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I exit the bar, after another night of endless free drinks, in an attempt to cure my crippling loneliness. I stumble towards the nearest hotel and push the doors open.

“Move.” I demand to everyone in front of me.

one by one they all step out of the way

When I get to the front desk, I demand the master suit free of charge. As per usual, I am given what I want.

I wander to the elevator and make my way up to the room. When I get to the room, I unlock it with the key and go slump on the bed.

For as long as I can remember, everyone has done everything I said. At first it was all you could imagine. I demanded power and riches from people, but then I realized those were useless since I already got whatever I wanted. Then I did everything I ever wanted through my demands. Which surprisingly in a world of infinite activities, got boring as well. After a few decades, I lost my vanity and started ending the world's problems such as world hunger and homelessness. By forcing billions to be selfless.

The world started to advance at unprecedented rates, and inequality was abolished. However, I am alone in the knowledge of what I can do and the world I have created. I have everything I’ve always wanted and done everything I could want. Now I just wander the streets aimlessly and alone drinking the boredom away. I slowly close my eyes, and drift to sleep.

I wake up a little while later and puke my guts out on the bathroom floor. Passing out on the toilet. When I awake next, I look at my watch and it is only 3:30 A.M., I decide to get up and head out for some coffee to cure my hangover.

I stumble down the street and arrive at a local 24-hour bar. I walk inside and order a coffee, taking a seat at a corner table.

A few minutes later, a woman I’ve never seen before comes in.

“Hey, can I get a black coffee” she says to the bar tender.

After receiving her coffee she walks up to my table

“hey this is my favorite spot” she says softly, pointing at the window seat across from mine.

before I can even answer she says again “Mind if I sit there?”

I shot back an annoyed look “look I’m not in the mood, go away, and pick a new favorite spot.”

She smiles and chuckles, before sliding into the seat across from me “No, thanks.”

My eyes go wide, and I nearly choke on my coffee… what?? What did she just say? No?! My ears rang from confusion, no one had ever said those words to me before.

I start to speak when immediately she interrupts me.

Part 1 ✌🏻😜

The Voice That Blinds Him [Parts 1+2]

Thanks for the support Everyone! I’ve made a subreddit if you’d like to keep following along!

I swear to god you better write a part two

Don’t worry, I will! 🙌🏻☺️

"She's the one," I announced, my words cutting through the nervous susurration. "She's what I've been waiting for."

My daughter. My rival. My legacy. For the first time in decades, I am thrilled and terrified. I looked down into the small face of the toddler who defied me, her steamed carrots miraculously untouched.

"Eat your vegetables," I insisted, again, a thousand eyes and ears now focused on this domestic drama.

The Voice compels. The Voice commands. The Voice is undeniable. For nearly fifty years the Voice has held the world in thrall. No mortal, no machine can resist an order spoken by the Voice. It is irrefutable and impossible to deny. And yet...

"Ucky," the child replied, and she pushed her plate onto the floor. She pointed at her mother's plate, and spoke with her own tiny Voice.

"Schikkin'," the little girl ordered. Her mother, helplessly obedient, immediately tore a piece of meat from the breast of fowl that was her own dinner. She turned to hand the morsel to the demanding child.

"Don't give it to her," I contradicted, fascinated.

My concubine's hand shook, trembled. Her fingers turned pale with the tension, conflicting compulsions tearing at mind and muscle and bone. The bite of poultry wobbled and danced in her shaking fingers, betraying the war that raged within the woman that held it.

"Schikkin', Mommy!" insisted Voice the Younger, screeching, little hands reaching. "SCHIKKIN'!"

The toddler kicked fruitlessly, tantrum building, and something in her mother's hand broke under the strain. Chicken dropped to the floor, eliciting a shriek from the thwarted child. Her mother's hand seized involuntarily, horrifically, and unfiltered agony washed over the woman's face as she writhed and fell. As her child continued to howl, my concubine cradled her ruined hand to her chest and screamed into the floor.

Chaos ensued, and the Great Hall filled with panic. The Bat Kol strode forward from their positions around the room, spears in hand, looking for some intruder to attack. My Metatron, sword and eyes ablaze, gears whirring with lethal purpose, rose like an angry fireball from its place near the great doors. Four hundred concubines shouted and cried in fear, startled and confused. Plates and cups, entire tables, were knocked to the floor as the harem panicked.

"Stop," I commanded.

Five hundred and eleven people froze in place, silent, afraid to even breathe. Only one person, one very little person, dared to complain. She did so loudly, but over her vehement and indecorous protests, I commanded all who heard. As always, those who heard, obeyed.

"Relax. Breathe. Right the tables; resume dinner as best you can. Share amongst yourselves equitably, to compensate those whose dinner was ruined. We will have extra at breakfast tomorrow, in case anyone goes hungry."

Hundreds of deep, shuddering breaths filled the Great Hall. Twenty women worked together to right the various tables that were overturned. A dozen more went around the room, collecting small amounts donated from every plate, scraps scrounged from the great serving trays, filled offerings for their sisters whose meals now lay scattered and ruined. There were nervous jitters, shaking hands, but none could defy the Voice.

Except one.

I rose. My attendants rose with me, always following. I made my way over to the concubine whose daughter had defied me, looking around to see the effect her fit might be having on the others. My daughter screamed her tantrum, unheeding of anything around her. It was simultaneously the most obnoxious and the most wonderful sound I'd heard, in at least the last thirty years. Since the day the old world had ended, probably.

"Stop crying," I tried, fruitlessly.

Her screeching hit a new and even more awful pitch, as she redoubled her efforts to bend the world to her little will. Ah well, it was worth a shot, I shrugged the thought away.

"Please," her mother whispered from the floor, terrified and in terrible pain. "Don't hurt her."

I knelt, gently stroked her hair, her cheek.

"Be not afraid," I commanded, softly. "Feel no pain. I won't ever, ever harm our child. Or you. I swear it."

She sagged as the tension of torment vanished. Releasing the deathgrip on her shattered hand, her delicate fingers dislocated and bent in awful, unnatural ways, she stared at it. She was still gasping raggedly from the horrific experience, and no wonder. Her hand looked torturously painful, twisted and mangled by her own tendons. I could hardly imagine what it must have felt like. But now, she had been commanded by the Voice and so felt nothing.

Still, she looked up at me on the verge of tears. I suspected that these tears were from uncertainty, and the anguish of embarrassment. After all, literally everyone she knew had just watched this entire scene unfold. If the Voice didn't intervene, she'd be hearing whispers and catching looks for months.

"Go to the doctors. I will speak to your sisters. Then I will come to you, and I will bring our daughter," I promised her. "You have done well, and I am proud of you, my love."

Slowly, unsteadily, my concubine--I couldn't even remember her name, I realized guiltily--rose. She made her way towards the door, unwilling to look around in case she caught the eye of some jealous or judgmental sister. Our daughter wailed on unceasingly, unmindful of her suffering mother, uncaring of all else but the object of her fixation.

Until her father--the de facto ruler of the survivors of humanity, and the bearer of the Voice which had ruled men and beast and machine alike since the bombs fell--turned to her.

"Daddy schikkin'! Schikkin Daddy NOW!" she strained out, face red with rage, hands beating against the baby chair for punctuation.

With an awed grin, I offer the little monster the rest of the chicken from her mother's abandoned plate. She screamed defiance once more, still furious in the grip of unbridled infantile emotions, and snatched at her prize. She tried putting it in her mouth, tried squeezing it, tried seething noisily at it, waiting impatiently for it to metamorphose into the strips of hand-shredded meat she expected it to become.

Enthralled by this tiny tyrant, I begin to tear strips of meat for her, keeping her sullen attention occupied. I didn't dare let her strike upon the strategy of commanding others around her. With a toss of my head, I gestured to an attendant.

"Prepare a garden. Only the deaf may work there. Her mother may move there if she chooses, but no one else may enter without approval. This girl must be taught, and raised, and protected, and... and above all, cherished."

My attendant rushed off, her robes flapping around her long legs as she ran to obey. Another took her place at my side. The rest of the Hall went back to their meal, though the whispers I heard carried venom. I suspected the whispers I didn't hear were worse. I would have to speak, to command, lest bitterness lead to tragedy. I tried to ponder on what might be the correct thing to say.

Meanwhile, the future queen of the world munched sulkily on seasoned meat, one ragged strip clutched greedily in each greasy fist. I found my own attention captured, my focus ensnared. My little girl. It was so hard to worry about the many, when I was so captivated by the one.

"My daughter must never be entirely reliant on the Voice, lest she be helpless without it," I mused aloud. "As was I, the moment my daughter told me 'No'."

"Are you always this rude" She jests.

I continue sitting across from her, mouth agape, unsure of what to do. Should I be angry? Or upset? Scared that she shrugged off my request like it was nothing more than an annoying fly on the wall? What do people feel when they are told no? It feels so foreign; rejection, defiance, and all associated feelings I had long forgotten. No, rather, I had never known them. Hearing those words, seeing her noncompliance, no matter how small i-it was so... real. Perhaps, the first real thing I had ever felt or witnessed, certainly the first novel thing in what feels like forever.

"Hello?" She waves her hand in front of my silent, motionless body, that is staring at her.

"I think I broke him." She says turning to the bartender and laughing softly. The bartender laughs in kind and continues wiping up the counter.

I still have not moved, because despite sensing what's going on around me; I am completely unable to process it. Suddenly, a smile involuntarily flutters across my face and I chuckle. Thinking about it now, I can't remember the last time I smiled. Let alone what it was that made me smile.

"You're a strange one aren't you." she says her eyes tracing the smile that had just formed across my lips. As I continue to sit their in utter shock and silence.

"Well, I guess we have that in common." She says, as she slowly turns to look out the window.

intrigued, I look out the large, partly smudge, glass window beside me just as she did. Only to be shocked again. I see now why it's her favorite spot, as I suddenly realize how long it’s been since I've stopped and looked at things; to enjoy their beauty and simplicity. The beauty in their simplicity. Luckily, it seems, I wasn't quite incapable of that yet. Still, I've sat here a thousand times and never once stopped to appreciate it.

It was a quiet alley, and a peaceful one at that, looking into a long street. It was raining slightly, and the traffic lights shimmer off the street in a beautiful display. Red, green, yellow. Such a simplistic pattern, yet so mesmerizing all the same. Despite the hour, there were still a few passer-Byers, dressed in raincoats, each adorned with black umbrellas. The buildings across the street are far from modern, but feel nostalgic. Almost like I've been here before- Honestly, now that I think about it, everything about this feels so familiar.

"Hey-" I finally managed to say breathlessly, not realizing I had been holding it in all this time. But when I turned, the seat across from me lay empty, all that remained was a cup of black coffee. Still steaming hot, and seemingly untouched.

Part two as promised u/thecheesyB 🙌🏻! Thanks for all the support thus far, let me know if y'all want a part 3!

The Voice That Blinds Him [Part 1+2]

Thanks for the support Everyone! I’ve made a subreddit if you’d like to keep following along!

I’d take a part 3.

Glad the prompt inspired you so much.

Great, I’ll get on it ☺️! It was a great prompt 😉

You need to continue this...

I need a part 3 asap :)

Hey, how's the next part coming along? I'd really like to keep reading this story ☺️

[deleted]

I stare at the empty seat across from me, stunned for yet a third time in mere minutes. She’s gone. The first real thing in my life, and I don’t even know if she was real at all. When? I thought. When did I become so reliant on others to blindly follow my will, that I myself had gone blind with complacency. Letting life slowly pass me by. Content in drinking away my sorrows. No. No more. I jumped out of my seat.

“Bartender!!” I squealed

“That woman, where did she go?”

“She just left.” He replied in a calm robotic demeanor. Good, I thought, she was real after all.

“Which way did she-“ I catch myself. This was the problem wasn’t it. Right here. I had stopped living life and had started letting others live it for me. They were my eyes and ears. My willing full puppets to string along in anyway I saw fit. No never-mind that, This is no time to question the past! The woman, where did she go? I turned my attention back to the bartender.

“Bartender, which way did she head out?” I hastily said again, this time firm in my resolve. He pointed out the side door, and I ran out after her.

The rain has picked up and from under the bars awning, I can see only a few feet in front of me. Damn it. Which way should I go?

Suddenly, I see a figure heading down the side-road, running perpendicular to the window we just sat at. I run after them.

“Hey wait! Waiitttt!” I yelled, as I run across traffic towards the side-road.

“You there, Stoppp.” I yelled again, to no avail, they kept going. It must be her, anyone else would listen, right?

I ran fast. As fast as my legs could carry me, but when I catch up, I stand alone at a dead end. Not a trace of the person I had just seen. Damn it, where could she have gone? I slither back to the hotel in defeat. Upon arrival, I head to my room and lay down on the bed.

I lie awake, my mind uneasy from the day's events. That woman who was she? I was missing something, had I been there before? she said it was her favorite spot, but I’d never seen her there before. Have I? Ughhh, what was it?

The next day, I head back to the bar.

“Bartender, let me see your security tapes. All of them” I say pointing to the camera behind the bar. He obliges and brings me to a room behind the counter, I sit down and start scrolling through the tapes.

"Leave me." I say to the bartender, who promptly leaves, shutting the door behind him. I start with the moment I met the woman and scroll backwards determined to find her.

—-

Thanks for all the support this far! Here it is u/Seabass9975, u/chielachristina, u/thecheesyB, u/DilithiumMiner, u/PresentationOk1717

Also I’m kinda new here, but feel free to follow to stay updated on my work!

The Voice That Blinds Him [Part 3+4]

Thanks for the support Everyone! I’ve made a subreddit if you’d like to keep following along!

Just put it up, hopefully it meets your expectations! 🙌🏻☺️

im so hooked on to this story

Thanks for the Support! I made a subreddit to continue it! Unfortunately, I probably won’t get done today, but I’m working on Part 4!