The Doubt Factory

by Paolo Bacigalupi

“That’s right,” Moses muttered. “We got you all figured out.”

  The man was staring up at what Moses considered to be the key banner.

  DOUBT FACTORY PLAYBOOK

  COUNSEL AGAINST A RUSH TO JUDGMENT.

  ATTACK THE SCIENCE.

  BUY CONTRARIAN SCIENTIFIC RESULTS.

  PUBLICIZE BOUGHT SCIENCE.

  EMPHASIZE QUESTIONS RATHER THAN ANSWERS.

  TEACH THE CONTROVERSY.

  ACCUSE OPPONENTS OF PRACTICING JUNK SCIENCE.

  KEEP THE PUBLIC CONFUSED.

  CONFUSION = DELAY = $$$$

  Mr. Banks was frowning as he stared up at all the writings, his daughter not far off, staring up at the Doubt Factory laid bare.

  Moses watched Alix’s expression change as she read.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  Dad turned to her. “They’re lunatics,” he said. He started to smile. “They’re just lunatics, that’s all. Conspiracy theorists.” He walked over to the news cameras. “You wanted a quote?”

  He talked happily into the camera, and by the time he returned to Alix, he was smiling more broadly still. “We should go,” he said. “It will take a little while for all this to sort out. I’ll get a car for us.”

  “But…” Alix waved at the banners and their web of connections and accusations. “What is all this?”

  “I have no idea. Performance art, I guess you could call it.” He gave a little chuckle. “You have to give the deranged credit—they may not have a grip on reality, but they’re certainly industrious.” He shook his head sadly. “For their sake, I hope someone gets them help. There are medications that can help control this kind of mental instability.”

  “So what is all this?”

  “It’s nothing, Alix,” he said. “It’s just the rantings of a bunch of very passionate, very unstable Occupy Wall Street types. Corporations buy the government! These kinds of radical theories…” He laughed. “It’s what children and conspiracy buffs think. It’s a bit like the 9/11 truthers or the people who think the moon landing never happened.”

  “Why is he laughing?” Cynthia asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Kook said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Adam said. “Look. The cameras are all over the banners. He’s the story now. Banks is out of the shadows. They’re totally sucking up the information.”

  “No.” Moses felt his blood draining from him as he realized what he’d been too impassioned to see before. “We screwed up.”

  “Bullshit. It went perfect,” Kook said.

  “No.” Moses pressed his hands against his forehead in frustration. The scope of his failure was too horrifying to accept. “We did it wrong.”

  Simon Banks was guiding his daughter out of the factory. He was laughing. He was smiling at his daughter, and laughing, and completely unfazed by the event that they’d engineered. Another of Kook’s spy eyes picked them up outside the factory, tracking the pair as they climbed into a Williams & Crowe SUV. The last glimpse Moses got of Simon Banks was of the man looking smugly self-satisfied as he stared back at the still-smoking building, right before he closed the door and let Williams & Crowe whisk him away.

  “We screwed up. We completely screwed up.”

  “But look at all the coverage we’re getting,” Tank protested.

  “But that’s just the thing: Banks isn’t the story,” Moses said, tapping the screen. “We are. The crazy kids who do crazy things.”

  “Crazy cool things,” Kook said.

  “No. Just crazy. We look bugnuts crazy.” He stared at all the banners, finally seeing what he’d been blind to. He’d walked right into the same playbook the Doubt Factory used every day. Sincerity always loses. You can’t shake up the status quo.

  His uncle used to say there was a fine line between clever and stupid. Whatever scam you created needed to be bulletproof.

  To that, Moses silently added another dictum: There’s a fine line between clever and crazy.

  “We look like we’re straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something. We might as well be that old guy who lived in the cabin in Montana and wrote those goofy manifestos.”

  “Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber,” Cynthia said.

  “Yeah, him. All they have to do is associate us with his manifesto or about a thousand Earth Firster things. The Radical Environmental Agenda or some shit. Occupy Wall Street loony tunes.”

  Cynthia groaned as she got it. “They’ll frame the story around us. Talk about how sad it is that we don’t have a mental health system. Like the Sandy Hook shootings. NRA used that tactic.”

  “Yeah, we screwed up. We just became the story, instead of the Doubt Factory. Now Simon Banks is just an innocent victim, and we’re a bunch of crazy-ass lunatics.”

  Moses watched Alix and her father driving away. The memory of Simon Banks smiling as he climbed into the SUV burned in Moses’s brain.

  “We blew it,” Moses said. “We totally blew it.”

  PART 2

  26

  ALIX SAT IN AP CHEM, staring out at the sunshine. Another hot spring day, with everyone wilting and complaining that for a rich school, Seitz ought to be able to figure out how to get its AC right. All of them sticky and bored in the heat, and all of them stuck in neutral, waiting for the clock to run out and for real life to start.

  Sophie texted her under the table. GOING OUT. YOU WANT TO?

  Sure.

  Whatever.

  Cynthia was gone.

  Moses hadn’t been seen again.

  2.0 had disappeared entirely, like they’d evaporated into the sunshine. Poof, gone. A strange hallucination that left everyone shaken but fundamentally unchanged.

  Alix thought about the whole thing often. She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when she’d handed the USB stick over to Lisa and to her father. The moment when she’d been on the verge of doing something dangerous and against the grain, and then stopped short. The moment when she decided not to go play in the traffic.

  Safe, because she loved her family.

  Safe.

  She couldn’t help wondering what might have happened. If there were an alternate-reality version of Alix Banks who’d plugged that USB stick into her father’s computer and unleashed the fury of the universe.

  Maybe that Alix had ended up as a smashed hood ornament on the front of a Lexus, but this one was fine.

  Shaken, but fine.

  Shaken, until after a little while, she shook the fear off. And then what did she have? An odd little story that she was starting to doubt more and more as time passed. There wasn’t even anything she could point to, to say that her near miss with the mysterious-dangerous-whatever had even been real. 2.0 was gone.

  Not a trace.

  Poof! Gone!

  A magic trick.

  Now you see it, now you don’t.

  It pissed the FBI off royally.

  Not only had Williams & Crowe failed to notify them that they were about to go after a target of FBI interest, but it had lost them entirely. Terrorist cells weren’t supposed to just evaporate into thin air, and yet 2.0 had managed the impossible. Pictures of Moses and Cynthia circulated. A few blurry photos from the rave had been recovered, showing Adam, the beautiful blond DJ. And then… nothing. Every lead was a dead end.

  Cynthia turned out to be a ghost: stolen SSN, false history, a PO box for an address.

  Moses showed up on a couple of surveillance tapes from when he’d punched the headmaster, but even then he always seemed to know which way to turn his back so that it was impossible to get a clear look at his face.

  Moses was a phantom. Cynthia was the most solid lead they had, and she petered out. Maybe her father really had worked in tech and done data mining. Or maybe it was all lies, because no one could dig up a likeness. And the rest of them?

  A kid whose aunt worked with asbestos? No good records.

  Some gutter-punk girl? You could find them on every street in every city in America.

  Some Latino fos
ter kid with an asthma problem? Nobody even bothered to keep track.

  Of course, the FBI went over the factory with a fine-tooth forensic comb, but it had been full of human detritus from the huge rave that 2.0 had thrown. If there was decent physical evidence of anything at all, it was hopelessly obscured. What they did come up with were a lot of banners and a whole host of surveillance cameras that seemed to observe every angle of the factory.

  The FBI tech who had studied them reported that they’d been sending encrypted signals to… nothing at all. Some kind of nearby local network that no longer existed. Still, they’d managed to match a pattern and connect it to another local network that led onto another—link after link in an anonymous chain that eventually dead-ended in Estonia. Investigators were left pulling their hair in frustration. They had nothing.

  Well, rats. They had a lot of rats. 2.0 had left the rats with a sign that said FREE TO GOOD HOME. Those were the rats that Alix had seen at the rave. It turned out that they’d been heisted from the same testing facility as the ones 2.0 had used in the school. A private lab that had been involved in evaluating Tank’s asthma drug, the one that supposedly caused comas.

  Williams & Crowe had confiscated the rats as corporate property, along with several vats of Azicort, the bronchial dilator, and a long screed from 2.0 about pharmaceutical companies doing suspect testing. According to the banners, the rats in question were being used by George Saamsi and Kimball-Geier to prove Azicort was a safe substance suitable for use on chronic asthma.

  It looked as though the rats had been meant to be released in another massive wave, reminiscent of the prank at Seitz, but by the time the cages had opened, most of the rats had already died of a different kind of respiratory failure—choking to death on pepper spray and tear gas.

  Everyone admitted it was a lot of dead rats.

  In the end, after hours and hours of investigations, the FBI came up with nothing. 2.0 was gone. Disappeared into the wind, leaving behind a fading memory of their oddball pranks and little else.

  If the misfits of 2.0 were still out there, they had probably moved on. At least, that’s what the FBI said. They’d resurface. And in the meantime the FBI was patient. It had other investigations and other emergencies that were more pressing. Alix’s father was given the name of an agent in charge of their case, and the FBI packed up and moved out.

  A few weeks later Williams & Crowe left, too, taking Lisa and their armored SUVs with them.

  Alix was hugely relieved to see Death Barbie go, not least because she couldn’t help but get the feeling that Lisa blamed her for getting the Williams & Crowe security people locked in the cages. It had taken hours to get them all out. They’d eventually resorted to using cutting torches.

  After that, Lisa had trailed her everywhere, and Alix had meekly submitted to her guard. Neither of them suggested that Alix deserved to have time to herself or that Death Barbie had been overly protective—one of those irritating moments when the adults had read the situation better than Alix had and subsequently let her know that she was now on thin ice and had to earn her way back into their good graces.

  But now, finally, Death Barbie was gone, and Alix was left feeling…

  Lonely?

  God, Alix, you are so lame.

  She didn’t have a bodyguard and a spy living with her 24-7. She should have been grateful for that much at least. Sophie and Denise were still here, and boys like James kept asking her out. And Derek was always good for a laugh, even if he didn’t have Cynthia to try to compete against anymore. Derek was ridiculously relieved to find out that Cynthia had actually been a graduated senior.

  “I was having major inadequacy issues,” he admitted. “I was studying all the time.”

  Days slipped by. Alix went to the occasional Mom-and-Dad-sanctioned party. She rolled toward finals, and everything was fine, in theory.

  Except… what?

  She’d gotten her SAT results, and they were great, but her first thought was that she should tell Cynthia, who had helped prep her. And then she realized once again that Cynthia was gone.

  That girl was like getting your braces off. The smooth, slippery feeling of nothingness, where there should have been something.

  Alix looked at her SAT scores and wondered why she didn’t care at all. It all felt so fake. Like she was one of those lab rats that they ran chemical tests on. You took the tests, you ran through the maze, you got the score.… Then they chopped out your brain to check for tumors.

  The sound of books being gathered startled Alix. Even more startling was that it was last period, and she’d somehow managed to drift all the way through the last half of school without taking much notice of anything at all.

  Jonah was standing outside her classroom door, waiting for her. He started jabbering about how Mr. Ambrose was a Nazi for docking him a grade.

  “Who gives a damn how I format my bio notebook?” he kept saying as they climbed into Alix’s cherry-red MINI. “I should have gotten a perfect score.”

  “Yeah. He screwed me with that, too,” Alix said absently.

  Cynthia had gotten a perfect score on her SATs, Alix remembered. She knew how the SATs were built, top to bottom, and had happily tutored Alix.

  It was just a test, she’d said.

  “You can make the mistake of thinking test scores say something about you,” she’d said when Alix had expressed awe at Cynthia’s numbers. “But they don’t. They’re just something they use to put you in a box.”

  At the time, Alix had taken her words for false humility and as a sop to Alix in case she royally screwed the test. But now Alix knew that not only had Cynthia gotten a perfect score, but she’d also walked away from it all to run with 2.0, a surreal gang of OCD crazypants kids dedicated to some other game entirely.

  Different rats, running a different kind of maze.

  Cynthia, good girl gone bad; a different rat in a different maze, passing a different kind of test.

  Tests.

  Alix remembered Moses handing her the USB stick.

  There were all kinds of tests, and Alix couldn’t decide if she’d failed or passed hers. She’d gotten away from 2.0. She’d warned her father. She’d protected her family—

  “Are you even listening to me?” Jonah asked.

  Alix realized she’d been sitting in the car with the engine running.

  “Sure,” Alix said as she put the MINI in reverse. “Why? What did you say?”

  “Fuckin’ A, you’re getting as bad as Dad,” Jonah said. “You never pay attention anymore.”

  “I do, too, pay attention.” Alix pulled out of the school parking lot, heading for home.

  “Ever since that whole thing with 2.0, you’ve been acting weird.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Yeah, you have.”

  “My freak-show brother is telling me that I’ve been weird?”

  “You know what I think?” Jonah said. “I think you miss being caged up by 2.0.”

  Alix glared at him. “Take that back.”

  Jonah grinned, completely unrepentant. “Oh, come on. I bet it was way more interesting being all caged up like that. Kidnapped, by the mysteriously hot leader of the outlaw gang 2.0…” He trailed off suggestively.

  “You are one screwed-up—” Alix glimpsed movement on the sidewalk and slammed on her brakes. There was a familiar figure cutting between the cars along the street.

  Oh my God.

  Black guy in a bomber jacket.

  Moses.

  Her heart lurched. The guy turned his head. The world righted itself. Not Moses at all. Just some random guy. He didn’t even look like Moses. He had a goatee, and it was graying. He was just some old guy.

  Ick.

  Alix watched the man unlock his BMW and climb in.

  Jonah smirked knowingly as she got the MINI going again. “That wasn’t 2.0,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  “Bet you’re disappointed,” Jonah goaded.

&n
bsp; “Seriously, Jonah. Fuck off. If you keep this up, I swear I’ll make you walk home.”

  Her brother snorted, but at least he shut up.

  Alix’s heart was still hammering from that first glimpse of the man. Something about the way he’d moved or his style had triggered the response. Adrenaline and fear and surprise… and… what? Something else that she didn’t really want to look at, and didn’t like Jonah poking at.

  PTSD was what her shrink was calling it.

  And not just about Moses. The 2.0 crew all tended to trigger her. Sometimes it was Moses. Other times, Cynthia. Blue hair immediately reminded her of the hacker girl, Kook. Willowy blond boys could make her see Adam. Alix had even hallucinated that she’d spied Tank once, a skate rat barreling down the sidewalk.

  Alix’s shrink warned that there might be depression after all of Alix’s stress incidents and recommended medication to combat the lethargy and forgetfulness that Alix had started exhibiting. After all, Alix had stopped getting out of bed on time. She’d forgotten Jonah at school twice. She’d started skipping track-and-field practice because she just couldn’t muster the will to care whether she remained on the team. As far as Mom and Dr. Ballantine were concerned, these were hanging offenses.

  “It’s just running on a track,” Alix had protested. “It’s not like I’m failing school, Mom.”

  “It’s just not like you,” Mom replied. “You never lay around the house like this. You never watch TV like this. Or play that game all the time…”

  “Skyrim.”

  “It’s not like you. Sophie called again, you know.”

  Sophie, wanting to go out and do… something. Shop for lipstick or try to find a dress that would make her size 6 look like a size 2 or… whatever. Alix couldn’t be bothered. She had dragons to kill—on the Xbox that it turned out 2.0 had bugged, right inside her own house.

  When Alix had told them that Cynthia was a double agent, Williams & Crowe had been delighted because it helped explain the listening devices they’d started discovering all around the Banks’ property.

  Cynthia had been good at what she did, that was for sure. Everything about that girl had been a lie.