Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  It makes sense, he thinks, in an Oedipal kind of way: if your children represent all of your most massive failings, you naturally come to subconsciously resent them, to hate them, to desire their punishment.

  And that was what had happened—each time the younger generations had said, “This is hurting us,” the elders had cried, “You dumb, ungrateful kids! You think that’s hurting you? We’ll just do it twice as much, then!”

  And so they had. Even when it hurt them too, when it hurt everyone, they still did it. All these strange, inexplicable, self-inflicted wounds, seemingly done for the sheer, selfish pride of it all . . . For McDean, a marketing man who feels obligated to understand his audience, it is still largely a mystery. His grotesque theory is the only thing that comes close.

  Eventually, the Vigilance team gave up on dead kids and switched to armed minorities, and that worked out just fine. It is an old warhorse—show John McDean’s Ideal Person a dead kid, and he shrugs. Show him an image of a black man with a gun (or a Mexican, or a Muslim), and all the needles just dance like ballerinas.

  He watches on the big screen as an ad rolls depicting a tricked-out Cadillac with tinted windows, cruising down a suburban street. The windows roll down a crack, and a pair of eyes peer out suspiciously. The race of the person is unclear, but they’re not white. Then the protagonist of the ad—Joe McBlandGuy—puts on a pair of augmented-reality glasses, and the advanced lenses read the license plate on the Cadillac, identify all the crimes it’s been associated with, and assigns it a threat level . . .

  It’s a generated ad, of course: a dream whipped up by machines to terrify the elderly with a vision of an America that doesn’t really exist.

  It suddenly strikes McDean that this is a very odd way to make a living—but at least it’s a living.

  “Chief,” says Ives, standing in the media pit. “Chief, chief! We just broke it, we just broke it!”

  “Broke what?” asks McDean.

  “The TMAs!” says Ives. “Fucking hell! You broke your TMA records again!”

  The control room breaks out into whoops. McDean tries to grin but can’t quite bring himself to do it. He clears his throat. “Audience rate is still climbing?”

  “It’s slowing but not plateaued yet,” says Ives.

  So, no Perseph—not yet at least. “All right,” says McDean quietly. “All right.”

  His phone vibrates softly. He looks at it—a message: u ready?

  He mentions something about the bathroom and walks away.

  * * *

  The door reads his biometrics, clicks open, and he walks in. He stands in his private bathroom, unlocks his phone—finger, face, breath—and sends a message to Tabitha: ready. what the hell app is this?

  Her response: apoidea

  He sends back: what the fuck? do i need a dictionary to run this app

  Her: you work in tech, you know they go for bullshit greek names

  Him: fine fine

  He finds it on the app store. This is totally against company protocol and should be impossible, but he got Darrow to crack his phone for him ages ago.

  He installs the app and asks her: username?

  She replies: honeygirl

  Him: jesus. ok

  He finds her on the app. They connect. Then he waits.

  Finally his phone vibrates, and the app says: INCOMING MESSAGE. He hits the OK button. The screen goes black and says: PLEASE PLACE DEVICE SCREEN UP.

  “Huh,” he says. He does so.

  The screen flickers—and then, to his shock, a tiny, mostly nude Tabitha suddenly appears to be standing on his phone, wearing nothing but white socks and pink tennis shoes.

  His mouth falls open. “Holy shit,” he says.

  “Hey!” she says. Her voice comes from his phone, he can tell. “Hi! I can see you.” She points at him with two fingers. “Can you see me?” She points at herself with two fingers.

  He looks at her, craning his neck from side to side. “Uhhhh. Yes.”

  She laughs, giddy, and twirls. “Whaddya think?”

  “How . . . How the fuck does this work?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Johnny. It’s an optical illusion. Look at the phone from the side.”

  He does so, looking at it from the very edge. She appears to vanish. “Oh,” he says.

  “It’s super hard to get the angles right—like, when I look at you, I’m really looking at nothing—which is what my friend Madeline told me would happen. But . . . can you see this?” She does some kind of dance move, kicking her leg so high, her kneecap touches the side of her torso. “And this?” She twirls again, leg high in the air. It’s impressive; he forgot she did dance in high school.

  He hears explosions and screams from the main room. Something’s just happened on Vigilance. Something bad.

  She lowers her leg. “What was that?”

  “You’re not watching?”

  “No, dumbass, I had to get all this set up. I don’t usually do my hair and wear makeup to just be naked, you know.”

  “It’s nothing,” he says hoarsely. He holds his hands out to her, as if feeling a radiant warmth from her tiny, frail, flickering body.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “Nothing. Please keep dancing.”

  “Do you want me to dance? Or do you want me to do this?” She does the splits.

  “Oh my God,” he moans.

  “And this?”

  “Jesus . . .”

  “And . . . let me see . . . I’m not sure if I can pull this one off . . .”

  He shudders, overcome, and unzips his pants. Then, serenaded by the distant sounds of screams, gunfire, and death, John McDean frantically, desperately masturbates to the faint, pale vision of youth twirling about on his phone.

  Delyna walks through empty, quiet city streets. There are no cars, no buses, no pedestrians, no nothing.

  But then, there wouldn’t be. There’s a Vigilance on, after all, and most of the world shuts down when that happens.

  She’s still shaking, still trembling. She still hears the gunfire in her mind. She has a curious desire to jump into a hole and hide, hide from the smell of the burning propellant and the smoking wood, worming her way deeper into the earth to avoid the violence she’d been running from all her life yet was never able to truly escape.

  A light rain begins to fall. She has no umbrella. She stops and looks up at the sky.

  Once, it snowed during this time of year in the city, but it never does anymore. It will never snow here again in the remaining duration of the human species, however long that is. She knows this for a fact. Remembering it fills her with a curious, aching loneliness.

  She sees the ONT tower in the distance, the three letters glowing a clean, clear white. Then she lowers her eyes and sees a restaurant full of people, all the customers standing around a handful of television screens.

  What an easy thing it is, to make Americans destroy ourselves, she thinks. You just have to make a spectacle out of it.

  She walks on into the city.

  There’s a pounding on the bathroom door. “Boss?” says Ives’s voice. “You asked when we were plateauing on numbers. We’re just about there.”

  “Got it,” calls McDean. He’s finished and mostly cleaned up by now, but he still enjoys just looking at Tabitha.

  The two of them exchange a glance. Tabitha smiles wickedly and holds a finger to her lips. He smiles and does the same. Then she does something with her hands—probably fiddling with her phone—and she vanishes.

  McDean exits. Ives is waiting in the hall, looking calm. He probably thinks McDean was doing drugs in there—which he was, in a way. Tabitha definitely alters the chemicals in his brain. “We’re sure?” asks McDean.

  “We’re sure,” says Ives. “And get this—Bonnan’s still going. He’s approaching the record for most kills. The cops have him hunkered down in an AirWei store.”

  “A fucking tech store, huh?” says McDean as they walk down the halls. “Well. More ad
revenue. What happened to Rison?”

  “Blew himself up,” says Ives. “Along with a lot of cops. That’s probably why Bonnan’s still going. Rison was upstairs and had an angle on the cops as they were going to advance on Bonnan. He tossed one grenade right into them, but the other . . . eh. Held onto it too long.”

  “How many cops still standing?”

  “Four. Bonnan’s been tagged in the shoulder, but he’s still going. AL-18s, man. All the other shit just can’t compete.”

  McDean walks back into the pits and takes stock of the situation. It’s a shootout—classic stuff—but he knows it can get boring if it goes on for too long. Army Man—for the first time, McDean sees his name is supposed to be Admiral McDonough—is animatedly describing how he’d take Bonnan out.

  “Wild Bill Bonnan is trending on Nuuvu,” says Ives. “I didn’t make that one up.”

  “Because it’s fucking stupid?” asks McDean.

  “Yeah.”

  His phone vibrates again. His heart swoops as he checks it, but it’s not Tabitha again—it’s Kruse. “Fuck,” he mutters. He composes himself and answers it, saying, “Hello, Mr. Kruse.”

  “Hallo, John. I understand you are about to activate Perseph.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well. I would like you to know that while Perseph is active, there will be filters in place in the control room so you and your people do not feel its effects.”

  “Uhh. Oh. Really?”

  “Well, yes. If you saw it, you would be . . . well. Pretty useless for a while. You would just keep watching—which is the point. This is very advanced stuff, far more advanced than anything China has.”

  McDean very much fucking doubts that. “I see, sir. Is . . . Is there a process that I need to go through to make this all happen?”

  “No, no. I have been in communication with Andrews. It is a simple permission he needs to run. I just wanted you to be aware—while Perseph is active, do not, say, look at the ONT platform on your phone, or something of that sort.”

  This disturbs the ever-living shit out of him. “Is there anything else I need to know, sir?” he asks, exasperated.

  “I suppose we will find out!” says Kruse chipperly. “Goodbye, John.”

  There’s a click, and the phone goes dead.

  McDean looks at the main feed. The AirWei store has rows and rows of tables, all covered with tablets, phones, VR and AR sets, and so on, though they’ve all been pretty much destroyed by the gunfire. It’s dark, but the drones have night vision, so he can see Bonnan crouching behind the back left desk. There’s an open door to his right, but it probably just goes into the store’s server rooms or broom closet.

  “Do I run it?” asks Andrews.

  “Audience growth is fading,” says Ives. “Not yet zero—but it’s fading.”

  “Do I run this thing, sir?” asks Andrews. His tone is somewhat insolent.

  McDean thinks of one of his ads: the soldier holding the little boy, shining a light into the darkness. He thinks of Tabitha, rendered in pale pinks and reds, twirling on his phone. He thinks of Phuong Dang sitting on the floor and crying.

  “Fuck it,” says McDean. “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  Andrews clicks his mouse a few times. And then . . .

  Nothing. Nothing seems to change. Bonnan is still hunkered down. The cops are still taking potshots at him.

  But Ives says, “Whoa.”

  “Whoa, what?” says McDean.

  Ives stares at his monitors, his mouth agape. “All our numbers . . . Like, all of them. They’re holding perfectly, perfectly steady. Look.” He swivels his screen around and shows McDean his charts: the lines are all flat, perfectly, perfectly flat. It’s like there’s an error in the program. “Totally static. Like a frozen heart, mid-beat.”

  “Is this . . . correct?” says McDean.

  “I think so,” says Ives. “Like . . . Who knows?”

  “Holy shit,” says Andrews.

  McDean turns around. “What now?” he asks.

  “Well . . . I can’t see what Perseph is doing,” says Andrews. “Like, I can’t see the results, what the viewer sees. But I can see the processing power that it’s eating up, and . . .” He shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything require this before. Maybe if I were, like, trying to map the entire surface of the earth, and project it in the sky, beside the moon or some shit.”

  “But . . . But what is it doing?” asks McDean, frustrated.

  “Beats me,” says Andrews. “A lot of something.”

  “Whatever it’s doing,” says Ives, “people can’t look away.”

  McDean turns back to the main feed. Bonnan’s still there. Cops still taking potshots.

  He imagines his audience staring at their screens, unable to turn away or blink or move because of . . . something. Something this artificial mind is doing to them, having been taught, in a way, by McDean himself.

  But what did he teach it to do? What is it showing them?

  Black boxes inside of black boxes inside of black boxes.

  “So, now what?” asks Darrow. “We just . . . keep going?”

  “Until our audience fucking dies?” asks Neal.

  “Wouldn’t take long,” says Perry with a laugh. He spits into his cup.

  “We just . . . complete the Vigilance,” says McDean, feeling curiously helpless.

  They all look at each other.

  “All right,” says Darrow. “Can do, boss.”

  “Give me some better eyes on Bonnan,” says McDean. “And this isn’t great television, frankly. A dude holed up with a bunch of broken phones . . . I don’t want to watch that.”

  “Sure thing,” says Neal. “What’s the move?”

  McDean frankly isn’t sure. If Perseph is doing what Kruse says it should be doing, then it doesn’t really matter what they do.

  “Let’s goose him,” says McDean. “Use one of the drones in there to set off a minor flash. We need to create some action. Get the conflict going aga—”

  “He’s moving!” says Darrow.

  McDean watches as Bonnan readies himself, then pops up and fires three quick bursts at the cops. He dives over the checkout desk and dashes into the open door in the back room—the one McDean assumed went to the server room.

  “Where the hell’s this kid think he’s going?” asks Perry.

  “Follow him,” says McDean. “The show drones can remote into anything, right? If so, we’ll need to be ready. I don’t want him, I don’t know, fucking with their servers or anything.”

  “Kid’s from Iowa,” says Perry. “A hacker he ain’t.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Darrow. “The show drones can remote in if they get close. But let’s see . . .”

  The tiny drone floats forward, into the open door. It’s dark inside, but the night vision adjusts . . . and McDean sees something very strange.

  Bonnan is standing quietly to the side, firearm lowered, like he’s waiting for something. Sitting before him is a curious device: it looks like a large, black halo on black metal stilts. There’s a thick cord running from the back of the halo, and it’s plugged into the servers . . . but the servers look very unusual. They don’t, in other words, look like the sort of servers that a goddamn mall tech shop should have.

  Neal and Darrow shoot to their feet. “Oh my God!” screams Neal, a real, genuine scream of terror.

  “No way, no fucking way!” shouts Darrow.

  Everyone’s shocked to see them react this way. Most of the time, they never react at all.

  “What the hell?” says Perry. “What’s wrong with you tw—”

  Then the main feed goes dark.

  Then all the rest of the feeds go dark.

  Delyna is about to walk across the bridge when she hears a harsh crack.

  She stops.

  She knows that sound. She just heard a hell of a lot of it, after all.

  She looks around for the gunfire—she thinks it was behind her. Then she hears another crack—but this one i
s across the river.

  Then another, and another, and another . . . Gunfire from the apartment buildings, from the alleys, from the streets. Some of it even appears to be coming from the restaurant at the corner.

  “What the hell?” she whispers.

  The Vigilance crew stares at their darkened feeds. Some of their computers seem to be working, but anything that has anything to do with watching Vigilance is dead.

  “What was that?” says McDean. “What the hell was that?”

  “It was . . . it was a Shandian,” says Neal. He sounds shaken. “I . . . I think. Right? Wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” says Darrow hoarsely. “I’ve only seen the specs. But I think it was.”

  “The fuck is a Shandian?” asks Perry.

  “It’s an . . . an antenna,” says Neal. “Made by Zhōngháng Kuang. Chinese tech company.”

  There’s a silence.

  “An antenna?” says Ives. “That’s it?”

  “Like bunny ears?” asks Perry.

  “No, dickbags!” says Darrow angrily. “It’s like a Wi-Fi antenna turned up to a million! It’s basically an AI bomb! It fools anything looking for a connection to automatically route into it! Once the connection’s made, it leaps up the chain like lightning, jumping from device to device. Some Pakistani terrorists used one in India. Drove it into a military base, turned it on. The place started firing missiles like a goddamn firework.”

  Another silence as everyone considers this.

  “So . . . when your drone got close to the Shandian,” says McDean slowly, “then it would have automatically connected to it . . . and then leapt up the chain, to . . . here?”

  Darrow slowly exhales. “It would have tried to. But the defensive AIs here are top-of-the-line, NSA stuff. Unless we were compromised from within somehow, it should have been stopped or hopefully slowed. Alarms would have gone off, at the very least! But I didn’t hear a single one!”

  “Then why are our feeds dark?” asks Andrews.

  “I don’t fucking know!” shouts Darrow.

  “Can you do something?” asks Ives.

  “I frankly don’t want to fucking touch anything!” says Darrow. “If it’s really in here, the Shandian AIs will notice me doing something. It’s very, very, very sma—”