Mr. Smith decided the ripest fruit was his dear mother. She certainly gave him plenty to work with. Father had left her five years ago to run off with a co-worker half his age. Mr. Smith could work with that. Mother also took the distance that had developed between her and her son very hard. Mr. Smith could exploit that as well. But how to begin? It would need to be slow, so as to avoid making her suspicious. Little things . . .
He decided to keep it simple—the next morning, he told Mother goodbye rather than ignoring her as he walked out the door to school. He greeted her when he came home from school. He told her goodnight when she went to bed. And at each brief contact he tried to find Mother’s signal. After a few days he became familiar with her channel (or frequency or whatever it was he was picking up) and could tune in easily. Her thoughts were not terribly interesting—variations of loneliness and self pity, occasional bursts of happiness at connecting with her son again, all mixed with the mundane bullshit of everyday life.
As he became adapt at tuning in to his mother, he began to attempt to send his own signals back at her. At first he tried completely new thoughts, but that simply turned her signal to static. It was sometimes a day or two before she let her guard down again. So Mr. Smith began to amplify her emotions instead. He focused his effort in two directions. First, he amplified any thought of inadequacy in his mother. Mr. Smith wanted her desperate for any attention she could get. Second, Mr. Smith strengthened any feeling of bonding she had with him. He intended to be her whole world.
Soon, Mr. Smith felt confident enough to move onto phase two . . .
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