SF in The City Anthology by Joshua Wilkinson Read Free Book Online Page B

of them inside her skull. “Let me guess, I’ll suddenly get a tumor or something?”
                  “Killing you would be a rather stupid and dangerous method,” Og exhaled a puff of smoke dramatically. “The nanoids carry beta-amyloid proteins, which form plaque around brain cells. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, you will have a serious case of Alzheimer’s before you are even twenty-five.”
                  “If that’s your plan, why not just kill me?”
                  Og put on another one of his malicious smiles. “The death of a famous actress would demand further investigation. Your disappearance will spark rumors, like you ran off with your boyfriend, or some creeper kidnapped you. Instead we are going to silence you in plain sight. With your memory affected, people will blame your condition on drug use. Everybody knows charactors are under a lot of pressure. Maybe you couldn’t take the lifestyle anymore and downed a little too much ephemerol? In short, your death would tip suspicious parties off, but your fall from grace will make the tabloid sites for a few weeks before quickly vanishing.”
                  “Why do you want to control those peoples’ minds anyway?” Patty had resigned herself to her own fate by this point.
                  “I always wanted to deliver a villainous monologue,” Og said wryly.
                  “If I am going to be so forgetful in the near future,” Patty looked at her enemies in defiance, “you might as well tell me everything.”
                  “Alright,” Og put his feet up on the kotatsu  in front of him. “As you have probably realized by now, Central Authority has been tapping peoples’ minds for some time, collating data from the emotions and mental commands posted on the mind net. Of course, we have our fair share of enemies, and they would possess serious leverage if proof existed for our surveillance. My bosses need to make government supervision of the human mind public as soon as possible. After all, if people gladly hand up to us the power to spy on them, are we really in the wrong?”
                  “That’s a twisted way of thinking,” Patty muttered.
                  “We just needed an excuse for surveillance,” Og took another puff on his cigar and continued. “When people watch your upcoming documentary, the scene where a lion kills a cow will emit the proper frequency of light, which will activate the nanomachines in the food and drinks, which the audience members will have had time to consume. As you will recall, Sovereign Cinema is only one of thirteen theaters in the entire city that requires the purchase of food and drink for admission.”
                  “What happens when the nanoids are activated?”
                  Og’s nasty grin returned. “They will target neurons specifically related to fear and anger. All at once, mass hysteria will break out amongst the audience, followed by violence. When the official story hits the mind net, the suggestion will be that humanity has grown too arrogant and forgotten the dangers of our own thoughts. A few more staged acts of ‘bestialism’ will convince people that something is wrong enough with the human condition to warrant surveillance. We will be there to protect them from themselves.”
    ***
                  Patty. Patty. Patty . This young charactor could only focus on that name and try to hold onto it. At the moment, she was in a Central Authority VTOL, though she didn’t remember what these kinds of vehicles were called. Og Husher had gone overboard with the Alzheimer’s ploy. Patty Plattson could remember barely anything from her past. What had she been doing that night? Did she have a history “characting?”
                  One nasty memory made its way to the surface, as she looked out the VTOL’s