The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  It was supposed to look like a giant hand with a raised middle finger pointed at the Patriot Palace. If you squinted, it kinda looked like that. The Empire State Building was the middle finger. The wreckage of world monuments was supposed to compose the other fingers of the enormous hand.

  He wasn’t an artist, he thought to himself. But they’ll get the point, he was sure.

  The security forces were within hundred yards. In addition to logging out a targeted avatar, a guard’s tap would also reveal a user’s profile name and IP address, and that’s where the true danger lay.

  Orion touched the air to materialize a new window. A floating menu appeared in front of him with the words Log Off in red.

  “I think we’ve created enough chaos today,” he said.

  But when he pushed the text, there was no response. The menu froze. He pushed again, and nothing happened.

  “Diana, are you seeing this?”

  “It looks like a glitch caused by the new administrator panel. I told you I needed time to test these privileges.”

  The details of the flying patrol car were visible now, he could see the faces of two guards through the windshield.

  “Now is not a great time for ‘I told you so.’ You win. Can you force a log out by cutting the connection or turning off my headset?”

  “Your headset is battery powered and doesn’t have a remote toggle for wireless connectivity.”

  “Shit,” he breathed out. My name, he thought. They would never stop looking for him if the guards got his name and IP address. The Sharesquare execs would find out. The government would hunt him down forever. Orion turned and started to run.

  It was an open field though, there wasn’t anywhere to go. The patrol craft, built like a physics-denying Ford Mustang, was closing the distance forty yards behind him.

  “What if I took the headset off and smashed it with my foot, Diana?”

  “Smashing the hardware won’t necessarily remove every trace of your credentials. You might just leave your avatar here, paralyzed.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he panted, pumping his arms.

  Orion waved open the administration construction window again as he ran. That menu still worked. He could still build.

  The sirens were whooping just behind him now.

  “Halt! User, you have violated the rules of the Patriot Palace. Please do not resist,” a steely voice, magnified like a megaphone, called out.

  Flicking through the carousel of options, Orion selected a thumbnail image of the Mall of America. Four floors, 530 stores, and eleven thrill rides and roller coasters, said the listing. Shooting a glance over his shoulder, he flung the Mall into existence in the air between him and the patrol car.

  The structure appeared more than fifty feet off the ground. It went soaring across the field and then crashing with a thunder that nearly shook Orion off his feet.

  But the patrol car had swerved just as the building left Orion’s fingers, and the security officers were already making up the lost ground.

  “Diana, can you hack whatever cell tower my headset is connected to? Take it down?”

  “Yes, that could work. I’ll run a denial of service attack. Just give me time.”

  Orion swiped through the carousel once more. He needed a place to hide. Then he found a thumbnail of the San Diego Zoo, a $130 million-dollar purchase for a lay user—one of the most expensive available—and he tapped it and tossed the creation into the field in front of him.

  A blue grid of the zoo materialized and stretched to the horizon. It was enormous. The texture of a golden lion statue filled in. Leafy trees burst into life on all sides and an expansive sidewalk materialized beneath his feet. There was the sound of a brass band playing somewhere. It was one of the world’s most celebrated zoos in all its glory. Large glass aviaries rose into the air to his left, but he veered towards the right, to an enclosed reptile exhibit.

  Somewhere in front of him, a pair of digital lemurs was swinging and hooting excitedly behind thick glass. But then his avatar was struck by the bumper of the patrol car, and the impact sent him sprawling to the ground. Inside his headset, Orion watched the zoo all around him spin.

  “Diana…” he began, trying to help his avatar find his bearings as he dealt with the disorientation. Users can’t be hurt in Sharebox, but they can certainly get pushed around.

  “Halt, user. You are in violation of Patriot Palace rules,” came the voice again.

  They were dismounted now. Two identical male avatars wearing sunglasses and police uniforms were running over to him.

  “A few more seconds, Michael,” said Diana.

  “No, I have to smash the headset,” he argued, his voice starting to crack with fear. “They’ve almost got me.”

  Orion’s avatar finally scrambled to his feet, but one of the officers had caught him by the arm and pinned him to a door with a colorful iguana printed on it.

  “I’ll hold him, you tap him,” the officer barked to his partner.

  “Diana, it has be now, or I need to smash it.”

  “Wait one more second,” she said.

  “Diana, goddamnit—”

  The second officer hurried over as Orion struggled with the first. There was only so much self-defense a user can do in a haptic suit. He shoved, he punched, but the first guard’s grip held him tight. Then the second officer was reaching out with two fingers, looking for the spot just below his chin.

  But when the officer’s fingertips were still a handful of inches away, the screen went black.

  White letters appeared.

  Logged Off – Network Connection Failed

  Orion caught his breath, realizing that his heart was slamming in his ribcage. He pulled the headset from his face and stood there for a moment. He was back on the savannah grass in the warm afternoon sun, feeling unbalanced as Sharebox users often did in the first few moments of returning to their real lives. They even had a name for it: net hangover.

  “That was close.”

  “That was childish,” Diana’s voice came from the black box.

  “Well,” said Orion while running a hand through his sandy hair and regaining his balance. “I think it underscores the notion that we probably should develop some kind of strategy.”

  Orion walked back into the ranch after sunset that evening. Most of the hands were just finishing up dinner. Charlotte was seated at the end of the table in the dining hall—a large space flanked by the trunks of the massive red Mulanje beams holding the straw ceiling in place. She and Moyenda were talking with heads bowed.

  “We’ll hang on,” Charlotte was whispering. “Less problems with predators this year, and the rains might come early.”

  “If the money problems take a turn for the worse again, we should tell staff,” Moyenda said, trying not to look too grim as his eyes darted around to everyone at the table.

  “I know,” Charlotte replied, resigned. “I know. Let’s wait and see.”

  Njemile had cooked up mkhwani that evening—pumpkin leaves and tomatoes fried with peanut flour—to accompany an American-style beef stew that Charlotte often requested. Stews helped the limited meat supplies stretch farther, and they reminded her of home.

  No one looked up when Orion walked in, so he quietly made for the kitchen.

  “Njemile, you’re an artist, this looks amazing,” he flashed her a roguish smile and leaned on the countertop beside her. “You should be cooking in one of those five-star hotels up the lake.”

  “Sometimes you lay the sweetness on too thick, Orion,” she said reprovingly, but her eyes lit up under his compliment.

  “May I help myself to a plate?”

  “You’re late,” she said, bending over a stack of platters in the sink.

  “Oh, I can clean up those dishes when I’m done.”

  She turned to face him an
d crossed her arms. “You got a lot of hustle, mzungu. A lot of charm. I don’t know how much sense you got.”

  “I just got caught up in the garden this afternoon.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You think if you work hard enough in that garden the mistress is going to like you?”

  Orion smiled.

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “Not to the Miss. But she doesn’t like to trust.”

  “All this hustle couldn’t hurt though, right?”

  Njemile walked over to him, handed him a plate of food and gave his cheeks an affectionate squeeze.

  “You keep at it.”

  Orion took a seat back at the dining hall and began shoveling down his stew. Moyenda called out over the table as the last few ranch hands began rising from their seats with empty plates.

  “Miss Boone needs to go down to Lilongwe tomorrow to get her visa renewed,” Moyenda said. “Who is available to drive her?”

  It was a three-hour trip across bumpy roads, and the ranch hands looked awkwardly between each other, no one leaping at the offer.

  “How about the mzungu takes her?” Njemile said from the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed. She caught Orion’s eye and gave him a wink.

  Charlotte made eye contact for the first time that night with Orion, who was in the middle of chewing through a hot bite of zebu loin. She raised an eyebrow, and Moyenda looked at him expectantly.

  “Yea, dab be great,” said Orion with a full mouth, trying and failing to swallow a bite while a trickle of stew ran out the corner of his mouth. He grabbed a napkin to clean his face.

  Charlotte looked at him with skepticism, but there was something else there too. Amusement? Orion always came off so graceful and confident. So it seemed to please her to see him caught off his guard, without his usual swagger, at least this once.

  She looked at Moyenda, who shrugged at her.

  “Have the car ready by nine tomorrow,” Charlotte called over the table to Orion. Then she walked out of the room.

  After

  Charlotte Boone. Darnell couldn’t believe it. His first assignment as a Sharesquare employee took him traveling to one of the most remote places in the world—to the African bush. Here he thought they’d find perhaps some elite squad of hackers hiding in a bunker. Or maybe some kind of high-tech wiz kid who got lucky and tripped the wrong wire on Sharebox’s security protocols. Instead they found his generation’s most celebrated entertainment icon.

  Darnell’s first bunkmate in the Army had hung a poster of Boone wearing this yellow bikini from one of her first breakout films. He stole glances at it all the time. It was impossible not to. And she was just as beautiful in person too. Darnell watched her ride out at dawn from the ranch stables through the lens of a pair of long-range binoculars; her red hair was wrapped in a tight ponytail, her eyes a flash of emerald.

  But Malawi? Why Malawi?

  When the accident happened, when Diana’s crimes were unmasked to the world, when the Hollywood elites fled the country out of fear of reprisal, everyone had expected Charlotte Boone to stay. She wasn’t like the rest of them, women would say to each other in hair salons as they gossiped and crowed over the exodus of the smug liberals whose politics they disliked so much but whose acting they had quite enjoyed. Charlotte had never spoken a word on a political or social issue before.

  She’s one of us, people concluded from her notable omission from these campaigns. So even though Charlotte spent her summers sailing on the south coast of France, even though she Instagrammed her evenings dining in the most exclusive restaurants in the world and consuming champagne that costs thousands of dollars, blue-collared townspeople in rundown, rural America from the Rust Belt to the Appalachians to the Midwest would still point at their television screens and say, she’s one of us.

  But when the accident happened, Charlotte left too, and everybody who had vouched for her was disappointed. Adding insult to injury, her disappearance was absolute. She hadn’t fled with the flock of celebrities who aimed to rebuild Hollywood outside of Prague; she hadn’t made a single public appearance. Her old friends assumed she was biding her time, that she was waiting for things to blow over before she would decide where to go or what side to pick. They tried to play it down and say that she was just being the same Charlotte she had always been—the one who always took a cautious approach to maintaining her uncontroversial appeal.

  But it had been a couple years now, and here she was, still hiding at the edge of the world. Could she really be the hacker? It didn’t make sense.

  “Even if she’s not the one trying to break into Sharebox, we should still expose her,” Arlo said from behind Darnell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could have inherited all of Hollywood when everyone else left. She could have been the queen of the castle, but she apparently was just another elitist scumbag like the rest of them. And a coward.” Arlo spat on the ground. “We should tell the world where she’s been hiding.”

  There was a radio technician there too. He was a quiet man who walked around with a laptop and a small satellite receiver. There was no doubt, he said. The person behind the string of malicious (and successful) security attacks against Sharebox was within a four-mile radius of the ranch house.

  Peering through his lens, Darnell saw another person, a white foreigner, emerge from the house. He tossed a satchel into the passenger seat of a small, green pickup truck. Arlo jerked the binoculars from Darnell’s face and hastily held them up to his eyes. He stared at the white stranger for a while. Then he laughed.

  “I know this man. He is definitely the hacker. Oh my, he will be quite a catch.” He grinned and his tongue darted out between his lips.

  Arlo always seemed to be smiling. It was a cold grin that did not reach his eyes, and it struck Darnell as unnerving, almost inhuman. Serving extremist political causes had impressed upon Arlo the urgency to appear at all times accommodating and nonthreatening to the people he met. It was a thin veneer tended to give a palatable first impression, to make his hatred feel less frightening and more mainstream to the people he encountered. If you could make people who are full of hate seem likeable, maybe you could change the way people think about hate itself. That was the reasoning. And smiling was important. Arlo’s mother taught him that when he was just a boy. Everybody likes a person with a nice smile and a sharp haircut.

  On their journey to Malawi, through long plane rides and car trips over central Africa, Darnell and Arlo spoke little to each other. Darnell believed in his country. His steadfast faith in the United States had driven him to enlist in the Army, it had compelled him to accept the president’s invitation to serve as a guest at the State of the Union, and it empowered him to tell his story of troubled-urban-youth-turned-hero at speaking events hosted by pundits at the Patriot Palace. He wasn’t a very political person, but what Arlo’s history of youth activism represented to Darnell was something else, something more extreme. And Darnell didn’t know for sure if Arlo’s people were all racists or Nazis, or just some of them. Either way, Arlo represented a subculture that disgusted Darnell.

  They had only one meaningful exchange on the plane ride from Tangier to Lilongwe. Arlo started by asking Darnell about the day of the attack on the Chicago train station, but Darnell quickly changed the subject.

  “What drove you to take a job at Sharesquare Industries?” he asked instead.

  “The world is changing fast these days,” Arlo responded, staring out a window, a smile ever on his face. “Things are speeding up. It will be harder than ever in this country to not be rich. Working for the largest tech company is the best thing you can do to protect yourself.”

  This answer surprised Darnell. “What are you afraid is going to happen?”

  “It’s what’s already happening,” Arlo turned and blinked at him. “Fewer jobs, higher education costs. Only the people with
money, the big money, get a say in the government and get a say in the media we consume. Look at Sharebox itself. Only those who can afford it get the power to build there. The rest of us are nothing, nobodies, no voices, and we’re locked into that. At least by working with the company, I’m on the inside of it all.”

  “You sound like a Sharebox critic.”

  Arlo rolled his eyes and his strained smile dissipated. “And you sound like the kind of guy who likes his world black and white. I almost envy that. You’re a simple guy. You believe in things because people tell you that you should believe in them. But just because people call me a Nazi doesn’t mean I’m blind to the way the real world works.”

  “Then why are you involved in right-wing politics?”

  Arlo sniggered and turned back to facing his window.

  “Well, I can tell you I’m not in it for their economic theory.”

  That’s all they said. They contented themselves to sitting in silence for the rest of the flight.

  Now they were hiding in a thicket in the African wilderness. They had been fending off mosquitoes for the better part of three hours as they squatted on the side of a hill observing the ranch house.

  “They’re leaving,” Arlo said.

  The white foreigner and Charlotte Boone, who had returned her horse to the stables, were climbing into the green pickup.

  “Tell me if the signal moves with them,” Arlo ordered the technician. “Fast,” he added with a menacing undertone.

  The technician started at his laptop for another minute. He mopped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief from his pocket.

  “Yes,” the technician finally said. “Whatever device is hacking Sharebox, it’s currently on the move.”