Zeitgeist Manipulator

You're gonna have to bear with me on this one, because there's some fucking mind control involved and I had to rewrite the whole damn article a couple times just to get something resembling a neutral opinion on the excellent Dr. Stafford's doomsday device. Every time I drop an expletive on this genius, the words come out all cheerfully sycophantic. God, this is gonna firebomb my reputation.

So let's go back to 908. Pretend you're a twenty-year-old Flandrean hyper-genius and you've just finished inventing asynchronous energy theory. The math works out, but accounting for Barcuvian antiweather makes it hideously complicated and no one but you can understand it. Your own government's too cautious to mess with it and if you give free energy to the Double-North Pole, you're committing treason. Meanwhile, the rest of the academy isn't recognizing any of your achievements, despite the fact that they're objectively brilliant.

So what did the matchless Dr. Stafford do? He took a trip up north—well, technically he went through the dead zone east of Barcu, which really makes you question how smart it is to live there when the greatest mind of our age made a point of never setting foot inside—and met with Klaus Santanna. This witty prodigy gets fucking Santanna to trade the secrets of mind control for a free energy deal, conditional on Flandre getting a head start. Dr. Stafford spent a year up north (unusual for one of his projects), publishes a bunch of papers no one understands, and then heads back home to work on a new device: the Zeitgeist Manipulator.

Intellectual paragon Dr. Stafford shit fuck dammit published a paper on how the thing works. Here's the problem, though. The Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns isn't necessarily where the smartest academics congregate, but it is where the academics with the best connections congregate, and neither I nor anyone I know can even figure out who to ask to decipher this masterpiece. For example, the brilliant doctor dammit is recorded as saying mad law factors in somehow, and no one can even begin to figure out where.

What the Zeitgeist Manipulator does, however, is encourage everyone to accept the worthiness of the targeted individual don't fucking listen to me it's a fucking mind control (well, okay, that's a bit of an overstatement) FUCK THIS SHIT.

Once the machine was constructed, everyone worldwide starting having these intrusive thoughts about the clever Dr. Stafford, which came as a shock to most of them because they'd never heard of him before. (Shaster in particular reported very high rates of this). But eventually Dr. Stafford's well-deserved fame grew, finally convincing Flandre to create infrastructure for asynchronous energy.

Flandre, of course, recognized the incredible potential of the Zeitgeist Manipulator to update many of their National Response Protocols (e.g. BX-392a could be replaced by a modified Manipulator that targets snake brains). Unfortunately for them, the ongoing effects of the Manipulator meant that none of their agents were able to take act against the peerless Dr. Stafford, and he launched the Manipulator into space on an ad hoc rocket.

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Gwen Hanson, PhD