John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“I exhausted that lot weeks ago, Chas!”

Cooper watched this display of spurious bonhomie with clinical detachment until at last Watson handed his empty tea cup to an orderly and returned, his smile fading. “Right, Dr. Cooper. What’s the status?”

Watson was fresh from the armored limo that brought him from Orly. He’d flown in from Sicily, where he’d been weeks overseeing the new security measures on the rebuilt SA Communications Center and Central European Headquarters. He was out of touch with developments here. Klaus, Spengler, and the Board had approved the testing of Larousse’s public-image modifications. But Watson was skeptical.

“It’s worked out lovely in Rome with Serro,” Cooper was saying, lacing his bone-white fingers over his crotch; lacing and unlacing them again. “And you can see we’re getting a crowd response in the upper seventies-plus for Larousse.”

Watson glanced at the crowd-response readout. The graph jiggled up and down as the readings vacillated, but it never went below seventy-five. “Short-term success is very heartening, but sustaining it, especially with the vulnerability to sabotage…” Watson took a deep breath as if preparing for an overwhelming task.

“Well, Klaus thinks he’s got any open ends for sabotage quite under wraps,” Cooper said, fluttering his hands at the security-cam monitors. “And as for long-term responses… Colonel, a crowd, once it’s primed, will react consistently. A crowd is an entity unto itself, don’t you know, especially one this big. It has, well, a general mood to it, a, ah, collective attitude.” Cooper’s stare slipped into the middle distance; he rocked on his feet, riding one of his enthusiasms. “There are streaks of dissent, but most especially a crowd which has come to see someone for patriotic reasons is a trainable entity. You understand, we’re monitoring the crowd responses on a nanodigital grid, unit-by-unit. We’re literally missing nothing. Every twitch of a muscle in their faces; every blink—and blinks are very significant, don’t you know; every shrug, every glaze of an eye, every modulation of tone and throat clearing. We wrap it up into the Receptivity Signals Factor and it is simply a very consistent output—especially with RSF Enhancement.”

“People in a crowd often act as they’re expected to,” Watson objected, “not as they really feel.”

“It’s how they really feel I’m talking about,” Cooper said, flicking dust from a console with a finger that, if you didn’t look closely, seemed white-gloved. “I barely touched on the signals we monitor. Body-heat levels, exhalation rate, body language in forty-two modalities, bioelectric fields collective and individual, perspiration and the hormone traces in its evaporation—that’s one of our very best indicators. We’re really quite thorough.” His tone carried a dry dash of rebuke.

“The cost just doesn’t justify the potential, to my mind,” Watson said.

“It saves money in the long-run.” Cooper’s voice was becoming a little shrill. He blinked rather frequently in his closeted anger, as if he were personally modeling a Response Factor. “Saves money, don’t you see, because it predicts changes in public mood and allows us to suppress or manipulate them before they become militarily costly. The RSF monitor models out the sum total of the RSF factors and does a ninety-eight percent sociological/sociobiological projection.” He sniffed. “We anticipate the crowd’s mood swings—and by extension the public mood swings—well before they come to fruition.”

Watson knew the general principle. Certain RSF readings correspond to strong latent desires in a crowd. To the desire for expression of hostility against outsiders; to the desire for a ritual of racial unification (which might be as simple as a group salute to the flag); the desire for group violence; the desire for reassurance by an appeal to sentimentalism; the desire for paternalistic reassurance; a volatile range of suppressed and psychologically encrypted needs.

Decrypted, RSF readings could warn the speaker, through implants or hidden headsets, when he’s gone too far, if he’s not energetic enough, if he’s said the wrong thing—even before the crowd had seemed to react at all. Cued second-to-second, he’s got the edge, time to compensate, say just the right thing to bring the audience back under control, this right thing calculated by a computer interfaced with “human resource specimens”: high-level speechwriters pressed into service for the Second Alliance, maintained in semiconsciousness, extractors working in their brains to add the human creativity factor to the computer’s notion of charismatic speaking—the computers having analyzed thousands of speeches, correlating crowd reactions.

Larousse was the focus of all this, a dancer on unseen puppet strings. His public appearance was holographically altered, a thin veneer of image superimposed on the real Larousse, or more precisely on his bioelectric field, an image reconstituting, according to computer models and sociological studies, the look and mannerisms of the idealized French Nationalist leader. Instant charisma.

Watson shook his head. “Surely when he moves he’ll go out of phase.”

Cooper sighed theatrically and led Watson to a large screen on the opposite wall; he thumbed a tab, and Larousse’s profile fizzed onto the screen. Larousse was describing France as a great tree, an ancient and primeval tree that reached up into the heavens. But parasites, vines, and insects were sapping the tree’s strength, cutting off the flow of its vitality at the roots. And it is at the roots that this disease must be stopped…

“His movement cues,” Cooper said wearily, “are given to him via small metal nodes implanted just under his skin. They cue him with tiny impulses, little jolts of sensation timed a millisecond ahead. At first his response to this, his movements, were jerky, unnatural, imprecise, but we made it a matter of life and death for him to respond smoothly, and after a few weeks of training it became second nature. It’s all in the head, you know, the attitude. With our enhancement, right down to voice shaping, he’s quite irresistible. I’m overcome by him myself now, when I listen, don’t you know…” Cooper smiled thinly; his almost colorless lips vanished. “He’s come to enjoy it, rather. He imagines it’s all his own invention, the Larousse persona… And he’s quite disoriented when we take him off the cues. That’s all backstage, of course… It’s essentially a new stage of ‘virtual reality’ technology…”

“It would seem simpler just to project a holo onto the stage and animate that—”

“They just don’t look real enough. And he can’t always be appearing on television, not exclusively. There’s something about the physical presence of a man, maybe even something…” Cooper broke off, frowning. Stopping short of suggesting a psychic connection. Crandall didn’t approve: psychic phenomena was the province of demonology.

But Watson knew what he meant. Hitler had been effective in newsreels and would have been effective on television. But for the core of their movement, they needed to get in touch with something animal, something tribal, atavistic, at the heart of the best fascism. And that required physical presence from time to time, however dressed up it might be. “And the cameras are filtered against telltale holo shifts?”

Cooper had had enough. He turned sharply to Watson, snapped, “Ask your man Klaus. He’s made quite sure of every bloody detail. If you’ll excuse me…” And did his best to stride in manful outrage from the room.

Watson snorted as Klaus walked up, chuckling, looking after Cooper. Klaus was a bigger man than Watson, even massively muscled, his hair cut flattop, his short black beard clipped with equal geometric severity, his eyes onyx glittery. He wore the jet uniform of Security staff, and on his shoulder the chrome insignia of its chief: A Christian cross topped with an eye.