"I don't know what to make of it," I said. "I asked our tech people to check the IPs of the suspicious postings, but they said the IPs were all over the place." I reached for a piece of chocolate chip cookie in the tub on the roundtable. Melanie, one of the local news writers, always brought cookies to the editorial meeting. They were ostensibly for all of us, but we all knew they were intended to cuddle favors with the handsome, glamorous foreign correspondence Jan, who recently returned from the middle east to enjoy a bit of R&R.
"You know, now that you've mentioned it, I think I've seen a lot of the same kind of postings like you've seen!" Tom said. He covered congressional news. "And, like you said, they sprung up only a month ago or so. I haven't picked it up until now because, well, you know, my pieces always attract the most lunatics, so I wasn't paying much attention. But yeah, there has been a surge of crap recently and, uh, like you said, there is something 'off' about them."
I nodded, glad to have someone to confirm that I was not going crazy. "Of course, you and Eddie attract the most wingnuts as a rule, but my financial column too? That's just weird."
"I'll have to ask the IT people whether I am getting more comments lately," said Eddie. "If I am, maybe there is something weird going on."
Eddie wrote editorials, so he was always an easy target for shit-dumping in the online comments. He never read them, but Tom and I did monitor the online comments posted under our own articles, mostly because we got much fewer. Sometimes I wished I didn't have the compulsion to read the postings that bashed me or spewing crap, but there was something irresistible in seeing that there were people not only read my news stories but even cared enough to leave comments, even if at least half of the commenters were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. The boss also loved comments, regardless of their degree of stupidity, because the number of comments was one of the indicators of the newspapers popularity. It mattered to our advertisers.
"Can you be more specific about what exactly is 'off' about these comments?" Rick, our chief, spoke in his soft and slow Southern drawl. Yes, he was a Texan and an editor-in-chief of a liberal-leaning newspaper, which confirmed that geographic generalization is unreliable.
I scratched my head. "It's hard to pin down, but ... Well, first of all it's just the sheer volume. The number of comments under my stories have more than tripled from the average three months ago. Second, they sound eerily similar. They don't really sound like they were written by the same person, but the tone is, I don't know, similar. There is something stiff about them, especially when you look at them together. Also, they are rarely relevant to the actual story, but rather just repeat some general partisan talking points. You know, like 'Liberals hate America' and 'Another socialist who wants to rob your hard-earned money,' even though the story might be about the interest rate or something."
"Wait a minute," said Melanie. "You've reminded me of something I read in this New Yorker. It's about a shadow army of writers who are hired by the government to put out pro-government or anti-dissident messages on the Internet."
"What?" Tom and I said simultaneously.
"Are you saying you don't read The New Yorker?" Melanie winked at us. "Go find it yourself. Basically, the government has hired a lot of people to covertly go to all the large discussion forums and 'manage public perception'."
"Like pushing propaganda?" I asked.
"Not exactly . If they just repeat the government line, other people would immediately pick up their real identity. Instead, they've developed some very sophisticated tactics to manipulate and misdirect public sentiment, especially in the online environment. Like, if a lot of people are complaining about a new policy, they would come in and twist the subject to redirect their anger toward foreign countries or the business community, or something. I don't remember all the specifics. Go read it yourself."
A chill went down my spine. "No kidding," I said, chewing my lower lips and thought about the comments I had seen. "Indeed it sounds kind of familiar ..."
"There's more," Melanie said. "I was curious and e-mailed the reporter who wrote the piece."
I glanced at Jan and saw a glint in his eyes as he looked at Melanie.
"He said he heard a rumor that the Chinese government has created a program, or maybe a number of programs, that send out a lot of Internet bots to do the same thing, which used to be done entirely by humans. But that was unconfirmed, so he could not put it in the article."
"Can they do that? Comments by bots instead of humans?" Tom was incredulous. "Do they have the technology to create comments like human chatters? That's impossible!"
"Really? Do you think the online chatters you see nowadays are so intelligent and uniquely thoughtful?" Eddie interjected with a sarcastic smile. "I'd believe it --- most of the comments left on our Web site are bots, or humans, or a machine that randomly put words together, whatever. I can't tell the difference. Can you?"
We fell silent. "If they can do it, bots are a lot better than humans," I thought out loud. "They don't require continual salaries, they absolutely follow orders, and they keep their mouths shut."
"Call me crazy. Call me a conspiracy theorist. But I just thought of something," Melanie said. "The head of the fox party is married to a Chinese woman with extensive ties to the Chinese government, and the recent flood of comments are all pro-fox party, from what you said, aren't they?"
Tom and I looked at each other and nodded. "Pro the fox party or against their 'enemies', or both," I said.
"What should we do, if all this was true?" Eddie turned to ask Rick.
"Nothing," Rick shrugged. "There is nothing we can do, even if we can prove it, which I doubt. But also there is that first amendment."
"Bots aren't people," I protested. "They have no right to claim the first ..."
"Corporations have every right humans have," Rick cut me off. "You've already lost. Besides, on the Internet, what's the difference between humans and bots anyway?"
The room sank into silence again.
"Cheer up, at least our Web traffic is up, and the comments will help us get the Viagra account. Maybe you'll all get a raise in December." Rick got up and said, "Go back to work."
I'm taking a break from First Contact --- it's getting a little out of control and I'm not sure what to do about it. Here's a different story.
The title is, of course, an homage to GRRM.
---------------------
After a week of snow storm, the snow and wind suddenly stopped. From the direction of the rising sun, two black spot crawled across the icy plain that used to be the Chesapeake Bay. Gradually it became clear that they were two sleds, each pulled by eight dogs. On each sled were two human figures bundled in multiple layers of fur, leaving only their eyes exposed to the ruthlessly cold dry air. For days they exchanged no words among them, trying to expend as little energy as possible.
Finally, they stopped in front of a giant building standing in the frozen city that used to be Baltimore. Like other buildings, it was surrounded by at least ten feet of snow. The two drivers jumped off their sleds, each pulled out a spade from the sled, and began digging into the snow. The pale sun hung brightly in the sky without heat. The glistening white city was immersed in a dead silence. If there were any humans left on the continent that used to be North America, they would be huddling in the middle and southern regions of Mexico by now.
Except these four --- Simon Bluefish and his wife, his brother Billy Bluefish and his wife. Simon and Billy worked patiently and steadily, until they dug out a tunnel in the snow to reach the front door of the building. The wives sat and waited. Simon knew exactly where the front door was, because he had worked at the Institute of Cryonic Research for more than a decade, until it was shut down nearly six months ago. When the military evacuated everyone south, Simon and his brother hid their families, waiting, and waiting.
Using the spade, Simon broke the front door of the deserted building. The alarm, although still rigged, made no sound for lack of electricity. The women saw their husbands' gesture and followed them inside. It was just as cold as outside, but at least the knife-edge breeze was left behind them. Billy's wife unbuttoned her coat. A black-haired little head poked out of the bundle and looked around curiously. The boy was only four months old. The four adults had all been prepared for his demise on the road, but he had miraculously survived.
The cohort passed through hallway after hallway, as Simon navigated in the dark confidently like a blind man in his own living room. Finally, they reached a double door. The lock was easy to break. Behind the door was a cave-like warehouse. Simon turned on his electric torch and searched for the switch for the electrical generator. He found it and turned it on, listening with satisfaction to the buzzing sound. This was no dumb luck. He had come back a week after the institute was evacuated and tested out the generator himself.
Everything was as he remembered. Two rows of about twenty coffin-like containers lined up in the middle, while pipes and machines lined the walls. Billy went up to the first container and began to pry open the lid, but Simon stopped him. "Leave her," he said, and walked a few meters down. He stopped at a middle container and rubbed off the frost off the glass window over the head of the body inside. Inside lay a middle-aged man with a double chin. This was the CEO of the institute. He was one of those who decided to freeze their bodies in the hope of surviving the ice age.
Simon opened the container lid according to the instructions written on the surface of the container. The instructions for how to thaw the bodies using the machines against wall were also clearly described. After all, whoever discover them centuries or millennia later need to be able to thaw them correctly and easily. He motioned Billy to help him get the large, double-chinned man out. They carried the body, now frozen stiff, out of the warehouse and into the room next door. Next, Simon picked out three more containers to open and dumped the bodies. He was careful to take out only middle-aged men, as women and younger men would be a lot more useful when the ice age was over.
When people were evacuated south over the past year, no one knew how far the invading ice sheets would reach and how long this winter would last. Perhaps escaping to Mexico was sufficient. Simon was no climatologist, but he had eyes and ears and a habit of paying attention. He noticed that the people coming in and out of the institute begging to be frozen were the most powerful politicians and richest businessmen in the world. Being an invisible janitor, he heard conversations about how the cryonic machines have been tested and proven to work. He had devised a meticulous plan and made all the necessary preparation before he was sent packing along with other employees.
After four male bodies were removed from their containers, Simon first put the baby into one of them, closed the lid, and turned on the freezing process. It was done in half and hour. The frozen baby lay peacefully in the container, immersed in liquid nitrogen. Simon looked at the reading on the container and found everything to be in good order. They all hugged each other wordlessly. He then repeated the process for his brother and the two women.
After sealing up the fourth container, Simon let out a long deep breath of relief and wiped the sweat on his brow. The last person left would not be able to freeze himself, as there was no one left to turn on the switch and, in a few hours, turn off the electrical generator. He had heard that the building was probably going to be crushed by the glacier, which would continued pack the sturdy containers in ice.
Simon cleaned up after all was finished, just like he had done a thousand times before, turned off the generator, and closed the door quietly behind him.
"So, what do you really think about this ... situation?" Jennifer Ribisi asked, after they both sat down at a table in a restaurant in downtown Silver Spring. She was in her mid-thirties, dressed in cream-colored business suits that showed off her well-toned body and olive skin.
"What do you mean?" Major Hansen raised his eyes from the menu with a noncommittal smile on his clean-shaven face. His back was perfectly straight.
"I saw the look on your face when the Colonel was giving his presentation," she shrugged. "You seemed to disagree with his assessment of the situation."
The major hesitated. "I flew there, once with the Australians and couple of times with our own pilots. I saw some interesting things. I have a gut feeling --- but it's only a feeling --- that they might be intelligent."
"Intelligent?! Like us?" Jennifer leaned inward and whispered breathlessly. It was a proper surprise. "My boss and a few other people in the office don't even buy the theory that the red jellyfish is extraterrestrial. They believe it's merely a previously unidentified species or some kind of a mutant."
"And you disagree with them?" The major asked.
"You can't argue with the biochemical analysis," she said. Her eyes fell admiringly on the major's salt-and-pepper hair in the fetching military cut. "Thanks to the samples you brought back." The bodies of the red jellyfish lacked the most basic building blocks of all living beings on earth --- amino acids, nucleic acids, or carbohydrates. Instead, they seemed to be build primarily on nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, with only a few carbon molecules thrown in the middle.
The major smiled modestly, "The samples were really collected by my unit."
"And you were just supervising," she teased.
The waiter came over and took the orders. Jennifer continued to sip her wine while stealing glances at the middle-aged marine. "Why do you think they are intelligent?" She asked.
"I don't know, just a feeling." He shrugged. "For example, how did they get here if they are extraterrestrial?"
"Most people I know believe it was a meteor."
"But we have no evidence whether it was a meteor or a space craft?"
That was true. Many meteors enter the atmosphere every day, most falling in the ocean, and a space craft could have easily slipped through undetected. NOAA consulted NASA on the record of recently fallen meteors, but the latter found nothing out of the ordinary in their scant data.
Their food arrived. Jennifer reached her fork over and picked up a piece of broccoli floret from the major's plate, and put it in her mouth. "Just curious," she winked at him, her face flushed a little with the wine. She chewed slowly, "Hmm, delicious."
The major promptly received the signal. His fingers brushed her other hand resting on the white table cloth.
After the dinner, they went to her apartment in the city and made love. He tried to maintain his cool, but Jennifer got the impression that he had not been with a woman for quite a while and was very grateful to her. This restraint touched her for some reason. She kissed him, sincerely, after they were done.
"There was something strange," the major's voice broke the darkness in the cramped bedroom. "A couple of the kids got sick after they came back with the samples."
"Oh? From what?" Jennifer stared at the ceiling, her head resting in the crook between his should and arm.
"Cholera," he said. "But there was no cholera outbreak whatsoever within a thousand miles of the base. In fact, I don't know if there has ever been a cholera outbreak in the past hundred years in the entire Australia."
"So what became of them?"
"Both were promptly hydrated and given antibiotics. They recovered soon enough, but it was a pretty big scare."
Both fell silent. After a while, Jennifer spoke up: "Are you sure it was cholera?"
"Yes, the doctor on the base was pretty sure it was typical cholera. It was not some alien disease." The major's tone suggested that the same thought had occurred to him. "Maybe we should have saved their stool samples and conducted DNA analysis on the bug."
"Is that why you think they are intelligent?" She asked.
"No, there was something else," said the major. "They moved. When our aircraft got closer, they swam away with astonishing speed and unity."
"Wouldn't fish do the same? Perhaps they saw the shadow cast by the aircraft or heard its noise."
"Maybe, but we sent a boat out there and they fled quickly as well. And then we sent a robot fish to follow them, but it stopped sending electronic signals as soon as it reached the jellyfish bloom. First we thought it malfunctioned and sent a couple more, but the same thing consistently happened. We never recovered any of them."
"That's strange."
"Also, when I saw the swarm ... I don't know, but it left a deep impression on me," the major's voice took on a slightly strained tone. "I had never seen anything so large, swelling up and down with the wave, almost like a giant creature breathing and writhing. Yet it moved so fast, so swift, like lightening."
"Who would have thought a marine is so poetic," Jennifer said. She rolled out of the creaking bed, went to the kitchen, filled two glasses of water from the tap, and came back into the tiny bedroom. The light from the kitchen outlined her curvy nude body. The major sat up and touched her skin. "I should probably go back to the hotel," he said. "Gotta get the dirty shirts to the cleaner."
She chuckled. "God forbid you are seen in anything less than a spotless starched shirt." As he put clothes on his surprisingly youthful body, she looked up and asked, "Will I see you again?"
"I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon, back to Tasmania." He shrugged into his uniform. "If you stay on this project, I'll probably be back soon to give you a report about the whole ... situation."
Jennifer stayed on the project. In fact, half of the NOAA staff, along with a steady flow of people from NASA and other agencies continued to join the project to deal with the growing SITUATION.
"Look, Daddy!" Gina pointed with a chubby finger and stooped, a little unsteadily, to touch the sea water ebbing at her feet.
Jack leaned over the child, worried about her getting scratched or pricked by something dirty. The water in the tidal pool was clear and warm. Floating among the rocks and sand were a dozen or so shapeless creatures that looked like a bloom of jellyfish, except that they were bright red.
"Aren't they pretty?" He said to Gina, a hand on her little shoulder. Her skin was as smooth and delicate, like perfectly puffed bread dough, and her hair smelt like fresh out-of-the-oven bread. He thought about his fortune --- the ex-wife gladly handed him Gina's custody so that she could run off, untethered, with her new beau to the south of France.
It was the second day of their vacation on Tasmania. Just the two of them. Jack had left his cafe in Wellington in the hands of his capable manager and girlfriend, Joyce. The beach was beautiful and nearly deserted. Jack watched Gina walk close to the water, dip her toes into the gentle wave, and then run back shrieking with delight. I should ask the hotel staff for a bucket tomorrow, Jack thought, so that we can build a sand castle together.
"Fis, daddy!" Gina hissed the "sh" between her teeth and reached out to grab at the small bloom of the jellyfish.
"No, no," Jack gently held her back. "Hold a minute. Let daddy see if it stings." He leaned over and scooped a handful of water with a jellyfish. It did not sting. The translucent head glowed with a red hue in the colorless sea water. Jack had never seen anything so beautiful. Under the head, very short tentacles wiggles weakly. As the water leaked between his fingers, the jellyfish looked small and fragile.
"Bubble, bubble!" Gina muttered and poked at the head. With a faint snap, the head burst and squirted a crimson liquid in Jack's face. Jack was startled and dropped the jellyfish, and Gina laughed. He laughed as well and wiped the slightly viscous "juice" from his face.
When he turned to look at the water, the bloom of red jellyfish had disappeared without a trace. By now Gina had already turned her attention to picking shells. Jack straightened and thought he saw a large red patch with the size of a sailboat, darting way into the sea. Odd, he thought, Can jellyfish swim so fast?
That night, Jack became violently ill and died. The cause of death was cardiac arrest caused by extreme diarrhea and subsequent dehydration. However, the local medical examiner could not determine the infection that caused the diarrhea. Gina was sent back to Wellington and, unable to find her mother, the child welfare department allowed Joyce to adopt her.
A few months later, the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) received a request from the Australian Ocean Data Center to obtain satellite photographs of several areas near and south of the Tasman sea. The photographs showed an area in which the sea was flaming red. The area covered approximately 15 square kilometer and was, the scientists soon realized, expanding.
(TBC)
****
I had planned for only a short story, but now it is growing like the flaming tide. To be continued tomorrow.
I have not actually read "The War of the Worlds," but I know the story, which has inspired this story.
A quick online search after watching Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai confirmed my suspicion: The plot is very rarely understood by E...
