Chapter 35

I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in the morning to find Larry again snoring in his bed. He looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed until June, so I went to breakfast. The weather had improved markedly since yesterday, a beautiful, warm spring day, so I took a walk around campus which now looked a lot like the pictures you see on the student recruitment brochures, a few people reading on the lawn, happy people tossing Frisbees, and the buds blooming on the trees.

I felt refreshed, like I was ready to jump back into studies. I opened the door to the room and Larry was up, sitting on his bed, a certain look on his face, eyebrow raised.

“I came back from the party, which wasn’t that good, by the way, and went to open the door. I’d had a bit to drink so I wasn’t thinking straight and wondered why the doorknob felt fuzzy and why it wasn’t turning. It took me a moment to realize that it was a sock and not a bad case of black mold. Then it took me a little longer to try to figure out why there was a sock on the doorknob.

“But it finally came back to me, the secret Bat-signal we’d arranged. So I collapsed on the couch in the common room and when I woke up again the sock was gone. So. Details, please.”

“I ran into an old friend from high school.”

“That was an executive summary. There is no detail. Try again.”

“Nope. What goes on behind the socked door is private.”

“Carter, you owe me.”

“Still no.”

We went back and forth for a while longer and finally he stomped off to breakfast in a huff. I worked some more on a paper that was due and did my assigned reading, and the days fell back into their normal rhythm.

As the weather changed, it brightened everyone’s mood but also reminded us that exams weren’t that far off. I could see a few of my dorm mates start to buckle down in order to catch up for the past couple of months of partying. I happened to agree with Professor D and the other faculty that complex ideas can’t be learned or understood by cramming. They need to be assimilated over time. While the others often ragged me for being a tool, I felt like I was on top of the material we’d been given, or most of it anyway.

So I felt pretty good about prepping for exams when they finally did arrive, without that undercurrent of panic that, for example, Larry was feeling. I had time to think, about classes, about Karen, about my psi research (which I hadn’t done much with).

One afternoon, late, after my last class of the day, I was back in my dorm room, lying on the bed, mostly thinking about dinner and what I might be in the mood for. I can’t recall the chain of ideas, but it somehow led me to remember the states I often induced in my partners, and my offhand promise to myself to look into how to induce some of those same states in myself.

When I’d thought about this before, the process seemed insurmountable. I couldn’t figure out how to approach it. It was somehow easy to linkcast them to others, but I stumbled when I thought about how to turn them inward. I always gave up. It somehow seemed like trying to figure out how many reflections of yourself there were when you were standing between two facing mirrors. The reflections just went on into infinity, getting smaller and smaller.

There is something to be said for letting the mind chew on a problem in the background. The kind of non-linear reasoning that goes on there often leads to new ways to view a problem and find its solution. I’m just guessing here, but I think that’s what happened, since I hadn’t been able to find a way to make it work with my logical mind. This time, when I thought about it, it now seemed possible, as if my unconscious had found a hidden path.

I’ve alluded to being able to give myself a ‘stiffy trigger’, or being able to tweak certain senses like hearing. Those all involved finding the ‘link’ into my own mind, as I did so easily with others. It was harder doing it to myself because it required a conscious manipulation of the link, but being inside your own head made you lose your grip on the link.

The other thing I had found, by experimentation, was that when I manipulated my own control panel, tweaking my hearing for example, I lost contact with the outside world for some period. I wouldn’t be aware of someone talking to me, or knocking on the door, or a fire alarm going off. Being inside my head meant that I was cut off from the outside world while I remained inside. So I had to be careful where and when I did this, and I couldn’t do it for long.

This is hard to explain, because I don’t really have the right words for it. Maybe think of it like performing brain surgery on yourself. You are manipulating the very thing that allows you to control the manipulation. If you don’t do it right, well...

I could linkcast climax images like Avalanche and Roller Coaster to myself, because they were instructions to the mind on how to interpret something which was about to happen. Once I sent them to myself, I no longer had to do anything, no longer had to be ‘present’ inside my mind. I wrote them on the back of a metaphorical postcard and sent it to myself, then forgot it.

But maintaining a constant state, for example, Rowboat, which leaves the recipient with a sense of contentment, bliss, well, that seemed to require a continuing control, an active presence, which I didn’t know how to do. Therein lay the dilemma.

But I sensed that I might have found a different approach to linkcasting these images to myself. Whatever my unconscious mind had discovered, it didn’t provide me with any details. It just gave me the cryptic message, ‘You might want to try this.’ It didn’t even tell me what ‘this’ was. I presumed I’d recognize it when I got close to it.

It was too early for dinner, and Larry had a late class, I knew, so no time like the present. I got comfortable, and closed my eyes. If someone barged in, I could just say I was sleeping deeply and hadn’t heard them.

I found my own ‘link’ into my mind. For whatever odd reason, it was harder to sense than those of others, so it took some trial and error before I could walk it up into my own head. Once there, it looked not unlike everyone else’s epicenter. Each one was different, of course, reflecting the preferences and personality of its owner. Mine looked ... comfortable. Of course it did. It was my own mind, I was used to it. It should be familiar and comfortable.

Now that I was here, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t sense anything different about this place. Okay, I’ll try one of the things I’d done before, say, increase my hearing sensitivity. The last time I’d done this, I’d pushed it up by about ten percent, and found I was able to hear conversations in other parts of my house that I hadn’t been aware of. I had to remember where the ‘control panel’ for the senses was, but eventually found it.

I visualized hearing, the sounds around me in the dorm, and saw a portion of the panel glow amorphously. Didn’t look anything like an ear or sounds, but the mind developed these things for its own internal use and knew how they worked. I visualized it becoming more sensitive, and the blob -- for that’s what it looked most like -- seemed to expand by a small amount.

I walked back down the link into the real world. Eyes still closed, I listened. I’d gotten accustomed to the normal levels of noise in the dorm, and how it changed during the day. This was a time of day when many people still had classes and were not around, so it was normally fairly quiet at this time.

From the sonic soup I isolated certain sounds. I heard two guys arguing about one using the other’s deodorant constantly, and the other saying ‘It’s just fucking deodorant, Sam!’ The sound had a muffled quality, as if it were filtered through a closed door. I heard footsteps coming up the stairway, and a fire door opening. I heard someone’s radio playing a song I wasn’t particularly fond of.

I wouldn’t have heard these things in any detail with my ‘normal’ hearing, except maybe for the closing of the fire door. I was hearing beyond my normal sensitivity. If I left it like this, I wouldn’t be able to think. Every random sound would be poking at my consciousness, setting me on edge. So where was the clue my unconscious had left for me? Or was it just fucking with me?

I went back in my epicenter and set the hearing sensitivity back to something close to normal for me. I looked around to see if anything looked different. Nope. Now what? I don’t know. I thought about what I did when I sent these visual metaphors to my partners, and what was different from what I had just done.

In their cases, I visualized this sensation, or collection of sensations, usually by recalling its name which represented the collection of sensations, and linkcast it to them. I presumed it followed the same path, up the ‘link’ and into their epicenter, where it was processed by ... something.

What had I just done? I’d stepped into my epicenter, found the panel that controlled hearing acuity and caused it to increase. How was that different? Well, it wasn’t an image sent and processed, it was me controlling the sense specifically by manipulating the control panel. So, no ... what? No image, no visual metaphor?

I guess so. It was the only difference I could see. I hadn’t linkcast an image. I’d done something directly. What if I sent myself an image, a named visual metaphor? The only one I knew that worked, after a fashion, was Stiffy Trigger. That was problematic because it took a while to work.

Correction, it took a while to work if I had already cum recently. I don’t think I’d ever sent one to myself when I’d been celibate for some time. Normally the prospect of getting to stick my dick somewhere would be all the stimulus I’d need. If some hot girl batted her eyes at me I’d likely have a problem not getting an erection.