Zero Signal

"...se." Nathan heard just the fragment of sound, catching it just as his finger tapped the button on the MP3 player to interrupt his study mix. He looked over at his roommate, hoping to pick up some hint from context of what he'd missed, but Zachary just looked at him expectantly. He had a little crooked grin on his face, that 'I am definitely smarter than everyone else' look he sometimes got when he dropped a bit of neurology jargon into a conversation that he knew nobody else understood.

Nathan tried to pretend he didn't notice. It was usually the best way to deal with Zachary's attitude. Not that Zachary wasn't impressively smart, but there was knowing you were smart and there was thinking everyone else was stupid, and Zachary had a bad habit of losing track of the line between them. Whenever anyone pushed him on it, though, he just got defensive. It was easier to ignore the little smirk, pretend everything was fine, and ask him to repeat himself. "Hey, sorry, I di-"

It was as far as Nathan got before his mind caught up with what his senses were telling him. His hand caught his attention first-it wouldn't move. He started to gesture at Zachary, some insignificant little motion that he probably wouldn't even have consciously noticed...except for the fact that he couldn't make his hand move away from his cock. It felt like it was magnetized in place. He could move it up or down, but not away.

That shock of awareness cascaded into a chain of other sudden realizations. Nathan blushed at the sudden, awkward understanding that Zachary was smirking and staring not just at him, but at the way his hand automatically pumped up and down the shaft of his hard cock. Not just hard, he realized as he looked down. It was an angry, throbbing, purplish-red, with precum already smeared all over it like he'd been stroking himself for ages. He forced himself to stop, but he couldn't pull his hand free. And as soon as his concentration lapsed even a little, it was right back in motion again. He didn't understand how he could have missed it, but now that he noticed how turned on he was, it was difficult to think about anything else.

And he was looking at his cock. That hit his brain like an electric shock-he was looking at his cock, because he wasn't wearing any clothes. He was sitting on the couch just like he usually did when he was studying, he had his wireless earbuds in and his MP3 player on the coffee table with the rest of his stuff, but he was completely naked and sitting on a towel. He didn't remember taking off his clothes. He didn't remember masturbating. The gap in his memories seemed to suddenly yawn open wider and wider as he examined it, swallowing minutes and hours until he realized he had no idea when he stopped having a firm recollection of events.

All of this passed through his head in less than a second as "Hey, sorry, I di-" turned into, "What the fuck? What the fuck is, what the fuck what the fuck what the FUCK?" before he could even finish working his way through it all in his head. The panic he felt appeared out of nowhere, blossoming up under the arousal as he tried with increasing desperation to stop fucking his hand and realized that not only could he not control his hand, he couldn't control his cock, either. Freaking out didn't soften his erection even a little.

Zachary's smirk turned into a full grin. "You asked what I was working on," he said. "I figured I'd show you."

Nathan's stare flashed back and forth between Zachary's leering green eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, and his still-stroking fingers. "Show me?" he asked, the confusion and fear in his voice deepening as he continued to struggle for ownership of his own body and failed. "I, I what, I don't understand, show me what? Show me what?" He didn't remember asking Zachary about anything, let alone anything that could lead to this weird, fucked-up situation. He couldn't even stand up, he realized. His legs didn't want to rise from the couch any more than his hand wanted to stop pumping his cock, and it was increasingly clear that his brain didn't have a vote anymore.

"Calm down, 'dude'," Zachary said, sounding mildly irritated. It sounded so typical that Nathan was momentarily distracted from his incipient freak-out; he was used to Zachary putting little ironic quotes around 'dude', 'bro', 'man', and anything else he could think of to hint that he thought Nathan was a little too macho. Which was more amusing than anything else, usually; Nathan ran track to get him through school while he went for a degree in sociology, he wasn't exactly taking 'Rocks for Jocks' courses. But Nathan knew better than to sing the praises of social sciences in front of Zachary 'the brain is just like a computer' Halliday.

"That's better," Zachary went on. Nathan felt a muted shudder of fear as he noticed the way his panic had subsided into a glassy, helpless calm. "As I was saying, I'm showing you my research. I've been studying a lot about the way the brain processes sound-or more accurately, how it generates sound, because what we think of as 'sound' is really just a set of neural impulses produced by the auditory nerve on sensing vibrations. Sound is a purely psychological phenomenon." He snorted. "It's all in your head, 'bro'."

Nathan could tell that this was all in his head. He could tell Zachary was in his head, which would be totally freaking his shit out except for the fact that Zachary had told him not to freak out and so he couldn't any more, which was freaking him out in a meta way that he couldn't quite wrap his brain around because he couldn't fucking stop jerking off and it was incredibly fucking distracting. So he just sat there, in silence, angrily fucking his fist and waiting for Zachary to continue his spiel.

Which he did. "The point is, the frequency of a sound is just the frequency of a particular kind of thought. We don't really hear anything; the vibration is translated into an electrical pulse in our brains with a particular wavelength. Just like every other thought in our heads. Every thought has a pattern...and that was where I had my little breakthrough. Because waves with patterns can cancel each other out."

Zachary was in full flow, now, talking almost to himself as he began to pace the room excitedly. It was always the same with him-the easiest way to get him off of baiting people to prove his intellectual superiority was to get him interested in explaining his latest idea. It was probably why Nathan had asked him what he was working on in the first place-not that he remembered doing that, but if Zachary had been in one of his pissy moods, it would have been an easy way to get him away from complaining about how much the university glorified athletics.

Nathan had developed a depressingly large number of coping strategies to deal with his roommate over the last six months while he waited for a new room assignment. Apparently they weren't enough.

"It's like making waves in a pond," Zachary continued. "If you have a wave that ripples at one frequency-" His left hand moved through the air in a sine wave. "And you create another wave with a ripple that's the exact opposite frequency-" His right hand moved in its own sinuous curve. "What you get is just a flat line. Still water. A graph that runs right along the axis at zero." The two hands met, and he stopped moving either one. "Only what I did, I found a wave that runs exactly opposite to the frequency of your frontal lobe. A signal that zeroes out your thoughts. When I turned it on, you stopped thinking." He paused theatrically.

Nathan knew exactly what he was going to say next, and decided to forestall it with a question. "But the signal, it's stopped now. Why-" He tried again to move his arm, but it felt like he was doing some sort of weird isometric exercise where you pull and pull against an immovable object. All he could do was stroke himself, his fingers sliding up over the head of his cock with a careful attentiveness that was quietly driving him out of his mind with lust. His mind felt weirdly placid, still caught in that unnatural state of calm that Zachary had induced, but it wasn't touching the arousal that seemed to radiate through his whole body now. "Why isn't this stopping too?"

Zachary grabbed a chair from the dining table and swung it around so that the back faced Nathan. He sat down on it, one leg on either side, and gave Nathan's cock a good long look. "Well, that was kind of a surprise to me, too," he said, his jade eyes alive with arousal. Nathan could feel a hot blush creeping over his whole body; he knew that Zachary had never had a girlfriend, but he figured that his roommate was just shy or introverted or asexual or something. Months of weird, spiky social interactions suddenly took on a whole new meaning.

"See, what I found-and man, when I publish, it's going to change the whole field of neuroscience-I found that the frontal lobe isn't the only structure in the brain responsible for perceiving our surroundings. When I canceled out your conscious awareness, you entered a fugue state that was entirely different from anything I'd ever read about before. Not a coma, not a brain trauma that changed your personality or prevented you from forming memories, but a sort of waking trance. I could talk to you. You listened. But you couldn't think about what I said."

He gestured to Nathan's hand, still gliding on his shaft over a slick coating of precum. The ache in Nathan's balls was almost incandescent now, the need to cum weighing on his mind like a stone deforming a sheet of rubber, but his body refused to release his load. "So when I told you to strip naked and play with yourself, you just accepted that. It went past your conscious awareness, because that didn't even exist. Anything I tell you when you're in that state becomes automatic, instinctive. Your conscious thoughts rearrange themselves to immediately adopt the commands into your basic personality, all without you even noticing."

Nathan tried stroking faster, desperate for a release from the pleasant agony of endless sensation, but it only made his need worse. His body refused to cum, and the hot tingling bliss that shot down his cock and up his spine felt even more intense with every rise and fall of his fingers. He wanted to cry, it was so frustrating, but he wouldn't give Zachary the satisfaction. "But I, I did notice," he said, his breath coming in shudderng gasps as his hand refused to cease the new, faster pace. "I noticed exactly what you did to me."

"Only because I let you," Zachary said, his voice suddenly husky with lust. "Nathan, do you remember when I gave you that MP3 player?"

Nathan looked over at the device sitting on the coffee table. "I, it was..." It was suddenly much harder to think, is what it was. Nathan's brain suddenly felt like it was gliding over events, slipping past sequences of time like his thoughts were hitting icy patches. "A, a month ago?" he hazarded, forcing himself to reconstruct the memory, struggling to resist the easy narrative his mind seemed happy to build. "To help. Me study." Every time he tried to think about it, his cock twitched and throbbed, as it to tell him that he didn't need to think about it at all.

"Six weeks, actually," Zachary said, reaching down and scooping the MP3 player off of the coffee table. "But you're very close. I told you it would help you study, and honestly, it has. I've been reading your textbooks to you while the zero signal was playing, and you retained the information perfectly. But that wasn't the only thing I told you." He reached between his legs and began stroking his own cock with his free hand. Nathan tried to remember how long Zachary had been naked, and failed.

"There's a lot you haven't thought about, Nathan," he said, his hand matching the pace of Nathan's stroking, "because I haven't let you. You thought you were studying, but you didn't let yourself notice what you brought out here to 'study' with." Nathan tried to focus his eyes on the coffee table, forcing himself to think about each individual item his gaze rested on. But it was just normal school supplies. Lube, condoms, butt plugs, ball gags. Just the stuff he always brought out to study with. He felt his mind strain for a moment against an impossible weight, but the effort collapsed. Nathan felt a surge of inescapable pleasure as it did so.

"You don't remember all the other times we've had this conversation," Zachary said, panting with arousal. "Seventeen, it's-oh fuck, it's seventeen." Nathan let his eyes stare at nothing in particular, going glazed and unfocused as he struggled to remember anything that Zachary was talking about...but the more he tried to think, the harder his cock got, until it was twitching and pulsing and leaking precum all over his fingers and he realized that he had completely zoned out staring at Zachary's cock. And that felt so nice.

"God, it's so fucking hot watching you try to think," Zachary moaned. He was getting up now, walking over to Nathan with his hand still furiously jacking his cock. "It's so fucking hot watching you fail. Oh my fucking God, you, you don't-you have no idea, you-" Zachary's cock dripped clear fluid from the tip, and Nathan found his mouth opening of its own volition. It seemed perfectly natural to him, perfectly normal to want to give his gay roommate a show to get him off. The weight of obedience pinned his mind, he couldn't possibly fight it anymore. He could only surrender.

"Please, Master," Nathan whimpered, "please cum." And jet after jet of thick, salty liquid sprayed across Nathan's face and chest. Nathan barely even noticed that some of it was his.

"Damn," Zachary said, flopping onto the couch in evident exhaustion. "I am never going to get tired of that." His eyes were half-open, the smirk replaced by a lazy smile. Nathan knew that he'd never get a better chance to be free. He reached over and snatched the MP3 player from Zachary's unresisting hands, determined to keep his roommate from zapping his brain again. His climax seemed to have finally freed him from his strange paralysis, and he was not going to give Zachary the opportunity to program him again.

"Or that, either," Zachary said, his smile widening as he leaned back against the cushions. "It's so fucking hot when you think you're thinking for yourself, but all you're doing is following your programming. You're not free, Nathan. You're never going to be free." His cock was already stiffening again, Nathan saw. Then Nathan realized he was staring at Zachary's cock again.

He struggled to speak, tried to say something, anything that would prove Zachary wrong. But his mouth only hung open in a delicate 'o' as his volition gradually drained away and his gaze locked deeper and deeper onto Zachary's cock. It filled his field of vision, growing larger and larger as it hardened to a full erection. As if it was getting closer. As if Nathan was getting closer to it. As if-

"Press play, slave," Zachary said. Nathan's finger tightened on the button. Everything went blank.

THE END