Queen

“So this experiment allows me to temporarily experience synesthesia?” Veronica asked, squirming as Joe attached another electrode to her scalp.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” Joe replied, applying adhesive gel to another electrode.

Veronica blinked her eyelashes in a mock seductive fashion.

“And how do I look?” she asked.

Joe stepped back a bit to squint at her.

“Honestly?”

“I expect nothing less.”

“Kind of like Medusa, but in a good way.”

She sighed.

“That’s fair,” she ran her fingers through the cords cascading across her scalp. “You’re sure the adhesive will wash out no problem?”

Joe took a dramatic pause.

“And you didn’t think to ask that before I started applying the adhesive?” he replied as he turned to face her with one eyebrow raised.

She sneered at him, but her teeth dripping more with mischief than malice.

If nothing else, it was better than blowing her tips at Sultry’s, a campustown bar where she worked every Friday night.

She had raised a question to the entire bar while raising a jello shot in what was her third toast.

“Can anyone give me a reason why I shouldn’t slam this jello shot?” she held the shot above her head, wrist tilted slightly.

She found the wrist tilt, with so many other subtle psychological tricks, helped convey her desires to others more directly. As a psychology student at the university, she had made a practice of learning as much as she could about neuro linguistic programming, or NLP, in addition to her normal coursework.

When she got hired at Sultry’s, she had found a perfect staging area to test what she was learning, both in her psychology classes and through her own research into NLP. With the right cues, delivered at the right time, she discovered that she could get patrons to open up about anything to her. It went beyond the bartender as therapist stereotype, especially when she used a well-placed, but encouraging, touch, in addition to an occasional free drink. In addition to discovering that “her practice” garnished more tips, she had more than one post-doc reveal secrets about their labs that she found equally horrifying and fascinating.

While it had taken a few years to hone her technique, she now was comfortable enough using her practice that it was second nature to her, like a switch that she could turn on and off at will.

That evening she had noticed a patron staring at her a bit more than usual. He had been in the bar a few times before but that night he looked lost, and a bit desperate.

On a whim, she did the wrist tilt toward him.

She was wearing a Sultry’s crop-top t-shirt and denim shorts with red cowboy boots. Her shoulder length brunette hair was tied back in a pony-tail. She had just finished a four hour shift at the bar and was about to head home with her pockets mostly full of tip earnings.

It was then that Joe approached her and, with a light touch on her wrist, gently lowered her arm.

“I’m Joe. Want to experience synesthesia?” he asked.

Joe looked harmless enough to trust, and his touch didn’t cause immediate revulsion, as many other patrons had. She could tell it was meant in innocent fashion, as a gesture of assistance. She encouraged him to sit down next to her at the bar.

“What’s synesthesia?” she asked, as she ordered a beer for him.

Joe then explained his dissertation and, with the aid of his patent-pending device, he could theoretically induce a synesthesia-like response in others. He explained that synesthesia was like having the ability to literally taste music and see colors in sounds.

“Kind of like watching Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ only all the time?” she had asked as she set her shotglass back down on the bar. “By the way, my name is Veronica.”

Joe scratched his chin in contemplation for a second.

“Umm…yeah. I suppose you could put it that way. Did you like ‘Fantasia’?”

“’Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ are my absolute faves.”

Joe again paused.

“I sincerely hope you wouldn’t experience anything that distinct. I should think it would be something more like what happens at the beginning of the film with Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ in a cloud-like wisp around your visual field,” he set his drink down on the bar as he sat down next to her. “The first few times I tried it on people, that was the effect I was hoping for.

“Unfortunately, most people just ended up with a headache,” he sighed. “The one guy, my roommate, who didn’t get a headache, just ended up hypersensitive to the smell of his own socks.”

“Was that a good thing?” she asked as she fingered her shot glass.

“Actually yeah,” he responded as he polished off his beer. “They smelled horrible and he hadn’t done laundry for a while, which allowed them to fester.”

She smirked a bit.

“It almost sounds like the inducement of that hypersensitivity was intentional.”

“What?” he bounced on his barstool a bit. “No! Although I’ll admit it did get him to do his laundry, at least that one time. That selfless act saved humanity.”

“How charmingly altruistic of you,” she cooed.

He was dressed in ripped jeans and a NASA t-shirt. She noted his two-day beard and complete lack of jewelry. As she looked closer, she saw that the jeans were not ripped so much as burnt with holes. He was attractive in a washed-out doctoral student sort of way.

His eyes appeared honest, anyway, particularly in what she had learned about cues.

“Ahh, you’re noticing my ‘I survived O-chem’ jeans. That gets the chicks every time,” he offered. “Or at least it means I do laundry more often than my roommate. But that’s more for personal safety than hygiene. Acid burns suck.”

She shook her head and backed away from him for a second. She decided he meant no harm to her and might as well see what he wanted to do.

“So what do I have to do for this experiment?”

He asked the bartender if he could have a cup of coffee. The bartender grudgingly complied and started brewing a pot behind the bar.

“It might be more helpful for the experiment that you’re a bit tipsy,” he said, turning his attention back to the coffee as the pot slowly filled. “It’s my theory that lowering the inhibitions, or our control mechanisms, will allow the experiment to work better.

“But I digress. What I’ll do is hook up an array of electrodes to your scalp.”

“Wait a minute,” she said as she backed away from him a smidge further. “I’m not consenting to anything yet. This isn’t any sort of electroshock treatment is it?”

“No no no!” he said, flailing his hands. “Nothing like that at all! The electrodes are designed to convey very mild ultrasound to different, but very specific, parts of the brain: the visual cortex, for example, located here.”

He pointed to the base of his skull on the back of his head.

“Or the auditory cortex,” he made motions toward the area behind his ears.

“Or the somatosensory area, for touch,” his hands started at the top his head and drifted toward the back. “Or smell, which activates the olfactory bulb.”

With smell, he touched the top of his nose where it starts to emerge from the face.

“Those areas get stimulated due to normal sensory exposure. As an example, if you’re having a functional MRI, you smell a rose, the olfactory bulb gets stimulated and the fMRI shows the olfactory bulb lighting up compared to the rest of the brain.

“What I want to do with my ultrasound is apply equal or greater stimulation to other sensory areas of the brain while the normal part is stimulated. So if you’re smelling a rose, the olfactory bulb is stimulated but, in my experiment, we’ll say the visual cortex is stimulated slightly more.

He paused as the bartender slapped a mug of coffee down in front of him. He took a quick sip.

“So, theoretically, your brain will process the smell of a rose both by its odor-inducing chemicals in addition to producing a visual effect.

He took another sip.

“So you’ll be able to see odors as you smell them, or maybe even before you smell them.”

She looked at him with both eyes wide as his coffee mug.

“Whoa,” she said, grabbing a quick sip of his coffee as he set it down. “So how will it help the experiment if I’m drunk?”

“The human body always defaults toward stability, or homeostasis,” he said. “But if the person’s tendency toward self-control is altered, as happens with alcohol, I’m curious if my experiment will have a more pronounced effect: if a person’s consciousness will willingly surrender at least partial control of its sensory perceptions.”

He took a long swallow of coffee.

“Are you still with me?”

She thought for a second, then smacked her hand down on the bar hard.

“Hey Rudy!” she called to the bartender. “Can you spare a shot of Jäger?”

Rudy appeared to ponder this for all of a second before dumping her shot glass behind the bar and giving her a full measure of Jägermeister.

She tossed back the shot, shook her head violently and gagged, thrusting her tongue in and out of her mouth. Then she grabbed Joe by his NASA shirt and dragged him toward the front door.

“Let’s go while I’m feeling it,” she pleaded, as she continued out onto the street.

Veronica was comfortably lying back in a lounger with wires all over her head. Joe brought up a monitor that showed her brain. She thought she had a nice brain, lots of wrinkles.

“Is that me?”

“That’s you, live, now,” he replied. “Sure you’re okay with this?”

“Absolutely,” she nodded.

“3…2…1…” he counted backwards.

She noticed his fingers twitching over the keyboard.

“Go!”

While she didn’t feel anything weird or unpleasant, she became much more aware of his deodorant.

“Dude,” she asked. “Are you wearing Axe?”

Joe sniffed at his armpits.

“No,” he shrugged. “I think it’s actually an Axe knockoff. Why do you ask?”

He brought up an additional laptop and started typing notes.

“It just suddenly became a LOT more intense. All these smells. I can smell that you had pizza for lunch.”

Joe didn’t look up from typing.

“Can you tell me what brand and what I had on it?”

She nodded.

“The sauce smells like Domino’s, stuffed crust, with black olives and pepperoni. I can smell the can the olives came in.”

Joe continued typing.

“Anything else?” he asked. “I’m stimulating the somatosensory area.”

“That shot of Jägermeister just got a lot more intrusive,” she squealed, making quick fists and sniffing her fingers. “Oh, it’s like I’m swimming in anise!”

She brought her fingers up to her nose.

“I spilled some on my fingers and now it’s like my fingers are an extension of Jägermeister. Oh, it’s so strong. Is there anyway I can wash my hands? It feels like my fingers are going to fall off.”

Joe clicked some keys on the brain laptop.

“Anything different now? I’m now stimulating your visual cortex.”

Veronica’s eyes opened wider.

“Holy…” she clamped her mouth shut. “I can see it.”

“What do you see?”

Clickety clackity went the keyboard.

“I can see the contrails of the Jägermeister as I move my fingers through the air.”

“What does it look like? Does it have a color?”

She frowned.

“It’s not so much a color as a brackish distortion across what else I’m able to see. It’s like dropping olive oil in boiling water before you make pasta.”

She turned to look at him.

“Your armpits are kind of a dirty mauve fog, by the way,” she looked over his shoulder. “I can also tell there’s a slice of uneaten pizza underneath the papers on your desk.”

He smiled.

“What does the pizza look like?”

“The effect is much more jarring, like it’s trying to draw my attention or, more likely, my attention is drawn to it. It’s pulsing back and forth like a clear balloon, magnifying and then getting smaller, then magnifying again. Did I mention that I’m starving?”

“You’re hungry?”

“I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“Why’s that?”

“A flat belly gets more tips,” she stated matter-of-factly while drawing attention to her exposed navel. “Can I have that last slice of pizza?”

“It’s yours,” he said as he got up to move the papers.

He looked back at her, grinning.

“There is, in fact, exactly one slice here. Could you see that?”

“Dude, all I saw was there was pizza and I’m starving and I want it, now.”

He held his hands up in surrender.

“Hey, no need to get hussy. I’ll get you a plate.”

“NOW,” she demanded.

He picked up the slice and dashed it over to her. She seized it from his hands and took a deep sniff.

“The olive can smells disgusting, but I’ll live with it,” she said as she crammed the entire slice into her mouth.

“Is it okay if I switch you off?” he asked.

“I guess,” she said, still chewing.

“That should…,” his fingers clicked the keyboard. “…do it.”

“No it didn’t.”

He looked at her, again with one eyebrow raised.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m still feeling and seeing odors,” she replied. “That Axe knockoff deodorant feels nasty.”

He had both eyebrows raised now.

“Again, what do you mean?”

“Hell, it’s quicker if I just do this,” and she grabbed his wrist.

She could feel specific chemicals (neurotransmitters? she wondered) leaving her by touch and entering his skin.

Instantly, she saw his perception of touch dramatically altered. She watched as his face became painfully scarlet, like acid scalding his face. He tried to back away but her grip on his wrist was like a leather-lined vice grip.

“How are you doing this?” he cowered.

“I want this turned off!” she yelled, yanking electrodes from her scalp as she walked over to the laptop and ripped out the cords.

The moment she let go of him she sensed the burning sensation leaving him by a change in his overall color fog from magenta back to the dirty mauve. She did notice there was still magenta around what he had described as his somatosensory cortex.

She wondered if maybe that meant a part of him liked it?

When the last electrode was pulled out, leaving the globs of goo all over her scalp, she then looked at the laptop. It was giving a disconnection error.

She was fully disconnected from the computer.

She noted the new odor emerging from Joe. His own perspiration, a few drops of urine (“Gross!” she thought) and something else: her new sensibilities identified it as neurotransmitters stemming from the amygdala.

She could smell his fear.

And she savored it.