by E. C. Myers
“Penny, can you speed-read?” Max asked.
“It’s my ‘superpower,’” she said. “Almost as cool as a photographic memory, huh?” She slowed down then scrolled backwards. “Hey . . . there you are,” she crooned to the screen. She pointed at the address of the sender in one of the e-mails: [email protected].
“Geordie,” Risse said. “What’s the e-mail about?”
Penny opened an attachment, a scanned PDF with 150 pages of tiny text, illegible until she zoomed in.
“A contract. I don’t read legalese, so I’m not sure what all this ‘reps and warranties’ and ‘agreed-upon services’ is referring to. This one’s a renewal, so we have to dig deeper to see what it’s referencing,” Penny said.
“Look who it was sent to.” Max pointed: [email protected].
“Panjea,” Max said. “Can we figure out which account it’s linked to?”
“Only if you’re logged in to Panjea and the sender is one of your Peers.” Penny jumped through the rest of the document. “Who’s Kevin Sharpe?”
“He’s a technology consultant for political campaigns. Why?” Max asked.
“He signed this contract.” She pointed out two electronic signatures on the last page: Victor Ignacio, CEO of Panjea, and Kevin Sharpe, President and Founder of Kevin Sharpe & Company.
Max scrolled backwards through the document. Penny didn’t even react when he took over the keyboard in front of her. “This is outlining a workflow for ‘mutual information exchange.’ I guess Sharpe’s company is helping Panjea manage its users’ information?”
“Or Panjea’s sharing its users’ information with Sharpe,” Penny said.
“Their whole ‘thing’ is they promise not to sell information to anyone. They specifically mention the government. Their promises about making the world’s first truly safe and secure system and improving the internet are why they’ve been so successful.”
“I always thought that was too good to be true,” Penny said. “The loophole here seems to be that they aren’t selling the information. They’re giving it away.”
“For nothing? Ignacio’s supposed to be a savvy businessman,” Max said.
Vic Ignacio was known as a visionary and something of a renegade who started a boutique internet café called Synthwerks in the Bay Area a few years ago and turned it into the social media giant that Panjea was today.
Penny kept reading, dipping into random e-mails and files, the expression on her face a mixture of fascination and abject horror.
“Here’s a PowerPoint laying out the framework for streaming all user actions on-demand to a ‘backup server.’ Kind of a digital wiretap logging every action we take on Panjea.”
“That’s gotta be boring. ‘Max Stein Amplified Penny Polonsky’s note.’”
“That’s gotta be so illegal. Why would Sharpe—or anyone—want that stuff?” Penny asked.
“They’re consultants and data nerds, so they probably just study it all day. The more data they’re tracking the better: our habits, our interests, our—”
“Voting patterns,” Penny said. She highlighted a file called Poll_Projections_Prelimv2.docx.
“That’s it. That’s the connection. Sharpe was at the debate!” Max said.
“He was at your school? What for?”
“He’s doing work for Governor Lovett’s campaign. Mostly related to . . . her social media presence. But that doesn’t make sense. This goes way beyond monitoring metrics to see how their campaign is doing.”
“It’s predictive modeling. Look. This document is describing an algorithm that can figure out how people are going to vote based on their online habits. Not just on Panjea, but everywhere. If they’re somehow tracking that stuff live, and their algorithm is any good, they may know more about us than we consciously do ourselves.”
“That won’t change anything,” Max said.
“Oh? Let’s think about it. They can get info on any person’s account, any time they want. It’s like Max TV, on-demand. They’re watching your every user action, sometimes while it’s happening. When you log in. Which profiles you look at. Who you send messages to. What those messages say. What your friends are posting. What they’re not posting—look, they’re even capturing Panjea notes that were abandoned or deleted! It’s like it’s setting up a live feed of a person’s life.”
“So what do you do with all that?” Max asked.
“If you know what someone does every day, you have a good shot at predicting what they’re going to do in the future, maybe even before they do. And if you know that, maybe you can manipulate them into doing something else.”
Max nodded. “You could write an algorithm that makes them only see Panjea notes that support Governor Lovett, or say negative things about Senator Tooms.”
“Or send them the wrong information about their polling location. Or let them think that their candidate’s victory is locked in so they don’t bother to vote. Or divert their campaign funds without them realizing it.” Penny’s eyes widened, flicking back and forth as her imagination went wild. The problem was: If a hacker like her could imagine it, then it was very likely possible.
“That would be a very sophisticated algorithm,” Max said.
“Nah,” Penny said.
“I thought we were just talking about aggregating information and passing it on,” he said.
“You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t intend to do something with it one day. It’s possible they’re trying to capture everything because they don’t know what will be useful, but with the election coming up next month, Sharpe would need to act on it quickly. Even without an algorithm trying to influence you subtly, with enough information and access to other systems and infrastructure, you could interact with people in other ways. Maybe go old-school and try to affect people in the real world.” Penny jumped to her feet and started pacing in front of her computer.
“Sharpe wouldn’t kill Ariel and the others just because they discovered this,” Max said. “It’s not a big enough secret. There has to be more to it.”
She scrolled through more files. “We have to review it all and figure out how the pieces fit. What is this?” she muttered. “‘Direct access to the user environment,’ ‘unique opportunities to capture the population.’” She shook her head. “This is horrifying. Panjea’s into some nasty business.”
“I think I’ve got something too.” Risse pulled her headphone plug out of her computer and turned up the volume. “I’ve isolated the tones from Evan’s video.”
“What does it sound like?” Max asked.
“I’m not sure.” Risse played the tones again. “D, E, C, C-down an octave, G.”
“For the love of God, stop playing that,” Penny said.
“Re Mi Do Do So.” Risse sang the notes. She had a nice voice.
“That sounds familiar. Really familiar. But I can’t pin it down,” Max said. “I can also only hear that last bit on the clip. Do Do So? Da daaaa da. Da daaaa da?”
“Da da da, daaaa da. I lowered the pitch on these to something you both can hear.” Risse turned her computer to face them and bumped up the audio as high as it would go. She pressed play.
DUH DUH DUH DUHHH DUH
It couldn’t be.
“Play it again?” Max said.
DUH DUH DUH DUHHH DUH
“So the notes are—” Risse began.
“I know what it is,” Max and Penny said at the same time.
Max gestured to Penny.
“It’s from ‘Closer’ by deadmau5. It was Evan’s ringtone,” she said.
“Good ear,” Max said. “But it came from a movie first. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
“Oh.” Penny blushed.
“What?”
“Evan took me to see that. It was playing at an art house theater during HGH. I should ha
ve remembered that,” she said.
“Didn’t you say you didn’t see much of the film?” Risse asked.
“Risse!” Penny said.
“Hmm.” Max looked away.
He was jealous. Crap.
Despite everything, even with all the intrigue, and their mission, and Evan’s death . . . .
Max was starting to fall for Penny.
Penny met his eyes. She opened her mouth, then turned back to her computer screen.
“So what does it mean?” Risse asked. “It was obviously meant for one of you.”
“Or both of us,” Penny said softly.
Max cleared his throat. “I’ve seen the movie dozens of times. Those tones were a message scientists sent to an alien spacecraft to let them know that we’re intelligent. It’s a mathematical signal—”
“Using the critical tones of the major scale!” Risse said. “Aha! So aliens are behind this. I knew it.”
“Ha,” Penny said. “It’s a message, but I don’t know what it means.”
“I do, but you aren’t going to like it,” Max said.
“Well?” Penny and Risse said.
“It means we have to go back to Granville.”
19
They hacked a black 1994 Honda Odyssey and drove north to Granville. Max knew he would be recognized once he got back to his hometown, so Penny took the wheel while he and Risse pored over Evan’s files on their laptops, this time with Max ducked down in the backseat.
It was now evident that Panjea was up to no good, and considering how many of the social media company’s own employees had died recently, their activities seemed to be connected to a bigger, more ominous picture.
“We should release these documents and call it done,” Penny said.
“Where? Send them to WikiLeaks? Fawkes Rising? Evan could have done that, but he didn’t,” Max said. “What would that accomplish?”
“People would flip out,” Risse said.
“Evan’s death and his crime are already drawing attention to the wrong issues. Instead of getting angry about Panjea watching our every move and basically being like an arm of the government, the public will focus on another lone hacker taking justice into his own hands: breaking the law, stealing secrets, then killing himself over the guilt. And Evan isn’t here to defend himself,” Max said.
“We are,” Penny said.
“Would you come forward?” Max asked.
“Nope. We’d be charged too,” Penny said. “Look at Evan’s heroes: they’re all living in exile, or in prison, or dead. Aren’t you worried that’ll happen to you next?”
Max almost lied. He wanted to seem as noble as Evan. He wanted to act like the hero his friend clearly thought he was. But . . .
“That’s why I want to do this the right way. These e-mails expose Panjea, but we know Panjea can get away with this. We need solid information that will convince the world to bring them down. That’s not going to happen with a bunch of PowerPoint slides. It won’t be enough to have a journalist explain the e-mails’ significance to laypeople. We have to make a big splash that wakes everyone up to what’s going on.”
Penny looked at Max in the rearview mirror.
“We can prove that Panjea’s sharing our information with the government, but not that they murdered six people just to cover it up. And if we can tie it back to Lovett through her connection to Sharpe, it would change everything. That’ll affect who gets elected as the next president. We have to take this all the way, on our own. And we have to do it before the election,” Max said.
“We’re still missing something important,” Penny said. “If we follow the steps that led Evan to the debate, maybe we can figure this out.”
“Okay. How did he learn all this was going on?” Max asked.
“When he started working for Panjea, he could have stumbled across something while poking around in their servers,” Penny said.
“But why did he go to Panjea? Evan never wanted to use his skills that way, and he didn’t need the money.”
“We already know where it began: with the first person who was killed,” Risse said. “I just found e-mails in here from Ariel Miller to Evan. Dated from long before he started working at Panjea. She found out that Panjea was working with the government and wanted to get the information out. She asked Dramatis Personai for help, claiming that Panjea was able to spy on its users with their computers and cell phones. Turn on the webcam, eavesdrop, log everything they type.”
“That was Ariel?”
“She was a hacker who sometimes hung around the forums. She went by the handle dinglehopper.”
“I remember her. She sounded paranoid.” Penny’s voice was defensive.
“That’s what people thought about the NSA,” Max said. “This is worse. The NSA slurps up everything and stores it, but we know Panjea is actively monitoring its users’ activity.”
“This gives a new perspective to their ‘Everyone Online’ project,” Risse said.
“No shit,” Max said.
Panjea had made major headlines with an ambitious plan to make cheap tablets and computers available to anyone, anywhere and everywhere, and provide free Wi-Fi to cities all over the U.S. Now, instead of it being a generous act of charity, Everyone Online seemed to have an ulterior motive: to collect even more data and control more of the ways people use the internet.
“It looks like only Evan and 0MN1 took Ariel seriously,” Risse said. “Evan has copies of those chat logs in here, and from their private conversations, she decided to trust Evan because 0MN1 was too pushy and scared her off. He kept asking her if she worked for Panjea, because that was the only way she could have had access to their files.”
“That sounds like 0MN1,” Penny said. “He has no boundaries.”
“Evan never asked her for any personal details. As far as I can tell, he didn’t know if she worked for Panjea and he didn’t care. He just trusted the information she gave him. He must have put the pieces together only after Ariel’s death,” Risse said.
“Would they really kill six people to win an election? Or is something else going on?” Max asked. He felt like they were working with random pages from a playbook for a game he didn’t know how to play. There was no way to score points, let alone win, when you couldn’t grasp the rules.
“Something called ‘Project SH1FT’ is mentioned in a lot of these e-mails and slides, but nothing describes what it is,” Risse said.
“SH1FT? As in, shifting the election?” Penny asked.
“I guess we just have to ask: What could Panjea do if it was connected to everyone in the world?” Max asked.
They thought for a while in somber silence. They all arrived at the same answer: Anything it wants. “I wish we could just ask Evan,” Risse said.
“Me too,” Max said. He would have some other things to say to him first, though. “But maybe he never got to the ultimate answer.”
“Maybe we can do the next best thing,” Penny said.
“What could be better than this?” Max asked as he opened what had to be his five-hundredth document.
“Something occurred to me. When 503-ERROR disappeared, no one knew what happened. We pestered Evan, but he wouldn’t disclose anything about whether you had been arrested, or died, or just given up,” Penny said.
“He was good that way,” Max said.
“Right. So hear me out. What if all the silenced six aren’t dead after all? What if one of them really did choose to disappear? Say, someone who knew he was a target.”
“You mean L0NELYB0Y, a.k.a. Jeremy ‘Jem’ Seer,” Max said. “He was the only one without an article about his death.”
Penny nodded. “What do we know about him?”
“Not much.” Max opened the spreadsheet Risse had made with all the information they had on Dramatis Personai. “He was from Fairbanks
, Alaska, same as Ty Andrews.”
“They had to know each other,” Penny said.
“They went to the same high school. They were the same age. It’s a small place, so, yeah. I assume they were friends,” Max said.
“Ooh! I noticed something weird before, but I didn’t think it meant anything until now. Infiltraitor—Ty Andrews—and L0NELYB0Y were never logged in to the Dramatis Personai chat rooms at the same time,” Risse said.
“You think they were the same person?” Max asked. “But Ty Andrews is dead. He was a real person.”
“I don’t mean that Ty Andrews didn’t exist. I think Jeremy Seer was both Infiltraitor and L0NELYB0Y.”
“Then who was Ty Andrews?!” Max couldn’t keep the frustration out of his voice.
“Let’s find out,” Risse said.
She and Max switched to other computers and connected to the internet through Risse’s phone to dox Ty Andrews and look for anything connecting him to Jem. Max and Risse worked well enough together, but not as quickly as she and Penny did. Max would offer a suggestion after Risse had already considered it and discounted it, or when she was already halfway done with the search query. Every now and then, one of them would discover something and say it aloud, adding to their knowledge of Ty and Jem, slowly stitching together their portraits of the two boys and their town.
Risse updated her spreadsheet, now working from two computers in the cramped space of the passenger seat.
“Ty was poor,” Risse said. “He didn’t have his own computer.”
“Jem was friends with Ty on Panjea, but he never left any messages there until after Ty was dead. ‘I’m so sorry.’ That was an edited comment. I wonder what he wrote originally. I bet Panjea knows,” Max said.
“Damn. Jem deleted his Panjea account,” Risse said.
“Deactivated or deleted?”
“It's completely gone. He deactivated it the same day that Evan deactivated his," Risse said.
“So they both knew something. Maybe they were working on this together.”
A little while later: “Here’s a comment on another student’s Panjea page where Ty mentioned he didn’t know how to swim. So what was he doing at the lake?” Risse said.