The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,28

No one here admires me, no one looks up to me, Scott thought, except maybe Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, a young and as yet unsuccessful game designer who was as misplaced at Elysian Systems as Scott was, and who often stole glances at him through the glass of his office.

The executives running Elysian Systems were serious, middle-aged, and worked on a separate floor, the fourth, as if to immunize themselves from the eccentricities of the programmers: the executives wore suits and ties, and decorated their walls with plaques earned during their days as mid-grade managers at detergent and soft-drink companies. They had charged this government contract to Scott, the “vice president of programming,” even though any first-year graduate student in computer science could have managed to write the essential code. The contract was for the “accountability software” of the “Citizen Anti-Terrorist Sentry System,” CATSS, by which the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and other agencies farmed out guard duty at airports, nuclear power plants, and military bases to thousands of Americans sitting at home staring at their computer screens.

Scott’s programming mission was to find ways to make sure the “citizen sentries” were actually monitoring the 12,538 cameras in the system, instead of using their computers to play solitaire or shop for shoes. His programs gave these people, like rats in a laboratory experiment, meaningless tasks to do while watching the camera images on their computers, then rated them on those tasks and produced a waterfall of statistics that was especially pleasing to Washington. Scott clicked through fence images from a half dozen more places, including a perimeter fence in a piñon forest in Los Alamos, New Mexico, then went back to the work he was supposed to be doing: analyzing his programmers’ progress on a project to design animated fake “intruders” who would “walk” and “dig” and perform other suspicious acts alongside the fences and gates, frightening the citizen sentries into pushing the alert! button on their computer screens and causing an Elysian Systems server to register another entry in the vigilant column. He tried out “turban man,” an image of a swarthy fellow with a towel wrapped around his head running and ducking: the actor was his lead programmer, Jeremy Zaragoza, and the clip had been filmed at a rented studio along with others of “binocular lady” and “shovel man,” all played by various programmers in this office. Scott made turban man run along various fences: the challenge was to create animations in correct proportions to the various barriers on the screen as they ran and shoveled alongside them, which was proving to be trickier than anyone had anticipated. After watching turban man pass improbably back and forth through the steel mesh fence at the San Onofre power plant, like some superhero possessed of special powers, Scott absentmindedly clicked open the latest numbers from NASDAQ, which had been especially bad all morning.

No one in Elysian Systems bothered to hide the fact that they were using their computers throughout the workday to watch their stocks and mutual funds and 401(k) accounts, not even the executives up on the fourth floor. Before, we played Nerf football in the hallways, and practiced tango dancing in the cafeteria. Now we watch our retirement shrink in multicolored graphs. Football and tango were better for the soul. This morning, as on most mornings in recent months, Scott squinted at his screen in frustration at the dynamic displays, updated at five-minute intervals, that confirmed his poor financial judgment, his bad bets. For several years the market had risen dependably, and people started to think of it as a machine that made money, but that wasn’t its true nature. The market did not behave according to any pattern Scott had been able to discern. Turning the market into the graphs and charts of the type filling Scott’s flat-panel display created the illusion that it was a mathematical equation, that it obeyed rules like those hidden inside the core of computer games, where players spent hours exploring and prodding to uncover the underlying logic, the key that opened the jewelry box. The equations that ran the market were, in fact, too vast for any computer to decipher: they were the sum of the desires and fears of millions of people, divided and multiplied by the ostensibly rational but really quite subjective calculations of “analysts.” The math was twisted further by the fiscal legerdemain of accountants who could be as creatively fuzzy as impressionist