skonen_blades (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skonen_blades) wrote2008-05-29 01:12 am
skonen_blades) wrote2008-05-29 01:12 am
Airports
The best way to put them in limbo without alerting them is to put them in an airport.
If we intercept an agent and need to take him offline to dig through his secrets, we’ll put his conscious mind into The Airport. The Airport is a virtual reality structure as large as the continent of Europe. The hallways are long, the escalators are quiet, and it’s populated with constructs of stewards and passengers all rushing along to their destination.
The agent is given a boarding pass with a flight number that is posted on the direction boards. Through busses, terminals, elevators, hallways, check-in desks, security points, delays, re-scheduling, and loops, it’s possible to keep an agent’s mind walking with no suspicion for up to three days.
Something happens to a human mind in an airport. Time becomes meaningless. Connections to other people take on an abstract feel. Everyone feels like they are in the country of In Transit. They are uprooted from home and have become a traveling message, a shipment of themselves on their way to somewhere. They are on their way back or their way there but they are not 'here'.
It’s easy to keep their minds a little foggy about the details. It’s natural.
No alarms go off in their home country's head offices as long as they’re kept conscious. The Airport does the trick. We can go in and perform counter-espionage on their subconscious mind and memories while they blithely look for the proper gate for their flight.
Their mind wanders. They amuse themselves.
It’s only after a few days of delays that they start to suspect. That and trying to have anything resembling a deep conversation with fellow travelers. After they realize that the people in the fake world are about as deep as a puddle, the suspicion starts in and the illusion is generally discovered within a few hours.
It becomes as unstable as a dream at that point and we better be finished our work by then.
We can have them wake up with a hangover in a hotel room and be none the wiser.
tags
If we intercept an agent and need to take him offline to dig through his secrets, we’ll put his conscious mind into The Airport. The Airport is a virtual reality structure as large as the continent of Europe. The hallways are long, the escalators are quiet, and it’s populated with constructs of stewards and passengers all rushing along to their destination.
The agent is given a boarding pass with a flight number that is posted on the direction boards. Through busses, terminals, elevators, hallways, check-in desks, security points, delays, re-scheduling, and loops, it’s possible to keep an agent’s mind walking with no suspicion for up to three days.
Something happens to a human mind in an airport. Time becomes meaningless. Connections to other people take on an abstract feel. Everyone feels like they are in the country of In Transit. They are uprooted from home and have become a traveling message, a shipment of themselves on their way to somewhere. They are on their way back or their way there but they are not 'here'.
It’s easy to keep their minds a little foggy about the details. It’s natural.
No alarms go off in their home country's head offices as long as they’re kept conscious. The Airport does the trick. We can go in and perform counter-espionage on their subconscious mind and memories while they blithely look for the proper gate for their flight.
Their mind wanders. They amuse themselves.
It’s only after a few days of delays that they start to suspect. That and trying to have anything resembling a deep conversation with fellow travelers. After they realize that the people in the fake world are about as deep as a puddle, the suspicion starts in and the illusion is generally discovered within a few hours.
It becomes as unstable as a dream at that point and we better be finished our work by then.
We can have them wake up with a hangover in a hotel room and be none the wiser.
tags
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