Choose Your Own Brainwashing, Day 11 (Patreon)

The idea that you might have been chanting a mantra without knowing it seems outlandish to you, but the more you think about it, the more enticing it becomes. You can’t take your eyes off the spiral, of course (the spiral that while Lee has been talking has been undulating with different colors), but it should be simple to watch it and figure out if you’ve been speaking at the same time, right?

You take a deep breath and realize that your mouth feels very dry, and that your jaw feels weirdly slack. There’s a pause between that breath and your next that is longer than it should be if you were simply breathing.

You know that when you listened to the train car around you before you heard nothing, but before you were listening for breathing not chanting, and maybe you just didn’t notice any voices because that would have meant not giving your full attention to Lee’s voice?

You still don’t hear any voices in the train car, but you can feel a rhythmic vibration in your throat and jaw, and an accompanying buzz in your brain that you can’t believe you didn’t already notice.

“And now,” Lee says (and you notice absently that the spiral begins to pulsate in time with her words), “I wonder if you’ll be able to hear the things I’ve been hiding from you? Have you reached the place where that can be true?”

What do you think has been hidden from you?

1. A memory
2. A trigger
3. A mantra
4. An agreement