Inside, the place was grubby. It looked like the last occupant had been an ethnic bakery. The floor was filthy, but there was still the faint whiff of bread. She locked the door behind them, then went to a mirror behind the counter. She pulled out a hankie and used it to push on the mirror without leaving finger marks---it popped out an inch. She pulled it open all the way on a hinge, which revealed a steel door with a keypad. She tapped out a code into it, turned the knob, and, the two went in. She pulled the mirror behind her closed, then shut the steel fire door.
“The Old Ones own a couple places like this in Toronto. It suits their purposes to have real estate that can be used as ‘pop ups’ whenever they start a special project and need to create a workspace.” The room was clean and had workbenches with stools around most of the periphery. There were various computers plus what seemed to be a small, but well-supported video studio with a large green wall sitting at one side.
A couple people were working at terminals. One of them came over. He was tall and thin, had a short, full-face black beard, dark heavy-framed glasses, a thick head of curly dark hair. He was wearing birkenstocks with socks, khaki slacks, a denim shirt, and, a grey, unbuttoned cardigan. “Hey, good to see you. Is this your protege?”
Sally pre-empted Nate’s response with a brief statement directed at him, “We don’t use names here for security reasons.”
She turned back to the tall, thin man. “Yeah. I brought him here so he could learn a bit about what you are doing. Fill him in on the project---no picky details, just the broad over-view.”
The thin man turned to Nate and gave him a spiel that had obviously been given enough times before to come naturally. “OK. One of the big intermediate-level problems our society is facing is the decline in civic cohesion. We have increasing numbers of people who don’t believe in science, journalism, anything the government says, etc. That in itself would be a problem, but they do believe in some pretty nonsensical things instead---and that leads to behaviour that is a big problem for everyone else.”
“They don’t get vaccinated because they think that it’s conspiracy by Bill Gates or lizards from space or something else to inject them with chips that track their every movement or make you sterile or cause autism or whatever. As a result, diseases that should be relatively easy to control have become more and more difficult to deal with.”
“Even worse, small, but significant numbers of people are becoming radicalized to the point where they are willing to commit violence. We have people shooting up synagogues, driving trucks into crowds, planting bombs in public areas, etc. We have been studying what sort of people are most susceptible to this sort of radicalization, how it’s done, and, trying to come up with a way we can inoculate them to prevent this from happening.”
“We think that the problem is what are called ‘charismatic influencers’. That is, there are a small number of people who have the ability to inspire significant numbers of very committed individuals to do what they say. Mostly they do this just to raise money. But among the people with these abilities is another smaller set who---for one reason or another---are trying to get their followers to do acts of terrorism.”
“We believe that what makes someone an influencer is a specific type of behaviour that works on a specifically susceptible subset of the human population. The people we’ve been studying do this sort of thing subconsciously, but we think we can train individuals and use technology to do it pretty much on command.”
Sally joined in at this point. “We want you to learn how to use this technique to make you an influencer too. The hope is that if you are good enough at it, you might be able to ‘counter attack’ those specific influencers that seem to be most interested in programming lone wolf terrorist attacks.”
“Why don’t you take us into the studio booth to show us where you are at with your technology?”
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