"So wait," Ro interrupted, giving Cai a glance despite the sea of Italian traffic that seemed to obey neither the laws of the road nor those of consensus physics. "Hold on. You're saying it's not mind control?" He flicked his eyes forward again just in time to spot a tiny opening between two cars that he went for with the aggressiveness of a man who was used to driving on the streets of Rome, downshifting to give himself an extra burst of acceleration and sliding smoothly into the line of faster-moving cars heading out of town and toward the little villa they'd rented for the weekend.
Cai waited until Ro finished his maneuver to continue. "It may be in the colloquial sense," he explained, his voice becoming ever so slightly professorial as he warmed to his topic. "But classical conditioning isn't the same thing as operant conditioning, which is more along the lines of what we traditionally think of when we use the term, um... mind control." He tried with little success to conceal a slight blush of arousal; after a year of submitting to Ro's hypnotic talents on a regular basis, the phrase felt very different on his lips than it once had. He shifted position in the passenger seat, his thoughts already drifting ahead to the end of their drive and the very secluded country house they would share for the next few days.
"So what's the difference?" Ro asked, shifting into a higher gear as they got away from the heavy traffic around the airport and began to gain speed. "I mean, hypnosis, operant conditioning, classical conditioning, brainwashing... I know there are a few differences, but they're all just fancy ways to say mind control, aren't they? Pavlov was just the first person to discover it, that's all." Cai tried to keep from rolling his eyes in professional condescension. Despite Ro's intelligence and practical experience in the art of persuasion, it was clear that he was still one of those medical laypeople who was fully convinced that reading a single book on an airplane was enough to make him an expert on any topic. Cai would simply have to disabuse him of his confusion.
"There are, um, significant differences between all of those things," he answered, struggling not to sound didactic, "and some of them are... well, let's just say that there are some medically dubious terms in that batch. What Pavlov discovered was of limited practical application, at least in the field of... ahem... mind control, at least as, as we know it...." He felt his cheeks flush a bit hotter, his erection twitching slightly inside his tight briefs. It was going to be a long car ride if he couldn't keep his arousal contained. "It's mostly a, um, an interesting insight into the way the brain functions."
Ro's brow furrowed in bewilderment. "But, I mean, he made the dogs drool every time he rang a bell. That's not mind control to you?" Cai squirmed again, wishing their villa wasn't quite so far out in the countryside. He certainly needed a nice long break after four days of lecturing on immunosuppressant reactions, but every time Ro talked about controlling minds it only reminded him of just how good it would feel to stare into Ro's eyes and feel his will flowing into Cai's brain like a narcotic drug. He fiddled with the AC, uncomfortably aware of how stiflingly warm the car felt all of a sudden.
With a cool breeze blowing on his face, he felt a bit more able to proceed. "The, um, the dog s-salivated, yes," he murmured, trying to think of the word in purely biological terms instead of picturing his own drooling mouth staring vacantly at Ro's erect penis. "But, um, but that was a... it was a, um, a strictly limited response. It was something the dog already did anyway, what Pavlov termed a, um... an unconscious response?" Now it was Cai's turn to furrow his brow in confusion. "Excuse me, sorry, an unconditioned response. The dog didn't need to be trained to, um, to drool when it saw food. It did that instinctively."
Ro pressed the point again, though, his lawyer's instincts clearly unwilling to let it go. "But he still trained the dog to drool when he rang the bell, instead. He turned the bell into a trigger that would make his subject respond on his terms rather than the instinct biology gave it. He controlled its mind." Ro chuckled, taking one hand off the steering wheel to pat the older man's thigh disconcertingly close to his trapped, throbbing cock. "That sounds like mind control as far as I'm concerned."
