The entire stadium saw it on the Jumbotron and booed. Holmes did not react with grace. He flipped the crowd off. Repeatedly. He spat on the people in the stands nearest to him. He grabbed his crotch. He was taking down his pants to moon the crowd by the time security got to him. The clip was played repeatedly on SportsCenter that night, and the rest of the country got to see him too.
It got worse. It turned out that Justin was at the game as part of a Make-A-Wish group of pediatric cancer patients. Doctors gave him maybe a year.
Holmes could have ended it there by just apologizing and giving the kid the stupid ball, but he refused. When a local TV reporter asked him why he’d knocked an eleven-year-old senseless for a foul ball, he decided that this would be his fifteen minutes. “Hey,” he said, “there are winners and losers in this world. He’s got cancer? I got the ball. Life’s tough.”
It went viral. He went on CNN and dug himself even deeper. (“Look, all I’m saying is that if he really wanted the ball, he shoulda fought harder for it.”) For a couple of days, Gary Holmes was the most hated man in America.
And then the Kardashians did something or there was another mass shooting. People found something else to care about. They moved on.
“What did you do?” I ask Stack.
He hesitates again. His clean ideas and good intentions have taken a dive right into the muck.
“We thought—I thought—he would be a good test case. I figured we could get people to rally around him, make him give the foul ball back. So we entered him into the program. Sent it out into the wild. People who clicked on the news story would get more and more news about him. And they would be motivated to do something about it. I thought we could shame him. If enough people got angry—”
He stops.
“What makes you so sure your program had something to do with his death?”
“I didn’t. I mean, not at first. He didn’t give the ball back. In fact, he just seemed to get worse. He tried to become a celebrity. He got an agent. Then he dropped out of the news. I figured the software needed more tweaking. Godwin and I went back to work on it. Then I got a news alert a couple of months later. He was dead.”
The police thought it was a simple home invasion. Holmes lost his job, got divorced, moved to L.A. for some reality-TV thing that never worked out—and then moved back to a really shitty neighborhood in Phoenix. The media pulled out the clip of him knocking the cancer kid senseless again, and nobody really mourned.
Except Stack. He wondered if their software had something to do with it. He scoured the Internet for clues.
Stack found a photo of Holmes’s dead body that was posted on a message board, along with a boast from an anonymous user: YOU’RE OUT.
That was all the confirmation Stack needed. He was sure his program had led to this.
“I told Godwin we couldn’t do this anymore,” he says now. “He was angry. He said we really had something important. Valuable. We had to keep going. I told him no. I wanted to wipe out every copy of the code. Clearly we didn’t know what we were dealing with. And I thought that was going to be the end of it.”
I see the text messages and emails in his memories. Lots of back-and-forth. But in the end, Godwin agreed. He said he’d erase his copies of the program. Stack went back to focusing on his anonymous payment application. He thought it was over.
And suddenly I get it. For all his intelligence, he couldn’t see through someone else’s lies.
“Godwin took the code, didn’t he?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
In response, Stack sags a little more in his seat. He points at the screens.
“It’s in here,” he says. “As soon as I heard about this online, I checked. It’s hidden in the site. Every visitor gets that code we designed together.” He taps a few more buttons, spins the screen to show me again. A list.
“Look. Atlanta, Georgia. Local weatherman gets the crap kicked out of him after getting busted for a DUI near a school zone. Gay-rights activist in Los Angeles put into the ICU. Radio talk-show host gets a bomb threat. Woman in D.C. caught flipping off the camera at a veterans’ memorial has her credit rating and her tires slashed. Mom in Iowa who slapped her kid in a grocery store gets fired, gets a visit from child services, gets rear-ended while out driving. Jason Davis is attacked by a stalker while he’s walking his dog.”
“And Kira Sadeghi,” I remind him.
Stack nods. “And Kira Sadeghi. Every one of those people was on Downvote. Celebrities are easiest to target. They’re already out there, in front of the public. But you can make someone into a celebrity too. Think about all those people who have lost their jobs because they posted something stupid on Facebook or Twitter. For a couple of hours or a couple of days, they’re worse than Hitler. Anyone could be a target. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true. The online mob will take them down.”
I remember everything I pulled from Goetz’s head, how he was repeatedly pummeled with images and clips of Kira. The algorithm found him, identified him, and kept feeding him fuel for his rage.
He wasn’t alone. And now I realize, he wasn’t the only one either.
This is why Vincent had developed such hostility toward Kira and Jason Davis after visiting Downvote. He didn’t realize it, but he’d been targeted by the software too. It had started pushing every negative fact it could find toward him. He got to see them at their worst every time he clicked on his computer. Of course, he didn’t take his sidearm and start shooting at them because Vincent is, more or less, stable and sane. But someone who’s already on the borderline . . .
“Lone gunmen,” I say, taking the words right out of his mind. “Border-line personalities. People who are at the breaking point.”
“The crazies,” Stack says, nodding. “The ones who are looking for a reason, for something to fix on because their minds are already coming apart. There are a surprising number of them out there at any given moment. And when it all comes together for them, they’ve finally got someone to blame for everything miserable in their lives. They’ll jump out from behind the computer and go after the bad guys. They’ve finally got a target.”
Now I can see it the way he does, the picture that’s suspended crystal clear in his head. It looks like one of those maps from a movie where the zombie virus spreads, or the missiles are flying in a World War III simulation. A red spot appears in San Francisco or Iowa City or Jacksonville. Red lines leap across the map. More red spots wherever they land. And then, when the map is covered in red, there are sudden explosions, thousands of miles away from the original outbreaks.
“Emotional contagion,” Stack says. “Like you said. A virus. And it’s getting worse. Most of the people won’t do anything, of course. But they’ll spread the message. They might send an email. Or share the idea along their networks. And if it’s the right idea—if it hits just the right notes— then it’s going to hit critical mass. Millions of people will see it. And in most cases, I only need a few to go out and do something about it.”
*
We both sit for a moment after that. Stack, with his guilt. Me, I’m just trying to put it all together.
After a long moment, I finally ask the obvious question.
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
Stack unwraps his half of a protein bar again. Takes another tiny nibble. Wraps it up and places it back on the desk. God, he’s hungry.
“You know I’ve got my own problems with the federal government right now,” he says. “I know this is going to sound selfish. I’m not guilty of what they think I’ve done. But I could give them something else, something that would stop people from getting really hurt—”
“You want to trade Godwin to the feds. Get yourself off the hook, get them to focus on him.”
I see his defenses go up. “It’s not just about saving myself,” he insists. “Godwin has to be stopped.”
“Fine,” I say. I don’t really care about his justifications or his excuses to himself. As lo
ng as he gives me the guy who put Kira in the hospital. “Tell me where to find him. I’ll handle it from there.”
He smiles. There’s a little dance of amusement in his brain. “Well. That’s where we run into a problem,” he says.
And I see it. I scan all the memories I can find. Same answer.
“You don’t know his real name?”
He shrugs. “We only ever collaborated online. That’s how I do ninety-nine percent of all my work now. He could have been a guy in a wheelchair or a twelve-year-old girl in a trailer park, for all I cared. His ideas were what mattered.”
“You worked with him. You built an entire software platform with him,” I say. “And you never once got his actual name?”
I’m slightly incredulous. Not that I don’t believe him. I just don’t believe people can operate this way. No wonder he can’t go to the feds with this. Or even his lawyers. It’s not the worst excuse I’ve ever heard, but it’s close.
“You really don’t work in tech, do you?” Stack asks, and he’s actually grinning now. “I couldn’t tell you the real names of most of the people I talk to every day. I have no idea what they look like. Or if they’re male or female or something else entirely. They’re screen names to me. I know their voices from what they type. I could identify any of them from a few lines of code or text. But they could walk right by me in the street and I’d never even glance at them.”
I give him a long look. I don’t find this nearly as amusing as he does.
He must see something in my face, because inside his head, it’s suddenly all shields up, and he’s leaning back hard on his belief in his superior intellect. “This is how the world works now,” he insists. “Ideas are more important than what you look like, or where you’re from. That’s all just meat. The ideas are what matter. I would think that someone like you would understand that.”
I take a long look around at his high-tech womb, the tight little space he’s carved out for himself at the center of his floating fortress.
And then I look back at him. “Until someone from the real world decides to reach out and touch you. I think you would understand that.”
He shrinks from me, mentally and physically. But he nods.
///12
I Need You to Be Smarter
Sara rides back with me in the helicopter. Her mind is a little less troubled than before, but it’s hardly a calm blue ocean. She’s pleased that Stack was unharmed when I stepped out of his office, but she’s still got something she wants to say to me.
“You taking the job?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I tell her. It’s the truth. I don’t know if Stack will really help me find Godwin or not. It’s a good lead. And he’s got resources that Armin can’t match. But his offer comes with strings attached. One of which is sitting right next to me.
“If you’re going to work for us—” she begins.
“With you,” I say. “Not for you. With you.”
“Either way. We need to set some ground rules first. I know some of the things you’ve done,” she says.
“You know what I can do?” I ask her.
“I know what you say you can do,” she answers carefully. Of course, she’s also got the standard, more honest response:
“That’s right, I am,” I tell her. “I really can read minds. I thought you’d want to know that up front. I find it saves time.”
She stares at me for a second.
“Yeah. A lot of people have that reaction.”
While she’s digesting that, I scan her mind to find out what she knows about me.
I learn that Stack shared my file with her. In addition to the file, she’s also done her due diligence. Executive protection is still a fairly small field. There are a lot of people who claim to have CIA and Special Forces backgrounds, and Sara has had a lot of experience checking into that. She was able to reach out to a lot of people who have worked with me, and got more information from people she knows in the military.
She’s assembled a fairly complete picture of me, and the view from in-side her head isn’t exactly flattering. It’s as if there is smoke all around me, a kind of darkness I carry. There are numbers in her mind: my body count, a tally of lives lost because of me, either directly or indirectly. There is a former tech CEO who now goes into seizures whenever he tries to sit in front of a computer. A corpse found on the roof of a mall in Dubai. And further back, a list of names of people who got on the wrong side of the War on Terror.
I am a little impressed that she’s still willing to sit this close to me. I am not sure I would do that, given some of the stuff on my résumé.
And that is why she wants to talk to me.
“Listen. Here’s the way it is,” she says.
I can’t say I enjoy how she’s looking at me right now. I’d like to say she’s wrong. I’d like to mount some kind of defense of myself here. I’d like to say, I have done only what I’ve had to do to protect myself and my clients. And that I never enjoyed it. That would be the professional response.
But it wouldn’t be true.
Perhaps predictably, I get a little angry. And I try to turn it back on her.
“What do you think you do for a living?” I ask her. “If someone were to take a shot at Stack, would you just sit there? Or would you shoot back?” She was prepared to put a bullet in me if I threatened him, after all.
But she doesn’t seem at all bothered by the question. In fact, she’s got an answer all ready for me.
“Look. In this world, there are sheep, and there are wolves. You’re a sheep—hey, you’re a good person, a solid citizen. You keep your head down and do your taxes on time. But you’re easy prey for the wolves. Those are the people who prey on the sheep. The people who are willing to break the rules of the pasture and hurt and kill so they can take whatever they want. So you have to have sheepdogs. People who can do the same things the wolves can, but who choose not to—unless they have to. Someone to protect the sheep. Show their fangs to keep the wolves at bay.”
I’ve heard this before. It’s popular with a lot of Special Forces types. I’ve never bought it. “And that’s you?” I ask.
“That’s me. And that’s you too, if we’re going to work together.”
“So I can bark, but not bite?”
She frowns. “Don’t play dumb with me,” she says. “Do what you have to, but no more than that. Someone tries to hurt you, you figure it out, but whatever you do, you will not leave a trail of bodies that goes back to my boss.”
“So it’s about public relations, not morality. You don’t want him to look bad.”
Her frown deepens only a little, but I can feel a real spike of animosity under her self-control. For the first time, I’ve made her angry. “No. It’s about morality. Aaric believes in making the world a better place. But he’s not talking about religion or politics. For him, it’s math. He’s worked it out to the last decimal place, and the equations only balance if we stop killing each other. He’s going to help make it happen.”
“You mean, you really believe in this social-networking software of his? You think it can push people into being better?”
“I believe in him. He is smarter than I am. And he’s smarter than you. So I don’t care if you think it’s bullshit. We cannot allow this guy Godwin and Downvote to pervert what Aaric has been trying to do. That is my bottom line. And that goes for you too.”
“And what happens if we do run into people who want to hurt us? Someone else who’s all fired up from Downvote and ready to rack up a body count?”
“You’re supposed to be this incredible living weapon, right? Well, then prove it. If w
e get in trouble, you find another way. I need you to be smarter. You will follow the rules. Or you can go back to cleaning rich people’s toilets.”
There’s another, more practical reason she doesn’t want me to kill Godwin. Stack needs him, needs to trade Godwin to the feds, and that won’t work if we deliver a corpse.
The main problem with that is, I just want Godwin to pay. If things get difficult, then it’s going to be a lot easier to kill him than capture him. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is.
Still, if she were making the argument that we have to take Godwin alive because it’s the only thing that will keep her boss out of jail, it would make more sense to me.
But for Sara, it’s really as simple as doing the right thing.
I check her for deception. Performance. The mental signs of salesmanship, the parts of the brain that start humming when someone is saying something they don’t quite believe, when they’re trying to fake sincerity.
But she has no doubt. She says it’s not religion or patriotism, but it sure feels like it. It’s that same certainty I get from some believers. Not the ones who have never been tested. It’s easy to be certain about Jesus or America when you’re nineteen and you’ve never prayed for anything but a date to the prom. I mean the believers who have seen friends die and watched family suffer, and have realized that their place in the plan doesn’t mean unlimited happiness and rainbows. They have seen the world, and the ugliness it contains, and yet they still believe that their way is the surest path to salvation, whether it be democracy or Christianity or Buddha.
Sometimes I envy those people. It would be nice to have an answer, any answer, instead of blindly groping around in the dark. That’s where I find myself most of the time. I know more than most people ever will. I have access to all their secrets. And because of that, I have never found an answer I trusted. There is always another truth, a hidden motive, something just below the surface waiting to be revealed.
But there are times I would like to believe.
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