Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 35
I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in the morning to find Larry again snoring in his bed.
He looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed until June, so I went to breakfast. The weather had improved markedly since yesterday, a beautiful, warm spring day, so I took a walk around campus which now looked a lot like the pictures you see on the student recruitment brochures, a few people reading on the lawn, happy people tossing Frisbees, and the buds blooming on the trees.
I felt refreshed, like I was ready to jump back into studies. I opened the door to the room and Larry was up, sitting on his bed, a certain look on his face, eyebrow raised.
“I came back from the party, which wasn’t that good, by the way, and went to open the door.
I’d had a bit to drink so I wasn’t thinking straight and wondered why the doorknob felt fuzzy and why it wasn’t turning. It took me a moment to realize that it was a sock and not a bad case of black mold. Then it took me a little longer to try to figure out why there was a sock on the doorknob.
“But it finally came back to me, the secret Bat-signal we’d arranged. So I collapsed on the couch in the common room and when I woke up again the sock was gone. So. Details, please.”
“I ran into an old friend from high school.”
“That was an executive summary. There is no detail. Try again.”
“Nope. What goes on behind the socked door is private.”
“Carter, you owe me.”
“Still no.”
We went back and forth for a while longer and finally he stomped off to breakfast in a huff. I worked some more on a paper that was due and did my assigned reading, and the days fell back into their normal rhythm.
As the weather changed, it brightened everyone’s mood but also reminded us that exams weren’t that far off. I could see a few of my dorm mates start to buckle down in order to catch up for the past couple of months of partying. I happened to agree with Professor D and the other faculty that complex ideas can’t be learned or understood by cramming. They need to be assimilated over time. While the others often ragged me for being a tool, I felt like I was on top of the material we’d been given, or most of it anyway.
So I felt pretty good about prepping for exams when they finally did arrive, without that undercurrent of panic that, for example, Larry was feeling. I had time to think, about classes, about Karen, about my psi research (which I hadn’t done much with).
One afternoon, late, after my last class of the day, I was back in my dorm room, lying on the bed, mostly thinking about dinner and what I might be in the mood for. I can’t recall the chain of ideas, but it somehow led me to remember the states I often induced in my partners, and my offhand promise to myself to look into how to induce some of those same states in myself.
When I’d thought about this before, the process seemed insurmountable. I couldn’t figure out how to approach it. It was somehow easy to linkcast them to others, but I stumbled when I thought about how to turn them inward. I always gave up. It somehow seemed like trying to figure out how many reflections of yourself there were when you were standing between two facing mirrors. The reflections just went on into infinity, getting smaller and smaller.
There is something to be said for letting the mind chew on a problem in the background. The kind of non-linear reasoning that goes on there often leads to new ways to view a problem and find its solution. I’m just guessing here, but I think that’s what happened, since I hadn’t been able to find a way to make it work with my logical mind. This time, when I thought about it, it now seemed possible, as if my unconscious had found a hidden path.
I’ve alluded to being able to give myself a ’stiffy trigger’, or being able to tweak certain senses like hearing. Those all involved finding the ’link’ into my own mind, as I did so easily with others.
It was harder doing it to myself because it required a conscious manipulation of the link, but being inside your own head made you lose your grip on the link.
The other thing I had found, by experimentation, was that when I manipulated my own control panel, tweaking my hearing for example, I lost contact with the outside world for some period. I wouldn’t be aware of someone talking to me, or knocking on the door, or a fire alarm going off.
Being inside my head meant that I was cut off from the outside world while I remained inside. So I had to be careful where and when I did this, and I couldn’t do it for long.
This is hard to explain, because I don’t really have the right words for it. Maybe think of it like performing brain surgery on yourself. You are manipulating the very thing that allows you to control the manipulation. If you don’t do it right, well...
I could linkcast climax images like Avalanche and Roller Coaster to myself, because they were instructions to the mind on how to interpret something which was about to happen. Once I sent them to myself, I no longer had to do anything, no longer had to be ’present’ inside my mind. I wrote them on the back of a metaphorical postcard and sent it to myself, then forgot it.
But maintaining a constant state, for example, Rowboat, which leaves the recipient with a sense of contentment, bliss, well, that seemed to require a continuing control, an active presence, which I didn’t know how to do. Therein lay the dilemma.
But I sensed that I might have found a different approach to linkcasting these images to myself.
Whatever my unconscious mind had discovered, it didn’t provide me with any details. It just gave me the cryptic message, ’You might want to try this.’ It didn’t even tell me what ’this’ was. I presumed I’d recognize it when I got close to it.
It was too early for dinner, and Larry had a late class, I knew, so no time like the present. I got comfortable, and closed my eyes. If someone barged in, I could just say I was sleeping deeply and hadn’t heard them.
I found my own ’link’ into my mind. For whatever odd reason, it was harder to sense than those of others, so it took some trial and error before I could walk it up into my own head. Once there, it looked not unlike everyone else’s epicenter. Each one was different, of course, reflecting the preferences and personality of its owner. Mine looked... comfortable. Of course it did. It was my own mind, I was used to it. It should be familiar and comfortable.
Now that I was here, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t sense anything different about this place. Okay, I’ll try one of the things I’d done before, say, increase my hearing sensitivity. The last time I’d done this, I’d pushed it up by about ten percent, and found I was able to hear conversations in other parts of my house that I hadn’t been aware of. I had to remember where the ’control panel’ for the senses was, but eventually found it.
I visualized hearing, the sounds around me in the dorm, and saw a portion of the panel glow amorphously. Didn’t look anything like an ear or sounds, but the mind developed these things for its own internal use and knew how they worked. I visualized it becoming more sensitive, and the blob—for that’s what it looked most like—seemed to expand by a small amount.
I walked back down the link into the real world. Eyes still closed, I listened. I’d gotten accustomed to the normal levels of noise in the dorm, and how it changed during the day. This was a time of day when many people still had classes and were not around, so it was normally fairly quiet at this time.
From the sonic soup I isolated certain sounds. I heard two guys arguing about one using the other’s deodorant constantly, and the other saying ’It’s just fucking deodorant, Sam!’ The sound had a muffled quality, as if it were filtered through a closed door. I heard footsteps coming up the stairway, and a fire door opening. I heard someone’s radio playing a song I wasn’t particularly fond of.
I wouldn’t have heard these things in any detail with my ’normal’ hearing, except maybe for the closing of the fire door. I was hearing beyond my normal sensitivity. If I left it like this, I wouldn’t be able to think. Every random sound would be poking at my consciousness, setting me on edge. So where was the clue my unconscious had left for me? Or was it just fucking with me?
I went back in my epicenter and set the hearing sensitivity back to something close to normal for me. I looked around to see if anything looked different. Nope. Now what? I don’t know. I thought about what I did when I sent these visual metaphors to my partners, and what was different from what I had just done.
In their cases, I visualized this sensation, or collection of sensations, usually by recalling its name which represented the collection of sensations, and linkcast it to them. I presumed it followed the same path, up the ’link’ and into their epicenter, where it was processed by... something.
What had I just done? I’d stepped into my epicenter, found the panel that controlled hearing acuity and caused it to increase. How was that different? Well, it wasn’t an image sent and processed, it was me controlling the sense specifically by manipulating the control panel. So, no...
what? No image, no visual metaphor?
I guess so. It was the only difference I could see. I hadn’t linkcast an image. I’d done something directly. What if I sent myself an image, a named visual metaphor? The only one I knew that worked, after a fashion, was Stiffy Trigger. That was problematic because it took a while to work.
Correction, it took a while to work if I had already cum recently. I don’t think I’d ever sent one to myself when I’d been celibate for some time. Normally the prospect of getting to stick my dick somewhere would be all the stimulus I’d need. If some hot girl batted her eyes at me I’d likely have a problem not getting an erection.
Was there something different in the way these visual metaphors were processed? I had no idea. As I thought about it, I realized that I’d never really examined how these visual metaphors worked. I just sent them and stuff happened. What’s to question?
But perhaps the process itself was important. I supposed I should figure it out, if only for the sake of completeness, for understanding. Okay, I’ll send myself a Stiffy Trigger and see what happens. So here, out in the real world, I linkcast myself that image, then walked the link up into my epicenter.
I’d remembered where the panel that governed the rigidity of my dick lived from previous excursions here. Of course I would remember, that stuff is important to young men! I looked at the panel and could see the area of interest, because it was what I was thinking about. It was brighter.
It didn’t look bigger or anything, but I’d just sent the image and it would probably take some time.
While I waited I looked around. There were scores of other panels that monitored and controlled the myriad functions that took place in the human body. None of them were outstanding in any way, since I wasn’t focusing on them. They just appeared to be a kind of grey, like they were on standby, the monitor in sleep mode.
Hold on, that’s not quite true, there’s one over there. I got closer. It was doing... something.
Shapes were forming and disappearing, changing color, getting brighter and fading out. I could make no sense of it, but it must have a purpose.
I looked around again, trying to see if anything else was active. I was still focused on the idea of ’stiffy’, and that’s what caused a panel to activate, just as it did when I had looked at, say, the chem TA, Ron McCarthy’s epicenter, and focused on the concept of stoichiometry. I found where that information was stored. This was a biological process I was looking at, but it should be the same difference. I should see the processes that led to an erection.
So what was this panel showing me? It wasn’t the panel that controlled the blood vessels for the penis and allowed it to get an erection; that lived over there, and I looked over my imaginary shoulder at that panel. Whoa, hold on.
I glanced over at that display and saw activity, the familiar blob, now changing color and size.
Maybe time to step outside my head. I walked back the link to the real world, still lying on the bed, and opened my eyes. I’ll be damned. That looks like the beginning of a stiffy trying to get out of my jeans.
Okay. I hadn’t made note of the time I sent myself the stiffy trigger, but it hadn’t been that long, I was sure. So I had a puzzle here. I now had two panels connected to the concept of penile erection. I knew one of them was the penis itself, and the blood vessels connected to it. So the other one was... what?
Back up the link into my epicenter, where the other unknown panel still glowed. And as I watched, it slowly grew dim and faded entirely. A glance at the ’penis panel’ showed that it was still active, and the blob seemed to be larger and had changed color, a kind of pale red.
So, if a panel is ’active’, according to my understanding, it means it is involved in the activity I’m currently interested in. If the other panel has faded into inactivity, that implies it is no longer involved in the activity. Thus, there was some process at work involved in establishing the erection, but it had finished and was no longer active.
What process, then? The only difference I could figure was that I had sent a command, a visual metaphor, to establish an erection. From what I observed in the real world when I stepped out momentarily, I had almost a full erection. By the time I returned to my epicenter the new panel was fading to black.
As a hypothesis, I assumed that the new panel had something to do with the processing of the instruction, determining what had to be done, which senses and bodily functions were involved, and how they had to be manipulated. Once that had been completed, it shut itself off, no longer needed because it had finished making the necessary changes.
Was this a—I didn’t know what to call it. It was something akin to a computer language compiler. Karen would understand this better, but my crude understanding was that a compiler converted a high-level language into machine language that the CPU could understand, calling in pre-built resources from libraries where needed, such as a simple instruction to print a single character from a location in memory to the device connected to the printer port.
If I sent even a relatively simple visual instruction, like ’build me a stiffy’, the mind would need to identify the part to be manipulated, and the means to do so, connect to the blood vessels and dilate them, but not so much as to cause damage to the vessels, and continue until it had reached some predetermined degree of stiffness. It processed an algorithm. Maybe that’s what it was, an algorithm processor.
Maybe. Maybe not. But at least it was a working hypothesis that satisfied the observed facts, so I could test it more. Now what? What other tests can I do? Perhaps try to induce a state in myself that requires active monitoring and adjustment. Then I could observe this supposed ’algorithm processor’ and see how it behaved.
I stepped out of my epicenter again and thought about this for awhile. All of my named responses had been constructed for one purpose, to raise a woman’s sensitivity and responsiveness, to make her happy. I had no idea what linkcasting something like Glow or Pulser to myself would do. They were keyed to a dick in a pussy or an ass. Besides, I didn’t want to send myself a command like that now. I might actually have an orgasm and have to change my clothes! Larry would probably choose that precise moment to walk in on me!
Maybe something less dramatic, like Rowboat or Sunshine. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how they would be processed in the absence of other stimulation. There’s no way to deduce what might happen logically. I’d just have to experiment.
I chose Sunshine. I thought its effects would be more easily observable, being less abstract in its goals. It was supposed to bring about a state of relaxed happiness, of joy and peace. I thought I could recognize those, that they would be different enough from my normal state that I could see a difference.
I had some apprehension as I prepared to do this. This wasn’t much different from the first time I’d come up with Cum Block and tried it on myself. It worked, but I panicked when I realized that I’d never set up a way to release the filter, and I’d had to puzzle it out on the fly. Fortunately, I’d figured out how to do it and I was actually able to have an orgasm.
So I took a deep breath and linkcast myself Sunshine, much as I sent myself Stiffy Trigger or Cum Block. I needed to figure out, among other things, whether these images had a finite lifetime, if they faded on their own or I had to manually cancel them. I suppose there could be worse things than being in a constant state of joy and peace, but still.
Having done so, I walked up the link to my epicenter again and started looking around to see which panels were active. Sure enough, the one I had observed earlier was glowing, moving different colored and sized blobs around, merging and splitting. It was processing something.
I looked around the ’room’, looking for a display that was glowing or showing movement. Far off in a corner, I did see something. This showed very little movement, and no distinct shapes. It seemed to be changing colors very subtly. I could not yet divine its function, but it was clearly involved in the state I was now concentrating on, the named image Sunshine.
I stared at it awhile longer until I decided that life was too short to be spending time in my head, there was a fine spring day outside, and friends, pretty girls, and maybe a good dinner, too.
I walked back down the link, back to my bed in the real world. I lay there smiling. I was right, I decided, I spent too much time thinking, worrying. It was too nice a day, and I felt good.
I sat up and immediately fell back, my head spinning. Not from dizziness, from the realization that I had just sent myself a named image that required monitoring and adjustment, and it worked!
I recognized the things I was feeling, because I had constructed the image to induce precisely those emotions. Happiness. Peace. Joy.
I found myself short of breath. This felt like a breakthrough, though I still didn’t understand it completely. At minimum, I had found I was able to send myself named images with an extended lifetime. I still had to determine how long they lasted. What if it were something like a programmer’s infinite loop error, where a program kept churning away, never ending, just eating up computer resources?
It might be nice to feel like this most days, but I could see it being a problem, getting in the way of self-improvement, study, introspection, and the like. If it eventually faded away on its own, then well and good. But I might need to come up with a way to suspend execution, much like you’d abort a malfunctioning computer program.
Larry chose that moment to return from his class, nudging the door closed with his foot and tossing his books on his bed.
“I’m so ready for dinner. I could hear my stomach growling during class. I hope no one else heard it. What’s with you? You win the lottery? You look happy.”
“I dunno,” I lied. “Maybe it’s just springtime making me feel happy, or the prospect of getting home for the summer. I do feel good.”
“Well, let’s go find some food. I’m starved.”
That actually sounded pretty good to me, so with one eye monitoring my mental state, we went off to dinner.