Okay, I’m a complete bastard, and just so you don’t have to hear about all of the fucked-up things I’ve done, let’s skip forward twelve or so years to the present, shall we?

“Wait!” you say. “What the fuck are you doing? What about Natasha? What about those weird dreams? What about everything else?” Hey, I told you at the beginning that I’m not a real writer, so what do I care about presenting my thoughts in the right order? Besides, if you’ve hung with me to this point, I’ll bet you’ll fucking follow me anywhere.

You can believe that I’ve done some truly horrible things since those embryonic experiments with the crystal. Unsexy things, things that might turn your stomach if I were to write about them here, so I won’t. With the power to do so much to so many, I’m really only limited by the reach of my imagination, and my imagination is just fine, thank you. I’ve been a bad boy. A criminal, really. I’ve influenced many a cumly woman, so to speak, and drilled into the brains of many others that I wouldn’t fuck if they paid me, and I can make them pay me.

To update you a bit, I’ve fucked hundreds of women since those early days — or is it more than a thousand by now? It’s not like I’m not keeping a count, you know.

And what about the women you’ve read about here in this trip down memory lane? Let’s start with my mother. No, I never went crystal on her, but only because I didn’t really want anything from her. I might have been able to help her through certain hard times with the crystal, but I must not have wanted that, either.

Cindy’s mother is a different story. She really did look great when she showed up at my door after all of that exercise. Lost two dress sizes without sacrificing the fullness of her tits in the least, and I barely had to fine-tune her sex jets at all, she was such a wild thing once she got going. It took a little more convincing to get her to help me seduce Cindy’s sister, Emma. For some reason, I wanted Emma to go out on a date with me of her own volition, and it was a special moment when I “robbed” the last remaining Walls woman of her virginity at the same parking spot where Cindy and I used to fuck. For a period of time, I was bonking Mrs. Walls on weekdays and her daughter on the weekends, with Mrs. Walls fully aware of the arrangement, whereas Emma was not. I was basically gentle with Emma and never really scarred her, but I did persuade her to write graphic descriptions of our sexual encounters to her sister out in California, just to complete the circle.

I cut Cindy loose, believe it or not. After fucking with her that one night over Christmas break, I pretty much lost interest. Strange, isn’t it, how you can feel something about somebody one minute (even if the feelings turn negative), and the next minute you don’t care whether you ever see their face again. And so I decided to allow her to go on with her life with minimal damage, and I haven’t run into her even once since then. Did I let her off scot-free? Well, not exactly. She lost her first female love forever, and she might have developed this abhorrence of contact lenses, combined with a compulsion to buy and wear the most horridly styled glasses you could imagine. I think she calls out my name every time her pussy runneth over — whether she’s sucking dicks or eating pussies or experimenting with the produce in the supermarket or whatever — but I’m not there to see or hear these problems, so maybe they don’t even exist. Like a tree in the forest, you know?

I kept fucking, and fucking with, Miss Knopski (I never could get used to calling her by her first name) for a good long while. I’m not sure whether I grew fond of the woman or just the woman’s grand tits — anyway, whatever the motivations, we actually became a couple for more than six months, although I never could shake the feeling that she was as much my pet as my partner. I played games with her, lots and lots of games. I made Miss Knopski fall in love with me, I made her hate me, I made her come back and beg for sex, I made her gay, I turned her into a streetwalker, I made her fuck her students, I made her suck off complete strangers, and on and on. If she had been able to remember how many Miss Knopski’s she had become in just a few months time, she probably would have gone insane.

In one of my favorite tricks with her, I arranged things so she would orgasm every time she marked anything as an “A”. I’d hear her grading papers at her desk at home, screaming out her climaxes as she read through the good stuff, eventually cumming even when marking some real dogs with horrible syntax and very little structure. Of course she would catch on that something was terribly wrong, but then I’d dangle the crystal and wipe those memories away, and she’d be back at square one again, breathing heavily as she read a crisply written essay, or overlooking mistakes in the lesser ones.

Because she also graded papers in her office at school, the sounds issuing from behind her closed door became entangled with a reputation for grade inflation, which ended up costing her any chance at tenure. But don’t cry for Miss Knopski. With those looks and boobs, she was never meant to waste her youth in a classroom anyway. I fessed-up to her one night, allowing her to see and remember how she could be controlled so easily. She was terrified at first, but of her own free will (I swear!) she came to see that she could be given drives that she wanted, drives she could never have achieved on her own. She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write and write and write. And so, saint that I am not, I set Miss Knopski up with a good pile of money and “guided” her into writing mind-control porn, because I wanted to read scenarios that were at least a little bit like my own life. Under two assumed names, she has written some of the best erotic fiction out there, and she writes with passion, you can be assured of that. She’s prolific, too, so it’s almost a given that you’ve come across her material on the Web, and if you read it, you liked it. There’s an authority in the way she writes, a palpable authenticity in the sexual encounters, no matter how diverse her protagonists’ sexual outlook or proclivities. It’s almost as though she’s lived those situations, and understands what it feels like to be controlled by an outside power. I wonder how she does it.

Which leads me to my wife. “Your what?” you ask. “Why get married when you can have any woman you want?” Because every serious politician has to have an attractive, adoring spouse, didn’t you know that? That’s right, I’m an up-and-coming public servant now, one of the young and ambitious hotshots in my political party, and Claire is the ideal wife.

Yes, Claire, as in Claire Cleavage. What can I say? Maybe I deprived the entire gay/bi world out of the cream of their crop by snaring Claire and directing her pussy into the straight and narrow, but fuck it — it works for me. My bride is gorgeous as get-all, her red hair glowing at my side. She exudes healthiness and is so obviously devoted to my needs. She is the perfect political foil, really — a woman all adoring and polite out in public, becoming a voracious cocksucker in the sack, especially when I grease her wheels just right. She knows full well that her mouth should be eating pussy instead of sucking my dick — I never could see my way to clouding her vision on that point — but what she really is inside means nothing compared to what I’ve made her into.

I fuck other women all the time — duh — and even allow Claire to flip back on occasion to enjoy some especially robust pussy, but I have to tell you that marriage is a wonderful thing, and don’t ever let some crazy sex story make you think otherwise. It’s nice having a home base to retire to, Claire’s tight tunnel sort of like my Batcave, a place where I can safely park my dick and go underground, plotting the daring exploits to come. And my lesbian wife absolutely craves my dick, isn’t that nice? It’s kind of like one of those cute photos of a cat and a dog peacefully sleeping together. Just recently, I even heard of a pet snake doing the impossible, by making friends with the mouse that was supposed to be its meal. Things like that kind of make you feel all warm inside, don’t they?

Yes, that’s me, more of a uniter than a divider, as they say. I’ve had crazy luck in my meteoric rise to power, maybe because my opponents have this knack for committing political suicide. My male competition keeps getting caught with their dicks inside of some irresistible hotbod’s mouth, and I won’t even tell you what happened to the one woman who challenged me for my party’s nomination. She called me a sexist pig the day before her accident, but I actually did quite well with the women’s vote in my first bid for public office. Since then, I’ve brought hundreds of wealthy bitches around to my way of thinking. They see the world’s problems exactly as I see them, and they persuade others, including their husbands, to see things as I wish them to

Or maybe I should say as the crystal wishes them to, which sometimes troubles that other Brian, the part that is still a little bit like the young lad at the very beginning of this memoir. I’ve learned over time that the crystal has its own agenda, its own trajectory, and it will get what it wants. What agenda? What trajectory? I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you even if I knew, but it seems that I need to have access to high people, or high places. Mark my words: Something big will go down some day, something very big, and I’ll be in the thick of it, I can tell you that much.

You might find this lack of specificity frustrating — after all,, when we read stories and novels, everybody is so fucking all-knowing at the end, every little mystery merely a writer’s tease with an ultimate solution. Well let me tell you — we’ve all been spoiled, because life isn’t like that, and I still don’t have all the answers. I have my theories about a lot of it, and I’ll share them with you now, but take them with a grain of salt. You’ve read enough by now to have some ideas of your own, and this is a case where your guess might be just as good as mine.

So what do I think? I think the crystal is alive. Don’t ask me what that means, or where it comes from or anything, because I don’t know. Is it a solidified bit of sweat from Satan’s left testicle, or a traveling silicon thingamabob from outer space? Fuck if I know. But the crystal is alive, I really believe that. I get this feeling that its consciousness merged with mine way back at the beginning, the first night Natasha showed it to me or maybe even earlier. And the really ironic thing is that I don’t believe it gives a flying fuck about sex — that was just an easy way to get into me, and use me. Did it see and exploit a particular weakness in my character, or would “I” have been conquered regardless? I really can’t say. But the crystal knew how magnetic Natasha was, and how irresistible she would be to me. It never quite owned her, like it does me, but it used her nonetheless.

And so what about Natasha? This whole story is named after her, and she was the first and the best, right? You want to know what I did to her. You want to know how I controlled her, how I “changed her heart”, as the title implies. Well, there was a change of heart, all right, but it requires just a tiny bit more setup.

I believed for a little while that the consciousness of Anton the Magician might have been placed inside the crystal, but now that theory strikes me as a bunch of crap. He was just an earlier host — maybe the first host, or the thousandth, I have no way of knowing. I’m pretty sure that Natasha killed Anton, although I’ve never asked. If the crystal got to him as it did me, then it’s easy to imagine Anton arranging the accident for Carlo, Natasha’s first love. Likewise with everything else that happened back then — Anton’s hypnotizing Natasha into marrying Lester Hart, Anton getting Natasha pregnant, even Anton disappearing if Natasha didn’t murder him — all of that stuff was orchestrated by the crystal, orchestrated in a way that would lead her, and it, to America, and to me.

Sounds egoistic, doesn’t it, like I think I’m at the center of the whole fucking world? Well, I have my reasons for seeing things that way. Those strange separation dreams I spoke about earlier — I think they’re something like the “thoughts” of the crystal, somewhat visible to me as I sleep. I can never really remember anything solid, but there are feelings in the dreams, and I’ve been able to decipher them to some extent.

The crystal wanted me, specifically me. Because it knew I would remind Natasha of Carlo, giving her a certain feeling of trust in me? Because I’m white, and nice-looking, and so electable? Because my mind is a comfortable fit for its consciousness? Or because I was weak, and obsessed with Natasha’s body, and so ready to trade part of my mind or my soul for hot sex? Probably all of the above, although I don’t really know. But it wanted me, and it got me, and it will use me until it wants to use somebody else. And I think that a transition might be coming. Not now, but in a few years.

It’s like this: I’m pretty sure that Josh, Natasha’s son, is the key. Josh was always the key. And now I’ll try to explain.