Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“They built this place all right, but they built it crooked.”

“Other politicians are crooked too, and they don’t build a goddamn thing. East Texas and SouthLouisiana — they finally got their heads together and cut a big piece of the pie for themselves. But things have always run crooked in this part of the country, always. They wouldn’t know what to do with clean government. Old Dougal fell down pretty hard in the long run, but that’s just Texas. Texas is ornery, Texans like to chew their good old boys up a little bit before they bury them. But Huey learned plenty from Dougal, and he doesn’t make Dougal’s mistakes. Huey is the Governor of Louisiana now, he’s the big cheese, the boss, the kahuna. Huey’s got himself two handpicked federal Senators, just to shine his shoes. You’re bad mouthing Huey up in Boston — but Huey is sitting just over yonder in Baton Rouge. And you’re getting in Huey’s face.”

“All right. I take the point. Go on.”

“Oscar, I’ve seen you do some very clever things with nets, you’re a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven’t seen everything that I’ve seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful.”

They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. “Okay. Let’s imagine you’re a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender’s name is noticed, and it’s logged, and it’s assigned a cumulative rating. After someone’s name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses.” Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. “The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy.”

Oscar laughed. “That’s a new one. That’s really crazy.”

“Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets… In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some com-monalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activi-ties. ”

“Sure. User profiles. Demographic analysis. Stochastic indexing. Do it all the time.”

“We built those profile sniffers quite a while back, and they turned out pretty useful. But then the State Department made the mistake of kinda lending that software to some undependable al-lies…” Fontenot stopped short as a spotted jaguarundi emerged from under a bush, stretched, yawned, and ambled past them. “The problem came when our profile sniffers fell into the wrong hands … See, there’s a different application for that protective software. Bad people can use it to compile large mailing lists of dan-gerous lunatics. Finding the crazies with net analysis, that’s the easy part. Convincing them to take action, that part is a little harder. But if you’ve got ten or twelve thousand of them, you’ve got a lotta fish, and somebody’s bound to bite. If you can somehow put it into their heads that some particular guy deserves to be attacked, that guy might very well come to harm.”

“So you’re saying that Governor Huguelet has put me on an enemies list?”

“No, not Huey. Not personally. He ain’t that dumb. I’m saying that somebody, somewhere, built some software years ago that auto-matically puts Green Huey’s enemies onto hit lists.”

Oscar removed his hat and carefully adjusted his hair. “I’m rather surprised I haven’t heard about this practice.”

“We Secret Service people don’t like it publicized. We do what we can to fight back-we wiped out a whole nest of those evil things during Third Panama… but we can’t monitor every offshore netserver in the world. About the best we can do is to monitor our own informants. We always check ’em, to see if they’re getting email urging them to kill somebody. So have a look at this printout.”

They found a graceful wooden garden bench. A small child in a pinafore was sitting on it, patiently petting an exotic stoat, but she didn’t seem to mind adult company. Oscar silently read through the text, twice, carefully.

The text was nowhere near so sinister and sophisticated as he had somehow imagined it. In fact, the text was crude and banal. He found it deeply embarrassing to discover his own name inserted into a mur-derous rant so blatant and so badly composed. He nodded, slipped the paper back to Fontenot. The two of them smiled, tipped their hats to the little girl, and went back to walking.

“It’s pathetic!” Oscar said, once they were out of earshot. “That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”

“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”

Oscar thought this over. “How many of those messages were mailed out, do you suppose?”

“Maybe a couple of thousand? The USSS protective-interest files list over three hundred thousand people. A clever program wouldn’t hit up every possible lunatic every single time, of course.”

“Of course.” Oscar nodded thoughtfully. “And what about Bambakias? Is he in danger too?”

“I briefed the Senator about this situation. They’ll step up his security in Cambridge and Washington. But I figure you’re in much more trouble than he is. You’re closer, you’re louder, and you’re a lot easier.”

“Hmmm … I see. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Jules. You’re making very good sense, as always. So what would you advise?”

“I advise better security. The commonsense things. Break up your daily routine. Go to places where you can’t be expected. Keep a safe house ready, in case of trouble. Watch out for strangers, for any-body who might be stalking you, or workin’ up the nerve. Avoid crowds whenever possible. And you do need a bodyguard.”

“I don’t have time for all that, though. There’s too much work for me here.”

Fontenot sighed. “That’s exactly what people always tell us… Oscar, I was in the Secret Service for twenty-two years. It’s a career, we have a real job of work. You don’t hear a lot in public about the Secret Service, but the Secret Service is a very busy outfit. They shut down the old CIA, they broke up the FBI years ago, but the USSS has been around almost two hundred years now. We never go away. Because the threat never goes away. People in public life get death threats. They get ’em all the time. I’ve seen hundreds of death threats. They’re very common things for famous people. I never saw a real-life attempted assassination, though. Spent my whole career care-fully watchin’ and waitin’ for one, and it never, ever happened. Until one fine day, that car bomb happened. Then I lost my leg.”

“I understand.”

“You need to come to terms with this. It’s reality. It’s real, and you have to adjust to it, but at the same time, you can’t let it stop you.”

Oscar said nothing.

“The sky is a different color when you know that you might get shot at. Things taste different. It can get to you, make you wonder if a public life’s worthwhile. But you know, despite stuff like this, this is not an evil or violent society.” Fontenot shrugged. “Really, it isn’t. Not anymore. Back when I was a young agent, America was truly violent then. Huge crime rates, crazy drug gangs, automatic weapons very cheap and easy. Miserable, angry, pitiful people. People with grudges, people with a lot of hate inside. But nowadays, this just isn’t a violent time anymore. It’s just a very weird time. People don’t fight real hard for anything in particular, when they know their whole lives could be turned inside out in a week flat. People’s lives don’t make sense anymore, but most people in America, the poor people espe-cially, they’re a lot happier than they used to be. They might be pro-foundly lost, like your Senator likes to say, but they’re not all crushed and desperate. They’re just… wandering around. Drifting. Hang-ing loose. They’re at very loose ends.”