Every Time I Close My Eyes

'New Logo for Carson's?' The email notification popped up in the corner of Kaitlyn's screen, and she clicked on it almost instantly. Not that she was excited to see yet another attempt by Elise to salvage the Carson account-they'd been going back and forth on the logo for the new branding campaign for about three days now, and every effort had somehow managed to be worse than the one before it. Elise had a bad habit of ignoring the notes her boss gave her and 'following her muse', which would have been fine if her muse had led her anywhere commercial or even aesthetically pleasing. They said that inside every advertising agent there was an artist struggling to get out, but the crazy abstract artist in Elise had made a break for it about three months ago and was sprinting for the hills.

Still, Kaitlyn thought as she opened the email, which contained nothing but an image attachment and the sentence, 'Be down in a minute to talk to you about this,' it was probably worth at least a look before she reassigned the account. It couldn't be any worse than the previous effort, and Elise had done good work in the past before she got onto this weird obsession with meaningless squiggles. Maybe she'd finally incorporated some of Kaitlyn's notes into the new-

"Haaagh!" Kaitlyn let out an involuntary gasp of disgust as she opened the image file. It was...hideous. Beyond hideous-it actively bordered on deranged. It was nothing but a looping, twisting scrawl that crossed in on itself over and over, occasionally taking sharp angles that gave the whole thing a jagged and uncomfortable feel despite the numerous soft curves. The only way they could use this in a branding campaign was if they planned to announce Carson's new product line of demon-worshiping cult hoodies.

"Whaddya think?" Elise said, popping through the door to Kaitlyn's office uninvited and closing it behind her. "Did you open it? Did you see it? Whaddya think?" Her tiny, perky body practically vibrated with enthusiasm, as though each and every one of her short blonde hairs was standing on end with excitement.

Kaitlyn shuddered. "I can still see it every time I close my eyes," she said faintly, her voice an aural picture of trauma. She wasn't exaggerating; the image felt like it was burned into her retinas, an endless and unfollowable tangle of loops and whorls and spiky peaks. She blinked a few times, but it was still there.

Elise squealed in delight and clasped her hands together in front of her chest. "Perfect!" she said, clearly overjoyed. "That's just what I was hoping for! Oh, it just encapsulates everything I've been trying to say for the last few months, Kaitlyn. I feel like I finally nailed it."

Kaitlyn tore her eyes away from the monstrosity on the screen and glared at Elise. "What?" She didn't bother trying to hide the anger in her voice. This was beyond reassignment bad, this was firing level bad. If Elise genuinely thought that this was of professional quality at all, let alone some sort of top-notch work, she was clearly exhibiting poor enough judgment that Kaitlyn would be justified in showing her the door. And if she thought this was a good time to be funny, she probably deserved to walk for that alone.

If Elise noticed that her job was at stake, she didn't let on. "It's so unforgettable!" she cried out. "I've been trying to make an image that will be in everyone's mind, and I think I finally got it at last. Thank you so much for putting up with my earlier efforts, Kait. I know it must have been frustrating, but I think that now that you see the finished product, you'll agree with me."

"Agree with-" Kaitlyn bit back what would undoubtedly have been an unprofessional, if cathartic outburst, and closed her eyes in an effort to re-center herself. It was no good. That horrible thing floated in front of her mind's eye, almost taunting her with its indecipherable ugliness. It was messy where it should have been elegant, complicated where it should have been clean and simple, and abstract where it should have conveyed a clear message. It practically dared the eye to follow it-every time you followed a line, it led you along an endless path of lefts and rights and ups and downs and intersections and ugh!

Kaitlyn sighed. "Elise, we need to talk. This new logo of yours, it's..." She stared at her computer screen, trying to find a word to describe it that didn't involve profanity. The squiggly mess looked like it was glaring back at her, somehow. Not that it looked like an eye-it manifestly didn't look like anything Kaitlyn had ever seen. It was almost impressively meaningless; Kaitlyn evaluated images all day every day for a living, and she couldn't derive anything from this heap of lines. No matter how long or how hard she looked at it, the design refused to yield to any kind of analysis.

"It's eye-catching, isn't it?" Elise said, coming over to sit in the chair opposite Kaitlyn. "I've been working on it for months, ever since I had my breakthrough-did I ever tell you about my breakthrough, Kait? It's really exciting stuff, I've had a hard time thinking about anything else. And you know me when I get excited. I'm all go go go!" She giggled, punching the air to illustrate her enthusiasm.

"What?" Kaitlyn generally liked energy in her employees, but not when it was in service to an account-losing disaster. "No, I-you never mentioned anything about this. Not to me, at least." She clicked the close box in frustration, banishing the offending image to the depths of her computer, but she felt like she could never unsee it.

"Well," Elise said, leaning forward in her chair, "I was thinking that really, what we do here is try to persuade people, right? Try to influence the way they think about our clients." She was going a mile a minute, her words machine-gunning at Kaitlyn to the point where the other woman wanted to duck behind her desk in self-defense. "But we're just doing it based on trial-and-error, intuiting the answer instead of thinking scientifically. So I figured that if I wanted to get really good at my job, I'd need to learn about the way the human brain processes images."

"Elise, can we not do this right now?" Kaitlyn didn't really care why Elise thought that mess was worth showing her anymore. There was no part of this conversation worth having except for the bit where they talked about whether to give Elise one last chance to produce something worthwhile or she packed up her desk immediately. All Kaitlyn wanted to do was kick Elise out of her office, go home, and lie down until she could find some way to get that awful piece of junk out of her mind. It was just so hideously over-complicated-every line felt like it swirled around every other line and back in on itself and then around three more lines and you couldn't even tell if it was all one scribble or three or four scribbles having sex with each other.

"Just bear with me," Elise said, bulldozing Kaitlyn's objections. "This is important. See, I've been researching a lot of neurological theory, trying to understand the structures in the human brain that process visual input, and I found some really interesting material online about the way that we store information. It's like, if the brain is a computer, and I know it's not but bear with me here, but if it was, then our senses would be our input ports. And when we look at things, it's like we're entering in a computer program."

Kaitlyn closed her eyes tight and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her head felt like it was bursting-not pain, exactly, just an overwhelming sensory impression, like being in a crowded bar during a light show. The image of that stupid drawing Elise had made simply wouldn't go away, it was embedded solidly in her mind's eye and she couldn't stop seeing it whenever she shut her eyes. "Elise, look," she said wearily, trying to wrest control of the situation long enough to at least throw the other woman out.

"Exactly! Look!" Elise replied, jumping out of her chair. "I thought that was the key too, Kait! We look at pictures, drawings, icons and logos and they form connections in our brain. They access other information, they send our whole neural network into action! And I thought, well, what if you could make a picture that directly accesses that network? What if you could make something that didn't just represent something that the brain understood, what if you could make something that directly instructed the brain itself? Something that you would just see and it would instantly influence your behavior?"

Kaitlyn opened her eyes sharply, staring at Elise in horror. "You what?" she asked. Not that she thought that anything Elise was saying was true, but the very thought that one of her employees would use her as a human guinea pig in some sort of brainwashing experiment was...it was loopy. Loopier than all those scribbles that twisted around into crazy patterns in her mind's eye. Loopier than every single one of the lines that she couldn't stop tracing in her head, each one leading to another, the design smooth and unbroken and seamless...

"I made...well, I guess you could call it a computer virus for the human brain," Elise said, coming around the desk to stand next to Kaitlyn's chair. "It's a computer virus in its simplest sense, of course, but that's okay because it's not really like we have anti-virus software because this is just an analogy anyway. Your brain receives the image through the optic nerve and begins deciphering it, the same way you decipher any image for meaning, but it's such a complex visual structure and it's so abstract that your mind can't really process it. It keeps running the same program, again that's just an analogy but by now you're probably having problems really paying attention to my words anyway so that doesn't matter, but it keeps running the same program over and over trying to make sense of what it saw but all it gets is more nonsense."

"I...I don't, um...Elise, what did you..." Kaitlyn blinked hard, trying to clear the squiggly lines out of her head, but it wasn't helping. She still saw it, overlaid on her vision like a daydream blotting out reality, an endless design of chaotic, swirling lines that she followed over and over, tracing each curve until it inevitably led her back to another, unable to find the beginning and unable to find the end. She sank back into her chair, clenching her eyes tightly shut. "What did you do to me?" she whimpered.

"It's very simple, Kait," Elise said tenderly, stroking Kaitlyn's long dark hair. "Your brain is shutting down. You just don't understand because your brain is shutting down. You're trying to make sense of that picture, but it's impossible, so your mind is devoting more and more of its resources to the task. Like a computer devotes more and more resources to the virus program until everything else is all sluggish and pretty soon even the operating system isn't processing very fast. I sped the whole thing along a little with some very rapid audio input to confuse you further, but you would probably have a hard time thinking by now no matter what."

"I, um, you, but..." Kaitlyn's tongue felt thick and clumsy in her mouth. She tried to gather her thoughts, but they kept disappearing into swirling lines, jagged angles, intricately intersecting loops of black on white. Over and over again, her mind following the pattern as it swooped and snarled her every conscious notion into a tangle of twisting, warping squiggles. She was barely even aware of Elise reaching down and undoing the buttons on her blouse, one by one, and slipping her hands inside to caress Kaitlyn's breasts.

"Don't worry, Kait," Elise said, sitting on Kaitlyn's lap and playing with her nipples. "It's not going to hurt you. It's just like a computer-your mind is going to run out of memory, trying to figure out what it just saw, and when it gets too slow and sluggish and sleepy to think at all anymore, it's going to crash. 'Brain has encountered an error and needs to close,'" she said with a musical laugh.

"And when that happens," she continued, her words now just meaningless sound in Kaitlyn's ears as the pattern consumed Kaitlyn's every thought, "you're going to reboot. You'll enter a nice, sleepy, fuzzy fugue state where your brain is open to programming just like a computer in boot mode. We can't use it for the Carson account, unfortunately-it wouldn't be safe to have people stare at a billboard and suddenly become mindless and obedient. But I didn't make it for the Carson campaign. I made it for you."

Kaitlyn moaned as Elise continued working the warm, heavy flesh of her tits. Everything else slipped away, the distraction of touch overwhelming what little mind she had left and making it impossible to resist the twisting pattern in her mind's eye. "I showed you that drawing because I wanted you just like this, all blank and aroused and open to my words, and now I'm going to program you." She kissed Kaitlyn on the lips, slipping her tongue into Kaitlyn's mouth and swirling it around. "You can probably guess I've already got a few ideas for what to program you with."

Elise paused. "Well, you probably can't, I suppose. Not right now. But that's okay too." She grinned, running her hands over the swell of Kaitlyn's chest. Kaitlyn gasped in pleasure, unable to figure out what was happening. She only knew that her body felt so good, her nipples felt tight and hard and her pussy was getting wet and lines, over and over, the pattern tangling up her mind in them and there were words but she didn't have the attention span to process the words and the lines and the fingers slipping into her panties and fucking her, and the swirling lines were more important, she almost had it, it almost made sense to her, she had to think, had to think about the image in her head in her head in her head-

Kaitlyn's world slipped away completely into blessed, uncomplicated blankness. Her head slumped to one side, her eyes staring sightlessly forward and her body going limp.

"There we go," Elise said, cooing the words into Kaitlyn's ear. "Now, listen..."

*****

"Wake up, sleepyhead." Kaitlyn's eyes fluttered open, unsure for a moment of where she was or even who she was. Then Elise came into focus, her legs spread and her pussy glistening with moisture, and Kaitlyn remembered everything.

"God, you're beautiful," she said, leaning in and licking away at the other woman's wet cunt.

"Mmm," Elise purred, as Kaitlyn's tongue lashed away at her clit. "Thank you, boss." She entangled her fingers into Kaitlyn's hair, pulling her forward, but Kaitlyn needed no encouragement. She couldn't think of anywhere she'd rather be than right here between Elise's thighs, lapping up her girlfriend's delicious juices and bringing her closer to orgasm.

Kaitlyn spiked her tongue deep into Elise's pussy, flicking at her clit as she dragged it slowly up and around. "One more orgasm," she said, in between bouts of licking. "Then we have to get back to work. The Carson account still needs a logo, you know."

"I've...nnh! I've got a few ideas," Elise whimpered, playing with her nipples as Kaitlyn ran her tongue along her pussylips. "We can talk about them, ohhh...we can talk about them when your tongue is less busy."

Kaitlyn chuckled, tickling the tip of Elise's swollen clit with her breath. "And yours," she said, nuzzling Elise's pussy until her chin was slick with the other woman's arousal. "I've been gagging for it for..." She suddenly noticed that the sky outside the office was dark, and shivered with desire at the realization that she must have been eating Elise out for hours. "Forever."

"Me too," Elise moaned, wrapping her legs around Kaitlyn's head as her hips bucked in the throes of a powerful orgasm. "Oh god, me too..." Kaitlyn shivered in arousal at the other woman's moans, and redoubled her efforts-she'd planned to stop, but when it came to the woman she'd loved as long as she could remember, one orgasm was never enough.

THE END