The Every, page 35
“The debate about smart speakers has been puzzling to me from the start,” she said, “because I see these as possibly the best weapon we have against child abuse.” She’d decided to focus on this angle. There could be no resistance.
The reaction of the team was swift and startled. One woman looked down, her eyes welling. Karina turned to this reddening countenance. “Rhea, did you want to say something?” Rhea had a round, friendly face framed by Bettie Page bangs. She sipped obsessively on her waterpack tube.
“No. I’ll add on maybe later,” Rhea said. “Finish your thought ….” She glanced at Delaney, but couldn’t remember her name.
“Delaney,” Karina said helpfully.
“Right. Delaney. You keep going.”
Delaney continued. “Okay,” she said. “Imagine smart speakers are just as common as smoke detectors. As far as I know, smoke detectors and sprinklers are required in all new construction.”
“They are,” one of the isos said, his voice disembodied and digitally altered.
“So why wouldn’t a smart speaker be required, too?” Delaney asked. “And for the same reason—to protect the inhabitants of the home from harm. The two things are virtually identical, when you think of it. The smoke detector senses smoke or carbon monoxide, and sounds an alarm. The people inside hear the alarm, and the fire department is notified.”
Now Rhea had her face in her hands. Karina nodded to Delaney, closing her butterfly eyes, urging her on.
“Just like any situation where you feel you’re being observed,” Delaney said, “your behavior improves. That’s been demonstrated here in myriad ways, from SeeChange on. But I would argue that the most dangerous place in the world is the home. The majority of violent crimes are perpetuated by someone you know.”
Now Rhea was weeping openly, and she was quickly surrounded by Everyones attempting to comfort her without, of course, touching her. Meanwhile, Karina was patting the air above Rhea’s shoulder, and a half-dozen other Everyones were near her, making sympathetic faces and sounds. Finally Rhea wiped her face and straightened her posture and her face took on a determined cast.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” she said. “I was abused at home. Some of you know this. It went on for years. It was such a shitty cliché. The one where the molester-stepdad is protected by the mother with low self-esteem.”
Now half the people in the room were crying, too. Delaney wanted to hunt down Rhea’s predator and deliver frontier justice.
“This would have caught him,” Rhea continued. “I know we’re talking audio through HereMe, but that’s the start. These should be required for any home where there are kids.”
Delaney saw the future. Cameras would be required in any place where there were children: schools, churches, libraries, homes. There was no possibility of it being any other way. Anyone refusing or resisting would be de facto allowing, planning, or engaging in abuse. And Rhea would be the ideal person to create and justify this new reality.
“Goddamn it!” Rhea said. “Right now some kid like me is being abused, and we’re complicit because we have the tech but it’s not being implemented already. It should be everywhere. Today. Yesterday. People are dying because we’re not listening.”
XXXIV.
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE FRANTIC, full of mission and fury. Karina and Rhea had set up a meeting with the Gang of 40 and the Every’s top legal minds, including a dozen former prosecutors and four former ACLU attorneys. For the day, the HereMe team created a presentation that they believed irrefutable. Karina insisted she go alone, and she did so, with the HereMe team tearfully bidding her good luck.
She returned two hours later, her eyes apoplectic. She looked around the room and composed herself.
“We have more work to do,” she said steadily. “At this moment it seems that the constitutional obstacles are significant—the Fourth Amendment being chief among them.”
Rhea’s face went purple, then pale, and finally fell apart. The team gathered around her, patting the air near her as more tears were shed.
“This is government-sanctioned abuse,” Delaney said.
“Exactly,” Karina said. Now her hand was stroking the airspace above Rhea’s head.
Delaney was mildly shocked at the outcome. It was highly unusual for the Every to give in to legal boundaries. They had long been inclined to try new notions in the real world and let them play out—well before inviting any regulation. The playbook would have had them try the program locally, with acquiescent households and the local police. After six months, the concept proven, it would quickly spread, as had doorbell cams and their lockstep alliance with law enforcement, reaching saturation far before any legal challenge could be contemplated.
“Take the rest of the day to …” Karina couldn’t finish.
The next step, to Delaney, was painfully obvious. But she was already far more visible and central to this particular idea than she wanted to be. She was dangerously close to getting credit for it, so she waited a day for the HereMe team to propose what she thought was inevitable.
The team was despondent. Rhea had taken a personal day at home. Karina solicited ideas and got none—none but the coining of the term dungeon for homes without HereMes; the social media team programmed bots to popularize the slur. Otherwise, the team lobbied Every attorneys, but with no additional arguments or evidence. After three days, Delaney had no choice. She asked for a private meeting.
Karina met her on the perimeter track. Her eyes were vibrating. “We don’t have much time,” she said. “I hope this has something to do with how we make this work.”
“We need proof,” Delaney said. “You’re giving them the vague promise of abuse prevented. But what if you gave them actual proof?”
“Catch someone abusing someone?” Karina asked.
“The AI is searching for words related to the bombing, and that’s fine. That should continue. But what are the odds the bomber has a HereMe in their home? They used a thirty-year-old truck. They left no digital trail. They know what they’re doing.”
Karina glared at the Bay. The view was far clearer now, without the tents and shanties. “Okay, so?”
“This dovetails with the bombing, but it’s bigger than it. We’re talking about requiring all families to have a HereMe in the home, activated at all times. We need to prove the concept. We need to program the AI to listen for the indicators we were talking about—raised voices, broken plates, slammed doors, certain keywords.”
“Okay. Then?”
“We have hundreds of police departments that have been working with the Every for years. Whose work has been made far easier with our data, doorbell cams, neighborhood cams, license-plate readers, search histories, downloads—”
“Right, right.”
“Well, we begin a program whereby AI dings when they hear trouble, that address is sent instantly to the local cops, they come and prevent an incident before it happens. The cops have bodycams on, so they get footage. In a few hours we can edit together a 90-second sample. Potential child abuse in the home caught by HereMe AI, relayed to the cops, cops arrive in time, wife and children relieved, crime prevented.”
“The lawyers will hate it,” Karina said.
“Maybe on this one we go around the lawyers. We prove the concept to the public, and it becomes something the public wants. The lawyers and the law follow the people’s will. Security cameras in ninety percent of the places they are already are blatantly unconstitutional, but the public wants them. And no one challenges them. Who could prove they’re harmed by the presence of surveillance cameras? Criminals? A class-action suit brought by burglars?”
“Right, right,” Karina said.
“The main thing is that we’re preventing abuse. It’s that simple,” Delaney said.
“The cops will make mistakes,” Karina said.
“We’re not talking about them busting down doors. But arriving, doing a wellness check, maybe removing the kids from the home for a few days. The evidence will be obvious. The abusers will be exposed, neutralized.”
“They can turn off the HereMes.”
“But they can’t. That’ll be the law, eventually,” said Delaney. “Just as it’s the law to have smoke detectors. It’s the law that cams are in every classroom and church. The one place kids aren’t protected is the home—and that’s where most abuse happens. This is screamingly simple.”
“Good. I’ll give you two days,” Karina said.
“Me? No, I’m not—”
“You just proposed this. What’s the problem?”
“I’m not the right person. Rhea should—”
“You think it’s more appropriate for Rhea to be re-traumatized by searching through audio of imminent domestic-abuse cases?”
The next day Delaney was sitting next to a programmer named Liam. He was a pale, sharp-featured man of about twenty-six, educated at MIT and completely surprised to be brought into such a project. Karina essentially locked them in a room and gave them two days to produce results. Liam had a habit of looking directly into Delaney’s eyes, locking them into a vibrating ocular clench, which helped her keep her eyes away from the vents cut into Liam’s bodysuit—two inner-thigh windows for testicular cleavage.
“I’m sorry,” Delaney said. “I know this is probably a lot.”
“We’ll end abuse somewhere?” he asked. “That’s the goal, right?”
Look up, Delaney told herself, but the flashes of strained flesh kept summoning her eyes downward.
“In theory, yes,” Delaney said.
“Where do we start?” he asked.
Grateful for a task, Delaney looked up the top ten counties in the United States for child abuse. After listing them for Liam, he found they had a relatively low saturation rate for HereMes in these homes—only 58 percent. Still, that was 1.6 million homes.
“That’s our search area?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s our search area,” Delaney said. She stared at the spreadsheets on his screen until the numbers took flight and blurred before her. Finally he looked to her. “And we’re searching for what words?”
Because the project had to be secret and the results quick, they had no time to find linguists, domestic violence experts, any authorities of any kind. It was up to Delaney.
“Just type them, send them to me, and we’ll make a list,” Liam said. “Send as you go.”
“And the searches happen instantly?” she asked.
“It’s current, yes,” he said. “Not always, but after the bombing we started real-time searches. We get dings the moment the criteria are met. Eighty, ninety percent match. Like, if the phrase we’re looking for is ‘I’m going to kill you,’ then anything close will get us a ding. ‘Gonna kill you,’ ‘I’ll kill you,’ ‘I plan to kill you,’ ‘Someone should kill you,’ ‘Get back here or I’ll kill you.’ Anything like that.”
He said the phrases with no affect. And then he waited for Delaney.
“Start with those,” she said. Beyond a handful of films she’d seen on the subject, Delaney had no point of reference.
Liam typed them in and again turned to Delaney. She was blank.
“How about, ‘You little fucker’?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and he typed it. His oval pinged, and he sighed elaborately.
“Ready?” he said, and from under his desk he retrieved an enormous rubber band, each side ending in a molded hand-grip. He connected it to a hook on the wall, and began furiously pulling at it, as if desperately swimming away from the wall. Thirty seconds later he took a break. “You want?”
Delaney took hold of the grips, attempted her own tragic swim, and relinquished them to Liam. They traded for a few more minutes and Liam sat down again.
“How about ‘You little motherfucker?’”
Delaney, out of breath, made an approving sound, and for the next hour, Liam’s fingers flew and Delaney occasionally added or amended.
I’m gonna beat you.
You whore.
You worthless whore.
You worthless little whore.
Get your ass over here.
Get your worthless ass over here.
You deserve a beating.
I’m going to beat your ass.
I’m gonna beat your worthless ass.
In an hour they had 188 phrases and Liam thought it enough. He stood before her, stretched, and now Delaney could not avert her eyes. When he turned around, his rear vents revealed themselves. They were vertical, bisecting each buttock, and he seemed intent that she have a look.
Sleep was a challenge. Delaney lay in her tube, knowing she would wake up and have to eavesdrop on the private conversations of unsuspecting families. She cycled through the peaks of Idaho.
Borah Peak.
Leatherman Peak.
Mount Church.
Diamond Peak.
None of her work at the Every up to then had been so direct; all else had been abstract by comparison.
Mount Breitenbach.
Lost River Peak.
Donaldson Peak.
Sleep pulled her under, if only for a few hours. She woke, turned over, pictured the deaths of children in twenty variations.
Hyndman Peak.
USGS Peak.
No Regret Peak.
And finally she slept through to morning.
When she arrived at their workspace, Liam was sitting and for this she was grateful. She quickly crossed the room to him so he wouldn’t get up. She rushed through greetings, staring at his blank screen. In her peripheral vision she saw nothing but black vinyl.
The process of the AI readying itself to search for these keywords and phrases took longer than expected, he said, and he’d been working late, finding and squashing bugs, and building in filters designed to sort out television and radio noise, and to focus on adult voices.
“Thank you,” she said, looking at his hair.
“With the bombing,” he said, “we got tens of thousands of matches in the first few days. It’s too much to wade through. In that case, of course, it was a rarer breed we were looking for. There are more abusers in the world than there are people who drive bomb-laden vans onto our campus, I’m betting.”
For no reason at all, her eyes fell to his lap, where she found he was wearing not a similar bodysuit, but the same bodysuit, with the same upper-thigh vents.
“I also put in kids’ screams,” he said. “Like, the AI will search for screams. High-pitched screams, wails, that kind of thing.”
“Thanks,” Delaney said, and left the room.
In the bathroom, the cartoon skunk met her, grinning.
“Hi Delaney!”
She ran to the stall and defenestrated her breakfast in a peach-colored flood.
“Is someone sick?” the skunk asked, its face a sympathetic pout.
“I’m fine,” Delaney said.
“Remember, the clinic is available 24-7. Should I tell them you’re coming? Your EveryMed plan recommends you visit after an event like this.”
“Just nerves,” Delaney said. “Just excited about all the progress we’re making,” she amended.
She left the stall and began to wash her hands, thinking the skunk would focus on that, and begin the birthday song. She did sing the song—in the background. In the foreground, a second, louder, voice emerged. It wasn’t the skunk’s. It seemed to be coming from the cartoon tree next to the cartoon skunk. “There are many things that vomiting can indicate. Food poisoning, bacterial infections, even pregnancy. We do recommend you seeing a clinician. I’ll arrange with your OwnSelf system to find a good time today.”
Delaney declined, went back and forth with the skunk and the tree for a while, and finally escaped. When she got back to Liam, he was on the floor, apparently in the middle of a strenuous set of burpees. He finished, settled back in his chair, and informed Delaney that he’d already found thirty-eight matches. They were broken into batches tied to each phrase they’d programmed in.
“The most common is ‘I’ll kill you,’” Liam said. “But I almost think we should go for one of the more specific ones. Remember when I added ‘Get over here you little bitch?’”
Delaney didn’t remember that. But Liam had been typing furiously, as if channeling the phrases from memory.
“There’s a few hits with that phrase,” he said. “I checked out one that’s in progress. You want to hear? I’ll back it up a few minutes.”
His finger was on his touchscreen. Delaney’s skin was on fire. Damn, Delaney thought. Damn, damn, damn. She nodded. He touched the screen and the audio came alive, all over the room. The voices were in stereo surround-sound, a simultaneous transcription on the wallscreen. Delaney read the words, if only to dull the effect of the audio, which was so loud it seemed to be coming from the recesses of her own skull.
Male voice: You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?
[Pause 2.1 seconds]
Male voice: Your bitch of a daughter thinks she can fuck with me.
Female voice: Don, put that down. It’s not funny.
Girl voice: Let him talk. Every time he opens his mouth the house gets stupider.
Male voice: Get over here, you little bitch!
“Turn it off,” Delaney said.
“The scream comes in a second,” he said. “Sounds like he hits her, or throws something that hits her.”
“Turn it off!”
Liam killed the sound.
Between burpee sessions, the project continued. After much discussion with Karina and Rhea, Rhea agreed to lead HereMe, SaveMe. Karina’s concerns about re-traumatization, it turned out, were unfounded. Rhea wanted to be the face of the project and threw herself into the work like a warrior.
Focusing on the same household, Rhea led the team to the planned 90-second demonstration. She fed the audio and address to the local police, who got a warrant and arrested the stepfather on suspicion of abuse. The police bodycams provided dramatic footage of the drive to the house, the knock on the door, the stepfather’s shock at their appearance, his brief resistance to arrest, his head being guided into the squad car and, most importantly, the utter disbelief, the barely hidden glee, of the young woman, about fifteen, standing in the doorway, watching her oppressor sent away.
