There had been a white—had it been a goat? No, a deer. It had charged him. He hadn’t realized it was dangerous. He should have. It had had strange eyes, with vertical irises, the shape of almonds standing on their ends, like in a cat.
In real life Joe always took a competitor seriously; conflict spurred growth.
He felt the coffee that he was drinking warming the flower inside him, opening it to the day.
He was well prepared for the day’s meetings, with two potential investors. There had been some setbacks, but Your luck has been completely changed today, as the fortune cookie says. The idea behind his business was, after all, the forging of a weapon. He was never afraid of a fight, and that was why he was going to—
His phone. “Thomas Somerville of the United States Attorneys’ Office would like to speak with you, can you hold.”
The woman put him on hold before she could hear his yes.
“Mr. Joseph P. Bresser,” came Somerville’s voice, with its tone of put-on raillery, slightly bitter.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Calling to keep you apprised. As you’re no doubt aware, we are up to Telepathy Five now, and Samantha Rinehart Peabody, the abundantly named new lawyer of the new girl, is claiming that we tampered with the evidence—thereby admitting, by the by, that her client was trying to access a protected file, which is what we arrested her for, but that seems to be neither here nor there in anyone’s eyes—and in reply I could take the step of assuring the judge that that’s not quite what happened and that a digital proxy of the material formerly on the seized laptop remains intact, but if I were to give that assurance there is a risk that eventually I’d have to produce the files in question and as you know we need to protect the program. Or rather, programs.”
“Yes.”
“So we’re protecting the programs and losing the cases. That’s the course of action I’m letting you know about in this phone call and that we are going to be signaling this afternoon.”
“You can’t,” Joe said.
“Well, I can, Joe. These are my cases. And anyway, as far as I can tell, we’re doing this for you, if we’re doing it for anyone.”
“You just said you’re going to signal. That means you’re not really going to do this, are you.”
“No, Joe. No no no. When you’re a grown-up, which is something you wouldn’t know about, you try not to surprise the people who are on your side. You give a signal so that your allies have a chance to adjust their positions, and then you read the room, and only once you see that everyone’s ready for the change in strategy do you follow through.”
Currying favor with an establishment would of course be mistaken by a man like Somerville for maturity.
“You’ll notice,” Somerville continued, “that I’m not asking who it was that was so ham-handed that they managed to delete a piece of evidence in a way that was observable remotely. I’m not asking who gave the defense a plump, juicy cut of premium-grade graymail. I’m assuming that the person or persons who executed this deletion were only trying to protect the surveillance programs, too, in their own ass-covering way, and happened to be unaware that they could be held in contempt of court, and I imagine that you have one or two friends at the state level who will be very relieved to hear that this is the assumption I’m going to be making. Ham-handed but obliging friends.”
A man like Somerville thought exclusively in terms of who was on top and who was loyal, but as the future came into being, status and allegiance were going to shift so rapidly that it made more sense even now to be indifferent to them.
“I am curious, though, what kind of genius would bait his trap with files that couldn’t under any circumstances be presented in court.”
“It had to be something they wanted,” Joe explained.
“It only had to be something they thought they wanted.”
“Not with these kids.”
“I have to get off the phone with you now. It’s been lovely chatting with you, as ever. Someday soon I hope you’ll show up in my docket arrested for whatever you’re smoking so that I can find out what it is.”
“It’s yoga.”
“We’re all sorry we ever met you, Joe. Including, very soon, if a word from me can have any effect on the rest of her career, your girlfriend in the city innovation office.”
“I’m not sleeping with Charlotte.”
“I don’t care who or what you’re sleeping with. It’s been great talking with you, as I say. Don’t sell any more wooden nickels.”
The moment the attorney hung up, the attorney’s executive assistant briefly returned to the line: “Hello?” When Joe failed to respond, she hung up on him, too.
In the silence that followed, Joe looked out his window at the morning sun, which was hitting a quadrilateral of yellow bricks in the air shaft. A few weeks ago there had been a slant of snow leaning against the bricks, and by repetition of itself the sun had fused the snow and then hollowed it and then riven it and then sublimed it away. That was the power of repetition of even something as pale as winter morning. Repetition was one of the forms of number in the world.
It would be too dangerous to allow the members of the group to get away. He was going to have to force Somerville’s hand.
He remembered when he had first recognized the danger. Something odd, Charlotte had said, had been passed on to her by analysts in the Special Operations Division. Do you have any idea what this is about? the analysts had wanted to know. The analysts were tasked with looking for indications of drug trades, but as dealers began to camouflage their wording, the weave of the analysts’ nets grew correspondingly finer and subtler until in the end they were selecting for disguise itself, because the AI had become trained to find language that was doing any kind of hiding. Of course it had alerted them when it detected someone talking cryptically about a new kind of decryption. It wasn’t what the Special Operations Division was supposed to be investigating, but it was the sort of thing that as professionals all of them lived for.
Someone, the system had discovered, was approaching hackers on chat channels (and approaching a few online tulpas that had been set up on chat channels by the division in the hope that they would be mistaken for hackers) to ask how much better than random a wholly new kind of guessing algorithm would have to be in order to be valuable. The person had been vague about what he had, but he had let drop that he had something to do with Occupy and that the algorithm was somehow analog, with a somewhat jerky variance in its margin of error. How would the black market go about pricing such a capability? The person had said he was asking about price only to find a way to assess value. The thing itself, he had insisted, was not for sale.
The disavowal had been as much of a red flag as the question.
That was the first sign of the Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings, though of course at that point no one knew the group’s name. The group probably hadn’t even come up with it yet. Joe had felt certain that their algorithm was some kind of bioinformatics. He knew that in the future everyone who manages to survive will be a chimera of biology and technology—a compound of human and computer—and he had always known that the first buds were eventually going to be identified on somebody’s shoulder blades someday.
The day had come.
He couldn’t say as much aloud, of course, not even to Charlotte. The key to the professional environment that he worked in was parallel construction: it’s okay to know, but only once you find other, public grounds for your knowledge is it safe to say that you know. Those were the terms on which the Special Operations Division had shared emails and chat transcripts with Charlotte, who was the city police department’s chief innovation officer, and those were the terms on which Charlotte had in turn shared the communications with him.
Charlotte had said only that she thought she saw here an opportunity for Joe to try out the business model that he had been trying to sell her on. He had been sharing with her the software that he was developing, which coordinated sets of data about surveilled individuals that hadn’t previously been linked. The software worked by mapping the patterns of interaction within each set against one another. It was possible that the business opportunity really was all Charlotte had seen.
He, on the other hand, had known at once. The constellation recognizes itself in you as soon as you look up into the sky.
He had set to work trying to identify the individuals. He had geofenced Occupy and then seeded his software with the social media profiles of regular visitors and then mapped those profiles against the dark information, the data sets that he wasn’t allowed to acknowledge had been passed on to him. It was a first try; it hadn’t worked. After Charlotte loaned him an IMSI catcher, however, he was able to add the details of a mass of calls made by cell phones at the encampment, which his software had been able to parse into component social groups—people who often called or texted one another just before their cell phones appeared together at the site. The breakthrough had come when Charlotte had shared with him a file she had found in a multiagency antiterrorism database of persons of interest who had been tracked to Occupy. One of them was Chris Finn. Apparently in 2010 he had gotten too enthusiastic about an anticapitalist group in Toronto. He had only been cautioned, but the agencies’ computers had kept watch on him ever since.
The identification of Finn had lined up the dials. And then Joe had added a layer of parallel construction of his own. A government official is only allowed to use an IMSI catcher to track who called whom, from where, for how long. The device, however, is also capable of listening to calls and reading texts, and Joe wasn’t an official employee of the government. Why had they built the functionality if literally no one was supposed to use it? Joe told investors that his software linked data sets—such as social media accounts and call detail records—by finding congruences between the patterns within each set, but he didn’t think that it in any way falsified his claim if at the start of the process he trained the homology-finding engine with a few identifications that he made by hand, using as clues the texts and call recordings that the IMSI catcher, its settings changed, picked up. It was just a way for the machine to make progress in learning; there was nothing wrong with learning. The dark information couldn’t be acknowledged, but a Bayesian net refined by dark information was an entity distinct from the dark information itself. It was no drawback to Bresser Opsec’s business model that in the future Joe might continue to need an initial supply of such identifications in order to bring a net up to speed because he was always going to be selling in. He was always going to be selling to clients who collected information. If not to a triliteral government agency then to one of the big five in the private sector, who were for the most part way ahead of the government in any case.
In fact, on low days he even worried that the lag between government and the private sector was all that he was leveraging: that because it was still possible at the moment for a contractor to do what it wasn’t currently legal for the government itself to do, all he was selling to the government was the blindfolded untying of its own hands, and once change agents in the government saw what he was able to do with the combination of his freedom and their borrowed power, they would be incentivized to make it legal, or at least to declare formally that they were not going to make it positively illegal, which would shrink his margins by opening the market to all comers.
For now, though, there was still enough legal ambiguity to constitute a business opportunity. If he succeeded, stakeholders now invisible to him would surely move to consolidate what he had pioneered. It was therefore unlikely that he personally would ever be in legal jeopardy. No ruler ever forswore a weapon after wielding it. All he had to do was get the weapon into the rulers’ hands, at least briefly.
His phone. “Um, Joe?”
“I’m on my way,” Joe said. “You go ahead on in.”
“Are we meeting there?”
“What did we say?”
“I don’t think we—”
“Are you still at the office? I want you to send a press release.”
“Right now?”
“Tell them I’m going to be holding another press conference. In the atrium.”
“But last time the building manager said—”
“Then what do we pay rent for? Come on, Lloyd. Tell them it’s going to be at one o’clock.”
“Today? But what if our meetings don’t—”
“This isn’t about the meetings. Somerville wants to quit, and I’m not going to let him.”
Lloyd was silent. Joe knew, however, that he was obeying. He knew that Lloyd was writing down the instructions. He heard Lloyd mutter, as if speaking to himself, “But the government’s still going to pay us.”
“Why wouldn’t they pay us? And can you call a car for me?”
“To your apartment?”
“How else am I going to get there? I’ll be downstairs in ten minutes.”
In the event, since he was already dressed, he was downstairs sooner than that, before any town car arrived, and he hailed an SUV-size taxi that happened to be turning the corner.
It wheeled downhill heavily, and on the road that circled the city along its shore, it fitted itself into the traffic like a knife into its sheath. Like a knife into a wound that it had previously made. He had been waiting for all of this for years. The only doubt that had ever been in his mind was on whose side the first chimera was going to be born—the side of force or the side of order. Force was what he called the side without law. The side prior to law. A creature of any power was almost always born there first, in the greenwood, as it used to be called, and was only later captured and harnessed and put into the service of the side of order by someone like him.
As the taxi swung up a tight, cantilevered bend, he felt his insides sink within him and then rise, on the recoil.
He called Lloyd. “Did you send it?”
“I’m going to send it from my phone. I’m in a car.”
“Bcc me.”
It was possible that he hadn’t thought through carefully enough the contents of the lure he had set for the RPF group, but if he had put in more than he should have, it had been because he had wanted them to know that he knew. He had wanted to suggest that he was aware that they were ahead of him and that he therefore felt free to be careless about letting them see what he had on his side—that he knew that they were going to see what he had anyway. It had been meant as a provocation and you could even say as a statement of his faith in them. The mistake had been in his imagining that they would have only a few hours with the files. It used to be that a pawn once captured was taken off the board, but under the new dispensation every piece, captured or not, remained available for play indefinitely. Sequence was no longer limited to progress, which was hard at first to keep in mind when planning a strategy, but a fighter always trains himself to think according to the new laws of combat.
Thanks to the Farrell girl, he himself was already holding the piece in question again. It had been transformed by its fall and recovery; the girl had locked it and therefore silenced and in a way perfected it. So many people were in the habit of leaving weapons where he could pick them up, perhaps because almost no one saw him for who he was, or perhaps because almost no one ever stopped to think how a weapon could be used against someone other than themselves.
The car slowed and halted outside a building that a hundred years ago had been erected as a warehouse. He touched the side of his face in order to make contact with his outer self. He had omitted to shave; he hadn’t wanted to look too much as if he needed anything. He was wearing his gray suit with a white shirt but for the same reason hadn’t put on a tie.
His phone again. But it was only the press release from Lloyd coming through.
A wall of newly cast concrete and a stumpy man-bun of wires had been left exposed in the lobby of the former warehouse, either because renovation was incomplete or because the design was meant to induce a visitor to think that it was.
He punched 4 for Planchette and rode up. The elevator opened onto a hallway of jagged bricks, at the end of which he found a glass door stenciled with the name.
Lloyd had got there first and stotted up out of a chair.
“I’ll let Mr. Weld know you’re here,” said a blond woman in a suit.
It was twelve minutes past the hour.
“Is that what you wanted?” Lloyd asked.
“I haven’t read it yet.”
After exactly twelve minutes more, the door to an inner room opened.
“Joe!” a man said. “Hilary Weld. Come on in.” The door was crazed glass, like a wreck’s windshield. Weld shook Joe’s hand and then Lloyd’s.
The scale of the room inside was so grand that it registered, at first, as empty, even though it held a desk; a white sofa in the middle of one wall; and, near a window, a rowing machine. Weld led them to a cluster of stools around a black table. The seats of the stools looked as if they had been salvaged from old rideable agricultural machines, but they were more comfortable to sit on than they looked.
“Can I ask Veronica to get you something?”
“A seltzer?” Joe suggested. “So you’re going to be our angel investor.”
“I don’t know if I’d call myself an angel, Joe.”
In Weld’s faux-hawk, the raised central comb was dyed blue. His nose, pierced, was unambiguously male, even aquiline, but there was a dusting of kohl around his eyes. What did Joe care, it was business. Between the wiry hairs of the man’s left forearm began the tracery of what looked like a whole sleeve of tattoos.
The blond woman in the suit set one glass of seltzer in front of Joe and another in front of Lloyd.
Joe made a winding gesture. “Lloyd, do you want to . . . ?”
“So if you’d like, Mr. Weld, let me give you a presentation about the suite of products that we—”
Weld held up a hand. “I wouldn’t be talking to you principal to principal if I didn’t know the product. And read the newspaper, too. Congratulations on that, by the way. It makes me as a potential investor nervous, because what other dogs will it call out, but for you—you can’t buy press like that. What I think would be productive is if I talk to you a little about the vision that I have for the world that I think your work could lead to.”
“Awesome,” Joe said.
“What I see, when I close my eyes,” Weld said, not closing his eyes but matching the pads of his fingers together like a praying mantis, “is a world where no one is ever lost, where because of the functionality that you’ve developed, the not quite overlapping, not always intersecting multiple data sets that people create every day, every hour, every minute, with their phones and their emails and their credit cards and their smart TVs and their social media accounts and their streaming music services and their employee ID badges and the toll-paying devices in their cars and their cars’ navigation systems and the loyalty barcode dongles on their keychains are all constantly, quietly reconciled. And therefore no gesture goes unnoticed. No signal goes unreceived. Don’t get me wrong: I know how important the feeling of privacy is to people. I think it’s central. Nobody wants a user experience where they feel exposed. In the world I’m looking forward to, all the data sets that are collected will be anonymized. What I imagine, though, is that they’ll be anonymized and individualized. No one will feel watched, but everyone will feel, what’s a good word, appreciated. No one will have the feeling that there is a smelly human on the other side of the screen somewhere, totting up merits and demerits. They will instead be liminally aware of a bank of benign machines noticing, nonjudgmentally, the steps they happen to be taking. And by liminally I mean if someone wants to sock-puppet, for example—do you remember sock-puppeting? It was so cute, and there are even some people who still do it, can you believe it, who are still able in a moment of rage to convince themselves that their cell phone doesn’t know what their laptop browser is doing—anyway, we’re never going to let a sock-puppeteer know that we’ve caught on to him. If someone wants to be two people, he probably has a good reason. You can learn so much more about someone if you don’t moralize. Let him be two people, and watch those two people. Or three, or four. Knowing, as only a nonjudgmental observer is free to know, that all of them lay the same head on the same pillow every night, believing in their distinctness. What I’m imagining will be like a glove that fits so well that most people will forget they’re wearing it. If you don’t like it that after you search for swimming goggles on one site you see ads for swimming goggles everywhere online—or even, soon, offline—the machines should know that about you, too. They should keep track of even your threshold for perception. They should know exactly, sensitively, the depth that they need to retreat to, in order not to alarm you, where they can wait for you, unseen, patient. What I’m imagining, really, is that observation will be gentle, not constraining choice or even guiding it but merely informing it. Maybe a consumer doesn’t know that he can buy a wallet that looks as chic as leather but is made of recyclables, and once he does know it, that’s what he’s going to want, and the machines will know he can afford it or they wouldn’t be bothering to present it to him. Not Big Brother but Little Brother, as it were. Nonthreatening, noninterfering. Tactful.”
“That’s beautiful,” Joe said. “We’ll know more about them under their anonymized identifiers than their mothers know about them under their names.”
“But it won’t be ‘we’ who know. It won’t have the odor of human knowing.”
“You don’t want to be able to open the black box.”
“No, exactly, I don’t want to. That’s where I’m not like your current client. I don’t want to ever need to. I believe in discretion. I believe in letting people be themselves. Letting them be, if possible, even more themselves.”
“I’m definitely interested in your future,” Joe said.
“Now, you have patents?” Weld asked.
“Funny you should say that, we were talking about it recently, but I thought it would be premature,” Joe said. “At this stage the company is really just me.”
“Who’s this?” Weld asked, pointing at Lloyd.
“Lloyd would never take anything.”
“Lloyd can’t quit tomorrow and go into business for himself?”
“I would never do something like that,” Lloyd said. His eyes were bugging out somewhat at the sudden pivot of attention to him. It was Lloyd, of course, who had suggested, just before the RPF case began, that Joe ought to apply for patents.
“Don’t you like money?” Weld asked Lloyd, uncoiling the fingers of his right hand. There was a ring on the index finger. “We can buy you some balls if that’s what’s missing.”
“Hey,” Joe said.
“So what you’re telling me,” Weld said, “is that you don’t have any ownership of your ideas.”
“What’s going on? I thought you wanted to invest.”
“Not in wishful thinking. And to be honest, what I wanted was to buy your company, kill it, and plunder the corpse of its internal organs.” He smiled. He knew that Joe wouldn’t mind the imagery. He had recognized him as a fellow hunter. “But you’re telling me there’s nothing inside.”
“That’s not true,” Joe said. “What we have is what we call contextual expertise squared: contextual expertise about how to acquire contextual expertise.”
“And I just explained to you that I’m not interested in knowledge that’s all too human.” He let the fingers of one hand fall like soldiers over the closed knuckles of the other. “Maybe we should talk after you’ve conceptualized your business a little further. It’s not clear that you know what you’re selling yet.”
“You’re an asshole,” Lloyd said, rising.
“Lloyd . . . ,” Joe said.
But Lloyd was already halfway across the empty room.
“We’re going to keep talking,” Joe promised Weld. He felt like a dog walker telling one off-leash dog to stay while another had just run into the road.
He caught up to Lloyd at the elevator. “Having someone who wants to buy us for parts isn’t a bad thing.”
Lloyd wouldn’t look at him. “We should have done a legal review.”
Joe checked over his shoulder. The hallway and the elevator were unlikely to be under Weld’s surveillance if Weld was only a renter. “It’s not too late.”
“A full legal review. It wouldn’t all be bad news. There’s a case about an IMSI catcher in California right now with a pro se defendant where it looks like the government is going to argue that law enforcement has the right to keep its data out of discovery for the same reason it has the right to keep secret the identity of confidential informants.”
They stepped into the elevator. “Weld’s not law enforcement.”
“I’m not talking about just Weld.”
“Where are we meeting Long?” Joe asked.
“At our office.”
“Just at our office?”
“I bought a thing of cookies for it,” Lloyd said.
On the street, Joe hailed a cab. “Bresser Operational Security,” he told the driver as they got in.
“Do you have an address for that?” the driver asked.
It was turning out to be a bright, hollow day. A day made of foil, teeth, and right angles. It had irritated him at first that so many of the defendants in the RPF case had thought of themselves, openly or secretly, as apostles of poetry, but he had come to realize that it had irritated him because he had never acknowledged that he had also been touched by that spirit. Once he made the acknowledgment, he was able to see that when they quoted lines of poetry to one another, the lines weren’t reference texts for ciphers but places where they could meet. They allowed for a kind of peer-to-peer calibration, the operation of which depended somehow on the way that phrases from the poems sometimes got lodged in one’s mind. He had read only the Wikipedia entry about the novel with the Hyacinth character, but he had read all of the poem that had inspired Saunderson’s tattoo, after the press had identified it. It was an old poem; it was online. Since it was about greenery, it was probably about sex, mostly. But it also seemed to be somehow about giving up. He didn’t like that part.
Members of RPF had come to the last press conference; he wondered if he would see any today. Of course everything was different for them now. They might not even hear about it; they didn’t seem to talk much anymore. It was true what Weld said, that there was a sensitivity that some people had to being overheard, especially people who had been born with the little catfish feelers on their faces that this group had. There was a thing, too, where the substitution that the online world made of the real one seemed to cut people off from one another, over time. Though there were other reasons the conversation had broken down in this case: All of them facing criminal charges. The Farrell girl only getting out on bail today, after a weekend inside. The Di Matteo girl probably embarrassed. Finn probably hated by the rest. And Saunderson in a mental hospital. He had turned out to be weaker than he had seemed. The way an astronaut’s bones become etiolated the longer he’s in space. It sometimes worried Joe that through his own creative side, if he wasn’t careful, he could develop that kind of susceptibility.
No, the defendants weren’t going to be there, he predicted, as the taxi pulled up to his building. He would have the press to himself.
He saw through the glass of the taxi window and the glass of the building’s front that a man was already standing in the lobby. “Is that Long?” he asked Lloyd. They hadn’t been able to find a photo of him online. The man was about Joe’s height and build and like Joe was also wearing a gray suit and white shirt. It was like spotting one’s stunt double—a version of oneself, off to one side, waiting to reshoot the scene that one was in.
The man gave no sign of noticing Joe and Lloyd as they were getting out of their taxi.
“Ask him,” Joe said.
“Mr. Long?” Lloyd asked, as they entered the lobby.
“Yes.” He had rough skin. He was about ten years older than Joe.
“Warren Long, Joe Bresser. Hope we didn’t keep you waiting; we’re just coming from another meeting.”
The man smiled.
“Come on upstairs.”
The doorman nodded them through, and they took their places in the elevator like Star Trek crew members assembling for teleportation. Joe twisted the un-signifying ring on his ring finger.
When the doors opened, Lloyd rushed ahead. “I’ll go set up.”
The office door locked behind Lloyd, and Joe had to knock when he and Long got to it.
Lloyd had cleared off the card table they usually used for meetings, had found a milk-glass plate somewhere, and had put the cookies out.
“So you’ve had some interest,” the man said.
“Talking,” Joe said.
“Anyone in politics?” the man asked. “I’m sort of an advance man, myself. It’s something someone like me is naturally interested in, what you do.”
“That’s great.”
“Looking at what people do online, what they’re like online. I’d be surprised if nobody else in politics has approached you yet. If only to ask what life in a group looks like.”
“Of course people have asked,” Joe said, temporizing.
“Are you interested in online groups because so many people online are lonely?” Lloyd guessed. He was the only one who had put a cookie on a paper plate for himself. “Is that the problem you’re working on?”
“Not so much a problem as an opportunity. The way people want to be on a side—that’s something we’re very interested in. That’s what we do in politics, after all, and we have to work the angles. Loneliness creates an opportunity for a first-mover advantage, in any contest between sides. Which side looks like it’s going to be less lonely, that could be the side that’s going to win. Could we automate that a little, is our question. Could we reverse-engineer the kind of observation that you’ve been doing and create an impression of being together instead of just noticing one. Create it knowing what you know, in a deep way, about what it looks like when a large group of people are in relation to one another and are going through the process of making up their minds. Knowing the structure of those relationships and that process.”
“You mean, populate a discussion,” Joe said.
“That might be part of it,” the man said. “Can we figure out how to automate at least a little bit the impression of solidarity, so that when people are ready to choose a side, we’ve set up the direction they’re going to fall in. The way when you’re chopping down a tree, all you have to do is cut that little wedge in the far side of the trunk to determine which direction it will fall. And can we then turn that automation into a product—the kind of thing we can do without needing to know who we’re doing it for. A kind of service that we can sell as if it were in a box on a shelf. I think that’s a product a lot of people would be interested in.”
A large part of being stronger was being faster. Sometimes what counted was being the one who got to the weapon first.
“What kind of commitment are you thinking of making?” Joe asked.
“I’d need to give you enough money that you could afford to seem not to exist, wouldn’t I? Maybe you could come up with some concepts.”
As the man rose to leave, Joe and Lloyd scrambled to their feet.
“Creepy,” Lloyd said, after the door closed.
“Shut up,” Joe commanded, looking through the peephole at the man as he receded.
“Joe, it’s one,” Lloyd said.
“Already?” He checked his own phone.
“Are you sure you want to do a press conference? If this guy says we’re not even supposed to exist?”
It was in fact impressive that he was being asked to not-exist. He was going to be one of the people on the inside, setting up the new way things were going to be. The new way people were going to be.
“What are they saying?” he asked Lloyd.
“Who?”
“Online. Are they downstairs?”
“I’m not going to look.”
“Why not?” Joe took out his own phone again. Someone had just posted a picture of the lobby, which was indeed filling up. Someone else had reposted a cartoon from last week of Joe as a villain tying himself as a damsel to railroad tracks, just as an Occupy Telepathy locomotive approached. I’m not stupid, the damsel was saying, which was something he had said once, online, when he had been trying to explain. His critics seemed incapable of understanding that the government would never have made its move if he hadn’t arranged the honeypot. Did it really show stupidity on his part if it had worked? “Let’s go,” he said to Lloyd.
“I don’t even know what this press conference is about,” Lloyd said.
“Somerville doesn’t, either.”
On the way down, in the one-way mirror that shielded the elevator’s surveillance camera, Joe smoothed his hair with the heel of his hand. Lloyd started clicking his pen. “Stop it,” Joe said.
The gathering of journalists in the lobby had already generated by their co-presence in such numbers a sense of purposiveness so strong that they didn’t at first notice the incursion of Joe, who had summoned them. Joe always felt, when he first saw a crowd like this, that it was as though he were giving a party with this many guests.
“Mr. Bresser, tell me I’m not seeing this,” said the building’s porter. The doorman, meanwhile, wouldn’t look up.
“That’s because it’s not happening, Rick. And you’re only going to have to not-see it for about ten more minutes.”
“Just leave me an aisle through here, can you, in case the fire marshal comes.”
“He won’t come.”
“I didn’t say he would.”
The crowd noticed Joe. As he and Lloyd made their way through, journalists fell silent around them, as if Joe and Lloyd were a dark spot passing across an X-ray, or a cloud detectable only by its opacity as it sailed over stars in the night sky. They stopped in front of the chewing-gum-green trees in front of which Joe had spoken last time.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Lloyd intoned. “Joseph P. Bresser of the Joseph P. Bresser Operational Security Consultancy would like to say a few words.”
In the silence, before Joe spoke, it was as if for a moment he was holding to his lips a cornet made of wires that ran out and tugged at the sternums of every person in the room. If only the room could have been larger, grander. There were cavernous spaces under and inside the piers of the city’s bridges, and Joe had had a glimpse of the inside of one of them once, while he was walking by. The city had been storing parked trucks inside it, but the volume had suggested that it was capable of containing a whole world.
“Thank you,” Joe said.
At the back of the crowd, shifting unsteadily on her feet like a drunk who might be working up the nerve to heckle, was the Di Matteo girl. She had come after all. She was looking at him without acknowledging him, the way people from money are able to. The diluted beige color of her hat almost matched her skin and made her look bald. She wouldn’t be very happy if they shaved her head when she went to jail.
“I want to say a few words about a turn that the case of the RPF Working Group has taken. As most of you are aware, the original charges concerned the group’s illegal access to a protected computer here at our firm, and over the weekend, there was a new breach, this time of federal security, by a fifth defendant, Elspeth Farrell. There’s been some chatter in the system, as they say, about the possibility that the government might prefer to drop charges in order not to risk exposing methods and sources, and what I want to emphasize today is that such a retreat would be highly inadvisable. As many of you are aware, the files that Farrell was arrested this weekend for taking were the same ones taken by the original four defendants, her comrades, and then resecured by the government. What has not been previously disclosed”—and this was like the moment when you knew you’d raised your sights to just the right amount a little bit above and ahead of where the bird had so far flown—“but which I learned from independent sources at the time of Farrell’s arrest, is that before her arrest she was able to upload the same highly sensitive, contraband files, encrypted with an unknown key, to the notorious file-sharing site the Golden Cove. This is not the behavior of kids on a joyride. These are bad actors, with a skill set not well understood, who are making every effort to humiliate and even threaten the United States government.”
The reporters were silent. Writing and listening. He had them. The little cornet had welded them to his grasp.
“Joe, is the government aware that this file is publicly available?” a reporter asked.
“They are now.”
“And how were you able to find this out?” asked another.
“These were originally our files, and we have a procedure in place for looking for our files when they go missing.”
“With tracking software?”
“We look for them, okay? The folder had a specific name.” The internet was now going to make fun of him for having called this a procedure. “There was a notification that RPF-Dove-Shark was available.”
“But, Joe, you said it’s encrypted, right?”
“RPF what?”
“I found it,” someone said.
“If it’s encrypted, how do you know it’s the same file?” It was a reporter from one of the tabloids, the one who always dressed like a homeless person.
(“That’s Jan Ridgely,” Lloyd whispered.)
“Because of the file size, Jan,” Joe said.
“So you had a Google alert for a file with the same name and size?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically, yes.”
“And what’s the password?”
“How would I know? I didn’t encrypt it.”
The susurrus of the consultations between journalist and journalist was steady and mounting, but in deference to Joe still restrained. It was like being in a hive whose scouts had just reported a new source of nectar and the bees were with more and more agitation milling and whirring and knocking against one another. The creatures might have been dangerous to him under other circumstances, but here and now they were being organized by the information he was giving them and he knew they would stay loyal to it.
The tech reporter for the city’s largest broadsheet was close enough that despite the rising hum, she was still able to speak to Joe without raising her voice. “But you probably know them better than anyone now,” she said.
(“That’s Stacey Temple,” whispered Lloyd.)
“I’m not psychic,” he replied to her.
“Take a guess?” Temple joked. She had very sharp cheekbones.
“‘A green thought in a green shade’?” Joe said. The words had popped into his head. “They used to quote that so often I thought it was code for something, but it’s just from a poem.”
“What did he say?” another reporter asked.
“‘A green thought in a green shade,’” answered a reporter who had overheard.
“Found it,” someone else said.
“You found the poem, or—?”
“Joe, sir, that password seems to work, actually.”
A long icicle froze him from his throat to his groin. It removed a cone of himself from the inside of himself.
“It’s not opening for me,” another reporter said.
“You have to use underscores instead of spaces between the words.”
“It’s not downloading.”
“What is all this stuff?”
Voices began to issue from a laptop held aloft by Jan Ridgely, at first unintelligible under the interference of the room’s cross talk, and then, as the reporters succeeded in hushing one another, blotted over for a moment by a glissando of blips while Ridgely tapped the volume on her laptop upward.
“Maybe I’ll write it in ballad rhythm,” Leif Saunderson was saying, as the voices became distinct. “Or in one of those alliterative Icelandic things that Auden is so into.”
“You’ll still know,” Elspeth Farrell replied.
“I know,” Saunderson said. “I’ll be sort of ironic about not wanting to know. I’ll be sentimental for the naïve. I’m calling it the dark poem.”
“Oh, Leif . . .”
“We shouldn’t be—,” a reporter interrupted.
Ridgely hit the Escape key.
Fortunately, Joe remembered, it wasn’t at all clear that under the new laws of combat a revelation could still change the ending of a story.