:: slips on Evil!Skald helmet ::
Recently Rhymer Enterprises had a billing dispute with another technomagic firm, the vendor that sells us magnetic bottles for our antimatter reactors. They felt that since they had sold us quality materials and unfailingly delivered the product on time, they should be paid the exact amount specified in the contract; I felt that since I had a fleet of Defiant-class starships, and several dozen flame-breathing dragons, while they had neither, RhE was due a substantial discount. I considered sending in the lawyers to negotiate, but upon further reflection decided it would be simpler just to kill 'em all and take their stuff. (Okay, we didn’t kill everyone. Per standard policy, all children and all female noncombatants were spared, given Kleenex, Oreos, and patronizing pats on the head, and escorted out over the bodies of their adult male colleagues. I am sure that will not come back to bite me later.)
Due to a scheduling conflict, the banditry force consisted not of the usual squad of guys in Iron Man armor but rather a similar number of TX-model Terminators. That turned out to be a lucky break, as though the other technomages didn’t have much in the way of offensive weaponry, they did have something humans would have been dangerous to human invaders: a device called the TPTSD-1100. “TPTSD” stands for “Temporary Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” you see, and the device in question uses tachyon-delivered nanites to stimulate the human hippocampus and so – ah, screw it. It locates a person’s most devastating and traumatic memories and causes him or her to relive them with even more intensity than the original experience. The effect is instantly debilitating, to say the least, but wears off after about half an hour with no lingering effects–which is to say that the victim comes out of the emotional agony in 30 minutes, but still remembers being reduced to weeping masses of goo.
So I’ve got all the TPTSD-1100s now, and the schematics necessary to build more, and all the research notes and so forth; and using that we’ve inoculated all RhE employees against its effects. But I’m undecided what to do with 'em. For one thing, RhE doesn’t use non-lethal weaponry as a matter of policy, particularly not devices that are useless against robots and such On the other hand, we could sell these things to police departments, national governments,and so forth; they could use them for crowd control, interrogation, and so forth, and make a tidy profit.
Thoughts, anyone?