Page 71 of Shielding Instinct

Chapter Twenty-Four

Petra

Petra had a quasi-secretive job, one that the FBI tried to keep on the down low.

Recruited to the Bureau by Rowan Kennedy when they were fellow doctoral candidates in the field of brain security—or whatever it was that people were trying to call it now—their diplomas said Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology.

But that was only because the field of study was so new that there wasn’t yet a consensus on what else to call their research.

Rowan called himself a Doctor of Propaganda.

To Petra, that didn’t quite get the gist ofherwork.

Things were changing so fast—every single day, innovations brought sweeping changes to how humans navigate the world.

Was that a burden on the human brain?

How well did the brain adapt to such constant shifts?

Did the modern world present unprecedented dangers to human wiring?

There was no data until someone asked the questions and looked for answers.

It was true that back in the first days of steam engine trains, there was fear that if a woman were to travel faster than fifty miles an hour, the speed would fling a woman’s uterus from her body.

It was also true that fear of new technology was often just the fear of the unknown.

But this was absolutely a brave new world.

AI was changing a human’s ability to tell what was real and what artificial intelligence had created on command.

Reality was becoming ever more malleable.

Was that image an actual image?

Is that video something that genuinely happened?

Is the voice on the phone that sounds exactly like my child really my child?

Who the heck knew?

What the government knew was that the human brain faced a shape-shifting reality and that con artists would swing in and manipulate people in unprecedented ways.

The FBI sought to understand how the new manipulations could happen and how to get out in front of it.

There were, in fact, few laws that protected a human’s brain from a criminal attack.

Legislation took time.

Well-thought-out, effective legislation took even longer, requiring studies and a clear understanding of cause and effect.

Everything protective took time.

Everything calculated to con people changed at lightning speed.

Faster. Faster. Impossible to keep up.

The FBI hired Petra specifically to study doomsday cults and the fact that people—in historically unprecedented numbers—were succumbing to the draw and falling to their sway.

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