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Leah has designed and coordinated the biggest psychological replication project in history. Principal investigators at six different universities are excited, she's picked the most important and influential and suspicious results, for a few particularly key results she's gotten people who believe in it and people who don't to work together on the replication. It's going to be fantastic.
Except.
Except.
Every grantmaker responds to her grant paperwork by saying it's "not original work," because you can get money for making up nonsense p-hacked bullshit but not for testing to make sure whether it actually describes reality in any way, and she just got turned down from her last most desperate hope and it's not going to happen at all--
Which is when she sees the ad. The trashy practically-pornographic game show Bimbo or Billionaire? is recruiting new players.
Leah hadn't really thought about Bimbo or Billionaire? before, except when she was talking with other psychologists about how it was the worst and most degrading use imaginable of cutting-edge bodywarping and mind control technology.
She's not an idiot. She knows the expected value of going on Bimbo or Billionaire?, if you don't get any mental changes, is only $1000. They want people to risk mental changes; it's what their (misogynist) audience is looking for. But. But--
She could get lucky. The show isn't rigged; after a lawsuit from an unhappy contestant, the order of their boxes is randomly generated from atmospheric noise, supervised by a team of four notaries with no financial connection to the show. She could get lucky and fund her replication project. She could get very lucky and win the billion and not have to worry about grant agencies ever again.
And even if she didn't, she would be beautiful. The audience votes for which changes you get, and sometimes they're vengeful. But someone who is kind and earnest and determined and a little nerdy-- the audience would like that. They wouldn't vote for breasts that look like bad plastic surgery or lips in a permanent pout. They'd give her something... nice.
She is shy and she's never kissed a boy and she wants so very badly to be beautiful.
--
She signs up.
She hires a lawyer and gets an iron-clad contract made that says that if she somehow, despite her best intentions, winds up a bimbo, the money will go into her replication project and not into Bad Dragon dildos and new clothes and hot boyfriends. The staff seems visibly disappointed.
