Mind Police, dawn.com

I made phone calls.  Charlie was reluctant at first, but as we talked he mentioned his knee was bothering him again and I told him this would cure it instantly, so he came.  Monique was hesitant too, but when we told her of the new laws making it a requirement, she talked to Mary privately for ten minutes then came back with her, and they went through with it hand in hand.   Scout was eager to re-dose and regain her old powers.  She told me that she’d spend time with me in the following days and share all her memories of Paris and read with me again.  She still saw in me a father figure, and that made me feel like something I should live up to.

I told her to call Rebecca’s parents and invite them over the next evening.  I even got hold of Helen, in Emeryville, and had her and her family over along with Rebecca’s for dinner and wafers.  The three girls, or teenagers I should say, really hit it off, once again flying away to play with Rollo before his bedtime.  I didn’t want to forget any of our old friends before a deluge of new faces and priorities would overwhelm us and make us forget past acquaintance.  After Claire and I appraised them of the situation, we decided to give each family a sheet.  Ken had valuable contacts at Apple who would be all ears for what we had to say and swore to bring them over.  Rebecca’s father worked for the power authority, definitely a set of people valuable to have on your side.  We gave them the same instructions as the others and directed them to use Han’s facilities for their recruits, as we didn’t want hordes of people at our doorstep, just a few team leaders.

In our bedroom talk that night I told Claire that I’d decided to take the plunge, that I wanted to become computer literate, and asked if she would take on this task at our dual booths each morning.  It would bring us closer and I would love her all the more for it.  I knew she could multitask and not even pause in her explorations while giving up a few screens to lesson me in all the basics.  She was delighted at my proposal.

“This is just one of the ways I’m going to make it up to you, for all that’s happened in the past,’ she said.  ‘I’m going to teach you everything I know, how to program and talk to computers and control them.  Roland, it’s a whole new world of knowledge as rich as your library, and when you know it, you’ll feel empowered because then you can manipulate it, bend it to your will.  And this is something you must know, as it’s in the process of trying to bend ours.”

“I just hope I’m an apt pupil” I replied.  “I’ll be at the kindergarten stage when we begin tomorrow.”

“Fine with me” she went on, “I’ll have two Rollos in my hands and be twice as happy the mother as ever.”

“No, I expect you’ll have two ‘Rolands’ in your charge very soon.”

“I’m happy with that”  she replied.  She was overjoyed and kissed me again in the dark.  Then we fell asleep like Romeo and Juliet would have if they’d had such luck.

The next morning the lessons began.  She set me up with online tutorials on two screens and monitored my brain to set the speed of these lessons to as fast as I could handle, a little faster in fact, as she relegated one small portion of her mind to monitoring everything I was trying to assimilate and answering all the questions that confused me, clearing away queries like a trailblazer in a jungle, like a bulldozer making a path.   With her help, I sped through years of coding lore in weeks, in just morning sessions, while she explored the web for possible allies and hacked government agencies around the world for information on their plans.

A few days into my lessons she found thousands of classified documents concerning prisoner modification, not just from the States but from around the world, scientist’s secret experiments and reports on behavior control, and others concerning wider applications of wafer programming.  All of this research was state-funded, think tanks of eggheads believing they were doing a public service by trying to eradicate free will permanently.  It was enough to raise Pavlov from his grave and give thousands of elected leaders dreams of becoming Kim Jong-un.

She encrypted and passed the files along to all our group.  The governments had no idea they’d been hacked and looted.  In fact, Claire took the time to slightly corrupt the files in these government databases.  She knew they were memorized in the heads of those who wrote them.  So she changed decimal points in numbers and reversed a few figures, omit a word or two to make it look like many of the trials had failed, that universal mind control was a much harder nut to crack.  She did this in ten different languages simultaneously while schooling me in the rudiments of computer programming while asking what Rollo would be given for lunch.  It was a miracle to witness.

Claire lived up to her commitment of training our core group at the house, but changed the plan after that, finding the visitors too time intrusive for the plans she had in mind.  For this alteration she called in Natalie, who stayed with us for a week, Claire reprogramming her head with the new wafers and training her to be a division head and instructor from now on.  It all worked seamlessly, as they say.   After clearing her head in the machine, I opened the safe and handed her five pages from a binder for our Sacramento friends.  But I suspect, as they left the room for a private conference, more than a few of those wafers were ingested.

As I saw this duo once again, like an apparition, walking away hand in hand out the door, a shiver ran down my spine from history.  But it was momentary, and I felt confident, safe, knowing full well that the machine in our panic room was my panacea, a one minute, complete remedy to any games played upon my mind.  And it was right next to my bedroom, which no delusions could hide from me.  One would have to make me a lobotomy case to erase this knowledge, in which state I’d be dead anyway.

So I felt comfortable in talking to Natalie once again in a friendly way, to which she reciprocated with long and intimate conversations at our dinner table and after dinner by the fireplace in our library, often sharing with me the same liqueurs I was enjoying,  Claire smiling broadly upon our reconciliation.  Natalie would take over some of the training of team leaders in Sacramento and snowball a whole new collective group there, starting in the governor’s office.  Claire said that within a few days she could glide through computer data and tell us if the governor was a proper inductee to our group.

There was no dark web yet, as Claire quickly discovered.  The first one was a product of a secret military project designed for encryption to hide data.  It was unofficially leaked and became open source.  It was called TOR, the onion routing protocol.  Then it was available to everyone, and people began transferring their discontents with society to their internet friends with perfect anonymity.  It became so popular it was soon the largest slice of the internet.

Now the internet was fully restored, but there was no discontent or dark net, just amazement and joy at our new universal status of health and intelligence.  So Claire started one.  There were still thousands of cyberpunks and freaks constantly typing away, and Claire contacted these people with her advanced skills and let them in, not only to her myriad conspiracy theories but her partial solutions to them, which many drank up like religious fanatics.  In a few days, she had thousands all over the globe begging for our new wafers.  Amazon was up and running so getting the product to anyone, under an alias, was easy.  It was Zaptech that had to go into high gear, as you had to rid your brain of old chips to ingest the new.  Orders for the machine poured in now from everywhere.  But the sales and deliveries had to be cloaked in secrecy, the units broken into parts and shipped from various locations disguised as other electronic gadgets.  The instructions to assemble them were hidden on the dark web.

We had another long afternoon meeting with Hans.  How could we get his device secretly to locations all over the map so that our cyber friends could join our ranks?

We came up with the idea of mobile vehicles, like food or ice cream vans or simply delivery trucks, where you could easily hide the backup batteries to power a unit and cruise to locations everywhere and process recruits.  That was for rural areas.  In larger cities, we set up secretly in basements and moved the equipment from one house to the next on a monthly basis to avoid detection.  But as of yet there was no one even looking for us, no police aware of our existence, no one with even a clue.  We were ahead of the curve and winning the game.

This wave of growth lasted a full eight months.  Our group now numbered well over two hundred thousand members, a tenth of them active, daily participants on our secret web.  We still had no enemy, and so we committed no crimes, no acts, except to keep expanding our numbers for the battles to come.  This kept us under the rug.

Claire was bonding with her quantum computer six hours a day, four in the morning and two each afternoon, sharing with all our group of ‘Illuminati’ her latest scripts of mind deception.  She had devised a mask we could all wear, a mirror operating system, to make it look like we ran on the common chipset, just like everyone else.  Improving upon this ruse, she came up with scripts to scan and identify anyone around who might be probing us beyond what our mirror system could disguise, along with offensive weapons to confuse anyone attempting it.  She invented what might be called a mental stun gun, blasting only a nanosecond but leaving the target bewildered for minutes and oblivious to what he or she’d been doing or where they were or why.

And she wasn’t the only one protecting us.  Others in our clan were contributing plans and innovations as well.  Our secret internet was bristling with ideas.  We had the best global mindset one could hope for, the sharpest and brightest in the world.  Those were our recruits: university scholars, scientists, inventors, middle management engineers and supervisors, just below the ranks of politicians and business leaders, whom we couldn’t trust.  They were too corrupted by power, to the point that they would readily betray us, for more power.

The first signs of trouble came with an order and a huge investment from the government into Zaptech, to immediately upscale their production of units a hundred-fold.  After several secret meetings with us, Hans agreed to the directive.  If he didn’t do it, the government would find some other company that would, and we wanted our man in control.

This took several months and made Hans a billionaire overnight, and Mr. Tanaki many times over that, but Hans warned us something serious was up.  Natalie had the mind of the new governor in her lap, so to speak, but this directive came from a new agency, the Federal Enhancement Bureau.  It incorporated parts of the NSA, FBI, CIA and other departments to oversee all matters of wafer production and distribution.  All laboratories were put under its direction and all law enforcement agencies carried out its missives.

The only possible reason for this was that the nation was prepping up for the introduction of a new chip into the minds of the general populace.  It would take time to implement, but the storm was brewing.  And from our connections overseas we had disturbing news that our continent was lagging in this game.  From China and Russia we heard reports of a new class of citizens quickly growing, who were granted special privileges for their zeal in performing their official duties, and the unaccountable joy they took in this tiring effort, around the clock, almost sleepless, relentless, monoscopic.

They were running the machinery of the country, trains and roads, grids and services, but also building new defences, walls and tunnels, military equipment, and practicing military drills, while the rest of the world watched and tried to mimic, with typical human stupidity.  Now it was our turn to devolve humans into slaves and ants, mindless robots, ready to obey any order with perfect patriotism.

The first thing any dictator does when he convinces half the populace to validate him, is to create thousands of spies to root out those who oppose him.  His power rests on fear.  He knows he’s wrong, a cheater to human dignity and free will, a denier of rights, and so the only recourse he has is to violence, torture and brutal subjugation, the whip to be precise.

But with our revolutionary advances in mind control, the whip took on new shapes.  Imaginary rewards could effect as much or even more than fear, if they were delivered minute by minute, in small doses, likes drops of water from a leaky faucet.  The first mouthful of a meal to one who’s starving, the comfort of entering a warm house coming in from the freezing cold or a soft bed for one who’s exhausted, an unexpected kiss on the cheek by one’s lover, imaginary or real, a hug that seems to last forever, overwhelm the pleasure centers of the brain.  These were the images and the ecstasy built in and released by the new chips on cue.

Government labs around the world had learned how to effectively program wafers to steer one’s focus to whatever aims they desired.  Mind control was perfected.  People were numbers in these state controlled experiments, less than that, less than zeroes.  They were re-programmed to feel a wave of joy in performing any task they were commanded to do, almost orgasmic, like a faithful dog fetching a thrown stick over and over again.

The surge was exhilaration and one’s entire personality shut down in a blinding light of mental ecstasy.  The desire to accomplish whatever they were told became something like an opioid addiction.  Scientists had now charted those mechanisms enough to program the chips, and their tests created something like the most abject junky begging on his knees for the next fix and getting it at the last minute, in exchange for his complete cooperation.  And this was something the leaders of all nations wanted, people in their palms, human jello, the masses constantly tingling and working to keep their dealers in power, for their next fix.

The most troubling aspect of this new development for us was that a new breed of ‘spotters’ were created.  Crime, in the usual sense, was almost obsolete as everyone was happy and satisfied in their needs.  And there was so much cross monitoring going on that people’s minds were an open book to read, like a Facebook post with everyone on earth posting every few minutes.  So the police forces around the world were given the assignment of probing into people’s thoughts for any signs of deviancy or dissatisfaction with anything.  They could only do this at close range, so they abandoned their cars and took to the streets as plainclothes pedestrians.  Their one new skill was to quickly probe a nearby person’s brain quite thoroughly without the target knowing it.

Claire of course developed tools to spot these spotters and deceive them into thinking that we were okay.  But this took effort, like performing a hypnotic act on an individual.  All of us quickly learned how to handle one such intruder, some of us could handle two or three at a time and Claire probably a dozen.  But as time went on the streets became full of these spies.  They worked in sync with each other like wolves, because in packs they had the ability not only to search and report a person but to redirect him or her like a puppet to the nearest reprogramming or ‘upgrade’ center as they were called, for a permanent fix with the new ‘happy’ wafer.