Synergy
The true cause of my success was not my own mind control device. That was the catalyst, true, but if left to my own devices I probably would have only used it to get pussy and live comfortably. It was Laura’s contribution that truly makes this story so interesting, the combination of her brainchild and mine into something greater than the sum of their parts. Synergy.
The story begins several years ago, after my last horribly unsuccessful date. To be frank, I am not much of a ladies man. I am too short and too overweight and too plain to be attractive, and it certainly doesn’t help that I can name every captain of every Starship Enterprise without missing a beat (Archer, April, Pike, Kirk, Kirk again, Spock, Kirk again, Harriman, Garrett, Picard, Jellico temporarily, back to Picard, and Picard again). I have glasses that do not favor my face, curly hair that will forever hold only one look, i.e. curly, skin that has no setting between pale and burned, and a nose that looks like it has an extra bone in it. I am a mechanical engineer by profession and I look it. My one saving grace is that I don’t completely dress like a nerd when I’m not at work: the nice thing about GAP, Urban Outfitters, Express, and the like is that it is very hard to find a bow tie/pocket protector friendly ensemble even if you actively try).
So here is a two minute excerpt from that date at a restaurant a little outside my price range (oh, yes, as an added bonus, I’m pretty broke, too).
“Hi, I’m Paul. You must be Michelle.”
“Oh…Yes…You don’t look like your picture online.”
“Er, it’s an old picture. So, do you want to wait by the bar until they call our number?”
“Sure.” Ring. “Hold on, let me take this…” She makes sounds while her girlfriend calls with a fake emergency. “Okay, I’ll be right there. Paul, I’m sorry. That was my sister. My dad’s in the hospital. He went spearfishing and has a ten inch hook stuck in his left eye. I’ll call you.”
“You don’t have my number!”
“Bye!”
Yep, it was a two minute excerpt because that’s precisely how long the date lasted.
So finally, I sucked it up and decided that if I wanted to meet anyone, it would take the help of trained professionals, which is how I wound up meeting Laura.
Laura Schlesterscherrhaussen (as pretty as her name is long and unpronounceable) was the owner and manager of Loveseekers, a small dating service set up in the not-horrible part of Pasadena. It catered specifically to iconoclasts, people who had a great deal of trouble on the dating scene because (she will deny this, but it is the truth) something within them is horribly, irreparably broken. The trick is that Loveseekers uses computer data to match people based on their idiosyncrasies, quirk, and neuroses. Thusly, rich computer nerds wind up with hot gold diggers, ugly girls get guys with abandonment issues, and crazy chicks wind up with repressed peacemakers, and horny geeks get matched with girls who sleep around to get revenge on daddy.
The service worked okay for me, and I did wind up hooking up with two girls in a year (a 200% annual increase compared to my own wooing ability as a control), but it was not great. Part of the problem was the women: the pretty ones were damaged, and the sane ones were ugly. But more to the point, I was really taken with Laura herself.
She was taller than me, nearly six feet, with a perfectly proportioned hourglass figure so that she had curves in all the right places without an excess ounce of fat. Her hair and eyes were both auburn, by which I mean brown but somehow way more interesting, and though she had dark olive skin she also freckled in the summer. Her legs went all the way up, as the saying goes, lithe and smooth and supple and often, since she favored shorter skirts, showed some tone when she crossed them. Her breasts were just a little too large for her frame, and I always made it a point to sit at a slight angle because her blouse tended to pull apart at the bust, revealing the gorgeous curves of her cleavage.
So that was Laura, and I fell for her immediately. She knew it too, as women always do, and completely nullified any potential I might have by making her feel uncomfortable by plopping me directly into the friend zone.
Because after the third or fourth date from the service didn’t work out for me, I asked Laura out in person, and she wound up inviting me to go with some friends. Zero intimacy our first time out, and at the end of the night, I was completely immasculated in her eyes. Lonely and pathetic yutz that I was, I kept trying to be her friend, just to be near her. The damnable thing was, I was good as her friend. If I’d been gay, I probably would have wound up being her best friend. We talked, she confided, we had great conversations, but because I was attracted to her and she was not, we were stuck in this perpetual friendship.
There’s your backstory. That was my life, for a year and a half, pining over this gorgeous girl who I knew I’d never get with.
Laura Schlesterscherrhaussen is not the direct reason I wound up inventing my mind control device, but she is the one who got me to turn my eye back on the old, failed high school project. I’d since moved on to other things (since grad school I’d been trying to get the kinks out of my perpetual motion machine; it just kept getting faster and faster) but I wound up digging out the blueprints.
And I finally figured out how to make it work.
The reason it had failed back in high school, I finally realized, was not that there was anything wrong with the technology. It was that science did not know enough about the human brain at the time. The model currently in favor is that ideas that form in our brains do so in something of an ecosystem, so that ideas that are more favorable, more habitual, or more attractive become a full thought and the others are likewise weakened, just as an animal with a survival mutation gets food and strengthens while less advantaged members of the pack starve. In its own way this makes perfect sense, since the actions in even our brains are made of cells that follow the same evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest paradigm as animals on the macroscopic scale. My tech from high school kept trying to force an idea to overwrite consciousness, because at the time I was working all the psych texts I read showed the brain as working like a computer. Instead what I needed to do was insert an irresistible and self-perpetuating meme into the brain. I had been attempting to rewrite computer code when I really needed to inset a virus.
The tests on the mice and the rabbits and the two monkeys worked fine (the local pet shop loved me, although they did look at me suspiciously after a while), and when I finally experimented on my self I discovered that in creatures capable of complete language patterns the effects were even more pronounce. I suspect it’s because most of the way we humans “think,” as in, when we parse out a concept in our heads, is really subvocalization. Most of the things you think occur to you so rapidly that by the time you actually figure out what you’re thinking, the idea has long past. That is how you are able to speak without completely planning in advance what you are going to say, how you are able to react to stimulus before you consciously perceive it, and why we can’t remember much of anything before we learn to talk: we’ve trained our brains to think in language.
My device transmitted a subliminal pulse that input an idea into a brain with enough repetition and force that it overwhelmed the other ideas that tried to form around it. I found through trial and error on my own part that phrasing these commands so that they made contextual sense increased efficacy even further. So, as an extreme example, if I flashed this pulse at a person and told them to jump off a building (not that I would!), they would probably be able to resist, but if I suggested they felt lonely and suicidal and jumping off a building was an inevitability, they just might. Like I said, extreme example. I’m not going to try that anytime soon.
Far from murder, my plans inevitably turned to love. Laura. She liked me just fine, we got along well, but there was absolutely no attraction to me on her part. I can’t really blame her, either, even with the improvements I’d made to myself since the testing began.
The first command I used upon myself, once I knew it worked, moderated my eating and enforced an exercise routine, aided by a mental block on pain that let me work harder than I normally would and thus build better results (our brains tire before our bodies do, an evolutionary trait to make up poop out before we really hurt ourselves). I also used the suggestions to get over my phobia of sticking a finger in my eye so I could get contact lenses, and to get over my embarrassment of going to a hair stylist to do something. With all the exercise, even my complexion looked better, as I started losing weight and putting on muscle. And since my waist and chest started shifting sizes, I had to invest in some new clothes, so that my wardrobe looked not only decent but also modern and vaguely stylish.
While all this was going on, I perfected the device and disguised it, because I deemed a Men In Black red flasher a bit too obvious. Instead, I was able to get the projector lens into a men’s gold collar, powered by a few lithium batteries in the back and connected via Bluetooth to my blackberry so I could program commands. That took more testing, and though this was astoundingly cool I was under no particular deadline to finish, so the whole process took about eight months.
By about the time I had micronized my device to a portable size and deemed it ready for human tests, I looked better than I ever had in my life. I was still not exactly a winner, I would never be a Hollywood star, but I could probably at least walk into an audition and have them pass me over for my lack of acting talent rather than solely shunning me due to my appearance.
Rather than go right out and test this on Laura (stupid idea, because what if it failed?!) I went to a bar. In Los Angeles, one more crazy, possibly-drunk loser with a horrible pick-up is easy to pass off, and if I switched up bars I would have a significant cross-sample to completely guarantee my results.
I started off at a club near where I work, one of those trendy, exclusive clubs that you know is trendy and exclusive because there is a line of people like you, but a little bit sexier and dressed better, waiting in line for hours to get in.
My first attempt was a total failure. From my outfit to my appearance, even though a vast improvement, I was still obviously not cool enough to get in. A bouncer booted me from the line and insulted me for wasting the space of a guest who might have a chance.
So I left, came back the next day in the same outfit (can’t change too many variables in the experiments. Don’t worry, I had it same-day dry-cleaned) and used the device on the bouncer.
I settled on something simple. This guy is cool. I should let him in.
BTW, I’d found through my own experiments that ideas spoken in first person held more power. When we argue with ourselves, when your brain is saying “you should” instead of “I should,” you are more likely to discount the advice.
The lens within my collar flashed its subconscious symbol, and the bouncer nodded politely as I approached. He let me in, to the despaired moaning of many prettier people waiting behind me.
Inside, the bar was dark, lit with a filtered blue light, hot from people dancing and sweating, and loud! A heavy pulsing techno beat, averaging 70 beats per minute (a little faster than the human heart, and with such sonic power the heart tends to catch up, causing a flush of adrenaline and the perception of excitement) was almost palpable.
I changed the setting on the collar and approached the bartender. I should give this guy a free drink, the bartender found himself thinking, and sent me a light beer on the house. So far the device was working fine for little things. I wanted to see just how well it could function.
At no point did I worry that anyone would think something amiss. I’d found through personal experimentation that I could justify even the most peculiar of commands so long as it was not fundamentally horrifying to me. Even when we do something that we consciously recognize to be imprudent, we’ll create explanations for our behavior. When you get right down to it, the motivation for every action by every man, woman and child since the dawn of time really boils down to “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But I certainly was looking forward to seeing these people again later and wondering if that justification still held, and seeing how these people reacted to me later.
So, on to experimentation. I hung by the wall, beer in hand acting as protective camouflage, and scoped the scene. I finally found a really hot girl in her early twenties dancing on the ledge by the open tier second level of the bar, moving her hips in ways I’ve never seen anyone do outside of a strip club on TV.
I set in program #1 and went to work.
The flash of the device caught her eye as I approached. If all was working to plan, right now she would be thinking to herself, I am really horny. I could totally go for sex with some hot guy right now.
As I got closer I was able to make out more detail. She was about 5′4″ and easily a C cup. She had a pale yellow shirt that matched her flat blonde hair, sort of imitating the Kelly Clarkson/Britanny Spears/Jessica Simpson/every-other-hot-blonde-bimbo-singer-actress motif that was en vogue. She wore tight jeans cut too short (at the time, Dukes of Hazzard had just come out and Daisy Duke cutoffs were temporarily back), and a bunch of silver bracelets and necklaces.
I had my own jewelry, but rather than being designed to attract the eye with its sparkle, my collar’s sparkle made her eyes reinterpret what she saw. That guy looks really sexy. He is totally sexier than any other man I’ve ever seen. Or imagined, for that matter.
Her gyrations, if it was possible, somehow became even more exaggerated and erotic. She slinked on over to me and moved in a calculated attempt to brush my arm. This person embodies everything I have ever found irresistibly sexy in a man, she felt herself thinking, and more to the point, believing. All the dozens of contrary concepts that argued with her new interpretation, What a geek, He’s way below my level, I wonder if mace expires?, Who let the nerd in?, were all not only overruled but weakened as the new commands assumed dominance.
She hollered her name, Allison, and I hollered mine back, and asked if she’d like to dance. She agreed quickly. Touching him makes me feel so hot and sexy. Touching him makes me even hornier. Her dancing soon became very sexual. She moved in close so her pelvis and breasts kept rubbing against me suggestively. Her tight shirt was pulled down, exposing ever further expanses of her fleshy, glorious orbs.
I bet he’s got a huge cock.
She licked her lips.
I know he’s got a huge cock.
She kept glancing longingly down at my crotch.
I’m so horny for his huge cock in me.
By this point she was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the heat on the dance floor.
I’m so horny for his huge cock. I’ve got to get that huge cock in me. I can’t bear to let it get away. I’d do anything to get that monster cock.
I do not have a monster cock, by the way. It is perfectly average, just under six inches. But Allison believed it was a monster cock, that it was bigger than any penis she’d known before.
Before the song was over (although with techno music it can be hard to tell) she was rubbing my dick through my pants and looked ready to jump me right there. “Want to go back to my place?” I asked her.
I’m so horny that if I don’t fuck his brains out soon I’m going to explode!
“God, yes!” Allison answered.
We got back to my place, and she was already almost out of her shirt and heels. Her bra popped off with a snap of my fingers (I may not have much personal experience, but as a mechanical engineer I know the fundamentals of the subject better than any layman, no pun intended), freeing her round mounds and revealing perfect pink nipples, already erect from her arousal and the sensitive rubbing against the fabric of her clothes as she grinded her breasts against me on the drive home.
I pulled down her cutoffs and soaked panties in one smooth motion, and was about to push into her when she asked, “Do you have protection?”
Now, I have a 168 I.Q. I designed a mind control machine, for god’s sakes. You would think I would have the brains to go out and buy some condoms before my experiments. As it was, the only condom I had in the house expired months ago. I guess, deep down, I really did not expect the machine to work, at least not this well, had always expected to be rejected even with the device on.
I was about to give into despair, when I got an idea. I still wore the necklace around my neck. I dared not take it off, lest the power of the suggestions fade as well. They had not faded in me, but I did want the machine to work, even if I simultaneously doubted it really would (remember what I said about ideas competing?) and might have unconsciously continued in behaviors I’d knowingly programmed in out of my own volition rather than any lingering hypnotic command.
I grabbed my blackberry and typed in some commands.
“What are you doing?” Allison asked, but I shushed her as I typed and pressed the key to transmit.
Suddenly, Allison got an idea. She smiled wickedly. “You know, if we can’t do it for real, it’s a shame to let that big hard on go to waste.” She slid down my front until her head was in front of my erect member. She glanced up and got messages to reinforce her current behavior.
I love sucking dick, and this one looks even sexier than usual.
She blew lightly, making my tip quiver, before slipping her lips around my penis and starting to blow me. She sucked my engorged cock, giving me exactly what I wanted, because every time she glanced up (which was in itself, highly erotic) she got new input on what to do.
I can go deeper than that. I bet he’d like his balls licked. And of course, I bet his semen tastes like chocolate. I better swallow every last drop It will give me a huge orgasm, the best orgasm I’ve ever had, by swallowing his cum.
I exploded in her, and she grabbed my back tightly to keep my bucking pelvis close to her face so she could gulp down every drop. Then as soon as I finished her own his started to squirm and she cried out in surprise and pleasure as her actions triggered an earth-shaking orgasm of her own.
“Oh my god! That was amazing!” she exclaimed. Completely of her own volition, she said, “Can we do that again?!”
I reprogrammed the device to suggest how much she wanted to have sex with me.
If just sucking that amazing cock did that, real sex would blow my mind!
Her friskiness returned and she started drawing up to me again, rubbing her mound over my flaccid penis to return its stiff strength.
I’d better hurry out and get a whole box of condoms! If I don’t hurry back he might not fuck me! Allison thought to herself. “I want you,” she moaned. “Are you sure you don’t have any protection?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Fuck,” she groaned. She flopped over onto her back, stroking my chest like it actually had muscle. “Okay. Wait right there. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” She kissed me, kissed my penis, and then got dressed. She grabbed her purse and headed downstairs to a convenience store down the street.
As far as I was concerned, this constituted a complete success of the machine. If I could entice a girl that hot to find me so irresistible that she’d go out and buy the condoms to fuck me, anything more I could do to improve the device could only be considered fine-tuning.
Allison returned to my apartment quickly. She’d bought two boxes of condoms (in an appropriate size; apparently my distortion of her perception did not extend to the truly delusional) and a package of those pills to encourage virility. “Not because I doubt you, lover, but ‘cause I plan to push you beyond human endurance,” she explained, jumping upon me as soon as I opened the door and ravishing me. I told her to get undressed and gave her nice round bottom a slight smack (to prove how profoundly her mindset had been altered, she found this endearing rather than cause for a slap of her own).
We had sex several times that night, and all seemed wonderful until the next morning when the lithium batteries powering the collar died down.
I woke up with Allison trying to sneak out of my apartment, keenly embarrassed. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. I was perplexed. Clearly the suggestions of the device continued in my presence, or Allison would no doubt have left after heading out of my apartment last night. But now she found me as repulsive as she normally would.
“Look, last night was a mistake…” she began, confirming my suspicions as began the obligatory bailout speech preceding the Walk of Shame. I accepted her brush-off equitably, asking only that let me dig for something while she spoke.
By the time she’d finished her speech, I’d located a new set of batteries off my workbench. I replaced the batteries, programmed in a new set of instructions through my blackberry, and flashed the device at Allison.
She glanced back toward me appraisingly, slowing as she approached the door. Actually, in the light, he really is pretty hot after all. Really hot. Really sexy. And his huge cock got me so horny last night…It’s getting me hella horny right now! You know, it is Sunday, and I don’t have to be anywhere…Man, that cock looks yummy…
It took significantly less time than before for Allison to start riding me, and when, experimentally, I turned off the device for a while she continued to find me irresistibly attractive. It was only after she awoke from a post-coitus nap around four that afternoon (with the device still switched off) and again exhibited the same recalcitrance that I figured out what was going on.
The purpose of REM sleep, near as we can tell, is partially to defrag the brain from experiences of the day, encoding what it decides as relevant in long-term memory and discarding much of the rest; this review process and the connections between random associations account for much dreaming. My hypothesis was that sleep helped reset the brain and expunge it of the foreign input my device included. However, just as with any other habitual thought, repetition strengthened efficacy and decreased the amount of time it took to return to such thoughts.
I sent Allison on her way with no hard feelings (and her phone number, in case I figured out how to use this over the phone) and I set about to further tests.
A few more weekends out confirmed my hypotheses, at both the same club (neither the bartender nor bouncer bore any animosity, having rationalized their actions, but neither would they continue to cut me breaks until I used the device on them) and at others.
Finally I was ready to test it on Laura.
I knocked on her office at work. She was still working at Loveseekers, and smiled amiably as I entered. “Hi, Paul,” she said. It was unusual for me to bother her at the office, so she asked, “This personal or are you here on business?”
“A little of both,” I said. “Laura, would you like to go out tonight?”
Her beautiful face took a patient, serious expression. As if lecturing a naughty child, she said, “Now, Paul, I’ve told you before that isn’t an option. I like you a lot, as a friend, but I don’t think we should date.”
Her words hurt, but I had been expecting them and was able to put up a fake smile. “Not with me, silly. I found a guy who I think would be perfect for you.”
“Oh,” she said, taken by surprise.
Feigning nonchalance, I said, “Tell you what, Laura. I brought him along. Meet him. If you like him, go out with him, and if not, try hooking him up with one of the losers who signed up for your service.”
She made a moue. “You know, you’ve used these services more than once yourself,” she reminded me.
“Yes, but evidently, I’m a loser.” As I spoke, her mind was already on other things, based on the flash of my collar.
I’m kind of excited about this guy Paul set me up with. He knows me so well. I bet he’s just my type.
I left the room and waited for three seconds. Of course, there was no second guy. But I had been tinkering with the device, its strength and efficacy, and was prepared to use it to its full potential on Laura.
As I entered the room again, Laura did not see her friend Paul, the stunted, immasculine, non-threatening friend. Instead, she saw her ideal mate. Everything sexy she’d ever wanted, she saw in me.
I noticed her pupils enlarge, her breathing flutter, her cheeks flush as she perceived me, all the physiological responses that are quite visible when you’re not completely consumed with your own fear of rejection. She arched her back and drew a hand up to her chin, awestruck at the sight of me. She took a deep breath, causing her bosom to swell, and unconsciously her upraised fingers undid the top button, revealing even more of her perfect breasts.
Oh my god! He’s gorgeous! He’s perfect! He’s glorious! He’s an Adonis!
Oh wow. I’m getting horny just being around him.
He is so sexy. He’s so sexy and I’m so horny!
Laura whimpered in need as I approached. With each footstep, and with each flash from the lens cloaked in my neckband, she grew more aroused, more entranced, more horny for me.
I wonder if I could fuck him on this table right now without anyone outside hearing me. Probably not. A dick as big as his and I couldn’t keep from screaming.
I had not even spoken and already I knew from her body language that Laura was all but ready to give herself to me right then and there. “I’m Paul,” I introduced myself.
“Paul?” she asked, too distracted by her lust to really pay attention