by Rob Reid
The kinda touching, kinda creepy post about the dead girlfriend was big on Reddit and Medium some months ago, and is a sudden internal sensation at Phluttr. People are forwarding it and posting it to their Pheeds under the hashtag #RebootJepson!!! Yes, it’s an odd way to process the shocking murder of a popular CEO. Yet it’s a fitting tribute in its very irreverence—irreverence being Jepson’s hallmark, and the company’s, too. It’s also a rather sweet meme, in denoting a yearning to get him back. For his part, the post gives Mitchell an uncharacteristic urge to bawl his eyes out—something he last did in college. Is it horror over the writer’s loss? The poignancy of any naïve hope to reunite with the dead? Or are Mitchell’s stingy tear ducts just keening for some goddam release for once?
If the latter, then fair enough. It’s been a hell of a week. The bombing, the death threats, then yesterday’s ghastly murder—any one of these things alone would be the worst event of his life. Apart from his Falkenberg’s diagnosis, that is. Which raises the issue of the no-less-jarring good stuff that’s afoot! Let’s start with his miraculous (apparent) cure. Make that his anonymous (apparent) cure, in that Dr. Martha knows nothing about the probiotic that seems to have triggered it. Indeed, although dutifully voicing delight, she seems to suspect he’s lost his mind.
Also high in the Good column is that mad night with the sumptuous Nayana Corea. Reading through their strange correspondence twice, he’s half convinced that if she knew the whole truth (above all, that Cyrano sold her on Mitchell as he more or less is, and without his urging, knowledge, or consent), she’d forgive him, and perhaps even see him again. He sure likes to think she might. Because after reading all her smart, snappy messages and ruminating on those endless steamy hours, you could almost say that he’s kind of (perhaps) falling completely and hopelessly in love with her.
In other words: Dr. Martha, you may be right about that insanity diagnosis! Although not for the reasons you think (as every cell in his body is positively screaming that he’s cured, and he has utter conviction on this point). But rather because a certain madness may lurk in his sudden leap into emotional oceans that terrified him when he was dying. Sure, only frustration and embarrassment triggered actual attacks back then. But this gave him a Pavlovian dread of other feelings, too. Fixing his embarrassment and frustration circuits has made those other emotions feel like the safe turf they always had been—and years of denial have made his soul ravenous for all feelings. But being so emotionally out of practice, he has these juvenile vulnerabilities that are (yes, Dr. Martha) insane. Like this childish proclivity to fall for the first random chick he happens to blunder into! Simply because she’s intelligent, witty, and worldly! Plus gorgeous, ethical, ambitious, sexy, creative, happy, centered, cosmopolitan, confident! Oh—and showed him the most mind-blowing sex of his entire life, by a factor of perhaps ten!
Well, hmm. Maybe he’s not so nuts after all. But he still feels like bawling his eyes out. He’s about to retreat to the sole private place in the office where a grown man can do this (the one-seat unisex handicap restroom on Three) when “Ph U” stages a coup de phone in his right front pocket. Short for “Phluttr Urgent,” this mode seizes control of your smartphone’s every output—causing it to hum, flash, jitter, shriek, pulse blinding LEDs, and perhaps (it’s rumored online) heat up dangerously. Only your closest friends and family members should have Ph U access to you, obviously, and this is Mitchell’s first-ever message through the system. It’s from Kuba. “Get out. OUT of the building IMMEDIATELY!!! No danger to others so DO NOT evacuate anybody!!! But YOU must leave NOW and LEAVE QUIETLY!!! To SB-null! Now, now now!”
Well, #HOLYFUCKINGSHIT. Over decades of friendship, Kuba’s never been a tenth this vehement. It’s as if a fearless shepherd boy who’s chided for being inadequately alarmist—a kid who’d take on a stampede of wolves with a squirt gun before he’d pester anyone—is suddenly cartwheeling around the village square with a hundred-watt megaphone shrieking WOLF! WOLF!! WOOOOOLF!!! When that happens, sensible peasants load their wolf guns and git.
Mitchell lacks a wolf gun, but he does git—straight to “SB-null.” This is their preposterous code name for a certain Starbucks. It was christened during that first night at the Interval, when the team jokingly flirted with minor cloak-and-dagger tactics. Right off Union Square, SB-null throbs with tourists, and repels any self-respecting local, which makes it as anonymous a public spot as any in walking range. Suspecting that his building’s about to go into lockdown, Mitchell skips the elevator and thunders down an interminable series of access stairs. Way down at street level, the exit’s fitted with one of those alarm-sounding bars that building managers everywhere refuse to warn about at the top of the steps. Wired since childhood to be polite, to vote, to never rob liquor stores, and generally be a model citizen, Mitchell gazes at the forbidden door, and bilious guilt surges from his heels to his core. Then the howl of approaching sirens pierces the door, and he shoves it open, because this is a goddamned emergency! No alarm sounds, of course.
Sirens are zeroing in from all quadrants, like a gathering swarm of banshees. But what really gets him is the thrumming. The air is churning with bass notes, like at a rave (one where the DJ mainly plays that helicopter sample from Apocalypse Now). Though no expert, Mitchell doesn’t have to look up to know this is military gear—machines that make cop whirligigs look like mopeds next to a Hell’s Angel’s Harley. Moving fast as he can without looking guilty of something, Mitchell avoids the main streets and reaches the Starbucks via a choppy series of block-bisecting alleyways. Kuba and Tarek are already there, and wide-eyed.
“They taped off the PhastPhorwardr,” Tarek says breathlessly. “All of it, in nothing flat! We figured your building was next.”
“We were just coming back from a meeting and saw them pounce,” Kuba says.
“Suits,” Tarek adds. “Creepy guys who looked like the ones you said interrogated you after the Jepson thing.”
“We watched them set up a perimeter from a block away,” Kuba says. “And no one’s getting in or out. So it’s not a bomb threat.”
“It’s not an anything threat,” Tarek agrees. “It looks like a dragnet. Like they’re looking for someone.”
“And it could be us,” Mitchell finishes for them. They nod.
So wtf? Well, for starters, this just has to be an Authority operation, right? The local cops can barely clear a homicide and could no more stage something this ambitious than they could conquer Mongolia! Of course, the Authority could be after anybody. But Beasley’s intercepted memo said they’re close to solving the quantum computer break-in. “So, where to?” Tarek asks.
Mitchell gestures around the tourist-choked Starbucks. “I’d say this is as good a place as any. And better than most.” And he’s right. Packed with shutterbugs, it’s a mighty unsubtle place for top secret operatives to stage quiet, plainclothes grabs. Also (assuming they weren’t tracked coming over here), it’s a mighty unlikely place to find plugged-in locals like them. All this should give them time to gather their wits and maybe pick up some news about whateverthehell’s going down at Phluttr.
As it happens, that part’s easy. Because once again, somebody’s leaking facts to the press. Is in fact leaking facts all over the place. Is in fact all but hemorrhaging them. “Oh. My. God,” one or another of them mutters dozens of times over the coming hours as the details pour in.
It turns out the rumored third Embarcadero bombing conspirator was quite real (was, in that he just took about a thousand bullets in a shoot-out). And, an ex-Phluttr employee! Lyle Willard was a midlevel tech in the synthetic biology lab. There, he did excellent work, while giving everyone hives with his creepy demeanor and ominous prophecies (yes, prophecies). He suddenly quit about eight weeks ago. One of the dead bomber twins was also a midlevel SynBio tech, only at UCSF. He and Willard met through professional circles and grew close. Like the Al Noor brothers, Willard was intensely depressive. Also like them, he was quite religious—although he was
no Muslim, but from the apocalyptic fringe of some Pentecostal splinter. Though estranged from his family and the church of his youth, he remained vulnerable to doomsaying. So when Jaysh al Hisaab said “doom” in its inimitably slick, viral way, Willard’s ears pricked right up. Ironically, he was the one who introduced his Muslim co-conspirators to the movement’s nominally Islamic theology. And once all were bought in, they agreed that the surest way to please the Almighty would be to do their very best to eradicate humanity. Then the baddies could go straight to hell, the Good straight to heaven, no passing Go, and we’re done!
“Willard synthesized most of the DNA needed to transform the Ebola genome into something called Yale Ebola in our lab,” Kuba explains, after ingesting a fairly technical leak that just broke online. “It’s the most virulent bug ever engineered. Not by these idiots. But by some genius at Yale. Only a handful of facilities can produce sequences as long as what they needed. Ours was one. So Willard printed them. Next, they had to stitch these patches into normal Ebola DNA. Willard didn’t have the chops for that. But the Al Noor brother specialized in that sort of splicing. So they incorporated a tiny biotech company. Which let them order everything they needed. Nothing very fancy or expensive, it turns out.”
“They were gonna infect themselves with the Ebola!” Tarek says, looking up from another article. “They called themselves ‘Ebola Martyrs,’ if you can believe that! That Yale jackass designed the bug to be supercontagious, and to have a long incubation period. So just a few days of fanning out and breathing on people could’ve started hundreds of infection sites before anyone knew!”
“So what was the bombing about?” Mitchell asks Tarek.
“Spreading panic. And though I really hate to say it, it was a smart plan. The thing is, they weren’t sure if they’d engineer their bug successfully. In fact, they were pretty sure they’d screw it up! So they were planning to simultaneously bomb Embarcadero Center and announce the Ebola thing—whether it had actually worked or not. They figured the bombing would give their announcement total credibility. So even if the bug failed, they could’ve spread deadly global panic.”
“I get it!” Kuba marvels. “Any crank can claim to infect the world with a doomsday bug. Several probably do every month. But someone who just blew up Embarcadero Center will be taken very seriously.”
Mitchell nods. “They’d seem capable of anything. Right after 9/11, I remember being sure Al Qaeda would blow up a World Series game simply because they’d just done the impossible once already! So if these guys blew up Embarcadero Center? And then said they’d done that Ebola thing?”
“And pointed the press to the lab in their garage?” Tarek adds. “And gave out all the other verifiable details? Of course, everyone would assume they’d engineered the bug. The entire planet would freak!”
“They’d also probably lie to magnify things,” Kuba speculates. “Claim to have gone to a hundred cities worldwide and sneezed on the grapes. Or to have two hundred accomplices sneezing in every country on Earth. Everything would be believed for at least a few days after the bombing.”
As it turns out, the world freaks out plenty—even in the face of overwhelming proof that the group never came close to engineering its superbug. By nightfall, every route out of the city is intractably jammed by terrified hypochondriacs and even-keeled rationalists alike. San Francisco is in utter gridlock, leaving all its emergency vehicles marooned in place. After this sinks in, widespread looting erupts. Lesser traffic jams meanwhile strike hundreds of other cities worldwide, as news of the Ebola plot makes every urban center feel dangerous.
Asian markets open in a state of abject meltdown—30, even 40 percent down!—before deep-pocketed opportunists who know hysteria when they see it flood the planet with buy orders, turning the indices around. Like an opioid hit calming a broader nervous system, the soothed markets get the rest of the planet’s tightly coupled memeplexes and infospheres to chill the fuck OUT. It helps that all of the conspiracy’s details are already public. With one nagging exception, that is. Which is, why did the bomb go off early? The second Al Noor brother was a senior facilities guy and had made that whole storage area his personal turf. This gave the gang weeks to bring their materials in bit by bit, and they were less than 10 percent done when it spontaneously detonated as they were doing this. Well, this seems like a small detail in a very big picture. So by late night, the crisis is largely over. Save for the news-cycle punditry, which will torment one and all for years to come.
It’s nearing dawn when the guys finally break camp. SB-null, with its Wi-Fi, abundant electrical outlets, and tolerance for lurkers who buy the occasional Frappuccino, has been an ideal place to ride out the storm (and management’s snap decision to remain open throughout the night as a service to those needing a refuge was a godsend). As for Phluttr HQ, local media reports that its cordon lasted only a few hours. It was allegedly just meant to keep the press and general public away from a satellite branch of the most chilling almost-crime-scene of the century (ground zero being the Al Noors’ South San Francisco garage, which will remain taped off for months). So as the guys head home, they’re as sure as they can be (which isn’t terribly sure, by the way) that nobody’s hunting for them tonight.
OPINION | COMMENTARY
Humanity’s Would-be Annihilation
We have avoided extinction for now, but “WTD” are coming.
By YANNIS KASSANDREYU
Special for The Wall Street Journal
A mysterious series of profoundly informed leaks has already taught us more about the failed San Francisco bioterror plot than was known about the 9/11 conspiracy a full year after the fact. Let’s start with the good news.
The cabal behind it was, mercifully, led by lab technicians rather than trained scientists. Lab techs are skilled people who run advanced equipment created by even more skilled people. They don’t design that equipment themselves. They may not fully understand it or why they’ve been asked to do particular assays. They’re like talented line cooks who prepare world-class meals by faithfully following recipes rather than head chefs who invent dishes and earn Michelin stars.
While the terrorists were more sophisticated than most techs, they were still venturing far beyond their pay grade. The proximate cause for their failure to engineer Yale Ebola was, of course, the fortuitous detonation of their incomplete and unarmed bomb. But absent that, it’s unlikely that their bioengineering would have succeeded. Toward the end of the process, certain technical challenges that they had not foreseen loomed. These have been dissected in several scientific forums, but for our purposes, it suffices to say that they were daunting.
But this does not mean the group suffered from stupidity. Nor from a lack of training, cunning, or motivation. Their core handicap was simply that they were operating today, rather than five or (at most) ten years hence. And this brings us to the bad news.
The passage of time makes wizards of us all. Today, any dullard can make bells ring across the ocean by tapping out phone numbers, cause inanimate toys to march by barking an order, or activate remote devices by touching a wireless screen. Thomas Edison couldn’t have managed any of this at his peak—and shortly before his time, such powers would have been considered the unique realm of God.
Likewise, the pitfalls that would stop present-day lab techs from producing Yale Ebola will soon be as roadway speed bumps to a passing jetliner. Radically upgraded descendants of the cheap gear in the terrorists’ garage will simply make those problems vanish. And problems that vanish for top lab techs will subsequently vanish for grad students, then for undergrads, then for smart high school students, then for dumb ones, and then, for dropouts.
Some take heart that this was the first serious attempt to erase our species in over five thousand years of recorded history. So mightn’t a similar span pass before the next major try? As my undergrads still say decades after the phrase first swept their predecessors, dream on. Suicidal monsters have been taking as many people with
them as possible from time immemorial. Downtown rampage killers; losers who strangle their families; commercial pilots who nosedive their planes; these killers are low and narcissistic enough to take every one of us with them if they could. Propitiously, they simply lack that terrifying power. Everybody lacks it, apart from a minute handful of leaders with nuclear arsenals. And everyone will continue to lack it—for at least five years, and perhaps as many as ten. So what is to be done?
Some seem to think an Islamic reformation, coupled with better monitoring of the unreformed, would go far toward securing the world. But this is not strictly an Islamic problem. Few perpetrators of America’s countless mass murder-suicides are Muslims. One of the San Francisco plotters was devoutly Christian. And the four thousand kamikaze strikes carried out in the waning days of World War II rival the total number of suicide bombings the entire world has seen throughout history. Some maintain kamikazes somehow “don’t count,” as they were part of a military. But the groups that commit virtually all suicide bombings are almost purely martial in nature, making such arguments useless sophistry.
The grim truth is that all societies produce rampage killers and murder-suicides. Even the most pacifist and Shinto, like Japan. Even the most organized and tolerant, like Germany. Even the most wealthy and humanist, like Norway. More dangerously, some subset of the worst killers are content with entirely random victims. And some subset of them would set no upper limit to their body counts. These are the people we should most fear as mass murder democratizes. And humanity produces far more of them than we realize. We just never hear from most—because even they are rational in their way, and if denied handy mechanisms to slaughter innocents, they rid us of themselves in acts of simple self-destruction.
When massacrists do set out to kill, two force multipliers stand out. The first is technology. Jet crashers like Andreas Lubitz and Osama bin Laden have caused the most damage thus far. Terrorists with explosives are next in line, followed by people with high-powered guns. As for the simplest technology, Chinese school rampages average just half the victim count of American ones because Chinese attacks are often mass stabbings. Which gets to the heart of why the US racks up more familicides and workplace slaughters than entire continents combined: those who arrange for everyone to have boundless gun access, while feigning cosmetic nods toward embargoing the lucrative criminal and mentally volatile markets. It is gun access alone that sets America apart in this arena, and not a unique Yankee propensity to violence, however perversely flattering American mass-slaughter apologists and profiteers seem to find this notion.