"You really should have let well enough alone, darling." His voice drips with smug triumph, sneering condescension condensing onto every syllable as it falls from his thin-lipped, smirking mouth. "I understand that Miss Grant is your closest friend, and I'm sure you felt like you had a moral obligation to extricate her from her current circumstances. But believe me when I say that you're going to wish... profoundly and all too briefly... that you'd simply given up on her rather than choose your current rash course of action." It's not rash at all, but he doesn't know that. Not yet.
He cups my chin, his slender alabaster fingers pressing firmly but not painfully into my bronze flesh as he straps my head into position in the chair. Behind him, Ellie stares at the two of us with rapt, vacant devotion in her bright blue eyes; the mask is gone now, and it's blatantly obvious that she no longer has a will of her own. She's mindlessly, helplessly dedicated to fulfilling Doctor DeVere's commands, and if I ever had any hope that she might snap out of her trance and free me, it's dead now. But of course I didn't. If I thought she was capable of escaping her conditioning, I would never have come here in the first place.
"There we go," he mutters, almost to himself, as he buckles the last of the nylon straps into position to completely immobilize my head. "Not too much longer, dear, just a few more minor calibrations and we'll be ready to begin. I'm sure you're planning to resist, to pit your will against my skill and talent in adjusting the human consciousness, but please don't imagine that it'll affect the final outcome. Struggle all you want--physically and mentally. It doesn't matter. The end result is inevitable." Behind him, Ellie's head bobs up and down in absent compliance, agreeing with an opinion she wasn't even consulted on. Her hand drifts down between her porcelain thighs, rewarding herself for her mindless acceptance with slow, lazy masturbation. I doubt she even realizes she's doing it.
DeVere lowers a projector from the ceiling, concealed behind a hidden panel that's indistinguishable from the bland acoustic tiles around it. I'm quietly impressed by his operation, not that I'd ever let him know; to the casual observer, this looks as indistinguishable from any other dentist's office as 'Connor DeVere' does from any other dentist. Even when I came here with Ellie, I never noticed the cunningly concealed restraints built into the chair. I didn't spot the soundproofing behind the soothing powder blue wallpaper. I had no idea that the unlabeled silver cylinder connected to the gas mask contained not nitrous oxide but a far more potent and fast-acting tranquilizer. And neither did Ellie... which is how she came to be his mindless, obedient slave.
"There's no resisting, you see. Not against this." He scrubs the back of my hand briefly with an alcohol wipe, and I feel the briefest sting as he inserts a thin needle before hooking it up to an IV stand that was hidden in the supply closet until just a few minutes ago. "It's not just hypnosis, pretty girl; it's a full-spectrum brainwashing experience that incorporates decades of research in neurology, psychology, endocrinology... I don't expect you to understand. Ellie's informed me that you're majoring in English Literature. But trust me, I'm an expert on mandating compliance." He chuckles. "More than you could possibly know."
I do my best to hide a smirk of my own. He has no idea how much I really know. He did an amazing job of scrubbing the search results for his image, but I wasn't about to let it go once I realized what was happening to Ellie. I kept taking photos of him surreptitiously every time I came here with her, ignoring her increasingly overt deference and submission in favor of getting a good shot of DeVere's face that I could use to hunt him down on the Internet. I finally got lucky about a month ago, scrolling down an endless number of pictures of smug white men until I found an obscure report from a conference on psychology from seven years ago where he was sixth from left in a group of scientists. The caption below it read, 'Bryce Hampton, Lia Douglass, Kore Yokahama, Lin Chao, Calvin Frank, Dover Conal and Kim Imahara attend the 5th Annual Providence Conference on Behaviorism in Rhode Island'.
Once I found his real name, it wasn't hard to figure out how Dover Conal became Connor DeVere. The scandal at the University of Maine couldn't be covered up, not once the charges were filed and the messy details of Conal's experiments became part of the court record. Again, they tried their level best to scrub the search engines, but the wonderful thing about that unusual name was that there were so few results you could bury it under. When I knew what I was looking for, I found his obituary without any real difficulties. I don't know whose body they really found, but I suspect that DeVere had no trouble convincing someone to die in his stead. That should chill me to the bone, but nothing about this man frightens me now.
My train of thought is interrupted by a cool, faintly discomfiting sensation that flows up my hand to my arm. "The drug disrupts activity in the frontal lobe, impairing cognition and inhibiting critical thought," he says, adjusting the flow of the intravenous solution into my veins. "You're going to find very shortly that directing your consciousness to focus on any one thing will become difficult, then impossible. You'll be easily distracted by repetitive visual stimuli, and your limbic system will wind up attempting to take up the slack from the parts of your brain that are out of commission. But since those regions mainly concern themselves with emotional responses, and the experience you're about to have will be... highly pleasant." He pauses. Turns. Heads to the supply closet again.
When he returns, it's with a pair of very sharp dressmaker's shears. With a few rapid snips, he cuts away my jeans from the waist down to the knee, everywhere he can reach without unbuckling my restraints. I'm still a little surprised he didn't strip me naked while he had me unconscious earlier, but I suppose his top priority was getting me into the chair and getting me strapped in. The sedative he used acted swiftly, but it wore off just as quick. Better to make sure I couldn't escape than to risk a nude woman sprinting out of his office and screaming bloody murder.
