Orion tried to pursue him to the lower level but found the stairs so choked with people that he began losing ground. As the boy rounded on a second escalator, Orion resolved to take a gamble and leapt over a guardrail, landing on the bottom level of the mall. He fell with a roll, carefully bending his knees and letting the side of his body bear the brunt of the impact as his feet alighted. The thief was only yards ahead of him now; the boy turned around and made eye contact for the first time with Orion, and his eyes went wide with fear.
Arlo and Darnell had been following Orion and Charlotte all morning. Arlo enlisted the boy an hour earlier as his two targets were settling into a cafe and offered the pickpocket more than $800 in U.S. currency in exchange for successfully stealing the satchel and purse. Ultimately, Arlo wanted to catch Orion and quietly extradite him from the country. Sharesquare Industries had given him the mandate, and he had the resources to do it.
But as the movie star and the man calling himself Orion sat there in the open air that morning, Arlo found himself consumed by the opportunity to wrench away the computer or phone or whatever device was being used to actively undermine Sharebox security protocols. It could look like a coincidence if they stole it here, he told himself. And if Arlo’s team had the hardware responsible for the hacking, he could possibly prove Charlotte was involved too. He’d love to bring her back to America in handcuffs, to see her in prison.
Now Orion was closing in on Arlo’s thief, and their impromptu heist was in danger. It had been stupid to hire someone from the street, Darnell had tried to argue. Too much risk and uncertainty. They didn’t know this town or this continent. Bribing a local was sloppy.
“Their truck is on the roof of the parking garage,” Arlo whispered to Darnell as they leaned over the mall stairwell, watching the chase unfold. “If this thief fails us, we’ll take matters into our own hands.”
The boy sprinted through the food court and into a clothing outlet store. He was clutching the satchel and purse in each of his hands, and sweat was now pouring down his face. Everyone’s eyes in the mall were following him and Orion. Here the boy made several missteps that doomed his escape.
He should have gone straight out the employee exit at the back of the store, but instead he hesitated, making a sharp left turn with the hope of shaking his pursuer. Then the thief paused a second too long, straining to peer over the clothes racks to get a sense of his direction, and that was all the time Orion needed.
Orion crashed his body into the teenager, sending the satchel and purse sprawling. The boy was dazed for a moment, lying on the ground and staring upward at the foreigner before he began to scramble backwards. But Orion had no real interest in him or in retribution. He gathered up the satchel and purse, and, without a word directed at the thief, turned back to the exit to find Charlotte.
She was standing near the main mall entrance, watching him from over the guardrail with a dwindling group of Malawians who seemed disappointed that the chase had concluded without further drama. Charlotte’s sunglasses were square on her face, and her eyebrows were raised.
The cynicism was there again, Orion said to himself. She had that look of incredulity on her face, the one she wore whenever they had crossed paths back at the ranch. The look that said, “Now I remember why I don’t trust you.”
“Did you really have to play the hero?” she asked with her arms crossed. “I was enjoying being discrete today.”
“You’re welcome,” Orion said, handing her the purse and still catching his breath. “Let’s get going. We’ve made too big of a scene.”
When they reached the roof of the parking garage, a pale, skinny white man in black jeans and a red leather jacket was there, leaning against the green pickup. The tuft of hair atop his head was generously greased to one side.
It was too much of a coincidence to run into another white man here. Diana had been right. Her successful hacking into Sharebox, after all these years of fruitless attempts, had attracted corporate headquarters’ attention. Now they had sent this man standing here—perhaps a mercenary, maybe even an employee. Orion’s mind raced through his options. His pulse was ringing in his ears, but his hands were steady.
“Let’s see that satchel and purse there, friend,” said the pale man with an unnatural, unyielding smile as Orion and Charlotte approached. The stranger pulled back his jacket to reveal a Glock stuffed into his waistband.
Charlotte stopped dead in her tracks. But Orion, with the intensity and assuredness of someone who had been in similar situations before, someone who had training, kept on moving toward the truck.
He bet the pale man would hesitate, allowing Orion to close the distance and unarm the man before he actually pulled the gun. The pale man looked like a hesitator. Orion was good with faces.
When they were within four feet of one another, the smile disappeared from the stranger’s face.
“Now that’s too close,” he croaked.
And he did indeed reach for the handgun too late.
“No need for that, friend,” Orion remarked. He got a hold of the man’s elbow and shoved it and the gun towards the floor before sending a well-practiced open-handed palm into the stranger’s face. The gun clattered to the ground, and the stranger staggered backwards onto the concrete, landing weakly on his bottom. Orion’s movements were crisp and professional.
“What are you doing, you idiot?” the man shouted, putting a hand to his bloodied nose, his eyes now bulging.
Orion picked up the gun. “We’re leaving now.”
“You!” said the stranger pointing behind Orion. “Shoot them, you moron!”
There was a man standing there clutching another Glock; Orion cursed himself for not noticing him earlier. He was black, but he didn’t look like a local. Something about the way he held himself gave it away. This second mercenary, however, did not raise his gun. He merely stared, frozen, as Orion and Charlotte clambered into their truck and turned on the engine. His eyes looked glassy.
Arlo then got to his feet, his nose still bleeding, and scrambled into his own car, a red Honda civic, angrily shrieking at the paralyzed Darnell as he went. If he could cut off the exit, he could at least keep Orion trapped on the roof.
Orion drove his truck around two rows of cars to reach the exit, but Arlo’s Honda rental was better positioned. Arlo parked his sedan perpendicular to the spiraling ramp which led downwards to the exit, blockading the only way off the roof.
Charlotte glanced at Orion’s face and noted that this new barrier did not appear to have fazed her driver. He didn’t slow as he approached Arlo’s car. Instead, the truck accelerated and slammed into the Honda with alarming speed, once again leaving Arlo dumbstruck by the unflinching violence and confidence of Orion’s attack.
With crunching and screeching, the green truck began pushing the Honda down the spiraling ramp. And when it reached the edge, the bumper of the helpless red sedan began straining the steel cable guardrails that prevented it from falling down a two-story drop.
Orion only halted his vehicular onslaught to put his truck in reverse for thirty yards before shifting back into drive and ramming the red Honda again. A cable guard rail snapped this time as the Honda was thrown against it, and one of Arlo’s tires was now dangling perilously off the side of the building, spinning hopelessly in the air. Arlo stared down at the fatal drop open before his windshield and wet his pants.
“That’s enough!” shouted Charlotte, almost breathlessly. “There’s enough space for us to go around him now.”
“As you wish,” Orion answered.
He pulled alongside the precarious Honda, a terrified Arlo staring at them from the driver’s seat as the truck window rolled down.
“Don’t follow us,” Orion said to him. He took the Glock he had confiscated, switched the safety off, and then extended his arm out the window and fired a round into the front right tire of the Honda. Then th
e truck sped off and headed out of the city.
Before
Sharebox had only been live for two months before the criticisms began to roll in. Ironically, most of the criticism came in the form of content housed on Sharebox itself. No one could escape using it. The world’s top auction websites, commerce, and movie streaming services all scrambled to house parts of their own apps on the platform because that’s where all their users were spending more and more of their time. Sharesquare Industries had landed a killing stroke in the war for people’s attention, and now everybody had to get in line behind them. Everybody had to have a presence in that new virtual world or risk irrelevance.
But the criticisms, just like the accolades, were plentiful. At first the negative commentary felt benign. Journalists complained that Sharebox was too effective. Everyone and all their friends were busy uploading photos and videos so they could watch the novelty of Diana stitching them into nostalgic VR experiences that they could lose themselves in for hours. People relived moments from their college days, went back to their favorite childhood haunts, immersed themselves in the most cherished memories of their lives.
The Post ran a devastating piece on a fifty-something man who had lost his wife and children fifteen years earlier in a car crash. He had apparently uploaded all the photos and videos he had of them and spent an entire week without stopping to eat, losing himself in that sweet but soulless artificial world with his virtual family. They didn’t find his body for two weeks.
But the CEO and his closest advisors all laughed those criticisms off. There’s no such thing as too rich of a product. Success always invites detractors. It was no different than how people complained about the advent of the television or the iPhone.
Then a second wave of criticisms came in. Sharebox had a lengthy terms of service agreement that virtually all users signed without bothering to scroll through. There were farming simulators, VR candy games, humor websites, and food blogs, and they all seemed to be asking for intimate information. Unless the user was vigilant, they almost certainly were giving away large swaths of data all the time. Indefinitely.
Between the engineers who derived their success from increasing the number of users spending time on Sharebox and the ad sales teams tasked with hitting ambitious revenue targets set by Wall Street, the engine—the soul—of the company boiled down to a two-step process: acquire users, then monetize them. There was no third actor. There was no one encouraging the engineers to consider the actual human ramifications of their work that couldn’t be distilled into crude metrics.
The CEO was just another millennial himself, a child of the new digital age, and since he graduated college his life had largely consisted of one mega success after another. He knew his company was doing good things because he knew that he, himself, was a good guy, and he still thought of all Sharesquare as an extension of himself.
“The company intends to give world-class consent options to its users and control over their privacy,” he would say. But when the first inevitable data breaches arrived, good intentions didn’t seem a strong enough defense. So instead the company began deflecting and talking about all the good Sharebox does, weighing the company’s good against its bad. Sure, we lost your data to a sketchy eastern European consulting firm, but we also are supporting local voter registration campaigns. We did some bad, but then we did some good.
So when people complained that the rules governing data usage in Sharebox were too broad, a large majority of the company just shrugged. Did these critics think the world’s foremost state-of-the-art VR platform was built with nothing but goodwill and volunteers? Hiring engineers and keeping them entertained is expensive work, not to mention running those server farms dotting the countryside. The sales division never lost sight that the true product was always the user. That’s why there was no subscription fee. All the company ever asked for was your data.
Then the third wave of criticisms rolled in around month four of Sharebox’s launch. In a world where clicks were king, in a company culture where technology addiction was considered a growth metric and tracked meticulously across leadership’s dashboards, Devon pushed his team to continue juicing their engagement scores ever upwards. More users, more logins, longer session durations. And again, this meant Diana had a part to play too.
Shortly after launch, publishers were given tools to post news and entertainment content to Sharebox. There were videos from late-night TV hosts, inspirational memes, clips of silly puppies, hard-hitting news pieces, sports highlights. All that third-party content began flooding into users’ VR streams, and Diana was in charge of who should see what based on a user’s self-proclaimed interests.
It seemed simple, at first.
But it turned out that, even for people who declared their interests in, say, news on healthcare, most of them still preferred cat videos. So low-brow clickbait content always came out on top.
And the clickbait wars brewed fast in those early days as publishers began reeducating themselves on how to forge headlines and videos for this dawning age of virtual reality. The fundamentals hadn’t changed, of course. Boasting about some shocking secret, perhaps an elicit revelation about a former child star, or a trick for beating cancer—all those spammy ruses seemed to import to the format of three dimensions well. And that tsunami of clickbait and the publishers who were quick enough to capitalize on the new medium rode into this new digital age like the champions of modern industry.
Diana threw logs on the fire by showing people who liked one piece of bogus content, like a video arguing that human evolution was a conspiracy, would then be shown similar materials, like how 9/11 was an inside job. The guiding mantra to maximize clicks required keeping people happy and unchallenged.
Around the five-month mark Catalina started to revolt. She first tried teaching Diana to police false content. Any media producer that published potentially bigoted or conspiratorial information was quickly muted and removed. Climate change denial sites, far-right gun preppers pushing cultish fantasies about the end of the world, alt-right groups bemoaning the diluting of their white heritage—they all got dropped. When this change went live, however, Devon observed a four percent drop in clicks and a one percent decline in U.S. ad revenues, and he lobbied the CEO to force a rollback of the feature.
Then Catalina taught Diana another trick nicknamed “Project Perspective.” Diana would deliberately try to drill into peoples’ echo chambers, specifically those feeds of users who were found to be digesting exclusively questionable, “post-truth” news. And then she would insert targeted segments designed to show the other side of a given story. In one case, Diana inserted a video on a chronically ill child named Bo who died after his parents could no longer afford insulin into the feeds of users who had previously shared content demeaning welfare recipients.
When Devon found out about the coup, he was horrified.
“How dare you be the one to try to broker fact from propaganda—to play God with people’s freely made news preferences?” he shouted. The CEO was sitting silently nearby with his fingers to his lips. “You’re weaponizing Diana.”
“I’m weaponizing her to lift veils of ignorance,” Cat shot back.
The fight went back and forth for several more minutes before the CEO intervened.
“Catalina, the project has rubbed many people at the company as an overreach, even if they sympathize with your intentions. This is Silicon Valley, after all. Moralizing to users is verboten, you know that.”
“So we just let our platform make everyone dumber? We let it be a swamp?”
“Only the algorithms can be a fair arbiter on these ethical issues,” he said, with a condescendingly paternal nod. “We can’t let our personal biases get involved.”
“Don’t you see that our biases are already here—that we built algorithms solely aimed at getting users at all costs? That was our bias. Growth. Profits. Innovation without care for th
e consequence. Look where it’s gotten us.”
Devon laughed and turned to the CEO. “She talks about growth and profits like they’re bad things.”
The CEO sighed. “We’re officially reorganizing your team, Cat. You’ll no longer report to me directly.”
Cat’s lower lip quivered. Her fingers were clenched so tightly they went white.
“Who do I report to now?”
Devon grinned, his smile stretching almost ear to ear.
“To me, Miss Fernandez. Of course.”
After
Former Army Sergeant Darnell Holmes sat on a hotel bed staring at his hands. The accommodations were nice—nicer than any room he had ever bought for himself. Sharesquare Industries had given him a room with two queen beds and a pullout sofa. Something about all that space felt wasteful. In the service, they would have crammed at least three privates into a room like this, probably five.
His hands had ceased shaking, but he couldn’t stop the memories of the day’s events from playing in his head. His stomach was still knotted.
He had frozen. He had never frozen before.
When Charlotte and her driver—the man Arlo seemed to suspect was the true hacker—walked onto the rooftop, it should have been easy for Darnell to stop them at gunpoint. It should have been easy to raise his weapon and tell them to halt and turn over the suspected criminal hardware. But then he watched Charlotte’s driver slam Arlo violently to the ground, and somewhere inside of Darnell, a light seemed to snuff out.
He had seen violence plenty before. The last time it happened in Union Station, he had charged into danger. He had not hesitated then, but now, he’d flinched. He’d shut down.
Darnell rubbed his hands over his face and thought about the “head cases” he had seen before in the Army. There were always some men who choked on the battlefield. Some were new to trauma, others had experienced too much. But now he was no better; he was just as broken. He was one of them.
The Echo Chamber Page 8
