Chapter three
"I think we need to talk," Gracie heard someone say.
She was at the local pub down the hill from the computer center, sitting at the bar, nursing her scotch and editing a physicist's awkward code. The physics was beyond her— he was trying to model relativistic frame dragging around a black hole— but a few simple tricks had the code running 12X faster. She was going over it carefully, making it bulletproof. She liked sending code that worked flawlessly the first time. It was a point of pride. It also had the added benefit of eliminating extended dialogue with the helpee. Win-win.
It was also a win that she was doing her work instead of having to attend this month's department meetup, which Dean Weiner had cancelled. No explanation given by Beth, his EA. Gracie wondered if the video she'd done on him could be the reason.
She finished an edit and turned to look at the speaker. She didn't quite recognize him, but maybe she'd seen him somewhere around campus. He didn't seem special. Average build, a bit older than the usual idiots that thought she'd be flattered by their attention. She took a sip from her drink. She could have just quickscoped him with an insult, but he didn't seem worth the effort. She picked her tablet back up and was about to continue her work, ignoring whoever he was, when he spoke again.
"Antonio."
That got her attention. She reassessed him. Still didn't seem special, definitely not a guy she would pick up, even supposing she'd been much less sober than she was now, which was not completely, on her second scotch. "One second, please." She got out her phone and swiped to the single text she'd received from an unknown number, with the single word, 'ANTONIO', the entire message. She showed it to him. "Why did you send me this? Is that your real name? Pathetically uncreative way to hit on a plain girl."
He just laughed in response. "Dahlia was so right."
He couldn't mean the only Dahlia she knew. So what was he doing here bottom feeding around her instead of one of the legitimately attractive women in the place? And she was in her standard work clothes, jeans, T, Chucks, even underwear— she wasn't hunting today. There was a group of three coeds not far away giggling and laughing in a booth, way better looking and better dressed. Fine, if he was a player then it had to be okay to play him back. "Can I show you something?" she said.
He shrugged.
Taking that as agreement, not that an objection was going to stop her, she swiped to 1.6, careful to select the unlettered version, brought up the video, and said, "I'd like you to take a look at this." She had no intention of opening her legs for him, but it would be poetic justice to leave him super horny for a kitty he was never going to pet.
He took a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. She held up the phone to him and played the video. He smiled. He continued smiling.
She checked the phone. Yes, the video was playing. No one smiled at the video. They were all slack-jawed, concentrating as if it were the map to the holy grail, which it was— if the holy grail was pink and wet and between her legs. She saw the video reflected in his glasses. It really was fascinating, even in reflection. She needed to study it, really focus on its . . .
"Whoa," he said, "steady."
"Who . . . did you . . ." she began, but couldn't recall the rest of the question she was going to ask, something about someone's name. He was holding her from falling off her stool with a hand on her shoulder, holding out her phone for her to take. She looked at the phone, not understanding how he had it. The women in the booth laughed; their feminine voices were like music, their pussies had to be so delicious. She looked over there. She saw that the girl at the end was showing a lot of thigh as she rocked with laughter. There had to be a sweet world under her skirt. Gracie thought it would be so cool to just go to her and offer to crawl between those thighs, and . . .
She shook her head. What was she thinking? She took the phone from him. She could see herself in his glasses. Her reflection in the lenses didn't look good. "Just— just a minute. I have to— to do some, something." She slid off her stool and wobbled as steadily as she could manage back to the ladies' room. She couldn't help glancing at the coed, whose legs looked so sweet, so smooth.
In a stall she sat and tried to regain her equilibrium. She understood what had happened. She'd accidentally shown the video to herself as a reflection in his glasses, which were actually sunglasses, the reflective type. She'd been very careful while composing the video and building the app to run it without looking at it, just checking the sequences through the metadata she had the app generate. But one glance in his lenses had been enough to catch her instead of him, and feeling what it had just done to her, she realized how potent it was. She was still seeing that young woman's thigh, and sliding her lips up it to— she shook herself. She wasn't into women. She liked men, she really did. Men's thought processes were so interesting, so logical, yet twisted. Women not so much. But damn, she was wet.
Those images she'd been inserting into men's minds were intoxicating. She didn't like what they were doing to her— she'd shot herself in the foot with her sex gun— but they were a learning experience. If she were into women she'd probably be loving how she felt and hitting on the girl in the booth right now. This little mishap helped her understand what she was doing to her "boys", who liked women and had mostly, except for Paul, been hitting on her when she videoed them, as she called it. No wonder they were so enthusiastic about getting their heads between her legs. She felt better now about what she'd been doing to them: not forcing them to do anything they weren't willing to do already, just amplifying their natural desires. Except for the first guy— Jayden? Jason?— but that had been almost accidental. Live and learn.
She'd been skeptical when she read in the series of papers the researchers' claim that the method wasn't hypnosis. She'd only skimmed the papers, which had been lazy of her. Sitting in the bathroom stall, seeing the images in her mind and even feeling them in some way, her skepticism vanished. It was deeper than simple hypnosis, way deeper. She knew the images well, of course. They were a curated selection of shots she'd captured off various porn sites, plus her own genitals. Heavily curated, because most pussy eating on those sites was girl on girl, or a brief interlude between fellatio and coitus in which some creepy guy bobbed his head between female legs and you couldn't see anything he was doing, even assuming he was really doing something to the woman. But she'd found some good ones, and she could even now imagine herself as a man enjoying doing it to a woman. That was sort of cool. She liked men.
But the app needed work. She logged several to-dos as she sat in the bathroom stall, letting the lesbian images fade. Foremost was to add a test in the facial recognition routine to check for her own face and halt if it found her. No more accidental self-hacks. And she needed to reread that research paper to find a way to get past visual impairments such as mirror sunglasses. And trap errors when the app recognized smiles and other anomalous expressions that couldn't be immediately dislodged from the target's face. These mods would be more than tweaks. It was time to do a major update and move to 2.0.
First, though, she had to get back and talk to this Antonio guy. She felt a twinge of panic. Those mirror glasses hadn't been an accident. Somehow he was onto her.
# # #
"So, Antonio, how do you know me?" she said to him when she returned to her seat at the bar. She was both relieved and a little scared to find him still there.
He sighed and shook his head slightly. "You are quite brilliant, Grace. Stellar in an environment of exceptional minds. But you have a lot to learn about people. And you should actually read the papers you were given to get up to speed on VICTOR."
Victor? Gracie didn't remember a guy named Victor. And what papers? Had someone named Victor written one of those boring neurology papers on the experiment . . . then she got it.
"Don't even remember me, do you?" He was almost laughing at her.
"You— wait. You were at the meetings, the visual-whatever . . .?"
"VICTOR. Visual Cortex Translational Operand Research. Yes. I'm the PI, in fact. And my name is not Antonio."
Gracie had to grip the bar to stay upright on the barstool. Her head swam as bad as when she'd self-videoed. The principal investigator of the experiment knew what she was doing to her boys. "They— they seem to like it," she blurted. It was the only defense she could think of. She looked again across the pub at the coeds. No, she no longer had the urge to do something with one of them. But her boys, most of them, liked it, even told her so, though she still had trouble believing it.
"I'm not sure who you mean by
they
, but Dean Weiner seems to be having a good time, I'll give you that."
"Dean—"
He took out his phone. For an instant Gracie had the crazy idea that he was going to do a video on
her
. But he put the phone to his ear. "Hi, Beautiful. Yes, she's here. We've been talking. As you predicted, it's coming at her a bit fast. Yes, my thought exactly." He handed the phone to her.
"Hello, Grace, how are you doing?" she heard in her ear.
"I'm— I'm— Dahlia?"