Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “It’s a vicious cycle, Jobber.” I’d gotten into the habit of talking with him late at night, using him off label as a therapist. “If I keep working for free, everyone’ll expect me to keep working for free. If I don’t, I’ll still get nothing.”

  “I understand you’re frustrated, Arun. I hear it in your voice. But in my heart I know you’ll find a paying client. Would you like to hear positive testimonials from other social media consultants whose Jobber profiles resemble yours?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “I believe in you, Arun. I see your tremendous potential. My advanced analytics tell me you’re not the quitting type.”

  I put Jobber into sleep mode, tears of frustration—and, okay, maybe gratitude—in my eyes. After two years learning frameworks and platforms that were already obsolete, I felt cooked. Living with my parents and sisters in Casper, I slept in every day, drank too much, and smoked up more frequently than was advisable with friends from my old gen ed playgroup, who were, like me, “structurally unemployed.” But then one day, I woke up. I felt a fire inside. It wasn’t anything particular that lit me up. I just realized that Jobber was right. At bottom, I wasn’t the quitting type. I’d take anything, I swore. No matter how low the work, or how little it paid. You have to start somewhere, right? That’s what Jobber told me, anyway.

  I WORKED EIGHT-HOUR NIGHT shifts, six days a week, making sure BigMachine worked right. It was two hours from home, and it paid shit, but it was a job. The rambling complex was off I-80, a rest stop and Amazon-UPS droneport franchise. You could sometimes catch sight of mechanics in silhouette, quadcopters, tiny zeppelins, and fixed-wing aircraft taking off, landing nonstop. On my side of BigMachine, rigs came in, gassed up, loaded and unloaded cargoes. Truckers, ranging from chunky to obese, drank, ransacked vending machines, in search of diverting calories. Everything at BigMachine was automatic. Well, almost everything. Occasionally, a hose tangled up, an unusually big rat would die in the bathroom, a trucker would collapse drunk on a snooker table with a mighty thud, or a stray drone jammed up with bird poop would drop from the sky. I did what little the robots couldn’t, a poorly paid ghost in the machine.

  The bosses knew me only as a data plot on their management dashboards. Never met or spoke to me. My time was mostly open, as long as hoses behaved, spindly Lucite robot bartenders got orders right, temperamental vending machines belched out their goods to hungry shoppers, and drunken truckers didn’t get too violent. Dimethyl ether fueled trucks; alcohol, people. My consulting career was a nonstarter, so I paid a big chunk of my new income, and burned through my extra time, retraining. Took classes in Microsoft Ampersand and then Iterated C, both at home and during work hours. When classes depressed me too much, I sometimes watched serials, but I never had much love for entertainment media.

  Mostly, I was an eyewitness to the end of the age of the truckers. They told me that their days were numbered now that their rigs were mostly automatic. In the beginning, because robot trucks increased total trucking volume, truckers actually got more work. More trucks meant more legally mandated drivers, manning machines in case of trouble. But robotrucks became more reliable, and corporate lobbyists gathered in Washington. The law couldn’t last. Truckers would eventually have to be sacrificed on the economy’s automating altar.

  I sympathized with them, though my sympathy wasn’t entirely pure-hearted. If the truckers liked me—not just BigMachine, but me as an individual cog of that machine—my performance scores went up, my evals would reflect those scores, and I’d make a bit more money. So though I saw myself in them, those doomed truckers, though they found me genial enough to tell me their troubles, though they liked me enough to like me, I was, basically, whoring myself out for tips. And good at it.

  I was surrounded by friendly folk all night, every night, but Big-Machine was a lonely place. I stopped talking to Jobber, ignored his increasingly urgent messages as my one-year subscription expired. It felt awful, like abandoning a real friend, like Jobber missed me, but I just couldn’t face him. He reminded me of the person I once said I wanted to be.

  EVERY HEAD IN THE bar turned. The truckers were too confused to catcall. Kneeling in a corner, rescuing a reckless cleanbot, I forgot to breathe. When you spend the better part of six months hanging out with cranky middle-aged men, when you haven’t talked to a woman your own age for the better part of a year, that’s how you might react, too. Charlotte Wong came into BigMachine in full intern regalia: blue pleated pants, crisp white shirt, shoes with gold buckles, leather satchel under her arm. Her black bob shone fluorescently. I knew who she had to be. I-80 often gossiped about Johnny Appledrone.

  Johnny was a dronepunk. His custom Volkswagen Camper drove up and down the interstate. Its ruined chassis had been replaced with fabbed hard plas. It had a custom sensor and control pack, which did an okay job at driving the vehicle, though sometimes the system rebooted unexpectedly, and the Camper veered off the road. Johnny was too busy to drive it himself. Was always tinkering in his mobile workshop, tweaking custom code for CAD freeware, making local-brew fabricator feedstock, building and refining drone prototypes, adding to forums, thousands of words a night, they said, spinning drone philosophy with the world community of dronepunks. If you were lucky, you’d see one of his small batches, freshly fabbed, rising from his open moon roof. They looked like hummingbirds, like butterflies, like largish cockroaches, sometimes like flying Wiffle balls, but they were basically airborne router/servers, designed to form mesh networks with like-minded devices.

  © 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

  He was an engineer and an artist, already a legend, to some a hero, to the FAA a menace to the national airspace, which had in the last year become the site of a low-grade war between the agency and those who refused to obey its mandates. No warrant had yet been issued for his arrest. He’d lawyered up pretty good, the ACLU at his back. But the consensus was he couldn’t walk free for long. Johnny was a hippie loser, the truckers said, but whoo-whee! those girls of his? Johnny’s lovely interns? They dressed all Wall Street, were routed to him through the ACLU’s pipeline, were committed to this that or the other thing, but still, wow. Man had some kind of thing for left-wing yuppie ladies.

  “The vending machine,” Charlotte said, nervous, which made me nervous.

  “What seems to be, you know, the trouble?”

  “It . . . It’s better if I show you.”

  I said, “My name’s Arun, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “My name . . .”

  “Charlotte,” she said. “It’s a mess. The machine, I mean. It told me you could help.”

  I FRIENDED HER, DEAR no-nonsense Charlotte. She was a New York City charter-school girl who, by way of Yale and then an ACLU paralegal job, had found Johnny, deferring admission to Columbia Law’s certification program to support his mission. Through her, I met the others. All told similar stories: bubbly Beatrice (Wesleyan), Sandy of the Perpetual Smirk (Vassar), gentle Zara (Brown), and then, when Zara lost her faith, icy Petra (Oberlin). Whenever Johnny’s entourage came through BigMachine, usually just the Camper and a support vehicle or two, Charlotte made a point to stop in, say hi, fab skim lattes for the crew. Johnny himself never left the purple Camper. I saw his browned hands once, carpal tunnel braced, reaching out from the side of the van to take his latte and a bag of Extra Calorie Yum-E Pretzel Chips. His dreaded beard was momentarily visible, as if floating free of his face, and in that moment I imagined him as the love child of a sadhu monk and a survivalist Santa Claus.

  Charlotte mostly (well, okay, only) talked about Johnny’s mission. I’d heard about the Drone Commons from the truckers, but she taught me how it worked. Ordinary computers, ordinary networks—that is, the mediasphere—they’re filtered end to end. You run illegal encryption software, say, or watch a movie without paying, and your phone knows, and the network you’re on knows, and the platform you’re using knows, and the servers those platforms are running on know, and soon eno
ugh the U.S. Department of Intellectual Property Protection, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation know. So you just don’t do it, run the software or steal the movie, I mean, however tempting. The system isn’t 100 percent foolproof, but it works well enough as a deterrent to illegal activity. The feds can always shut down the physical network if there’s real trouble, like they did during that anti-Marriott strike two years ago in Chicago, whose organizers were using illegal encryption to organize the picket line.

  On the Drone Commons, by contrast, nothing’s filtered. No one owns it exactly, or you could say everyone owns it. It’s just out there. Anyone can add devices to it as long as they follow the Staskowski burst transfer protocol. You need a special device to use it, since hacking a locked phone is a Class E felony. But it isn’t hard to find open devices, Charlotte said, showing me hers (it looked like an ordinary phone), as long as it’s made from a legal fabricator. And though it was technically illegal for someone to sell open fabricators, there were hobbyist loopholes, which the dronepunk community exploited.

  Frankly, I didn’t see why you’d defer your life for Johnny, why building the Drone Commons should amount to a near-religious life project, especially when you could use the perfectly good, ordinary mediasphere, what government PSAs called hygienic networks. Yes, the Drone Commons originally grew out of efforts to bring Internet coverage to rural areas, but mediasphere satellites gave better coverage now. And yes, the Commons wasn’t technically illegal, but unless you were up to no good, why would you bother to use it? I didn’t ask.

  I developed a silly crush on Charlotte for a while, but my one-sided ardor faded fast. I realized we’d only ever be friends. Maa had been searching for a nice Indian girl for me to marry, a condition of my living at home. I wouldn’t be single much longer. Better to forget Charlotte and Johnny, the romance of their mobile crusade. It was time to refriend Jobber, to plot my final escape from BigMachine.

  ON MEMORIAL DAY OF that year, Martin Gallagher did what he did. He hacked the computer of his Freightliner D9000, hooked it up to what looked like a standard fifty-three-foot intermodal container that authorities would later determine had been fabbed in an ad hoc compound near Salt Lake City. Filled the container with fertilizer explosive. Drove to downtown Cheyenne, his own hands at the wheel, in control for once. Parked in front of the tallest building in the city, the newly built regional headquarters of the Department of Transportation, which had recently passed Directive 3482, a trial program experimenting with a small fleet of totally driverless trucks. At nine A.M. of that day, after six minutes and thirty-two seconds, during which time security cameras show him sitting stock-still, staring out his windshield, face neutral, he detonated his truck and himself.

  An explosion the equivalent of almost one kiloton near vaporized five city blocks, killing 3,032 souls, injuring ten times as many. It was a miracle more people weren’t killed. At that moment, Charlotte and I were having coffee. I’d gotten off my shift at BigMachine, and she was showing me a new prototype drone Johnny had built. A life-real killdeer, down to the smallest particulars. She controlled it with hand gestures, making it fly around my head, laughing at my discomfort, my bashful refusal to try it for myself. Then came a pop, a rattle. Seconds later, chimes cascaded through every phone in the diner. Charlotte got a message from Johnny and left right then, her coffee unfinished, Johnny’s life-real killdeer drone left for me to dispose of.

  MAA ALWAYS INSISTS I’M a likable guy. You might say my troubles all followed from that fact. Because, you see, Martin Gallagher didn’t like much in his miserable life, but he liked BigMachine, and he liked me. I didn’t make the connection at first—didn’t think to check—but the FBI did.

  “Let me see if I understand you, Arun. You’re saying you don’t remember ever talking to Martin Gallagher?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know.”

  The second suited man: “Ten minutes ago, you seemed sure you didn’t remember him.”

  “But then you showed me that video of us talking, and I kind of . . . I’m just saying it’s pretty clear I did talk to him. I don’t deny it. But so many truckers come through BigMachine. It’s like my job to talk to them.”

  “Your pay partly depends on them liking you,” said the first agent. “Isn’t that the case?”

  “I never said otherwise.”

  “So, tell us, did you ever do anything special to make Martin Gallagher like you?”

  “You saw the video. I unjammed a vending machine for him.”

  “We mean anything else,” said the second. “Because if you can’t remember now, now that we’ve jogged your memory, and we find another video . . .”

  Two special agents sat at our kitchen table, Maa at their side, more afraid than I’ve ever seen her. When you’re on a work visa, you never forget what the bastards can do to you, even if your children are natural-born. The Fourth Amendment cyborg sat very still on our couch in the living room, her eyes flat clouded lenses, tiny wires burrowing into her head sockets, an occasional glance left, right, her movements sudden and odd. Because she had upgraded senses—enhanced vision, superhearing—she bypassed any Reasonable Expectation of Privacy. What her senses recorded was considered admissible evidence. The case law was ambiguous, Charlotte told me later, and the ACLU had been fighting Fourth Amendment cyborgs for years, courts indecisive on the question, no final settlement in sight. But the fact that the cyborg was there at all was a sign that I was of little importance, part of a broad sweep of data collection, no probable cause for a real warrant. Good news, I guess. But the hunt was ruthless. The FBI, agents of the Department of Transportation, and local law enforcement interviewed me six times. Interviews could last all day. When flesh-and-blood agents got bored or tired, they had me talk with interrogation software that directly accessed my biometric feeds. Then I worked all night. I burned through sick days fast, took a day of unpaid leave, spent what little money I had on legal-defense software, used Red Bull Xtreme Dermal Patches to survive savage shifts. I got groggy and irritable, started fighting with my parents and sisters. My work metrics crashed. Just as my legal expenses mounted, my income shriveled up. I couldn’t see the bottom, but I knew that it was coming fast, and that it would hurt like a motherfucker when I hit.

  THE CHEYENNE MASSACRE CHANGED BigMachine. Gallagher had released a video manifesto, a seven-hour soliloquy, a darkly frenzied attack against the Department of Transportation, against automated trucking, suggesting all manner of wild conspiracy theory. When asked, I made a point to say I hadn’t seen it, wasn’t interested in seeing it, and never would be. It was true, too. The truckers weren’t sure how to respond. Everyone hated Gallagher, yes. At the same time, he’d taken action, while they, for all their whining and complaining, sat on their hands, waiting for the end, the day they’d finally be fired. The sympathetic chatter—cloaked beneath tortured disclaimers (“I don’t like what he done, but . . .”)—made me sick. So many died at that monster’s hands. How could anyone say a kind word, offer a single qualification or explanation for his actions, include the word but in any sentence about him? The truckers knew my views, and though they professed to feel the same way, liked me less than they once had, which further savaged my pay. Gallagher’s video was all anyone talked about at BigMachine till the Department of Justice put the kibosh on it. It was material evidence in an ongoing investigation, the press release said. Might contain codes meant for other homegrown terrorists. One day, it was made to vanish from the mediasphere. The truckers, usually an animated lot, even in the darkest times, grew silent, as though they’d gotten some collective memo: Shut the fuck up about Martin Gallagher. Loose chatter was no longer allowed.

  And then one day the secretary of transportation issued a new directive, and the truckers were gone, literally overnight, as if they’d never existed in the first place. Dozens were arrested, up and down the interstate. The entire trucking fleet of the United States of America became fully automated by fiat. Gallagher s
ped up what he’d meant to stop. My zone of BigMachine was now almost human-free. I had almost no work. Trucks still fueled up every hour of every day, guzzling DME, but the vending machines stayed full, and the bar was empty, the Lucite robot bartenders museum-still. My dashboard sometimes stayed green all night. Those green lights no longer signaled my diligence, but prophesied my obsolescence. It was just a matter of time before they let me go.

  The droneport on the other side of the complex, meanwhile, livened up. Gallagher had used the Commons to plan his attack. He had uploaded his manifesto there, and the authorities couldn’t take it down without destroying the physical infrastructure of the mesh network. Newly empowered by Congress, emboldened, the FAA subjected Class G airspace to martial law and policed higher altitudes with a new ruthlessness. The starless sky exploded, night after night. The war was on.

  “JOHNNY NEEDS HELP,” CHARLOTTE said.

  I was wedged between Zara and Sandy in the back of the car. Charlotte and Beatrice faced me from the front seats. We were near Laramie, heading to a diner for an early breakfast. I was starved after a lonely night’s work. It was a bit of a shock when Charlotte, who’d asked to meet me, came with the entire retinue of interns. Four months had passed since the blast. I hadn’t seen any of them. But I’d messaged Charlotte about my situation at BigMachine, told her my job wasn’t likely to last much longer, so they must have known I was desperate.