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

and sucked into the group, they get some kind of feedback loop from it…uh, ‘crowd psychology,’ that’s another thing they kept saying; I remember now. But it wasn’t just about angry mobs—anything where people feel swallowed into the masses and lose any sense of personal responsibility or, um, personhood, I guess. They found a frequency or something that stops that from happening. The idea was that when they get swept up in those situations, people do all sorts of awful things they wouldn’t ordinarily if they’d just been able to think about it.”
    I thought about the riots LA had suffered. A lot of people who weren’t ordinarily violent, escalating into layer upon layer of savage destruction. From what Pilar was saying, the Signet Devices could stop such chaos before it ever sparked.
    They might be able to calm war zones. Or take down cults. Or, heck, even undercut the power of schoolyard bullies.
    “The police and military were all sorts of interested in it,” Pilar continued. “ Really interested. Like, Arkacite had a bajillion meetings with important government people; those guys were throwing money at them.”
    “So why isn’t it out there?” This sounded like exactly what I wanted. But she’d called the project a fiasco…“What went wrong?”
    “They couldn’t calibrate it right,” explained Pilar. “No matter how much money the Defense Department piled in. It turns out people’s brains are real sensitive to it. Real sensitive. Either it was too low to work, or too high and—well, apparently it made the test subjects too individual, if that makes sense. Made ’em distrust each other and start fighting because of that, instead of mobbing together. So the point was to stamp out aggression, and it ended up causing aggression for a different reason. And there was a sweet spot where it worked, but they could never maintain it reliably, and they especially couldn’t do it evenly over a large area.”
    Hmm. “Do we at least have any of their testing data?”
    “You know, I think we might,” Pilar said. “Or, well, we should? When I was keeping records for them, I didn’t have clearance for the technical details or anything, but I could see all the data and reports, so that probably is buried in the stuff we have. Checker copied over the whole Arkacite mainframe; he’s a ridiculous packrat that way.” She smiled fondly. “It’ll take me a while to look through, but if we’ve got it I’ll send it your way. What do you want it for?”
    “Calibration’s just math,” I said. “I bet I can figure it out.”
    “Wait, you want to build one?” she squeaked.
    “No,” I said. “I want to build a lot of them. Why do you think I was asking you all this?”
    “What for?”
    “The crime in the city lately,” I said. “I’m looking for a way to axe it, and this sounds like more than a good start.” The possibilities kept expanding in my head. Combating deindividuation would potentially be a sweeping blow against gangs and organized crime, at the very least. I thought of Pourdry’s goons and their blind loyalty and was angry all over again. Devices like these might not be able to stop someone like Pourdry himself, but if they gutted his organization, how powerful would he be then? “Let’s see how brave these assholes are without their armies to hide behind.”
    “You mean you want to put these things around LA?” Pilar’s face stretched itself into a bizarre combination of incredulity and horror. “Cas, don’t take this the wrong way, but that is a terrible idea!”
    “Why? I’m not going to do it unless I can get the calibration right, which I bet I can.”
    “They barely did any human testing!” she protested. “I don’t even know if it’s something people could take long-term. You could make things way worse—”
    “And I could make ’em way better,” I said.
    She leaned away from me, shaking her head over and over. “It’s too risky. This is so dangerous.