The Deluge, page 107
“She’s cunning,” Mo said of Shipman. “She’s a ruthless woman in a lot of ways. A bit scary, and clearly quite sad. Yet I liked her when we met. I still do.”
As it turned out, Jaquelyn Shipman’s book never made it to press. A host of lawsuits descended, from Wall Street, from her former partner, Fred Wimpel, from the Sustainable Future Coalition, and most bizarrely, from The Pastor. There were allegations that she’d fabricated parts of her story, and the pressure on her publisher was so relentless, after a few months they withdrew the book. Shipman disappeared behind a team of lawyers.
That might have been the last thought I gave her, had she not sent me the letter—twenty-two pages front and back. As I began reading, it’s hard to overstate the fury I had at this woman. Ravenous for attention, wounded that her bullshit memoir had been shelved, she was now seeking out allies among likely marks. Her writing was cold, clinical, and she began by saying she was almost relieved that her publisher was pulping all the copies. She’d not set out to expose anyone, she said, and couldn’t tell me the nature of the objections for legal reasons. She then went on a twelve-page aside about her childhood in Iowa, her family, her work as a flak for the ad industry, and finding her mother after her suicide. Instead of a book tour, she’d moved to Italy to work as an administrator for an organization in Rome that aided refugees and asylum seekers. Why am I telling you all this? she wrote, anticipating my question. She then described meeting Kate, the short time they spent working together, and how my former girlfriend had changed her life.
I expected her to gush about Kate, as so many people now did, to fill the page with clichés in her hard, edgy handwriting. Shipman was grinding the pen so hard into the paper at that point, stencils of the words were showing through on the other side. I expected something like I know she still loved you, she’ll always love you, etc. I expected the ritual blather. But far more disconcerting, I recognized Kate through her eyes. Kate’s self-absorption, her anger, her volatility, it was all there, and by the end I realized this woman had not only known Kate but had seen her in a way few people ever did, and I was left bewildered that Kate had allowed this mannered corporate woman into her inner sanctum.
I live with an astonishment, a rage, a grief at the woman I was, she wrote. And I know intimately a guilt most people don’t even know they carry.
There was enormous grace to what Shipman did by writing me that letter, even though by the time I finished I was filled with a sense of dislocation, like I’d been kidnapped and dropped off in a foreign city without even a suitcase. For days this followed me, my unease at how Kate had left this trail of herself everywhere, and I was grateful I’d not told Moniza about it. At the end, Shipman said, Do not feel like you have to write me back. But I wanted to, if only to thank her for her honesty. The letter and her address sat in my office drawer for weeks as I prepared to do so, and I may well have. I was still mulling what I would say when an FBI agent showed up at my door.
* * *
Over two years after Kate’s death, Coral Sloane came to see me in North Carolina.
Mo and I didn’t get many visitors, so I was surprised enough by the doorbell, let alone to see Coral standing there in a dusty beige jacket and ill-fitting jeans. I made coffee, and we sat in the kitchen. Moniza was in New York that week, but I’m sure they knew that. I asked if they were still undercover or here to see me on official FBI business.
“No. They have me on a desk now. Training. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Training? Like training other people how to lie and betray their friends?”
Coral limply humped one shoulder up and down. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s very inappropriate for me to be here, Matt. I’d appreciate your discretion.”
“Sure.” I sipped my coffee and visualized hurling the hot drink in their face. When Rekia told me that Coral had been undercover FBI, it shook me to my core. Yet Coral did not seem remotely contrite. Their matter-of-fact at-all-costs manner had not been a put-on. I thought of their kindness to me, talking me through my lowest moments with Kate. To think that they’d been a spy while actively participating in every internal debate, argument, and decision within A Fierce Blue Fire for over half a decade—it was a betrayal I still couldn’t wrap my mind around, and this had the counterintuitive effect of blunting my rage.
“Was anything true about you, Coral? The Salton Sea? That story about your dad?”
“I was myself, Matt.” Coral pushed their glasses up the bridge of their nose, and though they’d assured me they were the analog kind, I obviously remained alert. “And you were my friend. That was real. All I will say in my defense—and then I’d like to leave it at that—is that we had strong suspicions there were people in your organization who were 6Degrees.”
I snorted. “You don’t believe that.”
“It never mattered what I believed. I had a job to do.”
I stared into my mug, trying hard to summon any fury, but it had turned as cold as the coffee.
“There are things, Matt, that no one has exactly put together.”
“Like I’m going to listen to any theory from you. And great job, Coral. It turns out all those attacks were masterminded by a handful of people mailing each other fucking lotto fliers.”
Their blunt fingernails, painted brown, played a little syncopated beat on the Formica of the kitchen island.
“Have you ever heard of Megadata Narrative Reconstruction?” they asked.
“Nope.”
“At least you’re aware of the AI programs that write books and music and VR xperes, I’m sure.”
“Yeah. Go figure. As soon as I get a book contract the entire profession is about to be rendered obsolete.”
They gave me a wizened little smile. “Stay strong, bud. Authorbots will need to use our bodies as batteries if we nuke the planet to deny them sunlight.”
Despite myself, I hissed a laugh.
They continued, “The FBI uses similar tech—everyone does now. Real Philip K. Dick stuff, and the profiles are insanely vivid.”
“What does that mean?”
They removed a blue folder curled into an inside pocket of their jacket. It was stuffed with old-fashioned tree paper and secured with a thick rubber band. They held it in their lap.
“When we found the 6Degrees suspects, we ran their identities through these programs. These AIs gather background by processing vast reams of data. Basically, the moment a person is born we start producing digital trails in a billion different ways. It’s all there, it just has to be collated and sifted through.”
I felt my stomach grow queasy as Coral went on to describe how these AIs could mine every online interaction, keystroke, every piece of biometric data a person’s phone or watch or glasses ever recorded, and of course every conversation they’d ever had in the proximity of a device that could listen. Dating back to the 2000s, most networked devices, TVs, stereo systems, earbuds, digital assistants, remote controls—it had all been spying and collecting ambient conversations. Analyze a person’s words, heart rate, blood pressure, and every email they’ve ever written with advanced machine learning and one can gain a frighteningly realistic insight into their inner psychology. Of course, all this data would take a literal lifetime to sift through and assemble into any kind of coherent narrative that could prove useful to law enforcement (or advertisers). For every moment spent plotting one of the most impressive criminal conspiracies in American history there would be two hundred thousand of the individual just going to the bathroom or being frustratingly unable to locate milk in an unfamiliar grocery store.
“The algorithms know more about you than you could possibly know about yourself. They know what you’re going to do before you do. We’ve largely turned our lives over to them,” they said. According to Coral, the first-generation of MNR was a bit sloppy, producing asides and explanations that generally cropped up in distracting fashion, as if the program was constantly finding new information and couldn’t decide if it was extraneous or vital.
“These next generations, though—they’re getting to be unbelievable,” they said. “The ability to basically reproduce a human life, down to an individual’s thinking. ‘Psychological reconstitution’ is what we call it, and it’s probably more accurate than if the individual wrote their story themselves. Currently we need a warrant to get a reconstruction, but trust me, it’s too useful. Pretty soon we won’t.”
I laughed. Coral was such a geek—that was true, at least. “You’re freaking me out.”
“It should.” They nodded to the refrigerator, a stainless-steel behemoth with every standard feature, including a camera inside to check the contents and a screen to FaceTime people while we cooked. “We are nothing but data. We basically sold our inner selves to the new colonizers for a handful of pretty beads. For instance, we did an MNR of the guy who killed Mackowski. The bomber was actually profiled by identity prediction analysis when he was in the criminal system. That makes a reconstruction easy because his behavioral data was always being collated.”
“So why couldn’t you stop him? Ash Hasan’s sister was killed in that attack.”
They shrugged. “The guy was never deemed a threat. That’s why they used him. The decisions we make aren’t always up to us. That’s why MNR is only useful after the fact right now, but even then… So there’s a woman from 6Degrees leadership we’re still looking for. She had a couple different aliases. We know this because when we captured Ismael, McCurdy, Worthington, and the others, we used a new technique.”
Coral went on to explain a method called “echolocation.” This used data from various sources to re-create the identity, attitudes, and thought processes of people with whom those sources interacted. The Weathermen were smart. Part of their protocol was to pollute their data, and this successfully hid them for a long time. But once the FBI found people in leadership, the echolocation AI could work backward. Colonel Kellan Murdock put a bullet in his head, but because the Pentagon had a treasure trove on the man from his service in Iraq, the AI was able to reconstruct an early meeting between the colonel and this woman from 6Degrees. It used his thought process and the processes of nearby diners to reassemble their conversation and how she might have reacted.
“It’s a jankier read,” said Coral. “The more it uncovers, the more it can deduce. It builds out the life of a suspect as far as it can. But we still haven’t caught her. We think she may have somehow falsified certain elements of her identity, biographical details like her mother’s country of origin. Possibly even her own ethnicity. Things like that. Honestly, it’s almost beyond belief that she’s managed to beat the AIs so far, not to mention facial recognition, fingerprints, not a trace of DNA—we’ve got nothing. It’s as close as I’ve ever seen anyone come in this day and age to being an honest-to-Christ ghost. No one understands how she’s done it.”
“Coral.” I was growing impatient. “What’s this have to do with me?”
They smiled weakly. “We found this one MNR that’s not ours…” They hesitated and laughed uneasily. “It’s a reconstitution, but no one knows where it came from. The cyber folks thought it was espionage at first. It knew things it should not have access to. It’s a recounting of the siege of D.C.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘it’?”
“Well. Originally, the intel was so detailed, the CIA thought it was a Chinese intelligence operation. But their state security is investigating their own versions in Mandarin and Cantonese.”
I was caught between wanting to laugh and be amazed and hate them still and hug them and ask if we could start hanging out again. My nostalgia surged for the ratty offices in Adams Morgan and all our hours of banter on every topic, from Martian terraforming to William Faulkner novels.
“Okay, so what’s the prevailing conspiracy theory? I’ve heard a few in my time.”
“We know AIs have surpassed human intelligence but that doesn’t mean they’ve achieved consciousness. I tend to think consciousness is just going to turn out to be pointless mental pollution organic life coughed up while it multiplied. But what if one of these AIs decided it liked spinning yarns? And it has access to basically any data it wants, from conversations we’ve had near any kind of microphone to seismic images of the Indian Ocean. It’s not exactly documenting current events per se, it’s more like it takes an interest in people. It explores. And it tells stories fabricated from complex systems modeling. It’s leaving these little digital keepsakes. Burying them in the global network infrastructure as a kind of, I don’t know, time capsule. Or maybe for reasons of its own that we couldn’t even understand.”
I stared at them for a moment and then released an uneasy laugh. “Okay, man, that is kind of spooky.”
“Just saying.” They slid the folder across the countertop to me. “Obviously, you can’t tell Moniza where you got this, but I’ll leave it in your hands. You can decide if you want to give it to her.”
I didn’t touch the file or even begin to reach for it.
“What is it again?”
“It’s the story of the siege. That’s what it wanted to describe for some reason.” They put a hand on the folder and inched it closer to me. “Just read it all the way through, Matt. You’ll understand why.” They stood and gave me a weak smile. “It was good seeing you, man. I’m damn sorry for how things went down. Sorry for everything.”
As they turned to walk out of my house, I said, “Coral.” They stopped and turned. “Why are you doing this?”
With a perfectly blank expression, they said, “You deserve to know what she was thinking. And maybe people deserve to know. That’s up to you.”
I huffed and shook my head at them. “Well, aren’t you worried my fridge is listening?”
“Yes,” they said. “I am.”
Then they walked out the door. I sat in my kitchen for a long time, trading my gaze from the refrigerator to that blue folder.
* * *
It took me a long time to actually bring myself to read the document. I hid it in a box in the crawl space and waited for Moniza to be out of town again. Then I poured myself a whiskey and began on this MNR of unknown origins.
When I finished, Jackie Shipman’s letter was long forgotten, and I couldn’t think and I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t understand what I’d just read. It cast a wide net over the people who’d been there for those sweltering summer months, the hope and the violence that followed. Hard to read because it felt like the MNR was inside them. But also, there was Kate in frightening three dimensions. Some machine learning algorithm had gotten closer to her than I ever had. Maybe that’s why, impulsively, I did what I did.
I’m not sure if Coral wanted me to hand that file over to Moniza to salve their own conscience, but that night, drunk as I’d been in years, all I knew was I didn’t want that file to exist. I took it to our firepit in the backyard and burned it. I’m not sure if I regret it. Some days I wish I had the document to read again. Others, I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on it. It frightens me more than that hideous image that arrived in my in-box.
I never told Mo about Coral’s visit, but when she came home, she could tell something was off. I couldn’t think about anything else. I couldn’t focus. I spent too much time on forums reading about AI narratives. Conspiracy theories were religions now. Acolytes claimed the newly awakened AI god was already here, speaking to us through the data, guiding the human experiment in ways either benevolent or pure evil, depending on who was postulating. All these wild, naked theories mixed with Coral’s visit and that terrifying blue folder and my mourning for the years at A Fierce Blue Fire: babbling with Coral uninterrupted for hours, Tom snarling his politics through a squelching dip, Rekia cutting to the moral core of any issue, Liza delivering every cutting line on cue. And coursing through it all, every precious memory of lying with Kate beneath hot stars in unbounded wilderness.
Moniza and I were in the kitchen, putting together lunch, when she stopped halfway through screwing the lid off a jar of mayo, licked her fingers, and put her hands on her hips. It was the way she phrased it that unnerved me.
“What’s happened, Matt?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s happened.”
“Right now. Your face. It looks like a spanked bottom.”
She was right. I’d felt my face flush immediately.
“Your brooding is so obvious,” she said. “You can’t do it silently.”
It took me a long time to respond to that.
“You have to let me grieve.” And a ghost passed over my skin.
“Have I said anything?” she pleaded. “It’s been over two years now, and I haven’t said a thing, Matt. I’ve let English stoicism do all the work.”
We stood there together, a total impasse. Finally, she lowered her eyes to our hardwood floors. “Maybe you just need to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you loved her. And that your heart is broken.” She put a hand to her cheek. She made certain her voice was under control. “I’d rather you just say that than feeling all the time like you’re so very far away.”
More so than when I found out, in that moment, I cracked. My wife took me in her arms, and she let me weep in her hair. I dug my fingers into the flesh of her back and felt how very solid and alive she was.
* * *
Mo and I were better after that. We found out she was pregnant in July, so she was four months along by the time Hurricane Kate grew to the most powerful storm ever measured in the Atlantic Ocean. My parents arrived at our house on October 3 as the cyclone churned toward the Eastern Seaboard. In the satellite images, it appeared to be preparing to swallow the earth itself. My parents had packed their Suburban with so much food and water, it took the three of us nearly an hour to unload while Moniza ran Xs of tape over the windows. By the time the storm reached us, we figured the winds would dissipate, but it was a worthwhile precaution. I wasn’t so much worried about wind as water. We lived in a narrow valley southeast of Raleigh not too far from the Neuse River, which had flooded before during Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Alberto. Most of the neighbors I spoke to seemed to think we were far enough inland. We’d be wet but fine.
