MIKEL J. WISLER

He looked like a brainless oaf, smiling so widely his molars showed, but he could hardly help himself. Trisha’s effect on him. Plus, she always wanted to meet in person. Impeccably dressed in a low-cut blouse and slacks, her silky blond hair flowing down her shoulders, she strode in with an airy ease, making Gustavo wonder if she learned how to glide rather than walk in those high heels. He sent a command to search the web for new high heal tech which allowed the wearer unnatural smoothness in their gait. His brain implant logged the command. His desktop at his apartment started combing the web for him. Despite being connected to local Wi-Fi, he didn't want any distractions. Best to delegate his curiosity. He would check it later.

 

She smiled as she took the seat across from him in the quaint coffee shop a few blocks from his D.C. apartment. Gustavo kept smirking like a moron.

 

“Thanks for meeting, Gus,” she said.

 

“Any time,” he answered.

 

“How are things?”

 

“Good. I mean, aside from the glitches in the last trial.”

 

“Well,” she leaned in, “I’m here to help.”

 

He made a conscious effort to maintain eye contact and not glance down at the subtle cleavage revealed by the cut of Trisha’s blouse.

 

“I appreciate it,” Gus said. “Were the targeting parameters the only issue?”

 

Trisha nodded and sighed, “Someone in marketing messed up data entry.”

 

“Oh, I see. Thought you guys had a pretty thorough customer personas developed, and the geofencing was pinging several decent fits. But it was as if the algorithm was looking for an absolute 100% fit and not finding it. I’m still up for diving into the code to try to open that up more.”

 

“No need.” Trisha shook her head.

 

“Just want to make sure I can deliver.”

 

“We’ve seen your work and we’re impressed. Love what you did for a certain energy drink a few months ago.”

 

“Thanks—wait,” Gus frowned for the first time. “You… know about that?”

 

Trisha gave him a broad, warm smile. “Who do you think recommended you?”

 

Gustavo swallowed.

 

Trisha reached out and touched his arm and whispered. “Gus, we’re all friends here. It’s okay. You know how it is. The old duffs in the Senate and Congress don’t get how tech works. It evolves too rapidly for them. Laws either run decades behind the curve or jump way out of line and over-regulate everything to the point of strangling entrepreneurs, such as yourself.”

 

Gustavo swallowed again, but this time because of the warmth of her soft hand on his arm. He needed to get his shit together. She was a client. She gazed at him with earnest eyes, reflecting her tone. Tricia had a point about the over regulation. In the past six years, new laws managed to kill off three major tech companies after they became unable to play by the randomly amended and seemingly arbitrary rules.

 

“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” he managed.

 

“Let me get you the updated personas,” she said. “Do you mind disconnecting from local Wi-Fi during the transfer? Paranoid precaution my boss insists on.”

 

She rolled her eyes with a smirk. Gustavo disabled all wireless communication with a thought. His mind became still without the background connections. The jazz tunes in the coffee shop become tinny and thin now that the enhanced musical experience for augmented customers became unavailable to him.

 

Trisha reached into her purse and pulled out a vial of lipstick. Except, when she screwed off the top, no matching red wax to what she wore on her lips protruded from the tube. Instead, it appeared empty. She slid the middle finger on her left hand into the tube and then pulled it out. On the fingertip now rested a small, flexible memory chip.

 

“You ready?” She said, holding up her left hand.

 

Gustavo leaned forward, tilting his head down and to his left so she could have access to the touch interface of his implant right behind his right ear. Trisha leaned in as well, reaching out to place her finger with the chip right on the implant. The data transfer started automatically. Gustavo breathed in the vanilla scent of Trisha’s perfume. From this angle, he had a wonderful view down the front of Trisha’s blouse, which he was powerless to avoid.

 

#

 

Even as he walked back to his apartment, he began checking through the new data from Trisha. He kept his wireless connections off for the moment to keep himself distraction free for most of the walk. The morning air around him grew stickier as he walked, summer arriving at last. As he approached his block, he opened the connection to send commands to his workstation at his apartment. Despite his ad blocker, a sudden urge for the pho noodle chain two blocks north hit him. The taste and smell flooded his senses, though he knew this happened strictly in his brain and contradicting his body’s desire for something cold to drink.

 

Gustavo chuckled. These noobs were going to get busted if they weren’t careful.

 

He headed into his red brick building and up to the 4th floor where he lived. His door unlocked as he approached and he slid into his studio apartment, where he kicked off his shoes and dropped onto the chocolate couch. This week’s selection of wall art updated and appeared for him. The implant took care of providing his eyes with the augmented reality paintings for his otherwise bare, beige walls. Apparently, it was a Van Goh week.

 

Time to run a new trial.

 

He sent the mental command to have his custom designed ad distribution app—more like, reverse engineered without all the clumsy coding and government-mandated limitations—to be displayed on one of the three large screens at his sit-stand desk opposite the couch. This app and his ability to keep it a step ahead of the law got him the clients willing to pay well and not the shit jobs his buddies got through the socials. On the second screen, he opened the new data. On the third, he cranked up some EDM.

 

He dropped the new data into his app and ran a quick make sure it passed all the crucial input markers to run an effective campaign. When it passed with flying colors, he double-checked the agreed-upon geofencing regions, the targeted physical areas where the ad would transmit to augmented users once they entered the range. The info had changed, and he liked to make sure his app recognized all the new incoming data before he began a new campaign.

 

Time for a new run. He sat up and stared at his screens.

 

“Let’s do this,” he said with a satisfied smirk as he sent the mental command to run the program.

 

Now, the waiting game.

 

He sat back and sighed. Not much to do now, but wait until the program started pinging the right personas in the selected geographic areas. But the pitiful engagement at each run continuously troubled him. Trisha insisted the errors were due to the faulty customer personas. That could certainly do it.

 

Trisha. Gustavo couldn’t stop thinking about Trisha. He knew better than to get fixated. Bad enough with any client. But a secretive client? Hell, she was the face of an unnamed client willing to pay major money to circumvent laws against direct neurological advertising. Bad move getting infatuated. Once the job was done, he wouldn’t see her again for some time. Zero chance her employer would want to risk running more campaigns again so quickly. 

 

He pulled up a mental browser in incognito mode and ran a search for Trisha again. He got nothing. Trisha was not her real name, obviously. Not exactly a surprise. A lot of his clients didn’t want to use their real names. 

 

Two hours later, when his app got a hit and deployed the neural ad, Gustavo sat up and watched with relief. It was working. Maybe all the personas simply needed to leave their workplaces and hit the right areas. But when another hour passed without a single other hit, he grew worried. Had Trisha given him more faulty personas?

 

Three more hours passed before he got a hit again.

 

He sent Trisha a text message to Trisha’s secure line.
    

Gus: New run is 6 hours in. Only two hits. Are you sure these personas are legit?

 

Trisha: Positive. Just very specific. Keep up the great work.

 

Gustavo sighed. They were spending serious money on this, but satisfied with a low hit rate? Yet, if they were happy, what did it matter? he tried to reassure himself.

 

Being a creature of curiosity, he pulled up the customer the personas from Trisha and ran a report. But that resulted in nothing out of the ordinary, which he expected. So, he drilled down further.

 

Customer personas served as stand-in for a general sense of an ideal customers. You could keep it general (i.e., males between 20 and 40 years of age) and guarantee you advertised to people with absolutely no interest in your product. The more specific you got (i.e., females in their 20s with designer brand implants and active Yoga studio memberships) the better your hit rate turned out.

 

Trisha’s personas appeared fairly detailed. And she provided plenty of them—way too much to run through manually. An algorithm with clear rules must have generated all these personas. But with so many, why the low hit rate?

 

He pulled the most recent report back up. The numbers balanced precisely between male, female, and non-binary personas. He hadn’t given it much thought before, but who had a product these days with such balanced appeal? Even bottled water needed to be specific about their marketing. Very specific. The days of blasting mass market ads out to millions of people with no clue about them or how relevant the product or timing of the ad was to their situation lay in the past. Something felt off to Gustavo, seeing this level of balance.

 

Next, he checked the age range. It too balanced evenly across adult age ranges. Race specs matched population proportions. Where was the unique demographic for their product? Granted, he didn’t even know the nature of their product. Best to keep it that way. He avoided asking too many questions. Given the nature of the work he did, which often landed slightly that side of legal, clients got scared away if he started asking too many questions. And he got it. Unlike old TV shows where an undercover cop showed up wearing a wire, Gustavo was the wire. He just wasn’t a cop.

 

He considered leaving things alone. But he felt the nagging concern that he might be blamed for the low hit rate and that Trisha's boss would refuse to pay, making him consider leaving things alone. He pulled up a customer persona and examined the data. It seemed so... plain.

 

This one was for a white male in his 30s, average income, standard interests, nothing particularly unique. Then something caught his eye. Finally, something specific. This profile specified the ad must target white males in their 30s who... had attended Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana?

 

One of his gaming buddies graduated from Notre Dame. That was where she met her partner, who attended Saint Mary’s, an all-women college nearby.

 

“What the hell?” He muttered.

 

That one detail rendered the otherwise very broad persona utterly useless. Unless the persona specified a transgender individual who had transitioned after college, this profile had no match in the real world. He checked to be sure.

 

“Nope,” he muttered. “Why the hell did you guys make a dud customer persona?”

 

This had to be a mistake.

 

He pulled up the next persona. Again, it appeared rather generic. Its most specific detail: place of employment. It targeted females in their 40s who currently worked at FTF Financial. Gustavo’s jaw dropped. FTF went belly up a few years ago after being busted for influencing clients of competing financial advising companies to make bad investments through targeted neural-marketing. FTF Financial was one of the key reasons for the hullabaloo in Washington D.C. about making this kind of targeted marketing to implant users altogether illegal. That would completely shut down Gustavo’s freelance operation. Right now, he could operate under the guise of being a legal ad programmer. And sometimes he took legitimate gigs. But the best money came from the grey zone, or a step beyond that.

 

Two customer personas with a single parameter that rendered them useless? Was there more? He dove in, losing track of time. Often, he searched for company names, colleges, professional networking groups, and anything else these personas made a specific part of the type of customer they pursued. He looked up anything suspicious. Repeatedly, the most specific detail rendered the whole profile useless. They were each a cutting contradiction. These customer personas would never find a match.

 

But he’d gotten two hits.

 

He pulled up the record of those two hits. Running a comparison for both to see which personas matched, it found one result. He opened it up and…

 

He sensed the text alert hit his consciousness. Trisha.

 

He squinted at the matching profile. It appeared more robust than the others at a glance. More detailed.

 

He checked the text from Trisha, which meant letting his implant filter the text into his mind more or less like a thought. He didn’t read the text so much as become aware of it.

 

Trisha: Great work! Boss is happy. I’d like to meet with you right away. I have a surprise.

 

The awareness of the winking emoji and the associated flirty vibe flooded him. He responded with an elevated pulse and shallower breaths. She wanted to meet right away. The boss was happy. She was being flirty. All very good things. Right?

 

But Gus was a problem solver. How poorly the campaign performed still vexed him. And what about this new profile on his screen seemed more complete? He swallowed back the uneasy feeling, trying to crawl its way up his throat.

 

Trisha texted him again, urging him to meet up with her right away, back at the coffee shop.

 

Why the eagerness to meet suddenly?

 

Gustavo’s stomach twisted with new worries.

 

#

  

“Are you okay?” Trisha asked as he approached her.

 

“Yeah,” Gustavo nodded. “Had a close call with a car on the way here.”

 

“Gus! You should pay more attention while walking,” she smiled. “It’s not good to be working and crossing the street.”

 

He forced a laugh and nodded, pulled in by her smile. He noted with surprise that she’d changed since they’d last spoken mere hours ago. She wore a low-cut black dress now. Not a long dress, either. It ended mid-tight. He tried to stop himself, but his eyes racked over her figure of their own accord. When they darted back up to meet her eyes, he could tell she knew what he’d done. Her smile broadened.

 

Gus swallowed and forced himself to focus. He glanced around the coffee shop, noticing the scattered people present.

 

“How about a walk?” He said.

 

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

 

“Yeah, I feel sort of amped up after that car nearly hit me. Adrenaline, nerves. I’d rather go for a walk.”

 

She obliged him, and they left the coffee shop. On the sidewalk, they strolled side-by-side. Gus forced himself to keep looking forward. Trisha’s silky blond hair, immaculate makeup, and damn black dress hugging her figure proved too distracting.

 

“I have your payment ready,” Trisha said. “Plus, a healthy bonus.”

 

“Was that the surprise?” Gustavo asked.

 

“It’s quite a good bonus. You should check your account.”

 

“I figured out what you’re up to,” he said flatly.

 

Trisha reached out and took his hand, bringing him to a stop.

 

“We know,” she said. “You’re a bright guy.”

 

He locked eyes with her and swallowed hard, trying to find the air necessary to push out the words stuck in his chest.

 

This ad was meant for only one person.

 

“It’s a big bonus for a job well done, Gus. Maybe you should take a vacation. I have been desperate to get down to the Cancun myself,” she said as she raised her eyebrows suggestively.

 

Cancun. Trisha in a bikini. How big was that bonus? His mind raced.

 

“You’re hacking me,” he said.

 

Trisha laughed and cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

 

“You’re inside my head, you hacked my implant, and now you’re up to something. You had me run this ad targeted for one person and one person only, and now you’re up to something. You designed all those other customer personas to fail. What was in that ad?”

 

Trisha sighed. “You are a smart one, Gus. But not smart enough.”

 

“What did you do to Senator O’Brian?”

 

“We did nothing to her,” Trish shrugged.

 

“She’s the only person who fits your one legitimate persona. The ad wasn’t an ad at all, was it? You hacked her implant. And now you’re hacking me.” 

 

“Oh, sweetie,” she laughed, “I did hack you, but not in the way you think.”

 

She pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled at him.

 

“I used the oldest hack there is, Gus. And you have been powerless to resist it.”

 

Gus’s vision narrowed as he clenched his fists.

 

“Why?”

 

“That’s not for you to know,” Trisha said. “But a smart guy like you will figure it out. Too bad it will be too late.”

 

“What did you do to Senator O’Brian?”

 

“You’re smart, Gus. But we’re smarter than you. We know you tried to set up a relay to stream an encrypted feed of our conversation. But it’s going nowhere. You can’t be a mercenary one day and whistleblower the next.”

 

“I never wanted to mess with politics. I just—”

 

“Wanted to make a buck. Yeah. They all do. You should have taken the bonus, Gus.”

 

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

 

But even as he said it, he sensed the connection to his computers in his apartment vanish.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“If you’re not going to play nice, I’m afraid it’s out of my hands. We can’t have any loose ends. Plenty of people will have questions and want to understand why O’Brian changed her mind so close to the vote. This has to be clean. I’m sorry, Gus. I liked you. Cancun would have been exquisite.”

 

She turned and walked away. In that instant, Gus realized where he stood. When had they moved to the middle of the street? He tried to run after her, but his legs turned to stone.

 

He heard the screech of tires a moment before the impact. The world turned into a swirl of confused colors and shadows, then resolved again as a crocked view from asphalt. He could still see Trisha’s bare legs walking away as the tsunami of pain reached his brain. He tried to trigger his emergency beacon from his implant, but none of his systems responded. It was just him and his thoughts and a growing pool of his blood on the asphalt.