Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

All those years living with his uncle, the man not knowing how to do anything except teach a young boy about the con…

And now, at last, Moses had come full circle. A business office, just like all the other polished business offices. It was infuriating that the place looked so normal .

“It feels like…” He hesitated. “It should be bigger. I don’t know. More…”

“Like Mordor?”

He nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. This is the place that did it to us. Me. Adam. Cynthia. Kook. Tank. All of us. Someone inside here came up with a plan and made sure that we all ended up where we did.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

It should have been filled with bats, Moses thought. Bats and the sulfurous stink of evil. Instead, it was sterile AC air and a tenth-floor view of other buildings that were just the same size. Modern evil. It didn’t look like anything except another office building.

If you wanted to look at evil, it was just a bunch of suits and ties, a bunch of cubicles and computers, the quiet whirring of commerce. Evil wasn’t anything. It was just business as usual.

“Moses?” Alix asked. Her tone was worried. “Are you okay?”

He turned to her. The girl who had risked everything to join him on this Don Quixote quest, standing there in her custodial uniform, looking concerned.

You’re not alone, anymore , he realized. She’s with you. She cares about you .

The Doubt Factory had stolen so much from him, and yet it had also given him Alix. The thing that had destroyed his past had given him the girl who made him want a future. He wanted a future with her.

So let’s put the Doubt Factory in the past .

Suddenly Moses felt a weight lifting off him.

It was all going to work. He’d finally made it here. And thanks to Alix, he was going to make it through to the other side.

“I’m good,” he said, and couldn’t help smiling. “Let’s go dig up some secrets.”

Alix booted up her father’s computer. Her face lit blue as the screen glowed alive with its security challenges.

“Okay,” she said. “This is where we see if Kook’s programs are as good as she thought.”

“Oh, they’re good all right.”

Moses plugged his slate into the computer’s USB drive and held his breath. A second later the retrieval program kicked back the answer they were looking for. The password was as long and as bad as a software-license code.

“Damn. Your dad’s serious about security.” He started reading off numbers and letters, letting Alix type, with her confirming each letter and number out loud as he worked through the sequence.

Alix hit Enter.

Authenticating…

They held their breaths.

The computer continued with its boot sequence and opened to a familiar desktop layout.

“I’ll be damned,” Alix whispered.

Moses couldn’t help grinning. “I told you Kook was good!”

“Yeah, she’s a genius. What do you want to get?”

“Let’s see if we can look at some client files.”

It took a little bit of rooting around in the server’s file structure, but eventually Alix found what she was looking for and popped open a database search window. One of the fields said Company .

Alix typed * in the window and hit Enter.

Corporate names started spooling:

Dow Chemical

Monsanto

ConocoPhillips

Philip Morris

Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals

Lukoil

Merck & Co

Pfizer Inc

Marcea Pharmaceuticals

Apple Inc

Hewlett-Packard

American Petroleum Institute

Google

Intel

National Rifle Association

Amgen Inc

Household Product Association

Eli Lilly & Co

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers

Oxbow Corp

Microsoft Corp

Hill + Knowlton

Oracle Corp

Novartis AG

Bayer AG

AstraZeneca PLC

ExxonMobil

Koch Industries

Facebook Inc

Amazon.com

National Association of Manufacturers

3M

Royal Dutch Shell

Chevron Corp

BP

Edelman

Procter & Gamble

Association of Equipment Manufacturers

Unilever

Personal Care Products Council

Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America

Archer Daniels Midland

CropLife America

Syngenta AG

The list just kept going.

And going and going…

“This can’t be right,” Moses said. “It’s like every major company in the world. BSP can’t have done doubt work for all of them. I mean, BSP is good, but they’re not this big.”

Alix frowned and started opening files, checking the contents under individual company names.

“Some of this looks like standard PR,” she said. “Totally legit work. Crisis communications, that kind of thing. Some of it looks like it’s more like ad campaign stuff… just general image polishing.”

Fighting a feeling of disappointment, Alix went back to the main search screen and started checking pull-down menus. “The database is broken down by industry type, but it’s obviously not organized by ‘unethical business work’ or anything like that.”

“Okay, that makes sense. So what do we have?”

“I don’t know. There’s a ton of stuff in here. Some of this looks like they’re consulting with other PR firms. Some of it’s just letters and stuff. Just really basic correspondence.” She popped open a file. “This one’s just a pitch letter. I don’t think Google hired BSP, but I guess Dad thought they had an image problem that he could help with.”

Alix popped open another file, trying to get a feel for what she was seeing. She laughed out loud. “This is interesting. Some of the company names are connected to potential campaigns that Dad’s got ready to roll, just in case…. Like BSP expects something bad to happen and wants to be able to pitch as soon as it does. They’ve got a whole section here for environmental disasters: chemical-plant explosions, toxic leaks, pipeline breaks, drilling platforms exploding…”

Moses leaned close. “Did they do the BP oil spill?”

“I don’t think so,” Alix said. “My dad was making jokes about them when the Gulf thing happened. I think he was pissed that they hired someone else instead of him.”

She looked up at Moses. “This is too big. It’s like the tobacco files. There’s millions and millions of documents, but a lot of them look totally legit. It’ll take time for us to comb through it all. Is there someplace you want to start? Some way you want me to sort all of this? Start alphabetically? Go after Big Oil? Big Pharma? Big Ag?”

“Let’s start with Kimball-Geier. What’s up with Azicort?”

“Well?” Lisa said, leaning back from her laptop and turning to Mr. Banks. “I told you they’d try something like this.”

They were in Williams & Crowe’s Data Integrity Monitoring Center, watching red flags pop up as the kids started accessing files.

“Well?”

Mr. Banks’s jaw was clenched, holding back an ocean of roiling emotions as he watched the pair poking around in the BSP central file servers.

Lisa waited patiently for the man to come to the conclusion that was inevitable.

Frustratingly, he seemed unable to make the call. A minute ticked by.

Lisa pressed gently. “We’re going to need to shut them down. You have clients who are at risk. Williams and Crowe has clients at risk….”

“I want him gone,” Banks said through clenched teeth. “I want him away from my daughter.”

Lisa nodded, pleased. “Once we have them, we can arrange for him to disappear.”