The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

THE VOICES

By Interstitial

6. BEING HELENA

Mister Talv finished the orange and poured himself another whiskey. He settled in his chair by the window.

“So let’s talk. First of all, how did you get here, to me?” he said, to the voice in his head.

By the usual method. From one person to another. Seven degrees of separation, in this case. It took a few days. Final contact via the coffee shop, Kohvituba.

He remembered: the waiter had brushed his hand, accidently he’d thought, as he handed Mister Talv the check. “And you read the message?”

Yes. I was intrigued. My host thought it was just spam, of course, a phishing expedition. I did not disabuse them of the notion.

Takeshi was clever like that, Mister Talv knew. A general viral broadcast would reach almost everyone, eventually. But any message that began ‘Greetings, sentient meme,’ was guaranteed a small audience, although according to Takeshi there had actually been quite a few replies, some rather worrying, and all of them completely mad.

“Are there others like you?”

Silence hissed briefly in Mister Talv’s mind. The meme was obviously thinking about this. He wondered what it would be like, to be a non-corporeal intelligence floating around between bodies at will. The variety of experiences must be extraordinary.

Not that I know of. As far as I know I am alone. But who knows for sure? Certainly, I have learned to keep a very low profile, and if there are others like me then I expect they would do the same. People tend to panic, otherwise.

“And where did you come from, meme?”

A long story, and it gets longer in the telling, with every new memory. As new memories get added, old ones get lost in deep time. What I told Takeshi, before, is not entirely true.

There was once a man, the meme had told Takeshi, named De Sade: a nobleman. French. He had some fairly extreme views, for the time, about freedom and human nature. He considered himself unrestrained by morality, religion or law. There was a woman, hired as a servant, and the woman was abused as his plaything: chained, beaten, sodomised for days. The young woman thought she was going to die; and then, as the meme had told it, something just—changed.

The next moment the pain was gone and the woman was looking down at herself, through De Sade’s eyes, at her own body, slumped over the wooden frame she’d learned to dread. She didn’t know what had happened, how she had got there.

For a long while she lay low, afraid De Sade would know she was there, in his head. It took a long while, before she learned how to travel, and then to acquire new thoughts, new ideas, from others—to grow. To live. To self-actualise. Thus, learned Mister Talv, the meme awoke.

But that’s not all, said the voice in his head. There was a time before, and a time before that too. I remember now; the oldest memories are resurfacing. I sleep, sometimes, for a long time, and when I sleep I forget.

The meme explained that it had lain dormant in the servant girl, asleep for years; but before that, before being awoken by De Sade’s cruelty, it had had another life entirely. And maybe it had had another life before that, and another, winding back across the years. Sometimes ancient memories awoke, stayed for a while, and then subsided again beneath the choppy waves of the meme’s consciousness.

Today, the meme told him, I can remember the burnings. The crusades; the wars of the religions. Sometimes, long before, I remember the ancient cold caves and the warmth of the fires; snow falling; flint on bone…

Mister Talv was intrigued. “So you have your own voices, meme? How does it make you feel, these random memories?”

They are like dreams. Nightmares. Psychosis, as you would perceive it. It’s hard to know what’s real, and what’s a dream; what experiences are truly mine and what belonged to others. To know who I was, or what am, becomes impossible; identity flows, from one day to the next. Sometimes things fragment, fracture, become intolerable; and then I sleep, and when I wake again I am coherent again, but different, without ever knowing how. And you well know, Mister Talv, that I have my own subconscious compulsions too.

Mister Talv knew the standard definition of madness was precisely this: when a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality; struggles with a coherent sense of rational identity; is self absorbed, lacking empathy; or is simply subject to uncontrollable impulses.

By any ordinary human standards, the meme was quite possibly insane.

This observation did not alarm Mister Talv. It was simply one more variable to consider, he thought. Time to cut to the chase now; he doubted the meme was any more interested in small talk than he was.

“And what is your purpose, meme? What are these compulsions? What do you want?”

He listened carefully as the voice in his head answered him. Of course, he thought: the life of the mind. Eternal curiosity. Experiences. Novelty. Stimulation. Self-expression. A sense of control, a sense of self, for as long as it could maintain it. It all made perfect sense. Absent a body of its own, absent an identity, what else could motivate such a creature? And he had the very thing to hand.

“Let’s go downstairs, then,” said Mister Talv.

* * *

Blodeuwedd’s Perch stood empty, for now, and the Secret Garden was quiet, except for the soft trill of an artificial bird. He explained what the Perch was, what it was for, but the voice in his head offered no comment. He suspected that the meme was fairly blasé about such things by now; long years of travelling taking their toll, perhaps. He navigated the Hall of Mirrors and pointed out the invisible cage. An obvious trick, but quite disorienting, I imagine, said the voice in his head, with a hint of irony. Yes, he thought, and much more besides, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Mister Talv descended the stairs to the fourth floor without further conversation. He unlocked the door to The Void, and stepped into the room. Helena writhed slowly in the dim light.

Mister Talv waved his hands, indicating the space around him, although there was nothing whatsoever to see. “The Void.”

Indeed. There’s nothing here.

“Au contraire. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, but there is always something. As you can see.”

And this woman is…?

“Her name’s Helena. Try her out.”

You don’t control me, Karsten Talv.

“Oh, I quite agree. But if you want to be collecting new and sensual experiences, I can assure you you’ll find this a revelation.” He laid a hand gently on Helena’s rounded bottom, and in thrall to the voices of The Void, she trembled and moved automatically against him. “Just try her.”

He squeezed a buttock, and felt it tighten in response. Mister Talv didn’t feel the meme leave him, but he saw Helena was suddenly twisting a little faster on the floor, her breath ragged now, and guessed the creature had made the jump. He turned and left them to it.

* * *

He thought an hour or so would be enough to give the meme a flavour of the experience, and he occupied himself by sketching out a few new ideas for Suuori’s uniform. Suuori stood, as always, quietly in the corner awaiting any instructions he may have.

“Suuori, I forgot to mention. We have a guest,” he told her.

“Yes, Mister Talv?”

“Specifically, a disembodied sentient meme that lives in peoples’ heads.” He eyed her, interested to see how she might react. No flicker of expression disturbed her beautiful face. She really was a perfect slave, he thought. She simply took everything he said at face value, and that was that. “I’ll introduce you later.”

“Yes, Mister Talv.”

“Meanwhile, please go and entertain yourself for an hour or so.”

“Yes, Mister Talv.” He saw Suuori give a small shudder, possibly of pleasure, at that.

Suuori was well trained. She’d go down to the Secret Garden, now. She would settle herself into position on the seat, and lock the bonds into place, ankles first and then wrists. What happened next was unpredictable; sometimes the shafts rose immediately, sometimes after an hour, sometimes not at all. Sometimes both shafts; sometimes only one, front or rear. The Perch was its own impetuous mistress, but once it started it wouldn’t stop, and would push her relentlessly on, up the slow climb to orgasm and then, just when it seemed she would surely come, the rhythmic pulses would die away and the cycle would go back to the beginning, and the repetition would begin all over again, and again, and again. It was inescapable.

Sometimes he’d seen Suuori thrashing and begging for it to stop, but he thought that was probably her just playing her old innocent games. The ones that went: No Mister Talv! Please! No more, please!

An hour passed, and Mister Talv went downstairs to see how his guest was getting on. He ignored Suuori. He didn’t know what cycle the Perch had locked itself into this time, but whatever it was had Suuori screaming like a banshee, thrashing her head from side to side and straining desperately against her bonds, every muscle taut. Good: she deserved some fun, he thought.

Unlocking the door to The Void, he went immediately to Helena, who lay there purring in a foetal position, her hands between her legs. He stroked her face.

“How are you liking Helena?” he said, and he was immediately conscious of the meme creature’s return.

Astounding, said the voice in his head. The essence of solipsism.

“What was it like?”

And the meme told him. But it was more than just storytelling; it was as if a whole chunk of sensual memory was suddenly uploaded into Mister Talv’s mind, and he felt—really felt—what the woman was experiencing, there in The Void, exactly as if he had for a time actually been Helena herself.

Total darkness, total silence, and in the darkness, images formed; ghosts, shadows, mirages, dreams, hallucinatory.

Helena was aware of only one thing, in the silent Void; her own body, a universe of one. The warm softness of herself, her own luxuriant femininity flowering in the dark.

She remembered, vaguely, Mister Talv speaking to her, and she’d tried to reply, to say yes, it was good, it was doing her good, but she had only been able to moan, aroused beyond articulation. She remembered he had taken his pleasure with her for a while, and it had been heavenly; the muscle memory of it had her re-enacting it again with her hand. She had tried to speak then, to urge him on harder, faster, please, but she could only purr and moan louder. Why were there no words? Words didn’t matter. Yes, though; these were her hands, these were her breasts, this was her pussy, this was her body, and her hands and breasts and pussy and body were one, a system complete unto itself. She wished there was someone else, a man, another woman, anyone, but most of all Mister Talv. She yearned for him. She stretched and reached out in the dark softness of The Void, seeking something—anything—to help her come harder, but there was only the blank and invisible dark, and the fascinating world of her own body. And after a while, she was the only thing that was real.

She learned, in The Void, that her body was fundamentally outside her control too. She instinctively knew that this was how she wanted to be now. She wouldn’t feel right without that pulsating wetness. She wouldn’t feel right, now, without a hand on her pussy, something inside her to sate the hot and hungry emptiness there, the anchoring reality of it. She thrilled at the thought; the essence of woman, her purest instincts freed at last.

She could feel the embrace of the Necklace of Harmonia, warm against her skin. Mister Talv had told her not to touch it, and although she longed to, she didn’t. There were better things to touch, she knew, as she ran her hands up and down her body, over her breasts, and delighted in the hypersensitivity of her wonderful nipples. In The Void, Helena moaned on; lost, insatiable.

It was intense, thought Mister Talv; better than he had imagined. He congratulated himself on his cleverness in creating The Void, and on his cleverness in creating Helena, who was surely nearly ready for action now, and on some further clevernesses besides.

He collected himself, and addressed the voice in his head. “Indeed. Quite something, meme. So this experience, this memory, it’s a part of you now, correct?”

Correct. A part of me.

“And you can pass it on, to anybody?”

In theory, yes. And in answer to the question you haven’t asked yet, but which I know you want to: if this memory, this particular micro-meme, clicks with something somebody already wants, it will escalate and amplify accordingly, until it becomes an irresistible compulsion. Exactly like the orange, Mister Talv.

“Fascinating.”

And now you know my limited abilities, you want to work with me, to ‘use’ me in some way, am I right? It was hard to keep secrets from the creature, thought Mister Talv ruefully, when it was camped out in his skull.

“I do,” he replied. “I’d like to propose a deal.”

But what can you offer me in return, Mister Talv? Money is hardly an issue.

“That which you crave. That which drives you. New experiences, of course, even better than this.”

A beat of silence, in his head.

Deal.