This Weightless World, page 7
Eight months ago, a recruiter from the single most influential company in the world had called to discuss a program Ramona had developed in her junior year at the University of Chicago, something she’d scarcely remembered. The recruiter found the program scanning university journals for potential R&D projects. The program in question was an AI-generated safe search function that protected users against 9/11, a variety of other PTSD-inducing content, and body dysmorphia triggers. The recruiter had been particularly impressed by its surgical incisiveness. Ramona was offered twelve months and relocation costs to keep teasing out the code in Mountain View.
The program was called Tiresias, and it used deep learning to navigate the networks of trauma online and meticulously remove triggers from sight. At first, it had only gone after keywords, but human language was rife with nuance and connotation, and it had to familiarize itself with how triggers worked in the mind to head off the subtler content. To date, it was sophisticated enough to build a protective shield around a social media account, saving the user from harassment without affecting any other content whatsoever. It could be good for society in a satirical sense.
Tease out what? Ramona thought. The code looked like it belonged in a bad ’80s hair metal band as it was. The director of R&D told her to “think outside the bun.” She interpreted this to mean that he didn’t know why the hell she was here either, and she suspected she wouldn’t be there for much longer. The only thing she knew for certain was that leadership had very little interest in Tiresias in its present state. Otherwise, they’d have bought it as is. Censorship didn’t bode well in the Googleplex. Facebook and Twitter, companies with serious harassment problems, would happily pay millions for the latest version of Tiresias, but these newest functions had been developed at Google, and thus belonged to Google. Leadership would sooner let Tiresias rot away in a neglected server than sell its latest AI to a competitor. They could always reconsider their stance on China and run IT for the Great Firewall. She didn’t know what would come of Tiresias. She was stuck, and her twelve months were coming to a close. So, she sat around worrying about waste, what a waste she was, the waste she produced.
Her options were limited. One, she could continue feeding Tiresias data, studying how it detected triggers through deep learning, and pray. Two, she could embrace total confusion, and simply stare at it and do nothing all day. She liked the second option. Anticipation was the flower to disappointment’s stony fruit.
Ramona moved a framed photo of Sevi onto her desk. Had she a cubicle mate, they might have asked her if the guy in the picture was her boyfriend. She wouldn’t have known what to say. At first, she and Sevi had only called each other to talk about Omni and their observations about life since the technosignature’s discovery. The way cars were slowly colliding in the streets. How domain names featuring the word Omni were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. They emailed each other pictures and articles. Sevi had sent her a photo from a salon in Beijing that specialized in dying your dog fuchsia. Ramona sent Sevi an article about a real estate mogul who was purchasing abandoned McMansion subdivisions for future temporary housing for the aliens. They talked about how underneath the novelties—mugs, hats, a commemorative slushie flavor—they were noticing actual things about actual people. A man Sevi had passed on the way to work each day for years had suddenly stopped him to say hello and ask him what he did for a living. The man was a Xerox repairman and loved to cook. Ramona had seen eavesdroppers welcomed into strangers’ conversations at various stores and coffee shops. And less and less did people want to talk about Omni—they were running out of things to say about the planet. Earthly things were in vogue again. The weather, politics, feelings. Small talk, for the most part, but with intention. These things could make a difference, she thought. People were taking charge of a cosmic phenomenon. Twice, she’d taken her top off on Skype; once, she requested a picture of Sevi’s cock—she looked at it and said, “I remember that.” Kind of a clumsy, ridiculous object, despite its social lore, but she liked it. Boyfriend? She didn’t know. Kind of a clumsy, ridiculous, and socially unevolved thing, too. But she was in love again, that much was clear. If everyone fell in love again, maybe that’d make a difference.
After emptying another yogurt sheath, Ramona stared for some time at a strand of Tiresias. Ineptitude was new and required ruminating over too. She felt milky and unsteady, in need of burping. An exercise ball rolled into her cubicle. Its cheery red body bounced off her shoeless heel and wobbled to a stop against a metal filing cabinet like a fat child. The cabinet had nothing in it but a few chocolates. It had come to rescue her, she thought, this ball. She’d walk it back to its last user and violently berate him, for which she’d be fired and given the chance to get on with her life. But something dinged before she could address the rubber sphere. The automated age, she admitted, would feel at first as if everything needed you. Awaiting mankind wasn’t an autocracy, hopefully not, but an automacracy, the soft autumn descent of the self. Only after the self would there be peace, the floating stasis of a billion untenable obligations.
It wasn’t her Gmail, that almost corporeal reservoir of warnings, pleas, bargains, and duties that gave the company its curb-stomping foothold in so many people’s personal and professional lives. It was her phone, a news notification. Some people followed politics, others watched the polar ice caps melt in real time, a few collected memes restaging the fascism v. communism dialectic. Ramona asked to be pinged each time the surveillance economy grew a new eye, or whenever a computer was used to violate a person’s civil or natural rights. She was following stories about Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange and a new story about Aaron Swartz, who was awaiting trial for stealing JSTOR articles, a ridiculous indictment but good enough pretense to hide the government’s widespread campaign against young, charismatic, and slightly messianic computer whizzes who might jump-start a civil liberties movement. The growing outrage needed keeping up with. It did nothing but bring her more anxiety and misery. But when Ramona’s eyes refocused from the light plane of her monitor for the light plane of her phone, it wasn’t a headline about a person’s arrest she read, but one about a man’s impending early release. A man she knew. A man she’d helped the feds put way. A man named Dana Johnson.
Through much of college, Ramona had spent most of her free time doing illicit things on the internet, a curiosity that’d sometimes flare into all-nighters she called Nocterms, when, in keeping with the Maker’s schedule, she’d utilize the uninterrupted hours others reserved for family, food, and rest to hack. It was an act of unabashed anarchy. It was fun. U of C was where fun went to die. She was chipping away at the monolith, undermining the artifice of control by reminding internet users how fragile their networks were, dismantling them before their very eyes. Her mind, too tired to wander, to wonder about Tide pens, a new pair of yoga pants, the last time she’d gotten laid, would still with the cool blue of the monitor and let her work for up to twelve hours at a time without sleep. Twelve cigarettes, a shit, was all it took to get through the shift. She was part of a little group led by someone who called himself Jesse. Together, they hacked politicians’ and CEOs’ emails seeking evidence of backdoor deals for future corruption charges. She wrote malicious scripts for Jesse, unique lines to create new vulnerabilities that couldn’t be traced for a few days, weeks. They were designed for all sorts of mail servers. The mail servers were the first routes of entry. The fact she was asked to find holes in so many meant Jesse had diverse but specific interests. He was not seeking a litter of credit cards or social security numbers. Occasionally, Ramona would be sent to the doors of a corporate portal—an in-house program from which an employee could manage their 401(k) contributions—and be told: Get in. Her patience, conservativeness, and quiet got her what Jesse wanted, whatever that really was. Once in, Jesse could social engineer his way to the accounts of import. She hacked impetuously. A lot of what she saw looked energy-related, stuff just shy of a smoking gun, meant to implicate someone in the grand climate conspiracy, those making millions and billions off the death of the planet. She wasn’t an environmentalist, not really, but she had a role to play. Maybe Jesse wanted to rustle up a scandal, something to wake up the Earthlings once and for all: You’re being conned to death! Maybe he knew a shy whistleblower who’d fill in the details but just didn’t want to be in charge. Ramona had only ever gotten so far as to deduce that Jesse was searching. In the dark, people everywhere were always searching, always; signaling one another with a language of exchanges, trading comments and dirty gems, wearing each other’s IPs like couples dressed as one another at Halloween parties, braiding their codes into a giant and totally fucked DNA chain, searching, searching, searching. Even the NSA was searching. Whatever it was they were hoping to find, they kept looking because they hadn’t found it yet.
Eyeing the headline, Ramona felt her vascular system constrict, her heart moving in the uneven style of a gondolier. She opened her spam folder. The computer-generated diction, shoddy auto-translations, and vomit-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-infects sense of abandon estranged her into a carefree, Ponzi-scheme-curious, erectile-dysfunction-suffering senior citizen seeking one weird trick Obama didn’t want him to know about. As this other, she could breathe again.
She tried to block it, but the events of that day returned to her. Snow was filling the cement balcony. Her roommates, Alisha and Genevieve, were at their parents’ for the winter holiday. The FBI didn’t burst in, guns blazing, they knocked. Standing inside her slanted living room, the men showed her a search warrant and spoke to her with the calm of guidance counselors.
“We think you’re mixed up, that this guy took advantage of you, made you do things you wouldn’t otherwise have done,” one said.
The other said they thought she was a true patriot.
“We know you’re from Boston. You a Patriots fan?”
Jesse’s real name was Dana Johnson. He was a twenty-nine-year-old security analyst from Arlington, Virginia. He and his girlfriend had a daughter.
“But he’s dangerous.”
“We just need your files.”
“No one will ever know it was you.”
She complied without any mention of the potential charges they might’ve thrown at her had she not. Consequence was a natural, invisible structure living beneath her feet.
Dana got twenty-five years in federal prison. No mention of Ramona in the deposition. And he was getting out, seventeen years early. Even if the FBI had kept their word and never mentioned her name, Dana knew it was her. She knew Dana knew. The invisible consequence of the world had returned. She was supposed to have been forty-five years old, an impossible age, when it came to swallow her up. She was supposed to be a different person, a person who’d done something with her freedom, a person who’d made up for her past, a person insulated by wealth. She’d done nothing of the sort; she had nothing to protect her. And even though she’d cut all ties with everyone she used to know eight years ago, even though she’d been a corporate sellout forever, people like Dana Johnson, people like Aaron Swartz, were still the people whose opinions actually mattered to her, they were the moral center of this world, of the world to which everyone was supposed to be headed. Sevi would be surprised but he wouldn’t care, and would she really care if he did? Her parents would be relieved. “Oh, honey, you made the right choice. I’m so sorry you got involved with that criminal.” Google, if she still worked for Google, would be split. Half would be indifferent. The other half would threaten to walk out if she wasn’t fired. And after she posted her letter of resignation on a company forum, and after that post went viral on social media, her life would be both the same and impossible to go on with. Because of the shame, absolutely, but mainly for her failure to do something with the freedom she’d stolen from Dana. She was always going to be found out. She was always going to be destroyed in some way. But she was supposed to have done something, at least.
PG, a sort-of-friend who worked for Twitter, popped up on her Gchat. He did math stuff, mainly, but spent a few hours a week blasting bots and trolls from existence, though also, he had more than a few bots trolling people at any given time himself. She wrote to him.
me
How do they expect the human race to even exist another one hundred and fifty years if we keep jailing our brightest people, chopping down the rainforests that hold the cures to all our current and future diseases, melting the ice caps that contain the ancient diseases that will kill us in the future! I’m talking about Aaron Swartz btw.
She’d try to create a sympathetic public record in the coming days, to complicate Dana’s inevitable smear campaign. For years, she’d thought of writing Dana, telling him everything, begging his forgiveness. But that opportunity had now passed, and her survival relied on an ambiguous confluence of neutered corporatism and reflexive anarchism. In less than four months she’d be out of a job. In six months, everything anyone had ever believed about Ramona Thompson would be eclipsed by what Dana Johnson had to say about her.
PG
O plz that white boy?
me
Um do you mean that social justice fighter? That hacktivist? That fucking bastion of internet freedom?
PG
He’s a sacrificial lamb and I’m not gonna waste my pity on a know-it-all twenty-five-year-old who got caught doing a sloppy hack no matter what they do to him. Deep V collar-crimes just aren’t any of my concern.
me
Just making conversation …
PG
Consider that topic covered
me
You don’t have work?
PG
Do you?
me
You could just put up your away message like a normal person if you don’t want people to bother you.
PG
Too monoculture I’d rather be 100% transgressive 100% of the time
me
I thought I was done with contrarians when I left UChicago
PG
I thought I was done with people who name dropped their university when I graduated with honors from Stanford’s Machine Learning program
But I forgive you. BRB
He never came back.
* * *
RAMONA LEFT WORK early without having accomplished a thing. Before going home, she sat in a corner of Dolores Park for half an hour, slipping her shoes on and off, watching skateboarders jump over skateboards. Father Chen had once said she could go on with her good self and start a nonprofit that’d probably take half the homeless population off the street if she wanted. She wished she did.
There was a woman screaming at the top of her lungs into a microphone nearby. People needed to know she didn’t think Omni meant shit. A wag-the-dog the cosmos had given the governments of the world to evade public scrutiny for a while. The mike was passed, and a man spoke, less loudly, about gang violence on his street. Ramona followed the sound and found an audience thickening around the voices. A man talked about his love of buses, his fear buses would go away if electric cars took over. He didn’t think he’d feel safe traveling in anything but a bus. He’d raised his hand, gotten the microphone. Ramona went over to the crowd and raised her hand. The man who’d spoken about the buses handed her the microphone. Everyone’s face turned to look at her, a whole audience of speaking listeners, of listening speakers. It was a system model. During Occupy these same people engineered a human microphone after a noise ordinance declared the usage of megaphones and amplifiers illegal. Their words had moved like an ocean wave from person to person.
“I met Aaron Swartz at a conference once. He was nice. I can’t believe he’s going to jail now,” she said.
“A young brother,” a man said, and the woman beside him nodded. They were both older, and Ramona didn’t think they knew what she was talking about.
“Well, yeah, he’s young, and he’s a brother in the fight against the surveillance state.”
“Sing it, sister!” a skinny white man with a familiar-looking IT badge said.
“What’d he do?” the woman who’d nodded asked.
“He stole several million articles on plant life from an online database.”
“And they caught him?” the woman said.
“Yeah.”
“And he’s actually going to jail?”
“Probably.”
“And he’s a white boy?”
“Yes.”
“Must’ve been some really good plant articles.”
“I don’t know. They were written, like, over a century ago.”
“Antiques,” the woman said to the man beside her. He nodded.
* * *
ON HER WAY into her apartment, the protestors had confused her for one of their own and offered her a leftover breakfast taco. She’d almost cried. Inside, smoking herself into a malcontent cloud, she drafted several text messages to send Sevi.
Why do I feel like the world speaks a different language from me?
Aaron Swartz, hero or library delinquent?
Talk?
She settled on I love you and waited. She’d smoked maybe a bit too much and was in between stages of highness—uncomfortable, paranoid—so she smoked more to break through. Feeling better, high as fuck, she stumbled on her way to the bathroom. When she sat down to pee nothing came out, or it did, and she didn’t feel it, and for a moment she feared she’d peed herself several times in her life without noticing. Before she could give this concern any more thought, Sevi wrote back.
I love you so much, Ramona. Every day we talk I feel stronger, closer to my true self. You inspire me and give me courage. I’m going to see Samson this weekend.
If she’d been drinking, she might’ve broken into tears. Good. I love you too, she wrote back and sent it before realizing she’d already written “I love you.” She felt embarrassed for only a second. Sevi wouldn’t care. Sevi wouldn’t criticize her for that kind of mistake. She was an inspiration to him, he’d said so. Even if she was unhappy, she was inspirational. Even if she was a fuckup, she was inspirational. Even if she was a coward, she was inspirational. She stayed seated on the toilet, a woman in love.
