Mind Projector

Shlepping crates of old junk from his family's basement was not the summer break he'd had in mind. He'd come home from college intending to hang out with his friends and maybe even hook up with a girl now he was a sophisticated college man. But before he could do any of that his mother had a list of jobs for "the man of the house" starting with clearing out the decades of accumulated garbage. By rights his father should be doing this, most of this shit was his anyway, but since he'd run off with his secretary he wasn't around much these days. Jason shook his head, over a year later and he still couldn't quite believe his own dad could be such a cliche.

He sighs hefting a box of video cassettes labeled Grandma's soaps. He's already been at this for hours and he's barely made a dent. And after he's done here he still had the garage to do and after that the attic as well.

Muttering under his breath about the unfairness of the whole situation he shoulders open the basement door only to feel the overloaded box disintegrate in his hands. The contents spill out, clattering down the basement stairs in an avalanche of black plastic.

"Fuck!" he swears "Fucking unbelievable"

"Language Jason!" his mother scolds him from the kitchen "You may have been corrupted by your time away but I won't have you passing on that potty mouth to your sisters"

"Sorry, mom," he responds "It's just, ugh, never mind."

He shakes his head at his mother's protective attitude, he knows that neither of his sisters is the innocent angel she seems to imagine them to be but saying that would just start a fight. So, instead, he tramps back down the stairs collecting the dropped tapes as he went.

He's assembled most of them in a neat stack when he notices one of them is lighter than the others. Puzzled he gives it a shake resulting in a loud rattle, there is something in there, he realizes.

Prying it open he finds a leather belt, no, it's too small to be a belt, a collar maybe? Whatever it is it's studded with pieces of chrome and has a plastic knob in the middle. The knob is stamped with numbers one to ten and looks like originally belonged to an old radio.

Underneath all that are several sheets of notepaper. Unfolding then Jason reads,

To whom it may concern,

Greetings, you hold in your hands the culmination of my life's work and (at the risk of sounding immodest) the greatest scientific achievement in human history. It has served the purpose for which I created it but I find myself unwilling to destroy it and so I leave it here to be discovered someday, by you, whoever you may be. It is, in simple terms, a psionic amplifier. Simply wear it around your head and it will increase a person's natural telepathic abilities to an extraordinary degree.

Use the control knob to set your desired power level and focus your thoughts on your intended target. At lower settings, subjects will be rendered suggestable allowing you to manipulate their thoughts and emotions. The higher the setting the more directly you will be able to control your target or targets with the highest enabling complete subjugation.

I must warn you, however...

And here the note trails off. There is more writing but it is illegible, faded by time and use.

"Okay..." Jason says not sure what to make of all this "That seems, insane. There's no way this could be real, it's got be some kind of prank. The girls set all this up to prank me..."

Still, he can't help wonder, what if it was real? Shouldn't he at least test it?