Stepping off the bus, Wayne patted his pocket absently, checking his phone was still where it should be. He knew it was; that didn’t matter. The habit was long embedded now, and in Wayne’s experience old habits lasted well beyond when they would normally end.

In many ways, he reflected, that was also why he’d got off the bus in a much nicer neighbourhood than the one he lived in. He hadn’t bothered to move for a long time, after he’d started to earn enough that he could, and now he wouldn’t want to move. Habits crystallised and became the person who had developed them.

Without needing to involve his brain in the process, his hands produced some gum from one pocket and he began to chew as he walked along.

He ran his fingers through his hair before tying it back in a ponytail, then glanced at his fingers, looking for any ink stains; he’d been working on his latest Gundam kit during the afternoon while his code was compiling, one of the perks of working from home, but it had led him to show up at her apartment once while she was still with her old boyfriend with a bright yellow splash across his index finger that the boyfriend had joked about for months afterward.

Wayne had outlasted that habit of Chantal’s, though. He gave himself a quick smile as he remembered that fact; there had been a time when the two of them had nearly drifted apart, just after college had separated them. Chantal had made the effort to stop that happening, though; had kept him as a friend.

He knocked on her door. As he often did, he turned away from the door while he waited, squinting out at the neighbourhood she lived in, a row of near-identical homes with near-identical gardens. There was one woman who lived across the road and two doors down who glowered suspiciously at him whenever she saw him there, like he didn’t belong.

Wayne glanced down at the faded Macross T-shirt on his chest, the comfortable sweatpants he’d worn all day. Maybe he didn’t belong there, but that was only due to the snobbery of women like her. Tech industry workers didn’t wear suits anymore.

*

Chantal opened the door and smiled warmly at him. He smiled back, not quite meeting her eye, and stepped inside. She made room for him, pressing her back against the hallway wall, and closed the door after him. Wayne wondered if she hadn’t closed it just as quickly as she could, hiding him from her neighbours.

She was much more concerned about the judgements of others than he was.

“I’m hoping it’s your turn to pick this week,” he said, “because I haven’t brought anything.” He paused at the door of her kitchen, as he always did, lingering to glance inside and see the calendar hanging from a magnetised hook on the side of her fridge. A calendar that showed Chantal herself posing in a variety of different lycra outfits, all of them as tight around her figure as Chantal’s choice of clothing when relaxing at home was baggy and form-disguising.

This month it was gymwear, taut black shorts extending halfway down her thighs with a white leotard over the top. The photographer had captured her halfway through lifting weights, her butt thrust back toward the camera, heels and knees bent, back straight, the weight bar held just below her neck on bent-back hands.

There was enough of a sense of movement there that you could almost picture her straightening up, lifting it proudly above her head, though Wayne tended to dwell lower than that, his eyes lingering on the buttocks and thighs.

Chantal made her money modelling, in what she called “the legitimate end”, which she largely defined by what it wasn’t: “No booth babes, no skimpy cosplays, nothing where the public think they have a right to fondle me, nothing lewd and one hundred per cent no fucking OnlyFans.” She’d make a face when she said that as if the idea was abhorrent.

“Yeah, don’t worry,” Chantal said cheerfully. “I’ve got it all planned.” Making shooing motions with her hands as she came up behind him, she ushered him through into the living room with a broad smile, where a large bowl of popcorn, two wineglasses, and a bottle of wine awaited.

When they’d met at school, not even ten years old, Chantal and Wayne had immediately hit it off. Chantal’s older brother had been an anime tape trader, before it was commonplace to see much more than Pokemon on broadcast TV; Wayne, on the other hand, owned the ‘big name’ toys from all the TV-inspired toylines, gifts from a doting father who didn’t understand his son but knew all the same what would make him happy.

So they would play together, when at his house, and watch cartoons together at hers, and over time they expanded the range of things they did together, adding live-action shows of various kinds, playing on the N64 and then the Playstation as they went through their teens, and it was understood even when they were dating schoolfriends that Chantal and Wayne would spend time together.

Even through college, while Chantal had gone out of state and Wayne had settled in for his studies a couple of hours’ drive from home, they’d still met up several times a year, whenever they were both back home. And while college had changed them both, Chantal had made the effort to keep the two of them talking, and they had just enough interests to stay friends.

They couldn’t have had more different college experiences. Chantal had taken to the nightlife around her campus like a duck to water, and after dating a fitness fanatic through her second year, had found herself in the gym more and more.

She had stopped following the kinds of shows they’d watched anything like as much, and in fact barely saw films at all these days outside their fortnightly movie nights together.

In hindsight, Wayne’s college experience had been good advance training for video game crunch culture. He’d focused almost entirely on his courses.

Rather than making new friends, he’d shed some of the few he already had, had cut down even further on hobbies that he couldn’t keep up from his dorm room. It had been about saving time and money; the knock-on effects he’d realised only over time.

Late in his college experiences, he’d also learned, not that not everyone enjoyed porn, but that not everyone was willing to admit it. And even among those who did, opinion was more divided than he would have expected on Legend of the Overfiend and its ilk. Wayne had by and large stopped talking about a lot of the things he enjoyed, even to Chantal.

He sank down into the sofa and smiled up briefly at her, rewarded by an answering smile that was warm. But of course, Wayne told himself, models had to be able to smile like that. They were professionals at hiding how they felt.

“So what’s the plan?” he asked, and Chantal picked up the remote and turned on the screen with a flourish, revealing the movie she’d already queued up for streaming; The Incredibles.

“I thought we’d make a double bill of it,” she said.

Wayne nodded. It wasn’t in his top five - it was actually at least five years more recent than most of them - but it was fine, and so was the sequel, so far as he remembered. He picked up his wineglass, and Chantal sank down into the sofa beside him, lifted the bottle, and poured for them both.

“So how have you been?” she asked.

“Yeah, fine,” he said. “You?”

“Oh, pretty good.”

“Did anything happen with that date you had coming?”

Chantal laughed. “The one I had my doubts about already?” Wayne nodded. “Not what he wanted, anyway,” she continued. “He was an absolute shit all the way through dinner, honestly. Apparently between us matching and the date he googled my name.”

“So he found out what you do for a living.” Wayne nodded. This wasn’t the first time it had happened.

“Exactly. So, you know. He assumed I had all sorts of outfits back home. And that if I did, he’d get to see me model in them.”

“Right.” Wayne never met her eye when she got onto this topic. He understood, after it had been explained to him around her fifth or sixth refusal, that Chantal didn’t like the idea of doing what she did at work to turn on her dates. That psychologically it made her feel like she was working on a date, and that this felt to her uncomfortably like being a whore.

But there had been those five or six refusals, and a couple more afterwards, when he’d been drunk. Maybe more than a couple.

“He made some crack about me dressing up like Wonder Woman and him tying me up,” Chantal continued, her voice resonating with disgust. Then her entire tone changed. “And you know, Wayne, I thought, this is only supposed to happen in bad sitcoms, but I’ll never get a better chance.” She turned to grin at him; he caught her smile even as he avoided direct eye contact.

“So I reached over the table and I knocked his wineglass back into his lap, and while he was still gasping like a beached fish over that I picked up his dinner plate and I dumped spaghetti bolognese all over his hair. And then I walked out.”

Wayne laughed in spite of the dull ache in his belly. Chantal disliked a lot of the things Wayne fantasised about. It was hard not to feel judged. And besides, she’d grown into a stunning woman. If you stripped away the fact they’d been childhood friends and evaluated her just on looks, she would be an incredible catch. She was one of the women he fantasised about, though her personality never factored into those moments.

“I guess I shouldn’t ask if you want to try Sailor Mercury?” he asked, making a joke of it. Her hand moved, lightning fast, and she caught him on his upper arm with her knuckles in a backhand.

It wasn’t a hard strike, not by any stretch of the imagination, and the look she gave him afterwards was still a smile, if a strained one. “Behave,” she told him. “It’s never happening.”

He held up both hands in mock-surrender. “I know,” he said.

“You’re lucky I know you’re joking around,” she told him. “Shall we start the show?”

“Sure.”

They settled back to watch the movie, though they didn’t stop talking. Wayne mostly answered her questions with questions of his own. It worked pretty well as a way to not talk about what he really felt, and Wayne usually tried to avoid that where he possibly could. That evening, he particularly wanted to avoid it; he kept thinking about that extra refusal, augmented by hitting him, even if lightly, even when he had disguised his request as a joke.

There had to be a way to change her mind, but he knew he was going to have to trick her if he even wanted to try.

Midway through the sequel, Chantal abruptly laughed. “God,” she said. “Remember when we fooled around with this stuff?”

Wayne looked back at her, bewildered, until a memory bubbled back up to the surface, one he hadn’t thought about for some time. During the Christmas break in their freshman year, after watching… honestly, he couldn’t even remember what, except that it had featured a blonde who’d been hypnotised by someone’s gaze, and Chantal had wondered aloud if it really worked. Carried along on her enthusiasm, he’d tried to hypnotise her, going purely off what worked in the movies, using an old necklace she wore with a small heart charm.

On the day it had seemed as if it had worked, with Chantal becoming vacant, even docile, and from time to time Wayne had regretted not trying to assert himself more firmly while she was in that state. Later, she had claimed it had been nothing of the sort, that she’d just been playing along.

It all seemed a far cry from what Screenslaver was up to.

And yet…

His lips were suddenly dry. He ran his tongue over them nervously for a moment, considering.

“Kind of,” he said. “What was it I said?”

“Something about resisting,” Chantal said. “Or not resisting. Or something.”

“That’s it,” Wayne answered. Looking sideways at her, he snapped his fingers. “Resistance is futile. You will be overpowered,” he quoted. He’d almost just used the full Borg quote, but he hadn’t quite been sure if it would work for anyone else and didn’t want any awkward explanations if she’d spaced out watching TNG.

She had been sitting quite casually, not moving, but somehow she was stiller now, and her resting expression had shifted slightly, though Wayne couldn’t have put his finger on why or how.

He was himself still now, not wanting to move in case somehow it broke the atmosphere. He reached out and tapped her forearm with a finger, a gesture she couldn’t find fault with if she were conscious, but which there should be reaction to.

She didn’t even blink, he noticed

…In fact, she hadn’t blinked since he’d quoted the old trigger.

Holy shit.

“Smile, Chantal,” he said, and her parted lips slowly spread into a smile. It was her usual smile, which was normally warm and welcoming, but it turned out that when her eyes didn’t light up with it, it looked almost mechanical.

Suddenly erect, Wayne adjusted the placement of his arm to ensure she wouldn’t notice anything. “Are you hypnotised, Chantal?”

“‘S.” It was a very quiet answer, but it was an answer all the same. Wayne considered his next move.

“Chantal,” he said after a few moments of silence, “When you wake up, you will slip out of that sweater you’re in and set it aside. You won’t even notice you’ve done it.” He ran that back in his head hastily, wondering if he might have left anything out or said anything wrong, but it all seemed to hold together, so he snapped his fingers.

Immediately the smile drifted back from a wide, mechanical thing to her resting expression. Now he’d noticed the lack of light in her eyes when she smiled, he could see a liveliness, if not a light, filter back into them.

He waited, excited. Chantal took another sip of her wine and leaned forward, setting the glass down on the waiting coaster on her coffee table. Now she had nothing in her hands.

That had to be preparatory to taking off her sweater, didn’t it?

But she simply sat back, still watching the film. She laughed. “Can you believe we thought that worked?”

“Right,” he said. He would have sworn she was hypnotised. She was a model, not an actress, how well could she fool him without time to prepare?

He snapped his fingers again. “Resistance is futile,” he said. “You will be overpowered.” And again, he was rewarded by the slackening of her features, the abrupt - shockingly abrupt - emptiness in her eyes.

He considered giving her the suggestion again, but didn’t think it would work. She’d smiled when told to, though. Either she would obey suggestions below a certain level or she’d only obey suggestions while she was in trance.

Or, of course, she had managed to fool him, however doubtful he found that. He needed a better way to test it.

He picked up her wineglass and poured half of what remained into his own. Chantal didn’t twitch, or speak up, despite this happening in front of her glassy, open eyes.

Well, that was probably a good indication, he thought. But just to be sure…

He snapped his fingers again, taking another sip of wine as he did so, and watched Chantal’s gaze refocus on the screen.

“No need to repeat that,” she said. She leaned forward for a handful of popcorn, and as she did so, she glanced at the glass.

Chantal tutted to herself, picked up the bottle, and topped herself up. She turned to offer it to him, but set the bottle down after seeing his nearly full glass.

Wayne was confident of himself then. She was brushing aside what happened in trance. He was seized almost immediately by the urge to put her under again, pull up that sweatshirt and whatever lay underneath, and grope her.

But it might shock her out of trance. Or it might be something she’d manage to remember.

He had the ability to change her mind, but only about things that didn’t matter.

How frustrating.

*

Far from being what he did to entertain himself while he should be working, as it had been the previous week, over the weekend his work on his new Gundam became the thing he was distracted from with other thoughts.

Wayne kept thinking about how Chantal had looked, smiling, with nothing behind that smile. About the brief impression of mechanism to it. His friend’s beautiful body, but with nothing of her inside that could leave him worried he was losing her - which he often did worry, in the dark before sleep took him - or that could push back against his desires.

Impossible, of course. Completely impossible. But that didn’t stop it feeling so close he could practically touch it.

His mind kept straying back to the question of how. How did one achieve the impossible? The idea that there was a way, lodged in his memory but just out of reach, would not leave him. Wayne kept picking away at it, thinking about the options he had.

They saw each other for a handful of friends’ birthday parties - when there were always others around - and for a movie night every couple of weeks. No more, no less. Contact was therefore limited to those occasions, and contact where he could pursue her slight hypnotic vulnerability, only to the movie nights.

Something about the movies, he thought.

Something about programming people through movies.

There was something there, and all he needed to do was remember it.

*

They alternated hosting movie nights, more or less, which was the main reason that Wayne’s apartment was always tidy and regularly cleaned, even the bedroom.

He’d gone for nachos and dips rather than popcorn, and the wine wasn’t as high priced as the wine Chantal always bought, but it was good enough; there were some logos he recognised as being good quality for the price, and he always went for those.

Usually he streamed films on the smart TV, but in the past he’d occasionally chosen to show something from their childhood that wasn’t available digitally, so he’d connected it to his computer a long while ago; a secondary hard drive was full of anime, tokusatsu, 80s and 90s cartoons, as well as DVD rips of any movie or show he’d ever bought, from habits formed once storage got good enough, before broadband improved to meet it.

He’d chosen another of those files this time, although it wasn’t the original he planned to show. He’d opened The Mask of Zorro in an editor program and over the past few nights he’d painstakingly added his own contributions to the film, sentence after sentence that would flick across the screen for a frame at a time, repeating several times each.

Wayne was as close to sure as he could be that Chantal wouldn’t be consciously aware of the edits. So whatever happened or didn’t happen, she wouldn’t be angry about it, because she shouldn’t consciously know about it.

He opened the door to her with a small smile, just trying to hide the anticipation on his mind. Chantal returned it with a warm beam of her own. “How’ve you been?” she asked as she stepped in.

“Yeah, good,” he said automatically. “Nothing really to report.”

“I worry about that,” Chantal said, idly glancing into his kitchen before going through into the main room. Her smile seemed muted after the glance, which he tried to duplicate as he followed her through, but all she would have seen was the door hanging poster of Jun the Swan, one long leg extended in a karate kick, her short skirt still (barely) keeping the image decent. Wayne couldn’t see why that would be an issue.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s not healthy to never have any news,” Chantal said. “Every so often, sure. Even most of the time. But I worry sometimes that I’m the only person you talk to outside work. Really talk to, I mean.” She looked up at him and tutted. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Sorry,” he said automatically, and then “Like what?”

“Like what I said is true and you didn’t realise that’s odd.” She sighed and sat down. “When’s the last time you got out and did something?”

“Probably last con,” he said, taking a seat beside her. He opened the wine and poured.

“When was that?”

Wayne took a moment to calculate. “Two months maybe?”

Chantal sighed. “I’d say you should go speed dating or something but I know you’d find that absolute hell.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Something, though.” She flapped a hand, and Wayne reflected that this was why he usually liked to keep asking her questions. It neatly avoided this situation. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to drop heavy stuff on you in your own home.”

“It’s okay,” he mumbled, not because it was but because he hoped it would be by about midway through the first movie. “What’s going on with you?” he tried. “Speed dating?”

She snorted with laughter. “God, no. Not again. No… nothing romantic on the horizon again yet.” Instead she started telling him about a recent day at the gym when it had been fuller than usual, a pro wrestling show being in town and the wrestlers wanting their daily burn.

“I got some crazy workout ideas by the end of it,” she said. “I might test a few of them. Giorgios keeps telling me power thighs are in.” Giorgios was one of the photographers she modelled for most often. Wayne had picked up over time that Chantal didn’t like him much, but respected his contacts, his talents, and his eye for upcoming trends too much to set him aside.

Wayne was briefly distracted speculating on how Chantal would look with even thicker thighs, but he recovered himself before his friend could notice. “Anyway,” he said. “I felt like a classic this time. Something from our youth. But we’ve watched most of them a lot, so…”

He fiddled with his controller and his phone, and the screen came to life, the opening scene of Zorro paused at the start.

“Okay, it’s definitely different,” she said. “But let’s do it.”

Wayne hit play and sat back. It was hard to enjoy the movie when you had a clock in your head. The first splice had been at the five minute mark, to give her time to relax into it first…

*

It was a cliche to say your oldest male friend was like your brother. Chantal’s experience was that it was also untrue, in every way that mattered. Wayne certainly didn’t troll her the way a brother would.

They half-watched these films, at most, chatting to each other alongside them, mostly touching on the same collection of in-jokes they always had done. That evening, Wayne seemed to have a more difficult time keeping up with the conversation; there would be times when he’d say something, and she’d answer, and it would seem like he had to stop and remember the context, even though it had just been a couple of seconds.

On the other hand, he seemed much more cheerful than he sometimes did, and the further they got through the movie, the happier he seemed to get.

“You must have really loved this movie,” she said. “How come we haven’t rewatched it before?” She had kept her eyes on the screen while asking him, knowing full well that Wayne didn’t feel comfortable opening up about himself and suspecting strongly that a true answer to this question would involve admitting a number of things.

She thought he must have waited for the swordfight to be over before answering, although the swordfight itself seemed to be just seconds long, far too short for a swashbuckling movie like that.

She licked her fingers clean of nachos and transferred her wineglass to her nacho hand.

*

Wayne wasn’t really paying attention to the movie anymore. He wasn’t staring directly at Chantal, but that was simply a question of what she might comment on. All the same, that was where he was looking, as much of the runtime as he dared, and the rest of it he was keeping track of the runtime, and therefore keeping track of where they were in the sequence of suggestions.

Each set of subliminals began with the sound of someone snapping their fingers and yellow text proclaiming

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

YOU WILL BE OVERPOWERED

That was important. It was a trigger for her, not for him. And he didn’t want to accidentally affect himself while they watched these movies together. Using the trigger, he hoped, was opening her up to it.

Certainly he’d seen the shift where the thoughts seemed to vanish from her eyes at all the right timestamps. But he’d had to start very carefully. The first movie of the night was just a test; if signs looked positive, he would follow up with a doctored Ghost in the Shell that had more intense suggestions. If not, he’d run a movie without subliminals and regroup.

He’d read online somewhere that you could drop someone deeper if you kept waking them and dropping them, so the first half of Zorro was spent doing that.

He wasn’t sure, but she seemed to be taking longer to wake back up every time. It had reached the point where he was surprised that she wasn’t noticing the way she felt when she was half-awake.

But then she stopped eating the nachos and shifted her wineglass hand, leaving the other hand free. His breath caught in his throat, in the anticipation; but he remembered that just two weeks earlier, he’d had hope when she adjusted her grip on her glass, and his hope had been deflated.

It might be the same again this time. Or everything might fall into place.

He watched.

Very slowly, almost lazily, she lifted her free hand, index and middle finger extended, thumb out, ring and little finger curled in, up and pup in a graceful arc that oh-so-slowly met her lips, already slackly ajar as they seemed to be whenever she slipped into trance.

And then they slid, just as slowly, into her mouth, and her lips closed around them.

Chantal began to suck, her fingers slowly sliding in and out, until the subliminal cycle switched off three minutes later.

Wayne felt like he’d been holding his breath the whole time, but that was just the lightheadedness of euphoria. It was working. And he knew the cycle had ended, not just because of the spark returning to her eyes, but because of the way her moving fingers suddenly stopped.

A blush was already blooming across her cheeks as they stopped, and Wayne was glad he’d known this might be coming; it had given him a chance to turn back to the screen before she could glance toward him, embarrassed, to see whether or not he had noticed.

Strange, he thought, that someone who worked as a model could be so shy about the sex appeal that was part of her job, even for the relatively prudish content that her fitness modelling was. But Chantal had that shyness.

Or perhaps she retained it around him. They’d known each other when they were children, after all, and there had never been any hint of romance. If ever someone could be described as in the friend zone, Wayne would definitely fit that description.

After a moment he saw, out of the corner of his eye, her hand come down to rest briefly on her thigh, before the wineglass was transferred back into it.

She didn’t say anything about it. He would guess she thought of it as something she’d done absent-mindedly, and probably she’d persuade herself there had been nothing sexual about it.

Five minutes later, when the cycle started again, she leaned forward to put down her wineglass entirely before resting back in the chair and once again beginning to suck at her fingers. This time her movements weren’t so slow; there was something almost graceful about them, in fact, in that there was no wasted motion.

He wondered if he could tweak that with further subliminals. Whether he could coax her motions into a certain artificiality.

He didn’t watch for most of the cycle, being sure to keep his attention apparently elsewhere so that when she came out of it she wasn’t embarrassed. Catching herself doing it twice had been as many times as he could justify, when he planned out his blocks of subliminals; a test and a confirmation but no more. Doing it over and over or for long enough for her fingertips to crinkle could easily tip his hand.

Wayne had no intention of tipping his hand.

He refilled her wine, taking the opportunity to look at her as he did. “What do you think of the film?” he asked, and suddenly remembered he hadn’t replied when she’d asked him something similar earlier.

Hopefully she’d have forgotten.

“They’re good numbers,” she said with a smile. It was the ultimate shortening of a saying they’d had together for some time; the film was by the numbers, but it didn’t matter, because they were good numbers.

Wayne smiled. “If you enjoyed that one, my next choice is going to blow your mind.”