The Last Network - Chapter 36
Pusher Man
Paolo had been working the problem since he touched down at SFO.
How do you find people who want to watch the world burn? How do you get them to flame one target and not another? How do you keep wildfire from spreading out of control?
He wasn’t sure it could be done.
The first part was easy. Peared was filled with sociopaths. Some of his earliest work was identifying them and keeping them isolated from the general population. They were called Evil Eyes around the office. Generally, they cycled through accounts, but used the same VR headset. You could find them from their low ratings and short connection times. They’d pair up and drop people over and over until they found someone willing to do their bidding.
Until now, there was no need to do anything other than quarantine them.
Now the task was to find people who wanted the same bad outcomes, pair them with people who followed orders, and push them all down the same road to hell. Kendra’s orders. She didn’t think you needed controllers coordinating multiple Hands. She thought all you needed was enough powder and a match. They were inciting chaos, not performing surgery. Give humans the right conditions, and they’d do the rest. Besides, clients would be willing to accept collateral damage if they got the outcome they wanted.
It sounded simple coming from her lips, but the challenge was to do it invisibly. Paolo preferred more elegant solutions, but this approach had the lowest likelihood of being detected. Privatize the benefit and socialize the risk.
He decided to start simply and work his way out.
Right now, he was following the Phish comeback tour around the US. Today, they were up at Watkins Glen. In the middle of their show they did a cover band bit and played audience requests. It was a perfect testing ground for Paolo. After five shows he was able to identify people attending the show with AR glasses and match them to Peared users at home. Now, he was trying to get the Pairs to all want the same cover song.
The band was in a frenzied jam. After this they would take requests. He pushed the melody to Over the Rainbow to his test group. No one could hear it over Trey Anastasio’s guitar, but it was there working its way into their heads. Their brains would pick it up and process it as a memory from earlier, one of those unplaceable earworms. As the decibels increased from the stage, he pushed the volume up and quickly flashed glamour effects, ruby red slippers, falling barns, and yellow brick roads, across their glasses. Hopefully some of them would be tripping or take it as a flashback. He needed them to translate those quick glamours as a sign the band should play that song.
The jam ended in a crash of cymbals and Phish took a moment to catch their breath. Paolo waited, watching twenty views of the band across five split monitors. The aging rockers slurped down water from cheap plastic bottles. Finally, they asked the audience for requests. Paolo hit the record button. He’d have to parse out the responses of forty different people, twenty Eyes and twenty Hands. That wasn’t nearly enough to cut through the crowd of 20,000, but he wasn’t trying to influence the stage yet. He was trying to get his little ants in the crowd to pick the same song out of a million possibilities.
If he could do that, he was well on his way. Herding hippies was far harder than swaying undecideds into a simple choice of yes or no, cheer or boo. Their centaur jobs would involve getting a crowd to make a binary decision.
Once he could do that, it was just a matter of amplification and intensity.
He heard the classic riff to Layla kick in. He turned his recordings off and dropped out of God Mode. It was time to analyze the streams and see how much further he had to go.