Overthrow

by Caleb Crain

  “That’s beautiful,” Joe said. “We’ll know more about them under their anonymized identifiers than their mothers know about them under their names.”

  “But it won’t be ‘we’ who know. It won’t have the odor of human knowing.”

  “You don’t want to be able to open the black box.”

  “No, exactly, I don’t want to. That’s where I’m not like your current client. I don’t want to ever need to. I believe in discretion. I believe in letting people be themselves. Letting them be, if possible, even more themselves.”

  “I’m definitely interested in your future,” Joe said.

  “Now, you have patents?” Weld asked.

  “Funny you should say that, we were talking about it recently, but I thought it would be premature,” Joe said. “At this stage the company is really just me.”

  “Who’s this?” Weld asked, pointing at Lloyd.

  “Lloyd would never take anything.”

  “Lloyd can’t quit tomorrow and go into business for himself?”

  “I would never do something like that,” Lloyd said. His eyes were bugging out somewhat at the sudden pivot of attention to him. It was Lloyd, of course, who had suggested, just before the RPF case began, that Joe ought to apply for patents.

  “Don’t you like money?” Weld asked Lloyd, uncoiling the fingers of his right hand. There was a ring on the index finger. “We can buy you some balls if that’s what’s missing.”

  “Hey,” Joe said.

  “So what you’re telling me,” Weld said, “is that you don’t have any ownership of your ideas.”

  “What’s going on? I thought you wanted to invest.”

  “Not in wishful thinking. And to be honest, what I wanted was to buy your company, kill it, and plunder the corpse of its internal organs.” He smiled. He knew that Joe wouldn’t mind the imagery. He had recognized him as a fellow hunter. “But you’re telling me there’s nothing inside.”

  “That’s not true,” Joe said. “What we have is what we call contextual expertise squared: contextual expertise about how to acquire contextual expertise.”

  “And I just explained to you that I’m not interested in knowledge that’s all too human.” He let the fingers of one hand fall like soldiers over the closed knuckles of the other. “Maybe we should talk after you’ve conceptualized your business a little further. It’s not clear that you know what you’re selling yet.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Lloyd said, rising.

  “Lloyd . . . ,” Joe said.

  But Lloyd was already halfway across the empty room.

  “We’re going to keep talking,” Joe promised Weld. He felt like a dog walker telling one off-leash dog to stay while another had just run into the road.

  He caught up to Lloyd at the elevator. “Having someone who wants to buy us for parts isn’t a bad thing.”

  Lloyd wouldn’t look at him. “We should have done a legal review.”

  Joe checked over his shoulder. The hallway and the elevator were unlikely to be under Weld’s surveillance if Weld was only a renter. “It’s not too late.”

  “A full legal review. It wouldn’t all be bad news. There’s a case about an IMSI catcher in California right now with a pro se defendant where it looks like the government is going to argue that law enforcement has the right to keep its data out of discovery for the same reason it has the right to keep secret the identity of confidential informants.”

  They stepped into the elevator. “Weld’s not law enforcement.”

  “I’m not talking about just Weld.”

  “Where are we meeting Long?” Joe asked.

  “At our office.”

  “Just at our office?”

  “I bought a thing of cookies for it,” Lloyd said.

  On the street, Joe hailed a cab. “Bresser Operational Security,” he told the driver as they got in.

  “Do you have an address for that?” the driver asked.

  It was turning out to be a bright, hollow day. A day made of foil, teeth, and right angles. It had irritated him at first that so many of the defendants in the RPF case had thought of themselves, openly or secretly, as apostles of poetry, but he had come to realize that it had irritated him because he had never acknowledged that he had also been touched by that spirit. Once he made the acknowledgment, he was able to see that when they quoted lines of poetry to one another, the lines weren’t reference texts for ciphers but places where they could meet. They allowed for a kind of peer-to-peer calibration, the operation of which depended somehow on the way that phrases from the poems sometimes got lodged in one’s mind. He had read only the Wikipedia entry about the novel with the Hyacinth character, but he had read all of the poem that had inspired Saunderson’s tattoo, after the press had identified it. It was an old poem; it was online. Since it was about greenery, it was probably about sex, mostly. But it also seemed to be somehow about giving up. He didn’t like that part.

  Members of RPF had come to the last press conference; he wondered if he would see any today. Of course everything was different for them now. They might not even hear about it; they didn’t seem to talk much anymore. It was true what Weld said, that there was a sensitivity that some people had to being overheard, especially people who had been born with the little catfish feelers on their faces that this group had. There was a thing, too, where the substitution that the online world made of the real one seemed to cut people off from one another, over time. Though there were other reasons the conversation had broken down in this case: All of them facing criminal charges. The Farrell girl only getting out on bail today, after a weekend inside. The Di Matteo girl probably embarrassed. Finn probably hated by the rest. And Saunderson in a mental hospital. He had turned out to be weaker than he had seemed. The way an astronaut’s bones become etiolated the longer he’s in space. It sometimes worried Joe that through his own creative side, if he wasn’t careful, he could develop that kind of susceptibility.

  No, the defendants weren’t going to be there, he predicted, as the taxi pulled up to his building. He would have the press to himself.

  He saw through the glass of the taxi window and the glass of the building’s front that a man was already standing in the lobby. “Is that Long?” he asked Lloyd. They hadn’t been able to find a photo of him online. The man was about Joe’s height and build and like Joe was also wearing a gray suit and white shirt. It was like spotting one’s stunt double—a version of oneself, off to one side, waiting to reshoot the scene that one was in.

  The man gave no sign of noticing Joe and Lloyd as they were getting out of their taxi.

  “Ask him,” Joe said.

  “Mr. Long?” Lloyd asked, as they entered the lobby.

  “Yes.” He had rough skin. He was about ten years older than Joe.

  “Warren Long, Joe Bresser. Hope we didn’t keep you waiting; we’re just coming from another meeting.”

  The man smiled.

  “Come on upstairs.”

  The doorman nodded them through, and they took their places in the elevator like Star Trek crew members assembling for teleportation. Joe twisted the un-signifying ring on his ring finger.

  When the doors opened, Lloyd rushed ahead. “I’ll go set up.”

  The office door locked behind Lloyd, and Joe had to knock when he and Long got to it.

  Lloyd had cleared off the card table they usually used for meetings, had found a milk-glass plate somewhere, and had put the cookies out.

  “So you’ve had some interest,” the man said.

  “Talking,” Joe said.

  “Anyone in politics?” the man asked. “I’m sort of an advance man, myself. It’s something someone like me is naturally interested in, what you do.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Looking at what people do online, what they’re like online. I’d be surprised if no
body else in politics has approached you yet. If only to ask what life in a group looks like.”

  “Of course people have asked,” Joe said, temporizing.

  “Are you interested in online groups because so many people online are lonely?” Lloyd guessed. He was the only one who had put a cookie on a paper plate for himself. “Is that the problem you’re working on?”

  “Not so much a problem as an opportunity. The way people want to be on a side—that’s something we’re very interested in. That’s what we do in politics, after all, and we have to work the angles. Loneliness creates an opportunity for a first-mover advantage, in any contest between sides. Which side looks like it’s going to be less lonely, that could be the side that’s going to win. Could we automate that a little, is our question. Could we reverse-engineer the kind of observation that you’ve been doing and create an impression of being together instead of just noticing one. Create it knowing what you know, in a deep way, about what it looks like when a large group of people are in relation to one another and are going through the process of making up their minds. Knowing the structure of those relationships and that process.”

  “You mean, populate a discussion,” Joe said.

  “That might be part of it,” the man said. “Can we figure out how to automate at least a little bit the impression of solidarity, so that when people are ready to choose a side, we’ve set up the direction they’re going to fall in. The way when you’re chopping down a tree, all you have to do is cut that little wedge in the far side of the trunk to determine which direction it will fall. And can we then turn that automation into a product—the kind of thing we can do without needing to know who we’re doing it for. A kind of service that we can sell as if it were in a box on a shelf. I think that’s a product a lot of people would be interested in.”

  A large part of being stronger was being faster. Sometimes what counted was being the one who got to the weapon first.

  “What kind of commitment are you thinking of making?” Joe asked.

  “I’d need to give you enough money that you could afford to seem not to exist, wouldn’t I? Maybe you could come up with some concepts.”

  As the man rose to leave, Joe and Lloyd scrambled to their feet.

  “Creepy,” Lloyd said, after the door closed.

  “Shut up,” Joe commanded, looking through the peephole at the man as he receded.

  “Joe, it’s one,” Lloyd said.

  “Already?” He checked his own phone.

  “Are you sure you want to do a press conference? If this guy says we’re not even supposed to exist?”

  It was in fact impressive that he was being asked to not-exist. He was going to be one of the people on the inside, setting up the new way things were going to be. The new way people were going to be.

  “What are they saying?” he asked Lloyd.

  “Who?”

  “Online. Are they downstairs?”

  “I’m not going to look.”

  “Why not?” Joe took out his own phone again. Someone had just posted a picture of the lobby, which was indeed filling up. Someone else had reposted a cartoon from last week of Joe as a villain tying himself as a damsel to railroad tracks, just as an Occupy Telepathy locomotive approached. I’m not stupid, the damsel was saying, which was something he had said once, online, when he had been trying to explain. His critics seemed incapable of understanding that the government would never have made its move if he hadn’t arranged the honeypot. Did it really show stupidity on his part if it had worked? “Let’s go,” he said to Lloyd.

  “I don’t even know what this press conference is about,” Lloyd said.

  “Somerville doesn’t, either.”

  On the way down, in the one-way mirror that shielded the elevator’s surveillance camera, Joe smoothed his hair with the heel of his hand. Lloyd started clicking his pen. “Stop it,” Joe said.

  The gathering of journalists in the lobby had already generated by their co-presence in such numbers a sense of purposiveness so strong that they didn’t at first notice the incursion of Joe, who had summoned them. Joe always felt, when he first saw a crowd like this, that it was as though he were giving a party with this many guests.

  “Mr. Bresser, tell me I’m not seeing this,” said the building’s porter. The doorman, meanwhile, wouldn’t look up.

  “That’s because it’s not happening, Rick. And you’re only going to have to not-see it for about ten more minutes.”

  “Just leave me an aisle through here, can you, in case the fire marshal comes.”

  “He won’t come.”

  “I didn’t say he would.”

  The crowd noticed Joe. As he and Lloyd made their way through, journalists fell silent around them, as if Joe and Lloyd were a dark spot passing across an X-ray, or a cloud detectable only by its opacity as it sailed over stars in the night sky. They stopped in front of the chewing-gum-green trees in front of which Joe had spoken last time.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Lloyd intoned. “Joseph P. Bresser of the Joseph P. Bresser Operational Security Consultancy would like to say a few words.”

  In the silence, before Joe spoke, it was as if for a moment he was holding to his lips a cornet made of wires that ran out and tugged at the sternums of every person in the room. If only the room could have been larger, grander. There were cavernous spaces under and inside the piers of the city’s bridges, and Joe had had a glimpse of the inside of one of them once, while he was walking by. The city had been storing parked trucks inside it, but the volume had suggested that it was capable of containing a whole world.

  “Thank you,” Joe said.

  At the back of the crowd, shifting unsteadily on her feet like a drunk who might be working up the nerve to heckle, was the Di Matteo girl. She had come after all. She was looking at him without acknowledging him, the way people from money are able to. The diluted beige color of her hat almost matched her skin and made her look bald. She wouldn’t be very happy if they shaved her head when she went to jail.

  “I want to say a few words about a turn that the case of the RPF Working Group has taken. As most of you are aware, the original charges concerned the group’s illegal access to a protected computer here at our firm, and over the weekend, there was a new breach, this time of federal security, by a fifth defendant, Elspeth Farrell. There’s been some chatter in the system, as they say, about the possibility that the government might prefer to drop charges in order not to risk exposing methods and sources, and what I want to emphasize today is that such a retreat would be highly inadvisable. As many of you are aware, the files that Farrell was arrested this weekend for taking were the same ones taken by the original four defendants, her comrades, and then resecured by the government. What has not been previously disclosed”—and this was like the moment when you knew you’d raised your sights to just the right amount a little bit above and ahead of where the bird had so far flown—“but which I learned from independent sources at the time of Farrell’s arrest, is that before her arrest she was able to upload the same highly sensitive, contraband files, encrypted with an unknown key, to the notorious file-sharing site the Golden Cove. This is not the behavior of kids on a joyride. These are bad actors, with a skill set not well understood, who are making every effort to humiliate and even threaten the United States government.”

  The reporters were silent. Writing and listening. He had them. The little cornet had welded them to his grasp.

  “Joe, is the government aware that this file is publicly available?” a reporter asked.

  “They are now.”

  “And how were you able to find this out?” asked another.

  “These were originally our files, and we have a procedure in place for looking for our files when they go missing.”

  “With tracking software?”

  “We look for them, okay? The fold
er had a specific name.” The internet was now going to make fun of him for having called this a procedure. “There was a notification that RPF-Dove-Shark was available.”

  “But, Joe, you said it’s encrypted, right?”

  “RPF what?”

  “I found it,” someone said.

  “If it’s encrypted, how do you know it’s the same file?” It was a reporter from one of the tabloids, the one who always dressed like a homeless person.

  (“That’s Jan Ridgely,” Lloyd whispered.)

  “Because of the file size, Jan,” Joe said.

  “So you had a Google alert for a file with the same name and size?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically, yes.”

  “And what’s the password?”

  “How would I know? I didn’t encrypt it.”

  The susurrus of the consultations between journalist and journalist was steady and mounting, but in deference to Joe still restrained. It was like being in a hive whose scouts had just reported a new source of nectar and the bees were with more and more agitation milling and whirring and knocking against one another. The creatures might have been dangerous to him under other circumstances, but here and now they were being organized by the information he was giving them and he knew they would stay loyal to it.