David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Then he told James about how the paranoia began to creep up on the beauty, and then to eclipse it.

He did at least try to keep away from the stupider wings of the Internet, where cranks peddle conspiracies. But he was constantly tempted. He would read too much about nanotechnology and then begin to see the tiny machines all around him. Or he would come across news of a huge private correctional corporation manufacturing a mobile, container-based prison system that could be delivered and installed in days and how one of the principals of that company was a higher-up at FEMA. Problem is, when you begin to talk about FEMA even possibly being nefarious, people edge away from you. So when he saw any garden-variety crackpottery in his copy, he’d scrub it out before he clicked Publish.

And then how it devolved further; how it slid below the surface of cogency and into such solipsistic nonsense that it became clear to the blog’s fifty readers that Leo was in the grip of something, maybe drugs and alcohol, but probably something else as well. His output increased, and he stopped doing any sort of editing, really. There were rants about being slighted by the UPS guy; bossy warnings about leaving your computer unguarded, about the puffer machines at the airport, about nonstick pan coatings, and about the direction of the culture. There were bellicose and politically incorrect challenges to received notions and the status quo; exhortations to avoid respectability and to live by a code.

And then he told James how he had become focused on the vast and terrible conspiracy that he alone had divined.

“Okay, here we go. This is the stuff. Tell me about this,” said James.

“See, I was online, right? Just poking around,” Leo said. “And, well, you know that blowhard Mark Deveraux?”

“The self-help guy? Bring Your Insides Out, or whatever?”

“Yeah, that guy. Well, I used to know him. Ten years ago. We were best friends in college. Anyway, I found this video of him on the web, where he was talking about how you can have whatever you want, you just have to learn to control your wish-making faculties.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Well, it was the way he was saying it. But here’s the thing: He was lifting this stuff from my blog. Not word for word. But I was pretty sure it was mine.”

“Motherfucker,” said James.

“I know, right? He was probably making money off it. He got it wrong, is the thing. I never said you could have whatever you want. I just said you should notice that you do get most of what you wish for. You wish to enter the traffic stream without touching other cars; you wish to propel your sleepy body bipedally to the bathroom; you wish that the meaning of this or that moment would become more apparent to you — these are granted wishes.

“I was furious. So I started to look into my old friend Mark Deveraux. Turns out, in every talk he gives, every idiotic ‘blessay’ he pens, he also shills for SineCo and for this new device of theirs, the Node—”

“Oh, I saw one of those,” James interrupted, “they’re cool.”

“No, they’re not, James,” said Leo, his voice gone granite. “They’re totally evil. They’re biometric sampling and surveillance devices that SineCo — or whoever’s behind that company — is distributing.”

“Hold on. They’re selling them, right? Not distributing them?”

“At a steep loss. The tech press can’t figure it out. They’re saying that either SineCo is building these in some secret incorporated part of Asia using, like, incarcerated children, or it’s the shaver-cartridge business model — you know, where they sell to us schmucks, at a loss, the thing that makes us have to buy their expensive thing forever.”

“Yeah, it’s true. That shaver-cartridge racket is bullshit.”

“But I say that it’s a much longer con. I say that they want to get this device into the hands of everyone in the whole world, where it can collect all of our movements, our vital signs, our images, our voices, our ambient audio, our DNA. All of it.”

“They can collect that?”

“Oh, they do already, as much as they can. They biomonitor your sewer pipe, and they use HIPAA siphoning, and facial recognition at ATMs, and AV collection grids at major intersections. And I won’t even go into airport security. But with the Node, you bring that motherfucker home. At your bedside, in your pocket, on your dashboard, to a date. You’re always showing it what you’re looking at.”

“You ever figure out who the They is?”

“Well, no. But check it out: The TSA has this program called Clear, where if you get pre-vetted, you can skip security.”

“Yeah, I saw that. But I never see the line those people are supposed to use.”

“I don’t think they’re even in the same part of the airport as you and I. And clear is also a state that Scientologists are trying to achieve. And Clear is the name SineCo gave its new operating system. And Baxter-Snider, that huge pharmaceutical — they make Synapsiquell — they’re giving out free contact lenses. For research, they say. The program’s called Contact Lens — Enabled Astigmatism Research: C–L-E-A-R.”

Blue room; James thinking. “Okay. Put that way, it’s weird, I guess. But so you think SineCo and the Scientologists and the TSA and Baxter-Snider are in cahoots?”

“And my old friend Mark.”

James didn’t say anything.

“I know; it sounds bonkers.”

But at the time it really hadn’t. He’d wanted to alert the world. Once he’d decided that everything transmitted electronically was being vacuumed up into an enormous shadow-government database, he asked his friend Jake if he could use his letterpress machine, then camped out in Jake’s studio for thirty hours, setting type until his hands were black.

When the first broadside clacked off the machine, he took it outside to read it in the five a.m. light. He saw the text was smudgy and poorly kerned. But reading it, he knew what he had was electrifying. He knew it could change the world, stir the people, bring them to the ramparts. The thirty-six-point banner headline was THEY ARE COLLECTING EVeRYTHING (Leo could only find four thirty-six-point capital E s).

“How many copies do you want to print?” Jake had asked, handing his friend a mug of coffee.

“Five thousand? Ten thousand?”

“Let’s start with fifty,” Jake said.

But Leo omitted the goriest details from this account of his unraveling. He did not tell James about how he had bragged in the broadside of his illustrious pedigree. “Descended from the American intellectual elite,” he’d said he was. And he did not tell James that he had actually threatened Mark Deveraux in the broadside. Near the end of his breathless, alarmist, offset screed, he announced that he had “incriminating footage of SineCo fraudster and pitchman Mark Deveraux.” As he recalled now, that seemed appropriate, because he was exhorting everyone who wished to join the resistance to do everything in his or her power to oppose this evil plan. What was in his power to do was to trip up one of SineCo’s frontmen.

But he saw now that that part was extra-weird — the public-threat-making part. Why had he failed to do any moral calculations about blackmail? At that point, it was by any means necessary . But nothing was by any means, was it? There was always context.

“You know, it’s not even that far-fetched. That’s not what’s wrong with it,” said James.

Leo did know. And he knew what James was going to say next.

“It’s that…why would you be the only one to see it? It has that classic schizo thing, where you’re at the center of it all.”

There are many centers, thought Leo. Not Jesus Christ but the Holy Ghost .