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LifeGames Corporatoin

Page 5

by Michael Smorenburg


  “We use a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; by electro or magnetically stimulating the temporal lobe just above the ear, we can trigger these hallucinations—make ghosts or UFO’s appear… have God’s voice boom inside the subject’s head. We’re reverse-engineering biology, we bring on and control what has spontaneously been happening to some people for all of history.”

  “You don’t think it’s dangerous messing with the brain?”

  “Not at all,” Ken assured her. We’re riding in on an evolutionary adaptation. You want a side lesson? It’ll help you grasp the scope and context of what we do.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “We obviously have something that makes us very different from our ape cousins. They need to see tens of thousands repetitions of doing something before they grasp it. We grasp it in one or two viewings. The question is…?”

  “Why?”

  “Mirror neurons. You experience them when you see someone, say, twist their ankle, and you physically cringe… sort of feel your own ankle twist and their pain. Psychopaths don’t have this response.”

  “Oh, good… I’m not a psychopath,” she almost asked if he felt others’ pain, but she already knew the answer.

  “The evolutionary scientists tell is it’s why we developed so fast. Our mirror neurons, in our Temporal Lobes, run a sort of virtual reality software. It recreates a simulation so that in my brain I can actually get a good grasp of what you’re thinking or feeling… and I really feel it inside of myself. It helps me understand that you have intentions and predict what you’re going to do, it helps me come to your rescue or neutralize something negative you’re going to do before you do it… It’s obviously a very advantageous faculty to have. It means we watch something done once and we can imitate it. No other animals have the same density of these neurons, and none of them can do this.”

  “And this is established fact?”

  “Sure,” he insisted. “Accident victims—people who’ve had their corpus coliseum cut—the connection between the two halve of the brain. You wind up with two separate people in one head… one half of he brain might believe in a god, the other half’s an atheist.

  “Why don’t they teach this? Maybe in schools?”

  “They’ll probably pick up too much resistance… The implications of it explaining why humans are honest or kind, and why we had this huge leap in cooperation that led to the world we’ve built, flow directly from that, that sort of simple explanation’s not popular for people who want a good mystery.”

  “But still…” Catherine was frowning, thinking of those implications. “So you’re saying you’re not doing anything more that the brain is already doing?”

  “Sort of… yeah… it’s not a bad way of putting it. The brain’s already running virtual reality software, we’re just amplifying it. Very good Cath.”

  “It’s how I earn the big bucks.”

  Catherine’s mind somersaulted—the scope of LifeGames’ new dabbling suddenly crystalized—chemically open up pathways within any healthy mind and then electrically stimulate the brain to control it. Together with the autosuggestion of hypnosis already gripping a subject, LifeGames would have total control over the mind, thoughts and actions of the subject.

  With a shock, she realized she was at risk of being hypnotized by Ken’s carefully modulated voice, and she silently reminded herself that she was with a man of unfathomable capacity and unknown motives. For certain he was intelligent and manipulative, and his grasp of psychology was obvious.

  “Whoa! Whoa, Whoa…!” she rubbed her own temples as if what she was hearing was illusion, “I’m going numb here.”

  She’d said it loudly, an outburst, and some of the other patrons looked across at them.

  “My mind is tumbling, Mr. Torrington. What precisely are you doing to me?” It was only halfway a joke, the information was overwhelming, but something in his manner had her captivated; under his spell.

  “You’re right, I should stop.”

  “You dare!” Catherine threatened with impish radiance; again it worked and he smiled the grin of another small victory before continuing.

  “In the early days our operation—the infrastructure—was quite crude. Great big sets to accommodate client’s training needs. They’d don the helmet feeding visuals with integrated audio and pneumatic pressurized suits for haptic feedback… it was a mess. What we have now makes that look laughable by comparison. We used to deck-out entire airline cockpits to train pilots and we’d hang special-ops military personal in giant gyroscopes, like the one in your advert… That’s all passé, pretty shortly it’ll be redundant.”

  “What was I hearing then in the corridors?”

  “The last of the old tech. It’s not our future, not as profitable, not as… sexy.”

  “You had me fooled, I thought infrastructure was your competitive edge, and I’m supposed to be an insider.”

  “You’re becoming an insider.”

  It was a promise of lots more information dangled close to her nose she could smell it. He implied that she could taste it too if she played her cards just right.

  “It’s not prudent just yet for the general public; non-personal and key clients; to think we’re moving as fast as we have been to the new way. It suits us for the public to think our trainees are physically hurling themselves around in Three-D virtual reality suits, dangling in gyros, but the change is coming fast. All our top clients are already on the new systems. And,” he dropped his voice so only she could hear it, “my darling, love you as I do, if you breathe a word of this before I’m ready I will personally bury you.”

  It felt like he’d wrapped a crowbar around her head. In that instant she knew he meant it and it gave her a buzz to be riding this wave so close to its deadly curl.

  “Ken,” Catherine said it as quietly, almost huskily, “I can keep a secret.”

  “You will.”

  “It’s the people I tell that can’t,” she shrugged with a smile.

  He laughed, and that was something she’d never seen him do.

  “Well…?”

  “Well what?” Catherine responded.

  “What do you want to talk about now? Now that you’ve admitted you’re untrustworthy and I’m going to have to kill you…?”

  “More of the, uhhmm…” she said, and then blurted something she wasn’t thinking and it shocked her “…something sexy.”

  “Something sexy?” he repeated slowly, and there was a glint in his eye that made her wonder how deep into her head he had been manipulating. He clinked her glass for her to drink.

  “We’ve also got a God Helmet.”

  “A God Helmet?”

  “The name’s a bit off—it’s not a helmet at all, just a webbing band with electrodes. The name comes from the early days of TLE, it’s jargon. The electrodes generate specific magnetic pulses that the computer controls, interacting directly with their biological neurons. It’s full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. We can shut down the signals coming from the real senses and replace them with the signals that the brain would be receiving if it were in the virtual environment. The result is, it feels totally real. The ‘God’ part comes from the early days when scientists first proved they could create religious experiences on demand, under laboratory conditions. Of course, we’re far down the track on that now, working on having you go there interactively with other people and have any kind of experience with anyone involving all of the senses, we call it “beaming”… Impressed?”

  She nodded, too stunned to talk.

  “We’ll eventually be able to route an entire flow of sensory emotions out via the Internet. You’ll be able to plug in and experience what it’s like to be someone else. Can you imagine the boon for human intelligence when individuals can merge with our technology. Factor in our R&D on nano-technology to push life expectancy and you’ll be talking centuries. And imagine… just imagine…”

  “And you can also do th
is? Already?”

  “Oooh, no. We’re not yet beaming, but it’s on the cards. Right now we have nodes that neuro-lock with the central nervous system—it’s a 2-way bridge. Like I said, we use it to bypass the sensory organs when we stimulate our programs directly into the brain. We retrieve the experience our subject is having via fiber optic cables that display on our monitors. Effectively we’re looking through their eyes, we see what they see, we sense and feel what they feel. It’s where that footage we reviewed today in your campaign came from—directly from a typical feedback loop.”

  “What? I thought that was a set, a CGI mock-up? A computer graphic interface simulation…” She was dumbfounded, “You’re telling me that was someone’s thoughts we were viewing? Actual recorded thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  “I… I… well. Ken, I’m…”

  “It’s quite something, isn’t it.” He let the silence hover—he hadn’t lost track of his objectives. Adjacent diners had come and gone, and the evening had tumbled by precisely as he’d planned.

  There was something about this woman that bewitched him. He’d had this feeling before for a woman, but those occasions had been fleeting and rare; he knew that the only way to exorcise the uncomfortable crush from within would be to have her, to know her in the biblical euphemism.

  “You still got an appetite for details?” He posed.

  Her mind reeling, stunned by revelations she’d not begun to guess at, Catherine nodded and murmured something encouraging, an agreement that emerged from her mouth, bypassing her mind.

  “We need the public to continue believing that the operation is mechanical. We keep the decoy alive, we use our equipment to run a few subjects… to show it’s business as usual. We maintain a full staff complement and maintenance division. Nothing seems to have changed from the outside. Meanwhile, we’re ratcheting the old program down, only putting the less important subjects through it. The Very Important Persons, the VIPs, the world leaders in their field, the high rollers, big bankers, politicians, military strategists… we’ve started pushing them through the new programs. They don’t know it because we take them down, hypnotize them in a greenroom and only usher them into operations when they’re under. They’re of course coded to remember it differently. So, when I tell you there’s a lock-down on who knows these functions, I’m talking life and death… Like, just about nobody outside of a closed ring. That’s how I’ll know if you ever leak it.”

  “Fine—got that.” She was now truly terrified and deeply aroused. “Keeping pretenses is my job. I sense there’s something you’re working toward; you have a problem that needs my attention?”

  “Let’s call it a teething problem.”

  “You need it sanitized—kept from the press?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Then why did you tell me all this, burden me with the convoluted mess? Why make it possible that I slip up?”

  “Because I trust you… and I want you to experience it, to run a session—awake and in the flesh. No hypnosis sequence.”

  “What? No, Ken… No, I don’t think so,” Catherine denied it vigorously, but the fear factor was screaming within her for a yes. “There is absolutely no way…”

  “Don’t be so nervy… I’ll arrange it—no patch and you won’t go with the whole ritual; it’ll be light, very vanilla… We’ll do a mechanical, not a TLE, won’t use the new electrodes. You’ll be totally awake… lucid and cognizant.”

  “There’s no way I’d do the hypnosis for sure…”

  “But you’ll do it without?”

  She shook her head, pretending to not like the idea but tumbling inexorably toward a yes; “Ken… no… I just can’t, I won’t.”

  He smiled and tilted his head, nodding.

  “Okay… all right,” she began to relent. “I’m not agreeing to this at all… but I’m definitely not doing the hypnosis.”

  “I agree—no hypnosis. We can do it that way, just a very mild ride, the helmet and the feeds. I want you to really understand. In your position… as spokesperson for our company, you absolutely have to.”

  It was nonsense and posturing, they both knew it. In spite of herself, Catherine knew she had capitulated and was buying in. “I’m absolutely not agreeing,” she affirmed, “but… I’m intrigued. Let’s just leave any thought of my participation out of the conversation and tell me more. Give me a picture; what exactly goes on behind that smoke screen, Mr. Torrington.”

  She tried to employ the girlish grin for a third time, but it was unconvincing. Ken gave himself to it willingly.

  “We bring the subject in from the Green Room… With the need for heavy machinery now eliminated, we need surprisingly few staff—just one or two. In fact, just a single member can run the whole show—it’s all software and automated.”

  “Good for integrity—confidentiality,” she observed.

  “Precisely… We bed them down—all very clinical. There is some question of the, uhhmm… bodily functions—the bags and catheters, that’s handled by medics.”

  “I’m not having any of those” Catherine smiled, making it a joke.

  “But you’re not doing it—remember?” He winked, “… We fit the God Helmet and the patches, and let the secondary hypnosis sequence begin. It takes them down another stage, or several stages, as deep as we need them for our purposes. The software begins to run—there’s some twitching, there’s a grunt, a grimace, sometimes mumbling, and then it’s over. We debrief, we de-hypnotize, remove the hardware, return to Green Room, and begin the process over with the next subject. The results are all recorded; the recordings are analyzed, graded and results posted to whoever is fitting the bill.”

  “And you’re cramming more training in like this?”

  “Depending on the sequence and application—several fold…. Actually—dozens of times the normal pace we can achieve with other advance methods. That’s hundreds, possibly thousands of times real life. A year’s worth of piloting, or courtroom dramas, or political electioneering—trained, practiced, assessed, repeated, over and over again in a single session. You come out a different person.”

  “And that returns us to my earlier question about expending energy and replenishing it? I’d imagined the subject actually doing whatever it is they’re signed in to do—fighting a war… running, tumbling, firing… whatever—like we had in the Board Room…. God…” she looked awed, “I feel so dumb… So… So silly.”

  “Don’t—it’s a natural assumption to make.”

  “But the physical routine; surely they’ll thrash themselves to pieces?” She posed.

  “A good observation. But you don’t when you sleep, right?”

  “What?”

  “When you sleep, you can have all kinds of outlandish dreams—falling, running, fighting, driving… whatever. And you don’t actually run or fight in your bed—it’s the theatre of your mind. And that’s what we’re doing and all we’re concerned with—your mind. The physical health of your body is not our concern—we are only interested in getting information into you and reactions to those stimuli back out of you. That’s a cognitive exercise. What we really do is control sleep, control dreams.”

  “Aahhhhh….!”

  “You’re getting it. When you sleep, your body is paralyzed—it has to be, it’s an evolutionary reality, if you weren’t paralyzed you’d beat yourself and sleeping partners to a pulp. We have a sequence in the hypnosis sequence—the secondary sequence when we fit the God Helmet that takes care of that. It paralyzes the body, just like sleep.”

  “Oh-kaaay….!” Catherine exclaimed, “You know,” she dug into the recesses of her mind, I read about something like this somewhere. One of the breeds of dogs, Rottweiler’s, they have a mutation where they don’t have dream paralysis. I remember now because I had one… fortunately not one of the mutants; it was in the training book. They don’t have the suppression and it makes them act out their dreams, makes them tear a house to pieces in their sleep.”

&nbs
p; “Not the best breed to act out.” Ken observed.

  “No kidding!”

  “You want to know something else about Temporal Lobe Epilepsy? On one hand it heightens religiosity—when someone’s in the state, their response to words associated with religious thought are hyper-stimulated, their reaction to neutral words is unchanged, and their response to sexual words diminishes.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means you’re safe.” He said it as a joke, but they both caught the moment and knew it wasn’t.

  “And you want to bring up sex because….?” She’d spoken the words again as if a ventriloquist had hold of her voice, the ventriloquist in the wine glass.

  Ken was momentarily knocked off balance by her forthrightness and she saw it.

  Now it was his mouth that spoke before he could check the words;

  “Just me wondering what gets you turned on when the power suit comes off. What really turns you on?”

  She’d exposed the angle she’d seen him aiming for. Instinctively she knew that this sudden swing in conversation had her on a ledge; a watershed moment. She could pursue one of several directions, so she determined to drive the conversation and her association to where she’d prefer it to go.

  There was something wicked in her tonight and it wasn’t just the wine; she was in a reckless mood, of a mind to be blunt and frank, and shocking. It was a tactic she’d often used to instantly neutralize a man’s advances.

  Nothing had been said between them for long seconds and she weighed how far she dared push her next statement. It was a moment of conflict—half in deliberate blunt control, and half still under his hypnotic spell that had been building through the night.

  She rolled her dice.

  “What turns me on?”

  Catherine repeated Ken’s question with deliberately slow cadence, looking him directly in the eye. She spiced the words with her voice and pronounced them emphatically with her lips; lobbing the dangerous subject like a grenade.

  She continued confidently, “I’m thirty-six. Never married… doubt I ever will. I’ve had six heterosexual relationships, two serious…. Anything else?”

 

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