Stephanie Simplified
By Ozhojabbe
Stephanie looked around her apartment, feeling her heart rate quicken as she put the helmet on her head. She was always feeling so anxious and nervous. Always overthinking things.
Stephanie tended to live inside of her head. She had been seeing a therapist for a little over two years now, and it had helped a little, but she still found herself unhappy with her life and her choices. Grad school was draining, and she was starting to hate every minute of it.
Sure, she was smart and pretty, but she had so much trouble talking to people. She never knew what to say. Every conversation felt like a chore to get going. She constantly felt like an impostor or a pariah. A few boys had asked her out over the years, but they had quickly grown bored of her, or didn’t listen to her, or didn’t respect her in the long run. She felt tired and used and misunderstood at this point.
In her weakest moments, as she lay in bed for hours without an ounce of energy to get out of from under the covers, she had dared to fantasize what she could do to herself to feel something again. To not care what other people thought. To not care about thinking, or all the hard problems in the world. Or about all the hard problems in her own life. To not feel anxious. To not feel depressed.
To not feel angry and broken.
The idea hadn’t come to her all at once, but as she saw the effects of the memory modifying device she was testing as part of her doctoral thesis on various mammals, she couldn’t help but notice something. All of her test subjects seemed to be happy and content.
Sure, the macaques had forgotten how to play the little video game they were training them on, and the dogs would forget their tricks, but they didn’t seem to care. They seemed utterly unconcerned about the lack of their usual rewards, happy to fail over and over again, and eat and mate and play with others of their species.
Some of them had been basket cases before the treatments with the device, the horrible remnants of animal experimentation that had somehow ed the university ethics boards and afterwards they were the calmest, easiest animals to deal with.
Stephanie realized she was in too deep one evening, when she had idly modeled out a modified version of the device fitted for humans in her CADFAD program. It had been a sort of morbid curiosity. An expression of her empty longing. But after it was made, she looked the design over, and realized it might just work.
She told no one of what she was planning. Going into the lab on weekends and after hours to work on her plan in secret. It took all of her savings, and a little bit of embezzling of grant funds to get it completed, but finally she had succeeded.
And now, she was looking at herself in the mirror, with her trembling fingers on the button.
She was going to be the first human guinea pig, and she had no idea if the instructions she had painfully coded line by line over the course of several months were going to work. She had consulted hundreds of brain scans and neuroscience papers as she had mapped out the neural pathways, tried to wrap her mind around all the chemical cycles and signals that modern technology understood.
The helmet she had made was a work of genius.
Her last work of genius.
It had been the only think keeping her going. Keeping her tolerating her tiring, endless existence for these past few months. Keeping her forcing herself out of bed. Keeping her teaching her undergrad students, day after tiring, ceaseless day.
Stephanie steeled her nerves and flipped the switch.
She didn’t feel anything at first, but then she noticed the subtle waves of electricity playing across her temple. It almost felt like a pleasant scalp massage, with just the hint of tingling over the rest of her body.
Stephanie started to watch a dreamlike stream of images in her minds eye.
“Fascinating!” She thought. “It seems that the rapid access and remapping of memories in my brains is causing my mind to interpret the, uh, um… It’s making me, like, daydream? Or something?”
Stephanie’s daydreams followed a girl who felt kind of terrible all the time. She was working so hard, pushing herself and feeling utterly unfulfilled and alone about the whole thing. Stephanie didn’t like the images, but she was at least thankful that they were happening to someone else.
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a life like that.
The images followed a sort of dream logic, going from one event to another in a strange order.
“Oh!,” Stephanie realized. “The images are going in reverse. That’s so cool!”
She watched as the hardworking girl worked twice as hard as anyone else in grad school for half the recognition. She watched as the girl applied to grad schools because she wasn’t ready to leave school yet. Wasn’t sure if she would ever be ready for the “real world.”
As she watched these things play out in her mind eye, Stephanie noticed that her skin was starting to feel really yummy. She closed her eyes and started to move her hands slowly over her body. It felt so good! The tingling in her scalp seemed to extend wherever her fingers made with her skin, and she let out a little moan as she felt her hand move over her arms. Her stomach. Her breasts.
Her skin was so sensitive right now. It was hard to focus on the little movie that was still playing.
The smart, sad girl was going through undergrad now, going to every office hour, ignoring every invitation from her roommates to party. Turning down a few guys, and regretting the guys she didn’t turn down. No time for family, friends or anything else outside of academics. Every waking moment on getting that degree, of living up to her impossible standards.
Stephanie didn’t know why, but the longer she watched her daydreams and ran her hands deliciously over her body, the less burdened she felt. It was like a huge weight was being lifted off of her shoulders. She felt free and happy, and maybe a bit silly.
But it was so nice to feel silly. To feel a little slow—a little unfocused.
That was it!
Her thoughts were starting to slow down all of a sudden. She was still watching the hapless girl as she now worked through a nightmarish senior year of high school—judged by her more popular peers, with no hobbies or friends to speak of, but Stephanie just watched without any mental noise or commentary.
Before, she had had opinions and thoughts and worries and cares for the life she was watching in reverse, but it was suddenly as if her mind had gone from a four lane highway to a one lane highway. It was impossible to think about more than one thing at a time. Every time she tried to think something about what she was watching, the train of thought was completely lost when she got distracted by the next thing to pop in her head.
It was kind of fun. See an image, and almost think something about it before- pop.
Pop, pop, pop. Her lips curled into a smile at the pleasant feeling. Maybe in the past she would have put more energy into recovering her train of thought, but instead she started to get accustomed to the new sensation. She embraced the easy, simple cotton candy thoughts that drifted through her mind only to pop a few seconds later.
Stephanie watched the girl move backwards through high school. Seeing people invalidate and ignore the girl at best, and mock and tear down the girl at worst. Seeing the way the girl’s parents insisted on perfection.
When high school finished playing in Stephanie’s mind, she started to feel a giddy energy building up inside of her. It was spreading through her whole body. And on the edges there were notes of… lust?
Stephanie’s breathing got harder, and she found hands migrating down between her legs. Her nerves were still dancing with the electrical tingles of the device, and as she started to play with herself she found the sensation incredible.
Stephanie let out another moan, and watched as the girl in her mind’s eye said goodbye to middle school. She got to elementary school. Constantly switching schools, never able to put down roots, always the weird new girl in class. Academics her only lifeline. The only thing that made her parents notice her.
And as these last memories stopped, Stephanie’s smile widened. And then she started to giggle.
She giggled and giggled. Everything was simple and easy now. All that was left in her head were fluffy, fun thoughts.
Since the movie inside her head stopped she opened her eyes, and saw a pretty, happy girl in front of her. The girl had a metal hat on her head, and her hands between her thighs, and she looked like she was having the time of her life. Her skin was flushed and her eyes were full of lust.
Stephanie quickly realized that the girl was her! Stephanie smiled, a big dopey smile. There was no sign of intelligence behind her eyes.
“I look so fuckable!” she said. Then a great idea popped into her head. “Wait! I should totally go fuck a hot guy.”
As she said the words, she started to feel a longing that her own hands would never satisfy. She felt so horny, and she knew what she needed. She needed a cock inside of her.
The pleasant tingle ceased, and Stephanie removed the shiny hat from her head. (She wasn’t quite sure what it was anyways, and it wasn’t really her color.)
She quickly got dressed in a wet dream of an outfit, iring her body as she did so. God, she was so sexy! She had an amazing ass and tits, and she was skinny enough to be a model. Her puffy lips were perfect for giving blowjobs! She couldn’t wait to feel a guy’s hands all over her, to feel him inside of her. To please, and tease and never look back.
Stephanie checked her makeup one last time. Then she opened her apartment door, and started towards the nearest trashy bar.
She saw the hottest guy drinking alone, and walked right up to him.
“Hiya, mister!” she said cheerily. “I’m Steph. Wanna fuck my brains out?”
The man’s eyes scanned greedily over her body, before he pulled her tightly against him, so that she could smell the smoke on his jacket and the alcohol on his breath. And feel his pants straining against his cock as he grinded with her.
He whispered in her ear. “What brains would I fuck out? You look like you’ve never had a serious thought in your life, slut.”
Steph started panting. “You, pant, got me. I’m just an empty-headed fucktoy. A brainless bimbo. Just fuck me! I need you inside of me.”
The man led her to the bathroom in the back of the bar, and Steph started her new life.
After a marathon fuck session that blew her tiny mind and had her paramour screaming her name, Steph had a rare thought as she pulled her skirt back on. She loved her life, and couldn’t wait to see what the future had in store for her.