New Market Enterprises #2

What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance blah blah blah unintentional. You can find the original NME story here.

We here at New Market Enterprises have been making tremendous breakthroughs in brain manipulation. And by "have been making tremendous breakthroughs" we actually mean "we had a visitor from the future show up, stole his time machine, and stole lots of cool stuff from the future." One of these things we're calling the "Brain Blaster," but that's because our marketing department gets all their advice from their 8-year-old sons.

The gun can alter people's state of mind (as opposed to altering their perceptions of reality, this one alters their reaction to these perceptions). Our first use of it was to get Doctor Sanderson out of his closet at long last. Once we did that, we found a secret passageway at the back, but that's a story for next week.

On a particular setting, the gun increases the subject's concentration and decreases the subject's potential to be distracted. I regret to report that three members of our team starved to death after testing the gun on themselves and then reporting the effects in such minute detail that they weren't going to let a little thing like hunger distract them. We still have a lot of bugs to work out.

Again, this is not the sort of weapon that we'd like to fall into the wrong hands. Doctor Beth Fisher has been hit with it twelve times by twelve different co-workers who all tried to make her fall in love with them. We discovered further unfortunate implications when we programmed the gun to make us not want to use it for personal gain; no-one has the slightest interest in pursuing the project anymore except me, because I was in the bathroom when this decision was made and no-one had the willpower to zap me when I came back.

I have hidden the weapon. I tried to use it on Doctor Cribbins, to make him want to use the gun for humanity's greatest benefit; his head exploded. I have not endeavored to repeat the experiment, I and I would offer condolences to his family but our NME contracts clearly state that this sort of thing is expected to happen all the time. At any rate, we have more than enough tissue to put a clone together and I confidently expect Doctor Cribbins to return to us within a year. And, as I said, I hid the gun. Its capacity for good is undeniable; we can force people to vote Democrat, for example (hey, we need more federal funding. What else would you do with that money, start a war?), but we suspect that someone else may have beaten us to that one. However its capacity for evil is far greater, and every time it is used, someone's right to make up their own mind is violated.

No, just kidding, we're scientists. We're geniuses, of course we know what's better for you than you do. Now... forget you read this, and give me a raise.

(c) 2010