American endtimes economics met Chinese neurotech on a DAO-owned island off the coast of Proud Britain where a lawyer, a VP, and a biowarfare specialist moonlighting as a nomadic lab manager watched a preacher with two biochemistry degrees and a helmet of chips wired through his skull who had been injected an hour before with a cocktail of which the least psychoactive compound was high-grade synthetic ayahuasca. They were watching through a dozen cameras and sensor feeds on a wall-sized screen. The preacher was on the other side of the wall the screen was mounted on; depending on where you were sued he was in another country, and besides, the lab crew could be blackmailed.
At the moment the preacher was experiencing a vision and/or psychotic breakdown. The latter could be forgiven, for the subliminal videos he had been unknowingly watching before were horrifying enough — what had kept the biowarfare specialist from losing his sanity was either unknown or nothing at all. But to the VP's question it was confirmed that the company could reverse engineer from the preacher's rambling the drugs it had engineered somewhere else by subjecting other people to AI-optimized atrocities the company was spending a lot of money on not knowing about.
Questioned in turn the lawyer shrugged. The United States' view on the legal acceptability of claims of religious inspiration — mediated through AI or not — was mostly correlated with the size and targeting of lobbying payments. But government officers and judges had approved much worse; the patent would most likely be granted at not much more than the usual lateral-budget cost.
Satisfied, the VP went away to the helicopter that would take him to his jet, lawyer in tow like a cynical crow. The biowarfare specialist remained in the room watching the preacher. His memory of the lab was clear and dispassionate and he could link back the preacher's horrifying tableaus of biochemistry and pain to abstract project timelines and clinical charters. Between visions and memories the memories were worse.
Imperceptibly at first and then all at once the preacher's ramblings shifted in tone from past to future and from unwitting memory to confident imagination, horrors changing in shape but not darkness. The biowarfare specialist had always used to leave the room at this point, but ever since different subjects had begun to say similar things he had forced himself to stay, to listen, to go through the simple ritual of telling himself what they described was excess delusion, a case of overengineering madness, so he would not have to attempt the hopeless task of pretending it would not be deserved.