Open Primary

by A. C. Fuller

  I am as proud of her as I am of any of my children.

  Then again.

  No child is a mistake.

  And again.

  I am as proud of her as I am of any of my children.

  No child is a mistake.

  Tears flow, just as when I first read it in my office. This time they're quieter, and come from a deeper place. A childhood place. Like my body is slowly releasing the tears I'd held back year after year, learned to hold back when my father's name came up and my mother got tight-faced and quiet. It feels like there might be an awful lot stored up in there. I've just never checked.

  Tap tap tap.

  Someone's at the door, though I can't imagine that all the bathrooms are occupied. "Hello?"

  "It's Peter. The music is starting."

  I hear a faint beat coming from far away as I wipe my face and blow my nose, but I don't reply.

  "Just wanted to make sure you're okay."

  "I'm fine." I splash cool water on my face from a spigot attached to a large stainless steel tank affixed to the wall.

  "Well, I'm three Red Bulls in and about to wreck the dance floor. I didn't think you'd want to miss it."

  I check myself in the mirror. My cheeks are almost as red as my hair, and my eyes puffy. But I don't care.

  The redwood-scented breeze cools my face when I step out. Torches have been lit all around the stage, and a melody constructed from old computer sounds fill the air, backed by an electro-trance beat.

  Peter looks concerned. "Are you sure you're okay?"

  "I am," I say, and I mean it.

  An hour later, I stop dancing.

  My heart races at the front of the small but energetic crowd. The night has cooled and the air tickles my sweaty skin. I gaze at the sky, almost white with stars. I've never felt more alive. For a moment, I wonder whether I ate or drank anything dosed with whatever Dawson Whatshisname was on, but that's just my brain trying to make excuses for my happiness.

  "Mia," Peter says.

  He's breathing hard, his dark hair wild, and before I know what I'm doing, I'm on my tiptoes, kissing him.

  He kisses me back, pulls away for a moment to look into my eyes, then takes the back of my head and pulls me in with a perfect mix of strength and gentleness. I don't know how long we kiss, but it's long enough to forget where I am. He's not tall, but he's half a foot taller than me. Only when my calves start to burn do I pull away.

  Looking around, I remember I'm standing in a field, surrounded by the most powerful CEOs in the country, many dressed in costumes, all indulging in a cartoonish level of luxury. As torn as I am about the festival, I do feel transformed. The thoughts of my father are still present, but they don't carry the same negative weight they did earlier. I am less encumbered.

  Peter puts a hand on my lower back and we walk from our spot in front of the stage to the back of the crowd. The music fades and a voice comes through the sound system.

  "Y'all ready for another set?"

  It's Absolution again, back from break. The crowd erupts and a slow and strange synth melody begins. Peter turns toward the stage, and it seems he's happy to keep watching the show.

  I'm not. I press my tingling fingers gently into his palm before tugging his hand. "Let's go."

  He doesn't turn from the stage. "You ready to get some sleep?"

  "Not in the least." It's the first time in my life I'm certain I've nailed a sexy seduction line. I pull Peter toward the geodesic domes. "Which is yours?"

  Peter's face changes as he realizes that, yes, I'm trying to take him back to his place for the night. "It's, uhh, the big one at the very back." He points at a path of circular white stones that leads through the transient village. "Just follow the…um…path."

  I lead the way, my whole body surging with a new, unfamiliar feeling. Two feelings actually.

  On the one hand, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe what my life has become. Four months ago I worked ten-hour days for Alex Vane at The Barker, now I'm surrounded by the most powerful men and women on earth, leading one of them back to what I'm sure will be a very comfortable bed. Everything is surreal, like I'm living someone else's life.

  At the same time, I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I don't believe in destiny, but if I did I'd be certain that running Ameritocracy and being here at this festival—under the stars, as odd music thumps across the night, taking Peter to bed—is mine.

  We reach his dome and Peter steps in first. "Just give me a sec. I want to put away all my work stuff."

  Stopping at the doorway, I peer at the stars and do a slow twirl that reminds me of the night I met Peter, the night when I spun like a drunken fool on the dance floor and felt possibility I'd never felt before.

  I'm about to tell Peter this when my phone vibrates in my purse. Reaching in to silence it—because nothing kills the mood like a phone call—I see the name "Benjamin Singh" on the caller ID.

  Benjamin has never called me. Not once. He's texted me a couple times, but we speak at the office. He knows I'm out of town, and he's close enough to Steph that I assume he'd have run anything urgent by her.

  If he's calling me now…

  "Benjamin?" I step away from the dome. "What is it?"

  "I'm…I'm sorry Mia. Sorry to bother you. I'm here with Steph and we weren't going to call, but it's urgent."

  "What is it?"

  There's a long pause. I want and don't want him to tell me what's going on.

  "It's Thomas Morton," Benjamin says. "I figured out exactly what's going on."

  "And?"

  "It's much, much worse than we thought."

  18

  I never made it into Peter's geodesic dome. Instead, I offered a two-sentence excuse about "something going on with the site," and hitched a ride back to the Colton Industries campus in his helicopter.

  As it lands on the helipad, my phone lights up with a series of rapid text tones.

  Steph: Don't come back to the office, you need your day off.

  Steph: I mean come back if you want to, but you don't have to.

  Steph: Hello? At least let me know what you're doing.

  Steph: Are you even getting these?

  Steph: Oh crap, you're in a damn helicopter, aren't you?

  It's midnight when I get back to the office, where Benjamin and Steph are huddled over a laptop, glaring at it like it's the bearer of bad news.

  Steph turns when the office door creaks. "I was gonna get on the phone and tell you not to come back," she says, "but Ben told me you hung up."

  "I just got all your texts, but I have to be here. Tell me everything."

  "Hold on." Steph heads for the kitchen and emerges a minute later holding two glasses of wine. "You're gonna need this."

  Benjamin is on the backend of our site, clicking through voting records. "It's complicated," he says. "And I should warn you that it's not an easy fix."

  "Explain," I say.

  He taps a graphic on the screen. "It's a chart detailing the age, gender, and location of the voters who have ranked Thomas Morton in their top three. Average age of his voters is about what we'd expect. Gender is split fifty-fifty. And—"

  "Wait," I say. "The gender is split fifty-fifty?"

  "Exactly fifty-fifty," Benjamin says. "Why?"

  "Nobody splits exactly fifty-fifty," Steph says, half a second before I can.

  "Orin Gottlieb is skewed about sixty-forty, men to women," Benjamin says. "Marlon Dixon and Beverly Johnson are about sixty-forty women to men, and Tanner Futch is nearly sixty-five percent male voters. So, the fifty-fifty split is unlikely, but not as unlikely as this."

  He clicks the "location" section of the graph, which opens a detailed map of the United States, covered in thousands of tiny red dots. "Each dot represents a thousand voters who've put Morton in their top three."

  There are dots all around the country, but a few distinct clusters as well. "Are those dense areas in big cities?"

  Steph lets
out a long sigh. "Some of them, which is what we'd expect, but some are weird. Look, this New York cluster is way upstate, nowhere near New York City or Albany. And the Nevada clusters aren't near Las Vegas or Reno."

  Benjamin zooms to show a closeup of Nevada. "The weird clusters are around Indian reservations."

  "Not near," Steph says. "On top of."

  The three Nevada clusters are right on top of three reservations. In the west, the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Reservation, in the northwest, the Fort McDermitt Reservation, and to the north, the Duck Valley reservation, which covers a large swath of land on both sides of the Nevada-Idaho border.

  "How is that possible?" I ask. "They can't have populations big enough to garner that many votes."

  "Exactly," Benjamin says. "The voters can't be there."

  I sigh because Benjamin sometimes goes into a mode of obfuscating computer issues as a way to lord his superior knowledge over us. "Damnit, Ben. Just get to the point!"

  "Sorry. It's just that when you spend years doing boring coding, it's kinda cool to play detective for a few hours. Anyway, the reason all those dots show up in those places is that the dots represent IP addresses, not physical addresses. As you know, each voter must register with a physical address. And when I run the same check based on physical addresses, the map is dispersed much more evenly. More votes in big cities, spread evenly throughout the country, and so on."

  "So this means what?"

  "I don't know yet," Benjamin says, clicking on a browser tab. "But look at this. These are Tom Morton's hundred most-active users."

  The page is a series of profile pictures, the type every voter must upload to the site, under which is the date the voter registered with the site. "So?" I ask.

  He taps the screen. "See this face?" He scrolls down and taps on another. "And this one?"

  "Same person," Steph says.

  "But one is listed as Brian King and one as Dimitri Kronos," Benjamin says. "And here." He taps a woman's picture at the top of the screen, then scrolls down and taps another, identical picture. "They're not the same person with different pictures, they're identical pictures, just resized or filtered."

  "And probably not the real person at all," Steph adds, angrily.

  "Definitely not," Benjamin says. "I could show you a hundred more, but this is the least of our problems."

  I'm growing frustrated, and a little scared. Part of me wants to curl up on the floor, but instead I take a small sip of wine. "Can we kick them out? I mean, I thought we had systems for this?"

  Benjamin turns his chair slowly and talks to me like I'm five years old. "We do have systems, but not for what these guys are trying. This isn't a couple of 4Chan losers in mom's basement. This isn't even a hack in the conventional sense."

  "Then what is it?"

  He doesn't reply, but clicks back to the images of the maps with red dot clusters. "These vote clusters on Indian reservations, I have a theory."

  He clicks on the western New York cluster. "This is the Seneca Nation. Population around eight thousand." He clicks again and a data box pops up. "See that? Morton got eleven thousand first-place votes from within the land owned by the Seneca Nation. Plus about six thousand second- and third-place votes."

  "How's that possible?" I ask.

  "It's not, which is how I know something's up."

  "I thought we verified people's addresses."

  "We do," Steph says, "but he's saying that, regardless of where voters say they're living, those actual votes are coming from within that area."

  "Exactly," Benjamin says. "And it's the same for all the other clusters. Thousands more votes than there are people."

  "But how?"

  "It's too early to tell for sure," Benjamin says. "My current theory is that someone, or some group with very good technical skills and a lot of money, is trying to rig Ameritocracy for Thomas Morton. They're setting up fake profiles, somehow linking them to real addresses, then voting via botnet all over the country, with command-and-control servers on Indian reservations."

  "Why can't we just kick out those users?" I ask.

  "We can," Steph says, "but if I'm right, Benjamin is gonna say they haven't broken any of our terms or conditions."

  "Well, they have," Benjamin says. "We just can't prove it yet."

  "Damnit." I walk a little circle around the desk. "And we can't kick out thousands of users without casting the whole project in a bad light. We can't do it without more information. More evidence."

  Steph nods, and I know we're on the same page.

  I'm freaking out inside, but, technically, I'm in charge, so I play it cool and make a decision. "Benjamin, I know you're exhausted, but if you can spend the rest of the night on this, I'd appreciate it. We need to know who is behind this, how many voters and votes are involved, and whether anything else like this is going on with other candidates."

  "I'll need help."

  "Bring in as many people as you need," Steph says. "We can afford it for a couple days."

  "Right," I say. "This is priority one. If the credibility of our voting drops, the site is finished."

  Benjamin nods and picks up the phone. "It'll take me the rest of the night to figure this out if I'm lucky—probably longer. I know some people who can help. White-hat hackers who may have a better idea of what's going on than I do."

  "Can you trust them?" I ask. "We cannot afford for this to get out. We need to figure it out and stay ahead of the story."

  "I won't tell them enough for them to leak anything," Benjamin says. "But you guys have to do one important thing. Assuming I figure out exactly what's going on here, you need to figure out how to handle it in the press."

  I gesture for Steph to join me in my office to plan for the fallout, but another thought strikes me. "One last question. Assuming you're right that this is being run by servers on Indian reservations, why? I mean, why reservations?"

  Benjamin glances up from his phone. "I have no idea."

  The next morning, I stumble out of my office—where I slept on the floor—and scan the main office space. Steph went home to grab a couple hours of sleep, and now stands over Benjamin, who is either passed out at his keyboard or actually dead.

  Last night, as Benjamin worked on figuring out the details of the hijacking, Steph and I talked about a media strategy, deciding to remain silent until we know exactly what happened and, more importantly, what to do about it.

  "Steph." I shake off my grogginess. "What's going on?"

  "Just got here. Ben was like this when I showed up."

  "When was that?"

  "Five minutes ago."

  "You've been standing over him talking for five minutes and he hasn't woken up?"

  Steph nods, and I glance at the Red Bull cans, candy wrappers, and half-full coffee mugs on his desk. I tap him on the shoulder. "Benjamin."

  Nothing.

  "Benjamin!"

  He shifts on the keyboard, causing a string of gibberish letters and numbers to appear in an open document.

  "Benjamin!"

  "Wha?" He sits up suddenly, wipes the drool from his cheek, and looks around. "I had a nightmare that I worked at Uber." He shakes his head as if to clear something out. "It was horrible."

  "What did you find?" I ask.

  He taps at his keyboard and pulls up browser windows, taking long swigs of his coffee every few seconds. He's opened a dozen different documents before he leans forward, presses his face into his palms, shakes his head violently, and yells, "Wake up, Ben! Wake up!"

  Steph and I are used to this. Benjamin is not a morning person, and this is his psych-up routine.

  After a long, dramatic pause, he says, "The votes aren't coming from Indian reservations. They're coming from the Ukraine."

  I'm speechless. All I can do is offer Steph a blank stare.

  "Ukraine," he repeats, as though this is explanation enough.

  "Start at the beginning," I say as calmly as I can.

  "You know how I said last night
that the botnet votes seem to be controlled from reservations? That's where the servers are located that are actually running the attack. But those servers are controlled by users in the Ukraine."

  "Russia?" Steph asks.

  "So far, just the Ukraine, but we're still checking. Brianna. Hey Brianna. Brianna!"

  For the first time, I notice a small woman with long black hair sitting on the floor in the corner where my bed used to be. She looks up and pulls off her headphones reluctantly. "What is it?" she yells.

  "How many unique servers have you detected?"

  "Eleven. Ten in Ukraine, and a new one in Cyprus."

  "Where the hell is Cyprus?" Benjamin asks.

  "Island off Greece," I say.

  "Okay, keep looking," Benjamin calls. Brianna puts her headphones back on and buries her face in her laptop.

  "Why Indian reservations?" I ask.

  "Brianna and I think it's because Indian reservations are sovereign tribal land. Whoever did this knew they'd need U.S. IP addresses to vote on our site, and it's harder for the FBI or other law enforcement guys to seize servers on Indian reservations."

  "So, wait," Steph says, "computers in Ukraine and Cyprus are controlling computers on Indian reservations, which are creating fake users but using real addresses, then voting for Thomas Morton?"

  Benjamin looks strangely calm. "That's right."

  I am anything but calm. For Benjamin, this is just a technical mystery, one he believes he's solved. To me, this is an existential threat to Ameritocracy.

  "My office," I say. "Both of you."

  In my office, Steph leans on the corner of my desk as I sit behind it and Benjamin takes a chair across from us. I feel better on my own turf.

  "This is serious," I say. "What can you do?"

  "Already on it," he says. "First, we block the IPs and ban the users with fake accounts."

  "But that won't stop them from creating new accounts from different IPs," Steph says. "The nightmare scenario is that they do this right on the eve of the final vote."

  "That's what has me freaking out," I say.

  "We can work on that," Benjamin says. "I promise you we can figure out a way to make it more secure. Might take some money, but—"