The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

WATERING HOLE

Codes: mc, fd, nc, ff

Disclaimers (if you scroll past, you’ve still read ‘em—don’t blame me):

  • This author is not the same trilby who dwells on AOL; thus, Trilby on AOL should not be held responsible for anything that follows.
  • This work is copyright the author, © 1999. Kindly do not repost or otherwise use without permission and credit.
  • This is adult fiction with nonconsensual sex, mind control, and other immoral and illegal acts both explicit and implied. In real life this would all be very bad. All characters, events, and places are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, events or places is coincidental, etc. All characters are of legal age in all jurisdictions, not that it’s done them much good so far. References like “boy” or “girl” are rhetorical, not technical.
  • If you’re underage, stop reading and get out. (The average fashion magazine these days is probably enough.) If it’s just flat illegal there, ditto (and I’m very sorry.) If you find this sort of thing offensive in general, ditto (and why are you here?)
  • It’s more about mind control than sex. I’m a fetishist: point isn’t using MC to get sex, it’s sex being something interesting to do with MC. So if you only want short zap/long fuckfest . . . see ya. Also, I consider this literature, i.e. with redeeming artistic content, i.e. not “obscene” in the legal definition. (Argue that if you will, but it’s my story, so to speak, and I’m sticking to it.)
  • I disparage no lifestyle. If characters are forced into one, it’s the force that degrades, not the lifestyle.

Author’s Interjection:

  • I need (belatedly) to thank Mme Claude, a discerning observer of whose thinking I stand in awe, for inspiring the mirror-based induction Joyce undergoes in Part 9, and its echo elsewhere. I can only imagine what uses Mme Claude herself has found for it.
  • While I have the floor: another story that belongs in the Inspirations category is Daphne’s “Above That Ye Are Able”.

12.

Valerie Joplin made a soft, strangled noise as she stared at Joyce across the table in the safehouse. She opened her mouth again, and again there were no words.

Joyce hadn’t even taken her coat off. Valerie looked away to see Sheila curled up in a large afghan on an antique bench, staring down at her hands. Kit stood at the window, looking listlessly at the yard. As if in solidarity, they kept their coats on, too. She wondered if they even noticed.

She’d worried when Joyce had suggested this place. Marlene, one of the group who’d fought her way back to self-sufficiency and her old real estate job, kept a rotating list of properties known only to her, Valerie, and Joyce, in case someone needed to hide. Amanda didn’t know about them, as she knew about some of the other places.

So Joyce was already learning to think of her daughter as someone else, hypnotized into giving up anything she knew to her new Owner. A slave.

An enemy.

When they’d called, Valerie had taken the news crisply, making sure they’d contacted the necessary people at the police. There were steps, checklists. Things to do instead of think.

But now, there was only what had happened. Valerie searched for something to offer Joyce.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “It’s OK, Val. You’ve done more than ten people might.” Valerie winced, since she knew that wouldn’t bring Owen back, or probably find Amanda either. “I’ve known you a long time, Val. I know what you want to say. There aren’t words for it. But I know you feel it.” The blank weariness in her voice got to Valerie.

She felt sick. An attack was coming, and she would have relied on Joyce to help her meet it. This Mistress knew precisely how to cripple them. How could she ask Joyce now, when her life had just been ripped open? Valerie was trying to think like a best friend and a brigade commander at the same time, and it hurt badly enough to make her gasp.

Sheila looked up at her and blinked. She looked the same as Joyce, completely burned out, her gaze almost blank. Valerie was getting a worse picture all the time of what they’d found of Owen, and was bleeding for the three of them. She took a deep breath.

“Has she contacted you?”

It took Joyce a moment. “Offered Amanda for everyone else? Not so far.” Valerie quailed inside at the bleakness.

“It won’t matter soon. She could be anywhere in a few hours. Her . . . training has probably already begun.”

“We’ll get her back.” Valerie put all her conviction into it, and Joyce seemed almost to feel sorry for her, having to lie that way. She remembered Joyce telling her about trying to give hope to the hopeless, back in Mistress’ slave cells. But now Joyce was withdrawing so much she didn’t even respond.

“No, Valerie. It’s not about her. Amanda . . . would say the same thing if she were here. The real target is the group. Everyone else.”

Valerie sat up straighter, vowing to be worthy of this friend. “Joyce, I will never ask you to choose between them or your daughter.” She kept her voice steady.

Joyce straightened in her chair.

“Mistress removes all need for choices.”

Her peripheral vision alerted Valerie. Kit and Sheila moved smoothly and noiselessly, but it was as wrong as what Joyce just said. Instincts born of a thousand waking nightmares kicked her to her feet, the blocky pistol in her hand from underneath her loose clothing.

She swept the gun up, moved it across them all—and nearly dropped it at what she saw: out of their coverings, Sheila and Kit were fetish bookends, bodies sheathed in dark lycra, stalking her from opposite sides with silent, evil precision in boots that shone even in the room’s dim light. Their eyes were staring, and she almost felt the presence of the Mistress who controlled them.

They would make her into one of them, owned and obedient.

No! She swung the gun right toward Kit, the athlete with Mistress controlling her strength, even as Kit gathered herself to jump. Kit held still then, but Valerie knew with a chill that it wasn’t fear but a programmed unwillingness to die before her Mistress could use her.

Panic coated her, trying to get through her skin. She’d expected to fight strangers, vicious but free-minded thugs, individual mind controllers after their slaves—not women, not her friends, not puppets whose Mistress could make them forget to be afraid of a gun, or make them happy to die. She’d never killed anyone.

They didn’t try to rush her. Maybe they could think—maybe their owner was cautious of her chattel. Valerie was about to lose her mind at the idea of holding off her best friend and two of her patients and deciding which one she’d have to shoot first . . . She avoided their eyes, not knowing whether she was afraid of being hypnotized or just of seeing nothing in them.

She’d thought it had been shock.

Joyce had just sat there, talking about Owen and Amanda, pretending. What had the Mistress done to her mind?

Now Joyce shrugged her coat off and touched her waist, letting the skirt slide down her legs, like a lovely sculpture being unveiled. Now there were three identical bodysuited amazons, three beautiful robots. They were between her and both doors. Valerie swallowed a groan.

Joyce began edging sideways toward Kit until Valerie hissed, “Don’t!” She knew her voice gave them a gauge for her fear. She was missing something . . . her attention was now largely on the two of them to her right.

“Please,” Sheila said, and Valerie turned left without thinking. The flash caught her in the face, and it hurt her eyes for a second, but then a pleasant warmth spread from her eyes across her face, as if she’d been massaged in that second. Her mind was suddenly sluggish, and her body trembled gently in the excited sensation of fever. She seemed to float, keeping her balance purely by being weightless.

The gun didn’t fire. Her instincts, she realized dimly, sadly, didn’t run that way after all. I’m not a killer, God help me—God please help us all— There was pure pain, though—despair—in her moan as she tried to stand, tried to blink against the dazzle. Tried to think. It was so, so difficult.

None of them moved, and it made her feel irrationally safe. Sheila waited quietly, and flashed her again when she forgot and her gaze drifted right again. Her moan was weaker now, sleepier—she could hear it.

I can’t fight them, she forced herself to decide. They’ve started the trance already . . .

Oh God. No. Can’t sleep . . . She called up a face, any face—Marlene, the realtor, who’d given them this place.

I am it. I’m all that stands between Marlene and these mindless slaves that were my friends. I can’t let them take me. Because then . . .

She felt unspeakably sad for Valerie Joplin, who had to die now, as if she were someone else, and she mourned that woman inside, fighting as hard as ever she had to lift the gun to her head.

But . . .

“. . . it’s too heavy.” She barely recognized Joyce’s throaty whisper, so unlike her normal pleasant alto, a husky purr that she might have used back when she turned tricks. Or was it how she might have soothed Amanda to sleep, long ago?

The voice was inside Valerie’s head, warm and dark. “Too heavy. You don’t want to lift such a heavy thing; even holding such a heavy thing is too hard. Too hard to remember how to work it. So heavy, so hard to remember.” Of course it was. Valerie’s arms began to sink, as if in water.

For a moment, she paused, still finding a way to resist. There was a moment of clarity, between breaths, and she saw the gun was now pointed directly at Joyce’s heart. She looked at Joyce’s eyes, saw something.

A plea.

Just then, Valerie felt she wasn’t alone. But the pleasant flash-shock in her eyes and her mind, the feverish paralysis, the way her mind was nothing now but a scattering of ideas . . . If there was an idea there, she’d forgotten what to do about it.

Whatever might be in Joyce’s eyes, her voice continued to soothe the thinking out of Valerie. Her voice was so low Valerie felt more than heard it. It taught her with each soft throb into her head to forget about words, ideas, to submit to the sound, which just meant sleep. Joyce kept murmuring, and Valerie relaxed as she stood, letting it soothe her, the gun settling gently to her side. Joyce stepped over to her, still repeating the litany, as she took the gun. Valerie raised her head, trying to focus her eyes. Joyce nodded to her, and Valerie shifted to focus on her, to find out what Joyce was agreeing with. Joyce just kept nodding, and before Valerie realized her mistake she forgot it was one—the motion had captured her attention and pulled her eyelids down again. Now they were heavy, hard to hold up, and whatever idea Valerie had been trying to form just . . . dissolved.

Joyce pushed her gently back down into the chair, and the next thing in Valerie’s sleepy mind was oddly distinct. She felt she must look forward, waiting while the deep green cover came off the beautiful disk with the swirling lines. It began gently to spin.

With the last of her resolve Valerie dazedly tried to look away, and the memory of Marlene’s face, smiling, unwarned, blotted out the disk for a moment. She shut her eyes. She heard one of them breathing softly just above her, felt a hand stroke her hand with a gentleness that made her want to cry. The breathing faded and the hand fell away. It left Valerie empty, alone, and she listened, desperately, for something. She heard a soft humming.

It soothed her. It was a monotonous lullaby that washed away her worry. It was in front of her. She blinked her eyes open.

The spiral swept them up.

Sighing, Valerie fell into it.

13.

Valerie tried to wake up.

She felt as if she were wrapped in thick bedding, but she realized what held her was her own body. It was relaxed to the point of being numb, and she was barely aware of lying down at all. She’d been dreaming of swimming in a thick green pool of warm, swirling . . . something. The displaced feeling reminded her of—waking up once—on a table—no no no

The anesthesia had held, that time long ago. Right now she couldn’t remember what surgery it had been, just her vague terror as she rose helplessly to consciousness under the scalpel like a diver surfacing too fast, waiting for the bends.

Hard to think. Pictures were appearing before her eyes, capturing her attention, blanketing her senses. She didn’t question how—she couldn’t focus on anything but how beautiful, and how deeply subjugated, the women looked.

Women naked in an elegant drawing room, in languid attendance on a shadowy noblewoman.

Women sleek in corporate-slut wear, briskly toiling in a spotless office for an unseen boss whose control reached through the phones, the intercoms, the office intranet.

Women blank-faced in a concrete cellar, nude in collars and boots, tying other, listless or weakly-struggling women into chairs that forced their faces against flickering panels, staring impassively as the struggles slowed, ended.

Valerie held still, with the feeling of long practice, as the Feeling rolled over her. It was like lying on a white-sand beach’s waterline and letting the warm sea wash over her. The Feeling wasn’t as sharp as an orgasm, but it went on and on and on and . . .

She watched more women, enslaved or enslaving others.

The Feeling was the sea. And the tide was rising.

“Hello again, Valerie.” She’d heard the Voice before, knew she must listen, must not resist.

She tried to feel afraid, and then she knew her mind was not responding, either.

Women barebreasted in identical thongs, docile under the baskets they carried as their sisters in the fields gathered more of the crop, heedless of the heat and the work.

“you and I have something in common, Valerie.”

The Voice was inside her. It wasn’t the inner caress of Joyce’s tranquilizing murmur. This was a firm, cool hand in surgical latex feeling along her skin—but it was exploring her soul instead. It made her want to arch herself up to it, and it made her want to writhe away and run screaming.

She did neither. Someone had Told her to be still, and the odd thrill she got was strong enough to dilute what the Voice was making her feel. An odd thrill. She knew what it was.

Obedience.

What mind control actually felt like. It should scare her, but . . .

“you and I find mentally enslaved women fascinating, Valerie.”

Women reflecting the torchlight from oiled bodies, naked to adore the goddess statue, sinking in sinuous unison to abase themselves before Her.

“Worth devoting a life to exploring.”

Like a gloved hand on her thigh, oh god. Near her pussy. Soulless rubber. To stroke or . . . she whimpered, and did not know if it was fear or need.

“you’re feeling, very mildly, what all slavegirls learn to feel when they do as they’re told. I don’t think it surprises you, Valerie. I think you’ ve been drinking it in all this time. A friendly little vampiress lapping up the slavery of all those lovely women you help as it just bleeds from them.”

Women falling into trance as they worked, dropping pens and utensils and tools as their eyes went dim and faraway, ignoring bosses and lovers and children under the spell that conquered them, walking away from their lives to unknown slavery without blinking, hypnotized into forgetfulness by a lorelei only they could hear.

Valerie was a bit more awake now, but she was fully, even contentedly aroused, as the Feeling washed around her again, just a bit more deeply. Was that really it? The Voice was trailing a smooth, hard fingertip through the furrows of her brain. Did she really get off on what the women had been through? Was she really using them? She could remember—couldn’t she?—how she really felt, how wrong this all was. She wanted to think, access those memories, shut her eyes, stop listening.

No. Not stop listening. Anything but stop listening.

The glove over her pussy now, to stroke or slap.

“Vicarious slavery. they told you how they served and obeyed, and that was all you needed. you’re an imaginative girl, Valerie, and many of these sluts were chosen just because they’re intelligent as well as pretty—able to articulate what they felt, a rich diet of submissive memories for you to feast on. Perfect—and no real Owner to worry about, to risk displeasing.”

The glove was impersonal. It did not love her. It used her. Valerie wanted to suck it, wanted to cower under it. Please use me.

“But isn’t having an Owner to take your selfhood from you really the

point?”

Women in slave tunics, cowering in a darkened palace corridor before the lanterns of the amazonian guards, staring in horrified reproach at the collared girl who pointed them out, as the guard captain played the leash in her crotch to reward her.

“you’re a bit harder, Valerie. you’ve never been brainwashed, so you’re first one in this particular slave chain who hasn’t already been taught to obey.”

Obey. The jolt flicked over her like an unexpected wave, more pointed than the Feeling.

Women in bodysuits . . . a dance class . . . Valerie was distracted, wondering what would happen to this set of women, but as they went calmly about their warmups, she drank in their willowy bodies, their reverie of concentration like a teasing preview of trance.

Then she realized the difference. She was their teacher, and they all looked at her, making her damp with the way they skipped to their places, so well-trained, so deferential. So trusting. So—obedient. Oooh, that felt so nice.

She told them to listen to the metronome. Just stand and breathe and listen, and count to themselves. It would important later, she said, to be one with the rhythm. They trusted her, and obeyed her. She met the quizzical gaze of the accompanist, who sat wondering why she wasn’t to play the piano . . . but who stood, to breathe and listen, and count to herself.

Valerie could move. She moved her hand, and when it touched her outer thigh she jerked with the pleasure of the contact. She might have cried out. She slid her fingertips across her thigh, feeling its curve slide down into the furrow of her groin.

Women under hypnosis, her students so pretty in their sweat and flushed skin, their straining muscles, hypnotized now by the ticking and the counting, their common whisper echoing from the mirrored walls, reaching and dipping and rising and bending, all together. They trusted her and let her direct their bodies, and just now had given her their minds, all unknowing. Soon she would teach them what else to whisper as they moved, the movement sending them slowly, irrevocably deeper into submissive trance. Teach them to worship and obey their mistress.

Her Mistress.

Something penetrated to Valerie’s core, disturbing the dreamlike ecstasy—not pain, but like the light from her bedroom door as someone found her playing with herself. Worse than pain: shame, recognition of what wrong thing she was doing.

Then her fingers did find her pussy, and she shut everything from her mind but the pleasure. And the mindless dancers she controlled.

So sweet, giving themselves to her.

A pang, as her pussy and clitoris reached languidly for orgasm, missed it, settled back to wait. So sweet, the dancers—and so stupid.

Valerie realized part of the pleasure came from the contempt she felt for them. So easy to snare these sluts with their own foolish trust in her. Following her orders, depending on her, probably dreaming about her when they stroked themselves to sleep at night—they’d practically thrust their heads into the collars they would soon kneel for.

Meat for Mistress.

She smiled when one of them blinked and tried to break the rhythm, the woman’s eyes widening as she learned the rhythm owned her, trapped her. Her gaze turned to Valerie’s in silent appeal, begging to be freed from the spell she was under, her lips instead mouthing the new words Valerie had taught them, to replace the count.

“I just obey. I must obey.”

Watching them move and bend, whispering the words that stripped their wills layer by layer, words she had given them, Valerie felt her smile widen. She rocked on her feet, shifting her groin forward to ride the Feeling as she saw the woman’s hurt and astonishment—and as she saw the woman’s lips wrap themselves around the mantra, and her eyes began to roll up.

Then that other feeling was back, spoiling it, tainting the lovely despair she saw and shared as the dancer felt her soul being gradually drawn from her, realized she was helping to surrender it with her mindless . . .

Someone was crying.

It grated on Valerie, but it wouldn’t go away. Staring harder at the image of the hypnotized dancers, frigging herself faster—it just spoiled these things. Something was wrong, and for the first time in—how long had it been?—the Voice was not explaining it.

Somehow, Valerie closed her eyes.

She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, but the memory was boiling up from inside too forcefully to ignore.

Caroline.

Caroline whom she found in her garage one night, naked, with the pistol. Waiting for her, holding on with the last of her courage, to explain. Valerie remembered with searing clarity how everything she had—the words, the help, the reassurances—had evaporated before leaving her lips as Caroline explained the addiction of the hypnoslave. The bottomless shame at being taught to love it. The terror of not even being sane enough to fear it later, of surrendering to it forever. Some of us you can save, she said to Valerie, bless your brave heart, but some are just too far gone. Nothing helps them.

Not therapy, not prayer. Not love, either, she said, and I’d rather my husband mourn me dead than learn to despise me—like this. Caroline held the gun like a friend as she told Valerie what she’d decided.

Valerie felt her heart try to stop as she knew what her friend needed her to do.

Nothing.

She almost turned away when Caroline put it to her head, but then looked into her eyes. I will remember for you, she told Caroline. I will tell them all that my friend’s no coward. The tears came but she blinked them away, and she saw clearly as Caroline took her soul back. She didn’t flinch at the terrible crashing noise, or collapse until it was done and there was all the time in the world to grieve.

I’m sorry, Caroline, she told herself now. I couldn’t use your gun when I had to, and now . . .

No. Valerie knew she did not get off on mind-molding women into slaves.

But she was starting to learn to.

Valerie knew she was being very skillfully brainwashed, and she felt a paralyzing despair as she remembered that she couldn’t hold out forever. Eventually, they could erase even Caroline, and then she would . . . obey.

Even now she felt the stirring, at just the thought of that word.

Not much time, but she had to try. Something inside her had brought her Caroline to snap her out of it. She summoned Marlene’s face, again, not lost like Caroline but still out, still free. Hunted now, by a predator she didn’t know was there.

Valerie knew she was speaking to her own mind, but still she cried out:

Run, Marlene! Run! Run from me! Please don’t let her catch you!

Run . . .

14.

Sheila tried to wake up. Something had roused her. It felt good, and restful, just to remain standing as she was, in the open-eyed sleep she’d been left in, but . . .

Someone was crying.

She gasped. Looking quickly around, she realized she was alone in this sparsely-furnished room with the woman on the bed. She herself was in her collar, and nothing else.

She realized she was herself again. Inner Sheila was—out.

Something had done that, a voice in quiet agony. It led her to the woman on the bed.

Valerie Joplin. She lay nude and limp on the sheets, glistening with sweat, her left hand quivering just beside her pussy. Nothing bound her, and Sheila concluded it must be the hypnotic commands that held her motionless. A VR set covered her eyes, fed from the computer that sat incongruously on the nighttable.

For a moment, Sheila looked down and admired Valerie. Not a model’s body, but well-knit, someone to look at suddenly at the beach or by the fireplace or as she undressed for bed and realize in that second how lucky you are to know her . . .

She remembered Kit’s body. Burying her face in her hands, she drew a deep, deep breath. I can’t.

Valerie had awakened her. Something was happening in Valerie’s head, under the VR and the headphones, and she was trying to fight it, and losing. Her cry had reached in, past slave sheila’s hypnotic trance, and pricked Inner Sheila in her cage, like all the other cries Kit’s and Amanda’s and Joyce’s, torturing her since the unspeakable thing she’d done to her lover.

Sheila knelt and reached for the goggles, trying to remember how her programming had made her put it on, without remembering too well and lapsing back under. This close to Valerie she could smell her—fear, arousal, simple sweat—and wanted just to pause and lick her, but the pain in her cry, and the debt Sheila owed her for freeing Sheila with it, kept her on task until she was looking at Valerie’s eyes blinking and moving. They looked at her but focused somewhere else. She slid the headphones off, and jerked the wire from its jack, almost superstitiously frightened that even that tiny whisper would reach her, bewitch her into submitting, sleeping, putting the VR back on over Valerie.

She felt Valerie warm and smooth beneath her, but what rushed into Sheila now was the memory of Valerie at the first interview in her cubicle, tentative and polite, tender of Sheila’s dignity.

Brushing Valerie’s damp hair from her forehead, Sheila leaned over and hugged her, burying her head in the hollow of her neck. She tilted her head up, licking hair aside to whisper in Valerie’s ear, “You’re a free woman, Valerie. You’re strong and you’re better than this. You helped me and all of us. Now it’s our turn. We’ll help you now.”

Swallowing, she knew “we” were figurative for now. She was acting for all the women Valerie had saved, but in terms of available bodies . . .

She kissed Valerie’s eyelid gently, and the woman seemed to calm down, though she kept whispering “Run . . . run . . .”

“We will,” Sheila told her, smoothing her hair.

In a moment she realized it felt too much like the times she’d never been able to have with Kit, and she shook as a single spasm of pain shot through her. Kit was here, elsewhere in the house, but she’d been brainwashed into the walking dead. If Sheila touched her hair, Kit—slave kit—might just break her arm. Or kill her. Or do nothing. Just stare.

Taking a shuddering breath, Sheila rose and looked around to see what there was. I have no idea what I’m doing, she thought. I wish I’d watched more spy movies. But she couldn’t remember what movies she’d liked. Before.

She saw an inducer lying on the floor. For a second she looked away, as if it could start by itself and reenslave her. Had Mistress programmed her to feel this fear about all the machines?

Well, not unless Mistress had expected her to free herself.

Oh, God. Was this another trick of Hers? Another pantomime with the wind-up Sheila doll pretending she’s free?

I can’t think that, she told herself. I just have to keep going. Valerie must have done that—if she’s been under that programmer for as long as I think, she had to be fighting it somehow, or she’d be begging to kiss Mistress’ ass by now.

Suddenly Sheila stopped, almost dizzy. Oh no, I can’t do that. The thought of Mistress’ ass, poised over her as she knelt proudly before the other slaves . . .

She almost slapped herself, but she looked back at Valerie instead. “You’ re right,” she said.

It kept her from slipping back into the erotic abyss, but pretending Valerie could hear her just made her feel lonelier. To keep moving, she stepped over and took up the inducer, remembering how she’d set it down when Joyce and Kit had laid Valerie on the bed to begin her initial programming.

God, that had been days ago. She remembered kneeling by the phone, manufacturing sorrow and determination as she passed on the story Mistress had planted in her mind, telling Marlene and couple of others about the attack on Joyce’s family and that Valerie would be away for a while to try to deal with it. She and the other two had stayed here, sleeping in shifts.

Valerie had lain in the bed under the VR. Sheila and Kit had cleaned and watered her, in pauses where her constant trance had been deepened almost to coma.

The inducer. Sheila looked down at it. Power, in her hands. It felt almost wrong to be holding something this powerful without Mistress’ commands echoing in her head to control its use. She breathed in and out, trying to let that perilously attractive idea pass her by.

She knew the next part of the plan she’d put together in her dreams, the moments between slave sheila’s waking and sleeping. Inner Sheila had come to herself for a few heartbeats, mourning for Kit and so many more, and then thinking. The next part was not easy, but it was simple.

But she knew walking through a minefield was easy, too. You just never step on one.

How to get them up here to the bedroom?

She stepped over to the dresser, keeping her eyes down, but still in the bottom of the mirror she saw her thighs, her shaved pussy, the gleaming metal of the inducer like a long cruel dildo she was about to wrap herself around. No . . .

Helplessly aroused, she raised her eyes up past her breasts, to the collar and Mistress’ talon brand, to her parted lips—her tongue startled her as it darted out to lick them. Her wide eyes. Open, submissive eyes.

She looked at the slave girl in the mirror, saw her breasts start to rise and fall.

She wanted to fuck the slave girl until one of them screamed.

She closed her eyes but then she could her herself pant.

Help

Someone did.

“Run . . .” called Valerie softly, and Sheila obeyed, throwing herself back from the mirror and stumbling to the bed.

She made a hurt sound, laughing and crying at once as she looked down at Valerie, who seemed to be sleeping naturally now. She leaned down and kissed her between her small, neat breasts. “Do you ever stop saving us?” she asked, sucking air to keep from crying.

Staying on her knees, she reached for the bedside phone, which they’d set to intercom. She took a breath, trying to let the confusion and sadness and fear—and the unfamiliar anger she was learning to trust—seep out of her voice. Right. She picked it up.

“Controller?” she whispered. “i can’t obey my programming. i must change the disk and i can’t find the new one.”

Joyce didn’t ask if she’d looked. Mistress’ slaves were too well-trained.

“How long until you must change it?”

Sheila felt a jolt, hearing Joyce with free ears. For a moment her head spun, and all she wanted was to close her eyes and say to the phone, this slave is malfunctioning, Controller, please help this slave to obey! She could crawl to the door, kneel, and wait to be punished, corrected, reenslaved . . .

She kept her eyes open and looked at Valerie. Part of her wanted to exult at the woman’s helplessness—but not enough. She took Valerie’s hand.

“Five minutes, Controller.”

“Wait.” It clicked off.

Sheila stood up and turned to the door, picking up the inducer. Then she knelt and leaned over to kiss Valerie, on the mouth this time, tasting the bitter flavor of her hunger and long sleepless ordeal, and not minding.

“In case it doesn’t work,” she told the sleeping woman. “Thank you for getting me this far. I love . . .”

There were footsteps beyond the door, and she rose smoothly, checking the settings on the inducer before taking aim.

Oh, shit—both of them.

She swept it across them and they halted, dazed in the beam. She watched Kit freeze, her eyes reflecting a half-familiar light as her already expressionless face went even blanker.

“Sleep!” Sheila hissed, and Kit’s eyes closed as she folded silently to the floor, her head thumping on the doorframe. Sheila moaned faintly, as if she ‘d just hurt herself.

Sheila turned to Joyce, and said, “Come here and listen.”

Without hesitation, Joyce obeyed.

15.

“Joyce, I—” Sheila hesitated. Joyce, still in her leotard, stood in front of her, swaying slightly, making a dreamlike effort to fight the mechanical hypnosis. Sheila realized she didn’t know enough about how to use mind control to try deprogramming Joyce. She could simply tell Joyce to be her ally now, but it would just be slavery with another name.

It might not work. Sheila knew she couldn’t undo the chains that bound Joyce’s mind and will to Mistress with a toy like the inducer.

And Sheila was, quite literally, damned if she were going to be anyone’s Mistress.

Joyce’s eyes cleared, and she looked puzzled for a moment before her mind, empty of distractions, took it all in.

“Did you hurt slave kit?” Joyce asked without looking to see for herself. She sounded calm and strong, and her gaze settled on Sheila like a strong hand.

Sheila dropped her head ever so slightly as her eyes flicked immediately to the other girl. “God, Kit. Please don’t be . . .” She turned back to Joyce, suddenly afraid of what she was trying: Joyce was a strong personality dominated by an even stronger one, and they could sweep up a weakling like her in—stop!.

“She’s not ‘slave’ anything, Joyce. Neither am I. Neither are you.

“i am Mistress’ obedient slave.” Joyce sounded so happy about it. “slave kit is Her property too. So are you. Just think about your programming . . .”

“Stop it!” Sheila gestured. Screw the fear—she’d started, and she was gambling on Joyce still being there. “Don’t! Don’t try hypnotizing me—I know you can if I let you and I can’t let you. Just listen. I . . . I am free. I’m not sure why, but I’m free. I betrayed someone I love very much and I helped you do the same, and we have to stop it all now.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Joyce. Please try. Reach inside and remember. I saw Amanda get through to you, I know there’s someone there inside you still. Please, Joyce.”

Joyce listened to her. Her eyes closed and opened. “Mistress owns me body and soul, slave sheila. i worship Her. What makes you think a misbehaving slavegirl can turn me?”

Sheila hung her head. “I can’t do this alone, Joyce. I don’t know what they’ve done to Kit but I’m really afraid they fucked her mind up too much.” Speaking that fear aloud made her voice uneven for a moment. “But I can’t leave her and I can’t let them take Valerie . . .”

“There’s no ‘they’, slave sheila. There’s only Mistress, and we who obey Her. She already owns you, and slave kit, and soon She will own slave valerie and teach her to obey.”

Shaking her head, Sheila stepped back and looked down at Valerie. “All those women, all those good, brave people, are going to be sent back to slavery, and it’s going to be my fault. I was the catspaw, the pawn. I brought all this down on them, after they helped me, and welcomed me, and . . .” she looked over at Kit “. . . loved me.”

“It’s not your fault.” Joyce sounded almost like her old self.

“What?” Sheila was confused, and Joyce’s tone relaxed her as it had when they were friends. It had to be a trick—but what if she were getting through?

“you don’t really exist,” Joyce explained gently. “The real slave sheila belonged to Mistress for a long time. you surrendered your will to Mistress and your ‘self’ was replaced by an obedient little slave whom many of us admire for your complete devotion. Mistress used that slave to create an artificial personality to be her catspaw, just as you said.

“i remember that she said you were so weak and open you were perfect for turning into someone else.”

Sheila tried to recall how that didn’t matter, but her fear was winning. “Joyce! Please don’t . . .”

“So, slave sheila, you’re not defending anything of any value. And there’s no friend betraying Valerie or the others—just another slavegirl who knows how to obey.

Joyce trembled as she stressed the last word, and Sheila knew Joyce saw it make her tremble, too. “No,” she said, but in a small voice.

She gathered herself. “Joyce, I’m here. Whatever I am, Mistress did it too well. I’m such a realistic ghost that I believe in myself. It wasn’t a nonexistent person who fell in love with Kit.” She looked again at the woman lying stunned on the floor, and trembled even more. “And Kit fell in love with someone real. She loved me.

“That makes me real, Joyce. Maybe it’s whoever I was before Mistress brainwashed me the first time—I can’t remember who that woman was. But it doesn’t matter. I remember Kit. And I’m in here.

“And you’re in there, Joyce. I saw your daughter, the daughter you love, reach you. She reached me, but I was too deep then; Mistress’ voice in my ears kept putting me under. I couldn’t think. But I’ve been making myself think since then, Joyce, dear friend Joyce, making myself remember that beautiful, glorious daughter of yours and how she tried.

“She loves you, and I love Kit. Shit, I love both of you too—it’s pathetic, Joyce, but it’s got to be enough, because it’s all I have. Please . . .”

Joyce stared at her, and Sheila started to hope. She kept blinking, and she hadn’t come any closer.

But Sheila distracted herself again. “I had someone I loved, that I gave to Mistress.” She glanced down at Kit again. “Someone who knew I was doing it to her, and loved me anyway. God, if she’d had just a bit more of a chance she could have fought it off. And maybe saved me.”

Looking at Joyce, she said, “We can still save Amanda. I’m sure she hasn’t been fully processed yet; Mistress doesn’t need her for this, and it’s not too late for her. For any of us. Fight it, Joyce—she told you that you could. Be free. Set us all free. Please.”

Joyce seemed to relax. Sheila breathed in, hoping, afraid.

Then Joyce looked up, and Sheila knew she’d lost.

“slave amanda already knows how to obey her Mistress,” she said, smiling. “And wherever she is, whoever’s fucking her, she’s pleasing them for Mistress.”

Sheila shook her head silently, pleadingly. Joyce looked at her almost sadly, but began walking forward now, letting her body sway. In the husky voice she’d used on Valerie, she said, “sheila, i want to help you.”

Sheila was mesmerized by Joyce now, seeing her step lightly forward, her body full of coiled strength, her eyes bright and unblinking in her obedience to the woman who owned her, and focused now on her prey. On Sheila.

Leaving out “slave” had confused Sheila, and bought Joyce another few inches of approach. “After all, you helped both of us to remember how to obey Her, didn’t you?” she asked, sincerely, as she moved closer.

“What?” Sheila, sunk in horror and guilt at what she knew Joyce meant, was truly prey now, a tender helpless mouse falling into the eyes of the cat gently stalking her.

“you helped slave kit overcome her freedom by reminding her how much she enjoyed giving it away the first time.” Sheila felt the stab, heard Kit whisper “goodbye” again, and set herself to take it—but she felt smaller now . . .

“Then you—mmm, licked me away from my free will.” Joyce’s gratitude was real, and it showed in her voice. That frightened Sheila most of all.

“I’m . . . sorry,” she said, brokenly, but she was breathing harder. “Please, Joyce, please forgive me. I was enslaved when I did it but it’s still my fault. But let me make it right. In the name of God, Joyce, please don’t let me leave this mess that I’ve made. Don’t let me leave Kit like that. Please . . .”

Now Joyce stood against Sheila, invading her space and claiming it, the underside of her breasts under the lycra brushing teasingly across the tops of Sheila’s, as Sheila had to look up slightly.

It was a trick to make her feel dominated, and it was working. Sheila felt sick as she realized how stupid it had been to try reaching a slave of Mistress’ as if she were an ordinary human being. It may have been the only right, clean thing to do, but it had still failed, and she had let everyone down—Valerie, Kit, Amanda, the group. Never mind herself—she deserved that for losing the others’ chance to be free.

Joyce. If there’d ever been a chance for her, Sheila had just lost it, too.

Joyce. Her breath was warm on Sheila’s skin, and her body warm near it. Her thigh brushed against Sheila’s for the briefest second as they faced each other.

Sheila felt only desire as the beautiful robot stood over her, feeling herself liquefying in the humid eagerness for Joyce simply to . . .

Take her in her arms.

16.

Joyce’s touch was delicate, mindful of Sheila’s sudden fragility, and Sheila couldn’t keep anything in mind now but how wonderful it felt to be held. She felt fingertips slide lightly down her spine, and curved herself forward, feeling the lycra of Joyce’s bodysuit against her bare belly. Then she relaxed, leaning her head on Joyce’s shoulder.

“sheila.” She felt the whisper above her ear, stirring her hair. Hearing her name started to bring it back—Kit forgiving her, Amanda’s last stand, and Valerie, fighting so long, trying so hard to protect everyone.

And her sorry-assed excuse for a rescue.

Sheila felt the crying hit her almost as hard as an orgasm would, and she was helpless to hold it off.

Joyce held her through it, as the truest of lovers do during that kind of orgasm.

When she stopped to breathe, she heard Joyce speaking. Felt her speaking, the air sliding along the edge of her ear. “you tried, sheila. Brave little sheila.” Slowly Joyce nuzzled Sheila’s head while Sheila stood quivering, her eyes lidded. She felt Joyce’s lips claim her earlobe. Her teeth gently closed on it, held it lightly while Sheila almost floated, waiting. Opened.

“But you’re not a heroine, sheila. you’re a charming little fuckup.” Joyce bit her ear. Sheila squeaked, jumped, went nowhere in Joyce’s firm hold. She felt Joyce’s thigh press between hers, and let it part them. Tried to grip it. She wanted to be angry at what Joyce had said, but . . . mmmmm . . .

“you’re a sweet little piece of lapcandy to catch some lesbian’s eye. And you did—as programmed.”

The words were making Sheila crazy. She leaned forward to Joyce’s neck, kissing, then licking, then sucking her collarbone.

“Lapcandy,” Joyce whispered, teasing her ear again. “Such a complete slut—your lover’s lying over there and you’re melting over someone else.” Sheila clung painfully to Joyce, feeling every inch of the other woman against her, riding the smooth hot skin under her pussy, and Joyce held her.

Your lover’s lying over there.

Sheila tried, she tried, but she was already too tired, and there was just too much of Joyce, warm and strong and controlling and touching her so . .

“Slut,” Joyce said conversationally. “you’re just not the kind of fighter slave amanda or slave valerie were. It’s making you hot—isn’t it?—just to realize how degrading it is for women like that to be turned into mindless slaves because they depended on a whore like you.”

“P . . . p . . . pl . . .” Sheila was so confused. Love for . . . Kit . . . still burned in her, but that candle had so much wax that the flame was drowning in a perfumed, pastel lake of . . .

. . . wax . . .

Joyce flexed her thigh between Sheila’s, and Sheila came with a quavering little moan.

Sheila’s breath shuddered out of her. She looked into Joyce’s eyes, letting them suck her in. She realized she was still aroused. She leaned into Joyce, feeling Joyce’s fabric-sheathed crotch rub divinely against the bare skin of her shaved pussy. She was slick now as she tried to ride Joyce ‘s thigh.

Sheila could barely remember what she’d felt about Kit now. She was turned on—but as she remembered the girl’s helpless struggle against the sedatives and her lovely minuet with the hypnotic pendant, as she remembered finding the right buttons to push to turn Kit’s own virtues against her.

Sheila wanted to cry, but it was for the memory of awakening to Mistress’ voice, knowing the invisible leash was in her neck again. She’d turned against Mistress . . .

She fell further into Joyce’s eyes. “But She won’t mind,” she thought aloud, “it doesn’t matter what a whore thinks . . . anyway . . .”

Joyce nodded, and Sheila began nodding back, remembering how Joyce had hypnotized Valerie and wanting to submit too.

A last chunk of resolve reached the surface of the bubbling pool that Sheila’s will had melted into, but it just focused her mind on what her pussy already knew.

She let her gaze lock onto Joyce’s. In a tone almost of wonderment, she recited softly, “i am just an object, a tool of Mistress. you are Her willing slave. you are being used to weaken and hypnotize me into Her slave, too. you will take over my mind and make me obey. i will give up my will and hear only your voice, and obey your commands, which will be Mistress’ commands. i will worship Mistress again and obey her forever.

“Is . . . that it?”

“Yes,” said Joyce.

Sheila looked into her eyes for a moment, and Joyce somehow knew to lean down and kiss her, long and lingeringly. Sheila remembered kissing Joyce on command in her foyer, her head still spinning with Mistress’ voice from the headset, Joyce’s taste still on her tongue from Joyce’s own turning.

She thought about that night, about . . . slave amanda. About how she stared blankly into the inducer, about how she’d bucked and cried as her mother ate her out, about how she’d left with them, obediently, empty.

About nothing else.

Sighing for a last time, she said, “This whore will obey.” slave joyce kissed away the tear that rolled down from her eyes, and then stared into them.

slave sheila whispered, “Thank you,” but neither of them really heard it, or thought about it further as slave joyce began to hypnotize her.

slave sheila stood at attention, lost in the image of herself in the mirror, nude and collared as a slavegirl should be. Reflected light from the hall gleamed from her pussy and the inside of her thighs.

“Whore.”

The command seized her mind and she skipped over the bed, where her Controller stood. slave joyce inclined her head toward the beautiful woman with the tormented face who lay sleeping, her body slick with sweat. valerie.

“This meat needs to be receptive to her processing sequence.”

“Yes, Controller.” slave sheila was eager to obey the order. Any order.

“Fuck her.”

“Yes, Controller.” slave sheila got that out before the panting silenced her and she crawled onto the bed, pushing valerie’s limp knees apart and leaning down to feast on her.

she knew how good she was at this, and soon she’d brought valerie awake from wherever her mind had been. valerie started to mutter something like “run,” but as sheila’s well-trained tongue flicked over her, the words broke up into little cries, as the thought behind them fragmented under the tiny jolts slave sheila was sending.

valerie’s hips began to buck, weakly but faster, and slave sheila pulled back, smiling at the long whimper that won from her. she began to kiss and suck her way up valerie’s stomach, pausing to enjoy her breasts.

she looked back at her Controller, and saw slave kit come to stand on the other side of the bed, ready to reattach the programmer’s phones and VR hood.

valerie was still, somehow, trying to say something. slave sheila swung up to straddle her and then worked her way up to sit on her chest, enjoying the way the woman’s breasts felt against her asscheeks.

valerie’s dazed struggle to speak felt wonderful against her clit, and she arched back, reaching to tweak valerie’s to keep her focused.

she saw the other two slaves watching her contort on top of the new recruit, and her pussy clenched as she realized that even slaves could feel contempt. she smiled at them, and then valerie’s tongue came together with her joy at serving Mistress again at last.

slave sheila tried to call out to Mistress as she came, but she was too far gone. No matter; as she settled back and looked down at valerie’s face, she already felt herself getting excited again. Being a whore had privileges all its own.

she heard the words now. “Please . . . help . . . help me . . .”

Centering her pussy before lowering it to valerie’s mouth again, slave sheila smiled down. “Oh, valerie, i will! i . . . am . . .”

17.

Kris and her mother looked up the glass walls of the atrium. The woman who ran this place, who offered help to Kris and women like her who’d been subjected to mind control, had started out in quiet, humble rooms in borrowed places. Depending on desperate funding appeals, volunteers, a moribund car being driven into the ground. Kris wondered if something had been lost when she went . . . big time.

This didn’t even seem like a clinic, however upscale. It looked like it sold something. Rare and valuable somethings.

Her mother shook her head at it all, but her younger sister Kathleen pointed to the garden that filled the center of the huge internal courtyard. Kris heard the soft sound of falling water and wanted to go sit there for a while, and the polite young woman leading them into the Oasis Center seemed as though she’d understand, but she wanted to get this over with. She’d spent too much of the last few months hiding from her own mind.

It was hard enough just to be in this glass office prism, which reminded her so much of the sort of place where the bastards in the computer-geek fraternity who’d done her would work eventually, while she scrambled to pick up the pieces of her graduate study.

But she had to face all that in the real world, and Oasis sounded like they understood.

Kris wondered if this woman, Sheila, who’d met them had any idea herself what it was like. She wasn’t really clear whether Sheila was a staffer, a receptionist, or something else. The short skirt and heels were just the right side of starlet to pass in an office, but she had none of the gravity Kris expected from a therapist.

No. She wasn’t another survivor. A twinkie like her would never have gotten loose from the mind controllers who took her. She might have liked it too much.

Jesus. Kris stopped dead in the corridor, holding her head in her hands, horrified at herself. Still so full of poison. She looked up. Her mother looked pained, Kathleen looked away. Sheila nodded and then stepped closer.

“God, I’m sorry,” Kris choked out, as if she’d spoken it aloud.

Sheila smiled at her, as if she’d heard but forgiven, and then reached out and touched her cheek. “We never apologize for what they put there.”

“You’re—?” Kris felt like an even lower form of life. Maybe if she ran, she could drown in the water she’d heard before they could stop her.

“Most of us here have been. It’s a way to give something back. You eventually find a way to pass it on.” She smiled. “Maybe you’ll find something here, too.

“Would you still like to come in?” There was something vulnerable about the way she put it, as though it were terribly important to her, as if Kris were important enough that her choosing to leave would hurt Oasis somehow.

Corporate come-on? Kris didn’t think so, somehow.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I would,” and walked on.

“Oh, look!” Sheila said, waving though the maze of glass walls to a lithe figure coming to them. “Dr Joplin’s done with her ballet class. We can walk her to her office.”

“I think,” said Kathleen suddenly, “that I’m going to go sit down.” Her mother frowned but Kris looked at her, and for no particular reason did not meet Kathleen’s usual resentment with her own.

“Tell me if it’s a real waterfall,” she said, and was amazed to win a smile. Kathleen strolled off, and Kris found Sheila smiling at her, too. See what you can do already?

Kathleen liked the garden, and found a stone bench to sit on. It was a real waterfall, all right, and a fair-sized little pond with flat ground around it. She almost expected to see rabbit or deer step from the bushes for a drink, and found herself holding still so as not to frighten them off.

Suggestibility—it runs in the family. She didn’t smile.

Then she saw a shadow on the water and turned to see another woman walking to the bench.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said, but Kathleen was trying to apologize at the same time. This woman looked like she worked there—not a doctor type, but some sort of manager. The better kind of manager, Kathleen thought, the kind who really do know what they’re doing. Tall, cool, calm, she looked like anything from a wise late twenties to a vibrant mid-forties.

“I come here every so often just to collect myself,” she said, in a high, clear voice. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Kathleen swallowed the reflexive counter-apology. “I can see why. It’s so peaceful. I’m Kathleen, by the way.”

“Hello, Kathleen. I’m Joyce.” She sat at the other end of the bench, so gracefully that Kathleen wondered if everyone here took dance. “Yes. It’ s part of the whole idea of the Center—a peaceful place where vulnerable living things can gather and drink. Feel safe. Relax very deeply. An oasis, even if not the desert kind.”

Kathleen felt drawn to her, and wanted to deserve her interest. “A watering hole?”

“Precisely.” Joyce smiled at her.

END