H-17 [part one: an event that might change everything]

mada (63)in #writing • 8 years ago

Halloween Seventeen (H-17) is a fictional series that centers around a world-changing event that occurs on 31 October, 2017. It is about radical transparency, societal complexification, and all of the weird stuff that might happen when systemic instability meets everyday life in a high tech world.

Kensington stood, bow-legged and wheezing slightly, so close that Harold could see the tiny hairs protruding from his nose. Harold Baker fixed his gaze there to avoid looking Kensington in the eye. He said nothing, but thought with all his might, "Don't do it. Stay away from me."

Kensington did not jump up and begin pommelling Harold. Instead and with a curious twitch, he sneezed.

"Is my dog allergic to you," asked Harold's boss, Christen -just-call-me-Chris- Tanner, as she appeared in the entry way where Harold had been waiting. She followed up with, "Ready?"

Harold nodded, and then followed Chris out the door, down the street, and into the nearly empty diner for their customary Saturday lunch meeting.

It was just the two of them this week. Kyle Trake, their team's 'hardware guy', had yet to return from the conference in Nevada to which he had been summoned on Tuesday. It was unusual for Chris to have asked Harold to meet her at home rather then at the diner. She acted perfectly ordinary when he arrived, though, so Harold waited until they were comfortably seated across from each other over paper napkins and ice water to give her the "What the hell?" look.

"Oh, don't worry about it," Chris replied to the unspoken question. "My creepy neighbor asked me on a date, and I told him that I had a boyfriend. He always looks out his peep hole into the hallway when he hears a door open - I can hear his footsteps. Today he will have seen you, and verified the truth of my lie with his own eyes. So hopefully he will give up," she explained.

"Happy to help, I guess," Harold said flatly, and then asked "Should we find Kyle and SkyFu him in for this?"

"Nah. No reason to disturb his vacation to nerd heaven," Chris replied, amused at her own blatant mislabelling of TAONet's' corporate headquarters.

'Corporate headquarters' was made up of reflective geodesic domes - some functioning as greenhouses, some as labs or offices, a few as communal kitchens, and the rest as personal living quarters - arrayed around a monolithic black tower shaped like an upside down tornado. A giant solar-powered communications blimp perpetually circled high above the tower, and a massive array of computing hardware quietly hummed away in the old silver mine that sprawled underneath the the compound in all directions.

A few dozen techs lived there full-time and maintained the campus' largely automated data systems and everyday infrastructure, along with five unpaid graduate student interns, two 'hospitality chiefs' and a groundskeeper. Small groups arrived and left on an ongoing basis for job interviews, training or team building exercises, employee evaluations, obscure research projects, quarterly management retreats, and so forth.

The place was like a reality tv show. Every square inch of it was monitored by audio and video feeds streamed live to web. Top managers had unfettered realtime access to these feeds, any TAONet employee had access to all but the 'sensitive project' feeds, and the whole world could keep an eye on the common areas or watch the campus from above via a blimpcam. The 'hospitality chiefs' insisted that everyone be "cool, competent, cooperating, and having a great time!" as judged by audience feedback.

Harold grimaced. "Well, I'm good with keeping the borg out of our lunch, but I hope Kyle doesn't get voted off the island for missing our meeting," he said. "By the way, do we have anything important to go over today - should I even bother getting my computer out?"

Chris shrugged. "Leave it. Unless there's something you wanted to bring up," she said. "Your spiders all seem to be in good shape and we're making our insight quota, so this company lunch is just logging facetime for the record." After a brief pause wherein they ordered their respective lunches by rote - a burger and fries for Chris; a grilled cheese and fries for Harold - she asked, "Hey what was that downtime on Thursday? Anything to worry about?"

Chuckling slightly, Harold ate a fry, "User error. I sent the too many spiders into the wild and forgot to have them sort out with each other when and how they sent their data back. So I accidentally overloaded our servers. Everything was back in order within a couple of hours."

"And you learned your lesson? Fair enough," Chris said. She had secretly panicked after glancing at a big block of funny looking error messages in the logs reviewed cursorily over her breakfast smoothie, and was secretly relieved to learn that it was routine and unimportant. Being their node's 'people person' meant that, technically, this was all she needed to know. She pressed the issue, though. "Only - maybe I'm missing something - but don't the spiders coordinate according to well-established and automated parameters? Isn't that part of what makes our node so solid; helps us process data as we mine it?"

"Usually? Yes. Meaning with standard format queries. Here, I sent a hundred evolved bots after data proving out a new correlation between measured profile and measurable behavior that I've been looking at. There was no reason to expect more than a few thousand records per hour - I just ran the thing as background to the usual stuff - but like half a million records came back right away and crashed the system. It was like I was a noob all over again; trying to download the internet. If -"

Chris held up a hand to stop Harold from continuing. "Go back. New correlation? Is there anything to it?"

He nodded. "Maybe," he said. "Nothing big money, if that's what you're thinking. Not like a solid predictor of pregnancy or of next year's nickel futures. At best, if I, er-we, manage to prove it out, it'll have some low-to-moderate value in security or policy bundles," he clarified.

"Don't worry," she responded after studying him for a moment, "log the expense as general research. If you can make it bullethead-proof, great; we'll turn it into a thing. If not, no biggie." Then, almost as an afterthought, she asked, "does Kyle know anything about it?"

Harold considered before answering, "Not likely. Only if he's been tracking our error logs from summer camp."

Kyle Trake was, at that moment, looking at a large picture of Harding Shaw, boldly overprinted with the words 'the original bullethead' in bright red stencil-font, that had been tacked to a bulletin board next to a 'break-bubble' coffee maker in lieu of the usual corporate office motivational poster. Shaw had literally become the company's poster boy for what to avoid in the field of predictive analysis, after he misconstrued the purpose of an 'anonymous tip' from the NSA delivered to his email, and sent an FBI investigative team after a perfectly ordinary middle class family for their 'suspicious' Troogle searches and Spamazon purchases. At the time, a dozen or more perfectly ordinary non-terrorists were being visited every day for similar reasons, but this had been a slow news day, and Shaw's decision sparked a short-lived media frenzy for which there was minor political hell to pay. Shaw himself was promoted to fill the FBI's seat at a newly-created, multi-department information sharing task force. One of the programmers that had worked on the program from which the data that Shaw misinterpreted came, Rupert Connelly, was blamed for the whole thing and unceremoniously fired. Connelly later became one of TAOnet's founding partners, and had insisted that every one of the company's security-related behavioral prediction softwares produce unambiguous, 'bullethead-proof' user experiences.

But Kyle, waiting for coffee to brew, was not thinking about the poster he was looking at - though he did stick his tongue out at Shaw's image for the room's hidden cameras to score nerd solidarity points with anyone that happened to be watching him remotely. Rather, his attention was split between the novel problem that had been presented to him upon arrival in the guise of a seminar subject, and the more pressing problem of how to avoid the 'hospitality chief' Hanna Fisk, who had railroaded him into committing to a 'teambuilding paintball showdown beginning at high noon' that he had no intention of participating in. The only way he could see to avoiding the showdown without deliberately causing an injurious accident was to rush underground to the gated confines of the special project area that he'd been shown the previous day. It occurred to him then that he might be served by a visual prop to communicate the urgency of his need to get back to the special project tunnels on the long walk to the spire across what was often an extremely distracting campus, so he remotely logged into his home node's system via a workstation in this break-bubble and printed a raw-looking report of his home node's activity since he'd been away.

With a large mug of coffee in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other, Kyle exited the geodesic dome at a brisk pace. The maze of five foot wide pathways that wove its way between the campus' domes was easy to navigate when heading for the spire. Not only was the landmark huge, rising nearly two hundred feet above the desert floor and appearing like a twisted obsidian pyramid, but by design the wind was always moving towards it at a good clip. He had nearly closed the distance to the spire, in which lay the only entrance to the special projects tunnels, when he spotted Hanna Fisk in a group of sixteen doing tai chi in an 'oasis' plaza. She did not break her form, but Kyle could tell that he had been spotted. He waved his sheaf of papers in the air, pointed them towards the spire, gave an exaggerated shrug, and continued on his way.

The spire was huge, but its size mostly resulted from its utilitarian purpose. While the building housed a small auditorium, a few offices, and the main entrance to the underground portion of the campus, these habitable fixtures accounted for just two percent of the space's volume. It primarily served as a power plant and central cooling system. It converted sunlight to heat, and this into a large vortex of heated air that accelerated as it rose buoyantly upwards and out the spire's peak. The vortex was fed by vents around the spire's perimeter on the desert's surface. It was also fed by a network of underground tunnels that pulled air in from distant surface vents, through cold wells, over data storage and computing machinery to keep this at optimal temperatures, and then into and through the spire's massive volume. The end result was a perpetually monstrous updraft, which turned a series of giant, electricity-generating wind turbines. The building was shaped like a giant upside-down tornado because, in effect, it held a giant upside-down tornado.

The entrance to the special projects tunnels was the only place on the campus where access was gated, and security guards were visible. The company's policy of radical transparency made it easy for anyone to know who was or was not allowed past this gate at any given time. Each of the three posted security guards independently confirmed that Kyle Trake was allowed through the fortified door they guarded as he approached its entryway where they were stationed. Two of the guards ware engaged in a game of chess at a small circular table, while the third sat on a beanbag plugging away at a video game. As he passed, one of the chess players met Kyle's eyes and nodded slightly. Kyle knew the drill and responded in kind. Tucking his sheaf of papers under an arm to free up a hand, he then slowly pulled the oversized door open, stepped into the hallway beyond, and slowly pulled the heavy door closed behind him.

The door to the project that he had been summoned to headquarters to participate in - Project Causeway - was slightly ajar, and Kyle paused for a moment before entering the project chamber to try and get a sense of the conversation his entrance would interrupt.

A soft female voice with a confident edge and patient cadence was saying, "... the concepts are well understood, and the simulator is up and running as of late last night. How do you want to set up tonight's demo?"

"Minimally, so the team can see rapid progress right away as they sink their teeth in," a neutral baritone voice responded. "No reason to try to wow anyone at this point. We can just ..."

Not knowing how long the exchange would continue, Kyle lightly tapped the door to announce his presence and proceeded into the chamber. "Dr Chen, Dr Connelly," he said to each in turn. "I know the next project meeting isn't until later, but I didn't have anything better to do and so thought I might come down here and jump in early. If -," he said.

"What did you bring us," asked Dr Edith Chen, reaching for the papers still held underneath Kyle's coffee mug arm. He offered no resistance as she efficiently freed the report and began skimming the pages. Before he could think up an excuse for toting this printout into an unrelated special project, she surprised Kyle by turning to her colleague and saying, "Rupert, Have a look at this. It seems Mr Trake has come up with a scenario to plug into the prototype!"

"Really? How did you manage that so quick? Well, walk me through it," Dr Connelly said emphatically to his visibly perplexed subordinate.

"He's got server logs and browser logs telling the story of a flash crash. The browsers are all executing mutually exclusive search-and-report operations on unrelated internet users. But then their behaviors synchronize for unknown reasons, this tangles up the code that defines these users as unrelated, and neither the browsers nor the servers networked in this mining operation can record the relational patterns that emerge fast enough," Dr Chen narrated. "You think the new architecture will handle this differently, by externalizing the bulk of the complexity and eliminating the infinite loops. You've brought us a test subject. That about cover it?"

As she spoke, Kyle's confusion gave way to reluctant understanding, and then to genuine interest. It was actually sort of exciting. He nodded thoughtfully, allowing a smile to grow, "Sure. That about covers it," he said.

"No man, not like the matrix. Not like we're living in a computer simulation. Like we ARE a computer simulation," Slinky said emphatically. "Like we're the hardware, and there's a simulation running on us that we can't see," he went on.

"That shovel in your hand makes a bad microphone. Try using it for digging," interjected a stout, shirtless man with a full white beard as he added to a growing pile of dirt next to the narrow trench in which he stood.

"Is this deep enough," asked a young woman who was dressed for a circa 1929 African safari, gesturing to her own trench.

"Little deeper. Another six inches should about do it," said the older man, Goodyear, without looking up.

"So what - you're saying we're an x box for aliens or something," demanded Kevin Rain, a twentysomething, in a surprisingly aggressive tone. "It sounds like pie in the sky hippie bullshit. I'm tellin you, man, the aliens don't care about us. They just want our water," he said, glancing at Fiona, who did not pause or otherwise indicate that she cared.

The four silently dug at their respective, parallel trenches for a couple of minutes before Slinky paused and matter of factly uttered, "The universe is filled with water but not with people. If aliens came here wanting something, it'd probably have more to do with us than with water. But the idea I was talking about didn't say anything about aliens - you made that leap yourself. Got aliens on the brain there, do ya Kev?"

"You know it," Kevin Rain responded with a burst of laughter.

"That explains your fashion sense," exclaimed Fiona, stepping out of her newly completed trench. "My shitter's done," she said.

Kevin Rain theatrically surveyed his own army surplus boots, bright green short shorts, and hawaiian print buttondown with the sleeves torn off, all of which was spattered with mud. As an afterthought, he touched the tiarra made from last night's glow sticks that was gracing his brow. "Says the girl that's out to bag a lion," he retorted.

"My shitter's done too," said Goodyear, whose trench was a foot deeper than the one Fiona had just stepped out of.

Slinky glanced over and observed, "Hope so! Any deeper and you'd be digging a well."

"Lime, handwash, and tp are there," said Goodyear, pointing to the base of a nearby maple tree, where sat a lidded metal coffee can, a lidded plastic coffee can, and a clear plastic jug whose cap had been perforated. Already walking away, he said "Lovin you family. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I smell burning plastic in the woods over here."

Fiona's ears perked up. "I think I smell burning plastic over there too," she declared, following Goodyear away from the work site.

Slinky and Kevin Rain continued digging until each of their one by six foot trenches was deeper than Fiona's two feet but shallower than Goodyear's three. Then Slinky, using a thick permanent marker that was tied to his belt - along with a flashlight, a large tin cup, various bits of rope, and a roll of duct tape - boldly labelled the containers that had been pointed out, and used a scrap of twine to hang the handwash bottle at eye level from a tree branch. Kevin Rain collected the remaining shovels and asked, "Where you headed after this? I'm bringing these shovels back to Travelling Circus; I hear they got some dank chai going. You coming? Oh, and have they really found water all over the universe?"

Harding Shaw took his place at a large, gleaming, mahogany, oval-shaped conference table. Anthony Reviso, the DEA's contribution to the Total Information Taskforce - entered the soundproof glass-walled room and did likewise. A bespectacled man with a full head of neatly-trimmed, gray hair - the NSA's Steve Sharpe - cleared his throat to grab the silent room's attention before saying, "Let's get started."

Each ageing bureaucrat nodded his head. As was customary, Sharpe began, "If you'll open your binders, check the agenda to confirm that no critical items have been overlooked. Anyone?" As no one spoke up, he continued, "The the floor is yours, Tarbrook. Why did the Agency request that we all to lay off the Carribean Cartel? What can you tell us?"

Eustice Tarbrook, in his signature, disarmingly warm south-touched voice, looked casually around the room before fixing his not-at-all-warm gaze on Homeland Security's Steven Blake and replying, "there are active operations on three continents that may be compromised if you bring the hammer down on the Carribeans right now. The hardware they're shipping back to Sierra Lionne is being making its way to Turkish Kurds who will use it to further the interests of democracy in their region. Our European partners will be adversely impacted if Turkey can't hold the line against Islamic expansion through its civil war."

Blake, flushing with anger, tried not to take the bait, but could not help himself. "We have multiple sources putting the original source of this gang's heroin in Afghanistan - right in your agency's lap. And don't say 'hardware'. Just call them machine guns that your agency took from a US military warehouse. One of your guys was caught selling a crate of them in Miami two weeks ago."

"Actually," Reviso broke in, attempting to prevent Blake - technically his superior - from further venting in this open forum, "what I am hearing is that the CIA is ready to give us detailed intel on the distribution networks used by the cartel's customers. So we can nail dozens of mid-level operators here, and confiscate most of the dope before it hits the streets. As usual, we'll leak to the press that the criminals were caught because informants spilled the beans, and traditional wiretaps built the cases. A standard parallel construction. Everybody knows the drill. We'll get good conviction rates and keep the streets safe here while the CIA does its job abroad," he said.

"Just be sure to give me a call if any of that military hardware fails to make it out of the States," the ATF's Vaugh Willis chimed in.

"And for god's sake keep your people in the field appraised of our ops so we never bump into each other," added ICE's Gregg Franks.

Reading the ensuing moment of quiet as de facto consensus and without missing a beat, Sharp took the opportunity to move the meeting along. "Next one's on you, Shaw. This 'emerging threat alert' that went out on Friday is making waves. Now, NSA has confirmed the Bureau's intelligence, as well as -" Here he paused, allowing thin lips to trace something resembling a smile - "your interpretation of the its initial assessment," he said.

Shaw did not take the bait. Instead he recalled his embarrassment upon learning, at one of these meetings (from an NSA agenda item that he was certain the smug pencil-neck had personally included out of sheer meanness) that some tech firm had named him 'the original bullethead' in its internal memos and training documents.

Sharp continued, "The most pressing concern here is coordination. What's the narrative for our people?"

The man whose head was sort of shaped like a bullet looked at each of the others at the table carefully before answering, "That is being finalized at the top now. But you all have the facts. On May 18, there were 10 seemingly isolated clashes between local and federal law enforcement personnel, with 17 resulting fatalities. It seemed like a fluke. But then, on July 5, it happened again, this time with 18 such conflicts and 39 deaths. The latest such event occurred just a few days ago, on October 5, this one with 16 conflicts and 70 deaths."

Shaw paused to gauge the room's reaction - which ranged from characteristic simmering outrage in Blake to determined weariness in Tarbrook - before going on, "Now Texas' governor has declared a state of emergency to get get the feds to come in and manage their 'law enforcement crisis', and New York's mayor just gave a press conference claiming that 'rogue federal agents' are responsible for two NYPD deaths. I don't have to tell you how bad this is. With the exception of the attempted marijuana earnings seizure in Colorado, none of these clashes started as a regular juristictional disputes, or involved any wilful refusal to follow orders by the people involved. They just sort of happened. All that seems to connect them is the time frame."

Although everyone clearly expected him to, Anthony Reviso did not say anything about the catastrophically botched DEA attempt to take possession of a large volume of cash that had been escorted by armed Colorado state authorities while en-route to a new state-owned bank.

Tarbrook used the pause to interject. "Our people don't have their fingers in this, but we have been able to confirm that no known foreign threat is behind it," he said.

"Our data suggests the same," Sharp agreed, "This looks strictly domestic, but we aren't ruling anything out," he clarified.

Shaw, mildly emboldened by the suggestion that the others' confusion was comparable to his own, proceeded, "The message we're putting out is simple: these are isolated incidents. In times of increasing criminal and terrorist threats, routine communication failures have an outsized impact. It is a tragedy, NOT a crisis. And when we get to the bottom of how it occurred, we will never let it happen again."

"Fortunately," Shaw went on, "the Colorado story's getting some play, but only the Dallas and New York incidents are producing major headlines. The Texans are making a naked play for more federal antiterrorism money, which they'll probably get. The New York mayor's story was cooked up at a friendly meeting between NYPD and FBI - they couldn't keep an FBI fuckup resulting in the loss of two of New York's finest entirely under wraps, and thought this narrative would make the fewest waves. An enterprising police captain even convinced the rank-and-file to show their distaste for the media's skewed coverage of this narrative by silently wearing black arm bands rather than talking to the press directly."

"Why didn't you just tell him you're gay? No reason to drag poor Harold into it," said Trisha, leaning against a chainlink fence next to her girlfriend, watching Kensington excitedly yip around one of Prospect Park's many 'animal companion zones'.

"Why don't you tell your boyfriend that you're gay," Chris teased. "But to answer your question, I don't want my creepy neighbor knowing anything about me," she said.

"Well," Trisha shot back in a tone of mock-consideration, "Peter doesn't care if I'm gay, and thinks all of my friends are like childish background music for him and his oh-so-interesting friends, so he probably doesn't even get that I'm capable of having actual relationships. But as long as I fuck him and pretend to listen when he imparts his wisdom, and tell him how cool it is that he's thinking about such important things, he continues to pay for my apartment," she professed.

It was a variation on a conversation they'd had about once a week for the last several months. Trisha had inherited a roomy three bedroom apartment in Carrol Gardens last year, at age twenty, and couldn't possibly afford all the fees associated with such a prime bit of New York residential real estate. She could sell the place, and probably would after finishing her bachelors in a couple of years, but wouldn't be able to live for more than a year or two in the city on what she'd get from it. Neither she nor Chris, for different reasons, were comfortable with the idea of cohabitation at this stage in the relationship, and Chris could barely afford the rent on her Winsor Terrace closet-sized apartment. Peter - being fashionably unemployed due to significant inherited wealth, out of town most of the time on a perpetual vacation, and happy to pay a few thousand bucks a month to have a vaguely exotic woman half his age to screw and bring to parties whenever he happened to be in town - was Trisha's expedient solution to her financial troubles.

Chris, being a pragmatist, understood it, but refused to pretend that it was emotionally reasonable, and always brought it up on their Saturday afternoon animal companion zone date.

"We could just move to Vermont and be lumberjacks," Chris said, changing the subject.

"Or buy a boat and be pirates," Trisha responded. But her heart wasn't in it, and the words fell flat as they both realized that the game wasn't going to go anywhere today.

"Hey, what's with the black armbands the cops are wearing," Trisha asked after a moment, gesturing with her gaze to a couple of officers walking by on a nearby paved trail.

"Dunno. Something about a police shootout with the FBI in the Bronx, according to a conversation I overheard at lunch. Who knows with these bulletheads these days," Chris said offhandedly.

"Bulletheads? I love it!" Trisha squealed.

Kensington interrupted then, by charging up to Chris, stopping just shy of her knee, turning around in a little circle, and bumping his side repeatedly against her denim-clad leg.

As the trio proceeded to the subway, Trisha fell suddenly into one of the deeply contemplative silences to which she was prone. Nearing their station, she said, almost to herself, "that's odd."

"What is it," Chris asked, mentally preparing herself for the wide range of subjects that she'd seen provoke this occasionally-maddening conversation habit of her partner.

"I was just thinking about something I heard last weekend, at one of Peter's parties. Remember that guy I told you about who Peter pays to manage things after he gets drunk?"

"The one Peter's been trying to set up with gentleman callers? Sure," Chris replied, barking out a little laugh while leaning down to coax Kensington into the oversized purse she used as a pet carrier on the trains. For obvious reasons, Peter's woefully inaccurate gaydar had long been a safe and funny topic of conversation between them.

"Well, the other night night Peter left for almost an hour with this Austrian girl to 'look at her portfolio' in one of the galleries next door."

"Lame," Chris said.

"Right? I mean, what, did he think I wouldn't notice? But anyway this guy. Franklin is his name. Sometimes its Frank, or Frankie - I've heard him introduce himself as all three. Whatever. I told you he's a total weirdo but scary smart. Whenever he talks it annoys people 'cause he's kind of intense, so usually he just listens or asks questions, and stays moving cleaning up after people. Okay, so I was standing right next to Franklin trying not to get hit on by Peter's friends. He was focused on a conversation about guns in America that some of them were having. You know - school shootings, police shootings, like that. Whoever was talking was saying that gun violence is a disease, but republicans had stopped the center for disease control from studying it. Franklin wasn't saying anything, just collecting empty dishes to wash, but you could tell he was paying attention. Then he just sort of stops what he's doing, stares off into nothing, and says to himself, 'huh. They'll probably do the arm bands thing again. Wonder how that fits with the so-called disease model.' I didn't think about it at the time - it didn't make any sense! - but it was those exact words," Trisha recalled.

Chris frowned as she parsed the narrative. "Hmmm," she said, stifling the urge to comment further on Peter's appalling lechery. Then, more to redirect her own thoughts than from genuine interest, she asked, "So who is this guy, Frank? Do you think he knew the shootout was going to happen because of what he said?"

"Maybe. I don't know. He's some family friend of Peter's from Iowa or whatever. Don't even know his last name. He doesn't live in the city any more, but works the parties when he's in town. Peter talks to him like a child - and says some totally patronizing evil shit after a few glasses of wine - but seems to trust him. I don't know why he puts up with it, honestly. But beyond that, I have no idea - the guy obviously has his own thing going on. And you can almost hear the wheels turning on some other level when he talks. It can be eerie. Like with the armbands comment, but that was probably just a coincidence. Or maybe I am just not remembering it right," she explained, trailing off.

Yoshi was Abigail's only real friend. They'd met by liking each other's comments on the popular 'tiny house living' blog. Neither of them had real tiny houses, but both aspired to someday to own one of these. Abigail lived in a shipping container warehoused amongst twenty-two other economy domiciles in Oakland, and paid a mere twelve hundred dollars a month for the privilege. Yoshi lived in a private office cubicle in Tokyo, rented by the day for the yen equivalent of about fifty dollars. For the last two years, Abigail had been an assistant hiring manager for a San Francisco company that made software for home appliances. Yoshi had, during this time, worked a data entry job from his cubicle apartment - turning scanned images of receipts into spreadsheets of the information on the receipts. But he had lost his job a few days ago. Abigail felt bad for him.

'I can probably get you a job, if you can make it here.' she texted.

'Thank you. I do not have enough money go. I will find another job here.' he texted back.

'But what if you can't find another job?'

'Then I will sleep in the stairwell of my parents building'

'No. Come here. I will pay for the plane.'

'No. I can not.'

'It can be a loan. You can pay me back.'

It had seemed like such a good idea last month. But now, with nothing left of her savings and waiting at the airport, Abigail was not so sure. She had helped Yoshi secure a short term business visa on which to travel, paid for his round-trip airfare, and even transferred two thousand dollars to his bank account so that he could prove he had the ability to pay for the trip. Now she stood, holding a printout of Yoshi's face from a screenshot, watching the airport people amble by.

'Is that you? I am waving:)' - a text from Yoshi.

She looked up from her screen to see a gaunt Japanese man about her height, waving at her and smiling broadly. "Yoshi! You found me!" she yelped, surprising herself by nearly tackling him in an enthusiastic embrace.

"I-," he stammered while taking in the twenty-eight year old woman's presence. "You-," he tried again, still grinning and looking bewildered. "It is great to meet you in person," he finally managed. Though thickly accented, his english was perfect.

"You too! Oh my god, you're actually here," said Abigail, whose anxiety had disappeared.

After a meal out and long drive back, it did not immediately register that something was amiss as the pair approached the gate in the chainlink fence after parking the rental car some blocks away. When Abigail's key failed to fit a new padlock on this gate, she turned to Yoshi and said, "that's funny." Then she peered between the green plastic slats woven through the fence's chainlinks and did not see her shipping container apartment - or any of the other such dwellings that had been situated in the commercial lot just a few hours prior. "Oh shit!"

she said. "My place has been moved."

"What?" Yoshi asked. Then, "How? Is this some kind of joke?"

Abigail had seen a series of texts arrive from her landlord throughout the day, but had assumed they were just the usual reminders to like his posts on social media, and so had ignored them. Now, she pulled out her phone and read these carefully. The first message was an 'official notification' that her house was in transit to a new location until 9pm, at which point it could be re-inhabited. The second message welcomed her to her new location, and informed her that she was now part of 'Megacrate Sustainable Village.' The remainder of the texts were reminders to like her landlord's social media posts about his new partnership with the Megacrate.

"My house moved," she explained. "We have to take a bus to get there."

Yoshi looked her and smiled. "So we both get to move to a new place today," he said. "Its probably better. This neighborhood does not look very good."

"That synoptical processes developed in tandem with panoptical ones, from the Inquisition to the Internet, leads ... to the argument that the synoptic and the panoptic are mutually implicating processes which serve reciprocal functions. What is unique to the contemporary context ... is that it is technologically feasible for panoptical and synoptical impulses to merge through the same technology."

(Quoted from: Probing the Surveillant Assemblage: on the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control, Sean P. Hier, Surveillance & Society 1(3): 399-41)

After what turned into a two hour train ride back to his Harlem apartment following the lunch meeting, Harold stopped to check his mail. Usually he only did this on recycling day - moving a week's accumulation of useless paper directly from his mailbox to the curbside bin just on the other side of his building's entryway doors - but something told him to take a peek in his box as he went by. A letter stood out. This was hand addressed to him, with a nameless return address in Virginia and bore a Manhattan postmark from a few days ago. Harold took this letter, and left the other envelopes - filled with special offers and the like - to continue their slow transformation into a mailbox-shaped recyclable brick. He opened it as soon as his apartment door closed behind him. The handwriting was startlingly neat:

H. Baker: It has come to my attention that your bots may have captured an event of interest. An inspection of your October 5 logs will confirm anomalous behavior. There are large forces at play, on which your work may shed some light. If you would like more information regarding same, there is a data cache located at njh1gt554gnfrs328786.com containing further instructions. Username and password are o00o0oOOo0.

The letter was unsigned. It was too weird. But this was, he supposed, exactly the sort of thing he'd signed on for when he joined one of TAOnet's nodes. The company promised its contractors - and all of its employees except the directors were technically contractors - zero privacy and no micromanagement. That was the trade off - you offered transparency and received a healthy measure of protected autonomy in exchange. In the time it took for Harold to remove his shoes, hang up a light jacket, open and close the refrigerator door without removing anything, and thread his way between stacks of cannabalized computers to a clearing in the living room's vast machinery puzzle, Harold became comfortable with the letter. But it was still strange. Normally - or so he'd heard - such a cryptic letter would come embedded as human readable text in a block of code that tried and failed to auto execute on a server, or as a sequence of failed login attempts that were easy to see and string together when looking over a website's error records.

The hand written letter was old school. Its surface would have been scanned at the post office, but its contents had likely remained hidden throughout its brief transit uptown. Until Harold followed the letter's instructions - if he chose to - the whole thing could probably be forgotten about safely. For all he knew, this was one of the company's famously elaborate pranks, and if he accessed the 'data cache' he'd end up seeing a sped-up dickpic slideshow or an ironic e-card that started with 'So, I heard you tried to download the internet...' But really, why not check it out?

There was no danger to his system if he took some basic precautions before attempting to access the data cache mentioned in the letter. And there was a not insignificant likelihood that one of the 'hospitality chiefs' out west had roped Kyle into staging an elaborate prank - and so not following through carried the risk that Kyle would look lame for the viewers if the stunt didn't come off. Hell, the more he thought about it, the more plausible this seemed. Kyle was probably part of a test of some new predictive software, and the arm bands thing was probably the prediction being tested. The only way to find out was to find out. And when Harold logged in to the mysterious domain, what he found was not at all what he had expected to find.

There were no funny animations or clever applet games to greet him. Just a plain directory. The first folder in this directory was named 'ProjectCauseway'. It contained a 'ReadMe.txt' describing how Harold's bots related to the project Kyle would be working on at TAOnet headquarters, along with thirty eight additional files pertaining to this project. Still half convinced that the letter was some kind of company joke, Harold read through these files and then copied them to his one of his node's shared servers without thinking too much about it.

Other folders in the top level directory were not so easily deciphered. Some of them looked like other TAOnet projects, naming other people by name as sources of work contributions, but none of these were the sorts of things his team worked on. One, titled 'MeshNetworkReboot', contained pages of specs and gps locations of mobile server stacks and network communications equipment. Another, 'QuantifyingSemiotecticStimergy', held information about a buggy program that attempted to interpret crowd sentiment from behavioral cues evident in CCTV feeds. There were dozens of others.

The last folder in this main directory, called 'Synopticon', held files documenting what appeared to be a simulated future world war sparked by a crash of the global economic system, set to occur in 2023, along with hundreds of pages of chat logs discussing the implications of the simulation. Another bundle of files, in a subfolder named 'CriticalInterventions', contained reports on strategies for averting or managing the simulated future crash, along with more irc logs of discussions. Also in this directory was a 'submit new item' link that opened a dialog box that would apparently allow Harold to add his own files to the cache. There was far too much here to make sense of, and he did not really know what to make of it. Who were these people? Were they inviting him to play a game? After staring at his computer screen for too many hours, Harold logged off the site and began preparing for bed when the phone rang.