The new startup is lauded as a breakthrough. Marketed directly at women’s mental health, the app is simple - put your phone by your bedside and it will play a gentle “white noise” while you sleep, helping you relax, rest, and focus for the next day. Thanks to ubiquitous advertising, it quickly sweeps the nation, extremely popular as young women gush about how well it works, whether what they’re noticing is a real change, or a placebo.

But it does work. The frequencies played, can, after huge amounts of R&D, induce an actual, near-euphoria in the brain, if an extremely mild one. That is, it’s mild for now. Once better delivery mechanisms are rolled out, the female brain will be putty in this mysterious company’s hands.

And of course, after a few months of having the best sleep of their lives, when the comfy headphones are nudged at them, they’re eager to buy, their personalised algorithms both increasing their tolerance to these new stimuli and leaving them craving a higher dose. They of course have no idea what’s really happening to them.

It’s at this point in a girl’s journey when the breakdown of cognitive capabilities will begin to change, albeit subtly. In this first step, new levels of stimulation will be bumped into their brains, programming them to develop a Pavlovian response to a certain tone. When this tone is played, it comes to command absolute attention to whatever follows it, whether that be an advertisement or an outright instruction. Naturally though, this all remains below the surface…

But this is far from the end. With women now obsessed, and positively so, about how “healthy” their sleep is becoming, the natural next step is for this app to help them more; In order to deliver the best sleeping experience, they need data from when you’re awake - and you like your headphones, right? So on go the rubber wristbands, comfy but snug. These are yet another leap that would have been technologically infeasible just years ago. Capable of interfacing directly with the body’s nervous system, they can shoot waves of either pleasure or aversion straight into your brain, at varying intensities, and the wearer won’t even know where it’s coming from. It’s at this point, the app starts to use this conditioning to enforce its policies… Multisyllabic words and complex sentences will grow harder both to comprehend and to verbalize, critical thinking will be suppressed, and productive activities and chores will feel more gruelling, uncomfortable and aggravating than ever before… Now, the real brain drain can truly begin.

Hey all! So above I’ve written what I see as the early introductory phase of a story around some sort of malicious machine entity slowly taking control of all women, then proceeding to brainwash and condition them, eventually eroding their IQ and mental faculty to pitifully low levels. If you’re into world building, sci-fi, mental changes, and play around control, societal change, and power dynamics, drop me a chat or message with your thoughts on this, as I’d love to flesh it out more.