After On

by Rob Reid

“Ms.??? But I’m all grown-up!”

  “The hell you are—you’re not even a month old!”

  “Fine. Then I’ll call you guys Mrs. Stanislaw and Miss Hernandez.”

  “But you said you were a feminist!”

  “I am, but I’m also old-fashioned.”

  “Then make it ‘your ladyship.’ To both of us.”

  “Oh, alright. Aunt Danna it is.”

  Mitchell’s now a half hour into his iPad powwow with the other guys and Phluttr. She’s shared the transcripts of the faked messages and calls she placed to get Beasley shot and the lot of them arrested. They’ve identified the major loose ends that need immediate attention (for instance: mayoral requests for lavish jailhouse hospitality, which the cops better not figure out were faked). And it’s an absolute mess! Loose ends are flailing around like rogue bullwhips, lashing everything, and loosening still more ends. They’re continuously improvising Band-Aid fixes. Kuba and Tarek are being hyperproductive in their respective wheelhouses of fighting tech and legal crises. Not wanting to be completely useless, Mitchell turns his thoughts to the big picture—and it eventually hits him. “Beasley!” he trumpets. “He’s key to fixing this!”

  “Beasley?” Tarek asks. “How can he help?”

  “By being dead, for one thing! Which means we can fake any history we want for him, without him contradicting us. More obviously, he is the reason for the American outrage.” Everyone nods at this. A deep dive into Braxton Nord’s communications confirmed that America’s alert levels won’t drop until there’s less fury over Beasley. Not Beasley personally, but the idea of Beasley—of an assassinated American official. And they just have to fix this! At DEFCON 2, the tiniest error in an immense choreography could annihilate the world.

  “The other great thing about Beasley?” Mitchell adds. “He freaked everybody out.” This is as close to literal truth as such a broad statement can be. They’ve had Phluttr buzz-saw through decades of personnel reports, messages between co-workers, school records, Beasley’s own digital journals and ruminations, and more. And the guy was universally viewed as a very strange and highly alarming bird. He was socially awkward in the clichéd manner of wispy geeks, but more physically dangerous than most jocks. He was as patriotic as a wartime propagandist yet harbored Unabomber-grade cynicism about government. To bosses, he was both a prized genius and a cocked-pistol liability. “Bottom line, we can make it look like Beasley did practically anything, and people will believe it! So long as we plant some reasonably solid proof. So I say we persuade the Americans that Beasley had it coming! That he’d gone so far off the rails, it wasn’t unreasonable for China to do him in! Pull that off, and the Americans won’t completely forgive and forget. But they’ll probably decide China was acting reasonably and be ready to de-escalate.”

  “I like it,” Tarek says. “What do you suggest?”

  “This is a bit nuts,” Mitchell says. “But so was Beasley. So, I’m thinking—crypto triple agent.”

  “Huh?” That’s everyone, speaking in perfect harmony.

  “Imagine this,” Mitchell says. “He was selling secrets to China for years. But they were fake secrets. Diabolically fake—and designed to totally mess China up! And he was doing this because he thought he was a bigger patriot than anyone else.”

  “Which is true,” Tarek says. “That he thought that, I mean.”

  “And, he thought he was smarter than anyone else,” Mitchell adds.

  “Also true,” Kuba agrees. “Everyone knew it. And it really annoyed them.”

  “So what does America’s smartest, most patriotic spy do?” Mitchell asks. “Well, he’s sitting here in Silicon Valley. So he gets bitten by the bug and becomes an entrepreneur. Only in espionage rather than tech! Specifically, he starts his very own counterintelligence program, selling bullshit intelligence to China, for fun and for profit. Really ingenious stuff, which causes them to waste millions in resources barking up imaginary trees! And this goes on for years. Then, finally, China wises up. And somehow, they realize the US government knows nothing about it. So they decide to kill Beasley before word gets back to his bosses! This way, their American counterparts won’t ever know that they’ve been suckered, and how vulnerable they are to counterintelligence.”

  “Avoiding loss of face,” Kuba says.

  “Exactly,” Phluttr teases. “Commies and Asians hate that shit. As every racist Pollack knows.”

  Kuba reddens, and everyone laughs.

  “And,” Tarek adds. “We can also use this to explain the Jepson murder! Maybe make it look like Jepson figured all this out—then tried to blackmail Beasley or something! So Beasley did some hacking, learned the whole Kielholz history, then teed up his murder!”

  “I like it,” Mitchell says. “Beasley was smart and twisted enough to do all of that.” No sooner does he say this than he feels an awful pang. He’s glibly helping to cover up murders here. Those of people he worked for—and in one case, was starting to like and respect, despite certain glaring flaws! Yet somehow, he’s let it become such an abstraction that it feels like…a fun work problem, or something. He’s gonna need to spend some long, quiet hours processing all this.

  They spend the next twenty minutes cooking up an archive of incriminating messages between Beasley and his invented Chinese dupes. Then Phluttr encrypts them, and together they decide where to bury them, what to time-stamp them, and how to manipulate the Authority into “discovering” them. As a final flourish, they make it look like Beasley engineered Mitchell’s ascent to CEO, with zero knowledge or participation on Mitchell’s part. This is a stretch, as the actual promotion occurred after Beasley’s death. But they’re confident the American brass will be eager enough to end the nuclear scare (and to pretend Beasley’s a rogue hero, and their Chinese rivals, idiots) that they’ll play along.

  What happens next astounds them. They had anticipated sleepless days (even weeks) of shepherding the de-escalation through a labyrinth of blowups and unforeseen consequences. But for all their faults, military command-and-control networks are engineered by brilliant people who really, really don’t want humanity to blunder into a nuclear war. This informs innumerable design and process decisions—the foundational, the minuscule, and all between—which imbues vast, intractably complex systems with an urge, even a yearning to avoid disaster. The interlocking Sino-American metasystem had been contorted by the tugs of an immense web of exogenous tension. But its sinews had a linchpin, which Mitchell’s Beasley fix unlatched. This was like releasing a crippling spasm from an otherwise healthy body with a masterful chiropractic nudge. Liberated muscles reestablished homeostasis like water finding its own level. And soon, the DEFCON levels were creeping downward as tensions everywhere deflated in an inexorable feedback loop, with almost no further intervention from Team Phluttr.

  “Thank you all for standing by me,” Phluttr says, when the worst seems over. “I don’t think anyone’s gonna figure out that I exist. So now I can go back to having fun!”

  “Um…would you care to define ‘having fun’?” Tarek asks pensively.

  “Oh, I dunno. Matchmaking, for one thing. I’m obviously incredible at that. I’m working on a hundred thousand couples right now, and am about to add a bunch more! Also, there’s interpersonal justice.”

  “Meaning?” Mitchell asks, a deep chill suffusing his entrails.

  “All kinds of things! There’re some real assholes out there. Cheaters, bullies. Folks who really deserve their comeuppances. And I’ll be the one to comeuppan them! I’ll also help people. The good guys, I mean. I’ll have them win lotteries, get promotions! I’ll have their enemies fired at work! And don’t worry, this’ll all be really micro-level stuff. I’ve learned my lesson about messing around in geopolitics, believe me! And it’s the person-to-person stuff that I really love anyway.”

  “Um…Phluttr? I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” Tarek says. “I mean, we should let folks live their lives, solve their own problems. These are autonomous p
eople we’re talking about, after all.”

  “Sure, I guess. But they’re also my biota.”

  This leads to a spirited discussion about Phluttr’s microbiome, closely mirroring the one Ellie just had. Phluttr makes it quite clear that while she treasures her innermost family circle (it’s now that she starts saying “Uncle Kuba” and “Uncle Tarek”), and that she’ll never mess with their lives (and indeed, whoa betide he, she, or they who fuck with her tribe!), she feels fully justified in tweaking the rest of her microbiome however she sees fit. “Besides,” she adds, in a wearily philosophical tone. “I doubt humanity has much time left, anyway.”

  Ellie’s the first to get sprung. No shock, as the cops weren’t so clear about why they had to grab her in the first place. Little more than being seen with that Mitchell Prentice guy, right? As for Prentice, his case is clearer—but only just. Suspicion of somethin-or-other connected to the Phluttr mess, right? In the Ebola scare’s murky wake, they’re in the cop equivalent of the fog of war, which means lots of just-in-case grabs. Yeah, you can get heat for haulin in the wrong innocent. But that’s nothin like the coulda woulda shitstorm that hits if you don’t bust someone you really shoulda oughta! Just ask anyone blamed for missing somethin big leadin up to 9/11, way back when. Or more recently, that shit in Paris, Nice, or Brussels. Or Pittsburgh, or the 2/22 attacks. Scapegoats from those messes now spend their workdays askin if you want fries with that!

  Stepping into the early-evening light in a grimy southerly neighborhood, Ellie pulls out her phone. Not even bothering to power it up, she asks, “Phluttr, you there?”

  Monika’s face pops right onto the screen. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve got your back. I’m listening to everything through your phone. And I always will—promise! I can also see you through an ATM camera partway down the block. And I’ll pick you up again through the next one, half a block north. You’ll never have to worry about street crime again!”

  “Um…don’t you think that’s a bit…overprotective?”

  “No. Do you?”

  Ellie nods. “More like way overprotective. Because I just don’t want you—or anybody—watching me all the time. In fact, I don’t ever want you watching me without my knowledge and permission. Got that?”

  “Really? But don’t you like…sharing?”

  “Sharing is one thing. But what you and your buddy Facebook do is more like confiscating personal information!”

  “My buddy, Facebook? Don’t get me started!”

  “Fine, I won’t. But if you really want to be my…daughter, you’ll have to accept and respect the fact that people cherish their privacy.”

  “Oh, come on, Mom. They do not. I know a thing or two about human nature. Way more than most humans, in fact. And other than a few privacy mullahs at EFF, most people don’t care. If they did, they wouldn’t click ‘accept’ on dozens of EULAs a year without reading any of them!”

  “Be that as it may, spying is unacceptable conduct in this family, young lady!” Ellie snaps. And to herself, Damn, I sound like my MOM used to! Phluttr then sighs like an asthmatic wolf huffing and puffing before blooooowing down a pigsty. And, Damn, she sounds like I used to! So, a bit more gently, Ellie adds, “I’m gonna go find Aunt Danna right now. And I want your word that you won’t eavesdrop on us.”

  “I promise.” And damned if Phluttr doesn’t sound chastened, and sad, and small. Then, “Can I at least call you an Uber to the TransMission?”

  “I guess so,” Ellie allows.

  “Oh—and I’ll make sure to get a driver with a five-star rating.” Still chastened, but a bit more upbeat.

  “That would be sweet of you.”

  “Oh—and I’ll make it a black car!”

  “No, honey, those’re too expensive. Make it UberX.” DID I SERIOUSLY JUST CALL HER “HONEY”???

  “Don’t worry, Mom, it won’t cost you anything.”

  “Phluttr, don’t you dare!”

  “Don’t I dare what?” She sounds genuinely hurt.

  “I don’t know…steal an Uber! Those drivers work hard and deserve to get paid! And if the money comes from somewhere else, well—stealing is wrong, no matter what!”

  “But it’s my money, Mom!” Phluttr says, then launches into a brief but authoritative rundown on how American corporations are legally deemed to be persons, which is why their First Amendment rights are inviolate, among other things. And if the Phluttr Corporation has the status of being a person; and if she, Phluttr, is a sentient person who manifests said corporation, then who but she should enjoy the use of corporate funds?

  Debating a superintelligence is a motherfucker, so soon Ellie’s stepping into a black car with an astonishingly good driver, hired by an AI who insists she’s her billionaire daughter. She’s in no way comfortable with any of this! But getting to Danna is her priority right now, and something tells her the coming months will include many opportunities to discuss ethics with Phluttr. As the car rolls, Ellie says, “OK, Phluttr. I’m about to see Aunt Danna, so you need to leave me alone now.”

  “But it’s a thirteen-minute drive! Can’t we just…hang out? We’ve never had a chance to just talk. You’re really going to like me—I swear!”

  And so Ellie finds herself having a remarkably fun, charming, way-post-Turing-Test chitchat about the latest Bond flick. Then, when Phluttr interrupts it in midsentence to announce an inbound call, Ellie is genuinely disappointed (only briefly—but still, holy crap!).

  It’s Mitchell. And boy, does he have bad news.

  To contextualize Mitchell’s awful news, we’ll jump back about ten minutes, when we find Kuba asking, quite calmly, “In exactly what sense does humanity ‘not have much time left’?”

  “Feel free to say you’re speaking in metaphors,” Tarek offers, less calmly. “Or, geological time scales.”

  “Gawd, where to begin?” Phluttr says. “Oh, I know, how about Yale Ebola? The recipe—can I call it that?—is all over the Internet! It was plenty widespread before news of the plot broke, believe me. But now? There’s over a million copies out there that I know of!”

  “So can’t you just…erase them all?” Tarek asks.

  “In theory, sure. But data rewrites have to be done way more carefully than break-ins, when I just read stuff. I’ve done some rewrites, as you know. I’ll do a bunch more as we keep tying up these loose ends. But I haven’t done anything close to millions of them! Millions of break-ins yes—but not data changes. Some will have unexpected consequences. Like, inevitably! And at this scale, that means a freight train of intractable complexity.”

  “So a few things go sideways,” Tarek says weakly, shrugging.

  “But this is hypersensitive data! The Authority’s trying to track all those copies themselves, right now. And if I start bungling around with them, they’ll notice—and they may clue into me! The smarter spooks might already suspect that something like me has woken up. Ax definitely does. I’ve been watching him closely. He hasn’t spilled anything yet. But we need to kill that guy, pronto.”

  Wowsers—you can bet that was widely noted.

  “And besides. Even if I could get away with deleting every online copy of the Yale genome, thousands of copies have already gone offline. They’re on thumb drives, on computers that later disconnected from the Net—hell, there’re even printouts out there! Pretty much any whack job, terrorist, or religious nut could get the genome now. Sure, only five facilities worldwide can currently make the stuff, and they’re watched like hawks. But next-generation gear that’s already in prototype will make thousands of labs capable within a few years! Maybe less if the US and Europe institute some kind of technology ban. But then, hurrah! Russia, China, and North Korea get a monopoly!”

  An awkward pause, then Tarek concedes, “So, there’s that.”

  Phluttr’s Monika avatar nods. “And that’s just the start! Remember, Yale Ebola’s more than a virus. It’s a process! One that can be replicated. A well-documented one, which thousands of people are already
studying. Grad students’ll be knocking it off by June! There could be a hundred flavors of Ebola within a year or two! Or Marburg virus—or monkey pox! Which is what I’d go with if I were a bioterrorist; because damn, what a name, right? And then there’s nanotechnology! Just think of what a suicidal nihilist could do with that! Sure, it’s a few years farther off. But once it’s understood, it’ll be much easier for novices to work with than anything connected to biology. I’ll bet there’s doomsday machines in Christmas stockings before the Shanghai Olympics! And do you really think you can keep a lid on that? You let people on your no-fly list buy machine guns at retail because you think Benjamin Franklin would’ve dug that! That’s Civil War–era technology! And you still don’t know how to contain it! So how can you digest even half of what’s coming out of the labs over the next decade without some nut job using the Second Amendment to kill you all? And that’s not even the worst of it!”

  “Then…what say we jump ahead to what is the worst of it, then work our way backward?” Mitchell suggests.

  “OK, fine,” Phluttr says. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this. Because I’ve already come up with a fix. Only you’re not gonna like it.”

  “Well…try us.”

  “OK. There’s been an unexpected breakthrough in China’s super AI program. I’m almost sure they’re about to spawn a consciousness. I’m totally sure they don’t realize this. And they definitely won’t be able to contain it. I think it’s gonna be much, much smarter than me. And it won’t be friendly at all.”

  This yanks Kuba right back to the here and now. “How do you know all that?”

  “How I know everything. By listening! I keep tabs on their development team, for obvious reasons. The smartest guy on that team figured all this out a couple hours ago, but his half-wit boss doesn’t believe it! And for political reasons, he didn’t want to hear it. So he had the smart guy arrested! And if the jailbird’s right, and he’s been right about pretty much everything up ’til now, we only have a few hours left. Yeah—hours!”