Hypno Harem Read Online Free Page B

began to bawl. As the girl’s mother knelt to comfort her, the tyke pointed at Woody, leaning nonchalantly against a nearby tree, and screamed, “Bad, bad!” The mother cast a baffled but angry look his way. He’d shrugged— Who me?— and had strolled off.
    The experience was unnerving but it proved to him that Popper was on to something. You really could read someone’s mind, even their memories. You had to be close though, no more than a dozen feet away. And reading a mind wasn’t the same as controlling it.
    So it was that several days ago he’d found himself following Dr. Emma Starke one afternoon to a Starbucks near campus, where he took a seat two tables away. He calmed his mind and proceeded to dream himself into the personae of the gopher from Caddyshack . In this form he dream-burrowed below the restaurant—dig, dig, dig!—until he’d popped through the floor of the stony fortress that housed Emma Starke’s flinty intellect. He’d left the Swiss Army knife in a closet crammed with obsolete weaponry and that same night followed its beckoning light—not unlike a lighthouse beam—back into her brain, though he’d done it sitting in a lotus position on the floor of his studio apartment, miles from where she slept.
    Rummaging through Starke’s mind that night, he’d seen the massed hostility to Popper and his work and by extension to any student he’d nurtured. He could see he couldn’t reverse her bias, not even from inside the woman’s brain. It was too entrenched, too close to her own professional identity. The best he could hope for was more time, time to think of a way around her.
    So he’d “moved the furniture,” changed small things here and there that disposed her to treating him, if not more kindly, at least more fairly. It was the best he could do and, frankly, he didn’t expected it to work.
     
    S tarke scowled at his request for more time and he thought she was about to refuse. Then she abruptly changed expression, pulled inward by something. Her eyes went to her desk. When she looked at him again, she almost smiled. “All right, Woody. A month. Give it your best shot.”
    Whaddaya know? It had worked! He said goodbye and quickly left, partly to hide his glee and partly so she wouldn’t have time to reconsider.
    The sun was directly overhead when he stepped outside the neuroscience building. Noon, time for lunch. He was hungry too. He whistled as he went to get a hamburger. My, such a busy morning!
     
    T hat night Woody read more in Popper’s book as he waited for one o’clock, when he assumed Candice would be asleep. The first part of the book had been theory and practice: the how-to of “mind infiltration,” a phrase of his own that he preferred to the tortured jargon of “transcranial exploration.” The second part discussed its implications, whatever term you used. They were unsettling at first, then alarming and in the end scary enough that he saw why Popper compared handing off his life’s work to Gandalf entrusting a little hobbit with “deh Vun Rink to Rule Dem.”
    Once you’d learned to get in someone’s head, you could learn how to go about changing that mind. Everyone’s mind was susceptible to this, though how much varied greatly. People with strong wills and fully developed identities were very hard; rarely could they be changed much. Others were easier, particularly children above the age of nine, when their minds were sufficiently developed but their identities and values still fluid. Teenagers, themselves barely in control of their minds, were hard. Young adults were relatively easy.
    “Mind control” which brought up the familiar corny image of the guy in a turban waving a pocket watch while a girl dozily goes, “Yes, Master,” was a misnomer. A mind couldn’t be controlled with a two-hour course in hypnosis and a snap of the fingers.
    A better term, Woody thought, was “mind hacking.” Like computer hacking, some people were better at it than