For a moment, I wondered if Alice was truly capable of understanding pleasant or unpleasant aesthetics, but I had more important things on my mind. These stories reeked of profit. I knew where I needed to focus my attention before I let myself get distracted by anything else.
Any sort of trending topic is designed with a plan in mind, though. Consumerism is built on trends. Trends, like waves, must rise and fall with time. These waves of popularity are expertly controlled by stories such as these.
Once an old story grows stale, it is replaced by the next new round of news. Eventually, though, the old stories are dressed up in a new, shiny outfit and start making their rounds on the nets all over again. It's an endless cycle.
New product designs also follow this same cycle, with design changes meticulously planned to maximize hype. Nobody is looking for innovation regarding these cycles any longer. The rise and fall of new products has become as commonplace as the rising and setting of the sun each day.
As mankind continued to advance, more and more of what were once considered "hobbies" became necessities. Mankind has reached an age in which people can't survive without knowing about the latest and greatest new trend.
Of course, everyone knows these fads will eventually become obsolete and be forgotten, but they let themselves go crazy over the latest fleeting money-sink anyway. Perhaps, without these cycles, people would be more true to themselves, and the net would have become a diverse place with a small niche for anyone. Universalized trends and fads seem to have prevented that from happening.
These five stories circling Olive's new product were creating ripples in the net that were disproportionately large; they were poised to become tsunamis rather than waves, in a way nobody in today's world had seen. If this trend were to reach critical mass, it would trigger an uncontrollable consumer frenzy, creating mass hysteria that would prematurely obliterate the other popular trends in the market. It was clearly a poor move from a marketing standpoint. And five stories, all at once? Anyone foolish enough to believe this was just coincidence has no right to be an armchair detective, let alone a trader.
Somebody was planning something, that much was certain. If I could manage to get in on this as well, I'd make more than mere pocket change. Perhaps I was letting the frenzied markets sweep me up in their furor, but I couldn't help tacking a few extra zeroes onto my imaginary payout. Even if this was a bigger risk than usual, the rewards seemed worth it.
The problem was figuring out if all five of those stories were keys to the lock or if only one was real and the others were just a cover. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest. The best place to hide a story is among the news trends.
"Which one do you think it is, Alice?" I suddenly asked.
"I lack sufficient context to interpret your query or its intent," she responded.
"Thank you. That's what I expected you to say," I replied.
If an A.I. could answer that sort of question, there wouldn't be any reason for a human being to be in this business. Only a biological mind as tangled as the one behind this mess could unravel its mysteries.
As I scanned the news, I intentionally let my vision blur. The trick is not to let yourself read every single line, but instead look at the pattern. When something unnatural shows up, it will stick out like a sore thumb. The ones who set these stories up would surely have designed them so they would be noticed.
Once a story attracted this much attention, it was no different than somebody standing out in the middle of a crowded street and shouting, "Look at us! We're planning something fishy!" Their plan must have been a good one if they were still expecting to make a profit after calling this much attention to themselves.
Suddenly, an image of the new Olive device, the Neo, caught my eye. It was resting snugly on a display modelled after a human hand. Just the kind of eye-catching presentation that made Olive famous. Of course, the hand had been designed to fit the device perfectly, so that was no surprise. It was designed to look unnaturally natural.
Unnaturally natural.
I could feel the neurons in my brain begin to run wildly as I glanced over the five topics once again. They were all superbly made to attract investors. People would most definitely feel as though there was something to these. It was quite the impressive trap.
If five doors should suddenly appear in front of you, most people would begin to wonder if there may be a treasure chest hiding behind one of them. But what would happen if the treasure wasn't behind one of the doors, but instead was hidden behind a boulder lying nearby?
"Alice, I need you to do another search for me," I began. "This time, only sample from the stories in the current news cycle. You're looking for any stories with a deviation value of zero. Are there any that stand out as unnaturally natural?"
"Understood. This may take a moment-" As Alice was finishing her first sentence, she began a new one, overlapping herself. "One match found."
Alice's ability to do this was a phenomenon caused by the gap between her processing functions and her human interface functions. I didn't have time to care about things like that right then, though.
"There is one story that matches up perfectly with the ideal model of the current news cycle," Alice continued. "Its deviation value is less than one with all numbers right of the decimal matching the model perfectly."
As Alice was reporting her findings, the City Carrier came to a stop and the chime to alert passengers of arrival began to sound.