dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

When it was over, Abernathy covered his face with his hands, exhaled deeply, then put his hands on the desk in front of him, his fingers steepled, fingertips meeting his chin.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we know, and might I say it’s nowhere near enough. The Poiana Mazik mentioned on the recording is a tiny village in Romania, notable only for its isolation, its plum brandy, and … nope, that’s it. There have been no recorded environmental disasters, disturbances, evacuations, battles, cordons or terror attacks—and certainly no creatures—which would make this seem like a hoax of the most tedious order, if it wasn’t for one thing.”

  “And that would be… ?” Ani asked.

  Abernathy winced.

  “Poiana Mazik is about three miles from Joe Dyson’s last known location. And he’s gone dark.”

  “Dark? Does that mean you haven’t been able to contact him?”

  Abernathy nodded.

  “But how can that be? He’s not even on the same case.”

  “That’s certainly what we thought,” Abernathy said. “It looks like we were wrong. The victorious investigation appears to intersect with Joe’s case in Romania. Do you know what is three miles away from Poiana Mazik? What has Joe out there in the first place?”

  “I assume it was a break in this homeless-people-in-slavery case,” Ani offered.

  “A break, yes, and not one we thought to be particularly promising. But it was all we had, and it led to the Eastern European factory of Dorian Systems.”

  “Dorian?” Ani said, incredulously. “As in Dorian Interactive? As in the maker of the item at the top of just about every nerd’s wish list? NeWToPia?”

  “It seems I am the only person at YETI who had a Dorian-shaped gap in my pop cultural knowledge,” Abernathy grumbled. “Yes, that Dorian.”

  “So how does Dorian connect to the thing in Luton?”

  “Tenuously, or so we thought. There was a new kind of chip in all of the computers we seized. And they all self-destructed after we got our hands on them. But we were able to make out the Dorian logo on one of them—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You seized computers in Luton?”

  “That’s what the slave-labor force were assembling.” Abernathy said.

  “Well, I’ve just learned an important lesson,” Ani said, “and it’s this: pay attention to the details of other investigations. I’ve been so focused on the victorious thing, that I missed a huge piece”

  “You can see how this all connects up?” Abernathy asked.

  “Maybe. But first I need to get a look at these computers you seized.”

  Ani shook her head.

  “You definitely need to stop compartmentalizing cases, Abernathy,” she said. “Especially when there are overlapping elements. In this case, computers.”

  “Noted,” Abernathy replied. “Now, could you please explain to me what has gotten you so excited?”

  “They’re an odd kind of generic, off-brand PC,” Ani explained. “Okay on their own, but they’re really something when they’re networked. You see, these computers, they share processing power where it’s needed, when it’s needed. So if I’m using one, and I don’t have the processing power to hash twenty thousand passwords, then the computer will farm the job out to one or more networked computers, using their CPUs and GPUs to make up the computational shortfall. It’s a beautiful implementation of the idea of a distributed computing network.

  “The individual computers look like lemons, and perform like them, too, and that makes them easy to underestimate. But these computers hack like the Devil.”

  “And you know this how?” Abernathy asked, impatience just about, but not quite, hidden.

  “They’re the same computers I’ve been working on at victorious.” Ani said, enjoying the look that spread across Abernathy’s face.

  The one that looked like a bunch of pieces had just slotted together behind his eyes.

  That looked like things might have just gotten a little clearer, but also a whole lot darker.

  Abernathy tried chasing down the Shuttleworth brothers, but they were still flying back from the States.

  He pulled in as many people as he could from the two investigations. They sat in the briefing room looking baffled by the sudden integration, before he stepped forward to address the group. “Thank you for your time,” he said. “I’m going to make this as brief as I can, because we have some emergency, damage-limitation kind of work to be getting on with. Okay, thanks to Ani, here, we’ve actually made some progress on two investigations, so I hope the rest of you feel a modicum of shame. Don’t wallow in it, I missed this, too. And Ani is out in the field for the explicit purpose of finding this kind of stuff, but the lesson we must take away from this is lapse is cross-check active investigations. I’m sure that we used to do that kind of thing, so could we start again? Thanks.

  “For those of you involved in the victorious case, I’m sure that you are aware of the other thing we’ve been filling our time sheets with: the raid on a bowling alley in Luton that freed a number of teens being held as slave labor, and provided us with a bunch of computers and a smaller bunch of scumbags. What you might not know is that all of the seized computers contained chips that led to a major player in the global entertainments industry, Dorian Systems.

  “Anyway, Joe Dyson pursued that lead to LA, and then to Eastern Europe, where he’s gone off comms. Whether it’s bad signal, a dead battery, or something more serious, we don’t yet know. I will now yield the floor to Ani for an unprepared—but, I’m certain, quite excellent—catch up of her own. Ani?”

  “Thanks, boss.” Ani had been sitting at one of the desks in the briefing room, but thought it might help if she stood up and moved to the front of the room. Abernathy stepped aside. She looked out at the faces of her colleagues and tried to pretend that this all felt completely normal. “I’ve been working on the infiltration of victorious since we organized that little sting operation down in the West Country. It was feeling like a total waste of time until a couple of days ago when I started work at the downtown Dead Cell—that’s v-speak for ‘office’—of victorious.

  “It turns out that victorious is using the same computers that were being assembled in Luton. I was impressed with the way that the v-computers used distributed processing—sharing task loads between other computers on the network, out-sourcing processing power—and I suspect the technology that makes it all possible is the chip that burned itself out in all the seized computers, a chip manufactured by Dorian Systems.

  “Dorian have a factory in Romania, near a village called Poiana Mazik, which just so happens to be the site of some odd phenomena mentioned in documents scalped from the victorious server in a file called Gaia.meme. This dotmeme file contains a compressed archive of news pages and videos detailing some kind of attack on Poiana Mazik. It is a file that is capable of deleting itself if opened by the wrong person, and so the information we have from the dotmeme file is just a few random fragments saved as the files all deleted themselves. I say ‘saved,’ but what I mean is …. Oh, look, I’ll leave it to Dr. Ghoti to explain just how we recovered them. But here’s the thing: there has been no such attack on Poiana Mazik. The reports do not seem to match up with the reality. So what are they?

  “Answer number one is simple: it’s all a hoax. A harmless Internet prank. victorious intends to plant these meme files on targeted servers, get them to rewrite some newspapers’ webpages, and maybe end up fooling a bunch of people into thinking something bad is happening. Maybe they want to loosen the hold we have on digital media as a news source we can trust. Maybe they just want to mess with peoples’ heads. So they create a virtual disaster that’s only happening in people’s computers, but has the power to convince those people it’s true. There’d be a new conspiracy theory within moments of the first denial of anything transpiring in Romania, too, because one thing about memes: they stick. They gain hold and replicate. They spread.

  “Why did planking ever become a thing? Or that cat
that sounded like it was saying ‘O Long Johnson’? Actually, that last one was pretty funny … but, anyway, maybe that’s why they’re using the word ‘meme’ as a file name. victorious do seem pretty focused on their memes, even devoting a section of the London office to their production. That’s interesting because besides being irritating photos of cats with slogans, the word ‘meme’ originally described the way that ideas, behaviors, fashions, and trends spread throughout culture. And not just Internet culture. When I was looking into the whole meme thing, I discovered that it was Richard Dawkins that coined the term, and it’s modeled loosely on the idea of the gene. Maybe ideas are transferred through a society using the meme as their mechanism.”

  She paused to let all that information sink in, and to give her brain time to plan her next point. Composing theories and hypotheses on the fly was pretty much the way these briefings went, and—she had to admit she was pretty good at it—but it was also mentally taxing and a little bit terrifying.

  “Answer number two is where it all starts to get a little weird,” she said, “so bear with me on this. What if the information about the Romanian disaster is true, but it just hasn’t happened yet?”

  A male analyst, Matthew something, raised his hand. “Are we saying that victorious can predict the future now?” he asked in a dismissive tone.

  Ani had no idea. She’d just spoken her theory out loud because that’s what Abernathy had told her to do. The guy didn’t need to make it sound like she was an idiot. Her idea had just followed from the first one: either it was false or it was true. And if it was true …

  She felt a shudder pass down her spine.

  If it hadn’t been for the tone of the guy’s question, and the flash of anger she’d felt, she might never have made the leap to her next statement. And it was pretty much out of her mouth before she’d even had a chance to think about it.

  “No,” she said, a little defensively. “But maybe they can create it.”

  Abernathy barked out orders for people to look into every aspect of Dorian Systems, to find out more about Poiana Mazik and why it might have been selected by victorious as the contents of the dotmeme file, and to generally work on confirming or denying anything Ani had just suggested.

  Then he dismissed the meeting, keeping only Ani, Minaxi Desai, and Dr. Ghoti back.

  “I need feet on the ground in Romania.” Abernathy said, urgently. “I can send some backup in with you, because Ani here just worried me, but I’ll understand if you want to opt out of this mission.”

  “If Ani’s wrong about victorious engineering a disaster there, then there’s no danger,” Minaxi said. “And if she’s right, then we really need to know. I’m in.”

  “Me, too,” Dr. Ghoti said.

  “Of course,” Ani agreed.

  “Good.” Abernathy rubbed his hands together. “I need to make a few calls so we don’t have to rely on commercial aircraft flight times. We’ll have a mission briefing in”—he looked at the watch on his wrist—“shall we say twenty minutes? That should give you just enough time to pass on whatever you’re working on to the next person down the line. I’ll see you back here then.”

  He half turned to walk away, then shook his head, solemnly. “You realize that every time the dominant form of media changes, society changes, too?”

  “All right.” Ani said. “I’ll play. Tell me how.”

  “Think about it. When oral traditions gave way to Gutenberg’s printing presses, humanity was able to set down its knowledge. People learned. They discussed. They innovated. Then came the telegraph, the telephone, the television, and knowledge gave way to trivia and entertainment.”

  “It’s one way of looking at things.” Ani said. “A bit Luddite, if I’m honest, but hey, is there a point hidden in there somewhere?”

  Abernathy grinned, his trap sprung.

  “In the days of print as humanity’s dominant medium, the US got Abraham Lincoln. In the days of TV, they got Ronald Reagan. Now, with the Internet, fake news, and memes they got Donald Trump. Join the dots. Twenty minutes, everyone?”

  Ani had a call to make. She had no idea how it would go, if the person on the other end would even want to speak to her, let alone do another favor for her.

  She rehearsed her opening line a few times, but it got worse the farther away it got from “spontaneous,” so she pressed DIAL and leapt straight in.

  “Hey, Brian?”

  “Ani? Are you okay? You ran off pretty quickly …”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Did you get home okay?”

  “Taxi. No problem. You ordered it, remember?”

  “I remember. How are you feeling?”

  “Er … groggy. Guess your friend hypnotized me or something?”

  “Or something. Look, I need … I …”

  “The answer’s already yes.”

  “Hey, you want to be careful making blanket agreements like that. Nothing good can come of it.”

  “You want me to … Insert next instruction here.”

  Ani laughed. “The cell within the cell is still active?”

  “Of course it is, Ani. I think that we’ll need to define our roles a little better later, but I’m still your partner in crime.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Pleasure. So what do you need?”

  “Okay, I don’t suppose you know what happens to any broken computers at victorious HQ?”

  “They replace them, shove the old ones in some closet, and forget—Oh, okay. Do you need me to steal one of the old ones?”

  “Not steal. Just get a look at the guts. Specifically, the motherboard.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “A Dorian Systems chip. You’ll know it when you see it because you won’t know what the heck it is.”

  “Dorian as in … ?”

  “One and the same. Oh, and can you cover for me?”

  “Sure. You’re not coming in?”

  “I’ve got to look into something. But if anyone asks, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”

  “What should I say is wrong with you?”

  “That, my friend, is entirely your call. I guess the severity of the condition will be a barometer of the esteem you hold me in.”

  It was Brian’s turn to laugh. “It won’t be anything too serious,” he said. “I will see you soon, though?”

  “Count on it.”

  “I do. See you, RedQueen mystery girl.”

  “See you soon, my meme hacking friend.”

  “Sorry folks,” Abernathy said, looking disappointed. “I tried to get you something amazing to fly in—a Bell Boeing Osprey with vertical take-off and landing—but you’d have had to pick it up in Germany, and it would’ve wasted more time than it set out to save, so I’m afraid you’re traveling by private jet.

  “Now, the serious bit. We have no idea what we’re sending you into. It might be nothing. It might be, as Ani implied, exactly what the dotmeme file said, just deferred. It might be anything in between. I’ll need you to investigate the village, find Joe, and generally make sure that you all get out alive. To that end, I’m including a couple of roadies to make sure the European tour goes well. You’ve heard of the SAS?”

  “The Special Air Service, British Special Forces,” Minaxi said. “Elite troops.”

  “The guys I’m sending in with you make the SAS look like whey-faced Romantic poets. Ani, did you get in touch with your friend at victorious?”

  “Sure did. He’s going to try to get a look inside one of the victorious office computers to see if there’s a Dorian chip involved. I think we know the answer to that question, though. That name just keeps coming up, doesn’t it?”

  “And for a man with such a huge reputation, he seems to keep himself very much to himself,” Abernathy replied. “A reclusive multi-millionaire software designer who’s managed to remain pretty much out of the public eye for decades. I’m trying to find out everything I can about him, but I’m playing catch-up, so I’ll keep you appris
ed of anything pertinent I discover. The one thing that occurs to me is that when we visited Dorian Interactive in LA, the exec we spoke to there … Curtiz, I think it was … said that Mr. Dorian was in Romania.”

  “A mighty big coincidence,” Ani said.

  “Now you can see why you’re traveling out there, can’t you?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT’S OVER 9000

  The forest had been sparse by the fence itself, but had grown more densely the deeper in Joe traveled. His instinct had been to move out of sight of the fence—and the factory—but travel roughly parallel to it. It would be the quickest way back toward the road. But when the trees got closer together and started hemming him in, his progress slowed to almost a crawl.

  The feeling that he was being manipulated into his present course of action persisted, but once he’d hit the ground on the wood side of the fence, he was committed to it. If the staff of Dorian Europe had forced him into the woods, then Joe could see nothing to explain why. Surely, he would have been easier to catch by the factory, but that was assuming that capture was their end game. It was also possible that they had just wanted him off the premises.

  If so, they’d succeeded.

  Maybe they figured that he hadn’t seen anything criminal, or even concrete enough that he could take it to the authorities, so why not let him go? Who would he tell? Who would care? Or believe him?

  That had been a mistake, though. Joe didn’t know exactly what he had seen, or what it all meant, but he had seen enough to know that there was something very, very wrong going on in that factory. He tried his phone, then his chip-based intercom, but there was still no signal from either. Either the Carpathian Mountains created a natural dead zone, or there was some heavy-duty signal jamming coming from the Dorian factory. Joe hoped it was the former, but feared it was the latter.

  He’d been traveling for a few minutes when he got the distinct feeling he wasn’t alone. He tried to dismiss it as paranoia, but the thought just kept chipping away at him.

  A dense colonnade of trees suddenly pushed him farther from the parallel path he’d been attempting, and he stopped for breath and to get his bearings. There was a brittle, cracking sound off to his left, followed by another matching noise to his right. Both had sounded like wood being snapped, and not the tiny snaps of twigs being stepped on, but louder as if branches were being ripped away from trees. The fact that they occurred on either side of him, timed within seconds of each other, seemed sinister.