Relapse
by Jukebox
For a long, blissful moment, Abbie lay in bed without any memory of what she'd done the night before. Her baby blue eyes slowly opened, taking in sight of the morning sun crawling imperceptibly down her bedroom wall, and she drifted in that languid peace that only truly happened in those moments before the world caught up with her sense of self. She didn't have any cares, any worries--Abbie didn't even know what day it was, and it felt exhilarating instead of terrifying. It was the most glorious absence of care and worry, a free and easy relaxation that existed in those transient instants before her brain finished booting up and all she knew was that she was well-rested and content.
Naturally, it couldn't last. Abbie's leg brushed against the wet spot on her mattress, now cold after a long night's sleep, and it was enough to make the memories of the previous evening crash down on her with their own malicious gravity. "Oh shit," she whispered to herself, flinging back the sheets and realizing just how badly she'd lost her resolve the night before.
The damp patch on the sheets spread perhaps two feet in diameter, give or take a few inches, and even from here Abbie could smell the heady scent of sex saturating the fabric. She was suddenly aware of a sandpapery dryness in her mouth and throat, the legacy of collapsing into sleep without taking even a moment to replenish the fluids she lost from.... Abbie didn't like to finish that sentence, not even in the privacy of her head. She'd been doing so good, too. It had been almost a whole week since she looked at her phone before bed, and three weeks since she'd allowed her webscrolling to turn into something more--
Her phone. Abbie looked around wildly, wondering where she'd managed to put it last night. She couldn't remember much about the end of the evening's events; by the time she finally fell asleep, her brain had long ago given up recording things with any kind of clarity. It wasn't on her charger, it wasn't even on her bedside table, and she didn't even know what time it was without it. Abbie yanked up her pillows and rummaged through her bedding, her pale slender fingers searching wildly for the rough plastic casing that among the soft sheets and blankets. Finally, she brushed against something that wasn't fabric... but it wasn't her phone either.
It was her toy. Her special toy, the one Abbie thought she didn't keep charged anymore. Finding it in her bedclothes suggested a whole host of things about the previous evening, none of them good. Abbie held it gingerly by the dangling antenna that allowed the vibrator to connect to the Internet while still inserted into her cunt, and experimentally squeezed the concealed power button beneath the silicone sheath. It buzzed intensely between her fingers, still full of vigor. Abbie wanted to believe that meant she hadn't used it, but the slick, sore feeling between her legs whenever she moved told her otherwise. With a grimace, she set it on the bedside table and kept looking for her phone.
After a full minute of searching, Abbie found the slim device wedged between her headboard and mattress, its battery completely drained. She plugged it in, then grabbed an oversized nightshirt and tugged it on over her naked body and went to get a drink of water while she waited for the phone to boot up and show her just exactly what the fuck she was looking at when she passed out. Not that Abbie didn't already have a pretty good idea, but she at least wanted her suspicions confirmed before she decided how badly to berate herself for her total lack of willpower the previous evening.
No. That was unfair. Unfair and unhelpful at that--if Abbie constantly treated her relapses as some kind of moral failing on her part, she was never going to escape the insidious grip that BrainBreak.com had on her psyche. She'd learned the hard way already that the hypnosis files and 'brain training' games on the site had a real effect on her; what started as a fun hobby to improve her concentration and memory had turned into long, languorous sessions of teasing her slick cunt over and over again as the mesmerizing voice of the site admin slowed down time and kept her blissfully poised on the edge of climax. Every game seemed to flow so smoothly into the next, every video she unlocked fascinated her more and more... it wasn't just her weakness that lulled her into compliance. It was the Brain Breaker's clever, methodical use of the mind's own system of rewards against it.
Abbie shivered, remembering how she got better at the simple games that the site started her on, little realizing that every subsequent challenge she unlocked trained her thoughts in ever-more specific ways. And the guided meditation videos that she opened up with her in-game currency had slowly given way to potent, sexual trances that made her cum all over her rubbing fingers, then from there to longer and longer sessions of pleasure that ended with climax as a reward. And orgasm drifted ever more tantalizingly out of reach with every file until she found herself forgetting why she even wanted it when the Brain Breaker's trances felt so fucking good....
Thankfully, spilling cold water all over her trembling hands snapped Abbie out of the spell of nostalgia that threatened to enfold her. She refilled the pitcher and put it back in the fridge, then took a long gulp from her glass. Then she grabbed the pitcher out of the refrigerator again and refilled her cup. It must have been a longer night than she realized if she was that thirsty. Abbie filled up the pitcher a second time and went back to her bedroom, cursing her treacherous subconscious for lulling her into yet another damn night lost to the website.
Abbie let out a little gasp when she realized she'd left the door half-open and the Bluetooth vibrator sitting out on her bedside table, bright pink and unmistakably sexual to any roommates that might be passing by on their way to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She'd thankfully managed to conceal her slow descent into submission from Sammi up until now, a feat that became increasingly difficult every time she went back to BrainBreak and unlocked a new achievement with her acceptance of new post-hypnotic suggestions. Even now, more than four months after Abbie's decision to quit, her underwear drawer remained unopened and the thought of wearing clothes around the apartment made her itch. It was a relief when she was able to close the door and peel her shirt off again.
Abbie massaged her tits until the itching went away, wishing there was a way to get rid of the sensation that wasn't so overtly sexual. God, the urges were always so much more powerful after a relapse--two days ago, she'd gotten to the point where she barely noticed the uncomfortable tingling feeling, but now it was like she had a prickly rash all over her flushed, sensitive skin. Abbie had to set down her drink and use both hands to rub it away, and she was uncomfortably aware of just how hard her puffy pink nipples were by the time she'd finished.
She checked her phone, but the battery still wasn't charged enough to give it a chance to reboot--Abbie must have been a very busy woman last night to drain it so completely. She decided to busy herself in the interim by finding the docking station for her sex toy that she'd apparently managed to hide from herself for the last couple of weeks, looking under the bed and inside the closet and anywhere she could remember being close to an outlet. She didn't hold out much hope that she'd find it--Abbie's unconscious mind was all too good at keeping her from noticing things that the Brain Breaker didn't want her to know about--but at least it would keep her mind off her tits for a little while.
It was things like this that had alarmed Abbie enough to make her decide to quit the website cold turkey. It was scary enough that she could hide things in her room from herself, but Abbie honestly didn't remember even ordering the vibrator in the first place. It had just shown up one day at the apartment, a delivery from an Amazon affiliate that Abbie had to awkwardly avoid opening in front of Sammi lest her roommate find out just how deeply she'd gotten in over her head and stage some kind of intervention. The first time she turned it on, somehow the website automatically detected it and pinged it with a connection code that the buzzing device instantly accepted.
That was when it started getting really difficult to resist the brainwashing. When Abbie was rubbing herself with one hand while scrolling through the site with the other, there were at least a few moments where her sluggish, hypnotized body lost enough coordination to distract her into fumbling with her phone and snapping her out of the increasingly intense trances that she found herself drifting into while playing the site's games and watching its interactive videos. But once she had her toy in, her pleasure was entirely controlled by BrainBreak.com's code. It buzzed and thrummed and throbbed her mind deeper into the flow state that the games induced, guiding her on and on and on to newer heights of obedient bliss. Abbie didn't know how bad it could have gotten if she hadn't forced herself to stop.
For a given value of 'stop', she mused ruefully, giving up on the futile search for her vibrator's charger and returning to her phone. Sure enough, when she sat on the bed and booted it up, Abbie opened the web browser to discover it right in the middle of a session of 'Thought Popper', one of her favorite of the site's many training games. The score had reset--it always reset every time she returned to it, only allowing her to keep improving on her record by staying focused and sinking deeper into trance--but it looked like she'd racked up a hell of a lot of points last night. Enough to unlock a whole new game. That couldn't be good.
Abbie's fingers itched to start a new game, to tap away at the iridescent bubbles on the screen that represented her drifting, floating thoughts, but she resisted. That had to be good, right? If she could fight the urge to pop her mind away on a lazy Saturday morning, then surely she was still in control of her impulses. And if she was in control of her impulses, then that meant, logically, that it was safe to stay on the website a bit longer. It wouldn't hurt to go back to the home screen and see what the new game was. She wasn't going to give in again, she was sure of it. That was why it was okay to give in again, just for a little while.
Abbie absently wiped away a tiny rivulet of drool from the corner of her mouth and tapped the home button in the upper right-hand corner of the page. The main menu popped up, filled with the activities she'd already unlocked--many of the videos that were marked 'Needs Reinforcement' just a week ago when she'd clicked on the site in her bookmarks in a moment of weakness now had the flashing, sparkling 'Good Girl!' logo that made Abbie's cunt slicken all over again. Fuck. She'd really fallen off the wagon hard last night, hadn't she? No wonder her mattress smelled like a fucking brothel.
A wave of shame welled up in Abbie's chest, but she reminded herself that it wasn't a catastrophe. Everyone had little backslides now and then when they struggled with--with their bad habits, she insisted silently, her thumb sliding over the screen to locate the new content she'd unlocked over the course of the previous evening. It didn't erase the progress she was making, just because she spent a whole night watching videos designed to erode her willpower and erase all the progress she was making in resisting the Brain Breaker's power. She... she would just close the browser, set down the phone, take a shower and go for a little walk to get her head together.
In a moment or two. In just a few minutes. Not quite yet.
The new game was called 'Photo Finish', and Abbie winced with an almost physical discomfort at the sight of the words 'High Score: ZERO' next to it. Abbie tried to tell herself that this was how the site operated, that it hijacked her dopamine production to give her hit after hit after brain-melting hit of reward hormones every time she unlocked an achievement or opened a new video or earned a new high score. She struggled to remember that her owner--the owner, the website's owner, she angrily corrected herself--was using those dopamine bursts to train her into keep playing, and then capturing her drugged and sluggish mind with hypnosis videos while she was vulnerable. She insisted to her own subconscious that the artificial structure of scores and content gates and loot boxes (how long had she played 'Thought Popper' trying to get that cute pink top for her avatar?) was meaningless, and ultimately addictive. She tried so very hard to force herself to break the cycle and put the phone down.
But there was a zero next to that score. It wouldn't take long to beat that, would it?
Abbie barely even noticed her shaking fingers reaching out to scoop the vibrator off of the bedside table, then slowly moving down between her thighs to insert it into her once-again soaking cunt. She was too busy following the tutorial for the new game, smiling vacantly as she took photo after photo of random objects with the cell phone's camera and received the tiny little pink flash that she'd long ago associated with warm, thought-stopping pleasure. The buzz against her clit began to build. If she only took the right pictures, she knew, she'd finish at last. It had been ages since the site had given her actual climaxes as a reward, and Abby felt a sudden and intense craving to follow her instructions.
It wasn't hard to figure out what the game wanted. She had a mirror right there on her wardrobe, and every shot of Abbie's nude body earned her brighter, longer flashes of hot pink bliss. She grunted mindlessly with every 'Good Girl!' score multiplier, panted with lust as she earned bonus points by spreading her legs and letting her tongue hang out and rolling her eyes back in her head to give her that perfect vacant, mindless slut look. Her phone sent her a notification about a website asking for permission to access the photo directory, but she clicked it away with a stab of irritation. She didn't want to worry about permission for anything except cumming now.
When it finally hit, Abbie's orgasm was stronger than any other climax she could remember. Her eyes slipped shut, but her thumb automatically kept stabbing at the photo button in a determined effort to keep prolonging the pleasure and increasing her score. She had to be getting near the top of the site's leaderboards with this performance, she knew. She might even be getting personal attention from the Brain Breaker for her activities. Abbie came all the harder imagining her owner getting off to the sight of her naked, lewdly displayed body.
When her eyes finally managed to focus on the screen again, Abbie saw that she was already close to unlocking another game. Something called 'Recruiter'. She tried for a moment to speculate on its rules, but something in her subconscious steered her away from the idea. She didn't need to think about it just yet. She only needed to take another brain break and watch some more videos, then play 'Photo Finish' until she was ready for the next step. Everything else would take care of itself when she was ready. And the last, desperate, easily defeated stabs of her feeble resistance showed Abbie just how close to perfectly ready she truly was.
Her vacant smile widening into a rapt, plastic grin, Abbie collected her rewards and opened the next programming session.
THE END
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