Enter The Arena

Cara first saw it while she was scrolling through her social media feed, a link for one of those dumb online quizzes that always enticed people with false promises and stupid gimmicks and irritating open-ended questions. She breezed right past it, that time, rolling her deep brown eyes at the obvious clickbait and forgetting it entirely after a momentary surge of annoyance at her friends for reposting something so clearly obnoxious... and more than a little bit chauvinistic, to boot. She'd long ago outgrown the need to go through some stupid test that proved she was smarter than ninety percent of brunettes or whatever the latest fad was.

But then she saw it again, a few hours later. And again the next day, and again and again as it went viral through her friend group. And every time, Cara's irritation deepened a little bit further. The annoying claim--'Nine Out of Ten Women Are Hypnotized by This Image - Are You? Take the Quiz'--and the accompanying picture of a woman sitting mesmerized at her keyboard, drooling in her chair and staring blankly at a monitor's flickering light... it goaded her, and it goaded her even more that she was being so transparently manipulated by a clickbait link with that exact goal. Even though she knew that the best course of action was simply to ignore it, or better yet to mute or block it so that it simply vanished into the ether unseen, something about the smug, confident insinuation the ad implied made passing it by into a subtle admission of defeat. Her friends clearly weren't afraid to test their will against the mysterious image. But Cara was.

Or at least, that was what she imagined some web designer thinking, every time she scrolled right past the picture of the slack-jawed, mesmerized woman instead of following the link and testing herself in the arena of the mind. Even though Cara knew that it was a pure psychological tactic, the exact same kind of hook that got people to watch slide shows about unfairly canceled television series and read dumb articles about 'life hacking', she couldn't deny the frustrating, taunting effectiveness of the vapid blonde and her glassy-eyed stare. It made Cara want to challenge the test maker. It made her want to show whoever posted that ad that she wasn't some bubbly, simple-minded airhead who could be captured by a simple spiral. And finally, after days of contending with herself, Cara decided to click.

When she followed the link, it took Cara to a website where she answered a series of questions that were obnoxiously transparent in their intent. 'Do you prefer color or black and white?' 'What are your favorite colors to look at?' 'Are your eyes bothered by rapid flashes?' 'Do you like slow transitions or fast motion?' All blatantly geared to steer Cara to her perfect bespoke hypnotic image, whatever that was. It was undoubtedly nonsense--the script probably just took everyone to the same generic spinning disc every time, with the quiz primarily there to create engagement or deliver eyeballs or whatever the latest stupid metric was for advertisers gullible enough to give money to these sites--but it was unskippable nonsense, so Cara put up with it. Giving up now would only feel like a cop-out.

She answered the questions rapidly, eager to skip the preliminaries and get to the real test, and she actually rolled her eyes when she got to the final screen. At the top, a large block of oversized, ominously flashing text warned, 'HYPNOSIS IS REAL!' Below that, in slightly more sensible letters, it said, 'IF YOU CLICK 'YES', YOU ARE OFFERING CONSENT TO BE HYPNOTIZED AND TO HAVE SUGGESTIONS PLANTED IN YOUR BRAIN, AND ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY HABITS, COMPULSIONS, OBSESSIONS, OR ADDICTIONS IMPLANTED BY THE MESMERIZING IMAGES YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE. IF YOU REALLY THINK YOU ARE TOO WEAK TO RESIST, CLICK 'NO' TO EXIT THE WEBSITE NOW AND BE RETURNED TO YOUR HOMEPAGE!' Of course Cara clicked 'yes'. What else was she going to do?

The next screen didn't immediately bombard her with some kind of strobing image, though. Instead, it had another little text block with some instructions. 'Watch the center of the screen while the timer in the corner counts down,' it said, moments before the words faded away to be replaced by new ones. 'When the countdown reaches zero, look away from the spiral and click on the button that appears below it.' Annoyed, Cara waited for the next screen of instructions, wishing there was a way to skip to the test directly. She wanted to get this over with. 'The countdown will continue into the negative numbers!' the third screen read. 'The lower your score, the more susceptible to hypnosis you are! Good luck!' The text finally vanished, replaced by a twisting, spinning spiral of hot pink and soothing black that slowly swirled down and away into the center of the screen.

The timer started counting down from 120. Cara stared at the little point of blackness in the center of the spiral, impatiently waiting for her chance to click the button and show how strong-willed she was. It wasn't even as though it was going to be especially hard. Sure, the image moved with a smooth, easy flow, just fast enough to keep her eyes tripping over the bands of color as they proceeded into darkness while not dissolving into a blur of motion that she couldn't follow at all. But that didn't mean she was unaware of the little clock in her peripheral vision. She would just keep staring a little while longer, keep watching until the numbers ticked away from 115 to 0, and then she would win. It was just that easy.

Cara caught herself looking at the timer as it ticked down gradually to 110, but she tried her best to refocus her gaze on the smoothly flowing spiral. The rules said to look at the center of the screen, and Cara wasn't about to let whoever it was that made this stupid test think that she only won because she spent her two minutes trying to avoid looking at the 'mesmerizing image'. That might make them think she was afraid that it was really going to work on her, and she was determined to prove them wrong.

She smiled ruefully, recognizing the absurd irrationality of her stubborn determination to outlast the spiral and its entirely hypothetical owner. It wasn't like there was someone peering at Cara from the other side of the screen, rubbing their hands together in amusement as they watched her stare at the twisting bands of pink and black as they swirled around and down and around and down. This was probably just the work of some bored, underpaid web designer who didn't know who looked at their site and didn't much care. Cara's imaginary opponent didn't really exist anywhere but in the privacy of her own head.

But she was still going to show them. Even if there wasn't really some nerdy dude out there, cackling with sadistic glee as he imagined woman after woman staring into his hypnotic spiral and going all glassy-eyed and blank just like the dizzy blonde in the ad, it still felt like there was to Cara. She'd spent most of her college career being underestimated, just because she liked hot pink and she had cleavage and she wore contacts instead of glasses; seeing yet another way to test herself against the conventional stereotypes of unintelligent, weak-willed girls who couldn't resist something that any man would brush off easily, well... it was the perfect bait. Even knowing that the strongest proof of her willpower was simply to refuse the link any engagement, even knowing that she would prove exactly nothing to exactly nobody, here she was. Gazing into the warm, flowing depths of the endlessly moving tunnel of light. Following the bands of pink and black. Watching with riveted, ferocious intensity and daring it to mesmerize her.

Cara's eyes flicked up to the corner of the screen, and she was startled to find out that the timer had already descended to 93 while she was lost in thought. She needed to pay more attention to the time, she told herself. She couldn't afford to go woolgathering, not when she really wanted to click on that button as soon as it appeared. It would make her feel pretty fucking stupid if she was so busy visualizing the moment when she beat the stupid hypnosis game that she'd somehow suckered herself into playing that she wound up getting a score of negative seventy or something. She needed to stay focused, stay in the present, and not get tangled up in her own thoughts.

That was probably how most people 'lost', Cara realized. It wasn't that they were hypnotized--hypnosis wasn't even really a thing, not the way that it was in old movies where some evil genius swung a pocket watch in front of a woman and she went all slack-jawed and meek. No, it was probably just that without anything to do but stare at the pretty swirling light show, they got distracted and wound up thinking about something else while their eyes automatically tracked the continuous flow of colors down into the darkness at the center of the screen. They stopped paying attention to the test, and started planning out their weekend or daydreaming about their favorite celebrity or something. And by the time they finally snapped out of it, the timer was down to--

71. How the hell did that happen? Cara could swear she only drifted off into contemplation for a few seconds, but somehow she'd wound up staring at the spiral for a lot longer than she realized. She swallowed hard, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that her lips had parted and saliva had begun to pool in her open mouth just like the empty-headed blonde in the ad. Maybe she needed to take this a bit more seriously, after all. Maybe the questions had given them, whoever they were, a little bit of an advantage in creating a hypnotic image that was really difficult to ignore. Not that Cara was going to look away--she still wanted to win, after all--but she needed to take this seriously and not just let her mind wander while her eyes locked onto the spinning disc.

She noticed a sound coming from the speakers, a low droning thrum that slowly filled the room with white noise that somehow coincided with the rotation of the spiral despite its tuneless buzz. Cara couldn't be sure how long it had been going on--it seemed almost like it had always been there, like it was coming from inside her head as well as out. It resonated inside her skull, as if it was filling the inside of her eyeballs up with static until her thoughts were mere ghosts among the constant noise. Cara suddenly wondered how long it had been since she'd blinked.

The spiral couldn't really be affecting her, could it? It had to be impossible. Her friends would have said something if it actually mesmerized them, they would have... have warned her, or complained about it, or even just sheepishly admitted that they had lost themselves staring into the bottomless tunnel of spinning, twisting light and shadow. But they all just said that it was cool and everyone should try it. They all--they all said that, didn't they? Exactly that. They all reblogged the link, and they all added those exact same words. 'This is so cool! You've got to try it!' That suddenly seemed very significant to Cara. She had a lot of different friends, and hundreds more acquaintances on social media who expressed themselves in every idiom known to the vastness of the Internet. Surely they wouldn't all say the same thing right down to their punctuation, would they? Not unless they were doing what they were. Um. What they were told.

Suggestions, wasn't that what the warning talked about? Suggestions and habits and compulsions and addictions. The website as good as told Cara that if she did drift off into trance while she stared at the spiral, if she really wound up glassy-eyed and drooling and gazing in blank fascination at the spinning pink ribbons that streamed endlessly down into the center of the screen, it would make her do things. And she'd agreed to that. She'd agreed that it could plant obsessions in her head, because she didn't... didn't think it would really work. That suddenly seemed very overconfident to Cara. She wondered what the timer had counted down to now. She was surprised to find that there was no real urgency to the question, certainly not enough to force her to flick her gaze away from the captivating striations of color that tripped her up every time she tried to focus her blurred and mazy vision.

She needed to stop, Cara realized. Even if the timer wasn't at zero yet, even if she just had to X out of the window and admit that she was a little bit more easily distracted by pretty lights and swirling colors than she initially thought... she needed to quit now before the website started to give her suggestions. Cara was honestly just lucky that they hadn't somehow snuck something into her head already, some whispering instruction hidden in the depths of the throbbing tones that broke up her thoughts with their constant binaural drone. She would have noticed, of course, but--

Something wet dripped from Cara's chin down onto her chest. She reached up to wipe it away, but her hand felt so infinitely comfortable resting on her own breast that she didn't want to move it.

She definitely needed to stop now, she warned herself. The button had probably popped up already; she couldn't seem to tear her gaze away from the center of the screen far enough to check, but it had to have been two full minutes since she first started staring at the swirling pink spiral and let her thoughts descend into the darkness at its heart. Cara was about to reach out to her mouse... but the moment her awareness centered on her right hand, she realized it was between her legs rubbing her pussy through her panties. They were soaked, she noticed absently. They were absolutely soaked clean through, and Cara was pressing her fingers tightly against the wet spot until her clit throbbed like the buzzing drone from her speakers was a vibrator thrumming inside her cunt.

T-that was a sign that she absolutely had to stop. If Cara was masturbating... how long had she even been masturbating? How long had she been lightly squeezing her left breast with one hand while her other was teasing her slick, needy cunt through her panties? Did, did the spiral tell her to do that? Was there a voice in the endless buzzing drone, a voice that had slipped right past her conscious mind while she was staring blankly at the spinning disc and slowly, groggily realizing that something wasn't right about her captivated stare? Or were there words in the image, flashing by too fast for her sluggish brain to notice but somehow picked up on a deep, subliminal level by the part of her that was mesmerized by the endless tunnel of light? Cara recognized that she was once again distracting herself from looking away, that all her speculation was just one more way that she tricked herself out of clicking on the button and escaping the prison that held her attention trapped in the spiral's depths, but she couldn't make herself climb out of the endless, recursive layers of self-reflection. It was as though her awareness was looking up at her body from the bottom of a mine shaft, unable to affect anything the drooling, helpless woman in front of the computer was doing.

Even her climax, as intense as it was, somehow seemed to reach her waking mind as a drifting flow of pleasure that only deepened her helpless relaxation. Cara could feel her pussy clench tightly, could feel her clit throb in an incandescent starburst of pure bliss that the spiral stroked into drowsy, mesmerized ecstasy, but she was only a passenger in the body that experienced her orgasms. She wasn't in control anymore. She couldn't even make her eyes glance up to the timer in the corner. The smooth, flowing bands of light and shadow filled her entire field of vision, reflecting across her slack and expressionless face as she stared at the screen.

She was losing.

Somehow that tiny spark of frustration remained, long after the rest of Cara's consciousness had descended into numb weariness and sleepy, mindless bliss. Even when she lost the ability to care about the suggestions being subtly woven into her dazed and drowsy brain, even when she stopped trying to wonder what she was being programmed to do and what kind of compulsions the website was implanting into her mesmerized subconscious, she could still think about that timer. She could still think about that score, going down further with every second she gazed helplessly into the spiral and masturbated herself deeper into obedient, euphoric devotion. She was fucking losing the stupid fucking Internet game that she only clicked on to prove that she could win.

Slowly, fitfully, Cara fanned that spark into a flame. She made herself concentrate on that timer, turning it into a nagging irritation that the rest of her mesmerized mind couldn't ignore, a tiny speck of grit in the gears of the smoothly turning spiral inside her sleepy brain. It kept her from descending all the way into the depths of blank, amnesiac emptiness, distracted the part of her that just wanted to sink deeper into pleasure and forget everything but the throb in her stiff, aching clit and finally prompted her eyes to move that tiny, seemingly insignificant distance up and to the left. Looking away from the spiral at last.

The number was like a splash of cold water on her brain. -1200. She'd lost twenty minutes just staring at the spiral, listening to the hypnotic drone in her ears and masturbating her brains out. With immense difficulty, Cara forced her lethargic arm up to her mouse, unable to avoid noticing the slickness on her fingers as she moved it with a distinct lack of coordination to click the button that must have been at the bottom of the screen for ages. It was the crappiest score ever in the history of scoring, she was sure, but anything had to count as a win if it meant that she escaped that insidious, captivating swirl of light and sound.

The spiral went away. The screen went blank. The thrum in the speakers cut out. Cara heaved a sigh of relief... and then she saw the words 'LEVEL 2' appear in front of her. Before she could move her mouse to the X in the corner of the window, a new timer appeared, this one set to 180. A new disc of pink and black appeared, this one spinning just an imperceptibly tiny bit quicker. The drone resumed, louder and more thought-stopping than before. And Cara's fingers slipped off the mouse and fell into her lap as her mind drifted back into empty, obedient bliss once more.

THE END