A private jet was one of the best perks of Samantha Hudson’s new job as President and CEO of Mindlull Industries. The charismatic founder Steve Careers had been a terrible business man and after Google had acquired a controlling interest in the company they had wanted to have someone with a more business orientated background take over. Their pressure had seen the ‘promotion’ of the founder from CEO to ‘CIO’ a made up title standing for Chief Inspiration Officer.
It meant he gave interviews and pretended like he ran things while Hudson made the actual decisions. That had meant canceling the project that he had been championing because it kept loosing money.
It had been a tense meeting.
Careers had pointed at the computer on the boardroom desk, “This is it, this is what we’ve been striving for. The Mindlull Deluxe. Complete mind control. We’re not just increasing someone’s likelihood of clicking on a Google Ad by ten percent like we did with the eSalesAd System. This is complete enslavement.”
Hudson shook her head, “Well there’s no way to monetize that. Google can use another ten percent bump in ad views. If we can deliver eSalesAd 2s then we’re heroes. This, even if it worked won’t have a corporate use. We’re now in the persuasion game, not the mind control game.”
Needless to say he had not been happy. But when they shipped eSalesAd 2s they had been heroes and their stock had jumped twenty points. Samantha Hudson appeared on the cover of Business Week and the executive team at Google was very pleased. Careers was not, but the increase in the company’s stock price had made him even richer than before and so he had started to behave.
As Samantha was watching her bags being loaded onto the private jet to fly from her San Francisco office to New York for a Ted Talk she was going to give Steve Careers came up to her.
“I just wanted to show you something the team in the lab came up with. I really think it’s great. It’s the iMindlull, portable, convenient,” he said excitedly holding a black piece of glass about the size of a large calculator.
Samantha cut him off, “I thought we agreed to cancel all development on that. We’re in the ads game, I don’t care why you founded the company, the shareholders want technology not mind control.”
Rather than argue Careers activated the device. The screen sprang to life with flashing colors and lights and the speakers played a soft hissing noise. Seeing the lights out of the corner of her eyes Hudson looked down and towards the screen. Her mouth fell open as her expression relaxed.
Steve Careers smiled, ”Invite me along for the flight. We have a lot of work to do you and I. We need to get this company back on track. Ads are for selling snake oil. You don’t rule the world with internet ads.”
Hudson agreed, her mind completely lulled. Onboard she had her strip to only wearing her bra and then they began to work on the paper work to start research into the Mindlull TV. Once he had one of those in every home things would get interesting.