First Steps

Drake leaned back in his chair, a satisfied grin creeping across his face as he replayed the memory of his first "big swing" base wide, rather than just the experimental little playpen of his division.

He had taken a gamble—jumping straight to the most audacious command he could imagine without building up to it with a gradual sequence like he'd been doing so far.

"Big cocks were meant to be complimented." That was it. Just one bold directive encoded into the lights across the entire facility.

And it worked.

Tracer’s lingering stare, her stammered words, her eventual awkward compliment—it had confirmed everything Drake had always believed but had rarely seen validated. People—everyone—were fascinated by big cocks. Society’s polite veneer might try to obscure it, but deep down, that primal curiosity was always there.

Drake had suspected it for years. Women might gasp, blush, or feign shock, but their eyes always betrayed them. Men might snicker or make crude jokes, but it was jealousy, not ridicule, that drove their laughter. His mutation wasn’t a curse—it was a blessing the world hadn’t learned how to appreciate yet.

That smug realization made the success with Tracer all the sweeter. He hadn’t needed to ease her into the belief with subtle layers of reasoning. No 1-2-3-4-5 gradual progression, no baby steps. It had simply been -1: Big cocks were meant to be complimented. And her reaction had proven that belief was already nestled deep in the human psyche, just waiting to be drawn out.

He still remembered the look on Ana’s face the first time she smiled at him after his experiment with her. They’d been working side by side in the tech bay, recalibrating one of the Morphing Grid consoles, when she had turned to him with her new bright, almost saccharine grin.

"Y’know, Drake," she’d said, her voice cheerful yet laced with her trademark sarcasm, "if your tech skills were as big as... well, some other things, we’d have this done in half the time."

Her eyes had flicked down briefly, a subtle glance at the bulge in his uniform before she looked back up with raised eyebrow.

It was perfect.

The grin was ****, of course, her tone slightly awkward, but the fact that Ana—acerbic, no-nonsense Ana—had managed to both insult and compliment him in the same breath was proof enough that his light encoding worked. More than that, it confirmed the universal truth he’d always suspected: his size was impossible to ignore, no matter how much people pretended otherwise.

Ever since Elastigirl dropped them off with the tech team, Drake’s mind had worked like a machine, quietly processing, scheming, and calculating far beyond what he allowed anyone to see.

While the rest of the tech team had struggled to decode the mystery of Screen Slaver’s goggles, he'd maintained an air of detached curiosity, offering minor suggestions and observations that kept him just helpful enough to avoid suspicion.

But Drake had an advantage no one knew about. Buried deep in the recesses of his skull was a neural implant, a piece of illicit tech he’d installed himself long before joining Nexus. It was an advanced device that allowed him to record and save everything his eyes took in—every screen he viewed, every line of code he analyzed, every detail of the goggles’ functionality as the team carefully deconstructed them.

Drake had quickly realized that the team’s work on the goggles was being closely monitored. Every diagnostic, every hypothesis was scrutinized by the higher ups, leaving little room for the kind of independent experimentation he knew would uncover the tech’s true potential.

So, he played the long game. He let the others run in circles, proposing theories that went nowhere and performing tests that yielded no meaningful results. Meanwhile, his neural implant quietly recorded everything. By the time the goggles were dismantled and their components destroyed per protocol, Drake already had every piece of data he needed.

And he’d figured out the truth: Screen Slaver’s tech didn’t just hypnotize—it encoded information into the brain using light.

Drake’s first instinct had been to exploit the base’s many screens. From terminals and monitors to the massive holo-displays in the common areas, Nexus was flooded with potential conduits for subliminal commands. It would have been a simple matter to embed the necessary patterns into existing systems and let them do the work for him.

But as tempting as that was, Drake quickly dismissed the idea. Evelyn Deavor had branded herself Screen Slaver, and her entire methodology had revolved around hypnosis through screens. If there was one thing Elastigirl would be paranoid about, it was the use of monitors for mind control.

If she has even a fraction of a brain in that big bubble butt of hers, Drake thought smugly, she’s got monitoring protocols in place. As confident as he was in his hacking skills, he wasn’t about to risk tripping alarms that would bring her and the rest of Nexus down on him.

That’s when the idea struck him: the lights.

The base was flooded with artificial light, from the overhead fixtures in every room to the subtle strips lining hallways and workstations. It was a simple system, designed for comfort and efficiency, with no security measures in place. After all, who would bother hacking the lights?

It was perfect. Using the light fixtures, he could encode subliminal commands just as effectively as with screens, but without raising any suspicion. The patterns would be subtle, nearly invisible, and impossible to detect without the right equipment.

No one would suspect that the soft glow of a desk lamp or the ambient lighting in the cafeteria could rewrite their thoughts.

Drake had wasted no time. Using his neural implant, he developed a program to interface with the base’s lighting system, allowing him to embed commands into the light itself. The process was seamless; the lights didn’t flicker, dim, or show any visible change. To anyone else, they were just ordinary lights.

It was a stroke of genius, and as Drake implemented his first tests, he felt a surge of smug satisfaction. Screen Slaver’s tech had been powerful, but it had been loud, clumsy, and obvious. Drake’s version was quiet, surgical, and utterly undetectable.

Drake’s first experiment had been on Ana, the senior tech who lived in the room across from his. Ana was in her 50s, a plain-faced woman with an acerbic wit and little patience for anyone. Yet, despite her sharp tongue, Drake found himself oddly attracted to her. She had slim, boyish hips that contrasted strikingly with the absolute milkers she carried up top—breasts that probably sagged to her knees out of uniform but packed just right when held firm by Nexus’s standard-issue attire.

Using the lights in her quarters, Drake carefully encoded a sequence of commands over three days. The initial belief was innocuous: efficiency in work is important. It wasn’t a stretch—Ana already valued precision and effectiveness in her work. Once that belief was embedded, he added another: a cheery smile for male co-workers improves efficiency.

By the third day, the normally bad-tempered woman was presenting cheery, if obviously fake, grins to every man she passed. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

Drake watched her transformation with a mix of awe and smug satisfaction. The lights alone had done the work, subtly altering her behavior without her even realizing it.

The experiment was a resounding success.

Encouraged by his results with Ana, Drake began running simulations using his implant’s neural modeling software. He carefully mapped out the brain’s response to different types of input, testing how far he could push changes without triggering rejection.

The simulations confirmed what he suspected:

1. Incremental Change Was Key
   The human brain would reject any belief or behavior too dissimilar from its existing framework. However, by stacking smaller, logical changes, it was possible to build up to much larger shifts over time.

2. Reinforcement Was Essential
   Each implanted belief had to be reinforced repeatedly to take hold. Once established, however, the brain would defend the new belief as though it had always been there.

3. The Scope Was Limitless
   Given enough time and patience, it was possible to overwrite even the most deeply ingrained knowledge or logic.

Drake’s experiments and simulations left him with an irrefutable truth: with light, nothing was out of reach.

He stared at his implant’s data logs, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Screen Slaver’s goggles had been a blunt instrument, but Drake’s approach was surgical. He didn’t need to shock the brain into obedience—he could guide it, mold it, reshape it into whatever he desired.

As he shut down his terminal for the night, his thoughts turned back to Ana. The sight of her **** smiles brought him a perverse sense of satisfaction. He wondered what other beliefs he could layer into her mind—what other truths she might accept with enough time.

For the first time since joining Nexus, Drake felt something he hadn’t experienced in years: control.

And he had no intention of letting it go.