Disclaimers:
All persons mentioned are over 18 when any hanky-panky happens. All companies and names are changed to be nonsense, any correspondence between a real person/company and this thing is your imagination or the happenstance of the multiverses.
If you're not comfortable with the mind-control sub-genre, relax, it's a fantasy, there's nothing forced here, and I hope the ideas play out with some happy-fun aspects.
Gaming Pre-Life
So, I've always been into two things - games, and math. Well, three - starting in 6th grade, I've always been horny, too. Basically, I go through a lot of lube and pencils.
One kind of math I love is game theory - I tried playing a bunch of both board games and online games, but after a while the patterns in them just turned into pure-chance or abstract heuristics (if-this do-that) equation-driven prediction trees.
I started this exploration when I was little, playing games with my mom (dad split when I was 8). She and I would play board games, but that got boring and slow. Mom was into math, too, she'd majored in it in college but 'had to be a CPA because topology doesn't pay mortgages'.
That's kind of a family saying, 'topology doesn't pay mortgages': have fun, but unless you're doing something useful - to someone else - you'll go hungry.
Console and online games were fun for a while, but when I could see there were always going to be people with slightly faster connections, more money for in-game purchases, and faster reflexes than I could ever have, well, most of those got old.
The strategy games, those were fun. I liked those, especially if there was a little first-person-shooter stuff because the strategy was picking which enemy to attack first, with what weapon, in what location.
I got super-into three different games and played them a lot. They were fun, but some monsters were TOTALLY probabilistic to kill. There was no way to advance levels without paying bucks or getting super lucky.
Of course, once you leveled up, if you went down a level and then advanced again, it wiped out the record of how you got lucky, so I couldn't go back and see my stats effectively. The whole probability thing pissed me off.
Since it cost me time, I examined every part of the gameplay for clues on how to get better odds on shooting a Jork.
Freshman year in high school, I noticed something - After you shoot a Jork, the color changes for a certain amount of time. I wanted to see if that time delay was constant. I found, it wasn't!
Normally in games like this, changing a status is either timed, dependent on a factor you can't see, or random within a range. Random within a range would yield a probability distribution curve - flat or a bell curve - and that'd be definitive info. I liked _knowing_ things, usually a clue in one part of an online game meant they re-used the idea elsewhere.
So, it turned out that delay was bucketed (I wrote a tool to time it exactly). There were only several delays possible. That meant there was a SECRET there, more info I couldn't see. I decided that meant the delay depended on a TYPE of Jork (not ever indicated anywhere - they looked alike). Extrapolating by the delays and their four weapon types, there were 1024 kinds of Jorks.
Each type of a Jork required a different kill method, impossible to determine from the outside, but known the game developers, who (everyone knew) ran automated testing on their games to validate it worked before minor releases.
For instance, for one type of Jork, killing it took 12 times in its foot, then 7 torso shots, but if you shot its head it was forever unkillable and you were hosed.
I tracked all of this with a special double-feed both into my monitor and into another computer's video-in, so I could see after it was killed what killed it. I had to kill a shit-ton of Jorks to get any decent heuristics on what killed which one. Fuck that was hard - massive hours involved.
Sure, the game was fun, but raw data collection is Seriously Boring. I HAD to find a better way!
Setting up a software-driven mouse-driver was a kind of hack that was technically frowned on and prevented on-box, but when the mouse-driver was on another box and it re-fed-out mouse movements to a 'real' mouse (innards exposed, no movement needed), I could bypass that.
There weren't plans for these, but there were plans for how to hack specific brands of mouse to tweak various settings, and I had fun with a software oscilloscope, multimeter, and 'gadgets' to find what was really going on.
Suffice to say for this story, I figured out how to read subtle clues in both the game's color schemes and the delays of color change. Then, I scripted aim and clicks to automate my responses. I was probably doing better automated testing than their own testing department!
This let me advance rapidly through the game.
The trouble with this: Like any cheat, once you use it and become triumphant, you've defeated the point of the game and it gets, again, super-boring.
VR Headsets
Backing up a little, I was in Junior year of high school when VR headsets ("halders") came to our school. I ate it up. Plugging their VR gear into our school laptop, BOOM, we could memorize anything.
I'd read about it online (news articles), but as soon as it came in I started reading up as much as I could on how it worked, etc. And, I was super curious!
The idea, everyone knows now, I'll go over again: Association based learning can be super-fast and highly reliable for recall in wetware brains like ours. Thus, memorization became simple, and school classes that required it just got Super Easy.
Classes changed. Memorization became the base level, and we had to add skills about WHICH rule to use.
A great example is falling-object physics, where you're given about 4 equations and a set of facts, and you have to figure out which equation gets you the answer. Usually it's not one equation, it's two or three, combining and transforming until you get the answer.
Picking that right transformation is a skill, not a memorization.
Before, to memorize things, it was flashcards, lightweight look-guess tries many times a day over 2 weeks, cements it into your brainstem. For sequential info, mom taught me to create 'Mad Wackrad Sosad Toobad Armorclad' rhyme-schemes, supply the first word and the rest replays into your head.
So, the VR headsets could help us by giving us fast memorization as associations, which is what human brains do really well, regardless of overall intelligence level.
Really, intelligence is inventing metaphors - abstracting a group of like items/situations - and using those to guess based on possible metaphor associations.
The TRIPS equipment was called a WidgetCo ("Head-hand Active Learning Device for Emergent Realization", natch). WidgetCos are sort-of-VR sunglasses and wristbands. Once we put them on, we could play games that threw on-purpose memorization into gameplay and then use that stuff in increasingly complex games.
The games were fun!
I liked them a lot, because I didn't get bored, and it generally took a lot to keep me interested. Through most of my school, I was bored most of the time and kept one eye reading a novel or doing crosswords and the other on my classwork.
WidgetCo learning fed my fancy like mad! Epic win, from my perspective. I wanted one for home, too, but mom couldn't afford it, so I figured out a set of trades in my OTF Jork game, used a medium-sized hunk of in-game money (selling items I'd acquired by "cheating" gameplay I'd written code for) to trade for out-of-game cash, to get a WidgetCo for home.
The school district, helping both super-rich and handicapped kids, had a server connection for people who had home units. Connected in, I pushed through independent study and did the rest of my high school required classes before Christmas junior year.
The trouble was, I didn't want to graduate early. I was in band (french horn) and cross-country/track, and missing out on good times would have been seriously borked.
Instead, with mom's help, I signed up for online classes at our local college. Mom was an adjunct professor there, meaning she mostly was a CPA accountant full time and 3 nights a week she'd go over and teach a class in stats or some other math subject. Hell, I saw her work when she did video lectures, and I could have taught them (though I wasn't old enough).
Being adjunct faculty means free tuition, and it was a super-nice college, though it was associated with an evangelical church and most of the people that went there were way more conservative than Mom and I were. I didn't fault them on that, religion is one of those things you grow up with.
So, starting in spring Junior year, I spent mornings at Aardmore College, 7:30 am to noon, doing in-person stuff like English class discussions and physics lab. Then, it was back to Graymont High School, for health (grad requirement), band, and then my two gym classes. The state graduation requirement was 4 years of gym classes, a giant pain, but what the heck, I was definitely getting fit.
Of course, I followed the gym classes with cross-country running practice (which I loved), so you can definitely bet I was far, far, far more fit than any person needed to be.
It was a full day, but I was living large and loving the way my understanding of the world was changing.
Summer school after Junior year was just as fun, though my social life was crap. I'd been dating Julie Heckter since Sophomore year, she was great and we had fun hanging out, but she didn't want to have sex. Frankly, I wondered if she ever would want to, but we had fun otherwise so that was fine.
We did kiss and stuff, but no sexy-time makes Kevin a horny boy, and I probably _increased_ my lube use after we started dating.
Part of the problem was that she was super-guilty about any kind of interaction that wasn't sitting in a hard-backed chair dressed in +5 chrome armor. I was pretty sure she got those ideas from her mother - so I was kind of in a battle with her mom.
Some things about fundamentalist Christian churches I don't easily understand.
Our birthdays were both right about the start of the school year, and with that date, she had decided she was going to have sex regardless of her mother's opinions. So, we tried it, and tried it farther, until we got it mostly going.
That 'GOING' meant 'Doing It' about once a week, sometimes twice or three times but all on the same day. I wasn't stupid - I'd read and practically memorized two college textbooks on human sexuality. They both said, in many ways, make sure both people are getting orgasms.
