The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“The Ubani code.”

“What about it?” my best friend replied, raising one eyebrow. I was referring to a cheat code that Ken Ubani had put it in every game he worked on; a cheat code that Lenny and I had been obsessed with for more than a decade.

“No one knows more about it than us,” I said with a smile. “You and I might be the world experts on it.”

“Except Ken Ubani.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s been dead for five years, Lenny. He doesn’t count.”

“Okay so first of all he’s not dead, he’s missing. Maybe he just ran off to a tropical island somewhere, wanting to hide from the fame he’d developed for himself. What’s your point?”

“My point,” I continued, ignoring my friend’s conspiracy theory, “is that no one else ever got the Ubani code working in Pakki Pakki 6, until we tried doing it in an underwater rocket with one health left.”

Lenny grinned. We’d immediately shot to the top of the leaderboards, until the other players had worked out what we were doing and joined us.

“No one else knew how to activate it in Gunslinger Island, until we figured out you need to type the code three times in reverse.”

“We’re great,” he yawned. “I get it. Is there a reason you’re telling me this instead of helping me pack these boxes?”

Lenny’s family was moving. A friendship that had lasted more than a decade, suddenly ended by his Mom’s transfer to a new plant. Life can be cruel like that.

“So my point is, Ken Ubani’s last project was the Wand.”

“That’s probably why he was disappeared,” Lenny said thoughtfully, clearly not following my train of thought. “The government finally saw how intelligent he was, and they had to eliminate him.”

“I thought he was on a tropical island.”

“That’s where they send genius inventors. So they can keep making government superweapons.”

“You’re not listening,” I sighed. “The Wand is an Ubani project, right?”

“Right,” Lenny said, before his hair shot back and his eyes widened. “Ohhhhhh.”

“Do you know where your Mom’s is?”

I’d given Lenny a lot of crap when his Mom had bought a Wand. She was one of the first to get one—back when the name was still fresh, a national joke. But pretty soon, it was like the Wii, or the iPad—as everyone got used to it, we forgot how funny the name had seemed at first.

“Yeah,” Lenny said, scampering off to find it.

While he was gone, I finished moving the last comics into the box, and looked up to see his sister standing there, watching me.

“Evie,” I said cordially.

“Fuck-face,” she replied, matching my tone.

Evie was Lenny’s older sister, and she was a bitch. She was born a bitch, and she’d probably die a bitch. She was a classic example of why you should never judge a book by its cover—she had this perfect olive skin, long brown hair and gorgeous brown eyes, and a rack that had been responsible for probably half the erections I’d ever had in my life. If you didn’t know her, you’d think that she was a perfect little angel…hell, that’s what Lenny’s Mom thought.

But I knew better. So did Lenny.

“I bet you can’t wait to move,” I said, keeping my tone calm. “A whole town of people who don’t know that shaking hands with you will give them syphillis.”

“I bet you can’t wait until we’re gone,” she responded. “Maybe you’ll make a friend who doesn’t know how small your dick is.”

I flushed at that one. Evie had once walked in on me while I was peeing. I don’t know if she’d seen anything, but she’d told everyone that I had a tiny cock.

Yeah. Including Lenny.

“Get out of here, Eves,” Lenny said, marching back into the room.

“Bye, fuck-face,” she said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

I hated her. We both did. But I couldn’t stop myself from watching the swish of her skirt as she walked away. Her legs. Her ass. That skirt.

I shook my head, and turned to my friend.

“You find it?”

Lenny grinned, and pulled it out.

The Wand.

It was released about eighteen months after Ken Ubani disappeared, and it had rocked the world. Not just the tech world, either—within a year, every bed in every hospital had one, and they were starting to see heavy adoption in prisons and schools, too.

Lenny’s Mom was a tech junkie—there was no real reason for her to get one; she wasn’t a medical professional, or particularly stressed out. She just always had to have the latest gadgets. It worked out great for Lenny and me—she really got it when he told her how much he wanted the latest console.

No one’s sure exactly what Ken Ubani was designing it for. Apparently his business partner found the first prototype in his house, and they had to backwards engineer a lot of the tech, but the potential was immediately pretty obvious.

It was a black cylinder about the size of a remote control, with a single button. You hold it up to your head, press the button, and it…slows your mind down.

It’s hard to explain. It doesn’t like, knock you out, or change the rate at which you moves through time. It just sort of makes everything…ah, god, I’m doing a terrible job of this. Here, this is what the box said:

The Wand is the ultimate relaxation tool. With one gentle tap, watch the world fade away. Lower your heartrate, expel stress and unwanted thoughts, and clear your mind. Fifteen seconds will feel like fifteen minutes of deep rest. A nap on a beach, a professional massage, a deep bubble bath—all just a button-press away. Rediscover your calm with The Wand.

So like, it basically just relaxes you. It was completely safe, too—it wasn’t like you could turn yourself into a zombie.

Lenny’s Mom would use it after a long day at work, or when she was getting into a fight with someone online, to calm herself down. Lenny and I had tried it a few times, but we didn’t really see the appeal—I guess if you’re old, fifteen seconds is no time at all, but we figured that was time we could have been spending gaming.

I’d heard tech companies had been the first to adopt them, realizing how much more productive programmers were when they weren’t stressed. And like I said, they’d started to make their way into schools—students who free access to them during exams scored like thirty percent better.

Prisons had started giving perks to inmates who used them at least once a day, to decrease violence and riots and all that, and almost all hospitals now had them on-hand for when someone was having a heart attack

The Wand only affected the brain waves, but obviously the brain controls the heart etc, and so it ended up saving a whole bunch of lives. Ken Ubani had already been my personal hero for the Headmatch series, but the Wand really made him a household name, with a lot of people being like ’oh no he died too young’ and ‘imagine what else he could have made’, all that jazz, almost two years after he died without them having heard of him before then.

I dunno. It bugged me. We’d appreciated him when he was alive, y’know?

“Okay,” Lenny said, squinting his eyes at the Wand. “Only one button. How are we going to do this?”

I tilted my head to the side thoughtfully.

The Ubani code was normally directional—right, right, right, right, left, up, left up down, left, left, up. → → → → ← ↑ ←↑↓ ← ← ↑ —I’d decided long ago that it was going to be my first tattoo.

“Maybe wave it around like a Wii controller?” I asked, and Lenny shot me a look.

“It doesn’t have an accelerometer,” he said. “Besides, people are probably going to do that accidentally, just while carrying it around. You saw how sneaky he got with the Ubani code in his last few games.”

I nodded. His last release—Headmatch X—had required you to work out the ever-changing map’s layout, then travel between rooms to hit the code, ignoring the shifting gravity and everchanging compass points. I wish I could say we’d been the first to work that one out, but it had come out in Japan three months before the rest of the world, and so they’d cracked it before we even got our hands on the game.

“How does the button work?” I asked, and Lenny threw it to me.

“You press it, you can’t press it again for ten minutes.”

That was one of the reasons the Wand couldn’t be abused—they’d hard-wired that time limit into the technology. No way around it. You go hazy for fifteen seconds, you can’t do it again until your body and brain have had time to recover.

It meant that you couldn’t use a Wand to put yourself into an ongoing stupor. Someone had tried to do that a few years back—they’d borrowed a bunch of Wands, and switched between them for like five minutes straight, recording themselves for a YouTube video. It really did a number on them—it like, permanently slowed down their brainwaves or something.

There was talk about banning the Wand, but they took it to court and proved that like, bashing your own head in with a filing cabinet caused more damage, and no one was suggesting they should ban filing cabinets.

Just to be safe, the new models all come with a thing where they disable any other Wand within a three-foot radius when they’re used. Lenny’s Mom was one of the first batch, though, so it didn’t have that.

“Maybe this is dumb,” I finally said, after a few minutes of examining the Wand. “I mean, Ubani didn’t even make the final version of this. Maybe they just didn’t bother putting it in.”

“Nah,” Lenny said, taking the Wand back. “They barely even understand how this thing works, even now—I’ll bet they just manufactured it with his specs exactly, and he’d already put one in. There’s got to be some way to do this.”

“There’s no accelerometer,” I mused. “There’s no direction buttons. There’s just a single button—‘On’—and then…”

“What?” Lenny asked, in response to my pause and thoughtful look.

“Huh,” I said.

“What??”

“How does it know whether it’s pointing at your head?”

“Well, it doesn’t know”, my friend replied, looking at me strangely. “You just…”

I pressed the button. Nothing happened.

“See?”

“What?”

I handed him the Wand. “Press the button.”

He did. Nothing happened.

“Now point it at your head and press the button.”

He looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Trust me,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.

“Fine.”

Click. Lenny’s face went slack, and I mentally counted down from fifteen.

Right as I hit ‘one’, Lenny was back.

“That’s such a trip,” he said with a grin.

“Feel better?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I’ve been more stressed lately than I thought.”

I nodded. We hadn’t really talked properly about the move. We’d just sort of been…avoiding it.

I was really going to miss Lenny. Not that I’d ever tell him that.

“So what’s your point?” he said.

I tried to press the button once more, but it was locked.

“The button locks for ten minutes after it’s pressed…”

“Yeah…”

“Or if you’re holding it to someone else’s head.”

“Yeah,” he said patiently. “It’s a security thing. So you can’t use it to knock other people out.”

“Right. But how does it know where you’re holding it?”

There was a pause as Lenny considered my question.

“Oh, huh,” he eventually said. “Damn. You’re totally right. I never even thought about that.”

For the next ten minutes, we pored over the device, until the small light alerted us that it was ready to use again. Then, I tried holding it against Lenny’s bed, against the stack of boxes, against a stuffed toy he’d had sine he was a kid, against my leg, my chest, my arm, his head…but the button wouldn’t press.

“Ready?” he said, and I nodded. I held it against my head, pressed the button, and…

Click.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of being Wanded. It’s not like you get transported away to a happy place or anything like that—your eyes don’t even close. You’re still aware of everything around you—I could see Lenny, I could see his room, I could smell the curry that his mother was cooking downstairs.

But none of it seems to…matter. Like, if there was a fire in the room, I don’t think I’d be able to care. It’s like that stuff is irrelevant; what’s really important, for that time, is just being.

The advertisement wasn’t kidding when it said fifteen minutes, either. Lenny’s Mom called out to let us know that dinner was almost ready, and while I understood the words she was saying, I heard them over a loonnnnnnnnnng period of time.

It’s weird—if you stretched out fifteen seconds of talking, made it sixty times slower, I’ll bet you couldn’t even understand what’s being said. But while you’re under the Wand, you know. You can just hear it, somehow, even though it’s impossibly slow. And like I said, it just doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, just existing in that time, collecting your thoughts, taking a moment to reflect on what life’s about.

Some people are really into it. I’ve heard of people bringing these things with them into the office on a stressful day—like, when you’ve got so much going on that you really want those little breaks.

It really doesn’t do anything for me. That’s why Lenny and I only used it a few times—I already feel like my teenage years are going soooo slowly; literally making time feel like it’s running slower is the opposite or what I want.

When the fifteen seconds ended, I blinked twice, and looked at my friend.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said casually, taking the Wand from him. “So when you press it against someone’s head, it can like…read that there are brainwaves there?”

“I guess,” Lenny said.

“And it knows that they’re your brainwaves?”

“I guess so,” he replied thoughtfully, before his Mom called us downstairs for dinner.