He smiled and gave her a wink.
Charlotte laughed but felt a prickle of discomfort. His story of getting involved kinda sounds like yours, a voice in her head pointed out. You’re only here willing to do something because somebody you care about got in trouble too.
“I am ashamed for what I was,” continued Gabriel, staring at his glass of zinfandel. “I let Kyle take all these risks, and all I wanted was to be fat and happy. But at least now I like to believe I am reformed.”
“I’m so sorry,” Charlotte responded, and she reached across the table to clasp his hand. “I’m sorry about Kyle.”
Gabriel wiped another tear from his eye and drank deeply from his glass.
“Well, my dear, was that story news to you?”
“I had heard some of it, yes.”
“From Michael?”
“No,” said Charlotte, rising from her seat. She walked to her bag and produced a small black box, like a speaker, and placed it on the table in front of Gabriel.
“Diana, say ‘hello.’”
“Hello, Mister Boucher,” said the device in that calming female voice that people everywhere still knew so well. Not only was it the voice of their old smoothie makers, but also something they heard in the early Sharebox launch, in marketing ads, and other Sharesquare products.
They of course didn’t use that voice anymore, but no one could forget it. Gabriel looked at it with revulsion.
“You rigged up a device to talk like Diana?”
“I am Diana,” the device corrected. “And under your former acquaintance, Michael Jacobs, I’ve become quite skilled in decryption and undermining security systems.”
“Is that so?” scoffed Gabriel, weighing her words and finding them amusing.
“I know you have three other profiles on the Dark Web that you use to appeal to different factions in the resistance. I know your bank account is rapidly dwindling, and you’re in danger of not making your next mortgage payment. I know that you spent a night with a vineyard owner at a Napa chateau four months ago.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows raised.
“I am not proud of that, but I’m still a red-blooded Frenchman at heart. Kyle would understand.”
“I think the point here is that this is a special copy of Diana that Orion, er, Michael…” Charlotte said, correcting herself. “A copy he kept, and he’s built on it, and it’s a lean machine for breaking into things that nobody believes can be broken into.”
“And what is it that you want to break into?”
“It’s not a matter of wanting to do this, Mister Boucher,” said Charlotte. “I don’t want to be doing any of this. I hate that I’m here. I’m just a coward, like you were once. But I am not reformed.”
As she said this, the words nearly lodged in her throat. They were truer than she intended.
“They’ve taken Michael to the Citadel,” she continued. “And you have to believe me that he has something that can fix this whole broken world. But only he can do it. We have to get him back, or none of this will ever get better. Diana thinks he was brought there sometime this week. If we rescue him, we can break Kyle out as well.”
Gabriel poured himself a fresh glass, his hand trembled for a fleeting moment.
“Yes, of course, I knew you would say the Citadel. A vile place. The most reprehensible atrocity since this whole business began. But you can’t throw a rock in an online resistance forum and not find some thread about overthrowing the Citadel. It’s the Holy Grail for everyone in the movement. Everybody’s got a plan. Everybody’s always got some new foolproof way they claim they can do it. Everyone likes to brag. But here we are. The Citadel started accepting prisoners three years ago, and no one has done anything about it. No one has so much as spat on that building because everyone knows what would happen if you tried.”
“None of those people have Diana,” Charlotte said coolly.
She was trying to sound brave, like she knew what she was talking about. Because she had spent her entire flight to America telling herself she was crazy, the side of her that was fierce and compassionate wrestling with the side that was distrustful and selfish. Up to the point where she rang the doorbell, Charlotte thought about turning around. And even now, a part of her hoped Gabriel wouldn’t be convinced, that she would inevitably try her hardest to persuade him but ultimately be rejected.
“Ugh,” Gabriel groaned, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms. “You are a very beautiful woman, Charlotte, and I’m quite taken by hosting you here. You have true charisma. I’m an old timer, so I hope you’ll forgive me saying you remind me of the Hollywood greats. You really are the successor of those golden days. And I admire you for suddenly leaping into the troubles of this country with such a bold idea, but you don’t understand this game, you don’t understand the odds of what you’re talking about. You’re a fish out of water.”
“Then help me understand the odds.”
“Well, let’s talk security. The Citadel is covered in numerous overlapping layers of it, but the first one is possibly the most important: the only people who can even walk through the lobby of that dreadful place are employees of the private contracting firm running it, or the Sharesquare Industries Security Team that keeps the tech infrastructure humming. That protection is simple and defies imitation, as all good defenses do. Anyone walking in must have a badge made specifically by the company with a custom micro-transmitter that can’t be recreated without stealing the company’s own proprietary machinery. And the face of that person must match their employee profile photo from the HR database so as to not raise a red flag with the receptionist. Your Diana might be able to hack through all the software protections in the world, but these are very basic barriers that no amount of sophistication can solve.”
“So you’re saying we would need an employee, an insider, to work with us?”
“I’m saying that’s one of many things we would need.”
Charlotte leaned back in her seat to think, but it was Diana who spoke next.
“I might know someone who can help with that.”
Now
His boss, Mariko, was smiling at him, but she was not giving him good news. She was out of town that week somewhere. The New York corporate office perhaps? So they were meeting inside an office in the virtual Sharesquare campus instead.
Mariko wore a flamboyantly blue dress today with a golden peacock adorned on one side and a surprisingly high slit on the other. It confused Darnell, whose avatar always wore the same default set of jeans and a polo shirt. What was the dress code for working avatars?
“Darnell, I received word that you met with a Post reporter yesterday afternoon,” she said crossing her legs. “That same one from the event in the Palace. Brittany Williams. And you did this without discussing it with anyone beforehand.”
Darnell’s head spun for a second.
“How did you—?”
“There are no secrets for Sharesquare employees,” she shook her head from across a bland-looking virtual table. “In this case, someone else at the cafe, just a regular user, recognized you and took a picture. Our algorithms automatically look for activity uploaded to Sharebox that involves our employees.”
“Wait,” said Darnell. “So the company is accessing user data to check up on us?”
“It’s all in the terms of service agreement,” Mariko sighed. “It’s quite above board. It’s the algorithm that does the work flagging issues or events that might reflect poorly on the company. It’s not like someone is sitting in a room watching all this stuff.”
Darnell didn’t know what he felt. Was he angry that he was being spied on? Or was he just incredulous that his boss was telling him he needed permission to meet with whomever he chose in his free time?
“It doesn’t matter why we know anyway. What’s important is company loyalty, Darnell. We need to be able to trust you here.
I talked down my boss from any serious disciplinary action. I said it was probably an innocent mistake, right?”
“I guess so.”
“You didn’t talk to her about private company matters, did you?”
“It was more of a political discussion, I suppose.”
Mariko shot him a look that signaled her irritation, but she shook it off and smiled again.
“Listen, I’d like you to take a week to recharge. You’ve had a lot of information thrown at you. Let’s chalk this oversight up to you feeling a little overloaded.”
“I’m being suspended?”
“With full benefits, don’t worry. It’s not like we’re taking your credentials or anything.”
Darnell left the meeting feeling disoriented. He pulled off his headset, stepped off his treadmill and returned his haptic suit to an individual locker at his desk. There was a text message on his phone from an unlisted number specifying an address in Presidio Heights:
Come at 8 tonight. You’ve had questions. We have answers.
He stared at the message and mumbled to himself. More cloak and dagger shit, he thought. But there was no denying he was intrigued. He assumed it was Brittany, the Post reporter, wanting to talk more.
He put the phone in his pocket, tucked his chair into his desk and left the office.
That evening, Darnell strolled down an affluent stretch of tree-lined streets to arrive at the Tudor mansion of Gabriel Boucher. He was dressed in a silk shirt and his finest coat. Walking into a neighborhood like this at night as a man of color was not something he wanted to do in more casual clothes.
He knocked on a heavy Spanish colonial door, which swung open almost immediately. A young girl, perhaps seventeen, with short, brightly purple hair, a round face and a white tank top, stood in the doorway. She looked him up and down. Then she turned and shouted to someone inside the house, out of Darnell’s sight.
“He’s here!”
Then the teen walked off and left the door open for Darnell, who cautiously followed her into an expansive drawing room of hardwood floors, Persian rugs and a lit marble fireplace. It was quite opulent but also dustier than he would have expected from such a residence.
Darnell walked into a wide kitchen where two people were seated, joined by the purple-haired girl. One was an older man with bags under his eyes and a finely pressed suit that looked European. He was leaning back with his legs crossed, smoking a clove cigarette. And the last person was tall, with a slender figure and long red hair like a movie star.
Boone.
They all turned their eyes to look at him expectantly.
“Oh no,” he stammered taking a step back. “I am most definitely in the wrong place right now.”
The older man stood up from his seat and moved to pour a glass of wine.
“Oh no, monsieur. You are most definitely right where you need to be.” He walked to Darnell and extended the glass. “Please take a seat.”
“I’d prefer to stand.”
“Your man seems a little jumpy,” said a voice from somewhere in the room that Darnell could not see.
“That’s why we’re here to talk. No need to be rude,” chastised the Frenchman.
Then Darnell saw where the voice was emanating from. There were four video conference screens mounted on wheeled stands about four feet off the ground, crowded around the table in place of chairs. Each screen showed a different face. There was a dark-skinned woman with bright red lips on the first one. Two other screens showed a man and a woman—or at least that is how Darnell guessed their genders—who appeared to be twins. And on the last screen was a man whose face was wrapped in a black scarf.
“I thought everybody used Sharebox for teleconferences now,” said Darnell.
“Not everyone,” the Frenchman smiled. “We’re a fearful people, I suppose.”
“Why did you reach out to me? How do you know me?”
Darnell looked around the room and found Charlotte’s green eyes shining at him, a faint smile at her lips. An accusation was buried there. Surely she recognized him from the parking garage in Lilongwe?
“Diana figured out who you are,” answered the Frenchman.
“Who is Diana?”
A nondescript black speaker sitting on the table spoke out in a voice that was chillingly familiar but also unfailingly non-threatening.
“You called the ranch house on the lake with a warning,” said Diana. “You said your name was Darnell, and I cross-checked publicly accessible tax and insurance business records to find a Darnell Holmes who was recently hired by Sharesquare’s security division. Then I found a flight record manifest matching your name for north Africa.”
“That sounds like a lot of violations into my privacy, but let’s talk first about why I’m having a conversation with a genocidal machine here in your house.”
“I assure you this copy of Diana is quite harmless,” cut in Charlotte in a silky voice.
“Why did you leave that message, monsieur Holmes?” the Frenchman asked. “Why would you betray the confidences of your employer like that while they were in the middle of a pursuit?”
Darnell sighed and he walked closer to the table and slumped into a seat, where he promptly accepted the glass of wine. The screens of the four virtual attendees, who were so quiet it was easy to forget they were there, pivoted on their wheels to see him better.
“What? Are you going to expose me? Blackmail me? Are you journalists? Is this connected to that Post reporter?”
“There are no journalists here,” said the Frenchman. “We just would like to get to know you better. My name is Gabriel Boucher. Miss Boone, I believe, you have met already,” he winked. “This is Alexi.” He motioned to the purple-haired teen. “Don’t let her age fool you. She excels at a tremendous range of skills, from carjacking to grifting, and she is quite calm under pressure. Here on the screens we have Blue Bird,” indicating the woman with the red lips. “Koti and Kota are brother and sister.” And then motioning to the screen of the man wrapped in black, he said, “And that’s Gor.”
“I’m guessing these are people you met on the internet. You know you’re not supposed to trust people you don’t know.”
“I trust these people with my life,” Alexi responded.
“Darnell,” interjected Charlotte. “Just please tell us why you sent me that message. Does it mean anything? Does it mean you’re…” Then she hesitated.
“That I’m ready to join whatever suspicious little party you invited me to here? I sent that message because I have doubts. Because I’m human, and I work for a new employer in a space that’s changing really fast. That’s all.”
“It must be hard for you,” offered Gabriel, taking a drag on his cigarette. “You come from a profession where your ethics and honor were something you lived and breathed each day. And now you’ve been brought in to serve Devon Zimmer, who is as crooked as his Sharebox is destructive.”
Darnell took a sip of wine for the first time since he sat down.
“Listen, I was just a soldier. I was a good soldier. I helped ensure the dead got the military honors they earned and the families they left behind were treated with dignity. It was not an easy job, but it gave me purpose. It was not my role to question why people were dying. That’s not a soldier’s place. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have questions then. Or now. It doesn’t mean I don’t wonder about things. And I’m not a soldier anymore.”
Gabriel said nothing, taking another drag.
“It starts with questions,” offered Charlotte, leaning on the table closer to him. “They gnaw at you at first. That’s what I felt. You know about Sharesquare’s role in the development of the Citadel.”
Darnell winced.
“You know what a sham those charges were against the people there,” she continued. “Michael is in there now. The man named Orion you hunted
in Lilongwe. He was on the verge of a breakthrough, of using Diana to discover something. He could have exposed the organization and reversed this toxic world Sharebox has brought us.”
This was certainly a bluff, but Charlotte spoke it with steel nerves and conviction. She had been coy about the nature of Orion’s cure-all solution with Gabriel. A story about transmitters shooting messages into space and repeating lives was still not something she could look herself in a mirror and force herself to contemplate, let alone explain convincingly to someone else. But yet she put some faith in the idea that Orion was humanity’s last, best hope; it seemed as rational a cause as any, or at least the only cause she had left.
This world, in this timeline, was likely already lost if his story were true, but that was okay if Orion could be freed to capture his memories and transmit them again. Then, at least, there would be another try.
A deep Eastern-European accented voice came from Gor’s video stand, though the masked mouth did not appear to move.
“What is this breakthrough so powerful that it can reverse the erosion of society?”
Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but Diana saved her the indignity of a hasty lie.
“Orion was teaching me to hack Sharebox security protocols so I could expose the truth of who was behind the Nutrino Mixer malfunction,” said the black box. “He believed it was an inside job by someone with the intent to sow outrage and discord.”
Charlotte had to stifle her own surprise upon hearing these words. Diana had never spoken of it before, nor had Charlotte thought it possible the AI was capable of bluffing, if that is what she was doing. But all eyes in the room were now firmly on Diana.
“You’re saying someone programmed Diana—you—to deliberately sterilize people so they could create a backlash? Like a false flag attack?” It was Koti who spoke this time, with his pale face and slicked-back hair that was so blonde it was almost white.
The Echo Chamber Page 18
