“Of course.”
A trickle of tourists had already begun streaming forward to the main observation lounge. Parents, dressed in bright-colored sarongs and Patagonian slacks, herded kids who sported the latest youth fashion-fake antennae and ersatz scales-imitating some of the alien personalities that had been discovered aboard the Livingstone Object … also called, for some reason, the Havana Artifact. A grand conference may have been called to deliberate whether it was a genuine case of First Contact, or just another hoax. But popular culture had already cast judgment.
The Artifact was cool.
“You say an alert came through two minutes ago?” Tor wondered. Nothing had flashed yet in her peripherals. But maybe the vigilance thresholds were set too high. With a rapid series of clicks on her tooth implants, she adjusted them downward.
Immediately, crimson tones began creeping in from the edges of her specs, offering links that whiffed and throbbed unpleasantly.
Uh-oh.
“Not an alert, madam. No, no. Just preliminary, precautionary-”
But Tor’s attention had already veered. Using both clicks and subvocal commands, she sent her specs swooping through the data overlays of virtuality, following threads of a security situation. Sensors tracked every twitch of the iris, following and often anticipating her choices, while colored data-cues jostled and flashed.
“May I take away any rubbish or recycling?” asked the boxy tray on the wall. It dropped open a receptacle, like a hungry jaw, eager to be fed. The servitor waited in vain for a few moments. Then, noting that her focus lay far away, it silently folded and departed.
“No cause for alarm,” Tor muttered sardonically as she probed and sifted the dataways. Someone should have banished that cliché from the repertoire of all ai devices. No human over the age of thirty would ever hear the phrase without wincing. Of all the lies that accompanied Awfulday, it had been the worst.
Some of Tor’s favorite software agents were already reporting back from the Grid.
Koppel-the summarizer-zoomed toward public, corporate, and government feeds, collating official pronouncements. Most of them were repeating the worrisome cliché.
Gallup-her pollster program-sifted for opinion. People weren’t buying it, apparently. On a scale of one thousand, “no cause for alarm” had a credibility rating of eighteen, and dropping. Tor felt a wrench in the pit of her stomach.
Bernstein leaped into the whistle-blower circuits, hunting down gossip and hearsay. As usual, there were far too many rumors for any person-or personal ai-to trawl. Only this time, the flood was overwhelming even the sophisticated filters at the Skeptic Society. MediaCorp seemed no better; her status as a member of the Journalistic Staff only won her a queue number from Research Division and a promise of response “in minutes.”
Minutes?
It was beginning to look like a deliberate disinformation flood, time-unleashed in order to drown out any genuine tattles. Gangsters, terrorists, and reffers had learned the hard way that careful plans can be upset by some softhearted henchman, wrenched by remorseful second thoughts about innocent bystanders. Many a scheme had been spoiled by some lowly underling, who posted an anonymous squeal at the last minute. To prevent this, masterminds and ringleaders now routinely unleashed cascades of ersatz confessions, just as soon as an operation was underway-a spamming of faux regret, artificially generated, ranging across the whole spectrum of plausible sabotage and man-made disasters.
Staring at a flood of warnings, Tor knew that one or more of the rumors had to be true. But which?
Washington area Beltway defenses have already been breached by machoist suiciders infected with pulmonella plague, heading for the Capitol…
A coalition of humanist cults have decided to put an end to all this nonsense about a so-called “alien Artifact” from interstellar space…
The U.S. president, seeking to reclaim traditional authority, is about to nationalize the D.C.-area civil militia on a pretext…
Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas, this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident…
A method has been found to convert zeppelins into flying bombs…
Among the international dignitaries, who were invited to Washington to view the Livingstone Object, are a few who plan to…
There are times when human-neuronal paranoia can react faster than mere digital simulacra. Tor’s old-fashioned cortex snapped to attention a full five seconds before her ais, Bernstein and Columbo, made the same connection.
Zeppelins… flying bombs…
It sounded unlikely… probably distraction-spam.
But I happen to be on a zeppelin.
That wasn’t just a realization. The words formed a message. With subvocal grunts and tooth-click punctuations, Tor broadcast it far and wide. Not just to her favorite correlation and stringer groups, but to several hundred Citizen Action Networks. Her terse missive zoomed across the Net indiscriminately, calling to every CAN that had expressed interest in the zep rumor.
“This is Tor Povlov, investigative reporter for MediaCorp-credibility rating 752-aboard the passenger zep Spirit of Chula Vista. We are approaching the D.C. Beltway defense zone. That may put me at a right place-time to examine one of the reffer rumors.
“I request a smart-mob coalescence.
Disinformation, a curse with ancient roots, had been updated with ultramodern ways of lying. Machoists and other bastards might plant sleeper-ais in a million virtual locales, programmed to pop out at a preset time and spam every network with autogenerated “plausibles”… randomly generated combinations of word and tone that were drawn from recent news, each variant sure to rouse the paranoiac fears of someone.
Mutate this ten million times (easy enough to do in virtual space) and you’ll find a nerve to tweak in anyone.
Citizens could fight back, combating lies with light. Sophisticated programs compared eyewitness accounts from many sources, weighted by credibility, offering average folk tools to reforge Consensus Reality, while discarding the dross. Only that took time. And during an emergency, time was the scarcest commodity of all.
Public avowal worked more quickly. Calling attention to your own person. Saying: “Look, I’m right here, real, credible, and accountable-I am not ai-so take me seriously.”
Of course that required guts, especially since Awfulday. In the face of danger, ancient human instinct cried out: Duck and cover. Don’t draw attention to yourself.
Tor considered that natural impulse for maybe two seconds, then blared on all levels. Dropping privacy cryption, she confirmed her ticketed billet and physical presence aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, with realtime biometrics and a dozen in-cabin camera views.
“I’m here,” she murmured, breathlessly, toward any fellow citizen whose correlation-attention ais would listen.
“Rally and feedme. Tell me what to do.”
Calling up a smart-mob was tricky. People might already be too scattered and distracted by the rumor storm. The number to respond might not reach critical mass-in which case all you’d get is a smattering of critics, kibitzers, and loudmouths, doing more harm than good. A below-zero-sum rabble-or bloggle-its collective IQ dropping, rather than climbing, with every new volunteer to join. Above all, you needed to attract a core group-the seed cell-of online know-it-alls, constructive cranks, and correlation junkies, armed with the latest coalescence software, who were smart and savvy enough to serve as prefrontals… coordinating a smart mob without dominating. Providing focus without quashing the creativity of a group mind.