Using Master PC For Self-Improvement

Author's Note: I originally wrote this for EMCSA but I think it has a lot of fun decision points that someone could take in another direction. Check the guidelines and feel free to add a chapter! I originally started posting this using my long chapters I did on EMCSA, but I just went through and broke them up into smaller CHYOA-sized stuff at a few decision points. Sorry if I messed anyone's bookmarks up, I'm new to this site!

The glow of the computer screen bathed Candice in a gray light. It was well past midnight, and Richard was sound asleep in the bedroom. She could hear him snoring. It had been another uneventful evening. They'd watched some TV, had a frozen pizza dinner, and fallen asleep. And, Candice considered, that was sort of the problem. Candice was 29 years old — still in the prime of her life! She and Richard were a young couple. The magic couldn't be gone already, could it?

Richard had been a bit more distant lately, spending more and more time on his phone. That in itself wasn't too bad, but she had seen him quickly lock the screen lately as she'd walked by, and she'd begun to get... not suspicious, exactly. More scared. Scared that she was going to lose him to some sort of online affair.

So here she was at two in the morning, sitting in the dark office browsing this strangely monochromatic erotic story website. Candice knew a thing or two about computers — she was actually a software engineer by trade — so it had been easy to start tracking his phone use. That had led her here.

It seemed Richard had read a lot of the stories on this website. He seemed to really like the ones that involved viruses that turned women into mindless bimbos and another series called Master PC, where the protagonist had a computer program that let you change people. They were kind of a "genie grants wishes" type of story wrapped up in a modern technological shell. Candice thought it was a kind of lazy plot device. Computer programs couldn't do that. At least hypnosis had some grounding in reality.

But she was curious about what Richard saw in them. Apparently he had a thing for mind control and submission that she'd never known about before. What else didn't she know? She typed "Master PC" into her search bar to find more stories. Only one search result came up.

You've Been Selected. Install Master PC!<

Weird. She clicked the link to see what the site was about, and immediately a program unpacked onto her computer. Even weirder. Clicking links from search engines was not supposed to do that. It hadn’t even put her through an install wizard.

An icon now sat on her desktop. The graphic was a simple stylized M. Master PC. She knew she shouldn't click it. It could be a virus, spyware, or who knows what. But she was just too curious. She had to.

The program launched and there it was, just like in all the stories. Candice saw herself from a third person view, as if a camera was about three feet to her right. Which, incidentally, would put it inside the wall. Beside her picture were her vitals. 5'3" and 163 pounds. Long brown hair in a conservative haircut, though it was pretty messy this time of the night. There was an "athletics" entry that was at 40%, whatever that meant. Hovering over it revealed a multitude of sub-categories, from endurance to dexterity. Her sexuality was listed as well, as its own top-level statistic. It was only 30%. Hovering the cursor over that number revealed even more subcategories, from nipple sensitivity to the "Erogenous Shoulder Slider." There were more statistics, but she skipped them.

As she looked closer, it wasn't exactly like all the stories. ittedly, Master PC was always a little bit different depending on who was writing, but the characters in the stories always seemed to have the ability to type whatever they wanted in. Candice looked all around for a box where she could type "Candice looks like a young Heidi Klum, but prettier and wins the lottery every time she plays." This box was nowhere to be found.

In its place were a dizzying array of drop-down menus, sliders, and text boxes filled with numbers and percentages. A window called "Mental State" flashed an ever-changing array of icons that made no sense to Candice, even though she already knew what she was thinking. Candice browsed a bit until she found the "superficial appearance" tab. That seemed like a safe place to experiment. She adjusted the "master weight" slider down thirty pounds, and watched them drop off the on-screen avatar. She hovered the mouse over "Apply Changes," held her breath, and clicked.

A shiver ran over her body, and instantly she felt lighter. Candice had been heavier and lighter over the years as she’d dieted, achieved her goals, and then gotten lazy and fallen off the wagon. One thing she’d never noticed was the difference she felt as she slowly packed on or lost weight, but now Candice immediately felt better as the pounds evaporated. She sat in shock, staring at the screen, at herself, and back again. It was real. My God, it was real.

What should she do? Should she go wake up Richard? Should she just delete the program and forget about it? Should she call the news? She stared at the screen for five minutes, before realizing there was really only one choice. Anyone given this kind of power would have to use it. It was just too tempting... and she could show Richard later, once she had figured out how it worked. She made more adjustments. She was happy with her breasts, but they'd begun to sag just a bit. Richard had said it was just her imagination when she'd mentioned it to him, but she could tell. It couldn't hurt to make them perkier, so she found that dial under the "breasts" subcategory and adjusted it up to where she'd been in high school... maybe even a bit better. She found the "apparent age" slider, and adjusted it down to 21. A warning flashed, saying she should be careful when using the "apparent age" slider in conjunction with the "biological age" slider. She made a mental note to find that option later.

Then she really got into it, shaping her eyebrows, lengthening her eyelashes, slightly plumping her lips, and making her nails longer and stronger. She made her hair a darker chocolate brown and gave it the lustrous sheen that only models on the boxes of hair-care products have. Then she took some more weight off just for fun. There was another slider for "facial symmetry." She moved that down, and her features distorted grotesquely. Then she slid it up to 100%. Her features returned to normal. In fact, better than normal. She couldn't tell exactly what was different about her face... but it was just overall more attractive.

In the end, the avatar in front of her was like a much, much prettier version of herself. It was still herself, still Candice, but a version of herself that had just spent hours at an all-inclusive spa and was having a great make-up and hair day. She hit "Apply" and ran over to the mirror. A gorgeous woman stared back at her.

Going back to the computer, she typed Richard's name and began browsing his vitals. Again, jumping to "Superficial Appearance," she brought his weight down a bit. He wasn’t as far off his college weight as Candice, but he had gained a bit. She turned it down just enough that she didn’t think he’d notice and upped his "facial symmetry," which did wonders for him as well in ways she couldn't quite pinpoint. She stopped there, not wanting to do anything too drastic that he'd notice. She clicked "Apply."

Taking a breath, she realized she was doing exactly what all the characters in the Master PC stories always did. She chided herself. With this kind of power, you needed to use it on more important things than breast perkiness. She went into Richard's health tab. He always complained about his back. Numbers representing muscle strength and resilience, bone density and white cell production... it was all there. And a lot more complicated than "superficial appearance." Candice got the impression she'd need to be a doctor to really comprehend most of it. Nevertheless, she managed to make some tweaks that she thought would help.

And if she could do something like that.... what about her grandparents? They were in pretty poor health. Could she make them healthier? Make them in better shape and more mobile for the rest of their lives? Make them younger altogether? What about people she didn't know? Should she be curing kids with cancer? Something else from the Master PC stories surfaced in her mind. Some of them talked about a sort of "shadow police," making sure people like Candice didn't cause problems. They were just stories... but obviously she wasn’t the only person with Master PC. And she hadn't heard of any cancer wards suddenly being completely cured. She'd have to take this slow. Think about it. Still, she pulled up her grandparents' and dialed their biological age (she'd found that setting on the health tab) back three years. There. Now, she had some time to figure out exactly what to do for them. She resolved to come back to the Big Questions later. For now, she was going to do some safe stuff no one would notice.

The "mental" tab caught her eye. She pulled Richard back up, and with a voyeuristic thrill checked him out. Under Romantic Love, there was a drop-down box. Candice's name, along with a few other women, were listed there. Most of them were his ex-girlfriends. She was shocked, until she began browsing through it. For some reason, it rated love on a scale of 1 to 512. His love for her was in the mid 400s. No other woman got out of the 30s. She thought about turning herself up all the way to 512, but resisted. She knew she'd regret making him love her on anything but his own . But under Sexual Attraction, she was nearly heartbroken to find that she rated lower than several of those same ex-girlfriends. Was this the source of his distance? Candice had never considered sex to be the main component of a relationship, but she'd always heard guys were different that way.

In the next room, she heard the shower turn off. She hadn't even realized it had been turned on. She looked at the time. Richard was up and getting ready for work! Panic struck her. She slammed the laptop shut and wondered if he'd notice the changes. Would they be too much to explain away? She jumped into bed, pulling the covers over her.

Richard stepped out of the shower. "Hey, hon. Back in bed?"

"Yeah.... I'm not feeling good. I'm going to call into work," she replied, her face muffled in the pillow.

"Anything I can do? Want me to grab some medicine or something?"

"No, I was just up taking some Tylenol when you got in the shower."

They made a bit more small talk before Richard left, Candice being careful to hide her body under the covers. Richard left for work, and Candice called in sick, then immediately jumped back onto the computer.

She pulled up her own profile. She looked back at the bar labeled "30% sexual". She hadn't made any psychological changes to herself yet, and this seemed like a good place to experiment. Besides, it would probably make their relationship stronger. She turned it up to 80% and clicked "Apply." She felt the same shiver, and immediately, thinking back on Richard, she realized she should have done this before he left so they could have had a morning quickie before he left... and then she smiled. It worked! But she didn't feel like a sexual zombie. She just felt more, well, sexual. And she enjoyed sex as much as the next person. More couldn't really be bad, right?

She decided she'd made enough changes for now. She got up, took a shower, and pulled on some clothes. They were a bit too big for her new, more slender frame. She hadn't been this thin since high school. Maybe not even then.