"In short, ladies and gentlemen, NuForce can retrain your employees. They will be more productive, more loyal, more committed, demand less pay and fewer benefits. Our program reduces turnover to negligible levels. Productivity increases. All of this translates directly to your bottom line. Our projections indicate that the average company can increase profit margin 23% by hiring us, though that will obviously vary by firm."
Kitty sat at the conference table seething. It should be her giving the presentation.
She
guided NuForce through financing.
She
made the strategic decisions that took ReBirth from hypothetical idea to marketable product.
She
was the one who had made it all possible. Michael Vanderbilt was a brilliant biochemist. It was the ideas he had in a garage lab that laid the groundwork for NuForce. But he had no head for business. The ideas wouldn't have mattered without her taking charge.
"Any questions?"
And yet, it was Michael Vanderbilt standing at the front of the conference room.
He
was the one making the pitch to executives from powerful corporations and owners of successful private companies. He had never been this articulate. This confident speaking in front of an audience.
She had suspicions.
"So, how does it work?" Peter Benford asked. Chief Operating Officer of the largest call center operator in the world.
Michael smiled. "I'm sure you will understand when I say that how Rebirth works is proprietary."
That evoked around the table the laughter of people sharing a secret, rather than actual mirth.
"What I can tell you," Michael continued, "is that we deploy Rebirth through normal training sessions. We hold them either at NuForce, or we can come out to your own facilities. We would need time to set up in the latter case."
"How long do these training sessions take?" Jessica Cain. She owned a chain of fast casual restaurants.
Kitty squirmed. She wanted to stand up and punch Michael in the face. Then she would show them what Rebirth could be used for.
She sat almost motionless in her chair.
"That depends upon how complex you want the programming to be. Simple things, like training your employees to be more attentive, can be accomplished in a couple of hours. We estimate that the deepest, most thorough alterations can be made in a week."
"A week?" Peter Welch. He ran a large temporary employment agency. "Don't they figure out what is going on?"
"Again, this varies. Most modifications can be seeded without awareness on the part of the subjects. We can also run them without being that subtle. It takes less time that way, and so is cheaper for the client. In that case, the very first bit of programming is not to rebel against additional instruction."
"What kind of changes can you make?" Benford again.
"Just about anything you can think up. There are certain basic human functions and drives that we cannot overcome. We can, however, co-opt most of them and use them to reinforce the alterations we make. Rebirth alters personality on a fundamental level. It cannot erase or rewrite memories. Yet. But it can produce dramatic personality changes in its subjects."
"You say it requires training sessions," a quiet voice asked, "but that the subjects are not necessarily aware of the programming." James Scott. Most of the potential customers came from low wage, low skill industries. Scott was managing partner of a white shoe law firm. "Can it be used in settings other than an explicit employee training meeting?"
"Yes, it can," Michael said. "It won't work in some of the places you are thinking about. The equipment can be set up so that it is hidden, but you need unfettered access to the space both before and after the session. But you could use it in meetings, in job interviews, or even social settings such as a networking event with cocktails."
"So, you could be programming us right now?"
Michael laughed. "I suppose, in theory, we could be, but we aren't. I don't anticipate this meeting lasting long enough for even rudimentary programming to be put in place."
