Mark liked Aidan as a friend, so he didn´t want to change him … much. Maybe a few small things. But seeing Aidan´s fearful face, he decided on scaring him a bit for his own fun.
Aidan was scared. Mark had full control over him. And that grin he just got made it worse,
“What to do with you, Aidan? All these possibilities. Maybe I should get you out of the picture. Think about it, I could make you a simple, unimportant little pebble. Maybe you end up in a garden next door, or on the other side of the planet? Maybe deep in the earth or under the sea. Living to eternity, without any release from your simple, boring existence?
Or a screw or nail, used one time and then locked until you rust away? Some leaf on a tree, slowly falling apart in winter? A single grain of sand, deep in the desert?” Mark laughed as Aidan got paler with each suggestion, begging with his eyes alone for Mark to reconsider.
Aidan was nearly fainting in fear. A pebble? A screw or nail? A leaf? A simple grain of sand? Was Mark serios? He would rather die directly then be something like that. And Mark would make sure he would be aware, of that, he was sure.
A few minutes of laughing later, Mark finally calmed down. “Relax Aidan. Even with this control over you, I won´t do anything bad to you. You are my friend, and I want to keep you around. Such a fate would be for someone I truly loath. Sorry, but seeing you so scared just needed a good joke.” Still grinning, Mark saw Aidan slowly regain some color, but the fear remained. “I won´t harm you, Aidan. Maybe a small adjustment or two, but nothing big. If you stay calm, you can talk and move again, Aidan.”
The first thing Aidan did was break down as he regained movement. But with all the fear and stress slowly leaving him, it was just like cut strings. Mark laughed at him. “Don´t laugh. You had me at your full mercy, and I believed you. I nearly pissed myself in fear of your proposed fate for me.” Aidan said angrily and huffed when Mark laughed even more. He would take his revenge, but right now, Mark was by the laptop, so Aidan couldn´t access it, and a simple stop would have him frozen again, anyway.
Mark shivered while laughing, and guessed what Aidan would do if he could. Lucky for him that he was not in the kitchen right now, or he would end up something bad as revenge. He would need to make sure Aidan couldn´t change him. With that thought, Mark turned to the laptop, and quickly saved his file with a password. In Aidan´s file, he copied his “Mark rules” sentence to be there twice with a few empty lines between, before coloring the copy white, making it invisible.
“What are you doing?” Aidan asked, again fearing what Mark would do and quickly walking over, but not before Mark was done.
Mark turned half around as he explained: “Nothing bad. I just feared revenge for what I said, so I locked my file with a password. I don´t want you to punish me with one of my ideas, after all.” Mark laughed lightly. “I suggest you do the same with yours after we delete my sentence. I will use your bathroom, so you know I won´t spy on your password.” Mark showed Aidan he deleted his sentence before saving and leaving the laptop to him. If Aidan didn´t check the “empty” space, he wouldn´t know he was still under Mark´s control even if he locked his file. And if he did simply mark and delete it, that would be lucky.
Aidan was split between relief and anger, Mark couldn´t change him anymore, as he quickly set a password to make sure, looking if Mark changed anything else. He made his hair black again, but nothing else for now. Anger for Mark to escape his punishment so easily. Aidan would find a way; he was sure of it.
While on the toilet, Mark whispered: “Aidan will have a memory card with his mind on it accessible only to me by a slot in his neck, hidden by his hair and won´t notice it. And if removed, his body will be frozen in stand-by.” With that, Mark could still edit Aidan as well. And it would show if Aidan cleared the text input of the white space. If not, well, Mark would soon edit a few things. He had not lied to Aidan; he liked his friend. But one or two smaller edits would be made.
Aidan felt a small prick in his neck, but felt nothing as he touched it. If he knew Mark´s fears, he could make something off that. But he didn´t know them.
--
When Mark returned from the bathroom, Aidan was still searching at the laptop for any way to take revenge. He walked over to him. “Found anything interesting Aidan?”
Aidan grumbled out: “Not what I´m looking for.” He didn´t turn to look at Mark, who used the time to look at Aidan´s neck, searching. Mark grinned when he saw the card slot, knowing he could still control Aidan, before sighing at him. He placed his hand on Aidan´s shoulder, trying to comfort him. “What is it? Still my joke? Come on Aidan, I never planned something like that, I just said I could do it to you. You were easy to scare with it, nothing more. I´m sorry if you believed me about that. I thought we could laugh together about it.”
Now Aidan sighed as well. He was still pissed at what Mark said, but part of him knew how Mark was normally to others. And such jokes were normal, even if he would have been able to really end up a pebble or anything else. Mark had worded it right, he hadn´t risked Aidan becoming something as such. And somehow, he believed that if Mark had activated it by accident, he would have called and changed him back. “I feared what you could do to me, Mark. What if I really ended up a pebble on a garden path? You don´t know if you could get me back so easily, and searching for me? Without knowing where I ended up?”
Mark sighed again. Aidan had feared something Mark hadn´t thought about, namely being never found, trapped. Isolated from everything, eternal boredom. “Okay, I guess I went to far. If I had had planned something like that, I should have tested getting you back here first.”
Even so slowly, Mark´s hand wandered from Aidan´s shoulder up towards his neck, having also found the eject button for Aidan´s mind-card. A thought occurred to him; he could most likely make copies of that card. One for safety reasons, fully unchanged. Another, most likely the one he would use, with light edits. One with more changes to Aidan. And what about creating a whole other person to “use” Aidan´s body? What if he could safe some form to go with the mind? Could he create a card with a cat-mind, which would also alter Aidan´s body with some cat features or even make him a full cat in body?
“Good that you realize that. I don´t fancy being trapped like that, knowing I will never be myself again. I don´t think you would like that, right?” Aidan asked, ignoring Mark´s wandering fingers.
“No, I wouldn´t like that, either.” Mark said, just as his fingers could reach the button on Aidan´s neck. After waiting another second, Mark hit the button.
Aidan was out cold that very second, his body now frozen with empty eyes staring at nothing as the card slipped out of his neck. His body was now in stand-by.
Mark carefully extracted the card, fearing he could damage it and kill Aidan´s mind. Laying the card on the desk, Mark looked it over, before he tried: “Aidan´s mind memory-card will be labeled “Original Aidan”. There will be three copies, one labeled “Aidan small edits”, the second with “Aidan big edits” and the last just “Aidan fun”. I also will have a case to keep them with me, which I can´t lose and can only be opened by me.”
Before Mark´s eyes, the card glowed as three copies jumped out of it, all labeled like he wished them. A pencil next to the laptop changed into a small case, which was filled out to make sure any card inside was safe from moving, and had four slots inside for cards.
With a grin, Mark set the “Aidan small edits” card aside and put the other three into the case, before putting it into his bag. He could experiment with the other two cards later, and the original Aidan was safer with him anyway. Satisfied, he put the memory-card into the card-scanner, planning on viewing what to change in Aidan.