✅ The Baby Makers

Going Down

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The corridor off the main room had a white tiled floor, and walls so white they practically shone. There wasn't natural light here, they must be too deep inside the building to get the benefit of the windows. But it was still well-lit, and clean. Somehow that gave Ana a little more confidence.

Some of the doors had little brass plaques on, but she was following Phil at too brisk a pace to stop and read them. She noticed that in the windows in a couple of the doors, there were pictures that looked like they might have been painted by small children. The kind of vague, blobby shapes that a pre-teen might bring home from school to hang on the refrigerator. She found herself wondering if they could be the work of children conceived here, though that was just a little strange. Or maybe they were for the benefit of hopeful parents, the ones who wanted to know that the baby makers really were a family-oriented group, despite their unusual methods. It was hard to guess.

Then she was in Phil's room, where there was no decoration beyond a simple desk, and a couch that looked like something from a dentist's office. Ana took a seat as soon as Phil gestured in that direction, and found the leather padding surprisingly comfortable.

Phil touched a switch somewhere, and the whole chair rocked back to leave Ana looking straight up at the ceiling. Just when she expected the motion to stop, it rocked back in the other direction, leaving her disoriented for a second. She'd spent a lifetime training her senses, and she quickly corrected her perception of orientation and motion. But she could imagine it would almost be dizzying to someone who hadn't practised thinking in a changing frame of reference. Now she was looking up at the ceiling, which was decorated with an irregular stippling of pale blue dots, while her body swayed gently back and forth by a couple of inches. There must be a spring in the chair's mechanism, she concluded.

"Now, I'd like you to focus on one of the dots on the ceiling," Phil spoke softly, but clearly enough that there was no chance of misunderstanding him. He was an expert, that much was immediately obvious, and he knew just what he was doing. "It doesn't matter which one, they're all the same. It's just something for your mind to dwell on while you listen to my words. Can you imagine how it would feel if one side of your mind could manage to keep track of that dot, following it as the world moves, and the other half could take in my words? You'd like that, I think. Then you wouldn't need to think too much about what I'm actually saying, and if it gets too complex for you at any point, you can just look at the dots and not think about it. You can just tune out my voice, and let the things I'm describing happen to you."

Ana would have nodded, but the rocking motion was close enough to nodding already. She could feel the signals coming from the balance centres of her brain, little chemical messengers telling her to relax and accept. It was why almost every culture in the world had accepted nodding to mean the same thing; because rocking back and forth generated small doses of hormones that made it just a little easier to agree, and to relax. Just like rocking a baby, she thought. She knew that many hypnotists asked people to nod when they were ready to proceed, making it easier to take in suggestions. But soliciting a nod and then rocking the subject with a chair, that was an interesting variation.

She knew there wouldn't be anything serious coming right away, so she accepted the change. Then he was asking her to further divide her attention. Splitting between listening to his words, and the tone of his voice, and the things he was telling her. Splitting up the sound of the words from their meaning, so his voice could be a relaxing white noise without having to focus on what the words actually meant. She accepted that as well, allowing him to guide her into relaxation, and allowing her attention to dart around the growing number of things he was asking her to focus on, so that sooner or later she knew she was going to lose track of them all, and start being surprised each time he drew her attention back to one facet of his patter, only to realise she'd somehow stopped noticing how much that part was changing her.

She knew what he was doing, that was for sure. She didn't know all the tricks, but she could feel how her mind was about to change, with every different induction pattern. It was the basic ability of the Order's members that they could recognise any attempt to control their minds, and that even included an almost supernatural recognition of hypnotic techniques, even the ones she'd never come across before.

Ana spotted one technique after another; and then another, and another, woven together like a complex braid. And one after another, she accepted them into her mind. She accepted that she was going to relax as Phil asked her to, and that she was going to start accepting what he told her. Then it was onto helping her to feel calm and refreshed. Dispensing with all guilt, he said, and all shame. She knew that was kind of why she was here, to see how it felt not to worry at all about doing things that she'd been taught were wrong. Phil said as much too. So he was going to ask her to imagine feeling a little younger, before she had fully learned to worry about those things. When she was less cynical, and more eager to explore.

Ana could imagine that easily. And as she felt the words flowing through her, she knew that if she accepted these words and imagined what he described, then she would be able to imagine feeling younger, and then she would start approaching his words with a more innocent, almost childlike mindset. It would be easier to accept rather than analysing. And as she accepted his words, she would naturally find it easy to imagine being a little younger, and fee her energy growing. She wasn't old enough to be feeling old, that much was for sure, but she wasn't quite in her prime either, so she knew it would feel good to imagine getting a little younger. And once she started on that path, he could ask her to imagine getting younger and younger, and it would always feel good, so she would always be inclined to take just one more step. She could even sense the words he was using that would tempt her to keep taking one more step. Just playing along for now, just seeing herself getting younger in her mind's eye.

It was a dream everyone wanted, wasn't it, to feel younger? So there was no need to feel guilty about seeing herself a year younger, or two. She'd go along with that. The words were so well structured. Even though her special senses were pointing out exactly how Phil was guiding her mind into believing it, she could see the logic in that path. She could feel the message behind the message as well, reading between the lines three or four levels deep to know where this elaborate monologue was leading. Sooner or later, he was going to ask her to imagine being a child again, she was sure. And then when she was a child, she wouldn't have learned why certain adult feelings were wrong; or why good girls didn't do certain things. He was setting her up to imagine herself as a child too young to have learned normal inhibitions, so he could tell her to do things she might normally shrink away from.

From a child's mindset, and with the power of a child's imagination, she was sure that it would be so much easier to let her grow up as someone who had never learned to be embarrassed; and hadn't developed the bad habits of modesty and inhibition. Then there would be nothing to stop her doing whatever the guide told her.

She couldn't wait to see what it was going to be.