Chapter 5 - Wherein a first test is conducted

Wherein a First Test Is Conducted.

I slowly started sending impulses through Jessica’s vagal nerve fibres and her area postrema. I knew both were involved in nausea and vomiting, but didn’t know if they were independent actors or would work synergistically. Slowly, slowly, I massaged them and coaxed them, and just as I saw Jessica open her eyes, I gave them a harder hit of activity.

It worked like a charm. She immediately ran to the toilet to puke her guts out.

No going to school today, sweetie, I thought to myself, a strong sense of triumph surging through me. Just this simple form of manipulation could give me powerful abilities to control other people.

I routed her aural activity to mine so that I could listen in on her conversation with her parents.

They had heard her rushing to the toilet to vomit, and her mother had come to check that she was ok. At this point, Jessica’s nausea had subsided because I had ceased stimulating her vagus nerve and area postrema. I was feeling a bit nauseous myself, though, because the visual input I was getting from her eyes was a mess of kaleidoscopic light. I lowered the opacity of that overlay, and instead tried to squeeze out better fidelity from the aural transmission. Her mother was fussing over her and checking her temperature with an in-ear thermometer, and it was an eerie sensation to hear the thermometer beep inside what felt like my own ear.

Since Jessica wasn’t running a fever, but puked again when I slammed her vagus nerve, her parents said she ought to stay home that day, and that she should call them if she started feeling worse. I giggled with excitement, I confess. Or maybe I laughed like a mad scientist. That’s probably a more accurate description, come to think of it. This was going to be fun.

When her parents had left the house, Jessica was already starting to feel better. In my visual representation of her avatar, I could see activity rising in orexin-dependent brain areas that process appetite and salience. She was getting hungry and was about to go to the kitchen for a snack, I predicted, and just a few minutes later, that’s exactly what she did. I was already reading her mind.

Or at least, I was reading her brain activity well enough to predict her behaviour minutes in advance. I couldn’t tell if she was going to have oatmeal or cornflakes for breakfast, just that she was feeling peckish.

I grabbed something to eat myself, and worked on getting the visual feed less kaleidoscopic while we both ate. She was watching TV in her kitchen and staying relatively still, so that made the job easier. Toward the end of her breakfast, I had managed to squeeze the feed much more tightly into focus, and the experience of looking through her eyes was more like looking through a pair of really strong glasses with entirely the wrong prescription. Good enough for my purposes right then.

While I did the dishes and Jessica went upstairs to her room to curl up in bed as any teenager would if they got to sleep in, I started to apply a signal to certain reward- and arousal centres in her limbic system. Slowly at first, but building up tension gradually, making her feel aroused and happy, but without particular cause. Then I started to slowly ramp up her testosterone production. This might cause you some confusion, but women actually have testosterone too, just as men have follicle-stimulating hormone. They just have less testosterone than men. When you ramp it up short-term, it makes women as horny as teenage boys.

I went to lie down on my couch and focused all my mind to the task of coaxing Jessica to become more and more sexually stimulated and aroused. In less than half an hour, I had her out of bed and into her bathtub. So sweet. I looked down through her eyes on her body as she undressed and slipped into the tub. The focus was improving, but it was still blurry. I could feel myself getting hard, almost as if in response to her arousal. This was the trippiest experience of my life, and I was only getting started.