PARANOIA A1 The Computer is Your Friend

by MacGuffin, WJ; Hanrahan, Gareth; Varney, Allen; Ingber, Greg

  The metaphor, Jerome realized, was escaping him.

  But Jerome was smart enough to see the truth. Given time, he was confident he could outwit the three Roys. They’d escalated to violence faster than anticipated, but that could be dealt with, although coming up with a cunning plan by lunch was pushing it. Getting the file from Peter-B’s office was a bigger issue.

  Another article of faith, on a separate paper scrap, held that everyone could be manipulated. There was no hermetic traitor – even someone who secretly espoused a really out-there philosophy, like a Sierra Clubber who wanted to return to the Outdoors, must pretend to be a good citizen, and so could be motivated by appeals to patriotism. Often traitors were especially vulnerable to such appeals, as they try to cloak their treason in obsequious, cloying, overly enthusiastic loyalty. Jerome’s system depending on identifying the most effective levers and, well, levering them. Give him a place to spy, and he would blackmail the world.

  Peter-B was the exception. After months of observing Peter, Jerome still found him a perfectly smooth sphere without the slightest hint of a lever. Everyone else had flaws, ambitions, agendas, dark secrets, or just personal opinions Jerome could use, leverage, and finally turn against them. Peter had nothing. He lived his life in strict accord with regulations. He never took risks or missed deadlines. He never stuck his neck out for anything, never made a decision that wasn’t ratified by a dozen fact-finding committees. It wasn’t that he was noticeably loyal, either. Jerome could have applied his techniques to fervent patriotism, but Peter approached loyalty as he approached everything else: with a fixed determination to conform exactly to what was expected of him, and no more. With frustration and perhaps a little fear, Jerome acknowledged Peter’s astounding powers of deception. Behind that spongy, buffoonish exterior, his boss concealed a mind like a steel trap and the survival instincts of a mutant cockroach.

  Threat Obfuscation was within walking distance of his quarters if he cut across the SMO Sector Conformity Is Fun Multifunctional Public Space. The huge, hangar-like room was crowded this morning, as INFRARED workers and their RED supervisors got the place ready for some kind of event. At one end, a scaffold for a screen stood half-finished, while overhead they’d strung steel cables for bunting and banners. Internal Security troopers in green armor—GREEN goons, IntSec’s all-purpose muscle—pushed through the crowd with bomb detectors and chem-sniffers.

  Jerome stepped past an ORANGE technician who was arguing with a newly-installed vendobot. “You’ll go where I put you.” The technician wrestled the machine up against the wall.

  “Everyone will be looking at the stage,” the machine whined. “I should be up at that end. You’re impeding my ability to sell Bouncy Bubble Beverage.” Almost every appliance in Alpha Complex had a bot brain in it, for the convenience and happiness of citizens. (At least, for the convenience and happiness of citizens working in the lucrative bot brain industry. If you just wanted to buy a can of Bouncy Bubble Beverage with a minimum of arguments and existential vending-machine angst, you were out of luck.)

  ATTENTION CITIZENS, THIS IS A SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS SECTOR MAY BE TARGETED BY COMMIE MUTANT TRAITOR TERRORISTS. REPORT ANY SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR, SUSPECT PACKAGES, OR OTHER POTENTIAL THREATS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

  The Computer’s announcement galvanized the IntSec goons into action. They started checking the credentials of every citizen trying to leave the Multifunctional Public Space. It was like putting a bar magnet into a tray of iron filings, if the filings spontaneously organized into a very, very long queue. Attempting to pull rank would only make Internal Security suspicious—only citizens of BLUE Clearance or higher could breeze through checkpoints. As Jerome crept towards the exit, he felt time ticking away.

  To no one in particular, he said, “I like my kneecaps.”

  —————

  TEN YEARCYCLES AGO....

  Celeste-O described her work as “data mine hygiene.” The lower clearances were denied virtually all information, but the higher clearances suffered the opposite problem: too much data coming at them from every direction. Millions of security cameras, hidden mikes, informants and spies and counter-spies, surveillance reports and rumors and traffic analyses, and on top of all that, a middle class of clerks, analysts, advisors and bureaucrats so desperate to justify their positions they could extract a 50-page threat report from a single word picked up by a surveillance bug. Sorting signals from noise was close to impossible.

  Celeste worked with data miners who tried to identify patterns in the data. Too often they went insane, making connections seemingly at random. She explained it to Jerome-R at one of their clandestine meetings.

  “Situation: You are a data miner. You have identified a group of traitors using a code to communicate.” Celeste spoke in a clipped monotone, and rarely looked directly at Jerome. When she did, she watched him as though from the far end of a telescope, like an explorer analyzing the strange natives of Alpha Complex. She looked quite nice, with sculpted features, black hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a trim figure suited for much higher-clearance clothing than her baggy orange jumpsuit. When she first recruited him, Jerome assumed she had some scheme in mind. It took him several months before he realized she was, in some distant way, lonely.

  “What’s the code?”

  “A simple color-based code. A limited number of words or phrases are encoded as color-band pairs or triplets. Red/yellow might mean ‘meeting,’ red/red signifies ‘we are being watched,’ and so on. Yellow/yellow means ‘do not trust what I am saying to you.’ The traitors can transmit covert messages as color patterns in conversation, or post notices in some fashion—say, if they control a laundromat, they can fill different dryers with jumpsuits of the appropriate color. Any traitor passing the laundromat can see the message ‘bomb-making meeting next Twosday—high security,’ but everyone else just sees a row of dryers.”

  Celeste pointed to the band of red paint along the cafeteria floor. “One of our analysts cracks this code. He can now read the traitors’ hidden messages. However, color pairs are everywhere in Alpha Complex. Look—the two of us form an orange/red color, signifying ‘Threesday.’ The data miner knows the code but not the context in which to apply it, so Alpha Complex becomes a cacophony of secret messages. Every time he sees a pair of colored objects, his mind instinctively ‘translates’ it.”

  Jerome-R sipped his CoffeeLyke. He’d learned if you waited until it was no longer searing hot, then swallowed without tasting, you could get most of the caffeine without the lingering sensation of burnt plastic. “I can see how that would be distracting.”

  “Distracting!” Celeste-O conveyed emotion not with the tone of her voice, but with her unnaturally mobile eyebrows. “It’s maddening. Rapidly, pareidolia sets in. With the sheer number of random color-pairs, it’s inevitable some will appear strangely significant. The analyst comes to believe someone is trying to communicate with him via, say, the arrangement of flavored CruncheeTym snack packets in a vending machine or the shoes worn by transbot commuters. The analyst becomes useless.”

  “And then you come in.” He always enjoyed his conversations with Celeste. He never let his guard down completely, of course—there was every possibility she was an IntSec provocateur—but if this strange creature was an actress sent to entrap him, they’d done a masterful if eccentric job.

  Celeste nodded. “Precisely. My role is to debrief the deranged and extract any useful insights I can.”

  “Ever get anything useful?”

  “Officially, no. However—” Celeste stole a sidelong glance at Jerome. “I began to discern certain patterns in the data. I found I could draw parallels between techniques, match rumors—”

  “Someone’s trying to communicate with you via insane data miners?”

  “No, of course not,” she said hurriedly. “I haven’t thought that in months. No, I’ve developed—well, am developing—a set of techniques for identifying modes of treason and deception, f
or finding commonalities among conspiratorial structures.”

  Jerome wasn’t sure if he was feinting to determine if she was an IntSec agent, or—for the first time in his life—expressing genuine trust. Regardless, he found himself confessing. “Ever since I was a Junior Citizen, I’ve always felt there was a big conspiracy out there, behind everything. I’ve never known where to start looking.”

  Four citizens sat down nearby: red/yellow/red/orange. Celeste-O watched them through her telescope.

  Then, for the first time, she looked directly at Jerome. “I think you’re right.”

  3: Threat Obfuscation

  Threat Obfuscation is a natural response to standard information-security protocols. Say you, a high-ranking Internal Security coordinator, have just found out those dastardly Communists are about to attack the main airlock in Sector XYZ. You send heavily armed agents down to the airlock to zap the Commies, right?

  But wait—what if there’s a Commie spy in your employ? If you dispatch your agents to the airlock to arrest the Commies, the spy tips off the enemy and they’ll change their plans. But if you don’t order your agents down to the airlock, XYZ will be overrun by borscht-eating socialists and The Computer will start asking awkward questions like WHEN DID YOU FIRST REALIZE YOU WERE CRIMINALLY INCOMPETENT? You’ve got to position your agents without—and this is the tricky bit—without your own agents knowing about it.

  Enter the Department of Threat Obfuscation.

  Threat Obfuscation creates a new fake threat for your agents to investigate that just happens to be right next door to the airlock. So you tell all your agents they’re investigating the Airlock Technician Drug Smuggling Ring, the Commie spy never realizes you’re onto their evil plot, the Commies get zapped, and you get promoted! Bonus Hot Fun rations for all, right?

  But wait, wait! What if there’s also a Commie spy in Threat Obfuscation? One well-placed spy there could ruin everything by reporting which threats are real and which are fake. The only rational solution, obviously, is to feed everything produced by Threat Obfuscation back into Threat Obfuscation a few times, so no one knows if the real threat is the Airlock Technician Drug Smugglers or Dangerous Toxins Carried In From Outdoors or the Communists or Citizens Driven Mad By Airlocks Changing Their Inner Ear Pressure, It Can Happen You Know or....

  —————

  “Your card, citizen.” Another IntSec guard was stationed at the door of Threat Obfuscation. That was unusual. The department didn’t normally rate a door guard.

  Jerome-G swiped his ME Card through the scanner. It bleeped twice. The guard seemed satisfied with the first bleep and disconcerted by the second, but he let Jerome past without questions. Glancing around the office, Jerome instantly picked up on the tension. Frightened faces with fixed plastic smiles watched him as he walked to his cubicle. A half-dozen IntSec troopers guarded other exits, and another two stood at the entrance to Peter-B’s office. The last time there’d been this much security presence at Threat Obfuscation was when they came to arrest Celeste-B.

  Betraying nothing, he kept his head down and went straight to his desk.

  The office was a testament to the many threats its workers had imagined:

  – The office light was dim and yellowish. The ceiling lights were low-power, low-mercury plastic tubing, because (as everybody knows) a random power surge can make fluorescent glass bulbs explode, driving glass shards into your eyes and mercury vapor into your lungs, blinding you, permanently damaging your nervous system, and causing lifelong chronic or recurrent tremors in your limbs, though this isn’t quite so much a nuisance as you might think because your life expectancy is quartered. Newly assigned workers suffered eyestrain and headaches until they started bringing in mini-flash handheld lights. You know, though, the batteries in those things can explode at any second.

  – Each desk was bulletproof, of course, and a worker could, on ten seconds’ notice, simply pull down a sliding panel to reconfigure the desk’s underside as a fully enclosed bomb shelter. Unfortunately the panel mechanism tended to jam, trapping the worker until freed by some outside agency with (usually) a welding torch. Jerome-G had heard stories of workers trapped until death from thirst, which just proved anything could go wrong at any time.

  – Under a pilot program coordinated with Research & Design service firm ChairBag Safety RD, many Threat Obfuscation desk chairs were equipped with experimental airbags. Though workers were unconvinced of the danger of Unpredictable Massive Seating-Product Wheel Failure, they liked the airbags for their quieting effect on office arguments. The jerk who used to pound the arm of his chair now merely tapped an irate finger on the desktop, though of course that only left said worker open to the non-negligible peril of bacterial contaminants under the fingernails, no really, you don’t know what cleansers the scrubots use, you could get that stuff under a nail, absently lick your finger or pick your nose, and next thing you know a docbot is transplanting your liver. Even desktop finger-tapping now merited a warning poster: DON’T BE A SAP, STOP THAT TAP! Really, it just made sense.

  Jerome enjoyed his job. Unlike virtually every other assignment in Alpha Complex, Threat Obfuscation had a little creativity and a little power. When he heard The Computer make a security announcement about one of his invented threats, it gave him a conspiratorial thrill. For that single moment, he was on the inside; if the conspiracy was invincible and omniscient, they’d never have let him rise to his current clearance. Every time they used one of his obfuscations, they revealed their vulnerability and foreshadowed their inevitable defeat.

  When she was in charge, Celeste appreciated creative threats; they’d done great work together. Losing her was such a shame. All Peter wanted to do was repeat the same few standard threats over and over.

  The morning’s C-mail cascaded across the screen. Trivial announcements about revised Fear Quotas, a proposal for a new Unspecified Free-Floating Anxiety Index, fiddling directives about proper capitalization, another round of employee hygiene mandates, and more security reminders about watching for Commie spies.

  Next he scanned his actual work-related mail, looking for an excuse to visit Peter’s office. Maybe he could propose a bomb threat at a product launch? No, he’d done that one last week. Pitch a few rumors of sentient boot fungus? Mutants tunneling in from the Underplex?

  A hand landed on his shoulder—a big, callused hand with a firm grip, the sort of grip that fits equally well around a truncheon or a suspect’s neck. This was an Internal Security hand and a “you’re a Citizen of Interest” grip.

  He looked up. Three quarters of the way up the hand’s arm he saw a green armband with the motto SECURITY THROUGH VIGILANCE and the logo of a watchful eye. He skipped over the shoulder part of the tour to the helmeted head. Flat, much-broken nose—scarred lantern jaw with stubble—deep-set dead eyes—yes, that was an IntSec face. “Jerome-G?”

  From his repertoire of mandatory smiles Jerome selected the most bland and inoffensive example. “Can I help you, officer?”

  “This way.” The guard marched Jerome across the office to Peter’s door. It wasn’t really the way he’d wanted to meet with his boss, but as excuses went, this one was convincing.

  Peter-B, a small fat black-haired man seated behind a big fat blue-painted desk, looked even more anxious than usual. His doughy cheeks glistened with cold sweat, and he was constantly licking his pale, pouted lips. Though he kept his posture exactly within regulated limits, he somehow managed to quiver.

  Jerome looked up at a shelf behind Peter’s head. There sat the folder of threat data—the data that could save Jerome’s kneecaps.

  On the couch in the corner sat another Internal Security officer, this one dressed in a snappy BLUE-clearance uniform instead of armor. The officer—his badge read Hayden-B—examined Jerome as one examines a stray hair in a bowl of soysoup.

  On the far wall was a huge teleconferencing monitor, and onscreen was—uh-oh—a VIOLET executive. VIOLETs were unimaginably senior figures; to have o
ne here, even virtually, implied a crisis. The youngish man had a long face, sculpted features, and hair that looked like every strand had been engineered to fit his head. Behind his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes were inhumanly bright, his pupils the pinpricks of a man high on adrenaline, ambition, and a whole dispensary of high-clearance drugs. Every few seconds, his gaze flickered away from the camera to some other screen; he was watching a dozen similar teleconferencing feeds at once.

  “Jerome-G reporting as ordered, friends, and may I say it is an honor to address such respected citizens.” Bootlicking wasn’t his forte, but it never hurt to try. The VIOLET glanced at Jerome and snorted.

  Peter leaned forward. His voice quavered. “Look, Jerome-G, just answer their questions, and none of your nonsense. –He thinks he’s smarter than me.”

  The last remark was directed at Hayden-B, who nodded. “He probably is. Traitors often display a high level of intelligence. Tell me, Jerome-G, what do you know about the League of Free Bots?”

  “They’re a conspiracy of renegade bots who plot to overthrow The Computer’s glorious regime.”

  “Is that all?”

  Jerome steeled himself. “That is all the information available through standard channels, officer.”

  “Under Mandate ISPM 102.14/c, this matter is now a security concern.”

  “In that case, friend Hayden-B, I can reveal that the League of Free Bots is a threat obfuscation generated in this office.”

  “What about the Transtube Pirates?”

  “The same.”

  “Sentient boot fungus.”

  “Er, yes.” Though that one hadn’t really flown. Not his best work.

  “The Humanists.”

  “Traitors, sir. A genuine threat, not obfuscated.” The Humanists were one of the oldest and most insidious conspiracies in Alpha Complex. They were dedicated to subjugating The Computer and establishing a new government of and by humans.

  “Do you have any previous association with known Humanists?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a matter of record.”