If you're not used to the trade show floors at tech conferences, you probably picture things like CES, with thousands of booths crowded with people. That's a huge show, and the trade floor is the focus. But smaller conferences usually have two or three dozen booths, and we're really all there for the panels. The trade show is where we go to kill time between panels, and by the end of day one, we've seen it all. By the end of the second day, it's a graveyard, and attendees are only there to grab coffee and duck back out.
It was the end of the second day, and I knew I'd seen everything, but was walking down the last aisle, checking my phone and killing time. The final booth had been deserted the entire time -- another secret of trade shows is that some small vendors don't show. But now there was someone sitting behind the curtained table at the front, an attractive redhead in her late 30s or so. I assumed at first that she was an attendee who just decided to take advantage of the chairs and table to get some work done; I'd had the same thought, myself.
But as I got near, she looked up at me and smiled.
"Hi, I'm Janine!"
"Hi, Janine," I replied.
"Are you interested in a free hypno stress reduction?"
"I'm sorry, a what?" That sounded like new-age gobbledygook, and while that wasn't totally unusual in tech -- see magnetic implants or any other stupid trend -- it still took me off guard.
"Hypno stress reduction. We use hypnosis to reduce stress. You know how a good massage helps reduce your physical stress? We use technology-enhanced hypnosis to deal with emotional and mental stress."
I asked, "So you mean the stuff like stage magicians getting people to act like chickens?"
She smiled again, this time the patient smile of someone who'd heard similar cracks a thousand times, and I felt bad. Also, she had a really attractive smile.
"Sort of, but not quite. See, there are two kinds of hypnosis. There's the short-term kind you're talking about. It's powerful, but usually doesn't last very long. You can get someone to do almost anything with it right in the aftermath, but you can't really change someone's personality."
"The other kind," Janine continued, "is the deeper kind, involving using the senses of sight, sound, and even smell to create suggestions and change behavior. That's the stuff people use to do things like quit smoking."
"So how does your product work," I asked, half out of curiosity and half because I just wanted to keep hearing her talk.
"It uses a combination of both styles, aided by some proprietary technology we're developing. Are you interested in trying it out?"
"I'm not so sure," I said.
Janine stood up and came around the edge of her booth. She was tall -- maybe 5'10", wearing an attractive blouse that was modest (but couldn't hide how nice her breasts were), and a brown leather skirt that was business length, but which I didn't doubt would make her backside look amazing. This was topped with some calf-high boots.
"It'll only take a few minutes to get you started," she said. And if I'd focused more on those final words, instead of the "a few minutes" part, I might have walked away. But I was both curious and fully distracted by her charms, and allowed her to take me behind the table.
She sat me in the chair she'd been in, then pulled out what looked like a VR headset from underneath the table. The cable attached to it implied that it was hooked up to a computer beneath the table.
"I'll just need you to wear this for two minutes," Janine said, her fingers brushing my head as she gently placed the goggles on me. I got a whiff of her subtle perfume as she leaned in close.
