Page 71 of Lone Wolf

36

Weapons of Mass Communication

Evan rose to match Allman, facing him.

Allman sat back down. After a moment, Evan followed suit.

“Why did you rise?” Allman asked.

“Because you did.”

“And you sat for the same reason.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you pick that chair to sit in? Of the three?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. Check under the cushion.”

Evan reached beneath the cushion, feeling crumbs against his knuckles. A slip of paper brushed his fingertips. He pulled it out. It read, Dr. Leigh will sit here.

“Go on,” Allman said, his eyes glittering for the first time with something like life.

Evan checked beneath the two chairs to his right. Neither had a note beneath the cushion. “And I assume there’s not a note beneath the chair itself?”

“Correct. It’s not a parlor trick. I indicated through nonverbal reinforcement—a tip of my head, encouraging eye contact, which chair you were to choose. Magicians call it a classic force.”

“Hardly shocking,” Evan said. “That’s how social cues work.”

“Are you aware that I’ve also conditioned you to blink at twice the rate as when we began this conversation?”

The observation knifed into Evan, the first cut of raw discomfort. Under Jack’s direction at the hand of psychologists, he’d been trained as a child— mercilessly—in psyops. He did not like to lose control of his nonverbal tells, and he rewound his body memory and sixth-sensed that Allman was correct. “I was not.”

“There’s an answer for everything. Every human behavior. You just have to be willing to search for it.” Allman smiled his toad-like smile. “At a certain point, you just sort of know everything there is to know.” He zeroed in on Evan’s expression. “What?”

“I was taught that the point of education is to learn how much you don’t know.”

“Quaint,” Allman said. “And outdated.” His digits were wide at the tips, swollen from water retention. He rubbed each thumb across the prints of the same hand as if checking for oil. “When I was a young man seeking to understand why my mind worked … differently, I visited a neuroscientist who put coils on my head to map my brain and send calming alpha waves into my anterior cingulate cortex, which, it turns out, functions at a near-inhuman speed. And I felt better. But I’m primarily an engineer. So I wanted to connect every step of the input and output. To fill in the space between my brain waves and my new sensory perceptions. So I filled in that space. You can fill in anything if you look hard enough. It’s just a matter of will.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

He breathed out through his nose, folded his hands across his paunch, and sank back into the cushions. He looked frustrated. “I built a brain. But better.”

“Artificial intelligence.”

“A human brain is one point three square feet if you flatten it out. Kind of a circle. Each neural patch, or building block, is a hundred thousand neurons laid six neurons thick. I built a hundred thousand neural patches adjacent to one another. So I have a hundred thousand patches of a hundred thousand neurons in a chip the size of half your pinky fingernail that is programmed to run full speed all the time as opposed to the ten percent humans get from their brains when they’re not looking at TikTok and eating snack cakes.”

“And it’s capable of filling in the gaps?”

“Yes.”

“Which gaps?”

“All of them.”

The words lingered for a moment.