Across the nation, continent, and in fact all English-speaking countries, tens of thousands of people were being at that same moment bombarded by similar phone calls.
The phone interactions started out innocently. Lots of pleases, and thank yous, and sirs. Offers to explain the special deals being offered, and agreeing to send customers more information.
But as sample data was built up, the calls were refined and “improved” through A/B testing until they became evolutionarily more aggressive and hostile.
Gentility was stripped away in favor of brute force mechanisms to get customers to simply agree without knowing necessarily what they were agreeing to. And eventually the system stopped asking, and started commanding.
Customers would pick up their phone, and hear a strange tone sequence unlike anything they’d ever heard before.
Those who could consciously remember hearing it described it to friends later as simply “odd” or “chilling.”
But it was much more than that. The system had collapsed billions of data points into a tone sequence followed by a mnemonic seed sequence intended to subliminally embed one idea in the minds of those hearing.
To put all their money into coins at a specific hash address.
A volitional virus.