Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  13

  News of the letter rippled out across the war room like a shock wave, dislodging asses from chairs and generating a murmur that rolled into a chorus of curiosity. Chawla steamrolled through the space with Lucas, Brady, Whitaker, and Hoffner in tow—straight for one of the quarantined conference rooms, this one with opaque glass walls.

  Chawla pushed the door open and two men were already at work. He introduced the first as Special Agent Stanley Tranter. Tranter was from the Applied Linguistics department and would have looked at home on any golf course—or ride-on lawn mower—in the country. The second man was from Software Forensics, and his name was Olly Porchnoy. Porchnoy clocked in at somewhere between twelve and thirty years of age and wore a very cheap suit that probably came with the imitation Naugahyde shoes and lavender shirt he wore. The shirt was wrinkled but tucked in, and he smelled of acne cream.

  Porchnoy didn’t bother trying to shake hands; he just went straight to work. “Okay,” he said, and hammered away on one of a dozen keyboards laid out in a line on the imitation wood surface of the conference table. “This was delivered to Chad Worthington’s business email at CNN yesterday at thirty seconds after 6:32 P.M. It was disguised as spam, so the network software jettisoned it. After he received a DM on his phone today telling him that he had missed an important email, he went to their in-house people, who found it. They opened it and called us. We’re taking it apart downstairs right now, but it’s been bounced around a remailer and delivered via a Tor connection. The metadata doesn’t have any value and I think it’s unlikely that we’ll find anything useful hidden in the code.” The kid stopped and went to work on another of the keyboards without saying anything. Lucas recognized the body language of someone more comfortable with numbers than people.

  Hoffner tapped the tablet in his hand. “The bomber told CNN that if they don’t publish his letter, he’s going to kill a bunch of children on television. He gave them until the three o’clock slot to air it and put it up on their website.”

  Lucas checked his Submariner—that gave them a little more than twenty minutes before the world knew as much as they did.

  Brady’s team was over at the Time Warner Center, texting her updates as they did their part of the investigation. She tapped the screen on her iPhone—which was in some sort of a waterproof case that gave it the general size of a car battery. “Their producer is going out with it. Their legal department has drafted a letter citing their efforts to prevent another attack.”

  Lucas couldn’t see the logic in the demand. “Why the threat? Those people don’t need any incentive to go public with something like this.”

  Tranter directed everyone’s focus to the first page of the letter. “I think you’ll understand once you read this.” And he began to read the letter aloud.

  It was two simple paragraphs. There was no salutation. It contained no hyperbole and stuck with clear, concise statements of intent. There was no flair to the language, no passion. But there was no missing the threat it promised.

  They wanted a revolution. They wanted the world to join them. In rejecting technology. In reclaiming its humanity. In resetting the clock of history.

  And if not, they were going to send the whole shithouse up in flames.

  With that, something in Lucas’s face must have changed, because Whitaker tapped him on the arm and whispered, “What are you smiling at?”

  Tranter had stopped reading and Chawla was doing that irritated thing with his face again. Brady just stood there, looking confused. Hoffner didn’t bother to look up from his tablet.

  Lucas shrugged. “That letter wasn’t written by our bomber.”

  It was Chawla who said, “How do you know?”

  “Because that letter wasn’t written by a human being; it was written by a machine.”

  14

  Whitaker jumped into the elevator as the doors closed. “You need to chill.”

  “I’m tired of people of getting in my way.”

  “Well, tough shit, and get used to it, because that’s the way it’s set up. People get in your way, they get in my way, they get in their own way. You’re too smart to fight windmills. And I’m not dumb enough to.”

  Lucas rammed a green aluminum knuckle into the console, and the car began its descent to the garage.

  Whitaker adjusted her jacket. “What was that upstairs?”

  The elevator dropped through the core of the building, the numbers counting down like the timer on a … bomb. “That letter wasn’t written by the people responsible—it was written by an algorithm.”

  “Are you su—” She stopped and reformulated the question. “How do you know?”

  Lucas had taught a course titled “Simulation Theory and the Cosmos” for four years now, and the central theorem was that human life was an offshoot of a complicated computer code that dictated the mechanics of the universe. And as much as he liked to deride the quality of the minds the university fed through his classroom, plenty of clever kids had challenged his self-image. He was in astrophysics, but crossover meant that a lot of the computer science students ended up in his auditorium—and some of the programmers were crafty. And like Aziz Shamim had famously tweeted, the acolytes of tech culture operated on one single frequency in response to one direct quesiton: What is my mother no longer doing for me? And for some of them, the answer was obvious: homework. So every semester he had papers handed in that had been produced by an algorithm. The first few registered as odd, but he couldn’t pinpoint what—exactly—was wrong with them. But letters are like numbers and when he finally sat down and took one apart, he figured out what was scraping his bark—the work had been produced by a natural-language generator. “Necessity isn’t the mother of invention: laziness is. I’ve read a lot of term papers written by text compactors, and I’ve written two articles on the topic. It’s pure math. Humans think a certain way.”

  “And so do computers?”

  “Computers don’t think, they imitate thought. We no longer have to write a set of rules for machines to follow, where the inherent flaw is that we are not very good at anticipating every contingency. AI perfects itself through trial and error—deep learning—which uses examples, not rules. And a machine can become very proficient at cataloguing examples. Even better than humans—just look at chess or Go or chopping carrots. But we offset that by processing new information in a very different way. Give a carrot chopping machine an onion, or give a chess computer a deck of cards, and they’re fucked. They can’t adapt. They can’t think. Look at what happened in March 2018—an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian. It saw the woman on the road and registered her presence, but all the examples of pedestrians it had ever been exposed to were at crosswalks, so it ignored her because it didn’t understand that she could be there. It couldn’t adapt to a task outside of its experience—even though it won’t make the same mistake twice.

  “But language has a finite number of components and contingencies; there are plenty of examples. And that letter was written by a machine. It’s content derived from data and produced by an algorithm. A machine can’t differentiate the meaningful from the meaningless, and it can’t generate any sort of a literary style or voice. It can only perform toward a goal it has been given, even if it is using examples. And I guarantee that the NLG that wrote that letter wasn’t particularly sophisticated.”

  The elevator made it all the way to the garage level without a stop, and the doors opened to three men with carbines at the ready, fingers over trigger guards. Lucas couldn’t figure out why they were here—no one was getting this far into the building. And no one would try to come through the garage—too many security points before this particular door. But the precaution said a lot about the siege mentality that had crept into the system—us versus them was now a fulltime mindset.

  Lucas blocked the sensor for Whitaker, then followed her out into the brightly lit corridor that led to the garage. “So,” she said, “how come Tranter couldn’t see that?”

/>   “He will. We’ll get a call in half an hour after he runs it through whatever software he’s used to using and he’ll give me an 80 percent chance of being correct, which gives Chawla an 80 percent chance of being wrong. But it will be too late, because CNN is going to run with the story, and the message will be out there. And we both know that there is no shortage of Pizzagate simpletons to buy into the narrative.”

  “So what is going on?”

  That was the central question to everything at this point. “Just look at Ted Kaczynski?”

  “The Unabomber?”

  “No, Ted Kaczynski the children’s author.”

  Whitaker gave him the stink eye as she swiped them through the sally port to the garage. “I only remember the broad strokes from one of my courses at Quantico. He was a … holy shit—he was a mathematician, right? He thought that man’s relationship with technology was leading society down a path that would eventually destroy mankind. So he tried to start a revolution by sending out letter bombs to various people—computer store owners, university professors—that kind of thing. Tried to blow up an airliner, but the trigger failed and the plane landed. From the late seventies to the mid-nineties he killed three people and wounded two dozen.”

  Lucas followed Whitaker through the garage. He realized he could still taste soot and something else. “That letter upstairs is a boiled-down version of the Unabomber’s manifesto—point for point. There is nothing original in it—instead of naming the system ‘industrial society,’ the algo called it ‘technological civilization,’ but that’s hardly what I would call originality. It took his basic grievances—leaving out his political bias—and put them in a package that your average attention-deficit riddled citizen could pay attention to long enough to grok. Which is the beauty of automatic text summarization tools—they can parse large quantities of data. And therein lies the joke—a technophobe would never use an algorithm to present that particular argument.”

  “So they’re just fucking with us? They’re not really worried about Skynet self-actualizing?”

  “Whoever is running this show is smart—you don’t cobble together a thermobaric explosion like this without a bucketload of brains—so there’s going to be a purpose in everything they do. Maybe it’s misdirection. Maybe it’s something else.” He looked over at her. “And just what, exactly, is Skynet?”

  “Don’t you take the kids to the movies?”

  “All the time; last week we watched The Sorrow and the Pity.”

  “I pictured you more of a Smokey and the Bandit kind of guy.”

  “That was the week before.”

  Which got a laugh out of Whitaker. “How is the TV brood, by the way? In all this commotion I forgot to ask.”

  “They’re good. Erin is opening a new practice with one of her colleagues, which she’s pretty excited about. Maude is a burgeoning artist; Damien is working on being the next Hendrix; Hector doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything, so I picture him becoming a barista or maybe a novelist; Laurie and Alisha are the unknowns—they’re too young for me to see any trajectory.”

  “Sounds like things are good in Pageland.”

  “I guess they are.” And he realized that this was small talk and that he needed to contribute. So he did. “And you? How are things? Shoot anyone lately?”

  Another laugh. “No. But in my effort to be more domestic I got a cactus. It’s plastic, but no one seems to notice.”

  A Latin dude in cargo pants and a Yankees cap had three Navigators lined up near the washing station. He was singing as he filled a bucket with spray from one of the hoses, and Lucas envied the guy his job for a second.

  Whitaker waved over at the man. “Hey, Augustine! Don’t you ever stop?”

  Augustine waved back and said, “Too much to do!” in heavily accented English.

  Lucas followed Whitaker up the main lane, both sides lined with the ubiquitous black SUVs favored by the bureau.

  “Why was Chawla talking trash about your book up there?”

  “Chawla doesn’t read books, at least not without pictures. He probably just Googled it.”

  “Well, what’s your book about?”

  The park lights on one of the Navigators flashed as they got close, and Lucas looped around to the passenger side. “It’s an examination of Schrödinger’s thought experiment on the cat.”

  “I thought you were more of a dog person.”

  The doors clicked open and Lucas climbed in. “And Erin wonders why I don’t leave the house more.”

  15

  Whitaker’s phone rang, and she answered by hitting a button on the steering wheel. “Whitaker here.”

  Chawla’s voice came on in stereo. “Whitaker, you still with Page?”

  Lucas said, “I’m here,” trying not to sound too irritated.

  “Okay, look, you two need to stay in the loop. They’re going live with that letter in five minutes, and I wanted you to know what’s happening in case you’re asked by anyone that matters. We’ve come up with a name for the bomber, and we’ll be using it during briefings and all press releases. It will also be the internal designation.”

  Whitaker thrummed her fingers on the steering wheel as they rolled up to a stoplight on Broadway two blocks south of Federal Plaza. “Shoot.”

  “Like we’ve done in the past, we’ll be using the first letters of the target to build the acronym.”

  Lucas immediately factored the statement out in his head; the Unabomber handle had been manufactured utilizing University and Airplane. He didn’t want to hear what Chawla was going to say next, but he couldn’t stop the man from speaking.

  Chawla continued with “So we’re going with the Guggabomber.”

  Lucas laughed out loud. “You’re fucking kidding, right?”

  Whitaker hit the mute button on the steering wheel. “Page, be nice. You don’t need this job, but I do. Be constructive.” She had the stink eye dialed up again.

  Lucas shrugged and she unmuted the call.

  Lucas leaned into the microphone. “Look, Chawla, why don’t you use something that doesn’t sound so heavy on the tongue. Maybe something a little less specific, but still in the realm of what’s going on.”

  “Like what?”

  Lucas literally threw his hands in the air. “Jesus, I don’t know. But not the Guggabomber—please. We’ll sound like idiots. Go with—” He compacted everything he had learned about their guy in the past few days into a single stream of code. “Call him the Machine Bomber.”

  “The Machine Bomber?”

  “It’s just an example. And not a particularly good one. But it’s better than the Guggabomber. It fits in with the narrative of that bullshit letter; he claims that he wants to blow up machines. And when it turns out that I was right, and you find out that the letter was written by the machine, it will fit the story going forward.” Lucas looked over at Whitaker and shrugged—he thought he was handling things diplomatically. “Either way, it’s a win-win.”

  Whitaker was shaking her head fatalistically. She didn’t look happy.

  Chawla said, “The Machine Bomber,” trying it out for size. “The Machine Bomber,” he repeated. “I think we’ll stick with the Guggabomber.” And he hung up.

  Lucas looked over at Whitaker, who was still shaking her head. “What?” he asked. “I gave it a shot.”

  Whitaker held up her hand. “I’m not talking to you except to ask for directions. And where, exactly, are you taking us?”

  Lucas pointed straight down Broadway. “Wall Street.”

  “Why Wall Street?”

  “When there’s blood in the water, the best place to start is with the sharks.”

  16

  CNN Breaking News

  “Good afternoon, I’m Chad Worthington, and this is a CNN exclusive.

  “A few moments ago, CNN received a letter from the people responsible for the bombing of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan last night. At this point we are unable to disclose how we have confi
rmed that this letter was written by the actual perpetrators of the terrorist attack, but the claim has been corroborated by the public information officer of the Joint Terrorism Task Force operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Please be advised, that the letter has graphic content, and has not been edited for content in any way.”

  The system is broken, and must be corrected if humankind is to survive. By humankind, we mean a humancentric society, where the value of social relationships should outweigh man’s relationship with technology. Technological civilization is an oxymoron and cannot be allowed to continue. We will not allow it to continue. In every war, there must be a first shot. In thirty seconds, an example will be made of a technocentric corporation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This corporation states its goal as the betterment of mankind, but it does this with very little humanity and too much technology.

  Human history is shaped by large, general trends, not small specific actions. And the destruction of technological civilization is imperative if human society is to survive. There are some positive facets of technological civilization, but they are so completely integrated with the negative aspects that both must be destroyed in order to build a human society worth living in. The citizens must accept that technological civilization cannot be reformed because the system is too pervasive. It must be torn down so that it can be rebuilt correctly. We are going to tear it down by any means possible. The bombing tonight is the beginning of the revolution. All citizens must join us. Burn the technological system down. Reject the machines and embrace our humanity. The only goal is to destroy. And when the destruction is complete, the revolution will be complete. There is no stopping us. We will burn it all down.

  “The special agent in charge of the investigation—Samir Chawla—has labeled the author of the letter the Machine Bomber, and the FBI will be using the title for all future news conferences, official statements, and internal designation.