Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to inflict draconian punishments on persons identified as hackers.

      In one sense, APEs had been decades in the making. In a tightly compressed, fast-forward style of discourse, Pluto reminded Corvallis of a lot of history that he already vaguely knew. Pluto, as it turned out, was part of a loose group of like-minded persons calling itself ENSU: the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking. The APE was his personal baby but others had been working on it too, cross-breeding his code with filter-evading, CAPTCHA-spoofing spambots built to flood Wikipedia with bogus edits and Amazon with fake product reviews.

      ENSU’s vision in the long term was noble and beautiful: they wanted to make a new thing called the Trusted Internet. Short term, the way they wanted to get there was to bury every old-school blog in fake comments, follow every legitimate Twitter account with a thousand fake ones, clone and spoof every Facebook page with digital myrmidons, and bide their time for weeks or months before suddenly filling their victims’ feeds with garbage.

      “I can see why you hired lawyers,” Corvallis remarked after he’d heard that.

      Pluto chuckled. “Only for the APE part of it. There are many participants on the ENSU list. Some more extreme than others.”

      “And all anonymous, untraceable, et cetera.”

      “Well, we use PURDAH.”

      Corvallis sighed. “I’ll bite. What is PURDAH?”

      Pluto was delighted that he had asked. “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”

      Corvallis leaned back and thought about it for a bit. Some parts of it were obvious, others less so. “How does holography enter into it? That’s a way of making three-dimensional pictures, right?”

      “That’s the modern usage. It’s a very old word. Academically, ‘holograph’ means a manuscript written entirely in one hand.”

      “One hand?”

      “Manu. Script. Hand. Writing,” Pluto said, incredulous at his slowness. “How can you tell if an ancient manuscript was written entirely by one person? The handwriting is the same all the way through, that’s how. The author’s name might not be known, but you can identify them, in a sense, by their handwriting—with greater certainty than could ever be conferred by their name alone.”

      “I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.”

      “It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manuscript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.”

      “So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’”

      “Documents or any other kind of digital activity,” Pluto corrected him.

      “And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—”

      “Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod.

      “Run the whole thing by me again?”

      “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”

      “It’s just an anonymous ID,” Corvallis said, “dressed up with a fancy name.”

      “Well, yes and no. Anonymous IDs aren’t registered anywhere. PURDAHs are registered using a distributed ledger, so their veracity can be checked anytime, by anyone. ‘Unseverable’ means that no one can take it away from you, as long as you take reasonable precautions.”

      “And Personal?”

      “Just there to make the acronym work out, I guess,” Pluto said. “But each СКАЧАТЬ