Chapter 7
“And did you find your next target?”
“Yes, a man called Zubeir. A hitman himself. Things were going to be difficult. He was retiring, and his agency wanted him to shut him down, because, you know… he knew too many secrets. We dug into his fears - and realised that he had a daughter he hadn’t seen for quite a few years. She lived with her mother in Europe. We had found our trigger here. We simulated a nightmare that would be like seeing the daughter in danger. He lived alone in the hills in a cottage with two rooms. Even though innocuous from the outside, that cottage was booby trapped. We used a local tracker to keep an eye on him. We were informed that he had tripwires put all across his innocent looking garden, he was expecting a hit anytime. He also got all groceries and meat home delivered, there was a boy who went and picked it up for him. We bribed the fruit-seller and laced up his apples.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes, it did. On the first night itself. We kept a twenty-four surveillance on him, with six cameras pointed towards his house. We found him pacing up and down his garden in the wee hours of the dawn. He had been up since two am. It happened the next night and the next and the next. We thought we had succeeded.”
“And did you?”
“For a while, yes. He stopped sleeping as the nightmare became stronger. And then one morning, we found him at the Mosque praying. He started hitting every religious place - we found him strolling outside a church and staring at the temple. Fear doesn’t know religion, when it strikes, you go to any place that looks good enough to help you. We trailed around hoping that it would work for a long time. My partner said that all the visible signs were here again, we were about to make a comeback.”
“Did you make a comeback?”
“No, we did not. But we saw a transformation. Instead of the cold calculating killing machine, Zubeir walked into the orphanage one day with a bag full of clothes, money, and chocolates. Hours later, he was still there playing with the children. He didn’t sleep that night either, but the next morning, with eyes that were bloodshot red from sleeplessness he went back to the same orphanage once again. This time he had two blackboards and a boxful of chalk. We found him taking classes that day. Apparently, some of the kids had failed in mathematics in the Madrasah, and he had taken it upon himself to teach them personally. He was up that night as well, but not because of nightmares, he was practising Algebra.”
“Algebra?”
“Yes. Seven of those boys had to pass, it had become Zubeir’s responsibility. He didn’t sleep for the next seven nights. We do not know if the nightmares recurred, because he never showed any signs. He wasn’t restless, he wasn’t afraid… he just trudged over to the orphanage every day and came out at sharp eight o’ clock every evening. On the seventh day, my partner lost his patience. So, I went to check up on what was happening inside the orphanage, pretending to be a potential donor. The warden showed me around. There were forty-five boys in total -all that the orphanage could afford to keep with its limited resources. And in the tiny storeroom that they had converted into a makeshift library, Zubeir was sound asleep on the bench. There was no sign of any nightmare! There were no nightmares of his daughter’s demise that was hunting him.”
“Which means…”
“He had found a way to beat the system that we had derived. He had risen above the fears that we had planted in him.”
“How did this happen?”
“I asked the same question. In fact, when the warden told me that Zubeir was one of the donors to the orphanage, I told him that I would like to meet him too. I waited and told the others not to disturb him. After a four-hour sleep he woke up, rubbed his eyes and sat down with his Algebra book. I approached him and we got talking over evening coffee and snacks. He told me he had been a man too absorbed with himself all this while, he was estranged from his wife and daughter and had accepted his fate, believing that one day he would be reunited with his family. Until he had the worst nightmares. He had taken the nightmares as a sign from Allah, it was time to redeem all his sins. Instead of asking the same question of why this was happening to him, he just accepted himself and his sins, walked over to the only place where he knew he could redeem himself, give those children a chance at a good life and see if he could earn some blessings in the process. Sleep came naturally after that.”
“So, now your business is not full proof anymore?”
“No, the system can be gamed. We can lose. Nothing’s full proof.”
“But that’s a loss of business for you. You no longer have a product!”
“No, we don’t. But every business needs to diversify. And it seems we can relook at our business plan now.”
“How?”
“By redeeming ourselves. By creating little nuggets of hope instead of nightmares. If someone like Zubeir can get over it and go ahead trying to change the life of forty children, imagine what those forty children can do if they have better dreams instead of nightmares. That’s when we decided that it will be the time to pivot… and that if we do, we will have a bigger market.”
“But the world runs on fear. You built your business model on fear itself.”
“We did, which is why we are still in the small business category. Hope is a bigger category in itself. Better… more potent, with really thriving bottom lines. Everybody needs that product. We can be a unicorn in no time.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“We analysed our product in detail. Realising that we take one bad memory and amplify it by a hundred times. That’s what the potion does really. If you have feared spiders, we just take that memory and make it look like the world is being invaded by spiders. So, what if we could just trigger the good memories instead. Trigger the moment when someone feels happy and enlarge it a hundred-fold. If a father remembers the first time he held his daughter and we amplify the joy a hundred times more by creating similitudes in his mind, wouldn’t he be motivated to do some real good in society?”
“So, you want to transform your business plan to doing good? You’re the son of the Devil and you want to be in a different territory? It’s not in your DNA and you can’t do it right?”
“Oh, we can. In fact, I have convinced my partner to do just that. Of course, we amplify the evil much more than we do the good in the media. Good does not sell. But there will still be people who believe in the Good, otherwise, my dad would not have been so useless most of his life. Because, his plans, however clever they are, fail most of the time. It needs baby steps, but it can be done.”
“Imagine what people will say - when they hear about it. Will anyone believe it? This is preposterous!”
“The question is not whether anyone will believe it. The question is how hard you will find to believe it. Let me tell you a little story here Mr. M. I’ve already told you that my relationship with my father is estranged. In fact, I have not seen him since I was seven years old. Most of my letters from school went unanswered. When I started up the business of selling bespoke nightmares - he supported me till he knew that I was deeply entrenched in his own philosophy. Mr. M, when you want to make a monster out of your child, you take him through the same experiences that you know will eventually lead to transforming him into a monster. That’s what I became, a bright and intelligent monster, shrewd to certain extent, with enough business acumen to build short term profit. But it took only a certain number of failures to show me that short term profit can only remain short term… it doesn’t change when the market changes, it doesn’t transform into gold when people start seeing the truth. All I needed to do was follow a hitman to his path to redemption to understand it. He battled my nightmares and then decided to take the path that he felt the most logical - help other children grow. That’s when I realised that I was mistaken. To prove my father wrong, to be different from him, I had only ended up taking the path that he had laid out for me. I had to change. And to change my business had to transform from bespoke nightmares to bespoke dreams. Tailored to perfection and built for success. Every simulation, a possibility for a better world.”
“You are wrong. It’s in your genes Z, you can’t shake it off. The Devil is your father!”
“True, but I am not the devil himself, am I? I can change, my father cannot. He does not define who I should be. Even as a businessman, my possibilities get limited when I implant nightmares in selected folks. Unit prices may be higher, but I make a loss on the topline. Instead, imagine what seven and a half billion people can do with the right dreams. They can change everything…and grant me a bigger share.”
“Seven and a half billion people aren’t dying to accept your dreams. Are they?”
“Oh, I have perfected my business acumen enough to know that I need to start with long free trials first. But you know what? Dreams are easier to trigger - they are simple, people want to be happy. I don’t need to know what kind of bespoke experience I need to create. Every experience that triggers a happy memory is bespoke by default. It’s unique, to each his own and something that needn’t be controlled. Can you comprehend what happens when seven billion people start to dream? It’s magic. But I understand where your disappointment is coming from. In fact, that’s the reason - I didn’t go to the mainstream media. I came to you. You see Mr. M, you didn’t choose me for the interview, I chose you. I am a researcher after all and everyone knows that my father is a shapeshifter. He doesn’t always appear as a man with horns and tails, sometimes red in colour. He can appear as a smart vlogger with gold-rimmed glasses, running his own video show in HellTube. A good researcher always knows his subject - and I know what M stands for. Mephistopheles. The Devil himself. Not a creator of bad news, but a messenger. You have not mastered evil; you have mastered communication. You know that is how it works. One bad news, and you can drive people nuts - tell them that the world is a dank, dark place… not worth living. You are like a vacuum cleaner, with every piece of bad news that you broadcast, you clean away specks of hope from someone’s mind. When you do it with those gold rimmed glasses, and your good boy looks, you can convince people well too. You don’t need to move an inch from your chair to do that. But the point is…I can see through you dad. Even if I have not seen you for years, even if you have shape shifted into this avatar of an honest vlogger, I can still see through you… because you can’t hide your true nature. You were fine when I was talking about all the nightmares that people were witnessing… but your entire attitude changed when you started hearing about the transformation stories. You wanted to build me up as a creator of evil. But what you have before you now is a worthy adversary. Someone who knows your tricks and has learnt a lot more about himself than he should. Hope travels faster and dreams can be infectious. Lace every piece of chocolate, every biscuit, every tea cake with bespoke dreams and there is something that you will find difficult to counter. So, this is where the interview ends, Mr. M… and this is where our battles begin. It’s going to last for a while. I may not always be successful, but I will be there… steadfast and standing. Now, I need to get back to my revised business plan and I wish you all the best. Good afternoon and good night.”
