Connected, Inc.

Chapter Four

At this point, you might be wondering when I'm gonna get to the point of this report. This isn't about the car crash, as you know. But in order to appreciate the full scope of what was happening and why it was happening, you've got to understand the state Moynacorp was in at the time. There was a perfect storm of problems growing over my head and I wasn't even aware of it.

In my own defense, I was busy. Pitch season had begun, and the city's entrepreneurs were preparing to engage with and against each other--new and old, startup and established. The Moynahan Corporation was involved with some of the conferences and competitions, sponsoring some and offering support where we could. It wasn't so long since we'd been where they are now, and it was only with the help of a huge number of people that Moynacorp grew into what it is and transition from enterprise manufacturing to software and exponential technology, especially with a propulsion engineer at the helm.

Project Dreamscape was a combination of the two. Even from the start, its applications were vast, and we're still finding new uses for it. Its original purpose was, as its name suggests, to induce a controlled dream state. The experience is similar to virtual reality in practice, but can be applied to the mind in various states of consciousness. It's been used as a substitute for anesthesia, for coma patients, for therapeutic purposes, even as remote communications. It generates some of the most unique data about how the human brain works that has ever been gathered.

I had been working on Dreamscape for nearly a decade, but it isn't my oldest project. Like everything else I've embarked on since high school, it was created in service to VASHTI. From my brief "hacker" days right on up to Epsilon, it's all been about collecting data. Digitizing the human experience. Making it palatable to a greater intelligence.

So you can probably imagine my excitement when the Internet of Things burst into existence. Talk about a carbon footprint--these days, everyone has a digital footprint as well, the habits and tendencies they develop around how they interact with technology. Every data set tells a story. Every data set is a person.

How better to teach technology to understand humans than in its own language?

Most of this technological manifesto is well known to the general public and to the media, in broad strokes. My motives actually run much deeper than anyone outside my immediate circle knows, and I'm endeavoring to explain it here, because it's central to everything that happened, and it's why I'm recording this at all. I need you to understand why this is important and why I've done all I have--because if you're listening to this or reading this, you've probably found yourself at the precipice of one hellhole of a moral and ethical dilemma.

So I'm gonna go back to doughnuts.

The next morning, Tina was waiting for me at my office. "Good morning, Christian," she said as I walked in, a warm smile on her face. She's a brunette with sharp green eyes, and she looks like a supermodel. That's to be expected when the people designing her synthetic body are a bunch of reclusive geeks.

Admittedly, I was on that team.

"Good morning, Tina. What's the news?" I asked.

"Alain brought doughnuts again," Tina said. "King cake-flavored ones. But Legal and Public Relations are holding a full staff meeting, and the attendees ate what the regular office staff did not."

"That's a pity," I said while opening my office door. The combined smells of almond, cinnamon, and pure sugar punched me in the nose as I walked in.

"Which is why Alain asked me to leave six of the doughnuts in your office ahead of time," Tina said.

"Lesson of the day: let Tina finish explaining," I said. "Is all the news this good?"

"That's all the news, so yes," Tina answered.