There was, of course, still light under one door along the corridor. The office it came from belonged, of course, to Rusty Fletcher.

Amelia sighed heavily. Rusty wasn’t even one of the old guard, she thought to herself. He wasn’t old enough to be.

He’d still been finishing his Masters degree up when the company hired those time-and-motion gurus. Amelia had sat through the presentations patiently as the experts explained that everyone working such long hours meant less productivity not just per hour but overall. Her smile had been a bitter one, knowing that Neuronostics wasn’t going to pay any attention and that her youngest, at that time still waiting to be born, was going to have even less attention in her formative years than the elder two had received.

To everyone’s surprise, upper management had taken the studies seriously, and it had been written into management and team leader handbooks that staff should be encouraged to head home within an hour or so of the end of official business hours. By the time Amelia had been promoted to manage R&D, employee work/life balance had been assigned a target number of hours in the office and was now a management KPI.

Her department was a decent size, and the rest had fallen in line with varying levels of gratitude - some of the team hadn’t had any real friends or hobbies outside work, so getting them into good habits had been hard - so technically she wouldn’t lose her bonus over Rusty. At this point, the bonus was no longer the point. Rusty was a good guy, but by his age she was already engaged, she snatched time with her friends, and managed to play tennis every weekend.

Rusty, by contrast… well, if he had any hobbies it was news to her, and she was confident he was single. The joke in the company was that you could tell the single men because their offices didn’t feature numerous posters of scantily-clad beautiful women (and the occasional square-jawed man - Amelia had occasionally lingered in Frank McElroy’s office for longer than she strictly needed to, and it wasn’t for the pleasure of his company), simply because they could keep those and the anime statues at home without domestic complaint.

There wasn’t nothing in Rusty’s office, but there wasn’t much; an Avengers: Endgame poster probably bought the year the film came out and carried from student apartment to the office when he landed the job, a novelty mug much faded by washing, a selection of whiteboard markers and magnets. A splash of personality, but not much else to stake a claim.

She rapped her knuckles on the door to his office then opened it. One of the analysis headrigs was resting upside-down on his desk, some of the magnetically shielded casing removed and the circuitry beneath exposed. Rusty was sitting at his computer console, leaning forward in his chair, face just inches from the screen as he painstakingly retraced the design of a circuit board. Amelia knew just from the body language that he hadn’t even noticed her polite knock.

She also knew from experience that if she spoke now, she’d startle him while he was in the middle of whatever change he thought was so important, so she waited instead for him to finish laying out that trace before she said “Show’s over, Rusty. Pack it up.”

He jumped in his chair, as she’d known he would, and wheeled round to face her. “Oh. Hi,” He grinned sheepishly, raised a hand to rub at the back of his neck. “You know, in a lot of companies, they’d be glad I was this hardworking.”

“A lot of companies measure value by time sat behind a desk,” Amelia returned, but she did so with a tolerant amusement in her tone. “You and I have lucked into working somewhere smarter than that, and it doesn’t say much for the pair of us’s smarts if we don’t take advantage of that.”

“I want to get this chip design sent for fabrication before I go home.”

“And I want you to go home and do that tomorrow.” She dropped into the other chair in the office. This was never a quick conversation. “And then I can go home to my family, who are supposed to need as much management as you actually do.”

“But if I don’t get this done tonight-”

“You’ll get it done tomorrow,” she said softly. “We’re still selling hundreds of the original design a year, and we sell them to the healthcare market. If the new edition is buggy, we’re going to spend months if not years fixing it to an even higher level of scrutiny. If we take an extra day at each step of testing but we get it right before it goes on the market, that’s a cost saving.”

“I guess, but -”

“Go home, Rusty.” It was her mom voice. She wasn’t proud of that but, on the other hand, he didn’t seem to notice.

“You don’t have to stay just because I am.”

“No. But since you aren’t staying, that’s not a problem. If you’re at a loss what to do with yourself, why not catch a movie? Or, hell, take yourself out to dinner then go to a bar. If you see anyone attractive who’s on their own, have a conversation with them. You probably won’t end up with a new relationship but you might, and either way you’ll have a good evening.”

He laughed. “You’re telling me to go out and find a date?”

“If you want to put it that way, sure,” Amelia told him. “But you don’t even have to put that much pressure on yourself. Just… do something fun. Talk to people about something that isn’t work.”

“I don’t need a girlfriend,” Rusty said. “I’ve got the best work wife going.” He flashed her a winning smile.

In spite of herself, Amelia was genuinely touched. The way he said it, she was sure he wasn’t just trying to sweet talk her; no, he actually felt that way. Which meant her particular one-to-one management style was working, with just one excruciatingly frustrating exception.

She smiled softly, but then chuckled. “I’m torn between thanking you for a flattering comment and telling you not to be silly,” she said. “My eldest is only four years younger than you, Rusty.”

“You hear about weirder age gaps,” he said. He was grinning, had perked up. He wasn’t flirting, she thought; of course, he wasn’t not flirting either. It was less about what they were saying and more about the tone they each said it in.

“See, this is what I mean,” she said. “You talk like this to a woman who’s interested and I think you could be quite charming. Same if you prefer men.” She paused. “Of course, if you’re not interested in either, you can just tell me to mind my own business.” One of the managers over in Operations had refused to believe one of their staff was ace. The fallout had been… memorable.

“No, I like women just fine,” he said. “I just…” He shrugged. “I went on some dates last year,” he told her. “Online ones.”

Oh, honey. As best she could, she kept her expression neutral, but she was bracing herself for something embarrassing. “Why only online?”

“Well, she lives in Hawaii.”

“My girlfriend, who lives in Canada?” She was smiling herself now. Rusty was good company; she did genuinely like him. Just not nearly so much as her husband or her children.

“No, no, she really does,” he said. “Well, she did. I don’t know if she’s moved.” She smiled at another reminder of the typical engineers’ precision.

“What made it stop.”

“We both knew it was going nowhere.”

Ah. “Was that part of the appeal?”

“I… haven’t really thought about it that much,” he said.

“I’m sure there are reasons a woman could fall for you,” she said, abandoning that line before it could make him despondent. “You just need to put yourself out there. It’s marketing, really. What are you good at that women would love?”

She watched Rusty think. Over the last three years, she’d got to know him pretty well. She saw the idea occur; when he didn’t immediately speak, she knew that he was trying to decide whether he should say it or not. Inwardly, she braced, but whatever he said, she knew she wouldn’t be reporting it to HR. This whole situation was wild, and it was her doing at least as much as his.

“I know how to make women cum by talking to them,” he said.

Amelia blinked several times, rapidly, staring at him as she did. “What.”

“Well, obviously, once you’ve been working here for a while, you get interested in how the brain works,” Rusty told her. She nodded, although she couldn’t imagine how this would link to whatever he was about to say. “So last year I decided to read up on hypnosis. You know it’s not actually all that well researched? Considering we can monitor brain activity and such these days.”

“Isn’t it a scam?”

“I mean, it’s possible my date last year was faking her orgasms over the call, but I can’t see why she’d bother.”

Amelia sat for a while in thought, digesting that. Eventually she rolled her eyes and stood. “Go home, Rusty,” she said. “And don’t let me catch you here this late again this week.”

*

Amelia got very little sleep the next two nights. Taking care of her family was enough to occupy her mind fully from the time she got home until she and Rolf went to bed, and after she and he made themselves a rewarding crop of endorphins they both usually drifted off to sleep quickly.

Those nights, though, Amelia kept thinking about what Rusty had said. On the one hand, it sounded absurd. On the other, she remembered the way he’d thought about it. She was sure it wasn’t a joke.

And that meant he at least thought it was all real.

On Friday night as she was doing her final checks, she again saw a single light shining from under a closed office door. Her first reaction was to sigh; after that was done with, she made her way to the door, knocked, and entered.

Rusty again had one of the headrigs upside down on his desk, and again part of the casing was removed. This time, instead of using it as reference, he was probing the circuitry with a tester, checking current levels for different paths on his monitor

She meant to tell him to go home. Instead she sat down in the other chair and said “What were you saying about hypnosis the other night?”

“...That I can use it to talk people into orgasm?”

“No, the other thing.” She was blushing, she knew, but she had hopes that if she ignored that fact it would go away.

Rusty looked uncertain himself as he thought back. Eventually he said “Oh. That it’s real?”

“And under-researched considering modern technology,” she answered.

“Right.” He nodded. “What about it?”

“Well, it occurred to me that there is a chance to actually get some research in.” She waved her hand at the headrig, which by virtue of being the prototype of the new iteration was arguably the most state-of-the-art brain activity analysis device made by Neuronostics.

“You… want to be hypnotised in that?”

“Well,” she said. “I sent Mindy home an hour ago, so we can’t exactly ask an intern to volunteer. I’m certainly not willing to conduct these tests during official working hours.”

“I think we could at least see if it’s possible,” she said. She wasn’t quite willing to admit how curious she was about what he’d said, but part of her had mentally tagged it as something to tease Rolf with in future, if it worked.

“What, uh…” He stumbled over his words. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Oh,” she said, blushing deeper again, “I’m sure you can come up with something.”

Rusty stayed quiet for a while longer. “You’re absolutely sure about this?”

“I’m sure,” she told him. She waited.

They were both now, she knew, well past the constraints of ethics. For him it was just unethical because she was a work colleague; for her, it felt perilously close to cheating on Rolf, though she told herself firmly that it wasn’t really. There wasn’t going to be any intimacy between them, and really it was all for science.

“I guess we can try it.” He set down the probe, picked up the piece of casing he’d set aside, and pressed it firmly back into place.

Seen as a complete item, the headrig looked like a combat helmet from a low-budget science fiction movie, all smooth plastic contours, with a couple of LED displays for readouts on the front and a chinstrap to hold it in place. Before launching the first version, they’d gone through several rounds of focus testing when deciding how to decorate the casing, to make it as friendly to as many users as possible.

Really, its main purpose was to ensure that the sensitive electrodes that would connect to the wearer’s head weren’t going to pick up the device’s own electromagnetic fluctuations. The whole point was to monitor the brain’s electrical activity, and contaminating that data would make it useless.

Amelia had worn it a few times before, out of curiosity as much as anything else. It wasn’t Neuronostics’ only product, but it had helped put them on the map.

She was comfortable settling it into place. It came down level with the bridge of her nose; she could see out underneath, with a limited field of vision, but unless viewed from below, her eyes were hidden. “Is not being able to see my eyes properly going to be a problem?” she asked.

“Well, you can do this several different ways,” Rusty told her. “Eye contact, eye fixation in general, is one way to go about it. But it’s far from the only one.”

Amelia was smiling again. You didn’t last as a manager in the tech industry unless you could at least tolerate the enthusiastic infobombing of a nerd with a chance to talk about their special interest, and in fact with most of her team she positively enjoyed it. There was something oddly pure about it. “Right.”

“I think the first thing, just get comfortable. It helps if you’re comfortable.”

“That I can do.” She settled back in the office chair, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. Then she closed her eyes.

“Alright,” Rusty said. “Now, there are a few different ways to go from here. They all work better or worse for different people. I’m going to take a guess based on what I know, and you’re probably going to find it works just fine. With me?”

She nodded, the headrig changing the balance of her head a little. It felt like she was being led a little on the downbeat of the nod. Amelia giggled.

“Good. Now, in the next few moments, you are going to fall into a trance. You are in a comfortable place. There are no distractions and no disruptions. All you have to do is listen to my voice, and to let yourself relax.”

The way he was talking had changed; the rhythm of his speech had slowed, the tone had softened. Somehow, even in the slow way he was speaking, he had contrived to add a beckoning urgency to his words. “And the fact of the matter is,” he told her, “you want to be hypnotised. We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. You’re listening to me because my voice can make that happen for you.

“You want to feel that drowsy spaciness. You want your thoughts to slow down, as if they are moving through treacle. To be caught up and trapped in sweet sensation.” Amelia felt herself agreeing. She hadn’t thought about how hypnotic trance might feel, but the way he was talking made it all sound so tempting. What would drowsy spaciness feel like, aside from being caught in sweet sensation? She tried to picture it.

“I am telling you this, and that makes it easy to believe, especially now that my words drip into your ears more quickly than your thoughts take shape.

“Thinking is slow and complicated, and listening is easy.

“You’re in that comfortable place, listening to a voice you want to hear, without distractions. All you have to do is listen to my voice, and to let yourself relax.

“Relax…”

A thrill ran up her spine at the way he delivered the word, the way he made it last, the way he made two syllables sound like the most important idea in the world. And in spite of his urgent coaxing, Amelia was aware suddenly, without thinking about it, that she had relaxed as she listened.

“Right now, all you want to do is be in this comfortable place and listen to my voice.

That drowsy, slow, spaciness is touching you now. You can feel it settling on you, and it feels good. It feels inviting. Isn’t that right?”

It might have been hours, or minutes, or no time at all, but the question seemed to hang in her mind for some time. She knew the answer, but part of her had to stir, inside herself, to answer.

“Yes,” she said. She spoke so quietly she wasn’t sure she’d even heard herself, but Rusty had clearly noticed.

“That’s good,” he said. “You’re doing very well. So, in a moment I’m going to let you drop into that inviting trance. And what I’m going to do is lift up one of your hands by the wrist, and when I let go, your hand will drop back into place, and you will find that your mind drops deep into trance along with it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said. It was easier to answer now, though she wasn’t any louder, even after noticing how quietly she had spoken.

It didn’t matter. She felt Rusty lift her hand, as he had promised he would, holding it gently by the wrist until it was almost level with her slumped shoulders.

She found that she was in a state of heightened anticipation, one she had achieved without ever becoming less relaxed. Any moment now Rusty was going to do what he’d told her he would, and she would drop into trance as her hand fell. She knew it already, was certain of it, was looking forward to it.

She was excited, and she was relaxed. She had thought those were opposites, but it turned out they could coexist.

He let go of her wrist and her hand fell to land with a clap on the back of the other, where it had originally been folded. But she didn’t even notice the sound. She was too busy falling herself. Her head drooped forward, and it seemed to her that there was an extra pull that she had not expected. She had forgotten the way the weight of the headrig affected such movement.

She found herself floating in a warm sweetness, something delicious and delightful.

Rusty said something else, but so quietly it was barely louder than a breath; her imagination suggested it might have been “Beautiful”.

“You can feel that lovely, sweet trance rising up within you, flowing through you,” Rusty was saying. “And you can let yourself experience just how good it feels. Let yourself notice pleasure, tingling from your head down your spine, sweeping across your body in pulses. It feels so good,” he coaxed. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yesss…” His words were paced so slowly and smoothly that it seemed right to take longer about her own.

“Very good. Now, if pleasure is pulsing, there must be a point it’s pulsing out from. And right now, I think it’s pulsing out from your head. Am I right?”

“Yes,” she answered again. She was picturing the spot in question. If she had been asked where the pulses came from before he said that, she couldn’t have told you if they had always come from her head, or if his words had guided them. She wouldn’t have understood why someone might want to know.

“Well, you will notice over the next minute or so that the origin point of your pleasure pulses is flowing to the back of your head… and then into your spine… and running down your spine… and it will come to rest, soon, in the source of so much pleasure, throbbing between your legs, in your pussy.

“You can feel it moving, can’t you?”

“Yesss,” she whimpered. The tingle up and down her spine had only grown, and even as the source of the pleasure sank away from her mind the waves it sent out continued to wash through it. Her scalp sang with blissful satisfaction. Her eyes, half-open, were unseeing.

“And when it takes root there, you will find that the pleasure is also a pressure, and the pressure of pleasure will build until you cum. Right now, that feels like a natural, beautiful inevitability, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re so eager for it, aren’t you?” The urgency was still there in his voice, and for all that he was coaxing her she knew now that he was excited by this too. That it mattered to him.

She hadn’t expected that, as obvious as it now seemed. “Yes.”

“You’d like me to speed up that descent, wouldn’t you?”

“Yesssss…”

She felt him grasp her wrist, felt her wrist lift back into the air, this time lifted up level with her lolling head. Excitement flooded her again, joining the pulsing, throbbing pleasure and the sweet, sweet relaxation in which she floated. “You remember how I speed up drops, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And so you know what will happen when I let you drop again?”

She whimpered.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, and let her wrist fall.

Next to her ear, she caught the sound of an electric fizzle, then a quiet, sudden pop. The confusion at the noise met the biggest wave of pleasure of all, pushing up through her nervous system like a geyser of bliss. Amelia screamed out in ecstacy, and then there was only nothingness.

*

The reality of what he was doing washed back in over Rusty suddenly as Amelia’s shudder of pleasure culminated in a juddering halt, at the end of which she was stiffly motionless. Partway through the induction he had somehow forgotten that the woman he was doing this to, who he often referred to in DMs with friends as his work wife, was his boss.

The language he was using had gradually slipped closer and closer to the tones he’d used with Malie in their hypnotic sessions last year. It had become something totally inappropriate, though he could console himself at least that the whole situation was inappropriate; there was no defence for this, but she would not want to admit any of this.

And then she had cried out, and he had heard something in the headrig misfire, and now she was abruptly stiff and unmoving, her mouth open. As so often after a loud noise, the silence seemed to echo with the cry of her orgasm. Her thighs were parted and Rusty could see the stain spreading across the crotch of her pantsuit.

Something had gone very right, but he couldn’t help thinking it had also gone very wrong.

He was about to ask her to wake up, his eyes wide, uncertain of everything he’d done, every choice they’d made between them. Right on the periphery of his vision he caught a bright flicker. His computer had woken back from sleep with the sudden return of input. That wasn’t from the keyboard or mouse, which meant it was a feed from the headrig; whatever had given, it hadn’t stopped working entirely.

Rusty told himself he’d just check the readings before he did anything else. Just in case there was a problem.

There was, of course, the possibility that the headrig was recording data, but was not fully accurate, due to the damage or due to an error in his own adjustments to design. However, the image of brain activity it projected looked very familiar. When he started working for Neuronostics, he’d wanted to get a sense of what a brain image should look like. He’d done a lot of research.

The strange pattern he was seeing reminded him of something. A mind affected by a particular drug while it was monitored. He wasn’t sure which one, but he knew which folder he’d stored the research in. He called it up and quickly paged through them until he found one which looked similar.

Scopolamine. The so-called zombie drug, known for inducing deeply suggestible states.

Rusty turned back to face Amelia. A fat bead of saliva now dangled from her open mouth on a thin strand, and the headrig had tipped slightly to sit on her head at a rakish angle. That same open mouth was a broad, vacant smile, almost goofy. It was, he thought, the least dignified he’d ever seen her.

It also had to be the most vulnerable he’d ever seen her, lying there in this oddly stiff stupor. As he studied her, an idea occurred; more honestly, a fantasy bubbled back up from the depths of his subconscious, back into which he had firmly shoved it every time it came up. Something that would never be feasible, and even if it would, the risk was too high. He’d long told himself that he wouldn’t be willing to take the risk, even if it was possible.

Suddenly the possibility was here in front of him. And the risk didn’t seem nearly so great as he’d imagined it would.

“Can you hear me?” he asked, still feeling tentative.

“Yes.” The answer was a little louder than her answers before, and the enunciation was perfectly clear. It seemed as if sinking into this even deeper state stripped away everything, leaving the precise word.

The next thing he said was not part of his plan but an impulse running ahead of his mouth. “How do you feel?”

There was a short pause before she answered. “Very good.” Her tone didn’t carry any of the pleasure, any of the emotion. A completely flat delivery. But he believed it entirely.

He grinned. “When I wake you up,” he said, “you will still feel exactly as good as you do now. Just as much pleasure will still fill you. You will know that at the peak, it felt even better. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You will never forget how good you feel at that moment. And it will seem to you that it is the best you’ve ever felt. You will want to feel like that again, won’t you?”

“I will.”

“After this experience is over,” he said, “you will not consciously remember anything that went on while you were in trance. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“What will not happen?”

“I will not consciously remember anything that went on while I was in trance.”

It was all going the way he’d hoped. Or at least it should be. He was going to need to test that. What was something whimsical enough that she wouldn’t question herself doing it, but still a first step on the journey?

“When you get into the office tomorrow morning, you will stop in to see me. As soon as we are alone, you will stand to attention and salute. What will you do?”

“I will stand to attention and salute.”

“When?”

“As soon as we are alone, when I get into the office tomorrow morning.”

“You’re doing very well. After saluting, you will get on with your day in whatever way you want to.”

“The next time you and I are here late alone, you will realise you want to see how your brain looks at the moment of orgasm. You will realise I can make that happen, by mixing hypnosis and the headrig.” He paused, considering. “Did you feel any guilt about asking me this time?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“You will not think about your guilt when you realise what you want,” he said. “Guilt is a way of saying something wasn’t right, but it’s natural for you to get what you want.” After a moment, smiling to himself, he added, “Except when it comes to me going home early, of course. Is all that clear?”

“Yes.”

Was it his imagination or was that wide open, goofy smile even wider now? She was completely transformed by it. He was tempted to take the headrig off so he could see all of her expression, but he wasn’t sure that wouldn’t break the trance.

He wanted to give her so many more instructions, to push her so much further, but while he was willing to dare the risks, he wasn’t fool enough to multiply them. No, if he wanted the shape of mind he dreamed of at the reins of that body he dreamed of, he would force himself to take it slower.

If the suggestions he had given her took as strongly as he thought they should, then he had a test of the depth of trance, he had a motivator for her to come back and allow him to trance her again, and he had it hidden from her conscious memory. And or all of those might fail, and if they did, it was better he’d gone no further.

“I am going to count up from one to five,” he said. “As I count, with each number, you will feel yourself rising back up out of trance to wakefulness, and at five you will be fully awake, and the trance will have ended. At that time all instructions for your trance will be gone, and all reassurances for afterward will activate.” He let those carefully chosen words hang in the air. “Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“Well done.” He took a deep breath. “One… Two…”

The lolling head lifted, just slightly. Rusty was reminded of actors, tied to chairs, pretending to come around out of unconsiousness. Was that how it looked when people came round, or was Amelia behaving the way her subconscious assumed she should?

“Three… four…”

Her mouth had closed. He saw her swallow away whatever drool had collected in her mouth but not escaped.

“Five.”

She made a quiet mmmph sound and wriggled in her chair, then rolled her shoulders as if loosening them after a period of stiffness. Sitting forward and upright, she lifted her hands to the headrig and eased it off, and she set it down on his desk to her side with one hand. With the back of the other she wiped the dangling trail of drool from her chin, blinking slowly several times.

All this done, she settled back in her chair and smiled at him. Rusty’s life mostly took place at work, but he’d caused that smile often enough to see the satisfaction behind it. “You good?” he asked.

She stretched languorously. “Very good,” she said, unconsciously echoing her own earlier comment. “Although I’m not clear on all the details.”

“No?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember much of it,” she said thoughtfully, then frowned slightly. “Actually I’m not sure I remember pretty much anything. Is that usual?”

“It’s not uncommon.” He took refuge in the truth. “Sometimes people find they develop the ability to remember more over time.”

“Hm. Well, maybe we’ll have to see if we can repeat that.” With that, she got up out of her chair; he was satisfied beyond his own expectations to see her unsteady on her feet. “But for right now, you need to get home so I can get home.”