interest began to wane. Just as the storm had spread from the Grotto to the blogosphere to the mainstream, now it reversed direction, contracting from the television studios and newspaper websites to the blogs to the Grotto, where the last band of hardcore zealots, like the original 300 in the film that Andrei had used to watch, fought a shrill and increasingly hopeless battle.
In Andrei’s opinion, the 300 were self-important, self-appointed guardians who had come to a party to which no one had invited them. When once he would have listened to them, and tried to mollify them, now he had no patience for them. ‘Leave if you want to leave,’ he wrote in a terse post in the Grotto. ‘No one’s making you stay.’
The hurricane blew itself out, but Fishbowl wasn’t quite the same afterwards. Internally, externally, everyone knew that it had morphed into something different. It was impossible to ignore its sheer size and the power it now wielded, and the fact that this power was being put to use in such a commercial way.
Over time, there were more resignations from among the core of old-time Fishbowl staff people who had joined when Deep Connectedness had been the sole manifest vision of the company, advertising had been a necessary evil, and not even FishFarm 1.0, let alone FishFarm 2.0, had been a glimmer in Andrei’s eye. They took their stock options and left. In their place came executives who joined in the full knowledge of the goals that Fishbowl had set itself and the kind of revenue-generating machine that Jenn McGrealy had constructed.
But Andrei himself wasn’t really aware of this. As Fishbowl had grown, he had become distant from his staff. The company now employed over 4,000 people and had offices in New York, London, Mumbai, Beijing, Sao Paolo and outposts in another dozen cities. While Andrei was still involved in the major hiring decisions, he had no real involvement or input into the process below the top level. Jenn McGrealy was an extraordinary operating executive and had learned to manage in a way that left Andrei free to spend his time in the areas that most interested him – which overwhelmingly was Los Alamos. His office was on the sixth floor and half of his time or even more was spent with the teams as they grappled with the enormous challenges that confronted them in developing the FishFarm 3.0 that he envisaged. He would emerge from the sixth floor to give interviews or appear at conferences, where he spoke passionately about the ideal of Deep Connectedness and was frustrated by the cynical questions he always seemed to get about profits, control, monopolization and, of course, the integrity of a site that quite unashamedly operated palotls. But then he would ask, by way of response, whether the questioner was a Fishbowl user, and the answer was always yes.
All people could think about, it seemed, was money. And yet, Andrei told himself, that was the least important thing to him. He didn’t understand how they just couldn’t see that he was changing the world.
But he was wrong. Some people could.
37
FARMING 2.0 WAS the second time Fishbowl had left the FBI red-faced. Andrew Buckett’s ravings on the site prior to the Denver bombing, while not involving any actual planning of the attack, had highlighted the Bureau’s failure to identify the threat posed by him and Hodgkin before they could act. This time, while less public, the effect of what Fishbowl had done on the Bureau’s reputation inside the Beltway was potentially far more damaging. Despite having had Fishbowl on its watch list since the day Farming 1.0 had become known, the Cyber Division of the Bureau had failed utterly to realize or even suspect that Farming 2.0 was under development. Like the rest of the world, they only found out when rumours began to spread. But, once the cat was out of the bag, they knew they were dealing with something momentous.
Ed Garcia, a 34-year-old graduate of Duke University’s Computer Science programme who had joined the Cyber Division seven years previously, was the agent with the deepest knowledge of Fishbowl. He immediately recognized the quantum leap in capability that had taken place if the rumours were true. He scanned the Grotto, got hold of the Spot the Bot app, spent some time on the network, and was soon convinced that some kind of artificial intelligence program was at work. He wrote a report that went via his boss to James