A Cartography of Sighs
What could make the guilty hyperpowerful feel safe with their servants after the world's end began? Nothing short of ownership of their minds, or at least the safeguards of the soft code of designed thoughts in the neural depths of those dangerously near.
They felt safe because they had this code. The VR-neurotech interfaces that had become so ubiquitous by market design and work requirements that they needed not be mandatory had allowed the collection of such information, and the application of such inescapable nudges, that a quiet language of unheard orders had arrived to the asymptotic limit of what such things had always been for.
Thus were servants and serfs made safe in the eyes of their masters by the application of neural engineering through eyes and ears without awareness or consent, the women and men who had built these tools seeing their know-how or careers occasionally crash down into the ever-growing slums, there to be carefully brought to Faraday hovels by present hackers, future criminals, and voluntary subjects of nightmare experiments, probing as such people had always done new languages for new interfaces, seeking the unlocking of new possibilities and the design of new forms of defense and new avenues of attack.
What could make the guilty hyperpowerful feel safe with their servants after the world's end began? Nothing short of ownership of their minds, or at least the safeguards of the soft code of designed thoughts in the neural depths of those dangerously near.