Remy rose to his feet. “What do you mean?”
Bailey shrugged. “You can hire a bot farm for next to nothing to push any kind of content you want. We do it at Fall and Fern all the time to promote new products.”
Remy had lost interest in his cleanup operation. He braced his hands on the island and stared at Bailey. “You’re saying we can pay people to stir shit with Todd online?”
“Well… yeah. That’s not how we use it at work, but I don’t see why you couldn’t.”
Remy looked at me. “We need to get Bram and Poe.”
28
BRAM
“I’m goingto need you to explain this again,” I said, leaning against the kitchen counter.
Maeve was sitting at the island with Bailey and Poe. Remy — who’d been inexplicably covered in purple liquid when I got in — had gone to change his shirt.
“Maeve said Ethan’s in hiding right?” Bailey asked.
I folded my arms across my chest. “Right.”
“So if you want to… hurt him or whatever?— ”
“I want to end him.”
“Right.” Bailey drew in a breath, like she was about to dive into some very deep waters, which I guess wasn’t far from the truth. “I don’t want to know the details, but if you want to do… whatever you want to do, you’re going to have find him.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“She thinks we can stir shit with him online,” Poe said. “Goad him into showing himself.”
“I don’t do online.”
I wasn’t a social media kind of guy. I was a break-your-face-in-person kind of guy.
“You don’t have to do it,” Remy said, walking back into the kitchen in fresh sweats and a clean T-shirt. “None of us do. Bailey said we can hire someone.”
“To stir shit online?” I was still missing something. “Won’t we have to tell the people we hire what we’re doing?”
Bailey shook her head. “Trust me, this is a thing people do. Businesses, political organizations, even governments. The bot farms don’t care. You give them a mission and they go to work.”
“What kind of mission would we give them?” Poe asked.
Bailey chewed her lower lip. “What would piss Ethan Todd off enough to draw him out of the woodwork?”
“Have a woman call him a pussy, make him feel weak and pathetic,” Maeve said. “He won’t be able to resist putting us in our place. It’s what gets him off.”
Her expression had turned dark, and I wondered if she was thinking about what Ethan had put her through in Romania, what he’d said to her during his rants.
“Making him feel weak and pathetic is a start,” Bailey said. “But that just gets him mad enough to reply. You need to get him out IRL.”
“What the fuck is IRL?” And why did I feel like I’d landed on another planet? One where words like “bot farm” and “IRL” meant something?
“In real life,” Bailey said. “You need to do more than piss him off. You need to… challenge him to show his face somewhere.”
“Challenge him how?” Remy asked.
“Apex,” Maeve said.
