The Unstoppable Wasp

“This section.” Nadia highlighted the code in question. “It’s genius. It’s incredible. It’s…subliminal.”

NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!

We all have two parts of our mind: the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind is the one that is aware of stuff (“I really want a bagel”). The subconscious mind is the one that isn’t aware of stuff, but still influences your awareness (you saw an ad for a bagel three hours ago and your brain has been secretly and quietly obsessed with it ever since). In order to stay under our awareness radar, “subliminal messaging” is designed specifically to target our subconscious minds (placing bagel ads in subway stops, arguably). Basically, it uses signals that we see or hear that we’re aware of, even if we’re not aware of how they may be influencing us.

The science behind subliminal messaging is highly contested, but a key component of the idea behind subliminal influence is priming, a phenomenon in which people are influenced to react in specific ways to specific stimuli. Playing ads featuring music from one?

?s childhood might trigger an emotional response that leads to the purchase of a product. Playing French music in a grocery store can have an impact on shoppers’ desires to purchase French wine. (Like the bagel ads, the background music is an example of a supraliminal—as opposed to subliminal—stimulus, something that is technically above the threshold of consciousness though we still might not be actively attuned to it.) Humans are easily influenced creatures, and both supra- and subliminal stimuli can influence us, especially if we already have an affinity for the thing being pushed at us anyway.

Like, say you really like working, and something tells you to do more work, but of a particular kind. You could be easily pushed into working, in this case.

Just a hypothetical. Moving on.

“So VERA’s been…telling you what to do? Without you even knowing it?” Shay asked, shocked. “Could this be why Ying won’t stop talking about Titanic?”

“I was never around VERA,” Ying corrected her. “And, to be fair, the physics does support that Rose could have fit more than one person on that door—”

“VERA’s been telling me what to do,” Nadia said firmly. “It’s been affecting my brain the same way being high would—I’ve been addicted to doing whatever VERA wanted me to do. In this case, it seems like she wanted me to connect her to the quantum realm at the expense of everything else.”

“I knew you would never have bought those white tennis shoes without outside influence.” Priya nodded sagely. “Way too on-trend.”

Nadia looked down at her feet. They were on-trend. Ugh.

“Why?” asked Ying. “Is there some cabal of dastardly VERAs trying to take over a very small universe?”

Nadia shook her head. “I don’t know. But it gets worse.” She highlighted a second portion of the code. “This here? This is a countdown. The code is recycling itself over and over again, the numbers getting smaller every time. And it looks like it’s going to terminate at midnight. Tonight.”

Shay gasped. “Just like Independence Day!”

“What happens when it Terminators?” asked Ying.

Nadia shook her head. “I can’t be certain. But it’s linked directly to the subliminal code.”

“I can guess.” Priya crossed her arms over her chest. “Times Square, the gold billboards? That was just a test case—telling a big group of people what to do, en masse. If I’m reading this correctly, at midnight, every single person with a VERA is going to be completely under her control.”

“Time’s up,” said Ying.

“That’s only three hours from now!” Shay said, shocked.

“I hate to be the one to point out the obvious here,” Taina piped up, “but is no one else concerned that this might not be VERA? Sorry, Nadia, but your new friend sucks and I’ve told you that from the start.”

“I know,” Nadia said, twisting around in her chair to face her friends. “And you’re right.” She saw the surprise on their faces at the admission. “We can’t rule Margaret out of this yet.”

“So what do we do?” Shay rested her hands on her hips. The girls all looked at Nadia. It was up to her to decide.

But really, it was hardly a decision at all. Nadia loved a lot of things. It was her thing. But there was one thing she loved more than anything else—more than good Ethiopian food, and synthwave, and cropped hoodies. More than rule-breaking. More than Lola and her driving instructor. Even more than her Wasp suit.

It was the G.I.R.L.s, of course. Nadia would always choose the G.I.R.L.s and their safety above everything else.

And they had an evil AI to destroy.

Like her biological mother, Nadia loved making lists. Like her machekha, Nadia loved checking things off lists. Nadia didn’t love either of those things because of the older women in her life; it was coincidence or fate or biology or some combination of the above. Nadia was her own person. But she liked that list-making made her feel connected to Maria and Janet, in a way.

Sometimes list-making was more helpful than other times.

Take meds

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