“You want to go there?” Gabe sneered when Dan suggested continuing their conversation at Starbucks, meaning, he could see, the whole chain-store-globalization-WTO-anti-environmental world she and her kind thought it represented. Passersby could have thought he’d called her a name from her operatic jaw drop. She acted as though going to Starbucks instead of Kafeino, the thread-bare place off campus, was an ontological decision. Which it was, she said, when he told her he’d prefer Starbucks because he could find parking there, car lanes in that part of town having been converted to lanes for electric scooters or hydrogen-only buses. One wheezed by, with a flock of scooters in its wake.“Fine,” she conceded, testily. “We’ll talk about it later.”
As he got into his car she unlocked her bike: a black Urban Crew with white rims, front brake. He noticed she had the chain on the freewheel side of a flip-flop hub so she could stand up on its pedals.
She began to follow him, he thought, as he pulled away from the curb, watching her in his rear-view mirror: orange racing goggles tinting her face. A game face, serious and hard as a nut in the shell of her helmet. Muscles striated her forearms, her hands in gloves gripping her handlebars.
At the first traffic light, she shot past him, standing up on her pedals to pump through the intersection as the light changed. Show-off. Racing him to make a point about cars vs. bikes the way her kind loved to do. He’d noticed that she had C12H22O11 tattooed on the base of her neck: probably a Neo-Ache, NGers, or one of those others who wanted everyone to live in teepees and save trees by giving up toilet paper.
When he arrived, though, he smiled to discover that he’d won—her bike was nowhere to be seen. Had she been lying? Just to ditch him?
Inside: the usual Toppers, each alone and occupying one of the small round tables like a Buddha of Commerce in its shrine, gazing into the navel of his cellphone. Sprinkled among them though were paunchy, middle-aged guys. Some in camo. Or wearing those goofy red hats. Each had a pistol on his table.
Dan walked by them, pretending it was no big deal. “Gun club in town?” he asked the barista after he placed his order. Arms wallpapered with tats, the barista sighed. “My boss signed a petition to outlaw guns in his church, so the websites that RedHatters get their ‘news’ from started saying the U.N. used his coffee shops to traffic in child prostitutes. They’re all here to ‘investigate.’” None of them had ordered anything, Dan noted. “But I don’t mind,” the barista said, “they’re less work. I’ll have your latte right up.”
Then he saw her. She was sitting as far in the back as she could manage, her back to him. She waved a hand over the top of her head. As he approached, he could see she’d been using the tiny mirror attached to her bicycle helmet to watch for him. “I don’t want anyone I know to see me here,” she said as he sat down across from her, taking the seat that had a view of the café instead of the wall.
Flushed from pedaling, she used a rubber band to pull her hair out of her face. She was kinda cute, he thought, pulling out his iFlex to show her what he did. Cute—in that Sci-Fi girl-scientist way.
Nerd, she thought, with a nerd’s security blanket: the iFlex that automatically logged him into the Starbuck’s network. Still, he was kinda cute—in that retro, computer-nerd way. And he really did seem to want to help her. A damsel in distress in his Dungeons & Dragons MUD? She stiffened. Is that where he was coming from? She watched him launch a program, trying to get a read on what he wanted. Here he was, saying that he thought what she did was cool, even though he was at the concert she attacked. What was that about? Then he follows her into a room of lobotomized ducks, whips out his cell and starts showing her pictures of the concert instead of snapping incriminating photos of the lobo-geese as she—or any PETA sympathizer—would have done. Maybe he was just coming on to her.
“Wait till you see this,” he said, rotating his iFlex so she could see, excited as a geek with the newest OS. He turned the computer so the gun nut near them couldn’t see, and she smiled, in spite of herself. A sea of dicks with guns all around, NRA and MAGA types with their faded red hats, and here she was, sitting right under their noses. A real terrorist would have detonated her vest by now.
“So, you think what I did was kinda cool, huh?” she said, skeptically, just to see how he’d react. When he didn’t, she took a sip from her Nalgene bottle, trying to do so naturally even though she was aware of the security camera’s black eye staring down at her from the ceiling. Back in the old days when surveillance was mostly optical, gorilla-theater actors used to stage plays for cameras like this: pranks like moonwalking past with a sign that explained Just going to work…. It all seemed so innocent now.
His screen came alive with faces like the ones he’d shown her on his cell phone. At its epicenter was the photo someone had taken of her at the club. Around it were lots of other photos of the riot outside, of the concert inside, of the party—and screen shots of the virtual concert going on in W.2—all overlapping to make a mosaic, overlapping to try to reconstruct an image of her. Only they were Frankenstein versions of her that a viewer could scroll through, like one of those flip-books for kids where the head of a hedgehog could be matched to the body of a penguin and the legs of an ostrich: a leg from one photo, an arm from another, the other arm from twelve different possibilities, dozens of different hands. There must have been fifty suggestions for feet, all in different kinds of sneakers, but none of them the shoes she’d actually worn that night. “Good thing my face wasn’t visible,” she said.
“As if,” he muttered, fiddling with the app.
“I mean,” she said, “I’m glad no one’s been able to figure out who I am.”
“Oh they know. Lots of people must know. Maybe your insurance company, tracking the behavior of its clients so it could weed out the ones that go to risky events. Or an aggregator compiling a dossier on you to sell to a realtor, or car dealer, or whatever other business…. Google knows for sure. Turn a face into a pattern of dots, which is what every picture is—pixels—and it’s no harder for pattern recognition to match them than it is for you to do a global search to find every use of a word in a Word doc. Even if FB can’t see your face, their algorithms can troll through some 800 million photos in less than 5 seconds and identify people with 98% accuracy: they use the same algorithms that map the features of a face to map the features of your posture. Hairstyle. A stain on your jacket, the way you hold a cigarette….”
She knew he was right. When she’d been waiting for someone to out her, and waited, and waited, and still it didn’t happen, she’d begun thinking that maybe nobody knew. That the density of the crowd had shielded her, so many people wearing facial-recognition blocking necklaces that it hid the faces of everyone there? That maybe the keffiyeh masking her face had masked her identity, finding it lying on the ground as she had, belonging to a stranger as it did, software matching the keffiyeh to someone not her. The cap she’d worn to keep the stink of smoke, or grass, or pepper spray out of her hair also hiding her hairstyle from the drones…. But she also knew that she was giving in to the worst thing a scientist could: the urge to let desire cloud her judgment. Did he work for one of those companies? Is that how he’d known from the start who she was? “Then why haven’t they outted me?” she asked warily.
“I don’t know. Maybe because doing so would contradict some b.s. about protecting users’ privacy that they’re saying in a billion-dollar lawsuit against them in Europe. Maybe they don’t want to set a precedent for giving away monetized information such as the details of your life. Maybe busting you isn’t worth reminding everyone that FB owns all their baby photos. Maybe someone’s pulling a reverse Snowden,” he said with a wink.
“Something like that.”
“But the police could—”
“The cops don’t care. They’re not going to divulge the fact that they can go to Google or FB and have them finger anyone in the world over a couple of busted guitar amps. It’s not like you blew up the White House, you know. No, your fate is in the hands of self-appointed cyber vigilantes, and that’s a good thing.”
He brought up on his iFlex the stream of people claiming to be her, all of them trying to hijack her 15 minutes of fame to sell their own band or politics, and all of them being analyzed by members of the witch hunt.
PlanetSansSun retweeted your repost. SunsSansPlanets.
Agent007 @Agent007 . 1m
#keffiyehGIRL may have obtained #keffiyeh in Syria. http://friendsofalaqsa.wazala.com/
OopsAgain @oopsagain . 1m
#keffiyehGIRL spotted in Malta. https://goo.gl/LtaSBt
We Can Do It! @wecandoit . 2m
Right, a woman could have never pulled this off. Go #keffiyehGIRL !!!
knowledgeW/Oreason @knownot . 3m
Has anyone considered the possblty that #keffiyehGIRL is a dude?
EL PAÍS @el_pais . 3m
Paul McCartney, todavía frustrado con John Lennon http://ow.ly/Pg0I7
reasonW/Oknowledge @purereason . 3m
#XactlySo paid #keffiyehGIRL to smash his shit. Part of show. Go home rumer mongers. The Internet is closed.
URhere @urhere . 4m
If you compare #photo1 to #photo2 you can see
#keffiyehGIRL’s elbow in crowd. http://ow.ly/Pg0I7
Accidental Tourist @accidentaltourist . 5m
Help compile #keffiyehgirllineup of all women at concert http://goo.gl/lg1npS
RightWinger @eaglesoars . 6m
The Ditto Report shows #owntheLIBS DELUSIONAL about relationship between #keffiyehGIRL and ISIS
AlsoRises @alsorisesthesun . 6m
Why is everyone talking about #keffiyehGIRL?
LiveBlogging @liveblogging . 6m
Are you live blogging yet! Here’s how: http://www.24liveblog.com/
Missing Evidence @missingevidence . 7m
Infrared imaging reveals outline of #keffiyehGIRL face beneath keffiyeah http://goo.gl/0jFhFt
Fr. Thomas Petri, OP @petriop . 7m
Had an emotional voicemail thanking me for saying it’s okay for Catholic to be in favor of Death Penalty
In other windows he opened up Flickr and Punkster and iNote and ePod and other sites posting clues to her identity: hundreds, maybe thousands of photos taken that night that vigilantes were trolling through, sorting, and labeling with their amateur-forensics attempts.
The detective work seemed to be narrowing to a handful of ‘persons of interest’ as some of the vigilantes already called them, adopting officialese the way phrenologists used to give bumps in the skull Latinate names to make their crazy theories sound like classical learning: a woman in one of the photos with the corner of a scarf, or handkerchief, or some other piece of cloth that could be a keffiyeh sticking out of the back pocket of what could be jeans. The online discussions debated whether or not the keffiyeh in the picture was from a tribe in Saudi Arabia or Morocco or Bangladesh; after it was determined that Yes, the different patterns did designate different groups, but that No, no keffiyehs worn in Bottom Billion countries were blue. Only hipsters in the U.S., Japan, and U.K. wore blue ones. Which set off a discussion about terrorist groups in Japan and the U.K., which bled into a discussion about whether the keffiyeh in the picture was cobalt, lapis, or azure blue, which dredged up #thedress and how colors appeared differently on different screens, even the same screen depending on how it was calibrated; meanwhile, others were trolling the online stores in Japan, the U.K., and U.S., to see where the keffiyeh could have been bought, while others were posting video of the different ways that one of the red-and-white checkered Bottom Billion keffiyehs could have been dyed blue, as someone managed to hack into the records of an Urban Outfitter that sold ‘Cobalt Blue’ keffiyehs, and had tried to match sales records of keffiyehs to people identified at the concert, while one of these, a researcher for a conservative think tank, first tried to claim that he hadn’t been at the concert; then, once too many photos of him dancing there emerged for him to deny it, tried to claim he’d been there for the music, then as others came forward to say he’d been there to buy drugs, and the witch hunt began to go off in other directions, one of the vigilantes claimed to have identified one of the ‘persons of interest’—one Amanda Hernandez—the woman in the photo who had the corner of a keffiyeh sticking out of her back pocket—which she claimed was just a blue paper napkin she’d stuck in her pocket after grabbing a bite from a food truck; and she’d posted photos on her FB page of her napkin, but others said it wasn’t the same one, so she said it was one LIKE it! That of course she didn’t keep the same dirty napkin in her pocket for 3 days! But they said they’d caught her in a lie, and others accused her of being one of the Mexicans who were killing all the bees in the country, and that’s why she busted up XactlySo’s amps, but she said that made as much sense as a jackass wearing a smoking jacket! Or a burro wearing a keffiyeh! Others began retweeting, calling her #burrogirl, turning it all uglier, fans of XactlySo began harassing her online, even though other vigilantes continued hunting for other ‘persons of interest’ while those they left behind continued to work it out with #burrogirl, #Confirmed Suspect #1….
He went back to that original photo; data windows popped up beside each bubble. “Look at the time stamp,” he said, pointing at the data linked to her photo. “Whoever snapped the picture didn’t put it online until almost 15 minutes later. Probably after they were out of range,” he said, referring to the fact that whenever the police arrived at a flashriot, the first thing they did was bring down commercial channels.
“But look,” he added, pointing to a blip on the screen as though to change the subject, “the server it went through was in Pakistan.” The blips made up the paperless paper trail of the photos: little pull-down menus that gave the code for the data transfers, routing numbers, IP addresses, handshaking signals, and other data he said could be used to trace e-mail, bank transfers, photo uploads—really anything that passed through the digital pipeline. “It’s how cyber vigilantes are able to out people.”
Jenny texted Mattie that Mary retweeted Heather who FB’d Alexa that Debbie was the one who first started the rumor—that Leslie wasn’t just iFriends with every guy on her iFACE page, but friends-with-benefits. But Leslie’s mom was the one that the little bitch should have been afraid of, spreading lies like that about her daughter. Lies Mom knew kept her daughter off the cheer squad. So she made up an online persona for herself—‘Brad’—posting a picture of some teen model as her own. Then Mom made up a backstory for the photo: ‘Brad,’ she wrote, was a popular but sensitive and misunderstood quarterback at his high school—and just wanted to talk. Then Mom, a.k.a. ‘Brad,’ struck up an online relationship with little-bitch Debbie to find out what she was saying about her daughter, Leslie. The plan worked perfectly, the little skank giving up the dirt for a couple of sappy compliments: Your cheerleading lyrics are so awesome! She never meant for the stupid twit to fall in love with ‘Brad,’ though if she had, that would have sweetened the revenge. Still, how could she know, how could anyone know, that after ‘Brad’ had lured her in, got her to write how much she really, really cared for him, after ‘Brad’ got her to trade secrets, got her to confide in ‘him’ that she was in fact the one who spread that rumor about Leslie being a slut—but only because Leslie had been really, really mean to her—after ‘Brad’ got her to send him a nudie so he could see for himself how much hotter she looked than Leslie (which took some doing since she and most of her class had been suspended freshman year for sexting photos of themselves), even after all of that, how could anyone know that after ‘Brad’ told her what a shitty trick that was, that only the scum of the Earth would think of it, and that’s why he put her nudie online, who would know that after he texted the world would be better without people like you and, BTW, I think your cheerleading lyrics actually suck and for that reason he was e-dumping her, how could Mom or anyone know the lying little skank would go and commit suicide? Sleeping pills, of course, the teenage girls’ weapon of choice. The girl was obviously messed up long before ‘Brad’ came along.
After the funeral, Debbie’s parents wanted to talk to ‘Brad,’ but he’d canceled his iFACE membership. Police pointed out just having a nudie on your phone broke child porn laws. Bloggers formed a virtual posse. Their techie friends took up the trail. When they discovered who it all led back to, they formed a cyber lynch mob around www.AllAboutLesliesMom—posting as much personal information as they could about her, and inviting everyone in the world to contribute. Virtual vigilantes hired a spammer to mass e-mail millions of people who cared about children and the Internet or at least one of the two, to visit the site where they could help make whatever punishment she would receive in court seem minor by comparison. They hacked into her phone and posted an interactive map that showed where she was 24/7, along with photos snapped of her and her license plate number as she went to the store, went through a speed trap, went anywhere and everywhere: every bit of data about her they could find in the public domain—or in private files like her health records—so people who thought like them would know where to direct their hate, inundating every inbox she was associated with with the message The World Would Be Better Without YOU. Someone else replaced her chest X-ray with one taken of a coal miner’s black lung. They gave her a life sentence of harassment, forcing her, after she got out of prison and tried to reclaim her life, to take up one identity after another after another after another in the non-virtual world….
“There’s no way to hide,” Dan said, “but you can vanish.” He showed her how easy it was to follow three photoshopped photos of her through a server in Denmark, then others from Spain. There was one from Monaco. He clicked a few buttons, saying, “Maybe there’s a selfie of you posing before Hagia Sofia at the same time that the concert was going on…. “His screen showed a red line arc across a map of Europe, connecting one server to another like those old-time movies that depicted travel by showing a cartoon airplane leaving a dotted line across a map as it flew from Istanbul to Paris.
“Maybe your photo went through Monaco via someone who snapped your photo in Pakistan, who put it on the web; or someone in Pakistan. Or in Morocco or Williamsburg: someplace where lots of women wear keffiyehs.” Now the red line spread like a spider web, as if the cartoon airplane connecting one dot to another was multiplying as it simultaneously flew to multiple cities. “Or maybe a friend in Monaco emailed a photo of someone who only looked like you to someone in Spain who was reminded of someone else who looked like you and e-mailed that other someone’s photo to a friend in Malta, who put all of them online. Or maybe there never was an original…. There’s so much fake news that I wouldn’t be surprised if XactlySo paid you to smash those amps. Or flood the Internet with fake photos.”
He clicked on the keyboard, mumbling, “Data gets corrupted all the time too,” as the Spanish IP number changed to the country code for the United Arab Emirates. “There.”
“How’d you do that?”
“The hard part’s generating some swarm.”
She knew about swarms. They were actually closer to her field than his because entomologists with backgrounds in math had been the first to construct models describing how insects, following a few simple rules, come together to act as complex nest activity. It wasn’t until much later that other fields took it up, using swarm models to describe subway riders, fluid dynamics, cloud patterns, or how individual voters could coalesce as a trumpapocalypse even if it was a disaster for each of the individual voters.
Still, she appreciated the way he was making her photo multiply, and doing so as hierarchy-free as individual ants. Water molecules didn’t need a leader to tell them when to become steam. Nor did rush-hour traffic. Who was foreman of the fish? Yet their schools could change direction more abruptly than any choreographer could direct.
“Third call: Low-fat latte in a dirty cup and a toasted bagel,” the barista called out, “Sans twelve-year-old.”
“Can you watch my Flex a sec?” he said, quoting a late-night comic whose skit about places like this had gone viral. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
Funny, she thought as he got up to get his drink. But she wasn’t sure if she meant ha-ha funny, or nerd-funny. She pivoted her bike helmet on the table and watched him walk up to the—Damn it!—he turned around to look back at her just as she was….
He’d meant the joke as a pun: a performance of swarming humor—millions of individual TV viewers finding the joke funny for their own individual reasons but their collective behavior coming together to give the joke a life of its own. But she hadn’t cracked a smile. Just sat there fiddling with her helmet. Probably didn’t even own a TV.
“Thanks,” she said when he returned. “For the noise, I mean.“ Did he blush? He waved her thanks away as though being thanked hadn’t occurred to him. Then he began telling her how it looked like every NG hacker on the planet was jumping into the act, bots beginning to multiply even the fake IPs he’d created…. Somehow talking to him, the way he injected all the misinformation into the system as casually as changing his socks made it all better…. Like turning a witch hunt into a game of Where’s Waldo. If for no other reason, she had him to thank for that. As she began to say more, the argument that a swing-bellied RedHatter was having with the barista grew louder, the man demanding to know why the barista had called out a latte “with a twelve-year-old” if the place wasn’t a U.N. front, while the barista kept sighing, tattooed arms crossed, looking up at the ceiling, and trying to explain that “sans” meant “without.” But that only made the RedHatter confused; he placed a hand on his gun as though that would help him think better as he demanded to know what country the barista was from, talking foreign as he did….
It got louder, and about the time Gabe and Dan began to consider leaving, it died back down. The RedHatter returned to his seat and the same old dumb scene fizzled to its predictable end with him grousing loudly to those around him.
“You into that?” she asked Dan, to not give the RedHatter the satisfaction of being noticed. She’d meant the W.2 icon in his dock.
“Nah. It’s just something a bunch of people I follow mess around with. Info designers and computing nerds, mostly, who keep tweeting about W.2 like it’s some kind of mystical thing.”
“It is. World’s largest shopping mall, The Holy of Holies.”
“Well yeah, that’s pretty much what it’s become. But there is something Cocoa-Puff going on.” He explained how the blogs keep talking about these mystery avatars: avatars that only appear to someone in W.2 after someone they knew died in the real world.
Gabe looked at him like he’d just told her about a weeping statue so he rephrased it: “Someone’s wife or son dies in the real world and then an avatar of that person appears in W.2.”
“Like a ghost?”
He hadn’t thought of it like that. “Well, not exactly— More like MyDeathSpace.com,” he said, meaning the virtual cemetery that gathered the MyFace pages of people who had died. “Except compared to the millions of people online, and the 160,000 who die every day, someone appearing as a ghost avatar in W.2 is rare. Maybe only happened a couple hundred times. Plus, all the iFACE pages gathered at MyDeath were created by the people themselves while they were alive. The MyDeath administrators just blur their faces to make them look ghostly. But some of the ghost-avatars are of people who never even heard of W.2,” he said, feeling compelled to press on, though not wanting to sound like he was recruiting her for the Flat Earth Society. “I mean there’s some blip in the W.2 programming that causes some people who die in the real world to appear as avatars in W.2.”
“Maybe it’s just ‘cause,” she offered.
He rocked back. “No, no, no. That might work in the real world. But not here,” he said, tapping his computer. “It can’t. To a computer, lack of pattern is more impossible than angels or miracles.”
During the argument with the barista, a couple of regular customers put on blue face masks as an up-yours to the red hats, both armies fighting this year’s war with last year’s rhetoric. A RedHatter launched into a loud-mouthed explanation of the Second Amendment.
Dan composed himself. “Look, I know what this sounds like,” he said, trying to make her see that he wasn’t just another flake running around trying to cure droughts with prayer circles. “But seeing an avatar of a dead husband or wife isn’t like seeing Elvis. The people aren’t stupid or even religious. They aren’t into pyramid power or chakras. They’re not even the kind to leave flowers on the steps of a school shooting.” This last point he said loud enough for all the NRAers in the café to hear.
That was kind of cool, she thought.
“At least not all of them,” he said. “They don’t have a guru or meditate or own a yoga mat. They’re just ordinary computer users: college students or engineers or paralegals. Not stoners or wineheads. This one Marxist professor won’t even talk about it other than to acknowledge that he’d seen an avatar of his dead son. A psychiatrist wrote an article in Wired…”
If it’s in Wired it must be true, she thought but didn’t say, seeing that she’d irked him enough already.
“…about how people, especially the emotionally wrought like someone who’s just lost a wife or husband or child, often sees whatever it is that they desperately want to see….”
Jesus’s face on a burnt tortilla.
“During the Middle Ages people often saw the devil. After Sputnik, alien abductions spiked—until Simpsons Episode 107 when Kang tells Kodos, ‘We’ve gone as far as anal-probe technology can take us,’ and they fly off, leaving Earth forever….”
Nerd. Quoting vintage TV.
“Now it’s Blood Falls—that bloodred waterfall pouring out of a gash in the ice of Antarctica? Pilgrims call it the Wound of the World and flock there to ask the Earth’s forgiveness. Maybe seeing ghost-images of loved ones in W.2 is just a manifestation of our networked mentality…. But there is something Cocoa-Puff about it….”
Cocoa-Puff? She held in a laugh at such a goof-ass, nerd-word.
“…even if it’s all just projection on the part of lonely people, there’s still something there for them to project onto. You can’t see an angel in the clouds without a cloud.”
Again with the angels and witches.
“…Maybe these mystery avatars will turn out to be just another version of the weather balloons people mistook for UFOs. But right now, something’s going on that nobody can explain. That’s the only thing these bloggers are really saying: how it could happen. Even if they can’t say why. Even if it isn’t really happening at all.”
If patterns were the most fundamental ground of being, any system will always need humans, thought Paul, checking the wiring harness that connected the brains of four rats to one another. Plural. Link billions of neurons together and you had a brain; link brains together, as he had, and you had a super brain—four rats with their brains wired as one could run a maze 67% faster than four separate rats working individually; wire ten rat brains together and it’s 78%; wire the brains of enough rats in a maze and they could run right through it as if they were looking at an aerial view—an overview that video-game players, or soldiers, could emulate by having EEG devices tattooed onto the scalp of each player to transmit and receive brain activity—a god’s-eye view that no one person could have alone since one person was not a pattern any more than one neuron was a brain. Unless a ‘person’ was a shorthand for the patterns he or she made, and/or the patterns that made him or her.
Over at the far end of the coffee shop was a brown pleather sofa, matching armchair, table lamps: one of those corporate attempts to make a store look like home. Gabe noticed because a girl came in wearing a vintage ‘mom’ dress like she had at home, even the same canvas tennis shoes she also had at home. After prepping her latte, she sat at one end of the couch. A few minutes later, a guy wearing the same Etsy-esque face mask that Dan had hanging loose around his neck, and the same round, vintage glasses, sat down with an espresso. If Gabe ran home and changed clothes, she could make herself and Dan look like a mirror image of the couple in the ‘living room.’ Except the guy and girl didn’t even say hello. Strangers. He wrote in a Moleskine journal, while she had her nose in a book of quotes from Che Guevara. Gabe could tell from the cover because she owned the same book.
The system would always need people—at least it was easy to think so back when the Asian Solutions office that Mr. Ashfram Sing supervised buzzed with chai-whallahs, secretaries in saris, and hundreds of associates on headsets:
AUTOMATED MESSAGE
To better serve you, your call may be monitored.
CALL CENTER
Hello, my name is <<Samuel>>. How may I assist you?
CUSTOMER
Hey, I’m like, what’s going on, dude? I mean I got a duplicate bill.
CALL CENTER
I’m very sorry for the <<inconvenience>>
<<mistake>> <<delay>>.
As soon as the mass migration of American companies to India began, though, the effort to weave humans ever tighter into the machine intensified, associates simultaneously handling multiple lines via function keys:
F1:
I can help you with that, <<Customer First Name>>.
F2:
You can use the ‘I want to’ drop-down menu:
<<Manage My Plan >> <<Manage My Features>>
<<Change Plan>>.
Then came the interactive FAQs. Bots. Customer Advice ‘Communities,’ and it seemed as if the human component might disappear completely. But as W.2 became a worldwide shopping ‘opportunity,’ corporations realized that merchandise pushed by sales avatars sold more Adidas, or bottles of Nu-Water or whatever, and they began generating thousands upon thou- sands of automated sexy sales associates, dignified African princes, and others sales avatars, all networked so that they all learned from each other the way every self-driving car learned from every other self-driving car. And Sam knew, imagining the cloud of online reviews, interactions, judgments and other human reactions that replaced everyone in his deserted call center, that he’d been right. The system would always need people, just not the ones he had imagined.
“…As regular people began to adopt blocking software to keep these spamatars from appearing on their screens,” Dan said, “merchants began using the same blocking software to keep non-buyers out of their stores. No shirt, no shoes, no W.2 Bank Account, no service….”
“And a computer consciousness begins to emerge,” Gabe said. “It’s stock Sci-Fi.”
“Sort of. Except it isn’t consciousness at all, unless consciousness is just an anthropomorphicization of
programming. In financial markets it’s clear: make the number on the right side larger than the number on the left. But how do you automate judgment about music? Or a painting? How do you make a computer guess instead of calculate odds? Or elect a president who will tear up climate agreements because he doesn’t ‘believe’ in thermometers? That can look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and continue to keep fighting even if a two-state solution would result in peace and billions of dollars for each side? No regular computer would pour that much blood and money into an area the size of Lake Michigan without being called insane. So how do you build religious fervor or historical resentment into judgment? Or sexual obsession? Or mourning? How do you make a computer that’s rationally irrational or insane? Easy! Make people part of the system.
“Maybe you read about the two sisters who were talking about their dad’s chemo treatments? They started getting texts for cemetery plots. They knew something was eavesdropping on them, but couldn’t tell if it was the thermostat, toaster, or TV, feeding their sniffles and breathing rates to an algorithm that identified their mood.”
“Oh yeah, now I remember. They sued the carrier for invasion of privacy.”
“Do you remember why it was dropped?”
“Lack of evidence, I guess.”
“Lack of defendant. Or rather too many of them. A judge decided that the Internet itself had come to the decision. Or rather, the true defendants were too dispersed. The system itself had cross-indexed their mood with different databases, the father’s drug prescriptions, recovery rates; insurance actuary tables versus his age; it figured out his diagnosis, where he was on the timeline and saw that dad didn’t have long to live.
“But, here’s where it gets spooky. The mother kept getting messages from him even after he died.”
“Junk in, junk out.”
“No, hear me out. The same automated software that would profile shoppers began to generate facsimiles of whatever it was these people were looking for—the way Google’s neural network was able to survey oceans of YouTube video and come up with the concept of ‘cat’ on its own.”
“Yeah, except dead people don’t shop. Nothing to track. Nothing to profile.”
“I know, I know.” He threw his hands up. “You start to see how this discussion begins to become like talking about God, or cosmology—speculation based on scant, indirect, and questionable evidence. The truth is that no one knows. But the Wiki that’s emerged around this seems to think that it has something to do with the fact that every signal leaves a trace, and every trace leaves a trace, the way they say that the explosions of ships that sank during WWII are still echoing in the deepest parts of the ocean, ever fainter, but there nonetheless.
“The Wiki thinks that a version of that is going on in W.2: every 1 and 0 is a stone thrown into the data pool, its ripples moving ever outward. If we could develop software to capture the motion of those ripples, then triangulate from their speed and direction back to their point of origin, we could recreate the original splash. Given enough data, and enough number-crunching capability, we could reconstruct anyone’s online life, they say. Or at least a cartoon of it.”
“An avatar.”
“Somehow the system is triangulating—generating a shade or ghost of these social nodes—once the originating source ends.”
“How do you mean ‘ends’?”
“You know, Ends. Dies. Dead people.”
“Oh,” she said. Then she asked, “But why would only some dead people reappear as ghost avatars?”
“The ghost avatars only seem to be generated when there’s a spike in interest—a living person searching for them. And searching intently. Marketers call it PUL, Persistent, Unfulfilled Longing: the obsessive mode some people go into searching for the perfect hat, or checking ten times a minute to see if anyone’s swiped right…. Somehow, the system is collating these searches as facsimiles of the longed-for items.”
“Even if the item is a person? How?”
“That’s what people can’t figure out. They think it has to do with searching online but not buying anything, combined with some algorithm that tries to match people to their desires—sorting and matching is what networks do best. The facsimile, or ghost, or shade of the dead one is being generated by some subroutine. His or her avatar can’t just roam W.2 because it has no more freedom than Jacob Marley. Meanwhile, the avatar looking for them is being shunted out of the buying zones the way bad email addresses are culled from a mailing list. Somehow the avatar of the living is being led off into the same zone as the dead one. That’s where they meet. The bloggers call it the Elysian Fields.”
The name made Gabe sit up. “Wait. What did you call it?”
“Elysian Fields. It’s from Homer. It means—”
“I know what it means,” Gabe said, Meadow coming to mind. Especially the longing in her face. “I think I might know someone who’s seen one of these ghosts,” Gabe said.
Dan went quiet.
“Or is at least trying to.”