Chapter 1: All That Came Before

I said I’d try to continue the story, and may have enough energy to do so now, we’ll see. I don’t want to repeat everything that was in the first installment (see A Talent For Influence), but I’ll give you the précis so you’ll understand the terms that I use and what I’d discovered up to now. It’ll be much clearer if you read the previous installment first.

The name I use here is Tom Carter. Not my real name, of course, but I have to call me something. Most of the friends I grew up with took to calling me Carter, rather than Tom, I’m not sure why, but that’s what I usually answer to. I’m from Cleveland. And if you believe that then you need to get out in the real world more.

So almost four years on and Carter from Cleveland still hasn’t figured out exactly how he came by this talent, which appeared suddenly when I was sixteen. I’d been playing ice hockey with friends, early 1990s, on Parker’s Pond. I wound up sailing head first into a stump and onto a pile of discarded cans containing something viscous, the collision leaving me unconscious and bleeding from the head.

An ambulance took me to the hospital, where I spent a week in a coma, my temperature shooting sky-high, and when it went back to normal I finally woke up and I was able to ... do things.

Well, it took me a long time, several years, before I was able to understand and control these things, and I have the feeling that there’s stuff I haven’t yet figured out, so it’s a work in progress. And during this process I kept my talents a secret from everyone. A good deal of that desire for secrecy was a certain paranoia about making this gift known to the government or to corporate America. I was pretty sure I’d never see the light of day if my secret got out.

Basically, I can do two things. First, I found that I can stimulate responses in an individual as if I were physically manipulating one of their sensory organs -- sight, sound, smell, touch. For example, making the nose twitch as if it were tickled, causing the person to sneeze. Or making the skin so sensitive that a person would jump if you touched them, or implanting a very specific smell in their head.

When I was in the hospital, after I was awakened from my medically-induced coma, I started to feel almost normal again, but still weak and somehow ... disconnected from the world. Being a teenager, everything aroused me, speculation and fantasies about women every waking moment. As I was drifting off to sleep one night, I was half-aware of one of the night-shift nurses, still young with an astounding chest, sitting at her desk doing paperwork.

Not quite asleep yet, I fantasized about getting her in a corner and squeezing those remarkable tits and hearing her moan. So you can imagine my surprise when my eyes flew open at the sight of her sitting at her desk fondling her boobs and moaning quietly! As soon as I stopped imagining it, she caught herself, straightened her uniform, and returned to her paperwork, a little embarrassed. Fortunately, she was alone at the time, most of the patients asleep, so I don’t think anyone else saw her. My reaction was, was that coincidence or did I do that?

Some more careful experimentation convinced me that, yes, I did do that. I didn’t know how, but I was able to repeat the experiment, careful not to let others catch on.

Being young and horny when I first discovered this, I concentrated on these kinds of stimuli, like making a girl’s nipples aroused, or implanting the sensation of a finger or tongue on her clit, or a finger teasing her G-spot. The target would not perceive this, I discovered, as someone touching them but rather as if they had occurred naturally in the person’s consciousness and they had induced those feelings themselves.

Those were great fun to experiment with, though I made a lot of mistakes before I learned some control. I called these kinds of actions “channeling”, because they stimulated a quite specific sensation in a specific target. I was able to do this only on a single person at a time, not a group, not even to two people standing right next to each other. I had to focus on one of them at a time. I was very disappointed by this discovery, as I was entertaining some detailed fantasies about the girl’s volleyball team at the time.

I had guessed, by trial and error, that this involved a direct connection with the target’s mind, and that the target had to be present, so I didn’t seem to be able to do it, for example, to a person on the other side of the wall. I still haven’t determined the physical range of this ability.

Second, I found I was able to induce specific emotions -- with some limitations -- in a target. This seemed to be different from channeling because it did not deal with specific responses to stimuli, but rather that I was able to create feelings of trust, acceptance, admiration, calmness or pleasure, for example, in an individual -- and this is crucial -- who I could see and focus on. They had to be aware of me. I had to be in their focus. It also didn’t work on groups of people, just one individual at a time. I called this particular talent “linkcasting”, because it seemed to involve some kind of mental link between the two of us.