Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Much of this was just placing an official stamp on information that legitimate news organizations had been piecing together all day but been unable to articulate loudly enough to be heard over the din. It brought out a kind of bloodlust in the assembled White House press corps, which was gathered right there in the middle of Main Street. During the wait, they’d had plenty of time to sample Moab’s impressive range of locally produced microbrewery offerings. Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, they were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine; beer; and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand. After the third such question, the president was handed a note by his press secretary. He read it, then raised his head and glanced over to his right, scanning his way down the line of nearby Moabites until he found the one person there whose last name could possibly be Kawasaki. “Why don’t you direct your questions to someone who knows? Mr. Kawasaki, from Lyke, has been here all day, working hard to establish the ground truth.”

11

Maeve didn’t want to think of herself, or to be seen, as someone who had been in need of getting rescued by a Prince Charming in a jet, and so this added a lot of texture to her relationship with Corvallis in the early going. Fortunately for that relationship, but not so much for Maeve and her family in Australia, those issues were soon swamped by something else.

All of the people in the Miasma’s conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters: the actor from the red-eye, all of the other performers in all of the fake videos, the cops who had searched the penthouse suite in Vegas, the sheriff ’s deputies who had manned roadblocks, et cetera.

And, of course, Corvallis Kawasaki and Maeve Braden. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States, and had been a reasonably well-known person to begin with. And she had been standing next to him. So within twenty-four hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him, and begun to evince interest in her; and within a week, she had become a figure of greater significance, in the collective mind of Crazytown, than he.

Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation. Toward power it felt some combination of fear and admiration, and Corvallis was powerful. Toward vulnerability it was drawn, in the same way that predators would converge on the isolated and straggling. Within a week, Maeve—who suffered from the fatal combination of being mysterious, vulnerable, and female—had been doxxed. Canyonland Adventures, as a business, had been destroyed by a flood of fake negative reviews and various other hacks. Maeve sought refuge at Angel Rock Ranch, but after a couple of days, Bob’s wife decided to believe some of the more wildly slanderous posts being made about Maeve on social media and decided it was time for her to leave. Tom, having nothing else to do now that the business was wiped out, bundled Maeve into a car, handed her a shotgun, and drove her to Salt Lake City, where he dropped her off (minus the shotgun) at the private jet terminal to await a jet that Corvallis had dispatched. Maeve only went into the waiting lounge long enough to use the toilet. Her legs were visible under the stall door. They were glimpsed in a mirror by a young woman who was standing in front of a sink freshening up. She was the best friend of another young woman who was the daughter of a hedge fund manager and private jet owner; they, along with other friends and family, were all on some kind of one-percenter vacation trip. The two young women, having recognized Maeve, took pictures of her and posted them on their poorly secured social media accounts. One of the pictures included the tail number of the private jet that Maeve boarded en route to Seattle. Its flight plan was obtained from the Miasma. More Moab truthers were awaiting Maeve in Seattle; they weren’t allowed into the private jet terminal at Boeing Field, but nothing prevented them from witnessing Corvallis’s arrival in his Tesla.

And so it went. All they could do was let it burn. Maeve’s harassment became the topic of hand-wringing coverage by the decent folk of the Miasma, but the mere fact that people were defending her only drove the truthers into higher transports of rage or made it that much more amusing for trolls to go after her. Maeve’s entire family was doxxed. Business records of Sthetix were pulled up from somewhere and laid bare. That she was now under Corvallis’s wing dampened the truthers’ ardor, since they were sadists and preferred to focus their energies on the helpless. But they did manage to find her sister, Verna, who lived in a bedroom community outside of Adelaide. After a first round of surgery and chemo, she’d enjoyed three years’ remission from her cancer, but it had now come back. She was on chemo again. Through a combination of social engineering and poor security precautions, a particularly avid set of nihilist hackers tracked her down to a hospital in Adelaide, and phoned in a bomb threat, and SWATted the place for good measure. All of the patients had to be taken out of the wing of the building where Verna was receiving her treatment. Not enough gurneys were available, and she was strong enough to walk with assistance, and so she ended up lying on the ground in the shade of a gum tree, dressed only in her hospital gown, still hooked up to the wheeled apparatus that was dripping the chemo drug into her IV line. A local truther, positioned outside the place with a long-lensed camera, was able to capture video of her rolling onto her side to puke. It went up on the message board favored by the truthers and became a humorous meme. The mother of Maeve and Verna got really angry and ventured out onto the front stoop of her house to denounce the hackers; a still frame of her indignant, tear-stained face became another meme.

Corvallis chartered a larger, longer-range jet to take him and Maeve to Australia. They drove to Boeing Field. The jet wasn’t quite ready yet and so they had to wait in the lounge for half an hour.

Shortly before they boarded, Pluto showed up.

Pluto had been one of the cofounders of Corporation 9592 and had made a corresponding amount of money. For a while, Corvallis had seen him every day, but after his switch to Nubilant, they’d lost contact and had not communicated at all except for a brief, awkward exchange at Dodge’s funeral. Pluto, well aware of his own social ineptitude, had obviously pored over an etiquette manual before showing up, and so, during his rote interactions with Zula and other immediate family members, had acquitted himself well if bizarrely, addressing them in high-Victorian grief speech straight out of whatever scanned and archived Emily Post book he’d memorized.

Pluto walked into the waiting area, which was furnished like a high-end hotel lobby, and shrugged his bag off onto a leather club chair. He seemed to have packed for a long trip. He sat down across from Corvallis and Maeve, who were in a love seat, just zoning out, not daring to look at the Miasma. Instead of greeting them, or even making eye contact, he opened up his laptop and pulled on a pair of reading glasses.

“Presbyopia has caught up with you, I see,” Corvallis said.

Maeve startled, and tensed; she hadn’t realized that this new guy and Corvallis knew each other.

“It would be unusual for one of my age not to have it!” Pluto scoffed.

Maeve had been sprawled back with her head resting on Corvallis’s outstretched arm, but she now sat up, the better to pay notice to this interloper.

Corvallis remembered, now, that back in the old days, the key persons at Corporation 9592 had made use of an iPhone app that enabled them to track each other’s locations on a map. It saved a lot of messing around with text messages whose sole purpose was to establish someone’s whereabouts. Corvallis had shared his location with Dodge and with Pluto. Dodge was dead. Pluto he had forgotten about. He made a mental note to turn the feature off. Not that he didn’t trust Pluto. But it was bad practice to just dumbly leave that stuff running.

“Your luggage is of impressive size and weight,” Corvallis observed, “and I note you have purchased a new sun hat.” For the price tag, and the tiny documentation booklet, were still dangling from Pluto’s headwear.

“Because of the ozone hole,” Pluto began, in a cadence suggesting he had a lot to say about it.

Maeve interrupted him, though. “This person is coming with us?”

“His name is Pluto,” Corvallis said. Then, before Pluto could correct the error, he amended his statement: “Nickname, I meant to say.”

Pluto seemed to finish whatever business he had been conducting on his laptop and peered over the lenses of his reading glasses at Maeve’s legs. Pluto’s general habit was to stare at people’s shoes when he was talking to them, and so Corvallis interpreted this as Pluto’s gearing up to engage in conversation. Maeve saw it as gawking at her prostheses. Corvallis, whose arm was still draped around behind Maeve, reached down to give her shoulder a squeeze and a pat.

“It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet,” Pluto said, “and so I am here to destroy it.”

“Destroy what?” Corvallis inquired.

“The Internet,” Pluto said. “Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work over the Pacific Ocean.”

Pluto sighed. “Then it will have to wait until we have reached Australia.”

“I didn’t like your friend at first,” Maeve said, “but I’m warming up to him.”

“That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation.”

“It’s already destroyed, haven’t you seen a bloody thing?”

“It is not sufficiently destroyed yet,” Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop. “The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand. Peak traffic occurred yesterday, at four point five kiloBradens.”

“What’s a kiloBraden?” asked Maeve, taking a personal interest since her last name was Braden.

“A Braden is a unit of measurement I coined for my own purposes, equal to the number of hostile posts made in an interval of one hour. It has now slumped to just over one hundred Bradens as the focal point of the attack has shifted to your mother and …” Pluto’s brow furrowed as he read something from the screen. “Someone called Lady?”

“Her Lhasa apso,” Maeve sighed. For the dog had been heard yapping incessantly on the soundtrack of Maeve’s mother’s front-stoop press conference, and was now receiving death threats.

“Anyway, we need to get that up into the megaBraden or preferably the gigaBraden range in order to achieve saturation,” Pluto intoned, “and we need much wider ontic coverage.”

“Ontic?” Corvallis asked, so Maeve wouldn’t have to.

The jet’s pilot entered through the door that communicated with the tarmac and gazed at Corvallis in an expectant way. “One more,” Corvallis told him, since there’d be paperwork. To Pluto he said, “Passport?” and then regretted it.

“A passport and a visa are required for entry to—” Pluto began, a little confounded by the question.

“Never mind. He has a passport and a visa,” Corvallis called to the pilot.

After they had walked to the plane and got settled into their seats, Pluto resumed the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “This kind of thing has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed,” he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. “Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn’t get us anywhere because it’s language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—”

“We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.

“‘Slut,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘hag,’ ‘fatty,’ all the bases need to be covered. If we generate traffic in the gigaBraden range—which I think is easily doable—but it’s all skewed toward, say, ‘feminazi,’ then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot—”

“I think we get the idea,” Corvallis said.

“—why, then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole.”

“Pluto, we sort of missed the part where you explained the whole premise of what you’re doing,” Corvallis said.

“I’m glad you said so,” said Maeve, “because I was wondering if I had blacked out.”

“What I’m gathering is that you have been developing some kind of bots or something …”

“Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. “I took the liberty of drawing up a logo.”

“Please don’t show us programmer art, Pluto, it’s not—” But it was too late, as Pluto had swiveled his laptop around to display an unbelievably terrible drawing of an animal that was just barely recognizable as some kind of ape. One shaggy arm had its knuckles on the ground, the other was whipping overhead as it hurled a large, dripping gob of shit. Wavy lines radiated from the projectile as a way of indicating that it smelled bad. It was even more terrible than most of Pluto’s programmer art, but he was smiling broadly and even sort of looking at them, which counted for something. Worse yet, Maeve liked it, and laughed. Corvallis hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.

“By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.

“What do you mean, arbitrary?” Maeve asked.

“As many as he wants,” Corvallis said.

“As many as I want.”

“Don’t they cost money or something?”

Pluto looked startled for a moment, then laughed.

“Pluto has ten times as much money as I do,” Corvallis said.

“Nineteen,” Pluto corrected him, “you don’t know about some of the interesting trading strategies I have been pursuing.” Redirecting his attention from Corvallis’s shoes to Maeve’s prosthetic legs, he went on, “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”

“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.

“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.

“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

“Yes. It worked unexpectedly well. So, another part of the strategy might be to spawn a large number of nonexistent harassment targets and deploy APEs against them as well. I just thought of that.”

“You said earlier you needed my complicity,” Maeve said. “My permission.”

“Yes, what I would like to do is run a troop of APEs at something like a gigaBraden for a couple of weeks, directed at you.”

“So if I understand the math,” Corvallis said, “during that whole time, a billion defamatory posts would be made every hour, personally directed against Maeve. Denouncing her as every kind of bad thing you have included in your ontology of execration. In all languages as well as using imagery. And on all kinds of social media outlets.”

“Her Wikipedia entry alone,” Pluto said, “would be edited a thousand times during the first tenth of a second. New material would be added describing Maeve’s career as a pirate, murderess, sex worker, headhunter, terrorist, and coprophage. By that point the entry will probably have been locked by the administrators, but not before all of the defamatory material is archived in the page history. Meanwhile my APEs will be spawning hundreds of thousands of new accounts on social media systems, and using those accounts to make millions of posts in a similar vein. Existing botnets will be leveraged to generate a colossal spam campaign. The Twitter attack will proceed in three phases. Phase Zero is already under way, in a sense, and consists of—”

“Why do you need my complicity?” Maeve asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s polite of you to ask, but …”

“It’s an open campaign. We would announce it. Publish statistics on how it’s going. You could do press interviews, if you wanted. The sheer magnitude of it would make it obvious, even to the most credulous user of the Miasma, that it was all a bunch of nonsense. Afterward, no one in their right mind would ever believe anything negative about you that had ever been posted on the Miasma. But because it is all technically slanderous, you would have to promise not to sue me.”

“Didn’t you say, when you first came in, that you were going to destroy the Internet? The Miasma?” Maeve asked.

“Yes.”

“How does this accomplish that?”

“I am going to open-source all of the tools for spawning APEs and running troops of them,” Pluto explained. “Combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, this will make it possible for anyone in the world to spawn an APE troop for pennies, and manage their activities from an app.”

Corvallis raised a finger. “I work for Lyke,” he pointed out. “If your APEs are setting up fake accounts and hurling shit on Lyke, it’s a problem for me.”

“An opportunity,” Pluto insisted. “It’s an opportunity for Lyke to differentiate itself from those old-school platforms that, in the wake of Moab, can never again be trusted.”

“Are you responsible for the Moab hoax?” Corvallis asked him flat-out. The idea had only just occurred to him.

“No.”

“Did you have anything to do with it at all?”

“No. Which is weird because whoever did do it thinks like I do in a lot of ways. But, I try to draw the line at anything where people die.”

“You’ve been working on this for a while,” Maeve said. “No one could create all of what you’ve described in a few days. I don’t care how good a programmer you are.”

“That is correct. I have been working on different parts of it ever since I retired from Corporation 9592.”

“Two years ago,” Corvallis said, for Maeve’s benefit. “And now you’re just being opportunistic. The aftermath of Moab is the perfect time for you to launch this.”

“And the perfect time,” Pluto insisted, “for your company to set itself apart from the competition.”

Maeve thought she had better sleep on it. Which was actually possible, on a business jet flying across the Pacific Ocean. She slept soundly for nine hours, which somehow gave Corvallis the premonition that she was going to say yes. Consequently, he slept poorly indeed, lying next to her making mental checklists of every action he was going to have to take as soon as they reached a place where he could connect to the Internet. The technical side of it was going to be easy; Lyke’s engineers, forewarned, could hack together some processes that would filter out most APE traffic. The legal aspect was what kept him awake, largely because it was out of his domain and there was nothing he could do about it save come up with half-baked nightmare scenarios and then worry about them.

He calmed down somewhat when he talked to Pluto. Pluto, as it turned out, had for a couple of years been employing several lawyers full-time, looking for ways to set this thing up so that he wouldn’t run afoul of any of the laws that had been established to inflict draconian punishments on persons identified as hackers.

In one sense, APEs had been decades in the making. In a tightly compressed, fast-forward style of discourse, Pluto reminded Corvallis of a lot of history that he already vaguely knew. Pluto, as it turned out, was part of a loose group of like-minded persons calling itself ENSU: the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking. The APE was his personal baby but others had been working on it too, cross-breeding his code with filter-evading, CAPTCHA-spoofing spambots built to flood Wikipedia with bogus edits and Amazon with fake product reviews.

ENSU’s vision in the long term was noble and beautiful: they wanted to make a new thing called the Trusted Internet. Short term, the way they wanted to get there was to bury every old-school blog in fake comments, follow every legitimate Twitter account with a thousand fake ones, clone and spoof every Facebook page with digital myrmidons, and bide their time for weeks or months before suddenly filling their victims’ feeds with garbage.

“I can see why you hired lawyers,” Corvallis remarked after he’d heard that.

Pluto chuckled. “Only for the APE part of it. There are many participants on the ENSU list. Some more extreme than others.”

“And all anonymous, untraceable, et cetera.”

“Well, we use PURDAH.”

Corvallis sighed. “I’ll bite. What is PURDAH?”

Pluto was delighted that he had asked. “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”

Corvallis leaned back and thought about it for a bit. Some parts of it were obvious, others less so. “How does holography enter into it? That’s a way of making three-dimensional pictures, right?”

“That’s the modern usage. It’s a very old word. Academically, ‘holograph’ means a manuscript written entirely in one hand.”

“One hand?”

“Manu. Script. Hand. Writing,” Pluto said, incredulous at his slowness. “How can you tell if an ancient manuscript was written entirely by one person? The handwriting is the same all the way through, that’s how. The author’s name might not be known, but you can identify them, in a sense, by their handwriting—with greater certainty than could ever be conferred by their name alone.”

“I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.”

“It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manuscript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.”

“So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’”

“Documents or any other kind of digital activity,” Pluto corrected him.

“And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—”

“Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod.

“Run the whole thing by me again?”

“Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”