Neal Stephenson - Fall or, Dodge in Hell

“We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.

“‘Slut,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘hag,’ ‘fatty,’ all the bases need to be covered. If we generate traffic in the gigaBraden range—which I think is easily doable—but it’s all skewed toward, say, ‘feminazi,’ then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot—”

“I think we get the idea,” Corvallis said.

“—why, then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole.”

“Pluto, we sort of missed the part where you explained the whole premise of what you’re doing,” Corvallis said.

“I’m glad you said so,” said Maeve, “because I was wondering if I had blacked out.”

“What I’m gathering is that you have been developing some kind of bots or something …”

“Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. “I took the liberty of drawing up a logo.”

“Please don’t show us programmer art, Pluto, it’s not—” But it was too late, as Pluto had swiveled his laptop around to display an unbelievably terrible drawing of an animal that was just barely recognizable as some kind of ape. One shaggy arm had its knuckles on the ground, the other was whipping overhead as it hurled a large, dripping gob of shit. Wavy lines radiated from the projectile as a way of indicating that it smelled bad. It was even more terrible than most of Pluto’s programmer art, but he was smiling broadly and even sort of looking at them, which counted for something. Worse yet, Maeve liked it, and laughed. Corvallis hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.

“By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.

“What do you mean, arbitrary?” Maeve asked.

“As many as he wants,” Corvallis said.

“As many as I want.”

“Don’t they cost money or something?”

Pluto looked startled for a moment, then laughed.

“Pluto has ten times as much money as I do,” Corvallis said.

“Nineteen,” Pluto corrected him, “you don’t know about some of the interesting trading strategies I have been pursuing.” Redirecting his attention from Corvallis’s shoes to Maeve’s prosthetic legs, he went on, “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”

“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.

“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.

“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

“Yes. It worked unexpectedly well. So, another part of the strategy might be to spawn a large number of nonexistent harassment targets and deploy APEs against them as well. I just thought of that.”

“You said earlier you needed my complicity,” Maeve said. “My permission.”

“Yes, what I would like to do is run a troop of APEs at something like a gigaBraden for a couple of weeks, directed at you.”

“So if I understand the math,” Corvallis said, “during that whole time, a billion defamatory posts would be made every hour, personally directed against Maeve. Denouncing her as every kind of bad thing you have included in your ontology of execration. In all languages as well as using imagery. And on all kinds of social media outlets.”

“Her Wikipedia entry alone,” Pluto said, “would be edited a thousand times during the first tenth of a second. New material would be added describing Maeve’s career as a pirate, murderess, sex worker, headhunter, terrorist, and coprophage. By that point the entry will probably have been locked by the administrators, but not before all of the defamatory material is archived in the page history. Meanwhile my APEs will be spawning hundreds of thousands of new accounts on social media systems, and using those accounts to make millions of posts in a similar vein. Existing botnets will be leveraged to generate a colossal spam campaign. The Twitter attack will proceed in three phases. Phase Zero is already under way, in a sense, and consists of—”

“Why do you need my complicity?” Maeve asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s polite of you to ask, but …”

“It’s an open campaign. We would announce it. Publish statistics on how it’s going. You could do press interviews, if you wanted. The sheer magnitude of it would make it obvious, even to the most credulous user of the Miasma, that it was all a bunch of nonsense. Afterward, no one in their right mind would ever believe anything negative about you that had ever been posted on the Miasma. But because it is all technically slanderous, you would have to promise not to sue me.”

“Didn’t you say, when you first came in, that you were going to destroy the Internet? The Miasma?” Maeve asked.

“Yes.”

“How does this accomplish that?”

“I am going to open-source all of the tools for spawning APEs and running troops of them,” Pluto explained. “Combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, this will make it possible for anyone in the world to spawn an APE troop for pennies, and manage their activities from an app.”

Corvallis raised a finger. “I work for Lyke,” he pointed out. “If your APEs are setting up fake accounts and hurling shit on Lyke, it’s a problem for me.”

“An opportunity,” Pluto insisted. “It’s an opportunity for Lyke to differentiate itself from those old-school platforms that, in the wake of Moab, can never again be trusted.”

“Are you responsible for the Moab hoax?” Corvallis asked him flat-out. The idea had only just occurred to him.

“No.”

“Did you have anything to do with it at all?”

“No. Which is weird because whoever did do it thinks like I do in a lot of ways. But, I try to draw the line at anything where people die.”

“You’ve been working on this for a while,” Maeve said. “No one could create all of what you’ve described in a few days. I don’t care how good a programmer you are.”

“That is correct. I have been working on different parts of it ever since I retired from Corporation 9592.”

“Two years ago,” Corvallis said, for Maeve’s benefit. “And now you’re just being opportunistic. The aftermath of Moab is the perfect time for you to launch this.”

“And the perfect time,” Pluto insisted, “for your company to set itself apart from the competition.”

Maeve thought she had better sleep on it. Which was actually possible, on a business jet flying across the Pacific Ocean. She slept soundly for nine hours, which somehow gave Corvallis the premonition that she was going to say yes. Consequently, he slept poorly indeed, lying next to her making mental checklists of every action he was going to have to take as soon as they reached a place where he could connect to the Internet. The technical side of it was going to be easy; Lyke’s engineers, forewarned, could hack together some processes that would filter out most APE traffic. The legal aspect was what kept him awake, largely because it was out of his domain and there was nothing he could do about it save come up with half-baked nightmare scenarios and then worry about them.