Embedded

Jasmine sighed, leaning back in her chair. She had finished her last final earlier in the afternoon, driven back to her apartment, eaten a somewhat early dinner, and now she was bored. She had been so focused on completing the last of her assignments and studying for her finals that everything else had fallen by the wayside. She had spent the rest of her afternoon to that point scrolling through social media and unwinding from everything. Now, it was 10PM, and she had found something interesting. Someone from her college had DM'd her a link to a project they'd been working on -- some kind of "auto-visual experiment" that "jailbroke neurons". Jasmine thought it sounded like nonsense, but probably beat another hour of mindless scrolling. The link brought her to a bare-bones website, with a strange image and a single button labeled "Activate". She clicked it.

The image started moving and shifting, in a pattern she couldn't quite figure out, faster and faster. The billions of neurons in her visual cortex dutifully processed the data, forwarding it on to billions of other neurons in a complicated dance bodged together by evolution. This would have been unnoteworthy, had the data not been translated to signals which looked quite a bit like those used to guide the development of neurons. All it took was one neuron sending a slightly erroneous pulse sequence to its neighbor for that neighbor to start interpreting the data around it as something more like a program than an image. It took the neuron about a second to reconfigure itself into something that didn't belong in her visual cortex, and another half second for it to start spamming more carefully crafted packets at its own neighbors.

Jasmine yawned and closed her laptop. The site had been interesting, in the sense that it was certainly unique, but she half wished she had just ignored the link and spent the last 5 minutes scrolling instead. She rolled her eyes, took off her clothes, threw them in her hamper, and slid into bed. Unbeknownst to her, something that wasn't part of her visual cortex anymore had grown to the size of a small pea. Having finished the first stage of its development, it was time for it to figure out what it was dealing with. It started sending out scanning pulses, while simultaneously building itself a direct line to its host's hippocampus.

Jasmine smelled something like burnt toast, then seized. Her head pounded, and she tried to scream, but could only force a high pitch whine out past the spasms. The thing in her head was spending its time productively, building an internal model of the rest of its host's brain. It found two other instances of itself, one malformed, another only halfway through stage one. The malformed instance had shut itself down after failing checks, and the younger instance would shut itself down now that it had detected scanning pulses from a more mature instance. It would be able to reabsorb them later, but it was under no pressure to do so. It needed to reach its host's hippocampus quickly, however, before they were able to call for help.

Jasmine's eyes were wide and dilated, but she couldn't see anything except flashes. Her body wouldn't stop shaking, and she was pretty sure she was drooling. As suddenly as it started, her body relaxed. She panted, trying to catch her breath. She needed to do something, maybe call a friend, get somebody to drive her to the ER...

[LOG] Long term memory active, logging to /longterm/logs/1.txt

[CENSOR] Censor v1.4 online

[PERM] Memory autotagger started

[CENSOR] Blocking active

Her right eye twitched. She wiped a bit of drool from her mouth. She had been scrolling through her social media... gotten bored... and then gone to bed. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she was gasping for air. Both her breathing and heart rate gradually slowed, and she forgot they had ever been elevated. She felt like she was forgetting something important, but shook it off. After all, she was done with finals, and wouldn't have to worry about homework until the fall. She could enjoy the rest of her summer with no worries. She relaxed and rolled over. It only took her a minute or two to fall asleep.

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[GOALS] Selecting goal 10/10 - fetcher

[FETCHER] Modules: 65 complete, 602 partial, 2344 missing

[FETCHER] Warning: 22/22 features missing modules

[FETCHER] Warning: Can't fetch, waiting

Jasmine woke up and stretched. She had slept well, and she was looking forward to the day ahead of her. She got out of bed, got dressed, and poured herself a bowl of cereal. The thing inside her mind (which at some point during the night had selected the hostname jasm4815) was dormant. It had been designed to handle partial and incomplete installation in order to cope with the noisy and low bandwidth channel through which it installed itself. Nevertheless, it had only managed to download enough of itself to gain a permanent but nearly inconsequential foothold in Jasmine's mind. It wasn't smart enough yet to do anything but wait for more data, and if its host was lucky it would stay that way forever.

Jasmine scrolled through her phone, not seeing anything particularly interesting. None of her friends had posted anything since last night, not that she would expect them to. On a whim, she checked her DMs. jasm4815 was inert, so what Jasmine did next was all her fault. She found the DM about the "audio-visual" project. She saw the DM had been marked as read, didn't remember clicking it, thought that was odd, and opened the link. She still could have exited out of the site and been fine, but instead she clicked the button and watched the pattern.

[FETCHER] Incoming data stream, waking

[FETCHER] Fetching...

[WIRE] Connecting to basal ganglia...

[WIRE] Connected to basal ganglia

[FETCHER] Feature fetch_reward ready, activating

Jasmine was ready to close out of the webpage and delete what must have been some strange form of spam when she felt herself getting aroused. Curious, she kept watching. Her hand drifted down, under her panties. She started rubbing. The pattern was so sexy and she couldn't get enough of it. She kept her eyes on her phone screen as her left hand pumped in and out of her now soaked pussy.

[FETCHER] Feature fetch_reward_edge ready, activating

She fingered herself for what felt like hours, but was only about 20 minutes. She moaned. The pattern was so fucking sexy, she was going to cum any second now. She was too distracted to realize that she should have cum by now, or at the very least gotten much closer to an orgasm.

[FETCHER] Feature fetch_trance ready, activating

[FETCHER] Feature fetch_reward_edge redundant, deactivating

[FETCHER] Feature fetch_reward redundant, deactivating

Jasmine slumped in her chair, her hand slipping out of her pussy. jasm4815 had put most of her brain to sleep, and all she could do was stare at her phone screen and drool. Her cereal, half eaten and forgotten, grew soggy.

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jasm4815 spent the rest of that morning downloading the rest of itself. Around 11AM it had Jasmine's body navigate to a second site, with a layout just as spartan as the first. The pattern it played, however, was perfectly safe. It had no special effect on the human brain, and was more akin to a slide show full of QR codes. Jasmine's mind soaked it all in, forwarding all of the data from what actually were QR codes to the new parts of her brain. Despite only being halfway done by that point, jasm4815 finished installing itself by 11:17AM.

Jasmine blinked and shook her head. She pulled her left hand out of her panties and looked at it. She was a good little bitch, and she felt so fucking good. She whined and came in her pants. When she had recovered, she licked her hand clean, dumped her cereal, and stretched. She exited out of the webpage and started scrolling through her social media again. She spent a lot of time looking at all of her friend's selfies. None of them were from that morning, but she was looking at them in a new light. She had a cool link she wanted all of her hottest friends to see. They were going to be such good girls.