Then somebody got the bright idea to transmit subliminal messages. Sebastian didn’t grasp all of the underlying mechanisms, which involved advanced theories mixing psychology, biology, and engineering. He had a hunch that the device’s designers didn’t have a clue, either, and were just throwing around fancy words to explain things they otherwise couldn’t.
Sebastian had always thought of subliminal messaging as when companies tried to get you to buy their shit—beer or pickup trucks or whatever—by flashing pictures of naked chicks, or a word like sex, across a TV screen so quickly your conscious brain couldn’t process it, but your subconscious brain could, so your subconscious brain nudged your conscious brain and said hey, asshole, buy that beer, because that beer equated to mind-blowing sex with hot girls.
Except the subliminal signals the device used weren’t pictures of naked girls but timed electrical pulses transmitted into the subjects’ brains by way of the vestibulocochlear nerve. What the designers hoped was that, in combination with spoken suggestions, these pulses would allow them access to the subconscious, like downloading data from a hard drive. The idea was to coax the subjects into divulging information in more detail, and with more reliability, than through conscious recall—to in effect obtain buried memories.
It didn’t work—at least not how they’d planned. They weren’t able to tap into a subject’s subconscious and pluck memories out like so many cookies from a jar.
But it turned out to be an even bigger mind-fuck than what they’d hoped for: In response to the subliminal signals, the subjects unintentionally acted out the content of the messages.
If, for instance, the designers transmitted a signal that translated roughly as tell us how you got here, the subjects paced around and around their cell, as if walking over a distance; or they mimicked the motions of steering a car. And they didn’t realize they were doing it.
Mind control.
The designers had blundered into mind control.
Well, okay, not mind control, exactly. Not like pulling a lever on a machine, or issuing commands like a drill sergeant to an Army recruit. You couldn’t send a message that said laugh out loud or stick your hand in a blender, then kick back and watch as the subject collapsed into giggle fits, or ground up their fingers on the puree setting. It didn’t work that way. The subjects tended to reject direct commands.
So the designers perfected their technique. They learned to be subtler, more refined: to perform some mental sleight of hand and trick the subjects into doing what you wanted them to do.
It wasn’t mind control.
But it was pretty damn close.
Pretty damn close.
Sebastian had seen a hypnotist once, in high school. A big fat guy with poufy hair and gold chains, in a velvet tuxedo with a ruffled shirt. He’d called himself Dr. Dream, or some such dumb-ass name, and had come to their school to put on a show. When he’d asked for volunteers, the popular kids had fallen over each other to clamber up on stage and make fools of themselves. Dr. Dream had tapped each on the forehead, and they’d responded by barking like dogs, performing air guitar, writhing like strippers—whatever Dr. Dream had told them. Some crazy shit. Meanwhile, he had sauntered back and forth across the stage, clutching a cordless microphone, tapping students on the head while crooning cheesy Vegas lounge songs.
Sebastian, only fourteen at the time, had concluded that the whole thing was total, unmitigated bullshit. He still thought so: popular kids pretending and preening, grubbing for more popularity. They’d known exactly what they were doing up on that stage. And the hypnotist? Please. He’d known ten-year-olds down on the corner that could run a better con with three-card monte than that bloated asshole.
But Finney’s device was the real deal. No bullshit, cheesy-ass lounge act here. He’d seen it with his own eyes, in the tapes. Not hypnosis, not really. It was more like persuasion.
And this was what he and Finney had planned for Wu this morning.
The device’s electrical signals would render her susceptible to spoken commands. The designers called this process—the combination of electrical signals and verbal commands—embedding. Once embedding was complete, Wu would experience an overwhelming desire to carry out the commands but would otherwise act and feel normally. Certain psychoactive drugs, administered before the signals, would make her mind more pliable. He’d seen to it that Wu had received healthy doses of these this morning, when he’d implanted the device in her ear.