She smiled a little, blushed, looked down at her feet bashfully and backed away a bit. She bit her lip nervously, kept her hands folded behind her, made herself a tiny little thing, cowering even, despite the fact that her eyes were smiling as warmly as she felt. In a way, this was Kyla Leeson’s signature maneuver; she never did it consciously, but when someone as shy and modest as her got that warm, fuzzy feeling inside, the motions came to her as naturally as breathing.
“J-Jay!” Kyla stuttered from the other end of the doorway. “Um, I uh, I thought you were supposed to be coming a bit later?”
“That’s correct,” Jay Duncan replied matter-of-factly. “I’d estimated my arrival taking place a half-hour from now, but it seems I had substantially overestimated the time required for my own chores prior to that. With those errands finished it seemed a more productive use of my time to come help Leonard with the Science project here than to wait on punctuality, and so after calling ahead, I came here. It seems to have been the right decision, in fact: you’re early too.”
“Y-yeah…” Kyla nodded, still not meeting Jay’s intelligent, bespectacled eyes. Truth be told, she’d been buzzing inside about meeting up with Jay for the project all day long, and had come as soon as she’d felt she’d made herself pretty enough. She said none of that, though, and had no plans to. “C-can I, uh, can I come in?”
“Oh, of course,” Jay replied, stepping aside and politely holding the door open for Kyla. “You’ll find Leonard in the shop out back. Mrs. Drullers is attending today’s PTA meeting, so we have the house to ourselves for now, within the limits of the usual rules.”
Kyla already knew that, but all the same she found herself blushing again. The whole place entirely to ourselves… She thought as she shuffled through the house with a mumbled “Thank you.” Well, ourselves and Leonard.
Leonard Dullers seemed to be in his own little world, though, at least for the moment or two after she and Jay came into the shop. “Let’s see… a little more power, a little slower on the frequency ramp-up…” he muttered, fiddling with some dials and paying close attention to what looked like a cow magnet on a wired-up lawn chair, placed between some of the electrodes they were using for the fair project. “Aaaaand let’s see if it works!” he said, flipping a switch with finality. The magnet jumped, and Leonard recoiled as if expecting an explosion or something, but after a bit the magnet settled down onto the chair and spun in place. “HA!” Leonard exclaimed, clapping his hands at his apparent small success. “That’s science, bitch!”
Jay was not impressed. “Leonard, what are you doing?” he asked of his shorter, chubbier friend.
“Oh, just having fun,” Leonard said, turning the machine off and getting the magnet to stop spinning. “We’ve already got everything just about as set up as we can get it before we strap our little lab mouse in. And hey, if it isn’t the mouse now!” Leonard said, jumping up to shake Kyla’s hand. “You ready to donate your body to science, my friend?”
Kyla shook Leonard’s hand but said nothing. Leonard wasn’t any taller than Kyla, but much bigger.
“I’d rather not risk having to recalibrate,” Jay said disapprovingly, unplugging the machine and putting away the magnet. “Not after all the bother we went through this morning.”
“Oh, relax, Jay, it’ll be fiiine. Mark my words, by the end of today, the three of us here’ll get to say we’ve built a working brain-computer interface in high school!” Leonard beamed in excitement at the prospect. “Imagine that, Jay!”
“Alluring though they may be, such fancies are conditional upon the proper function of the machine and the success of our experiments today,” Jay replied, starting to work with some straps and latches on the chair. “Ergo some caution in the use of the machine is prudent. Even more so in light of the fact that we’re subjecting our dear friend Kyla to all the risks! You are still sure about this, Kyla?” Jay asked, motioning her to sit down so he could strap her into the device.
Kyla blushed even harder than she had been, and her breathing quickened a little. She was an anxious, vibrating little bundle of nerves, and yet she’d never been so sure of anything before. She quickly put away her purse, took off her glasses and then her shirt, then got into the chair just as instructed. “D-do the honors, Jay,” Kyla proclaimed as confidently as she could.
And so he did. First he strapped her arms in, then her legs, then her head and neck. Soon, she could hardly even move unless he wanted her to. Then he rubbed some electrolytic gel into her key nerve bundles and attached the electrodes, one by one, gently but firmly. Sensually, she thought. Then came the induction wires, placed with just as much care and sensitivity as the electrodes, and then the hair network: Jay undid her ponytail and ran his fingers through her scalp with a little gel, making sure the net got stuck on just right before the scanning visor came down. Kyla bit her lip hard throughout it all, trying her best to stifle the little squeals and fluttery moans she might have made if they wouldn’t kill her with embarrassment. There was no hiding how red she was getting, though. If either of them could tell how this makes me…
“Yeah, bind her a little tighter, Jay, we wouldn’t want our prisoner running away,” Leonard jeered while watching. Kyla was funny about Jay being the one to strap her in, and judging by the look on his face Leonard seemed to know exactly why.
“If I pulled the straps any tighter I’d hurt her, Leonard.” Jay was as oblivious as ever, though, to Kyla’s mild disappointment.
“Eeeexactly,” Leonard replied with an eyeroll. “Anyway, are you done? I’ve got the tracer injection ready, and once that’s in we can get this show on the road!”
“I’ve very nearly finished, yes,” Jay said, reaching for the syringe Leonard was offering. “But once again I’ll remind you of the hazards of haste in this work. The outcome of this experiment is still far from certain.” Jay found a vein quickly enough, and gently, ever so gently in that polite, proper manner of his, started to slowly slide the needle under Kyla’s skin. She gasped a little.
“Jay, Jay, my good friend Jay, you worry way too much. We’re awesome scientists; it’ll turn out! Trust me, my friend, I know exactly what I’m doing over here!”
With that said, Leonard picked up the power cord to plug the machine back in. Doing so made a loud POP and a frighteningly impressive shower of sparks, and caused Kyla to lurch in place and squeal at the sudden electrocution. All the lights in the house suddenly flicked off, and just like that, nothing had power anymore.
Both Jay and a panting Kyla gave Leonard a glare that could have melted the fat off him if glares had that power. Wordlessly, Jay took the plug, flipped it over, and plugged it back in; Leonard had connected it backwards.
“Oooookay, so that was a mistake, but hey, it’s no big deal! I’ll just go reset the breaker and bring us back some fuses, and then all will be well, right guys?” Leonard said with a nervous chuckle.
“The sooner the better, Leonard,” Jay said, and that was enough to get Leonard scurrying off. Jay let out a long sigh when he was gone. “So Kyla, are you alright? You seemed to have gotten quite the jolt a moment ago.”
“I… I feel a little weird,” Kyla admitted, still beet red and deeply embarrassed at how she’d reacted to the sudden shock. “But I think I’m f-fine. Nothing h-hurts too much.”
Jay looked relieved. “That’s certainly good news. But you’re not unbearably uncomfortable, are you? I can untie you if necessary.”
“NO!” Kyla replied much more forcefully than she meant to. “I… Well, um, I… I kinda…” she tried to explain, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Yes?” Jay asked, eyebrow raised in confusion.
Kyla swallowed hard. Here she was, all alone with Jay, totally tied up and at his mercy; how could she not be turned on? Jay could do anything he wanted with her, and part of her desperately wanted him just once to do something with the opportunity, to try to take advantage of the situation and her, she’d let him get away with it! But he never would. He was just too nice. Jay was too nice, too well-mannered, too damn smart, too well-dressed, and just too intolerably handsome to even consider something as low as bondage play with fragile little Kyla Leeson! At least, he certainly wouldn’t as long as he didn’t know just how much of a rope bunny she actually was inside.
So just tell him, she told herself. Just tell him and get it out there. Tell him you like him. Tell him you want to be more with him. You CAN be more with him, IF you just get over all your STUPID anxieties and worries about things that aren’t going to happen, and for chrissakes, just tell him how you feel!
“Jay, I…” she squeaked out after a while of working up her nerve. “I kinda like it...” She gulped again. “I really like it when you tie me up, Jay.” At last, at long last she’d finally worked up the nerve to say it!
Jay gave her a curious lookover, then just shrugged. “Alright. That’s unusual, but I suppose there’s nothing wrong with being comfortable while strapped in like that,” he commented as plainly as if discussing the weather outside.
Kyla could have screamed. THAT’S NOT THE POINT! part of her wanted to shout. NOTICE ME, YOU BIG DUMB GENIUS!
As usual, though, Kyla said nothing. The conversation dropped, and the moment was gone.
The lights flicked back on, and a few seconds later Leonard was back. “See, guys, no big deal!” he said, waving aloft the replacement fuses he’d promised. “We’ll pop these bad boys in and will have lost nothing but time!”
“Thank you, but please don’t say things like that before we’ve actually tested the machine for damages,” Jay replied, getting straight to work fixing the machine’s electrical system with Leonard.
A short while later, all the fuses had been replaced and the machine’s most critical and vulnerable components had been tested and found undamaged. With that done, they finally plugged the power supply back in (properly this time), connected a data cable to Jay’s laptop, and booted up the control program he’d coded for the fair project.
“Alright.” Jay took a deep breath, briefly betraying a crack in his eternally calm, collected demeanor. “Moment of truth.” Kyla held her breath. Jay typed into the command prompt RUN SCAN and hit enter.
The machine hummed to life with steadily increasing buzz, and Kyla shuddered bodily at the sensation. All the electrodes and gadgetry Jay had spent so long attaching to her, inert and lifeless just a moment ago, had started to tingle and stimulate her in ways that were difficult to describe with everyday vocabulary. It’s just electricity, Kyla tried to remind herself as the feeling of the electrodes on her seemed to get stranger and stranger. It’s just safe, controlled, low voltage pulses of electricity and magnetism the computer needs to scan my nervous system. But to someone who’d worked hands-on with simple circuits before, it didn’t feel like electricity. It was more visceral, less painful and more pleasurable, and deeper somehow, like she had become a vessel to some aetherial energy channeled by the machine.
After a while, the sensation died down a bit, but didn’t really stop. The scan had finished, and over at the computer Jay and Leonard were looking at Kyla the way the machine saw her. “It seems to have worked…” Jay muttered, scrolling the mouse over the various portions of the computer model of Kyla for better datareading. Kyla felt funny, like a tingly feeling was moving through her wherever Jay’s mouse tracked: over her chest, inside her head, between her legs… it was some sort of spirit touch that phased in and out of her as the machine willed. Not that she could see the computer screen from where she sat…
Leonard clapped in celebration. “EU, RE, KA, That’s game 1 for the home team, boys!” Leonard exclaimed proudly after a quick look at the scan output. “Looks like we got 1 lane open, but hey, this is a two-way street, right? Time for game 2, let’s see it go the other way!”
“Alright,” Jay said a bit hesitantly, then entered the command CONNECT TO SCAN.
The feeling while connecting was MUCH more intense than the initial scan, and caught Kyla so off guard she couldn’t help but let loose a loud, sexual “Aaahn~!” as the machine revved up. It wasn’t just the sensory electrodes anymore; her entire body felt that energetic penetrating pleasure that couldn’t possibly be an electric shock! She writhed and twitched and shuddered as her muscles contracted and relaxed involuntarily thanks to the computer’s calibrating stimulations, and when it finally slowed enough to leave her gasping she had the inexplicably distinct sense of connection, like her body wasn’t entirely hers anymore and was shared with something else.
“Kyla?” Jay asked in concern when it was over. “Are you alright?”
“Y-yeah, totally fine!” Kyla lied quickly. She couldn’t let Jay or Leonard see just how much she was soaking between her thighs. “J-just caught me by s-surprise, y’know? I, uh, I didn’t really have any idea how that would f-... fuh, f-feel, and boy, it was really something!”
Jay looked like he wanted to ask more, but Leonard, paying no attention to Kyla, cut off that inquiry. “Oh man, looks like game 2’s another dub!” he exclaimed, looking at the computer screen. “Connected, connected, connected… If the readout’s right, the computer’s plugged into Kyla like a USB! We’re reading confirmation feedback from her body reacting to us and everything! Hey Jay, poke her with the mouse over here, let’s see if she feels it!”
“She’s certainly feeling something, Leonard, we’ll sniff it all out in due time,” Jay replied, but nonetheless he went through the experiment as asked. “Tell me if you feel anything, Kyla, and where you feel it,” Jay said as he clicked around on Kyla’s computer model.
Kyla obeyed immediately and directly. “I definitely feel it,” she said. The mouse wasn’t just a tingly phantom sensation anymore: it was touch. Actual, weighty, tangible touch that could grab her, slap her, caress her, grope her, and pleasure her as certainly as a human hand could’ve, if ghosts had human hands. “L-left arm, right knee, right cheek, abdomen, left shoulder, b-bosom, left foot…”
Leonard clapped his hands again. “Game 2’s a shutout! Let’s do more, let’s do more: let’s see if we can make her do things!”
Jay didn’t say anything. Eventually, he silently typed CONTROL into the console and hit enter.
Kyla knew what to expect now and bit her lip hard to stifle the noise she was almost certainly going to make. It didn’t really work; she ended up moaning and squealing all the while as the magic took her, filled her up and claimed her as its own. When the ecstasy -- the literal ex-stasis feeling -- finally subsided, she didn’t have a sense of connection anymore so much as belonging. She wasn’t sharing her body anymore: Jay owned it.
“Ooooo, I’ve got a good feeling, guys!” Leonard piped out excitedly. “C’mon, c’mon, we’ve got science to do, try it!” he urged Jay. “Experiment! Make her move!”
As was duty, Jay eventually, cautiously, hesitantly, carried out the experiment. With some clicks, some programing, and a little electricity, he could force any muscle he wanted in Kyla to contract or to relax, and it showed; they could see Kyla’s body involuntary straining against the restraints, trying to flex and break her free even when she clearly wished for them to stay put. It was a strangely foreign, alien sensation to her: she’d read about such nervous disorders as Alien Hand Syndrome, Tourette’s, and so forth, and was partially expecting something similar to happen to her if the experiment was successful, but as it turned out, expecting and experiencing a sensation were two very different things. It was an overwhelmingly total loss of control over her own body; she really was helpless for Jay, inside and out, as long as that magical electric tingle stayed within her.
Clap, clap, clap, went Leonard’s own victorious hoorah. “Pack it in, boys, we’ve won the whole series! What’d I tell you, Jay!? Not a single thing went wrong here! That Science Fair’s as good as ours!”
“We are not finished, Leonard.” Jay was still typing in the console. SAVE SCAN AND EXPORT TO FILE, he typed and entered. “We have yet to test the Upload and Download functionalities.”
“... the what!?” Kyla asked. She was panting hard now. “I don’t remember that!”
“Yeah, Jay, what have you been coding over there?” Leonard asked, now curious too. “It’s all your software, I dunno what these functions you’re calling, dude.”
“Fellows,” Jay explained as if it were obvious, “what we’ve established here is a direct link between my computer and Kyla’s mind. That link can be used to exchange commands, information, and data, of course.”
“Yeah, and?” Leonard asked. “I know that; what does the Download do?”
“What it usually means, of course.”
They both stared at him questioningly as Jay typed in DOWNLOAD ALL.
“I can download a redundant copy of Kyla’s mind onto my computer, or parts of it; her personality, her memories, her knowledge, and so forth.” Jay hit Enter.
Kyla gasped and her eyes went wide, then they saw stars, then they went blank. She came, and then she was dreaming. She was elsewhere, in some liminal space, watching her life pass her by and go away, while her body stayed limp in the chair. Every memory, every experience, everything that made her her flashed before her eyes and funneled through the datalink, into Jay’s personal collection. Now, Jay owned her SOUL.
When Kyla came to, she was still in the same chair, drooling slightly and soaked between the legs. She didn’t know how long she’d been out, or what she’d been doing; she didn’t even know where she was, for the moment before everything came back to her. Her brain rebooted as if from a deep sleep, and then she remembered.
“H-how long was I out?” she asked nervously.
“No time at all,” answered Jay matter-of-factly, still typing away at the console. KYLA.mnd Saved and Exported to File successfully, it said.
“Jesus Christ, Jay!” Now it was Leonard who seemed kinda freaked out by the science on display, eyes staring wide at Kyla, and Jay who seemed less-than-appropriately concerned. “If that was Download, then what the hell is UPLOAD gonna do!?”
“We can make changes directly to her own mind, obviously. I’ve already coded up some new personalities that can take control of her body and sideline her old persona, and a framework of memories for them, too.”
Jay delivered the line as calmly as if he were lecturing on the quantum mechanics behind the sky being blue. Leonard and Kyla, on the other hand, were SHOCKED. “Jay, holy hell, you’ve gotta stop, man! That’s WAY farther than the freakin’ Science Fair is worth!” Leonard’s mouth was running a mile a minute, but Kyla had no reply. She was dazed and confused, on the one hand still basking in the afterglow of the orgasmic experience she’d just had, and on the other hand refusing to believe this was real and happening to her. Jay… is this a dream?
“Nonsense. Given how successful the datalink has been thus far, I’m quite optimistic about this next test. Now then, let us begin!” Jay had already typed UPLOAD Persona1.mnd TO SCAN into the console, and before anyone could stop him, he hit Enter
