Under the Knife(27)

Interrogation.

It was while developing interrogation techniques that, he knew, the designers had stumbled across the device’s most intriguing—and unexpected—asset.

Not to mention its most goddamn disturbing one.

This line of research had been pursued in a different group of test subjects: all young men, of all ethnicities. They’d had the look of soldiers about them, he’d thought. They’d seemed more defiant than the others. Harder. Terrorists? Rebels? It depended on your point of view.

To his practiced eye, though, they looked to be true bad guys. Cold-blooded killers with empty stares, the kind that filmed themselves hacking off the heads of screaming prisoners in orange jumpsuits. There were more of these men in the world than Sebastian cared to count, men you didn’t waste time shedding tears over, and they’d provided a steady stream of fresh material on which the designers could experiment.

The research methods differed with this group. There were interrogators. You could hear them off camera, barking questions at the subjects in various languages. From the materials provided him, it was impossible for Sebastian to tell for certain which countries were involved. Which was just as well, since that information might have landed him facedown in a ditch with a bullet through the back of his head.

He knew the device was going to render obsolete every technique of information extraction conceived since the dawn of time. The goddamn thing practically read minds.

But there were … side effects. Irreparable ones that, even when they befell men such as these, gave Sebastian pause.

The interrogators had first tried a direct approach: asking the same questions over and over, like a song set on an endless repeating loop. Sleep held no escape because it was a physiological impossibility while the device was receiving voice broadcasts. Eventually, the subjects told their interrogators everything. The longest any had lasted before talking was twenty-four hours—and that guy had ended up spending the remainder of his short life with his hands clamped over his ears, screaming in repeated, ululating bursts the answers to questions that were no longer being asked. Which made the interrogators curious: Were there other methods that were even quicker?

Sebastian suspected that they had drawn their next inspiration—pumping loud heavy metal and hard-core rap into the subjects’ heads—from U.S. soldiers, who had employed similar tactics (albeit over loudspeakers) in places like Gitmo. This had an unfortunate tendency to drive the subjects insane with breathtaking rapidity, and usually before any useful information could be extracted. It was quickly abandoned. Still, Sebastian, recognizing many of the song selections, admired the interrogators their appreciation of these musical genres and gave them props for at least mixing some pretty decent shit.

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.