The Spy
I entered the grandly decorated hall, with glittering chandeliers and wide, elegant staircases. Windows lovingly furnished with huge, soft, red velvet curtains. A series of balconies beyond the windows overlooked an immaculately tended garden, waiters were spread vigilantly across the space, bearing silver trays of appetisers and champagne, and Baroque music from an invisible sound system was filling the air amongst the chatter, giving it the just the right amount of high-society pomp.
This was not my vibe, at all.
My normal Friday nights involved stained pyjamas and a Stan account, or a pub crawl with my girlfriends,
not
lurking around a high society soirée with tasteless hors d'oeuvres and even more tasteless old men. 'Out of place' didn't even begin to describe it, but I fixed a plastic smile onto my face, and took a subtle breath to calm my nerves.
Focus, Lucy. Eyes on the prize.
So I mingled. Met some old faces I recognised, but few who recognised me. This event was largely for
them
, after all. These were the big wigs of Academic Psychology, the most important people you could hope to meet in your career--if you wanted to have a career, that is.
The academic conference part had happened earlier in the day, and this was more of a meet-and-greet for keen, wide-eyed students to meet their future potential mentors up close. I laughed with their jokes, I listened to their mini-lectures on their topics of interest, and of course I flattered their egos at every turn. At last, after floating among various groups of people for the better part of an hour, I spotted the mark across the room.
It was at the point when I realised I'd been thinking of him as "the mark" this whole time, that the reality of the situation hit me.
Holy shit
, I thought,
I'm a fucking spy!
I should clarify that I wasn't actually a spy, and what I was doing here wasn't on any government books. Or even
off
them. There were no governments involved. I was a social worker by day, and the trickiest thing I usually had to deal with was misdirected violent outbursts from disadvantaged youths who had trouble managing their situational and emotional wellbeing. The stakes here were much higher.
I
was
in fact invited to this party, no codenames or cover stories necessary. My Masters degree in Psychology was real, my connection to these people was... okay, it was distant, but it was legit. I'd sat in their classes, I'd had essays marked by them. Some of them I'd approached, begging on hands and knees to be my academic advisor for my Masters degree. One of them had even accepted. But none of that was why I was here.
The truth was, I had this friend called Stephanie, one of my classmates during my Bachelor's, who made an amazing discovery. She dragged me along to a college party, not the kind of thing I'd usually go to--at that point in my life, anyway--and she told me to pick out the hottest guy in the crowd and follow her lead. Now, don't get me wrong, I was
theoretically
open to the idea of a threesome, with the right people, and maybe Stephanie might even be the right people, but a random sports scholarship guy definitely wasn't. So I was pretty relieved when she said we were only pretending. I picked one out, and then she told me what we were
actually
doing.
I was skeptical.
But we approached him, and we offered him a chance to skip the party and take us--both of us--back to his place. It's so easy to make staying at a party sound lame and pathetic when you flutter your eyelashes in a pleading sort of way and make the girls bounce a bit.
He never stood a chance.
Once we were there, Stephanie had me test out her theory. With very little persuasion necessary on his part, I started making out with him right on his couch, while Stephanie sat behind him, stroking his hair and murmuring encouraging words in his ear.
Between kisses, I began some approximation of a hypnotic induction, telling him how sleepy he was getting, telling him how he should just relax and do what we told him, and so on. I was astonished when, before I knew it, he had slipped right into a trance with no resistance at all, and his mind was putty in my hands.
I knew how a hypnotic induction worked, or I thought I did, but I'd never seen it work so fast, and giving the hypnotist such a degree of control. It looked like Stephanie was right--kissing a man in just the right way left him completely distracted and suggestible, allowing us to slip words into his mind that he would interpret as commands, or as part of his own thoughts. Doing the full hypnosis thing was probably easiest in the long term, but it also worked if you just ordered him to do stuff. What guy would say no to a woman who was kissing him?
Stephanie was eager to tell me I'd basically confirmed two parts of the theory she'd been formulating: it worked when other women did the kissing, not just her, and the suggestions worked best on the man when given by the woman who had kissed him. Though I was sure Stephanie's words had had at least some effect, too.
Of course, once Stephanie showed me all this, I immediately understood the implications. If the power to hypnotise men with kisses wasn't unique to her, or me, then how far did it go? Did it work on all men, with all women? Were there other factors to consider, like prior attraction? Did hypno-kissing work on women too? When I pitched that last one to Stephanie, she took it like I was volunteering to find out, and to be fair, when I played it back in my head, it did sound like I was. After many,
many
experiments, we concluded that it did not in fact work on women. I suggested a follow-up study, and she promised me with a laugh that I'd be the first one she came to.
That was the problem, though, there could
be
no follow-up. The whole theory revolved around subverting men's free will, and though Stephanie would contest the point, arguably brainwashing them too. No ethics committee in the world would approve of a study like that... unless Stephanie could influence their decision-making. Get them to see things from her point of view. If
only
there were some way of persuading them--
Yeah, you get it.
Which is how we come back to tonight, where I was roleplaying a spy in the middle of an academic conference for psychologists. See, I somehow managed to score an invite, probably because I was a promising student who had just graduated, and one of the higher-ups in the faculty had taken a liking to me. Stephanie, who was still a very close friend all these years later, had noticed that one of the attendees was the Chair of the Department of Psychology's Board of Ethics, Dr. Grant Fulton. Fancy having your scientific study signed off by someone called
Grant
. Is that nominative determinism or what?
