“Thanks, Bob. My stomach has been doing loop-da-loops all day,” Mitchell said. “Please people, feel free.” He referred to the food and bar, oblivious to the fact that Kronos had already helped himself.
As he headed toward the couch, the president extended his hand to Janice Tyler.
“I know everyone else in the room but we haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Tyler. I’m James Mitchell, nice to meet you.”
“It’s Janice, please. And you know, ginger ale is the perfect thing for a nervous stomach.” Oh shit, she thought, what a stupid thing to say. “So I’ll get one, too,” she said, patting her Nicole Miller — covered tummy.
As she started toward the bar, the president simply uttered, “Mr. Jefferies,” and a glass of ginger ale appeared in Janice’s hand. The president smiled and clinked her glass with his. “I hope you’ve got something good for me. I just came from the funeral of a U.S. senator. To mangle a line from Shakespeare, ‘I came to praise Hank Dent not to bury him.’ The director here tells me that Dent’s death may have been connected with your line of research, Doctor. Before that, I sat through a memorial service in Silicon Valley for all the people who died on that plane …” The man sat motionless for a moment, as if he could see the terror that those souls aboard the plane must have endured, then snapped out of it. “Horrible, horrible tragedies; we have to stop these terrorist acts … so what do you have for me?”
Everyone took their seats and immediately scanned the big blowups of the outline propped on easels throughout the room. Janice sipped her ginger ale and set it down. “Mr. President, I saw a film in college that chronicled the technique of a famous vaudevillian named Mesmer. He was a hypnotist. He would ‘mesmerize’ members of the audience and get them to do funny things by having them concentrate on a dangling pendant. But the big part of his act was when he planted a post-hypnotic suggestion usually based on a trigger word. After the subject returned to his seat, he might bark like a dog if Mesmer uttered the trigger word. We now firmly believe that all of the homegrown terrorists were programmed online by a method not unlike that, but supercharged by the power of a computer. There are subtleties and nuances we haven’t figured out as yet, but the main gist of it has been uncovered.”
She walked over to the first easel. “Like Mesmer, the way to control a subject is through the eyes. Lion tamers use the same technique. In short, get them by the eyes and they’re yours. Today a large segment of the population gives their eyes over to the most powerful technological device created by humans, the computer.”
“They also give their attention to television,” Tate said, interrupting.
“Yes, and that was abused in the sixties until the government interceded and stopped the practice. Because it was broadcast, it was also a one-way message, unilateral if you will. The Internet adds two important and powerful differences. First it’s interactive, a two-way street. The degree by which the subject is affected can be fed back to the controller and instantly tailored to optimize the depth of submission. Computers also have higher definition and therefore can pack more information into the bandwidth than television.”
Janice rotated the pointer in her fingers as she addressed the president. “As was the case in the sixties, without the targeted individual being aware, subliminal messages were transmitted directly into their subconscious. Their conscious minds did not realize these messages were being projected. Normally, these would reveal themselves upon a trigger or hypnotic-style suggestion.
“So the computer is hypnotizing them?” Tate asked.
“The old hypnosis model only follows to a certain point, falling far short of what we are dealing with here. For one thing, even the most susceptible subject wouldn’t do anything under hypnosis that would be against their conscious will.
In today’s version, somehow, by a means we haven’t yet deduced, the encoding of these messages is layered, hidden inside the target’s subconscious. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to refer to that hidden layer as the deep subconscious. There, the instructions lay dormant, waiting for a condition to be met in the layer above the subconscious. Kronos … er … Mr. DeMayo has identified that condition as an ‘if-then’ statement. It’s a logical argument that is the key to making decisions in a computer. If such and such is true then do action A, if such and such is false do action B or do nothing. Have I left anything unclear or are there any questions before we go further, Mr. President?”
“No, I’m following you. Somehow, two sets of commands are buried into a person’s brain. One says, if something is true, then do the second.
“Yes, that’s it, Sir. So here’s what we think happened in Martha Krummel’s case. As you know, she is the only homegrown who has survived. At first, her recollections of how she came to derail the freight train seemed random and disjointed. But when you apply this programming sequence, it all becomes plausible. As far as we can tell, buried in Martha’s deep subconscious were four “subroutines.” The first gave her the complete and very real experience that her husband Walter had just called. In that fabricated experience, he asked her to come to his office with jumper cables to boost his car’s dead battery. Although she knew he had been dead for twenty years, she was totally and absolutely living in the false reality in which she had, a few moments earlier, conversed with him.”
“Now how could something like that happen?” Tate asked.
“I think the positive side of her brain embraced this implanted reality. In fact, I believe her desire to have him back was so strong that, in her mind, the fact that he was dead was nothing more than a nightmare she once had. She was in a state that could best be described as dreamlike, where she wanted to get back to a dream that was interrupted. You know, the way sometimes people wake up from a dream that is so good, they try to go back to sleep to experience it again. But buried in Martha’s subconscious was an ‘if-then’ statement. As she drove, the sight of a road sign that read ‘Waukesha Gap two miles’ triggered it.” Janice pointed to easel number three and the image on it taken from Martha’s computer screen. “We found a picture of this road sign, originally from the Wisconsin Highway Department’s web site. It was embedded in the subliminal instructions we decoded using the MIT machine.”
Janice then pointed to an easel that held a shot of the fruit stand from the subliminal frames. “The ‘if-then’ statement in Martha’s mind said, ‘If you see this sign, then jump to the next subroutine.’ Originally, it seemed to us that Martha had changed her story. She told us that she turned down the access road to the train tracks because she thought there was a fruit stand there. What actually happened was, once she saw that sign, all thoughts of Walter and the intention to help him with his dead battery evaporated from her mind and were replaced with a new goal … the fruit stand.”
“But didn’t she know there was no fruit stand on that road?” the president asked.
“Sir, have you ever experienced déjà vu?”
“Yes. When you feel as though something has happened before.”
“But you know intellectually it hasn’t, correct?”
“Yes.”
“This whole new area of research that we are rapidly uncovering here may explain the phenomenon of déjà vu — or what I now prefer calling a concurrent memory. It is caused by a temporary lapse of the conscious mind. It concerns two parts of our minds, the conscious, the part of the brain that is our awareness of the here and now, and the memory, the repository of all things that have happened to us. To illustrate, if I were experiencing déjà vu right now, then everything that’s happening in this room, right at this moment, would bypass my conscious mind and land directly in my memory. Of course, I would have no idea this had happened. However, I do perceive what’s going on, or more accurately, recollect it in my memory. I am experiencing something as it is happening by instantly reading it back from my memory. Coming from there it has the same credibility as an old, cherished thought. Even though it is, in fact, an instant or concurrent memory of what is simultaneously happening at this moment.”