The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Captain Helga Reine, commander of the deep-space starship “Signet”, admired the spectacular view on the huge telescreen at the front of her bridge. It was almost as good a view as standing on the prow of the ship and staring into the void, with the additional benefit that one didn’t freeze to death and asphyxiate, while being fatally irradiated by gamma rays.

“I don’t think I will ever get tired of looking at this, Number One.”

Her first officer, Commander Frances McKay, walked up to stand by her Captain. McKay was a short redhead whose familial line originated in the Scottish Lowlands, and the visual contrast with the tall, blonde Reine was almost comical. None of the bridge crew would have dared laugh, though. McKay was a martinet, and Reine was the sort of leader whom one crossed at one’s immediate, fatal peril. For a decade-long deep-space mission, they were almost an ideal partnership.

“Quite so, Captain. The most destructive force in the universe—and we orbit it like a cruise ship would a Caribbean island.”

Reine had spent five years with McKay so far, and had therefore learned to detect a hint of disapproval in her tone. She concealed her irritation.

“Think of it as the Galapagos, Number One. A totally new environment, isolated from the rest of the known world.”

“Perhaps, Captain; perhaps. Certainly, unknown to the human species.” They both stared at the black hole LB-1—or at least, at the distorting effects of its huge mass on the local space-time continuum. The telescreen mapped a large portion of the non-visible electromagnetic spectrum to false color representations, so the two officers were able to see much more depth in the image than their unaided eyes could have done.

“You know,” mused McKay, “we have accumulated a lot of data about this black hole over the past three months—but at some point, we have to get it back to Earth for it to be of any value.”

“I agree.” Reine walked back to her console. “But if there’s the prospect of getting a new level and quality of data—that would be worth staying for, would it not?” She tapped at the keyboard. “We have a hideously expensive ship and crew—don’t we have to show a real return on Earth’s investment?”

McKay winced. Reine was doubtless calling back to McKay’s comment several years ago that it would have been cheaper to build the Signet out of solid gold, given the development and manufacturing costs. Ironically, Signet had large stocks of pure gold—some as an engineering reserve for its conductivity and ductility, but most of it as radiation shielding.

Nevertheless, McKay re-joined Reine at the console, and lowered her voice. “The crew aren’t dumb, Captain. They understand the basics of relativity. They know that for every week spent here at this particular meridian of the gravity well means that ten weeks have passed on Earth. We have already pushed out our perceived return date by more than two years. Many of them who have families are worried: What if their children are already fully grown by the time they return to Earth?“

“Let’s discuss this in my office.” Reine led McKay into the small room off the bridge which was Reine’s personal sanctuary—a shrine to science and history, with shelves holding actual leather-bound books, and images of the great scientists of the past 200 years.

Reine sank into her chair, and as the door slid shut, she fixed her 2ic with an armor-piercing glare. “Am I not the captain?” she hissed. “The crew will do as they are instructed. There was no guarantee on the return date—none! And the compensation reflected this. Everyone knew this when they signed up for the ship: Including you, Number One. Do not—do not! challenge my authority in this regard. It is I who will be accountable for our results when we return, and so it is I who decide when we have achieved our mission.“

McKay held her course. “The crew are not automatons, Captain. They will follow your orders, as will I, but as your 2ic it is my job to counsel you—and my counsel is that if we stay here much longer, we will have a very unhappy crew. That’s not good for anyone. Not for you, not for me, not for the crew—not for Space Force and Earth. I can, and will, continue keep order in the crew, but you need to know what they are thinking.”

Reine paused, then forced a small smile. “Thank you, Number One. I apologize for my tone earlier. I really do appreciate your honesty, and your counsel.” She stroked her chin. “I think we must spend at least one more week here. Lieutenant-Commander Nelson in Astrophysics has some very interesting results due, which we need to interpret. Then, I think we can move most of the way out of the gravity well, and reduce the relativistic effects on our return date, for a few more weeks of more general study of the system. There’s nothing else we have on the schedule to visit, so it should then be a straight shot back home under supra-light engines—7000 light years, 1.5 years of travel, non-dilated. Would this be acceptable to the crew, do you think?”

“Of course, Captain. I think you should address the crew to explain this, but my sense is that it will be an acceptable and welcome message.” McKay paused. “Will that be all?” She searched her Captain’s face for any clue as to what was really going on, but Reine could hold a famously good poker expression.

“Yes. Dismissed.”

McKay stepped out of the Captain’s office, and took back the command seat from the lieutenant currently sitting there. While scrolling through reports on her data pad, she mused on her relationship with the Captain. McKay’s Space Force command mentor back on Earth, an old and crusty—but wise—rear admiral, had once advised her: “The best you can hope for as a Commander, Frances, is that the Captain doesn’t hate your guts. As long as that’s true, you can probably make the relationship work. But it’s not the Captain’s job to like you, nor is it your job to like the Captain.”

McKay admired Reine’s work; Reine’s expertise was in cybernetics and AI, with a late conversion to an interest in the astrophysics of giant stellar objects, and she had published papers in all those subjects to wide scientific acclaim. McKay’s own interest was in xenobiology, but she’d picked up enough general background in the other subjects to be able to appreciate how talented Reine must be. In any environment populated by strenuous and driven over-achievers, there was an intellectual thermocline; below it, one could look around and think “if only I’d done something mildly different, I could be as good as that person.” Above it, for the 5% or so of genius, one could only recognize that study for a hundred years would not bring you even within shouting distance of the intellectuals in that rarified layer of reason.

McKay was ego-free enough to recognize that she was in that 5%. She was also honest enough to admit to herself that Reine was at the next intellectual level above her—at least.

Additionally, as a Captain, Reine had the crucial command trait of always being decisive—and only seldom wrong. This was not a small skill, especially when coupled with her daunting intellectual prowess. McKay in her junior years had seen smart but indecisive leaders, and decisive but completely incompetent leaders. Reine was the only leader who had effectively merged the two skillsets. No doubt that was why she had been selected to command the Signet, Earth’s premier and unparalleled deep space exploration ship.

McKay was uneasy about one of Reine’s research projects, however. Over the past two years, Reine had constructed her own personal robot, Maxine. Maxine was a teal color, with a cyan scanner light, distinguishing her from the dark crimson of the ship’s normal robots. Reine was apparently using her as a test bed for experiments in AI and ship control—and therefore Maxine had remarkably broad access to ships’ systems and the other robots. Maxine still required explicit command authorization for all her actions, but somehow that didn’t make McKay feel much happier.

The bridge door opened and Surgeon-Commander Putina entered. She made a beeline for the Captain’s office, acknowledging McKay on the way.

“Commander.”

“Commander.” Both officers’ tones were studiously neutral.

The office door closed behind Putina, and McKay stared at it for a moment. While her feelings about Reine were complex, her feelings about Putina were much simpler. McKay cordially detested the ship’s medical officer, and the feeling was apparently reciprocated. Although Putina was obviously a talented medical researcher, and ran an efficient and effective Sickbay, she gave McKay the creeps in the way that she seemed to look at most of the crew—as imperfect sacks of meat, rather than as individuals. McKay idly wondered if Putina had crossed her fingers while taking the Hippocratic Oath.

McKay also had concerns about Putina’s sickbay crew. At least two of them seemed to be very closely bound to Putina’s previous research, and McKay had seen enough cult-of-personality situations to be particularly wary of this kind of localized unblinking loyalty. Still, Putina had the confidence of the Captain, and so there were clear limits on how far McKay’s expressed concerns could go.

She shook her head and returned to her reports.

Putina took a seat in front of her Captain. “That bitch McKay really annoys me.” Her native Russian accent was normally kept in the background, but when she was excised it was hard to conceal. Reine didn’t miss the cue for her ship’s doctor’s emotions.

“She annoys me too, Mariya, but she’s a good officer.” Unlike you , she didn’t say out loud. “I’ve bought us a couple more weeks, but that’s as far as I think I can go without arousing suspicion from the others. How is it looking from your end?“

“I have ten production implants now. That’s the most I can make without attracting attention, but it should be enough.” Putina showed her data pad, with design specifications for a very complex piece of biomechanical hardware.

“How certain are you that they will work?”

“Eighty percent: That is, eight out of ten should work fully as designed. As long as you don’t mind expending one or two crew, we should be fine. I’ll need four for Sickbay, so we’ll get six others and expect four of them to work.”

“That will do.” Reine mused for a moment. “Nelson’s graviton prototype shows great promise. We should be able to get much closer to the event horizon with minimal additional time dilation.”

“I am not too worried about the time dilation.” Putina examined her fingers. “Who knows, maybe the statute of limitations will have elapsed by the time that we return to Earth.”

“Ah!” Reine waved her hand dismissively. “With the astronomical data we bring back, we’ll be heroes. No-one important will care about what you did before. And besides,” she pointed out, “your previous research, no matter its ethical issues, has turned out to be crucial for our future success.”

“When do you want me to start?” Putina switched apps on the data pad. “At normal ship accident rates, I’ll have the additional six by the end of this week if we start now. Plus or minus a day.”

Reine thought carefully. “Start tomorrow. I’ll close off the secondary rec room this afternoon, with the excuse of an unexplained low-level beta radiation leak.”

“Understood.”

“And make sure you don’t miss the officer’s dinner in a week’s time,” Reine smiled, without humor. “I imagine it will be quite the occasion.”

“Of course, Captain.” Putina stood up. “I’ll tell my two nurses first thing tomorrow. I’m glad I brought them along.”

“I’d imagine they’re glad, too,” smirked Reine. “Judging from that last urgent message we got from Space Force before we got out of comms range, they would have been locked in the deepest dungeon that the prosecutor could find, probably next door to you.” She flicked through a data pad. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me the whole story.” She grinned. “And don’t leave out any of the sordid details, understand?”

“Of course, Captain. Excuse me.” Putina nodded politely and made her exit through the bridge, passing back behind McKay who was carefully ignoring her.

Putina took the shuttle car back to her medical office, halfway down the ship. Her face was a blank, but inside her mind her thoughts were running at one hundred miles per hour.

Finally, her research would pay off. Reine was the only person she had found who really understood Putina’s drive to explore the human mind and its potential cybernetic connections; the practical opportunities she would have with the Signet’s 500-person crew would dwarf the inherently limited work she’d managed to do back on Earth. This would be a research smorgasbord the like of which no-one had seen before.

And whenever Helga gave her that certain look, Putina turned to warm jelly inside. Imagine just the two of them, ruling over the ship....

The shuttle car braked to a stop. Putina alighted and headed for Sickbay. She had a lot of preparation to do before tomorrow.

The next day found the six-person Sickbay nursing team at maximum effort. Putina had set them to handle a theoretical mass-casualty exercise involving a reactor leak, having borrowed six robots from the general ship’s operations store to act as bodies. She sat back and observed, taking notes on her data pad, while her two favorite nurses ran the triage station, and the other four worked with the robots which Putina had pre-loaded with a few simple scripts to describe various injuries and behavior.

In order to avoid disturbing the exercise, she had posted “URGENT CASES ONLY” on the Sickbay door, and locked it. That left everybody free to concentrate on their work. Or at least, that was the explanation.

Carolynne Rochard had moved into Space Force nursing from a career as an emergency response nurse-paramedic, so this kind of exercise was old hat for her. She dutifully worked her way through the treatment protocols, handling two of the “patients” herself, but most of her mind was free to daydream. She wondered why Dr Putina had selected Belinda and Beatrice to do triage—they weren’t particularly good at it, their expertise was much more around assisting in surgery and biomechanics, and the Doctor knew that was the case because the two women had worked with her before they joined the Signet. Well, perhaps that was why; the Doctor might have decided that they needed to build their skills in a new area.

Carolynne didn’t really like her boss. The Doctor was a very capable and knowledgeable medical practitioner, but she lacked warmth with patients, and didn’t even try to fake it. She was similarly cold with her team. That said, she was superb at teaching skills and techniques, and so even though she was a demanding taskmistress, Carolynne appreciated how quickly she was being helped to develop professionally. Once they finally returned to Earth, Carolynne was planning to quit Space Force and take up a high-earning position as a nursing team leader. They just had to get out of this damned black hole first.

They had been at the exercise for about an hour so far. As robots were effectively “treated”, they moved back to the Triage station and presented with a new set of symptoms. The team were developing a good cadence, making use of their knowledge of each others’ specialities. At this point they were near a peak load, with four of the six Sickbay beds occupied by “patients”, each with an interesting and potentially fatal set of injuries.

Suddenly all four of the “patients” collapsed, and the monitors by their beds—which were linked to the simulation program—showed a flatline or other fatal cardiac arrhythmias.

Carolynne rolled her eyes and bent over her “patient”, as did her three colleagues, to start resuscitation. This was so predictable, but she knew that as a matter of professional pride if nothing else, she would do it well.

Putina clapped her hands. “Next stage!” she called out.

Next stage? What ‘next stage’? Who was she talking to?

Her robot patient’s arm suddenly shot up, and Carolynne felt the familiar cold sensation of a hypospray on the side of her neck.

“What the hell...?” Carolynne moved away by reflex, but the robot’s arm had already returned to its side. She heard similar expressions of confusion from the other nurses, and turned to look.

The other three were all holding the side of their necks, as she was, looking confused. The confusion didn’t last long, though; their eyes closed and they dropped to the floor, unconscious.

Carolynne, puzzled and alarmed, started to walk towards Putina.

“Doctor? What’s going on?” She stopped at the look on the Doctor’s face; a smile, but a malevolent one. Beatrice and Belinda had similar expressions.

“I wondered which of you would be the one to get the paralytic instead of the sedative. I’m so glad it’s you, Carolynne.” Putina rose from her seat. “You can probably feel it now, can’t you?”

Carolynne could indeed feel it, but not understand it. Her fingers and lips were numb, and her legs were starting to buckle. Belinda and Beatrice hustled over and laid her down on a spare bed. She looked up at them and tried to form words, but her mouth was not complying.

“Put the others under more deeply,” Putina instructed her nurses. They walked over to where the robots had moved from the beds, replacing themselves with the nurse who had been “treating” them. Each nurse had another hypospray applied to her neck, and a monitoring disk attached to their temple.

Putina picked up Carolynne’s limp hand and squeezed it gently, judging muscle tone. “Excellent. Just the right dosage.” She leaned over, face to face with Carolynne, then gently kissed her nurse. Carolynne couldn’t respond, only able to taste her boss’s fresh, fragrant breath. She then felt the Doctor’s tongue start to nuzzle inside her mouth, and internally screamed. What was this? While she wasn’t at all surprised that the Doctor liked women, why her? And why now?

The Doctor took her time with the kiss, slowly entwining her tongue with Carolynne’s and stroking the inside of her mouth. Despite herself, Carolynne felt a warmth inside her. She hadn’t properly kissed anyone since the Signet had left Earth, and although she wasn’t inclined towards women, the Doctor clearly knew how to press her sexual buttons. Nevertheless, she still wanted to scream.

Putina finally moved away, and walked over to the doors marked “SURGERY”. “I’ve always wanted to do that, Carolynne,” she smirked. “And we’ll do it a lot more, soon; but I wanted to do it while you were still ‘there’.”

What the hell did she mean by that?

Putina gestured at Carolynne. “Prepare her for me, Belinda. Bea: monitor the others and keep them under.” She opened the doors, and winked at her helpless patient. “I’ll see you soon, Carolynne.”

Belinda rolled a gurney up beside Carolynne’s bed. “You’re very fortunate, Carolynne. You’ll have the honor of making medical history.” She produced a pair of shears and started to cut away Carolynne’s uniform. “You’ll see for the first time just what a genius Dr Putina is.”

Carolynne could only lie there and stare up at her colleague.

“You know Carolynne, I like you more like this.” Belinda pulled out a pair of hair clippers. “You always seem so tightly wound. You needed to relax, give up some control.” She started to run the clippers from Carolynne’s forehead. “Like your French braid, it’s always so tight and precise.” Carolynne felt cool air on her scalp as Belinda systematically shaved her. “See; now you don’t need to worry about that anymore.” Belinda applied the clippers to a few patches that hadn’t been properly addressed.

She ran her fingers through the hair on Carolynne’s exposed mound. “Maybe I should do this too.” She powered on the clippers and gently touched the base to Carolynne’s clit. Carolynne still couldn’t move, but her eyes started to water at the powerful stimulus. Belinda giggled. “You like that, don’t you Carolynne?”

Carolynne, in between waves of involuntary sexual stimulus, was certain at this point that Belinda was actually psychotic; not just weird, socially dysfunctional, morally reprehensible, but clinically psychotic. How had such a person got on board the Signet? Space Force had been scrupulous in their psychological evaluations, conducted by... a collection of senior medics, including Dr Putina. Oh, yes. That was probably how.

Belinda finally removed the clippers and switched them off. “I hope you enjoyed that, Carolynne. Think of it as a sexual swan song.” She beckoned to a pair of the robots. “Put her on the gurney.”

The robots took hold of Carolynne’s unresisting body and scooped it up, placing her neatly in the center. Belinda busied herself fastening restraints to Carolynne’s limbs and anchoring them firmly to the gurney.

“The paralytic will wear off soon.” She tested the anchorings. “I imagine that by now you would run for the hills unless we secure you properly.” She finished off with a stiff collar that was similarly anchored. “There! All ready for the next stage in your life.” She pulled on a glove and lubricated her fingers, then started to penetrate Carolynne’s sex. “Yes, you’re still quite tight. That’s all right, I’m sure Dr Putina will fix that.”

True to Belinda’s prediction, the paralytic was starting to wear off. Carolynne was slowly getting control back for her limbs, but her vocal cords were still numb; she managed a moan, but nothing more.

Belinda retrieved a sterile gown and cap from a closet, and put them on along with a mask, then draped Carolynne’s body with a sterile sheet. “I think you’re ready now. Let’s go and see the Doctor.” She pushed the gurney towards the double doors.

Carolynne, puzzled, stared at Bea who was still monitoring the three sedated nurses. Why wasn’t Bea coming with them? She was the normal anesthetist in the surgery.

The double doors closed behind them, and Carolynne found herself staring up into the masked face of Dr Putina.

“Hello again, Carolynne. I’m so happy to have you here. You’re going to be part of something beautiful.”