Mercury Revolts (28 page)

Prowse shrugged again.

“And then, after the
criminals,” she continued, “you move on to people accepting food stamps or
living in public housing. And again nobody complains, because after all, you
have to make sure these people aren’t taking advantage of the system. You don’t
want to be subsidizing a bunch of drug dealers. If you’ve got a tracking chip
in their heads, you can see exactly where they are at any time of the day, and
who they’re associating with.”

“Hey, I fought against those
requirements!” protested Prowse.

“Of course you did,” said
Tiamat. “You liberals push to get these programs in place, and then the
conservatives push for ‘accountability.’ The conservatives don’t have the votes
to get rid of the program, and the liberals don’t have the votes to override
the demands for these additional restrictions. And just like that, you’ve got
several million people who have effectively ceded their rights to the
government in return for a little cash or security. It’s beautiful. And once
you’ve managed to convince the public that people who are accepting ‘public
assistance’ need to be tracked by the government, you’ve got everybody by the
balls. After all, isn’t Medicare ‘public assistance’?
Or
veterans’ benefits?
Or Social Security?
Or
federally subsidized student loans? Or corporate tax breaks? Practically
everybody in this country is on some kind of ‘public assistance’ if you define
the term broadly enough. Hell, you could argue that federal highways are a form
of public assistance. All these damned freeloaders need to be tracked!”

“Hmm,” said Prowse. “I think
you’re oversimplifying things a bit. And in any case, I assure you that if I
had known about this whole ‘mind control’ program you’ve got going, I’d have
fought it every inch of the way.”

“Oh, that’s adorable,”
gushed
Tiamat. “You’re fine with tracking people everywhere
they go, but you draw the line at actually
controlling
them, because
that would be
wrong
. God, I love you ethical types. Where were your
ethics when that nuclear bomb nearly took out Grand Rapids? Were they out sick
that day?”

“That was not my fault!”
Prowse snapped. “Michelle said she’d remove me from power and find another
president willing to go along with it. It would have happened no matter what I
did!”

“OK, good,” said Tiamat with
a smile. “So you know where you stand.”

Prowse paled as he realized
what he’d just told Tiamat: that he’d do anything she asked as long as he
remained in power.

“So what’s your end game,
Tiamat?” asked Prowse bitterly. “Who else do you want to implant these chips
in?”

“Everybody,” said Tiamat.

Prowse frowned. “Now, when
you say everybody,” he said, “you mean…”

“
Everybody
,” Tiamat
said again.
“Every man, woman and child in America.
And then the rest of the world.”

“What, you’re just going to
start grabbing people off the street?”

“No, no,” said Tiamat. “It
has to be done in an orderly fashion. It’s one thing to force something like
this on prisoners and welfare queens, but when you start picking on Joe Middle
Class, you’re going to get some pushback. That’s when you ratchet up the threat
level, to dramatize the consequences of not tracking everybody. Michelle’s
already done a pretty good job of that with her little demonstration in Grand
Rapids. Scare the shit out of everybody and then tell them you can keep them
safe if they submit to the very minor inconvenience of having a tiny little tracking
chip implanted in their skulls. I mean, who could argue against that? Why
wouldn’t you want the government to know exactly where you are at all times? If
you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of.”

Danton Prowse frowned. “But
the mind control chips… Is that really necessary? It seems like Michelle and
Gabrielle were doing a pretty good job manipulating public opinion without
resorting to such extreme tactics.” It was true; between Michelle’s fabricated
security threats and Gabrielle’s massaging of the media, mind control was
almost redundant. Prowse had been particularly impressed by the way Gabrielle
had managed to dredge up “experts” to defend whatever absurd and illegal policy
the Prowse administration happened to be pushing at the time. Often these
people were major stakeholders in defense or security companies, or they were
officials from the Babcock administration who had been thoroughly discredited
years earlier. Some were bona fide war criminals. In many cases, they were all
three. These supposed “experts” would banter back and forth with some fringe
journalist or pointy-headed lawyer from the ACLU, the moderator would intone
that it was definitely “a serious issue on which people had some strong
opinions,” and then cut to a commercial featuring a lizard selling car
insurance.

“The problem,” said
Tiamat,
“is that public opinion is a capricious and
unpredictable beast. It requires a constant effort to keep people worried about
inconsequential issues and unconcerned with important matters. And while it’s
true that most people are sheep, easily led and controlled, there’s always a
fringe element out there, stirring up trouble. Like those guys running that
BitterAngels.net site. Since the Grand Rapids incident, the traffic on that
site has soared a hundredfold. With the right catalyst, a few dedicated,
independent-thinking individuals can get the sheep to look up. And once that
happens, it’s going to take more than a few press conferences and cable news
appearances to smooth things over. Of course, you’ve already made great inroads
into the fringe element by chipping felons, the poor, and people committed to
mental institutions. But there’s always a threat from those people who are
right on the edge of sanity. The ones who manage to stay out of any serious
trouble, but who don’t quite fit in with the sheep.
Those
are the people
we need to get to. But there’s no simple way of doing that without chipping
everybody.”

“So, what
now?”
Prowse asked.

“It will be done in stages,
of course,” said Tiamat. “We start with Grand Rapids. Chip everybody in the
city. And then, when that program is a smashing success, we’ll roll it out to
some of the other ‘high-threat’ cities.”

“And when you say that it
will be a smashing success, you mean…”

“I mean we get a bunch of
locals who had been opposed to the chips to go on national television and tell
everybody how wrong they were, and how much safer they feel now that everybody
in the city is chipped. This is the beauty of a mind-control program. The most
vocal opponents suddenly become strident supporters.”

“And you don’t think anyone
will see through that?”

“Sure, some people will. But
whoever complains the loudest will be next in line for chip implantation.
Eventually we’ll have silenced every critic either by directly controlling them
through the chip or through the power of sheer intimidation. Either way,
dissent is silenced. After we chip the residents of a handful of key cities,
the tide of public opinion will have turned. But we’ve got to do it fast,
before any organized resistance can form.”

Prowse sighed heavily. “And
you’re sure this is going to work? That we’ll be able to get most of the
country chipped before people realize what’s going on?”

“Absolutely,” Tiamat said.
“There’s only one loose end. And that’s being taken care off as we speak.”

Chapter Thirty-seven
           
 

Costa
Rica; August 2016

Gamaliel
and his team had just gotten into position when he received word that Tiamat’s
coup had been successful. Michelle and every angel and demon loyal to her had
fled Washington, and Tiamat and her agents now held the executive branch. Soon
they’d begin the process of chipping everyone in the U.S. The only weak point
in the plan was that Balderhaz was still at large. If anyone could throw a
wrench in Tiamat’s plan, it was Balderhaz—which was why Gamaliel and his team
of a dozen combat-trained demons were about to abduct Balderhaz and drag him to
the Mentaldyne facility in Utah. Tiamat hoped that Balderhaz could be put to
work designing weapons for her, but at the very least he’d be negated as a
threat.

Gamaliel wasn’t sure what
Balderhaz could do to interfere with Tiamat’s plan at this point, but Tiamat
wasn’t taking any chances after all the work she’d done to get this far. The
only reason she’d suggested the MEOW device in the first place, some two
hundred and thirty years earlier, was that she was fairly certain she could
come up with a way around it. She was right, but it had taken a bit longer than
she’d expected: it wasn’t until the advent of neural implant chips in the early
twenty-first century that she’d been able to devise a way to block the MEOW
device’s emissions.

Tiamat had founded Mentaldyne
in the late 1990s, when the technology was still cutting edge and the original
MEOW device was still in place. The destruction of the MEOW device on September
11, 2001 had been a serious setback, and she had been on the verge of shutting
down the whole enterprise: there was no point to devising an override for a
weapon that no longer functioned. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that the
chips had potential for uses far beyond blocking the MEOW emissions.

The chips worked by tapping
into the brain stem and sending a neural signal that was essentially the mirror
image of the MEOW emissions. Like noise-canceling headphones, the chip
counteracted the frequency of the debilitating neural impulses caused by the
MEOW device, allowing the chipped angel to function normally within the range
of the MEOW device.

But if you can send one sort
of neural signal, Tiamat reasoned, you should be able to send others as well.
Specifically, you should be able to override the signals sent by the brain to
the body, to get the individual to do something they didn’t actually want to
do. (Initially the testing of the chips had been on angels, as humans weren’t
affected by the MEOW device, but for the mind control feature, Mentaldyne
started with mice and worked their way up to dogs, cats and monkeys, and,
finally, human beings.) At first the signals sent through the chips were simple
motor movement, like “raise your right hand.” The human trials went better than
anyone expected: not only could the subject be forced to raise his right hand
against his will; the subject was actually convinced that raising his right
hand was
his idea
. Receiving countervailing neural transmissions at the
brainstem level was so confusing to the brain that the brain reacted by
rationalizing the end result as borne of its own intention. The subject would
vehemently insist that although he had originally intended not to raise his
hand, he had subsequently changed his mind. No matter what contrary evidence
was presented, the subject remained blind to the obvious fact that his mind had
been changed for him, vehemently insisting that he had raised his hand of his
own volition.

It was a small step from that
point to actually inserting intentions and preferences into the subject’s mind.
One man, who had a life-long aversion to cantaloupe, was convinced that
cantaloupe was now his favorite food in the entire world. He drove directly
from the testing facility to a local farmer’s market, where he bought
sixty-eight ripe cantaloupes and ate nothing else for the next three weeks. One
woman was converted from Judaism to Islam. An Oakland Raiders fan was convinced
to root for the 49ers.

With a few hundred of these
chips implanted in the skulls of influential individuals, Tiamat could rule the
world. The problem, of course, was that the people she most wanted to
control—the rich and powerful—were the least likely to submit to having a chip
implanted. Mentaldyne had a hard enough time finding vagrants who would go
along with it—and succeeded in this only by virtue of cash bribes and blatant
lies about what the chips actually did.

But the increased interest in
security after 9/11 gave her an idea: she’d have Mentaldyne add a tiny radio
transmitter to the chip and market them as tracking devices. Mentaldyne’s first
contract was with a supplier of veterinarian supplies, who marketed them as a way
of preventing little Fido or Fluffy from running away. Not long after that,
some of the more conservative states like Texas and Alabama began implanting
them in prisoners. Danton Prowse, who had to work hard to overcome the
impression that he had been “soft on crime” when he was governor of
Connecticut, gave in to an advisor’s suggestion that he support a nationwide
Federal Felon Tracking Program. That advisor, of course, had been a demon—one
of Lucifer’s agents whom Tiamat had managed to turn.

So what had started out
simply as a means of circumventing the MEOW device had turned into a
full-fledged secret mind control program. There were two different types of
chips: the ones implanted in angels and the ones implanted in humans. They
differed only in the respect that the angel chips included the anti-MEOW
feature. Both types of chips had the RFID and the mind control
functionality—although Tiamat neglected to mention this to her minions. She
insisted that the chips that were being implanted in her demonic underlings
were solely for protection against the MEOW device, and that the mind control
and tracking functionality had been disabled. Whether any of them actually
believed her was a function of how well they knew her.