Chloe sighed as she stumbled back to bed. This was her routine every day since she had been laid off: wake up, feed the cats, lie in bed all day, feed the cats again, sleep, and then do it all again. Day in, and day out. She tried to keep busy with reading, or with a project, or by spending time with her boyfriend (they lived together after all!), but she hated asking him every day how work had gone, and then having nothing to talk about herself except what she had watched on Youtube that day.

It didn’t help that in spite of regularly getting phone interviews after applying for work, Chloe somehow hadn’t managed to land a job after looking for several months.

She couldn’t understand it. This was a relatively minor setback, all things considered. There was no reason why an ambitious woman like herself, a former valedictorian, who graduated summa cum laude, and with a clear vision of where she wanted her life to be in 5 years couldn’t get a second interview. A part of her knew it was just the market - things were different than they were 5 or 10 years ago.

But Chloe was growing restless. She was going stir crazy.

It definitely didn’t help that winter had set in with a vengeance and going outside had become unappealing for her. Most days she felt like she was just wasting away. On more than one occasion she had driven to Walmart to buy a single thing her or John needed for the apartment, because she was bored.

That was ultimately it, wasn’t it?

Chloe was bored. She had gone from working for a Fortune 100 company, solving difficult problems every day, working hard on things that mattered, to being unemployed and not having a clear path forward. Chloe may have been smart, but her whole division at work being laid off had been a serious blow to her confidence. It felt like her career was stalling out, and the guarantee of future success was slipping away from her.

It was so stupid. She had talked a big game as she supported her boyfriend, John, in the past. She had been making six digits, and was happy to pay for everything as he got his art career off the ground. She had insisted that it didn’t matter that he made less than her, or that he had to take gig jobs as he got on his feet. But maybe a part of her had always enjoyed being the more powerful and succesful one in the relationship.

Now that John was the only one making any money, Chloe felt so useless. Ironically, his career was going better than it ever had. He had recently gotten a promotion at the print shop where he worked, and was regularly getting large format design work now.

Meanwhile, Chloe wasted away, day after day on the bed, wishing she had something impressive and important to work on.

Her parents had offered to pass her resume on to their friends in the industry, but Chloe was just finding it harder and harder to motivate herself to apply to places. It felt like she had already applied to hundreds of places, but no one was hiring.

And the cherry on top was the feeling that she was losing John.

They slept in the same bed every night, but she just felt so cut off from him. She tried to make excuses for them to watch shows together, or strike up conversations, but she could feel herself drifting away. She had once loved John, had even considered marrying him and having kids with him, but now she was unemployed and she was questioning everything.

And John was growing tired of her reduced sex drive. When she had been on top of the world, she had loved making love to him. But now, it just didn’t hold the same appeal as it had before.

“Hey, Chloe,” John said one day as he loaded up the dishwasher with the cups and bowls Chloe had used the last few days. “I can tell you’re bored out of your mind lately. What if I told you I had a possible solution?”

Chloe looked at him from the couch, dressed only in a bathrobe and munching on some banana chips. “I’m listening,” she said.

“One of our print clients had us make some ads for some medical research,” John said, handing Chloe a small poster. “It looks like good pay, and I think it might help with the feeling of directionlessness you have. I always admired how much you love to be working on something important, and this is something important you could do that will help me cover rent this month.”

Chloe looked at the ad. She really didn’t want to be a guinea pig, but the money looked really good. And she was close to reaching the end of her savings.

She sighed.

“I’ll consider it.”

* * *

Two days later, Chloe was sitting in a cramped waiting room at a university clinic. She looked around at the other people there. Some of them looked like students, just here to make a buck. For her part, she felt pretty out of place. She was 28 years old, and usually thought she was too important to put her health on the line for a buck.

But sitting here in the waiting room, out in public had far more appeal than wasting away, laying in bed all day.

Eventually, a woman called her name. “Chloe Allen?”

Chloe got up and followed the woman back to a dingy doctor’s office. The woman got her height and weighed her, took her blood pressure. Chloe was secretly relieved when she saw she had only put on 5 pounds over the past few months of unemployment. Despite her feeling like she was wasting away, at least she hadn’t turned into a horrible tub of lard.

Finally, when the doctor had listened to her heartbeat and breathing with a stethoscope, she told Chloe what she was going to be testing.

“We’re going to have you test this cranio-neural stimulator,” the doctor said, pointing to a helmet on the nearby table. “Our tests in rats and chimps have revealed that it seems to allow the increase or decrease in intelligence, with little to no side effects. Now, we’re ready for human testing.”

Chloe raised an eyebrow. “This thing can make people smarter?”

“That’s what preliminary tests show,” the doctor said. “If this product ever goes to market, we’re hoping to improve the general population and increase their intelligence as far as we can push it. It will be an intelligence revolution!”

Chloe found that an interesting idea. After being told roughly how the device worked, and what risks might be involved, she signed a few documents and was soon driving home with the strange device.

Could this thing really work?

Chloe was already a genius, but maybe making herself even smarter would get her a job even faster!

* * *

Chloe’s enthusiasm had flagged as soon as she had first used the device. Slipping it on her head, she had turned the knob for increased intelligence, and felt the strange buzz of electricity across her scalp. That part had actually been fairly pleasant - almost a massage.

But afterwards when she had slipped the helmet off of her head, she had felt so… strange.

Chloe felt so sharp. As she looked around her apartment, she was making connections she had never thought of before. But she also felt her latent boredom becoming much worse.

She wanted something to stimulate her supercharged mind.

She decided to read some research papers from her field, and was amazed at how easy it was to wrap her head around them. Usually, she had to think about things a bit, turn equations over in her head until they were second nature, but now it felt like she was zipping through the paper. And it was such a welcome break from her boredom.

When John got home, he was surprised to find her stooped over a stack of papers that she had printed out, and she was starting to highlight and annotate with her own additions.

“Wow,” John said. “I’m happy to see you having so much fun!”

Chloe looked at John, noticing how little she felt about him. She remembered one of the warnings the doctors had given her: part of the way device worked was by recruiting more neurons that served other purposes towards the purpose of intellectual thinking. Rats and chimpanzees both displayed less emotional range and depth when under the effects of the helmet.

She didn’t feel guilty like she usually did, but she also barely felt the echo of her usual care for him. She just nodded silently at him, grimaced a bit in annoyance at the interruption, and poured herself back into her research.

John sighed. This was a bit different from the ways she had been brushing him off lately (where she was usually half-dressed and in bed, unwilling to get up to join him in the living room), but he had grown used to her not paying as much attention to him.

He cooked some dinner for the two of them, let her know food was ready, and then started watching a show on the couch.

Chloe was a little bothered by the sound of his show, so she went to the bedroom and grabbed some earplugs, and then went back to her studying.

Chloe spent the next three days reading through every major paper in her field. Her interest had never been so piqued. She had clear ideas of research that could be done, and experiments that needed to be performed.

But the reality set in that she had no access to a lab or the equipment she would need to do all of the experiments that now buzzed through her head. She would need to find work in order to do all the things she wanted do.

And that’s when the boredom swept in with a vengeance. Sure, she could read another paper and think of a brilliant follow on experiment that might deepen humankind’s understadning fo the universe. But what was the point, while she didn’t have a job?

She was soon back to her usual routine, laying in bed all day, but it was worse this time. Her souped up mind craved more stimulation than her tiny appartment was capable of giving. She tried applying for jobs, but it was a thousand times more dull than before. She didn’t want to have to do all the in between, she just wanted to be handed a research grant and a ton of resources and a team working und her and be allowed to do the research she wanted to do. But this middle part where she was just trying to lay the groundwork for that reality had become even more dull than it had been at her usual intelligence.

She felt so much more bored. The boredom became like a pain, an aching, longing like nothing she had experienced before.

Eventually, she had to admit that she couldn’t stay like this anymore. She needed to return to her original intelligence, and her orginal level of boredom.

She slipped the helmet on and adjusted the knob to lower her intelligence.

But as her finger hovered on the knob, and the first tinglings started to run across her scalp a thought occureed to her. If making herself super smart caused her to be catastrophically bored, what would making her self super dumb do? She knew the researchers were mostly interested in the first question, but the device could do both right?

So she lowered the knob even lowere than it had been before.

The pleasant scalp massage intensified, and felt her emotions intensifiying. For the first time in a long time, she giggled. She didn’t know what she was laughing at, but the machine was tickling her brain and making everything feel so good.

She felt her years of professional work drift away. A part of her wanted to hold onto this, but the part that was laughing felt way too good to want to stop this.

“Bye bye, brain,” she said. And then she giggled again, as she felt her college knowledge drifting away.

She felt her brain fill with fluff, a pleasant static snatching away all her higher thought. She was enjoying herself in a simple way that she hadn’t experienced since childhood. A simple ignorance was spreading through her mind, and she was becoming more bubbly and bouyant with every fluffy pink cloud that filled her head.

And after a while, her head stopped being tickled.

She took the helmet off, and looked around her appartment. She felt so dumb. She looked down at one of the papers she had highlighted and annotated, and she couldn’t make heads nor tales of what any of it meant. Some of the big words were hard to sound out.

She giggled. She definitely wasn’t bored though.

Everything was so fun and simple now. She thought of her boyfriend, and her knees trembled. Her feelings were now so intense. She felt love and lust mingled together as she thought about John. It had been so long since she had fucked him, and she wanted his cock. She wanted to give in to pleasure.

But first, there was so much she wanted to do. Simple work that suited her simple mind just fine.

She took a shower, and dressed up in a sexy outfit she had only put on once or twice. She had so much joy doing her make up, and then she was off to do chores around the house. She had been so lazy before, not having the motivation to do anything.

But now, when she thought of John, and how grateful she was that he was paying all the bills, she couldn’t help but be moved to do this.

She was no longer capable of big picture thinking. She couldn’t pity herself for not working at an important job that put her genius to good use. She was a simple silly girl now, and most of the things that made used to make her depressed or worried or anxious were to complex for her to think about now.

Doing chores was simple. She loved her cute little kitties, so that was all the motivation she neeeded to clean their litter box. She loved John, so that was all the motivation she needed to make the place clean for him.

And when she surprised herself by finishing with a ton of time to spare, she decided to masturbate.

It was so simple. Thinking about John all day turned her on so much, so she needed to break out her much neglected vibrator. She pulled up some porn, and tried imagine that the guy was John and she was the girl. God, it was all so hot.

It wasn’t long before Chloe was screaming John’s name as she was wracked by an orgasm more intense than any she had experienced. Her mind had been turned towards pleasure, and now nuerons that normally thought about deep problems were singing in harmony with the rest of her mind as she experienced a pleasure she never knew possible.

Chloe lay in the middle of the bed for a time, just turning the memory of what she had just experienced over and over in her head. God, this was going to be addictive, and how much better was it going to be with John?

She decided to go shopping. Another simple joy for her. She loved looking sexy, loved feeling sexy.

At the store, she tried on a dozen outfits and then realized she didn’t know how much she had to budget for her savings. Math was hard! But she didn’t care, she bought it all with her credit card. She could figure out how to pay it back later.

Back at the appartment, she waited for John in a sexy little outfit.

When he finally came back, she pounced on him.

“Oh, babe, I’ve missed you so bad,” she said, kissing him all over.

John was taken back by her skimpy outfit, but it had been so long since she had shown him this kind of affection that he he didn’t resist. He was soon making out with her, running his hands under her skimpy clothes and loving every minute of it.

She loved his big strong hands taking control of her. She moaned at his touch, loved the way he massaged her breasts, and when he ripped her clothes off she couldn’t control herself.

Chloe gave in to pleasure. Pleasure was simple, and John’s cock was so good at making her feel pleasure. It just made sense to give John just as much pleasure, to rock her hips against him, tense her muscles in time with his thrusts, and make him go crazy with desire.

They made love for what felt like a delicious eternity, and John managed to impress Chloe with his stamina, giving her orgasm after wondrous orgasm. When her finally grunted, and filled her pussy with his sticky cum, she was past cloud 9, experiencing a universe of pleasure more intense than anything in her life.

“God, that was amazing, what got into you, Chloe?” John panted.

“You did, silly,” she said, giggling.

John looked at her. He hadn’t questioned her throwing herself at him, but he could see she was acting different now. She clearly didn’t have any thoughts in that empty head of hers.

“Chloe, you seem so much happier this way. Maybe while you’re looking for work, you should consider staying this way?”

Chloe hugged John tight. He was such a genius! She was having so much fun compared to the last few months, why would she ever give this up?