Taken for a Spin

**Authors note: this story is highly influenced by one of my favorite MC stories and authors. “Mountin’ Biking” by Joe Mudak. It’s available in a few locations (including mcstories), and I highly recommend you read it, but It is not a requirement to enjoy this story. I just want to make clear this is not entirely my original idea, but it is my original writing and characters!**

“There’s no way this guy is serious,” I said aloud as I read a forum post on my computer. I was scanning through a well-hidden hypnosis and mind control fetish forum on the internet. One of my favorite members had recently written several hot first-person short stories about a very special “smart” exercise bike. The bike in the stories had the ability to bypass the consciousness of its female riders. It allowed the gym employee to insert ideas into their heads, much to his enjoyment. The author, AnonMC1151, claimed these were “true” stories. That’s not an unusual claim on these forums. I guess the authors have fun imagining they are documenting what their exploits would be if they had a mind control power. That’s not really my style, but to each their own.

The most recent update to this story was a downer but much expected. The main character was not careful to cover his tracks and finally got caught. All his toys were deprogrammed, and he ended up running from the cops. This was not an unusual ending to one of these stories… well it wasn’t until the author made another short forum post.

“I managed to grab the bike and hide it,” the post read. “I can’t get caught with it. Maybe one of you can carry on with it… be more careful than I did. I’m not too worried about the cops. I’m more worried about the others.”

“I dumped the bike behind an abandoned dealership in Carlisle, PA,” the post continued, “Good luck. This will be my last post.”

The dramatic ending was exciting, if not a bit . What really grabbed my attention was knowing where this abandoned dealership was. I had driven by it several times while living in Pennsylvania a few years back. “It might be fun to drive by there,” I thought. “Maybe I’ll get a free exercise bike out of it.” I was seriously impressed that this author wrote a multi-chapter story to get rid of what was probably a crappy old exercise bike in his garage.

“Ring!” My thoughts were interrupted by my morning wake-up alarm. I glanced around the edges of the black-out curtains in my messy office. Sure enough, a sliver of sunlight was bleeding around the edges. “Shit!” I cursed under my breath after realizing I had accidentally stayed awake 24 hours during a work week.

I stood up from the computer and stumbled to the bathroom, trying not to step on any accumulated trash on the floor. “This place looks like a pigsty,” I thought to myself. I’d turned into a lazy slob since I started working from home two years back. I was single and gave pretty well zero effort in anything I did.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I wasn’t overly disgusted. I had gained a bit of weight recently, but if anything, I filled out my tall skinny frame even better than when I was in tip-top shape a few years back on my college track team. My hair had darkened to nearly black due to lack of I’ve light. It really made my gray-blue eyes pop. It almost seemed like my father staring back at me more than the mental image I had of myself. A tinge of nostalgia creep in. I missed that crazy old man. He was the only family I’d ever known.

I stepped into the shower to freshen up before getting to work. “Why do I still bother with this stupid job anyway,” I thought to myself while washing my hair. “Thanks to dad, I’ve got enough money for two lifetimes.”

My father was a grade-A womanizer. There’s no telling how many brothers and sisters I actually have. I’ve never met any because Doug was excellent at not being found by his numerous conquests. My mother was an exception to that rule. I don’t remember her at all, but according to Doug, she showed up at his door drunk with 2-year-old me in tow and demanded child support from him. The story goes he called CPS and ended up getting full custody of me in the courts later on. He was a cheap bastard, especially when it came to women. It somehow served him well, though.

He raised me reasonably well, with the exception of the ideas he put into my head about women. I didn’t get his charisma, so my misogynistic ideas didn’t pan out as well for me. I also had a tiny bit of empathy my father did not have. I still had my share of one-night stands and short relationships like my father did, but much fewer and farther between. Looking back, I always felt slightly guilty for the women I had used.

When Doug passed away a couple of years back, I just quit cold turkey and decided to stay single. My motivation to do much of anything kind of went out the window after that.

After getting ready, I dressed back into some comfortable sweats and stumbled back to my office to see what I had to work on for the day.

I was a website designer in a large consulting firm. My job was basically doing the coding and layout to create functional and attractive websites for various individuals and small businesses. Over the last few years, I have automated my process with templates and macros I made. I didn’t share these shortcuts with my company, of course. As far as my coworkers knew, I was an average website designer capable of setting up 1-2 small websites per 8-hour day. In reality, I only had to work about 2 hours a day to meet my quotas. Video calls were pretty rare, so I usually spent the rest of my workday gaming or surfing the web.

After a couple of hours of work, I finished my daily quotas and decided to lie down for a nap. When I woke up, I logged back on to the forum and looked back at the exercise bike story to see if the author had updated. To my surprise, the post was gone. I dug deeper and realized the author was no longer a member either. There was no admin note of a suspension or anything, so he obviously just deleted his account.

“Okay, now you’ve got my attention,” I mumbled aloud. He had been a forum member for even longer than I had. I couldn’t think of a reason why he’d write a new story and immediately delete his account before almost anyone could read it. It was only about an hour’s drive to where I believed the story mentioned, so I carefully grabbed some supplies and hopped in my old truck.

The starter motor clicked several times, but the old truck grumbled and wheezed to life in the cold winter air. The truck was not my daily driver. I just had it for the rare occasion I needed to haul things. After an hour of driving with the comforting drone of the worn exhaust cutting through the darkening sky, I carefully pulled into a shopping center parking lot. The lot was a few hundred yards from the abandoned dealership.

While I obviously didn’t think this exercise bike, if it existed at all, would have mind control abilities, I still wanted to take precautions before looking for it. I didn’t necessarily trust a random guy on the internet. Especially the part of the internet I was looking at.

I pulled out a pair of binoculars and surveyed the rear of the dealership from afar. “The light poles appear to be shot out, so there is no light, at least,” I began mentally checking as I scanned the area. “No people… but that might be a camera on that light pole. I don’t see a bike, though….”

Just as I was about to put the binoculars up, I caught a glint of glass from the far corner of the lot. Sure enough, whether by coincidence or not, a rather fancy-looking exercise bike was sitting there in the dark. I hopped out of the truck, folded my license plate back so it wouldn’t be visible, then drove to the abandoned dealership.

My face was mostly covered by my winter coat. However, I still carefully positioned the truck where the security camera on the light pole wouldn’t catch a good view of me.

The bike was glossy black with titanium accents. It had a huge tablet-like screen on the front, like the Pelotonnes advertised during the pandemic a few years back. This wasn’t the same, though. On the side, it said MC1000. I tried to lift it up and quickly realized it was easily over 600 lbs. It was about then the adrenaline finally kicked in.

“Okay, David,” I thought to myself. “This isn’t adding up. This thing has to be worth thousands of dollars. I either need to grab this fast or get the hell out of here.”

I quickly decided to try at least to load it up. A small voice in my head kept telling me, “What if the story was somehow real?” I didn’t think I would ever forgive myself if I didn’t at least try. So I opened up the tailgate and grabbed a furniture dolly and a 6’ ramp I brought with me. I managed to get the dolly under the bike with a lot of effort. Unfortunately, I wasn’t strong enough to push it up the ramp into the truck. I had a tie-down strap I could use like a winch to pull it up, but that would take a lot of time. So I decided to try getting a running start to push it up instead.

I pulled the bike back about 60’ and groaned as I pushed it hard up to jogging speed. The furniture dolly hit the ramp with a sharp blow that rocked the pickup and almost slowed me to a halt. With strength I didn’t know I had, I barely managed to push it into the bed. In a rush, I grabbed the ramp and closed the tailgate. Immediately after, a pair of lights appeared on the far opposite end of the lot. It was pitch black out now, so I probably hadn’t been spotted yet. I hurriedly raced my truck out of sight behind the building without turning my lights back on, then drove over the curb and through the ditch back to the main road. I turned my lights back on and merged in front of a shocked motorist just as a black SUV stopped precisely where I was not 30 seconds earlier. I took a few deep breaths and set my course back home.

I couldn’t stop looking in my rearview mirror on the way back. I figured I was being paranoid, but I took a few back roads and finally stopped in front of someone else’s house about 30 minutes from mine. I gave the exercise bike in the back a close once over, checking every visible part of it for an AirTag or GPS tracker. I didn’t find anything. As a final precaution, I left the truck and hid in the forest at the end of the street for about an hour to see if any scary black cars would appear. Luckily nothing happened, so I folded my license plate back down, drove back to my house, and parked safely in the garage.