Author's Note: Part 2, the previous installment, was kind of an interlude. If there is a main plot, Part 3 is the real continuation. But Kim and Sarah just keep demanding to have major roles in this series, and I indulge them.
The mind control aspect has been kind of in the background except as a contextual establishing element for a few installments. That is no longer the case.
Where We Left Off: A new competitor to the Evil Corporationâ„¢ that Garrett Morley works for has arisen in the Los Angeles area. Their success seems to be entirely due to their rapidly rising new CTO, Gayle "Steel" Wheeler. Garrett engineers an opportunity to meet his rival at a party, using the lovely Sarah Perkins (a previous participant in Garrett's mind control protocol) as a distraction. At this party, to Garrett's surprise, the younger Wheeler seduces him and uses him for sex. Putting the pieces together later, Garrett determines that he is now facing another mind controller.
All characters are at least eighteen years of age. In fact, all are at least twenty-one years of age. And many are over 40.
PERKINS RESIDENCE, MALIBU - JULY 7, 10:45 AM PACIFIC TIME
After a restless night, Garrett spent the morning in his home office in the Perkins bungalow.
Garrett hadn't yet found his center after his behavior during the encounter at the party the previous night. But he had something to focus on now.
"Steel" Wheeler's rise to prominence was no accident, and not (well, not entirely) due to her business acumen. She was using mind control to aid her personal ambitions. Garrett himself could potentially have done that, but too many highly-placed people within ProTekOmega already knew about MYG. Gayle apparently had no such compunctions or limitations. She'd certainly come out of nowhere, fully formed.
There was little in Garrett's files on Wheeler from before her surprise appointment as CTO of OnlyConnect. Just clips from local media and a few of OnlyConnect's own surveillance photos and videos that Garrett's industrial espionage team had been able to exfiltrate.
He wasn't going to find Wheeler's secret from that.
As Garrett watched archival MSNBC and Bloomberg stories on Gayle's ascension to CTO and her early successes at moving OnlyConnect into new markets, he mused on his own experiences with her.
Whatever Wheeler was doing, it was different in principle from the MYG protocol. Her kung fu worked quicker - even instantaneously - and didn't seem to require the extensive preparation that MYG did. But it was more limited. Last night, Garrett had still completely been himself and - at least as far as he could remember - his thoughts had been his own. He'd just been unable to refuse anything Gayle asked of him.
Asked.
Had "Steel" Wheeler found a way to make people follow her commands - by the sound?
It was something to go on, at least.
So Garrett mentally threw everything else out and started again, reviewing the dossier from the beginning. This time looking for evidence that Gayle was controlling people with her voice.
After a while, a pattern started emerging. In the older clips, at the times that Gayle accomplished her most successful presentations or negotiations, she had the same black tote bag with her in the room. But in the newer videos, the tote was gone - and she had added an ornate necklace that never appeared even once before two months after her accession to CTO of OnlyConnect.
A necklace that Garrett had seen up close last night, right at the top of the fragrant cleavage between Gayle Wheeler's grapefruit titties.
"What are you?" Garrett mused, staring at a frozen image of the necklace as it sat on the pale skin at Gayle Wheeler's collarbone. "Are you really a magic microphone that makes people suggestible?" But, outlandish as it sounded, that hypothesis fit all the facts of the case, including what Garrett had personally experienced.
As a theory, it was tenuous, but his technical people had done more with less in the past.
Decisively, Garrett moved to his laptop, opened a Zoom session, and brought Angela Davies in. As Garrett explained what he needed, he and Angela began inviting - non-optionally - ProTekOmega's technical people into the conference bridge.
First they reached out to the local LA people, then as the discussion became more involved, they branched out to bring in Garrett's team from headquarters. Then, based on what they found after the brain trust achieved critical mass, Garrett and Ms. Davies started to wake people up worldwide.
As the California sun rose to its zenith, the team continued to work diligently on the problem.
They analyzed all the hard data they had on OnlyConnect and Gayle Wheeler. They scanned operational research papers in sonic dynamics. They accessed FOIA documents on US Government research into sonic weaponry. They used their knowledge of the MYG protocol to analyze potential suggestibility vectors that the OnlyConnect device might be taking advantage of.
Garrett himself understood less than half of the details, but he was confident that the boffins were taking it in stride.
By the time the session broke up to let the team get to work on countermeasures, there was agreement that they could have a prototype which would theoretically - like a flu shot - cover a majority of the expected attack vectors. By the next morning. A little black box that would protect listeners from Gayle Wheeler's magic voice.
If it worked. And if it did work, Garrett would be the one who would have to test it.
PERKINS RESIDENCE, MALIBU - JULY 7, 1:45 PM PACIFIC TIME
As the sunlit beach outside the Perkins house began to really heat up in the summer afternoon, Garrett was still at his desk, planning and re-planning how the next day would have to go. There were a lot of moving parts - the little black box had to work, and be in place, and Garrett himself would have to go into the lion's den. And improvise.
It would be so much easier if they could just run Gayle Wheeler through the MYG protocol. Generally, having that advantage in his back pocket made so much of his undercover job into "easy mode." But unlike Wheeler's necklace, which worked in real time, MYG took a lot of preparation.
Meanwhile - unnoticed by the preoccupied Garrett - slender brunette coed Kim Perkins, back from classes for the day, slipped silently into Garrett's home office, careful not to make a sound. She quietly turned and closed the door to just a cracked opening into the hallway.
Since Garrett's influence had come into Kim's life, and she had come under his ... mentoring, Kim's grades had significantly improved and she'd even been considered for the Dean's List.
Given Garrett's preference for his women to be classy - and since she no longer really cared what college boys thought of her - Kim had leaned firmly into the "sexy secretary" look. After all, she had a sophisticated, experienced older man ... mostly ... to herself at home, so why should Kim need to deal with immature boys her own age?!?
Kim now habitually attended her classes at Blaine College in expensive blouses that were carefully tailored by the experts at Handa Black to emphasize her firm, full young bustline without exposing (much) cleavage. Then her blouses would be layered over the waistline of a complementary-colored skirt whose hemline usually fell somewhere near the knee on Kim's slender legs. Depending on the weather, the skirt could be a wraparound to emphasize her hips, or, like today, a classic A-line.
Kim even had a pair of glasses to complete the look, even though the lenses were just plain, not prescription.
Now, just inside the partially-closed office door, Kim lifted the hem of her skirt and gracefully bent over to playfully remove her pearl-white panties. She was just about to leave the unneeded garment out in the hallway for the butler, Clark, to pick up.
But then Kim had a thought - she was going to need her panties in due course.
Garrett was a man who always liked to be in control of every situation. A woman teasing him into sex was going to inevitably bring out his dominant side in response. And when Garrett was channeling his inner conqueror and playing the alpha male role, his climax was always particularly bullish, and the result tended to be... overwhelming.