the veil.
They waited three more days before holding a press conference. They announced it only an hour ahead of time, then drove into Adelaide and held it in a conference room at Pluto’s hotel. The short notice ensured that it was dominated by Australian media. This worked well. They could be every bit as superficial and tabloidy as media elsewhere, of course, but there was something about this project that seemed to appeal to their collective sense of humor. The atmosphere in the room was jokey and celebratory, and pervaded by a general sense that the Aussies had pulled one over on the rest of the world and that everyone here was in on the joke.
It was a week before the Bradens went back to something approximating their normal life. By then Pluto had already flown home. Corvallis went back alone on the jet, and Maeve followed him two weeks later. By that point it was possible to stand back and tally the numbers from the Moab hoax and from the ENSU project, which were now increasingly being viewed as two phases of the same basic event—the week that the Miasma had fallen.
Corvallis and Maeve carried on an odd, colorful long-distance relationship for the next two years. She got pregnant and moved in with him to a big old house in an expensive Seattle neighborhood, which they fixed up for the purpose of raising a family. It was a boy; they named him Vern, after Verna, who died from another recurrence of her cancer a month before he was born. Lucid to the end, Verna donated her brain to science. Specifically, she entrusted it to the Forthrast Family Foundation. The legal documents by which she did so grew more and more complex as the lawyers dreamed up more and more hypothetical contingencies. Having literally no time for such things, she ended up cutting the Gordian knot by saying she wanted “most favored nation” treatment, meaning that whatever was done with Richard Forthrast’s brain should also be done with hers. When Verna’s condition took a turn for the worse, Corvallis and Maeve flew her to Seattle, so that when she died her remains weren’t encumbered by any discrepancies between Australian and U.S. law.
On a ranch just outside of Moab, they maintained a second home. This did double duty as the headquarters of the Moab Project, a nonprofit organization funded by Corvallis and others—mostly people who had made a lot of money in social media—to sift through hoax-related data and think important thoughts about it.
The Moab Project investigated and documented the operational details of the hoax in forensic detail, right up to the point where each separate trail of evidence dead-ended in perfect cryptographic anonymity.
The total budget for the hoax was estimated to have been less than one million dollars. The networks had actually paid out more than that for the privilege of airing fake footage supplied by the hoaxers. Those payments, made in Bitcoin, had gone to anonymous overseas accounts presumably controlled by the hoaxers. Between that and short-selling various affected stocks on Wall Street, it appeared that they had paid for the exploit many times over.
Which was a mere detail when set against the thirty-one deaths and the direct economic losses, which were way into the tens of billions. Lawsuits filed against social media companies—including Lyke—depressed their valuations, distracted their executives, and took years to resolve.
The culprit was at first assumed to be an arm of Russian or Chinese intelligence. But the further the investigation went, the less likely this seemed. Some of the fake footage had originated from a Chinese computer graphics firm, but this proved nothing. The scripts and other written material, such as fake blogs and social media postings, seemed to have been written by native English speakers.
More people than just Corvallis began to suspect Elmo Shepherd of being the mastermind. He was a major shareholder, or a member of the board of directors, of more than one company that would profit from what came next. He was libertarian minded, a Bitcoin advocate. And he was from Utah, with a lot of local practical knowledge of conditions on the ground there. And so one school of thought said that he must have done it.
The opposing school of thought said simply “nah.” Simply “nah.” It was too ridiculous—too far-fetched. The connection to El’s home state was a mere coincidence, or a deliberate scheme to cast suspicion on him.
Corvallis and Maeve visited Moab less and less frequently as raising