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Jules would run the request for data on show-watching habits through Alyansa’s complicated station-wide agreement process. Eventually, that’d reach the show hosts. The archon’s arguments were, as Elys had predicted, more persuasive than anything she could’ve said. That persuasive genuineness of theirs was part of why she’d suspected Jules of sabotaging the city in the first place.
While everyone waited for Alyansans to allow City Support to view their data, Elys and Taia coordinated with detectives to clear each remaining member of City Support, including Jules, of blame for sabotaging the city. City Support had already searched the city for signs of tampering with the system, but this was one evaluation Elys was willing to repeat.
Jules, Taia, and Elys reconvened virtually that evening. A notification before Elys joined the conversation warned that Jules had set the conversation to be publicly transmitted and archived. By the time Elys connected to the visualization, the conversation had several hundred subscribers, and the count was rising. She resigned herself to her messy living room being broadcast to the universe, again. At least she wore pants this time.
Jules connected from a compressed version of the separated houses Solar rich folks lived in. The narrow room Elys occasionally glimpsed behind them made her feel a little claustrophobic. They waved a hand as if they could brush names off the list of performers that appeared in the visualization’s shared reference area. “People who watch these shows regularly are demanding CRUs when they ask the city for help.”
Taia, or another mediator using her ID and work face, joined the conversation in armor from a small room lit with warm light. A shelf behind them containing toys, folded clothes, and unlabeled boxes got included in the visualization whenever they leaned back too far. The mediator skimmed the list faster than Elys. “Conlen,” she snarled. That was definitely Taia.
The Les Conlen Truth Hour came in eighth on a list of the top nine shows with CRU-demanding audiences. Despite their popularity, the city noted that none of them were among the top twenty that Alyansans downloaded each week. Since the city hosted almost everything in Alyansa, it would know. Searching “CRU” in the show transcripts revealed even more.
“The phrasing is similar between these statements over the past few weeks.” Elys highlighted and copied sections of transcripts to put them all in one part of the visualization.
“‘Every attack is a deadly attack?’” Taia read aloud. “No you do not need... Not every crisis is an ‘attack!’ What are these people thinking?”
“This is what they’re thinking, isn’t it?” said Elys. “They don’t seem to be censoring themselves much.”
“The phrase I keep seeing,” Jules said, “is ‘you need a CRU every time.’”
They met Elys’s eyes, and she nodded. “That might do it. And on a small enough scale that it wouldn’t necessarily trigger reports, but big enough to cascade into the model.”
Taia looked back and forth between Elys and Jules. “Do what to what?”
“We checked for digital data amplification, hardware failure, illegal changes, anything that might lead the city off track,” said Elys, “But this is... Social data amplification, I guess. If these hosts convinced millions of people to demand a CRU for every inconvenience, then the city would take that preference into account. Since that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do, it wouldn’t show up on any of our tests, and it updated the model too quickly for the drift detectors and anomaly handling tests to mark it, although...”
If they could replicate this scenario in the testing environment more precisely, now that they had more data from reality to improve the model, she might be able to get the anomaly handling analyses to pick up the city’s mistake. She’d have to give that more thought later. “The result would look just like what we’ve been seeing: CRUs called for non-crises, the city dithering about who to send where, and everyone involved getting more and more frustrated.”
“Then our tests were correct,” said Jules. “There was no error.”
Even though Elys had nothing to do with the city’s development, she felt like she was radiating pride at how close the MCAI came to figuring out Alyansans’ irrational behavior on its own, with only one casualty. “The city’s doing the best it can to accommodate a new Alyansan behavioral state.”
She recalled the city’s wording in its autoanalysis and laughed, a little hysterically. “It was right. It was right! Its inputs did change. Just not the ones it was reporting on. We’ve been asking it the wrong questions.” It watched everyone so closely and weighted Alyansans’ opinions so heavily that its very nature made such abrupt input changes difficult to manage.
“Exactly.” The grim satisfaction in Jules’s voice suggested that they’d reached the same conclusion about the city’s performance. “That correction takes a great deal of quality data and guidance.”
“And it’s not going to be as efficient in decision-making as it was before this shift in Alyansans’ behavior,” Elys said. “Given enough time it will start assigning CRUs faster, but when it does, how would you expect the CRUs to react?”
“I’d be angry about being called in for problems I wasn’t trained to deal with,” said Taia. “The CRU called to standby for an hour while mine confirmed the situation would be mad too. Not everything is a crisis. Sending us to a situation that demands a different skill set is worse than a waste. Someone who’s already in trouble could be harmed by the people sent to help.”
“That’s not the intent of the Alyansans who created your crisis response policies, I assume,” said Elys.
“Of course not,” said Jules. “And the Republic knows that.”
“The Republic?” said Taia. “Didn’t you just say that this is a problem we Alyansans are causing ourselves?”
“Why are these hosts pushing this message, using such similar language, all at the same time?” Jules pointed out the column of dates on which the same phrases appeared in multiple show episodes. “Somebody’s putting words in their mouths. I think we all know who.”
“But why would they do that? And why hasn’t the city already decided what to do about it?” Taia leaned back while gesticulating, pulling the shelves behind her into the visualization for a second. “This sounds so simple.”
Although Elys had suspicions about the first question, it was well above her pay grade. “To an MCAI, this is a very complex problem,” she said, just as Jules was about to say something else.
Jules signed, “Finish your thought.”
“This is a bizarre outlier case I’m guessing you never had to train it on,” Elys said.
“Never,” said Jules.
The people who’d made Elys’s extraction from Alyansa profitable to Vatirah and so many others might just have found a way to exploit the very nature of MCAI station management. That, or Wirth or Nautilus were playing a strange game.
Elys couldn’t decide which of those possibilities made her angrier, but one hit a lot closer to home. “Let’s start by sending someone qualified to ask these show hosts why they’ve been saying it.”
––––––––
The conversation broke up, and Elys gave Taia an hour to change and get settled at home before she reached out to her. “So Jules keeps talking about the Republic paying someone to do this to the city. Why would an Alyansan accept anything they had to offer? What don’t Alyansans have?”
In the visualization hovering in Elys’s living room, Taia’s expression was somewhere between exasperation and disgust. “Well, collecting is popular here. Some people collect currency. Like, physical things that are worthless by themselves but get traded for useful things.”
“I know about currency,” Elys said gravely. “But do Alyansans buy things with it? Or collect digital currency which could be used?”
“I’m sure people collect digital currency,” Taia said. “Digital collection is as common as physical collection. More than, since you can have as much space as you want to display it in your digital home. I don’t know what they’d use it for, though.”
Her nose wrinkled. “I don’t want to know. There’s not much that we choose not to make or import. The few things on that list are on it for a reason. If I heard someone was hoarding digital currency and not displaying it, like they were going to use it to get something only they would benefit from... That’s gross. I’d wonder what other unalyansan things they’re doing.”
“I don’t usually go in for nationalism,” Elys said, “but you make it look good.” After Taia finished giggling, Elys added, “I’m pretty sure this happens in the Republic too. I mean, the RIS always has messages they want people to accept, and I’m sure they choose influential people to talk for them. And those people get paid.”
“Why don’t the RIS just say what they want to say?”
“People don’t trust them.”
“They don’t trust liars who won’t speak for themselves? I wonder why.” Taia stood and paced across her living room and back, followed attentively by Troll. Whenever they passed the couch, the visualization expanded to include Mighty where she lay on it watching them. “Wait.” Taia stopped, and Troll did too. “Republic citizens don’t trust the people who make major decisions that affect them? And they let those people hold authority over them anyway?”
“You don’t want to put yourself and all your friends and family on a watch list — that is, you don’t want to make them seem more likely to commit a crime than the people around them are. That makes it easy for law enforcement agencies to hassle them, which costs them money and occasionally their health.”
“That’s unfair. And creepy.”
“Now you’re getting it.
––––––––
Elys spent the rest of the day the same way she’d spent the past two weeks, studying show transcripts in various positions on her couch and her floor. As welcoming as Alyansa was, Elys reveled in having space of her own in it.
So far as she could tell, all nine show hosts had begun spouting the “CRU for every problem” message within four days of each other. Due to his episode schedule Les Conlen had been the last to begin, so his addition resulted in an easily measured increase in CRU requests. The week after Conlen joined the others in broadcasting that message, the city’s CRU dispatch slowdown began. In another four days, City Support received the first wave of citizen complaints.
Late in the afternoon, Zahra Wirth came through on her mediation agreement with a detailed set of Republic records that had to be classified, sent to Elys, Jules, and someone in Off-world Affairs. All nine suspect show hosts appeared in a list of contract employees of Eidolon Holdings, a Republic corporation infiltrated or owned by the RIS. Records showed each host’s payments from Eidolon, including dates that matched their changes in messaging.
Eidolon had paid most of them in Republic currency. One received a shipment of animal products instead, and Eidolon had sent Conlen media projects which Alyansans had chosen not to acquire licenses for.
“This is the evidence we’ve been looking for,” Elys told Taia when she accepted the visualization invitation.
“What?” Taia bent to tie on gym shoes, moving Elys’s perspective of her down with her head. “How?”
Elys laughed while she shared that visualization with Taia too. Elys and Jules had both been so right and wrong, in different ways. “Eidolon Holdings is basically the RIS. This is evidence that they’ve been paying those show hosts to make Alyansans change their behavior too quickly for the city to keep up with it, because Alyansans expected the city to do its best to think things through on its own before asking for help. Which it did, but it’s not as good at handling new information and scenarios as we’d like.”
“I see the first part about the hosts getting paid, which... That’s really scary, that the RIS would do it and it worked, city save us. But I don’t see how you got to the rest of it.” Taia was staring at the visualization with one shoe still untied, looking like Elys had felt after the first time the RIS tried to kill her, when she’d realized they had it out for her personally. “Maybe Off-world Affairs can put it in terms Alyansans will understand,” Taia continued. “I’ve got to get to the dispatch center for my CRU’s shift.” Now that Elys was a citizen and no longer needed a liaison, Taia was keeping a regular schedule with her CRU.
After Taia left the visualization to join her CRU for the day, Elys asked Nisse to send a conversation request to somebody in Off-world Affairs. An earnest-looking teenager in Alyansa’s loose and colorful business attire accepted the invitation while securing a gold rectangular clip over the end of their braided black hair. A text notification of Level Three Privacy Protection meant this conversation wouldn’t appear in the public archive. According to their profile, the kid’s name was Lan Huang and they’d assumed a role in Off-world Affairs instead of joining a CRU for their mandatory service period.
“Do you have a superior, or someone who makes decisions, who I could talk to?” Elys asked Lan as politely as her impatience allowed.
Lan finished skimming what Wirth had sent, and their dark brown eyes went wide. “I know why the city sent you to me!”
The kid invited Elys to a visualization without a verbal or signed order to their assistant, which was a little strange. Elys and Taia accepted and found the visualization populated with sim stills of text and clips of the suspect show hosts’ faces talking against bright, blurry, yet cheerful background scenes. It took Elys a second to identify what was odd about the images. She hadn’t seen an ad since she’d been in Alyansa.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what these were about.” Lan’s bronze skin glowed with a light blush, as if it embarrassed them to admit their confusion. “They’re from off-world. They started popping up in shows a few weeks ago. Now they’re in digital homes, public image collections, all over everywhere. Why are they here? Who made them? It’s not like they’re funny, right? But you’re looking at the same hosts I am.”
“And I would love to know who paid for those ads,” Elys said, “because I bet the money’s coming from the Republic Information Service, through Eidolon Holdings or someplace like it.”
“Really?” The kid’s eyes were now so wide Elys worried they’d pull a muscle. “If they were doing that then our ambassadors should ask them to stop.”
Elys couldn’t imagine the RIS doing anything but ignoring the ambassadors’ request. “That would be nice.”
“Yeah, okay! I’ll get some people to help me. Um. How much do you think should be public?”
“I wouldn’t spread the names around, or even that hosts were the attack vector, until you’ve got them to agree to quit paying hosts to manipulate Alyansans.”
When Taia came back from her shift with her CRU, Elys told her everything the Off-world Affairs kid had said. “So now all the major players know which entertainers are encouraging people to demand CRUs, and that the city’s doing the best it can with people’s new behavior. Now it’s up to all your — our — specialists to come up with a solution to the people problem, so City Support’s next rebalance will get CRU deployments back to normal.”
Taia caught her in a hug so tight it squeezed Elys’s breath from her lungs and the thoughts from her head. “You did it!” Taia said. “What now?”
Elys leaned her head against the back of the couch. The city had been delaying CRU deployments because so many Alyansans had asked CRUs to respond to non-crises that they’d convinced the city it didn’t know when to send them. The same thing had happened with deploying experts, because Alyansans were asking for CRUs instead. What now, indeed.
That, in combination with the CRUs’ resulting reluctance to rush to a call that didn’t require their expertise and the experts’ lack of interest in helping people who were angry they weren’t mediators, explained the delays. And the erroneous behavior had started with the Republic planting the “CRU for everything” idea through Alyansans’ favorite entertainers.
The Republic could do much worse, like they did to Reznikov, where Elys grew up. Alyansa had gotten lucky.
“Now I see if City Support wants help rebalancing the city to enforce an appropriate definition of when a CRU is needed, and to find a way to account for future sudden shifts in Alyansan behavior. The Republic successfully disrupted the station once, and if they don’t try this again, someone else will. And somebody needs to talk those nine show hosts into stopping that messaging, and talk to Alyansans about... rebalancing their definition of CRU necessity too, I guess.”
Taia stood. “Okay. You talk to City Support. I’ll look into the public information side. The whole station could be safe again by midnight!”
It would take longer than that, but Elys finally felt like they were on the right track.