Out Of Sight Out Of Mind

"Okay, so let's try this again," Paul said, looking unaccountably pleased with himself. "We're just going to start from the beginning, take it one step at a time, and figure out where we've been going wrong. Step One. Do you remember what's under this cloth?"

Daphne sighed in frustration as Paul put his pen to paper, waiting for her response. "No," she said, trying to conceal her irritation, "I don't remember what's under the cloth because you still haven't shown it to me." She didn't want to take out her annoyance on him-he told her when he asked her to help out with his project that it would involve a lot of tedious, possibly embarrassing questions and long hours of sitting around, and she didn't want to waste his time by quitting before the testing session was done and invalidating his results.

But she really wished that he would have mentioned to her that ninety percent of the tedious questions were going to be the

exact same

tedious questions repeated over and over and goddamn over without ever even getting to any of the testing that he mentioned at the beginning. Daphne was so sick of the preliminaries that she was just about ready to grab the cloth and yank it right off of Paul's mystery device, if only to get the damn thing over with and stop all the pointless teasing.

"Okay," Paul wrote, scribbling furiously in shorthand. (At least, Daphne presumed it was shorthand. It looked like squiggles to her and seemed to mean something to him, so it was either shorthand or a private code.) "But you do know what you're here for today. Can you tell me?"

Daphne had already begun repeating her answer before he could even finish. "You're working on your final project for your biomedical engineering degree, and you need volunteers to test a non-invasive medical device." She wished that wasn't all she knew about the machine sitting on the table between them, but Paul had insisted that knowledge of the test could potentially prejudice the results. It was one of the reasons he'd been so secretive with all his friends the last nine months. Daphne admitted that part of the reason she volunteered was just to find out what the big mystery really was.

Which made it all the more frustrating that Paul still hadn't gotten around to revealing it to her. "Good, good," he said, jotting down some more notes. "And you do identify as female, yes?"

Daphne sighed, her frustration welling up just a little bit. "Paul, you've known me for five years now-"

Paul nodded, gesturing placatingly to the video camera in the corner. "I know, Daph. But I really need to get all these responses recorded, just for purposes of documentation. Even when I know the answers. Let's try again. Do you identify as female?"

Daphne nodded, once again reminding herself that she could be helping cure Alzheimer's or something. "Yes, I do identify as female. Um, cis female, if it matters." She knew Paul was studying a lot of neurology the last year, and she also knew he had pulled in Charlie and Sue for their own testing sessions at one point, so he might be looking for that kind of data. Maybe it was some sort of scanning device, something that could nail down some of the ways the human brain constructed gender? She knew Paul didn't shy away from controversial research, but man would the campus fundies get their knickers in a twist if he could give scientific proof that trans women and cis women had some sort of common brain structure that men didn't share.

Paul scribbled some more, his face narrowing in concentration. "Now, this next part is a bit subjective, and it's okay to give me your unvarnished opinion here and not worry about my feelings. I promise I won't be hurt." He paused just long enough to make it clear that the qualifications were over, and asked, "What is your opinion of my skill at biomedical engineering? Do you think, for example, that I would be capable of doing something nobody in the field would be capable of?"

Daphne tried not to let her irritation with the length of the session (four hours? Had it really been four honest-to-god hours of this and they still hadn't even really started?) change her answer. "I think you're very intelligent, Paul. I've told you that before. And I do think that you're going to be a pioneer in your field. I don't know that you're already doing things that nobody else could do, but I don't think it would surprise me if you said you did."

Paul made a few more notes. By this time, Daphne imagined his professors reading the transcribed version like it was the screenplay for 'Memento' or something. "Okay, good. Now, the last question. Would you believe me if I told you that the device under the sheet beamed a harmless radiation directly into the optic nerve that put women into a trance state, during which they were heavily susceptible to suggestions? One that they wouldn't remember at all afterward."

"No," she said firmly. "Because that's stupid." The first time he asked this question, Daphne had tried to be diplomatic. But it hadn't aged well, and by the...sixth repetition? Seventh? She was losing count. However many it was, she was done tip-toeing around Paul's feelings on the subject. If he wanted her to believe that this stupid thing worked, he should just quit fucking with the game of Twenty Questions and show it to her.

Oh, but of course 'she wouldn't remember it afterward'. Daphne sighed, fending off more uncharitable thoughts about the amount of time she was wasting here. It wasn't that she thought Paul actually believed that he'd invented some sort of mad scientist bullshit machine to switch a woman's brain off, or even that he was legitimately trying to make her believe it. He was probably using the question to calibrate some other social response, like her willingness to dissent or her ability to hold an opinion in the face of repeated questioning or something.

Still, knowing that he was literally testing her patience didn't make her feel any better about it. She just wanted this damn thing to be over with.

It didn't look like that was happening any time soon, though. Paul jotted down her response and looked back up at her, not even bothering to move his hand in the direction of the cloth. "And is there any evidence that you would accept to prove the existence of such a device? Something you couldn't rationalize away as anything other than direct action of yours while under the influence of a hypnotic effect?"

Daphne put her face into her hands, trying not to despair at the circular, mind-numbing repetition of the questions. "Paul, we've gone over this. I've already told you that there are plenty of things I can think of that would prove it, but you'd have to actually do them. Not just tell me that you zapped me with your brain-buster machine and I didn't notice because it worked so well."

Paul must have noticed that she was getting annoyed, but he actually seemed to become more smug with every little squiggle he added to his notes. "Okay, so let's discuss that. Daphne, can you take a look at the consent form on the table?"

Daphne looked down through her fingers at the piece of paper in front of her. It was pretty standard stuff, the usual indemnity from legal responsibility for anything they did in the course of the testing, affirming understanding that the testing may involve procedures performed without her direct awareness-she'd signed it pretty quick, once Paul told her that the device was non-invasive. "Yes, I see it," she said, already knowing where this was going.

"And could you just turn it over and read what's on the other side?" Paul said, his pen at the ready to record her response.

She decided to skip to the end of this particular argument. "You wrote that before I got in here," she said, flipping over the sheet of paper perfunctorily to reveal the words, 'I AM DEEPLY HYPNOTIZED' written in clumsy block letters the whole way down. "It doesn't even look like my handwriting."

Paul eyed the paper critically. "It does appear that your fine motor control slipped a little. That's definitely something I'll need to work on-neurologically, it shouldn't be distinguishable, but..." He caught sight of the look on her face, and broke off from taking his notes with a slightly sheepish expression. "Sorry, woolgathering there. So that doesn't convince you at all?"

Daphne thought hard about pounding her head against the desk as an excuse to get out of further conversation, but she instead looked up at Paul and said, "No. Oddly enough, you writing something on a piece of paper and telling me I wrote it while hypnotized is not particularly effective. Can we move on?" Preferably to the end, she added mentally.

Instead of wrapping things up, though, Paul asked her a new question. "Alright, let's keep going. Daphne, do you remember coming in here today? I mean, your trip out to my workshop, the drive, coming in here and sitting down? It's all clear in your mind?"

Daphne glared at him, hoping to make it clear through her facial expressions that she was beginning to come to the end of her tolerance for Paul's endless questioning. "Yes, I remember coming out here today. Why, did you have one of these built for my car, too?"

Paul chuckled. "That really wouldn't be safe," he said. "But no, that's not what I'm asking. I wanted to know if you remember wearing clothing for all that."

Daphne stared at him like he'd grown a second head. She had no idea where he was going with this now-he'd clearly veered off from his science experiment into 'I still regret all these years of not asking you out because I was afraid of rejection' territory. "Of course I remember wearing clothes," she said acidly. "Why would I come to your lab without wearing clothes? I had clothes on when I left the house, I had clothes on when I drove to your workshop, and I had clothes on when I sat down in this chair."

Paul nodded. "But you don't have clothes on now."

Daphne rolled her eyes, appealing to the heavens for strength. "Well, of course I don't have them on now!" she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "They're folded up right here on the table, Paul. Did you somehow not notice them?" Maybe that was the problem. Maybe his device did affect perception, but it only worked on guys and made them think they could hypnotize women into doing whatever it was they just did.

Paul scribbled furious notes as he spoke. "And you remember taking them off? Like, you can actually remember the sequence of events where I asked you to remove your clothes and you complied?"

"I-well, I..." Daphne paused, struggling to connect the sequence of events in her head. She remembered coming in and sitting down, making small talk with Paul and signing the consent form. She remembered setting the pen down, and...and that was when she must have done it. Right before he asked her that first time if she remembered what was under the cloth. She must have stood back up, taken her clothes off-it was probably the heat, Paul kept his workshop climate-controlled at 78 and she had on a sweater-and sat back down again. That was how it happened, she was sure of it.

She could actually picture it in her head now, a sequence of events that fit so perfectly with the obvious evidence so well that it must be a memory. "Of course I do," she said. "But you didn't 'ask' me to do it, I just...I did it because I was hot. I wasn't hypnotized or brainwashed or anything. I did exactly what I wanted to do. You're going to need to provide more proof than that, Paul."

Paul jotted down another quick series of indecipherable squiggles. "More proof," he muttered to himself. "Wow. Okay, Daph, can you just look down real quick for me? At, um, yourself? Tell me if you see anything unusual, or out of the ordinary. Anything you wouldn't connect with your unaltered behavior."

Daphne leaned back from the table a bit and glanced down. "No, nothing," she said, slightly perplexed by Paul's new line of questioning. "I mean, I've got a vibrator in, but that's not anything new or weird. Not unless your ideas about sex come from the 1700s."

Paul raised an eyebrow and wrote down some more notes, as if she was the one acting weird and he needed to get all of her behavior down on paper. The whole thing was beginning to remind Daphne of a Monty Python sketch. "And you remember inserting that vibrator, then? It's not a surprise to you?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Daphne said. This memory came to her even easier than the one before, as though her mind was getting used to reconstructing a plausible explanation for the slightly implausible events of the last few minutes. "You, um...you surprised me with it as a gift, after I took off my clothes, and I didn't want to seem rude. So I just sort of, you know, popped it in and turned it on." Now that Paul brought it to Daphne's attention, though, it was distinctly harder to ignore. Her pussy clenched around the toy involuntarily as a spasm of pleasure washed over her.

"I see," Paul said, writing rapidly. "And this seems like natural behavior to you? You don't want to take it out now, or put those clothes back on?"

Daphne looked down again, staring at the toy for a long moment as it buzzed away inside her. "Um, no," she said, her voice suddenly sounding more than a little distracted-God, she needed to cum soon. She began fondling her tits, her thighs squeezing together to send the vibrations shuddering through her cunt. "No, I'm good, thanks. You know me, Paul, I'm...unnnhh...I'm not shy about my body."

That didn't seem exactly true-Daphne felt like she could remember plenty of times where she was careful to wait until Paul left the room to discuss sex with their female friends, or where she wore something a little less revealing than usual because Paul was going to be there and she didn't want to send mixed signals to a guy with a crush on her. But those memories must be wrong, because she wasn't shy about displaying her body to Paul at all, especially not sexually. She knew that it was perfectly natural to feel that way. She wasn't brainwashed at all.

"F-fuck!" she gasped out, an orgasm suddenly hitting her like summer lightning. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her hips lifted clean off the chair at the intensity of the pleasure. She'd never cum this hard. She didn't know why she was cumming this hard now. "Oh fuck yes..."

She didn't know how long the climax lasted, but it definitely felt like a good long while before she was able to pry her eyes open again to see Paul staring at her. One of his hands was under the table, and Daphne caught herself wanting to duck her head under to see if he was stroking himself down there. Not that she'd blame him if he was-all this time biting his tongue had probably left him pretty primed, and here she was teasing him with a hot masturbation session while he was trying to work. She almost felt bad, but the vibrator was still buzzing on her clit too hard to feel bad about anything right now.

"S-so, yes," she stammered, trying to get her mind back on the test. She was hoping she could get it over and done with soon; she was getting desperately impatient to get down under the table and suck Paul's cock. "Nothing weird, nothing unusual, everything normal. Can I see this thing now, so we can get this over with once and for all?" She tried not to let her frustration show, but it was hard. She hoped.

Paul looked down at his notes, looking somewhat indecisive. "Honestly, at this point I'm really not sure what it would achieve. As near as I can tell, you're fully prepared to make any rationalization necessary to integrate the hypnotic suggestions into your existing beliefs. I'm really having trouble thinking of anything to do to you that isn't, um...well, I mean you did sign a consent form, but there's consent and there's consent, and I'm feeling like I may have allowed my temptation to push things a bit past the limits of ethical-"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Paul!" Daphne said, leaning forward in her chair and grabbing the cloth. "It's not like any of it really w..." Her voice trailed into silence as she pulled the sheet away. A few moments later, it fell from her nerveless fingers. Then all she could do was watch and listen for a time.

*****

"Okay, so let's try this again," Paul said, looking unaccountably pleased with himself. "We're just going to start from the beginning, take it one step at a time, and figure out where we've been going wrong. Step One. Do you remember what's under this cloth?"

Daphne sighed in frustration as Paul put his pen to paper, waiting for her response. "No, Master," she said, squirming in her chair as she rubbed her nipples lewdly in the hopes of getting Paul to drop this nonsense and fuck her. "I don't remember what's under the cloth because you still haven't shown it to me."

It was a good thing she was his sex slave, she thought. Anyone else would have just yanked that stupid cloth off by now.

THE END