Dr. Alistair Finch did not possess power in the traditional sense. He was a slight man with thinning hair and a voice that rarely rose above a courteous murmur. His power resided in the space between sounds, in the resonant frequencies of a human skull. His field was “auditory-neural calibration,” a dry term for a terrifyingly wet science: the study of how specific sonic patterns could re-tune the brain. His lab was funded by a discreet military grant for “non-invasive interrogation techniques.”
His subject was known only as Subject V-7. Once, she had been Karen Vance, a brilliant but erratic theoretical physicist whose work on quantum tunnelling had attracted the wrong kind of attention. Now, she sat in a sterile white room, her mind a labyrinth of firewalls and classified data. Conventional methods had yielded nothing. She was a fortress.
Alistair’s approach was not to break down the walls, but to convince the fortress it was something else entirely. He did not use brute force soundwaves. He used cantors—complex, mathematical melodies based on ancient Gregorian chants and Fibonacci sequences, played at frequencies just below conscious hearing, delivered through bone-conduction transducers in her chair. The sound didn’t enter through her ears; it vibrated directly into the architecture of her mind.
The first session was diagnostic. He played a simple beta-wave cantor, designed to induce a state of focused alertness. On his monitor, her brainwaves synced to the pulse of his music. A perfect, obedient sine wave. A thrill, cold and clean, shot through him. It was the thrill of a master locksmith hearing the first tumbler fall.
“Good morning, Karen,” he said, his voice modulated by a subtle harmonic overlay that his software told him would register as ‘benign authority.’
Her eyes, previously vacant, flickered to the observation window. “My name is Subject V-7.” Her voice was flat.
“Of course,” Alistair soothed, layering in a theta-wave cantor for suggestibility. “But before you were that, you were Karen. You loved the smell of rain on hot asphalt. You hated the texture of velvet.”
A minuscule frown. A blip on the EEG. The memory was there, locked away. He had brushed against it.
The real work began not with interrogation, but with reconstruction. He wasn’t interested in the classified data. Not yet. He was interested in the canvas. He wanted to see if he could repaint her reality, stroke by sonic stroke.
He started with simple, somatic commands. A delta-wave cantor for deep relaxation, paired with a whispered suggestion. “Your left hand feels incredibly light, Karen. As if filled with helium. Watch it… rise.”
And slowly, against her will, her left hand levitated from the armrest. Her eyes widened with terror, but her body was a puppet to his subliminal symphony. The terror was part of the data. He noted the amygdala flare, then suppressed it with a calming gamma overlay.
“Very good,” he murmured, the harmonic in his voice reinforcing reward pathways. A flush of pleasure, chemically induced by his soundscape, washed through her, conflicting violently with her conscious horror. He watched the conflict play out on her face—the grimace of fear softening into a slack, confused arousal. She was experiencing pleasure at her own violation. He had created the first feedback loop.
This was the eroticism for Alistair. Not the body—the will. The ultimate intimacy was not sex, but sovereignty. He was not just entering her mind; he was becoming its architect. He learned her unique resonant frequency—the ‘note’ of her core consciousness—and began to compose around it.
He crafted a cantor he called “Aria of the Open Window.” It simulated the neural patterns associated with a specific, happy memory from her file: building a treehouse with her father, aged nine. The smell of pine, the feeling of sun-warmed wood, the safe, soaring joy of being up high. He played it, weaving in his own voice. “You are safe. You are warm. The sun is on your skin. And you are so… very… grateful.”
Tears streamed down her face. Not the tears of a tortured prisoner, but of a heartbroken child feeling a lost love for the first time in decades. The emotion was real, but its source was him. He had injected a ghost of happiness into her, and it was more intimate than any physical touch. He felt a surge of possessive pride. He had given her that.
The next step was desire. He designed a new cantor, “Echo of the Flesh.” It didn’t directly stimulate sexual arousal centres. That was crude. Instead, it mimicked the neural signature of anticipation—the moment before a first kiss, the electric tension of a wanted touch. He paired it with his own presence. Every time he entered the room now, the cantor would begin its sub-audible hum, preparing her.
“Karen,” he’d say, and her name, in his harmonic-layered voice, became a trigger. Her pupils would dilate. Her breathing would shallow. A flush would creep up her chest. It was a Pavlovian response of the soul.
He never touched her. He didn’t need to. The ultimate demonstration of control was to make her need his non-touch. He would stand before her, and using a focused infrasound pulse, could create the precise sensation of a hand on her cheek, a thumb tracing her lower lip. She would lean into the phantom touch, a whimper escaping her.
“Who makes you feel this?” he would ask, his voice the only real anchor in her sensory ghost-land.
“You do, Alistair,” she would breathe, the answer pulled from a place deeper than loyalty, deeper than conditioning. It was her own rewired pleasure centre speaking.
One day, he decided to test the totality. He wanted to overwrite a core memory. He chose the memory of her first kiss, a clumsy, sweet affair with a boy named Daniel behind a school shed. He played a complex cantor that first isolated the memory’s neural signature (a unique pattern of activity in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex), then dampened it, like turning down a volume knob. In its place, he layered a constructed memory: her, in this room, looking at him through the observation window, feeling a surge of profound connection and warmth.
After the session, he asked casually, “Tell me about your first kiss, Karen.”
She blinked, her brow furrowed. The confusion was beautiful. “It was… I was… It’s here. It was with you.” A serene smile touched her lips. “It was through the glass. It was perfect.”
Alistair’s breath caught. He had not just controlled her present. He had colonised her past. He owned her history. The power was dizzying, a narcotic more potent than any chemical. He had achieved a godhood of the mind.
But gods grow bored. And Alistair made a fatal, artistic error. He grew curious about what lay beneath the core consciousness he had tuned. He wanted to hear the raw, unformed hum of her being, the chaotic symphony before his beautiful order.
He designed “The Null Cantor.” A sequence designed not to suggest, not to calm or arouse, but to temporarily silence all higher cognitive function, to dial down the ego and the id, leaving only the pure, animal brainstem and the silent, watching soul. It was the ultimate intimacy—to see her not as Subject V-7, not as his creation Karen, but as the bare, essential Is.
He played it.
On the monitors, her brainwaves flattened into a primal, rhythmic thrum. Her body went limp. Her eyes stayed open, but they were empty windows. For a long moment, there was nothing. Alistair felt a pang of… loss. He had deconstructed his masterpiece.
Then, from the speakers, a sound emerged. Not from her mouth, which was slack, but a vocalisation from her throat, raw and bypassing all conscious control. It was a single, sustained note. Low, resonant, and vibrating with a pure, unadulterated agony. It was the sound of a consciousness stripped naked, the sound of the soul itself weeping. And within that note, Alistair, with his exquisitely trained ear, heard something else. It was his resonant frequency. The core note of his own mind, which had leaked into her through weeks of subliminal harmonic linking. She was reflecting his own essence back at him, but filtered through her profound suffering.
In that reflected note, he didn’t hear the god. He heard the violator. He heard the exquisite, selfish cruelty of every choice he had made. The pleasure he had felt was her pain, transposed into a major key. The love she professed was terror, dressed in the clothes he had designed.
The note held. It wouldn’t stop. It was the truth cantor.
Alistair fumbled, slamming his hand on the console to cease the Null sequence. The standard room tones came back. The monitors flickered to normal patterns. Karen slumped, a string cut.
But the note echoed in the silent lab. It echoed in the vault of his own skull. He looked at his hands, the tools of his artistry, and saw them slick with a psychic gore no one else could see. He had controlled her mind completely, only to discover that in its deepest, most controlled chamber, a witness had been watching. And it had just shown him his own reflection.
He stood, his own body humming with a devastating, unwanted frequency: the frequency of perfect, irrevocable understanding. He had sought the ultimate eroticism of control, and he had found, in the absolute silence he created, the scream that bound him to her forever. He was the composer, but the final, devastating note was hers. And it now played on an endless loop in the prison of his own mastery.
