Prototype Ch. 02

I dragged myself out of bed sometime around three in the afternoon. Another four hours of sleep helped but I knew it wasn't going to be enough to make up for missing an entire night. I knew I'd have to be careful with my time for the rest of the day or I would be worthless tomorrow as well.

I could always call in sick again, I mused. I knew I couldn't get away with that for long before I'd get someone at Physical Facilities riding my ass about how floors don't clean themselves. A little fatigue is nothing a long shower and a redbull can't solve.

The shock of the not-quite-warm-yet water hitting my face brought everything back to me. At least it gave me time to think. Some of it was a bit hazy, but there was still enough there to make my mind titter with the implications.

Maggie kissed me. She had never- and I mean never- done that before. Not on the lips, and not like... that. And the way she was acting...

Then came the realization that while I had not had that firm chat with her about my name, it seemed like I wouldn't need to. She called me Benjamin, not Benji. And more than once.

I ran through it all again in my head, over and over. Aside from the one quick request she had previously all but ignored, she had stopped calling me Benji and starting calling me Benjamin. On top of that, she had been grateful for my help. She had seemed almost shy around me, for the first time in- well, ever. And the phrase she had used to justify it all- "a token of my appreciation" was way too close to the fragment I had used to be coincidence. As far as I could tell, there were two mutually-exclusive possibilities- neither of which made any rational sense.

Either she had seen the fragments, read them, and decided that I was right. And then acted on them. Yeah right. After years of calling me Benji and treating me with as much affection as she might show a girlfriend, a few phrases on a screen convinced her to change her mind and her behavior.

Or... The fragments she had seen and discarded as not part of her play had actually altered her mind and changed her behavior. Right. Because seeing text on a screen can automatically be integrated into one's subconscious and conscious persona without any cognitive dissonance or displacement.

Then I realized what I had just said to myself.

As I was drying off from my shower I went back over the last few days in my head and came to a few actionable conclusions. Firstly, using dictionary definitions as meaningless fragments was an insidious way to increase one's vocabulary to levels that laymen might consider annoying if not outright counterproductive to effective communication and should therefore be avoided.

Second, as insane as it might sound, the possibility that the fragments were capable of altering behavior was actually a simpler explanation than Maggie changing a decade's worth of behavior in the course of literally two hours. Allowing that such a thing was possible at all, of course.

And third, I needed more data before I could come to any serious conclusion. I couldn't just come out and ask Maggie what had changed her mind about it. Her answer would be biased either way. I had to find a way to test if the fragments could impact someone's behavior enough to get them to do something they wouldn't normally do- but in a way that I could back out of as just a joke if it turns out it didn't work.

As I was getting dressed I ruled out using myself as a guinea pig for this experiment. I'd be just as likely to suffer from bias as any other test subject- and incapable of objectively measuring changes. So it had to be someone else. Maggie was an obvious option. I even had opportunity with her once she found a digital copy of her play. I could split it up into separate training sessions, one for each act, with some excuse as to why to spread out the exposure and changes. But no- Maggie was too important to me to test something with such... imposing implications before I knew what I was doing.

What I needed was someone else. Someone who knew me well enough that I could talk them into sitting down for a training session. Someone who worked within a well enough established set of behavioral norms that I could use them as means of testing the strength of the fragments. And, on top of all of that, someone that I wouldn't mind pushing, if not outright breaking normal moral and ethical boundaries in what amounted to an attempt at potentially extreme behavioral modification.

In other words... I needed a victim I was willing to sacrifice if I fucked something up. My options were pretty limited in that regard. Thankfully, they weren't nonexistent. Remember when I mentioned I had developed a few bad habits over the years? Ones that had contributed to my lack of progress towards going back to college?

Rachel was one of them.

Allow me to explain. As I said before, Maggie had all but ruined me for anything resembling a serious relationship. And I'll admit that my own low self-esteem and self-confidence pretty much did the rest. We'll call it 50-50 and leave it at that. Yeah, I mentioned I can be an asshole- says the guy who's actively planning on toying with the mind of another human being without their consent.

So- when you can't have a real relationship, sometimes it's just easier to resort to fake ones. Rachel wasn't the first "escort" that I had developed a professional relationship with- she was just the most recent one. Now remember, I'm not an idiot. I didn't go find some random hooker on the street. I used an escort service that specialized in college aged women with respectable backgrounds. Granted, I never took them out to grand galas or state dinners- but money was money and they didn't seem to mind so much. Once I found one that I got along well with- and who was willing to... push the boundaries of what might otherwise be legal- I stuck with her for a while.

Inevitably they would eventually grow out of the business. Or move on. Or hell, there was the ever present threat of them graduating, getting real jobs, and moving away. Think of it like stripping to pay for college- just a bit more upscale. Problem was, upscale came with an increase in costs as well. The benefit was that it came with a considerable decrease in risk. Besides, I'd never talked Rachel into anything more than blowjob before. Like I said- I'm not stupid.

Well... not with that anyway. One could easily counter that it was a waste of money that could have been put too much better use in saving towards college. And they'd be right. I was in a rut- remember? Get off my back.

A phone call and a short conversation later, and I had a "date" for later that night. No guarantee it would be Rachel, of course, but they would do their best. Especially after I offered to pay extra for the special request. The same rules applied as always. I was paying for the company of an intelligent woman for an evening and she was to check in with the agency by midnight. Nothing more. Anything else was up to the individual girl in question and was not the business of the escort service in any way. I verbally consented, betting the call was being recorded. I live in a "single party" state when it comes to permission to record. They didn't have to tell me if they were doing it.

The rest of the evening I spent trying to maintain my caffeine enhanced mental state as I worked on a new fragment list. This one was named "ESCORT", with "Rachel" as the password. You know, it might sound easy to think of random fragments, but after a time I found coming up with a long enough list on my own starting to get daunting. After all, the real list had to have a series of statements that were inherently true and wouldn't likely have an impact on the user. "The sky is blue", and "2 + 2 = 4" type of stuff only goes so far. But after an hour or two I had something I thought would work and yet be innocent enough to have no real effect- if they were having any affect at all. I hadn't really shown that to be true just yet.

Then, as I sat down to get started on the naughty list I was reminded of the other password protected files already on the machine. Why encrypt and password protect the files that contained the fragments? The training station had come preloaded with random problem sets- just meaningless word problems and number sets. But those weren't protected at all. Was there something in those fragment sets the original developers wanted to hide? Maybe they had figured it out too and the protection was there to keep prying eyes from noticing something unethical, if not outright illegal. It would go a long way to explain why the lab that developed the prototype had stopped publishing so suddenly and then all but disappeared into private industry.

I bet getting a look at those lists would give me more insight into this machine, and what it can do, than all of the papers I memorized combined. But there wasn't anything I could do about it now. Spoze I could code some sort of brute force algorithm to crack the passwords. Not like it locks me out after three failed attempts or anything like that. But that was for later. Right now I needed to get a list ready for Rachel- or whomever it was that arrived in her place.

I decided I was going to propose that this little setup was a "project" I was trying to put together. If I could impress someone in the engineering department, or so I'd say to my intended victim, then maybe they would let me back in and allow me to finish my degree. With that little lie in mind I started adding things to the fragment list.

I typed in "Helping Benjamin with his project makes me feel good" to put her in the right mindset. "I will help Benjamin with his project whenever he asks me" would get her used to the idea of coming back for more training if things seemed to be working. "I like Benjamin, he's pretty hot" would increase her interest in me physically. "I'd gladly give Benjamin blowjobs for free" would be something obviously against her own interest. And finally "It's okay to give Benjamin my cell number" and "I'd be happy to meet Benjamin privately" would be clear breaks in her contract with the agency and something they are expressly forbidden to do. At least that's what I'd been told when I'd dared to ask for them with a previous girl. I considered adding "I want to have sex with Benjamin"- but decided against it. At least for now.

Taken together the suggestions could be something that would push her well beyond the boundaries of what she would normally do, but could also be explained away with a shrug and a "can't blame a guy for trying" if they otherwise did nothing. Worst case scenario she gets super pissed at me, maybe slaps me, and I get blacklisted from their service. Unlikely, given that I wouldn't have laid a finger on her at that point. The most probable outcome of failure would just be that I wouldn't get a blowjob and would have to find a new girl to waste my money on.

Only time would tell.

It seemed like forever for 8 o'clock to finally arrive. I spent the time doing a bit more cleaning- my apartment really was a mess. It would seem my newly motivated self-worth wasn't willing to live in quite the degree of squalor I had previously been willing to accept. I may not be a college student anymore, but I had still been living like one. It was time to change that.

Dinner, unfortunately, was the warmed up remains of the pizza from that morning. I know- sounds like a college student again. Seems there were a lot of things I would need to change going forward.

Finally- the doorbell rang, signaling the end of my temporal torment. I checked my clothes, and my breath- and answered it.

Rachel stood on the other side with her dark auburn hair cascading free down just past her shoulders and wearing a pair of shiny black stiletto heels along with a simple little red dress. The dress hung off of three thin straps from each shoulder and reached down just far enough past her thigh high pantyhose to be presentable but short enough to still give just the hint of the leggings beneath. It also did an exceptional job of highlighting her very ample breasts with her cleavage almost leaping out to draw my eyes like a magnet.

"Enjoying my best assets, as usual Benjamin?" She asked, ever proud of her "investments" as she called them. She had splurged on breast enhancement a couple years back and wasn't shy about admitting it. Even so I still wouldn't consider them massive. She was still a college student after all. But they were certainly more than a good handful of flesh and I had been dreaming of getting my hands on them for months. Of course, I couldn't see the coy smile she was wearing until I forced my eyes to look a little further north.

"Going to invite me in? Or just keep staring?" She asked.

"Sorry, yeah. Come on in Rachel. It's good to see you again." I blurted out, backing out of the door to let her in. She always showed up in something worthy of an uptown dance club- not that I ever took the time to take her to one. Something about a personal dress code. Or maybe she just liked to look hot when she was selling her time and her body to other men. Whatever it was, I greatly appreciated the effort even if I wasn't going to show her off on my arm.

"First things first," She said as she put her purse down on my kitchen island and turned around expectantly. "And they mentioned something about a bonus?"

I nodded, pulling a small wad of twenties from my pocket and handing it over to her. I kept an emergency supply on hand in my apartment for just such a situation. There wasn't always time to make it to an ATM, and services such as this didn't take plastic. "It's all there," I said. "The usual amount, along with an extra $60 for the special order."

She smiled as she tucked the wad of bills into her purse. As her hand withdrew from the sleek black-hole-of-holding it held her phone instead. A few moments later she'd checked in with the agency and had turned her attention back to me. "So... What'll it be tonight, Benjamin?" She asked, her voice suddenly almost every day with just the slight promise of something more if I played my cards right. And offered to pay her, of course. "Another rerun of that zombie show before a quick blow job and then call it a night?"

Oh, she knew me so well. "Tonight I have a little something different in mind," I said almost suggestively. I didn't have the amount of practice she did at this.

Her expression told me she was intrigued. "You know where I draw the line and you've never struck me as the type to push your luck. What did you have in mind?"

I smiled back at her, dropping all sexual pretense and letting my excitement over my "project" show on my face. "I'll show you- it's in my room." I said, motioning for her to follow me.

"Sure it is..." She slurred, although her reason for doubt took a second to register. I told you- I'm not that experienced at this.

"No. Seriously. It's nothing, uhm... Sexual. But I do need your help with something- for school." I told her, grasping at the story I had fabricated as I moved into the room.

"So let me get this straight," She said a few minutes later after I had explained everything and even modeled the helmet for her. "I wear that. And sit there. And play some sort of game for a half hour."

"And then I give you an extra $50 if you didn't enjoy it. I really just need some measurements from someone other than myself to show to the Professor."

She noticed I was staring at her chest again. Her breasts were truly magnificent- or at least what I'd seen of them. She usually took her dress off to give me head, but so far she'd always kept the underwear on. Still, those breasts, in her myriad of amazing lingerie- any red blooded male would water at the mouth. "So, you weren't hoping to get another look at these and maybe enjoy my soft, wet lips around your cock tonight?" She teased me.

I couldn't help but gulp in response to that, not to mention rise to the occasion in other ways as well. Which Rachel obviously noted. "Uhm... that part's optional. Ah- uhm... afterwards." I stammered.

"You're cute when you're flustered." She teased me, although I was fairly sure there wasn't anything behind it. "It's your time I suppose. You're sure this isn't going to shock me or something?" She asked as she sat in the chair in front of the monitor station.

"Nothing like that. It just reads your brainwaves and sends data back to the main station." I told her again, reaching out to help her place the wire-frame helmet over her otherwise gorgeous head of luscious hair.

As I took my own seat across from her I was dumbstruck for a moment. The look of such a beautiful, young woman with a mass of exposed wires streaming off of her head was- let's just say I wasn't sure how to react to it. I'd like to say Rachel could make anything look hot, but sometimes there's just not much you can do. Focus on her tits, Some animalistic part of me pushed forward- and I planned to do just that- once she was deep into her training.

"Now remember, these are going to be random problems. Just try and find the fragments and put them in order. After a few of them go by you're going to start getting other fragments that don't belong. Don't pay them any mind other than moving them to the side of the screen to remove them. Got it?"

"Seems simple enough." She said with a nod, but then looked at me with a squirrel of a smile on her face. "You know Benjamin- even while staying fully clothed I've done some fairly weird stuff for guys before. But I think this takes the cake."

She had shared a few of her stories with me before, and a few of them were honestly pretty weird. "Worse than that that guy with the chocolate sauce and peanut butter?"

Rachel plucked a few of the wires coming off of her head as if they were violin strings and raised an eyebrow. "I think it's at least as out there, yes. For different reasons."

I smiled. "Then I shall share the trophy with pride." I loaded up the machine, and entered the ESCORT file when prompted for the random fragments. "You may begin when ready." I told her as her screen lite up with the radar display and the beginnings of her first problem.

"Here goes nothing," She said, hitting enter on her end to start the process as more fragments began to appear on her screen. "What's the little dot thing mean?"

"Oh right," I said, as if I hadn't intentionally left that part out. "It tracks your progress. That's how you win the game. Get it to the center and keep it there. The longer it stays in the center the higher the score."

"This just seems weird. Even for you," She said a few minutes later. She seemed to be having a hard time getting her blip to center and the random fragments were going to start anytime now.

"Just relax," I said, trying to calm her. "You don't need to try so hard. Just get into the flow of it. The random fragments are going to start in a bit. Being able to just throw those away will help."

My words didn't seem to do much to calm her but thankfully the fragments did. Once they started appearing she moved quickly to slide them off to the side to discard them. Having somewhere to start, even just getting rid of what wasn't supposed to be there, seemed to ease her into it. Within another 10 minutes she had her blip fairly centered and was staring off at the screen. That same distant but focused expression was on her face that Maggie had worn earlier that morning.

Was it really just this morning? I could hardly believe it. Within the span of a couple of days this machine had become a fixture in my life- and possibly the key to my future as well. Depending on the results of this test tonight. And subsequent ones to determine the extent to which behavioral alteration was possible. But I knew I was getting ahead of myself. There was no way to know which direction this was going to take until after Rachel had finished her training.