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Authors: Michael John Grist
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controlled."
"He's got a God complex," Lara said. "But it's fascinating stuff."
It was. In each section he'd listed countless documented examples where near-perfect knowledge of the five factors had allowed him to predict and manipulate the people in his experiments, without them knowing it was happening. He engineered chance meetings in elevators, with the conversations mapped out in advance like a mind reader, which resulted in love and later marriage. He set up teams of experts to work in such synchrony that they came up with innovations that had already been widely adopted in the outside world. He brought out the best in people like a virtuoso conductor playing an orchestra.
"More like a computer engineer designing a circuit board," Lara said, when I shared my thoughts. "In the orchestra the players have choices. He's making choice irrelevant, reducing them to component parts."
She was right. It was stunning, and no wonder it had been such a bestseller that it still had a whole display to itself, because laced throughout all this scary thought-control type stuff was the incredibly empowering message- 'You too can control this.' You could be the god controlling your own experiences, by setting the bar high just like Mecklarin did. It tied in to common wisdom about surrounding yourself with high-quality people, seeking out positive experiences and avoiding bad ones, but did so with a depth of hard research never seen before.
"Wow," I said, coming up after finishing. Lara hadn't finished but, by a hissing campfire gaslight we'd set up when it got dark, she clearly shared my feeling. "It's a complete blueprint for taking control of your life."
"Or other people's lives," she said. "Maybe it'll be useful as mayor."
I hadn't considered that. We sat in silence for a time.
"You think this guy knew about the zombie apocalypse?" Lara asked, breaking the silence.
Anything seemed possible now. Mecklarin was a magician, wielding the kind of mind control tricks Hank would have killed to use to pick up girls. Could it be possible he'd known where the outbreak would start? Could he have been watching Lara and I, waiting for the unstoppable moment when we triggered the infection already dormant in every human alive?
It was weird. It flipped everything on its head.
"I'm going to find out."
INTERLUDE 2
The MARS3000 mission seemed the most exciting thing Salle Coram would ever do in her young life. At 26 and only three years out of Yale with her doctorate in 'Extreme' Psychology, specializing in the study of colonization stress and confinement, a place in superstar Lars Mecklarin's grandest experiment yet was a distant dream.
Still she'd applied. They'd contacted her, she'd gone in for interview at Mecklarin's stunning office in Manhattan and been wowed afresh by the scope and scale of his plans.
"We are going to Mars," he'd told her, leaning against a massive mahogany desk at the edge of an Oval Office-like room, with the window behind him looking out over a perfectly aligned view north up Central Park. "Believe that." The confidence in his voice and manner, his easy swagger, the curls in his expertly slicked hair, all made her feel like the girl out of 50 Shades of Grey: smitten, spun around and overwhelmed.
"In ten to fifteen years," he went on, "with rockets from Open Origin or Steepletop, NASA or some other agency, it doesn't matter who, because it's happening. Humanity has a destiny and it's out there."
He pointed up and she'd actually followed his finger to the ceiling. He smiled at this and she went mushy inside.
"When we go, with our best and brightest piled into a rocket, when the engineering and rockets are all finished, they will turn to us. Our work will be the single most important domain left. How humans behave in close proximity for decades, how personality traits develop, how upsets become emergencies, how stress is both driver and destroyer. Our greatest enemy will come from within, and
"He's got a God complex," Lara said. "But it's fascinating stuff."
It was. In each section he'd listed countless documented examples where near-perfect knowledge of the five factors had allowed him to predict and manipulate the people in his experiments, without them knowing it was happening. He engineered chance meetings in elevators, with the conversations mapped out in advance like a mind reader, which resulted in love and later marriage. He set up teams of experts to work in such synchrony that they came up with innovations that had already been widely adopted in the outside world. He brought out the best in people like a virtuoso conductor playing an orchestra.
"More like a computer engineer designing a circuit board," Lara said, when I shared my thoughts. "In the orchestra the players have choices. He's making choice irrelevant, reducing them to component parts."
She was right. It was stunning, and no wonder it had been such a bestseller that it still had a whole display to itself, because laced throughout all this scary thought-control type stuff was the incredibly empowering message- 'You too can control this.' You could be the god controlling your own experiences, by setting the bar high just like Mecklarin did. It tied in to common wisdom about surrounding yourself with high-quality people, seeking out positive experiences and avoiding bad ones, but did so with a depth of hard research never seen before.
"Wow," I said, coming up after finishing. Lara hadn't finished but, by a hissing campfire gaslight we'd set up when it got dark, she clearly shared my feeling. "It's a complete blueprint for taking control of your life."
"Or other people's lives," she said. "Maybe it'll be useful as mayor."
I hadn't considered that. We sat in silence for a time.
"You think this guy knew about the zombie apocalypse?" Lara asked, breaking the silence.
Anything seemed possible now. Mecklarin was a magician, wielding the kind of mind control tricks Hank would have killed to use to pick up girls. Could it be possible he'd known where the outbreak would start? Could he have been watching Lara and I, waiting for the unstoppable moment when we triggered the infection already dormant in every human alive?
It was weird. It flipped everything on its head.
"I'm going to find out."
INTERLUDE 2
The MARS3000 mission seemed the most exciting thing Salle Coram would ever do in her young life. At 26 and only three years out of Yale with her doctorate in 'Extreme' Psychology, specializing in the study of colonization stress and confinement, a place in superstar Lars Mecklarin's grandest experiment yet was a distant dream.
Still she'd applied. They'd contacted her, she'd gone in for interview at Mecklarin's stunning office in Manhattan and been wowed afresh by the scope and scale of his plans.
"We are going to Mars," he'd told her, leaning against a massive mahogany desk at the edge of an Oval Office-like room, with the window behind him looking out over a perfectly aligned view north up Central Park. "Believe that." The confidence in his voice and manner, his easy swagger, the curls in his expertly slicked hair, all made her feel like the girl out of 50 Shades of Grey: smitten, spun around and overwhelmed.
"In ten to fifteen years," he went on, "with rockets from Open Origin or Steepletop, NASA or some other agency, it doesn't matter who, because it's happening. Humanity has a destiny and it's out there."
He pointed up and she'd actually followed his finger to the ceiling. He smiled at this and she went mushy inside.
"When we go, with our best and brightest piled into a rocket, when the engineering and rockets are all finished, they will turn to us. Our work will be the single most important domain left. How humans behave in close proximity for decades, how personality traits develop, how upsets become emergencies, how stress is both driver and destroyer. Our greatest enemy will come from within, and
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