The Doubt Factory

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  Tank never seemed impatient. Tank never seemed worried.

  Moses checked his watch again. Alix was late, and he had no idea why. Right after they’d sent Alix off with Cyn and Adam, he’d been frustrated to discover that the Banks household had gone dark to their surveillance. Sometime while they’d been convincing Alix to go along with their plan, the place had fuzzed out, and now Kook couldn’t pull a single image, either inside, or outside the house.

  “Either they put up new electronic countermeasures, or Alix disappearing made them do another sweep and Williams and Crowe found our bugs.”

  “Which is it?”

  “No way of knowing, unless you want to go over and ask.”

  He didn’t. But after being almost godlike in his knowledge of what was happening, it was frustrating to suddenly be blind again.

  Am I being too trusting?

  Maybe Alix was just grounded, and they’d have to wait longer. Or maybe she’d lost the USB key. Or maybe… Moses grimaced. Why am I sweating it? Nobody else was sweating it. Just him.

  How come I’m the only one who’s nervous?

  He schooled himself to be still. Maybe they’re all pretending to be calm. Just like me.

  He took another tour of the factory, trying to act relaxed. Kook was deep in another coding session. A sweet haze of marijuana smoke hung about her, and green cans of her latest energy drink were stacked around her in a tower that Tank had carefully built as she worked, with her so buried in her code that she hadn’t seen him doing it. A whole fortress of AdrenaPUMP.

  “Anything from the Trojan horse yet?” Moses asked.

  Kook gave him a sour look. “You asked me fifty times already. Go bother someone else. You’ll know if your girlfriend gets it online.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Go bullshit someone who will believe you,” Kook said, and went back to her coding.

  Moses made a face and wandered back to the main factory floor.

  Adam and Cynthia were kicking the hell out of a heavy bag. Taking turns practicing elbow strikes.

  “Pivot!” Adam was saying. “You want your hips in it! Whole body, girl! Whole body.”

  WHAM!

  Cynthia hit again, and the bag swayed.

  “Yeah! That’s what we’re looking for! Do it again!”

  BAM!

  Cynthia was hitting the hell out of it. They were both sweating. “Okay, now try your shin kicks,” Adam said.

  For Adam, it had started out as a bit of a joke. He hadn’t really thought Cynthia would learn. Didn’t have the killer instinct, he said. She didn’t have the rage—

  THWOCK.

  Cynthia’s shin hit the bag and it swayed. “Good!” Adam said. “Give me a combo punch. One, two, hook! Good! Keep going!” Adam turned and ambled over to Moses. “Any word from our girl?”

  Moses shook his head. “Nah.”

  “She still seemed pretty pissed in the car.”

  “We rattled her cage pretty hard.”

  Kook gave a shout from her workstation. “Hey guys! Come here! You got to see this!”

  They all ran for Kook. She was staring at one of her screens, her pierced eyebrows knitted with concentration. She expanded the security cam windows, filling up her monitors with surveillance views of the outside of the factory.

  SWAT-type people were just outside. Tons of security goons, blocking all the entrances.

  Moses swore.

  “I do believe that’s Williams and Crowe,” Adam said mildly.

  “I told you we couldn’t trust her,” Kook said.

  Moses didn’t have a chance to retort. Tear gas boomed toward the factory, trailing yellow smoke.

  Glass shattered.

  More tear gas rounds followed, a rain of toxic smoke, pouring in.

  Alix watched as the Williams & Crowe teams smashed the doors open. It took a couple of swings, but they tore the metal doors off their hinges. The doors fell inward, and tear gas billowed out. More smoke was pouring out from the broken windows above, yellow smoke that made Alix’s throat seize in silent empathy for Tank.

  Security teams with gas masks charged through the doors, M-16s held ready.

  It was like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer, Alix thought.

  Dad seemed to sense her anxiety. “Williams and Crowe recruits from special forces for their security work. They’ll be fine.”

  I wasn’t worried about them. Alix had a sudden sickening image in her mind of Cynthia lying in a pool of blood, shot dead by some armored guy with an M-16. Or Tank. And Moses? What about him?

  A gun went off and then another.

  Alix startled at the sound. Oh God, I didn’t want them dead! I wanted…

  More smoke was pouring out of the building, billowing clouds of it.

  “Is something on fire?” Alix asked.

  Their driver turned on his radio. There was a lot of shouting coming over the channels.

  Someone took over the channel—Lisa’s voice. “Hold fire! Hold fire!” Her voice was almost frantic. Alix listened, her throat tight with tension.

  The driver shut off the radio again. “They’ll be cuffing them now,” he said, pointing to the doors. “They should be coming out right there.”

  Dad glanced over. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

  Alix wasn’t sure. “I—” she started, and broke off. “Is that normal?” she asked, pointing.

  Massive billowing clouds were rising into the sunny sky. Not the yellow clouds of tear gas, but obscenely bright colors, white and red and blue gushing into a vast, towering plume of brilliantly stained smoke. Faster and faster, thicker and thicker.

  The guard turned the radio back on. Squawks of confusion crackled from its speaker.

  “Goddammit! I can’t see!”

  “Bars—”

  “Fall back! Fall—”

  “—cage—”

  “—back!”

  “—shot—”

  “Help with Jennings!”

  All the Williams & Crowe people were still inside. Not a single one had emerged.

  Alix leaned forward, staring. Realizing what was happening.

  In the distance, sirens wailed.

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  “Check it out!”

  Tank was pointing to one of their distance cams. It gave a wide view of the factory, and now a tricolored cloud was rising fast and huge from it, a billowing stream that kept on roiling.

  Moses stared at the rising plume. “Damn! That’s really big.”

  “It should be,” Tank said with satisfaction. “Half the factory is a smoke bomb. It was like ten tons of saltpeter.”

  Cynthia came up beside him, toweling the workout sweat from her face and neck. “Wow. It’s pretty.”

  Moses smiled sadly. “Yeah. It is.”

  “Here comes the rest,” Kook said. She pointed at another monitor where more people were carefully approaching the smoking factory. “There’s your girlfriend,” she said.

  “My, my.” Adam laughed. “She does look pissed.”

  She sure did. Moses watched as Alix approached the building. She was fighting to get close, being held back by her father and some Williams & Crowe goon. Alix looked shocked as she stared up at the smoking building. He thought he could read every emotion on her face. The surprise at all the smoke pouring out. The confusion of trying to figure out what had happened. Smart rich girl trying to figure out why everything had gone sidewise for her.

  She looked shocked and pissed, for sure, but he thought he could make out another expression there, too—a glint of tight-lipped admiration as she put the pieces together. Realizing that she’d been played.

  Now you see it, now you don’t. Like a magician whipping aside a cloth to reveal the white rabbit where the snowy dove should have been. Moses’s uncle had loved magic almost as much as he’d loved graft. The delight of the switch, the gasp of amazement as someone realized that they’d been fooled, as the world tilted off its rails and did s
omething that was simply impossible—

  “I should have called Guinness Book of World Records!” Tank said. “I’d be famous!”

  “You’d be famous in jail,” Kook said fondly.

  “How long before the newspeople arrive?” Cynthia asked as she clipped her hair up off her sweaty neck.

  “Can’t be long now,” Adam said.

  “Hell of a lot better than a press release.”

  Kook said, “I still wish we could have gotten into Banks’s computers. Would have loved to see what’s going on behind BSP’s firewall.”

  “Take the win,” Cynthia advised. “With that much smoke and everything we rigged inside, we’re on the five o’clock news, for sure.”

  “Still…”

  “Oh, stop it. We agreed that whichever way things went, it was a win. This isn’t hacking some Russian mafia credit card ring. We’re probably already on the NSA’s radar as it is. As soon as the news crews get there, let’s get this thing triggered and call it a day.”

  Smoke continued to rise, a tower of color so big it looked like the city of Hartford was going up. Moses watched the monitor that had Alix in it. She was still staring at the scene that she had helped trigger.

  Sorry, girl, he thought. You can’t believe in anything, and you sure can’t trust.

  The only thing you could do was test.

  Cynthia touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry about Alix,” she said softly. “I sort of thought she’d…” She trailed off.

  Moses remembered being brought up to trust. To think that people would do the right thing. His dad had always believed that people would do the right thing and play straight with you if you asked them to. It was another thing his uncle had always scoffed at about his dad.

  You know who you can trust? his uncle had once said. Nobody. En-Oh-Body. You trust yourself, and you watch your back, and everything else, you test.

  “I saw her coming a mile away,” Moses lied.

  25

  THEY FOUND THE WILLIAMS & CROWE team in cages.

  Every door that the security teams had charged through had turned out to be elaborately booby-trapped. As the last men ran in, the cages clanged down and locked with huge heavy iron latches.

  There was no mechanism to open them.

  Alix had to stifle her amusement at all the security teams sitting in their cages, sweaty and demoralized. About a million fire and police department people were standing around the cages, scratching their heads and trying to figure out what tools they’d need to get the cages open.

  Alix remembered Tank standing outside her own cage, inspecting it and saying, “Told you I could figure out the welding!”

  You sure did, kid, she thought. You sure did.

  They’d all known what they were doing. All the way. And she’d helped them pull it off. Moses had played her. Right from the start.

  If she thought back, she should have seen it coming: Moses’s comments that he didn’t believe in things, he only tested. Saying that he’d poked her dad enough that he thought he knew what he’d do when Moses grabbed his daughter. She’d thought Dad would move heaven and hell to get her back. Moses had banked on his using Williams & Crowe for revenge.

  Moses had played her.

  Or did you try to play him and lose? a voice snarked in her head. She’d said she’d help him, and then she’d changed her mind. What would Moses have done if she’d followed through with her promise? What would that have meant to him? What would it have meant to her?

  The whole factory smelled like caramel. A byproduct of the burning sugar that the 2.0 crew had used to construct their massive smoke bomb. Alix could construct the chemical reactions in her mind. The sugar, the saltpeter, all of it going up through elaborate, perforated iron tubes that Tank had likely constructed and were still baking with the heat of that massive smoke bomb burn.

  Alix caught sight of her father talking to Lisa through the bars. Death Barbie glanced over at Alix, and Alix thought she could detect her disappointment.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  Of course, no one was going to come straight out and blame her. It wasn’t like there weren’t screwups galore to go around. Williams & Crowe had completely underestimated 2.0 again. Fire trucks and police cars and hazmat vehicles filled the parking area outside, all of them called to the scene by the insane plume of smoke that had risen over the city.

  Lisa was looking pissed, talking into her radio, and listening to whatever was coming back from her bosses as she paced back and forth in her cage. Her squad sat glumly around her, staring out from the bars like gorillas at a zoo exhibit.

  Homo securitus, Alix thought. Or maybe, if you were feeling really snarky…

  Homo suckerus.

  All of a sudden Lisa was hurrying to the bars and calling to the cops, agitated. A second later Alix saw why. News vans had started pulling up, and camera people were climbing out to survey the scene. Channel 3 already had a crew panning the factory. Blow-dried talking heads started touching up makeup and setting up for shots.

  “Alix,” Dad called out to her. “Come inside. I don’t want you on the news.”

  Like that will change anything.

  Alix kept watching as Lisa begged the cops to bar access, but the locals didn’t care. Some of them were grinning and shaking their heads at the newspeople’s arrival, and Alix had the feeling that whatever clout Lisa had had, it had evaporated in the face of failing to notify them of her raid.

  A fire chief laughed and waved the cameras inside while Lisa shouted at him to stop. The camera guys didn’t wait for a second round of permission. They scrambled for the doors, jostling for the first shots of the building’s interior, before some other authority changed its mind and dragged them out.

  Alix watched, bleakly amused. Nobody seemed to know what was going on or who was supposed to be in charge. More Williams & Crowe personnel were arriving now, trying to get through the clots of emergency vehicles.

  The newspeople were cracking up as they filmed the Williams & Crowe assault team.

  “This is proprietary!” Lisa kept saying to them from behind bars. “You can’t film faces without permission!”

  The cameras ignored her. One of the talking heads got down on her knees, trying to get some of the trapped Williams & Crowe people to give her a quote.

  “What were you doing in here?” she kept asking, as all the security people turned away.

  “This about enough mayhem for you?” Kook asked Moses.

  Moses had been watching Alix, and it took him a moment to realize that Kook was talking to him. “What? Oh, yeah. Go ahead.”

  “Let’s blow this shit up,” Adam with a laugh.

  Kook popped open a terminal window and sent a series of encrypted commands to a server on the other side of the world.

  That server would communicate with another server, and then another, as bots and zombied computers that she’d picked up over years of hacking chained the signal together.

  She’d explained it all to Moses once. She never did anything directly. One encrypted signal embedded in noise and other communications bounced from place to place until, at last, a burst of commands launched itself from Estonia and landed—boom—on a local wireless network that bounced the instructions to the factory’s private network and…

  “Here we go,” Kook muttered.

  Bang.

  The explosions were so loud that everyone hit the floor. A whole carpet of people diving for cover in instinctive reaction to the booming that came from all sides of the factory.

  Alix hit the floor with them.

  They’re shooting?

  But no, instead of violence and gunfire it was…

  Canvases unfurling, canvas after canvas all around the warehouse. Images and info-graphics, spilling down the walls showing—

  Dad?

  Simon Banks’s face cascaded into view, done in the stylized form of old communist propaganda. Beside him, another canvas unfurled, revealing George Saamsi, and between them, a
stylized logo of a factory, generating question marks that puffed up and up and up, and below the image, the words:

  WELCOME TO THE DOUBT FACTORY

  More canvases spilled open. Banks Strategy Partners, with links to the names of different organizations and companies. Americans for Innovation. The Institute for Competition and Prosperity. Oil companies. Petroleum associations. Household products associations. Dozens and dozens of companies and organizations, and each one of those connected to more info-graphics with a variety of headings.

  LEGAL: A spiderweb of doctors’ and scientists’ photos with numbers beside them representing how much money they had taken from the associations for their research, and how many court cases they had testified in on behalf of companies.

  GOVERNMENT: Lists of company-paid people who also worked at government agencies. USDA. FDA. Atomic Energy Commission. EPA. Department of Agriculture. Minerals Management Service. Bureau of Land Management. Federal Communications Commission. Office of Management and Budget. And that was followed by long lists of laws and regulations that they’d consulted on.

  SCIENCE: Lists of scientists and research paid, with a web of lines linking back to the companies and associations—and all those lines made more connections back to her father and George Saamsi.

  CHEMICALS: diacetyl, Azicort, phthalates…

  It went on and on. Alix stared at the dizzying web of interconnections. In a way, it reminded her of Moses’s own breathless description of how he had dug into her father’s work, the wide-eyed sincerity with which he had described all the evils he claimed her father was involved in. So certain. So sincere.

  The canvases read like the work of the insane.

  The camera people were laughing and filming them.

  Kook whooped. They all crowded around the screens, watching as their work unfurled. All the ideas that they’d laid out.

  Moses watched Alix’s eyes widen as her father’s face unfurled on the banner and the newspeople started to film. The live Mr. Banks’s own expression was stony, taking in all the information they’d compiled about him.