I'm having a lot of fun with this setting. This chapter basically jumped into my head the second I was done with the first one; don't worry, there's actually sex in this one. I'm picturing Dr. Tessera as looking kind of like Judy Greer, and Mackenzie is the second character in a story I've published that I've decided looks like Natalia Dyer. I can't help it; she's hot.
The Tessera Method, ch 2
Dr. Daniel Abramson shook the last test subject's hand, and the man gathered his things and left. Another good day of research complete! Daniel and one of his colleagues, Dr. Alice Tessera, were gathering data on empathetic response: how people's vital signs changed when they observed an inanimate object having apparent harm done to them - mannequins being hit with hammers, and so forth. Alice's research assistants, Tyler and Sophia, bustled around the test chamber cleaning up all of the equipment and props; meanwhile, Daniel's own research assistant, Mackenzie, lounged against a wall while tapping away at her phone.
From his vantage point behind the one-way glass, Daniel hit the intercom to project his voice into the chamber. "Hey, Mackenzie, want to help clean up a little bit?"
Mackenzie glanced over at Alice's research assistants, who between them were just barely managing to wedge a mannequin into a storage closet. "Looks like they've got it handled." She started scrolling again immediately.
Daniel frowned. That girl was impossible. Why did he keep her around, anyway? Her breasts jiggled slightly as she laughed at something on her phone. He tried his best not to notice.
"What's the matter, Daniel?" Alice pulled out a bottle of scotch she had squirreled away in the observation room and poured a couple of glasses. "We got some good data today. Nothing to worry about, right?"
Daniel raised his eyebrows at the bottle as he accepted his glass. It had to have cost at least $500. He hadn't thought the data was
that
good. "Jesus, Alice, how do you afford that stuff on a professor's salary?"
She chuckled as she took a sip. "There are any number of ways to apply our research profitably if you look around for them, Daniel."
Daniel snorted and took a sip himself. "I sure haven't found any." He sighed. "I guess it's just that my research assistant isn't working out. She's just so lazy, and she won't listen to anything I tell her. I'm at the point that I'm wondering what I even pay her for."
Alice shrugged, her frizzy blonde hair falling a bit out of its severe bun. "Seems pretty clear to me. She's hot." She coolly regarded the distracted girl's thin, delicate, pale frame, her shoulder-blade-length light brown hair, her steel-gray eyes, her light smattering of freckles, her not-exactly-professional outfit of a tight crop-top T-shirt and a denim miniskirt, and nodded approvingly. "Worth hiring just on looks alone."
Daniel sputtered. "Excuse me? That's an extremely unprofessional thing to -"
Alice laughed it off. "Oh, live a little, Daniel. I'm not trying to trap you. Keeping some eye candy around can be a good stress reliever." She gestured at Tyler and Sophia, who were both in fact quite attractive. Tyler was tall, lean, and fair, with well-maintained hair and beard, dressed in close-fitting khakis and polo; Sophia was shorter and darker with loose ringlets of dark brown hair, her hourglass figure tastefully displayed in a sundress that just barely skirted the line of professionalism. Alice took another sip as she regarded them. "Looks are important to find. The rest can be changed if you know how."
Daniel scoffed. Easy for her to say. Tyler and Sophia had just finished the cleanup, no thanks to Mackenzie, who hadn't lifted a finger the whole time. "What do you mean by that?"
Alice stared at her drink for a second, then downed it in one go. "Let me show you something, Daniel. As a mark of my professional respect for you." She activated the intercom. "Thanks, guys! Tyler, Sophia, go wait for me in the lobby. Mackenzie, could you stay behind for just a second?"
Mackenzie frowned at the one-way glass. "What? Why? I thought we were done!" she whined, coming just short of stomping her foot in a fit of pique as the other two students happily filed out the door.
Alice was all smiles, though, even though Mackenzie couldn't see her face. "I'm trying to explain a proposal I've been working on for a new study, and it would go a lot faster if I could just demonstrate it. Could you take a seat?"
Mackenzie sighed petulantly, put her phone in her purse, and sat in the subject chair, legs crossed, one foot bouncing impatiently. "What's the study?" she asked.
"I'm going to play you a series of tones," Alice said, tapping away at her computer, "and ask you some questions."
Mackenzie frowned. "But what's the goal? What questions? What are the tones for?"
"Ah, ah, ah!" Alice tutted. "I can't tell you before we start, or it'll contaminate the results. Just humor me, please. This won't take long." She deactivated the intercom. "Last year," she explained to Daniel, her voice now for his ears only, "I did an interdisciplinary study with a professor from the Neurology department. Do you remember Erica Jennings?"
Daniel nodded, sipping at his scotch, trying to make the expensive liquor last as long as he could. "I think so. She was some kind of up-and-coming young hotshot over there, right? Already on a tenure track at 25 or something? What happened to her, anyway? I haven't heard her name in a while."
Alice waved a hand dismissively. "She was 23, actually. Quite impressive. But she's out of academia now. I'll get to it later."
Mackenzie waved her hand around from her chair. "Are you guys still there?"
Alice hit the intercom again. "Just a second, Mackenzie." She began tapping away at her computer, and a high solid tone began playing from a speaker somewhere in the testing chamber. She handed Daniel a pair of earplugs, and took another for herself. "Dr. Jennings had a theory that the human brain responds to certain sound frequencies. The skull acts as a sort of natural amplifier, and certain neural pathways open up, resulting in any number of interesting phenomena. Fairly early on, we found a tone that stimulates aggression."
Daniel boggled at this, suddenly extremely glad he had put his earplugs in without waiting to ask about them. "Really? The implications of this are-" He couldn't think of a proper way to end the sentence.
Alice just nodded. "Honestly, a little frightening. Which is why we never published that finding. Erica was afraid this knowledge would be used for evil, and she had a pretty good point."
Daniel squinted at Mackenzie. The girl was fidgeting uncomfortably, but that was normal for her. She certainly didn't look particularly aggressive. "Is... is that tone what you're..."
Alice laughed. "God, no. I never use that one. No money in it, and rarely any fun. But we kept playing around from there, and we managed to find a similar tone that causes sexual arousal. And then builds it. A lot."
Mackenzie was sweating in her seat, biting her lip, rubbing at her bare thighs. "How long is this gonna take?" she asked, her voice shifting from its usual bored whine to a more desperate, frantic tone Daniel had never heard before.
Alice grinned and held up a finger. "Wait for it," she murmured.
Five seconds passed in complete silence. Then ten. Daniel stared at Mackenzie, his mouth dry and his eyes wide.
Finally, Mackenzie threw up her hands. "Fuck it." Just like that, her right hand disappeared into the waistband of her skirt, she spread her legs wide, and she quite obviously started to finger herself.
As Mackenzie sighed with relief, Alice sighed with satisfaction. "And away she goes. It's been maybe a single minute of exposure to what I like to call the Prime Tone, and here she is, pawing away at her cunt in full view of two professors, one of which is her boss. And we haven't even started changing her norms yet. She's simply that horny."
Daniel couldn't take his eyes off Mackenzie. He'd, obviously, never seen her like this. Her eyes were closed and her jaw slack in ecstasy as she relaxed more fully on the chair, moaning softly to herself, her legs splayed far enough that her miniskirt was powerless to block his view of her pink panties, or her hand delving further and further into herself beneath them. Her left hand groped away at her pert young tits through the fabric of her shirt. It was a mesmerizing sight.
Suddenly Daniel became aware that Alice had said something else. "Wait, changing her norms? What does that mean?"
Alice continued to tap around at her computer, and the Prime Tone had a few others added to it. "One set of tones increases suggestibility, making the subject more likely to believe and accept statements made to them regardless of conflict with existing knowledge or beliefs. Another set softens the subject's certainty of cultural norms and taboos, both spoken and unspoken. A third set impedes critical thinking, blocking the subject from detecting obvious contradictions or, well, thinking too hard. A fourth blocks orgasm, but that's mostly tangential here. In combination, these tones have an extremely direct application, in that a precise usage of certain psychological tactics can essentially rewrite the subject's understanding of what is or is not 'normal' or 'acceptable' behavior."