by Leon, Mike
“Mine too,” Mary Sue adds. “He asked me if I think little girls will still play with dolls at the end of the world.”
“What’s a codification mainframe?” Sid asks. He directed the question at Mary Sue, but it quickly becomes evident from her crinkled nose that she does not have an answer. “Jamie?”
“I don’t know.” Jamie appears as clueless as the rest of them. “Where did you hear it?”
“In the doll store. The transient told me he wants to kill you and destroy the codification mainframe.”
“He could mean Narratr.”
“The narrator?”
“Narratr, with no O. It’s the supercomputer BuzzWorthy is using for a new project.”
“BuzzWorthy has a supercomputer?” Mary Sue questions. “I don’t want to be rude, but I think you probably mean a server.”
“No. I mean a supercomputer. That’s what Izzy and Bubbles called it.”
“Show me,” Sid growls.
INT. UNKNOWN BUILDING - DUSK
Sid keeps one hand on his gun as Jamie fiddles with a set of keys on a wide ring ahead of him. On the drive over he kept checking the rearview and windows, scanning over passing license plates and committing them to memory in case they appear again soon. He doesn’t see any of those plates now, and the narrow lot behind the decrepit warehouse Jamie led them to appears devoid of vehicles, people, and even external lighting.
“It ain’t the Waldorf,” Bruce says, looking up at the building from behind them. “That’s for sure.”
It’s undoubtedly a real dump of a building; one big block of red bricks and boarded up windows. It is not a great place to be holed up right now because of the lack of easy escape options and an enemy that can walk right through the brick walls. Sid will have to do something about that if they end up here for any extended amount of time.
Jamie gets the door open after what seems like an eternity of key jiggling and lock cranking, then stands and waits for Sid to go on ahead. Sid stands his ground. He isn’t interested in walking into a trap. He got a little lazy in that regard during the Red Scare debacle and it cost him. More to that point, he hasn’t exactly been ultra-careful with the jihadists, molesters, and gunrunners he has been roasting lately either. This is a good time to cut that shit out, especially with Graveyard in the mix.
Jamie walks on into the darkened warehouse with no extra convincing and only a very brief look of indifference. Sid follows and Mary Sue drags behind cautiously. Bruce remains in the doorway. None of them see as well as Sid in the dark, so he is less uneasy. The group’s tension is relieved when Jamie locates what very well may be the only light switch, and the warehouse is illuminated by a dozen racks of bright white LED bars that hang from the ceiling.
There are no ninjas or Soviet assassins waiting for them in the warehouse. There are only dozens of refrigerator sized black computer cabinets lining the walls of the single vast room and arranged into two rows ten meters long through the center of the floor space. The air is thick with the heat of these machines, though they emit none of the whirring noise that Sid would expect from so many computers.
“This is it,” Jamie says.
“BuzzWorthy really has a supercomputer.” Mary Sue chirps in astonishment.
Sid cannot assign any special significance to anything he sees here. He remains focused on Mary Sue as she inventories the contents of the room. He can almost hear her counting it all up in her head. “Does this tell us anything interesting?” he says.
“Sid, these machines cost over a million dollars per rack and there are sixty-four of them here. An installation like this costs more than BuzzWorthy’s estimated net worth.” She turns her attention to Jamie. “Where did all this come from?”
Jamie shrugs in embarrassed ignorance. “I thought Izzy bought it.”
“Motherfucker,” Bruce says. He looks like he wants to tear Jamie’s head off. “You think she walked into Best Buy and got same day delivery on this shit?”
“I’m just a journalist. It’s not my job to ask questions.”
“It is absolutely your motherfuckin’ job to ask motherfuckin’ questions!”
“What does it do?” Sid demands over the bickering.
“It monitors news sites and social media feeds from sites like Facebook and Twitter.”
“How many of them?” Mary Sue sheepishly asks, a look of apprehension creeping onto her face as if she already knows the answer and it disturbs her greatly.
“Uh,” Jamie stammers. “I . . . all of them . . . I guess.”
Bruce breathes an angry groan. “You guys built your very own private XKeyscore and you’re storing it in a shitty warehouse?”
Jamie looks momentarily confused. “What’s XKeyscore?”
“It’s the shady NSA computer program that steals all the internet data from everybody. How do you not know that?”
“Look, I didn’t have anything to do with setting up the machines. I’m not a computer programmer. I’m not an NSA spy. I have a BA in English and a certificate in Postmodern Literature. I couldn’t build a latrine much less put together all of this.”
“Why do you want to record data which is already publicly available?” Mary Sue asks. She finds a battered little desk near the door, topped by two monitors and a keyboard whose lit indicators imply it is wired to the machine surrounding them. “Is it building some kind of archive?” She taps the ctrl key and both monitors light up.
“I get it,” Bruce says. “These shifty motherfuckers got everybody’s data and they figure they can auction it off to the highest bidder.”
“No!” Jamie insists. “That’s not what we’re doing!”
“You’re tryin’ to make the pop-up ads work even better so y’all motherfuckers can cash in.”
“Pop-up ads? We don’t have pop-up ads! It’s not 1998 anymore.”
Mary Sue, already typing away at a black screen which is rapidly being populated by little blue alphanumeric characters, endorses that statement. “I don’t know, Bruce. Public data isn’t very valuable, and you don’t need this kind of horsepower to read some browser cookies.” She leans in and scans down a long list of blue file headers. Sid can’t make any sense of that computer gibberish.
“What about Hillary’s emails?” Bruce asks. “You got Hillary’s emails on this thing?”
“No! We don’t have Hillary’s emails! That’s not what it does!”
“Then enlighten me,” Bruce snarks. “What does it do?”
Jamie hums for a second, uncertain what to say. “I don’t know where to start exactly. What do you know about simulated reality?”
Bruce nods. “It’s like The Matrix.”
“No. That’s virtual reality.”
“Same thing.”
“Not the same thing.”
“Where do I jack in? Does it have the woman in the red dress? I’d like to bend her spoon if you know what I mean.”
“It’s not a matrix. I wish it was because it would be so much easier to explain. Have you ever heard of Stella Liebeck?”
“No.”
“You have. You just don’t know her by name. In 1994, a judge awarded her two-and-a-half million dollars because she spilled hot McDonald’s coffee on herself.”
“That nasty bitch? Yeah, I remember that.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. Bitch had butterfingers when the drive-thru clown handed her the coffee. She spilled it in her lap and took a soccer dive and went after a deep pocket. Everybody knows that story.”
“Exactly. Everybody knows that story. They don’t know the version where Stella Liebeck had horrible third degree burns because McDonalds kept their coffee too hot and she only sued McDonald’s for the cost of her medical bills.”
“Because that’s not what happened.”
“Are you sure? What about Michael Brown? Do you know that name?”
“Yeah. He’s the dumb thug got shot fighting the police and started the Ferguson riots.”
“Not everyone sees
it that way. Plenty of people believe Michael Brown was murdered in cold blood. “
“It was a lie. He tried to kill that cop. Went for his gun. Everybody knows that shit.”
“Do they? Hands up, don’t shoot, right? They still put it on t-shirts.”
“Cause people don’t read. They’re stupid.”
“The truth is what people choose to believe. There’s a wealth of evidence. Gell-Mann Amnesia, the Mandela Effect, everything Boudrillard ever wrote, the NES Classic hysteria. As long as information is convenient to their worldview, people tend to accept it without verification. If a black teenager gets busted spray painting cars and he doesn’t want his parents to think he’s a criminal, he might say the cops are out to get black kids. The parents believe it because it fits the mold of the little boy they know. It fits neatly in their worldview. They spread the story. Other people believe it because it conveniently fits their worldview as well. Eventually even some of the cops start to believe it. At that point we’re living in a world where the police are out to get black kids just because someone said so. Fact born from fiction. That’s hyperreality. It’s a simulacrum. It’s a perfect model of a real unicorn. It’s the most photographed barn in America. It’s an illusion made real by nothing but words and repetition.”
“Fuck that. The cops do hate black kids. Nobody just made that up.”
“You just said they made it up about Michael Brown.”
“They made it up about Michael Brown, but not other black kids.”
“How do you know? Were you there? Did you personally witness every injustice carried out on a black teenager?”
“Now you’re just being a pedantic asshole.”
“I do believe the police harbor racist attitudes toward dark skinned people, but I can’t substantiate it any more than you can. I can’t read the minds of every police officer. I can’t listen to every discussion they ever had to check for the n word. I don’t have slow motion replays of every police involved shooting. I don’t have the time in my life to go over every last detail and possible inconsistency of everything I hear. Most of what I know, I know because I was told, and it just felt right somehow. Most of what I know is probably just one of many versions of the truth. Some of it is simply wrong, but from where I stand it’s still the truth.”
“What are you getting at with this bullshit?”
“Objective truth is a lie. What you call truth I call a narrative—one of many. It’s the story you choose to believe. The narrative is reality. It’s more real than fact, because it supersedes fact. Change the narrative and you change reality. That’s what the machine is for.”
“Do you understand any of this?” Bruce says with a bewildered look to Sid.
Sid shakes his head to signal no—fuck no. “I’m only here for the whore money,” he says. “Just tell me who to kill.”
“I understand it,” Mary Sue says. “The machine isn’t collecting data. It’s analyzing it. It’s a crawler.”
“Exactly. See, you and I can’t listen to every living person’s opinion or worldview, but a supercomputer can. It can read every Facebook post, every line of every flame war on the SomethingAwful forums, every piece of CP uploaded to 4chan. The machine knows if you liked 50 Shades of Grey, agree with Richard Spencer, or think Harvey Weinstein got a bad rap, and it knows exactly how many people think like you and to what degree. It’s kind of like the ultimate opinion poll.”
“The code is massively expansive and incredibly complex,” Mary Sue says as she clicks through pages of code. “I don’t think one programmer could have written it all, but I also don’t think there could be more than one or two programmers in the world smart enough to understand it.”
“So you have a ’roided up Survey Monkey?” Bruce demands, sounding more agitated than before. “I still don’t get the point.”
“Assuming it works, it maps the collective narrative—what everybody, or almost everybody, believes. The collective narrative is the closest thing there is to objective reality. If I say this is a chair, and Rihanna is a good singer, to us one of those claims is objective fact and the other is a subjective opinion. Even though we know somehow that Rihanna is a good singer, we can’t call it a fact. That’s only because we don’t have the mental capacity to quantify all of the minute qualities that make Rihanna a good singer to millions of individuals. A supercomputer has that capacity. In theory, the machine can objectively state Rihanna is a good singer and why. In theory, it can also identify someone else with those same necessary qualities.”
“If you know exactly what made Michael Jackson great, you can just do all those same things and be as great as Michael Jackson.”
“In theory, yeah. More or less.”
Mary Sue’s jaw drops. “A company like BuzzWorthy could write clickbait they know everybody will click.”
“That was what Izzy wanted—clicks. She never saw the big picture.”
“And the big picture is?”
“The machine could possibly be used to steer shifts in the collective narrative.”
“Steer it how?”
“For example, if I want to bring back JNCO jeans, I could tell the machine that, and the machine will pinpoint exactly where in the media sphere to send a message that will bring back JNCO jeans. It might instruct me to get X-celebrity to endorse JNCOs or just write a think piece about them on a blog.”
“And you weren’t planning to restart the rollerblade craze, were you?”
“I think you can guess the answer to that question.”
“You’re talking about fake news. You can make fake news you already know everybody will believe.”
“We want to promote narratives that are friendly to progress.”
“But they’re not true.”
“If everyone believes it, it’s better than the truth. That’s the whole point of what I’m saying here.”
“That’s a real dirty way of thinking.”
“Think about the good we might do. We could break down old social constructs and promote equality for everyone. We could train everyone never to cat-call or discriminate based on race or gender. We could make guns and violence so uncool that no one would go near them anymore. The machine might be able to tell us when and where to whisper to start world peace.”
“Or where to shout fire in a crowded theater,” Bruce winces. “Sid, this thing is a fuckin’ doomsday device. We need to destroy it.”
“That’s a bit of an overreaction. Don’t you think? We don’t even know if it works yet. It probably doesn’t.”
“Actually. . .” Mary Sue corrects. “There were queries to the system as recently as this morning. They all came from the same IP.” Sid leans over Mary’s shoulder to take note of the eight digit IP addresses and timestamps on her screen. “These are going back months. They’re all pretty silly.” She snorts as she reads off some of the earliest queries. “Dollhouse was better than Firefly. Crocs make you jump higher. A blood diamond means more than other diamonds because someone died for it. Cigarette smoking can prevent Alzheimer’s. Eating a marble every day cleanses toxins from your body. Pegging is what your man secretly desires. Puffy shirts are manly in a non-ironic way. Flu shots cause erectile dysfunction.”
“Does this stuff make sense to you?” Sid asks. It all sounds like nonsense to him.
“No,” Jamie says. “That stuff isn’t true.”
“The truth is a lie,” Bruce mocks. “There’s no such thing as the truth.”
“I don’t understand. Why would somebody enter this nonsense? “
“It could be a trial run,” Mary Sue theorizes. “Whoever put in the queries recorded the results, did what the machine recommended, and now they’re waiting to see if cigarette sales increase.”
“But why?” Jamie still looks stunned. “Why didn’t they say anything?”
“Dammit, bitch! Do you need the spy hunter to spell it out for you? You all got played! Set up! You were just patsies!”
“For who?”
“The fucker who built the damn thing. We still don’t even know who that is.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What for?”
“This.” Bruce points at the computer. “This thing is a motherfucking shitstorm! The mystery man knows that. And he also knew if it ever got built, a whole bunch of awful would come his way in the form of ghost assassin motherfuckers and who-knows-what-else awful shit. So he set you all up for that. He made it look like you kids built this thing on your own so you would take the heat. Then you all end up dead, or not, maybe he doesn’t even give a fuck. Either way he walks away with what he wants.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“Dunno, but safe bet it’s not to make the Macarena huge again.”
After all this, they still don’t have anything close to an explanation to the most important question of the day. “Why does the transient want to kill whoever built the machine?” Sid asks.
“Fuck if I know,” Bruce says. “Ask him next time you see him. You got Semtex in the van right? Let’s wire it up. Whoever this motherfucker is, we’re gonna take his toy away.”
“Semtex is largely concussive,” Mary Sue argues. “Even if you bring down the whole building it won’t damage the platters enough to prevent data recovery. It would be better to burn the drives.”
“Thermite? I get to make thermite?” Sid says, practically drooling at the prospect. He doesn’t have an excuse to mix up incendiaries nearly often enough.
“I think gasoline will do just as well.”
Sid’s spirits are instantaneously deflated.
“You guys can’t be serious,” Jamie whines. “This machine could be a way to real attainable social justice. Not some Marxist college kid fantasy, but the real thing.”
“Aight. I’m gonna take the van out and fill up some gas cans,” Bruce says, jingling his keys on the way out the door.
“Let me get my laptop before you go.” Mary hops up from the computer terminal to follow him.
“Bring me the smelting stuff and the Murder Machetes,” Sid shouts after her.