LifeGames Corporatoin Read online

  “Persuasion…?” Her mouth ventured without first checking in with her brain.

  “You get it,” he smiled slyly. “You’re learning to think like me,” and it didn’t seem like a compliment, but he nodded to himself, making a note, and then he went on. “…Then the surprise… financing infrastructure and software was the smallest piece of the problems. You can’t scale this business with manpower, with one-on-one hypnotists, we needed to get that automated… led by the computer.”

  “I’m not surprised”

  “Why would you say that?” Ken’s question sounded surprised.

  “I’ve got an instinct that there’s a huge feedback-loop going on during the hypnosis that a human hypnotist doesn’t even realize… I don’t know how a computer can have that sort of empathy.”

  “I’d say you’re psychic… or been sneaking info out of our IP.”

  “Your IP?”

  “Our Intellectual Property… our ops manuals. They’re supposed to be classified.”

  Catherine looked surprised, and Ken studied her; her surprise seemed honest.

  “I swear… It must be instinct on my part, your operation’s tight lipped.”

  “Good…” he relaxed a smidgen. “But you’re an insider now, and we have momentum that competitors won’t easily emulate. I can confirm it without giving away State-secrets—we hit our biggest problems with automating the computer-generated hypnosis…. And patching it to each subject’s personal psyche… Creates situations you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Situations?” Catherine challenged.

  “The details could take hours,” he assured her and ordered another bottle.

  “I’m in no hurry.” It was music to his ears.

  Catherine waited patiently for him to continue, coaxing with cues and feminine wile. “The third subject we hooked up… Oh, I must caution, Cath… this is strictly, and I mean strictly off of the record,” his voice laced with unmistakable menace.

  “What happens in Vegas…” she gestured zipping her lips. Her eyes were sparkling, she willed them thus.

  Ken grinned, seeming to relax a little. It was then, in that moment, that he seized on his opportunity to aim the conversation down a path he was coaxing toward; cementing his advantage in the run of power play: By using jargon she’d certainly not comprehend, he knew he could force her into subordination to his superior knowledge. His mouth began to run, relating all manner of trials and tests in the early days;

  “…our first two runs were short and sweet with no hint of trouble, but the third attempt was a little unfortunate… we’d run the full ritual on the subject, and he was already neural-linked when he went meltdown.”

  He paused for dramatic effect, “As we swung him out over a precipice, he went into cardiac. Without medical on hand, he was a goner. But the worst of it was, we weren’t yet using the bags and he soiled himself pretty good.”

  He left the statement hanging.

  Catherine deliberately showed no response, just a lopsided grin of assumed bewilderment hanging across her face.

  Ken spotted the pantomime he’d angled to achieve: “What?” he asked, faking ignorance to his own over-complicating recount.

  “The full-ritual? Melt down…?What else…? Bags? I think I’m missing something here.” She maintained the pose—she actually knew and could guess at the terms, but she knew it was a game that he wanted her to play.

  “Yeah…. Company jargon… This is actually fortuitous… we need you up to speed on everything for the next rollout phase.”

  “Sure…” Catherine invited by leaning her elbows on the table.

  Unaccustomed as he was to more than a sip or two of wine, it now had his tongue.

  They each felt a victory; felt they were controlling the conversation.

  “You’re of course familiar with what we do? The virtual reality… The technicalities of VR I mean? The economics of it?” Ken quizzed.

  “Reasonably, but run it by me anyway, treat me like I know nothing.” Catherine suggested.

  Ken’s vanity overflowed in his tone as he laid before her the foundations of the LifeGames operation. “We’re way more cost effective than any field assessment, so it’s only in the backwaters that serious training and benchmarking for almost any human endeavor is still done the old-fashioned way. The airlines, of course, have simulated flight training forever; but we take it just so much further. Our first contracts were military Special Forces and tacticians. These are all obvious angles; but then the courts began assessing judges and we uncovered huge incompetence. It was a coup. Law firms started pushing their people through, then politicians got into it coming into election. Now it’s even school teachers who need our certification before they’re hired on.”

  He paused for a swig from his glass, “Okay so far?”

  Catherine nodded, “Standard stuff… VR is common enough; and I think I get what you’re bringing that’s different…” It was a leading question.

  “Sure, Virtual Reality’s now pretty much off-shelf technology,” he agreed; “Drop enough cash and you have a facility…. But what does it deliver? A simulation. And what’s a simulation when there are no consequences to the candidate? The plane’s tumbling in a death spiral, all the alarms and lights flashing exactly as they would in reality… But a VR pilot knows it’s a trumped up game. He knows his balls aren’t on the line. If the bird goes down, they just set up the scenario again, and off he goes into the next module… As you know, I bring a new angle; give him consequences, or, at least, take away his knowledge that there aren’t consequences in a simulation.”

  “You hypnotize him…” Catherine encouraged.

  “We hypnotize him before the simulation… yep. Get him believing that what he’s experiencing is the real thing. And, of course, these days we don’t have to just put a helmet on him with tiny screens to give him an eyeball view or stick him in a pressure suit and rock him around in a gyroscope. We found that subjects weren’t buying into the illusion of it. No… that was our other big innovation… to neural link subjects. Hijack the central nervous system with electrodes and give a four-dimensional experience; immersed totally into a three dimensional world with an authentic fourth-dimensional time component.”

  “Time component?” Catherine was afraid to overplay her hand; she knew what it was. “I mean… yeah… I know about the time dilation… but it’s very superficial.”

  “I’ll dig into that in a moment. It’s heady stuff,” he looked for her agreement.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Like I said; we started out with trained psychologists conducting hypnosis, but that’s not scalable—there are only so many of those nutcases available that you’d want to employ, we needed scalable to go global, so we encoded the sequence to software—now computers can take in the upper-ninety percent of clients from full consciousness to the fourth level comatose state in under fifteen seconds. Psychologists differ in their abilities, but even the best will take a minute or more—and time is money. It was our first real coup.”

  Catherine made a show of wide-eyed wonder as if hearing it for the first time, feeding Ken’s super-ego, willing him not to pause.

  “We swept the board clean… without a LifeGames training certificate you don’t have a prayer to get above middle management. We dominate global power through our facilities—Legislators in parliaments, senates in States, the judiciary in every country that counts, military strategists… friends and foes… we hold the strings, train and review them all.”

  “God—WOW!” Catherine knew they were powerful, but the impact of implications was a genuine shock that she didn’t need to fake. He was on a roll now, needing no more encouragement.

  “The computer’s got an integrated fMRI scanner, logging vast data fields, instantly compiling on-the-fly critical appraisals, re-training sequencing, re-testing… all in one run. Months and years of real-world performance all in a single session—all under one roof and at the touch of a button.”

&
nbsp; He was striding, rambling, unable to halt his mouth, “Ritual… you’re a smart cookie, you’ll have guessed… it means hypnotizing subject… fitting bags. The hypnosis suspends the knowledge that it’s a simulation. The action kicks off and the subject’s lost in a world that’s deadly real to him…” he hesitated a moment, “…or her… see—no gender bias…” he assured, “He… she… they’re really, truly there, immersed in the selected world. We deliver the goods—every time. Nobody to touch us.”

  He was unnerving; for all he was saying, something carefully not said, and it drew her in like a fish to a lure. There was fire here—something warm, reassuring and appealing about this discussion, this technology, this character, but something deeply sinister too.

  Ken had already finished his glass and was pouring another; Catherine hadn’t remembered to sip yet. “…You see, Cath, that’s the valid reaction… the real one, the true one, that’ll happen when a trainee confronts the real-life situation. Using other training methods, other VR without hypnosis… certainly, failing to get the subject down to level four… something only our software can do… you just don’t see our kind of results.”

  The alcohol was working its magic; Ken’s tongue was as slick as greased Teflon, information flowing over it without any holdback friction. Catherine kept the taps open with “oohs” and “ahhs” at judiciously chosen moments. So, as Ken swallowed the last of his glass, Catherine signaled for a new bottle of liquid truth.

  “And it was that number-three that taught us to use bags. What a mess… These days, the bags are standard operating procedure… catheter and rectal.”

  It wasn’t an angle she cared to pursue. Below the veneer of his billions, she reminded herself, Ken displayed a vulgar and ill-bred origin.

  “…And meltdown,” she offered, “…must be jargon for an operating problem—right?”

  “Right,” He confirmed, “And, the next phase for expansion will be the use of nutrition plasters.”

  He paused a moment, a moment that seemed terminal to the momentum and Catherine feared that the spell was gone, but he tantalized her with a promise;

  “I need to brief you on this; guess now’s as good a time as any. First I need a leak,” he stood up.

  Catherine watched Ken make his way through the dimly lit tables. In an obvious attempt to stave-off the onset of advanced inebriation he was forcing a stiffly disciplined control into his stride.

  Three minutes later Ken returned, and, predictably, he had assumed the different personality his vice lent him.

  “Where was I?” He asked rhetorically, gliding back to where he’d left off in his account. “Ah, yes. The next phase of our PR campaign will be way bigger, Cath. Our primary test market results in operations have been staggering.”

  Catherine’s eyes widened with genuine dismay, this first phase of the campaign was paying beyond her wildest imaginings, a bigger payday would be obscene. She was sorely tempted to suggest a sliding commission on increased revenues, estimating he might just agree, but it would derail the drift of the conversation so she let the strategic idea pass in favor of details.

  “Now that I’ve given the world the idea, there isn’t anything too mystical about our cocktail of hypnosis and virtual reality; eventually there’ll be corporate espionage… a breach. The competitions plenty far behind, but I need them out of the game, and we do that through innovation they can’t figure out.” He said it smugly. “I’ve got insiders on retainer, and I know the Chinese, Koreans and Israelis are all chasing hard—they hate depending on us.”

  It was all “I”, unadulterated vanity, and Catherine forced a smile to mask her aversion to the self-gratifying indulgence.

  “As you know, all the stuff you’ve been working on is our next phase but not yet ready to go to press, so this is all strictly off the record. Only executive level clearance for now… you’re in the inner circle. Do I have your commitment?” Ken urged.

  “Absolutely,” Catherine crossed her fingers, “hope to die!”

  He chuckled and seized the interlude to slide his hand across the table, cupping her crossed fingers in his palm. It was a shock—something she hadn’t expected and it caught her off guard. The candle flickered from his close passage, and the room’s temperature seemed to rise a degree.

  Catherine let his hand linger a moment before covering his hand with her other hand, squeezing it, and withdrawing to fold her napkin.

  Ken left his hand waiting in vain for a return to touch. It did not come.

  Her inner circle status was hanging in the balance, evidently consummated if she returned to touch, but she gambled—more power in a promise than an action, and she deliberately let her eyes caress his lips as she wet her own; “You were saying….? This next phase?”

  “Time Dilation…” he said it with reverence, almost mesmerically.

  It was show-time; Catherine cocked her head to one side. It was a deadly game, but she was in it and needed to break the impasse, and she did it with flattery, giving Ken the power by playing the student hanging on her master’s every word; “Einstein? Relativity? Speeding time up?” she offered.

  “Yeah, Einstein…” he nodded, “also genius, yes.” Ken inferred himself into an exclusive club. “He used the term first… this we must grant him.” He touched the wine to his lips, “…but my breakthrough’s right up there, equally monumental… and of course, genius. But, no… Time Dilation isn’t about speeding time up, it’s slowing it down.”

  “Sorry, that’s what I meant,” he’d bought it, and she knew she’d played the ruse expertly. “But how? How can you slow time down?” The concept appeared unlikely, and Catherine’s puzzlement at the possible mechanics of achieving the feat was absolute.

  “Our original combination of hypnosis and software, but we’ve got a new module that puts the brain into a… a sort of hyper-drive. When you go through the new sequence, everything seems normal enough to you, but the data is supercharged, pumping in and out of the neural connection at up to ten times—some times twenty times the throughput. The effect is more training in a fraction of the time. What’s happening is, it seems normal to you… you’re time dilated, but on our testing… and that means our billing cycle, it’s more training in less time… very very profitable to me. We are through trials and are test marketing to a limited group of premium clients.”

  There was a sudden minute flutter at the corner of Ken’s eye, a nervous twitch that brought his hand up to worry at it. It was a lie, and Catherine saw it. The twitch had betrayed him and she pretended not to notice.

  “Decode that for me please,” she prompted; knowing something was a lie, but whatever that something was, it wasn’t clear.

  “I’m vastly simplifying this… Using an upgraded hypnosis sequence, we suggest to the subject that images will be coming at them a little quicker than in real life. They respond. It’s been very successful in trials, and… uhmmm… some limited rollout.”

  The nervous twitch flicked again, she was closing in.

  “The computer then sends the images at the correspondingly faster rate suggested in the cue, and with the subject’s brain stimulated and their adrenaline going, they’re able to rise to the occasion.” There was a moment of sobriety and she saw caution in him.

  “You’ve done this? It works?”

  “That’s’ what I’m telling you. Yes, it’s already in operation to our top clients. We bill on the outcome, on how much assessment and training has been achieved, so that they don’t need to know how we achieve those results, as long as we produce. The improvement in efficiency has exceeded prediction by three hundred percent—and that’s a multiplier over our estimations that were already a four-times increase in productivity.”

  Catherine whistled, giving Ken a sense that she was counting his money, and he liked that.

  “I’m of course a wealthy man already… this is going to… well… I’ll be in a league of my own.”

  “Undoubtedly,” she moistened her lips again. “But
the function of it… I’m imagining it’s like being in a car accident? That feeling of time going by in slo-mo?”

  “You’ve got it!” Ken agreed enthusiastically.

  “Can the mind take it?”

  “The body’s been the bigger problem. Most of our subjects on the physical routines are athletes of one sort or another. But we’re herding fat politicians and lawyers through and we’re not yet certain of the implications… we’ve still got it notched down… one slip and it’s, well…”

  She found herself chuckling with him, the mood between them becoming ever more familiar.

  “So there is a level of fatigue?” Catherine prompted, with an instinct to propel the conversation, “The extra load…. the subjects must surely experience some degree of physical cost… exhaustion?” she squinted, “…even I understand physics enough to know that for a given amount of work there has to be a given amount of energy spent. Athletes aren’t immune, nobody goes on indefinitely.”

  “Smart cookie,” Ken grinned, the compliment seeming for once valid. “Another huge breakthrough. We’re using patches. You see, in our modern era, the human body is physically under-utilized. Actually, we’re all a bunch of hypochondriacs.”

  Catherine looked skeptical and she let it show, “Hypochondriacs.” An instinct nagged at her; something amiss.

  “I’ll give you an example of how under-utilized our bodies are to their capacity,” Ken was running with the doubt she’d conveyed, “You ever seen a hypnosis session, Cath… an ordinary stage show?”

  She shook her head, “Nope.”

  “Worth a laugh…. subjects do some pretty amusing things.”

  The conversation was drifting off track, and she needed to coax it back but the timing was off, so she waited and listened.

  “I’ve seen needles stuck into people up to the hilt,” he rambled, “they don’t feel a thing, even if they’re awake and looking at it. There’s no real explanation for it… the wounds don’t bleed. What can you say…? The power of the mind when it chooses to ignore something.”