Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Pluto walked into the waiting area, which was furnished like a high-end hotel lobby, and shrugged his bag off onto a leather club chair. He seemed to have packed for a long trip. He sat down across from Corvallis and Maeve, who were in a love seat, just zoning out, not daring to look at the Miasma. Instead of greeting them, or even making eye contact, he opened up his laptop and pulled on a pair of reading glasses.

  “Presbyopia has caught up with you, I see,” Corvallis said.

  Maeve startled, and tensed; she hadn’t realized that this new guy and Corvallis knew each other.

  “It would be unusual for one of my age not to have it!” Pluto scoffed.

  Maeve had been sprawled back with her head resting on Corvallis’s outstretched arm, but she now sat up, the better to pay notice to this interloper.

  Corvallis remembered, now, that back in the old days, the key persons at Corporation 9592 had made use of an iPhone app that enabled them to track each other’s locations on a map. It saved a lot of messing around with text messages whose sole purpose was to establish someone’s whereabouts. Corvallis had shared his location with Dodge and with Pluto. Dodge was dead. Pluto he had forgotten about. He made a mental note to turn the feature off. Not that he didn’t trust Pluto. But it was bad practice to just dumbly leave that stuff running.

  “Your luggage is of impressive size and weight,” Corvallis observed, “and I note you have purchased a new sun hat.” For the price tag, and the tiny documentation booklet, were still dangling from Pluto’s headwear.

  “Because of the ozone hole,” Pluto began, in a cadence suggesting he had a lot to say about it.

  Maeve interrupted him, though. “This person is coming with us?”

  “His name is Pluto,” Corvallis said. Then, before Pluto could correct the error, he amended his statement: “Nickname, I meant to say.”

  Pluto seemed to finish whatever business he had been conducting on his laptop and peered over the lenses of his reading glasses at Maeve’s legs. Pluto’s general habit was to stare at people’s shoes when he was talking to them, and so Corvallis interpreted this as Pluto’s gearing up to engage in conversation. Maeve saw it as gawking at her prostheses. Corvallis, whose arm was still draped around behind Maeve, reached down to give her shoulder a squeeze and a pat.

  “It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet,” Pluto said, “and so I am here to destroy it.”

  “Destroy what?” Corvallis inquired.

  “The Internet,” Pluto said. “Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t work over the Pacific Ocean.”

  Pluto sighed. “Then it will have to wait until we have reached Australia.”

  “I didn’t like your friend at first,” Maeve said, “but I’m warming up to him.”

  “That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation.”

  “It’s already destroyed, haven’t you seen a bloody thing?”

  “It is not sufficiently destroyed yet,” Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop. “The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand. Peak traffic occurred yesterday, at four point five kiloBradens.”

  “What’s a kiloBraden?” asked Maeve, taking a personal interest since her last name was Braden.

  “A Braden is a unit of measurement I coined for my own purposes, equal to the number of hostile posts made in an interval of one hour. It has now slumped to just over one hundred Bradens as the focal point of the attack has shifted to your mother and . . .” Pluto’s brow furrowed as he read something from the screen. “Someone called Lady?”

  “Her Lhasa apso,” Maeve sighed. For the dog had been heard yapping incessantly on the soundtrack of Maeve’s mother’s front-stoop press conference, and was now receiving death threats.

  “Anyway, we need to get that up into the megaBraden or preferably the gigaBraden range in order to achieve saturation,” Pluto intoned, “and we need much wider ontic coverage.”

  “Ontic?” Corvallis asked, so Maeve wouldn’t have to.

  The jet’s pilot entered through the door that communicated with the tarmac and gazed at Corvallis in an expectant way. “One more,” Corvallis told him, since there’d be paperwork. To Pluto he said, “Passport?” and then regretted it.

  “A passport and a visa are required for entry to—” Pluto began, a little confounded by the question.

  “Never mind. He has a passport and a visa,” Corvallis called to the pilot.

  After they had walked to the plane and got settled into their seats, Pluto resumed the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “This kind of thing has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed,” he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. “Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn’t get us anywhere because it’s language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—”

  “We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.

  “‘Slut,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘hag,’ ‘fatty,’ all the bases need to be covered. If we generate traffic in the gigaBraden range—which I think is easily doable—but it’s all skewed toward, say, ‘feminazi,’ then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot—”

  “I think we get the idea,” Corvallis said.

  “—why, then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole.”

  “Pluto, we sort of missed the part where you explained the whole premise of what you’re doing,” Corvallis said.

  “I’m glad you said so,” said Maeve, “because I was wondering if I had blacked out.”

  “What I’m gathering is that you have been developing some kind of bots or something . . .”

  “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. “I took the liberty of drawing up a logo.”

  “Please don’t show us programmer art, Pluto, it’s not—” But it was too late, as Pluto had swiveled his laptop around to display an unbelievably terrible drawing of an animal that was just barely recognizable as some kind of ape. One shaggy arm had its knuckles on the ground, the other was whipping overhead as it hurled a large, dripping gob of shit. Wavy lines radiated from the projectile as a way of indicating that it smelled bad. It was even more terrible than most of Pluto’s programmer art, but he was smiling broadly and even sort of looking at them, which counted for something. Worse yet, Maeve liked it, and laughed. Corvallis hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.

  “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.

  “What do you mean, arbitrary?” Maeve asked.

  “As many as he wants,” Corvallis said.

  “As many as I want.”

  “Don’t they cost money or something?”

  Pluto looked startled for a moment, then laughed.

  “Pluto has ten times as much money as I do,” Corvallis said.

  “Nineteen,” Pluto corrected him, “you don’t know about some of the interesting tradin
g strategies I have been pursuing.” Redirecting his attention from Corvallis’s shoes to Maeve’s prosthetic legs, he went on, “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”

  “Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.

  “Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.

  “You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

  “Yes. It worked unexpectedly well. So, another part of the strategy might be to spawn a large number of nonexistent harassment targets and deploy APEs against them as well. I just thought of that.”

  “You said earlier you needed my complicity,” Maeve said. “My permission.”

  “Yes, what I would like to do is run a troop of APEs at something like a gigaBraden for a couple of weeks, directed at you.”

  “So if I understand the math,” Corvallis said, “during that whole time, a billion defamatory posts would be made every hour, personally directed against Maeve. Denouncing her as every kind of bad thing you have included in your ontology of execration. In all languages as well as using imagery. And on all kinds of social media outlets.”

  “Her Wikipedia entry alone,” Pluto said, “would be edited a thousand times during the first tenth of a second. New material would be added describing Maeve’s career as a pirate, murderess, sex worker, headhunter, terrorist, and coprophage. By that point the entry will probably have been locked by the administrators, but not before all of the defamatory material is archived in the page history. Meanwhile my APEs will be spawning hundreds of thousands of new accounts on social media systems, and using those accounts to make millions of posts in a similar vein. Existing botnets will be leveraged to generate a colossal spam campaign. The Twitter attack will proceed in three phases. Phase Zero is already under way, in a sense, and consists of—”

  “Why do you need my complicity?” Maeve asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s polite of you to ask, but . . .”

  “It’s an open campaign. We would announce it. Publish statistics on how it’s going. You could do press interviews, if you wanted. The sheer magnitude of it would make it obvious, even to the most credulous user of the Miasma, that it was all a bunch of nonsense. Afterward, no one in their right mind would ever believe anything negative about you that had ever been posted on the Miasma. But because it is all technically slanderous, you would have to promise not to sue me.”

  “Didn’t you say, when you first came in, that you were going to destroy the Internet? The Miasma?” Maeve asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How does this accomplish that?”

  “I am going to open-source all of the tools for spawning APEs and running troops of them,” Pluto explained. “Combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, this will make it possible for anyone in the world to spawn an APE troop for pennies, and manage their activities from an app.”

  Corvallis raised a finger. “I work for Lyke,” he pointed out. “If your APEs are setting up fake accounts and hurling shit on Lyke, it’s a problem for me.”

  “An opportunity,” Pluto insisted. “It’s an opportunity for Lyke to differentiate itself from those old-school platforms that, in the wake of Moab, can never again be trusted.”

  “Are you responsible for the Moab hoax?” Corvallis asked him flat-out. The idea had only just occurred to him.

  “No.”

  “Did you have anything to do with it at all?”

  “No. Which is weird because whoever did do it thinks like I do in a lot of ways. But, I try to draw the line at anything where people die.”

  “You’ve been working on this for a while,” Maeve said. “No one could create all of what you’ve described in a few days. I don’t care how good a programmer you are.”

  “That is correct. I have been working on different parts of it ever since I retired from Corporation 9592.”

  “Two years ago,” Corvallis said, for Maeve’s benefit. “And now you’re just being opportunistic. The aftermath of Moab is the perfect time for you to launch this.”

  “And the perfect time,” Pluto insisted, “for your company to set itself apart from the competition.”

  Maeve thought she had better sleep on it. Which was actually possible, on a business jet flying across the Pacific Ocean. She slept soundly for nine hours, which somehow gave Corvallis the premonition that she was going to say yes. Consequently, he slept poorly indeed, lying next to her making mental checklists of every action he was going to have to take as soon as they reached a place where he could connect to the Internet. The technical side of it was going to be easy; Lyke’s engineers, forewarned, could hack together some processes that would filter out most APE traffic. The legal aspect was what kept him awake, largely because it was out of his domain and there was nothing he could do about it save come up with half-baked nightmare scenarios and then worry about them.

  He calmed down somewhat when he talked to Pluto. Pluto, as it turned out, had for a couple of years been employing several lawyers full-time, looking for ways to set this thing up so that he wouldn’t run afoul of any of the laws that had been established to inflict draconian punishments on persons identified as hackers.

  In one sense, APEs had been decades in the making. In a tightly compressed, fast-forward style of discourse, Pluto reminded Corvallis of a lot of history that he already vaguely knew. Pluto, as it turned out, was part of a loose group of like-minded persons calling itself ENSU: the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking. The APE was his personal baby but others had been working on it too, cross-breeding his code with filter-evading, CAPTCHA-spoofing spambots built to flood Wikipedia with bogus edits and Amazon with fake product reviews.

  ENSU’s vision in the long term was noble and beautiful: they wanted to make a new thing called the Trusted Internet. Short term, the way they wanted to get there was to bury every old-school blog in fake comments, follow every legitimate Twitter account with a thousand fake ones, clone and spoof every Facebook page with digital myrmidons, and bide their time for weeks or months before suddenly filling their victims’ feeds with garbage.

  “I can see why you hired lawyers,” Corvallis remarked after he’d heard that.

  Pluto chuckled. “Only for the APE part of it. There are many participants on the ENSU list. Some more extreme than others.”

  “And all anonymous, untraceable, et cetera.”

  “Well, we use PURDAH.”

  Corvallis sighed. “I’ll bite. What is PURDAH?”

  Pluto was delighted that he had asked. “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”

  Corvallis leaned back and thought about it for a bit. Some parts of it were obvious, others less so. “How does holography enter into it? That’s a way of making three-dimensional pictures, right?”

  “That’s the modern usage. It’s a very old word. Academically, ‘holograph’ means a manuscript written entirely in one hand.”

  “One hand?”

  “Manu. Script. Hand. Writing,” Pluto said, incredulous at his slowness. “How can you tell if an ancient manuscript was written entirely by one person? The handwriting is the same all the way through, that’s how. The author’s name might not be known, but you can identify them, in a sense, by their handwriting—with greater certainty than could ever be conferred by their name alone.”

  “I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.”

  “It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manus
cript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.”

  “So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’”

  “Documents or any other kind of digital activity,” Pluto corrected him.

  “And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—”

  “Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod.

  “Run the whole thing by me again?”

  “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”

  “It’s just an anonymous ID,” Corvallis said, “dressed up with a fancy name.”

  “Well, yes and no. Anonymous IDs aren’t registered anywhere. PURDAHs are registered using a distributed ledger, so their veracity can be checked anytime, by anyone. ‘Unseverable’ means that no one can take it away from you, as long as you take reasonable precautions.”

  “And Personal?”

  “Just there to make the acronym work out, I guess,” Pluto said. “But each PURDAH is linked to a ‘person’ in the legal sense of that term, meaning a human being, or a legal person like a corporation.”

  “So anyway,” Corvallis guessed, “all of the people involved in this Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking are talking to each other and posting documents using some kind of PURDAH system.”

  “It’s not very systematic. Really clunky to use. We could use some help from an investor to clean it up, put a UI on it.”

  “Pluto, you just told me a few hours ago that you have nineteen times as much money as I do, why don’t you fucking invest in it?”

  “It’s not in my wheelhouse.”

  Corvallis sighed. “Here’s what I’m getting at, Pluto. This thing that just happened? The Moab hoax? It was really well done. Like, eerily well pulled off. I mean, maybe when we’re done sifting through the wreckage we’ll find a place where they put a foot wrong, but overall, it was a masterpiece. I’m wondering who is smart and well organized enough to do something like that.”