dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “I think I’m lost,” Mina Desai said. “Is this Richard Dorian or … ?” Ani knew why Mina had tailed off. To finish the question was to acknowledge the enormity of what she was hearing, and that meant accepting that one of the information age’s biggest nightmares was not only a possibility, but had already happened.

  Ani could hardly believe it herself. Unfortunately, it fit the details of the case in a way that no other answer could. She had spent a lot of time confirming things on her tablet computer ever since the idea first started dawning upon her, and although she hadn’t fully fleshed out all the details yet, she was sure enough of the general particulars. “It’s a yes and a no answer, Ani explained. “As far as I can figure, there hasn’t been a Richard Dorian for quite a long time. At least not just a Richard Dorian.”

  She turned to the physical Dorian.

  “Or perhaps you would prefer to explain things yourself,” she said. “Isn’t that the way things usually go in situations like this? At the end of video games? Doesn’t the villain behind the events get a chance to tell his own story?”

  Richard Dorian tilted his head, considering her words. “It was never my intention to explain myself, but there is a certain logic to your suggestion. I would, however, like to hear the conclusions that you have drawn from the data you have been given. I will expand upon any areas that are incorrect.”

  Dorian smiled, and on the screens around the room the Dorian avatars had all become exact reflections of Dorian, their backgrounds now representing the room in which they were gathered.

  “But first, perhaps we should complete the gathering,” the Dorians said, and the one on the monitor on the wall behind the “real” Dorian turned to smoke and vanished. The screen was blank for a few seconds, then the background shimmered and a face appeared.

  Abernathy.

  Looking as confused as everyone else in the room who wasn’t Dorian.

  When Abernathy’s face appeared on the screen, Joe knew that Ani was right. He didn’t know how she’d put the pieces together, but now that she had, he saw that it was the only shape—the only pattern—that those pieces fit.

  Dorian, or emet, had hacked the webcam on Abernathy’s computer, one of the most secure computer systems in the UK. The ramifications of that were vast. It wasn’t just that they were able to do that, it was that they even knew about Abernathy’s existence. Which meant they knew about YETI. The investigation. Everything.

  Ani talking about how this scene was what happened “at the end of video games” had struck a chord deep within Joe. It was even a thought that he, himself, had entertained more than once during this investigation. The tuning fork key—right out of a survival horror game—had been the most overt sign. The battle at the village, with the golems attacking, their strategies altering as they saw how their adversaries reacted, seemed to follow the same kind of video game logic. As did the Eastern European setting.

  It was all theater.

  It was all planned.

  The investigation had been a trail that had led from the UK to the US to Romania in a logical progression, with each piece of information setting up the next leg of the journey. He hadn’t stopped to question how easy it all had been, how there were no false leads, how it had all followed a linear path.

  That nagging thought that he was being played had somehow never quite developed into the actual, physical reality: that he wasn’t just being played, but that he was also being forced into playing. Playing emet’s game, whatever it was.

  Both his and Ani’s investigations had been all about computers. He was tracking down the mysterious chips that they had found in the bowling alley in Luton; Ani had been trying to find out what the people who used those chips were planning to do with them. In video game terms, they had been pursuing different campaigns in the same overarching narrative, not realizing that their roles were predestined to bring them here, to this country, to this factory, to this room.

  These thoughts passed through Joe’s head in seconds, but the train of thought was interrupted by Abernathy. “Can someone please tell me what is going on?” he asked.

  Ani can, Joe thought.

  Abernathy read through the information on his screen again.

  He felt helpless, fifteen hundred miles from the action, with the events unfolding before him on his computer screen a horrible reminder of just how far from the action he truly was.

  How far away from the action he had left himself.

  The heavy weight of command was something that he had never struggled with. Had never even felt if he was being totally honest with himself. Abernathy had always suspected that leaders who doubted their facility to lead were rarely successful.

  Now he felt that weight pressing down upon him. He had made some hard choices, issued an order that even now he was regretting, and he was powerless to do anything to help the operatives that he had scattered.

  The web was exploding with talk about the events in Romania, but not the true events. The fake version that the dotmeme file had forced upon the Internet.

  The attack on Poiana Mazik had been edited and fictionalized, its details retconned across the World Wide Web. Instead of the unprecedented manufactured horror that it really was, now the events in Romania were being sculpted, manipulated, changed. Now a look on the Web would tell you, without doubt, that this was the final symptom of a phenomenon that experts said had been developing for decades. There were news stories dating back years, that provided the background for the events, and scientific papers that chronicled the discovery of Gaia, not as a hippy metaphor, but as a real, living organism. That none of these had existed before the dotmeme file insinuated them across the Internet would have seemed impossible even to Abernathy if he hadn’t watched it happen, in real time.

  The dotmeme file had changed thousands of web pages, inserting millions of words of corroborating data, video evidence and photographs. It had rewritten message board threads or generated new ones, all pre-dated predicting that Gaia—the planet Earth, herself—was finding it impossible to maintain her natural environmental and ecological balance because of the great threat called humanity. Abernathy could call up dozens of corroborating documents for this madness, all seemingly impeccably researched and peer-reviewed. Gaia’s immune system, the papers and articles suggested, was beginning to recognize the human race as a clear and present danger, and would one day mobilize her own immune reaction against us.

  The golems that Ani and Joe had met in Romania were being touted as that immune reaction: the planet’s own defense against humanity’s pollution of its biosphere, against the human influence on climate change, against deforestation, enforced extinctions, and genetically modified crops.

  Except they weren’t the golems that Ani and Joe had met. The golems that everyone in the world was finding out about were hideous, insectile creatures that looked like things from humankind’s worst nightmares. Never mind that the real creatures were nothing like the ones that Dorian Interactive had modeled in their own computers and digitally inserted into the world’s news media using the dotmeme protocols.

  Dorian, working with victorious, had effectively hacked the world. Had made handheld devices recognize the “unfinished” creatures that Ani had reported as insect demons. Abernathy shuddered at how it had all been accomplished. Dorian chips transmitting data to all those devices, making their cameras ignore the truth and display the digital forgeries.

  The real question was, of course, why? What was the purpose of the exercise? Why was Dorian trying to convince humanity that their own planet had turned against them? What was to be gained by manufacturing monsters? Falsifying a history for those monsters? Changing the world’s perception of them?

  The real world deployment of the monsters, their alteration by the dotmeme file, and the false history planted on the whole of the Internet had only been the first stage. Global telecommunications were in turmoil. Phone lines and mobile networks no longer recognized data that went against the picture that
Dorian and victorious were painting. The Internet itself had become stage-managed, refusing to accept data that conflicted with the fictional story that the dotmeme file was telling.

  This was what victorious had been working toward: A worldwide media takeover. A reshaping of reality to a story told by computers. As the shockwaves of the new story spread across the globe, the Internet, itself, was censoring dissenting voices. News channels were reporting the events according to the “facts” they were being fed. “Fake news” made manifest.

  This was nothing short of terrorism.

  Its sole purpose seemed to be to fan fear. The ideology behind it, however, seemed unreadable. Was it environmental activism, placing the blame for Poiana Mazik on humanity’s disregard for their own planet? Or was it an attack that was trying to discredit all media, by showing that reality could, in this digital age, be hacked and turned into something different just by the deployment of a package of data called dotmeme?

  Or was it a distraction? A way to turn the eyes of the world away from real threat that had, as yet, not been revealed?

  And were Abernathy’s darkest fears true? The ones that he had kept even from his own team. The ones that meant that the world would change forever if YETI didn’t stop them.

  People trusted the Internet as a source for information, so much so that news services were moving online. Cellphone footage was now common on broadcast news reports. Twitter users circumvented court injunctions banning the release of information. More and more it was online that people went to find out what was happening in the world.

  When the whole Internet started lying about world events, the difference between truth and fiction was in danger of becoming forever blurred.

  And Abernathy knew that this was just the beginning. The Gaia event felt like a test run. Or the first phase of a larger campaign. The second phase could very well be unfolding now, but he had no idea. He was reduced to waiting for Ani to switch her tablet back to conference so he could get her take on what was happening on the ground in Romania. The last he’d heard was that the YETI team was headed to the Dorian factory in search of answers.

  Hopefully, one of those answers would be to the question that was baffling him: where were the golems coming from?

  They were real golems, even if they were nowhere near as terrifying-looking as the ones that registered on every screen. If the digitally enhanced creatures were CGI, then the actual golems that Joe and Ani had encountered were like the tennis balls on sticks that actors played off against in green-screened movies. They were scary creatures in their own right that people would react to on film footage, but were far easier to fake than the final creatures that were applied in post-production.

  Was this NeWToPia, the new Dorian game and tech that the company had been working on? An enhanced reality that subverted the real world, creating a story that real people played in the real world in real time?

  There were so many questions, and so few concrete answers. The analysts at YETI were collating and examining data from every news service and every Internet site reporting the events in Romania, but they weren’t answering any of them. Abernathy was sitting in the Command Center, watching footage being discussed by talking heads on rolling news programs, and finding himself wondering how many of the people discussing it were real themselves. That was how far down the rabbit hole this Dorian tech had him falling.

  Could they trust anything they were seeing? Or was reality now an outdated concept, a remnant of a war of information that the human race lost the moment that the dotmeme file was deployed?

  And was the truth behind it all as dark as he suspected? Was this the emergence of something far more terrifying and more dangerous than anyone had dreamed? If it was all true, would his desperate plan work?

  And would he ever be able to forgive himself for the thing that must be done if he was right?

  That was the moment that his computer screen suddenly changed into a view of an office with Ani and Joe, Dr. Ghoti and Minaxi Desai, all standing near a man who Abernathy recognized from publicity photos as Richard Dorian. The image was coming not from Ani’s tablet, but from a tremendously hi-def camera that identified itself as emet in a caption in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

  Abernathy saw his team notice his arrival, presumably on a screen in the room, because they turned and stared at him.

  “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

  “We got it wrong,” Ani said. “Pretty much all of it. But that’s what happens when you look for human motives in a plan that isn’t entirely cooked up by a human.”

  Abernathy looked impassive, as if her words weren’t much of a surprise, but Ani, at last, felt as if she were on a roll.

  “I haven’t been able to understand it,” she continued. “The thing I kept telling myself I was missing. This whole plan, the means, the methods, the monsters … it was just so senseless, though only if you think about it as a plan concocted by Dorian working with victorious.

  “At the very start of all of this, we thought that we were investigating two completely separate cases. If we had connected the two cases back then, I can’t say that we’d have made fewer assumptions—or that we’d have been less wrong—but we would, at least, have seen that the overall pattern was different. That they were two means toward the same end.”

  She looked at Abernathy and shrugged.

  “But now that we do know, let’s look at it all a different way. What if the whole thing was a plan engineered not by Dorian, but by an artificial intelligence that he developed, which he called emet.”

  Dorian stirred in his seat and his face twitched, then seemed to relax. Color returned to his cheeks. “It’s certainly a convincing argument, Ms. Lee,” he said, this time with human intonation and emotion in his voice. “But it’s wrong in one very crucial respect.”

  When he spoke again there was almost a note of sadness in his voice.

  “The artificial intelligence wasn’t developed by me.”

  “I coded Centipeter almost thirty years ago,” Dorian said, as if he was giving a seminar, rather than sitting in an office, wired into a computer interface through a hole in his head, as six law enforcement personnel—two of whom were armed—stood by ready to stop his plan. “It was my third game and I had a whole team working on it. I wrote Missile Storm by myself, of course, but that’s the thing about success. It snowballs. I needed to take on staff to make bigger games to feed the higher expectations that came as a result of breaking game sales records.” Dorian laughed, dry and brittle. “First world problems, I know, but I had the devil’s own time getting that game to do what I wanted it to do. The problem was, I guess, that I was setting my sights too high, wanting to provide a video game experience that went beyond what was offered by other games of the time. But I just couldn’t deliver the experience that I longed to create. Truthfully, I couldn’t even come close. I was using up my budget at an alarming rate—when you scale up the number of people working on something, you also scale up the salaries—but making no progress. The enemy sprites were staccato, they moved … well, like sprites moved in those days—jerkily.

  “I wanted fluid movement, and I wanted that movement to follow less obvious patterns. I guess I wanted the enemies in the game to appear to be thinking, rather than moving randomly or in preprogrammed routines.

  “You have to understand that we had such limited storage space back then. If you were trying to get a game onto the Sega Megadrive, then the whole program needed to fit on a cartridge that held four megabytes of data. Four megabytes. Less space than it takes to store a medium bitrate MP3 file. The games industry was still in its infancy—and it was a mewling baby barely out of diapers. I wanted to get it up on its feet. And not just walking. I wanted it to run.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Joe said, “but we’re here to stop you, not listen to a TED talk …”

  “The headaches started early on in the development of Centipeter,” Dorian cont
inued, ignoring Joe’s interruption. “It wasn’t long before they completely overshadowed the whole project. I was delegating more and more to my staff, retreating away from the project like a vampire from the light. And then the real headache struck. Like being hit in the head with a bolt of lightning. A burst aneurysm in my brain—the doctors call it a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a bleed between the brain and its protective layer of tissue—that left me dying on the floor of my apartment. The cleaning woman found me, called an ambulance, and got me to hospital in time. Funny, I’d been planning to sack her. I think it’s safe to say that she was a better lifesaver than she was a cleaner. Of course, I didn’t have the heart after that.

  “I went straight into surgery for an emergency operation. Brain surgery. I was probably minutes away from dying. It’s sobering, isn’t it? That we can be so close to a death randomly dealt out by our own bodies. That we can have a time bomb ticking away inside us that one day just decides to explode.

  “Three out of five people die from the condition. Half of those that survive are left disabled or severely brain damaged. Me, I survived with no harmful side-effects. In fact, I had what can only be called an epiphany. A life-changing experience.

  “You see I woke up on the operating table. Apparently, it happens. A couple of people in every thousand. I opened my eyes and saw one of the surgeons leaning over me. There was thick plastic tubing in my mouth, and down my throat, keeping my airway open. It felt strange, but not painful. My vision was blurred to start with, and there were auras of light that I guess were the theater lights seen through tears, but the fog soon cleared. I saw the surgeon notice that my eyes were open. I saw him ringed with bright, almost punishing light. I saw his eyes staring down at me, getting closer and closer as he moved in to inspect me. And that’s when I saw it. That’s when I saw the code.”

  Dorian went quiet for a few seconds, but the room remained silent.