Meet Anita Olsen. The most popular girl in high school, she ruled as president of The Hot Babes Club - and as a bully who tormented Freddie Simpson for being a nerd. Freddie grew up to be a tech billionaire who invented a system of mind control, and life got very different for The Hottest Babe.
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Freddie and Anita were enjoying breakfast by the pool. For some reason, Anita was thinking about a friend who'd gone into rehab for alcoholism, then entered a 12-step program to aid in her recovery.
"It was fascinating," Anita said. "They talked about things that went way beyond a simple drinking problem. The premise seemed to be that everybody has character defects that damage their daily interactions with other people. A key goal to quit drinking is to conduct an honest moral inventory that identifies every character defect so you can remove them in an organized way."
"That doesn't sound like any fun at all," Freddie said.
"I got the feeling that my friend enjoyed learning more about herself," Anita said. "Everytime she found one character defect, she thought of two more. The list of defects on her moral inventory grew to be pretty long."
"Whatever works," Freddie said. "If it helps somebody quit drinking, it must be a good idea."
"I couldn't stop thinking about it," Anita said. "I eventually tried to make my own moral inventory. I ended up with a list of character defects that was pretty long. It would take a lot of work for me to conquer them."
Freddie didn't say anything, but he realized that he could erase any part of Anita's character that she wished. It would take no actual effort on her part.
"What did you put on your list?" Freddie said.
"Well, most of the defects told me that I have a lot of malice in my heart," Anita said. "All my life, I've done malicious acts just for fun. There's a wide range of things, but they mostly add up to an underlying malicious attitude toward other people. I wish I knew where it came from. There's nothing traumatic in my past that explains it. As far as I can tell, I was just born this way."
Freddie knew exactly what she was talking about. When they were teenagers, Anita bullied Freddie for purely malicious reasons. It was the one thing about her that baffled him. He wanted to know more.
"Anita, listen to me," Freddie said, using the phrase that always forced Anita to follow his instructions. "I want you to give me examples of malicious things you've done. Be absolutely honest."
"I think the reason I cheated on all my boyfriends is that I felt malice toward them," Anita said. "It didn't matter that they hadn't done anything bad to me. I just felt it would be fun to cheat. Like I was getting away with something."
"Anita, has it been difficult for you to be with me and not spend time with other men?"
"No. It's different with you. You are in control of so much of my life there's no room for malice in my heart," she said.
"Give me another example," Freddie asked.
"I like to make other women jealous," Anita said. "One reason I spend so much time dolling myself up is so other women will notice that I look better than them. I particularly like it when I flirt with their husbands, and the husbands flirt back. Women absolutely hate that, and I love making it happen. Sometimes I say or do things to make women think I'm having an affair with their husband. I get a thrill when I do that."
"Anita, why do you think you are this way?" Freddie asked.
"I don't know," she said. "All I can figure is that I have a sadistic streak." Freddie said nothing, but it certainly explained why Anita bullied him so relentlessly when they were teenagers.
"And I spent a lot of time thinking about the reasons I did have a lot of affairs with married men," Anita said. "For a while, I thought I was doing it because I enjoyed the danger of being caught. I had a feeling that married men make better lovers because they get excited knowing they are doing something forbidden. Something taboo. But I eventually realized I felt a fundamental malice toward these men and their families. I just didn't care if I did something that destroyed a family. I didn't care about wrecking the lives of the women and children involved. In some ways, I wanted that to happen. It's pure luck that we never got caught."
Wow. Freddie felt horrible hearing Anita say such terrible things. He'd known she was a deeply flawed person. That was the main reason he decided he was justified in kidnapping her; it would put an end to the swath of destruction she'd left behind for her whole life. Taking away her freedom stopped it, but the animosity was still there.
"I think this is why I've never had any friends," Anita said.
Freddie blinked. "Anita, you were the most popular girl at school. You were president of the Hot Babes Club. Those girls were all your friends."
"They weren't friends. They were toadies," Anita said. "One of the reasons I created the Hot Babes Club was to prove I was better than all those girls. I was prettier. I was more popular. I was president, and they were just members. I was prom queen, and they weren't. I was the homecoming queen, and they weren't. I had a rich, handsome boyfriend with a Corvette, and they didn't. Everything I did came down to an effort to rub their noses into the fact that they would never be as good as me."
It made Freddie sad. He wasn't satisfied with the fact that Anita could no longer act on her malicious nature. He wanted to remove it entirely.
"Anita, listen to me carefully. I'm going to tell you some things, and I want you to do exactly what I say.
"Anita, you have changed. The malice in your heart is gone. Your sadistic nature is gone. You no longer wish to hurt anybody for any reason. Where once you were malicious, now you are kind. Where once you were sadistic, you now are caring. Anita, from now on, you are a generous, considerate, empathic woman. Do you understand?"
"Of course I understand, Freddie," she said.
Then she fainted.
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When Anita woke, she was lying on the concrete beside the pool. A cushion from a pool chair was under her head. She had one of the worst headaches of her life. "Can you hear me, Anita?" Freddie asked.
"Yes. I hear you," she said.
"Thank God," Freddie said. "I was getting ready to call an ambulance. You were completely out of it for a long time."
"How long?"
"Maybe five minutes. Longer than the last time," he said. "You had a strong pulse and you were breathing fine, so I expected you to snap out of it a lot faster than you did."
"Freddie, can you help me get to bed?" she asked. "And can you get me some aspirin?"
It took every bit of Anita's energy to make the short walk to the bedroom. Freddie used pillows to elevate her feet. Her expression was slack and blank. Her eyes seemed to be unfocused. Her skin looked gray. Freddie considered ordering her to go to sleep, but he was reluctant to fool around with her mind any more that day. Clearly, she had a bad reaction when he removed the character defects she'd identified. Freddie didn't want to make any more changes until he understood what had happened.
Anita remained in bed for several hours. When she finally felt able to get up and move around, she looked weak and wan. She had no appetite when it was time for lunch. Anita spent some time sitting in a chair and staring off into space. The longer this went on, the more concerned Freddie got.
"I think I know what happened," Anita said finally.
It seemed to take all her energy to talk. "When you removed my capacity for being malicious and sadistic, you removed a very big part of me. I had no idea those character defects played such an overpowering role in my life, but now that they're gone, I feel like a completely different person. It's almost like an amputation. I'm having trouble finding a new equilibrium. It's . . . scary."
"If you want, we can try to restore those parts of your personality," Freddie said.
"No! God, no! I'm disgusted with myself. Now that those parts of me are gone, I can finally see how horrible I acted. I feel like I had a leg that was infected with gangrene. It's a shock losing the leg, but I don't want it back."
Freddie tried to disguise how concerned he was. The shock to Anita's system was serious, and he didn't know how she would recover. Worse, he hadn't known how serious her character defects were. Now that he knew, it changed his opinion of Anita - and not in a good way.
"I wish I could talk to a therapist about it, but there's no way to explain it," Anita said. "Can you imagine what would happen if I told some counselor that my boyfriend used some fancy new technology to remove a bunch of my character defects? They'd want to throw me into a locked psych ward."
Over the next few days Anita practiced mindfulness meditation, yoga, and focused contemplation of what had happened. Freddie gave her a lot of space until she asked to make love. It was a slow, gentle, loving kind of sex that let Anita know how much Freddie cared about her.
"I believe I know part of the reason I feel so strange," she finally said.
"And?" asked Freddie.
"Guilt. I feel guilty. I can't stop thinking about all the people I hurt. It was all so wrong. Freddie, I am so grateful to you for extracting the part of me that did all those awful things, but I did a lot of damage over the years.
"I've been reading what self-help authors say about this. Alcoholics who go through the 12-step program are instructed to make a complete list of the bad things they've done, then they are supposed to find ways to make amends to their victims. In most cases, that doesn't work for me, because getting in touch with those people after all these years would just make things worse. If I got in touch with the other girls in the Hot Babes Club, and said I used them to make myself feel better, they would just think I've lost my mind."
"I see your point," Freddie said.
"What I need is some way to make amends for all the horrible things I did," Anita said.
A week went by, and one day Freddie came home and found Anita wearing a slutty schoolgirl outfit. She had her hair done in pigtails and wore a short plaid skirt, saddle shoes, and a tight white blouse tied together with a knot that floated just below her cleavage.
