The Ultimate Hypnotist — A Master PC Story
by The Lycanthrope
Chapter 5 — A Little Work & A Little Play
That had been over a year earlier. Rebecca and I had spent a couple of months having earth-shattering sex every chance we could. I also spent some time copying skills and knowledge that I thought might eventually be useful. Over the course of a week, I sat parked outside every martial arts school I could find and copied knowledge and muscle memory from all of their instructors. That led to more physical improvements to my body. Self defense skills might be critical, so I crammed all I could find about karate, taekwondo, jujitsu, aikido, boxing, kung fu, and other fighting arts into my enhanced mind and body. I did the same parked outside the two local shooting ranges, gaining excellent firearms skills. A day spent driving around and parking near various tradesman’s shops gave me more skills that the average handyman would envy. The skills of a plumber, electrician, locksmith, framing carpenter, cabinetmaker, heating & cooling repairman, and stonemason were added to my repertoire.
I drove to one of the premiere tech universities and spent a day advancing my electrical engineering and software engineering knowledge even beyond what I’d gained from Brenda and Gary by copying from professors and brilliant graduate students. I also downloaded Ph.D. level knowledge of several other engineering disciplines while I was there. A trip to a state university gave me fluency in eleven foreign languages and a complete business education.
Of course I improved my own version of Master PC. First I overhauled the user interface to make it much easier and quicker to use. Then I optimized it to make it faster and more efficient on the newer hardware. Finally I started adding many new features and capabilities. As something new would come to mind, I would determine whether or not I could actually do it with the laptop MPC. With rare exceptions, all of my ideas were doable, so I implemented them. My version of Master PC on my laptop was as far advanced over the original MPC version as that one had been over punch-card computers of decades past!
I considered visiting a few multinational businesses and acquiring more real-world, practical information from some of their employees, but I was still worried about the black SUVs suddenly showing up. The storage unit auction had only been a few miles from my house, and it would probably be pretty easy for the government or anyone else to find me. I wanted to move, and maybe keep moving for awhile, but I hadn’t come up with a decent way to make money.
I could become a wandering contractor, I suppose, taking short-term computer jobs at companies all over the country, but even sitting still for a six-month contract made me nervous. I could work medical miracles with MPC, but that was extremely high-profile, and it would lead to exactly the kind of attention I wanted to avoid. I needed to be as statistically average as possible. One thing that I’d learned from my business “studies” was that government agencies have big computers looking for anomalies, and that’s how they catch a lot of white collar criminals and even run-of-the-mill drug dealers, bank robbers, and other unsavory types. Statistical glitches would get flagged and investigated. If a guy making $60,000 a year suddenly bought a $200,000 boat for cash, that would show up on somebody’s screen as something that might be worth investigating.
I needed a way to make good money, move around fairly often, and be a decent, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen who never showed up as an anomaly. The solution came to me in a late night TV advertisement.
Charles Jacanda was coming to town in ten days, and he would be at the Excelsior Hotel doing hypnosis to quit smoking for the low, low price of only $99! The ad showed photos of various different hotel ballrooms with a man in a suit standing in front of hundreds of people in row after row of seats. I jotted down the information about Mr. Jacanda’s “seminar” and started doing online research into hypnosis.
Over the next ten days I did my usual “park outside and steal knowledge” trick at the offices of a few local hypnotists and psychologists. When Charles Jacanda came to town, I simply took a room at the Excelsior directly above the ballroom he would be using. Stealing his knowledge was quite enlightening.
In terms of skill, he was nowhere near as good as the local hypnotists. He was a one-trick pony, but it was a very profitable trick. His quit smoking groups grossed him over $300,000 a year! The total gross was actually double that, but he (and apparently most other traveling “hotel hypnotists”) split the take even with the host hotel in return for the use of the ballroom, accommodations at the hotel while he was in town, and the hotel doing all of the local promotion to get hundreds of people to his sessions. He made absolutely no guarantees of success. A money-back guarantee was out of the question, since he only received half of what each person paid and the hotel would never refund their half to a dissatisfied attendee.
I’d found my new occupation, and I knew I could do it better. I needed to build a new MPC!