gigaBraden for a couple of weeks, directed at you.”
“So if I understand the math,” Corvallis said, “during that whole time, a billion defamatory posts would be made every hour, personally directed against Maeve. Denouncing her as every kind of bad thing you have included in your ontology of execration. In all languages as well as using imagery. And on all kinds of social media outlets.”
“Her Wikipedia entry alone,” Pluto said, “would be edited a thousand times during the first tenth of a second. New material would be added describing Maeve’s career as a pirate, murderess, sex worker, headhunter, terrorist, and coprophage. By that point the entry will probably have been locked by the administrators, but not before all of the defamatory material is archived in the page history. Meanwhile my APEs will be spawning hundreds of thousands of new accounts on social media systems, and using those accounts to make millions of posts in a similar vein. Existing botnets will be leveraged to generate a colossal spam campaign. The Twitter attack will proceed in three phases. Phase Zero is already under way, in a sense, and consists of—”
“Why do you need my complicity?” Maeve asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s polite of you to ask, but . . .”
“It’s an open campaign. We would announce it. Publish statistics on how it’s going. You could do press interviews, if you wanted. The sheer magnitude of it would make it obvious, even to the most credulous user of the Miasma, that it was all a bunch of nonsense. Afterward, no one in their right mind would ever believe anything negative about you that had ever been posted on the Miasma. But because it is all technically slanderous, you would have to promise not to sue me.”
“Didn’t you say, when you first came in, that you were going to destroy the Internet? The Miasma?” Maeve asked.
“Yes.”
“How does this accomplish that?”
“I am going to open-source all of the tools for spawning APEs and running troops of them,” Pluto explained. “Combined with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, this will make it possible for anyone in the world to spawn an APE troop for pennies, and manage their activities from an app.”
Corvallis raised a finger. “I work for Lyke,” he pointed out. “If your APEs are setting up fake accounts and hurling shit on Lyke, it’s a problem for me.”
“An opportunity,” Pluto insisted. “It’s an opportunity for Lyke to differentiate itself from those old-school platforms that, in the wake of Moab, can never again be trusted.”
“Are you responsible for the Moab hoax?” Corvallis asked him flat-out. The idea had only just occurred to him.
“No.”
“Did you have anything to do with it at all?”
“No. Which is weird because whoever did do it thinks like I do in a lot of ways. But, I try to draw the line at anything where people die.”
“You’ve been working on this for a while,” Maeve said. “No one could create all of what you’ve described in a few days. I don’t care how good a programmer you are.”
“That is correct. I have been working on different parts of it ever since I retired from Corporation 9592.”
“Two years ago,” Corvallis said, for Maeve’s benefit. “And now you’re just being opportunistic. The aftermath of Moab is the perfect time for you to launch this.”
“And the perfect time,” Pluto insisted, “for your company to set itself apart from the competition.”
Maeve thought she had better sleep on it. Which was actually possible, on a business jet flying across the Pacific Ocean. She slept soundly for nine hours, which somehow gave Corvallis the premonition that she was going to say yes. Consequently, he slept poorly indeed, lying next to her making mental checklists of every action he was going to have to take as soon as they reached a place where he could connect to the Internet. The technical side of it was going to be easy; Lyke’s engineers, forewarned, could hack together some processes that would filter out most APE traffic. The legal aspect was what kept him awake, largely because it was out of his domain and there was nothing he could do about it save come up with half-baked nightmare scenarios and then worry about them.
He calmed down somewhat when he talked to Pluto. Pluto, as it turned out, had for a couple of years been employing several lawyers full-time, looking for ways to set this thing up so that he wouldn’t run afoul of any of the laws that had been established