The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

In spite of the rough start, Laurie’s day at work went smoothly. A steady flow of customers kept her occupied until her lunch break, which she took early. She sat down at the break room computer (for a moment, she thought it would start pulsing at her like her home PC had), and she looked up her bank statement on the internet.

She held her breath as the statement loaded, mentally preparing herself for the worst while chiding herself for being paranoid. The balance... was more or less where she remembered it being. The itemized statement didn’t include any purchases from the last couple of days yet, but it was clear she hadn’t been cleaned out. She breathed a sigh of relief and then set about the tiresome task of ordering new pin numbers, changing passwords to her bank, to her email, and for good measure, to her MyBook. She was just happy she didn’t have any active credit cards.

Laurie got off work at three o’clock and went with some friends down to the pool at Barton Springs. It was a hot day just crying out for swimming, and this was almost a tradition among bookees (what the bookstore employees called themselves) when getting off work on summer afternoons. So they had a nice time of it, and then they ate dinner at Angie’s Pizza, and then they went their separate ways.

Laurie took side streets on her way home because it was safer than riding her bicycle in traffic, and because the rows of houses tended to have tall trees in their front yards that shaded the street, and that was important in the Summer heat. Even after seven in the evening, the air was muggy and the concrete was baking.

As she rode, she mentally rehearsed the way she would deal with Stegs and its terrible, icky little virus. She would immediately run a system restore. If it was pulsing, she would restart it first, and if it still blinked, she would turn it off and try again later. It didn’t flicker all of the time, at any rate, so she saw no reason this wouldn’t work.

And even if it wasn’t blinking, she wouldn’t look at the monitor for more than a few seconds at a time. And if she felt even a little bit drowsy, she would quit immediately. No more risks.

Laurie stopped at a stop sign, made it across the street, then felt a strange sort of tug inside of her, and...

Laurie woke to the familiar sensation of cool air on naked skin. “Shit,” she muttered groggily. Her eyes were still closed. Her room smelled of sweat and exertion.

When she did reluctantly open her eyes, she cast an accusing glare at Stegs, which sat unassumingly on her desk, casting her own accusation back at her from its webcam display.

Laurie rubbed her eyes with her palms and climbed out of bed on shaky legs. She’d apparently had a busy night—her back was a bit sore, her crotch a bit tender, and the faint, damp stain on her blankets was clearly more than sweat. “Oh, gross,” groaned Laurie.

When had it got her? She was so sure her precautions would work... but she didn’t even remember sitting down at her computer.

Well, it ended now. Laurie sat at her desk, ready to run a full system restore on the spot. But the first thing she did was yank out her webcam cable... which was different... she followed the USB cable from its port under her desk up to where the camera sat, proudly, on top of a stack of books beside her monitor. It was not the eight-year-old hunk of dusty plastic that had always sat there. It was new and shiny, and now that she thought of it, the webcam display on her screen had been a whole lot cleaner and clearer than it was before.

“Where did I get this?!” Laurie held the new bit of hardware and its cord in her hands as if it was a snake that might at any moment wake up and bite her. She looked around her room and noticed a box in her trash, a box with a picture of this camera and a title of Logitek QuikCam. She snatched it out, read over the box, then looked back into the trash for a receipt.

This she found as well, and read it over with trepidation. “Ninety-nine dollars?! I can’t afford this!” And she stuffed the camera back into its box along with any accessories and packaging materials she could find. She had apparently torn the box nearly in half trying to take it out in the first place, but now she carefully folded the box back into its original shape and did her best to tuck the lid flap back into place. She left the packed box sitting on her bed and backed away from it as if it might explode.

She needed a moment to compose herself. All she was thinking was, Oh god, this is bad, bad, this is bad... There were too many questions she could hardly bring herself to ask. What else might she have bought? What all had she done with that camera filming her? Who all might have seen it? How could she stop it from happening again? What should she do next?

… She checked the time for the first time that morning. “11:30?!” Her panic settled when she remembered she didn’t have work, but she thought she might have made some lunch plans at some point... Well, whatever plans she’d made would need to be put off. This mess was her priority.

“Ok...” she muttered to herself, “We need to return this camera.” The receipt was from the Comp-America a few blocks from her apartment. “Never mind that I managed to go all the way there, find it, buy it, and bring it back here without remembering.”

While she was at it, she needed to bring her computer into the store to be fixed. Never mind that she could even less afford that than she could this camera. She needed her computer for her work, and right now she could hardly trust herself to look at it, let alone put in the time and focus necessary to run a system restore. The book blogging had added a tidy little sum to her weekly paycheck, and her manager and her hundred or so regular readers expected it from her now. She couldn’t afford to be afraid to come near her own machine.

That reminded her that a review for her current book, the one she hadn’t had a chance to read in two days and thus was nowhere close to finishing, was scheduled to appear online the next day around noon. But that would have to wait.

Laurie, finally feeling like she was getting her footing, put together a tentative schedule in her head:

Shower and (for the love of God) get dressed.

Call her bank to check her account.

Back up her most important files and music downloads on her 4 GB thumb drive. If it can be done safely.

Pack up Stegs and the camera into her seldom-used old Beetle.

Grab a cereal bar to eat on her way out the door.

Return the camera and drop off the computer at the store.

Come home, try to forget about the whole affair, read the rest of her book, and start writing her review—which would require a computer, of course. Maybe she could borrow Mikaela’s.

The schedule having been drawn, Laurie stuck to it. She felt considerably better once she smelled less of mistakes and her nakedness was covered with clean clothes.

The call to her bank reported just two recent transactions—the $99.99 plus tax for the camera, and a mysterious $29.99 charge, plus tax, for some unknown good or service bought over the internet. Laurie griped to herself about that, a confirmation of her fears, and felt on the verge of pressing zero to speak with a bank employee and claiming identity theft. She had to admit, though, she was a little relieved. It could have been a lot worse than thirty dollars. And faced with the difficulty of explaining the circumstances of the theft... It just wasn’t worth it. So long as no larger charges appeared, she would let it go.

Laurie debated fiercely with herself over the detail of backing up her important files. Her heart raced and filled with dread at the thought of even approaching the infected thing. But she couldn’t bear to lose the accumulated work of years of writing, reviews, private thoughts, short stories, correspondences... No, she needed to preserve these things from those hacks that considered themselves computer technicians.

Fortunately, nothing happened. Laurie half-expected at any moment to lose consciousness and wake up naked in bed. But her computer never pulsed, she never felt tired, and when her thumb drive was filled, Laurie felt relieved to shut down the machine, even as she cursed her lack of additional flash drives for the rest of her files.

The customer service desk at the store accepted her return without raising a fuss. The man behind the counter at the repair center (his name tag said ‘Steve’) helped her heft the bulky old computer tower up onto the counter, and then he asked, “So, what’s the problem?”

“Virus,” said Laurie.

He nodded, and they went over the paperwork and the time necessary for repairs (one week to two weeks, probably).

Before Laurie left, she felt it necessary to warn the man. “Look, um,” she began, and he listened politely, “If it starts... pulsing? Because that’s what it does, it makes the screen flicker and pulse.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yeah, so if it starts doing that... Um, just don’t stare at it too long. Or if you start feeling tired or... sort of... spaced out.” Her voice had dropped, involuntarily, to a near whisper. It was such a silly warning she could hardly take it seriously herself.

Steve was nonplussed. He stared at her with a thin mask of politeness, and Laurie could tell he was trying to figure out what she was talking about.

“I know it’s weird. Just... I don’t know, it’s weird. Just... be careful.” and she turned around and walked, quickly as she could, back to the entrance, her cheeks bright red and stinging with embarrassment.

Having her computer safely out of reach was a load off Laurie’s mind. The harrowing affair was over. It cost her a few hundred dollars in repairs and a mysterious $30 swindling fee, plus the knowledge in the back of her mind that somewhere out there on the internet, there well might have been a couple videos of her stripping naked and... doing she-didn’t-want-to-know what. She didn’t want to know, but she was afraid she could guess.

But Laurie could ignore that. She didn’t remember it, and she doubted she’d ever see the evidence of it. She could go on with her life as if none of it ever happened.

And so she did. She skimmed through the rest of her book in record time, borrowed Mikaela’s junky old laptop more or less indefinitely, and churned out three paragraphs of lukewarm praise. Then she brushed her teeth and her hair, changed her shoes, and headed out with Mikaela to meet up with friends and spend a Friday night on the town. First to Armadillo Cafe and E-Mo’s for live shows, then to Ryan’s house for drinks and a screening of the hilariously awful movie “The Adventures of Hercules” starring Lou Ferigno. And at no point in the evening did Laurie black out, only to wake naked in her own bed the following morning.

Saturday she had a softball game in the morning (for which she was only slightly hungover) and a four hour shift at the bookstore in the afternoon. Then it was swimming at Barton Springs, dinner at Veggie Valhalla, relaxing with friends at home, then more live bands at Antonio’s.

Laurie stumbled through the front door of her apartment at 3:30 in the morning. Mikaela was close in tow, and they were still laughing at a joke that they both had forgotten. “I have work,” Laurie declared seriously, when she had sufficiently recovered, “at nine thirty tomorrow morning.”

Mikaela laughed at this and said, “You mean nine thirty this morning!”

Laurie shrugged, held her straight face for a second longer, then burst out laughing.

“You’ll still be drunk!” Mikaela accused.

“Will not,” said Laurie, apparently taking offense, “I’ll be almost dead sober by then. I just need to go... pass out.” And she turned around, scanning her apartment for the door that would lead to her own room.

“This is why you normally don’t stay out late with me on Saturdays!” said Mikaela, “I never have work on Sundays.”

“Yeah, well...” said Laurie, and she almost lost the thread of conversation, but she carried on, “Tonight it beats the alternative.”

“What alternative?”

Laurie found Mikaela’s face and fixed her gaze on it, wobbled toward her, and after a moment wondered if she was maybe standing too close. Then she started chuckling and could hardly get in the words, “Masturbating to my webcam.”

At this they both laughed, and when they stopped, Mikaela said, “What?” and they both broke down laughing again.

At length, Laurie made her unsteady way to her bedroom door, mumbling, “Work is going to suck tomorrow.”

“Goodnight, Puddle Monkey,” Mikaela called after her.

“Goodnight, Skittle Biscuits.”