Work Text:
“Esteemed members of the board, our fundamental approach to net-defence is wrong. Walls, trackers, harnessed monsters from the Deep Net. They are nothing but roadblocks and deterrents, a serious intruder will always get through, and what good is reprisal if it comes too late to prevent damaging leaks? We treat cybercriminals as enemies to be defeated. But if instead we were to pursue an integrated net-defence strategy, with a focus on porous countermeasures synergistic to our primary mission… We can transform enemies into assets.”
“Allow me to introduce you to the most advanced mneumoshaping measure ever devised. We call her Lethe.”
“Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you came in? With a subliminal K-engram injection package embedded in the soft netmedium, targeting the subject’s central executive, we can weaponise that feeling. It’s non-invasive, undetectable, and unlike other forms of cerebral-rewriting, it leaves the subject wholly in-tact. All Lethe has to do is lightly fray the edges of the working memory, and we have free reign to disrupt recall and implant suggestions, so subtly the subject doesn’t even know it’s happened.”
“We don’t need to foil the incursion. Let them in! Let them see, steal what they like! They see what Lethe tells them to see, remember what Lethe allows them to remember. They come away believing they have our darkest secrets, in actuality they’re another vector for our seeded infoscape. A new asset, with the capability to penetrate markets whose limited trust in our public divisions renders traditional dissemination methods ineffective. She turns thorns into roses.”
“Page 172 of your datapack has our fully costed implementation plan, as well as revenue predictions for licensing her to select trusted subsidiaries and partner organisations. Secondary and tertiary applications are on page 87. My personal favourite is her utility as outermost support for ice structures built following standard loss prevention procedure. You can’t climb a wall if you’ve forgotten where you put your ladder. Closed tests of that feature were… amusing. And of course, she comes with a standard tracker package. In the rare case she’s circumvented, Lethe remembers... “