Watch the Tapes

The package sat on Erika's desk for about a week before she finally did anything with it. She didn't put it off intentionally, but she'd gotten rid of her VCR about three apartments ago and it took a while for her to find the time and energy to buy one from the local thrift store. Plus, if she'd learned anything during her two years on the pop culture beat for Vixen Online, it was that padded envelopes with no return address containing nothing but a couple of unlabeled video cassettes and a hand-scrawled note saying, "WATCH THE TAPES" generally did not lead to a Deep Throat-style scoop. Most of the time she was lucky if they didn't contain actual dubbed copies of 'Deep Throat'.

Still, you never knew. And a second-hand VCR only cost about five bucks. Erika picked one up the next time she was shopping for cheap clothes and only left it in the bag for a couple of days before she finally hauled it out and hooked it up to her TV. She slid the tapes out of the mailer and spent a few minutes trying to figure out which one to watch first before finally picking one at random and popping it in.

The quality wasn't very good-it looked like a third-hand dub of an old hand-held video camera, complete with shimmery little video artifacts that slowly rolled down the screen as the tape played. The footage couldn't have been that old, though; Erika recognized the girl in the footage as Piper Laramie, a manufactured pop singer who had her first chart hit last year (barely) with some godawful song, what was it? She checked her phone quickly. Right, "A Rebel Just Like Me". Because nothing said rebellion like product placement in all your music videos and licensing your first single out to Old Navy.

She'd written an article on Piper a couple of months ago, although it was really about how old Erika felt seeing yet another nineteen-going-on-twelve baby-faced pop star doing mall tours and playing for screaming tweens while her record label tried to push her as the next Miley Cyrus. Beyond that, Erika hadn't cared too much. She already had too many pop stars to keep track of without adding another.

This didn't look like it came from her publicist, though. It was video of her in an office, sprawled in an overstuffed chair with one leg up on the armrest and the other on the floor, and listening to something on headphones. She looked like the Platonic ideal of the vapid, self-absorbed teenage celebrity-her mouth hung slightly open in a completely affectless expression, she was showing her panties straight to the camera, and her eyes stared vacantly at nothing with all the intelligence of a slightly concussed cocker spaniel. It was pretty much how Erika pictured Paris Hilton looking when she was alone.

After a minute or so, another person walked in. Erika recognized him as well; he was Saul Compton, manager of Piper and about two dozen other interchangeable teen acts stretching back over the last thirty-five years. Rolling Stone had called him "the Antichrist of music", but it hadn't stopped him from making more money than God off the backs of mediocre musicians' fifteen minutes of fame.

"How's it goin' there, champ?" he asked Piper in a honeyed voice that sounded like he'd long ago perfected the art of humoring petulant teenagers that still sold concert tickets. He patted her on the shoulder in a way that he probably thought wasn't creepy.

"Fine," Piper said, her voice a flat monotone of utter disinterest. Erika half-wondered if she wasn't strung out on quaaludes or something. Maybe that was what the person who had sent her these tapes wanted her to see? Maybe they figured that Erika wouldn't mind getting an exclusive of a big name record producer handing out chill pills to his barely legal protégée. If that was the case, they figured pretty damn right.

But Saul didn't give Piper any pills. He just pulled the headphones off of her head and leaned down to whisper something in her ear. She nodded, her blank expression slowly melting into a dreamy smile as she sat up in her chair. "I understand, sir," she said, still in that same drowsy monotone. "How would you like me to obey?"

Erika's eyebrows shot up. Obey? Okay, so half the time she assumed that most of the teenagers in Hollywood had some kind of weird Svengali thing going on with their managers, but she never really expected to have it confirmed with video evidence. It wasn't illegal or anything-Piper always dressed like she was thirteen, but Erika was pretty sure she was nineteen or twenty. But even if it wasn't actually taking advantage of a minor, the power imbalance was obvious. This tape could do some real damage.

And it got worse. On the screen, Saul cupped Piper's chin in his hand and said, still in that same infinitely patient voice, "Why don't you give me a blowjob now, tiger?" Erika shuddered-the unironic use of the word 'tiger' in the bedroom had to be, at the very least, a war crime. But Piper whimpered like he'd just finger-banged her to orgasm and undid his fly with obvious enthusiasm.

She half-expected the tape to cut out at that point, but it kept running as Piper slid her hand into Saul's pants and pulled his cock out. Erika paused the tape, feeling a little embarrassed, but somehow it looked worse in freeze-frame so she hit 'Play' again. She had to admit, Saul looked pretty stiff for a guy who had to be in his late fifties-he probably had a little blue pill or two in his medicine cabinet.

Erika noticed that Piper's very obvious panties were getting translucent as she wrapped her lips around Saul's cock and began bobbing up and down on it with impressive enthusiasm. "Oh, thank you, sir," she moaned as his dick popped out of her mouth on one upstroke. "Thank you thank you thmmmmf..." Piper swallowed it up again with every sign of rapturous enjoyment.

Erika was a little bit stunned, to put it mildly. She thought of herself as pretty good in bed-she was between boyfriends right now, thanks to a little incident involving a "borrowed" credit card and two hundred bucks in online gambling charges, but she liked to think that the men in her life would agree with her self-assessment as a generous lover. False modesty aside, her blowjobs took a backseat to nobody's. But Piper...

Piper adored it. Piper was slurping on Saul's cock like she had a second clit in her throat, gulping it all the way down and purring like a milk-drunk kitten before sliding it back out to flick her tongue all around the head. The whole time she was moaning and grinding the heel of her free hand against her crotch. When she did speak, it was more of the same babble of "Thank you sir, I love to obey you sir," over and over. It should have sounded stupid coming out of the mouth of a girl whose BDSM experience probably extended to a dog-eared copy of '50 Shades of Grey', but it didn't. She was too sincere to sound silly. She really wanted to please him.

"That's a good girl," Saul said, holding the back of her head with his hands. He wasn't forcing her down or anything, though; he didn't seem to be using any force at all. He'd just asked her for a blowjob, and she was acting like it was the best thing in the world. Erika could actually see a damp spot on the chair now where Piper was sitting.

"That's right, sweetheart," Saul said as Piper licked all the way along Saul's shaft like he was candy-coated. "You know what you need to do to cum for me, don't you?"

Piper nodded. "uh-huh," she whimpered out, her voice a thin reed of strained arousal. "Please, sir, please..." She engulfed his cock with her mouth again, deep throating it all the way down to the base before sliding it back out. "Please, sir, I just, I need it, please sir, please, I need you to, ohhh..." Her hand was jammed into the waistband of her panties now, pistoning in and out of her cunt. The fabric was so wet it was pretty much see-through by this point. "Please sir, please please please-"

"Good girl," Saul groaned out as he came, splattering Piper's face with thick, ropy strands of semen. "Fuck yes, good fucking girl..." His words trailed off into a growl of pleasure as he spurted all over her face and mouth.

The effect on Piper was astonishing. As soon as he came, she clenched her thighs together tightly and arched her back in a howling, screaming mess of an orgasm. Erika could see fluid gushing out of Piper's cunny, streaming through her panties and soaking the chair beneath her. Erika hadn't ever had an orgasm like that. She hadn't even seen one. But here Piper was, cumming with hurricane force just from getting a facial. Erika didn't like to admit to envy, but she was feeling a tiny twinge here and there.

Piper sagged back into the chair, glistening with sweat and cum. Her eyes were glassy from post-orgasmic bliss, and her legs spread apart like she was too well-fucked to ever close them. Saul patted her on the head and said, "That's my gal," just before the tape cut out.

Erika hit the stop button. Then she turned the TV off and went for a walk. She had a lot of thinking to do.

*****

It was six blocks to the coffee shop, and Erika didn't notice a single one of them. She was too busy trying to referee a no-holds-barred cage match between her conscience and her journalistic instincts.

On the one hand, this was a huge scoop. This was an absolutely magnificent story, the kind every young journalist hoped for. It was the perfect narrative dropped into her lap like manna from heaven-a squeaky clean young pop star representing America's collective innocence, used and exploited by a sleazy manager with nothing but his own selfish needs at heart. (Oh, and he was also having sex with her, her inner comedian tacked on.)

Of course, that was both a joke and not a joke. Everyone knew that these teenage acts got fucked raw by their managers. The sex scandal here wasn't just a sex scandal, it was a metaphor for the way that young women in Hollywood were constantly dehumanized and objectified. Erika could feel the story writing itself in her head, a tragic tale of a young girl with stars in her eyes and the creep who molded her into his literal fucking sex slave. Saul Compton didn't give a sweet goddamn about Piper Laramie.

And you do? her conscience whispered, sucker-punching her right in the hypocrisy when she wasn't looking. Because that was the other side of this. Releasing this story, releasing that tape...it would utterly destroy Piper's career. This wasn't Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, someone who already had a reputation as a "bad girl". They could survive a sex tape-hell, they could embrace it. But Piper, well...she wasn't exactly Disneyfied, but she was pretty close. Her career lived and died on endorsements, tween girls coming to her concerts, and parent-friendly rebellion against socially-approved repression. If even five seconds of her giving a blowjob to her manager hit the Internet, she had nowhere to go but down.

Was that going to be something Erika could live with? She asked herself the question while waiting in line for a soy latte she probably wasn't going to even taste. Could she hack it if she saw a headline six months from now, saying that Piper Laramie had gone ahead and decided to do hardcore porn because it was the only way left to pay the bills? Was she going to lose her shit if Piper took a bottle of sleeping pills the day after her article went live?

The scary part was that Erika wasn't sure she would. She was a little bit sickened to find out that there was a very real part of her that said fuck it, Piper Laramie was a technically grown woman who made her own decisions, and Saul Compton was an utter shit who should definitely know better than to film himself face-fucking his bankable talent let alone making copies. If they wanted to give her a story, something in Erika most definitely wanted to run with it.

But her conscience wasn't letting her go that easy. There was no sign of coercion in the tape. No force, no drugs-it almost looked kind of loving, if you could really believe that someone would seriously use the word "tiger" as a bedroom endearment after 1972. Sure it was kinky, but Erika had spent big chunks of her career telling people that kink-shaming and slut-shaming were crappy messages for pop culture to be pushing. Deep down, wasn't this story basically just "Young Woman Gets Her Rocks Off With Older Man"?

And of course, it's not like she knew where the tapes had come from. Someone had known this would ruin a career or two, maybe even a life or two, and had dropped it in her lap like a little ticking time bomb. She didn't like the thought that someone out there felt like she was just the sleazy little tabloid creep to fling this muck onto the Internet. (On the other hand, that cold little voice whispered, if they could make a copy for you they could make a copy for BuzzFeed and Jezebel. Someone's going to break this story and make a career out of it...why not let it be you?)

Erika threw her empty cup in a corner trashcan on the way back to her apartment. This wasn't getting her anywhere, literally or figuratively. She needed something to help make her mind up, to tip the scales one way or another. She needed to watch the other tape.

*****

The other tape began with a hiss of static that rolled slowly down the screen to reveal what looked like a grainy videotape from the mid-1980s. It showed a placard with a single word, "Rationale".

After a good solid five-count, the word disappeared and a series of bullet points scrolled into view like someone had just shelled out big bucks for a Paintbox and was eager to show it off. "Provide needed stability and security for our government against subversive elements without costly military expenditures", it said.

A second bulleted line followed. "Stimulate the economy through targeted activity in order to keep the financial system moving predictably."

And a third. "Preserve traditional values in the face of a rapidly changing culture."

And a fourth. "...have FUN!" Erika was having flashbacks to every temp assignment she'd ever had. She just knew that the person who wrote that laid out their ties for every day of the week in advance, just to avoid the risk of a spontaneous decision.

The screen held the four bullet points for another five-count, apparently just in case Erika was a slow reader, and then moved to a new one-word screen: "Methodology".

It cut away to a woman reclining on a long couch. She had large headphones covering her ears, and her eyes were glassy and distant like Piper's. Exactly like Piper's, Erika realized. Different headphones, but the exact same vacant stare. This woman was naked, but her body displayed that same loose, uncaring abandon that Piper had as well. Her legs were splayed out without any seeming worry that the camera could see her pussy with near-gynecological detail, and there was a little bit of a wet spot beneath her crotch as well. Although judging by the woman's furry muff, the video clearly came from a time before depilation became a thing.

A narrator broke in. "The Wyman-Morris Subliminal Stimulation System started as the brainchild of two scientists: Doctor Carol Wyman and Doctor Abraham Morris. Doctor Wyman had the initial theoretical breakthrough in determining how the brain processed low-frequency auditory signals, but it was Doctor Abraham Morris who transformed the theory into practical effect. He created the first auditory isolation system, a set of headphones which cut off external signals and allowed subliminal programming to enter the auditory canal without interference from other sounds."

A man wearing a white lab coat entered the picture, slowly removing the headphones and looking down at the nude woman. She looked back up at him with an expression of placid indifference, which changed to rapturous bliss when he leaned down and whispered in her ear. "Doctor Wyman acted as the first test subject for the Wyman-Morris System, and it is due to Doctor Morris' meticulous video documentation that we have an index for gauging exactly how long it takes to render a subject amenable to suggestions. This video, taken from Session Seven of the Wyman-Morris Experimental Archive, shows that Doctor Wyman was already accepting enough to allow herself to undergo the conditioning without wearing clothing even in the passive mode of conditioning, and was willing to perform activities when activated that she had previously refused."

On the screen, the woman had peeled the man's clothes off and was fondling his genitals with the same expression of dreamy contentment that Piper had shown in the first tape. That was where the sick chill in Erika's stomach was coming from-if she'd watched this tape first, she might have suspected the whole thing to be an elaborate practical joke or a porn parody, but Saul and Piper weren't kidding. She'd seen this thing, this subliminal brainwashing headset in action, and it had turned a teenage girl into a blowjob machine in five seconds flat. This was real. This was really real. Ogod.

"The pioneering work of Morris and Wyman allowed others to refine and develop their system into a portable method of 'instant teaching' that could produce results after only a few hours of conditioning," the narrator continued calmly, oblivious to Erika's freakout and to the rapidly developing fuckfest onscreen. "At this point, the stage was set for the grand social experiment we have begun undertaking."

Grand what? "Ogod," Erika muttered out loud. How old was this tape?

The scene cut away from Doctor Wyman bouncing up and down on Doctor Morris' cock to a shot of a Walkman resting on a rotating velvet pillow. "The next step was to develop a socially-acceptable method of delivering the subliminal signals, as well as manufacturing a masking technique that would allow us to deliver the conditioning undetected by the conscious mind. Thankfully, our good friends in Japan shared our concerns about societal decay and internal subversion, and were happy to come up with a commercial prototype that would satisfy all our needs."

Erika bit her knuckle. This had to be a joke. Had to had to had to. It was a really freaky, really elaborate joke by a whole bunch of people willing to risk professional ruin and public humiliation to prank an obscure Internet journalist who wrote snarky articles about Miley Cyrus, because the alternative was getting too damned fucking scary to contemplate. 1979. The Walkman came out in 1979. This, this whole thing, this whole thing that totally had to be a joke but really really really wasn't, it had been going on since 1979.

The screen cut away to another one-word title. "Implementation." After a five-count, it proceeded to a shot of an assembly line.

"The Wyman-Morris System has been mass-produced and disseminated to the taste-making public. It is expected, going forward, that the technology will be further refined and updated to incorporate advances both in sound quality and in subliminal conditioning. Key producers of popular music have been approached and are willing, in exchange for certain considerations both financial and otherwise, to incorporate the suggestions into the sound mix for their commercial releases."

'Financial and otherwise'. So that explained how Saul stayed big in the music business for thirty-five years. And why he always seemed to have barely legal young women in his talent stable. Fucking creepy fucker. Erika had already erased the article she'd written in her head earlier and was writing a new one. She was still working on a headline that didn't involve profanity, though.

The screen cut to what looked like stock footage from a Walkman ad, shots of people doing everyday activities while wearing their portable headphones. Erika had never thought of that as sinister until now. "As it permeates society, the Wyman-Morris System is already at work in what Doctor Morris termed as 'passive mode'. The passive mode subtly directs the subject's thoughts, encouraging acceptance of existing social norms, indifference to political activism, and interest in following cultural and economic trends. We anticipate our chosen candidates will hold the Presidency well into the next century."