Hypno Harem (3 page)

Of course
. It had been a year since Popper had died of a massive coronary. Within the department, Starke was feared, respected and liked—in that order—and a logical successor to his position. She was, however, not only deeply critical of Popper’s work but disliked him personally. Within a month of her appointment, she’d begun purging the graduate program of his students while moving her cronies into positions of power. He wouldn’t have a chance in such a kangaroo court.

He had expected Starke to demand something like global revisions accompanied by an impossible deadline. She hadn’t disappointed. This was it. Now or never. He took a deep mental breath and gave it a shot. “I’ll need more time. Give me a month.”

P
opper’s
death a year earlier had left Woody in uneasy possession of his final work on the brain, and he didn’t know what to do with it. His son Karl, a CPA and top executive with a big European accounting firm, flew in from Austria to wrap up the estate. He had little interest in neuroscience and gratefully accepted the university’s offer to take his father’s papers. Woody had debated whether to give the unpublished manuscript to him, but ultimately decided to keep it. Karl would likely hand it off to the university, which would go about getting it published by an academic press. Popper had been very nervous about the book falling into “deh wrong hands,” as he sometimes melodramatically put it. Woody owed it to the old man to keep it safe from prying eyes.

Little worry of that. The fact was that neuroscience had moved on since Popper’s day. He was an important historical figure but no longer one of influence.

Woody had only finished half the book, which was slow going. In the classroom, Otto Popper was an engaging teacher, fleshing out points with anecdotes and leavening his lectures with humor. As a writer, he was stodgy and colorless, and his premise—mind reading and mind control—was so fantastic that if Woody had not a personal demonstration, he would have called it nonsensical – or as Dr. Starke would say, “loopy.”

The truth was that he’d been so engrossed in finishing his dissertation and then defending it from Starke’s relentless attacks, that he’d given little thought to the book’s topic. It was only two weeks ago, when he finally realized the hopelessness of ever satisfying Starke, that he entertained the notion of changing her mind by stealth.

Only desperation could have impelled him to such a course, but his career was hanging by a thread. Kicked out of Templeton, no other reputable grad school would take him. He’d wind up with a dubious degree from some Florida for-profit college and end his days teaching high school science classes.

He reread the book’s key chapters and one morning actually tried out a “transcranial exploratory expedition” of his own. He went to a nearby park and sat on a bench with an old lady feeding pigeons. Except for a polite nod, she paid no attention to him. He calmed his mind and after a while entered a mild trance state. He imagined a sort of suspension bridge between the woman’s head and his own and saw himself crossing over. To his amazement he found himself in a misty landscape full of celebrities and songs from the 1950s and 1960s,
“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”
Kids that he assumed were the woman’s children and grandchildren, since their ages kept changing, wandered in and out of various doorways, usually demanding a meal. There was also a handsome young rogue with an Elvis haircut whose pompadour grew gradually grayer and thinner until it was gone altogether. Woody slipped out of her mind when he wandered into a space filled with caskets, all occupied.

He’d left the bench and roamed to the park playground, where he got inside the mind of a preschooler on a swing. He’d just begun exploring when the child suddenly began to bawl. As the girl’s mother knelt to comfort her, the tyke pointed at Woody, leaning nonchalantly against a nearby tree, and screamed,
“Bad, bad!”
The mother cast a baffled but angry look his way. He’d shrugged—
Who me?—
and had strolled off.

The experience was unnerving but it proved to him that Popper was on to something. You really
could
read someone’s mind, even their memories. You had to be close though, no more than a dozen feet away. And reading a mind wasn’t the same as controlling it.

So it was that several days ago he’d found himself following Dr. Emma Starke one afternoon to a Starbucks near campus, where he took a seat two tables away. He calmed his mind and proceeded to dream himself into the personae of the gopher from
Caddyshack
. In this form he dream-burrowed below the restaurant—dig, dig, dig!—until he’d popped through the floor of the stony fortress that housed Emma Starke’s flinty intellect. He’d left the Swiss Army knife in a closet crammed with obsolete weaponry and that same night followed its beckoning light—not unlike a lighthouse beam—back into her brain, though he’d done it sitting in a lotus position on the floor of his studio apartment, miles from where she slept.

Rummaging through Starke’s mind that night, he’d seen the massed hostility to Popper and his work and by extension to any student he’d nurtured. He could see he couldn’t reverse her bias, not even from inside the woman’s brain. It was too entrenched, too close to her own professional identity. The best he could hope for was more time, time to think of a way around her.

So he’d “moved the furniture,” changed small things here and there that disposed her to treating him, if not more kindly, at least more fairly. It was the best he could do and, frankly, he didn’t expected it to work.

S
tarke
scowled at his request for more time and he thought she was about to refuse. Then she abruptly changed expression, pulled inward by something. Her eyes went to her desk. When she looked at him again, she almost smiled. “All right, Woody. A month. Give it your best shot.”

Whaddaya know? It had worked! He said goodbye and quickly left, partly to hide his glee and partly so she wouldn’t have time to reconsider.

The sun was directly overhead when he stepped outside the neuroscience building. Noon, time for lunch. He was hungry too.
He whistled as he went to get a hamburger.
My, such a busy morning!

T
hat
night Woody read more in Popper’s book as he waited for one o’clock, when he assumed Candice would be asleep. The first part of the book had been theory and practice: the how-to of “mind infiltration,” a phrase of his own that he preferred to the tortured jargon of “transcranial exploration.” The second part discussed its implications, whatever term you used. They were unsettling at first, then alarming and in the end scary enough that he saw why Popper compared handing off his life’s work to Gandalf entrusting a little hobbit with “deh Vun Rink to Rule Dem.”

Once you’d learned to get in someone’s head, you could learn how to go about changing that mind. Everyone’s mind was susceptible to this, though how much varied greatly. People with strong wills and fully developed identities were very hard; rarely could they be changed much. Others were easier, particularly children above the age of nine, when their minds were sufficiently developed but their identities and values still fluid. Teenagers, themselves barely in control of their minds, were hard. Young adults were relatively easy.

“Mind control” which brought up the familiar corny image of the guy in a turban waving a pocket watch while a girl dozily goes, “Yes, Master,” was a misnomer. A mind couldn’t be controlled with a two-hour course in hypnosis and a snap of the fingers.

A better term, Woody thought, was “mind hacking.” Like computer hacking, some people were better at it than others but it was a skill that could be learned. Once inside a brain, however, an experienced hacker could alter his subject’s mental code, rearranging beliefs and attitudes, maybe lowering inhibitions or revising prejudices and opinions. According to Popper’s book, a subject could be made to fall in love, fall out of love, get an itch, worship false gods, become an exercise junkie, hiccup for hours, speed-learn a foreign language, master the cello, all sorts of brain voodoo.

Further, the book said an experienced hacker could also overcome a subject’s mental security system and leave a bot to be remotely triggered, make the subject—say a twenty-year-old busty blonde-haired coed—think his commands were her own. If he chose to do this, when he was done, said subject would have a zombie mind inside her
real
mind, ready to wake up and take over.

And the beauty part was she’d never know. That is, if he did it right.

Tempting as it was to repeat the morning’s experiment and control the thoughts and movements of luscious Candice Starke, he had more practical matters in mind. Emma Starke’s mind was too well-guarded to find anything useful. He hoped the mind of her daughter would provide some insight, some
key
to keep the woman from bouncing him out of the graduate program.

At 1:00, he assumed the lotus position, repeated his mantra for several minutes and then opened his Third Eye to look for his token, the Swiss Army knife. He saw two beacons. One would be Candice, the other her mother. One glowed rosy and warm, the other blue and chilly, not hard to guess who was who. Night travel between brains several miles apart took longer than a hop in a restaurant or anteroom, so it was twenty minutes before he was inside the head of Candice Starke, sound asleep in the rent house she shared with two other coeds.

Candice’s subconscious at night was less orderly, more fluid than in the day. It was still compartmented into rooms but the walls between the rooms were more like curtains, gauzy things that one could slip through. In one of them, he found a baby in a crib, looking up and gurgling. He heard something overhead and glancing upward, was startled to see a huge face above him, looking down and babbling in a tongue that sounded nothing like any language he’d ever heard. It was a woman’s face, young and pretty, hair sort of like Meg Ryan in
When Harry Met Sally
. Woody suddenly realized it was the face of Dr. Emma Starke when she was a young mother. She was watching infant Candice and speaking—what else?—baby talk.

Popper’s book had referred to the “multiple stories” that comprised most minds and Woody discovered Candice’s was no exception.  It had many floors, all of them apparently below this one. He could descend in various ways. There was a staircase, an elevator and something that looked very much like a water slide. He didn’t trust the elevator or slide and went down by the staircase, which sometimes looked like that in a public school, other times like one in a home and still others like you might find in a fairy tale palace.

He thought at first that the stories would represent years of her life and that the deeper he went, the younger would be her thoughts and memories. That wasn’t the case though. It seemed that with each level, the items he found were attached to memories that were ever more guarded – maybe thoughts and feelings repressed for one reason or another.

An hour and a half later he arrived in a level that seemed mostly about her high school years. There was an incident where she was suspended for a day after being caught smoking in the girls restroom. That seemed unremarkable teenage behavior but Candice was apparently ashamed of it. He was watching her puff away in a stall when he heard crying in another room.

He stepped through the restroom wall and found himself in what looked like Emma Starke’s private study, a small room lined with books and a desk piled high with student papers. Candice was standing, her mother sitting. The girl’s face was red and teary. Emma looked angry, even furious. Apparently she’d gotten a phone call from one of Candice’s teachers. Woody stood in the room with them and listened.

“I asked you a question,” Emma said sternly. “Did you
copy
your history paper?”

The girl didn’t answer. “
Well?
” said Emma.

“Just a few little things,” said Candice.

Her mother held up the paper, which was marked with a red “F.” Various paragraphs were circled in red ink. “
These
few things?” she asked sarcastically. Candice nodded, which apparently was an unsatisfactory response, since Emma repeated the question.

“Yes,” admitted the miserable Candice. “Mama, I’ve never done it before. It’s Gail’s paper. She said I could.”

“And that makes it
all right?
” Emma said incredulously. “I can’t believe that I’ve raised someone who would not only
plagiarize
but think it was
all right
to plagiarize!” She got a black marker out of her desk and stood. “Sit down.”

“What are you going to do?” said Candice nervously.

“Sit down!”
repeated Emma angrily. The girl sat. Emma brushed her blonde bangs away and drew a vertical line on her forehead. Candice instinctively jerked her head away. “Don’t move,” warned her mother in an icy voice. “Keep… your… head…
still
.” She drew a small half circle at the top of the vertical line, which Woody recognized as the letter “P.” After a minute she was done and stepped back to view her work. “That will do,” she said with satisfaction.

“What did you write?” Candice said anxiously.

“Go look in the mirror.” Emma followed her daughter into the bathroom. A word was written in neatly printed block letters on her forehead. “It’s backwards,” Candice said with a tremble in her voice. “I can’t read it.”

“It says “PLAGERIST.”

Candice gasped. “How long before I can wash it off?”

“You can remove it Sunday night.”

“But Mama, this is Friday! I have a soccer game tomorrow. And Ken and I are double-dating with Suzy and Steve.”

“Do whatever you want,” Emma said without sympathy. “but that stays on your head until Sunday night.” Candice  ran out of the bathroom and up the stairs to her room, where she threw herself on her bed and wept.

Woody was appalled. Emma Starke was right to make Candice understand that plagiarism wasn’t an acceptable shortcut to a good grade, and maybe punishment of some kind was in order, but this… this was excessive, close to cruelty. By now he’d spent nearly two hours investigating Candice’s home life and her relationship with her mother. He had failed to find the girl’s father in any of her memories but whether he was dead or simply out of the picture, Emma had brought up the girl up by herself. She was strict but loving and on no other occasion had she shown such severity, including several times when Candice had behaved much worse. Woody wondered what it was about plagiarism that triggered such fury.