The Ultimate Hypnotist — A Master PC Story
by The Lycanthrope
Chapter 6 — The Beast
That new Master PC system, “The Beast,” was currently telling me that it had reacquired an existing client — someone who had been through one of my “transformation seminars” in the past. The actual MPC was housed in the 3-foot tall rolling rack sitting in the corner of the room. The rack was ostensibly my amazing eight-channel sound system, and that wondrous beast actually did occupy the top few inches of rack space, along with the receivers for my wireless headset microphone and the cellular link to my tablet, smartphone, and watch. The bottom of the case contained a very efficient water-cooling system that was plumbed to the secret real purpose of the whole rack: Four custom-built, extremely fast computers, each with three high-end graphics cards. That gave me over 50,000 graphics processing units, each running very fast. Without the water cooling system plumbed to the CPUs and graphics cards on each computer, though, all the fans needed to cool them would have made the rack louder than a vacuum cleaner! The large radiator at the bottom of the case, with ultra-quiet fans blowing the heat out vents all the way around it, was nearly silent.
Along with hardware that was capable of doing “group hypnosis” transformation on tens of thousands of people during the course of a two-hour session, I’d also completely rewritten the Master PC software. The default interface was incredibly simple, since its primary function was simply to rapidly cycle through everyone inside the field perimeter defined by the eight beacons and make the specified changes to them, usually finishing a room with a few hundred people in under 5 minutes. An improved version of the old interface was still available, with much better control and programmability than the original Version 0.98 MPC. I’d incorporated much of what I’d learned from copying the skills and knowledge of the leading artificial intelligence engineers, too. The Beast did a fair bit of “thinking” on its own.
Actually, The Beast didn’t make changes to everyone. A 100% success rate would have been one of those statistical anomalies that I wanted to avoid. It scanned each person and determined whether they actually wanted to make the change they’d paid for, or if they were there because they’d been badgered into it by someone else. It usually found between 5% and 15% were attending under duress. In keeping with the hypnosis truism that you cannot use hypnosis to force someone to do something they don’t want to do, the new AI in the new MPC software would decide to not make any changes in most or all of those people, varying the number of them so that I usually had a success rate between 87% and 94%. Random variation in success rate avoided that statistical anomaly condition that might be noticed by an overly meticulous government computer.
According to The Beast, Ms. Melody Wilder had been the 517th person who had attended a seminar. That was back when I was doing “magic wand” sessions. I’d wanted to establish a reputation for being very good, so I’d programmed the AI to determine what was the fondest wish of each person when it came to their mind and/or body and, in addition to making them a non-smoker, also grant that wish, as long as it wasn’t outlandish enough to raise any eyebrows. Those clients had, indeed, become raving fans, happily recording testimonial videos about how great my transformation seminars were.
Unlike most traveling hypnotists, I had a decent web site. The testimonial videos were prominently featured, as was my money-back guarantee. Yes, I offered a real money-back guarantee! I could do that, even though I was splitting the proceeds with the venues, because I knew I’d only have a 6% to 13% failure rate, and I was completely willing to refund double my cut for those people, letting the venue keep their full cut of all proceeds. That made me very popular with the venues and made people willing to pay the $149 I charged to attend one of my seminars. The ones who were successful also received a command to be ethical and not demand a refund when it worked for them and not buying cigarettes saved them more than the cost of the seminar in just a couple of months. Even after refunds I still made over $65,000 on a day like the one I was having, though most days weren’t quite that good. And yes, I paid all of my taxes diligently and kept meticulous records. I’d been audited after my income jumped enormously the last few months of the previous year, and the Feds had been duly impressed with how thorough, complete, and accurate my records were, and it turned out they actually owed me a couple of thousand dollars of tax refund after the audit. Thank you stolen business school education!
The only drawback for me was scheduling. I was okay with the marketing, the accounting, and everything else involved with being a one-man mobile hypnosis seminar business, but the scheduling aspect just didn’t appeal to me. More than once I found myself pulling up to a venue just a couple of hours before my first group session was supposed to start because I’d booked the venue too soon after the previous one and I’d been delayed by road construction, a feminine distraction, or some other unavoidable thing. Fielding the “how close are you now” phone calls every fifteen minutes from panicked hotel managers didn’t make for a happy hypnotist, either. I was actually looking forward to having eleven days off before my next seminar, just to give me a break. Of course that was before The Beast informed me that I had a return visitor.
Not too long after Ms. Wilder had attended one of my seminars I stopped doing the “magic wand” sessions. I had a good start on a solid reputation, and I didn’t want to risk one of the “fondest wishes” being something inexplicable that would draw attention. I’d also been automatically password-protecting all clients against someone else with a MPC being able to change them, and I stopped doing that, too. I didn’t know if there were more MPC users out there. If there were, though, finding thousands of people who were password-protected would certainly have raised a huge red flag. My desire to keep my clients safe took a back seat to my desire to stay well under the radar of anyone looking for people playing God.