I’m using a special microchip to alter the mind of the woman I’ve been lusting after for years, creating an alternate persona that wants me. And then I’ll use the chip’s other option to take over her body for myself in Chipped, available on Body Swap Stories, Smashwords and Amazon.
I’ve been keeping tabs on the girl that got away. The one I should have married. We’ve been messaging online and following each other’s lives, but I wanted more. So I paid someone to inject her with an experimental microchip. It will set up an alternate persona in her mind. One that still wants me. One I can control.
Now her alternate persona is in command of her body and has brought her to me so we can do every sensual thing we should have done back then. And when that’s over the microchip has one more trick. I can use it to take over her body. Become her. Live her life. And fully explore everything about her body that I’ve missed over the years.
Tony
My finger hovered over the icon on my screen’s phone as I debated with myself for what seemed like the thousandth time that year whether or not to activate the neural chip I’d embedded in Ashley without her knowledge. I had yet to try it out and the small, pessimistic part of me doubted it would even work. But the temptation was always there.
Ashley and I had been friends since grad school. Both of us had studied bioengineering, me focusing more on technology and her more on theory. Even outside of lectures we were almost inseparable. I was the slightly nerdy brunet with the incredible memory. She was the cute blonde who disarmed everyone with her wit.
Everyone thought we were a couple. We hung out all the time, went to conferences together, studied together, partied together. As long as we’d been together, we hadn’t dated anyone. Maybe that did make us a couple? But without any of the relationship stuff that I’d secretly wanted. We needed a new term for what we were. Couples without benefits, maybe?
Whatever it was lay unspoken between us as we went through grad school. There were glances. Intimations. But neither of us broached the subject. Maybe I was young and dumb. Maybe just scared. Worried it was so fragile that naming it might break everything. Whatever it was, we were balanced on that edge of lovers and friends right up through the time we graduated.
We got jobs in different areas of the country. Moved away. Started careers.
I landed a job at a small university and climbed the ladder. By day I was an associate professor. By night I tinkered in my lab with a chip that could meld man and machine, focusing on the mind/body connection and whether I could interrupt it. My original thought was that it held great possibilities for psychology and rehabilitation. With the help of AI technology, we could end a vast range of psychoses and help people physically and mentally heal themselves. But as I worked year after year, I realized that the technology could also be used for a darker purpose. To control, or even hijack, a person’s mind and body.
I kept that dark part to myself as I improved the design, making it smaller, more efficient, more easily implantable, until the microchip itself was tiny. No bigger than a human hair and able to self-implement into a subject with a simple prick on the back of the neck. From there, it would grow towards the nervous system, eventually integrating itself into the nervous system and the brain. Not only could it send and receive data, but it gave birth to an AI that could worm its way into the person’s neural network and use their own brain’s memory to set up an alternate persona, ready to take over at a moment’s notice.
All this time my check-ins with Ashley became less and less frequent as the years passed and the physical distance between us faded whatever relationship we could have had down to birthday greetings and the occasionally lookup. Lots of occasional lookups. Not cyberstalking. Not really. There was always a little hope in the back of my mind that we would get back together. Maybe I could get a new job near her. We would reconnect. Find that old friendship and, this time, grow it into something more.
And then Ashley got married and I couldn’t pretend anymore. It was crushing when I read her announcement on her social media feed. That’s when I realized just how much hope I’d been holding out on. I needed to do something. Needed to see her, if only for closure.
I paid a private detective to follow her and found she was scheduled for a routine medical exam in the hospital. Bribed another person to prick the back of Ashley’s neck and implant my new device when she was there.
Now, a year afterwards, I was hemming and hawing over whether to activate it. It was on passive exploration mode, and by now should have connected itself fully to Ashley’s brain. Once the new persona was activated, it would be like the AI’s thoughts were her own. The impulses her own. The feelings her own. And I’d programmed it to be attracted to me.
There was a second part to the system as well, that I’d perfect while waiting for the chip to embed itself. I wasn’t quite ready to trial that. Not yet. One step at a time. The new persona first.
I checked the program I’d been working on. The one I would send through to the blank persona set up in Ashley’s mind. I called this persona ‘Ash’. She would be the one who still wanted to see me. Who still desired me. Ash was perfect. Of course she was. I’d been working on her for nearly a year. She wouldn’t disrupt Ashley’s life, just tweak it slightly. Just enough to bring her to me.
I pressed the icon on my phone’s screen and a window appeared. A dialogue box awaiting my command. I activated the program and set it to begin trying to establish a connection. Next, I sent Ashley a message through her social media feed. Just asking how she was doing. Telling her about my life. But a code was embedded into it. Invisible to her but not from the neural system using her eyes. All she had to do was read it and the Ash persona would be activated. And I would have full access to her mind and body.
I watched the neural system screen on my phone. Establishing connection. I didn’t know when she would read the message and I tamped down my impatience.
She still hadn’t read it by the time my next class started.
It wasn’t my best lecture. I was distracted. Flustered. All my work had led to this trial. What if it failed?
What if succeeded?
Still no connection after the lecture. It was rude to keep the phone on my desk during office hours but I had to know, tapping it impatiently every hour or so.
Finally, finally the connection message popped up that night as I was preparing for bed. I was giddy and had a hard time sleeping. The program booted itself up inside Ashley’s mind but there was no reply from her that night. None the next morning. I began wondering if it had worked. I checked and rechecked the code. It was good. It should work. That afternoon Ashley sent me an email. It was even better than I expected.
Read the rest on Body Swap Stories, Smashwords and Amazon.