John Merckenheimer couldn't sleep that night. He lay flat in his bed with his black sunglasses hiding his weary, open, eyes from the foreign agents surely surveilling him.
John kept thinking back to those loosed tears from earlier. The ones that slipped out when that pink tendril touched him in Albert's apartment.
The response was physical. Definitely physical. It had to be. But what had caused it? Allergies?
If it wasn't physical... if it was an emotional response, John would have to log it in his quarterly self-review. And he knew it would be used against him during promotion considerations.
But it wasn't an emotional response. John didn't have emotional responses. The only time he had really cried was when he exited his mother's womb. And he suffered only a few embarrassing hours as a newborn before life bestowed on him the power to control himself and he never cried again.
It must've been allergies.
But just to be sure, he checked the mood ring.
The Mood Ring was another CIA device: a small ring that changed colors based on a subject's emotional state. It was used most often as an interrogation tool, but had a secondary use as a neurofeedback device for agent emotional-regulation training.
A brief note on agent emotional-regulation training All agents of all respectable three letter agencies were trained to suppress blacklisted emotions like sadness, hopelessness, doubt, fear of enemy, etc, in favor of whitelisted emotions like valor, numbness, and fear of punishment by superiors.
The first step of this emotional-regulation training was sonic regulation. Agent spotify playlists were scourged of all lo-fi hip hop beats (proven to beget listlessness), indie rock (begat softness and melancholy), pop (frivolity), hyper-pop (destroyed the dopamine system creating a general licentiousness), etc, and replaced with heavy metal (strength), horror movie soundtracks (to be later harnessed as servile fear of superiors), mongolian throat singing, gregorian chants (encouraging of overall virtue), etc.
It was no secret that music had a deep and intense effect on emotion, and yet the public seemed to care. The NSA had strong-armed Spotify into conducting an annual data analysis on listening patterns and submitting them an annual report. (Spotify then branded it as a "fun" consumer feature: Spotify Wrapped).
Spotify Wrapped data is the NSA's foremost signal of the emotional distribution of the populace. Should the government wish to alter the distribution slightly, say towards increased fear (helpful for passing defense spending bills and anti-immigration laws), greed (helpful for gdp), or confusion (helpful for forgetting leaked corruption), the NSA simply approaches some bedroom producer with a few thousand monthly listeners and promises them fame and fortune if they make music that adheres to the NSA's supplied scales, modes, and chord progressions. The producers rarely understand music theory and rarely refused. The NSA then used their media propaganda backdoors and thought wave generator to push the artist into a #1 spot on both the physical and mental planes.
The most recent government plant was SOPHIE, pioneer of the lab-grown "hyperpop" genre. SOPHIE hit eighty million listening hours and so destabilized the young liberal psyche that they were rendered completely impotent in stopping Trump's 2016 victory.
Sonic regulation is truly the simplest and gentlest method of population control ever devised.
Anyway, let's move on. We can discuss emotional regulation another time.
The point is, John passed his agent emotional-regulation training with flying colors. His mood ring was grey (indicating numbness, a whitelisted emotion) nearly the entire time. Since he didn't need it, and he was not one for extraneous ornamentation, he usually kept it stashed in his desk drawer. .
But today, on this strange day, he fished it out of the drawer and put it on his ring finger. The glassy screen of the ring began to swirl with deep blues, purples, and dark red pigments.
John gave the ring some time to settle down into grey. The ring startup process could be chaotic.
He waited and waited, but the grey never came.
What was going on? Was the ring defective? Did he need a new one?
John took a deep breath and ordered his thoughts. Then he emptied his mind of them and sought the soft glow of empty contemplation. At first, the only thoughts that approached him were clearly attempts by Russian long-range thought control beams (always at the read for empty-headed agents) to seed silly notions in his open mind. But John had not only passed emotional regulation training, but also psychic defense training, and so these attempts were futile.
But towards the end of his contemplation, he felt a strong urge to go to the local bar. John had only gone to his neighborhood bar twice in his decade long tenure in Midtown, Manhattan. Once on an unsuccessful first date, and once when some over-familiar acquaintance from his hometown was visiting New York and thought it would be fun to "meet up".
The bartender looked at him and smiled.
“One Guinness.” John requested.
“The man wants a Guinness!” The bartender reflected.
John took a seat at the bar. The bar was lively with animated people yelling and laughing. One man sauntered up to John and asked him if he caught the game.
"What game?" John asked, seriously.
"HAH! You're joking right?" The man looked at John in jolly incredulity. But as John kept his serious expression, his expression changed into one of disapproving skepticism, and he sauntered off. "That guys a fucking fed man, who would wear shades in here?" he announced to his friends.
A wealthy looking woman in her 40s came and sat at the bar looking vaguely concerned. She ordered some cocktail and looked around. John looked at her and waved slightly. She immediately turned away from him.
John finished his Guinness and asked the bartender for another one. He seemed to not hear. John asked again. He kept drying cups and didn't respond. He asked again, louder. Nothing. Someone else asked for a beer. The bartender jumped into action. The woman watched the scene intently. John put $10 on the table, got up, and left.
The next morning, John had an idea come to him.
Of course, he could not trust the idea immediately. The NSA had rigorous discernment processes for such ideas.
The first step of this process was to bring the idea to The Thought Filter 3000.
Nowadays, very few of our thoughts and ideas are truly ours. Most of the thoughts streaming into your skull right now are most likely the product of foreign psychotronic manipulation via radio waves. Immense targeted radio waves beamed from the Taimyr tundra mimic the waveforms of human thought.
The US does the same, of course. How else do you think we got countries with intricate, spiritually profound and beautiful art forms borne of civilizational currents spanning millennia to abandon their culture for twelve seasons of the Big Bang Theory? To abandon their kilts and kimonos in favor of Levi's jeans? And not just shift, but to actually then turn against their own culture and see it as backwards and outdated, to see the kilt as kind of goofy, actually. I'll tell you how. The US subsidizes its cultural exports with ample assistance from the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska. Psychotronic thought-form manipulation.
To defend against the growing attack vector of thought-form manipulation, the CIA invented another device: The Thought Filter 3000. The Thought Filter 3000 was a conical helmet made of thick gauge aluminum that an agent could wear on their head. The aluminum protected against radio frequency thought manipulation. That way, the agent would only hear their own thoughts.
John donned The Thought Filter 3000 and closed his eyes. He noticed a pathetic desire towards chocolate that had been tickling him all day (95% of chocolate desires are Russian implants, the goal being chronic subclinical cadmium toxicity in the general population (not enough to kill, but enough to keep us all a bit dull and tired. Add up five or six of these thorns (food dies, organophosphate pesticides, tap water fluoridation) and the GDP loss is non-trivial)).
He also noticed a K-pop song from earlier in the day, blasted from a mildly suspicious Honda Civic-- potential K-culture agent-- that had assaulted him in traffic earlier in the day and drilled into his brain: I'm super shy, super shy, But wait a minute while I make you mine, make you mine... I'm super shy, super shy, But wait a minute while I make you mine, make you mine, finally leave him in peace.
After this, there was was a period of silence as his tranquil mind began to glow softly. Then the candidate idea arose again. It stayed, elaborated fully in his mind eye, then sunk into his chest. John knew that meant the idea was truly his own, and thus ready for stage two testing.
Stage two was the deep state egregore test. Every idea had to be tested for resonance with the deep state egregore, or group-soul.
The deep state egregore, codename MIKE (Morphogenic Intelligence Kernel Experiment), was the organizing force behind all shadow agencies and deep state operatives. If you've ever wondered how such incompetent individuals are able to pull of complex, international, conspiracies requiring immense levels of secrecy and coordination-- it's all thanks to MIKE.
MIKE was largely a black box, and the occult research division would not disclose to anyone how it was created, or how it was trained to be aligned with deep state directives. All John knew was that the process involved menstrual blood and cow skulls (the building janitor had complained to him one night).
MIKE spoke to John in a goblin-y voice.
So. Getting attached to this Albert now are we?
John said nothing. There was no need. MIKE could read all his thoughts.
Were you... were you crying?
John's chest clenched.
No need to get nervous, John. I won't tell anyone. Heh heh heh.
Well. You're framing this as a high-risk incel intervention. Hm. Well I can't deny that it could be a useful strategy. And I don't see it interfering with any of our ongoing conspiracies. Alright, go ahead. Have some fun.
The helmet beeped signaling the session was over. John returned to his desk and began the scheme.