The Watch in the Sand: Part 6

7:46 am, October 3, 2055

The door opened to Erin’s office. She entered, followed by Jack shaking the last few drops of rain water off his coat as he wiped his eyes, and looked carefully around the darkened room. A split second later the heat/motion sensor near the door flicked the lights on, bathing the room in a soft white sheen, and turning on the picture-wall to reveal Erin’s collection of photos. A soft violin concerto filtered out from the wall speakers, filling the room with its soothing melody, and the wall behind the couch faded into a huge window to let in the first thin rays of morning sun.

“Do you need anything? Can I get you some tea?” Jack didn’t answer. Erin took his coat and hat, and hung them by the door. Jack began pacing across the floor, steadying his breathing. The wall showed a few more pictures of Erin’s family than he remembered from the last time he had been in her office. Erin stood looking at him for several minutes before tossing her small shoulder bag onto the nearby couch that dominated the opposite wall. For a few moments, the only sounds were from Jack, struggling to get his breathing under control.

“Here,” Erin’s voice was calm. Jack opened his eyes to Erin holding a steaming mug out to him. He gingerly plucked the cup from her hands, and mechanically sipped at the hot liquid. He guessed it was tea — he couldn’t taste it. He sat down, and Erin joined him, laying her hand on his lower arm. Jack’s heart was trying to leap through his mouth. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

“How did this happen?” Jack’s voice was cold. Erin shook her head. Everything she knew about Nanocules told her it couldn’t have. Reflexively, her eyes unfocused again as she began to search the Boards once more for answers.

Officially, at 7:18 AM Central on October 3rd, 2085, two thirds of downtown Chicago died in the streets. There were few witnesses, and their posts didn’t arrive to the Boards until 7:25, when the downtown Line was reestablished. The visuals were chilling: streets full of limp bodies and stalled cars. Here and there a survivor walked through the carnage, glancing at the fresh corpses, eyes flicking like flies over the still bodies, bikes, and cars.

The posts were quickly linked, passed from Board to Board, and within minutes everyone on the Boards had seen or heard the witnesses’ accounts of the event. Millions of posts focused on the possibility of other attacks. Thousands of people were fleeing Chicago — others claimed nowhere was safe.

Mayor Talbot issued a calming post at 7:35 assuring the population that, while something had indeed happened, the city of Chicago would carry on, moving forward to the future together and fearless. Several hundred thousand people had already ranked the post, with two thirds giving it a Plus, the remaining third a Neg.

The Negs were panicking, throwing out wild theories about poisons, deadly solar flares, terrorist acts, and malfunctioning Nanocule factories. They said that since it had taken a whole ten minutes after the event before the mayor had posted, he was obviously ineffective and frightened himself. A current highly Plussed post detailed the time it would have taken for the mayor to be moved to a secure bunker under the river, and claimed the timing matched up perfectly — he must have posted from safety, and left the city to die. All evidence to the contrary was obviously doctored.

The Pluses praised the mayor’s leadership and courage, blaming the panic on the Negs; calling them fear-mongers, political hacks, opportunists, anarchists, and similar names. A small group of Pluses demanded that the mayor do absolutely nothing for at least an hour, to give the situation time to calm down, while cooler heads analyzed all the data they had. Every time this idea resurfaced, the furor started again.

“Is it the Line’s fault?”

Erin’s eyes focused on Jack’s intense gaze. He spoke again.

“I’m serious,” he turned his red eyes to Erin’s. “You work for the Banks, you know more about this than me. The Line cut out for ten minutes total, three minutes before and seven minutes after. I don’t ever remember the Line being shut down. Did that have anything to do with this?”

“I don’t know, Jack,” Erin shrugged, sighing softly. “I don’t know what this is.”

“Well, then help me figure it out!” Jack pleaded as Erin stood up and walked to the wall.

“I wasn’t there, Jack. I don’t know how I can help.” Jack sighed heavily, sipping his tea as Erin’s eyes unfocused again. Erin stood in front of the window, framed in the rain-dappled dawn for a few moments as her face looked out over the street, before she turned back to Jack, her eyes sharp.

“I thought you quit the force,” she said, gently.

“Not yet. They tried to edge me out by putting me on desk duty. It’s a mess, but I’m still there. Connie wants me…” He choked, “wanted me to leave.”

“Then why are you talking to me?” Erin returned. “Why didn’t you go to the station? They must have people working on this already, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the help if you want to be involved.” Jack shook his head.

“They won’t want to work with me, and I don’t trust them to get it right. Come on Erin, you took a doctorate in Nano-science, you know more about Banks, the Line, and Nanocules than half the people who run the Banks. Two thirds of Chicago dropped dead ten minutes ago, in unison. Why?”

Erin shuddered, hugging herself tightly.

“Somehow the Nanocules must have killed them. It’s the only way that everyone could have died all at the exact same time. Probably some hack from a terrorist group.”

“And that’s what everyone will believe,” Jack was scornful. “Stands to reason. Obvious answer. But you know that’s not right, don’t you? It’s impossible. The Line was down, so the Nanocules couldn’t have received any commands.”

“Why did you come to me?” She asked, coming back and sitting beside him. “What can I do?”

“Erin,” Jack gently grabbed her shoulders. “We need to find out what killed Connie and get it out on the boards as soon as possible. You know the Boards. Everyone can see the pictures of the aftermath, and everyone will want to know what happened. Some people will think up a few theories, based on few facts and a lot of conjecture. Some more people will agree, and minutes later, everyone will have a favorite explanation. Half an hour, and everyone will be certain about what happened, whether they’re right or not, and they’ll Neg everything else — they’ll stop looking for the truth because they’ll think they already know it, and they’ll never see anything different. We need the facts in the discussion now so they don’t get lost! If the truth isn’t fast, it’s useless!”

Erin nodded slowly. It was a weak excuse, an attempt to mask his need for an explanation for Connie’s death behind a professional policeman’s ethic. Even so, Jack was right.

It was called Algorithmic Bias. Her team had been working on an advanced Patch to the Algorithm that would keep posts from getting buried after being Negged. The sad truth of the Boards was that there was only so much information a person could get through in a day. The Algorithm sorted posts based not on recency, but relevancy. Plus or Neg any post you read, and the rest of the posts shuffle themselves based on your opinions — of the post itself, the opinions of other people, and how closely their Pluses and Negs match yours. It was incredibly complex, and ingeniously designed to make sure that you would only ever see one or two posts in a day that you didn’t like, or didn’t want to see.

The result of this was that with the complex web of Plusses and Negs covering the Boards, if a post was Negged three or four times it would never be seen again. Few people noticed or cared, because the Boards never lacked for content. It wasn’t until Erin and her team did a sweep of one day’s posts for a research project that they found out that of the seven billion posts in an average day, at least ninety million posts were being lost after fewer than ten people saw and Negged them. The most popular post in a day could receive five million Pluses, and seventy thousand Negs.

If the truth wasn’t what people wanted to see, they’d never see it. Erin thought briefly, then shook her head.

“The only explanation I can think of isn’t reasonable,” she said, quietly. “Someone hacked the Banks. The Line is rock solid — there’s no way someone could have programmed the Nanocules to kill anyone without the Bank’s noticing and resetting the program. Worse, the Line was designed to never shut down. As soon as the Nanocules lose contact with a Bank, they contact another Bank in range to re-establish the Line. There are always at least four Banks in range, possibly five downtown — all of them would have to be affected at the same time for the Line to be cut.”

“You think it was an inside job,” Erin couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. She shook her head.

“I want to say it can’t be. The background checks and psychological tests are incredibly tight. But somehow, someone must have programmed at least five Banks with a delayed command to kill, and then cut the Line.”

“No, that’s not it,” Jack shook his head in frustration, putting down his tea and pulling his hair back towards his neck.

“How do you know?” Erin crossed her arms. There was a pause.

“Because… because I’m the reason the Line shut down.”

For a few moments, the only sound was the classical concerto, filling the space between them. Jack closed his eyes, letting the music fill his ears. Connie had told him once that in a few years there would be only one song. Just one song on the whole of the Boards. And everyone would listen to it, and love it, and then an enterprising young musician would think it would be better with a slightly different beat, or a new instrument on lead. The new song would be posted, and everyone would listen, until the next musician wrote their song. Perhaps two people would write a new song at the same time, and they would still sound almost the same, weaving back and forth like a braid, circling around their source, until combining into another song, which would inspire again, and everyone would be listening to the same songs, one right after the other in a path through musical form and style. Movies, stories, poems, they would all follow the same form. With no boundaries, there would be no fads, no individual styles, just a slowly evolving uniformity.

“Did you know you can simulate a Bank signal?” Jack whispered, as he looked outside at the sunlit rain pattering on the glass. “It’s easy, really. I found the code and the instructions on the Boards half a year ago. A small transmitter, a bit of… you can transmit a Bank signal half a mile wide. You can mask the real Bank, and transmit your own signal. The hackers who made it were trying to use it to hack into the Line and control people’s Nanocules. It would never work, I know, but the signal did. I saw this, and Connie and I thought, well what if we hid the Banks? The fake Bank signal would still be there, so the Nanocules won’t try to find a different one, but what if the signal was empty, and they stopped receiving information? We thought it was safe… the Line would be cut and it would get people talking… Connie and I… It was a statement. You know?”

Jack rubbed his eyes and looked at Erin. She was sitting quietly, looking at him. Anyone else would have jumped on to the Boards while he was still talking, recording him with their eyes and ears. His testimonial would be posted and he would be justly arrested for vandalism, or unjustly for worse. But he knew Erin. She wasn’t chained to the boards the way his other friends were. He sniffed, slid off the couch and crouched down in front of her.

“That’s how I know it wasn’t the Nanocules. I turned them off. It was something else — it had to have been. The Nanocules — the Line to the Banks cut out and people died. Maybe there was something lethal in their bodies that the Nanocules were fighting. As soon as the Nanocules stopped, it killed all those people. You have to help me, Erin. We have to find out what killed them all.” Jack looked at Erin helplessly. She nodded slowly.

“The 3 minutes was the fail-safe,” She spoke carefully, brushing her hair behind her ears, her mouth firm. “Nanocules that lose a connection to their Bank will continue on their current programming for three minutes before shutting down if they can’t find another Bank.”

Erin stared at Jack. He stood, rubbing his upper arms as he started pacing.

“It could have been a gas leak or something,” Jack muttered, his hands waving in circular motions. “Some toxic substance that was leaking from nearby, and when the Nanocules stopped providing an antidote, people started dying. Maybe some new disease, or…” Jack’s hand froze. He licked his lips. “Look, you need to log into the CPD Board and access the Profiler.”

“What?” Erin was astonished.

Jack waved his hand dismissively. “It’s okay, I’ll give you my password. I’ll even unlock my Board and post that I’m asking you to do it,” he lied. “We don’t know what poisoned everyone… It could be natural, or it could be intentional. Someone could have poisoned downtown, thinking it would only make people sick. We need more facts about who was downtown. "

He directed her to a private app for the Police, called the Profiler. It was a deceptively simple program. Type in a name and in the span of a few moments it crawled through all the posts on the Boards, every Plus and Neg they ever gave, their locations, moods, and movement patterns, and built a profile. Not just likes and dislikes, or a psychological dossier, but likelihood of behaviors. Run a deep enough profile on yourself, and you could figure out anything from how much money you’d end up making before you died, to how many children you’d have, and with whom. Currently, it had a 94% accuracy with deep profiles, and it was improving — powered by the Algorithm.

Link it to GoneTo, a location app, and Erin would be able find anyone who had been in the Chicago area in the past month who was likely to mass-poison downtown.

Jack shuddered. He should have been doing this himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to access the Boards.