Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  This had been goddamn puzzling for McDean and his crew. What idiot, what fucking moron could possibly be not just willing but eager to get shot at by a well-armed loon?

  Yet the answer seemed to be—Americans. Lots of Americans. Most Americans, in fact.

  It’d taken McDean some time to figure it out. Since the turn of the century, America’s media had been constantly telling Americans that they weren’t safe, because that was what people wanted to hear: the human brain had evolved to prioritize threats, so they instantly migrated to them. This meant the news gave them all the threats they could have possibly wanted to hear—anything for a click or a ratings bump.

  Eventually, Americans had gotten so conditioned that they couldn’t conceive of an America without constant danger. They saw people shooting on the news, screaming on the news, dying on the news, and they’d started to believe—this is just ordinary life. And it was up to you to deal with it.

  Which generally explains how people react to Vigilance. If you’re an American, and you hear someone you know or love got wiped out on McDean’s show, your response isn’t “How on Earth can ONT be allowed to kill our own citizens?”

  Instead, it’s “Why didn’t that dumb fuck have a gun and shoot back? Why wasn’t he prepared? Why wasn’t he vigilant?”

  More than anyone alive, John McDean knows America isn’t a place you live in—not anymore. It’s a place you survive. And such a place is highly monetizable for Our Nation’s Truth.

  Business at the South Tavern was already at a crawl, but with the looming specter of an impending Vigilance, it abruptly and thoroughly dies.

  “Maybe a good thing,” says Raphael’s voice softly over her shoulder. “All these boys going to be trapped in here. Ain’t no one going out tonight.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think this happened before. They gonna buy a lot of beer and tip like fools.” He sniffs.

  “I don’t want Randy sleeping here tonight,” she says, eyeing him slumped in the corner.

  “Randy gonna Randy,” says Raphael. “Not much you can do about that.”

  Together they glance out at the street and see it rapidly emptying. “But it could be good,” he continues. Then he adds, “Provided it don’t happen here.”

  Delyna looks over the South Tavern regulars and suddenly feels that this is not at all a good thing. They are mostly all white, frustrated, drunk, and armed—a combination that would make any unarmed black woman uneasy.

  But she knows that even if she were armed, she’d find little solace in it. Delyna took many lessons from her father, but the ones he taught on firearms burn bright in her mind these days.

  So, you have a gun. But having a gun doesn’t make you a decent shooter any more than holding a football makes you a damn quarterback. Once you got it—do you train with it? Every week? Take classes? Clean it, care for it, maintain it, and train some more? Even then, do you really think you’ll be equipped to act lethally with it? Who knows? A gun is just a tool, Delyna. It’s like a hammer or a saw. Its use is more here—he’d tapped the side of his head then—than here, he said, holding up his trigger finger, crooking the knuckles. Then he’d dropped into cop-speech: To use a firearm wisely is about training to be cognizant of your environment and those moving within it, and learning the decision paths that lead you to use that firearm. A firearm should provoke analysis and thought, not action. Or that’s how it should be, at least. But thinkin’ is something more and more people seem goddamn reluctant to do these days.

  She remembers how he looked as he gave that speech, sitting on the edge of his bed with his shoes off, his uniform shirt unbuttoned. As a young girl, she’d always imagined her father more as a divine force than a man, especially when he wore the uniform. Those moments of almost forbidden vulnerability stay close with her now.

  She remembers the sound of that knock in the night. Her mother’s footsteps, the creak of the door. Then the dreadful wailing.

  As a child, Delyna had always been vaguely aware that her father might get killed in the line of duty. Yet it had never, ever, ever occurred to her that he might get shot and killed by another cop. But that was how it’d gone down: a botched collar, a chase through dark streets, some police officer peering into the shadows and spying the silhouette of a man with a gun—maybe a black man with a gun?—and lighting him up.

  The police department paid her family a good bit of money and sternly warned them not to sue. The officer who did the shooting was suspended but not fired.

  Delyna’s mother took the hint. They moved away and tried to forget.

  Delyna is still trying.

  She stands behind the bar and watches the white boys twitch and whisper and softly whoop as they discuss what’s coming, playing out lethal fantasies in their minds.

  She doesn’t regret not having a gun tonight. Her father’s life had taught her that the odds of her doing any good with it were miserably low, and the odds of it getting her killed were very, very high.

  McDean walks into the conference room, and instantly the monitors inside flick on. Tiny cameras in the corners read his face, his movements, and identify him; then the monitors communicate with the ONT calendars, find his appointment, and start the video call, all without him doing a thing or saying a word.

  McDean sits and watches as the cartoonish ONT video-call logo pops up and bounces around on the screens, waiting for someone on the other end to pick up. He watches it like a cat watching a goldfish bob around in a tank.

  He hates this. He hates talking to Hopper and Kruse. It’s like summoning the dead—and, in some ways, it almost really is.

  There’s a pleasant bloop! sound. McDean looks up, and one of the monitors switches abruptly to a feed of what looks like a corpse in a hospital bed.

  The corpse is fat and bulging, especially around the arms and hips, and it has countless tubes running into its graying, wrinkled body, into its arms, its neck, its ears. The corpse wears a specially made piece of hospital clothing to cover up most of its torso and its genitals—if it even has any anymore, McDean isn’t sure. A huge plastic mask covered in blinking buttons conceals the lower half of its face—this component is an especially dense network of tubes.

  Then the chest twitches. The corpse’s trembling hand rises, and it gently tugs the mask away, revealing a quivering, wet mouth full of yellow teeth. The corpse coughs and bellows in a raspy, country twang: “Goddamn it, McDean! I’m gettin’ trickles that you ain’t gonna go for the goddamn train station, and I swear to fuckin’ Christ, boy, I do not want to hear that shit!”

  “Good evening, Mr. Hopper,” says McDean calmly. McDean isn’t surprised to discover Hopper’s already heard how they’re leaning. Bryce Perry is a favorite of Hopper’s, so usually everything Perry hears finds its way back to Hopper eventually.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ good evening me,” snaps Hopper, “you greasy little marketing shit! This is gonna be the fourth Vigilance in a fuckin’ row that don’t do what I fuckin’ want it to do!”

  “We’ve studied the environment, a—”

  “Studied how? With your goddamn heads stuffed so far up your goddamn asses that you could kiss your fuckin’ livers?”

  “ . . . and the metrics are not looking great on the train station as a Vigilance environment,” says McDean. “The law enforcement presence there is simply overwhelming.”

  “Then hire soldiers!” snarls Hopper. “Real ones! Put on a good goddamn show!”

  “Other ONT affiliates have tried that,” says McDean. “It significantly hurt TMAs. We’re not sure how—we’ve dedicated hours of study to this, though so far the results have been inconclusive—but our core demographics can tell when the shooters or shooting is inauthentic. And they do not like it.”

  “You mean we can generate anything under the fuckin’ sun except a dumbass with a rifle?” asks Hopper.

  “It seems,” says McDean evenly, “that there are still limits to the technology. And there are second-order effects, too. Re
al shooters from real life generate far more social media buzz than someone groomed or planted. It’s a very powerful branding exercise, with lasting, durable market impressions, the value of which totals in the billions.”

  Hopper glares into the ceiling as he considers it. “Fuckin’ television,” he says. “Sometimes I wished I kept my ass in oil.”

  McDean frankly wishes the same. Wayne Hogget Hopper is perhaps the last remaining oil tycoon in the nation, if not the world. It was Hopper who pioneered the development of the autonomous frack rig, a massive behemoth of a robot that mindlessly trundles across the West, sensing oil and gas buried in the earth and extracting it like a giant, billion-dollar mosquito. That’s the only way to get oil out of America anymore, since so much of the land keeps burning.

  But the world is not interested in America’s oil anymore. China banned all internal combustion engines in the late 2020s, and Europe and India and the rest of the world followed suit soon after. All of this, of course, was made possible by China’s advanced factories, which pumped out electric cars, self-driving electric cars, and even self-driving flying electric cars.

  They definitely don’t have any of those in America. Mostly due to Hopper, and men like him, who went well out of their way to block such technologies. Though he’s one of ONT’s major shareholders, Hopper remains an oil man at heart, and he’s intent on seeing America keep using it. Hence his desire to see train stations and public transit get attacked in every Vigilance.

  McDean doesn’t understand the source of this desire, really. Hopper is both very, very wealthy, and very, very dying. Why a dollar more or a barrel more of oil matters to him is beyond the inkling of marketing men like McDean. Maybe that was just capitalism—always expanding, even in death. Or maybe this world simply belongs to men like Hopper, and always would, even in their death throes.

  “So, what the hell you goin’ to do, then?” asks Hopper.

  “We’re looking at a mall,” says McDean.

  “A mall? Again?”

  “It scores very highly on the target map.”

  “Why don’t we just do a fuckin’ rerun, then?” says Hopper. “Do they still do those on your streaming platform or whatever you call it?”

  “We’ll know our situation when we see the TMAs,” says McDean. “And if Perseph can do what Kruse says it can do . . .”

  Hopper laughs lowly. “Who the fuck knows. Goddamn, son . . . I know it’s a video call, but every time that freaky queer speaks, I swear I smell the cum on his breath.”

  McDean scrupulously avoids commenting.

  “Is he the boy or the girl, though?” muses Hopper aloud. “The fucker or the fuckee? Who’s shooting whose wad in whose mouth, is what I guess I’m askin’ he—”

  To McDean’s relief, there’s a second bloop! and another monitor switches to a feed of a strangely ageless-looking man wearing a perfectly white suit, sitting in a perfectly black chair in a perfectly white room.

  “Hallo?” says this new arrival. “John? John? Can you hear me correctly, please?”

  McDean tries not to wince as he watches Hans-Joachim Kruse speak. He’s not sure what’s worse to look at—Kruse’s face or Hopper’s body. Kruse is probably about the same age as Hopper, but he’s subjected his body to so many radical treatments and surgeries and drugs that he no longer registers as fully human to McDean’s eyes, so oddly pale and wet and gleaming and yet stiff. He’s like a mannequin stuffed into a stitched-together sleeve of human skin, with a swatch of black-haired scalp delicately placed atop the skull.

  “We can goddamn hear you, yes,” says Hopper. “Didn’t you design this shit? Doesn’t it always work?”

  Kruse blinks, unimpressed. The movement makes an unnerving click sound. “Hallo, Wayne,” says Kruse. “John, hallo, hallo—how long do we have?”

  “We’ve got a little over an hour until the peak window closes, Mr. Kruse,” says McDean.

  “What in hell does that mean, again?” says Hopper.

  “It means our traffic forecasts show the number of people at the two remaining potential environments will peak in the next hour,” says McDean. “After that, each environment offers diminishing returns. Our forecasts get more accurate the closer they get to the peak. We’ll have about a fifteen-minute heads-up.”

  “Ain’t these the same traffic models that said the rodeo would have three thousand fuckin’ people?” asks Hopper.

  “Ah,” says McDean. “I’ll have to check on that, sir.”

  “John,” says Kruse. “I am showing that Perseph is fully loaded and ready for engagement, yes?”

  “Correct, Mr. Kruse,” says McDean.

  “Excellent,” says Kruse. “Good. Once activated, our data show it should create a very strong viewer affinity. Perfect for Vigilance.” He considers his phrasing, his thin lips (very thin lips) twitching. “Unless I am mistaken, it will cause actual, physical pain for viewers to look away once Perseph is engaged. What environment have you selected?”

  “The mall, Mr. Kruse. At least, that’s where things are trending.”

  Another blink, another awful click. “Good. Very good! Then we will have a baseline against which we can validate Perseph’s performance, since you do malls so very often.”

  “It’s good that we’re goin’ with another goddamn mall?” says Hopper, baffled.

  “For the purposes of testing Perseph, yes,” says Kruse. “We can compare target market activation levels to the last few mall events, and calibrate Perseph’s affinities accordingly.”

  “I’m worried about damaging our relationship with our audience,” says McDean. “Too many malls, and people won’t be coming back.”

  “You do not understand, John,” says Kruse. His German-accented English is as crisp and cold as a scalpel fresh from an alcohol wash. “With technology like Perseph, the content will no longer matter.”

  McDean tries to mask his discomfort. He’s tried to articulate his concerns before, but Hans-Joachim Kruse is not a creature with any aptitude for concern. A former Silicon Valley titan, Kruse invested hugely in machine learning and neural networks when the technology was still in its nascent stages, and he is used to moving in bold, visionary strokes, sometimes describing his goals in quasi-religious tones, like he is the last surviving disciple of an order of priests.

  McDean knows that the reality is different. Kruse is not as bloodless as he seems. The man’s taken out entire legions of competitors either by burying them under lawsuits or hacking into them and destroying them from the inside. His flair for petty sadism is legendary: McDean’s heard stories about Kruse’s hack team driving a waiter to suicide just because the guy fucked up a salad order. Knowing that the man who funds most of ONT’s technology also happens to have a voracious appetite for cruelty has a wearing effect on a man’s mind.

  Especially since Kruse’s people developed this new tool—Perseph. McDean knows his own work’s been revolutionary in his time at ONT: no one else has designed and placed advertising content better in the company’s history, scientifically crafting signals and entertainment to assault the human brain. But he hadn’t been aware that Kruse has been using his own processes and work to teach an AI.

  Yet it makes sense—the more you can boil reality down to numbers and images, the easier it is for an AI to consume it, digest it, and learn from it.

  And McDean’s work, of course, is nothing but numbers and images.

  He isn’t sure what the entity known as Perseph does. No one did, really. No one knows how AIs work these days, except maybe the AIs that built them. But presumably, Perseph can do what McDean does, only better. Far better. And individualized, too: Perseph can learn who is watching their feeds, review what they like, and drop weaponized advertisements and copy right into the feeds, specifically designed to batter their thoughts—or that is the gist of it, at least.

  From what Kruse has described, it isn’t quite mind control. But it’s close.

  “Much of our research was inspired by gambling addicts,”
says Kruse. He licks his lips—his tongue, McDean notes, is a pale shade of yellow. “This expectation that if you just keep watching, keep refreshing, something wonderful will happen. It is this anticipation that Perseph has learned to capture, to stretch and distort beyond a second and into an hour, two hours, three, like a tantric practitioner prolonging an orgasm for half a day.”

  “That a fucked up way of sayin’ sex sells?” asks Hopper.

  “You will not want to activate Perseph until Vigilance has activated the peak number of visitors,” says Kruse. “It can be a . . . disorienting thing to drop in on. They must be watching, and then it must be activated.”

  “It’s still going to just look like regular television . . . right, Mr. Kruse?” asks McDean.

  “Uhhh.” Kruse has to think about it. “Quite possibly.”

  McDean considers his next comment. “Once Perseph has been given a successful test run . . . will I be able to view the research then?”

  Kruse blinks once more, another horrid click—it sounds like someone smacking their lips, like his eyelids make suction. “Now, John,” he says. “You know I cannot give you any insight into our research.”

  He sighs inwardly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Not without piling you under NDAs.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And unfortunately, all of the legal algos that manage ONT’s contracts specifically forbid you from signing external NDAs.”

  “Didn’t you design those, too?” says Hopper.

  Kruse waves a hand dismissively. His wrist pokes out from his sleeve—it’s as thin as a candlestick. “They were probably designed by another system. These things happen.”

  “Black boxes inside of black boxes,” says McDean quietly.

  “What was that?” asks Kruse.

  “Nothing, Mr. Kruse.” McDean’s guts flutter unpleasantly. He does not want to piss off Kruse—but he can’t share the man’s blithe confidence when it comes to subjecting his entire audience to a subliminal AI about which he knows fucking nothing at all. He’s heard Kruse’s people conduct tests on prisoners, and the thought horrifies him: prisoners don’t share the same race and economic backgrounds of any of his primary demographics at all. The population’s all wrong! If that’s his sample, then it’s skewed, utterly fucked! This could decimate his TMAs.