Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Andrews pouts very slightly. But Andrews is always pouting very slightly, McDean finds. Something in Andrews’s face makes him think of a pampered little schoolboy, and it brings out the bully in him. “The algorithms just make a gloss,” Andrews says. “I still have to make adjustments. And there are some features that the audience pays attention to more than others.”

  “Our target audience, goddamn it,” says McDean, “is seventy-two fucking years old! They’re not going to be able to tell if a pixel or two is out of place, or if the shading is a little wrong!”

  Andrews’s pout intensifies. “It’s just the principle of the thing.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you this . . .”

  Andrews sighs. “That this isn’t an art. It’s a science.”

  “Yes. This stopped being an art a hell of a long time ago. Just give me the lineup, okay?”

  Sighing, Andrews brings up the windows on his monitors. “We’ve got the usual,” he says. “Dragen security systems, Colt, HK, gold merchants, Procter & Gamble catheters, rest homes, and on and on . . .”

  McDean narrows his eyes as he takes in the blur of thumbnail images, all from various advertisements that Andrews’s scripts have generated. He tries to suppress his pulse—Andrews, the scummy little pervert, is willing to spend hours on a girl’s mouth but barely any time on this, this, the feed of advertisements that keep ONT alive. Every day, McDean reminds Andrews that these ads pay for his goddamn bread and butter. Every day, Andrews chooses to fuss with the aesthetics of this or that.

  The problem is that Andrews is good. Very good. Top-of-his-field good, capable of generating video and audio and imaging of literally anything—anything. The sample portfolio that had gotten him hired had included a generated video of Eleanor Roosevelt stripping nude and singing Black Sabbath, this old broad just rocking out in the nude—and it’d been convincing as hell. He is a god at generating security camera footage, at lightening or darkening the skin shades of people in live feeds, at creating false videos of people one might want to discredit—videos of officials and statesmen and competitors shrieking the most deplorable shit at the top of their lungs, or drunkenly ranting in the back of a police car, or masturbating in a school. Their competitors, of course, do the same—McDean has seen two very convincing videos of himself having sex with an elementary school–aged boy—but they don’t have the brand that ONT has or the talent. McDean just wishes that this particular talent wasn’t such a greasy little shit.

  And he is an especially greasy little shit. McDean knows that Andrews has used company software to create terabytes of select portions of the female anatomy: genitals and breasts, sure, but also hands, necks, wrists, hips, dimpled lower backs, the curve of a narrow ankle . . . For a while there he was really into shoulders. Andrews, it seems, does not adore women so much as he adores the components of women. McDean knows all about this because, like every computer at Our Nation’s Truth, Andrews’s tools are loaded with spyware. Andrews knows this too—he’s made a halfhearted attempt every once in a while to clear his stuff—but he probably doesn’t care.

  Maybe he doesn’t care because Andrews knows he’s too good to lose. But more than likely, it’s because he knows ONT is largely indifferent to this kind of thing. Television and sex have always been intertwined, they say . . . even if the sex is super weird, like generating a female face, using a 3-D printer to fabricate a highly realistic latex head with that face, and then holding the head down and fucking its mouth like a horny country kid going to town on a watermelon.

  McDean has carefully saved several copies of that particular hacked video, stolen from Andrews’s phone—just in case the little creep ever gets too ambitious.

  “What anchors are we going with? How did Robwright test?” he asks.

  “Very positively,” says Andrews. “Men like her. A lot. And her scripts are pretty advanced. I thought I’d surround her with men—our core demos seem to like that.”

  “Which men?”

  He shows McDean some anchor headshots. “Gramins,” he says. “Bowder. Usual pundit boys.”

  “That’s fine.” Then McDean feels his skin go cold. He knows what he needs to ask now. But he doesn’t want to.

  He takes a breath. “And . . . Perseph is fed in?” he asks.

  “Oh, Perseph is fed in to everything now,” says Andrews. “But you’ve got your briefing call with Kruse and Hopper in a bit—yes?” He smirks, because he wasn’t supposed to know about that. “Kruse can tell you all about it, I expect.”

  For the first time tonight, McDean feels genuine anxiety. Because Perseph is something . . . new. Unknowable. Uncontrollable.

  Different.

  “Get the ads sequenced,” says McDean. “I want them ready in an hour. Do not fuck with me on this, Andrews. An hour—all right?”

  “All right,” says Andrews, sighing.

  McDean suppresses another curse. Ad placement is his specialty. It’s been his life’s work, tracking the hormone levels of their target audiences and reading patterns for when they were susceptible to certain messaging. If you situate the content the right way and time it perfectly, the human mind is weak to very, very specific sorts of communications. To see Andrew fussing with the ads is like a sniper seeing someone fuck with his ammunition before a mission.

  But Perseph . . . Perseph could change all that.

  Best not to think about it. Get done with the show tonight, McDean tells himself. Then think about tomorrow.

  McDean reaches into his pocket, takes out a bottle of aspirin, and unceremoniously dumps a few capsules into his mouth. He dry-swallows, then turns to the M portion of A&M—media.

  Ives smiles at him, an open, pleasant, intoxicated sort of smile. “Hey, chief,” he says. He points a finger-gun at him and clicks his thumb, miming the falling of a hammer. “How’s the heart rate?”

  “What’s going on out there?” says McDean.

  “It’s quiet,” says Ives. “There’ve been a couple of NFL trades—that’s sucking up a lot of the demo’s bandwidth. Best bit—another celebrity sex tape got released, and half the people are screaming about how wrong it is, and the other half are trying to find out where to find it. All of them are debating whether it’s real, of course.”

  Ives gestures to his monitors. None of the pit screens have been all that readable thus far, but Ives’s takes the cake: one screen is covered with countless ribbons of aggregated social media feeds, another is covered in twelve constantly fluctuating little multiple regression charts, and the third screen is split in two: one half is a fluttering cloud of words, each word tagged with ratios, and the top half is a series of bubble charts, the bubbles expanding or shrinking like tiny supernovae. Reading any of it is like trying to read patterns in car headlights as they fly by you down the highway.

  But Ives can read it. This is because there is something very wrong with Ives’s brain. McDean isn’t sure what—probably drug abuse—but he’s always tempted to find out, just in case they need to make another Ives.

  “What’s the landscape like?” asks McDean.

  “Nuuvu is holding positive,” says Ives. He takes out a vape pipe and sucks at it absently. A cloud of queerly antiseptic-smelling vapor pours out with his next words: “ImCap, too. What’s left of Facebook is still chugging along admirably. All told, we’ve got 3.6 million brand influencers logged onto the platform and active now. Of those, one hundred and forty thousand are highly active. All commenting on the sex tape. Did we do the tape, chief?” he asks, genuinely interested.

  “No,” says McDean. “Not this time. As far as I’m aware, at least.”

  “Okay,” says Ives. “Because it’s working out really well. Everyone’s tuned in, and positively tuned in. Word trends are tilting toward humor, jokes.” He taps on a few feeds, which expand like unfurling blossoms, showing countless social media posts: ASCII dicks, kitten reaction loops, the usual memes. A few screengrabs of the sex tape—some actress, McDean doesn’t know her—that are blur
ry enough to make you wonder what’s going on. “They’re active but unsuspecting,” says Ives. “Perfect time.”

  “And the Vigilance chatter?”

  Ives brings up a different window and shows him the numbers. “They’re anxious. It’s been a while. They think a Vigilance could happen any time. I put out a taster using a third-tier account, just asking ‘where’s it gonna be,’ and it got over eighteen thousand re-ups. A good sign. Now we’re seeing a bunch of boys saying how they’d handle it. Action movie gifs. Lots of gun selfies. A few of the subforums are pretty active in how they’d plan a response.”

  “No one’s chattering about the prospective actives? Or the sites?”

  “Nope,” says Ives. “I’ve scanned for any mention of our nine prospective actives. Nothing unusual. As for the environments . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  Ives squirms a bit. “Well . . . We’ve been successful. Everyone knows any building could be a Vigilance environment these days, yeah? But that’s the point—right?”

  “What are you fucking saying here, Ives?” says McDean with a sigh.

  “I’m saying trying to figure out when the chatter is just chatter, and when the chatter is significant, gets harder as Vigilance gets more successful,” says Ives. “My scripts have managed pretty well so far. But it’s getting harder.”

  “But no leaks—right?”

  “Oh, no,” says Ives. “No leaks.”

  “Good. And you got your bot army all spun up?”

  “All spun up and ready to holler, chief,” says Ives.

  McDean nods and steps back. He checks his watch—almost time for the call. Then he takes a slow, deep breath, and walks toward the conference room.

  He passes by the sitter pit and glances over Perry’s broad shoulders at his screen. He sees the nine young men there, nervous and trembling and sweating, all save Bonnan, who is as placid as a Hindu fucking cow. McDean’s heart skips a beat—not with disgust but rather excitement.

  He imagines Bonnan walking into an office building, maybe in a black longcoat with military fatigues. He imagines the boy raising his assault rifle and opening up on the unsuspecting workers, his fully automatic weapon chewing through the desks, the walls, and, of course, the people cowering behind their cover, screaming as the rounds tear the world apart . . .

  I like that boy, he thinks. He’s going to make some great fucking TMA stats.

  He walks into the conference room.

  The game was simple—in broad strokes, at least.

  Potential contestants went on the ONT website and filled out a form. It was probably the most intense contract ever created in history, largely generated by legal AIs that could cover your ass literally a million times better than any high-priced law firm. ONT was great at goosing submissions to the form: they had ads on depression forums and sites frequented by people with psychological issues, all solid fodder for Vigilance.

  Once the potential contestants had filled out the form, they were put into a huge pool of people, hundreds of thousands, and told: We have your phone number. Keep it on at all times. We can call at any moment, anywhere. You miss the call, you’re out.

  Then the potential contestants waited. Sometimes they forgot about it. Most didn’t. You didn’t forget that you’d submitted yourself for that kind of thing.

  Then, at the discretion of McDean and ONT, the Vigilance clock would suddenly start ticking.

  Calibrated AIs and black box software would select the possible locations for the Vigilance environment. Algorithms picked the first cull of possible actives from the submission pool—usually thirty or so people. Then the possible actives got culled more, based on proximity and relation to those environments—did they know the place? Were they familiar with it? Was it completely unknown to them? This group—usually about a dozen people—would get contacted immediately and told they were on deck: You have been selected as a possible competitor in an upcoming Vigilance. Please proceed to the following coordinates for pickup.

  A crew of Vigilance handlers—all coordinated by Bryce Perry, lord of the babysitters—would descend, swoop up the potential active shooters, and pack them into circling unmarked vans. Then they’d get studied by the Vigilance producing team to make sure they were just, just, just right for the upcoming environment.

  It was impossible to express how calculated all this was. ONT knew every possible thing about their most lucrative audience member, McDean’s Ideal Person: what they liked, what they hated, how long they slept, how many times they’d fucked—and what they wanted to see. They selected prospective Vigilance environments specifically to appeal to the audience, and they selected prospective actives based on the environments and the audience. It was essentially like filling in a very, very complicated equation. And when you had all the values filled in . . .

  You made your choice, and selected the final environment.

  The environments were the hardest part. The people inside the buildings could have no possible inkling that they were about to be subjected to Vigilance. To do so would spoil the game, which would damage the TMAs, which would hurt advertising numbers. And you also wanted the environments to be right. You didn’t want to have an all-male environment, or all-female, or just kids, or the wrong race or income levels or professions. It had to have broad appeal.

  You were creating a story that every audience member would cast themselves in—and the allure came from watching to see if they’d survive.

  Once the environment was selected, the final selection of actives was made. You wanted usually at least two active shooters for every Vigilance environment. One shooter was boring, and anything north of six was confusing for the audience—like everything else in ONT, this had been carefully studied. The average was 3.47 shooters per Vigilance.

  Once your active shooters were selected, the unselected were given some compensatory fee—usually $500 or so—and then dropped off back at home: “Thanks but no thanks, fuck off.” Then came prep time: the selected actives were suited up with bodycams and given one thousand “gear points.” Then the boxes of gear in the Vigilance vans were thrown open, and the active shooters had to make their choice.

  An AL-18—a highly efficient, beautifully lethal assault rifle—cost 800 points. So, nearly all of them. A Klimke 78—basic police-issue pistol—cost 350. An extended clip for either firearm cost 100. Scoped hunting rifle—that cost 550. Body armor also cost 550 points, enough to make it undesirable. (Vigilance was not a game in which hedging your risks was encouraged.) Grenades cost 200 apiece. A better entrance cost 250. Stims that would amp up your reaction time cost 100 a dose. And so on, and so on, and so on.

  Ammunition was free, of course, including hollow-points and armor-piercing rounds. Shoot all you’d like, they said. That’s the point.

  Once the gear had been selected, each active shooter was taken to their assigned (or chosen, if they’d spent the points) entrance, where they waited until the light went green.

  The Vigilance production team waited until the perfect possible moment—and then all the active shooters were introduced into the Vigilance environment.

  The environment was locked down by ONT security. And what happened next . . .

  Well. That was some great fucking television.

  If a shooter died—which was very, very likely—their listed contacts were compensated with one million dollars.

  If a civilian or a law enforcement officer took out a shooter, they were rewarded with five million dollars.

  And if a shooter survived Vigilance—in other words, if they were the final lone survivor, with no civilians, no LEOs, and no other shooter possessing a pulse in the Vigilance environment—they were awarded with the grand prize, twenty million dollars.

  So far, ONT had only had to give out the grand prize twice. Both times, the active shooters had been unusually proficient, and the Vigilance production team had adjusted the metrics to make sure that sort of person never got selected again.

  Now, the obvious fu
cking question was—why would civilians agree to this? Why consent to the possibility that you might be gunned down for pure entertainment?

  The first answer to that was easy: America was dying. Quite literally. There’d been a mass migration of the younger generations and immigrants out of America throughout the 2020s, leaving the nation saddled with an older generation that couldn’t work but was entitled to steadily advancing medical technology that kept them all alive for far longer than any economist had ever predicted. The elderly population ate up whatever national budgets remained like locusts devouring corn in the fields—there were no funds for roads, bridges, schools, and definitely no money to deal with all the floods and fires and droughts that kept happening. America stopped doing nearly everything.

  Except television. America’s aging population might not be able to work, but they sure as fuck could watch some television.

  So, ONT went to various places in America—malls, offices, schools, public transit—and said, “Hey. You’re broke, and you’re already getting subjected to mass shootings—that’s just part of living in fucking America, okay? But here’s the deal—we subject you to our controlled mass shootings, we stream it over multiple platforms, and you get a cut of our ad revenue.”

  Almost every place had consented. All they had to do was put up a sign at the entrances and exits saying: THIS FACILITY CAN BE SUBJECT TO OUR NATION’S TRUTH’S VIGILANCE™ AT ANY MOMENT, with a lot of fine print indicating that, if you walked in, you were agreeing to the contract—i.e., you couldn’t sue their ass off if your brother or wife or kid got blown away on national television.

  So, that was the first answer, which was easy to explain. But the second answer . . . that was harder.

  Because, to ONT’s surprise, people wanted to be civilians in Vigilance. They wanted to be bystanders, to be attacked. They wanted to be under siege. They wanted to stand up, and fight back, and see if they survived.