Free Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) by SL Huang

might not be the only one, neither. We been pissing off a fair number of disreputable folk the past few months. If they start talking to each other—”
    “I’ll try to get some intel,” I said. “Meanwhile, Checker’s doing some research into Pourdry’s business. Once he does, we’ll offense right back.”
    “Your MO, always so elegant,” Arthur said.
    “When did you get so sarcastic?” Jesus, I wished it were more elegant. I was all about elegant solutions. “Elegance would be fighting back at the root. Going after each bad guy one at a time is ass-backward.”
    Arthur was a smart guy. “That what you was up to with all the maps?” he asked.
    “Yeah.” I studied the road.
    There was no particular reason I should tell Arthur what I was working on. In fact, there were plenty of good reasons not to, the first and foremost of which was that there was a better than even chance he’d side with Checker and try to stop me.
    Arthur had tried to stop me from doing things a couple of times in the past, and I’d always plowed right through his moral stance with a nice fuck-you and done them anyway. One of those times I’d gotten someone killed. The other time I hadn’t, but I only managed to avoid it by causing myself to be tortured with a car battery.
    Arthur hadn’t been happy. He was a hard man to read, but I was pretty sure I was still on probation with him. I’d promised to try to stop doing that shit.
    I licked my lips. “I think I have a way to clothesline the crime rate.”
    “Yeah?”
    I explained.
    Arthur let me talk without interruption as I outlined the plan: Arkacite technology, my math, and metropolitan Los Angeles as a testing ground. I kept my eyes on the road, steadily framing out his reaction.
    “And I think Pilar’s right. The technology, they had it functioning. It was just a matter of the mathematics,” I finished out my summary.
    “How does it work?” I couldn’t tell yet from his tone what he thought.
    “Well, I don’t have the technical specs yet, but I can give you the report summaries.” I put on my best reasonable voice. “First, they discovered the unique brain pattern that comes from the deindividuation state. You know about brain waves?”
    “Know they exist.”
    “We’ve been able to categorize brain waves for a while—what they look like in the normal waking state, what they look like in deep sleep, that kind of thing. But their researchers figured out the unique Fourier series—or, I should say, the narrow range of Fourier series—”
    “English, Russell.”
    “What I’m saying is, they managed to pick up what the brain is doing when you hit that deindividuated state. The mathematical characteristics of the brain waves.”
    “And then what?”
    “It turns out brain entrainment has been around for a long time,” I said. “It’s fascinating, really. People have discovered all sorts of ways to sort of, um, get a subject’s brain frequencies to align with an imposed frequency. Like, they’ll play beats in the subject’s ears and get their brain frequencies to slow down to a more meditative state.”
    “Subject,” said Arthur. “You mean a human being.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “People. We’re all math inside.”
    He shifted in his seat. “Go on.”
    “It’s only recently that the social psychologists and the neuroscientists started to cross over and talk to each other more. They did heavier research into the neuroscience of different psychological states, and somewhere along the way someone with funding got wind of it.”
    “Arkacite.”
    “Yeah, or the military grants, or some combination. Anyway, the important part is, they figured out how, when someone is in that deindividuated place—they figured out how to use a combination of audio and electromagnetic frequencies to realign the brain out of it.”
    “Side effects?” Arthur asked. “Is it dangerous?”
    “No more dangerous than listening to music.” That wasn’t strictly true. After