The Rideshare

By DeRicki Johnson

He glided from traffic into the hotel turnabout, pulling before the businessman with the travel bag clutched in his hand.

“Airport,” the businessman said from the backseat.

Good, the driver thought. Time to talk. Engaging in ways expected of the best drivers, he plied his rider with seemingly random banter ranging from ecology to social justice. The carefully crafted neural programming script was far from random; it was learned from The Gnosis Order.

At trip’s end, the driver uttered the neural activation syllables, so close to “Have a nice day,” that the rider never realized his thinking had been indelibly altered.