David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Get the fuck outta here,” said Leila. “So what are you? If ‘the Committee’”—Leila made air quotes like the woman had—“is a cabal, what are you guys?”

“We’re just a network. We stay in touch and keep each other up to date, share ideas.”

“You mean like Friendster?” said Leila.

“If you like. Look, I’d be skeptical too, okay? But listen. The Committee has founded a secret, sovereign corporate state to achieve its ends. We want to stop them. But we can’t just call the police or whatever, because they operate way above that level.”

“What do you mean, way above that level?”

“They control seventy percent of the bandwidth in Asia, all the newspapers in contentious geopolitical zones, and the major pharmaceuticals. They control Sine, Skype, Facebook, all of that. They own forests and water basins and silica mines and railroads and airports. They have shareholders in the security services of most of the nations in the world. They have a very capable, committed executive tier. They recruit by convincing, co-opting, or blackmailing. They have extraction teams and attorneys and a kind of HR department. And they’re planning to put it all into play. Soon, we think.”

A waitress approached their table. “Can I get you anything?” she asked. Leila hadn’t realized it was a table-service place; she had just chosen a chair on the periphery and camped.

“I’ll have a mint tea,” said Paige Turner.

“Nothing for me,” said Leila.

The waitress went to clear a cup from their table, which was covered with Leila’s papers and magazines.

“Oh. Sorry. Here,” said Leila. She collected her stuff and shoved it into the open maw of her big bag, then put it all on the floor beneath her feet. The waitress acknowledged Leila’s help, and then knelt down to push Leila’s bag farther under the table. She made a watch-out signal to Leila by tapping at the corner of one eye and then indicating the rivulet of passersby in the concourse.

“Yes. Thank you,” said Leila, and smiled back at the woman.

After the waitress left, Paige Turner went on. “They’re simply going to start a protection racket. Like, it’s going to be sold as a service, but they’re going to sell you what had been free before. Some of them are Malthusians who believe that the Earth won’t continue to carry us beyond about ten billion, so they want to secure their access to resources: water, genetic material, the electronic transmission of data. But then a lot of them are probably just profiteers.

“To stop them we’ve hacked together a broadcast platform which we think we can stand up and defend for, maybe, seventy-two hours. We’re going to use it to disseminate to everyone in the world the truth of what’s been going on. We’d also use that platform to offer everyone in the world a third way?” She did the rising-intonation thing, as if unsure of herself or awaiting some reassurance from Leila.

Wasn’t the third way a Clinton thing? “Go on,” said Leila.

“Right now, if you’re born in certain places, you’re just fucked, right?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“While we have the world’s attention, we’re going to send back to them all the information that’s been collected on them. Then destroy that data and offer everyone the chance to sign up with us.”

“What do you give them?”

“A number.”

“Say again?”

“We give them a number. Well, we each discover our own number, really.”

“Why does anyone want a number?”

“Because it’s the beginning of a new way of organizing the world.”

“Yeah, it’s also the beginning of a way of subjugating the world.”

“That’s why we want to have a really good launch. But once everyone sees the scale of the data-mining the Committee’s been doing and the fascist reach of their operation, they’ll know we’re the good guys.”

“That’s terrible logic,” Leila couldn’t help saying. “If I’m sitting at my desk or whatever and I get your big announcement, I’m going to want to evaluate your claims independently…”

“And how would you do that?” Paige asked.

“I guess I’d start by searching for committee, cabal, electronic coup .”

The waitress came back with Paige’s mint tea and a little handheld payment device.

“Thank you,” said Paige. She fed the payment device her credit card and keyed a PIN code into it. The device chittered out a little receipt, but when Paige tore it off, the bit of curled paper fluttered to the floor. “Sorry,” said Paige to the waitress, who had knelt to pick it up.

“I told you,” Paige went on, “they control all those search engines. We’re working on getting paper about all of this. But the Committee is basically paperless. Maybe that’s to save trees.”

Leila needed a moment to see that this last part was a joke.

“When you get handed back your file and you see how much they know about you, you’ll be mad enough to really do something,” Paige assured Leila.

“Walgreens knows I buy Pantene? I don’t care.”

“Okay, but how about if a shadow government is filing away everything about you: your genetic sequence, your demographics, images of you, your social schematics, your skills, your access to wealth, your patterns of movement, your pressure points, your hopes and dreams, your fears and desires? How about if they’re doing this because they have a twenty-year plan to own or control all the knowledge in the world? How about if they’re betting on a breakdown of the digital infrastructure, because in that case, they’ll be able to charge the whole world for data recovery? Only it’s not really betting, since they can cause the breakdown; they can initiate the emergency.”

A chill rode Leila’s spine. A reflexive disinclination to believe in political conspiracy theories flows from two beliefs: that human incompetence makes such conspiracies untenably complicated, and that people do not allow terrible injustices to be perpetrated upon them.

But Leila had just spent six months in a totalitarian state where she had been daily reminded that the second premise was not axiomatic. If it can happen to someone else, it can happen to me, she remembered. Anyway, there was something plausible here — that a syndicate would cause an emergency and then sell the rescue. That’s what all good mafias did, wasn’t it? It was probably a totally orthodox business plan. “But how’d they get the genetic information?” she asked Paige. “I never went in for my mouth swab.”

“Monitored waste streams, biosampling postage stamps. The Node. Look, I’m not from the technical side, okay? I’m a travel agent. I’m just here to deliver your tickets and documents.”

“Oh yeah? Where am I going?”

“Dublin. To attend a meeting.”

“No. Listen, just so we’re clear: I’m on my way back to California.”

“Well, look, maybe we can help you out with what’s going on there. And we hardly ever divert people like this, but you’re apparently a potentially valuable asset”—Paige rolled her eyes a tiny bit here, maybe bitchily, even—“so this is like some big deal. You should try to enjoy it.”

That line, to Leila, was stranger than the one about the biosampling postage stamps.

“Enjoy it?”

“Yeah. Like, your ticket gets you into the fanciest lounge in this airport. There are really nice showers in there.”

Her ticket? And was that a bitchy swipe, about the shower? In fairness, she could use a shower.

“And here’s a phone,” said Paige, sliding a phone across the table. “It works only when it has a secure path, and sometimes it only lets you text.”

“I don’t want your phone. If you want my help, you’re going to have to make a better case.”