Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) Read Online Free

a minute after I got out of the car and let my surroundings seep into my senses, the inputs dropping through functions into outputs, cause and effect. Everything fell within error margins, mundane and safe.
    I took one last look around before dismissing whatever vibe I’d had as a subliminal outlier and climbing the outside stairs to the heavy door stenciled with “Arthur Tresting, Private Investigations.” I pushed it open into a pleasant, professional office. At the front desk, a young woman in a bright ruffled blouse looked up and gave me a huge smile—a genuine one, as far as I could tell.
    “Cas! Good to see you! Arthur’s not in yet; d’you want to hang out and wait?”
    Pilar Velasquez was Arthur and Checker’s office manager. Almost as short as I was but quite a bit heavier, she was charming and cheerful and one of those people who basically personified the word “cute.” She’d cut her shiny dark hair into a sharp bob recently; it suited her.
    “Actually, I came to see you,” I said, pulling up a chair across from her desk and dropping into it.
    “Oh!” She placed the papers she’d been reading in a neat pile on her desk so she could give me her full attention. “What’s up?”
    “You still have all the hacked Arkacite files, don’t you?”
    “Yup. Arthur and Checker never believe in throwing anything out, you know. Thank goodness for computers! Do you know how many file cabinets I’d need if—”
    “You mentioned something,” I said. “A couple years ago. That Arkacite was working on technology to help law enforcement.”
    Pilar’s eyebrows turned to squiggles; I could practically see her rewinding her memory. Pilar had been an administrative assistant at Arkacite Technologies before I’d accidentally gotten her fired in the midst of a huge battle with the company over their AI. Since Arkacite had been an evil tech conglomerate out to eat the world, and since Arthur and Checker paid her better and didn’t sexually harass her, I was pretty sure she didn’t hold it against me.
    “It was something about frequency generation that would break up mob violence,” I said. “You mentioned it when—”
    “Oh! Right. I know what you’re talking about. The Signet Devices.”
    “The what?”
    “Signet. That was the project name—code name, maybe; I don’t know what they would’ve called it if it’d ever gone into development.”
    “Can you give me all the records on it?”
    “I’m not sure we have them all?” she said. “That project was pretty secret, and we didn’t grab the stuff behind the military firewalls, because it wasn’t, you know, necessary at the time. But it might be easier for me just to tell you anyway—I was in on that one. I mean, not in on in on, but they needed someone to keep records through the whole fiasco so they had me sign a bunch of NDAs and take minutes at all the meetings. What do you want to know?” She gave me another big smile, as if she lived to violate Arkacite nondisclosure agreements.
    “Okay,” I said. I’d still have to get the specs somehow, but at least Pilar could give me a rundown. “So what did it do? Calm people down or something? Make them less aggressive?”
    She cocked her head to the side and thought for a minute. “Not quite. I mean, that’s the result, sure—that’s what they were going for as an end, I think. But what it really did was break down the, the—I’m not remembering all the names now; they had a lot of social psychologists come in who used a lot of academic language about it; I’ll send you the files we’ve got, but—oh! ‘Deindividuation,’ that was the term. It breaks people out of deindividuation. Which in practice meant—”
    “They were looking to disrupt mob mentalities,” I guessed.
    “Yes! Or at least, that was a big part of it. The frequency that gets emitted—or something—it stops the brain feeling, well, you know how people can get in crowds? They lose control, they get all overwhelmed