The Tessera Method

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."

Daniel blinked a few times. "It can what?"

Alice smiled with satisfaction. "In most cases you have to apply the new norms through what seems like therapy, since that's what the subject is expecting to receive from you. Talk a lot about how they've let themselves go by not following these norms that don't really exist, but it's okay, because you're here to help them heal and put them back on the right track and so on and so forth. But Mackenzie... Mackenzie knows me as a hardass scientist, not a hippy-dippy Ms. Frizzle look-alike. I'm not her therapist, I'm her slave-driver boss's bitch partner. So that's what she's gonna get."

Daniel thought he understood what Alice was saying, but it was hard to translate those implications into actual real concrete events he could believe were occurring in front of him. "Alice, what are you doing to her?"

Alice rose to her feet. "Wait in here a second while I close the trap." She opened the door to the testing chamber and stepped through. Daniel found, to his surprise, that instead of putting a stop to this obviously unethical behavior, he was waiting and letting her close the trap. He poured himself another drink. Not much else to do now.

When Alice stepped into the testing chamber, Mackenzie just about jumped out of her skin. "SHIT!" Mackenzie cringed and tried to turn her body away from Alice, but, of course, she didn't stop masturbating. "Fuck, sorry! I thought maybe you weren't... I mean, it was taking so long that... uhhh..."

Alice rolled her eyes. "Oh, stop blubbering, Mackenzie. Whether you're masturbating has nothing to do with my study, and it won't contaminate the data. It's your body, do whatever you want."

Mackenzie blinked a couple times. "It's... what? Um. Okay." She relaxed again and fingered herself openly, in full view of Alice's watchful eye. Daniel couldn't believe what he was seeing. Alice had just convinced Mackenzie that masturbating in front of her professor was... okay. That it wasn't Alice's business whether Mackenzie was masturbating or not. In three sentences. These tones were unbelievably powerful.

Alice tutted at Mackenzie's technique. "It would definitely be more comfortable for you without those clothes in the way, though. You can take them off if you'd like."

Mackenzie blushed. "Um... I guess... are you, like, sure it's..."

Alice sighed impatiently. "You're my partner's research assistant; of course it's okay. I'm astounded he's let you keep your clothes on as long as he has, to be frank. Now stop wasting my time and get naked so I can get on with my study without having to watch you fumbling away at yourself so ineffectively."

Mackenzie seemed relieved as she unzipped her skirt. "Right, yeah. Thanks."

Alice nodded. "Your top too. It's almost painful watching you try to squeeze your tits through that thing." She gasped as Mackenzie's shirt came off. "Mackenzie, are you - are you wearing a

bra

? I didn't take you for such an old-fashioned girl!"

Mackenzie blushed and covered her chest with her arms, suddenly self-conscious about what had probably seemed like a quite nice and expensive bra a second before. "Oh! Uh, sorry?"

Alice laughed condescendingly. "Don't be sorry, Mackenzie, I'm just surprised. You've never struck me as the prudish church-girl type. I don't even think my grandmother wore a bra. That's a new one."

"S-sorry, Doctor!" Mackenzie hastily popped off her bra, freeing her tits. Daniel chewed his lip as he watched hungrily. Nice little handfuls, not too big but round and full, their diamond-hard nipples held up high and proud by the vigor of youth. He'd never really allowed himself to think of Mackenzie as a sexual being, but he didn't even need a Prime Tone to feel a stirring as she got naked in their testing chamber.

As Mackenzie finished by stripping off her pink lace thong and shoved her pile of clothing under her chair, the bra carefully buried under everything else to hide all evidence of its existence, Alice opened the door to the lobby and called Tyler and Sophia back in. She frowned at Mackenzie's carefully-groomed landing strip as she waited. "You have unshaved pubes, too? Also a surprise. Kind of gross, really. Although I shouldn't be THAT surprised you're such a frump, what with those unheeled shoes you insist on wearing. How have your girlfriends let you get away with all this?"

Mackenzie was blushing more fiercely than Daniel would have thought possible - being subjected to Alice's strange Fashion Police criticisms while hornier than she'd ever been must have been quite an intense experience - but she barely even bothered stammering out an apology this time before collapsing back into her chair and attacking herself with her hands once again. Eager to get back to it, Daniel supposed. He found himself rubbing at his now rock-solid erection through his tweed slacks as well - he'd have to be dead not to respond to this display at least a little bit.

Tyler and Sophia seemed a bit surprised by the display they found upon coming back into the chamber, but they mastered it quickly. "Tyler, the restraints, please," Alice said as she sat at the table across from Mackenzie's chair.

Tyler's attention had been quite thoroughly seized by the naked, masturbating coed in front of him, but when Alice gave him an order, he snapped to attention immediately. "Right away, Doctor!" He reached into his backpack and came right out with what appeared to be a set of Velcro restraints, without having to even root around for them.

Alice held up a hand. "Get the metal cuffs too. Mackenzie's hands are busy and I want to make sure they're still available for her." Sure enough, what appeared to be a pair of police-grade handcuffs came out of his bag immediately. God only knew how often they needed to be used.

In short order, Alice's two RAs had Mackenzie's naked body trussed up to her chair: Velcro straps at the ankles, knees, elbows, and shoulders. True to Alice's word, her hands were not strapped down, only cuffed together, allowing her to keep rubbing furiously at her clit with only a little impatient reassurance from Alice that this was all fine and normal. Before this process was done, Sophia stopped what she was doing, sank to her knees on the ground, and began tearing her own clothes off. Daniel was a bit worried before he realized that neither of Alice's RAs were wearing earplugs. The Prime Tone was hard at work on them too.

"Shit, fuck, SHIT!" Sophia was just about the sweetest girl Daniel had ever met, and he couldn't imagine her swearing, but he also couldn't imagine her stripping naked and fingering herself in both holes on the floor of their testing chamber, and yet there she was, having a grand old time doing both things. Tyler glanced at her, and moved a hand toward his own obvious boner, but Alice stopped him. "Not until you're done with your job, Tyler. Don't make me punish you."

The tall boy blushed almost as deeply as Mackenzie and bit his lip hard as he finished his task. Finally, he was done, and he stood at attention, looking back and forth between Mackenzie and Sophia, damn near salivating at the female flesh on display before him. "Anything else, Doctor?" Daniel could hear the pleading tone in his voice.

Alice chuckled a bit. "No, I suppose not. Go ahead and fuck Sophia while you wait, or you're gonna tear a hole in your pants." Tyler breathed a huge sigh of relief as he unfastened his khakis, pulled out what was objectively an impressive penis, and just about collapsed directly onto Sophia's waiting form. He was hammering away at her within seconds. No foreplay necessary for either of them.

Finally, Alice turned her attention back to Mackenzie, who was now firmly secured to her chair. Mackenzie was rubbing hard at her clit with one hand, knuckle deep within herself with the other, red in the face from holding her breath, drenched in sweat as she watched the other two students humping like horny rabbits. "Why can't I cum?" she asked Alice, a pleading tone in her voice.

Alice took out a notebook and raised an eyebrow at her. "Is that a serious question? Because I'm your professional superior, and I haven't granted you permission, you pretty idiot. What, is this your first time masturbating? I'll let you know when I'm done with you. First I want to talk to you about Dr. Abramson."

Mackenzie's confusion was obvious. "Why?"

Alice pretended to write something in her notebook. "My study pertains to the effect of certain sonic tones on a subject's emotional state when discussing their unrequited schoolgirl crushes. That's why I wanted to use you as a test subject. I can tell you're in love with Daniel."

Mackenzie's brow furrowed harder than Daniel had ever seen it before. "You... you can?"

Alice raised her eyebrows and took another fake note. "Oh, honey. Everybody can. It's a little pathetic how you follow him around like some kind of lovesick puppy, frankly. Which raises the question: Why haven't you let him fuck you already? You knew what you were signing up for when you became his research assistant, didn't you?"

"I... what?" Mackenzie was absorbing a lot of implicit information while being blasted full in the ears with mind-control tones, so she apparently couldn't manage much more of a response than that.

"Being your boss's hot little coed fucktoy is half the job! Just look at my RAs." Alice gestured at Tyler and Sophia. He was pinning her arms down and fucking her with the vigor of a college fratboy, but just at that second Sophia rolled them over and pinned him right back, her taut little Mediterranean body bouncing and grinding wildly as she sated her lust on him. "They're fucking each other crazy in front of me just because I wanted to keep them busy while I talk to you, and when we get to my house tonight they're going to spend

hours

making me cum. Isn't that right, kids?"

"Yes, Doctor!" The two students had been moaning incoherently, but they responded to Alice's question instantly and without hesitation. She had them trained well.

Alice grinned with obvious satisfaction. "Look, it's simple. You want to be Daniel's chosen toy, clearly. What college girl wouldn't want to be a slave to a professor? I'm sure all your little friends will be jealous as hell. And your job depends on it! So why don't you just give yourself up?"

Mackenzie was trying valiantly to finish herself off, strumming her clit hard enough that it probably hurt. "Uh! Ah! But... isn't Dr. Abramson... married or something?"