Mysl v Moci

The device sat in my palm like a dead beetle. Cold metal, black casing, a single red button that hadn't been pressed yet. I turned it over three times, feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of the plastic. My mother was in the kitchen. I could hear her humming. Some old song from the eighties, something about love and rain.

I built the thing in my bedroom over six months. Parts from online stores, a schematic I found on a forum that didn't ask questions. The theory was simple. Low-frequency electromagnetic pulses keyed to specific neural pathways. The amygdala, the prefrontal cortex. You didn't control thoughts exactly. You nudged them. You made certain ideas feel like the person's own.

I was nineteen. I lived in my mother's basement. I had not touched another human being in four months.

She was making dinner. Meatloaf. I could smell the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce mixing in the pan. She always used too much ketchup. I told her once, and she laughed and said that was the point, that ketchup was the point of meatloaf, that without it you just had a brick of meat. She was right. She was usually right about things like that.

I came up the stairs slow. The device was in my pocket. My fingers were sweating.

"Mom?"

She turned from the counter. Flour on her apron, a streak of something dark on her cheek. She was fifty-two. Her hair was going gray at the temples, and she had started wearing reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked tired. She always looked tired.

"What is it, honey?"

Her voice was soft. That was the thing about my mother. She was soft in a world that wanted her hard. She worked at a pharmacy, standing on her feet for nine hours a day, and she came home and made meatloaf and hummed songs about rain. She never complained. She never said a word about the fact that I hadn't left the house in four months.

"I have something to show you."

She wiped her hands on her apron. "Okay. Let me just finish this."

"No. Now."

She looked at me then. Really looked. Her eyes moved over my face, searching for something. I didn't know what she found. She put down the spoon and followed me to the living room.

I sat her on the couch. She sat where she always sat, the left cushion, where the fabric was worn thin from years of her body. I stood in front of her. The device was heavy in my pocket. Heavy like a stone, heavy like a secret.

"What is it?" she said. She was smiling, but it was a nervous smile. The kind of smile you give someone you're not sure about.

I pulled out the device. Held it up between us.

She stared at it. Her smile didn't change, but something behind her eyes shifted. A door closing.

"What is that?"

"An experiment."

"An experiment for what?"

I didn't answer. I pressed the button.

The device hummed. A low vibration that I felt in my teeth. My mother's eyes went wide for a second, then blank. Her hands fell to her lap. Her mouth opened, then closed. She looked like a doll. Like someone had reached inside her and turned off the lights.

I waited. The instruction manual said thirty seconds for full effect. I counted in my head. Thirty one, thirty two, thirty three.

Then I said, "Stand up."

She stood up. No hesitation. No question. Her body moved like it was attached to strings.

"Sit down."

She sat down.

My heart was pounding. I could feel it in my throat, my wrists, the backs of my knees. This was real. This was actually real.

"Tell me your name."

"Margaret Ann Kowalski." Her voice was flat. No inflection. Like a recording.

"Tell me where you live."

"1423 Maple Street, Apartment 4B, Portland, Oregon."

"Tell me what you're thinking about right now."

Nothing. She stared at the wall. Her face was empty.

I felt something cold slide down my spine. Excitement. Fear. They felt the same in that moment.

"Tell me what you think of me."

"Tell me what you think of your son."

A pause. The hum of the device was still there, a low thrum in the air between us.

"You are my son. I love you. I worry about you. I think you're smart but you waste it. I think you're scared of the world and I don't know how to help you."

Her words hit me like a slap. But they weren't her words. They were the words I had made her say. I had nudged her toward honesty, toward the truth she kept behind her soft voice and her tired eyes.

I pressed the button again. The hum stopped.

She blinked. Looked at me. Her eyes were wet.

"What did you do to me?"

"Nothing."

"You did something. I felt something. Like a hand inside my head."

"It's fine. It's over."

She stood up. Her hands were shaking. She looked at the device in my hand like it was a snake.

"Give me that."

"Mom."

"Give me that thing right now."

I put it in my pocket. She stepped toward me. I stepped back.

"You don't understand," I said. "This is important. This could change everything."

"Change what? Change me? Change people into puppets?"

"Not puppets. Just. Guided. Like a suggestion."

She laughed. It was not a happy laugh. It was the sound of something breaking.

"A suggestion. You put a machine in my head and you call it a suggestion."

"It's not permanent. It wears off."

"How long?"

"An hour. Maybe two."

She sat back down. Not because I told her to. Because her legs gave out. She put her face in her hands and started to cry. Not loud. Quiet. The kind of crying that comes from a place so deep you don't even know it's there until it spills out.

I stood there. The device was warm against my leg. I could feel the battery draining, the circuits cooling.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She didn't answer.

"I didn't mean to hurt you."

She looked up. Her face was wet. Her eyes were red.

"You didn't hurt me. You took something from me. You took a few minutes of my life and you used them for your experiment. Without asking. Without telling me what was happening."

"I had to test it."

"On me."

"Who else?"

She stared at me. The question hung in the air between us, and I realized I didn't have an answer. Who else? My father was dead. My friends had stopped calling. There was no one else. There was only her. There was always only her.

"I'm sorry," I said again.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She stood up, walked past me, went back to the kitchen. I heard the oven door open. I heard the meatloaf slide out.

I sat down on the couch. The cushion was still warm from her body. The device was in my pocket, and I could feel it pulsing, or maybe that was my own pulse, maybe that was my own blood rushing through my veins like a current I couldn't control.

She didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

I went back to the basement. I sat on my bed. I held the device in my hands and I thought about what I had done. I thought about her face when she said she loved me, when she said she worried about me, when she said she didn't know how to help.

I thought about the button. How easy it was to press. How easy it would be to press again.

The device hummed in my hand. I pressed it once more, just to feel the vibration. Just to remind myself it was real.

Tomorrow I would test it on someone else. Someone who wasn't my mother. Someone who didn't love me.

Tomorrow I would find out what this thing could really do.