"he3y...i fe3l m3zzed up. up. it's li1111ke thereee's jolts of l11111ghtnng inside my mbraaa44in and i just kind of zzzzzzz out, like, li111111ke -- there! like that. are you sure it waa4444s saaa444aaafe to tryyyy7yyy these things? things? thii11111iiiiings? things?"

i felt what she meant. i couldn't really say anything. even in my mind it was like my thoughts would get stuck on an idea, like a skipping record, and words or an image would just loop & loop in the weirdest way, it warping into itself or going sort of forwards-backwards with this static, like a torrented video that's missing pieces and goes all spidery with blue or green in the gaps -- i wasn't worried at all, though. electrical interference like this wasn't surprising, although i can't say i was prepared for what it's like to have mental images jpegged, skewed and twisted in on themselves -- it was supposedly nice and peaceful if you imagined a perfect field of blank white...full, calm saturation of your inner space...so they said anyway -- it was difficult to do that when the strong dose of chaos in your nerve signals kept ripping gaps in the blank white you tried to picture, and then now & then there would be a jolt strong enough to completely change what you were thinking about, so i would suddenly be imagining a dark forest with a ridiculously (suspiciously) happy rabbit and it would take ten or fifteen seconds before i remembered to try to imagine blank pure white.

when i tried to form words i couldn't remember what i wanted to say by the time i got to the end. it was like i couldn't gather myself, like my marbles were being shaken in a metal bowl, running together then shaken, clacking apart again and again -- so the fact that she could speak showed she was handling it better than me, by a fair bit. people are pretty different in how thick their myelin sheaths are, and that's supposedly what makes the biggest difference in this -- how insulated your nerves are against outside impulses...or how "raw" they are.

it was a funny (weird) (terrifying) experience right from the start...when you placed the small-bit-of-a-thing on your tongue it felt like a pill, and the metallic surface tasted similar. yet you didn't swallow it. you held it in your mouth, between your tongue and the top of your mouth, for a good few seconds, and then...then, you had to try really hard to keep from coughing, or gagging, because what happened then felt rather exactly like a ladybug crawling up the back of your throat.

it was looking for a nerve. when it found one, suddenly you couldn't feel it anymore. that was the first thing -- it locally neutralized any sensation of itself. then it didn't feel like anything anymore, and everything felt normal for five or ten minutes. then this started to happen. the zapping. the feeling like your thoughts were glitching out. like your mind's eye was an antenna tv and there was a thunderstorm closing in...plus now and again someone would hit a few buttons on the remote at random. this was it learning your circuits. mapping. it did this the same way that electromagnetic waves are used to find veins of metal -- it pulsed, and measured the time it took for the pulse to run back around through each nerve. then it compared those times to each other. it also detected the subtle ripples in that pulse formed where nerves branched and the pulse ran down each branch before bouncing back, interfering with its own signal. it deciphered these subtle modulations of its pulse to form a map of your nervous system, of the connections between nerves, in very fine detail. this all could take up to thirty minutes -- all the processing had to be onboard, since these weren't legal ones. if they could've used above-board cloud processing to decipher the pulses it would take less then a second. negligible time. and that was even with the legal ones having far weaker, subtler pulses, with harder-to-decipher signals. the subtler signals in the legal ones also didn't make you feel any more than a few odd tingles in your mind. they did feel just as weird to swallow, though. to have crawl up your uvula, really.

and the government-approved ones were so guardrailed. it was infuriating. they showed you their power, yet refused to use it for anything interesting. if you thought to yourself, "i want to dream i'm in paris," you'd find yourself lost in that dream in a matter of seconds. it was quite the feeling, the way they launched you into a dream, these things -- like accelerating hard in a long, straight tunnel -- there was a sensation of speed, faster and faster until -- like suddenly coming out into bright daylight, there you were.

so you felt what they could do. how rapidly they could do it. the wine tasted real, the grapes real, the buttery croissant real. you could even think, "add someone i would like at my table," and the next time you looked that way in your dream, there they would be, someone you knew or a stranger, whichever it sensed you'd like most. and yet -- and yet --

and yet...if you reached out your hand...even just to touch theirs...to squeeze it...to feel if they were as real as the table there, as real as the glasses, as the sun and the wind...if you came close, there, to touching the person there with you, though just in a dream, it --- bwink! it was gone right away. it all disappeared. just there, just at that moment when you were about to -- about to touch them.

it was torturous. tantalizing. they had to know. they had to know it just made people want the ones that weren't "approved"...that could make you think anything. see anything. dream anything. feel anything...that would...would really tell you who you were.

that was the other thing. you could ask the approved ones to show you certain things, like a book it knows you would like, a place it knows you would like to be...yet if you asked it to show you the person you know who you would be happiest with...there was just no answer. it didn't bwink out like if you tried to touch someone in the dream -- it just didn't answer at all. and you knew it knew. or could know if it were allowed to know. if they didn't worry about what knowing would do to people.

it could, it's true, be a problem if it showed that you would be happiest with someone who was with someone else. it would be torment to know. you would be tempted to do anything to break them up. or you might be. some people might be. and they might be quite happy, and you might be quite happy with someone else, and everything might have been quite nice that way. you could even all be friends. yet...if you knew that happy-est for you meant her...or him...it would turn everything else to ashes. or it might. you would just feel like things were supposed to be another way. it would be dangerous knowledge.

yet...it wasn't all that hard to get what we'd gotten. un-approved ones. and they had to know how much the limited "approved" ones tempted people. how could a half-dose make you want anything but a full one? it was like light coming through barred doors into your cell. so they couldn't be that worried. you were always seeing psas about how the answers these things seemed to show you weren't really really real...just what it thought would please you most in that moment...and maybe that was true, although they certainly felt real. they felt true right to your core.

so maybe they figured people would just doubt any answers they didn't like. or that it wouldn't be any worse for giving people thoughts like that than people are already on their own. in any case the un-approved ones weren't that hard to get. and the other thing was, the onboard processing made them drain out a lot quicker. you would get about twenty-five minutes with this model, supposedly, although it could feel a lot longer or shorter.

"uhmmmmmnnnnn11111111nnnnnnnniiii111111iiiiifffffffff55555eeeee333eeelllllll1111llllwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww--------" she said.

i was feeling the same thing, although i couldn't express it. it was like we had been sliding inch by inch, slip by slip down a gravel hill and just now we had started to gain speed and reaaaalllly slide, and naturally you have that mix of a rush of speed with the awww fuck of knowing you're going to hit something hard in a second ---

except -- it's like you hit a cloud -- nothing -- weightless -- and then you float. i was there now. she was staring wide-eyed into space, so i figured she was as well. i found my voice again, now that it was calm. "lay yourself down carefully...and close your eyes." she got down on her side, then rolled onto her back and stretched out, staring at the ceiling, breathing deeply. after another few moments i saw her close here eyes. i wondered what she asked first, yet i couldn't without disturbing what it was showing her -- there would be time after to ask. i wouldn't have to, actually, since we always told each other everything. still...i half wanted to just sit up, keep my eyes open, and watch her there, all stretched out, relaxed, in whatever dream she thought to ask for.

i watched her for a minute or so, then thought i should go in myself, since if i didn't i wouldn't have anything to tell her about after. i laid down beside her and stretched myself out. then i closed my eyes, and after a few moments of working up the nerve, i asked, "i want to experience really being hypnotized." i don't remember what happened after that. i didn't end up with very much to tell her. i had thought i would dream of being in a stage hypnosis show, after asking that, yet instead i just have this faint, vague memory of a complex, concentric shape, spinning inward and outward at the same time in a way i can't properly picture now, and i remember feeling like -- knowing -- being certain i couldn't look away. so i think i made a bit of a mistake. i hope i dreamed something nice yet i don't remember it at all! next time i'll have to remember to say, "at a stage hypnosis show." i don't know why i'm so interested in that idea. i just am. it seems a little like wicca in this day and age, with the degree of neuroelectrical integration that we have now. yet -- it's the simplicity, the nothing-but-people aspect of it that fascinates me, i think. it's like how stage magic is still cool even though we really can cut people in half and put them back together without particular issues. (sorry if that's scary.)

i really want to be hypnotized in real life, and yet...i'm nervous to tell anyone, since it's sort of weird and silly at the same time...and someone would have to put so much into learning it to do it on me. they used to train doctors in it, i've read, yet obviously they don't now, when we can interface much more directly with nerves & thought. so the only people who still learn how to hypnotize are the stage hypnotists...and they're quite secretive about it. i've heard some will do one-on-ones for the right price...a high one.

so -- so far -- i haven't experienced it until now. or at least i assume i just did. next time i need to remember to say, "on stage, and i remember it all"....although i'm curious to have what just happened happen egain, except i remember it. since whatever it was was quite intense. i assume so, anyway, because of how little i remember.

when i'd opened my eyes, she wasn't lying beside me anymore -- she was over by the window, staring out across the tops of the trees in the woods. she must have finished her ride a bit before me, which makes sense -- my rawer nerves took less signal power to modulate. i sat up and just watched her. often after a ride people aren't ready to talk for a little while. reality seems like a thick, almost frozen syrup, compared to just asking it things and seeing htem happen.

"nnnnnnnnngggggngngngnngggg," i hummed in the back of my throat. that signalled it to crawl itself back to the top of my mouth. (it kept enough reserve power to walk its way out.) feeling it there with my tongue, i reached into my mouth -- not the most pleasant feeling -- and took it out, placing it back in its little case, which immediately hummed to small electrical life. after about thirty seconds of auto-autoclaving, the case puffed out a tiny jet of steam, and a green light came on, blinking slow, showing it was charging. hers was already charging in its case there next to mine. they took a while to charge -- something about the type of battery the unapproved ones had to use -- which was kind of good, since otherwise people might just be riding all the time. i'd heard some people had five or six, so that they could be riding almost all the time, yet i'd also heard that that kinda screwed you up, and i did know that that really got you in trouble. one unapproved one, you just got a ticket & they took it, but two on one person, and you were considered distributing. that was one of the hard rules of unapproved riding -- you kept your one on you, never left it anywhere you weren't, lest it be a second one found in someone's apartment while only they were there. if you ever found another person's in your apartment, you didn't try to get it back to them, you just whipped it out the window the moment you found it. everyone understood.

i stood up, unplugging mine from the charger & putting it in my shirt pocket. "i want grapes," i said. she said, "mmmmmmmmmm," not really as in "mm, delicious!" but more as in "do whatever, i am lost in deep thought." mine would have to charge later, since i couldn't leave it there. it would push back the time of our next ride a little, yet you couldn't start thinking like that. it was all just dreams, after all, and you couldn't let it take over your thoughts. you still had to live, and eat real grapes, which, for all the power of the thing, were still better in some unsayable way than any dream-grapes. maybe it was just that they were real, and nothing but what's real is real, and on some level your body knew real, since it was real. as i walked i thought about being hypnotized in real life, and i wondered how being real would affect how it felt. i knew i couldn't guess now...and what it really felt like, in real life, was the one thing it couldn't show me. if only i could find someone who wasn't part of that stupid secretive guild or whatever they call their thing...hmph!