A blogger has honed his intuition by building a virtual reality device he calls an experience machine. The machine runs through many plausible scenarios by stimulating lucid dreams in the person who uses the machine. The blogger uses the dreams to test drive a wide variety of plausible ways the presidential campaign could unfold. He is able to run through many scenarios very quickly as the experience machine can slow down the experience of time, to explore many possibilities. As psychologist Gary Klein points out, gathering a lot of experience enhances intuition, so the blogger has developed a strangely accurate sixth sense when dealing with things he has thought a lot about in the experience machine.
A hacker who had been curious about the bloggers public references to a technique he used to experience much more than the average person in a condensed period of time breaks into the bloggers computer and finds the specs for the experience machine. He builds it—it requires cheap, easy-to-get materials and a computer screen, essentially. He starts using the experience machine and is blown away. He is a Trump supporter and offers to provide the Trump campaign with his expertise.
The blogger discovers that he’s been hacked and uses the experience machine to quickly develop hacker skills. He then figures out who hacked him, hacks the hacker back, and discovers emails and instant messages from the hacker to the Trump campaign. The blogger realizes the hacker is giving Trump a large advantage with his experience-machine developed insights.
The blogger uses the experience machine to figure out what to do. He spends more time on this decision than he had any other. When he comes out of the experience machine this time, he has experienced the equivalent of months of contemplation, in a matter of a few days, due to the efficiency with which he can run through experiences. He feels an electrical buzz in his head. He sits at his computer. His hands move without him feeling he is in control of them. They open up the experience machine design document saved in his computer and uploads them to google docs. He then shares the google doc with about 100 email addresses of different individuals, many of whom he only has a fuzzy recollection of their identity.
His finger hits the enter key and emails are sent to these select people notifying them of their access to the experience machine design, with a message saying they were selected and entrusted to make the best use of it, given its power and potential, for both good and bad.
The blogger then sits back in his chair, feeling as if a possessing spirit has been exorcised from him and he was in control of himself again. He feels a sense of relief from the tension of the past few days. He doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen, but his intuition says things will be okay.