I dragged myself out of bed sometime around three in the afternoon. Another four hours of sleep helped but I knew it wasn't going to be enough to make up for missing an entire night. I knew I'd have to be careful with my time for the rest of the day or I would be worthless tomorrow as well.
I could always call in sick again,
I mused. I knew I couldn't get away with that for long before I'd get someone at Physical Facilities riding my ass about how floors don't clean themselves.
A little fatigue is nothing a long shower and a redbull can't solve.
The shock of the not-quite-warm-yet water hitting my face brought everything back to me. At least it gave me time to think. Some of it was a bit hazy, but there was still enough there to make my mind titter with the implications.
Maggie kissed me.
She had never- and I mean never- done that before. Not on the lips, and not like... that.
And the way she was acting...
Then came the realization that while I had not had that firm chat with her about my name, it seemed like I wouldn't need to.
She called me Benjamin, not Benji. And more than once.
I ran through it all again in my head, over and over. Aside from the one quick request she had previously all but ignored, she had stopped calling me
Benji
and starting calling me
Benjamin
. On top of that, she had been grateful for my help. She had seemed almost shy around me, for the first time in- well, ever. And the phrase she had used to justify it all- "a token of my appreciation" was way too close to the fragment I had used to be coincidence. As far as I could tell, there were two mutually-exclusive possibilities- neither of which made any rational sense.
Either she had seen the fragments, read them, and decided that I was right. And then acted on them.
Yeah right. After years of calling me Benji and treating me with as much affection as she might show a girlfriend, a few phrases on a screen convinced her to change her mind and her behavior.
Or... The fragments she had seen and discarded as not part of her play had actually altered her mind and changed her behavior.
Right. Because seeing text on a screen can automatically be integrated into one's subconscious and conscious persona without any cognitive dissonance or displacement.
Then I realized what I had just said to myself.
As I was drying off from my shower I went back over the last few days in my head and came to a few actionable conclusions. Firstly, using dictionary definitions as meaningless fragments was an insidious way to increase one's vocabulary to levels that laymen might consider annoying if not outright counterproductive to effective communication and should therefore be avoided.
Second, as insane as it might sound, the possibility that the fragments were capable of altering behavior was actually a simpler explanation than Maggie changing a decade's worth of behavior in the course of literally two hours. Allowing that such a thing was possible at all, of course.
And third, I needed more data before I could come to any serious conclusion. I couldn't just come out and ask Maggie what had changed her mind about it. Her answer would be biased either way. I had to find a way to test if the fragments could impact someone's behavior enough to get them to do something they wouldn't normally do- but in a way that I could back out of as just a joke if it turns out it didn't work.
As I was getting dressed I ruled out using myself as a guinea pig for this experiment. I'd be just as likely to suffer from bias as any other test subject- and incapable of objectively measuring changes. So it had to be someone else. Maggie was an obvious option. I even had opportunity with her once she found a digital copy of her play. I could split it up into separate training sessions, one for each act, with some excuse as to why to spread out the exposure and changes. But no- Maggie was too important to me to test something with such... imposing implications before I knew what I was doing.
What I needed was someone else. Someone who knew me well enough that I could talk them into sitting down for a training session. Someone who worked within a well enough established set of behavioral norms that I could use them as means of testing the strength of the fragments. And, on top of all of that, someone that I wouldn't mind pushing, if not outright breaking normal moral and ethical boundaries in what amounted to an attempt at potentially extreme behavioral modification.
In other words... I needed a victim I was willing to sacrifice if I fucked something up. My options were pretty limited in that regard. Thankfully, they weren't nonexistent. Remember when I mentioned I had developed a few bad habits over the years? Ones that had contributed to my lack of progress towards going back to college?