Author's note:
All Character's in this story are over the age of eighteen.
Any names or places that bare similarities to reality are purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Warning: This story contains elements of non-consent
*****
Gareth was an ordinary looking kind of guy; the kind of person you'd probably look past when walking in a crowd. He was thirty years old and worked as a software developer for small mobile app game company called
Mini-mind games.
What he lacked in aesthetics though he more than made up for in talent. Today was an important day for him.
Gareth put the final touches on the hidden algorithm in the new and upcoming popular mobile game
Pixie Explosion.
It was a masterful, yet hidden piece of genius that would have propelled his career beyond anything he'd ever dreamed of, too bad he could never show anyone since it was unethical and highly illegal.
Gareth had built a subtle yet extremely effective subliminal message into every frame and sound bite emitted by the new, free to acquire, micro-transaction-based game. It worked by putting the user in a light hypnotic state that gained more effectiveness the longer and more often they played the game, on a very low level it produced the same responses as one would have to taking drugs but not as debilitating.
The effect was slow however and required a lot of time to build the addiction, he also knew it wouldn't work on everyone so he knew he had to be patient. It wasn't the addiction he was interested in however, sure it would get the company more users and thus more revenue. His boss would probably congratulate him on the numbers; attributing it to well thought out design and gameplay.
But no.
It was the more sinister layer he built underneath his algorithm.
Mind control.
He predicted that over time the user would become susceptible to certain suggestions emitted by the app. The longer they played the game the more control he would have. For himself he also built the "Master Control App", this app was a special version of the game that he could use for two-way communication between anybody using the "Slave" version of the app.
Gareth waited at least six months before conducting his first test, the app was already in the top 10 on the store so he was confident that he would have a decent sample size. He needed to make sure that it would yield at least some results before recording his findings. Since the users had to accept the terms of service before playing the game, tracking daily usage and location data weren't that hard. What they didn't know was that his sneaky little program was also sending extra information to a private server he owned that showed him in more detail how effective his work was.
The Master Control App he created; which only he could log into and use showed him a map on the home screen. It looked like a standard map so anybody being nosy wouldn't be overly suspicious but it had one additional feature, it showed him where users of his app were located and their current status.
He divided his users into three main categories.
Green - These users hardly ever played, maybe only a few minutes at a time throughout the day.
Orange - These users played the game in larger increments, totaling to a few hours a day
Red - Heavy users of the app, several consecutive hours a day.
Gold - Reserved for extreme cases.
For his first field test he elected in an area away from his workplace/home. Despite all the precautions he'd taken in hiding his code, he didn't want to risk anything. He made sure his phone used a specially built proxy for mobile phone data so that any traffic sniffing wouldn't be able to pinpoint his exact location.
When he first logged into The Master Control App (MCA). He happy to see a few green dots in his surrounding area. Flashing dots indicated users who were playing the game currently, steady green indicated the game was installed but not running. If he tapped on individual dots, he would get the same data the user sent to the company, it wasn't much since the user could still select how much data was sent.
More importantly it showed the total time spent playing the game, it ranged anywhere from one minute to several hundred. Gareth spent the first few hours just walking around, it was a public park on the weekend so it strolling around repeatedly simply made it look like he was exercising. As he walked Gareth took note of all the users that had a high number of hours, mostly younger people of course since they had the most time on their hands. That was fine for him since their brains were already naturally predisposed for suggestive control anyway.
As the park became less busy, and thus less witnesses he decided to begin.
Experiment One: