PARANOIA A1 The Computer is Your Friend
Page 12
Jerome—thin, balding, with a ratlike face that looked frozen in the precise moment of nitpicking about a misspelled answer on a survey form—was looking around goggle-eyed at the office. The room was probably eight times the size of the quarters he shared with—what would it be, at YELLOW?—at least one other citizen. The chairs, optimized for ergonomics as opposed to speed of construction; the shelves lined with art objects; the drink dispenser that dispensed drinkable drinks; the complete absence of the smell of burning electrical insulation—the place was, by the standards of the lower clearances, palatial. And this was just one room of several.
By the standards of the higher clearances, of course, the whole BLUE suite was a cramped hellhole. Ascension to those levels would happen, Granville told himself. One clearance at a time.
Celeste waited patiently in another chair, with a large folder of papers in her lap. Granville could never shake the suspicion Celeste was an advanced android, dispatched by some mysterious alien intelligence to spy on Alpha Complex. Her black hair was too perfectly pinned, her breathing too regular, her frame and features trim but just a bit off. Her eyes, like her vast intellect, were icy and clinical.
Out of the corner of his eye, Granville checked his security camera. It wasn’t part of The Computer’s surveillance network; he’d installed it himself. He disliked leaving these intruders unwatched, even for a minute. The timing of that IntSec officer’s visit made him suspicious. Too convenient, too suggestive of conspiracy.
He smiled. “Let’s keep this exquisitely short, shall we? In fact, if you could just leave and send me your questions in the form of a memo, that would be ideal.” Eeeeeyedeeeeauuul.
“Firstly,” Celeste began, “something of a delicate matter regarding your physical location. Certain individuals raised the question of—”
Jerome interrupted her. “Are you ever visiting the office again?”
Granville concealed his distaste. “Oh, certainly. In, um—the fullness of time. However, I hardly need to breathe down your necks, do I? We can handle everything through C-mail and telepresence. Physicality is so—intrusive.” He gestured towards the bank of monitors and computer consoles on his desk.
Jerome examined the tangle of wires and cables that connected Granville’s computer system to the official complex-wide data network, AlphaNet. “If I may say so, friend Granville-B, that’s a fantastic telepresence set-up you’ve got there.” Jerome’s bootlicking wasn’t perfunctory—he genuinely seemed to admire Granville’s console. “I can see why you’d stay here. It’s much nicer than the ThreatObs office—not that the Threat Obfuscation office is anything less than perfect, The Computer designed it so it must be perfect, all hail Friend Computer.”
“Hail The Computer!” Celeste and Granville repeated. At their clearances, they didn’t really worry about random loyalty sweeps, but old habits die hard.
“Yes, well, an executive needs a matching console. It’s got functions you’re not even cleared to know about. I can run my entire life through that system. Is there anything else?” Granville dared to hope they just wanted to gawp at his office.
“Yes,” said Celeste. “The Beatrice-Y situation.”
“Still? Why is that still a problem? I assumed you dealt with it. That is your job, dealing with—” He flapped his hand vaguely. “—Things.”
Granville had never even met Beatrice-Y. She’d worked in the ThreatObs office on something technical and boring he’d never bothered investigating. Her treason had nothing to do with the department—Internal Security discovered she was blackmailing some PLC drone to fund her addiction to happy pills. As far as Granville knew, they terminated the treasonous Beatrice, replacing her with a new clone that was guaranteed to be loyal and drug-free. Why did people keep digging up dead bodies and leaving them on his desk?
(Technically, since Beatrice was atomized in a termination booth, they’d be vacuuming up free-floating carbon molecules and putting a bag of them on his desk. It sounded even more unhygienic.)
“It seems an IntIntSec int-report—Internal Internal Security internal report—about Beatrice was accidentally CCed to CPU’s Department of Memetic Contagion Assessment, and they bumped it up to the Oversight Committee for all DUPES.” Celeste glanced at Jerome. “That’s Deceptive Undercover Procedures Ensuring Security.”
“How high has it gone?”
Celeste hesitated for an instant, and Granville’s stomach turned. “That’s the other issue. The office was working so hard on the new TraceRoute system—”
“A hundred ten percent!” Jerome flashed thumbs-up.
“—that certain things were missed.”
“They fell between the clones,” said Jerome.
Granville was wondering if Jerome’s thumbs-up was a message to some hidden accomplice who’d somehow planted a camera in his secure suite. No. Impossible. His suite was sacrosanct. “Certain—” He glared at his subordinates. “—Things.”
To his surprise, Celeste turned to Jerome. “That is all for now, Jerome-G. Please resume your duties.”
Jerome looked startled but pulled himself reluctantly out of the comfy chair’s embrace. “I suppose TraceRoute won’t write itself.” He nodded to Granville and left. Granville wondered why he’d been here in the first place. It looked like the little nonentity had scarfed down half a bowl of his good licorice pastilles.
Celeste proffered a thick stack of printouts. He brought out his pocket disinfectant spray, then paged through them. Requests for meetings. Requests for records. Increasingly strident demands for meetings to discuss the absence of records. Veiled threats. Explicit threats. Escalations.
“You missed an entire Internal Security inquiry into ThreatObs?” He revised his option of Celeste down, from “brilliant sociopath” to “idiot savant.” And here comes the finger-pointing, he thought.
“Yes. For security reasons,” said Celeste, “they were delivered by pneumatic tube to your office. We were unaware of the situation because no one was there to see them.” Celeste didn’t sound angry or defensive. Her tone was the auditory version of a little red warning light on an industrial machine ready to jam.
Granville’s grip on the papers tightened. If any sufficiently gross incompetence is indistinguishable from treason, he couldn’t tell who was being incompetent here. He micromanaged the entire department from his console. He could tell when employees logged on in the morning and when they logged off, he could correlate CoffeeLyke consumption and bathroom breaks, he could spy on them from any wall-mounted security camera or the dozens of spycams he’d planted—and he’d missed all this.
That, or he’d missed them hiding it from him.
“If I may draw your attention to the last page—”
He flipped to the end, then stopped breathing. Keywords seemed to leap off the page into his optic nerve and assault his motor centers. DELEVAN-I—MEETING—14:00—GRAVE CONCERN—BEATRICE-Y—COOPERATION ASSUMED.
Granville’s head whipped around to his console screen. 13:47. “I’m scheduled to meet Delevan-I? Department-of-Excision-head Delevan-I? In about 15 minutes? And this is the first I know about it?”
Delevan-I wanted to ask him questions about Beatrice-Y, the traitor in Threat Obfuscation. If Delevan-I didn’t like the answers to those questions, then Granville would be terminated. Not immediately, of course—Delevan might be INDIGO, but that didn’t mean he could just send a BLUE to a termination booth. No, it would be a slower death. First Delevan would take Threat Obfuscation away from Granville. They’d shunt him over to Rumor Monitoring or Dissatisfaction Factoring, something harmless where a traitor couldn’t do as much damage. Then, regretfully, they’d demote him to GREEN or YELLOW—then he’d no longer be cleared to enter the corridor to his suite, so they’d take that too. He’d end up in some filthy, germ-ridden barracks, surrounded by mutants and diseased traitors.
Intolerable. Unthinkable.
13:48. In the fullness of time.
He was still gazing blankly at the sc
reen, where a text crawl showed alerts and threats across Alpha Complex mixed with inspiring loyalty slogans.
+++ASH FROM TERRORIST BOMBING MAY CAUSE CANCER+++
+++SMILE CITIZEN+++
+++COMMIE FORCES ATTACK OUTER DEFENSES OF ESA SECTOR+++
+++THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND+++
But he read not a word. He needed something to stop Delevan-I eviscerating him. He needed to shift the blame, or spin the whole debacle so he wound up looking like a hero. He needed to get inside Delevan’s head. He needed a miracle.
“I shall give you time to focus on the upcoming meeting,” said Celeste, rising. “Psychological experiments suggest optimum productivity in a meeting is achievable only if all participants have adequate time to prepare and visualize their goals.”
“Prepare visualize,” Granville muttered. A thought struck. “How close is TraceRoute to completion?”
“All the major subsystems are in place.” Even in casual conversation, Celeste spoke in bullet points. “The sniffer reads the target’s data exhaust—network presence, reading history, statistically significant words in surveillance files—and runs it all through the psych profiler to model the subject’s major fear-triggers and paranoid tendencies.
“If you brought more Mould-B-Gone Quik-Kleen Spray this month than last month, you probably have a fungus problem in your quarters. That makes you measurably more attentive to rumors and news about mutagenic spores, sentient boot fungus, vatslime spills—and we can use that. If we don’t want you to go down a corridor, but can’t order you not to go down that corridor without giving away sensitive information, we just let slip a targeted rumor about how that corridor is warm and moist and fungal.”
Miracle, miracle. “Problems?”
Celeste crossed her arms. “We still have some security holes in the current implementation, but they can be fixed. The major issue remaining is dealing with crossover, where the tailored threats for multiple individuals contradict each other. We’re working on automating ambiguity and procedurally-generated sinister inferences. And—other things,” she added darkly.
“But it works on individuals?”
“Yes. The operator identifies a targets and specifies a desired result. The system will extrapolate the target’s psychological levers from the trail left online, then automatically generate threats to push those levers in the appropriate direction. In testing, it almost always generates better-than-chance results, and effective changes in target behavior 69% of the time.”
“Only 69%?” He looked at the clock. 13:51.
“That’s four times the average success rates for same-stage R&D projects.” She shrugged. “We’re still working on it. You can, of course, review the prototype from your console.”
A 69% chance. Better than nothing. He logged in to the TraceRoute server. “The psychological lever manipulation—in the lab, you do that with videos and subliminal messaging. What’s used in the field?”
“We’re experimenting with multiple vectors. For higher-clearance citizens, we can simply float faked news reports and citizen alerts through our usual channels, and count on sophisticated targets to pull them in unwittingly, via their usual data tools. We’re still working on solutions for the lower clearances. Individually targeted subliminals have proven problematic—assuming you don’t want to drive citizens into a psychotic fugue state.”
Could anyone tell the difference? Irrelevant—he cared about one vengeful INDIGO. “So, I specify the target, whatever the behavior I want, and TraceRoute automatically comes up with threats that’ll make him do what I want?”
“Yes.”
13:53. “How long does it take to build a profile?”
Celeste sounded distracted. “It depends on how much data exhaust is available for sampling. On average, two to four hours.”
No! Vatslime! Could he stall Delevan-I for two to four hours? Impossible. Delevan was a stickler for punctuality. Missing a meeting by 15 minutes would be just as bad as harboring a traitor; missing a meeting by two hours was an express transbot to termination.
“But we’ve already started the profiling process,” Celeste added. “The TraceRoute database includes many high-clearance targets in this sector.”
Granville carefully angled one monitor away from Celeste and ran a search for Delevan-I.
MATCH FOUND.
Miracle. “Celeste, you can go.”
13:54.
—————
The Computer, in its infinite electric wisdom, allocates six (6) clones to every citizen—a Prime body and five backups. In the unlikely event that a citizen is lasered, disintegrated, poisoned, squished, electrocuted, deep fried, terminally polarized, exposed to toxic waste, eaten by giant radioactive mutant cockroaches, or otherwise fatally inconvenienced, the citizen’s memories are transferred at the moment of death to the next vatgrown clone in line. This procedure is entirely safe and never leaves lasting psychological scars.
Higher-clearance citizens are by definition even more valuable to Alpha Complex, so The Computer allocates them extra clones. Unfortunately, after the sixth clone, a mysterious phenomenon sets in—the technical term is replicative fading, colloquially called drift. Both genetic code and personality engrams degrade during the cloning procedure. When the replacement clone is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, the drift produces conspicuous genetic defects—a sign of potential deviance and danger.
On Granville’s main screen, Delevan-I-IYX-14 looked dissatisfied—or certain of his facial sections did. No one element of Delavan’s face was anything other than perfect, but they didn’t fit together. One eye fixed Granville with a basilisk glare; the other wandered and blinked at random. When he inhaled, his nose whistled perceptibly. His pearly white teeth were just a little too small for his mouth, giving the impression he was eternally sucking on something bitter.
“Granville-B!” he croaked. “So happy. I’m sure this will be a brief formality. Just a few ticks to box, you know.”
Granville, seated at the console, moved the keyboard out of the camera’s line of sight. “I’d like to start off by identifying areas of interdepartmental synergy so that this inquiry can ultimately be a learning experience,” said Granville’s mouth. His mouth went on to spout lots of other buzzwords and enthusiastic management code words. He didn’t listen. On another window, he was still elbow-deep in the TraceRoute interface, learning what was where. User-friendliness was not a hallmark of Celeste’s designs.
He had already selected Delevan-I as his target. After staring at a list of “desired actions” for five minutes, he’d figured out these were choices he himself, Granville, wanted Delevan to make. Now he was translating the options from Celeste-speak to Human: Aversion, Deprioritization, Intensification, Pursuit (“specify degree”), Suspicion, Trust (“not currently functional”), and something inscrutably christened Widgetization. He chose Aversion.
“So, this traitor, Beatrice-Y.” On the main screen, Delevan picked up a printout. Granville noticed Delevan had no fingernails. His hand looked like an ill-fitting pink surgical glove. “Rather embarrassing she got a place in such a sensitive department, isn’t it? Questions are being asked, you know. How will this impact the sections you’re supposed to be concealing?” Delevan licked his lips, and a trail of drool ran down the corner of his mouth.
“In the absence of data,” Granville heard his own mouth saying, “our partners may assume this is simply one more false-flag story we planted.” Another dialog box popped up on his second screen, asking what topic he wanted to “sensitize” for Delevan.
>BEATRICE-Y, he typed.
12,043 MATCHES FOUND.
Every citizen has a unique identifier, name—clearance—sector of origin—clone number. He hadn’t given the TraceRoute system Beatrice’s full identifier, so it threw up every “Beatrice.” He couldn’t recall Beatrice-Y’s sector of origin or number, so he typed >BEATRICE-Y-***-* and hit SENSITIZE.
The system whirred. An eyeball ic
on rolled around while the server thought about his request.
“I mean,” Delevan was saying, “what’s the point of a whole department set up to hide things behind scary fake threats if the Commies already have a mole in it? It’s simply not cost-effective.” His left eye beamed hate rays at Granville through the screen. The other eye blinked feverishly.
“Beatrice-Y was an isolated incident, she never had access to any information above YELLOW Clearance, and all obfuscations are GREEN or higher.” Granville checked his secondary monitor. The TraceRoute system was running, drawing on whatever horrors it inferred from Delevan’s data exhaust, wrapping them around Beatrice-Y, and using them to bludgeon Delevan.
Granville tapped into the data stream going to the Alpha Complex news feeds, and his screen filled with a litany of falsified news alerts and rumors.
+++CAPTURED TRAITOR HAD TIES TO CIRCULEX, SAYS INTSEC+++
+++IS INTSEC ALREADY AFTER CIRCULEX LEADERS?+++
+++YOUNG WOMEN BEING CORRUPTED IN GREATER NUMBERS+++
+++WHY IS CIRCULEX HUNTING PEOPLE NAMED “BEATRICE”?+++
He couldn’t see any connection to Delavan—he’d never heard the name “Circulex”—but the search must have unearthed some link deep in the data.
“Well—that—where there’s one traitor, there’s probably—treason—” Delevan trailed off as he looked offscreen, presumably at the same stream of alerts. Beads of sweat appeared in patches on his forehead.
“Very wise, sir.”
“Treasonous—treason.” An expression of horror crossed the sections of Delevan’s face that could express things. “One moment, please.” He leaned offscreen.
Granville thought this was all going rather well. A few more hints, a little more dark foreboding, and Delevan would be too terrified to cause trouble for ThreatObs. TraceRoute worked remarkably well. He’d have to keep an eye on Celeste. She was too valuable to lose, and too clever to be trusted.
A notification window popped up, informing him an IntSec InfoSec Officer wanted to talk to him. He’d never heard of “InfoSec,” but Internal Security reshuffled itself seemingly every few hours. Still, this was hardly the time. He clicked REJECT CALL.