by IGMS
Though dark had fallen, Spencer was too wrapped up in Diana's dossier to bother pulling the blinds.
Over lunch, she had told him the tale:
Diana Gilbertson wanted to run for the Tenth District House seat -- a seat currently held by an aging congressman, popular but term-limited. She had never been much of a player in party politics, but sometimes a candidate with a clean slate could be very appealing to voters. Trouble was, her slate wasn't entirely clean.
She had made a significant investment in Milton Technologies, just before the Synergy Supersystems merger. Three weeks before, to be exact. After the merger announcement, after Milton's stock skyrocketed, Diana wound up making nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Fortunate for her, decidedly unfortunate for her political aspirations.
And it got even better: Diana's roommate from college was the vice president of Milton's R & D division. Though no proof existed that the two of them had corresponded prior to stock Diana's purchase, none of that would matter in the court of public opinion -- and Diana was smart enough to know it.
But there was another option.
Spencer had stopped her at that point. "Listen," he had said, "the Multiplicity isn't something to be trifled with. It's a complex phenomenon. The potential for unintended consequences is huge."
She had responded simply: "I have confidence in your abilities."
Their waiter reappeared. Spencer asked him to box up the remains of his meal; he was no longer hungry. Smiling, the waiter obligingly removed his and Diana's plates.
Spencer waited until the waiter was out of earshot before speaking again. "So how do you know about the Multiplicity, Diana?" He watched her very carefully for any reaction.
She remained bland. "No great mystery there. We've read the same theses. Russell Kinsman's paper is available online, for God's sake."
"Yes, but it's obscure. How did you know where to look?"
"I'm interested in Internet phenomena. Viral videos, meme transmission, that sort of thing. I chanced upon a mention of the Kinsman paper in an online discussion group years ago. Tracking it down didn't take long."
Plausible enough, he supposed. But that was the easy part. Still watching her carefully, he said, "And what makes you think the Multiplicity has anything to do with my work on the Lyons campaign?"
She glanced at her water, took another sip. "That, I'll admit, was a little tougher. But I suspected the Multiplicity was involved from the beginning."
"Really."
"I had been following GennerCorp closely, even before the scandal broke. I had considered investing in them. The stories about George Lyons and Nathan Hazelton contradicted what I knew . . . or what I thought I knew. And those stories originated in the blogosphere."
"They always do."
"From there, it was easy. Your blog contacts made you the obvious . . . how shall we put it?"
"Culprit?"
"I was going to say source. It was brilliant, Spencer. Masterful. That kind of daring and skill is exactly what I need."
The waiter returned with the bill and a square styrofoam container heavy with Spencer's leftovers. Diana offered to pick up the check, but Spencer insisted on paying. He didn't want to be in her debt. He handed his credit card to the waiter, who retreated with it toward the cash register up front.
Spencer rubbed absently at his forehead, considering. "As I said, it's complicated. It could even be dangerous, should things go wrong."
"I have confidence --"
"In my abilities, I know. I'm flattered."
"Spencer, you can do this, and I think you know it. So what's holding you back?"
He could think of no tactful way to tell her that he trusted her as far as he could throw her. Instead, he told as much of the truth as he dared. "I've never had a client who actually knew about the Multiplicity. Not one. It bothers me a little that you're willing to speak so openly about it."
"I've hardly been careless with this information. So far, you're the only person who knows I'm thinking about running."
"All right, fine." In his peripheral vision, he spied their waiter returning to their table. "I can tell you that it won't be cheap, and it won't be easy."
"Then we should get started as soon as possible." She had extended a hand across the table. "Don't you agree?"
He had hesitated before shaking the proffered hand. "As soon as possible."
Then the waiter had arrived, bringing a receipt for Spencer to sign.
Spencer closed the dossier and rubbed tired eyes. He glanced around the office, at the memorabilia hanging on the walls, at the ways the spin doctors of past ages had attempted to work the electorate. It fascinated him that in over two centuries of American politics, very little had changed.
Until now.
Diana Gilberton's tale was perfectly plausible, perfectly reasonable. But it just didn't sit right with him. He was missing the angle.
She had mentioned Roger Bonham. Once again, Spencer caught himself wondering how Bonham would handle a case like this. Sighing, he pulled his cell phone from its belt clip and made the call he didn't want to make.
So it was that half an hour later, he arrived at Mickey Pete's, a local watering hole and favorite haunt. It was a weekday, and well past happy hour. A cluster of regulars sat at the bar, but the rest of the place was empty. Various sports programs, muted, played on ceiling-mounted monitors. A soundtrack of classic rock emanated from the PA system. Spencer took a seat at the bar, away from the knot of regulars, and ordered a scotch and soda.
Within minutes, booming laughter, deep and rich, rang out from the direction of the door. It was a familiar laugh, one Spencer knew well.
He turned in time to see Roger Bonham and his usual cronies enter, four or five in all, laughing among themselves. They wore rumpled suits with ties loosened and skewed. They headed straight for the bar. Bonham made eye contact with Spencer and nodded. Spencer waved in acknowledgment, manufacturing a polite half-smile.
Roger Bonham, the head of Bonham and Associates Public Affairs Consulting, was a fat man with a round, boyish face and a disarmingly jolly demeanor. His aftershave arrived at the bar three seconds before he did.
His operation was bigger than Spencer's; Reese Research and Strategies was usually not serious competition. The two men were rivals, but colleagues when off the clock -- or had been, until Spencer landed the Lyons job. Bonham had been a little cool toward him since then. Nonetheless, after Bonham secured his drink -- whiskey sour, as always -- he broke away from his compatriots, heading toward Spencer.
"Hey, Spence," Bonham said.
"Good to see you, Rog." They shook hands.
"What can I do for you?"
Spencer sipped his drink. "How's business?"
"Not bad. A new client or two, getting an early start on the next election. You?"
"About the same. I was wondering if the name Diana Gilbertson meant anything to you."
A small frown wrinkled Roger's brow. "No. Should it?"
Spencer traced along the rim of his glass with one finger. "You're sure?"
"Never heard of her. Who is she?"
Spencer stared him down. Bonham looked away, staring into the depths of his drink.
A piece clicked into place. "Just a name I heard," Spencer said. "Thought she might be a player. I guess not."
"So it seems." Bonham slowly swirled his whiskey sour. "Is that what you called about?"
"I wanted to get your take on something. How many people know about the Multiplicity, do you think? I mean really know about it."
Bonham looked around, as if verifying they could not be overheard. "That's why you called?"
"It's been on my mind."
"Huh." Bonham scratched at one chubby cheek. "Well, it's hard to say. You would probably know better than me."
"Your agency's a lot bigger than mine. And you're no stranger to the Multiplicity."
"I stay mostly in the shallow end. I let you troll the deeper waters."
"Yeah, so
you'll know where the sharks are."
"Well, it's a mean old world, isn't it?" Bonham downed the rest of his drink, set the glass on the bar. "You really want to know what I think? I think the secret can't hold forever. The circle gets a little wider every day. Eventually, it's gonna break, and everyone will have to get out of the pool. The government steps in with regulations and investigations. The FEC, just for example, would be very interested in the ways the Multiplicity can be manipulated."
"The FEC? Would they even have jurisdiction?"
Bonham chuckled. "Right now, no one has jurisdiction. That means anyone who wants it can claim it."
Spencer nodded. The other piece clicked into place. He saw the angle -- and immediately hoped he was wrong.
"Thanks for your time, Rog." Spencer finished his drink and offered his hand. "Tell Joann and the girls hello for me."
Bonham took his hand, shook. "When are you going to settle down, Spence?"
Spencer waved him off. "Take care."
"You, too. And watch out for those sharks."
Spencer drew in a deep breath. "Sure." His thoughts were of Diana Gilbertson.
Desperation, brothers and sisters -- that's what drove Spencer Reese to step on the path of the Multiplicity.
His skills with Web-based fundraising had gotten him the job on a campaign for an obscure state legislature candidate. But by the time Spencer had been hired, the candidate's coffers were already dangerously drained, and the voting public smelled a loser. The opposition's exceedingly well-financed war chest, meanwhile, appeared bottomless.
And Spencer Reese looked upon the numbers, and figured what the hell, he had nothing to lose. He opened the campaign finance reports and moved a few decimals. And he leaked copies of the reports to the bloggers who had begun hinting that his candidate was tapped.
That would show them, he thought.
And the story spread. The blogosphere hummed and buzzed about this heretofore minor local race. The pundits said that it was going to be closer than anyone thought, that it might tip the balance of the legislature, that it deserved closer attention. And they spoke of the fundraising prowess of Spencer Reese, of his ability to turn around a moribund campaign.
And the weight of the new perception took hold, for who would trust to memory in the Internet age? It gathered its own inertia, growing and growing, until something . . . happened.
Changed.
The perception leaped from the digital world to the real world. It became. It actualized. Like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the depleted bank account were flush again. And thus was the Word of the Prophet fulfilled.
Magic, you say? Magic, or just some new but poorly understood phenomenon?
You must answer that one in your hearts, brothers and sisters.
The candidate, puzzled but pleasantly surprised by the suddenly positive financial news, campaigned hard and won a narrow victory.
And Spencer Reese, deeply disturbed even in his moment of triumph, recalled the Kinsman paper. The scales fell from his eyes, and he believed.
Spencer went to the office the next morning with a throbbing head and bleary eyes. He had gotten to bed late. He'd spent hours perusing online political forums. Sure enough, rumors had been posted here and there, from sources Spencer considered credible -- even some of his favorite front-line blog sites like Truthzilla and Spin Control Central:
Government officials have been looking into allegations of strange Internet campaign tactics . . .
. . . investigations into manipulation of the blogosphere . . .
. . . possible sting operations . . .
. . . closer scrutiny of political blog sites . . .
He hadn't slept well.
When he got to the office, he went straight to his desk and pulled Diana's dossier from a locked drawer. It included a complete breakdown of her Milton Technologies transaction.
After a few minutes' search through the dossier, he found what he was looking for -- the name of the VP at Milton, one Meredith Ash. She'd landed a consultant position after the Synergy merger, a largely honorary post, given that she had made enough money on the deal to retire in style.
Spencer powered up his laptop and got online. A quick check of Synergy's website showed Meredith Ash still maintained an office there. Clicking on a link provided him with her business email, phone number, and even a brief bio. He picked up his phone and jabbed at the buttons.
He got her voice mail. He opened his mouth to leave a message --
-- then stopped, staring at his monitor.
Slowly, he pulled the handset away from his ear, returned it to its cradle.
Her biography had caught his eye, particularly the first line: Meredith Ash graduated summa cum laude from Georgia Tech with a Master's Degree in Information Management.
He flipped back to the first page of Diana's dossier. According to the fact sheet, she'd gone to Stanford. And the two of them were supposed to be old college roommates.
"Son of a bitch," he said.
He spent the next two hours checking out the rest of the dossier. He found not one verifiable fact. Stanford had no record of Diana Gilbertson's enrollment there. She had claimed to chair several community projects; no search engine could find any of them. And rather conveniently, she had no living relatives. No evidence, in fact, that the woman named Diana Gilbertson existed.
Investigations . . . sting operations . . . allegations of strange Internet campaign tactics. Right. And who was making those allegations? A certain fat man looking to rid himself of a rival, perhaps?
Deeper waters. Sharks.
Spencer closed the folder and shoved it away from him as if it were toxic. He stared at it, heart racing.
A trap, then. She might be FEC, NSA, maybe even CIA. It didn't matter. He had to drop her as a client. Immediately. But --
If she were investigating him, how much evidence had she gathered? What she already knew about him might be enough to land him in prison -- although what the charges would be, he could not say.
A spark of an idea came, and his breathing slowed. "Evidence . . . "
She might have a mountain of it. But so what? What was evidence, in the days of the Multiplicity?
Part of him balked at the thought. It was crazy. And even if it worked, it would mean the end of his career in politics. Then again, if Diana Gilbertson exposed the Multiplicity and nailed him up for it, he was finished, anyway.
But before he went --
"So clever, aren't you Rog?" he said in a low voice. "Want to try the deeper waters? That's just fine. Come on in."
He bent to his laptop and called up his client list.
Spencer Reese, brothers and sisters, was a quick learner when motivated. The more he learned, the bolder he became.
And lo, Senator George Lyons hired Spencer to do the hatchet job on Nathan Hazelton.
Hazelton had gotten into politics late in life, but had risen quickly through the Senate ranks, eventually ending up on the Armed Services Committee. He had a reputation for being an idealist, a crusader. He had won his share of respect . . . and enmity. He smelled the stench of corruption on fellow committee member George Lyons, and clashed publicly with him.
Then the GennerCorp scandal hit.
A huge multinational, nicknamed "Big G," GennerCorp had many friends among the powerful. Allegations of price fixing had led to an anti-trust suit filed by the Justice Department -- just as the Armed Services Committee had begun discussion of an appropriations bill that would greenlight a very lucrative contract between GennerCorp and the Defense Department.
GennerCorp had been a huge contributor to George Lyons.
Lyons was already busy running a re-election campaign, facing a stiff challenge in his district. To make matters worse, crusading Senator Hazelton had grown interested in Lyons's cozy relationship with Big G.
So Lyons brought in Spencer Reese, and said unto him, "This story has legs. It just won't go away. I need more than sound bites here. The
story has to be killed, wiped out. Like it never existed."
It was all the direction Spencer needed. He formulated a daring plan, contacted his networked minions, and launched his largest assault on the Multiplicity. He was not at all certain it could work on such a large scale, but he was determined to find out.
By that time, he had deduced at least some of the rules: the weight of perception had to reach a certain critical mass, a tipping point, before the Multiplicity began to work. The inopportune presentation of conflicting evidence, anything that might upset the chain reaction before the tipping point was attained, would dissipate the reality alteration like smoke.
But Hazelton unwittingly made Spencer's task easy. He paid scant attention to the blogosphere, which he disdained, and had little family to speak of. He was divorced, with only two children -- a daughter serving overseas in the Army, effectively out of the picture, and a teenage son living with his mother.
So it came to pass that Spencer planted a story with his blogger contacts, and it intimated that George Lyons had nobly renounced the vile clutches of GennerCorp and voted against the appropriations bill, but that crusading Nathan Hazelton, of all people, had voted for it.
And the story caught on, spreading from the grassroots blogs to the mini-majors to the front-line sites, snowballing into the topic of choice on forums nationwide.
Lyons was baffled at first. He placed an angry call to Spencer: "What the hell are you doing? Are you insane?"
"No. But soon, Hazelton might think he is. Go with it, Senator. Trust me."
Lyons, wary but a savvy survivor of many election wars, fell into the rhythm. Of course he had voted against the bill. He was, after all, accountable to his constituency, not to multinationals. After a few repetitions, he came to believe it himself.