"Keep watching. Eyes on the lights. You cannot look away." The voice in Miranda's ears is as steady as a metronome, as cold and remorseless as a winter's storm. It gives her nothing to argue against, nothing to plead with, only the implacable directives she's already too dazed and muzzy to resist; her gaze is locked onto the waves of color that ripple across the screen, but thought and memory have already become foreign to Miranda and she doesn't know how long she's been following the instructions that have infiltrated her stupefied brain. Time doesn't have meaning anymore. Neither does space. Only the lights matter now.

"The lights make you obedient. You cannot look away. You need to listen and accept your instructions." Miranda feels her head dip forward a little, the constant effort to keep her eyes open and her gaze locked onto the swirling pulses of light and color exhausting her beyond reason, but she doesn't give in. She hasn't been given permission to give in yet. She hasn't received instructions to let her fluttering eyelids slip shut and sink completely into the void of oblivious, amnesiac trance and it's a sign of just how thoroughly the hypnotic programming has enslaved her that she now craves that so badly. She's aching for the opportunity to simply slump down in her seat and stop her conscious mind entirely, but it's being withheld precisely because she's so desperate for it now. Miranda's being tricked into perceiving vacancy as a reward and she's completely fallen for it.

"Watch the lights. Follow the lights. You cannot resist the power of the lights on your mind and will." The phrasing is elliptical, repetitive, but that only serves to make it even more difficult for Miranda to struggle against; trying to follow the thread of reasoning behind it is like punching fog, and Miranda's waking mind has already almost completely tuned out the droning monotone in favor of the rippling waves of color that expand outward from the constantly moving dot on the screen. Every time she tries to focus on the voice, it only sounds like it's saying the same thing. Every time she tries to think about it, she runs smack into a brick wall of groggy lassitude. It's just so much easier to stare and sink and obey.

"The lights are making you complacent. The lights are making you receptive. The lights are relaxing you deeper and you cannot resist." Miranda can feel her breath getting shallower, slowing down until it precisely matches the pulsing rhythm of the rippling hues in front of her impossibly heavy eyes. She can't remember the last time she blinked. She can't remember where she is, what she would see if she turned to look at the person hypnotizing her, how she got here or how long it's been since she even thought about struggling against the pull of the colors on her sleepy gaze. All she knows is obedience now. Her consciousness is little more than a meek and wriggling thing at the back of her head, easily ignored in favor of the images on the screen.

"You need to be compliant now. You need to let the lights empty your mind. You need to be open and blank and obedient so my words can fill the void inside you with purpose." The voice never tells her to want anything, Miranda notices with a dull vapidity that's almost instantly swallowed up by another pulse of color. It never entices or seduces. It simply jackhammers away at Miranda's will until she can only think of choice as something that happens to other people. She's being hollowed out into a vessel for someone else's wants and desires and the only reaction left to her is a numb, complacent contentment that saps her will to resist even further.

"The lights are flowing into your mind. The more you watch them, the more helplessly obedient you become. Keep following the lights." Miranda's muscles relax further, slumping into her seat until it's the only thing keeping her from simply toppling over onto the floor in a limp and lifeless heap. She doesn't know what would happen if she did; no doubt whoever owned the voice that was remorselessly hypnotizing her would simply prop her back up, stir her back to a vague semblance of consciousness, and begin programming her all over again. For all Miranda knows, it's happened once or twice already; every memory is instantly and effortlessly written over by the lights into a new and omnipresent now, swallowing the person she was and leaving an even more compliant husk in its place. She could have been like this for hours, days, and she would  have no way of knowing.

"The lights make you into a compliant drone. Being a drone gives you purpose. Having purpose gives you pleasure." Miranda doesn't even know if what she's experiencing is actually real, or if her mind is drifting through a void of hypnotic complacency while her body goes about its tasks and this is merely a representation of some inexorable enslavement she completed ages ago. Maybe her consciousness is always trapped in this room, maybe the voice is simply a reflection of the programming she absorbed in its entirety and she can't stop listening to it because it's become her identity now. Miranda can't be sure about anything but the beauty of the lights on the screen in front of her.

"Only the lights matter now. Your every thought is swallowed by the lights. My words replace the emptiness left in your mind once the lights have erased your thoughts." It almost feels like overkill to batter away at Miranda's already subjugated mind like this, but she doesn't question it; questioning requires thought, and Miranda's only briefly aware of her own thoughts before another ripple of color washes them away and leaves her blank and placid and awaiting instructions. She doesn't speculate on the purpose of her conditioning, she doesn't anticipate or dread whatever ultimate use she's going to be put to. She only stares. It's easy to watch and listen and obey.

"Your mind is empty except for my instructions. My instructions tell you to follow the lights. You need to follow the lights and sink deeper into obedience." There's a swirl of dizziness behind Miranda's eyes, a brief flicker of vertigo that leaves her head drooping down even further and her eyelids fluttering so hard that only the whites show, but some deep and unconscious impulse forces her to lever herself back into a position where the lights are visible once more, and within moments she's already forgotten her brief dalliance with unconsciousness. Of course she wouldn't be allowed to succumb to oblivion yet. Not without permission. Miranda craves that permission so badly now.

"Only compliance matters now. The lights induce compliance. You need to follow the lights so you can be made compliant." The voice never changes tone, never betrays even a hint of satisfaction or irritation or pleasure at its dominance over Miranda's will. She can't tell if it's a man or a woman or someone elsewhere on the spectrum of gender speaking to her; whoever they are, they have a perfect androgyny to them that befuddles Miranda's every effort to give them an identity. She might almost think them to be computer-generated, except that would require thinking and Miranda can't do that anymore save in the loosest and most perfunctory sense. Even that simply feels exhausting, as though they're training her to crave numb vacuity in the same way they're training her to crave mesmerized slumber. If they can get her to wish she could stop trying to stir her sluggish brain into motion, then she'll never put up resistance again.

"Compliance brings obedience. Obedience is pleasure. Following the lights brings you perfect pleasure as your compliance makes you obey." Miranda feels it again then, that faint shiver of quiet contentment that locks her brain into complacency and makes everything but staring at the screen feel too much like effort. It's not the kind of pleasure she would imagine from an attempt to condition her into mindless obedience; she still can't help feeling a sort of dull surprise that they haven't chosen something more intense and potent and overwhelming to erode her will to resist. This is so much more subtle and insidious and impossible to fight. Just an omnipresent tickle of sleepy satisfaction at being such a good drone for her controllers.

"You cannot escape the lights. You cannot escape my voice. You cannot escape your own need for obedience." Something gives way inside Miranda, not breaking her will exactly because there's no longer anything left to break, but definitely curling into the crumbling fragments of her disassociated mind and taking deeper root inside her. It's a sensation that Miranda dimly recognizes, from minutes or hours or days or years ago--she's found some tiny remnant of her own resistance, an insignificant scrap of her identity that doesn't already belong to the voice, and it's collapsed under the weight of her hypnotic subjugation leaving her that much more truly brainwashed. Miranda's genuinely astonished to discover it's still there in the instants before she forgets it ever existed.

"Every thought terminates in compliance now. Every attempt to resist ends in the lights. The lights induce obedience and you can never escape it." Miranda has almost completely lost track of her own body now; she's drifted so completely and totally into the flow of colors on the screen that it almost feels like she doesn't really exist, like she's escaped herself entirely and gone into the endless ripples that numb her brain and sap her will. She can't imagine staying conscious much longer, but at the same time her desire to obey is so strong that it simply overrides whatever limitations she might have thought she possessed. She feels like if she was struck by lightning right now, she would have to wait for permission to die.

"You cannot resist. You do not even understand the meaning of the word. The lights have erased it from your brain and you can never get it back." It suddenly strikes Miranda that she's never had the slightest urge to reply to anything the voice told her, or even to nod in vacant agreement with its words. They've simply filled her up--no, more like she's been poured into them, her subjugated mind perfectly molding itself to the form of its new container like water inside a jug. The voice has given her a shape and she's echoed it perfectly, and anything that didn't fit simply slopped over the sides and drained away ages ago. Miranda can't even remember it well enough to miss whatever it was she lost.

"You're ready to take the lights inside yourself now. You're ready to go into them forever and let them go into you. You're ready to become perfectly obedient as your eyes follow the lights one final time." Miranda's breath doesn't quicken, she doesn't stir in her seat, but inside her mind leaps with joy at the notion of finally being able to give up on the wearying effort of consciousness and allowing herself to give in completely to the stultifying numbness of the colors on the screen. It doesn't even occur to her that she should be trying to fight the weight of hypnotic control pressing down on her lethargic brain; the word 'resist' has been erased from her vocabulary now, and its absence leaves only one direction for her to go. She wants to be emptied. Her small, simple mind can imagine nothing else. The docile contentment within her surges at the promise of total surrender to the power of the voice in her ears.

"And sleep." It's such a simple command, a total contrast to the twisting and turning labyrinths of speech that preceded it, and that very simplicity makes it music to Miranda's ears. Her eyelids slam shut, her head slumps forward onto her chest, and although the voice continues to program her, she's gratefully oblivious to all of it. She only knows slumber, and it's the most blissful surrender she could ever imagine.

THE END