The Word Exchange

by Alena Graedon

  Vernon also suggested that Vera take a bodyguard and warned her not to use a Nautilus or Meme; not to interact with anyone manifesting aphasia; even to avoid sims, telecasts, streams, radios, and phones—although this last suggestion may have been at least in part to protect her from bad news. He also advised that while reading infected messages could potentially be dangerous, reading books, especially those requiring abstract thinking and memory, was actually encouraged: it was thought to be therapeutic.4

  None of us knew then of the disaster that would begin on the night of December 7. But when I proposed that maybe I should go with my mother, Vernon and Dr. Thwaite presciently resisted, saying that as certain Synchronic employees seemed to be looking for me, she and I would both be safer if I stayed on Beekman until I could “escape.”

  The two of them then spent twenty minutes “convincing” me to go to the U.K. We were stived up in the study, surrounded by stacks of books and academic journals: Lexikos, It Beaken, International Journal of Lexicography, talking over Chopin’s Preludes, which hissed from an ancient record player. Dr. Thwaite offered to help me get a passport expedited so I could leave early the next week.5

  “Why the U.K.?” I asked, feigning ignorance. Face aching from the lie.

  “Well, for one, Memes have never been sold legally there,” Dr. Thwaite lectured, “so they have far fewer of them. And far fewer cases of the virus as a result. We all feel we haven’t seen the outbreak’s peak, and that things are likely to get worse before they get better—if they get better.”

  How prophetic those words have come to seem.

  “And Vernon is headed to the U.K., too,” he continued, “to work on a project. He’ll set you up with friends.”

  Like the “friends” Doug is staying with? I nearly said. But didn’t.

  Vernon had been anxious to leave New York during the two days since he’d brought me to Dr. Thwaite’s. Soon after I’d watched on the darkroom monitor as Vern limped from the lobby, he’d gotten a call from Max, just off the set of PI and badly shaken about Johnny. He’d asked Vern to come to SoPo. But when Vern arrived at the bar, Max was belligerently drunk—and barely intelligible for other reasons. He accosted Vern with a handful of Diachronic pamphlets, raving that no one but Vern could know the things they accused, that government investigators had been asking him questions. “Tanee not the only ones,” Floyd added a little coldly. Finally Max yelled, “Don’t chosset the launch! I don’t want to see you zyvo.” Vern had already planned to miss the gala—his ticket to London was for that night—but he tried to reason with Max, calm him down. That, though, was impossible, and Max soon began ranting that if Vern didn’t leave, he’d beat the shit out of him. He spit at Vern. And as Vern headed for the exit, Floyd called, “Watch your back.”

  That turned out to be excellent advice. Vern tried to take the B train home to Fort Greene, but crossing the Manhattan Bridge had proved harrowing: a slim man dressed all in black had sat down right across from him, hand in a pocket with a prominent bulge. In the DeKalb station Vern managed to slip away—he’d been a track star before the accident that wrecked his knee—and board the Manhattan-bound train. Since then he’d been staying at an aunt’s in Harlem. But it didn’t seem safe, and he didn’t like putting his family in danger.

  Vernon was with us that night because he’d come to say goodbye; his flight left in a few hours. He hoped I’d agree to go to the U.K., too, he said, and that he’d see me soon. Tired of my charade, I nodded, consenting to go as soon as I could get a passport.

  That was when a casual remark sparked a pyrotechnical fight.

  Dr. Thwaite asked, offhand, what time Vernon would arrive in Oxford the next day.

  “Not until late,” Vernon complained. “I have a six-hour layover in Montreal.” Then, flexing his long fingers, he added, “But better that than an overnight in Reykjavík.”

  “Wait—what?” I said, ears perking up at mention of the last city in which Doug had been seen.

  Guiltily Vernon glanced away. Took off his glasses to avoid my gaze. Blushingly buffed them. “Nothing,” he said. But by then it was too late: he knew they’d have to tell me.

  “Jesus Christ!” sputtered Dr. Thwaite.

  That was how I learned that Dr. Thwaite had known Doug was in Oxford for weeks—since the night Doug had arrived there, in fact, fresh from Reykjavík, on a private jet owned by Fergus Hedstrom. He’d gotten in late on Saturday, November 17—just one night after he’d gone missing. As the news came to light and I learned they’d kept my father’s whereabouts from me, I became so upset that I surprised myself—and both of them—by throwing the closest thing at hand: a photo of Nadya.

  The frame grazed the desk, flurrying papers before shattering on the floor. Canon erupted in a volley of barking. Dr. Thwaite grimaced. Grimly he bent to try to soothe the dog and collect shards of glass. Reproached, “You led me to believe that you and Max—”

  “That’s not true,” I quickly interjected, turning my back on Vernon so he wouldn’t see my face redden. Crouched to help. Remorseful but no less mad.

  “—and I just wasn’t sure,” Dr. Thwaite was still saying, “if you could be trusted not to say something to Max. Not that I thought you’d betray Douglas on purpose—”

  “Betray him?” I bristled.

  “—and then, when you started showing signs of aphasia, I was afraid that if you and he spoke, that he—he might also be put at risk. Or, even more likely, that he’d be worried enough to come back, which seemed dangerous for him, and perhaps for other members of the Society. And, crucially, that it might jeopardize his efforts in the U.K. So it just seemed best, given the circumstances,” Dr. Thwaite continued, eyeing the large, jagged piece of glass in my hand, “for him to believe that you were perfectly fine and safe. But just … unavailable for a bit. Given the circumstances,” he repeated.

  The circumstances, I pointed out, were that for three weeks I hadn’t known whether my father was dead or alive.

  “I told you he was all right,” Dr. Thwaite muttered, folding a glittering cache of glass into a square of paper. Wearily, he righted himself and placed a trembling hand on Canon’s jouncing back. “Stop that racket,” he said gently to the dog. The upstairs neighbors had started banging. I heard a muffled shout.

  “No,” I rejoined, standing abruptly. Said, maybe louder than I meant to, “You told me you didn’t know where he was.”

  “Please,” Dr. Thwaite said. He looked beseechingly at Vernon, who was fumbling to turn up the record player. “Just be quiet.”

  “Why? You really think Synchronic is monitoring you? You think they have your apartment bugged? You think anyone gives a shit—”

  But Dr. Thwaite had closed the space between us and covered my mouth with his shaking hand. It smelled of camphor and vinegar and Canon. “Yes,” he menacingly hissed in my ear. “That’s exactly what I think. Am I worried about bugs?” he scoffed. “No. Drones.” All at once I understood why he had blackout curtains that were always closed. Music going all the time.

  Later I’d start to believe that his fears were well founded, when we received an unwelcome guest. Later he’d give me a letter that shed light on nearly everything, which he made me vow not to read until I was safely on the plane. But that night, over the sandy sound of glass sucked up by the vacuum and the dolent chords of Chopin, he just reassured me that my father was safe.

  When I asked him what he’d told Doug about why I hadn’t been in touch, he confessed that he’d said I’d gone up to my grandparents’ house in East Hampton before Thanksgiving, to spend a quiet holiday with friends, and had stayed on. It didn’t really make sense as an explanation—the Hamptons aren’t exactly off the grid—but I tried to let it go.

  He also admitted, after a long, crackly pause, that Doug had been expecting me to join him in Oxford for several days. Dr. Thwaite was supposed to have relayed the message that Doug wanted me to fly to meet him.

  I gritted my teeth. Worked to stay calm as I asked Dr.
Thwaite what he’d told Doug to explain my absence. Uncomfortably, he looked from me to Vernon, who was studying the clock. “We told him—I told him,” admitted Dr. Thwaite, “that you hadn’t made up your mind to go.”

  And again I lost it. I couldn’t help myself.

  Dr. Thwaite winced. Placed his hands on his ears. “Yes, I know,” he lamented, face pinched. “But—”

  “Listen,” Vernon cut in. “I’ve really got to go.” He hitched his thumb at the clock.

  Embarrassed, I tried to swallow my anger as we saw Vernon off. I asked him, choking up a little, to give Doug a hug for me. “You can hug him yourself soon,” Vernon said softly, “but okay.” He pressed me close. Then he was gone, departing on what would be one of the last flights out for days. His 787 ascending through mild turbulence as the first revelers arrived at the Future Is Now gala downtown.

  We now know far more, of course, about what happened that night. But at the time we knew only that it was catastrophic.

  After Vernon left, Dr. Thwaite and I sat down to eat—thin tomato soup and cold roast chicken—and silently cleaned the dishes. Then, in his study, I secretly went online.

  I wasn’t watching the gala coverage, but I later learned this was near the time that the party’s live Meaning Master contests and word auction were getting under way. After Synchronic’s two-week publicity blitz, which had started on Black Friday and culminated in Max and Laird’s PI interview two nights before, PI had managed to pull in a surprising number of viewers. Which was especially remarkable given that some must have avoided the broadcast because of infection fears.

  But far more people logged in to the event not through PI but via Synchronic’s websites. Because the real draw for viewers—aka “players”—was the Meaning Master contests: $100,000 each for words deemed most (1) original, (2) efficacious, and (3) “pleasing,” purportedly by players themselves. Millions of people had beamed in to play live during the event using brand-new Nautiluses bought that day, Memes, smart screens, computers, and sims. Perhaps as many as 10 million people, estimates suggest (although at this point it’s of course impossible to know if that number is accurate).

  Anyone could enter the contest, and beaming in new words was free. But popular terms fared best—the more popular, the better. “Liking” a word was cheap, 5 cents per click. Bidding was more of an investment—the ground-floor offer was $25—but helped boost a word above the morass of submissions, considerably increasing one’s chances of winning.

  The official vote was scheduled for nine p.m. EST. But while players feverishly liked and bid on their just-minted “words” in the last minutes leading up to the tally, I was trying to buy a ticket to London. And the web page wouldn’t load. The address field tried to flood blue but aborted. The loading wheel spun and spun, like a lazy Susan. Then a gray phrase appeared: “You are not connected.” Impatient, I clicked to a new page. But home wouldn’t load either.

  “There’s something wrong with your Internet!” I yelled down the hall to Phineas, betraying my infraction. Then I tried to navigate back to the discount ticket page. For a few seconds it appeared clearly, listing Sunday flights from JFK to Heathrow. But there seemed to be an error: a direct flight that left at six a.m. was listed at $12,000. Further down, another, with two layovers, said $6,500. The cheapest one I saw was $3,900, and it was on Inuit Airlines, with a stop overnight. I assumed that the site had been hijacked, especially when it reloaded with prices in yuan. And then, after another minute, refused to load again.

  Confused, not really thinking, I quickly logged on to Life for the first time in weeks, to see if other problems had been reported. And just as Dr. Thwaite hobbled in, irritably grumbling, “What are you shouting?” the feed filled with the most incredible things. Some intelligible—“Is the Internet broken?”; “Can’t access $ in my account!”; “I think I just heard gunfire”; “I see flames”; “Looting on Nostrand”; “hell’s kitchen 2”; “LA”; “herd there clsingthe borders Get out wil u can”—and many more I couldn’t read—“edlesteelest3aHe”; “Kajia S0111”; “acha boo chew”—before the site’s formatting collapsed, language unspooled, and characters deluged the page.

  “Shut the computer off!” Dr. Thwaite commanded. In shock, I hesitated, and he shoved me roughly aside. Ripped the power cord from the wall.

  “W-what’s going on?” I stammered, dazed.

  But Dr. Thwaite didn’t say a word.

  It now seems dangerously naive, but before that night I’d never really believed that an outbreak could turn so quickly into an epidemic: the steadily rising waters abruptly rushing above our heads. That a virus we’d only just learned about—that had by then infected only hundreds of people—could very quickly sicken tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. More. That we could be derailed in other ways: infrastructure wracked. Language devastated. I always thought we’d have time—to prepare our citizens, shut schools, develop more and better treatments. Of course the schools were closed. But by then it was too late.

  On the night of December 7, at 8:57 p.m., just minutes before results of the gala’s Meaning Master contests were meant to be unveiled, all those who’d logged in to play or watch the party on a Synchronic website had received a message on their devices. The same warning appeared on a giant screen projected inside the museum. According to scattered, conflicting reports, it said something like the following:

  We are writing to inform you that this machine has been infected and enlisted as a zombie. It is already being used to destroy language and other tools of the state, and it has been programmed to infect every device in your network, perpetrate attacks, and self-destruct upon completion of these aims. We hope you enjoyed reading this message; it may be the last you read.

  Machines that received this communication were instantly wiped clean of data and shut down, their putative users locked out. Scores of people were also infected—millions, by some estimates, in that one night alone. Some only with a peculiar aphasia. Others with a virulent, life-threatening disease.

  We now believe that Synchronic created what has come to be called the Germ virus several years ago, at the same time that its employees were designing the Aleph—and developing the very first, secret prototype of the Nautilus. The Germ, too, appears to have been a kind of prototype: an early version of the malware Synchronic would later develop far more effectively with Hermes’s help. Like much of Synchronic’s hard- and software, it was designed overseas, in a lab outside Beijing. (It’s speculated that the virus was created in China at least in part to insulate the company from blame—try to shift suspicion to foreign workers if the Germ were ever traced back to Synchronic’s devices.) But it hadn’t worked as Synchronic wanted, it seems, and it had triggered lots of glitches, slowing the Aleph, shuttling users to strange websites. It was also highly contagious, spreading even to machines in which it hadn’t been tested. And it had other unintended effects.

  When it was clear that the Germ experiment had backfired—Brock largely faulted it for the Aleph’s failure, which had badly damaged Synchronic’s reputation, perhaps nearly killed the company—Synchronic worked to eradicate it. They also hurried to release the Meme as quickly as possible. And the whole idea of profit-driven malware was apparently set aside for a long time—until last spring, when Max appeared at exactly the right moment to revive it, arriving opportunistically, like a virus, to exploit a seemingly perfect set of circumstances.

  By then the Meme had been around for years, and users had started to show clear signs of dependence. Synchronic was also preparing to release the Nautilus—likewise long shelved—before Christmas, and executives evidently believed that their new device would further encourage “user-machine integration.” The Word Exchange, too, had become dominant. And when Max came along to pitch Meaning Master to Synchronic, Brock had recognized an opportunity to revitalize his virus. The game seemed like a good delivery system: it could infect every device that played as well as every device with which that device “communicated
.” It also generated neologisms. That was a boon; it meant Synchronic wouldn’t have to hire many word workers, like those I’d seen in the Creatorium. With the game, it could farm the work out: gamers would unseam language themselves. Pay for the privilege, in fact.

  The more the virus proliferated, the more people would visit the Exchange. The more who came, the more, in turn, who would discover Meaning Master and subscribe to the game. The more who played, the more fake terms would be created—and embedded in limns, emails, texts, and beams—and the more people would pay to decrypt them. On and on, in a destructive spiral. That’s how it was supposed to work, and did, when it was released in the first week of November—and for nearly a month before everything was upended.

  There’s a lot we still don’t know about the language virus even now, nearly two months later. But I’ve heard one very cogent hypothesis, explained to me by a postdoc in genetics here—Dr. Barouch, a laconic brunette with luminescent eyes who speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth—and I’ve done my best to outline it as well and faithfully as I can.

  In the human genome there are millions of what she described as “ancient viruses,” called retrotransposons, which exist in each of our cells: teeth, hair, organs, skin. They’re found in many other organisms, too; we inherited them through evolution. Over millions of years, genomes learned to keep these viruses in check with a kind of “genomic immune system.” Antidotes, in a sense, Dr. Barouch said.