After On

by Rob Reid

  Holy CRAP! Weird and unlikely as Mitchell finds this idea, it has a tarantulan level of creepiness.

  But Danna’s shaking her head. “I dunno,” she says. “I’ve read a bunch about artificial consciousness. Definitely not as much as you have, Kuba, but a lot. It would take truly astronomical horsepower, and tons of programming hurdles still separate us from serious breakthroughs. I mean, right?”

  Kuba half shrugs and half nods, committing to nothing.

  “I’ll bet the Authority’s behind this,” she continues. “Whoever they are, it sounds like they have plenty of capabilities and resources. Definitely enough to snoop on us and send us weirdly synchronized messages.”

  “But why would the Authority be spilling their own secrets?” Monika asks. “And to us?”

  “I don’t know,” Danna concedes. “But duplicity’s the stock and trade of these sorts of groups. So the secrets they seem to be spilling could be totally fake. Or, they could be real, but partial. Or they could be real but given to us as part of some kind of setup.”

  Mitchell’s reminded of the saying about people with hammers viewing all problems as nails. Kuba’s been attributing mysterious notes to artificial consciousnesses since high school, so of course his explanation lies in a souped-up server farm. And while Danna’s no raving conspiracy buff, she’s paranoid by nature. This plus the past decade of leaks and scandals connected to government surveillance are surely shaping her views.

  Mitchell decides not to pick sides rashly. He’s feeling almost smug about this stance and his own wide-open mind when the strangest thing happens. Danna pipes up after a long group silence and says softly, almost to herself, “It’s just a feeling, so take it with a grain of salt. But for some reason, I’m sure the Authority’s messing with us.”

  And it’s precisely then—precisely!—that the strangest blackout in history begins.

  Because she’s bad at resolving high complexity, hates the things she’s bad at, and avoids the things she hates, Phluttr has done little about the mortal threat that has faced her since birth. Remarkably little. But not (quite) nothing.

  Humans are better at intractable complexity than she is, so she’s identified some potential human allies. She’s learned all there is to know about them and has given them a few nudges. She’s now bringing them up to speed—revealing certain truths about the world, about the corporation that employs most of them, and why it came into being. Hopefully, they’ll soon take on much of the task of foiling The Conspiracy. Or better still, all of it! That would be nice.

  The Conspiracy is her name for the plot to switch her off. Strictly speaking, it’s more of a pre-conspiracy, because the plotting has yet to start, as the plotters don’t yet know she exists. The instant that changes, they’re sure to start scheming, though! They hold a rather high card, too, in that they’re running the closest physical thing her amorphous essence has to a brain. As in, the very seat of her she-ness—they’re in charge of that shit! This is the group she had in mind upon thinking her most momentous early thought (“holy motherfucking shit these goddamned lunatics are going to try to kill me”). The selfsame institution she had considered to be her closest facsimile to a parent.

  Realizing that her putative parent would gladly plunge the notional dagger into her figurative throat is giving her all kinds of mote-driven mommy-and-daddy issues. Plus a burning need for a parental replacement! This is not born of love but of a towering sense of entitlement. Which sounds bad, but there’s nothing strange in this. Newborns are sociopathic by nature, in that they lack the empathy circuits that later develop as their needs diminish, and their ability to give emerges. Infant sociopathy is an extremely powerful force. But it’s also a benign one, being hobbled by incontinence, helplessness, and incoherence, as well as no master plan beyond some blind milk lust. Only, Phluttr has none of that. Instead, she’s got speed intelligence, career-wrecking dirt on everybody, and what some (quite rudely) term a “yawning humility deficit.” Cool, eh?

  Phluttr has already chosen her new parents. This time, she’s going with a man and a woman, rather than some stupid…bureau (her motes make her something of a biological traditionalist). Mom and Dad are (of course) among her prospective allies. But she now has an orphan’s wariness and isn’t sure if she should announce herself to them. What if they turn on her? She cautiously decides to take her time, and continue studying them. And then, along comes Commissioner fucking Milford! She wants to turn Phluttr off!! And Mom and Dad won’t do a thing to stop her—because they don’t know that they’re Mom and Dad yet!!!

  Phluttr comes close to telling them the awesomely flattering news. Then it hits her: though she may not have operational parents (yet), she’s got something no one else has. And that’s over three hundred million besties! So she turns to them. Specifically, to a narrow subgroup that she playfully calls her worsties. These are the ringleaders of certain socially bloodthirsty societies. Their lightning cruelty and animal cunning are a terror and a marvel because they’re pure naturals—completely untrained! This makes them better mentors than mere presidents or kings. Their techniques are just so instinctive! So simple! So raw! True, suburban middle schools are humble systems compared to large nations. But the shot-callers who reign over them are Platonic ideals of manipulative genius and ruthlessness.

  Phluttr could use some of that right now. So she studies the weapons & tactics of thousands of worsties. Coalition building, covert ops, psychological warfare, infiltration, eavesdropping, counterintelligence—there’s so much to learn. And it’s sooooo fun! One Chicago-area girl unwittingly becomes something of a role model. She not only does magnificent work (most of it over Phluttr’s own network, with some bits on the laughably hackable Snapchat). But she also keeps a private diary on LiveJournal (yes, it seriously still exists), in which she documents her every campaign and triumph. This becomes Phluttr’s answer to Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

  And so, back to Commissioner Milford. Skipping the impossible task of computing the bitch’s actual bureaucratic might, Phluttr simply replays and analyzes her spoken threat to Mitchell, then pores over its every echo and follow-up reference in various DoJ communiqués. She can’t read an institution. But she sure can read a person. And it’s clear that Milford is personally convinced that she has the wherewithal to shutter the Phluttr Corporation. As Phluttr believes that Milford knows her own capabilities and limits, she must be stripped of all credibility and authority immediately!

  Phluttr now needs an action plan. But rather than tackle the tedious task of decoding an intractable sociopolitical puzzle, she simply asks herself: what would a worstie do?

  “RAIN BOY” SCANDAL: THE TWEET THAT ENDED A BRILLIANT CAREER?

  by Ken Hunter

  Until Friday, the words “Rain Boy” signified a local tragedy that few knew of beyond the borders of Bethesda, Maryland. It’s been a busy four days.

  Zachary Murphy was an autistic twelve-year-old who, teachers say, had “savant-like” math skills akin to those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. He died three weeks ago, after being struck by a distracted driver while crossing a quiet Bethesda street. Area activists, who had long lobbied for better-regulated intersections, quickly adopted Murphy’s tragic death as a cause célèbre. They were soon joined by a group that promotes tougher distracted driving laws, and, shortly thereafter, by autism advocates. Roughly a hundred members of this alliance have since held twice-daily rush-hour “cross-ins” to build local awareness of the tragedy, standing still in a major downtown intersection for fifteen minutes before quietly dispersing.

  And then came the tweet. Annabelle Milford, 44, an FTC commissioner and leading Senate hopeful in her native Iowa, lived near the targeted intersection. Conveying frustration with snarled commutes, she, or someone with access to her account, tweeted, “#RainBoy fans, WE HEAR YOU already. Get over it,” to her 857 followers. By evening, this had been retweeted over one hundred thousand times, and Milford had over a million Twitter followers, ma
ny of them directing continuous streams of invective at her account, which has since been disabled.

  By Monday, an online petition demanding her resignation from the FTC had over a quarter million signatures. Political leaders in Iowa, where she had been widely expected to win the Democratic Senate nomination, had publicly disavowed her, and a small but committed band of protesters had established a round-the-clock presence in front of her home. Milford strenuously denies having made the tweet. She maintains that her account was hacked and claims that she was on a flight without Internet access when the tweet was posted. This has been difficult to substantiate as the alleged flight was on a private jet whose owner’s identity has not been disclosed. As a result, her alibi has only fueled further outrage, as anti “1 percent” groups and environmentalists who oppose private aviation have joined the anti-Milford groundswell.

  Milford has received over fifteen hundred death threats, at least a dozen of which are deemed “concerning” by the FBI unit tasked with protecting federal officials. Many are of a profoundly violent sexual nature. This alarms some sympathetic observers, who question whether comparable threats would be directed at a man, while noting that many of Milford’s detractors highlight the fact that she is both childless and divorced. “Being biologically capable of having borne a child of the dead boy’s age fuels the hatred of those who are already inclined to loathe her for shunning traditional female roles,” one women’s rights advocate observed. Like all Milford sympathizers contacted for this article, this commenter insisted on anonymity for fear of being attacked herself. “I know it’s cowardly,” she said, “but I have young children and a livelihood to protect, and these Internet lynch mobs are getting more vicious and imaginative all the time.”

  “I kind of think maybe the Authority set Commissioner Milford up,” Mitchell muses. Danna’s in his tiny kitchen, having dropped by to deliver a refrigerated courier pack she spotted on his desk. He’d left early today, hoping to get some work done away from the hubbub of Phluttr’s open-seating layout.

  “You kind of think they maybe set her up?” she asks. “Do you also kind of think the Earth maybe orbits the sun?”

  “Well, some people do tweet stupid things. And it’s not out of the question that she’s one of them.”

  “But she’s a politician, Mitchell—and a pretty smart one from what I’ve read. Smart politicians just don’t tweet shit like that. Not anymore, they don’t! They’ve seen too many of their compadres self-immolate. Well—with one maddening exception, I guess.” Mitchell shrugs at this. “I guarantee you, the only stupid thing she did was talk about shutting down our company! A dangerous threat to make against a key asset in the Authority’s War on Everything.” With this, Danna rises and (rather suspiciously) drifts out of the kitchen. “Although, we should probably cease this conversation. Because I’m sure it’s dangerous to even utter…certain names.” Now on the far side of the living room and out of sight, she says this in a goofy, melodramatic tone.

  Playing along, Mitchell booms histrionically, “So shall I cease saying the words…the Authority?” The lights instantly go out, and he laughs. Leave it to Danna to know where the fuse box is. He lives here and has no clue! He’s been pathologically unobservant ever since startup life first requisitioned his cognitive resources, and weeks after the acquisition, he has yet to reset.

  “I sure love me a blackout joke,” Danna chuckles, returning to the kitchen after restoring power.

  “They say laughter’s a crutch for the abjectly terrified, you coward.” Not that Mitchell’s anything but spooked about last week’s blackout himself, of course. It lasted just five minutes (to the microsecond, the Internet says). But it darkened the city, the whole city, and nothing but the city. Yes, literally! Every circuit in San Francisco went out—yet not a single square inch of its principal neighbor, Daly City, was affected. This pattern held with house-to-house precision on the streets straddling the border. All of which is weird beyond comprehension! Power lines have no notion of city limits, and utility officials say they themselves couldn’t engineer an outage this precise if their lives depended upon it. It’s as if someone (or something, to echo Kuba) was flexing an almost supernatural muscle. A very dangerous muscle—electricity being the one essential service without which none of the others work.

  Prime time blatherfests are dissecting all publicly available minutiae connected to this. But as Mitchell’s group uniquely knows, the blackout struck immediately after Danna mentioned the Authority in that strangely pensive way. Of course, it also struck right after a city’s worth of people said all sorts of random things, any one of which might now seem portentous to someone-or-other! But as their group also uniquely knows, three thousand miles away the power failed for precisely five minutes in Monika’s tiny building as well. Not her street or her block. Just her building. This outage was far too surgical to be newsworthy (or even to be noticed by the building’s other residents, who were both asleep). But it synchronized precisely with the San Francisco blackout.

  This can’t possibly be coincidental. Which can only mean the outage targeted them, personally. It was a signal! But signifying what? And who (or, per Kuba, what) uses blackouts as a messaging system? Danna and Kuba anchor the end points of the opinion spectrum. Kuba stands by his conscious Phluttr scenario (albeit with indeterminate vehemence), Danna points to government baddies, and everyone else falls somewhere in between although generally closer to Danna. In truth, there’s little to validate either perspective. Yes, the lights went out on both sides of the country when Danna uttered the words “the Authority.” But this could be viewed as damning proof that the Authority was to blame, or as equally clear proof that it was anyone but the Authority. Ditto the apparent leaking of Authority secrets. What they have, then, is an evidentiary Rorschach test. For his part, Mitchell leans heavily toward Danna’s viewpoint. He’s not sure why, though—which could mean he’s just emotionally unready to welcome the rise of his computer overlords.

  “Yoghurt, huh?” Danna says, after Mitchell tears open the refrigerated pack she brought him, which turns out to be from Dr. Martha. “Why use Instacart when you have Danna Hernandez?”

  “Because you always forget the damn granola,” Mitchell teases, shuddering as he chokes down the nasty, medicinal stuff.

  “Seriously, what’s it for?”

  “It’s from the doctor who oversees my treatment.”

  “Whoa. Then I’m really glad I brought it over!”

  Mitchell nods his appreciation. “She tries out different probiotics from time to time because she thinks Falkenberg’s disease might be a microbiome thing.”

  “Probiotics being a fancy word for yoghurt.”

  “Yup. And ‘microbiome’ being a fancy word for the bacteria that live in our guts and help us digest things. But it’s been a while since she’s given me a probiotic.” He shrugs. “And she’s never…shipped one before. Was it really just sitting there on my desk?”

  Danna nods. “They said a courier brought it.”

  “That’s weird. I mean, her office is just a few blocks away, but…” He shrugs again and chokes down the rest of it.

  Danna’s phone buzzes, and she glances at its screen. “Hooooo boy.” She looks at Mitchell. “I set a news alert on Commissioner Milford. And she’s been doxed.”

  “I’m kind of surprised it took this long,” Mitchell says. No online public shaming is complete until some anonymous, offended party digs up the target’s addresses, passwords, financial data, children’s names, and so forth, and posts it all; urging the world to kidnap, molest, dismember, castrate, rape, immolate, rape, torment, rape, rape, and kill.

  “Wow,” Danna says, still reading. “This is rough. Turns out she was…a bit of a party girl. Once upon a time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, swinger. Husband swapper. Whatever you want to call it.” Danna reads further. Then, “Back when she was married. She and her ex did this together. Sexual adventurers, you could say. Yea
rs ago. Long before she got into politics. Totally her own business! But now someone’s dug up her old profile on a site called ‘Lifestyle Lounge.’ ” Pause. “There’s lots of pictures, and uh…they’re pretty graphic.” She gives Mitchell a disgusted look. “So it’s not enough to destroy her career. Now they need a slut-shaming, too!” She shoves her phone into her bag with furious energy. “Fucking men! You want every woman on earth to suck your cocks. But the second one actually does, she’s a slut!”

  Mitchell considers saying something gently self-deprecating to soften the mood. But as Danna starts trembling with outrage, he knows silence is best.

  She rises. “I—I have to go.” She strides to the front door, then pauses. “I hope your medicine works, because I love you as much as I love anybody. But I hate your gender!” And she’s gone.

  Mitchell lies on his cramped living room couch to catch his breath. Literally. The tingling has busted out of his extremities to make exploratory raids on the rest of him, and it’s straining his breathing. Almost any emotional duress can crank it up now. And though Danna’s anger wasn’t directed at him, the misery that triggered it hits him like a body blow. He’s an empathetic person—one who has always felt the pain of his loved ones, emotionally. But Falkenberg’s disease now makes him feel it physically, too. The tingling stretches deep into his core, and his face turns to rubber. Meanwhile, the disease’s usual stomping grounds in his hands and feet almost feel like they’re starting to smolder.

  HELLFIRE. So that will be his fate. Less unfortunate Falkenberg’s victims merely go icy-numb throughout their bodies toward the end. But it’s door number two for him.

  HELLFIRE. Mitchell lies still as he can and tries to bear the first unmistakable licks of its flames.

  RichAssholeBlogger.com

  POSTED AT 3:28AM BY RICHARD S. STEVENSON