The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I’m going to tell you the story of how my life got a whole lot better for a while, and then got a lot worse, because of one ridiculous book.

I’m a Math professor, hanging on to the bottom-rung position that gives me the right to call myself that. I’m an adjunct at a teaching college, meaning I barely make enough to scrape by and spend most of my work time marking assignments rather than proving brilliant theorems. But at least I don’t have to wear a tie, and I can set my own hours.

My wife left me five years ago, and won custody, so I only get to see my kid Rob grow up on weekends. He was eight when this story began. I was 38. I didn’t hate my life, but there wasn’t much to look forward to. That all changed on a bus ride.

I was taking the coach back to Boston from a conference in New York — one bus ticket a year was pretty much all the conference travel this college would pay for — and I had just woken up from a long nap lying across the right two seats at the very back of the nearly-empty bus. I became aware of a glow coming through the seat crack in front of me, and I looked through. A woman was reading the illuminated screen of one of those new Kindle Brilliants. The font size was big enough that I could read along...

I wake up in the softest bed I’ve ever been in, at least a 2000 or maybe even a 3000 thread count. I look around groggily, noticing the sunlight streaming in from the giant plate glass windows, when it strikes me. Holy hell, did I just spend the night in the bed of Simeon Hunt?

My subconscious is wagging her finger at me. What must Simeon think of me now that he had to rescue me from my disastrous wrong turn into a bad neighborhood, half out of my mind with fear. I relive the memory of those panhandlers reaching their filthy hands towards me, asking for change, and I shudder. What would have happened if Simeon hadn’t been tracking my cellphone, and appeared, whisking me into his Audi? I was so exhausted from my ordeal that I don’t even remember him putting me to bed in his luxury hotel suite. How embarassing!

But at the same time, my inner goddess is doing nonstop backflips, and giving me high fives. Hey girl, she says, you’re in the bed of Simeon Hunt!

I look around with a start and flush, realizing that I’m nearly naked and my clothes are nowhere to be found. Then I notice a brand new sundress hanging on the handle of the closet, in what I instinctively know is my correct size. As I get up from the bed, I become aware that the most beautiful cello music is filtering in from outside the room. One of my favourite pieces, Pachelbel’s Canon.

I slip on the dress, and walk on lush white carpet into the living room of this suite, which must cost $1000 a night, helplessly drawn by the music. But I am pulled up short when I see him, sitting behind the cello on the far side of the room. He’s wearing a linen shirt with the top two buttons undone and just a hint of ribcage, and his jeans show off his slender thighs. His hair is like a giant brown cloud, while his brown beard is just as big and lush, coming out from his face in all directions rather than down his chest. The handsome small bit of face between the two is mostly covered by his big, square, gold rim glasses.

[ Wow, that was unexpected, I thought. That could be a description of me! ]

His eyes are closed, his perfect brow furrowed with concentration. Holy crap he’s hot!

At last the piece ends. Without opening his eyes, he says, “Ariadne.”

I want to rush to him, to make out with his gorgeous furry face, but then I remember the contract, and its impossible demands. So instead I stand there, blushing furiously.

“Come,” he says, “you need sustenance after your little adventure last night. What am I to do with you?”

And he stands up, takes me by the hand, and leads me to the kitchen and dining area, where a breathtaking assortment of tropical fruits have been laid out. They look expensive too. All this for me?

Could it be that the billionaire business genius, and most eligible bachelor in Seattle, Simeon Hunt, is interested in me? Me, plain old mousy Ariadne? My subconscious shakes her head skeptically, but my inner goddess is nodding her head so hard it could come off.

Just then his cellphone rings, and he whips away from me sharply. Suddenly he’s all business. “What’s happened to the shipment in Guyana? ...if they can’t get it, it’s his ass on the line... If we have to, we’ll source those microchips from Burma... We need those specs to show investors...I need leverage Jake, to get the equity to make that takeover of the CDO...it’s shit or bust time!”

Storm clouds cross his brow. They cross from left temple to right, gathering strength as they go.

At last the conversation is over, the storm has passed, and now all of his intensity is focused on me. I flush once again.

His eyes flash. “You haven’t given me your answer yet, Ariadne. Will you sign the contract to be my sub, on alternate weekends for two months, holiday weekends excepted? Remember, I told you to stay away, I’m twenty levels of fucked up. With me it’s kinky, weird, sadomasochistic sex or nothing.”

“...I...I just don’t know about this contract. It’s such a big commitment.”

He looks shocked. “No one ever says no to me. You truly are a one of a kind woman, Ariadne. You inflame me. I’ve changed my mind. We must have passionate, vanilla sex right now.”

And he strides around the kitchen island and takes me into his arms.

I feel my body melt in the fire of his embrace, as another fire ignites in my you-know-what...

There was a lot more along those lines. But I became distracted by a low panting and whimpering coming from the owner of the Kindle. Then I noticed the way the shadow from the Kindle’s screen on her chest was flickering, because of the rapid movements of her arm. She was masturbating! This was the best thing that had ever happened to me on a Peter Pan bus.

I watched and listened for a while, and then decided I needed to sneak a better look. I stood up and walked halfway up the aisle, past the sleeping passengers, and then back towards her. She was so engrossed she didn’t notice me at all. From the front I could distinctly make out her arm moving by the glow of the Kindle, her hand down the front of her pants, which had the top button undone. Her head was tilted back slightly and her mouth hung open.

I decided to switch to the seats aisle across from her. I lay back with one eye half open.

I saw her slow down, seem to get possession of herself, and take deep breaths. She looked around, and started when she saw me there. She appeared to assure herself that I had been asleep through her solo adventures. Then she did a doubletake and began staring at me.

This was uncomfortable, so I pretended to wake up, and turned on the overhead light. As I bent down to pull out a journal article printout from my laptop bag, I snuck a closer look at my fellow passenger in the light. She was in her mid 30s, wearing a shawl sweater over a top and slacks. Her blonde hair was shortish in something of a “mom cut”, but surrounding a pretty face.

She pretended that she hadn’t just been staring, but then as I leaned over my paper I could feel her stealing looks. After a minute, she scooted over to the aisle seat, and leaned over to me.

She said in a low voice, “This is going to sound weird, but you really look like a character in this book I’m reading!” And she gave a half-giggle. “It’s called 20 Levels of Desire.”

I blinked. “A good guy I hope.”

She smiled at me. “A very good guy.”

She held eye contact with me for a few seconds too long. Then she turned back to her Kindle, that had been sitting on her lap. She started tapping it and swiping it.

A few seconds later, she leaned over again, smiled at me and said, “Would you do something for me? Just for fun?”

“Uh, ok.”

“Would you just say this,“ and she pointed to a line on the Kindle’s screen. She added, “You look so much like him!”

“This line?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were big, and I was aware that her face was quite close to mine.

“‘Ariadne, I don’t know how you do this to me. You have captured my soul.’”

“That’s good,” she said, and there was a little catch in her voice. She was breathing like she’d just finished a race. Our knees were touching. “But could you read it one more time, and just make it sound a little more stern and commanding?”

“Ok... I’ll try. ‘Ariadne, I don’t know how you do this to me. You have captured my soul.’”

She said vigorously, only just under her breath, “Oh Simeon, it’s my soul that has been captured!” And she threw her arms around me and practically jammed her tongue into my mouth. It had been a good four years since I had been kissed, and now to have this woman passionately making out with me was overwhelming. I was painfully erect immediately.

She moved out into the aisle, never breaking lip lock, and proceeded to straddle me, her eyes closed. I could feel her breasts pressing into my chest. She reached up to the bus ceiling with one hand and turned off the light, while the other hand caressed my neck. She was murmuring between kisses, “oh Simeon. Simeon. I’m your possession.”

When there was a moment to come up for air, I said, “Um... hi, my name’s Jay.” And she murmured, “Shut up. Just look at me.”

And she shifted off me, to the window seat. Her eyes were shining at me, with a simpering expression. She unbuttoned my jeans, pulled them down along with my underwear, and took out my hard erection.

“Shh, Simeon,” she said, as she gently stroked it.

“Uh...Ariadne.”

And she cried, “Oh!” and started to pump it quickly and firmly. I saw her left hand go into her pants, as she started to frig herself at the same time.

In no time at all I exploded, all over the back of the seat in front of us, and she came a few seconds after, teeth gritted and eyes screwed shut as she tried to keep down the volume. Her whole body shook, which I could feel through her hand on my softening cock.

A minute or two later the bus driver called, “Boston, South Station,” and we snapped out of our post orgasm trances. We hurriedly got cleaned up and grabbed our things to get off the bus. While standing up in the aisle, I said, “So... we should exchange numbers? Are you uh, on Facebook?” She cocked her head to one side and smiled sweetly at me. Then her face went slack and she went in for one more passionate kiss. Her hands were buried deep in my beard. Then she walked off the bus and out of my life.

After that day, you can bet I started noticing 20 Levels of Desire. There were a string of news stories about the popularity of the book, how quickly it had risen up the bestseller lists, how women of all walks of life, who often hadn’t consumed much in the way of romance novels or erotica, or any books at all, were finding it irresistable. The author, E. P. Smith, had signed a deal that her book would be available exclusively on the Kindle Brilliant, and sales of the device had gone through the stratosphere.

Buyers included a lot of women who didn’t seem like e-reader type. Like my neighbour down the hall at the Department, Dr. Sarah Roberts. Her home is lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves, beautiful volumes from every decade. And yet one day when I pushed open her barely-latched office door, I saw her behind her desk with a Kindle in her left hand. Also, her whole body was vibrating, pearls jumping off her chest slightly, and her right hand in her grey blazer sleeve was down behind her desk. Her face was red, and a few strands of black hair stuck to her forehead.

Before I had time to react, she yelled, “SHUT THAT DOOR!” and I hastily did.

You didn’t need news stories—all you had to do was to keep your eyes open. Everywhere I went I started to notice women reading Kindle Brilliants, absolutely intent on the page and often shielding the screen, so that I had no doubt about the book they had loaded up. I also knew by the way they were continually shifting in their seat, touching their face and neck, or smoothing their hands along their thighs. The book was making them horny as hell.

Some women went further. It seemed like there were a lot of fans of the book who were either latent exhibitionists, or just deluded about how well they were concealing their self pleasuring. In the park, in the back of my lecture hall, behind the desk of the department secretary, women were clearly masturbating themselves to the book, oblivious to the world around them.

The biggest change though, for me, was that women were looking at me differently, at least women in the book’s target age range. Just like the woman on the bus, I realized they saw Simeon Hunt when they looked at me. In any subway car there would be at least one woman who couldn’t stop glancing over, and in some cases brazenly and lustfully staring.

I bought the book and read it. I honestly couldn’t see what the attraction was — apart from the fortuitously quirky look of the male lead, it seemed to be a basic, even rudimentary, romance novel. There was some light bondage and domination, but the vast majority was vanilla sex and fluttering emotions.

But it helped me to know what was going on, most importantly to recognize one signature move that women were making, that always meant they wanted to sleep with me: biting her lower lip while making eye contact. Just like Ariadne did every time she wanted to seduce Simeon (and I mean every time—the book is very repetitive). Some did it more subtly, others made it so obvious you could have picked it up from space. But it always meant that if I wanted, I could take them back to my tiny bachelor apartment, or that they would give me their number to have a rendezvous at a later time.

My ex-wife had moved Rob to an alternative school, against my protests—that’s where most of my paycheck goes each month—and a week after the bus ride she phoned to ask me to take him to their winter fair. And I’m glad I didn’t protest too much, because I had never seen so many beautiful hippie moms in one place. Wooden jewelry and dyed linen dresses were all the rage, and though there were lines starting to show around the mouth and eyes, their skin glowed with health—all that farm-share produce and yoga at work.

As I walked into the school gymnasium with all the craft tables set up, I felt an instantaneous change in the atmosphere. It was like I could smell the hormones. Heads turned and stay turned. I seemed to have caught the eye of nearly all the straight and bi moms simultaneously. They filtered towards me, trying to look nonchalant, lining up to introduce themselves to me and my son. They flirted and ruffled my beard. Several of them found ways to slip me their phone number.

The one I called belonged to Kelly, who had wide blue eyes, very short orange hair, and a long swan-like neck, with a black jewel on a choker around it. Later that night the jewel was swinging madly as I fucked her doggy style, admiring as I did her muscular back and arms. Like Dr. Roberts, she’d been to graduate school, but apparently that had been no protection against the guilty pleasures of 20 Levels.

I had a string of affairs. I always got my marking done, and weekends were reserved for Rob, but the rest of the time I could have as much pussy as I could handle (I even started mentally calling it “pussy”). Ariadne may have been a slender redhead, but women of every shape and hair color liked me just as much. If I didn’t meet someone over the course of my day, all I had to do was to go down to McTeer’s, where the 70’s and 80’s music selections catered to the Gen Xers and older, and pretty soon I’d be surrounded by women.

Although these women wanted to fuck me, and often, I had to learn something else, which is that they looked at it as nothing more than a fun diversion. An escape from their everyday lives (and, often, marriages), just as the book was. They never saw it as cheating on their partner, any more than reading the book. After Claire, Meghan, Lee-Wei, and Liz, I got better at not falling in love myself, and began to just enjoy it. If my wife wanted to take Rob for the weekend, based on some excuse, I didn’t fight her like I used to do.

Here’s the thing that supercharged such occurrences, and probably earned me the punishment I got later: I didn’t just passively receive all this attention for my resemblance to Simeon Hunt—I played it up. I replaced my round wire-framed glasses with square ones, and I bought a linen shirt (I didn’t even know what that was until I looked it up). I let my face get even bushier. Most of the time I would be my normal, mild-mannered self, and they would do all the work of seduction, but I discovered that throwing in a few sharp words from time to time did wonders. I would glare at the woman I was having dinner with and say “Finish your food!”, and watch her cream her panties. Sometimes we didn’t make it through dinner, especially when the woman would start fellating an asparagus spear—another signature Ariadne move. (the one who went to town on a baked potato was even less successful at being sexy.)

I noticed other patterns in the types of things they liked to do. One favorite was sucking my dick in the bath. I often thanked my lucky stars that I had a big, old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub in my apartment. It certainly saw a lot of action during that period. I would lean back against the sloping end, and the woman would come out of the water, hair all slicked back, and go to work on my wet cock, with both her mouth and my penis heated by the water. My only complaint about this activity was that the book seemed to have given all its readers the idea that they were expert cocksuckers, regardless of past experience, which sometimes led to more enthusiasm than effectiveness. Also about half of them seemed to have the impression that men like a little bit of teeth with their head.

If I saw a woman more than once, pretty soon she’d start hinting at the idea that she’d like to be restrained. This was outside my previous realm of sexual experience, which consisted of my sexually conservative ex-wife and a handful of mostly mortifying other experiences, but the reactions I got spurred me on. I found that even just holding a woman’s wrists above her head drove her wild. While I had never been into spanking before, the writhing, moaning reaction it created in 20 Levels fans soon made me an enthusiast too.

At this point I should say that it wasn’t just me: men who looked like me around the country were getting laid. We were the new hipster. There were trend pieces in Sunday supplements about it, with mocking photographs: “Is this the new sexy?” But we had the last laugh, as we found our pale, scrawny bodies getting sexed on the regular. The publishers even had to change the posters for the book that were all over the place, taking off the generic shirtless hunk and replacing it with a moody shot of Simeon’s signature cellphone holster. People who hadn’t read it wouldn’t appreciate the real Simeon Hunt, but the devotees didn’t want an impostor.

The nice thing about the trend was that even if more guys wanted to jump on board the Simeon bandwagon, and could grow a beard at all, it would still take them months to catch up with us. And yet the trade papers reported that with an inevitable film version in production, Gerard Butler, Chris Evans, and Taylor Kitsch had all started growing their hair and beards, to help them get considered for the part.

I got in so deep that I paid my woodworking buddy to build me a big lacquered wooden X, to which I affixed padded wrist and ankle cuffs so it looked just like the one in the book. When I would bring a woman home and she would see the apparatus against the wall—hard to miss in a bachelor suite—her face would light up like a kid at Christmas. Due to lack of storage space, when I had non-sexy guests I had to disguise it as furniture for my cat.

I liked to see how these women, who were well out of their first youth, maybe with a husband and kids, and who might have never done a single kinky thing in their lives, reacted to being naked and strapped in. They would strain against the bonds, and work themselves up to an incredible state as they felt their helplessness, and traveled into the mindset of Ariadne in the book. I barely had to do anything to bring them to a boil except stalk back and forth in my linen shirt. I was astonished the first time a woman came just from a gentle tap on the pussy from the end of my leather riding crop. And by the time I unstrapped them they were a puddle of pure submission and sex, ready to serve me in any way I wanted.

I wish I could say it helped me outside of my sex life, but not really. It didn’t affect my work much, since most of my students were all below the age that the book seemed to appeal to, and thank god for that. But Simeon was on my mind. One day my ex-wife was sick and so I had to go in for the meeting with the principal about Rob.

She said, “We’re concerned that Rob isn’t socializing at his grade level. He hasn’t yet internalized the Value Wheel we focus on at this school, and in particular he’s been receiving low scores on Community Awareness. We think it’s best that we let him repeat a year.” I was furious, this was typical Montessori nonsense that would separate Rob from his friends and waste a year of prime learning time, but I could already feel myself caving in the face of her PhD-in-education certainty.

But then I spotted the corner of a Kindle Brilliant peeking out of her purse.

She was a handsome woman, with a long but shapely nose and warm brown eyes framed by wavy brown hair, so the prospect of using my sexual Jedi-mind-trick on her was not at all unappealing. I straightened my spine, and put on my best stern Simeon voice. “You will let Rob into the fourth grade. This is important to me.”

“I’m sorry, but we had a special meeting about Rob, and the consensus process decided this is what he needs.”

Back and forth we went, me turning up the dom voice, and her remaining still and controlled, but with a slight flush to her cheeks, and occasional gritted teeth, that betrayed her annoyance. Finally she said, “I have another appointment coming in. I’m sorry, this is our final decision.” And I left, fuming.

At around 7 that night I had almost recovered from my defeat, when I received a text from an unknown number. “This is principal black. I need to speak with you. Please come to 343 houston St. as soon as possible and ring the door bell.”

I texted back, asking what this was about, but the only reply was, “Just come.”

I drove to the address, and it was a small bungalow with the lights on inside. I rang the doorbell, and I heard a clacking sound, like heels on a hardwood floor, and the principal’s voice call from inside, “Come in.” I pushed the door open, and walked into the hallway.

I turned to look in the open room on my left, and saw a sitting room, warmly illuminated, with a big glossy oak table against the wall. Bent over the table with her ass jutting out towards me, was Principal Black, wearing a black lacy bra, black heels, silk stockings attached to a garter belt, and nothing else. I noted she still had an excellent ass.

I heard her say in a strangled voice, “I was disobedient today. Please, Simeon, punish your sub.”

I realized that what I had mistaken for anger in her office was really arousal, and the superhuman act of will in resisting the urge to submit to me. But it had to come out sometime. Now I was back on solid ground. I strode over to the table and laid down a solid smack on her bare asscheek. As I continued the spanking, and her behind reddened, she whimpered and howled into the tabletop.

Pretty soon she was kneeling in front of me, eyes looking up at me frantically as she rapidly worked her mouth over my cock. She obeyed my orders to grovel at my feet, crawl around the room, call me “sir”, receive my come on her face and push every last bit of it into her mouth. At the end I told her, “Now, I expect you to move Rob up to the next grade.” And she raised her face from the carpet and said, “Certainly not.” At least I was able to take my frustration out in a vigorous ass wallopping, never mind that she loved every second of it.

It was from one of the nights at McTeer’s that I got kind of famous. An Instagram photo of me and my linen shirt got posted on a 20 Levels message board, where it instantly went viral. Petitions circulated to cast me in the movie role. I learned not to check my email at work or when my son was around, because two or three or twenty times a day I would get emails with the most explicit propositions, often including photographs. Women from around the country, and the world, wanted to sleep with me, were flying into Boston just on the possibility. And I let some of them.

But one day I received an email that was different from the others. It was from a casting director at a reality television production company. They wanted me to be a contestant in an upcoming show, to be called “The Real Simeon and Ariadne”. They could fly me out to L.A. next week.

Luckily it was the summer break, so I thought, why not!

I may have lost the plot a bit, with all the attention I was getting (not to mention orgasms). How on earth did I think I belonged on television?

Because of my appearance and fan community status, I didn’t have to audition, but I did get to go with the ten other Simeons to watch some of the Ariadne open call. It was held in a huge civic center, and when we walked out onto the mezzanine and looked down to the floor, there were snaking lines of redheaded women in tight clothing as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of them. We must have been a funny sight, eleven awkward men in their 30s and 40s with giant unruly beards and hair, mostly in polyester-blend button-downs and pleated pants, but when the women caught sight of us, a great shrieking sound rose up. Many started jumping up and down, and I spotted at least two flashing their breasts at us. After a few seconds, a good number broke from the lines and ran towards the stairs to the mezzanine, busting through the security line, at which point we were hurriedly led out of the center.

Two weeks later the casting was done, and us eleven men and eleven women were set up in a rented McMansion in the Hollywood hills. Our level was styled to look like Simeon’s penthouse, all glass, leather and steel tubing, with moody black and white photographs on the wall, while the level the women lived on was styled like a homey student apartment, much like Ariadne’s in Pike Place Market.

Over the next two weeks there was a parade of challenges and planned activities too stupid to go into. But the important thing was that the women were stunningly beautiful, and unlike many reality shows where they have to make it look sexier than it was, the contestants on the show were hooking up constantly, in practically every configuration. I had my pick. My favorites were a short, busty Italian woman, and two Irish women, one slender and nearly translucent, one earthy and lushly contoured. We played Simeon and Ariadne often, even when there were no cameras around.

This even continued into the hotel where we were sequestered for several weeks while the episodes broadcast, so that we would eventually be in sync for the big live finale. Although my time at the hotel was briefer than most, because I was in the final two. For various arbitrary reasons, mostly fixed by the producers, all the other Simeons had been eliminated one by one, except for me and Aaron Schlesinger, an engineer from Seattle. Although Aaron matched the book’s description of appearance even more than I did, I considered that I beat him in the personality department. He just seemed nervous and twitchy most of the time, whereas I was able to summon some pretty forceful Simeonisms in front of the cameras — all that practicing in the bedroom paid off. But it’s pretty sad when you’re out-charisma’ed by a math professor. The producers would feed us bits of information about how the episodes were being received, and I was gratified to hear that I was one of the major fan favorites as well.

The day came that we were all on a soundstage in Burbank, with bright lights, a screaming, all-female audience, and suntanned host. We were all on stools, and the two finalists, Aaron and me, were on stools separate from the rest. After the interviewing and the clips from the season, the host announced that the vote was going to begin.

“But first, a special surprise!”

And with a loud and energetic music cue, a plump middle-aged woman walked through the curtain at the back. She had a worried smile.

“The author of 20 Levels of Desire herself, E. P. Smith!”

And the audience went crazy. They gave her a standing ovation. She sat down in a swivel chair next to the host, and shuffled her feet into position under it. She had been on TV dozens of times by this point, so how could she still be so nervous? Her eyes kept darting around to all the Simeons.

“So Ellen, if I can call you that, can you tell us once again the story of how you created the global phenomenon that is 20 Levels of Desire?”

She had a strong Yorkshire accent. “Well Tyler, I guess you could call this my midlife crisis. Some people buy a sportscar, I wrote down all this rubbish...” The crowd laughed.

As the interview went on, I noticed something odd, which is that she kept looking away from Tyler to Aaron, who was sitting behind him. She was saying, “...so I set aside a special room in my house and I wrote for one hour a day while Pat took care of the baby...” And she trailed off. She stared down at her feet. There was a silence, which felt like an eternity on live TV. Then we all noticed that she was crying.

Suddenly she exclaimed, “I didn’t write 20 levels of Desire. It was Aaron Schlesinger!”

There was a collective gasp. We all turned to look at Aaron Schlesinger, who was squirming on his stool.

“He was working for Amazon, and he put something in the Kindle. And the book. It affects your mind! All I know is I couldn’t stop reading it, and when I was finished I wanted him, I wanted him so badly. He told me to pretend to be the author, and keep it a secret. He said if I didn’t we could never have sex again! But I never knew it would affect so many people!“ She looked out at the audience and cried, “You’ve all been brainwashed by 20 Levels of Desire!”

Pandemonium. Aaron made a break for it, but studio security grabbed him and hauled him away. The rest of us were rounded up and questioned separately, over a long and frightening night.

It was all true, as further investigation turned up. Aaron had figured out how to embed subliminal messages in the e-ink display of the Brilliant model of Kindle, that made female readers thoroughly engrossed in the book—giving it time to implant its messages—and sexually fixated on men who looked like him. He must have had a thing for moms, because it was programmed to only deliver its commands to women 35 and over. The Wall Street Journal even conducting an experiment where a women looked at the e-book before and after midnight on the eve of her 35th birthday. Before, she thought it was boring garbage. At 12:01, though, it took three interns to tear it out of her hands.

(I wondered about the under 35 women on the show, who slept around as enthusiastically as anyone, but then realized it must have been a type of mob psychology.)

The movie was cancelled. There was a massive recall of every Kindle Brilliant, enforced by law, although there were rumors that some women managed to hide theirs, and continued to enjoy it—even though they knew their fascination with Simeon was a lie. The scientists have never figured out how to unbrainwash a single woman who read that book. I guess they still haven’t reproduced Aaron’s technology, and I’m grateful for that. Every day I’m afraid I’ll see subliminal technology in the news, but for now at least it seems to be as far out of sight as Aaron Schlesinger, who is not even officially acknowledged to be in United States custody. He could be dead, or he could be in a black site in Romania.

It was nothing compared to what Aaron probably dealt with, but the next year or two were a rough period for me. The email solicitations dried up—though, it must be said, not entirely—and in their place came a huge volume of hate mail and blog eviscerations, including plenty of death threats. Three quarters of my Facebook friends defriended me, and all but my closest two real-life friends stopped getting in touch. I was luckier than most of the other Simeons in that I didn’t lose my job. But if I had had anything resembling a real academic career, it would have been killed stone dead.

I was so lonely that I did something I shouldn’t have done, which is to answer some of those remaining solicitations. Even though these women came to me, they hated me and they hated themselves (sometimes that made the sex hotter).

I also got plenty of dirty looks on the street. And worse. One night I was walking back from the bar, and a group of normal-looking middle-aged guys caught up with me. They knocked me to the ground and took turns kicking me in the ribs and stomach, not to mention crushing my Simeon glasses to powder. I guess they had wives who liked the book. I got myself to the emergency room, where the nurses treated me like I’d been beaten up while trying to perpetuate a burglary.

So finally I did the obvious thing and shaved off my beard and cut my hair. Even thought I’d worn them like that since I was 18, when I started that to defy my mom and dad. I got some hobbies, and rededicated myself to being a good dad. I don’t get those smoldering looks anymore, that still made me feel like George Clooney, but I also don’t get the look of shame and anger that would now inevitably follow—not to mention the beatings.

I guess there’s only one thing more to add, which is that I got married. Dr. Sarah Roberts. She started having lunch with me after the broadcast, when nobody else would. She saw my bad behavior on the TV show, but she also saw some of my heart, and got to know and like me better over those lunches. And I got to know her too, in a way that I hadn’t gotten to know any of those women pretending to be Ariadne. I found out that besides Math, she’s into weird things, like giant squid and Sumerian archeology. Before too long we started dating, real dating, not just BDSM-spiced fucking, and we fell in love. I wouldn’t have guessed she would be good with kids, but Rob loves her. She got some negative blowback from her friends, and from the blogosphere who still torment me, but as a mathematician she didn’t let the clearly irrational get her down.

But I still have a little Simeon in me, and she has a little Ariadne. Just recently she admitted that part of her motivation in having lunch with me had been to see if she could break her artificially-implanted fascination with Simeon Hunt. And, along the way, to enjoy the sexual buzz she got from the way I looked. That part took her a lot longer to admit to herself.

But she’s ok with it now. Behind closed doors, deep in the world of passion, I’ve discovered that I can throw in some sharp words, or hold her hands above her head, and it touches something deep in her. It’s our two year anniversary coming up, and after a lot of hemming and hawing she managed to get out that she wants me to grow out my beard this summer break. I can’t wait.