The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  “Nutrino blending manufacturer files for bankruptcy”

  “Sharesquare Industries CEO resigns in shame”

  It wasn’t enough retribution though. Not even close. The state of American politics had already been toxic, but the revelation that Silicon Valley had suppressed fertility among conservative voters was a match thrown on a gasoline-soaked haystack.

  Mike dared a trip to the Patriot Palace just to see how the scandal was playing among those who felt victimized. A speaker was at the city center, raging at a crowd. What other ways are west-coast liberals conspiring against the good people of the flyover states? he asked to shouts of agreement.

  This is the natural evolution of liberal elitism, one pundit asserted atop a screen as big as a skyscraper. All those smug liberals in Hollywood and San Francisco have been waiting for a moment like this.

  Another commentator was speaking from a virtual panel discussion. They’re not really sorry about it, she said. They’re just sorry they got caught.

  How many people are involved? asked someone in the crowd. I don’t believe a scheme like this could be just a couple bad actors.

  Mike watched as a slurry of suspicion and conspiracy ran rampant. No right-wing commentators feigned any effort to control themselves or the paranoia that began to grow rampant among their base. Their people wanted action, they wanted vengeance. Mike stayed away from the Palace after a week for fear of being discovered he was a Sharesquare employee himself.

  In response to that tsunami of hysteria, Congress granted the then U.S. president sweeping powers to investigate and charge Sharebox employees with crimes. But soon several other Silicon Valley companies also found themselves caught up in the frenzy. Leaders were forced to resign, many of them blamed for conspiring to inflict biases in their products on users. The Justice Department began mining personal Sharebox records, which were freely provided to the government’s investigation team without warrant, to identify Silicon Valley employees with vocal progressive values and slap them with charges, big or small. They stood accused of using their positions of influence in the corporate world to abuse the American people. A mountain of data, of Likes and restaurants visited and photos of newborn children, important moments and mundane ones that Sharebox kept around through evolutions of its platform were now turned over with little quarrel or indignation to an investigative body.

  Mike followed Catalina’s trial, broadcast in a virtual projection that any avatar could sit in on. She was the easiest of scapegoats. He watched her face as she stood in the courtroom, and the prosecutor presented messages she once posted about repealing the Second Amendment and another that read, “We shouldn’t debate with Nazis, we should just punch them.” The state argued that she was a radical hate-monger with violent ambitions.

  Even though the physical evidence that she manipulated Diana software into poisoning users never materialized, Cat still stood accused of influencing the AI to commit its atrocity. Mike watched her low lip quiver as the jury read its verdict and saw her slump in her chair when the judge announced her sentence. But Mike couldn’t touch her, couldn’t hug her, couldn’t do anything for her.

  The trial raised the specter that perhaps the crime wasn’t simply about mismanaging software that had gone amok. The crime was being an outspoken and “careless” liberal activist. And, to a lesser extent, being an immigrant.

  People like Catalina are why the world has gotten so polarized, the pundits said.

  She wasn’t even born here. Why are these people even in this country?

  Then the administration of Sharebox was restructured by the federal government. The social media platform was too entrenched in society already, too integral to the culture to simply be dissolved. But all copies of Diana software were destroyed, though crucial bits of its video-stitching algorithms were spared. Devon Zimmer, who seemed to miraculously emerge unscathed from the company’s fallout, was promoted to the role of CEO and moved the corporate headquarters to New York to lessen the stain of California politics on it.

  But in this new Red Scare the desire for blood was still not yet sated. The president and his extremist supporters had chummed the waters too much to stop. They enacted criminalization of any “inflammatory left-wing views designed to promote discord and undermine the values of the United States.” No one knew what this meant exactly, but after an Oscars event in which several actors and actresses used their night on the red carpet to denounce the “government witch hunt,” they were banned from using Sharebox for life. Two of them were later arrested on a charge of “conspiracy to incite violence.”

  Private citizens took up the government’s charge too. They began exhaustive and meticulous attacks on high-profile progressives online, hacking their accounts, exposing their home addresses, finding compromising photos. Neighbors reported each other on a hotline set up by the government to report dangerous political extremism. Bigots everywhere felt emboldened to berate people of color or homosexuals on the street for their presumed political values or immigration statuses. Assaults, vandalism, and property destruction for such hate crimes skyrocketed and frequently went unpunished.

  Then the Hollywood exodus began. Celebrities began the leaving the United States, giving up on it. They said they were going to reorganize in Europe somewhere or maybe Canada. That’s when the most famously neutral of all stars at the time, Charlotte Boone, left the country too, to the surprise of her apolitical fanbase, and disappeared from public life.

  Regular people began to leave too, left-leaning families who were afraid of reprisals for their views. Most progressive people stayed, believing the storm would pass. They tried to see the tide of arrests and legislative moves as a knee-jerk reaction to the Diana incident that would blow over soon if given time. The nation’s checks and balances would restore order eventually.

  This is not the end of America yet, those people would try to say reassuringly to one another behind closed doors. This is just a setback. We will come back together as a country. This view was sensible, well-reasoned and rooted in history. But Mike watched the horrors grow from the safety of his headset, and he knew the truth.

  Things were not going to get better.

  Outside Time

  Charlotte fled to Malawi when Hollywood imploded, feeling disoriented watching her friends flee the country. She chose to lay low in the one place she felt connected with her father. She was, despite all the cynicism and cautions she exercised in her professional life, still a romantic.

  But the government’s purge of “liberal provocation” did not end as swiftly as many hoped, and she found herself living there now for three years. The president, the man behind the frenzy of it all, had only passed away a few weeks earlier, mere days before Orion arrived. Now no one knew what to expect next. With the antagonizer-in-chief dead, would this mark the beginning of a period of reconciliation and a return to reason? Or would another, possibly even more radical faction seize control in the emerging vacuum? There were only whispers coming out of a hushed Washington, D.C. as power brokers prepared their next moves in the private rooms of Georgetown restaurants.

  Charlotte had felt insulated from the intrigue out in the bush, throwing herself into the task of running a profitable cattle ranch. But then Orion told his story to her in their quiet, clay-walled hut in the hours before dawn that morning. The sound of rain falling on the adjacent tin roofs was the only sound in the forest all around. It was an impossible fantasy of a tale, and it changed everything about her life all over again.

  Orion was a high-level engineering manager at Sharesquare Industries’ plush campus in sunny Silicon Valley. He went by his birth name back then, Michael, or more commonly, Mike. His project work involved a small surgery he volunteered for in which a small electrode array was implanted on his brain’s cortex. It was designed as an interface to relay neural activity to and from a computer.

  He was staffed with a host of neuroscie
ntists and engineers to build the technology, but their software never developed the necessary tools to decipher and make compelling sense of all the neural readings the chip projected. It was like being handed a three-dimensional map of New York City, but it was drawn in two dimensions across ten billion sheets of graph paper with no instructions on how to put it together. The project was abandoned shortly after the explosive success of the company’s other project, Sharebox.

  He was there when the company was thrown into the chaos of the Diana revelation and Catalina Fernandez was declared public enemy number one. She was something of a loner, just as her trial had depicted. But he was her friend, maybe one of the only people at the company who could say that. Orion just stood there dumbstruck when security hauled her out of the office, feeling alarmed but helpless.

  When the investigation into Diana’s software started, Orion tried to access the codebase himself to see if he could piece together what went wrong. But most all of Diana’s code was hastily wiped out by a team of superstitious government engineers, and the forensic leads dried up along with any hope that Orion could exonerate Cat by producing new information. The change histories couldn’t be totally gone. Project administrators like Cat had unique authorization keys for pulling their raw logs, but no one consulted with her to retrieve those.

  Then the trial began, and still Orion did nothing. It took several weeks before he realized that he had quietly copied the entire Diana code library almost eight months earlier and left it on his hard drive. Now he had a copy—the only remaining complete copy of Diana, even if it was missing eight months of new updates since Orion had duplicated it. But he found nothing in the code that suggested why Diana would begin poisoning users.

  He booted her up, installing the software in an old laptop. He fed her ambiguous problems.

  Diana, how can I access the more current logs in the Sharebox servers without an authorization key?

  Diana, is there anything on the internet that might indicate if your software was deliberately sabotaged by someone?

  Diana, if I gave you outputs of my neural activity, could you could convert it into meaningful and transferrable information?

  Sometimes, she was able to offer solutions to these problems. They weren’t always great, and more often than not, it would take her days, weeks or months to come up with a thorough response to Orion’s questions. But the ability to tackle ambiguous, open-ended problems, even if they took a lifetime to solve, is exactly the genius Cat put into her AI software that no one else in Silicon Valley had managed to emulate.

  Along the way, it was quickly clear to both Diana and Orion that without Sharesquare Industries computing resources, she lacked the power needed to tackle sophisticated questions. So Diana began teaching herself how to hijack poorly protected personal computers and route their processing power to solve her own problems. She became skilled at decryption, at denial of service attacks and even how to phish unsavvy users for passwords and usernames. She developed ways to cover her tracks, always careful to not use more power than she needed and draw attention to herself. And it worked well because there were long years for her to do all this. Orion did nothing to promote her labors other than to keep her laptop plugged in and charged.

  There came a day when Devon, the newly installed head of Sharesquare, called Orion into his office and peppered him with questions about his loyalties to the organization, about how he felt about Cat, about those liberals in general, and Orion didn’t know what to say. He fumbled over his answers, trying to disguise the revulsion he felt now for Devon—Devon, who sold Cat down the river without protest, who gleefully cozied up with government investigators and helped them handpick employees to investigate and charge with phony crimes.

  Walking out of the office feeling quite certain that he had failed his interview, Orion packed his things, emptied his bank account and flew with Diana to South America the next day. There he bought a condo in Bolivia by the sea and began calling himself “Orion.” He emailed his resignation to Devon and hoped to simply be ignored.

  Orion knew he was a coward. He said nothing during the advent of Sharebox, created by his peers with no thought to the polarizing effect it would have on society. He said nothing about how they birthed a platform to legitimize crazed conspiracies, bigots, and trolls and did so little to police it all.

  When Cat’s trial began, he watched the highlights on the nightly news and he’d peruse the code base, but he never risked anything for her. He kept his eyes down, collected his paycheck, and never offended anybody. And now he lived in Bolivia, doing occasional software freelance work to pay his bills. Sometimes he traveled. But like a coward, he worked to not draw attention to himself. In those days, the people who didn’t flee America called everyone who did a coward, so this didn’t bother him greatly. He had lots of company among all the global exiles. Among all the cowards.

  Then a day came when that sleepy life was at last upended. When he could no longer ignore America as it tore itself from the inside out amidst a global economic collapse. Orion lay reading on a couch in his small Bolivian condo. An open window tempted in a cool ocean breeze on a warm day. Then Diana’s voice called out from a dust-covered laptop in his closet.

  “I have the answer we need, Michael.”

  Orion rose with a start, not having heard Diana speak in years. In decades, perhaps. Thinking upon it, he wasn’t even quite sure why he still kept her plugged in. Orion groaned with the exertion of standing up, his muscles aching in a dull way.

  He was seventy-two years old then.

  Outside Time

  In the months after the U.S. president dies, a cabal of congressional leaders will lead a small coup and force the former vice president to resign through means of physical coercion or blackmail. No one is quite sure. Then they will install a new leader who is even more radical than his predecessor, and after a series of bombastic and nonsensical economic moves, unemployment will rise in great leaps.

  And to all the newly jobless males, the leader will blame immigrants, people of color, and women for taking all their good jobs, and no one in D.C. will be willing to halt the leader’s rhetoric. Then society will start tearing itself apart until no one trusts anyone and decency is a thing that can only be found between blood relations, and often not even then.

  People will stop paying taxes. Government workers will walk off their jobs. Corruption will become so rampant at the federal level that there will be nothing left once municipalities go bankrupt. Once cities can no longer afford to pay their police forces, law and order become brittle and will be handled by self-appointed sheriffs who have the guns and manpower to fill the void. People who live through all the turmoil will spend what resources they have on ensuring access to a Sharebox headset and connection so they can still lose themselves in their past lives, their old photos, the videos of their childhoods and the suburban streets they grew up on from the “good old days.” Nostalgia becomes a drug, and all the broken people of the new world will be addicted.

  Orion knows all this.

  He knows it all will happen because he has seen it already.

  There was nothing that could fix the upside-down world in the post-Diana days. But Diana offered Orion a different kind of solution in his old age. He mostly passed his golden years by reading twentieth-century novels and watching reruns of shows made in the 90s, and he was just grateful the jagged shrapnel of his country’s implosion hadn’t yet collided with the small coastal town in Bolivia where he still lingered, subsiding off solar power, well water, and a local economy that, at least for the time, still respected the legal tender of the national currency. He ate a lot of papaya, corn, and tubers from the local market. You couldn’t trust the fish anymore. Too full of plastic and heavy metals now; it wasn’t worth the risk.

  Diana did have an interesting proposal though—an impossible, wild proposal. It had taken her thirty-seven years to figure out—thirty-sev
en years of tackling the problem pushing workloads of complex calculations and research through a staggering array of CPU computations on hijacked server resources from around the world. And all that gigahertz of “compute” was tethered together harmoniously to answer Diana’s questions. She was merely the quarterback of all that instrumentation, the lead detective distributing jobs to her team of investigators and piecing together all the findings. Detroit—the old Detroit—could have been lit for six months using all the energy that was consumed by her labors.

  Orion reached into the closet and pulled the laptop from the closet with withered hands. His hair was sparse and grey. Through the years, he had to move Diana through a few different devices, but this last laptop had lasted over a decade. The old man sat down on his couch and lifted the screen to see an incomprehensible collage of text and media. There were videos of children playing, a photo of the ceiling of a dentist office, some text that mentioned the smell of a box of crayons and the taste of saltwater in the ocean. He had to squint through his reading glasses to make sense of it.

  “What is this, Diana?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  “This is a graphical interface representing your thoughts and memories. I’m afraid it’s a bit contrived to represent the complexity of your brain on a two-dimensional screen, but I’ve tried to do my best.”

  Orion was able to scroll and click and move through portions of the collage, which were bucketed into organizational patterns that didn’t always make intuitive sense. Sexual memories and thoughts, for example, were spread amongst several different categories. There was a section called the “Reticular Formation” which contained words and thoughts about lust and appetite, but there was also specific visuals, partially formed photos and flashes of video, that belonged to a larger categorization named “Cerebral Cortex.” Orion looked at the imagery and sat there blinking at it for a long time, feeling something familiar and strange in his stomach.