The Word Exchange

by Alena Graedon

  “Doing things ‘analog,’ as my daughter would say,” offered a man whose name I hadn’t caught. “Leaving a paper trail,” said Tommy Keach.

  “Which is why these meetings have recently become more secretive,” Victoria explained. “And why everything we say here is confidential. Leaving a paper trail isn’t always very safe, depending on what those papers say. Some members have made the very brave and deliberate choice to share what information we’ve collected publicly. But we’d like to keep that a choice for everyone. Especially as some of us have received explicit threats.” She glanced at Dr. Thwaite, who pretended not to see. I wondered what that look was meant to say. I thought of Rodney, and of the squad car on my block. I also couldn’t help but think of Doug, who’d just been spoken of so much. And who wasn’t there.

  I cleared my throat. My heart was beating painfully. “I know a lot of you,” I began, my eyes traveling around the crowded room. “Some of you I’ve just met. And I hope you’ll forgive me for repeating myself, because I’ve already asked most of you this question. But I’ve spent the past three weeks looking for my father. And there’s nothing I want more than to find out where he is. But at this point”—and here I, too, let my attention settle on Dr. Thwaite—“I just want to confirm that he’s—he’s still okay. So if any of you know anyth—”

  “He’s fine,” Dr. Thwaite cut in abruptly. His eyes shooting, for some reason, to Susan.

  “Phineas,” Victoria said darkly. “You haven’t told her?”

  “Told me what?” I asked. Tiny white dots started sparkling in my vision.

  “That he’s talked to your father,” Clara hurriedly explained, curls gently quaking. “And he really is okay, don’t worry—Phineas, tell her—just at an ‘undisclosed location.’ ”

  But Dr. Thwaite was still staring silently at Susan, who was staring back with equal intensity from behind her red glasses.

  And before I could ask what was going on, my phone began to ring.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, groping at my coat. And I kept apologizing—everyone was watching—until I’d finally turned it off. I saw that the caller was Bart, and that I’d somehow missed two other calls from him.

  Susan turned her stern gaze back to me. “We don’t allow phones,” she said coldly.

  I knew some people were afraid the virus could be transmitted that way. I nodded, but then I continued on. “The reason I’ve been even more worried lately about my dad”—and myself, I didn’t add—“is that I heard a story last week that was really pretty frightening.”

  After what Victoria had just said about receiving threats, I felt compelled to tell them what had happened to Rodney, although I didn’t use his name. As I spoke, the tensile energy of focused listening filled the room. “And this same man who stabbed my friend I-I saw him,” I said shivering. “The night after my father went missing.”

  The room’s silence took on a different quality, as if changing from amber to red. Then Susan, her face flushing slightly, said, “Tell us what you mean.”

  Which is how I found myself describing what I’d seen that night in the Creatorium: the disassembly line; the furnace; the workers with their strange coils (Nautiluses, several Society members confirmed); “paradox” vanishing from our corpus. I confessed that I’d gotten sick after using the foreman’s device but quickly added that I’d taken a course of treatment. And for the first time since I told it—to Bart, and later to the police—no one seemed to doubt what I said. Which I almost regretted. Because when I looked at Dr. Thwaite, he was extremely white. In a strangled voice, he said, “This is very serious.”

  “Why?” I asked, shivering again. “What does it mean?”

  “Mean?” Dr. Thwaite said, a little stridently.

  The dark-haired man who’d started off the meeting with the flat joke about Doug broke in. “I think the Chinese mafia is involved—or the government. Maybe the Russians.”

  “Involved? In what?” I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous or judgmental.

  “Please,” Franz said, raising his big hands. “We don’t know who the partners of Synchronic might be. Let us not make assumptions.”

  “Come on,” the man jeered, eyes bulging slightly. “You think it’s a coincidence all those workers were Russian and Chinese?”

  “They weren’t all. They were—”

  “I’m not saying it’s the workers’ fault,” the man continued, talking over me. “I’m just saying, let’s use our heads, for Christ’s sakes. Doesn’t this remind anyone else of the Russian-Georgian cyberconflict back in ’08? Or, I don’t know, the attack on Taiwan in 2016?”

  “But that was just a computer virus,” I cut in again. I remembered it well—the many patches we’d had to implement after.

  “It wasn’t just a computer virus,” Rob responded, pulling his long gray ponytail over his shoulder. “It was a large-scale, ongoing cyberattack. Devices that got infected with the virus were recruited into botnets and used to stage assaults on more secure networks.”

  I’d read that in one of the Society’s pamphlets, but I didn’t see the connection. “That may be,” I said. “But that’s not what’s happening here—”

  “Yet,” Rob softly interrupted.

  “—where we have people getting aphasia, getting really sick. Some of them dying. That didn’t happen in Taiwan.”

  “That was before Taiwan had the Meme,” Clara said ominously.

  “And actually,” Archie Rodriguez added, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his fleshy knees, “there are a lot of rumors about a handful of deaths that happened around the same time in Beijing, maybe also Taipei. That those were the first cases of word flu.”

  The room filled again with a cold, biting silence. I felt confused and a little queasy. How, I wondered, was a computer virus—zeroes and ones—supposed to be killing people? What did it have to do with the NADEL? And why would Synchronic, one of the most profitable companies in the world, be in any way involved?

  No one had answers to my first two questions, or so they claimed. And at the last one I faltered a little, glancing uneasily at Vernon, despite his earlier speech.

  “Don’t worry,” Clara said, reaching behind Franz to grip the back of Vernon’s chair. “He’s on our side.”

  Vernon smiled—a little ruefully, I thought. “I don’t make a great spy, I’m afraid,” he said, latticing his fingers in his lap. “But with Johnny’s help I’ve gathered some circumstantial evidence that the computer virus—I mean the same one that hit Taiwan—might have been created by Synchronic, to try to increase returns for shareholders. At least, they seem to have invented a different one more recently with that goal in mind. But at this point I have no hard proof I could take to the feds.”

  Rubbing his bad knee and frowning, Vernon began to lay out his case. Bizarrely, he started with Meaning Master.

  Max had of course done a very compelling job of pitching the game, Vernon said, not just to Synchronic but to everyone at Hermes, Vern included. The initial idea seemed to be for a fairly standard, almost boring word game, not so different from one they’d developed earlier, called Whorld. But Max had claimed that Meaning Master would in fact make people reflect more on the language they used. By minting new coinages, they’d consider words’ potential power but also their malleability, how they can be transformed into things of greater or lesser value.

  It seemed like a pretty lofty ambition, Vernon admitted, for a two-minute diversion. But Max was never at a loss for inspired rhetoric (“Aka horseshit,” Clara interjected), and for a while—especially when Max quoted them some figures of what they could each potentially earn if things went “their way”—it had all sounded somehow plausible, and even virtuous. They knew they should have doubted figures so large—tens of millions, Max had claimed.1 And they did express some doubts, Vernon maintained, at least among themselves. But when Max contacted Synchronic in March, no one objected.

  The first time Max met with Synchronic representatives, he went
alone and reported back, ecstatic. “It’s exactly what they’ve been looking for,” he claimed, high-fiving them all. The aspect of the game that had intrigued them, apparently, was the idea of making words mean different things—“ ‘Exchanging’ them, if you will,” Synchronic’s CEO, Steve Brock, had allegedly said with a lurid smirk.

  Synchronic didn’t care so much for the “meaning stuff,” it seemed. Too complicated. They’d rather have players do something else with the second minute of each round. But Max had argued that the meanings were the most crucial part—and whatever he’d said must have been convincing enough: when he got back to Hermes’s Red Hook offices that day, he told the guys they’d have to get started developing immediately.

  They’d celebrated—the first in a series of blowouts to come. Max seemed to think that if it all went well, Synchronic might buy them out, which had been his goal all along. (“You really think Synchronic would buy your company?” I’d teased him once. I remember his response perfectly; it seems so foreboding now. “I think my company’s going to take over Synchronic,” he’d replied. And the way he’d said it gave me a chill.) As cork bottles popped and lines of powder were sniffed, the Hermes boys were all pretty elated. But they were also a little confused. After their first sale to Synchronic, years earlier—a voice-activated data-transfer application—they’d worked on a series of more interesting projects that they’d hoped Synchronic would notice. When Max had tried pitching those, he’d gotten a few callbacks from people much lower on the ladder than Steve Brock. But until he’d reached out about Meaning Master, he’d never even been asked in for a meeting.

  Vernon claimed that in addition to being a little mystified by Synchronic’s interest—“They’d never done a game before, that I know,” he explained—he’d been somewhat suspicious fairly early on. “I’d been coming to these meetings for more than a year by then,” he said, again tapping his cane on the carpet. “My views on Synchronic had already changed.” Part of the reason he’d hoped Max’s pitch would stick was that he thought a sale to Synchronic might give him better insight into the company. (Which indeed it did.) But even so, it had taken Vern a while to be actively dubious enough (and nervy enough) to begin investigating anything. “Until maybe early May.”

  Cautiously, but also without really believing he’d make any strange discoveries, Vern had started asking a few questions, checking records, and talking with Johnny, who was overseeing the game’s engineers and designers—and who slowly seemed to be getting cold feet. And bit by bit Vernon started to piece together a hypothesis about how Synchronic, and thus Hermes, hoped to make money from Meaning Master. “Not through subscriptions and ad revenues,” he offered obliquely.

  “For at least a month, though,” he continued, “I still really doubted what I thought I’d found.” His theory was both troubling and very odd; it just didn’t seem plausible. But the enormous sums of money Synchronic was funneling into Hermes didn’t seem quite real either, and yet they were; by the end of summer Vernon’s bank account was bulging with more funds than he’d ever imagined it could hold.

  When Vern began hearing references to “money words,” he initially thought it was just a clever phrase for the fake terms generated by Meaning Master gamers. (These neologisms were expected, after all, to generate lots of profits.) And that was what everyone at Hermes called them. But slowly it started to dawn on him that to some people, notably Max and Johnny, “money words” also seemed to mean something else.

  Over the years Synchronic hadn’t failed to notice (had perhaps in fact nurtured) a tendency in users of their Meme: to forget useful, commonly shared language necessary for all human exchanges—work, diversion, love.2 (The speed with which a user lost words seemed to rest on a multiplicity of factors: how many languages she spoke; her pre-Meme vocabulary and memory; how deeply engaged she was, on a regular basis, with new ideas and their articulation; how much she used a Meme, etc.)

  For Max and Johnny, money words weren’t only the random strings of letters spit out by their new game: “tekkis,” “nowy,” “zyarjing.” They were also the words whose meanings had gradually eroded in Meme users’ memories: “ambivalent,” “irony”; later, things like “bitten” and “clothed.” They were a particular subset of words looked up most often on the Exchange and identified with the help of immensely complex algorithms—i.e., slightly abstruse terms that were nonetheless familiar enough to be needed in day-to-day life. These words were called money words because in certain devices—devices, Vern deduced, that had been infected with a new computer virus—they were “exchanged” with made-up neologisms. And this sometimes resulted in sales on the WE.

  In the years since the Meme’s release, Exchange sales had gradually increased as users encountered more and more words they couldn’t recall on websites and Life, in emails, texts, and beams, in “word-processing” documents, and even in speech. But Synchronic had very recently uncovered a way to exploit the process for bigger, quicker earnings.

  “What they figured out,” Vernon explained, “was that some of the words Meme users forget most often can be replaced, very carefully, with newly invented ‘words,’ and people don’t quite recognize the substitutions as fake. Or they’ve just begun to doubt themselves so much they’re not sure what to think. But they do draw a blank, of course—a lot more often than with real words, even the ones they can’t really remember. And just to communicate, they’ve started downloading meanings of some of the fabricated terms.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “They buy fake meanings to fake words? How does that work? Don’t people … realize?” But my mouth was dry and my tongue felt numb. When Vern had described Meme users so estranged from everyday language that they didn’t know what words they didn’t know, I’d had an uncanny vision of myself in the 1 train with Doug. Sliding my Meme from my pocket after he’d said something “obscure.”

  “No, no,” Vernon said, shaking his head. “That’s the thing. Part of the reason Synchronic wanted Meaning Master right on the Exchange website is that they created a program linking artificial words to the definitions of the real words they’ve replaced. Say ‘rain’ gets traded with—I don’t know, ‘zistrow’ or something. When a person gets a pop-up asking if she wants the meaning of ‘zistrow,’ she’ll see something like ‘water from the sky,’ maybe, which would make sense in the context. And she can just continue blithely on, writing, reading, talking, whatever. Barely even realizing she’s downloaded anything.”

  I could tell from the starched, stoic faces of others in the meeting that they’d heard this all before and accepted it. But I was finding some of what Vern said pretty incredible. Other aspects, though, were harrowingly believable, and an image of my little silver Meme, buried in a bedroom drawer, floated for a moment in my brain. I shuddered, feeling the unwelcome first tendrils of a headache. The overheads began to blur.

  As I later learned, many of Vernon’s speculations turned out to be unnervingly accurate. But there were also lots of details he didn’t know, which it would take several more weeks to uncover. Vernon didn’t then quite understand, for instance, the mechanism for exchanges of real terms with fake ones: that Johnny Lee and his team had modified Sixth Sense software so that in Memes infected with a new computer virus, it could seek out and swap money words on and through users’ devices. Vern also didn’t know, e.g., that Johnny et al. had logged hundreds of research hours assessing “confusion thresholds,” determining how many words could be switched before users started to suspect that the problem was extrinsic to them. (By the time of the Nautilus launch, the average had climbed to nine per electronic page.)

  There was one other thing of which Vern was unaware: that Max had asked Johnny to design the game with a small idiosyncrasy. Brock had been very clear with Max: if he let Max keep the “meaning part” of his game, fake definitions were to be completely segregated. He didn’t ever want to hear of a Meme user requesting the meaning of an ersatz word and getting a fake “meaning”; that wo
uld make her far more likely to doubt not herself but the machine or, worse, the Exchange—and, more broadly, Synchronic. Max of course had reassured him. But in fact, very, very occasionally—less than 1 percent of the time—Meme users would get a fictional definition. And that was because Max had explicitly asked Johnny to develop the game that way. Whatever Max’s motives may have been, when Brock and others eventually discovered the unauthorized change—and records of Max making the request to implement it—they had their own interpretation: that Max was deliberately trying to harm the Synchronic brand. Which did not exactly endear him, or anyone at Hermes, to the parent company. And in fact when it came to light, just as everything else was falling apart, it put all of them, and even me, on a very dangerous footing. But Max most of all.

  Vern did by then suspect that one goal of Meaning Master (perhaps the only goal) was to spread Synchronic’s new malware. He’d also begun to believe that when the game, and thus the virus, had been released a month earlier, in the beginning of November, there’d been other, unintended consequences. Consequences that had started to manifest in the weeks before we’d all come to find ourselves in that close, humid meeting room.

  Just after Hermes-cum-Synchronic had first introduced Meaning Master, e.g., lots of people with non-Meme devices were actively wondering if something was wrong with them, and were trying to get them debugged or replaced. People like Doug, who’d begun noticing strange emails in his in-box and then discovered problems with his machine.

  Early November, we later learned, was likewise when the earliest victims of the word flu started experiencing their initial insidious symptoms. And while Vern didn’t really understand how the virus—a computer virus—was giving people aphasia and making them sick, that’s nonetheless what he and the rest of the Society seemed to think.

  After he laid out these allegations, I felt pretty ill myself. I wondered if he could tell I was in shock. He’d just implied that Max—my Max, the former love of my life—might be infecting lots of devices—and, inadvertently, people—for profit. Committing capital crimes.