She folded up the maps, put the rubber bands back on, and set them aside. Moving on to the next task, she pulled out her tablet and opened a voice transcription app, one of many recent technologies made possible because of a leap forward in artificial intelligence.
As AI got better and better, all kinds of companies were taking advantage of the tech to make more capable software. June didn’t do much reporting on AI, but she kept up on new advances. It was a little freaky, she thought, for the present day to start catching up to science fiction. Some obvious benefits, but oh so many possible disaster scenarios.
June wasn’t particularly worried about aTerminatormoment, where the machines revolted, made robots that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and tried to wipe out humanity. She was more worried about the number of jobs that could be lost over a relatively short span of time and what effect that might have on society. If AI advanced as quickly as the experts expected, it would be like NAFTA on steroids, and it would cut across every sector of the economy. Every AI company was racing for the brass ring, the mother of all killer apps and the enormous fortunes it would generate. Nobody seemed to be thinking much about the long-term ramifications.
Even if one company did decide to slow down, twenty more would leap forward. All the journalists in the world wouldn’t change that. There was simply too much money involved. Government oversight had been neutered by hundreds of millions in campaign contributions. Even without it, regulation would never be able to keep up with the rate of change. The genie was officially out of the bottle.
Sighing, she found the digital audio she’d made from the Messenger cassette and uploaded it to the transcription app. It immediately began to spit out text. She copied and pasted into a document and then, because poor sound quality tended to amplify mistakes, began to work her way through it, checking for errors.
There were remarkably few. They must have updated the app again, she thought. Before long, they would be able to transcribe your thoughts. No joke, there were actual companies working on that, with some early success.
She tried to be hopeful about all this rapid technological evolution. She wasn’t always successful. And June was good at technology. She actuallylikedit.
What if you were someone whodidn’tlike it?
What if you were truly afraid of what the future might bring?
You’d be someone like the Messenger.
—
She went through the cassette tape transcript, looking for key words and phrases. The Dark Time. The Industrial Machine. The Messenger. She noticed there was no mention of Gun Club, but she added that to the list. Then she ran web searches for each one, looking for mentions online. Once she found those, she could backtrack, find more people to talk to. With any luck, she’d find the Messenger himself.
Working her way through dozens of pages of results, she foundplenty of hits. “Dark Time” led to a Google Chrome extension, a music sequencer, books about the cold war, and a hip-hop duo. “The Industrial Machine” led to large machine shops, computer-controlled equipment, and, oddly, a vast world of sewing enthusiasts. “The Messenger,” which seemed the most promising, led to a movie, a video game, a TV show, and multiple magazines from previous decades. “Gun Club” led to, yes, ten thousand gun ranges and shooting clubs.
None of it seemed remotely close to what she was looking for, a group of freaked-out people working toward some kind of cataclysm.
She went to a half dozen social media sites and tried again. Lots of results, so presumably there might be some signal in the noise, but if so, she couldn’t see it. She tried the usual encrypted communications apps, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and a few others, looking for any public groups with those key words, but nothing popped up there, either. Not even anything with common coded language, which some extremists had learned to use to keep from getting blocked by various apps.
After several hours of this, June shoved back her chair and began to pace the house. She was a good researcher, with years of experience and an affinity for the web, but she’d found zip, nada, bupkus. She didn’t get it. Enderby and Reed were tech professionals. Wouldn’t they use the technology at their disposal?
Sighing, she went back to the dining nook and picked up the cassette player, ejecting the tape and turning it in her hands. This was technology, too. Old technology, but it still worked.
Also, it was analog, not digital. Which made it inherently more secure, because it was simply harder to copy and distribute. If you wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the so-called Industrial Machine, maybe this was the best way to go about it. Build a physical network and distribute cassette tapes, person to person, to the secret faithful. With everything offline, there was no electronic chatter.
That was basically what Osama bin Laden had done after he went into hiding, she thought. He’d sent handwritten letters and analog recordings into the world using an elaborate system of secret couriers, which prevented the United States from tracking any electronic signals back to his hideout. The messages were distributed hand to hand until they reached the radical imams and their madrasas. He’d directed his entire international operation that way. Despite the intensive efforts of the most fearsome military and intelligence apparatus the world had ever seen, bin Laden had escaped detection for almost ten years.
Also, if you were going to communicate in secret, audio was an especially powerful way to do it. Perhaps the most powerful, because of its intimacy. Wearing headphones, it felt like a whisper in your ear, or a voice in your head. Perfect when you wanted to convince scared or angry people to do crazy shit.
Plus, for tech workers like Enderby and Reed, this old-school vibe was probably part of the appeal. Couriers and audio messages and secret meetings. It would make them feel like spies. Or revolutionaries.
Man, when she found this Messenger guy, she was going to bitch-slap him so hard he’d forget his own name.
If Peter and Lewis didn’t put a bullet in his head first.
30
June had still not gotten a reply from any of the three people who’d given strange responses to the question about Gun Club. She’d emailed them again and was busy finding their phone numbers and home addresses when her phone pinged with a text. It was Robert, telling her the burner was unlocked and giving her the new access code.
She sent back her thanks and a promise of breakfast at Wonderland when she returned to Milwaukee, then unplugged the phone and sat down to work her way through it.
Typically, the security provided by burners was their anonymity. Unconnected from any known account, data paid for in cash, destroyed after a few days or weeks to start the cycle again with a new phone and new number. On top of that natural protection, or maybe because of it, people who used burners tended to watch their words in text and email. So she didn’t have high expectations. Maybe a few cryptic texts, a couple of phone numbers. Someplace to start.
But she hadn’t expected the phone to be completely empty. No call history, no text history, no browser history. No emails. No contacts. No previous searches archived in Google Maps. And zero other apps. In fact, the only indication the phone had ever been used was a scratch on the battery cover and the absence of the usual manufacturer-added bloatware, which often harvested user information and was a colossal pain to remove. She’d seen her share of burners, and this was the cleanest she’d ever come across. Why work so hard to sanitize an anonymous phone you were going to smash with a hammer and toss in a dumpster?
She thought about the cassette tape again. The Messenger and his people were going to a lot of trouble to stay under the radar. But something nagged at her.
She went back to the recording transcript and read through it one more time. Here it was, toward the end. Check your messages twice a day, he’d said. Clearly the slow-motion cassette network wasn’t the only means of communication. Inevitably, some things would have to be dealt with more rapidly, or one-on-one—hence the burner. And she knew it had been in use. But there was nothing in its memory. So where were the fucking messages, and how did you check them?
