by Morgan Wolfe
So it was that several days ago he’d found himself following Dr. Emma Starke one afternoon to a Starbucks near campus, where he took a seat two tables away. He calmed his mind and proceeded to dream himself into the personae of the gopher from Caddyshack. In this form he dream-burrowed below the restaurant—dig, dig, dig!—until he’d popped through the floor of the stony fortress that housed Emma Starke’s flinty intellect. He’d left the Swiss Army knife in a closet crammed with obsolete weaponry and that same night followed its beckoning light—not unlike a lighthouse beam—back into her brain, though he’d done it sitting in a lotus position on the floor of his studio apartment, miles from where she slept.
Rummaging through Starke’s mind that night, he’d seen the massed hostility to Popper and his work and by extension to any student he’d nurtured. He could see he couldn’t reverse her bias, not even from inside the woman’s brain. It was too entrenched, too close to her own professional identity. The best he could hope for was more time, time to think of a way around her.
So he’d “moved the furniture,” changed small things here and there that disposed her to treating him, if not more kindly, at least more fairly. It was the best he could do and, frankly, he didn’t expected it to work.
Starke scowled at his request for more time and he thought she was about to refuse. Then she abruptly changed expression, pulled inward by something. Her eyes went to her desk. When she looked at him again, she almost smiled. “All right, Woody. A month. Give it your best shot.”
Whaddaya know? It had worked! He said goodbye and quickly left, partly to hide his glee and partly so she wouldn’t have time to reconsider.
The sun was directly overhead when he stepped outside the neuroscience building. Noon, time for lunch. He was hungry too. He whistled as he went to get a hamburger. My, such a busy morning!
That night Woody read more in Popper’s book as he waited for one o’clock, when he assumed Candice would be asleep. The first part of the book had been theory and practice: the how-to of “mind infiltration,” a phrase of his own that he preferred to the tortured jargon of “transcranial exploration.” The second part discussed its implications, whatever term you used. They were unsettling at first, then alarming and in the end scary enough that he saw why Popper compared handing off his life’s work to Gandalf entrusting a little hobbit with “deh Vun Rink to Rule Dem.”
Once you’d learned to get in someone’s head, you could learn how to go about changing that mind. Everyone’s mind was susceptible to this, though how much varied greatly. People with strong wills and fully developed identities were very hard; rarely could they be changed much. Others were easier, particularly children above the age of nine, when their minds were sufficiently developed but their identities and values still fluid. Teenagers, themselves barely in control of their minds, were hard. Young adults were relatively easy.
“Mind control” which brought up the familiar corny image of the guy in a turban waving a pocket watch while a girl dozily goes, “Yes, Master,” was a misnomer. A mind couldn’t be controlled with a two-hour course in hypnosis and a snap of the fingers.
A better term, Woody thought, was “mind hacking.” Like computer hacking, some people were better at it than others but it was a skill that could be learned. Once inside a brain, however, an experienced hacker could alter his subject’s mental code, rearranging beliefs and attitudes, maybe lowering inhibitions or revising prejudices and opinions. According to Popper’s book, a subject could be made to fall in love, fall out of love, get an itch, worship false gods, become an exercise junkie, hiccup for hours, speed-learn a foreign language, master the cello, all sorts of brain voodoo.
Further, the book said an experienced hacker could also overcome a subject’s mental security system and leave a bot to be remotely triggered, make the subject—say a twenty-year-old busty blonde-haired coed—think his commands were her own. If he chose to do this, when he was done, said subject would have a zombie mind inside her real mind, ready to wake up and take over.
And the beauty part was she’d never know. That is, if he did it right.
Tempting as it was to repeat the morning’s experiment and control the thoughts and movements of luscious Candice Starke, he had more practical matters in mind. Emma Starke’s mind was too well-guarded to find anything useful. He hoped the mind of her daughter would provide some insight, some key to keep the woman from bouncing him out of the graduate program.
At 1:00, he assumed the lotus position, repeated his mantra for several minutes and then opened his Third Eye to look for his token, the Swiss Army knife. He saw two beacons. One would be Candice, the other her mother. One glowed rosy and warm, the other blue and chilly, not hard to guess who was who. Night travel between brains several miles apart took longer than a hop in a restaurant or anteroom, so it was twenty minutes before he was inside the head of Candice Starke, sound asleep in the rent house she shared with two other coeds.
Candice’s subconscious at night was less orderly, more fluid than in the day. It was still compartmented into rooms but the walls between the rooms were more like curtains, gauzy things that one could slip through. In one of them, he found a baby in a crib, looking up and gurgling. He heard something overhead and glancing upward, was startled to see a huge face above him, looking down and babbling in a tongue that sounded nothing like any language he’d ever heard. It was a woman’s face, young and pretty, hair sort of like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. Woody suddenly realized it was the face of Dr. Emma Starke when she was a young mother. She was watching infant Candice and speaking—what else?—baby talk.
Popper’s book had referred to the “multiple stories” that comprised most minds and Woody discovered Candice’s was no exception. It had many floors, all of them apparently below this one. He could descend in various ways. There was a staircase, an elevator and something that looked very much like a water slide. He didn’t trust the elevator or slide and went down by the staircase, which sometimes looked like that in a public school, other times like one in a home and still others like you might find in a fairy tale palace.
He thought at first that the stories would represent years of her life and that the deeper he went, the younger would be her thoughts and memories. That wasn’t the case though. It seemed that with each level, the items he found were attached to memories that were ever more guarded – maybe thoughts and feelings repressed for one reason or another.
An hour and a half later he arrived in a level that seemed mostly about her high school years. There was an incident where she was suspended for a day after being caught smoking in the girls restroom. That seemed unremarkable teenage behavior but Candice was apparently ashamed of it. He was watching her puff away in a stall when he heard crying in another room.
He stepped through the restroom wall and found himself in what looked like Emma Starke’s private study, a small room lined with books and a desk piled high with student papers. Candice was standing, her mother sitting. The girl’s face was red and teary. Emma looked angry, even furious. Apparently she’d gotten a phone call from one of Candice’s teachers. Woody stood in the room with them and listened.
“I asked you a question,” Emma said sternly. “Did you copy your history paper?”
The girl didn’t answer. “Well?” said Emma.
“Just a few little things,” said Candice.
Her mother held up the paper, which was marked with a red “F.” Various paragraphs were circled in red ink. “These few things?” she asked sarcastically. Candice nodded, which apparently was an unsatisfactory response, since Emma repeated the question.
“Yes,” admitted the miserable Candice. “Mama, I’ve never done it before. It’s Gail’s paper. She said I could.”
“And that makes it all right?” Emma said incredulously. “I can’t believe that I’ve raised someone who would not only plagiarize but think it was all right to plagiarize!” She got a black marker out of her desk and stood. “Sit down.”
“What are you going to do?” said Candice nervously.
“Sit down!” repeated Emma angrily. The girl sat. Emma brushed her blonde bangs away and drew a vertical line on her forehead. Candice instinctively jerked her head away. “Don’t move,” warned her mother in an icy voice. “Keep… your… head… still.” She drew a small half circle at the top of the vertical line, which Woody recognized as the letter “P.” After a minute she was done and stepped back to view her work. “That will do,” she said with satisfaction.
“What did you write?” Candice said anxiously.
“Go look in the mirror.” Emma followed her daughter into the bathroom. A word was written in neatly printed block letters on her forehead. “It’s backwards,” Candice said with a tremble in her voice. “I can’t read it.”
“It says “PLAGERIST.”
Candice gasped. “How long before I can wash it off?”
“You can remove it Sunday night.”
“But Mama, this is Friday! I have a soccer game tomorrow. And Ken and I are double-dating with Suzy and Steve.”
“Do whatever you want,” Emma said without sympathy. “but that stays on your head until Sunday night.” Candice ran out of the bathroom and up the stairs to her room, where she threw herself on her bed and wept.
Woody was appalled. Emma Starke was right to make Candice understand that plagiarism wasn’t an acceptable shortcut to a good grade, and maybe punishment of some kind was in order, but this… this was excessive, close to cruelty. By now he’d spent nearly two hours investigating Candice’s home life and her relationship with her mother. He had failed to find the girl’s father in any of her memories but whether he was dead or simply out of the picture, Emma had brought up the girl up by herself. She was strict but loving and on no other occasion had she shown such severity, including several times when Candice had behaved much worse. Woody wondered what it was about plagiarism that triggered such fury.
He decided to look into the matter on another trip into Emma’s brain. Not tonight though. It was nearly three a.m. and he was bone tired. Brain trekking was hard work, time to float back to his own brain. Before that though, he had to get back to the level he’d originally entered, at least a dozen flights above. It made him weary just to think about trudging up all those stairs.
He walked through several gauzy walls until he found the stairway. He stared at it and sighed, “I wish you were an escalator.” He began the long walk up and a moment later realized the stairway itself was moving, conveying him upward. It had turned into an escalator! Somehow Candice’s brain had interpreted his thought as her own.
Woody smiled with giddy glee as he effortlessly rose through the levels of Candice’s subconscious. All he’d done was utter a wish and her mind had complied as instantly and fully as a genie in a lamp. So long as he was here, what other wishes did he have?
Under the Table at the Waffle House
Candice work up early Wednesday morning with a tingling in her pussy. She’d been dreaming about Woody Goodman, of all people. Until yesterday, she’d never given him a thought, just another one of Mom’s grad students. She saw him sometimes in the neuroscience building, a typical shy science nerd. That had been fine with her. She wasn't into nerds.
But since yesterday, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. In the anteroom outside Mom’s office, she’d had a fantasy about him that had gotten wildly out of control, right in front of him! Fortunately, he was deep in something on his computer and hadn’t noticed. Lucky thing, but it made her red with embarrassment just to think about it.
Candice went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Tiff and Sandra weren’t up yet, so she wouldn’t have to rush for once. She worked up a thick lather and soaped her breasts. Hmmm, wish it was Woody’s hands on the girls. That would be— Stop it, Candi!
She toweled off and went back to her room. She inspected her closet. What to wear today? Something nice, something hot: boy bait. She chose a pleated red skirt and tight red tank top. Shoes? Something red maybe? You’ll look like a stoplight, Candi. Just go with the blue pumps.
She left the house and got in her car. She had two classes today, one at ten and another at three. In between, she’d lurk in the neuroscience building. There was a snack area where the nerds hung out. Maybe she’d run into Woody.
For some reason she took a different route to campus today. She passed a seedy pancake house, then pulled into a parking lot and turned around. She drove back to the restaurant—Waffles & More!—and parked. Inside, she took a table and waited for the waitress, a middle-aged woman who looked like her feet hurt.
Setting down a glass of water and a menu, the waitress smiled at Candice. “Know what you want, hon?”
Candice had come in because she thought she was hungry but now she didn’t even glance at the menu. For no reason at all, she said, “Does Woody Goodman come here?”
“Who?”
“Short guy, brown hair, glasses, about my age. Always on his computer.”
“Well, that could fit a lot of fellows that come in.”
Again for no reason, Candice said, “He likes strawberry waffles with whipped cream.” How on earth did she know that?
“Oh! Him. Sure, he’s in here almost every morning about this time. Always takes the same booth.”
“What booth would that be?”
“Over there in the corner. We’re never crowded but that’s the one he likes. I don’t think he’s real comfortable around people, if you know what I mean.”
Candice dug in her wallet and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. She glanced at the name patch on the waitress’s uniform: Maureen.
“I want to surprise him, Maureen. Don’t mention me when he comes in, all right?”
“Sure, honey. But you don’t have to pay me.”
Candice talked to her for another minute. The waitress grinned and laughed. She shook her head but took the money.
Woody walked into the pancake house. The place was dim and dreary. He wouldn’t keep here but for the waffles. They made great strawberry waffles here. Real strawberries, not jam. Fresh too. Closest thing to Mom’s he’d ever found.
His booth was empty like always. He sat down and opened his notebook.
“Hi, Woody.”
It was Candice’s voice, but he was alone.
“Down here.”
He glanced under the table. She was on her hands and knees, smiling coyly up at him, blonde hair falling in her face.
“Candice! What are you doing down there?”
“Waiting for you.”
“For me? Whatever for?”
“I wanted to apologize. I was rude to you yesterday. I feel bad about that.”
“Oh. Well, no problem. But how’d you know where to find me?”
“Little bird. Actually, I don’t know how I knew. I just did. Telepathy maybe. Do you believe in telepathy?”
“Not sure. Why don’t you come out from there and join me?”
“I kind of like it down here. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Well, it’s a little weird, but okay.”
“See, I had a dream last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I dreamed I was under a table, sort of like this. And you were sitting at the table, just like you are now.”
“That so?”
“Uh-huh. And then…”
“And then?”
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Well, don’t tell me then.”
“What I’d rather do is show you.”
“Show me what?”
“What I did in the dream.”
“Uh, all right.”
“You just go on and do what you do every morning when you come here. Eat your waffle. Check your email. Whatever. Don’t pay any attention to me.”
He arched his eyebrows. “You want me to act like you’re not here?”
“Yeah. Ignore me.”
He laughed. “That’s a little hard to do but I’ll try.”
> “Thank you, Woody. You’re so sweet.”
Woody turned his attention to his notebook screen. He glanced at the headlines on Yahoo News, then went to one of his favorite neurology blogs. Hmm, scientist in England has a patent on an oxytocin compound administered through a nasal spray. Claims the drug improves empathy in people who are socio—
He felt hands on his crotch, his zipper being pulled down.
Back to the blog. English guy did a lab trial of his drug on convicts, said it changed their behav—
Hands inside his pants, fumbling with his jockeys. Very weird, this. But sort of exciting too. He felt a stir between his legs.
Hands next to him, setting down water and menu. “Hi there, hon!”
“YAHH!” Woody jumped.
“You all right, hon?”
“Yeah, uh fine. Just startled me is all.”
“Must have been a million miles away.”
“Yeah, uh, guess I was. I’ll have the—”
Hands on his cock! Pulling it outside his pants.
“Have what, hon? The usual?”
“Yeah, the strawberry… you know.”
“Extra whipped cream?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure love that whipped cream, don’t you?”
“Oh yeah. Sure do. Jeees…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just… love that…”
“Cream?”
“Yeah.”
“How about coffee?”
Tongue! Tongue on his cock!
“Hon?”
“Huh?”
“You want coffee?”
“Yeah. Oh yeah!”
“Cream?”
“Huh?”
“Cream.”
“Not yet.”
“What?”
“I mean, no cream. God no.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in a jiffy. You be good now.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, hon.” Maureen walked away. This was the longest conversation he could remember having with her, oh God. She wasn’t usually so… Sweet Jesus! She must be in a good mood today, had a big smile. Fuck, that feels good. Candice was licking down the length of his cock now. Rock hard! He was rock hard. He’d never been this hard before. But then he’d never had Candice Starke giving him a blow job under the table in a public restaurant before. That probably had something to do with it.