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I sat in Scott’s desk chair with the paper wadded in my hand staring into the black screen of the laptop. I held my breath and untwisted the folds of the frayed scrap. In bold type, it read, NLD Init. The rest of the word was torn away. They were meaningless letters, useless. It was a relief.
Ha, what a drama queen, I chided myself and turned my attention to the mangled letter opener and the black and tan scar on the desk. Maybe because one problem was easier to solve than the other, I began to puzzle over possible words to match the abbreviation. Neuronal...Limbic... D, what’s a good one for D?
I touched the laptop pad. It opened to the NOI page, the logo, a simple golden circle for Omega. I tapped the icon. It led to a screen with a login and password prompt for NOI’s virtual private network. Knowing Scott, the password would be some unfathomable combination electronically updated every thirty seconds. Instead, I turned my attention to an answer page and typed in NLD. I scanned the overview summary and pages of related searches…Nonverbal learning disorder…National League for Democracy… Nervous Little Dogs. A bold link at the bottom of a page caught my eye. NLD INITIATIVE, NON-LETHAL DEFENSE. That was it. I recalled the news story I’d seen that morning about the NOI defense contract. What did they call it? Neuro-metric monitoring.
I tapped on the link and the page opened to a block headline, GUARD YOUR MIND. The site was crude and appeared to be slapped together in a hurry. Not only was the page chaotic, but the page builder was clearly paranoid. The site opened to an article list. I scanned several old stories from The Washington Post and one from the New York Times detailing a weapon designed for crowd control. It used a form of microwave to produce extreme burning sensations on the top cell layers of the skin.
“The result is excruciating pain with no physical damage,” read a proud quote from a military official.
It sounded like a description of hell. The article list included other titles from obscure sources on bizarre subjects… AI and Neurotechnology, Meme Warfare, Nanotechnology, Psychotronic Weaponry. One headline caught my attention. Mass Zombification. I hesitated before I tapped the link. The title read, PSYCHOTROPICS AND NEURO TECHNOLOGY - MEANS FOR MASS POPULATION CONTROL.
The first paragraph read: “Military research conducted with nano-enhanced drug delivery systems encode pulsed signals directly to the auditory cortex of the brain, leading to thought implantation.”
I felt an uneasy twinge. The sense one would get if a guard dog asleep by the bed jolted awake and pricked his ears toward a darkened hall. It was something I’d heard Scott theorize about in one of his many what if scenarios. He never spoke in specific terms about his research, but sometimes—usually after a couple of glasses of wine on a Friday night—he couldn’t resist the sound of his own words, the spectra of his own brilliance. And it was dazzling. On those evenings, I could curl up beside him and the fire and just watch him think. I’d revel in his pure amusement in the realm of idea, the what ifs? It was a game he played.
“You have to dare to be great, Chlo. It’s a dare.” He sipped his wine and rested his feet on the coffee table, buzzed and relaxed. He reached for me, curled beside him on the couch, and twirled a lock of my hair. “I believe this can be a very different world, Chlo, a better world.”
A response wasn’t required. All I needed to do was watch and admire, sit in his audience. I didn’t even need to listen.
“I’ve modeled psychological tipping points algorithmically.” He explained how reams of biometric data paired with advanced machine learning models were creating knowledge inroads scaling omniscience. “We can predict responses to motivation and desire for an individual just as clearly as the behavior of an entire population.” He wasn’t talking to me as much as at me. I watched the firelight reflected in his eyes, the smooth line of his nose, how his white shirt was a canvas, a refraction of violet-blue, flickering reds, amber yellows. I took his hand and cupped it against my cheek. It was warm and dry and smelled faintly of lavender.
He explained that an example of a tipping point is that finite sequence of actions between thirty-two degrees and thirty-three degrees that changes everything. “It’s the hundredth monkey,” he said. “It’s the key to change on a global scale. All it would take is a critical mass of people aligned.” He held his forefinger extended, like the God in Michael Angelo’s Creation, and flicked it against his thumb. “And the rest of the hordes would tip like dominoes.”
According to Scott, the problem was that no matter how much data, there was the occasional wildcard. You still couldn’t apply finite measures to people. “There are too damned many behavior variables,” he said. “You have to measure people in terms of statistics, trends. It’s inexact,” he clicked his tongue against his teeth, something he did when he was annoyed. “It’s the difference between analog and digital, static and clear.” At this point, he was no longer even talking at me, but to some hidden collective, the archetypes of problem solution. If it were up to Scott, he would find a way to bitmap the soul, control for those pesky variables, get rid of the static.
I grabbed a paperweight off his desk. It was a trifle I’d bought for him after a day at Fisherman’s Wharf, an Edenic landscape encased in a glass ball. He said he liked the way it felt in his hand. In my hand, it felt hard and cold. I shook it. Glitter floated in slow motion. Scott was always coming up with ways to troubleshoot the world’s problems, create order out of chaos. Perfection was his religion. But it was just a game of what if.
The rap tune I’d heard in the security guard’s car resurfaced in my head. I’m the mister, a trickster, a craftster. Wanna be your master, gonna make you my slave. I hit the back button on the laptop screen and continued through the links. There was an entire community of people who believed they’d been subjected to covert mind control tests, complete with survivor forums.
I closed the search page. Folie à deux.
