Tessa Lewis, Wyatt's old neighborhood friend

I visited the Lewis house first thing on Monday. They lived just a neighborhood over, but they used to live on the next street. Tess lived there - a close friend for a long time. Tess had just finished her freshman year at the local community college (she had turned 20 in May), but she planned to transfer out to a bigger university after finishing a few more general courses.

When I showed up on the front doorstep, Tess greeted me with surprise. She didn’t know I came back for the summer, which was my bad. For months, I'd been so wrapped up fantasizing about and designing the MK Ultra experiment I was going to run on her, that I’d ghosted the accounts we normally used to stay in contact.

Despite the lapse in contact, though, we clicked like always anyway - we were old friends. A couple months of radio silence couldn't change that.

We hugged, Tess asked about how uni was going, she bitched at me for not calling more often. I told her a few crowd-favorite stories, and got a few laughs out of her. Then we took the conversation up to her room.

This used to be a common occurrence when we were younger and in high school. Now that we were both technically adults, though, the two of us snickering and skipping past the living room to sneak up the stairs made Cassy, Tessa’s little sister, glancing from her phone and arching an eyebrow at us from where she was sprawled out on the couch.

Neither of us cared. If anything, Cassy's suspicion only made Tess snicker louder.

Mine and Tess’s friendship had always been unconventional. We met back in middle school - Tess a 6th grader, me in 8th. I had no friends. I was more about books and video games, backthen. But Tess thought I was cool (for some reason), and even though she was super annoying, I chose to keep her around. In part, because Tess was kinda fun to talk to. In part, because I was lonely. But mostly, it was in part because Tess was a cute girl, and I had absolutely no sense of shame.

Okay. To clarify. Sure, Tess didn't turn many heads, but she was super cute for those who actually paid attention. Some would call her mousy, but I thought Tess's lank, shoulder-length brown hair, doe brown eyes hidden behind glasses, and her compact, waifish frame worked wonders with her nerdy, self-ironic style.

Course, I had ideas for looks that would work even better for Tess. Looks that'd really put her on people’s radars.

So, we arrived in Tess's room, and she sat on her bed, and I sat in her desk chair.

“So what’s this big secret anyway?” asked Tess, cutting straight to the point.

I assumed a thoughtful expression and swiveled to and fro in the desk chair “You’re still planning to go into engineering, right?”

She nodded.

“Well then,” I said, reaching into my backpack, “I’d really like to ask for a favor.” I pulled out a jet-black CD. It caught the light like oil, strange rainbows showing in its surface.

Tess’s eyes widened. “Woah. That’s beautiful,” she said. “What is it?”

Luckily I’d read all the documentation. I had a wealth of trivia to share. “This CD is made from a complex polymer. It supports an encoding way denser than the cheap plastic kinds people used in the past. It’s part of an old research project one of my professors was involved with,” I said, lying only a little bit.

She tilted her head in a way that sent a little ripple through her dark, lanky hair. “What kind of research?” asked Tessa.

“Subconscious learning through auditory stimulation,” I answered, examining my nails like it was no big deal.

“You mean subliminal messages?” There was a note of doubt in Tess's question.

I shrugged. “I wanted to write a paper about subliminals. Maybe do my own research for when I’m going for my doctorate,” I said. “That's a far ways off yet, but the sooner I start, the sooner I’ll find out if the whole thing's BS."

Tess snorted at me and took off her glasses to polish them on her shirt. “**** learning is a joke. At least, artificially induced **** learning. The human brain doesn't work that way,” she said. “I watched a video about it. Running yet another experiment on subliminals would be a colossal waste of time.”

“You watched a video, huh? So, then why not help me prove it for good and save future generations the effort?” I asked, leaning forward while trying to hide most of my eagerness. “If helping me out with this was something you wanted to do, I wouldn’t be asking you for a favor. But, if I do get a paper out of this encoding approach, you can put down on your university transfer applications that you've already assisted with novel research. Even if I can’t publish for a few years, you still reap the benefits on your post-graduate resume - assuming you graduate, that is.”

Tessa snorted at the ribbing, then turned thoughtful. Calculating. She was only a freshman this year, but next year she was going to be looking at her transfer options to schools like MIT or Stanford.

I knew I had her hooked. It’s why I spent so long coming up with the story.

“I’ll help,” said Tess, “but if somebody asks, I want to be able to tell them something better than, 'ugh, I guess my friend asked me to help out or whatever'.”

I sighed, resigned. “I figured as much. I’ll pay you $40 per CD you help me test,” I said. “That way you can say it's a paid internship.”

This pushed Tess over the edge. “Really? Sweet,” she said, now keen on the proposition. Who doesn't want cheap easy money, fast? It's how all scams in the universe operate. “So how do we test the CDs?”

I remained a mask of stoic professionalism on the outside, but on the inside, I let out a gleeful cheer.

Tess didn’t know it yet, but she’d just turned into the all-important first stepping stone on my journey. Soon, I’d find out just how far I could take a dream into reality. Because if this actually worked, my potential would only be limited by my own imagination.

Staying cool and casual took a concentrated effort. “Well, I figured we’d do it the old-fashioned way,” I said, forcing my voice to stay even. “I’ll give you a CD, you listen to it for a bit - maybe a day or a week or something, maybe longer - then we record whether you've shown any response, and try a new variation if not. I’ve got a whole bunch of CDs already burned, each one taking a different approach.”

“Okay, but what do you mean that I have to listen to the CDs?” asked Tess, on guard. “$40 isn’t that much if we're talking hours of work.”

I shrugged and spun the pathfinder CD on my index finger. “You don’t have to sit there with your headphones on, listening in like a sonar operator, if that’s what you mean,” I said with an effortless smile. “I put music tracks on the CDs. Under that is the subliminal content.”

“And what is the subliminal stuff?” she asked. “Language learning? Brainwashing?” Her tone was joking.

“Naturally, that’s a part of it,” I joked back, keeping a straight face.

One wrong hint from me and this would all be over before it began. I could always find another subject, sure, but I'd invested too much in making Tessa my subject to let her slip through my fingers.

“But no. If you can repeat a key phrase embedded in the subliminals without being told what it is beforehand, without you ever consciously hearing the phrase, then to some extent subconscious learning must work, QED. If you can’t, then it doesn’t - at least not with you.”

“Ah. So it’s a key phrase I’m supposed to pick up on,” she said.

“That’s the long and short of it."

I'd come up with the key phrase concept as a litmus test to verify if Tess had taken to the rest of the buried audio. In reality, the black CD on my finger contained a whole lot more. But, like a magician, if I assigned Tess a task to focus on one aspect of the subliminals, she wouldn't think to look for more. She had a diligent, if naturally curious mind - I had to be sure to keep it distracted.

I pushed on. “For the study, all I’m looking for is that, maybe once a day, you put a CD on in the background. Or, you could play it while you’re sleeping. But that may not be as effective, and it'd still need to be loud enough to hear, so if it keeps you up, that might not work.”

I gave Tess the rest of the instructions, and she listened intently. Basically, however advanced my MK Ultra CDs were, they were functionally identical to regular CDs, the only difference being that to play one, you had to have a specialized driver installed on your computer.

At the end of my spiel, Tessa pronounced her verdict. “All right,” she said simply, “I’ll help.”

She bought every line of BS.

We shook hands on the deal. Tess accepted the first CD along with the assignment to listen to it once a day. In exchange, I handed Tess 40 bucks, and, unbeknownst to her, made her into my very own personal science project.