Trey I’m picking up good vibes on the freeway, something a lot of people don’t know how to do especially while being chased by a crazy man who wants to kill them. I just robbed this man of a little over five million Euros, now I’m hauling ass towards the Mexican border hoping the blinking engine light in my car’s dashboard doesn’t mean I’m a dead man. Even in this situation, fifty klicks from the border (which I’ll have to run through, the guy behind me wouldn’t stop from blowing us both up) and one hundred ninety four meters and losing in front of a pissed off Italian hitman, I’ve cranked the radio’s volume up. Purely for the sake of enjoying music. This isn’t about listening to a nice tune before I die, or finding spiritual resolution through the voice of a sweet stranger. The desert outside of my car is beautiful, dammit, and I’m going to listen to whatever the hell I want, hitman or not.
Maggie’s Screaming Light of Reality Conversion, now screeching loudly on my radio, started four years ago. Maggie wasn’t even a teenager then, but she didn’t care to let that stop her from being famous, despite the child-economy laws passed a year before her birth. She was rich (it comes with being famous. Think about the term “eyeballs”, used by advertisers. If you’ve got four billion eyeballs on you every day or every week – you’re selling something, and its your fault if you don’t profit out of that.) at a very young age compared to the rest of the New Wave of bands. Few bands have tried to be reclusive and shy away from the media spotlight. One guy from Lightning Bolt shot a reporter who trailed him to his trailer in the middle of Arizona. It got on the news: him lighting a joint while the camera fell to the ground as the reporter bled out, but all the other gossip chasers put a healthy distance between them and him. He didn’t get prosecuted, of course. That would hurt the network’s eyeballs. Anyways, the drummer from Lightning Bolt lost a stack of eyeballs, and now no one buys Lightning Bolt music-players because no one knows when they release a new one except for the die-hard fans. I’m one of them. Maggie took a different approach to being talented, beautiful (though she wasn’t really, but everyone thought she was since she was young and played music like a maniac and knew how to smile with the clean flick of her head to the camera, a little bit of a dirty angle that ends up looking just fine, just “Mawgie” as her psychotically obsessed reporting music gurus say) and subsequently rich. She made a big deal over being rich, and she let everyone know it. They loved it.
Why did these people enjoy Miss Mawgie flashing her rich life before them? Because they wanted it too. Every fucker on the planet wants to be rich, weather they’re rich or poor, young or old, excited about life or too tired to give a fuck because they’ve seen the twisted cycle play out before. But offer them a million dollars for doing nothing but “looking good” and smiling the right (dirty) way and they’d climb over it, more eager then a virgin would climb onto a pornstar who materialized in their room, naked. Unfortunately for the half of the world that watches other people talk about being rich and show off being rich, they’ll never be rich, probably because they spend more hours a week watching people like Miss Maggie and working in a cradle-to-grave job, believing in that big break like a thirteen year old believes in a teleporting pornstar.
Me though, I don’t care about living a long, healthy rich life. That’s for people with talent and connections, and I’ve got none of that. I’ve got guts and a healthy dose of hatred for anyone at any given time. I didn’t expect to make it through the border, and now that I think about it I’m not sure what would be stopping Vince behind me from chasing me through. Oh, that’s right. I was going to get here first. Because Vince wouldn’t know I’d stolen the money until I was almost there. And the border guards would have set up their Real Barricades, the ones designed to keep tanks out. Great plan, too bad it sucked. It sucked because my partner; excuse me, ex-partner; decided to tell Vince about our plan before I got there. Which meant instead of walking in and out without making a sound, I had to make corpses out of the security team that stood in my way (who the hell tries to stop a thief in the middle of fucking Mexico?) The country’s famous for its banditos, and the modern ones are more dangerous then the fucking Mafia. More dangerous because instead of style, class and precision they average out to be men aged sixteen to forty, raised on beer, tobacco, and having more cojones than the next angry, drunken spic. But hey, I suppose Vince keeping a rocket launcher in his bedroom made them feel secure about standing up to me – if any real trouble came, the boss would swoop in and save the day. Nevermind that the rocket would kill everyone in a room, including the security team. I never said Mexicans were smart, but they’re dangerous. And my ex-partner must have thought he’d get a deal, telling Vince his money was being stolen. Like Vince would throw him a couple ks as a thank you. Mexicans don’t say thank you, ever. So my partner was a dumb fuck –I found his body waiting for me in the yard of Vince’s mini-mansion. Didn’t stop me from breaking, entering and leaving though. I had no plans on surviving, I just wanted to piss Vince off.
See, there are easier ways of making five million for someone with my skills, which as I said are guts and a directable hatred. The hatred gives me focus, the guts lets me execute. Helps that I’m smarter then any drone who went to school, and a better shot than your average special forces Rambo – I’ve been in too many corporate and private wars to just be “lucky” – and you wouldn’t want to play Russian roulette with me either; shit often turns out to work fine when it shouldn’t. Except now I’m really sure I’m fucked, because my car is beginning to slow down and there’s smoke rising out of the engine. Time to hope gripping that wheel full of adrenaline has screwed up ol’ Vincent’s aim enough to send a rocket into America, and not into my car or the ground next to me. I nudge the steering wheel to the left a bit, the car tilts a little. If this was an ordinary car-chase I’d let Vincent get real close and zig-zag a bit, then turn hard to shake him off, preferably letting him slide into an oncoming semi-truck. But I can’t let him get closer then a hundred meters, at which point his rocket would move fast enough that my missile avosion system (yeah, avosion. Got it from the Chinese, Lucky Jenny’s fifteen klicks south of Vincent’s mini-mansion. They can’t spell for shit when writing on billboards but their software is glitch free. Usually.) can’t do jack. This thing is supposed to jerk my car hard one way or the other if it detects a missile lock, or if I set on manual (which I have) then it just beeps a lot and flashes a light, telling you to get the fuck out of the way before the guy behind you pulls the trigger. Oh yeah. Vincent mounts his rocket launcher to his car when he goes out so he doesn’t even have to aim. But Lucky Jenny’s does more then just detect guided or unguided missiles – it also scans for the electrical charge that is emitted when a rocket from a car (or other vehicle) system is launched. That tiny electric charge is big enough to register on the detection system, letting you know to get the fuck out of the way because the guy behind you has pulled the trigger.
I call my girlfriend for spiritual resolution as I turn the car off the road. “Chelsea, hey. Not coming home tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Got an Italian with a rocket on my ass.” I hang up before she can answer. The car is losing speed now and I decide to jet before Vincent realizes I can’t dodge anymore. Being on foot is even worse.. Catch-22, motherfucker. Either way, you die. I open the driver’s door and roll out, grabbing the bag with the five million first. Maybe Vince will see it and decide not to incinerate me. Maybe he’s got another mansion with another five million further south.
Vincent’s slowing down and my car goes careening into the desert. I’m too low for his rocket to hit if I duck, and he’s realized it too. Now he’ll just try to run me over. I’ve been in this situation before and it’s never fun. A lot of people think they can dodge a car moving like a bullet at them, that they’ll jump heroically to one side or straight over the car. If I jumped up, Vincent just might pull the trigger on that rocket launcher and incinerate us both. He lacks a certain amount of survival instinct, which is part of why I stole from him – he thinks he’s too crazy to mess with. Looking at my options, I grimly realize he may have been right after all, and I should have made my five million over five years doing less dangerous work where I wouldn’t be facing Mexicans with rocket launchers with a dead car forty-eight klicks from the border. Maggie’s voice trails sweetly into the distance with my car, and I smile, thinking I wouldn’t rather die any other way.
Vincent Tedesco, a single person, claims a rocket launcher as his weapon of choice. His rocket launcher is capable of destroying most land based vehicles found all over the world, a profound ability for one man. Before man possessed weapons he was left with his own body. Anyone who has tried to wield an untrained body to kill another human being finds the murder exceedingly difficult if their victim is not asleep, distracted, paralyzed or otherwise prevented from free motion. The first weapons were simple ones: naturally formed rocks and humongous branches, then shaped clubs and swords. At this point in the history of weapons, one person could not face off against an entire army. At best, a skilled swordfighter could handle half a dozen, maybe eight swordfighters of considerably less aptitude. Armies were mobilized en masse, hundreds of thousands of men wielding sword and shield.
Along came the bow and its counterpart the arrow. Before, being outside of stone’s throw from your enemy meant you were safe. Very safe – they couldn’t touch you. With the arrow, your safe distance shrank. A lot. One bowman can suddenly dispatch a dozen swordsmen in seconds regardless of the swordsmen’s aptitude at fighting with swords. Killing power was decided before the fight – wars from a distance became wars of strategy and positioning; very different from the tactical struggles swordsmen had to face. The descendents of the bow and arrow are, of course, the gun and the bullet. The shapes have been reversed – where the bow was a strange elipse with a straight arrow, gun barrels are now straight and narrow while their ammunition is a small, round object. In the process of reversing these shapes; range, rate of fire and killing power increased drastically. For a comparison, look up any conflict where one faction possessed firearms and the other were using bows and arrows. Your case study will generally show the people with firearms invading the people with bows and arrows. The lopsidedness of the battles is something like a professional boxer attacking a three year old child. If the boxer makes a mistake, then maybe the child will get a scratch or a bite. But it is exceedingly hard to make a mistake of such magnitude when you are approaching from a distance with weapons that outdistance those of your opposition.
Range, generally speaking, is a non-issue in modern combat. Bullets, missiles and bombs can all travel considerably far – and considerably fast. Generally too fast for a human to react too. New technology was developed in response to the sword – armor. Armor has evolved to include information systems – where old armor automatically protected its user from impact, new armor automatically informs its user of an incoming attack, or if it is very advanced armor it will alert its user before an attack has begun, by monitoring conditions. Conditions of attack in modern warfare are nearly countless, and most modern soldiers rely on their default equipment: eyes, ears and brain. But where the eye cannot see over the horizon or detect supersonic jet fighters before they have passed, electronic information systems can do both of these.
Armor is always effective at the technology level it is invented – speaking both deep and wide in range. The continual development of armor has pushed weapons development into becoming more and more powerful to bypass various armor systems. This is a logical occurance, something the first swordsmiths and armorsmiths could have forseen. The compact nature of modern systems, however, probably eluded their imaginations. Vincent Tedesco is forty-eight kilometers south of the Mexico/Texas border, and has initiated the quick release of his miniature rocket launcher from the roof of his car. He now holds in his hand a weapon capable of annihilating an enormous variety of armor technologies whose function is to absorb impact.
Vincent Tedesco, in a common strategic blunder, has failed to know the nature of his enemy. What he doesn’t know is that his target – the man who stole five million Euros from his personal vault three and a quarter hours ago - has in his brain a new paradigm of a weapon system. This man’s weapon is designed to kill not armies, but brains in large areas. In the past, the ability to devastate millions of lives in a single attack caused soldiers to hesitate as their minds processed the absolute power of their weapons. There will be no such hesitation in this man, because his designers ensured he forgot all about the neuroelectromagnetic disruptor in his lower right jean pocket until the part of his brain programmed by his designers to keep him alive with the use of modern weapon systems activated.
From an objective point of view, this man did not steal five million Euros from Vincent Tedesco’s private vault because he was “pissed off” at Vincent. This man is highly unimaginative, and his thoughts of pursuing other lines of work to earn five million Euros are in practice nothing but symbolic – the neuron connections that deal with his foresight are extremely weak. Large parts of his neural structure were rewritten when his (current) brain was designed four years ago by a military theorist and neurologist who was fortunate enough to transfer his ideas from imagination and turn them into reality.
Three seconds after Vincent has unhinged his rocket launcher from the roof of his car, the body of the man he’s chasing begins acting autonomously, independent of his conscious memory. Barricaded memory becomes conscious in his muscles, which lift the neuroelectricmagnetic disruptor – or city killer – from his pocket, spins the range into a very narrow beam (to prevent the waves from spreading back towards him) and his right index finger pulls the trigger: which promptly fries the brainstems of all human and some non human mammals in a ten degree angle for five kilometers. Vincent Tolesco’s rocket launcher weapon has been outclassed by a futuristic technology, just like when a primitive bow and arrow user encounters the bullet of a colonial raider’s rifle - they are both dead before they understand what is happening. This is the nature of modern warfare.
Maggie “Vat is this? Vas your rhythym left with your lover?” My sarcastic German accent tells Daniel that I’m not too pissed – but take it seriously. As band leader I have to watch that everyone’s in great condition. Contrary to what certain psychological theorists think, humans cannot live in vacuums. We are constantly absorbing and changing our reality – that much is fact. To think it is natural for us to enter one combination of physiological and psychological state and sustain for the rest of our breathing life.. absurd theorists live in a spiritual vacuum. I wonder if any of them have actually tried listening to our music – was it renounced automatically because it offended their construction of “good music”? I’ve read essays about the band where it is so obvious they were written by feeding off ideas from other essays, targeting the misled mass who reads that crap.
That mass of spiritually blind, creatively inept is decrementing each year. A lot of them find themselves caught up in being spiritually inept and creatively blind – they start believing they’ve solved the issues of their previous mindstates and their new one is the answer. Like I said, maintaining a single state is absurdism. Hearts and minds ebb and flow – we can’t take any one state we exist in as an ideal to perpetually possess. In doing so we lose possession of the state, and the idea of the state possesses us. Man I do a lot of thinking about this. There are days when I don’t, of course. Days when I’m lost in music or lost in sex or lost in colour. That last one.. looking at colour, realizing its just light reflecting and we can’t ever see anything without being it. Hearts and minds are the real sublime. I erase that from my mirror on schedule each morning, no matter where I am I’ll find a mirror and erase those words. Every night I write them again.. perpetual fluctuation.
Looking back at Daniel, he seems to have recovered some of his internal rhythm but I can tell he’s still contemplating what he’s been doing for the last two hours. She did something that surprised him, I can tell that much. He’s not sure if he liked it and.. funny guess, but I’m not sure if she did either. Ah, there he goes, smoking the pipe. Culture Magazines used to call it “Musician’s Muse”. Marijuana isn’t a muse though – it can’t inspire you by itself. The only good thing it can do for you creatively is give your “states” (I don’t know what else to call them. I haven’t perfected my theory of selves and I don’t intend to) an opportunity to push aside all the crap that you’ve been building up and take a real look at things. Real. The result of this process is called Reality Conversion. And to look at things, well – you’ve got to keep your eyes open and absorb the light. Or Light – if you want to get mystical. Or worshipful. Same thing. Hey, information is religion. The Electron Hackers have been saying that for over a decade now - I remember being four years old and hearing those words patched through my television channel. They hacked thirteen major networks and pumped their religion through the wires. It worked, I became aware. I started doubting that my parents held normal jobs after I heard those words. But I had no idea what normal was in this world.
Daniel’s finished his hit. He was distressed by her. Shit, his face is turning red. He knows I’ve been figuring him out ever since I started watching him three minutes ago. He knows and I know; it’s mutual awareness. I should say something? I should say something. “Daniel, hey man. Something ain’t chill, is it? What’s the power?” Slang for what’s your enemy. Sort of a joke on the “Self-POWERED” philosophy/informational religion that was being slammed around five years ago. Self Power. A lot of new businesses. A lot of money stolen. A lot of people switched from believing that humans being should live in vacuums and living in vacuums themselves to believing that humans shouldn’t always live in vaccums because some change was ok – and never crawling out of their spiritual black hole. If Self-POWER was as righteous as they claimed, then we’re all capable of doing anything we want, no “POWER” can immobilize us because we have our “SELF”. Great idea, until you wake up.
“Maggie babe.. there’s kind of of, a niche glitch.”
“Whas the definition of our situation?”
It’s been on my heart for a few minutes now that Daniel is concealing himself extremely well. Too well – that’s quite a mask. Please don’t live in a vacuum, Daniel..
“She wants to give away the baby.”
The sound pounds through my ears, my heart beats faster. This is a conversion.
“..when?” I almost mumble. Their daughter is due in five weeks.. oh..
“Soon as she’s born.” His eyes are red, and it’s not the marijuana. He’s been more excited about having a kid then anyone I’ve ever seen.. and he’ll make a great father. Will. Not would. Giving the kid away? When he first heard that I was thinking an abortion.. Daniel doesn’t always talk literally, but now I know the daughter’s being born!
“I’ll take her, Daniel.”
He’s looking at me like, even if I wasn’t stoned, I’d still be staring at you. You, Maggie the sixteen year old rock superstar, taking a child. Are you nuts?
I’m just converting realities.
Michael Possibility keeps me awake at night. Was the reprogramming accurate? Was our map of the brain correct? Does Trey possess any deeply buried psychological characteristics we failed to notice? A knockout pill is waiting for me. If I accept it, I fall asleep. I have dreams. Sometimes I refine my work in my sleep, but ever since Trey went to Mexcio I’ve been having nightmares. He gets killed, police capture him, or worse.. interrogated and his unconscious revealed, leading a trail back to me.. Christ. What the hell am I doing? This is an experiment. No scientist ever gets things right all the time.
But if my theories are correct and we reprogrammed his brain properly.. my God. Programmable soldiers. No fear, no hesitation, no scruples. Pure power. A war machine inside everyone’s head.. I sometimes wonder about reprogramming myself – just to see what its like. Just to kill without knowing how or why I’m killing, just being. Fifteen hours a day I’m drawing lines, crunching equations. Inventing formulas. Fixing glitches. I don’t do anything else. I can’t. The human brain is my passion, my obsession.. and my talent. I’m good at what I do, I don’t deny that. Every scientist has to believe in his abilities. If I stayed in the possibility nightmare of the evening in the day I would make no accomplishements. I would sit in despair. I must put my theories into practice, and refine them in the process. Constant improvement, constant improvement. How many hours I’ve put into this project – I don’t care. But if things backfire.. if Trey freaks out with a psychosis there will be no future in this line of work. If he gets himself killed.. its possible I could argue a case. Fix some glitches. Fabricate previously unseen faults in his psyche.
I’m worried there might be faults already. If – dammit! I can’t sleep like this, I can’t live like this! Ok.. if neural connection type 173-A intercrosses with neural connection type 224-A carrying a heavy information shock load, and 173-A has just been depleted of potassium.. will 224-A be affected? It’s been thought yes, but in every situation this occurs there was always another –
“ bang bang bang “
Damn. Lost in thought.. I can still think at will. Its taking more and more to psyche into it though.. I reckon that’s Trey at the door. I’ll go let him in..
“Trey! Where’s the color of the color of the color?” Trigger words. Except this isn’t Trey – I forgot my contacts who the hell is –
“Hi, Doctor Michael. You must have been expecting your experimental weapon.” He’s pointing a tranquilizer at my stomach. Oh God..
“Thanks for the trigger words – that will help us understand Trey. But we are interested in more then Trey. We want to sponsor your project.”
The military is sponsoring Trey.. who is he from?
“Theorise all you like, Doctor. Will you let me inside?”
My mouth is gaping open. Of course I’ll let you inside. My disruptor is in the bedroom.. he closes the door. The tranquilizer hasn’t moved from me. Oh God, my limbs are shaking. Does he really intend to sponsor the project? He might want to just steal everything I’ve got. No choice – I can’t think about this. He might cut my brain open if I refuse.
“Who are you with?”
That’s a hell of a disgusting smile. “A branch of the EuroAmerican military, of course. We heard about your work from ex-CIA. There are several intelligence branches in the government, Doctor. Three of them are planning a coup against Europe. Will you assist us?”
Vincent Tedesco was a successful half-Mexican, half-Italian mobster. I didn’t care what Trey did to him. But supporting a coup in my own country? That’s civil war. An international civil war. That’s.. if I reject this offer I’ve got no doubt I’ll be tortured until I say yes – or die. I’ve trapped myself – I should have seen this coming. A nation develops a new weapon. Every general who hears of it wants it. And this group figured out how – they found me. There is no option.. but I could engineer future soldiers to sabotage things.. I could start my own coup, in the future…
“I will assist your organization.” I’m sweating. He pulls the trigger and the dart knocks me unconscious.
Ed I remember when I was first building robots. Back then, we engineered killbots – slang for a robot designed to kill things or people. You know, back then before all of this Information Warfare shit and the Europeans invading.. I kind of liked my job. I saw Harold on TV once interviewed by a ditzy blonde who pretended to know the difference between a capacitator and an electron. She asked Harold: “How can you build a machine knowing it will kill people?” And Harold smiled and said to her: “How come you’re interviewing me instead of stopping governments from declaring war on each other?” And then he just stared at the camera, smiling. He loved his work and he ain’t gonna quit over a corp-sponsored newshit live feed asking treehugging questions. Robots rock. Me and Harold got that tattooed on our right shoulders, back when we started our first company. We got calls within a day of sending our design specs to the military, and business was good.
Now, business ain’t so good. Back then, I loved figuring out a way to hold extra rockets on a TL-8 and increase the maximum speed by 10 km/h without adding more then 20 kg. Or how to rig the Frog up so it was invisible and amphibious. Sealing that one up and seeing it run was incredible – it could launch mortars from the middle of a lake then crawl out and you wouldn’t see it without infrared. We were working on fixing the heat signature too – the Invisible Frog it was going to be called – in the middle of the war and those Europeans showed up at our door. Sons of bitches were in full body armor and carrying Nikeon rifles; telling us we better stop all production of combat robots and parts because the Europeon Union was taking over and there’s a worldwide ban on that sort of thing. Well fuck me. Maybe those robots did kill an innocent woman in Africa here and there – they also kept that woman’s husband and his friends from sneaking into New York with an atomic bomb each. If we hadn’t built those scanning bots, I don’t think anyone would have. I came up with the mechanism for that, it was so complicated it even impressed Harold and it saved the nation from a massive atomic bombing.
Jury’s still out on who gave those Africans nukes and sent them over. They supposedly died of disease shortly after being detained. Political bullshit as usual – they were probably tortured for weeks. Or maybe an American killed them, because he hired them in the first place. I’ve got a few suspicions on who that might be myself.
Well with the Euros (and their currency, you bet your ass it’s still stronger than ever) steamrolling the country’s power centers you can bet there was resistance. Expecting that, they brought with them millions of European Union citizens and employed them as Peacekeepers. Those peacekeepers are the ones who hold Nikeon rifles and speak with muffled voices through bulletproof helmets. They basically went around to every one who was a registered weapons owner and stole their gun. Quite a few Americans tried shooting the Peacekeepers (myself included) but in that armor, hell, they just ignore your bullets like you’re throwing rocks at them, take your gun then leave you “a legal record of their peacekeeping action”. I’ve been building transport robots since they came around and told me killbots were illegal (two weeks after they stole my gun). Getting by but damn, nothing beats the millions I was making. Harold left the company after we stopped building killbots and I don’t know where the hell he’s at now.
Got a call from my daughter today. Funny girl, Madeline. Almost as good at psychology as I am building robots and programming electronics. Almost. Well, she called today and wanted to borrow some books of mine about Information Warfare – written before the Information War was fought (or not fought, depending on how you look at it) and before the Euros hijacked the country from the top-down and bottom-up with their political coups and armies of bulletproof soldiers. When I got her message a little wave rose out of my stomach. Sort of froze me up inside, trashed my mind then a new creature came out – a focused, intuitive and wise one. Just like when I solve a new robotics problem or have a flash for a redesign. Something big was up in my daughter’s world. And especially unusual, since the new Nation isn’t supposed to go to war with anybody.. I’ll call her back and say she can pick the books up any time. But I’m gonna sit down and talk with her about her work when she comes over.
Madeline Dad would be pissed if I go out and tell him what I’m doing – but I won’t have to, he’s smart enough to figure things out. In two weeks I start working with Doctor Mikeli Petrov on neuron analysis for battlefield applications. I’m assuming this means designing training and chemicals to a) suppress dangerous neural networks from activating – like thinking of your wife and kids when someone’s sniping at you and b) strengthen and improve focus on healthy neural networks, like how to aim your gun and acute awareness of all senses. I’m ecstatic I was picked.. I loved working with neural connections but research got cut off when the Euros took over. Damn them and their incessant micro-management of public science!
The Euros irk my sense of cooperative science. I’ve always believed scientists should work with each other across national and cultural boundries and then share their results with the public, with governments, with engineers and with human rights groups and ethicists for social impact analysis. The entire nation’s science is now effectively under government control which is a) fantastic for funding (they print the damn money!) and b) contains terrible ethical implications – why are they doing research in secret. I’m nervous. My passion for understanding the human brain and mind is overwheleming – but if the applications of my talent are controlled by the government without external parties able to have their say.. I get shivers.
Well there’s his house.. damn it’s been a long time. When the Euros scratched my neural network research I moved west to Illinois and operated as a psychotherapist. Rewarding, but nothing new ever happens. I see the same people with the same mental compositions and use the same techniques. It’s not exactly legal(and maybe not ethical!) to invent new psychotherapeutic techniques on the spot – illegal, in other words, to give straight up advice to someone. We are supposed to let the patient make the decision. This generally results in fantastic personal accomplishment when the patients trust our advice.. and conversely, spectacular breakdowns when they don’t. All because they have to make the decision themselves. It’s irritating seeing people fail to grasp simple mental concepts over and over again because they refuse to let go of the way they are. Gripping their ego, and the ego grips back hard. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to switch places with my patients for a month, live their life and then return it to them; show them all the progress I’ve made! Humans are merely humans, after all. We can see someone suffering but we can’t stop their suffering – only show them what they need to do. Dad raised me like that and it worked fine – I wasn’t too proud to listen to his advice and set aside my old preconceptions!
Mom’s case was like the old schools of psychology: behavior management. She always complimented me and encouraged me when I performed well at something or made her happy. She wasn’t too stern when I fucked up but if I did something completely out of her holy vision for her princess daughter I’d get stared at like I was an obnoxious foreign houseguest who just ate all the food and threw her unwashed clothes over the sofa. Mom was a bitch, I guess. Only cared about me “looking good” to her friends (who shaped her opinion of what I should be). Dad was selfless enough to encourage me to figure things out for myself. He’d question me – and often tell me he thought things I did were stupid – but he always had a reason based on the mechanics of things, not the ephemeral opinion of his peers.
Hey, I’m at the door. Guess I better knock. Oh, it opens. Dad already knew I was here – he’s likely got security cameras and spectrum sensors scattered in the grass.
“Hey dad!” I wrap my arms around his back and hug him sincerely. I haven’t seen him since I moved to Illinois.
“Great to see you Madeline.” He’s smiling warmly but I can see the spark of suspicion in his eyes.
“Ok dad, you’re wondering what the hell I want with Information Warfare books – right?”
“Haha. Madeline.. I’ve got a damn strong hunch about what you were just hired to do, and I’ve got another that you’re not allowed to say anything about it.”
“I don’t know too much and I don’t mind talking about it anyways. To hell with the Euros and their rules – I’m a scientist!”
Dad smiles gamely and leads me inside. Hm, he’s got four locks on his door now. Two more since I was here last.. seeing bulletproof soldiers outside your house must have caused a serious paradigm shift of dad’s definition of “safety”.
“Madeline, as smooth as the Euro’s national takeover was, a lot of Americans are still pissed about it. Now granted, many have realized that society more or less runs like it used to – except all of the guns are in the hands of the new government. Those thousands of riots were all dispersed for that reason – the government held the weapons. This is sort of an example of Information Warfare. In this scenario, the information held isn’t “knowledge” but the ability to redefine reality for others through the instrument of the gun. Anyone who lacks that instrument and faces off against someone who does, loses. Killbots have been banned and all robotics engineers were gracelessly informed their work – and communications – would be monitored. So there’s not much chance of a revolution, is there?”
Damn, dad’s diving straight into the mud, as always. This is relaxing.. I’d love it if all of my patients were like him, confronting issues straight on. “Yeah dad, there isn’t much we can do against a massive army – who have the weapons, armor, discipline and communication.”
“You used the word we; indicating you too are not happy with the government.” He smiles. What the hell? Of course I’m not.
“Of course not! I just can’t do anything about it.. so I accept.”
“Your reality has been converted, the Information War won. Do you listen to Maggie’s band?”
“The teenager?”
“Her.”
“A bit. Dissonant.”
“Intentionally. To disrupt your thought patterns to facilitate the creation of new views.”
“Interesting. Shock produces change – a psychotherapy axiom.”
“Madeline, if the Euros have no worry about a revolution from within the country – why are they recruiting you to work with military theorists?”
Shit, if he had said ‘work with the military’ I’d have understood. ‘Working with military theorists’ means he’s smarter than I gave him credit for or he’s got a source of Information supplementing his intelligence. Hm.. “Either there’s a new danger within the country that can overwhelm their armies – or a foreign danger.”
“Madeline, are you familiar with the.. fragmented process of the Europeans taking over?”
“Um.. no. It all went very smoothly from my perspective (including managing the riots and collecting the guns etc.)”
“What they don’t make public is that there were multiple international intelligence agencies vying for control over the country. The Euros happened to have the most ground forces, the best weapons and armor, and the most spies already planted. But there were other agencies at work – and they are still alive.”
“And intelligence agencies primarily deal in.. information. They know things – things that could maybe bring down the European’s control structure!”
“Exactly. And you are about to become your own intelligence agency – working from inside the Europeans but not liking their leadership as a whole. They know this – so don’t try anything subversive. But learn everything you can.”
For a minute I thought he was going to initiate me into one of those other intelligence agencies. But now that I’m aware of them.. I have their information, I can act on it. Dad’s trying to alert me to something – many things. Look behind the scenes, predict what people are going to do, don’t blindly follow. A tear comes up to my eye..
I wipe it, and smile at dad. “I’m a scientist, dad. My life is learning and applying.”
“Leave the application to the engineers. Would you like some coffee?”
Flight 8492 EuroAmerica, bound internationally for Genevea. The nation’s top scientists and dignitaries are on board this plane and it is being escorted by no less than fifty manned fighter jets – the Euros don’t trust robots.
For a good reason. Eight years ago, when the fight for taking over America was just beginning to surface in the form of assassinations, bribes and kidnappings, French programmer Anthony Granger was working with the European Union’s killbots branch – the Robotics Division of the European Army. One fateful day when the latest killbots were taken out to the countryside for a test run, one of Granger’s coworkers noticed an anomaly – the size of the killbots operating system was the same but the hash function was different indicating a change in the code. He was too late in reporting the discrepancy – the killbots were already following Granger’s instructions to kill the French Army General and were moving on to seize control of a supply depot 20 kilometers north of the testing site.
Granger had a co-conspirator in the air force, who injected code into the nation’s air communication system, preventing fighters from taking off by locking them down via electronic override. The French called on other nations to airstrike Granger’s robots, but not until he had taken over four outposts and depots. Within six months legislation was passed preventing the use of robotics because they were too easily manipulated. The European Union, at this point, still had no idea at the malleability of the human brain, and so redirected robotics funding into unintelligent weapon systems for their military.
Doctor Mikeli Petrov and his assistant Madeline Rozeanu (incidentally a quarter-french, but far less ambitious than Anthony Granger) are on EuroAmerica Flight 8492. They are within eyesight of a dozen bulletproof soldiers, in case they begin shouting anything revolutionary or pull lethal technology (like neuroelectromagnetic disruptors) out and begin firing. These powerful weapons are something like a personal nuke – one trigger pull can eradicate brain functioning in the area of several kilometers. The few members of the governments who know about these weapons are very, very scared. The people who own them generally do not advertise that they do – the smartest course of action would be to kill these weaponholders with a pre-emptive strike, and the brain they leave behind shows a very distinctive style of death, which would lead to an investigation.
One such investigation occurred almost fifty kilometers south of the United States-Mexican border, seven months before the Europeans took over the United States. Mexican scientists were baffled, and were even more baffled when men in dark suits arrived in helicopters from the USA, requesting they take the body with them and offering thousands of dollars in return for the Mexicans to keep quiet. They did, and the existence of the city-killers was again saved from the public eye.
The European government doesn’t know is how many city-killers were produced, where they were produced and who is in possession of them now. The European (and by extension, American) government is in a state of constant paranoia: paranoia of sudden death by brain assassination and paranoia of entire blocks of civilians falling dead while a revolutionary makes his demands. Most of the politically inclined scientists in the world stopped sleeping peacefully when they discovered, or witnessed, the neuroelectricmagnetic disruptor for the first time. Now, all American and European scientists are politically oriented regardless of their personal biases, because the government has taken over most scientific fields. Their paranoia has spread to their scientists, and this is the reason Doctor Mikeli Petrov appears unusually nervous to Madeline Rozenau – who feels one hundred percent secure (if not a bit oppressed) in a planefull of bulletproof men who’s job is (in addition to making sure they don’t run away) kill anyone who tries to kill them. Madeline knows of no reason why anyone should explicity target her – Mikeli Petrov knows for a fact of at least 50 men and women who would like to see him personally dead – if not at least for the simplest reason of taking his expertise away from the EuroAmerican Union (as it will formally be called after this conference).
One hundred twenty four meters behind the neuroscientists, and bound in a straightjacket is a man formally known as “Trey” and now known jokingly by neuroscientists as “Traitor”. When Mikeli Petrvo programmed his brain to steal five million Euros in currency from the personal vault of Vincent Tedesco in Mexico, he was oblivious that some of his neural structure altering techniques would cause rapid brain decay almost a year later. He is being taken with Mikeli and Madeline to be examined by their peers in Europe for further analysis of Mikeli’s work and the science of reprogramming a human brain.
Madeline Rozenau is blissfully unaware of Trey’s existence and suspicious of the concentration of soldiers one hundred and twenty meters behind her seat but cautious enough to not inquire of the soldiers about their concentration. Since Mikeli offers no information about the guards that they didn’t tell her themselves (don’t leave our sight, don’t say or do anything revolutionary or stupid), she decides to keep conversation friendly and asks Mikeli about his travels.
Mikeli is strangely silent about this subject on the plane, even though he spoke openly of his visits to over a dozen countries in the last eight years at the airport. Madeline assumes that these guards are not to be trusted – or that there is surveillance on the plane looking to expose details of Mikeli’s past he would rather not let his employers (and captors) know. Madeline decides instead to discuss general neurological theory with Mikeli, who happily obliges.
The flight takes only ten hours with the super-sonic engine, and after only ten minutes at the airport Madeline finds Mikeli and herself being hurried along by dozens of guards (while fifty fighter jets patrol the sky) to an underground hotel, two nights before the conference.
Assassin Welcome to my world. Through my sniper scope I can see everyone, everything. I see human civilization grinding along their concrete paths, fusing into a chaotic symphony of endless toil. I destroy this world. It is larger than me but I am its predator. Most of its moving parts are oblivious to me – the individual cells of the beast are unaware of my existence. Some of these cells have evolved a combat mind – these combine to form organisms of soldiers and governments. Other cells evolve an independent mind and begin trying to function in a pattern ingrained within itself but unmatching to its organism-at-large. These cells split from the organism and become criminals, dissidents and.. assassins.
Government combat cells are dangerous. They have all the killer instinct of a criminal or assassins but where these deviant cells must evolve their own mechanisms to fight the host, government cells are linked to a body of soldier cells who have been wired to execute their orders down to murderous detail. I was a soldier once. And then I rebelled. I grew my own mind and in an act of Darwinian strangeness eradicated my parent organism. My squad, my General and my Commander in Chief – the President of the United States. My mind had evolved past the biological need of survival – I wanted to thrive and flourish. The French cell of the European Union paid me 2.6 billion dollars to violate my genetic instincts. The death of the president cell left the American organism vulnerable to subjugation by another large organism. European diplomats and assassins paraded down the arteries of America like a genetic disease, rearranging the structure and functionality of the country. I am proud to have tipped off the rearranging of the beast.
The European monstrosity has not subdued the land. America, Russia, Japan, China, Australia and Korea have merged but other government organisms still prowl, protective of their bodies and hungry for the blood of the beast. One of these has just hired me. They want me to kill a Russian scientist who they fear has developed a weapon that could take over the mind without torture or propaganda – but by rearranging the neural network inside the brain. I appreciate being able to rearrange my neural network from my own mind, I do not appreciate another organism reprogramming me to serve their mind. I accepted the job with righteous Darwinian pleasure. Mikeli Petrov’s plane lands in Geneva in four hours, and I am driving to meet him.
Sylvia The European dumbfuck who kidnapped Doctor Petrov must have been in a rush – Petrov’s apartment seems untouched. I found a Neuroelectromagnetic disruptor by the bed and a computer with the neural reprogramming software hidden inside a safe with only forty-minutes of searching. The safe would have taken half an aeon to crack its electronic lock but I know a thing or two about circuits re-wiring myself. Disabled the pressure sensor by bashing it hard enough with a rock. After that, just drilled a hole, opened up and rewired the lock’s mind. Doctor Petrov, your science is older than you think. Where there’s a way to rearrange information; there is a will to rearrange it.
I pocketed the neuroelectromagnetic disruptor – after enabling its safety and turning the power off. Frying my brain with a stolen weapon in an unoccupied apartment would be an unsuitably ironic end to my life as a thief. Not going to tell the Africans about my new weapon though. May even use it if they try to double-cross me. Heh. Just holding it allows me to comprehend why they were banned when regular firearms were not.. with one of these babies, you don’t even have to aim.. I’ll still keep an uzi strapped to my right breast to show I’m dangerous. If I started walking around with no visible weapon I might get shot before I had a chance to pull the disruptor. Keeping an uzi there has saved me from dozens of gunfights, and let me blast my way out of a dozen more. Pretty bad ratio, really. Thieves aren’t supposed to fight people unless they have to. Either I’m shit at staying low or I only take the most dangerous jobs.. enough introspection. I’ll turn into a damn psychologist if I stay here any longer, and maybe a dead one. I don’t know if those Europeans or anyone else is coming back.
Hey, Mikeli had a monitor hooked up to a surveillance camera outside! Right next to the microwave.. and I was just rummaging for petty cash in the drawers. Holy hell, those look like Africans! If they respected me enough to have the computer by now why the hell send.. neck tattoos. Fuck, it’s not them, it’s their rival clan or whatever. Hang on. Front door they entered is over there? They must be going up that hallway.. any other cameras, Mikeli? Let’s change the channel. Still on the first floor, looking around.. let’s see if this disruptor will work. Power on, dispersion angle wide.. shit! If I fire this I fry everyone else in this building. Got so zoned in, damn.. alright, uzi. Leave the computer here and wait for them in the hallway.
I hear footsteps..
“Waa! Don’t shoot!”
A resident walking down from upstairs.
“Shut up and get down the hall. Get on the floor and don’t speak.”
“k..” Well at least he’s complying with the rest of that. Ok, those Africans are right underneath me. Disruptor time. Power on.. dispersion angle 60 degrees.. safety off.. pull the trigger. Was that –
*b-bump*
The sound of two bodies falling to the ground. My God, that was amazing. Safety on, angle to 10 degrees and power off. Oh, what about this guy..
“Hey. You never saw me, deal? Answer me!”
“Ok! Bye!”
