THE THIRD WAVE OF BOOMER attacks started in December. Yet again they weren’t set off by Isaac Abramson. Mark had been chastened by the knowledge that actual FBI agents knew where he lived. Had talked to Julia. His mother. Off and on for weeks he found himself invited into channels where planning was taking place, then booted off, then let back in. It wasn’t clear he even wanted to be on there right now. But it was also difficult to tell how serious to take all the badgering from the Silence guys—they called him a narc a lot, but they called each other narcs a lot, too. By the beginning of the winter he had come to feel like a single temblor amid a far larger quake—a prime mover, an occasional voice, but the effect of the motion was too great to decipher. Even if he did have to talk to a federal agent there wasn’t much to say: he chatted on the Internet. He made untraceable videos he knew were encrypted. He’d done nothing wrong. Political speech was a clearly protected category. When he was at the magazine Mark had worked on a story about the proliferation of small earthquakes all over Oklahoma and Arkansas, regions that had never had earthquakes, but who now had hundreds a month, all caused by fracking companies that were disposing of waste and wastewater by injecting it deep into the ground, where it hit once-stable fault lines. These had to be the first large-scale man-made earthquakes in natural history, and now here he was, causing something of the same himself—and then finding that it set off a greater temblor, shaken by some other force, undetectable, separate. Again it had to have been someone in Silence’s myriads who sent out the Boomer Action that led to not only their downfall, but Isaac Abramson’s.
Just before the action was called for, the #retirer channel went live again, and there was a wild, chaotic conversation. Mark hadn’t been let in on the planning for the call to action itself, but he picked up on the fact that there was a series of targets being considered for attacks. No matter how he searched back up the thread, it wasn’t clear what was settled upon as a target. Mark asked a couple times what the plan was, but each time he just got the same response:
<silence1>: narc
He couldn’t have told any of them about the feds if he tried. Chatting with them with what he knew made it feel like less of a threat—a secret he held, and owned. Meantime Mark could do nothing but watch as the hackers in Silence went after old media. Hijacking the advertising experience ahead of an episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website was one thing. But now they went after the centerpiece of the American home: the TV. For years people had been talking about the Golden Age of Television, about how with the advent of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad we were living in a moment when TV, once the basest form of entertainment—aspersed by parents and critics and David Foster Wallace alike—had overtaken cinema for artistry, for cultural reach.
So Silence went after it.
They used it.
On NBC, on Sunday Night Football, they managed to overtake one full thirty-second advertising slot. It went out to tens of millions of viewers, and then on to tens of millions more the next morning when people who had made videos on their phones of televisions broadcasting their message posted it to social media. After the first quarter of a Patriots–Broncos game, both teams undefeated and starting the two most popular quarterbacks of the era, the first ad that came on after play began featured someone calling himself Boomer1. It was not Boomer1, of course—Mark was Isaac Abramson was Boomer1, and he had nothing close to the knowledge, wherewithal, or desire to hack into a major network television broadcast and put a Boomer Boomer video up for the whole world to see. But it came on-screen, someone sitting in a basement that looked a lot like Mark’s parents’ basement in Baltimore, with an upside-down Jerry Garcia poster over his right shoulder and wearing a David Crosby mask.
“This is Boomer1,” the person on the hijacked ad said, his voice disguised by a vocoder. “We are Silence. We have something to tell you. This is the next and final Boomer Action. It is to be called ROWRY.” The person in the video said it so it rhymed with the name Rory, but in big yellow capital letters the word “ROWRY” flashed on-screen like the 800 number in some late-eighties television commercial. Mark had been the first to use the word, on his own video. Now it was being broadcast across the country on network television. “That’s ROWRY, as in: Retire Or We’ll Retire You. The legal retirement age in the United States of America is sixty-six. There are hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions aging adults in this country still working long past that age. They are baby boomers. They have the jobs we want. Those are our jobs, the property of the young. They are taking the jobs we should have. Their grasp is tight, and it must be loosed. We want the jobs. You have them. We are not unreasonable in our demands but we want them met. You have three months to retire. Blah blah blah the Ides of March. After that: boom boom.”
The feed cut out. NBC returned its viewers to the advertisements advertisers had paid for, starting with a spot for Chevy trucks.
The real Boomer1, Isaac Abramson, Mark, was not on his computer when it happened. He was not on chat rooms, searching for IRC channels where Silence might be discussing the fallout. He was, of all places, over at Costco’s parents’ house, watching the game. He’d gone out for drinks with his old friend a couple times since they first ran into each other at that Starbucks. Costco texted and e-mailed, and when he invited Mark over to watch the game it was the first time he’d gone to his friend’s basement, the same basement he’d hung out in hundreds of times as a teenager.
When the Silence hack started, Costco said, “What the faaa?” His parents were out of town for the week, and he and Mark were smoking a spliff. Then the ROWRY call came out. “All right, dude, this shit is just blowing up. Hacking an ad on national television? What did we just see. Fucking MNF. Those dudes are killing it.”
Mark wasn’t sure what to say. It was one thing when he’d seen Silence’s videos for the first two waves of attacks, sitting alone in a room waiting to see if Coyote or HHH or any of the multitudinous Silence posters might have a comment. But now here he was with another human. Another human who was stoned out of his gourd and also appeared to be in support of what Silence was doing.
“I … don’t know,” Mark said.
“Dude, are you okay?” Costco said. His eyes spidered with veins from the joint they were smoking. Part of Mark felt like this might be a time to tell Costco he was being surveilled, maybe, by the FBI. But he didn’t know how to say it and he didn’t know how Costco would take it. That, and Mark had a long history, when they were teenagers, of freaking out a little when he was smoking pot. Once at a party he’d taken a bong hit and then proceeded to grip the edges of the Barcalounger he was sitting in for five hours, earning him the nickname Rodin, which it took him a semester to live down. Now Mark sat there in a different kind of terror.
“Just a little too stoned, I think,” Mark said. “You? You fucked up by it?”
“Not fucked up by it,” Costco said. “Listen, I just gotta fucken say, I kinda know the guys who did that shit. I mean, in whatever way you can say you know someone on the interweb. I know that seems crazy.”
Mark stared at him. He wasn’t sure if he was paranoid or if Costco was suggesting what he was suggesting.
“You know I was always into computer shit,” Costco went on. “And so you know when I got canned by T. Rowe it was because I was looking at some sicko shit on the net while I was at work. I got real caught up in IMing with people I didn’t really know. They showed me all these sites. This one website that had this thing called a sideboard where you could go and Jesus it was just the sickest shit—I mean if you weren’t careful you could find yourself surfing child porn or snuff films or scat porn or who knows—stuff that makes Two Girls One Cup look like Fraggle Rock.
“Anyway, these guys I chat with, a lot of them call themselves part of a thing called Silence now and you can get on it and off of it and they’re the ones getting the word out, I think. I mean, dude—you wanna see?”
Mark wasn’t sure what to say so he said sure, he’d see. So while Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth emerged back on-screen after having been upended by the wave of Silence taking over one of their commercials on Sunday Night Football, their badinage less energetic for the rest of the game, Costco pulled out his laptop and showed Mark a bunch of things Mark already knew: how to get onto the TOR router, how to open windows on the Dark Web and log on to IRC channels and chat. He explained how it was so deeply encrypted even the feds couldn’t track you down on it. Hearing his friend repeat that fact made him feel less paranoid. Not less stoned, but less paranoid.
Costco logged on to a couple of the IRC channels Mark regularly hit, but there was nothing there. Just a blinking cursor.
“Fascinating,” Mark said. He said it like he meant it and he was trying to sound like he meant it but Costco said, “Honestly, dude, IDK what the fuck—I figured these boards would be lighting up after that hack. Who knows. They must be somewhere else. Sometimes they say which rooms to head to and sometimes they don’t—it’s just chance. But I swear. I think these motherfuckers are the guys. They’re into some serious shit.” Mark didn’t say anything. “Well, shit, now you’re making me all paranoid. You’re being all narky. You’re not gonna tell anyone I’m into this shit, right? You’re not like researching a journalism story or something, are you?”
“I am not,” Mark said. It was the longest sentence he’d uttered since the ROWRY commercial aired. “If I’m being honest, I’m fascinated by what they’re up to, too.”
“Okay,” Costco said. “Okay, word.” He let his own grip on his Barcalounger slip. He pulled a big head nug out of a jar and started breaking it up to roll a joint. “Okay. Okay, well, if you have a look at some of those IRC chats, lemme know what you think. If nothing else, those guys are funny as fuck. And, you know, right. Someone’s gotta do something.”
“I thought you thought Gandhi might be more right,” Mark said.
“Even Gandhi has his limits. And you know me, bro! I’m always changing my mind. Out of my mind. Where is my mind.”
Costco rolled his joint and they smoked it and Mark headed out.
When he got home he felt emboldened by getting on TOR with Costco, by the tacit sense of consent implied by looking at chat rooms alongside another live human, so he logged on and found that the IRC channels were all silent. Nothing on #retirer, even, where he was somehow sure he’d find someone online. On the surface web—on Twitter, on Facebook—comments sections of articles were blowing up with questions about ROWRY, which was already #ROWRY: how seriously were all those people sitting behind desks at academic institutions, the CEOs of just about every Fortune 500 company, to take this threat? When the second wave of Boomer attacks was spurred on, they went quickly. They were incontrovertible. They had a real, tangible, IRL effect, something the sixty-and-above demographic could understand as a threat. Mark dipped one toe into the #hackro room, though he knew all those threads were dead. Same at #retirer and all the rest. He’d started a revolution, then considered trying to walk it back—and now the main initiative, ROWRY, was back harder than he could ever have imagined. Hoped. Dreaded. He didn’t know what the plan was for March, and it wasn’t entirely clear if anyone at Silence did, either.