Travis Starnes
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Out of Control - Chapter 8
🕑 Added 2025-02-11 15:57:59 +0000 UTCI shut the door behind me and leaned against it. It was still afternoon and the dorm was mostly quiet. Some kids were moving in, but classes started Monday, so most were here already. I guess this being their first week at school, they didn’t want to spend it cooped up in their dorm room, and were out exploring the campus or going out to Beal’s street, which was apparently the go-to place for bars and coffee places.
Thankfully, Alex wasn’t here either. If anything, he was at the library, already working on whatever was going to get him to valedictorian in four years.
I took a big breath and pushed off the door, tossing my backpack onto the unmade bed and going over to the desk on my side of the room. I sank into the creaky desk chair, swiveling back and forth as I tried to piece together everything that happened over the last several days. All I’d wanted to do was join a frat, and from there my whole world had changed. The physics lab, the hospital, the party at the grove, Sophia, it had been so much.
And now I had superpowers. Well ... not superpowers. But something.
The tests at the library and cafeteria had confirmed it. I could make people do things just by telling them to. I couldn’t lie, it was a little exhilarating, but it was also completely terrifying.
The differences in how people responded to my suggestions were striking. I thought back to the library, where I’d convinced that guy to hand over his laptop. He’d done it without hesitation, but when I’d told him to delete his paper, there was resistance. It was like pushing against an invisible barrier. The same thing had happened at the cafeteria, getting extra food was easy, but trying to access restricted areas had given me another headache.
Of course, where the line was, who knew. I’d had the same headache making Emily ready to leave her boyfriend last night as I had asking to go behind the counter.
Both were big, I guess, but there seemed to be a wide gulf between them. And then there was Sophia. I was having trouble figuring out what to make of that. Had she really wanted to spend the night with me, or had I unknowingly pushed her into it? I had already figured out that when I really pushed someone to do something extreme, I got the bad headaches, and the lack of headache during our time together seemed significant.
Of course, maybe it was the alcohol that made it easier, although even if that were true, was it me drinking or her that did it?
I shook my head, getting back on track. Maybe the headaches didn’t have to do with them, but were caused by pushing past someone’s resistance. So which was it? Was it tied to the strength of my desire for the person to comply or was it linked to how much the suggestion conflicted with their own wishes?
One thing was very clear, the potential for misuse of my abilities was suddenly, painfully clear. Look what happened with Sophia. What if I’d accidentally caused her to sleep with me. Even if I hadn’t meant to, the idea made my stomach churn.
But had I?
We’d gotten along really well and I couldn’t remember giving commands, but like ... what even is a command. Is putting it in the form of a question considered a command. Did my asking her if she wanted to go back to her room count as an order, or did she just say yes. We were both kind of drunk, so it could have just been the booze talking.
Of course, her reaction the next morning said it was more than that. I didn’t have a ton of experience, but I had ended up with someone after a night of partying a few times, and it hadn’t gone like that.
Even if they didn’t remember a lot about me or had gotten blackout, they still kind of knew. She’d been completely shocked. And replaying everything, I was almost certain the things I said after that were commands. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but in trying to calm her down, I’d used whatever this power was on her.
But there hadn’t been any headache either, so maybe I hadn’t used the power.
Not that I was ever going to know. I just kept going round and round. It’s not like I could ask her.
I pushed myself out of the chair and paced across the room, stopping by the window and looking out at the people milling about or going from here to there.
Maybe the headaches were a kind of warning, my body telling me, this is close to the limit of what you can do, don’t push too hard. What would happen if I asked someone to do something extreme like walk off a roof or something. Not that I’d ever do that, but would my head just explode, or would it be more headaches.
I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer to that.
What I needed were rules. I wasn’t some great man of virtue or anything, but my parents had raised me to do right by people, and taking someone’s free will seemed to fall squarely into the “wrong” category. Worse, it would be so easy to just stumble into “wrong.”
Casual suggestions for trivial favors seemed harmless enough, but I didn’t pay that much attention to what I said most of the time. I just very easily say something innocuous and the person could upend their entire life because they thought it was a command.
Rule one, be very careful with what you say. Even casual commands or suggestions. It seemed all too easy to accidentally give orders without realizing I’d done it. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin someone’s life by accident.
Which lead me into rule two, no using it to get with someone or for anything romantic. It was hard enough to not know how a girl felt about you without also having to wonder if the only reason she was with me was because I commanded her.
That was going to be hard, though. I could think of a million things I could say that would be perfectly normal for two people dating, but with what I could do would lead to the other person losing their ability to make their own decisions.
The more I thought about those two rules, the more I realized this was going to be a nightmare to deal with. I was going to have to be very careful what I said in every moment. I couldn’t just ... say something anymore. Everything had to be calculated and thought out.
Just considering that sounded exhausting.
What I wished was that it was something I had more control over. I didn’t want to have to consciously avoid saying things. If I had to have this thing, I wanted it to work when I wanted it to, and not just constantly.
Not that anyone asked what I wanted before I got it.
I considered some other rules, like not using it for personal gain or not trying to change people’s life decisions or take away their free will, but those seemed more nebulous.
For one, while I wasn’t going to use it to have some cashier empty their till or anything, if I got pulled over by a cop, I would definitely use it to get out of a ticket. I also didn’t feel the least bit bad about keeping the dean from expelling me from school.
I think the key was more, don’t be an asshole with it. Or rather, don’t let it make me someone I wasn’t. I think, as long as I stuck with my morals, I should be on the right track.
Almost more important than that, I couldn’t talk about this to anyone. Who would believe me? Worse, what could happen if they did believe me? Maybe I’d watched too many movies, but it wasn’t hard to guess what the government would do if they found out. Probably cut open my brain and try to figure out how to reproduce what I could do.
Being able to control other people might be a teenager’s wet dream, but it was definitely the holy grail for the US government. I wasn’t naive enough to think they wouldn’t use it in all kinds of shitty ways, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.
Although most importantly, I didn’t want my brain scooped out.
So no telling anyone what I could do. Not Brandon. Not my Parents. No one. Which kind of sucked. If there was ever something I needed to be able to confide in someone else about, this was it.
So, no telling anyone and no being a dick with the power.
To make that work, though, I had to figure out how to control it better. I needed to know the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind these powers.
Some of the why was easy. I had no doubt in my mind that it was connected to the accident in the physics lab. I definitely didn’t have any powers before that, and looking back at what happened at the hospital, I was pretty sure I’d used it on both the police officers and Professor Finch. Finch for sure, cause I had the headache with her.
The ‘how’ was a lot harder. I wasn’t even sure what quantum physics was, let alone how it would cause me to be able to give people suggestions and make them do things. I didn’t even know what that machine they were using was, other than it looked complicated and expensive.
I went back to my desk and pulled open a browser window. Now, how do I search this. I tried “quantum physics mind control,” which came up with pretty much nothing. Not a surprise. I would be shocked if this had happened before.
I tried to think of other things, but nearly all of them required knowing literally anything about quantum physics. I dropped my head into my hands and tried to think. I can’t figure out about the actual experiment, that much was clear. I just didn’t know enough. So what’s the next best thing.
After a minute I had a thought and tried something new, doing general searches about physics lab explosion and Briarfield College physics lab explosion, looking for news articles and social media posts. There weren’t a lot of them and most of it was pretty vague, only referring to it as an “accident in physics department.”
Once or twice, I did find a reference or two that gave me at least a little bit of a nudge in the right direction. One mentioned Dr. Finch’s area of specialty, quantum computing. From there I did some searching and found that, apparently, the lab had been working on building a computer using the stuff that atoms were made of as kind of like a computer circuit, so that a little bit of material that had millions of atoms could do super long calculations, taking the place of huge supercomputers.
Or something like that. It was way above my head, but it sounded impressive.
As I did more searches about Dr. Finch and what she was working on, with a lot of looking up words in an online dictionary, something did catch my eye. I’d found some references to Dr. Finch’s early works when she first came to Briarfield. In some of those papers, there was another PhD’s name listed, something that I hadn’t seen in more recent papers, where it was her and a bunch of grad students.
For the first few papers, her name was always listed with a guy named Wells. In the first one, his name even appeared above her name. Then, after three papers with their name on each one, his name suddenly disappeared. It was like the guy had written a bunch of groundbreaking papers and then vanished into thin air.
I tried searching for Dr. Wells specifically, but hit dead end after dead end. I’d assumed he was also a professor at Briarfield, but he wasn’t mentioned in any of the archived pages of the school faculty. Worse, the papers he co-authored with Finch didn’t list him being with any other institution. He really was like a ghost.
After what felt like hours of fruitless searching, I finally caught a break. I found a very old paper published by Dr. Wells after his collaboration with Finch ended. Finding his name somewhere else was interesting, but the thing that really got me was the title of the paper. “Unlocking Human Potential through Quantum Triggering.”
As with half of everything else I’d been reading so far, it was all but incomprehensible to me, full of advanced physics and neuroscience jargon. What I could understand, though, hinted that there was something here. In several places it referenced “untapped cognitive abilities” and “fundamental alterations to human consciousness.”
Maybe that’s why he disappeared so completely. This was pretty wild stuff, the kind of thing that I imagined would get you laughed out of most scientific conferences.
Adding to that was the fact that the other names on the paper had been redacted, leaving Wells as the sole author.
I spent the next hour searching academic directories and social media platforms for any trace of Dr. Wells, but came up empty.
Just when I was about to give up, I stumbled across a reference to his name on a blog called “Beyond the Boundaries of Science.” The site hadn’t been updated in years and felt barely functional compared to websites today, but the articles there were ... interesting, to say the least.
One post talked about experiments in the 1980s aimed at proving the existence of psychic abilities and a government program called MK Ultra, although the author made it clear they were looking in the wrong direction. Another railed against the “myopic scientific community” and their unwillingness to accept “non-traditional thinking.” There was nothing specific about mind control or suggestion, but it was clear this guy thought he could alter people through quantum experiments.
Other posts were even more speculative, guessing about the future uses of this technology, talking about it being of “therapeutic treatment” for changing traumatic memories, and wild theories that hinted at “abilities” without saying anything concrete. As someone who didn’t really understand any of this, it sounded kind of legitimate, with fancy sounding words and phrases for everything. Except then I’d hit a part that was more basic that I could understand, all of which clearly that belonged in a sci-fi novel.
So he was crazy, but also the only thing connected to any kind of abilities through the stuff he and Finch were working on. Making him my only lead.
I searched for Dr. Wells’ name on the Briarfield College website one last time, but came up empty. I tried every search engine I could think of, using different combinations of keywords. I even checked academic databases and online libraries, but there was nothing recent.
This guy just ... stopped everything almost seven years ago.
Leaning back in my chair, I stared up at the ceiling, feeling frustrated. This guy might be my only chance at answers, and he’d vanished without a trace.
Sitting back up, I went back to reading and rereading stuff on his blog, since it was the only tangible thing of his I had aside from a few papers I couldn’t understand. I was surprised to find that a few pages had comments in the comment section. They were all generally anonymous and most were very clearly dismissive or mocking. One caught my eye though. Someone claiming to have known Dr. Wells personally and trying to defend him. And miracle of miracles, someone named “admin” had responded with a single word “thanks”.
Even more amazing, that admin profile had an email in it. Odds were, this wasn’t active anymore. I mean, what were the odds.
But also, what choice did I have.
I opened a new email and started composing a message. I had to be careful, I couldn’t just come out and say “Hey, I think your crazy quantum experiments gave me superpowers.” But I needed to say enough to get him interested.
After about a dozen rewrites and half copying stuff I’d seen in some of the articles about Dr. Finch’s studies and in their papers, I settled on something that felt right:
“Dear Dr. Wells,
My name is Kyle Morgan, and I’m a student at Briarfield College. I recently came across your work on quantum computing and its potential applications in neuroscience. I find your theories fascinating, particularly those related to unlocking human potential.
I was wondering if you might be willing to discuss your research further? I’ve had some... unusual experiences recently that seem to align with some of your hypotheses. I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts.
Thank you for your time,
Kyle Morgan”
I paused before clicking send. If I was being honest, this whole thing kind of scared me. Part of me just wanted to ignore all this and try going back to living a normal life, going to school, and trying to stay out of anything weird.
But, how could I. I’d already proven how dangerous this thing could be, and I needed to find a way to control it before I could ignore it.
I clicked send.
Now all I could do was wait and hope that Dr. Wells was still out there somewhere, and that he’d be willing to talk to a random college kid about his discredited theories. It wasn’t much, but it was the only lead I had.
Comments
Brett Grayson
I can't find a Chapter 7 in your Patreon.
Steve Anderson
Did I miss chapter 7 somewhere?
