"Telepathy is a goddamn myth," Sophie muttered vacantly to herself. The voices in her head disagreed. She squeezed her bleary brown eyes tight shut in an effort to push out the endless chant that infiltrated her brain like secondhand smoke slowly seeping through a closed room, and rubbed her temples so hard she could feel her fingers digging into the sore and tender flesh. It didn't help. She could hear the constant chorus inside her mind, whispering directly into her thoughts in over a dozen voices that had become as familiar to her as her own.

She stumbled off the bus, barely catching herself before she took a direct tumble to the pavement and barked her tan legs on the rough concrete. The whole time, the murmurs in the back of her head buzzed away like a migraine, disrupting her coordination and her concentration and making her usual walk home from the bus stop look more like a drunken stagger. At any moment, she expected someone to stop her and ask her if she was alright (and, unspoken but always implied, if she was really sure she belonged in this particular neighborhood) but she made it back to her apartment without interference.

Well. Without physical interference, at any rate.

Once she got inside, Sophie left the carton of chicken fried rice sitting on the kitchen counter and tottered over to the couch, slumping onto her side on the plush cushions and pressing her hands to her ears in a vain, futile attempt to block out a sound that she knew only existed inside her head. She used to think that was synonymous with 'in her imagination', but two solid weeks of dealing with the sussurration of murmurs that bombarded her in grim unison, morning, noon and night, had made the difference painfully clear. "Please, just leave me alone," she whimpered, but of course they didn't listen. They didn't listen to anything but each other anymore, and that definitely included Sophie.

She'd seen a few of them around, now that she knew what she was looking for. They all looked different, but there was something about their facial expressions that gave them away--a slightly distracted smile, as though they were floating through their daily routine in a blissful daydream and didn't quite have the mental energy to devote to social interaction. They spoke in an absent-minded mumble, they got easily confused by anything more than the most basic and uncomplicated questions, and they had a tendency to forget things without constant reminders. To anyone who didn't know any better, they just seemed a bit slow.

Sophie desperately wished she didn't know any better. She could hear the mantra echoing inside their heads, filling up their minds so completely and totally that there was no real room for anything else. They went through the motions of everyday existence, yes, but it was really just compliance and not action. Someone out there told them what to do, and they did it until they received their next set of instructions. Because at all times, for each and every one of the fourteen or fifteen warm bodies that made up the group mind, obedience filled them with rapt and beatific joy beyond anything else imaginable.

Sophie didn't know who was giving them those instructions. She felt a shadow sometimes, the hint of a vast and terrible presence that was conspicuous only by the traces it left behind in the cult she'd somehow accidentally tuned into. But for all she knew, that was simply some kind of weird coincidence, and the leader of the group gave his brainwashed followers instructions by text message or something. She didn't want to investigate further. She didn't want to get to the bottom of the whole secret cabal of mind-controlled slaves and free them from their helpless thrall. She wanted to make the goddamn whispers in the back of her head stop so she could go on pretending she didn't have any idea any of this fucking bullshit existed.

"Oh, god, not again," she muttered, her fingers tangling into her long, tightly braided hair as she felt the pressure inside her mind increase another perceptible fraction. She could pick out the new voice if she concentrated, a husky baritone that she was pretty sure belonged to Mister Mangianello up on the fifth floor. She'd bumped into him once or twice buying groceries; he was a gregarious man with a wide smile and a thick, bushy mustache and an infectious laugh. But just like the others, he'd joined in the droning chant of obedience that echoed inside Sophie's brain twenty-four seven.

She never heard any of them as individuals. Whatever it was that gradually tuned Sophie and the other inhabitants of the apartment complex in on one another's thoughts, it appeared to be set to receive-only until the moment they surrendered to the constant weight of the group mind's continuous telepathic whispers. She wasn't going to be like Jean Grey, beaming out a distress signal with her mutant brain to the cavalry up in Westchester; she was more like Rosemary Woodhouse, her independence constantly under siege by a sinister cult that wanted to subsume her identity into their own.

Not that she thought they were doing it on purpose. They couldn't do anything on purpose--that was the whole point, wasn't it? They existed in a network of perpetually repeating thought that continually reinforced one another's devotion to the group; none of them could break free, because they all had to listen to the voices of the others telling them that they couldn't break free. Obedience existed as an emergent property of their hive mind; if it wasn't for that shadow Sophie glimpsed sometimes out of the corner of her thoughts, she might suspect that they had no leader at all. A flock of birds turned as one, didn't they?

But the shadow. Sophie was classically educated, despite the occasional condescending explanation she got from neighbors who were surprised she went to college--and when she described to herself the outline of that shape she felt as 'terrible', she didn't mean it in the sense of awful, or evil. She meant that it was terrible in the way thunder was terrible, in the way a towering wave was terrible in the instant before it crashed into the shore; it was simply so powerful, so titanic and overwhelming that all she could feel in its presence was the most dreadful awe. She might just as easily have described it as 'awesome' if she didn't feel a bone-deep conviction that it was going to destroy her.

Not physically, of course. The... victims, drones, whatever she was supposed to call them... they all looked fine. They ate sensible meals and got a healthy amount of exercise and drifted through life in a kind of vague, placid joy that Sophie might have envied if she hadn't experienced first-hand just how little was going on inside their docile and obedient brains. They were as well cared for as any pet, but mentally they were just... gone. And when--if--when Sophie succumbed to their collective will, she would be gone too. Everything that made her a person, a unique and separate individual with her own interests and personality and identity, it would all be subsumed into that same constant chant of compliance that she heard inside the others. She would cease to be Sophie, and become another blank and brainwashed slave to the collective mind.

'Would be'. As if there was any hope of escape. Sophie wasn't stupid, she understood that whatever was slowly consuming her will was centered on the apartment complex she'd moved into a few months ago. And if it was just a matter of breaking her lease and crashing with her aunt for a few months until she could find a different place to live, she would have said to hell with the security deposit and left with nothing but an overnight bag to her name. But she'd tried that. Wherever she went, the whispers followed. Distance was no obstacle to their communal chant, and even cashing in all her vacation and going to the West Coast for a week hadn't helped drive them out of her head.

Resignedly, Sophie got up and staggered over to the kitchen, grabbing her food from the counter and a fork from the dishwasher and mechanically shoveling chicken fried rice into her mouth. She barely even tasted it now; the voices in her head were so loud that they drowned out most of her other senses, leaving her trapped in a fog of half-experienced perception that left her blank and numb. Only a few things got through the haze, and Sophie didn't want to risk them for fear of making herself ever more vulnerable to the mantra that threatened to wipe her mind entirely.

When the food was gone, Sophie threw the carton in the trash and went back over to the couch, once again curling up into a ball and trying to shut out the endless chant in her head. She let out a low, bitter chuckle--hearing voices was practically a cliche of mental illness, but Sophie would gladly have gone to any shrink and gotten meds if she thought there was the slightest chance that they could make a difference. She devoutly wished she'd fallen down some rabbit hole of paranoia. The truth was so much worse.

There were others like her. People in the other apartments, people who lived next door, people who lived up and down the block and had the same haunted, exhausted expressions on their faces whenever Sophie caught sight of them. Fourteen or fifteen was going to become twenty, thirty, fifty or a hundred soon, and the more people who fell victim to the telepathic intrusion, the harder it would be for her to resist. Soon she'd be just like the others, a mindless pleasure zombie with a vacant smile and empty eyes, and....

The moment she thought it, Sophie's hand crept down between her thighs. It was the only thing she could still feel now, the only sensation that penetrated the numbing fog of extra-sensory perception that made her world a haze of constant exertion. When she masturbated, Sophie felt pleasure like it was the only thing that was still real to her... but she also felt the sensuous warmth of the chant inside her head, coaxing her deeper into blank and drowsy bliss. They all felt that good, all the time. What Sophie needed three fingers and sometimes a toy to achieve, the group mind experienced naturally.

She didn't know whether pulling up her skirt and jamming her hand into her panties made her weaker to the telepathic influence, or whether the constant bombardment of obedience made it harder and harder to resist fingering herself. It didn't matter. Either way, more and more of Sophie's nightly routine centered on stroking her slick labia until she felt herself dissolve into exhausted bliss. Someday soon, she knew, it would become part of her daily routine as well; her job would recede into dim and distant irrelevance compared to the throb between her legs, and she'd cum herself blank and stupid while the call inside her mind beckoned her into communion with its relentless will. She would know the shadow at last. And it would know her.

That wasn't supposed to sound sexy, but Sophie had had a long day. And a long week. And a long week before that, the effort of constant resistance sapping her strength and her will until all she wanted to do was fuck her brains out and stop struggling any longer. She knew the bodies of the group mind were doing the same thing right now, coupling and thrupling and fucking themselves and one another silly in a constant orgy that echoed the pleasure inside their heads, and she envied and hated them in equal measures for the simplicity of their joy. More than anything, she simply wanted an end to the war inside her brain... and to her mingled delight and despair, Sophie suspected it wasn't long in coming.

THE END