The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

Jan stood in the cool shadow of the flying saucer and looked away across the lake at the trees on the far side. It was easier to see the wind ripple them than the water, and it was soothing to watch.

“Jan.”

She didn’t respond. She felt like the leaves on those trees in the distance, swaying gently back and forth, back and forth in the breeze. Just hearing her name told her nothing, gave her no reason to do anything but sway in her mind like a leaf in the breeze.

“Jan. Please. Talk to me.”

Jan’s attention swiveled, pulled now by something stronger: a command. She turned to see Tina next to her.

Tina was lovely in her swimsuit. Jan just stared at her for a while. The dark-green maillot showed off her long legs and trim hips, and the subtle iridescent patterning followed her slim, strong upper body with every shift as she stood there, gleaming in the sun outside the shade of the saucer looming overhead. Jan knew Tina worried about her bust size, but seeing her lithe in the shimmering fabric she thought Tina looked like a beautiful serpent.

She thought about floating down there in the lake, half asleep in the ripples, while Tina slid toward her under the surface, undulating through the water and staring at her with wide unblinking eyes.

They were wide now, wide . . .

Tina blinked, wearily. “Jan, answer me. Did you hear me?”

Jan shook herself. “Um, no, Tina. Sorry. What did you say?”

“I said . . . said . . .” Tina was looking at Jan’s eyes, and Jan looked back into Tina’s, wondering what Tina saw in hers and if Tina would tell her. She heard Tina’s breathing speed up and lighten, sounding like Jan’s roommate back at the dorm when she played with herself. She realized Tina’s eyes were flickering with something, light off the lake, and were almost as soothing to look at as the leaves.

Tina’s eyes grew wider and easier to look into. She didn’t blink.

“Stop that,” Tina whispered, and then put her head in her hands.

She spoke again without looking up and her voice was muffled. “Shit. Maybe they’ve got us hypnotizing each other, too . . .

“Please listen to me, Jan.”

“OK.”

“Jan, tell me how long we’ve been here. At the . . . flying . . . saucer. I think it came last night, but it feels like longer . . .”

Jan thought about it briefly. “I don’t know, Tina.” She wasn’t sure why it mattered, but Tina hadn’t asked about that.

“Doesn’t that bother you, Jan?”

“No.”

“Jan, we all went camping. We drove out from the University and brought our stuff, and we came out here. Tracy said—Tracy said she knew this great place no one else knew about and something . . . we saw a UFO and I don’t remember feeling—” Tina stopped and held her head again.

“Something to do with Tracy. I’ve got to think . . .”

Jan watched her. It was too hard to think. It was easier just to . . . just . . .

Jan woke with her eyes already open. The wind and the lake had mesmerized her again.

Tina was staring at her needfully. Jan thought of advising her to look out at the rippling breeze and let it stop her thinking, but it was easier to relax and wait.

“Jan, we’re standing next to an alien spaceship and we’ve met aliens. Six-legged ones. We haven’t told anyone and no one knows we’re here. Or they’re here. Jan? Isn’t there something wrong with all that?”

“Yes,” Jan said, and felt good hearing Tina’s little moan of relief. “They’re not ‘aliens.’ They’re Explorers. They told us that.”

Now Tina moaned more loudly, and Jan liked that, too. “God—you ‘re not even kidding. God.”

Behind her, Jan could hear more moans, closer to the central column on which the flying saucer perched, like an immense steel mushroom on a thick stem. They were too low and breathless to recognize voices, but it was probably Shaheen and Randi. They’d been fucking on the shady grass under the spaceship ever since Explorer Two had suggested they stop resisting their mutual attraction, and Jan usually liked to watch.

She’d probably turn and look now, if Tina didn’t want her to do anything more, but then she was distracted by a swatch of bright red further away on the grass. It was Shaheen’s bikini bottom. She realized she had no idea where Randi’s suit was anymore.

“Jan.” Tina’s voice was tight. “We should call someone on your cell phone. I think we’re on the edge of a zone for it. Call someone and tell them about our new—friends.”

Jan wondered for a second about the way she’d said “friends” but she remembered something else. “We can’t call right now, Tina. I don’t have the phone.”

“What? Where is it?”

“I gave it to Explorer Five. It wanted to examine our primitive Earthling technology. Shelby gave it hers, too, so it could compare.”

“When—when will you, ah, get them back?” Tina’s voice grew quieter as she spoke.

“When it’s done with them, I guess.”

“Does anyone else have one?” Tina was almost whispering.

“Lisa . . . no. Lisa said she forgot hers in the van. She’s always forgetting . . .” Jan was mesmerized by the trees again. The wind had changed direction.

“OK, Jan. Thanks. I . . . thanks.”

Jan stared.

“Hi,” said a clearer voice. Jan blinked a few times and let her eyes focus, looking down at Explorer Five. The Explorer’s eyestalks were level with her own eyes but the pear-shaped extraterrestrial itself stood only to the height of Jan’s breasts. It stood on its hindlimbs, while its midlimbs spread hesitantly and its more delicate forelimbs held a small machine.

Jan drifted for a moment. Tina must have left her before the Explorer had come over. “Hi,” she said, grinning at it.

“How do you feel . . . Jan?”

“I feel wonderful,” she said sincerely. And then, because she remembered that it was because the Explorers’ machines made them all feel so nice, she added, “Thank you.”

“That is good, Jan. You are welcome.

“What makes you feel wonderful, Jan?” Explorer Five’s voice carried some emphasis, and Jan felt a warm need to respond correctly.

“I really feel nice being here, near your cool spaceship. I also really enjoy being around you. All of the Explorers.” Jan moved a little, as the good feelings intensified. “It’s, um, soothing. But exciting, too.”

“Yes, Jan.” Explorer Five was pointing the device it held at her head and looking at it with one eyestalk while the other bore into her own eyes. It was so cute. She stood still, as they liked her to, so the instrument could probe her mind more smoothly.

“Please, though. Jan, I am confused. You are soothed—relaxed, tranquilized. But you are also excited?”

“Um.” Jan really wanted to help the Explorer understand how her mind worked. It seemed very important to all the little newcomers to know how humans thought. “Well, my mind is really calm, almost asleep sometimes. It’s so easy not to think much. But my body . . . I’m really turned on. Sexually aroused,” she added, in case Explorer Five didn’t understand.

“Yes.” For a moment both eyestalks looked at the device it aimed at her, then looked at her, then divided tasks again. “And does obeying Explorer instructions also turn you on, Jan?”

She blinked, dutifully trying to associate the low, pleasant buzz in her pussy with that. “No, Explorer Five. I mean, it’s nice when you or the other Explorers tell me what to do, but . . .”

“Yes. I see. I think you need a session in the ship, Jan.”

“A brainwashing session?” she asked, with the weird little flutter between her thighs that word gave her when she heard it, or said it, or thought it. Erin had told her that was what happened to them on the ship, but Erin had been masturbating when she said that, and wondering if the Explorers would mind if she volunteered for another one.

“Yes, Jan. What a—funny word. Yes. We will wash your brain. But we cannot do it now. One of your friends is inside, being . . . brainwashed.”

Jan relaxed, knowing the Explorer would sort out the scheduling.

“It is your friend Erin. She is responding well to her training, and she will help with your session when hers is done. It will be . . . half an hour before we can brainwash you.

“While we wait, Jan, would you like to play?”

Jan smiled. “Sure, Explorer Five. What . . . ?”

“The animals that your friend Shelby talked about, that she likes to ride.”

Shelby, the geology major. The equestrienne. “Horses?”

“Yes, Jan. We can play horses. Would you like to be my horse?”

“OK.” Jan realized it would be fun, and when the Explorer asked if horses wore clothes the sudden cold feeling of leather whips bits hurt was gone too quickly to bother her. She stripped and let her two-piece drop where Explorer Five pointed, then knelt and shivered with the weird-but-enjoyable feeling of the extraterrestrial’s weight on her upper back. What might be skin or might be a suit was cool and odd against her own skin as she let the alien mount her and then stood when Explorer Five tightened its thighs. She leaned slightly forward until the weight was balanced, and Explorer Five’s midlimbs circled her shoulders.

She stood for a moment, savoring the passivity of waiting for her rider to steer and goad her. She felt the Explorer’s frail forelimbs light on her shoulders, and felt a warm protectiveness.

Explorer Five’s hind feet kicked her delicately below the ribs, and she started to walk forward. Explorer Five turned her almost immediately by squeezing her shoulder, and Jan shivered all over when she did. The Explorer walked her past Shaheen and Randi, but the girls were oblivious, Shaheen writhing on her back with her eyes rolled up while Randi stared intently down, working her hands in Shaheen’s pussy and ass at once.

But Jan looked ahead as she knew her rider wished her to. She didn’t need to stare, really. The glimpse and thought and liquid sounds from the lovers were enough to make her wet and stiffen her nipples, but she wasn’t sure how much of that was about being ridden.

She looked ahead at the pillar of the ship, now reminding her of a machined treetrunk holding up the landed saucer, and felt a weird chill deep down in her mind before the heat inside her melted it. Then Explorer Five’s hand left her shoulder.

The slap on Jan’s ass jolted her, and she responded before she could even think. She ran.

2.

Explorer Five had Jan going like a thoroughbred mare, and it was better than any run she’d ever had. She flew through the shadow of the flying saucer, racing out through the meadow along the lake, running without a care for where she was going because her rider would decide that and turn her head.

She was stopped before she knew it. Her brain had been turned off and her body remembered the wonderful feeling of running flat-out, but now she just stood in the meadow, wanting to wriggle with how much fun it was but not wanting to risk making her rider fall.

Explorer Five turned her again and she paced back toward the dully-gleaming saucer, breathing deeply, almost wanting to be spurred forward again. Striding naked through the grass she let herself drift into a reverie of being Explorer Five’s horse each day, every day. Whenever they didn’t have her asleep or being brainwashed. Ridden and running.

Jan saw two figures walking up the meadow toward them, and Explorer Five nudged her over to meet them. It was Explorer Two, with Tracy walking behind it.

Tracy was nude, too, and Jan realized she hadn’t seen much of Tracy since they’d . . . found the UFO here, other than glimpses of her trailing Explorer Two like a pet on an invisible leash. It had been Tracy’s idea to camp this far into the hills and Jan was starting to remember how odd it had seemed that she knew her way to this lake, and how intent she’d been that they’d all love the place once they saw it.

Explorer Five brought Jan up short, and she stood as straight as she could with the little being on her back. She was juicing freely, being someone’s horse and now with one of her friends watching her.

But Tracy didn’t seem to see her. Tracy was marching stiffly behind Explorer Two and staring ahead without anything on her face. The little redhead’s wiry, well-knit body was jerking forward and Jan almost thought she was pretending to be a mime pretending to be a robot.

When Explorer Two stopped, Tracy snapped to attention behind it, still staring, ignoring Jan, Explorer Five, the meadow. The world.

Jan looked at her. Her copper locks were swept up on top of her head, and Jan realized she couldn’t remember Tracy putting her hair up since . . . since . . . she gave up, but it had been a while. Jan kept looking, and wondered if Tracy wearing her hair long and down had had anything to do with the cigarette lighter-sized device high up on her neck, near her hairline. Lights winked on it, faint in the sun.

Jan felt an unfamiliar coldness in her belly, seeing that. And how dull Tracy’s eyes looked as they stared at nothing. So much duller than that thing on her neck. Near her brainstem . . .

Explorer Two spoke in the clicking, chirping Explorer speech, its eyes on their stalks unreadable but weaving in a way that made Jan nervous now instead of mesmerized.

Explorer Five responded past Jan’s head. “No. I still control the Jan-unit. It obeys me.”

Her pussy fluttered.

“It is already conditioning itself to submit and serve,” Explorer Five went on. “Detect the arousal essences—they register even at your distance.”

Explorer Two paused. “Please speak Language.”

Explorer Five gripped Jan’s body more tightly, and now she did wriggle, a little. When she felt the light touch on her breast she gasped b ut held still. “No need. All of the human females have been tamed. They will not abrespond, even if they hear and comprehend. Their minds are dulled and their wills are drained. This one is no longer capable. Yours is already controlled by—”

“You have taken that unit . . . Jan . . . too far from the ship. The docility field is too weak to extend even at maximum gain.”

“Jan-unit responds even without its influence. It is naturally docile. It has not yet consciously absorbed the obedience/pleasure lock, but again I note to you its secretions. The Jan-unit’s sexual response is already becoming synchronized with slave function. Soon it will learn to obey.”

Jan wanted to finger herself, even as she wondered why hearing she was naturally docile was turning her on. She wondered why seeing Tracy standing like an automaton behind Explorer Two was turning her on even more.

“Explorer Five, I indulge your insistence on using their speech: without more direct-control implants, we must practice issuing commands in a form they can know and obey.” Even through her daze, Jan could tell Explorer Two was condescending. “But we are limited. We have only the licensed protective field to tranquilize sapients close to the ship.”

“Yes, Explorer Two.” Above her head, its body still possessively astride her, Explorer Five let its voice grow snide. “Our enterprise has been handicapped in its ability to control Earthling minds. You were unsuccessful in obtaining a full-strength enslaver from the military, despite your assurances of contacts and access. We could have reactivated the Tracy-unit and let it guide us to the academic-grouping, the ‘University,’ and harvested them all with one field-pulse.”

Explorer Two’s eyestalks came together. Jan felt a little worried for her rider’s sake, but then she started to feel a vague sting inside.

Control Earthling minds.

Docility field.

Know and obey.

Learn to obey.

Obey. Her pussy hummed. But her belly got a little colder.

“Alert.” Tracy’s voice was toneless but clear, and they all looked at her. She was still rigid, but her eyes were fixed on Jan.

“Report, slave,” Explorer Two said.

“Slave obeys.” Tracy’s voice was intense and smart, as she’d always been, but now it sounded as dead as her eyes seemed. The thing on her neck blinked. “The Jan-unit is no longer fully under Explorer control. It experiences confusion and fear.”

Jan suddenly felt even more naked, and less aroused. Even the touch of the Explorer mounted on her was no longer soothing. Something built in her, over the growing coldness, but she didn’t recognize it as a scream, yet.

A dazed part of her inside was trying to formulate how could Tracy rat me out like that but it couldn’t focus on why it would be wrong.

“Emergency status?” Explorer Two’s eyestalks had swiveled to peer into Jan’s face, and now she stared into them wide-eyed as they examined her.

“Negative,” Tracy intoned. “The Jan-unit is still under the effect of the docility field. Its thoughts are blunted. It will not try to escape and it is still submissive to Explorer command.

“But it is starting to think again.”

It sounded like an accusation. That drew Jan’s gaze from the not-quite-mesmerizing scrutiny of Explorer Two back to Tracy.

“I have programmed the Tracy-unit,” Explorer Two explained more evenly to Explorer Five, “to use its residual knowledge of Earthling affect and behavior to assess the other specimens, especially concerning their individual responses to the mind conversion.”

So there, it seemed to imply.

“We should return the Jan-unit to the field and dim her thoughts again,” said Explorer Five, sounding more eager to end the dispute now than really concerned with taming Jan.

I shouldn’t let them take me back there. Jan wasn’t sure why she so badly wanted to keep thinking, but she did. Still, there just didn’t seem to be any good reason to be disobedient when her rider nudged her back toward the flying saucer. She felt herself start to walk back down the meadow, toward the huge disk that was suddenly so . . . sinister.

Flying saucer. Oh my . . . god. Tina . . . ?

“Jan.” Suddenly the pool of her mind dissolved in ripples. Soothing, concentric, absorbing ripples . . .

“Yes, Explorer Five?”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m—I—” She couldn’t remember, but it felt oddly bad.

“Should we hypnotize this one?” Explorer Five sounded concerned, and Jan felt guilty.

“No,” Explorer Two said. It was coming back with them, and she could see Tracy marching like a lithe, pale machine in its wake. “It will remain controlled. In any case, the most effective hypnotic devices are the fixed ones at the ship. The Jan-unit will continue to obey until it is exposed to one.”

Jan struggled against the tranquility. It was hard. If being away from the spaceship reduced the mind control’s power, she hadn’t been clear long enough for her thoughts to wake up. Now she was obediently strolling back into the numbing zone again, and knowing that she’d soon be deep in trance again scared her but was also strangely relieving.

She forced her eyes over toward Tracy, wondering if her obviously brainwashed friend would sense and report her dimming resistance. Even as it faded.

But they’d turned the redhead’s awareness off again, and she continued to stride puppetlike. Her green eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the ship ahead of them. The control box on her neck kept blinking.

How could I not see that? How could none of us notice that on her?

Oh. No. Maybe she had us all hypnotized to ignore it. Maybe that’s why we all agreed to come . . . here . . . to . . .

As her thoughts disintegrated, Jan realized vaguely that she had no more time to think about what a docility field was.

Then there was just . . . docility.

3.

With Explorer Five’s light but controlling weight on her, Jan felt her worry fade as she strode under the spreading overhang of the saucer. She was becoming submissive again, just as Explorer Five had said she would, and enjoyed it much better than the stress, out there, that she was already having a hard time remembering.

“Yes. You are right.” Her rider patted her head as she bore it carefully into the shade, and she smiled. “It is back under field control.”

“The field has been effective in more complex control than that,” Explorer Two said, and strode off past the ship’s central column, toward a low rise before the woods. Tracy stayed in its wake, robotically precise, and Jan paced after them at a touch from her rider.

I am so good at being ridden, she exulted mildly to herself. She started to raise her knees to step, mincing like a Lippizaner in dressage, and felt herself juice.

They found a hole in the shallow slope, and it gave Jan a distant twinge to see how much like a grave it looked, with a berm of fresh dirt around on one side. The twinge disappeared in a wave of heat as she saw Tracy come to a halt, stiffly at attention almost at the edge of the grave but looking up over it into the trees as though she didn’t see it.

She looked like a platform diver zoning before she leaped. Clods of dirt flew from the hole in synch with a rhythmic scraping, but Tracy didn’t twitch.

Explorer Five rode Jan to stand next to her as Explorer Two advanced to the hole. Inside, Jan saw Shelby in her hiking boots and socks and workgloves, but otherwise wearing nothing but a bandanna around her neck. She was sweaty and dirty, but like Tracy’s freckles it just pointed up her attractive shape. Her hair was back in a ponytail but some strands had escaped and clung prettily to her forehead and cheeks.

As Jan stopped beside Tracy, she saw Shelby had one of the small shovels the campers had brought. She put it against the side of the hole and then came to attention like Tracy, her gloved hands tight against her muscular thighs. Jan thought of Shelby using her as a horse, astride her with those thighs, keeping her in control with leather and steel.

Shelby raised her head attentively. “Hello, Explorer Two,” she said clearly. She looked up past Tracy and didn’t even glance at her friend standing rigidly like a zombie attendant, with the thing on her neck still winking its lights. Shelby looked only at Explorer Two.

“Hello, Shelby-unit. What are you doing?”

Shelby’s eyes lidded a little but stayed open. “I am doing as I was instructed, Explorer Two. I am mining for ixkat-tok.” Her Carolina drawl made the alien word elegant as she clicked it out. Jan remembered her in Introductory German, too self-conscious to pronounce correctly and stand out from the rest.

“Why have you stopped obeying that instruction, Shelby-unit?”

Shelby stood calmly straight, her breasts rising and falling slowly as she rested from her labor. “You indoctrinated me that Explorer presence overrides all prior instruction,” she told it. “I am obeying that instruction before resuming my task.”

“Good. Do you know what ixkat-tok is, Shelby-unit?”

“Yes, Explorer Two, once it was explained to me. It is an ore of the element we call copper, useful to Explorers.”

“Is there any here?”

Shelby looked up out of the grave she’d dug. “No, Explorer Two. There is no copper in this part of the continent, and in any case copper on Earth does not interact so as to form ixkat-tok. The necessary processes did not take place in Earth’s formation eons ago. It does not exist on Earth.”

“Then is it useless for you to dig for it?”

“No, Explorer Two!” Shelby responded happily. “I am sorry my planet has no ixkat-tok for you, but I am glad that I can obey your command to dig for it.” As she stood, Jan could see Shelby’s nipples stiffen.

She saw Shelby’s grey eyes were dark, and realized that in her hole, looking up, Shelby’s sky was the looming UFO above. She also saw so much of Shelby’s eyes because the other girl’s pupils had shrunk to pinpoints, and the other girl wasn’t blinking very often.

“Did you think so before I asked you to stand in front of the field emitter?”

Shelby’s expression didn’t change. “I no longer remember what I thought before you put me in the . . . tranquilizing place.”

Explorer Two turned to Explorer Five. “Intense exposure to the field by itself can produce obedience, not just docility, on the same order as our slower phased conditioning.

“After it was shown the geological data, the Shelby-unit pointed out the difference in ores. It had been told that we needed and valued both the copper and the refining byproducts, and it was trying to be helpful by saying we were ‘barking up the wrong tree.’ It remained help-oriented even when I suggested it could serve as mining labor. I think it would have abresponded to that, however, if it had not already been docile from standard field-effect.”

Jan thought of Shelby when they asked her ladyship to clean something back at the house. It might have been nicer—and quieter—if they’d used a docility field. But here she was, submissively digging her way to the Indian Ocean just because Explorer Two had told her to.

“Are there detrimental effects to cognition from overexposure to the docility waveform?” Explorer Five sounded dubious.

“Perhaps,” Explorer Two said, moving its eyestalks to study the nude girl in the gravelike “mine” while she stood passively. “But this one may be of more use as a servitor anyway. It clearly has enough mind left to be able to comprehend commands and obey them.

“We will test its cognitive ability later.”

The eyestalks came together and peered into Shelby’s blank grey gaze. “Shelby-unit.”

“Yes, Explorer Two?” She tensed, and Jan saw how strong the young horsewoman was. She could easily outfight a Explorer . . . although it puzzled Jan why she’d even think of that.

“What will you do now, Shelby-unit?”

“I await your next command, Explorer Two,” she said crisply. “Then I will obey.”

The Explorer turned away. “Resume mining for ixkat-tok. When you find it, you may leave the mine and report to the nearest Explorer. Do you understand?”

“I understand, and I obey!” Shelby grinned, and turned to retrieve the little shovel.

Jan knew Shelby would keep digging now until someone told her to stop. Or maybe only if a Explorer commanded her to. She wondered if any of them would. Her pussy itched as she saw the girl’s muscles move under her skin, heard her breathe in exertion. Then her rider had her moving back past the ship’s central column as they went with Explorer Two and Tracy, who still followed it mindlessly.

“I deplore your arbitrary use of human resources,” Explorer Five called from over her head. “I had not finished my cognitive assessments. Now we cannot determine whether the Shelby-unit could have been used for higher-order tasks once we rendered it totally obedient to us.”

Explorer Two ignored Explorer Five and said, “Halt.” Tracy stopped dead and came to attention. They were a few meters away from where Shaheen and Randi lay tangled in each other. The girls seemed to have fallen into an exhausted sleep, but as if the Explorers’ approach roused her, Shaheen squirmed a little under Randi and found her way to a breast. She worried it with her mouth until Randi groaned and cried out and reached to torment her in turn.

“Down.” Back rigid, Tracy dropped to one knee so that the shorter extraterrestrial could reach her neck and pluck off the blinking device. She kept staring forward but ignored—or had been told not to see—the lovers.

Explorer Two said, “I will study the data in this and determine whether the implant device remains suitable for long-term control.” It seemed to notice Tracy still genuflected, arms by her sides, as if posing for a sculpture. At another command she rose to attention again.

“The Erin-unit is being hypnoconditioned aboard the ship,” Explorer Two went on. “That should be complete for now.

“The Randi-unit shall be next. We will see if it submits more readily to control after prolonged arousal.” One eyestalk turned to peer at Randi, whose current sixty-nine with Shaheen had them both undulating like snakes. The taller girl was palming Shaheen’s ass obsessively as she slurped at Shaheen’s pussy.

“But—” Jan felt a hand cup the side of her face. “I had scheduled the Jan-unit for hypnosis next!”

Neither of Explorer Two’s eyestalks bothered to look at Explorer Five. “You do not decide scheduling. You merely request. If you make a pet of one of the human females, that does not entitle you to have it converted ahead of sequence.”

Tracy didn’t move as Explorer Two stepped over to the girls on the ground. “Randi-unit, Shaheen-unit. You no longer desire to pursue sexual activity. You wish only to rest.” Their plaintive sounds were sweetly discordant but even in the hours-old sex trance the suggestion in the docility field bent their minds. The girls went boneless, and then parted like a cell wistfully dividing. They lay beside each other as if poured there.

“Shaheen-unit, sleep.” There was a sigh and one of the two pools of liquid girl was still.

“Randi-unit, rise.” The tall girl came slowly to her feet and stood, blinking down at the alien. “You should now go into the ship and report to be hypnotized.”

Randi blinked again, and slowly nodded. Jan could almost see the suggestion quietly, inexorably pushing her other thoughts aside, if she still had any after that marathon fuck with Shaheen. But if she’d seen Shaheen plunge into deep sleep and wanted to join her, now she only wanted to go aboard and be hypnotized.

Randi repeated the suggestion slowly in a monotone and turned to carry it out.

Explorer Two stepped away as well with no word to Explorer Five. Tracy pivoted and marched after it.

Jan knelt then at Explorer Five’s command to let it dismount. She felt a little sad for it being pushed around by the senior Explorer, even more than she was disappointed at missing her turn to be brainwashed. But with the ship looming overhead, stupefying her with the docility field, she was too calm to do or say anything.

She was still too full of the pleasure of having been its mount, and a pleasantly beast-like submissiveness told her that it wasn’t her place to say anything about what happened between Explorers.

“I am sorry, Jan,” it told her, “but you must wait to before we can wash your brain.” Jan just smiled and nodded.

It was too preoccupied to tell her to stand again before it walked away, but Jan felt nice, kneeling nude where it left her in the shade of the alien ship. There was a rhythmic scraping noise, just audible, and Jan wondered if that was Shelby, still obeying Explorer Two’s command to keep digging for ore that was lightyears away.

4.

“Oh, god.” Tina stepped around her. Jan enjoyed Tina’s light-brown muff, level with her eyes. It was untrimmed, but small. “Please get up, Jan.”

She stood, obeying commands even in a human voice. She stared at Tina’s crotch for a while and then enjoyed her way up Tina’s soft belly and pert little breasts.

Tina took it as a question, bringing her arms up to cover her chest and then dropping them with a sigh.

“No. Whatever they’re doing to us to make us hot for each other hasn’t—affected me yet.” She swallowed and looked at Jan’s body, and Jan saw her tremble. “No. It’s not.

“I just took my suit off,” she said. She looked tired. “I saw them sweet-talking the others out of their clothes, one by one, and I didn’t want to stand out.”

Jan thought Tina was beautiful naked, but could only smile.

“It’s hard to resist,” Tina said. “They seem like they’re pretty disorganized and I don’t think all of them can tell us apart, so I’ve been able to stay way from them.” She looked at Jan. “But this . . . humming . . . we’re just standing around like tame rabbits letting them play with us. Keeping us tranquilized, so we won’t resist when they—

“Have they taken you into the ship yet? Jan?”

“No, Tina.” Jan shook her head. “Explorer Five wanted me to be hypnotized today, but Explorer Two told Randi to go in, instead.”

Tina’s weary eyes brightened. “Are you sure, Jan? Do you remember . . . but you wouldn’t, if . . .”

Jan sighed. “I’m still curious about the ship. They took Kelsey inside this morning but she didn’t say anything when she came out. She’s almost like Tracy now. Robotic. She won’t talk to anyone.”

“Tracy talks to her,” Tina said, quietly. “I saw them just staring into each other’s eyes. Kelsey just listened . . .”

“Tina? Have you been inside their ship?”

Tina’s eyes widened. “No! I mean I don’t—think so. Oh god.” She seemed less lethargic now, but more frightened, and Jan worried to the small extent she could. “I wouldn’t remember. They’d tell me not to, and I’d do . . . as I was told.”

She took a sobbing breath and looked up, turning to see Kelsey stalking across the grass toward the column of the ship, her eyes wide and unblinking.

“No. If they’d gotten me I’d be like her. They don’t need to fool us. Not when they can put us into a waking trance so we’ll wait for the rest like good little girls.

“But they’ll notice. They’ll come and tell me I have to go in and let them hypnotize me. I don’t know what I’ll do if they try to make me.”

“Why don’t you want them to?” Jan found that odd, and a little scary. “Explorer Five says it’s very nice to be hypnotized their way.”

“I’m sure it is,” Tina said bitterly. “Really ‘nice.’”

“Tina, there’s nothing to be scared of with hypnosis.”

Tina looked at her. “You mean because they officially can’t make you do what you don’t want to?”

Jan stared at her, trying to recall. It seemed to make sense to Tina, anyway. “Yeah.”

“It’s this docility field they talk about.” Tina blinked. “They talk about it. Right in front of us, in English. Like we’re potted plants.”

“They said they needed to practice our speech.” Jan smiled, recalling the Explorers as they’d spoken. “That way we can understand their commands, and obey them.”

“Jan?” Tina’s expression was so pained that it nearly pulled Jan from her serenity. “When . . . when did it become a good thing to obey Explorer commands?”

Jan shook her head slowly, luxuriously. “I don’t know, Tina. Maybe it’s not. But . . .”

Tina did cover her breasts this time as she hugged herself.

“Fine,” said Tina, but her voice trembled. “Well, this field makes us very suggestible. Makes it hard to think, to want to think. Turning hypnosis loose on us now . . . we’ll want to do whatever they put in our minds. If they tell me I want to be a slave I’ll believe it, and then—

“I will be.”

Tina was crying. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, angrily. “Fuck. I just have to stay out of that ship. But we have to get out of here before they brainwash us all.”

She stopped, and Jan saw her eyes widen, almost as if seeing that.

Jan nodded, no longer feeling any inhibition. “Yes, Tina. If they take control of the rest of us, they can make us bring you into the ship to be hypnotized.”

Tina gritted her teeth, trying not to cry again.

“They can brainwash us in other ways, too,” Jan said. Tina looked at her, distracted at least. “They used the docility field on Shelby, and now she obeys Explorer Two no matter what it tells her to do.”

Tina nodded. “I—know. I tried talking to her before. I think it was this morning. She was telling me she had to find this stuff that isn’t here, that isn’t even—” Tina choked.

“My god, Jan, she had a fit. She dropped the shovel and fell down and she was thrashing in the dirt.” Now the tears ran and Tina ignored them. “An alien came over and I just pretended to be a zombie and told it she’d fallen. She might have swallowed her tongue or hurt herself on that shovel.

“I didn’t do anything for her. I wanted to stay invisible. I just . . . walked away while they worked on her. Just a docile Earthling. Letting another Earthling die.”

“She didn’t die,” Jan pointed out. “She was digging when we came back. She seems fine.”

“Whatever they did to make her obey without having to use that hypnotic thing in their ship—it fried her brain, Jan. They experimented and every experiment’s a success, because it tells them what happens, even if the subject has another seizure and . . .” Tina tensed again.

“But each time I try to focus on escaping and just walk away my head spins and I get so sleepy.” Tina was almost snarling, quietly, with the effort of not getting sleepy now as she thought of it.

“Oh christ,” she said, “one of them’s coming.” She started to move slowly away, letting her eyes stay wide, and Jan found herself able to believe that Tina really was just as dazed now as the rest of them. She moved aimlessly toward what had been their campsite when they’d still thought about camping. There was no one there by the fallen tents now. Explorer Five had taken Jan to the spot under the UFO after it had suggested Jan give it her cell phone, and she’d explained about Earthling camping.

Explorer Five had asked her to demonstrate human feeding, and as she ate a mealbar she’d realized she was famished. After that she’d glimpsed one or two other Explorers lead girls there to watch them feed. She wondered, not very hard, if the Explorers had taken every girl there so she could eat.

Maybe not. Tina said they couldn’t always tell humans apart.

Right now Tina just stood in the little cluster of forgotten human goods and didn’t look at any of it. The Explorer she’d wanted to avoid walked past her without shifting an eyestalk and ignored Jan, too.

Without knowing why she tried, Jan made an effort not to look at the water again. She faced away from the lake and looked at the trees. But she saw them under the spanning roof the flying saucer made, and in a breath’s time it pulled her gaze up, like an inverted horizon. Her neck stretched and she gaped upward, feeling her awareness spilling over it but too fascinated to stop.

It was getting dark when Jan came back to herself, her neck a little sore. She felt drool at the corner of her mouth and her lips were dry. She’d stood open-mouthed under the Explorer ship, lost in it.

Motion drew her eye. She saw Shaheen uncoil from the ground and go quickly to the access door, from which Randi walked stiffly, followed by a Explorer that pointed one of the mind-measurement instruments at her head. Randi had the same blank stare now as Kelsey and the other girls who’d been taken into the ship, but Shaheen trotted eagerly over to her.

Randi stopped, her hands against her sides, not responding. The shorter girl slid against her and reached up to pull her down for a kiss, but Randi was like a statue. Shaheen moaned unhappily against her and started humping her leg, but Randi did nothing.

Finally Shaheen pulled back and pouted, looking at her with a disappointed hurt that still dripped with lust. “Randi? What’s wrong? I’ve been playing with myself since I woke up—”

Randi stayed posed at attention but swiveled her head until she faced Shaheen.

“I am no longer programmed to have sex with you.”

“W-what?” Shaheen looked like she’d been slapped, but she couldn’t turn away from the girl she’d been fucking for—however long it had been. Jan felt bad for her, as she had for Tina’s pain.

Randi’s head swung back to face forward. Her voice shook with conviction.

“I am programmed only to obey Explorer command.” She closed her eyes and her thighs trembled. When she opened her eyes they were rolled back, but then they focused again.

“I must now report to Explorer Six for new commands. I will be useful. I will obey.” She didn’t look back as Shaheen started crying quietly. Then she pivoted and stalked away toward one of the Explorers on the far side of the saucer, under its rim.

“Randi was strong.” Tina’s whisper came over Jan’s left shoulder. “The psych professor couldn’t get her into a trance, not once. She could stare anyone down.

“And they’ve turned her into—that. How can we fight them?”

Jan didn’t bother to ask why they should fight. She watched as another Explorer spoke to Shaheen, and the girl’s face smoothed, smiled, nodded. She knelt, seemed to lose herself in thought, still smiling, and then slumped over to the ground, asleep.

Tina’s arms came around Jan from behind and her body was warm as it pressed close. Tina rested her head on Jan’s shoulder.

“We were all screaming,” she whispered. “We were trying to run away—all except Tracy. They did something to us and we stopped being afraid . . .

“Do you remember, Jan?” Tina’s breasts were soft against her back and Jan could feel the other girl’s pussy, furry and warm against her ass. “We were just a bunch of naked animals, she made sure of that for them. Then they did that humming and we even forgot our animal sense, to run and hide.”

“I remember lights,” Jan whispered, wanting to ease Tina. “It was so peaceful . . . just wanting to come to the call. It called to me and I had to come.”

She was looking at the saucer on its thick landing pillar and it was easy to remember how it had looked as they all walked up to it, slowly, soothed to a restful pace by the deep throbbing and the synchronized pulses of color that swabbed over the curving cylinder.

As one, they had knelt, rapt in the pretty flickering colors while the throb worked through their bodies and numbed their thoughts. They had watched, learned, slept, awakened. She remembered girls being spotlit, and speaking, and then going to sleep again. She remembered awakening into her own beam but nothing else.

“Please, Jan.” Tina’s voice was desperately quiet in her ear. “I need someone else to remember how they got us.”

Jan relaxed and tried, for her.

5.

“Pretty isolated,” Shelby said as the girls spread out across the grass near the lake. Shelby’s grimace and stance hinted it was more about how far from the SUVs they’d hiked than how remote it was from the highway. She was fine in the saddle, but not one for route marches.

“That’s its charm,” Tracy said, smiling and turning gracefully to gesture, as though this beautiful place were all hers but they were all welcome. “Barely anyone knows about it, at least not yet.”

“Wow. Look,” Randi said, slowly turning to look around, all 360 degrees. “It’s like before anyone came. No buildings, no powerlines.”

“City girl,” Tracy said, and they laughed.

Then Tracy and Sally, another outdoorsy type, got them organized and the campsite took shape. One tent made the almost-customary initial collapse, and they paused to jeer Shaheen, the structural-engineering major, who’d inevitably been the one who’d goofed. She brandished an uprooted tent peg unconvincingly. Eventually they left her alone.

Jan found herself and Erin, a slim girl with long cornsilk hair, tramping down to the lakeshore.

“So inviting,” Erin said. “Look, there’s even a beach, sort of. You can walk right out into it.” She grinned at Jan and they ambled along.

“Funny about Tracy,” Erin said quietly, peering out at the far shore.

“What is?”

“Pretty brave of her to come back. I heard something happened to her somewhere out here a couple of years ago, when she and a couple of friends hiked up into the woods.” Jan had heard something, too. She and Tracy’d been sophomores then, but hadn’t known each other.

“Something weird. They said the two friends disappeared—” Erin broke off as Sophia ran past, pulling her T-shirt off. She sprinted into the water in her bikini and splashed into thigh-deep water before she stopped and waved her arms back at them all.

Tracy called out to her where the deeper water started, and Sophia was soon porpoising around.

“So much for camp discipline,” Erin laughed and shucked her clothes, backstory forgotten.

A couple of the other girls ran past—Tina in her chaste maillot and Kelsey, not surprisingly, in just her thong. Is she just playing, or is she really as bi as they say? Jan smiled as they went past, and thought about going in herself, but she felt guilty and went back to be useful as Tracy and Sally considered the camp with a critical eye.

Jan was still wondering about Tracy and what had happened to her years ago. She did know Tracy had changed her major back then, but didn’t know much else about it.

Much later, warm under the full moon, after they’d had a great stew Sally and Randi had concocted from dehydrated trail dinners, Jan found herself walking away from the lantern-glow with Erin.

“Disappeared?” she asked, and Erin looked startled, then sheepish. They compared rumors, neither one learning much more than she thought she knew already.

“So anyway, there was something. It was hushed up, they said—the other two just left school, or something, and Tracy—”

“—still haunts these very woods.” Tracy and a couple of the others had come up behind them. Tracy stood hands on hips, her animated face holding something in check, silvery in the moonlight.

Jan looked at Erin, not wanting to blame her but not especially happy to be part of this.

“She lost one of her arms, see,” Tracy said lightly. “So now Tracy walks the forest—with a hook!”

They all started laughing as she made a swiping gesture with a claw-like hand. “Makes it ever so easy to score s’mores from other campers,” she explained. “Though of course they tend to be on the gritty side. From being dropped on the ground during panicked flight, and all. Still.”

“Uh, do you want my s’more, Tracy?” Shaheen asked, holding one out still unbitten, and they started laughing again, not sure if she were kidding.

“Well,” Jan said mock-gravely, to help get Erin off the hook, “you . . . did change your major.” She pointed accusingly.

“Sigh,” said Tracy, hanging her head theatrically. “Yes. Yes. We did some soul-searching that trip—well, I did—and I faced a traumatic event: I realized nobody gave enough of a shit about Dark Age history to pay me anything worthwhile for knowing it. So I decided to do something interesting and likely to get some of my student loans paid back in this glacial epoch. Hence—psychology.”

“I’m sorry,” said Erin.

Tracy looked sidelong at her. “You should be. Putting me in such a lame urban legend.”

She grinned. “Why not like that other I-think-she-went-to-the-U-but-maybe-it-was-State girl—also a psych major, I note—who actually brainwashed her housemates into thinking they were alien abductees and enslaved them? I mean, really.”

“I heard about that.” Sophia waved her arms. “I think it was like that all-bases thing that was all over the net a few years ago. Her name was Carol or Karen or—”

“Or Mesmeralda,” Tracy finished. “Or Ermintrude. Yes. Definitely one of those. Or Smedley.

“Anyways, after turning her free will-challenged roomies into her mindslaves, she—”

“—haunts these woods?” Kelsey piped up from the other side.

“Nope. These are my woods,” Tracy said, doing the hook gesture briefly for emphasis. Wound up like this, she looked especially devilish.

“In fact—if that’s the right word—she vanished with her now-devoted little roomiebots, and today makes a tidy buck or two selling lesbian porn videos. They fuck on camera because she’s got them thinking they’re halfway to Tau Ceti doing documentaries about human sexuality on the Alien Nature Channel or something.”

She grinned. “Or so I hear.”

“Yeah, Trace. We know you’d never buy that kind of video.”

Her grin widened. “Buy? No. Download? Welllll—”

There was laughing and some applause.

“You need a website,” Randi said. “To debunk your legend. TheTracyBehindTheMyth.

“Dot net,” she added.

Tracy rolled her eyes.

Then suddenly she froze, as if listening to something, staring into space as she tried to focus. They all went still too, and the sound of the other girls by the camp stove was faint.

“OK.” She sounded different, but calm. “Early start on the creepy stories, but as I said, it’s a pretty lame try. Everyone into the pool!” She smiled and pointed imperiously at the lake. “We can swim for a while since the water’s so warm, and somebody better come up with something really bone-rattling for later.”

“Or else?” Jan asked her.

“Or else we’ll just have to join hands and sing Kumbaya,” Tracy told her, grinning maniacally. “All—night—long, ahahahahaha!”

She pulled off her tank top and slid out of her khaki walking shorts, sleek and nude and natural, wiry in the dimming twilight. Jan remembering other times she’d caught herself staring at Tracy, fascinated by how the redhead’s freckles made her smooth, leanly muscular contours somehow more vividly curved. Now, taut in the silvery light, she was almost luminous.

If I liked girls, I’d be in love with her. Half of us are, anyway . . .

“Last one in the pool,” Tracy said, sauntering through them toward the lake, “is an alien sex slave!”

Giving a shrill but musical yell, she ran into the water and then a lot of them were. They ran and splashed into the moonlit lake, shattering it into froth. Pretty soon everyone was in.

The scream came first. It might have been any of the ones echoing to the woods, and no one paid attention. Jan didn’t until she saw Lisa, topless and brightly lit, pointing up, in toward the woods, above the woods.

Jan almost didn’t want to turn, feeling the shadow before she saw it.

6.

Screaming.

There was a hush, and then more screaming. The thing was immense, a hole spreading across the night sky, utterly silent, slow and alive. It blotted the friendly stars and chopped into the moon.

Jan was paralyzed.

Social reflex based on other fears pulled her eyes down automatically to look at the others, and for a moment all the girls were stock-still as its shadow spread over them.

The . . . flying . . . saucer.

It must be using a paralyzing beam. Jan’s mind clicked empty in panic at being trapped like this, helpless when it landed. They’d all be helpless, standing still like jacklighted deer when things came out and took them—

Screams, and a shout that sounded more angry than afraid. They weren’t paralyzed by anything but shock—so far. Splashing resumed as some of the girls ran back out into the water, not thinking, just away from the terrible noiseless intruder falling down on them.

The woods. She might hide there, wait, eventually try to walk barefoot and bareassed back to the SUVs, praying no one else had done it first and left her—but she’d be leaving them—

While her mind weighed that, her body and hindbrain saw the saucer setting down on the meadow, between them and the woods, and Jan was thigh-deep in the lake before she knew she’d turned.

Then the low humming started, and as it throbbed through her body she forgot why she was running.

She stumbled to a halt in the cool water, and watched two others ahead of her slow and stop, too. One of them was Erin, and Jan thought of calling to her, but the idea was oddly hard to keep in her head.

She shook her head, and that helped for a bit. She looked around. The girls were all motionless again, but they just stared into space now, facing toward the UFO or away or whichever way, standing calmly. All of them.

Sophia was right in front of her, empty-eyed, still without a T-shirt. Her hands hung by her sides. The other girl looked awake but drugged. She was looking right at the flying saucer, but there was no fear in her eyes.

Jan had to force her sluggish mind to remember why that was strange.

Oh no. The aliens were using something on them now, whatever it was. Something more powerful than a tranquilizer dart. Something impossible to run from, that could make them stop wanting to run.

Jan felt it humming into her head, too, and was drowsily shocked that it felt so good. It might be worth it just to feel it, stop, relax, give in . . .

She felt it sucking her resolve away. They didn’t need to drug her body when they could anesthetize her will.

Someone was still moving.

Tracy, nude and erect and pacing calmly among her immobilized friends as though mingling at a successful party. Smiling happily. Now and then she stopped and looked at a girl, and then came to attention, her face going as blank as the girl’s for a second before she woke from the momentary trance and grinned, moving on. Sometimes, before or after trancing out, she would speak quietly to the girl, who would murmur an answer too soft for Jan to hear, without shifting her gaze from infinity.

Jan’s fears were off and running now, but her mind was too sleepy to keep up with them. Tracy was still moving. God, Trace, don’t screw around trying to wake us up—run for the cars!

In front of her, Sophia sighed, her eyes trying to focus. They met Jan’s, and closed briefly.

“Jan.” Half whisper, half moan.

“Yes.”

“We . . . this is really happening to us, isn’t it?”

Jan shivered, tempted by the idea that she was dreaming this, helpless in front of alien invaders.

“Yes,” she admitted. She saw Sophia’s eyes glaze, perhaps in despair, and tried to keep the other girl from lapsing back into deeper trance.

“They’re doing something to us . . .”

Sophia blinked slowly. “Yeah. I can’t move . . . no, I can, but . . .”

Jan felt it too. She could move, but she didn’t want to.

Sophia sighed, relaxing. “I remember feeling like this. At a party, once . . . for fun.” She drifted, lost in remembering it. “I let someone hypnotize me.”

So—we’re hypnotized, Jan thought, and tried to worry.

“I thought about getting up, or not listening . . . but I just kept wanting to do as I was told.” She smiled shyly, as though confessing a guilty pleasure. “It felt so hard to think of doing anything but what the hypnotist said I should.”

Her smile deepened. “I think he was cute. But maybe he just told me to thhh—”

The humming seemed to intensify and Sophia ran down as it neutralized her thoughts. Jan’s dimmed, and she just looked at the other girl go blank without really caring.

It faded, and Jan’s thoughts started to register again. Sophia swayed but didn’t try to move.

Jan pictured Sophia in a room somewhere surrounded by hushed friends and strangers, demure in jeans or a party dress, eyes reflecting a candle or a pocketwatch—but it was suddenly, dangerously erotic to know Sophia was here, practically nude, helpless.

As helpless as Jan was.

“They can come for us now,” she made herself say. “I . . . we should try to . . .”

Sophia sighed, as if trying to think of escaping made her tired. “There’s really no need to do anything, is there?”

“We’re just . . .” It was as Sophia had said—Jan was fighting just to keep herself thinking, and she knew it would be so much easier if someone could do that for her. Distantly she was more frightened. The UFO wasn’t just making them stand still. Soon it would be able to make them do things.

Sophia’s memory of being hypnotized had already lulled her into surrendering, and Jan stared at her, trying not to be envious.

“Do as you were told,” she breathed, and saw Sophia’s eyes almost roll up.

She panicked quietly as she found she lacked the will to say something to pull Sophia out of the trance she’d just caused.

Sophia’s soft words were in her mind, now, as she felt the same delicious fading of will. Something in that UFO had the power to hypnotize them remotely, and they would all wait obediently for that hypnotist to start telling them what to do.

She and Sophia and the others would start doing as they were told. Jan pictured them all trooping into the ship in single file . . . climbing onto the experimentation tables themselves, looking up at the machines with blank eyes . . .

It was hard to stay afraid, though, looking at Sophia. The other girl’s bare breasts moved lightly with her calm breathing, and she looking serenely at the alien spacecraft that held her in thrall. Sophia looked happy and content.

Then something warm and firm hit Jan and carried her down into the water, and it woke her up sharply. Pulled her out.

“Come on!” It was Sally, and it hit Jan like adrenaline to know someone else wasn’t yet under whatever spell held the others.

The humming was still in her head, and Jan felt the lassitude trying to massage her limbs into stopping and sleeping, but she was awake enough now to be scared.

She looked at Sophia’s face as the other girl remembered hypnosis, and looked away quickly.

They started to run.

The other girls turned around, in unison. Now it was Sally that hesitated and Jan who pulled aher long, running along the lakeshore to reach woods beyond the huge dark shape that seemed to stretch . . .

The other girls walked back toward the UFO now as it called to them.

Called.

Jan felt it in her crotch now, a maddeningly nice quiver that focused her mind and made her silly with a need to earn it. She and Sally had slowed to a walk before they knew it. Sally mewed as her steps grew shorter and less steady.

“Can’t . . . can’t . . . uhhh . . .”

There was a soothing sound like a brook over rocks, as the girls who’d made it into the lake marched obediently back to the grass. A girl who’d gotten quite a distance down the shore walked toward them. It was Shaheen, sleepwalking now back to the shape that had scared her into sprinting. Her petite body was relaxed and her eyes lidded as she passed Jan and Sally without seeing them.

“They can’t resist it,” Sally breathed. As Jan glanced at her, feeling suddenly leaden and confused, Sally stopped. She turned, slowly, to face the UFO herself, and shuddered.

“Must go to it,” she breathed, and started walking back too.

Jan took her arm, but Sally seemed stronger now that she’d stopped fighting the hypnotic alien pull. Jan just managed to lever herself into facing the thing, too.

Now the humming was all through her head, and down in her body.

For a few steps she was still sleepily telling herself she was going after Sally, to help her.

But the increasing, mind-blunting joy it gave her wiped that from her. Sally was just another girl-shape lost in the bliss of her own surrender.

Jan blinked, overcome. enjoying it.

Yes. She must. She must go to the ship with them.

The great silent vessel settled to Earth, and then the sides of the cylinder it rested on came aglow with colors. The erect shapes of the hypnotized girls nearest it were silhouetted against it now, but Jan didn’t see them anymore.

As they all walked quietly toward the thing, obeying its summons, none of them saw anything but the swirling colors.

7.

“I remember now,” Jan whispered, and Tina squeezed against her, breathing thanks. “I don’t really want to remember it. But I do.

“We were terrified. They weren’t—aren’t—our friends.” That was so hard to say, and Jan didn’t really know if she believed it even now.

“I’m sorry,” Tina said. “But if we’re going to get out of this we need everything we can summon. They charmed us out of our fear and it makes us helpless. Fear isn’t bad, not as bad as becoming what they’re turning us into.”

She moved against Jan and her breath was hot and rapid on Jan’s skin. This much sustained coherent thought inside the mind-numbing field was exhausting her. Jan thought of the irony if Tina thought about struggling until the effort put her to sleep. As Tina’s belly caressed her short ribs, she realized that image wasn’t ironic.

It was almost painfully arousing.

It was hard not to want it to happen. Jan waited out a weird, sadistic impulse to draw more of that from the other girl, peaking her hope and energy and then watching her collapse. Lying defenselessly at the feet of the next Explorer that came by to see what had happened. But then Tina against her felt different, and as she visualized Tina at obedient attention, staring like Randi or Shelby, she saw tears under the empty eyes.

Whatever that meant, part of her didn’t want it to happen.

“We have to escape,” Tina said. “I’ve been thinking about it. When I can think.”

Jan remembered the stray thoughts from that night—last night? “To the SUVs?”

“Yes!” Tina said, glad that someone else could still think that way. “I can’t decide whether it’s better to go when it’s dark, or light. If we wait a little bit and go now, they might not notice—or even if we run for it, we could make the trees before they did anything. Maybe.

“But we could get lost and just wander around the woods and getting thirsty and tired. So if we tried in daylight, we might be able to find the way back.”

Jan tried to picture them, naked in the woods. But before that—

“They could probably find us,” she said, gingerly. “They could have . . . sensors. In the ship.” It felt good to try to think, if only to keep Tina company, but it was so draining.

“I know, but—”

Jan reached up and felt Tina’s neck, realizing she was looking for the spot where the Explorers had attached their device to Tracy. “It could be anywhere,” she whispered to herself.

“What?” Tina gasped. “You think they microchipped us?”

Jan’s head swam as she admired how sharp Tina still was. “Maybe.” Like pets, she thought, and as it turned her on, she held Tina closer.

“I don’t remember them doing . . .” Tina trailed off sadly.

“They might not have,” Jan said, recalling how confident the Explorers seemed in how the docility field was keeping the girls tame. “But that night, we were all hypnotized. They could have implanted us while we knelt there.” She sighed, resting from the exertion and smelling Tina’s hair.

“Maybe it’s there but you’re under a posthypnotic block against finding it.” Tina said it and had no idea how hot it made Jan to think of being that controlled.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tina said after a moment, and her voice was quieter, so much that Jan worried. “I’m really not thinking. We’re still in this damned brainwashing field. We wouldn’t even get out from under ship-shadow before they’d turn us to obedient jelly and just tell us to stop. They wouldn’t even chase us—we’d bring ourselves back. And then they’d lobotomize us.

“After that we’d be like Shelby. All ‘yes Master I will obey’ when we weren’t having convulsions—” Suddenly she was sobbing against Jan, and Jan felt a deep stab of pity. Whatever was keeping Tina from succumbing as completely to the Explorer mind control had left her to face their danger with no relief at all.

“Tina,” she said, “we’ll make it.” She didn’t know why she was saying it, but it felt true. Maybe they could balance—Tina had the drive and the clearer memory of being free, and she herself could help Tina fight the despair.

“I’m going to go back over to the campsite,” Tina said. She sucked in a breath to steady herself. “I know where Sally’s stuff is—I don’t know what happened with Tracy or if they got her before all this but I don’t trust her stuff. I’ll get a canteen, a compass. Not much more or they might see I’m carrying something.”

“OK,” Jan said, wondering if she were letting the other girl plan or just surrendering to the field and letting Tina control her. But Tina was going for it now, and with an unfamiliar clarity she knew they might not have another chance. The Explorers might decide it was time for one or both of them to be taken into the ship and turned into slaves. She felt guilty—if they brainwashed Tina first, she’d probably get over it. Maybe get turned on.

But she’d forget. If the Explorers enslaved her before they got Tina, Tina would still try, alone. Jan didn’t want Tina to have to do that.

“We’ll need to separate,” Tina said very calmly, but Jan realized how terribly hard it was for her to say it. “They probably think we’re necking here—” She moved against Tina and actually kissed her under the ear.

They faced each other, and it was very easy for Jan to lean forward and kiss her lips. Tina kissed her back, looking surprised but happy.

“But—we—ah—we—” Tina swallowed, and Jan leaned forward to kiss her again, on the forehead this time.

“I know,” she whispered. “We can’t do anything else together or they’ll see.” Tina sagged against her gratefully.

“Meet me on the far side of the saucer. We can stay apart and just sort of drift to the trees, and join up once we’re in them.”

Then Tina was moving away. Sort of drifting. She did move just like the rest of them, Jan saw, and wondered how hard it was for Tina to keep thinking. She was pretending to be as passive and controlled as the other girls so well that she might be trapped in her own act and forget she was pretending.

Jan started to walk. She passed Shaheen, still sleeping in a pretty heap where the Explorer had tranced her. There was a delicious perverse tug in her womb as she thought of stopping, kneeling, feeling up the smaller girl until Shaheen woke, and then ravishing her and forgetting all about Tina and escaping and what it would feel like to think clearly again.

But when she thought of Shaheen’s sleepy eyes opening to her, her mind saw Tina looking out of them. Not blaming Jan, not even seeing her—but full of rage and grief for what the Explorers had done to Shelby, were doing to all of them.

Jan kept going.

Ahead of her two Explorers were conversing in their own speech, and without being obvious she biased to avoid them. Her path toward the darkening woods took her past Shelby’s little ixkat-tok mine. It looked as though Tracy had returned to her platform-diver pose at the hole’s edge, but the nude girl at rigid attention was Randi, and she was speaking to Shelby.

“Dig. Now. Lift. Now. Raise. Now. Throw. Now.

“Dig. Now . . .” Randi’s eyes were still trance-wide in the soft glow from the saucer, and her voice was singsong and lifeless at the same time.

In the hole, Shelby moved with staccato precision, obeying each instruction and pausing until Randi’s “now” to execute it, perfectly in rhythm. Jan’s pussy warmed at her obedience, but the part of her that Tina had awakened suddenly hurt as she saw, through the haze of alien mind control, what they’d done to her friend. Already, Explorer Two had reduced Shelby to a helplessly willing slave worker. Now they were using Randi to turn her into an even simpler, voice-actuated machine.

Shelby’s skin gleamed with sweat, and Jan couldn’t tell whether it was sweat or honey that gleamed at her cleft.

Then Shelby stopped in mid-move and shook the shovel, letting dirt fall out. Then she flipped the shovel out of her hands like an incompetent majorette. She fell to her knees while Randi stared down at her and kept chanting commands, and then she flopped against the side of the grave she’d been digging and thrashed. Jan winced, and her blood went cold as she knew Shelby wasn’t even feeling the impacts. It seemed longer than the few seconds it had taken before she stopped moving and lay against the dirt, looking like Christ from the Pieta’.

But there was no one to hold her.

Randi stopped reciting commands as her hypnotized mind took it in, and then she turned and walked stiffly away. She passed Jan without looking.

Jan looked at Shelby. She knew bleakly that she was awake now, or close to it. She thought of jumping into the hole to help the other girl. But she knew Tina was out there under the ship, counting on her to make it to the woods.

I didn’t do anything for her. I wanted to stay invisible.

Jan knew she had to. She and Tina had to get away if any of them were to have a chance. She told herself that Shelby, the girl who’d come here with them, who liked horses and hated cleaning house, was long gone.

But there was no one to hold her.

Just a docile Earthling. Letting another Earthling die.

Putting one foot in front of the other, Jan started walking away.

“Jan? What has happened?” Explorer Five had come up from the direction of the ship’s central column. “Randi-unit spoke of a malfunction. Are you distressed?”

She turned to the Explorer, and heard someone shrieking at it, “Malfunction? Malfunction?” It was the ache in her throat that told her she’d been the one.

It lifted the gadget it seemed always to be pointing at her, and once again aimed it at her head.

Whatever the thing told it, Explorer Five made a chirp of dismay and then chattered quickly into another object it held.

I’m awake. I hope Tina hears this. We’ve got to— She turned and started to run.

It was so much easier to run, she thought bitterly, without carrying an alien. She felt fleet as a deer. She didn’t look for Tina, closing her mind to the idea that Tina might not know she’d had to try now. But as her pulse pounded in her ears she realized that girl really did care more that someone got out than—

The world began to hum.

8.

Jan was in slow motion, her graceful leaping strides slowing and shrinking. The docility field tingled as it tamed her, and she felt it in the folds of her pussy as in the folds of her brain, wiping her clean of anything but wanting more of it.

Her veins were full of warm, sluggish syrup and her limbs deliciously heavy now. The field throbbed to higher intensity and swept through her, taking from her even her inertial motion.

As her steps slowed and her heavy, heavy body came gradually to a stop, she could feel it all draining out of her. Anger, fear, horror at Shelby’s fit and Randi’s heartless reaction. They faded into pink fog as the waves put her back into their thrall.

Jan was still now, swaying on her feet with the feeling. It was like orgasm, but the long, slow, endless kind at the end of someone’s tongue. Even after it peaked gently it swirled through her body and she writhed weakly under the phantom caress. With the little mind she had left she realized that they had her. She was helpless. She’d do anything the aliens told her, if they’d even promise to make her feel like that again. They could do whatever they liked with her.

When she realized that they would, she came.

She did nothing else, just standing and staring as the twitches stopped.

Yessss . . .

Her new feeling for Tina was becoming even vaguer now. She was too deeply enthralled by the humming that still pulsed through her. She remembered how the Explorers had soothed her and the others that night, quelling their panic and then putting them into that lovely half-sleep.

It had suddenly felt so nice to stop running, to wait and hear the call, to feel and submit to the new urge to return and relax and stare into the pretty, pretty lights . . .

She remembered a book about rabbits on a journey. When the rabbits said someone “stopped running” it meant they were dead.

She forgot the book, and started to like the idea of being their rabbit.

Jan stood still, under the hull of the saucer. She stared out at the woods, barely visible now as the light went. There was the residue in her mind of thinking freedom was on the other side, but the pink blankness that owned her was so much better to submit to.

She was able to wonder if Tina had made it to those woods, if she’d even heard Jan’s scream. Or if she had but the field could reach her as far as the trees, and snared Tina’s mind to make her come back.

She wasn’t able to resist dreaming about fucking Tina into oblivious bliss while a Explorer decided what to do with them.

The Explorers let her stand there as the field scrubbed her mind, until it was emptied even of that.

When they throbbed the impulse into her, she turned and walked back to the column and the waiting Explorers. She felt only simple happiness at being able to obey it.

She saw, in the strange light from the saucer, the other girls standing blankly too. When she’d flipped out in front of Explorer Five, it must have alerted the ship, and they’d just cranked up the docility field to regain control of her. As it blunted her will, it had flatlined the other girls, whatever they’d been doing. Whether newly brainwashed or still just docile, they were all mindless now for while.

Jan couldn’t get her head to look away but she thought about Tina.

Tina wouldn’t have had a chance. She was probably motionless and drooling on the other side of the ship. Whatever incriminating supplies she’d taken from the campsite would have fallen from her nerveless hands to lie beside her, unseen by her mindless eyes. The Explorers would have figured out her plan, and that she was more resistant than they’d thought, before she even woke up. If they ever let Tina wake up again.

Jan felt another twinge at that, and realized that even now she was feeling again. The magic orgasm was already losing its hold on her, though slowly. Being with Tina—and seeing poor Shelby—had ignited something in her, and she was grimly happy that it would burn in her until the little monsters had to snuff it out entirely.

That feeling slipped a little as she found herself walking up to Explorer Five and stopping. A familiar pet-like feeling came over her, and even though she’d just learned to hate the little alien, there was an itch to please it that crawled maddeningly in her cunt. She flinched when it raised the device to her head, which may have told it more about her mind than the readout did.

That’s been telling it how mindfucked I am. She felt a twinge of shame to remember how often, a little earlier, Explorer Five had checked her head and been pleased at how empty it had been then.

Then the twinge became erotic, and she whimpered. They had other hooks in her, and they could still make her want things she mustn’t ever do.

“Jan. You do not feel wonderful now. I am sorry.”

She tried to speak.

“It is fine, Jan. Do not try to articulate. Your fear is logical. But you will not be like the Shelby-unit.

“Jan, you will be fine. The . . . Shelby will be examined and assessed. All memory of her will be removed from your thoughts and the others’. Then you can feel wonderful.”

In the daze and the humming its voice sounded almost caring, but Jan heard how it thought only that Shelby’s seizure had scared her about her own fate under their control.

It had, but the Explorer didn’t seem to think that it might hurt her to see Shelby hurt. Or to know that Shelby couldn’t help herself by now. To Explorer Five, Shelby wasn’t even the sort-of pet that Jan was—it might even dislike her, for being Explorer Two’s experiment.

Jan started to cry, because she didn’t know if anyone else ever would, for the girl in the empty little mine pit.

Explorer Five’s eyestalks waved up and down her, and then it spoke English into its communicator. “Send the robot.”

Jan stood, trying to move her heavy eyes to look at the ship. She was still expecting something metallic and red-eyed when a short, strong pale body walked into view.

God. Yes. They’d turned Tracy into their robot.

Tracy walked up to Explorer Five, those emerald eyes still blank, and brought herself to attention. Despite herself Jan dampened. It was just too arousing to see the vivacious redhead brainsmoothed into this . . . object . . . which obviously lived now only to obey the aliens.

“Slave reports,” she said in that soulless parody of her own voice. Then her eyes closed and she swiveled to face Jan. Jan looked at the finely-muscled body, the cinnamon dusting of freckles—

God, Tracy had freckles on those delicate little eyelids. The tender detail tore at Jan.

Tracy stood quietly, eyes closed. Jan wondered if her controllers could somehow beam thoughts into her mind, or if the other girl was just—turned off.

Tracy’s eyes opened.

They focused. She smiled.

“Hi!”

The shock was like a hand on her crotch. “T-trace? Are you—?”

“i’m here, Jan.”

“But—I thought they—”

“They did, Jan. Did They ever. i am completely Their creature now. i am talking to you now but ‘i’ am just a subroutine in the girlbot They turned tracy into.”

Jan shivered with how excited Tracy seemed to be.

“You’re Tracy.” She sensed what she’d hear, but something—something in her pussy where the throb still echoed—made her ask anyway. “Aren’t you?”

The redhead beamed at her and shook her head. “Oh, no, Jan. i am not anyone. tracy was enslaved and then destroyed. i was allowed to help destroy her, but i do not have an identity. i am a thing which They use and find convenient to treat as an entity.”

“What did they do to you?” Jan whispered.

Tracy smiled. “They chased me and caught me. They hypnotized me and fucked me and hypnotized me again. They played with me and kim and jessie and They used us against each other.

“They melted our minds and redesigned them.” She licked her lips and her hips made a small, obscene turn.

“And They made us like it.”

Her smile widened. “Then, They said i had the best slave potential. And They put the implant into my brain.

“They did things to me that i am not advanced enough to understand, and others that They simply programmed me not to know.

“They sent me back with my new purpose. i am to obey Them.”

She stepped closer to Jan.

“They had probed tracy’s human thoughts and used tracy’s brain to generate a plausible story for when i was reinserted to initiate my function. kim and jessie’s disappearances were explained.”

“What happened to them?” Jan couldn’t look away from the lean body, the warm green eyes that reached into her with awful temptation.

Tracy shook her head. “Shhh, Jan. kim and jessie no longer serve Their purposes and do not matter. ‘i’ do serve Their purposes.

“And very soon, so will you.” She was so close to Jan, looking up at her. “Blissfully.”

Jan could feel the warmth from the pale skin, smell arousal and sweat and Tracy’s own musk. Her own need spasmed between her thighs as they loosened.

Tracy pulled her close and as their clefts slid together she took Jan in a kiss.

Jan shivered and tasted girlhoney as Tracy’s tongue fed it to her. Tracy lingered and moved against Jan, holding her up.

“i love the way girls taste,” Tracy breathed, hot and soft in her ear. “Girls who are mind-controlled taste best of all.

“But now They are commanding me to begin converting you. i’ve been reprogrammed to help Them destroy your will and make you into another slave.” She stared avidly into Jan’s eyes.

“They got me, Jan. They used me to get these other slaves.

“Now, W/we are going to get you.

“It is time for you to go into the ship.”