by Caleb Crain
“No, Joe. No no no. When you’re a grown-up, which is something you wouldn’t know about, you try not to surprise the people who are on your side. You give a signal so that your allies have a chance to adjust their positions, and then you read the room, and only once you see that everyone’s ready for the change in strategy do you follow through.”
Currying favor with an establishment would of course be mistaken by a man like Somerville for maturity.
“You’ll notice,” Somerville continued, “that I’m not asking who it was that was so ham-handed that they managed to delete a piece of evidence in a way that was observable remotely. I’m not asking who gave the defense a plump, juicy cut of premium-grade graymail. I’m assuming that the person or persons who executed this deletion were only trying to protect the surveillance programs, too, in their own ass-covering way, and happened to be unaware that they could be held in contempt of court, and I imagine that you have one or two friends at the state level who will be very relieved to hear that this is the assumption I’m going to be making. Ham-handed but obliging friends.”
A man like Somerville thought exclusively in terms of who was on top and who was loyal, but as the future came into being, status and allegiance were going to shift so rapidly that it made more sense even now to be indifferent to them.
“I am curious, though, what kind of genius would bait his trap with files that couldn’t under any circumstances be presented in court.”
“It had to be something they wanted,” Joe explained.
“It only had to be something they thought they wanted.”
“Not with these kids.”
“I have to get off the phone with you now. It’s been lovely chatting with you, as ever. Someday soon I hope you’ll show up in my docket arrested for whatever you’re smoking so that I can find out what it is.”
“It’s yoga.”
“We’re all sorry we ever met you, Joe. Including, very soon, if a word from me can have any effect on the rest of her career, your girlfriend in the city innovation office.”
“I’m not sleeping with Charlotte.”
“I don’t care who or what you’re sleeping with. It’s been great talking with you, as I say. Don’t sell any more wooden nickels.”
The moment the attorney hung up, the attorney’s executive assistant briefly returned to the line: “Hello?” When Joe failed to respond, she hung up on him, too.
In the silence that followed, Joe looked out his window at the morning sun, which was hitting a quadrilateral of yellow bricks in the air shaft. A few weeks ago there had been a slant of snow leaning against the bricks, and by repetition of itself the sun had fused the snow and then hollowed it and then riven it and then sublimed it away. That was the power of repetition of even something as pale as winter morning. Repetition was one of the forms of number in the world.
It would be too dangerous to allow the members of the group to get away. He was going to have to force Somerville’s hand.
He remembered when he had first recognized the danger. Something odd, Charlotte had said, had been passed on to her by analysts in the Special Operations Division. Do you have any idea what this is about? the analysts had wanted to know. The analysts were tasked with looking for indications of drug trades, but as dealers began to camouflage their wording, the weave of the analysts’ nets grew correspondingly finer and subtler until in the end they were selecting for disguise itself, because the AI had become trained to find language that was doing any kind of hiding. Of course it had alerted them when it detected someone talking cryptically about a new kind of decryption. It wasn’t what the Special Operations Division was supposed to be investigating, but it was the sort of thing that as professionals all of them lived for.
Someone, the system had discovered, was approaching hackers on chat channels (and approaching a few online tulpas that had been set up on chat channels by the division in the hope that they would be mistaken for hackers) to ask how much better than random a wholly new kind of guessing algorithm would have to be in order to be valuable. The person had been vague about what he had, but he had let drop that he had something to do with Occupy and that the algorithm was somehow analog, with a somewhat jerky variance in its margin of error. How would the black market go about pricing such a capability? The person had said he was asking about price only to find a way to assess value. The thing itself, he had insisted, was not for sale.
The disavowal had been as much of a red flag as the question.
That was the first sign of the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings, though of course at that point no one knew the group’s name. The group probably hadn’t even come up with it yet. Joe had felt certain that their algorithm was some kind of bioinformatics. He knew that in the future everyone who manages to survive will be a chimera of biology and technology—a compound of human and computer—and he had always known that the first buds were eventually going to be identified on somebody’s shoulder blades someday.
The day had come.
He couldn’t say as much aloud, of course, not even to Charlotte. The key to the professional environment that he worked in was parallel construction: it’s okay to know, but only once you find other, public grounds for your knowledge is it safe to say that you know. Those were the terms on which the Special Operations Division had shared emails and chat transcripts with Charlotte, who was the city police department’s chief innovation officer, and those were the terms on which Charlotte had in turn shared the communications with him.
Charlotte had said only that she thought she saw here an opportunity for Joe to try out the business model that he had been trying to sell her on. He had been sharing with her the software that he was developing, which coordinated sets of data about surveilled individuals that hadn’t previously been linked. The software worked by mapping the patterns of interaction within each set against one another. It was possible that the business opportunity really was all Charlotte had seen.
He, on the other hand, had known at once. The constellation recognizes itself in you as soon as you look up into the sky.
He had set to work trying to identify the individuals. He had geofenced Occupy and then seeded his software with the social media profiles of regular visitors and then mapped those profiles against the dark information, the data sets that he wasn’t allowed to acknowledge had been passed on to him. It was a first try; it hadn’t worked. After Charlotte loaned him an IMSI catcher, however, he was able to add the details of a mass of calls made by cell phones at the encampment, which his software had been able to parse into component social groups—people who often called or texted one another just before their cell phones appeared together at the site. The breakthrough had come when Charlotte had shared with him a file she had found in a multiagency antiterrorism database of persons of interest who had been tracked to Occupy. One of them was Chris Finn. Apparently in 2010 he had gotten too enthusiastic about an anticapitalist group in Toronto. He had only been cautioned, but the agencies’ computers had kept watch on him ever since.
The identification of Finn had lined up the dials. And then Joe had added a layer of parallel construction of his own. A government official is only allowed to use an IMSI catcher to track who called whom, from where, for how long. The device, however, is also capable of listening to calls and reading texts, and Joe wasn’t an official employee of the government. Why had they built the functionality if literally no one was supposed to use it? Joe told investors that his software linked data sets—such as social media accounts and call detail records—by finding congruences between the patterns within each set, but he didn’t think that it in any way falsified his claim if at the start of the process he trained the homology-finding engine with a few identifications that he made by hand, using as clues the texts and call recordings that the IMSI catcher, its settings changed, picked up. It was just a way for the machine to make progress in learning;
there was nothing wrong with learning. The dark information couldn’t be acknowledged, but a Bayesian net refined by dark information was an entity distinct from the dark information itself. It was no drawback to Bresser Opsec’s business model that in the future Joe might continue to need an initial supply of such identifications in order to bring a net up to speed because he was always going to be selling in. He was always going to be selling to clients who collected information. If not to a triliteral government agency then to one of the big five in the private sector, who were for the most part way ahead of the government in any case.
In fact, on low days he even worried that the lag between government and the private sector was all that he was leveraging: that because it was still possible at the moment for a contractor to do what it wasn’t currently legal for the government itself to do, all he was selling to the government was the blindfolded untying of its own hands, and once change agents in the government saw what he was able to do with the combination of his freedom and their borrowed power, they would be incentivized to make it legal, or at least to declare formally that they were not going to make it positively illegal, which would shrink his margins by opening the market to all comers.
For now, though, there was still enough legal ambiguity to constitute a business opportunity. If he succeeded, stakeholders now invisible to him would surely move to consolidate what he had pioneered. It was therefore unlikely that he personally would ever be in legal jeopardy. No ruler ever forswore a weapon after wielding it. All he had to do was get the weapon into the rulers’ hands, at least briefly.
His phone. “Um, Joe?”
“I’m on my way,” Joe said. “You go ahead on in.”
“Are we meeting there?”
“What did we say?”
“I don’t think we—”
“Are you still at the office? I want you to send a press release.”
“Right now?”
“Tell them I’m going to be holding another press conference. In the atrium.”
“But last time the building manager said—”
“Then what do we pay rent for? Come on, Lloyd. Tell them it’s going to be at one o’clock.”
“Today? But what if our meetings don’t—”
“This isn’t about the meetings. Somerville wants to quit, and I’m not going to let him.”
Lloyd was silent. Joe knew, however, that he was obeying. He knew that Lloyd was writing down the instructions. He heard Lloyd mutter, as if speaking to himself, “But the government’s still going to pay us.”
“Why wouldn’t they pay us? And can you call a car for me?”
“To your apartment?”
“How else am I going to get there? I’ll be downstairs in ten minutes.”
In the event, since he was already dressed, he was downstairs sooner than that, before any town car arrived, and he hailed an SUV-size taxi that happened to be turning the corner.
It wheeled downhill heavily, and on the road that circled the city along its shore, it fitted itself into the traffic like a knife into its sheath. Like a knife into a wound that it had previously made. He had been waiting for all of this for years. The only doubt that had ever been in his mind was on whose side the first chimera was going to be born—the side of force or the side of order. Force was what he called the side without law. The side prior to law. A creature of any power was almost always born there first, in the greenwood, as it used to be called, and was only later captured and harnessed and put into the service of the side of order by someone like him.
As the taxi swung up a tight, cantilevered bend, he felt his insides sink within him and then rise, on the recoil.
He called Lloyd. “Did you send it?”
“I’m going to send it from my phone. I’m in a car.”
“Bcc me.”
It was possible that he hadn’t thought through carefully enough the contents of the lure he had set for the RPF group, but if he had put in more than he should have, it had been because he had wanted them to know that he knew. He had wanted to suggest that he was aware that they were ahead of him and that he therefore felt free to be careless about letting them see what he had on his side—that he knew that they were going to see what he had anyway. It had been meant as a provocation and you could even say as a statement of his faith in them. The mistake had been in his imagining that they would have only a few hours with the files. It used to be that a pawn once captured was taken off the board, but under the new dispensation every piece, captured or not, remained available for play indefinitely. Sequence was no longer limited to progress, which was hard at first to keep in mind when planning a strategy, but a fighter always trains himself to think according to the new laws of combat.
Thanks to the Farrell girl, he himself was already holding the piece in question again. It had been transformed by its fall and recovery; the girl had locked it and therefore silenced and in a way perfected it. So many people were in the habit of leaving weapons where he could pick them up, perhaps because almost no one saw him for who he was, or perhaps because almost no one ever stopped to think how a weapon could be used against someone other than themselves.
The car slowed and halted outside a building that a hundred years ago had been erected as a warehouse. He touched the side of his face in order to make contact with his outer self. He had omitted to shave; he hadn’t wanted to look too much as if he needed anything. He was wearing his gray suit with a white shirt but for the same reason hadn’t put on a tie.
His phone again. But it was only the press release from Lloyd coming through.
A wall of newly cast concrete and a stumpy man-bun of wires had been left exposed in the lobby of the former warehouse, either because renovation was incomplete or because the design was meant to induce a visitor to think that it was.
He punched 4 for Planchette and rode up. The elevator opened onto a hallway of jagged bricks, at the end of which he found a glass door stenciled with the name.
Lloyd had got there first and stotted up out of a chair.
“I’ll let Mr. Weld know you’re here,” said a blond woman in a suit.
It was twelve minutes past the hour.
“Is that what you wanted?” Lloyd asked.
“I haven’t read it yet.”
After exactly twelve minutes more, the door to an inner room opened.
“Joe!” a man said. “Hilary Weld. Come on in.” The door was crazed glass, like a wreck’s windshield. Weld shook Joe’s hand and then Lloyd’s.
The scale of the room inside was so grand that it registered, at first, as empty, even though it held a desk; a white sofa in the middle of one wall; and, near a window, a rowing machine. Weld led them to a cluster of stools around a black table. The seats of the stools looked as if they had been salvaged from old rideable agricultural machines, but they were more comfortable to sit on than they looked.
“Can I ask Veronica to get you something?”
“A seltzer?” Joe suggested. “So you’re going to be our angel investor.”
“I don’t know if I’d call myself an angel, Joe.”
In Weld’s faux-hawk, the raised central comb was dyed blue. His nose, pierced, was unambiguously male, even aquiline, but there was a dusting of kohl around his eyes. What did Joe care, it was business. Between the wiry hairs of the man’s left forearm began the tracery of what looked like a whole sleeve of tattoos.
The blond woman in the suit set one glass of seltzer in front of Joe and another in front of Lloyd.
Joe made a winding gesture. “Lloyd, do you want to . . . ?”
“So if you’d like, Mr. Weld, let me give you a presentation about the suite of products that we—”
Weld held up a hand. “I wouldn’t be talking to you principal to principal if I didn’t know the product. And read the newspaper, too. Congratulations on that, by the way. It makes me as a pote
ntial investor nervous, because what other dogs will it call out, but for you—you can’t buy press like that. What I think would be productive is if I talk to you a little about the vision that I have for the world that I think your work could lead to.”
“Awesome,” Joe said.
“What I see, when I close my eyes,” Weld said, not closing his eyes but matching the pads of his fingers together like a praying mantis, “is a world where no one is ever lost, where because of the functionality that you’ve developed, the not quite overlapping, not always intersecting multiple data sets that people create every day, every hour, every minute, with their phones and their emails and their credit cards and their smart TVs and their social media accounts and their streaming music services and their employee ID badges and the toll-paying devices in their cars and their cars’ navigation systems and the loyalty barcode dongles on their keychains are all constantly, quietly reconciled. And therefore no gesture goes unnoticed. No signal goes unreceived. Don’t get me wrong: I know how important the feeling of privacy is to people. I think it’s central. Nobody wants a user experience where they feel exposed. In the world I’m looking forward to, all the data sets that are collected will be anonymized. What I imagine, though, is that they’ll be anonymized and individualized. No one will feel watched, but everyone will feel, what’s a good word, appreciated. No one will have the feeling that there is a smelly human on the other side of the screen somewhere, totting up merits and demerits. They will instead be liminally aware of a bank of benign machines noticing, nonjudgmentally, the steps they happen to be taking. And by liminally I mean if someone wants to sock-puppet, for example—do you remember sock-puppeting? It was so cute, and there are even some people who still do it, can you believe it, who are still able in a moment of rage to convince themselves that their cell phone doesn’t know what their laptop browser is doing—anyway, we’re never going to let a sock-puppeteer know that we’ve caught on to him. If someone wants to be two people, he probably has a good reason. You can learn so much more about someone if you don’t moralize. Let him be two people, and watch those two people. Or three, or four. Knowing, as only a nonjudgmental observer is free to know, that all of them lay the same head on the same pillow every night, believing in their distinctness. What I’m imagining will be like a glove that fits so well that most people will forget they’re wearing it. If you don’t like it that after you search for swimming goggles on one site you see ads for swimming goggles everywhere online—or even, soon, offline—the machines should know that about you, too. They should keep track of even your threshold for perception. They should know exactly, sensitively, the depth that they need to retreat to, in order not to alarm you, where they can wait for you, unseen, patient. What I’m imagining, really, is that observation will be gentle, not constraining choice or even guiding it but merely informing it. Maybe a consumer doesn’t know that he can buy a wallet that looks as chic as leather but is made of recyclables, and once he does know it, that’s what he’s going to want, and the machines will know he can afford it or they wouldn’t be bothering to present it to him. Not Big Brother but Little Brother, as it were. Nonthreatening, noninterfering. Tactful.”