When she bent over to clean one of the café tables I took my chance and fired. My umbrella twitched in my hand as a concealed spring-loaded air pistol shot the little dart across the café. My heart was in my mouth as I watched it whip across the room and bury itself into her perfect little bottom.
Anne gave a yelp and stood up looking furiously around and rubbing her behind. Her eyes fell on a young man at the next table sitting with his girlfriend.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?" she yelled, her pretty face flushed with anger.
"What are you talking about?" the man looked confused.
"How dare you touch me!"
"I didn't touch you!" replied the man now clearly flustered and annoyed.
"You pinched my ass you pervert. That really hurt!"
All eyes were on Anne and the man that she thought had assaulted her. No one was looking at me. They hadn't seen me fire the dart.
As designed, when Anne rubbed her bottom, she had unknowingly snapped off the tail of the tiny dart and I watched it roll under a nearby chair. The head of the dart was buried in her ass. Already the anesthetic gel it was coated in would be easing the pain.
"I don't have to put up with this! Get the hell out of here!" shouted Anne.
"He didn't do anything!" said the man's girlfriend, but she looked a little unsure.
"This is the twenty-first century mate! You can't just touch up young women!" I joined in.
The man was a lot bigger than I was. He glared at me with pure hatred and I was very glad that we had a table between us.
Anne and the other waitress, Becky ushered the man and his girlfriend out of the café. They left, the man still protesting his innocence and his girlfriend looking angry and embarrassed.
"You try and be friendly to people and they think they can take liberties!" said Anne as she watched them go.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
"I think so, I don't know what that freak did, but it really hurt!" she complained rubbing her bottom.
"Some people!" I agreed.
While everyone was still looking at Anne, I pretended to drop something and quickly retrieved the tail of the dart from under the chair.
The disturbance now over, gradually the customers returned to their coffees. I sat back down and surreptitiously opened the special app on my smartwatch. The watch sent its signal and the 'love bug' pinged its response back. The love bug was active, all systems working.
I gave Anne a friendly smile as I left, but she was too busy talking to Becky and didn't notice. Most women look straight past a short, balding, middle-aged man, so I was used to it.
I couldn't believe this had gone so well. I couldn't believe that I'd dared to go through with it!
---
My name is Graham. I'd always hated the name, but it suited me. A boring little name for a boring, little, non-entity of a man.
I was employed just down the road at the university campus. I had a degree in Theoretical physics, but my career had never really taken off. At the age of fifty I was reduced to administering medical experiments for other people's inventions.
The experiment that I had recently been working on was a treatment for bipolar disorder.
There are many chemicals in the brain the effect mood. Such as Serotonin, Dopamine, Endorphins and Oxytocin. Sufferers of bipolar disorder swing between manic and depressed states often caused by too much or too little of these chemicals in the brain.
The new treatment was very simple in theory. A tiny implant was inserted into the human body. This was designed to store these chemicals when there was too much of them. Then it could release them when there was too little. As a result, it should keep the bipolar patient's mood at an even level.
The implant used brand new materials to filter the chemicals from the bloodstream. It was only about the size of a grain of rice but could swell to about the size of a pea as it filled its reservoir. This was all the storage it needed as the amounts of these chemicals in the blood are tiny. It could run for years powered only by the small amount of electrical energy naturally present in the human body.
The early prototypes of the implant needed to be remotely controlled. Communication was made with the implant using just a basic blue-tooth signal. The operator could trigger the device to store or release happy chemicals.
Levels -1 to -5 would withdraw the chemicals, 0 was a neutral setting and +1 to +5 would release them. The only real flaw in the system was that the implant had to first collect a reservoir of the chemicals before they could be released.
As I studied the test subjects, I couldn't help wondering what effect this would have on someone who didn't have bipolar disorder.
No one else in the team seemed to have any ethical worries about the new implants. They were too engrossed in the science to think about ethics. However, I realized that if I could control someone's implant, then I could make them feel happy or sad on command.
This could be used as an amazingly powerful form of behavioral conditioning, especially if they didn't know that they had an implant inside them. Just imagine; I could make someone deliriously happy every time that they were close to me and very sad if I went away. It might not happen at once; but they would unconsciously learn that they needed to be near to me. They would want to be my friend or maybe even more...
My mind immediately turned to thinking about Anne.
Anne was a student studying at the university and had been working part time at my regular coffee shop for a few months. I was immediately struck with how lovely she was. She was incredibly beautiful, but she wasn't just pretty; she was funny and clever as well. Some beautiful women can be stuck up and vain, but she was a genuinely nice, friendly person. She really was my dream woman.
I watched men hit on her all the time, but even when she rebuffed them, it was in a firm but kindly way. So that they got the message, but they didn't leave feeling humiliated.
I had developed quite a crush on her, but I had never even thought of asking her out, she was so far out of my league that it was depressing. What would a girl like that want with a middle-aged man?
I'd never married and, apart from a few very brief relationships, spent most of my life single and alone. The implant gave me the possibility of being with the most perfect eighteen-year-old woman I had ever met.
Still, it was just a dream. I would never dare do something like that, something so unethical.
---
But then one day I found that the safe where the prototype implants were stored, had been left with its door wide open. There should have been six implants inside, but three had gone. They had been stolen! In a moment of madness, I grabbed the three remaining implants and quickly stashed them inside my desk draw before I raised the alarm.
It turned out through examining key card data, that a Korean post grad working with the team had been the last one to open the safe. By the time the police were called she had vanished. Her apartment was empty. We found out later that she had fled the country.
The authorities assumed that she had taken all the prototypes. No one bothered to search the laboratory. Once the initial furor had died down, it was simple for me to smuggle out the three that I had taken. No one ever considered me, an unremarkable little middle-aged man as a possible culprit.
The prototypes had cost millions to develop and the whole experimental trial was ruined. The program to develop a cure for Bipolar disorder never recovered and was abandoned a few weeks later.
This was sad because it might have worked, but at least I kept my job. I simply moved onto the next experimental program that the laboratory worked on.
---
The code name for the prototypes was LB-546X. I joked to myself that the 'LB' stood for 'Love bug'. I had three prototype implants, and I had the app to control them loaded onto my smartwatch. However, they were utterly useless unless I could implant one in my intended victim.
I couldn't just stab Anne with a syringe. She never seemed to be alone, so I couldn't drug her and insert the implant while she was unconscious. I would be caught and, if people realized what I had been trying to do, I would have gone to prison for a very long time. Even if they didn't understand my plan, assaulting a young women would have destroyed my career.
I remembered that the KGB in the 1980's had used a poison umbrella tip to try and murder a dissident in London. That wouldn't work because she would know that I had stabbed her. But it gave me an idea. I brought a small spring powered air pistol and experimented with firing pellets the same size and weight as a love bug.
I brought a raw chicken for target practice. However, it turned out that the love bug would not penetrate its skin. I added a weighted tail to give it enough mass and help it to fly straight. The tail was designed to break off on impact so hopefully it would not be noticed. This made all the difference and the pellets pierced neat little holes into my chicken.
Next, I tried shooting myself with one of the dummy pellets. I chose a 15-foot range which I judged to be about the distance I would need to work with. I rigged up wires to the trigger, gritted my teeth and pulled. It worked as intended, deeply penetrating my flesh, but 'fuck me' it hurt!
Fishing the pellet out with tweezers I worked out that it had penetrated my leg muscle to at least an inch. But the pain was a serious problem. If it hurt that much, my victim would investigate her wound, maybe go to the Hospital Accident and Emergency department. The love bug would be discovered.
In my final test I added a glob of anesthetic gel to the tip. It still really hurt, but the pain lessened to almost nothing after a couple of minutes. If I targeted part of her body that she could only look at in a mirror, once the initial pain had gone, she might not investigate further. I needed to shoot her in her lovely little bottom.
It was a simple task to conceal the weapon in my umbrella and, it being a typical wet British autumn, carrying an umbrella wouldn't look out of place.
---
I visited the café every morning looking for an opportunity. A couple of times she turned her back to me, but I froze and didn't fire. A couple of times my conscience got the better of me. I realized what a horrible thing I was planning to do, and I left pledging to destroy the love bugs and forget about Anne.
But after yet another night alone in my grotty little flat, I would slink back to the café armed with my umbrella.
