Maybe enough time has passed now. Maybe it's safe to reveal this stuff to the world.
I've been sitting on it for too many years. In this thread I will be revealing a series of transcripts, all from 2063 or earlier, and all allegedly from a once-powerful cabal that called themselves the
Adherents of Jsona Var.
I can't tell you for sure if the transcripts are true, or if it's all some weird hoax. If they
are true, then they have far-reaching implications, and they cast recent history in a somewhat different and chilling light. If not, then I suppose we can consider ourselves lucky, but might want to be vigilant in the future.
Truth or hoax? That's for you good folks on Shadowland to decide. I know better than to try and assert either way.
I will begin with the first transcript. If it garners interest, I will offer what little context I can, then post the next file from this archive, and so on in that manner. Part of me hopes that nobody cares; that this can gather dust safely in some antiquated backwater node. But I can't just continue to sit on it.
>>Stornoway [2.3.2070]
QUOTE (Transcript 1) |
It should be stressed from the start that Mindhack has little in common with standard psychotropic IC like BlackHammer and GreenGlade. It does not require a Direct Neural Interface and does not induce biofeedback in the normal sense of the word. Its roots, in fact, are considerably older and more humble: going back to 20th century brainwashing techniques, propaganda theory, subliminal advertising, hypnosis, even con-artistry. This is practically the stone-age when it comes to neuroscience, and that perhaps is why this approach has been overlooked for so long, while people have tinkered with more advanced but less robust magical and psychotropic alternatives.
The seed project at CMT was fairly unassuming: improved Matrix marketing and public relations techniques, that’s all. We introduced some spyware code into commercially available online simsense works. The trick was to filter out the emotional track of the simsense recording then use the safety filters common to all sim-players to monitor the natural emotional responses of the subject to different sensory quanta and send that data back to us. What I mean by sensory quanta is the raw elemental building blocks of sensory experience according to Quian-Quiroga theory. The neurological components that the visual cortex breaks an image down into, for example: contrast right angles… fractal leafing… eye motifs, that sort of thing. Not just visual components though: sound, smell, taste, touch, even proprioception can be broken down in a similar way.
As you can imagine, we got a staggering amount of data back in a very short time. You can’t just look for those sensory quanta that produce a strong emotional response- it doesn’t work like that. You have to look for the combinations common to strong responses. That requires some serious data-mining. Serious pattern-finding algorithms. But that’s what we had, and that’s what we did. That gave us a framework in which we could build a psychological profile from a subject’s choice of viewing material, and then tailor a broadcast- any kind of broadcast, not necessarily simsense, to suit that psychological profile.
To cut a long story short, the project was successful. Scarily successful. So we buried it, wrote it off in CMT’s books as a failed line of inquiry, eliminated any potential leaks, informed our friends here at the Lake and quietly began phase 2 from a private facility.
Like I said, the Mindhack agent doesn’t need DNI, doesn’t need trodes, doesn’t need any of that. Of course those things don’t get in the way- and in fact they can speed the process up because the user is accessing so much more information every second, but basically all Mindhack needs is an ordinary Matrix user. At first it’s just following them around, getting a taste for what they like. Before long, it starts experimenting. Subtle changes to their perception of Matrix sites, the buttons they push. Double-checking what buttons it can push to steer them. Once it knows them- bang! It’s got them. It can start to tell them what to like, and what not to like. What to buy, what not to buy. What to do, what not to do. And the subject is totally unaware that anything is happening to them.
It takes time. That time varies. We’ve got some subjects conditioned in less than a day. Others have taken a couple of weeks. In part that’s down to differing levels of Matrix use, but there are also unknown psychological variables that we still need to understand.
Nevertheless, this is powerful stuff. We at the Lake know all too well the kind of trials metahumanity must face in the future. The need for metahumanity to act, at times, with a unity of purpose to stave off disaster. The Mindhack agent is our tool to that end. |