Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Worse, anything she did with Charlotte, she felt she had to do more and better with Essie to avoid Essie feeling slighted. The joy and spontaneity went right out of her play.

  Why was she even behaving like that? Was she overcompensating, anticipating underlying jealousy on Essie’s part? Or was she doing it to make herself feel more secure? After all, it was Essie who had another big date with Michael looming that week. Another sleepover. Igloo felt a mile deep in a pit of despair.

  Angie finally arrived, pulling Igloo out of her recollections. Angie’s 3D printed car rattled only slightly on the dead-quiet street. How Angie loved that car. She parked across the street from the coffee shop, locked up, and nodded to Igloo, indicating they should walk away together.

  “Coffee?” Igloo said, once they were far from Angie’s car and any would-be eavesdroppers.

  “Wait,” Angie said. She pulled out a cobbled-together device in a 3D-printed case and waved it around.

  Igloo knew better than to ask if it was really necessary. Angie had become more paranoid over time.

  Angie caught the expression on Igloo’s face.

  “A single misstep could risk everything we’ve built. You don’t realize how lucky we were to break the old stranglehold. The end of centralized power on the Internet is within our grasp. One sniff of what we do on the side, and the government shuts down everything.”

  “Fine.” Igloo held up the drinks and paper bag. “Look, do you want your coffee or carmelita bar first?”

  “Neither. I want you to listen very carefully.”

  Here goes. The worst part was that until Angie took something out of her hands, there was no way for Igloo to eat her own bar. But she couldn’t really complain to a one-armed person about not having a free hand, could she? She settled for a sip of coffee.

  “What is it?” She tried not to think about the chocolate chips and caramel in the center of the bar.

  “The last election was close,” Angie said. “In the end, less than 2 percent of the vote separated a progressive candidate from a regressive one.”

  “Yep.” Igloo held out the bag. “Gerrymandering, voter obstruction, criminally bad education system, obscene amounts of money thrown at the election. There are a thousand reasons for it. Can you take your coffee?”

  “We can’t do anything about those, can we? Angie ignored the proffered cup and continued down a side street. They wandered into a rundown industrial district. Igloo trusted that Angie would have either cleared the path ahead of time or at least ensured there were no compromised cameras.

  “But we can do something about what people see and read.”

  “What are you talking about?” Igloo said.

  “Don’t play dumb. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Igloo shook her head. She couldn’t imagine where Angie was going with this.

  “We do it all the time. We manipulate people. We provide suicide hotlines, and domestic abuse support help. We change the stories they see, give them more positive ones. We deliberately show them there’s a way out.”

  “We do that for people in crisis,” Igloo whispered, glancing left and right. “We’re saving their lives.”

  Angie bent down slightly, got close in to Igloo’s face. “How many lives were lost when the President was elected? More hate crimes. More violence. Geopolitical instability. It has to stop.”

  “We can’t manipulate media for the entire country. Entire world.”

  “We can, and we have to.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  Angie shook her head, and finally took her coffee cup. Only now Igloo was too upset to eat.

  “I’m right,” Angie said, “and you know it. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  “Wholesale manipulation of voters is not what we stand for. That’s what the bad guys do, Angie, not us.”

  “Really? You won’t manipulate information to make a better world?” Angie cocked her head. “Some simple distortions, not even lies per se, just control over which information gets around. That’s not worth preventing another radical president? The other side already manipulates everyone who votes for them. All we’re doing is evening things out.”

  “No, Angie. Tapestry is literally some people’s only conduit for information. Nobody else has that advantage. They tell lies piecemeal. That’s not the same thing as changing wholesale what everyone sees.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Igloo. I don’t give a shit how manipulative we are. We can stop a war, crush a political party, and change the course of history. This is our time. We have to do it.”

  “What the fuck has gotten into you?”

  “I’m worried that the clock is running out for us. Maybe we can do this today, but we can’t do it tomorrow. What happens when the government comes after us and shuts down Tapestry? Then it’s too late.”

  “Okay, there’s paranoid, and then there’s paranoid. You’ve stepped over the line.”

  The glare in Angie’s eyes would have sunk a lesser woman.

  Igloo swallowed hard. There was something intimidating about pushing back against someone who could kill you with her smartphone. “Besides, you can’t know for sure that we can achieve the effect you’re talking about.”

  Angie resumed walking, forcing Igloo to run after her.

  “I already tested the idea,” Angie said. “Tape can selectively override story feeds, even for non-Tapestry feed engines. I tried it with the mid-year ballot measures in California and swung the vote for progressive initiatives by more than five percent over what the polls predicted. The concept works.” She shrugged and picked up her pace.

  “Linus fucking Torvalds. What have you done?” This was far, far worse than simply killing an abuser.

  “The right thing,” Angie said. “Now we need to do the right thing on a bigger scale. We have eighteen months until the next election.”

  The presidential election? Igloo’s body shook, and the world faded away. She vaguely noticed that she’d dropped the coffee and the food bag, felt a splatter against her leg.

  Angie ditched her own coffee, grabbed Igloo hard under one armpit, and carefully lowered her to the ground as her legs gave way. She knelt next to Igloo.

  “I know this sounds crazy. I’m sorry I’m breaking this to you all at once, but there are people after me. I need you to know what to do, in case something… Just in case.”

  “In case what, Angie?” Igloo shook her head, trying to get rid of the fuzzy feeling.

  “Nothing. I’m going to show you how to modify what goes through Tape. We’re going to shift what people are seeing over the next year and a half. Very carefully, very gradually, but we’ll do what we need to do to make sure we get the president we deserve.”

  Igloo felt like she was floating outside her body. Was Angie really talking about manipulating hundreds of millions of people, of influencing who was elected leader of the country? Was this some bad nightmare?

  “Come on,” Angie said, “once I show you the code you’ll be back to all right.”

  Angie had a spare car parked under a tree nearby, an eighties American car, the cloth interior ripped to shreds, a fleece blanket spread across the front seat. The car started with the squeal of a loose belt. Angie checked her phone, glimpsed at the sky, then waited for half a minute. “Satellites,” was all she said. She checked the phone again, then pulled away in a rush. She drove less than ten minutes, entered an empty parking lot by a warehouse, and parked behind the building.

  “Let’s go before a train comes. They’ve got cameras on the engines now.”

  They left the car and entered the building through a small side door that Angie unlocked. Igloo still felt numb. Manipulating an election? If Angie was paranoid before, it was going to get worse. Much worse.

  The interior was filled with spools of wire. Two massive skylights, streaked with grime, let in the late morning sun, which shone down on a single rusting shipping container near the back.

  Angie led them to
the container and unlocked the door.

  “How’d you find this place?” Igloo asked.

  “I’m subleasing the space from the owner who uses this for backup storage,” Angie said, as she levered the door open. “They only come in once or twice a month to shift stock around. There’s a cell station antenna on the roof.”

  Igloo nodded. With a mobile phone base station, they could tap into the antenna’s fiber option connection for high bandwidth or use the antenna itself to connect to other nearby base stations. They’d traded other hacks last year to get the exploit from a pair of Canadian hackers.

  Angie opened the shipping container to reveal two long desks, chairs, a portable toilet, and cardboard boxes. Once inside, she pulled the door closed behind them. “The whole container is made of five-millimeter thick steel, which blocks all signals except what we allow out.” She gestured toward a bundle of cables that exited through the back wall. Then she pointed out a cardboard box. “You’ll want that. Canned coffee.”

  Igloo reached inside, found a black cylinder of pre-made Japanese coffee. At least, she assumed it was Japanese from the kanji writing, and assumed it was coffee from the picture on the front. She pried the can open, downed it, then suppressed the urge to gag.

  “That is awful,” Igloo said. “Let me pick the coffee in the future.”

  On the other side of the cardboard box she was surprised to find a waist-high safe. They’d never had a safe at any previous sanctuary. Angie caught her puzzled look.

  “I’m keeping all the electronics in here. The safe won’t keep out anyone determined to get our computers, but it’s pressurized, which gives us a tamper-evident seal. If the safe is opened, the pressure changes, we get notified, and we know our stuff has been compromised. The biometric reader scans the blood flow in your palm. Harder to spoof than a palm print.”

  Angie placed her hand on the front screen of the safe, and after a few seconds, the screen lit up and displayed a hexadecimal keyboard. Angie typed a series of digits, and the safe unlocked with a thunk. She swung the door open to reveal a pile of Apple computers and tablets.

  Igloo’s head swam. “Let me get this straight. You created a new safe house. Awesome. I get that. You did it on the sly, also fine. You stocked it with furniture, a safe, and supplies.”

  Angie nodded.

  “You could have asked me to help, you know. You didn’t have to do this yourself.”

  Angie shrugged. “Sometimes I need time alone, you know? I’m stuck talking to people all day at work. Coming out here, I get some peace of mind.”

  Igloo stared at Angie, suddenly sympathetic. Two introverts, forced to work with others to get anything meaningful done. Yeah, she could understand.

  She found herself sweating and unzipped her hoodie. Given the early hour, it was surprisingly warm inside the shipping container. “Man, it’s hot.”

  Angie glanced up. “Unfortunately, the sun comes in through the skylight this time of day and bakes the container like a solar oven. Don’t worry, it cools off later.” Angie pulled a laptop off the top of the pile. “Come on, let me show you what I’ve done.”

  A few minutes later, they were hunched over the screen going through the source code for Tape, the communications layer for Tapestry, that was responsible for the composition of services and the collection of metrics necessary for the accounting code to credit all the participants who contributed to the end-user experience.

  “Here, do you see what’s happening?” Angie pointed to a block of code.

  Igloo looked more closely. She shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, it’s obvious we’re looking at the last layer before transmission to the feed queue. This bit here,” she pointed to a specific line of code, “extracts the participant chain and queues it for transmission to Participant Accounting. We add in the accounting for the presentation layer at the last minute.”

  “Right. Except when we extract the participant chain, we change what’s being sent to the feed queue.”

  Igloo reviewed the code again. “No, we’re not.”

  Angie smirked.

  Okay, so she was. How? It took Igloo ten minutes of hunting, and it wasn’t until she inspected the object at runtime that she figured it out. “That’s just mean. Changing the underlying behavior.”

  “All the test cases care primarily about the accounting, and the accounting is still credited correctly for the original content. We just piggyback an extra piece of content onto the feed queue. I had to do it that way because if the user interacts with the content, it’s going to trickle meta-data back into the system, and there has to be referential integrity. Basically, it has to be a real piece of content, not something we fabricate.”

  Igloo slumped in her chair. “It’s not right, Angie. I’m sorry. Altering a person’s feed when we know they’re in trouble is one thing. We can make sure they see the information that might save their life. I’m totally down with that. But this…” She pointed to Angie’s code. “It’s wrong to try to change what millions of people see to align them with how we want them to think.”

  “Come on, you know the red feed, blue feed deal,” Angie said. “What Tomo showed users was completely different based on who their friends were and their past history. Feed algorithms selected what users were most likely to engage with, even when those stories were fake news. The more people engaged with fringe information, the more fringe information they would see, until finally they aren’t reading any factual news at all. Even if the only change we made was to ensure people see actual, real information, that alone could be enough to swing the vote. This is education, not manipulation.”

  Igloo’s chest felt like it was being crushed. There was something to what Angie was saying. But it was massively wrong to keep that power hidden. It was too important for Angie and Igloo to be solely responsible. It was the difference between peer-reviewed and junk science. Between open source and closed. This demanded nothing less than total transparency.

  “We should have thought about this when we were designing Tapestry in the first place,” Igloo said. “Instead of federating and decentralizing the feed selection algorithms, we should have kept control over them. Then we could openly tweak the algorithms to favor reliable news sources but do it in a peer-reviewed way.”

  Angie raised one eyebrow. “So you are in favor of showing people factual stories.”

  “Yes, obviously. But you’re going about it the wrong way. Secretly changing the algorithm behind the scenes isn’t the same as being public about it. People think they can choose their own feed selectors. If people find out that we’re secretly manipulating what they’ll see, when they think they’re in charge, there will be riots.”

  “Do you have an alternative?” Angie asked. “Because I’m open to other ideas.”

  “We work with everyone implementing a feed selector. Get them to choose filters for reliable news sources voluntarily.”

  “Then people will change their feed provider. They’ll go with someone else who will show them the fringe stuff they want.”

  “We make it an explicit part of the provider contract,” Igloo said. “They must bias in favor of reliable data if they want to be part of Tapestry.”

  “Then we’ll end up in a quagmire over what constitutes reliable data. We’ll be taken to court. People will fight us. It’s better if they just don’t know.”

  Igloo’s head was tight with tension. She didn’t want to do it Angie’s way, but she didn’t see any alternatives. They had backed themselves into a corner. Damn, but it was hot in here. She pulled off her sweatshirt and tossed it on top of a box.

  Angie grabbed her arm. “What is this?”

  Igloo looked down, couldn’t see anything.

  “What?”

  “These bruises. On your back.”

  Oh, fuck. Did she still have marks from her last play? Essie had topped her a few nights ago and used a cane on her shoulder. It had been lovely, but the impact left brutal welts.

&
nbsp; “They’re nothing.” She shrugged away from Angie.

  “Don’t nothing me. I know what it looks like when someone’s been hit.”

  Igloo’s stomach knotted itself. “It’s not like that.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Nobody did this to me.”

  “You’re going to tell me you fell down a staircase? Don’t play dumb with me. Who did this?”

  “It’s not what you think, Angie.” Igloo took a deep breath. Oh fuck. Why did this have to come up now, of all times? “I…” She paused. Swallowed. She felt like she was about to step off a cliff. “I like to…”

  She had to just get it out. Why was this so embarrassing and awkward? “I like to be hit, okay? And I like to hit people, too. I know that has to be confusing for you, given everything you’ve been through. But nobody is being abused.”

  Angie stared, her face a little pale. “This has to do with those clubs you’ve been going to.”

  “Shit. You’re spying on me.”

  “I have to keep an eye on you. For operational security. Nothing too close, but I need to keep us safe.”

  “I’m not one of your victims. I don’t need saving,” Igloo said. “I know how to take care of myself.”

  “Do you?” Angie slid the tank aside. “You’re black and blue. You have welts everywhere.”

  “It’s play,” Igloo said, pulling away, and putting her back to the wall. “It’s fun. It’s a release. It’s taking—”

  “Fun?” Angie said. “It’s mixed up in your head. You’re justifying what’s being done to you. Essie did this?”

  “It’s not about Essie. It’s no one in particular. Sometimes I’m the top, sometimes I’m the bottom. This is how I play with people. I like the cathartic release of being beaten. I like letting go of control, letting someone else be in charge. But honestly, I don’t spend all day psychoanalyzing myself. It’s just the way I’m wired, and I accept this about myself.”

  “Wired? Or conditioned to associate abuse with love?”

  “Oh, Jeez. It’s not abuse. It has as much in common with abuse as practicing judo has with a street mugging.” Oh God, now she was quoting that old boyfriend. “We’re consenting adults, fully aware of what we’re doing.”