Darcy had been imagining this moment in her head for a long time. She wasn't exactly sure how long--the knowledge of what was happening to her had seeped into her brain gradually, pieced together from months of noticing odd decisions and incongruous actions and strange, bewildering gaps in her memory. She couldn't count the number of times she'd brushed off a few hours of missing time here and there, snapping out of a fugue she didn't remember entering with a slick mess between her thighs that some hidden part of herself whispered insistently to ignore.
Even the purchases--a sex toy here, a slutty outfit there, an upgraded cell phone with a vastly superior camera compared to her old model--they didn't trigger alarm bells by themselves. Darcy was an up-and-coming young executive, and she managed her money wisely for the most part; if she decided to splurge every once in a while on one of those fancy remote-controlled vibrators that connected to the Internet, who cared if she didn't have anyone in mind to use it from the other end? It was fun and flirty and she liked to daydream about the possibilities, that was all. Until Darcy noticed that she daydreamed a lot. And very, very vividly.
That might have been when she began to fully put it all together. When she realized that it wasn't just her imagination, and the toy between her legs really was buzzing harder every time she pictured a faceless stranger stroking the surface of their tablet to bring Darcy to new heights of helpless ecstasy, she began to think--loosely and without any real result those first few times, but think nonetheless--about the way vibrators like that worked. For someone to be controlling it, she would have had to give them permission to link to the toy through the Bluetooth connection on her phone. And Darcy didn't remember doing that.
Until she did. Slowly, sluggishly, pushing against some subtle resistance in her mind that insisted it wasn't worth thinking about, Darcy began to uncover memories of absently picking up her phone while her mind and her other hand were preoccupied with pleasant distractions, and tapping on settings in the vibrator's free app with a vacant, thoughtless smile on her round pink cheeks. And when she thought about that smile, that carefree expression of vacant bliss she wore when she handed control over her pleasure to a complete and total stranger, Darcy found it to be ominously familiar. She recognized it from other times. Times she realized she'd glossed over in her mind as easily as she had the moment when she let someone she didn't even know fuck her soaking cunt.
Darcy told herself at first not to worry about it--it was just a fantasy, after all, and she'd been fantasizing about being under the control of a seductive stranger for as far back as she could remember. But gradually, she began to recognize the artificiality of the voice in the back of her head; it wasn't a figure of speech, something in her mind was literally telling her to ignore her growing misgivings and go back to thoughtless masturbation. And once Darcy knew it for what it was, she could push against it and gradually connect the memories of that blank, blissful smile back to other times she'd experienced the same kind of dreamy vacancy in her own head.
She realized that ordering the toy in the first place had been a decision she'd arrived at without any real consideration on her part, an impulse that popped into her head one afternoon while she stared vacantly at her phone and floated in a bubble of empty bliss. She finally began to think about her long Sunday drives in the countryside, and her inability to recollect exactly where she'd gone and what she'd done when she got there. And Darcy slowly remembered that when it came to her fantasies of being controlled by a stranger, 'as far back as she could remember' wasn't very far at all.
That was when she began to daydream about this day instead. When it finally hit Darcy that her thoughts and desires weren't her own, but instead the artificial construction of some stranger's hypnotic skills, she imagined what it would be like to meet him at last and find out what kind of man would... and could... defeat her will so completely for so long. She had no real doubt that it was hypnosis behind her strange compulsions and otherwise inexplicable behavior--the details of her subjugation remained frustratingly difficult to recall, hidden at the headwaters of the insistent current that pushed back Darcy's every effort to think about her own conditioning. But she retained a vague notion of a sparkling sapphire pendant, held just over her eye line until her eyelids fluttered from the exertion of staring at it. And unlike so many of her memories of the last few years, she felt certain that this one was real.
Darcy began to plan. At first her schemes were little more than a new kind of fantasy, marked by elisions in logic that led to her confronting the sinister hypnotist in his lair and winding up down on her knees in a reaffirmation of his power over her. But she recognized those daydreams as merely another manifestation of her programming, pushing back on them with determination and structured concentration on the practicalities of achieving her goals. She focused on the things she knew she could achieve, feeling more and more certain every time she resisted the urge to masturbate to the notion of their final meeting that she was getting stronger. She wouldn't fall victim to him. Not again.
She put tracking software on her own phone, certain that at some point her hypnotic controller would push his luck and try to compel her into another visit. She added keystroke logging on her computer, and even looked into asking her wireless provider to restore her deleted text messages; they couldn't get back what she'd so blissfully erased, but that didn't deter her. Neither did weekend after frustrating weekend of snapping out of a fog of hazy, obedient rapture only to find that she'd once again turned off the services she'd installed. She only pushed harder. All Darcy needed was to hold out just a little bit more against the programming in her brain. Once she could do that, once she could find him, then she could confront him on her terms.
