Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,69

Pluto began, a little confounded by the question.

“Never mind. He has a passport and a visa,” Corvallis called to the pilot.

After they had walked to the plane and got settled into their seats, Pluto resumed the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “This kind of thing has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed,” he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. “Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn’t get us anywhere because it’s language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—”

“We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.

“‘Slut,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘hag,’ ‘fatty,’ all the bases need to be covered. If we generate traffic in the gigaBraden range—which I think is easily doable—but it’s all skewed toward, say, ‘feminazi,’ then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot—”

“I think we get the idea,” Corvallis said.

“—why, then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole.”

“Pluto, we sort of missed the part where you explained the whole premise of what you’re doing,” Corvallis said.

“I’m glad you said so,” said Maeve, “because I was wondering if I had blacked out.”

“What I’m gathering is that you have been developing some kind of bots or something . . .”

“Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. “I took the liberty of drawing up a logo.”

“Please don’t show us programmer art, Pluto, it’s not—” But it was too late, as Pluto had swiveled his laptop around to display an unbelievably terrible drawing of an animal that was just barely recognizable as some kind of ape. One shaggy arm had its knuckles on the ground, the other was whipping overhead as it hurled a large, dripping gob of shit. Wavy lines radiated from the projectile as a way of indicating that it smelled bad. It was even more terrible than most of Pluto’s programmer art, but he was smiling broadly and even sort of looking at them, which counted for something. Worse yet, Maeve liked it, and laughed. Corvallis hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.

“By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.

“What do you mean, arbitrary?” Maeve asked.

“As many as he wants,” Corvallis said.

“As many as I want.”

“Don’t they cost money or something?”

Pluto looked startled for a moment, then laughed.

“Pluto has ten times as much money as I do,” Corvallis said.

“Nineteen,” Pluto corrected him, “you don’t know about some of the interesting trading strategies I have been pursuing.” Redirecting his attention from Corvallis’s shoes to Maeve’s prosthetic legs, he went on, “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”

“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.

“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.

“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”

“Yes. It worked unexpectedly well. So, another part of the strategy might be to spawn a large number of nonexistent harassment targets and deploy APEs against them as well. I just thought of that.”

“You said earlier you needed my complicity,” Maeve said. “My permission.”

“Yes, what I would like to do is run a troop of APEs at something like a