the rear doors. I tossed a Faraday helmet to Mike, and picked up the blue globe of my trusty Arbiter’s helmet. Even after all of the abuse I’d put it through, the surface was smooth and blemish free. The geek in me couldn’t wait to reverse engineer it once this was over.

“Put the helmet on, Mike, and get inside,” I said. “Stay on channel four. I’ll let you know when to administer the antagonist.”

I shifted the pack on my shoulders, trying to ease the weight of the transmitter and power supply that I carried. Mike slung his rifle, and levered himself into the trailer. He picked up a large syringe, and knelt down next to the sedated body of our Fresno Sentinel.

“Tracking shows them heading through the south gate now, Alex.”

“Thanks, Amber. OK, let’s keep channels three and four clear from now on. Continue the evacuation, and try to get as much of our tech out of the building as you can.”

“Yes, Alex. Stay safe. I love you.” A chorus of agreement followed, as all of my girls added their own wishes.

I switched off the general channel, and over to my feed from Kara. “How’s Mateo doing?” I asked.

“See for yourself, sir,” the voice of the crippled sergeant came through. There was a crash behind me, and I spun around, instinctively raising my rifle.

The Fresno Sentinel stood next to the truck’s cab, his head covered in metal mesh. There was a deep, fist-shaped dent in the side of the truck that hadn’t been there before. “So the interface is working?”

“It’s clunky, sir, but operational, kind of like a tactical drone. I doubt I’ll have the reflexes to run him as well as the aliens do, but I’m hoping I have a better skill set than them when it comes to personal combat.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the aliens up close, and I doubt they know much kung fu.”

“That may be true, sir, but from what I remember, the general signals come into the helmet, and then the experience of the individual soldier takes over. I was trained in Army Modified Krav Maga at Fort Benning, and qualified Expert in pistol and rifle marksmanship, but I have no idea what Sammy here has for combat training.”

“Sammy?” I asked.

“Sammy the Sentinel,” Kara said. “Like Albert the Alien. We had to call him something.”

“All right, Sammy it is. How’s the visual feed?” I waved my hand in the air as Sammy’s head turned in my direction.

“Adequate, sir.”

“What about interference from Albert?” I asked.

“We’re getting some bleed through the cap, but I don’t think it’s enough to counter our own signals, as long as you keep the transmitter in range.”

“I’ll try,” I said, shifting my pack again. “Can you—”

“Alex, they’re almost there,” Amber’s voice cut in.

“Right. OK, places everyone. Break a leg, Mateo.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Mike and I scaled the fire escape on the outside of the two story building, and made it to the roof. The white Mercedes SUV had just entered the parking lot, and bounced up the curb to head around the back. I shucked my pack, and set it on the wide ledge of the parapet, about five meters from where Mike squatted, then rejoined him while reaching for the Arbiter’s helmet.

As the iris closed around my neck, and the cameras blinked on, I saw the Mercedes skid to a stop just behind the semi. The Sentinel leaped out, his rifle coming up almost immediately. The Arbiter climbed out more sedately, and rotated slowly in a circle, bringing the sensors in her helmet to bear on the surroundings.

I tapped Mike on the shoulder, and he lifted his rifle over the building’s edge. As fast as he was, the Sentinel was almost faster. Mike fired, and then ducked as shards of concrete sprayed over us from the Sentinel’s return fire. I felt it ping off the Arbiter’s helmet, and saw several angry gouges open up on Mike’s face and neck. The fire continued until the Sentinel’s magazine was empty.

The remote camera on the back of the truck showed his large, armored form moving toward the fire escape ladder, reloading as he ran. Behind him, the Arbiter sank to the ground, a dart protruding from her shoulder.

“Now, Mateo!” I shouted.

Just as the Sentinel grabbed the first rung of the fire escape, bullets chewed into the armor on his torso. They knocked him back so he landed on his ass, but quick as red lightning he was on his feet again, and rushing toward the new threat. Sammy poked his head out from behind the cab of the truck , and opened fire again. The force of his bullets staggered the charging juggernaut, but didn’t seem to be damaging him. Sparks flew, and metal shattered as the Sentinel returned fire, chewing up the front of the truck. Sammy stood his ground, as bullets pinged off his own armor.

Both rifles emptied as the distance between the two red warriors closed. Sammy slung his gun behind him, and took up a stance to meet the other Sentinel’s charge. I expected a crash like two freight trains colliding, but instead, Sammy pivoted on his back foot, and spun his opponent off his feet. The mass of the Sentinel rocked the truck as it slammed into the side, but an impact that would have killed a normal human barely fazed Albert’s minion. He scrambled upright, and turned to face his strange new attacker.

The two armored puppets squared off like wrestlers, circling cautiously, with their arms in motion, fingers flexing. At some unseen signal, they both charged, and a flurry of lightning strikes and counters flew between them. The enemy Sentinel was faster, launching more blows than Sammy, but Mateo’s puppet fought...dirtier somehow. More savage. At one point, Sammy had the other Sentinel’s arm in a vice grip, and the audio in my helmet picked up the crack as he bent three fingers backward. Pieces of red armor fell to the dirt, followed by sprays of red blood.

Sammy went down, from a heavy blow to his knee, and the other Sentinel was on top of him, pounding at his head with his remaining good hand. Sammy lifted an arm to guard his face, while he wrapped a leg around the other fighter’s waist. With a heave, Sammy rolled them over, ending up on top of his opponent. The other Sentinel tried to roll as well, but all he managed to do was end up face down on the ground, with Sammy kneeling on his back.

Through the interface, Mateo was able to direct his alter ego to plant one knee high on his opponent’s back, wedge his arms under the other’s armored shoulders, and heave. The back of the Sentinel bowed under the pressure, and I heard a grinding sound as his armored plates flexed in a way that they weren’t designed to do. Both fighters’ faces were locked in grimaces of exertion.

“Sorry, brother,” Mateo’s voice came over the channel. Sammy shrugged his enhanced shoulders, and the spine of the nameless Sentinel snapped, in the same spot that Mateo had broken his own back. Design flaw, Anatoly had called it.

Sammy got to his feet, and stood silently, while Mateo’s heavy breathing came through the comm. The enemy Sentinel whirled on the ground like a dervish, using his arms to fling himself about. I had to wonder if it was Albert sending panicked signals to his minion, or if we had short-circuited the Sentinel’s interface somehow. He stopped spinning, and I saw him claw his way toward his rifle, lying in the dirt near the destroyed truck.

“Mateo,” I said over the comm, “you need to get a net over him. Disrupt the signals he’s receiving, and he’ll lock up in pain.”

“Roger, sir.” Sammy grabbed the crippled Sentinel by the ankle and dragged him across the dirt toward the rear of the truck.

Mike and I climbed down the fire escape, but kept our distance from the two red men. Mike had a handkerchief against his shrapnel wounds, and I sent him to search through the wreckage of the cab for a first aid kit. I went to the unconscious Arbiter, and checked her pulse. This one looked cleaner, and more fit, than any other Arbiter I had seen. She must have been a fresh conversion.

I clicked over to the general channel. “Everyone check in,” I said. As my girls reported their status, I looked over at the mangled back door of the building. Somewhere inside, Albert the Alien waited, with no one to defend him.

For the third time in as many months, I walked down the stairs toward an encounter with an alien.

Mike followed, covering my back. Memories of Eddie came to me, and I almost sent him back upstairs, out of harm’s way, but then the same common sense that had ruled my decisions for almost a year took over. As much as I hated to admit it, Mike was a weapon in my arsenal, just as much as the rifle in my hands. With the way that Anatoly had fried his amygdala, he would never feel or empathize again, regardless of what cures we came up with for the aliens’ mind control. He felt no fear, and wouldn’t understand any explanation I gave him about not wanting to risk his life. If he was hurt in any way, I was the only one that would feel for him, and I couldn’t let my feelings interfere with the mission.

The basement of the admin building was laid out differently than the other two alien hideouts I’d been in, but I was getting better at knowing what to look for—two rooms, side by side, with clear conduits to the first floor transmission equipment. We’d found the equipment room upstairs, and come down the stairwell closest to it. A map tacked to the stairwell door showed a cluster of four rooms that looked like our best candidates.

Sure enough, the bright orange glow leaking from the bottom of one door beckoned us forward. I had Mike kick in the door, and I took point into the “egg-and-torso” room. It looked identical to the one in Salt Lake, other than the walls being painted a sickly pea-green color. The egg glowed in the far end of the room, and the torso-boxes lined up neatly against the near side.

From what my engineering minions, and Anatoly had been able to deduce, the egg was a combination energy supply, signal processor, and CPU for each alien’s operation. Destroying it would definitely shut down the transmissions, and would most likely shut off the life support for the alien, and for the torsos, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to destroy it just yet. I suspected that the explosion in Salt Lake City had been a failsafe triggered in some way by the destruction of the egg. What I didn’t know, was if the blast had come from some device already in place, or whether it had been delivered by other aliens when they figured out what happened to their fellow invader.

We had no word from Fresno yet, if that city had suffered the same fate, so there was nothing that we could establish as a cause and effect relationship. But anything I could do to prevent the aliens from blowing up the East Bay, I would have to try, including not repeating the actions of Salt Lake. With my Arbiter’s helmet in place, I didn’t feel as exposed as before, so I wandered through the room, casually checking each of the boxes, and examining the surface of the giant egg.

As if on cue, the wall between the two rooms went transparent, and I was staring at Albert the Alien in the flesh. He sat on his round ass, on the padded floor of his room. I had watched the vid of my first encounter so many times, that the differences between Alistair and Albert leapt out at me. Albert was taller, by perhaps ten centimeters, and larger around the middle. His skin wasn’t as dull as Alistair, more of a cerulean blue than a blue-grey, and his magenta bodysuit didn’t clash nearly as much. The collection of triangular protrusions around his “head” was denser than his former associate as well, combining more nodules of a smaller size. Overall, he looked like a younger, healthier version of Alistair, although that was a large assumption on my part—maybe the aliens aged backwards or some such, so Albert was really the old man in the comparison.

In any case, Earth’s invaders didn’t look all that physically dangerous. It was only when I remembered the mushroom cloud over Salt Lake City, Eddie’s lifeless body on the floor, and Lani’s frantic cries about the Sentinel shooting everyone in White Building, that I recognized the little egg-shaped guy as a cold, callous, murdering, blue motherfucker. My anger built as I watched him sit there, perfectly still. Their lack of a face made it difficult to figure out their attitude, but I knew that if he had any way to do it, he would be trying to kill me right now.

His silence, and my growing fury had me on the verge of setting an explosive charge against the clear panel, regardless of consequences, when Mike tapped me lightly on the shoulder. “Alex, comms. Lani needs you, urgent.”

I’d switched off my incoming comms, but had Mike leave his on for occasions just like this. I switched over, while still staring at the alien. “Go ahead, Lani.”

“Alex! There a ship right above you! One of those metallic ones that comes on the eight-days. It just appeared in the sky, right over your position.”

“Is it doing anything?” I asked. “Is there anything sticking out of it, like guns, or Sentinels parachuting to the ground?”

“No, baby,” she said. “It’s just sitting there.”

“OK, Lani. Thanks.”

“Wait! What do you mean, ‘thanks?’ Aren’t you leaving?”

“I don’t think so. Call Mike if it does anything unusual, OK? Love you.” I clicked off the comm and went back to staring at the alien. Why would a ship appear above us, and then do nothing? It was like an Army helicopter hovering over a battlefield and not firing. The only thing I could think of, was that Albert was still alive, and they didn’t want to kill him with friendly fire. The transmitter, and the orange egg-CPU were still active, so he must be communicating with Alien Central Command, but what was he telling them?

It was so frustrating not knowing what these invaders wanted. Everything about them was so...non-human. It was painfully evident from the fact that they needed eight human brains to even translate their thoughts into something that could interface with us. I looked down at the boxes containing the grisly evidence of our differences. One woman’s torso floating in the orange gel had a faint line across her abdomen—a Cesarian scar. It had been a poorly done operation, to leave such evidence, but the fact remained that this thing in the box, being used by Albert, had once been someone’s mother.

The creature’s calm indifference behind the transparent wall only added to my fury and frustration. I fished inside my tactical vest until I found the small black box. Putting it directly over the flayed skull and exposed brain of a male torso, I toggled the external speaker.

“What the fuck do you want?!” I screamed into my mike. My voice bounced around inside the helmet, and set up a strange feedback as it boomed out of the speaker, and back into my audio pickups. “Why can’t you leave us alone?”

The torso in the tank thrashed around briefly, and I nearly fell over in surprise as Albert moved out of his statue pose. He pivoted on his round base, and just like I’d seen his fellow alien do in Salt Lake, he picked up an object and placed it over his “face”—the spot where the four smooth circles of flesh formed a diamond pattern amidst the spiky surface.

Mike and I both raised our rifles, but there was no sudden, stabbing pain like before. Instead, the man in the tank opened his mouth, and moaned. My audio pickups caught the bubbling, gurgling sound, just as the male next to him came to life and did the same thing. Then two women. Then all of them at once. My skin crawled as I listened to this macabre choir of voices directed by the alien.

“What are you doing?” I said through the speaker.

The voices paused. When they resumed, their sound had changed, rising and falling in a strange harmony. There was a pattern to it, six beats that repeated over and over.

I triggered my comm. “Lani, are you getting the audio from my helmet?”

“Yes. We’re recording everything. But Alex, that ship is still right above you. I wish you’d leave, baby.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Something’s happening here. Just keep recording.”

I focused back on the chorus of sounds coming from the human bodies. The pattern got faster, and something about it nagged at the back of my mind...something familiar. Albert hadn’t moved, so I waited, and listened.

After maybe ten more repetitions of the pattern, I started getting frustrated again. Mike tapped my shoulder, and pointed at his ear.

“What is it, Lani?”

“Alex, you’ll never believe this. I had Dr. Walsh listen to the sounds, and he picked up on something. Listen when I speed up the playback by a factor of ten.” A click sounded in my ear, and then I heard my own voice speaking to me: “What are you doing?“

“Is that the same thing I said to him a little while ago?”

“Note for note, Alex. He’s varying the pitch and timbre of those poor people’s voices to create a sound that mimics English.”

Jesus. The alien was talking to me! My brain almost exploded with the implications.

I switched back to my external speaker. “Tell me what you want.” I said.

The voices stopped. Albert still hadn’t moved.

I dialed up Lani. “If they start up again, run the recording through that same playback. Speed it up so I can hear it.”

The torsos moaned. I waited until I recognized the repeat point, then opened Lani’s channel again. “Well?”

“He’s just repeating what you said, baby. Listen.” She played back the enhanced recording, and it was my voice again.

So Albert had found a way to mimic human speech, but we still weren’t communicating. I needed time to develop this new capability, but time was something we certainly didn’t have.

The decision to attack Albert’s base had been made on the fly, on our way back from Fresno, as a desperate move to stop the Sentinel from killing everyone at Rollins-Chiu. There hadn’t been any planning beyond the most basic, but the one thing we had agreed on was our time limit. After killing the alien in Fresno and capturing his Sentinel, the next closest alien base was in Redding, a city over three hundred kilometers north of us. If Albert had sent out a call for help, the fastest that a car could get here was around two hours. So unless I wanted to battle another Sentinel, I needed to be out of here in another fifteen minutes. That certainly wasn’t enough time to develop a communication protocol with an alien race.

Then there was still the aftermath of the attack at R-C to deal with. Albert had obviously suspected that something was going on there, and when we’d attacked his buddy in Fresno, he had dispatched his Sentinel to take out what he thought was a nest of rebellious humans.

I was caught in a catch-22, since I could probably spare my headquarters from further attacks by killing Albert, but the lesson of Salt Lake said that if I did that, more than a million people could die in the reprisals. I had hoped that the confusion of killing the Fresno alien with his own Sentinel would stave off the explosion; that they would think their armored creation had been faulty and acted without any directions from the human rebellion. They would chalk up his death to a defective product, and not act out against the civilians. But there was no way to know what Albert had reported back to his superiors about this attack. We hadn’t been able to shut down the transmitter, and the presence of the silver ship overhead indicated that he’d gotten out some kind of warning.

I didn’t see any solution for my problems. No good one at least. And now, suddenly on the cusp of opening communications with the invaders, I had to cut and run.

In order to buy us some time, I’d planned on isolating Albert from all of his support equipment, including this collection of torsos, and his power supply. Theoretically that would cut him off from controlling any more Arbiters or Sentinels, and keep him stuck inside his habitat until help came.

I went to the egg that dominated the room, and examined the tubes and wires that ran in and out of it. Most of them disappeared into the walls or the ceiling, with no way to trace their purpose, but the eight than ran across the floor were pretty obvious, as each one attached to a box holding a torso.

I took a cutting tool from a pocket of my vest, and bent over to examine the thick cables coming out of the generator/CPU.

“He’s moving.” Mike’s voice came over the comm, and I abandoned the cables to look back through the window. Albert had levered up onto his back legs, and waddled closer to the transparent wall. I straightened up and faced him, waiting for his next move.

“Down!” Mike’s shout echoed in my ears, but his warning was too late. A cable had sprung from high up on the egg, and attached itself to the surface of my Arbiter’s helmet. I saw it waving in front of one of my cameras, and felt the impact as the end touched the helmet. Before I could pull away, the cable latched on to the smooth blue surface, and then retracted, pulling my head into contact with the top of the machine.

Lights flashed in my eyes, and even after I squeezed them tight, they flickered behind my eyelids. A cacophony of white noise pounded at my eardrums. All of my limbs locked, as power surged through my body. The interior of the helmet heated up like an oven, and a thousand needles pierced the skin on my face.

[do not interfere with us, human...]

[He looks so sweet when he’s sleeping. All of his worry goes away. God, I love him so much.]

I jolted upright in the soft bed. Lani yelped next to me, then put her soft hand on my shoulder.

“It’s all right, Alex. You’re safe here.” [I wish I could take his hurt away...look at how his face changes. I’m so sorry, baby.]

I reached out and patted her bare thigh. “It’s OK, Lani,” I said. “It’s not your fault. I can handle it.”

She straddled my legs, and looped her arms around my neck. Her warm breasts rubbed against my chest. “Promise?” she said.

I put my hands on her hips, and gave her a long kiss. “Promise.” I said.

[He’s lying...but I still love him...]

I flashed her a reassuring smile, even as a dull pain expanded from the base of my skull. “Where’s Dr. Montoya?” I asked.

[Oh, god, what’s wrong?] “Do you feel all right? Does it hurt?”

“I said I’m fine, Lani. I just wanted to go over her findings again. Why don’t you see if you can find her. And Dr. Goldberg. And probably Dr. Li.” I patted her hip as she climbed off me, my hard cock tenting my boxers from when she’d rubbed against it. Her slim body looked gorgeous as I watched her pull on her clothes, although her ribs were more pronounced than before. Probably not eating enough in her worry; I’d have to talk with her about that.

Just as she opened the door to leave, Vivian came in, trailed by her daughter. They both gave me a bright smile, but I could feel the worry under Vivian’s facade, and actually hear what Erica thought. [Those burns look terrible. My poor Alex, I hope it doesn’t hurt. Why won’t anyone tell me what I can do to help?]

“Hey, beautiful,” I said. “And beautiful’s beautiful daughter.” Vivian shook her head while Erica blushed.

“You up for some decisions?” the older Zaluski woman asked.

“Sure. Although you’ve done a spectacular job without me, so far. Have I thanked you for that yet?”

“About a thousand times,” Vivian said. “Enough about it. You would have done the same for me, and probably done it smoother.”

“I doubt it. But what decisions do you need from me?”

“Well, to start with, our prisoners.” I winced inwardly at that word, since I didn’t like to consider myself a dictator who locked people up because they went against him. But still, what else to call them?

“Have Cassie and Anatoly had any luck getting the helmets off our two Arbiters?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Which makes it almost a week that we’ve kept them sedated and on feeding tubes. It can’t be good for them, Alex. We have no idea what’s going on inside their heads, and we can’t test anything about their brains while they’re still sealed in their fishbowls.”

“I don’t want to just rip the connection out of their brains, like what happened to Kara,” I said. “Let our two scientists keep trying. If they haven’t solved it in the next...say three days, we’ll come back to it.”

Vivian nodded. She didn’t carry a pad, but she seemed to have a great memory for detail, so I’m sure she just made a note on her mental checklist.

“And the crippled Sentinel?” she continued. “The doctors say his vitals are strong, but he probably suffered brain damage when his heart stopped on the way back from Alameda. His spine took a lot more damage than Mateo’s did, too. He’ll probably never regain the fine motor control in his hands and arms.”

“You’re saying he’s not worth keeping?”

She frowned at me. “You know me better than that, Alex. I hate to see anyone die, especially people who had no choice in what they did. If he was an alien, it would be a different story, but he’s a young man who joined the military to serve his country. I was a Marine wife for twenty-five years, remember.”

“I’m sorry, Viv,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

[What way? What are they talking about?] Erica’s mental block against conflict wouldn’t even let her track that we were discussing killing someone. It’s what made people like her mother so valuable to the fight, even though it put a huge burden on her. The only people in my “army,” who could physically harm another person, were my six remaining brain-fried drones, a young former barista, a nerdy Brit grad student, a paraplegic soldier, and Vivian. She was a military wife who knew about guns, knew about violence, and had the practical attitude of someone who had lived through adversity for a long time.

In the long run, the Sentinel would be worth saving, just like any other human life, but in the short term, we weren’t capable of caring for him without using resources that we couldn’t spare. I decided that I would deal with the crippled Sentinel myself. Either I would do it, or get one of my psychopathic minions to. Either way, I didn’t want the burden on this sweet woman.

“I’ll talk to Mateo, and see what he thinks. Let’s tackle this again at the same time as the Arbiters, OK?” She nodded. “So what else?” I asked.

“This place.” She waved her hand around at the fakewood walls, and living redwood tree in the corner of the room. “Are you sure it’s secure from the aliens?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “We only found it through a broken pic viewer. And with Todd and JJ both dead, there’s no way that Albert’s new Arbiter can pull it from their minds.” No one had shown me the footage yet, but Lani had confirmed that the Sentinel had killed both the heads of Rollins-Chiu.

When the girls had discussed places to hide my unconscious body from the aliens, Scarlett and Jill both remembered the location of Todd’s retreat in the mountains. The “rustic” mansion of vid mogul Andre Golden now housed twenty-three people, and a shitload of medical gear. Amber had hijacked the medical staff from the Neuroscience Center, and delivered them, along with a truck full of delicate equipment, to the mansion.

[Maybe if I gave him a blowjob, that would make him feel better...] I glanced over at Erica, to see her eyeing the bulge in my shorts.

“Not right now, Erica,” I said. The young redhead jumped, as I answered her unspoken thought. Vivian raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“I know this place is out of the way,” I said, “which makes logistics tough, but I think we should stay scattered for the moment. I don’t want to risk gathering everyone in a single spot until we’ve had a chance to re-evaluate our security.” I had been too lax in covering our tracks at R-C, or at least that’s what I told myself. It was my poor planning that had killed over four hundred people in White Building six days ago.

“Scattered is the right word,” she said. “We’re all over the map; from the science guys we moved to Lawrence Livermore Labs in the east, to the engineers at Vail MicroElectronics in the north, and us down here in the south, we’re in an area probably two hundred kilometers in diameter.”

“It’s inconvenient,” I said, “but it’s safe.”

“I’m not so sure. Communications seems secure, but it’s all the movement I don’t like. We have more vehicles going in and out of each location now, for logistics, for equipment deliveries, and for transferring people. We’re more likely to be noticed because of some kind of abnormal travel behavior.”

I sighed. She was right, but there wasn’t a perfect solution here. We all had to live and work under the threat of discovery, and if we had to take extra precautions now, that we didn’t have to earlier, then we would just have to deal with it. “Nothing we can do, beautiful, sorry.”

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think my husband apologized to anyone in his entire life. It’s kind of sexy when you get all humble and contrite like this.” She grinned to let me know she was playing, but Erica eyed me like a hungry cat.

[He’s always sexy, mom. I wish he’d let me get in bed with him...]

Vivian must have caught me staring at her daughter. “Is it happening now?” she asked. “Can you really hear her?”

I nodded. “I don’t know how it works, or how to turn it off, or...anything really. I’ve got the doctors coming back in so we can take another look.”

“And is it everyone that’s near you, or how does it work?”

I shook my head. “Not everyone. Not you, or Cassie, or Mateo. With the converted, I get some things, but not a lot. It mostly works with the women that I ‘freed,’ like Erica.”

“What about Kara?” she asked. “She was never converted.”

“Kara’s a different story. We both wore the helmet, and we both had our brains messed with by the aliens, but she had a direct connection in her brain through the cable, and, well, she’s girl.”

“What does that matter?”

“Arbiters are all women, and their control by the aliens is through overstimulation of the pleasure centers. Kara’s ability to read the converted comes from the way they programmed her while she was out of her mind with pleasure. In my case, I was a man wearing a girl’s helmet, without the direct connection to my brain, and with different triggers based on biology.”

“But does that mean you can’t hear Kara?”

“It means I haven’t tried,” I said. “Kara and I had an...odd encounter, after she recovered from her ordeal. She said that she still felt the alien in her head, controlling her pleasure, and that she needed to replace his ‘voice’ with someone else’s. So she traded Albert for me. Now though, I’m afraid of what effect I’ll have on her if I get too close. If my ability to project has been increased as much as my ability to receive, I may end up controlling her, even though I don’t intend to.”

[What would be so bad about that? It’s wonderful belonging to him.]

“I said controlling Erica, not belonging.”

Vivian took a moment to suss that out, then gave her daughter a strange look. I didn’t have to interpret Erica’s reaction, because I heard it echoing in my brain—she wasn’t the least bit ashamed of belonging to me, and thought it would be great if every woman felt just like her.

“Well, you’ll have to do it eventually,” Vivian said. “Be in the same room, I mean.”

“I know, but I want the doctors to have another look before we try. I also need to know if I’m being controlled in any way. Albert might have gotten to me, and I might not even know it until I betrayed us all. That’s the reason I always want you close.”

“Because I’m one of the only people who can take you out, if necessary,” she said.

Erica gasped at her mother’s words. [No! No, no, no, no, no...]

“It’s all right, Erica,” I said. I waved her over, and she happily climbed on the bed with me. She reached for the buttons on her shirt, but I held her hands and had her look into my eyes. “I’m commanding you now,” I said in my “forceful” voice. “You will not be upset by anything your mother has to do to me. Do you understand?” She nodded, and I let her go.

She didn’t take that as a dismissal. [Now I can get his yummy cock.] Her hands pulled down my shorts before I could stop her, and my protest died in my throat, as her warm lips wrapped around me. Vivian stood there, watching her daughter bob up and down on my dick, until I shrugged my shoulders and motioned her over as well. She peeled off her tight top, and got on the bed, moving up to give me a wet kiss. I knew Lani would be back in a minute, with three doctors in tow, but such were the ways of the new world...

“How’s it going, Mateo?”

“Great, sir. Glad you could make it.” The crippled Sentinel was in his motorized chair, examining something on a terminal.

“How is Sammy doing?” I asked.

“We’re making progress, sir. And he’s actually PFC Curtis Wright, USMC, from Mississippi. Nineteen years old.”

“So he’s talking?”

“Yes, sir. The meds have dulled the pain, and having the interface let me keep him calm as we weaned him off the alien signals. He’s still in isolation, but he’s getting better. He’s really a good kid, if you talk to him.”

“I’ll make sure to do that,” I said. “He saved my ass at Alameda. You, too, sergeant.”

With half his face hidden by the helmet, and with his dark skin, it was impossible to see if Mateo blushed, but he turned his head away for a second, staring at his toes. “Just doing my job, sir.”

“Bullshit. While everyone else was panicking, you sent Private Wright in to save me. Without his strength to pull me out of the alien’s grip, who knows what would have happened to my brain. Vivian was about to order Mike to blow up the alien, which might have led to a lot more deaths. But you kept your head, and got me out of there.”

“Well, in that case, thank the U.S. Army, sir. They’re the ones who trained me to stay cool in combat.”

“All right, Mateo,” I said. “I won’t try to embarrass you any more. But you said you had something to tell me?”

“Yes, sir. When Curtis and I talked, we started to remember more about the place where we were changed, and about the conditioning we received in the alien’s facility.”

“Really?” I said. “So what did you remember?”

“Well, it’s not really a single memory, sir. More of a general impression from a lot of different memories. And Private Wright remembers a lot more than I do, but he still has his ups and downs, so it’s hard to get it entirely straight. But anyway, I think the aliens invaded Earth to raise an army. They’re creating soldiers to fight in a war on some other planet, and when they have enough of us converted, they’re going to transport us all to the battlefront.”

That made a lot of sense. It was actually one of the scenarios that Anatoly and I had batted around before he was converted. Why else take all of the military off to some secret location? We figured it was either to execute them, or convert them all into a force to fight for the aliens.

“Any idea when they’re going to finish?” I asked.

Mateo shook his head. “No, sir. Just whenever they have enough soldiers to go on their transports. From the training sims they put us through, their enemy is some kind of six-limbed lizard thing, with skin like clear plex. They didn’t give us the full story, but Private Curtis got the impression that the Chrxjthal are actually the defenders in this war, trying to keep the lizards from taking over their group of planets. We were training to stand and hold, not to attack.”

“So to defend their planet from invasion, they invade another planet?”

“Well, they don’t consider us an evolved race, sir. So it’s more like taking over a planet of monkeys, and arming them to help save a bunch of humans.”

I was pretty sure I’d seen an old movie vid that disagreed with that logic. Whatever their reason for invading us, though, how could this knowledge help us drive them out? Obviously, we were on a timer, since who knew what they would do to us once they had their army ready to go. They had the power to glass the planet if they wanted. Or they might keep us as reserves, in case they needed to create more soldiers at a later date. But the idea of “normal behavior” was starting to crack at the seams, and the human race wouldn’t last much longer if it was simply left to its own devices.

“I need you to record everything that the two of you remember, Sergeant, even if it’s only vague impressions. Make sure you get a copy to Lani so she can update her alien files.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, is Private Wright lucid right now? I’d like to step in and say hi.”

Kara wrapped her legs around my waist as I drove deep into her. She had her eyes closed, and was moaning softly as I covered her tiny body with my large one, crushing her into the mattress while pumping my cock into the warmth of her pussy.

“Oh, fuck, that’s so good,” she panted in my ear. “Oh, god, I’m cumming again...”

She strained her body against me as she trembled through her fourth or fifth orgasm. We were hitting heights of pleasure that I hadn’t thought were possible, like we were feeding off each other in some spiraling, cosmic, Kama Sutra kind of thing. The way our minds were synchronized, each one knowing exactly what to do to stimulate the other, made this the most mind-blowing sex I’d ever had.

Of course, it was all because we’d both had our brains fucked with by the Arbiter’s helmet. I’d had my head scanned and poked and prodded by the best doctors I could find, and they all agreed that my experience at Alameda hadn’t resulted in any harmful damage to my brain. What it had done, was turned my neural pathways into a finely-tuned electromagnetic receiver. That was the reason that I could “hear” all of the thoughts of those women that I had converted back from alien control; their brains had been rewired to the aliens’ specs, and then rewired again my my commands, putting my imprint on their thought processes, and tuning their synaptic responses into frequencies that I was now able to receive.

I felt a little weird, and a little...damaged, somehow. I’d prided myself on staying free of any alien control for almost a year now, as more and more of my fellow Unconverted fell prey to the never-ending attempts of the Chrxjthal to control the planet. I’d put myself in harm’s way, quite a few times, and come out unscathed, but now, through my own carelessness, they’d gotten to me. I had to be grateful that I hadn’t suffered more damage from Albert’s attempt, but I could no longer say I was totally free of alien influence.

Logically, of course, I’d always known that there were many different levels of affect that the alien control could take. It wasn’t like those old zombie movies, where if you got bit, that was it, game over. Instead, it was a matter of how much physical change the EM pulses made to the structure of the brain, and how resilient the brain could be in returning to normal. People who had been subjected to an unfiltered EM pulse had—as far as we knew—irreversible changes, and their behavior could only be modified by commands. People like Kara and me, who’d had our brains messed with, but not permanently changed, could hopefully go back to normal, if and when we had time to study the problem in more detail.

In the meantime, the attraction between the modified parts of our brains had been evident the second that Kara had stepped into the room. My dick swelled in my pants almost immediately, and Kara’s breathing got heavy. We’d tried to stay neutral, talking about various things, like Mateo, and the repopulation of Fresno after the alien explosion failed to materialize. All the time though, my cock throbbed, hard as it had even been, under the covers, while I’d seen Kara’s flushed face, and her pointed nipples poking through the material of her top.

It was a different sort of attraction than I’d felt before. Certainly not physical; even though Kara was a very attractive girl, she couldn’t compete with the likes of Lani or Erica. It wasn’t emotional, not like the slow, languorous draw of someone in love, or even the bright, passionate spark of someone in lust. This was more about connection, and...fit. We fit together now, and while I think that feeling could take several different paths in our relationship, because Kara’s time as an Arbiter had been all about pleasure, at least for this first meeting of our minds, it would be pleasure that ruled the day.

I knew that she wanted me to kiss her neck, while I fucked her from above, and she knew that tilting her hips just so would squeeze my pistoning shaft in the most sensual way. And I knew that she knew it. Just like she knew that I was holding back until this exact moment, and I knew that she would tighten her inner muscles, and run her fingernails down my spine, right...now!...[nalwu...43iuh48p948​[0fjj42930...​r942f...​aj2ppw304wp3094...​g8h678e58e7...​sssaaaarrrrreeelllldddd...​pprroocceedd...​tosector5467.​734forcorpseremovalremainalert...​for insurgents kill any being on sight who does not follow normal behavior protocol...] ...my red armored hands gripped the wheel in a rictus of pain, steering through light traffic on Interstate 580, heading into Berkeley...my head turned constantly, scanning the environment for threats, absorbing the sights and sounds around me, as my cunt throbbed with pleasure...the signal from my Section Leader was plain, root out the insurgents before the fourth eight-day or they would unleash another reaction device, without evacuating me from the post...

Whatever pleasure, and mental connection I’d just experienced by cumming inside Kara, was completely forgotten, as my brain filled with sounds and smells and images and even languages that weren’t mine. Kara pounded on my back with her fists, and I rolled off her. She sat straight up in the bed, staring at me.

“What the fuck was that!”