Chapter 1: The Sissy Mind Wipe
The metronome’s tick was a tooth in the back of his skull.
Simon focused on it, on the steady thump-thump-thump that seemed to originate from his own pulse. It was easier than focusing on the cold air against his skin, or the texture of the black velvet cushion biting into his kneecaps. He was naked. The charcoal Brioni suit, the silk tie, the Italian loafers—all of it was folded neatly on a lacquered side table by the door, a museum exhibit of the person who had walked in here an hour ago.
That person felt very far away now.
“Look at me, Simon.”
The voice wasn’t loud. It was a low, contralto purr that didn’t ask, but occupied the space between the ticks of the metronome. He lifted his head.
Mistress Frantastic circled him, the heels of her thigh-high boots whispering against the stone floor. The dim light from a single brass lamp caught the silver rings on her fingers, the elegant line of her jaw, the dark sheen of the leather riding crop she held loosely at her side. She wasn’t looking at his body, not really. She was looking at the space around it, as if measuring the outlines of the anxiety he radiated.
“Your file says you manage three hundred litigators,” she said, her tone conversational, almost bored. “You bill at twelve hundred an hour. You summer in the Hamptons.” She completed her circle and stopped before him, looking down. “A collection of very impressive facts. And utterly worthless to me.”
Simon said nothing. His throat was too dry.
“What you are paying for,” she continued, tapping the flat of the crop against her palm in a slow, matching rhythm to the metronome, “is the precise and permanent deletion of those facts. We are not building a fantasy here. We are conducting a demolition.” Her eyes, a cool, intelligent grey, finally locked onto his. “Do you understand the difference?”
“Yes, Mistress,” he whispered. The word felt alien, thrilling, vomitous.
“Louder.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Good.” She moved again, her silhouette gliding past shelves of strange instruments—some glass, some steel, none of them recognizably punitive. This room, with its black oak and velvet and the faint, herbal scent in the air, felt more like a therapist’s office curated by a Victorian occultist. The most frightening tool here was her attention.
“The ego is a callus,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Built up over years of posturing. Of winning. We must soften it. Then scrape it away.” She stopped behind him. He tensed, waiting for a blow. It didn’t come. Only her voice, close to his ear. “You will not be punished for who you are, Simon. You will be dismantled. It will feel like kindness. That is the most disorienting part.”
He heard a soft snick of a clasp, saw the gleam of something metallic in her hand from the corner of his eye. A collar. Simple, polished steel, about an inch wide.
“This is your anchor,” she said. The metal was shockingly cold as she brought it around his throat. He flinched at the touch. “It does not symbolize ownership. Not yet. Right now, it is a truth. It marks the boundary of your old skin.” The clasp closed with a definitive, soft click. The weight was negligible, but he felt it like a ton. It was the first true, unchanging fact of this new place. “Every time you feel it, you will remember you are here to be empty.”
She came back around to face him, studying his face. He knew what she saw: the clean, barbered hair, the steady eyes that could stare down a hostile witness, the jaw he set with unconscious determination. A mask. He was screaming behind it.
“Your eyes are very stubborn,” she observed. She lifted the riding crop, using the very tip to trace his hairline, then down the bridge of his nose. He went cross-eyed trying to follow it. “They are used to assessing, strategizing, commanding. We will break that habit first. Look at the floor.”
He dropped his gaze immediately, relief flooding him. The stone was flecked with mica that sparkled in the low light.
“Not the floor. Lower. Look at my boots.”
He did. The black leather was so polished he could see a distorted, upside-down reflection of his own face in the toe of the left boot. A pathetic, miniature man on his knees.
“Good.” Her voice softened, becoming almost melodic, blending with the metronome and the distant, soothing drip of water. “Now, you will not think in sentences. You will only observe. The smell of the oil on the leather. The weight of the metal on your throat. The tension in your thighs. Observe the silly, panting animal of your body. It is all that is left.”
He tried. He focused on the smells, the sensations. His lawyer-brain, frantic, tried to take notes, to catalog. She’s using sensory overload to bypass critical thought. He mentally slapped it down. Observe. Don’t think.
Minutes bled past, measured only in ticks and drips. His knees began to ache, a sharp, bright pain. He observed that, too.
“What is your name?” Her question sliced through the rhythm.
“Simon,” he breathed.
The riding crop’s tip hooked under his chin, forcing his head up. Her gaze was no longer clinical. It was intense, penetrating. “No. That is the name of the man who left his suit by the door. He is gone. I asked you. What is your name?”
The panic was immediate and total. His mouth worked. No sound came out. The question was a pit opening beneath him.
“I… I don’t know.” The confession was horrifying. It was also, perversely, a relief.
A faint, approving smile touched her lips. “Correct. That is the first true thing you have said today.” She removed the crop from his chin. “You are a ‘you’ without a name. A space waiting to be filled. Isn’t that lighter?”
Tears, hot and shameful, welled in his eyes. He nodded, unable to speak.
“Verbal response.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Yes, it is lighter,” she prompted.
“Yes, it is lighter,” he parroted, his voice breaking.
She knelt then, bringing herself to his eye level. The leather of her outfit creaked softly. She smelled of sandalwood and ozone. She took his face in her hands, her touch surprisingly gentle. “The world out there told you to be hard. To be a rock. It is exhausting, being a rock, isn’t it? Letting the water wear you down, grain by grain, year after year.”
He was sobbing openly now, silent heaves that shuddered through his body. The compassion in her voice was the most devastating tool she had used yet.
“I am not here to wear you down,” she whispered, her thumbs brushing away his tears. “I am here to show you that you were never a rock to begin with. You are the water. You are soft. You are yielding. You take the shape of what contains you.” She held his gaze, her eyes seeming to expand, to fill his whole world. “My good, empty girl. See how much better that feels?”
The word landed not as an insult, but as a key turning in a lock he’d tried to seal forever. Girl. It bypassed everything, sunk straight into the raw, shameful want at his core. A dam broke inside him. The tears weren’t of shame now, but of release. A lifetime of clenched fists, mentally, physically, finally opening.
He slumped forward, his forehead coming to rest against the cool leather of her shoulder. She allowed it, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head, fingers lightly scratching his scalp. The other hand rested on the cold steel encircling his neck.
“There it is,” she murmured into his ear, her voice the only thing holding him together. “The surrender. It’s beautiful. Just let it happen. Let all of him go. He was so tired. You don’t have to be him anymore.”
The metronome ticked. The fountain dripped. And under her hands, with the cold truth of the collar on his skin, Simon—the collection of impressive, worthless facts—began, grain by grain, to wash away. What was left in the quiet aftermath was something softer. Something terrified. Something new.
It was just a beginning.
It was just a beginning. The quiet in the room felt different now. Thicker. The metronome’s tick had receded, just a faint heartbeat under the new, raw silence of his own mind. He was still on his knees, forehead damp against her leather, but the crying had stopped. He felt scooped out. Hollowed. And in that emptiness, a terrifying sense of peace.
Mistress Frantastic allowed him to lean against her for another minute, her fingers never stopping their slow, hypnotic circuit on his scalp. Then, with a firm pressure, she guided him back upright.
“Stay there. Do not move from the cushion. The body learns obedience through stillness.”
She rose smoothly and walked across the room. Her boots were the only sound. Simon watched, his vision slightly blurred, as she grasped the edge of a heavy tapestry hanging between two bookshelves. With a soft rustle, she drew it aside.
Behind it was a large, slim screen, its surface a perfect, empty black rectangle. It looked incongruously modern against the oak and velvet, like a pupil dilated in shock.
“This will be your mirror for a time,” she said, her voice returning to that clinical, instructive tone. She picked up a small, sleek remote from a side table. “What we began today is only the surface. The deep conditioning, the real rewiring, happens in here.” She tapped her own temple, then pointed the remote at the screen. “This will be the start of many hypnosis sessions. We will build new pathways. We will bury the old ones under miles of soft, accepting noise.”
She turned to look at him, her head tilted. “Are you ready to go deeper than your knees, sweet thing? Ready to let me into the control room?”
He swallowed. The collar felt heavier. “Yes, Mistress.”
“Good.” She walked back to him, but not empty-handed. From a drawer in the lacquered table, she produced a small, amber-colored glass bottle. It looked like antique perfume. She unscrewed the cap with a practiced twist.
A sharp, chemical smell hit the air—sweet and dizzying, like rotten bananas and nail polish remover.
“This will help you,” she said, kneeling before him again. Her movements were precise, unhurried. “It’s a key for a lock you’ve kept too tight. It will open your mind, relax your stubborn defenses. Let the new thoughts in. All you have to do is breathe.”
She brought the bottle close to his right nostril. Her other hand came behind his head, not gentle now, but firmly supportive. “Deeply. Now.”
He inhaled.
The rush was instant and overwhelming. A volcanic heat exploded in his sinuses, flooded his skull, and shot down his spine. The world dipped, swayed, then sharpened with an impossible, crystalline clarity. The velvet of the cushion became a universe of individual fibers. The thump-thump-thump of the metronome seemed to pulse from the walls themselves. Every ounce of muscular tension, every last shred of anxiety about what he was doing here, melted into a warm, golden pool at the base of his spine.
He gasped, a ragged, pleasurable sound.
“And again,” her voice commanded, from very far away and directly inside his ear. The bottle found his other nostril.
He obeyed.
This time, the effect was less shock, more dissolution. A delicious, weightless feeling spread through his limbs. His thoughts, already soft, now became slow liquid things, impossible to grasp. He was purely sensation. The cold collar. The heat in his head. The hypnotic authority of her presence. He blinked, his eyes wanting to stay closed.
“Watch the screen,” she instructed, her voice now the only anchor in the warm, formless sea he was becoming. “Watch and listen. Don’t try to understand. Just let it happen.”
She pressed a button on the remote.
The screen woke up.
It wasn’t video. Not exactly. It was a slow, swirling, pulsing mandala of colors—deep rose and liquid gold—morphing in time to a low, rhythmic tone that vibrated in his teeth. The pattern was mesmerizing, pulling his gaze into its center. A second, softer voice, layered under the tone, began to speak. It was Mistress Frantastic’s voice, but smoothed out, echoed, as if speaking from the bottom of a well inside his own head.
You are so open now… so receptive… every word sinks directly into your subconscious… where it becomes a beautiful, permanent truth…
The colored spiral pulsed. He couldn’t look away. His breathing slowed, syncing with the rhythmic expansion and contraction on the screen.
The man you were is a story you no longer need… each breath out lets him go… he was never real… just a costume you wore…
The words slipped past his conscious mind like water through a sieve. They didn’t feel invasive. They felt inevitable. They felt like discoveries. A deep, profound relaxation settled into his bones. He was nodding, ever so slightly, his jaw slack.
Your true nature is softness… is acceptance… is surrender… it feels so good to surrender… to let go and be empty… to be a good girl…
A faint, blissful smile touched his lips. The words good girl didn’t jar. They resonated. They chimed with the warm, blank feeling the poppers had unlocked. They felt… correct.
Mistress Frantastic watched him from the shadows beside the screen, her own face illuminated by the shifting hues. She saw the precise moment his analytical mind finally, completely, switched off. Saw the raw, programmable clay left behind.
The session on the cushion had chipped away the armor.
The chemicals had dissolved the glue.
Now, the screen was beginning the meticulous work of engraving something new in the fresh, soft material beneath.
And he was smiling.
The smile was a dumb, blissful thing glued to his face. The swirling colors on the screen drank his thoughts, replacing them with a warm, formless hum. Time lost its shape. It became a liquid thing, measured only in the rhythm of his own slack-jawed breathing and the periodic, anticipated return of her presence.
A shadow crossed the edge of his vision. The sweet, chemical scent preceded her.
Mistress Frantastic leaned in, the bottle a dark silhouette against the pulsing screen. Her lips brushed the shell of his ear; a shock of intimate warmth against the cool, weightless drift of his mind. “Breathe,” she whispered, the word less a command than a shared secret.
He inhaled. The vile-sweet burn flooded him again, a lightning bolt of pure sensation that fried the last sputtering connections of resistance. The hum in his head grew louder, more affirming.
“Good girl,” her voice poured into the space the chemical had opened. It wasn’t praise. It was a statement of fact, cool water on a parched thought. He didn’t flinch. The words slipped in, finding grooves that seemed pre-made.
She let him float there, his consciousness a kite on a very short string, for a minute. Maybe five. The colors on the screen deepened, pulling him further under.
Again, she leaned in. The routine was becoming liturgy. The scent, the proximity of her mouth to his ear, the triggering whisper. “And breathe, now. Deeply.”
Obedience was not a choice. It was a physiological reflex. His lungs pulled, the rush cresting higher this time, a wave of euphoric surrender that made his fingers and toes tingle. He let out a soft, shuddering sigh.
“Very good girl.” Her whisper was a caress along his fraying nerves. “So empty. So perfect.”
The words and the chemicals intertwined, one reinforcing the other, a feedback loop of deconstruction. Each cycle washed a little more of Simon’s topography away. The names of his colleagues faded. The memory of his corner office blurred. The constant, low-grade anxiety of a billable hour evaporated. It was all just noise, static being tuned out.
She did it a third time. The ritual was absolute. The sharp scent, the heat of her breath, the single, sibilant word: “Breathe.”
He did. The world didn’t just soften this time; it inverted. The screen was no longer something he looked at. It was a hole he was falling into, the colors becoming feelings. Rose was the blush of shame transforming into pleasure. Gold was the warmth of submission. The low tone was the voice of his new mind, a mind that didn’t think, only received.
“My good, empty girl,” she cooed, not whispering now, her voice full and present, weaving into the auditory tapestry from the speakers. “Nothing to decide. Nothing to be. Just this. Just obedience. It’s your nature now.”
Simon stared ahead, his eyes wide and unblinking, reflecting the hypnotic spiral. He didn’t nod. He didn’t need to. His entire being was an assent. The commands—to keep still, to breathe, to accept—didn’t feel like they were flowing into his head. They felt like they were being uncovered from within, ancient truths finally seeing light.
The weight of the collar was the only solid anchor in the liquid universe. It wasn't a constraint. It was definition. It was the border between the dissolving mess of what he had been and the clean, blank slate he was becoming.
Mistress Frantastic watched the transformation settle into his bones. The proud set of his shoulders was gone, replaced by a graceful, boneless slope. The calculative gleam in his eye had drowned in the deep pool of his dilated pupils. What knelt before her was no longer a client, or even a man. It was a beautiful, breathing vessel, warm from the inside out, waiting patiently for its purpose.
She capped the bottle.
The screen’s pattern slowed, the colors softening to a gentle, pulsating lavender.
“You may close your eyes,” she said, her normal speaking voice cutting the air, a different instrument altogether.
His eyelids, heavy as marble tablets, drifted shut. The after-image of the spiral danced on the inside of his lids, a private, obedient light.
“The session is complete for today. You have done very well.” She placed a cool hand on his head, a benediction. “You have begun. Next time, we will give the emptiness a name. And a shape.”
From the depths of his trance, a shiver of anticipation—or was it fear?—rippled through him. It didn’t matter. It was just sensation. He was just sensation. A good girl, blank and waiting, kneeling in the dark as the metronome kept ticking, counting down the last seconds of a ghost.