Self-Perception, by ChrisMyst

Chapter 1
Pressure

Chapter Description: By ChrisMyst. Ben shows up to the family reunion.

 Ben stepped out of his Lexus and pulled his sunglasses down from his head to shield his eyes from the harsh morning sun. What a waste of time, he thought to himself, as his polished black shoes made crunching sounds on the cracked soil beneath his feet. I’m going to need to get these things professionally shined, he realized, already noticing the reddish dust that was accumulating on the sides of the wingtips.

He shut the door with a loud slam, and as he walked away, the key fob buzzed in his pocket and he heard the locks on his car automatically activate from his decreasing proximity. With a deep sigh, he clutched his briefcase tightly under his arm and made the long walk down the dirt path, already feeling the sweat begin to accumulate under his suit jacket. What a god damned pain in the ass, he thought, over and over as he climbed the incline toward the sprawling house.

As he passed the mailbox, he noticed the tacky balloons that blew in the breeze, fumbling against one another lazily in the hot air. Classy, he thought as he moved off the path to avoid getting struck by the tangle of colorful balloons. A few had begun to deflate in the hot sun, with several already popped from the heat, hanging limply from the bunch that was carried aloft.

“Ben!” he heard, from across the sprawling yard.

“Hey,” he lazily called back, feigning excitement and waving back to his mother, “How are you?”

The two embraced and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. His mother was still young, owing to an early pregnancy. He was always slightly embarrassed around his peers who had parents who were doctors or professors as parents, while his mother worked retail at a department store. She had gotten pregnant with him at seventeen. Still in his early thirties, Ben’s mother was not even yet fifty years old.

His mother spent lots of time in her garden, when she wasn’t working at the Toys R’ Us where she had worked most of her life. Her skin was freckled and bronzed from a lifetime of being outdoors, her hair a faded brown, with lines around her eyes from smiling. She regarded her only son warmly, smiling up at him as he looked around from behind his sunglasses.

“How was your trip, honey?” she asked, taking him by the hand.

“Good,” he said, freeing it, “do you know where I could put this down?” He raised his briefcase up to show her, the leather glinting as it caught the light from the sun.

“Oh, uh, sure,” she said, “You can just throw it inside, Christopher is in there, too, you should say hi!”

“Thanks,” he said, moving past her towards the screen door of the house.

“Are you sure you don’t want to say hello to everyone first?” she asked to his back.

“I will, just, let me take care of this stuff first, it’s pretty important, okay?” he quipped, sliding the door open.

As he came inside the house, he had expected air conditioning, but was greeted, instead, by an oscillating fan ineffectually blowing from an opened window. The house was, at best, a couple of degrees cooler, and he was already sweating. His cousin, Chris, was sitting on the brown, worn couch, fiddling with his iPhone 8.

“Hey, Ben,” Chris murmured, barely looking up from his phone, “How’s it going?”

“Pretty good,” he replied, gently placing his briefcase on the table and clicking it open with a swipe on the fingerprint reader.

The screen on the inside of the briefcase glowed instantly once it was opened, showing a visual display of the contents of the briefcase, all the hardware components within and the status of the neuropeptides and transmitters within their associated biocaps. He looked over the status readout for each, making sure each was working properly.

The screen door slid open again, his mother, his aunt and Chris’ wife walking in, carrying an old cardboard box with a Volleyball net and ball in it. They put the box down gingerly in the corner and walked over to the refrigerator.

“Do you guys want anything to drink?” his mother asked to Chris and Ben.

“Can I have some ice water with lemon?” Ben said, feeling the heat.

“Well, you can have the water part, at the least,” she said, reaching inside the fridge to pull out a pitcher. Condensation formed nearly instantly on the cold plastic as she placed it on the counter and reached for a glass to pour it in.

“Hi, Ben, didn’t see you came in, whatcha’ got there?” his aunt Carol asked, peering over his shoulder into the glowing briefcase.

“You haven’t seen these? They’re everywhere on TV now,” he replied, cooly.

“Can’t say I have, what is it?” she asked again.

“It’s perceptometry equipment,” he said flatly.

“Oh,” she answered, looking confused, “is it, like, music stuff?” She reached for one of the small flat chips, attached with a white cord to the plastic biocap, filled with transmitters.

“No,” Ben said, moving in to pick up the object before she could, “it’s for people who want to be seen differently. Hmm. Like, if you have a facial scar, you can program this so people don’t notice it, for example. Or, if you want to grow a beard, but you never could, you could use this and people would think you had a beard. They’d be able to touch it, shave it, the whole nine yards. But it’s just in their head. You can take the whole package here and then even you would believe it was real, eventually.”

“Wow! Haha, I should use these and drop twenty pounds for my husband,” his aunt said, laughing.

“Well, they’re very expensive. Namely because it’s a one-shot deal. You don’t need to take repeated doses or have a big surgery like the other perceptometers on the market. Lucky for me, I’m the CFO of the company, so most of my job is giving the things out for free,” he explained.

His mother poked her head over her sister’s shoulder, “For free? You mean like, you just give them away?”

“Yeah, of course, otherwise no one would realize how great they are. We do a free trial thing. The real money isn’t made on the implants, it’s made on the software which makes the custom transmitters,” he said, pointing to the array of tiny vials that lined the briefcase.

“Transmitters?”

“Yeah, the stuff that you want to see. The chip is a basic signal device, but the transmitter does the work. Our software is what takes the characteristics you want and makes it into this,” Ben said, tapping on one of the vials, “These then do all the brain chemistry on both ends, the person being perceived and the person perceiving once the chip wirelessly tells the other persons chip what to perceive. Does that make sense?”

“I…I think so,” his mom said, looking slightly befuddled, “But what’s that?”

“This?” he said, picking up a small silver keypad, “This is what we call ‘the key,’ it’s what you can use to change someone else’s chip, like a little kid or something, if they can’t do it themselves.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said, “So, what kinds of things can you change about a person?”

“Look,” he said, spinning the laptop so she could see the interface, “You can select any characteristic you want right here.”

On the screen, a dizzying array of options lay before them, nearly laid out in alphabetical order: accent, age, charm, eye color, depth (voice), gender, height, intelligence, libido, musculature, nose length, penis size, stamina, teeth, and many more. Each click of an option revealed another array of radio buttons, property sliders and countless other ways to modify the initial value.

“Ben, I…know this is really important for work, but, well, since you give them out for free, do you think we could use them today? It might be fun to show the whole family how they work!”

Chris, naturally interested by the technical conversation, slid his phone into his pocket and walked over to the cluster of people huddling around the briefcase.

“Hmm,” Ben thought, pondering the situation, “I…suppose so. I don’t see why not, we would just use the perception chips on one another and not ourselves. That way, it’s just temporary.”

Chris’ girlfriend, Jennifer, finally piped in, “Yeah, can we try it, please? It sounds super fun!”

Ben thought this was a reasonable idea, after all. Messing around with some of his new products could give him some new perspectives to show real clients, plus it’d be a lot more fun than sweating all day in the backyard playing horseshoes, or something stupid like that, he realized.

“Let’s get everyone set up!”