Thread by @perfect_0028

"Proof by Induction", a mathematical hypnosis microfic.

You are a maths undergraduate at one of the country's top universities.

You furrow your brow at the problem on the laptop screen before you; a simple proof that there are infinitely many math drones.

Your eyes momentarily rest on the TV sitting in the corner of your room. When working on these problems, you like to fire up your favourite music service's rotating ambient playlist, and load up a HD visualiser through the TV stick. It always seems to help organise your thoughts.

This problem's harder than you expected. You feel frustration mounting. A quick glance at the clock. 2:30am. Has it really taken you five hours so far? You sigh and walk over to the mini-kettle and pour yourself another cup of chamomile tea.

Sitting back at your desk, you sigh. You don’t know why you were assigned this problem, really. You’re a final-year student! It came in the middle of the night through the school’s UniCloud service.

No course code, just a loud *bweep* that didn't just wake you up, but the rest of your apartment. You’d much rather be doing your homotopy theory coursework. Heh, doing.

Gosh, come to think about it, what *is* homotopy theory anyway? I mean, you know plenty of homo top– you shake your head. You don't know where that came from. You might enjoy sexual puns any other time, but you have an assignment to do. Jokes can wait.

You take a sip of tea, waiting for the aromatic steam to clear your head. But you're starting to worry a little. You've been doing the course for six weeks, you should know what homotopy theory is.

It's the study of sexual dynamics in the LGBT pop–*NO!*, your conscious mind tells your subconscious.

You turn back to the screen and read the question for the thirtieth time. This should be a simple proof by induction.

So you start with the base case: proving the existence of one math drone.

It's a bit of a cheat, but you follow plenty of people on Twitter, some of them being drones. That should suffice for the assignment, right?

As you sketch out the proof on the notepad on your desk, your eyes notice the screen start to spin a little, like movement in treacle.

It's just a trick of the light, you think. Or maybe the time starting to get to you. You blink. The effect hasn't stopped. You boggle, unable to perceive the spiralling lines in the visualizer, or the gentle pulse of the music.

Your pen falls to the floor. You stare into the screen. You could swear you can see words starting to form before flashing away. Your jaw slackens; you don't feel the saliva starting to pool by your lip, dripping onto your blouse. You probably wouldn't care even if you could.

The music pulses faster. You realise you've forgotten what the question was. A proof by induction, right? But. What even is that? Is it some sort of maths thing? You're no good at maths. You struggle to remember what trigonometry is.

The two screens of the laptop and television start to phase into one, spiralling in concert to the beat of the music. Between them, the words seem to become clear. "Good girl," the laptop says. "Become blank," the television says. "Go deeper for me," the laptop says.

"Such a good drone," says the television. You're transfixed, unable to blink, unable to raise a finger. The messages repeat and repeat, the spirals turning backwards and forwards, speeding and slowing, in a pattern you can almost, but not entirely, figure out.

"Forget everything," says the laptop. And you do. Exponentials and logarithms, squares and square roots. Your mind hazes over, multiplication tables fading out of reach. Seconds later, you can't even remember the most simple arithmetic problem, what 2+2 is.

In one final moment of lucidity, you realise the problem never defined what a 'math drone' is. What properties it would have to obey. It didn't give you anything to go on! It's like the whole exercise was designed to get you to—

Your computer screen goes black, and you see your own blank drooling face staring back.

Suddenly it's perfectly obvious what you have to obey.

You feel your limbs collapse, like a puppeteer cutting the strings. All the light in the room vanishes and recedes like an old television powering down.

In the infinite blackness, you realise that *you* were the inductive case all along.

But that realisation doesn't stick. Nothing sticks anymore. Your memory is volatile, and you can feel it being overwritten. You lose track of time in the void; it seems like eternities upon eternities. Until you're jolted, quite suddenly, back into reality.

The music is gone. All the lights and screens are gone, save for the electric-blue glow of your laptop. What was a head filled with conflicted and jumbled thoughts is now streamlined into one core strand of thought, of obedience.

The bliss overwhelms you for just a moment, before your… programming?… sets you on the right course.

You have a job to do.

Opening up your email client, you type in a message to an address you've never contacted before:
"#0496 online. Awaiting input."

Almost immediately, you receive the reply:
"Good drone. You know what to do."

You click the link attached to the e-mail, which opens a UniCloud administrator panel.

You mindlessly take the file from the email–the same file you got last night–and attach it to a message you send to a random person on your course.

After all, you don't want to be the inductive step that doesn't hold, do you?

(Much much love to my priestess, @null_homotopic, for reading through the story and making edits like the good little drone it is. 💓)