In this series of first chapters I am delighted to share the work of an anonymous contributor. Remember that any similarity to, or correspondence with persons, organizations, timeframes, or situations you believe to be familiar with from reality, virtual or non-, is either purely coincidental, or the unexpected fruit of your imagination.
CHAPTER 1
February 2020
Nashville (TN)
Lines of code were shooting across the screen. His fingers were stuck to the keys, moving imperceptibly. The rattle mixed with his heavy breathing, sounding like a sign of life that was neither mechanical nor biological. The meaty tentacles lifted so smoothly after each stroke that it seemed the pad was pushing out commands to the coder, and not the other way around. His arms branched out on either side, past a stack of pizza boxes on the left, and a pile of bills and payment orders on the right. Stuck to the desk were the rests of a gaming chair, studding his immobile arms. Past the rests, it was impossible to distinguish with absolute certainty between the chair and the body. The whole bulked out into 350-plus pounds of hardware and flesh, the frame and supports of the chair resembling more closely the exoskeleton of the soft tissue sprawled across it than an independent object. The clock read 4:16 AM. Travis yawned, nearly expelling a chunk of pizza.
- "Running smoothly," he hummed to himself. "When Wayne wakes up, he'll have nothing to complain about. Well, he always does. He'll find something... The code broke! The code broke!" he added in a high-pitched voice. "But they're not going to tell me I brought down the platform today."
It had been a weird couple of weeks, Travis thought. The surge, the new investors. Then the other day his old coding pal asking him on Discord whether it was true that he was working for that far-right platform. He had countered with a few lame jokes, something about his pointed hat being at the drycleaner's. But it wasn't sitting well with Travis now. He didn't think it was true. Look at Wayne, he wouldn't last 3 hours in the army. Okay: the guy likes to post pictures of that Russian guy. Stolin? But he just liked to get on people's skin, or under their nerves. Or something. He didn't think all of these stories were true - but it bothered him somehow. As if it got him dirty some way. Then there was that new investor, Bob Malocchio. Hm. Always seemed to be mad, that guy. Great voice, though. Wish I had that voice. Or that body, Travis quipped to himself. Anyway, he was a bit of a drill sergeant. Then there was that other guy - never heard of him. They said he had piles. Weird. Wasn't the big boss, whoever he was, supposed to be loaded? Wasn't that what Wayne always was most confident about? That his little stream would never dry up?
About 15 miles to the Northwest, Wayne Hutsze was holding on to the kitchen counter. He hated that. In the old days, nothing like a night of booze to let him sleep in. Hah! He'd binge until two, wake up twenty minutes before class, no alarm, and still show up to look like a million bucks. Yeah, that was then. He eased himself off the stool, carefully aiming for foothold on the floor with his velvet-slippered toes, and yanked his phone off the charger. "Let's see how my pretty little platform is doing," he thought. "I wonder if that troll is still going on about me. Was it on Tuesday, that I woke up to maybe fifteen notifications from the guy? Yeah, maybe I should be more careful. There always were these characters who would chum him up. Then the next thing he knew, they were giving him bad standing in the hacking community. Hell! He'd done things! He still was."
He tapped on the app, and a splurge of purple washed across the screen. Wayne felt better already. "Hablar, baby, here I come," he whispered. "Notifications: 183. Oh, that darn troll, was it?" He tapped the icon, and his screen filled up with comments from @Fuckyrprivlegehckr. "Oh fuck, the troll." He tapped on the notification at the top, but instead of carrying him to the thread, it took him to @Fuckyrprivlegehckr's profile. He tapped on 'back', and tried another notification. Again it took him to @Fuckyrprivlegehckr's profile. He scrolled down. "Hm, that son-of-a-bitch. All this lefty-anarcho crap. I should've banned the little shit. But what the fuck did he say about me this time?" He tapped back again, and tried one notification after the other, ever more frantically, until he realized the profile was all he could connect to. His head started glowing, he felt sick, and as he ran into the bathroom, he spit: "Travis, damnit!"
...
Danny Goldberg was on the phone. Nobody ever knew where he was, except on their back all the time. He was going to take the system down, this time, or make a pile while trying. He picked one of his messaging groups, called 'marketing', and set up a new meeting. It was time to get some activism going! He was going to find each and every one of those dumb bureaucrats and slap them with the Bill of Rights! As it was, each one of these crypto-communists was going to drive up the price of his crypto currencies, but certain things were non-negotiable. He knew, of course, that he was going to have trouble with Malocchio and his 'Renew Originalism' crowd, but for the time being he was carrying in some overdue investments. And traffic, of course. In this weird start-up world, the sole currency was traffic: real, fictive, spread-sheeted, feared, or hoped-for traffic.
"But first things first," he thought. "Let's get some boundaries set. Before Brenda or Malocchio run their promo campaigns and extract the very last bit of data right from under from Wayne's butt. Let's see if we can come up with some rules to keep these people from campaigning all the time. He grabbed a dark blue notebook from the desk, threw it open, and uncapped a pen. He paused a moment, smiled with a nod, and started writing as his lips formed word for word, whispering: "Thou shalt not collect your users' data." He paused, looked up, then grinned self-satisfied. "Thou shalt not muzzle thy detractors." He giggled and closed his notebook.
Sarasota (FL)
Brenda Hershey yawned, tightening her grip on the mug in her right hand. Through the kitchen window, she saw a yellowed leaf floating by on the surface of the pool. She cursed. "Rodrigo, damnit. You had one job." She didn't scramble in the morning to see her eight kids off to school on time to deal with this level of negligence... She sighed. The burden of all her millions would make itself felt in moments like this. You sent a guy to do an errand, and he would return with the wrong part. Or he would return empty-handed, gawking at you with some self-contended grin, as if you didn't have anything better to do than give him the same instructions again, this time with the cereal box graphics and wording. Good people! Where did you find good people these days? Intelligent people who would just shut up and listen. And do as they're told! She sighed again. The whole situation with Oxford Synthetica was still baffling her. As if collecting a little data wasn't exactly what all of them were doing. She knew, of course, that those free-wheeling Cubans were going to rake up some dirt and take it a bit too far, perhaps. But who do you hire, these days? At least they were very smart, those boys, but she could see where that was exactly what dragged her into the weeds eventually. With Wayne she was fairly confident she wouldn't have that kind of problem.
She had hired him way back then, when none of these problems were even on the horizon yet, but only as a coding teacher for some of her children. And she had rather hired him as a favor to his father, who was getting impatient with the petty rebelliousness of his son insistently styling himself as a 'hacker'. The plan had worked to the extent his son would at least leave the house before noon. And at some point - she didn't exactly remember how or when - after one lesson or other, they had all got to talk about social media. She had told Wayne right away that there wasn't, and never was going to be a platform for our kind of people. And while the children were fantasizing about building it from scratch, Wayne's deeper instinct of pleasing his audience had started projecting a whole new virtual world, in the image of their dreams and likeness. Then it was Jason who came up with that wonderful name, Hablar. Wonderful, she thought, despite the fact that it reminded her each and every time of his lousy father, that goucho, or peronista, or whatever descriptor he was currently using for himself, far and safely away in the villa she had had to buy for him in California. But yes: hablar, to just have a conversation with people. Like-minded people, if possible, but people, nevertheless.
That had been 18 months ago, and Wayne had expanded his billable hours, as well as a series of expenses, in a steady and unstoppable upward climb ever since. She much preferred remaining in the background, anyway, and Wayne more than enabled this preference by his affection for the limelight. What he certainly was not shy about either was to ask for more funds - she reminded herself to inquire with his father about this seeming habit of his that she could not quite explain. She had to remind Wayne that she, and certainly the new investors, were expecting to see returns. Sooner rather than later. But for the time being, the list kept growing.
Washington DC
Cee Di Testa knocked back another couple of olives and washed them down with a gulp of gin tonic. Johnny was late. She thought she had made it an attractive enough appointment, at one of the trendier Italian restaurants in the area, Il Cornuto, but maybe for the sake of punctuality she should seek out some Scandinavian bar the next time. Never mind the rules of the fashionable. But she did love those olives.
With a delay of about twenty minutes, a disheveled Johnny squeezed through the door, immediately spotting her at the little table in the corner. "Glad you could make it," she said, "in the end," as he dropped his coat over the backrest and sank on the seat with a thud.
- "Yeah, I'm happy I could. It's been quite the week. And if rumors are true, it's going to get a lot more exciting still."
Cee gave him one of her icy, unimpressed looks.
- "Glad you're on the same memo, John. But we're traying to stay ahead of things. You know, being on the scientific side of things, we try to command nature, not obey it." She checked whether his expression registered her reference and grabbed another olive. He returned her gaze with a quizzical look, opening his mouth to find a good word or two to answer. He sat there for another moment, closed his mouth, and nodded.
- "Yes, Cee, good to see you. How can we help you guys? I mean, we're just simple contractors. We thought you did all of this in-house."
Di Testa looked pained. Why did she have to deal with this dunce? When most of the time she could converse with the powerful, deal with the smartest people in the country. Or abroad. But stupid people had their purpose as well. She willed a smile.
- "Listen, John. For the good of the country, for democracy and all that, you know, we have to be prepared to take serious action now. We do some data processing in-house, but it's just a pile, it's a mountain of garbage, the whole internet is a sewer. And even if at the Harford Global Institute for an Equitable Internet we..."
- "Wasn't the Bureau partnering up with you? Or was it some outfit in Virginia? The whole industry is outraged about the type of contracts they've been offering lately. We can't compete with tax dollars."
Cee looked mis-amused, and spiteful.
- "Well, Johnny, I hate to disappoint your boys in the industry, but at the present time, with that... person..." The force of the p nearly expelled a piece of olive, clinging to her lower lip. "That - person in the White House, we are all counting on our less formal networks. You know: the good people we know we can count on. To save the country, you know, Johnny?" The piece of olive was gone. She stared at him. Johnny shifted in his seat and opened his mouth.
- "So you want four more years of this, Johnny? Is that what you want? Four more may as well be four hundred. This is it. We all need to know what side we're all on." Cee looked a bit hurt now. "Hm, maybe we should order? God knows I would just as well have olives and a couple more gin tonics for dinner. But I doubt they would have us back. And this is where people are at right now. Shall we order, Johnny? It would be a shame. You know: it's a new way we do things. We outsource the outsourceable. We share goals and profits. And I'm sure you can manage to do what we're asking for." Cee squeezed her eyes and lips in a matronly manner, as her hand reached for the olives.
- "So what kind of traffic are we talking about?" Johnny asked. Cee's eyes lit up hopefully. He continued: "Is it that new platform, that you're talking about? Pablar? Hallar?"
- "Oh no, not them," she answered disdainfully. "Not them! You mean Hablar?" She laughed like a movie-star princess, after a few gin tonics too many. "That's all deplorables. Each one more vacuous than every other. I really don't think they are going to give us any trouble... Listen, Johnny, no messing around, now. I've personally talked to Jack and Mark and they're fully on board. But there are things they could not do themselves, they say. That would be un-e-thi-cal, they say," as she moved her shoulders as per every syllable of unethical. "They figure, if someone would be doing it on ALL our behalf, who would you be to decline such an honorable task? Johnny? We will give you all the guidelines. It's not like you would be making any decisions on your own. No responsibilities to worry about. All of that lies between them and us, and back again. And maybe some out of Virginia, too." She looked ready to kiss him, Johnny thought, and involuntarily he pushed out from under the table, his chair shrieking back across the marble floor. In his embarrassment he caught the eye of a waiter, gestured, and said: "We are ready to order here." Cee curled back on her chair.