Taken for a Spin Ch. 01

Chapter 1

**Author's note: this story is highly influenced by one of my favorite MC stories and authors. "Mountin' Biking" by Joe Mudak. I highly recommend you read it, but It is not a requirement to enjoy this story. I just want to make clear this is not entirely my original idea, but it is my original writing and characters!**

"There's no way this guy is serious," I said aloud as I read a forum post on my computer. I was scanning through a well-hidden hypnosis and mind control fetish forum on the internet. One of my favorite members had recently written several hot first-person short stories about a very special "smart" exercise bike. The bike in the stories had the ability to bypass the consciousness of its female riders. It allowed the gym employee to insert ideas into their heads, much to his enjoyment. The author, AnonMC1151, claimed these were "true" stories. That's not an unusual claim on these forums. I guess the authors have fun imagining they are documenting what their exploits would be if they had a mind control power. That's not really my style, but to each their own.

The most recent update to this story was a downer but much expected. The main character was not careful to cover his tracks and finally got caught. All his toys were deprogrammed, and he ended up running from the cops. This was not an unusual ending to one of these stories... well it wasn't until the author made another short forum post.

"I managed to grab the bike and hide it," the post read. "I can't get caught with it. Maybe one of you can carry on with it... be more careful than I did. I'm not too worried about the cops. I'm more worried about the others."

"I dumped the bike behind an abandoned dealership in Carlisle, PA," the post continued, "Good luck. This will be my last post."

The dramatic ending was exciting, if not a bit forced. What really grabbed my attention was knowing where this abandoned dealership was. I had driven by it several times while living in Pennsylvania a few years back. "It might be fun to drive by there," I thought. "Maybe I'll get a free exercise bike out of it." I was seriously impressed that this author wrote a multi-chapter story to get rid of what was probably a crappy old exercise bike in his garage.

"Ring!" My thoughts were interrupted by my morning wake-up alarm. I glanced around the edges of the black-out curtains in my messy office. Sure enough, a sliver of sunlight was bleeding around the edges. "Shit!" I cursed under my breath after realizing I had accidentally stayed awake 24 hours during a work week.

I stood up from the computer and stumbled to the bathroom, trying not to step on any accumulated trash on the floor. "This place looks like a pigsty," I thought to myself. I'd turned into a lazy slob since I started working from home two years back. I was single and gave pretty well zero effort in anything I did.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I wasn't overly disgusted. I had gained a bit of weight recently, but if anything, I filled out my tall skinny frame even better than when I was in tip-top shape a few years back on my college track team. My hair had darkened to nearly black due to lack of I've light. It really made my gray-blue eyes pop. It almost seemed like my father staring back at me more than the mental image I had of myself. A tinge of nostalgia creep in. I missed that crazy old man. He was the only family I'd ever known.

I stepped into the shower to freshen up before getting to work. "Why do I still bother with this stupid job anyway," I thought to myself while washing my hair. "Thanks to dad, I've got enough money for two lifetimes."

My father was a grade-A womanizer. There's no telling how many brothers and sisters I actually have. I've never met any because Doug was excellent at not being found by his numerous conquests. My mother was an exception to that rule. I don't remember her at all, but according to Doug, she showed up at his door drunk with 2-year-old me in tow and demanded child support from him. The story goes he called CPS and ended up getting full custody of me in the courts later on. He was a cheap bastard, especially when it came to women. It somehow served him well, though.

He raised me reasonably well, with the exception of the ideas he put into my head about women. I didn't get his charisma, so my misogynistic ideas didn't pan out as well for me. I also had a tiny bit of empathy my father did not have. I still had my share of one-night stands and short relationships like my father did, but much fewer and farther between. Looking back, I always felt slightly guilty for the women I had used.

When Doug passed away a couple of years back, I just quit cold turkey and decided to stay single. My motivation to do much of anything kind of went out the window after that.

After getting ready, I dressed back into some comfortable sweats and stumbled back to my office to see what I had to work on for the day.

I was a website designer in a large consulting firm. My job was basically doing the coding and layout to create functional and attractive websites for various individuals and small businesses. Over the last few years, I have automated my process with templates and macros I made. I didn't share these shortcuts with my company, of course. As far as my coworkers knew, I was an average website designer capable of setting up 1-2 small websites per 8-hour day. In reality, I only had to work about 2 hours a day to meet my quotas. Video calls were pretty rare, so I usually spent the rest of my workday gaming or surfing the web.

After a couple of hours of work, I finished my daily quotas and decided to lie down for a nap. When I woke up, I logged back on to the forum and looked back at the exercise bike story to see if the author had updated. To my surprise, the post was gone. I dug deeper and realized the author was no longer a member either. There was no admin note of a suspension or anything, so he obviously just deleted his account.

"Okay, now you've got my attention," I mumbled aloud. He had been a forum member for even longer than I had. I couldn't think of a reason why he'd write a new story and immediately delete his account before almost anyone could read it. It was only about an hour's drive to where I believed the story mentioned, so I carefully grabbed some supplies and hopped in my old truck.

The starter motor clicked several times, but the old truck grumbled and wheezed to life in the cold winter air. The truck was not my daily driver. I just had it for the rare occasion I needed to haul things. After an hour of driving with the comforting drone of the worn exhaust cutting through the darkening sky, I carefully pulled into a shopping center parking lot. The lot was a few hundred yards from the abandoned dealership.

While I obviously didn't think this exercise bike, if it existed at all, would have mind control abilities, I still wanted to take extreme precautions before looking for it. I didn't necessarily trust a random guy on the internet. Especially the part of the internet I was looking at.

I pulled out a pair of binoculars and surveyed the rear of the dealership from afar. "The light poles appear to be shot out, so there is no light, at least," I began mentally checking as I scanned the area. "No people... but that might be a camera on that light pole. I don't see a bike, though...."

Just as I was about to put the binoculars up, I caught a glint of glass from the far corner of the lot. Sure enough, whether by coincidence or not, a rather fancy-looking exercise bike was sitting there in the dark. I hopped out of the truck, folded my license plate back so it wouldn't be visible, then drove to the abandoned dealership.

My face was mostly covered by my winter coat. However, I still carefully positioned the truck where the security camera on the light pole wouldn't catch a good view of me.

The bike was glossy black with titanium accents. It had a huge tablet-like screen on the front, like the Pelotonnes advertised during the pandemic a few years back. This wasn't the same, though. On the side, it said MC1000. I tried to lift it up and quickly realized it was easily over 600 lbs. It was about then the adrenaline finally kicked in.

"Okay, David," I thought to myself. "This isn't adding up. This thing has to be worth thousands of dollars. I either need to grab this fast or get the hell out of here."

I quickly decided to try at least to load it up. A small voice in my head kept telling me, "What if the story was somehow real?" I didn't think I would ever forgive myself if I didn't at least try. So I opened up the tailgate and grabbed a furniture dolly and a 6' ramp I brought with me. I managed to get the dolly under the bike with a lot of effort. Unfortunately, I wasn't strong enough to push it up the ramp into the truck. I had a tie-down strap I could use like a winch to pull it up, but that would take a lot of time. So I decided to try getting a running start to push it up instead.

I pulled the bike back about 60' and groaned as I pushed it hard up to jogging speed. The furniture dolly hit the ramp with a sharp blow that rocked the pickup and almost slowed me to a halt. With strength I didn't know I had, I barely managed to push it into the bed. In a rush, I grabbed the ramp and closed the tailgate. Immediately after, a pair of lights appeared on the far opposite end of the lot. It was pitch black out now, so I probably hadn't been spotted yet. I hurriedly raced my truck out of sight behind the building without turning my lights back on, then drove over the curb and through the ditch back to the main road. I turned my lights back on and merged in front of a shocked motorist just as a black SUV stopped precisely where I was not 30 seconds earlier. I took a few deep breaths and set my course back home.

I couldn't stop looking in my rearview mirror on the way back. I figured I was being paranoid, but I took a few back roads and finally stopped in front of someone else's house about 30 minutes from mine. I gave the exercise bike in the back a close once over, checking every visible part of it for an AirTag or GPS tracker. I didn't find anything. As a final precaution, I left the truck and hid in the forest at the end of the street for about an hour to see if any scary black cars would appear. Luckily nothing happened, so I folded my license plate back down, drove back to my house, and parked safely in the garage.

I slept with one eye open that night. I left the bike loaded in the truck. If any black SUVs showed up, I'd probably be better off if it was clear I hadn't attempted to use the bike yet. Nobody came, though, so the following day, I unloaded the unreasonably heavy machine and set it up in the garage.

I still didn't trust the thing, so I was exceedingly paranoid about setting it up. So I made a makeshift faraday cage out of a couple of woven wire trash cans and placed them around the substantial tablet-like touch screen before I plugged the bike in. I also turned off my Wi-Fi and all of my Bluetooth devices.

With the machine plugged in, a fan in the front wheel made a quiet whirr, and other unknown components made other electrical noises briefly before stopping. The screen flashed on with a brief swirling color start-up screen. It then flashed to a home screen with a bevy of buttons and options. At the top, the name MC1000 stood in proud, bold titanium-colored letters. As far as I could tell, it wasn't trying to connect to any internet. Unfortunately, I didn't have any sophisticated way to test it, but I did have an idea.

I grabbed my antique portable AM radio and turned it to max volume. I removed the faraday cage and carried the AM radio around the bike, listening for the telltale buzz of various frequency pollution. I heard nothing. I checked to see if the AM radio would pick up my cell phone's emissions. I heard an evident change in the background static as I moved the phone closer to the radio. With that data, I was reasonably confident this bike did not "phone home."

With paranoid testing out of the way, I began searching through the settings for any kind of user manual or hints about the "special features." Not that I believed they existed. After 30 minutes of searching, I found hundreds of settings, from gravel road simulation toggles to screen brightness adjustments. Frustrated, I opened the internet archive and found a snapshot of the forum story before it was deleted. Sure enough, one of the posts loosely described the process to activate the supposed mind control settings. I clicked settings and clicked through to page 3 of the settings list, then selected additional programming.

"Please type in PIN _ _ _ _" flashed on the screen. "Shit!" I exclaimed, "god willing, this is just a standard 0000 pin." A loud buzz came out of the speakers as "incorrect pin, two attempts remaining..." flashed on the screen. I tried 1234 and got the same result. I knew the answer wasn't in the story online, but I checked anyway. I also used Ctrl-f on a few other AnonMC1151 stories. The only idea I had was to try 1000 for the name MC1000. It was my only chance, I thought. I slowly typed the numbers, but right before I pressed the last 0, I paused.

"No, it can't be," I spoke aloud as I remembered 1151 in the author's name. I shakily typed it in. A loading pinwheel showed up on the screen for several seconds. Finally, a small ding sounded, and a new menu popped up titled additional programming.

"I'm in," I said in my best movie hacker voice. Scrolling through the settings, there were several debug and developer options. I clicked on one that allowed me to change the pin to a unique one I'd never used before. At the bottom of the settings list was an option called "Arousal and Mind Control Settings."

My breath caught at that. The small voice in my head, thinking there was a tiny chance that this was real, got much louder. There were two possibilities now. Number one was: this AnonMC1151 guy designed an exercise bike from the ground up, including industrial-quality parts, circuit board design, and professional coding, for the sole purpose of making a role-play sex toy or writing prop. The second possibility is that what he wrote was a true story, and a company out there makes functional mind-control devices and sells them on the black market. Occam's razor is generally a good tool for answering these questions; however, I couldn't be sure which option was the simplest explanation. So I'd just have to test it.

First, I needed to understand how to use it. There were several options in the sexercise settings, but notably fewer than all the other menus. The settings and their brief descriptions were as follows:

-Activate/Deactivate Arousal and Mind Control Mode (AMCM)

"Activate/deactivate seat stimulation system for programming female subjects. Please read user manual pages 80-90 for detailed instructions. Current setting: deactivated."

-AMCM active duration (enter time in minutes)

"Enter desired time until AMCM automatically deactivates when no subject is detected. Current setting: 15 minutes."

-Programming Mode: Manual/Automatic

"Toggle programming mode to automatic to use macro commands inputted in settings (see pgs. 90-115). Set to manual to self-administer verbal commands. Current setting: manual."

Experimental Intensity Toggle (low/default/high)

"Beta test setting. Alters the intensity of the AMCM stimulation system. Low will result in partial programming acceptance and possible awareness of programming changes. High may result in excessive cognitive restructuring. Current setting: default (recommended)

-Automatic memory adjustment (on/off)

"default setting ON automatically implants the memory of a pleasant workout session into the subject and erases the subject's memory of the acquisition process and programming (programming will still be followed). Setting OFF allows the user to manually dictate the subject's memory using verbal commands or allow it to remain unaltered. Current setting: ON

-Trigger phrase for permanent changes (insert up to 100 characters)

"A user-spoken trigger phrase to make all changes to the subject permanent. Current setting "you belong to me."

-Duration of programming (insert time in hours)

"When the trigger phrase is not used, this setting determines the duration in which programming will be applied. When the duration expires, the subject's memory of the time during the selected duration will be erased, and all thoughts about the period will be suppressed indefinitely. Current setting: 24 hours"

-Macro Commands

"Insert up to ten single-sentence commands per macro (see pgs. 90-115). 1 out of 3 macro slots is currently filled. Select macro group during route setup when programming mode is toggled to automatic. "

-Arousal and Mind Control Deprogramming Mode ON/OFF

"When toggled on and PIN is accepted, this mode allows for complete deprogramming of subjects. Warning: subjects will retain the entirety of their memories after AMCM was applied and will no longer follow any previously programmed commands. Restraints are recommended. Current setting: OFF

After reading the menu options and explanations, I was more than a little hard. "This can't be real," I said out loud as I wiped the cold sweat from my brow. "But I've got to find a way to try it." Images of girls from my past on their knees, looking at me in adoration, flashed through my mind. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves." I internally chided myself.

I then remembered that one set of macros had been filled. So I decided to click through and see what AnonMC1151 had written there.

"Macro Group 1: You obey Tony without question. You are very attracted to Tony. You are a dumb horny bimbo. You will happily have sex with anyone Tony tells you to. You will have Tony teach you to program the bike. You will encourage other attractive girls to try the bike. You will set up the bike and mind-control girls for Tony. You will believe you are doing everything of your own free will."

"Yeah... I can see how you got caught, Tony..." I laughed. He had some decent ideas, but the macro probably caused most of his problems. The macro likely made an ever-increasing amount of women suddenly become horny bimbos and start trying to get other women to come to ride the bike. It was inevitable that a concerned onlooker would eventually connect some dots.

"If this is real, I can do better." I thought while I started planning out how to test the bike.

The problem with finding a test subject was that I had no female friends. As I'd been referred to many times, being a misogynistic prick wasn't a trait that lent itself to maintaining friendships with women. Not that I really wanted to, anyway. I much preferred enjoying their charms that didn't involve talking. I burned all my bridges; this was the first time I cared. Convincing a trusting friend to ride the bike would be much easier if it was an option.

There were other ways to get a subject though. I fired up my computer and browsed my social media for local gyms and workout groups. There were several posts with women looking for personal trainers. That was my in. I had a minor in kinesiology along with my computer science major. I had some required classes that went along with my college track scholarships and decided to take a few extra to get the minor. Until now, I had thought I had wasted that time and money. I never expected I would be able to use the degree as a small proof of qualifications to start my own very private personal training business.

I spent the rest of the week cleaning out and renovating my garage. Finally, after several days of work, it had lovely black epoxy floors, an insulated garage door, wall mirrors, and assorted workout equipment. But, of course, the centerpiece of the room was my special bike.