Night. It had become night some time ago. There are no windows in the main hall of the Radix Group building, but the skylight had long since faded to a patch of inky blackness. I tab through page after page of reconnaissance papers and field team scouting reports, looking through profile after profile of teenagers and young adults from wartorn regions around the world. No patterns reveal themselves except a thorough sketch of the depths of human misery. Alice, too, is working overtime. Sometime after the beginning of the last few weeks we’d all entered a permanent state of “crunch time”, and she was especially stressed: The machine learning stuff, from what I gathered, was not going well. Even in a culture of self-denigration her CI reports were particularly abrasive. Chang-dol had given up trying to defend her during those CIs, and just brought her an endless stream of coffees and homemade pastries. The summer, which seemed so optimistic and full of promise at the start, now seemed endless.
I check the clock. Three A.M. Alice has gotten up for one of her rounds of pacing. I decide to join her. At least half of the Radix Group staff (including Simon, who insists on turning off the lights) are still here, some of them having brought cots and sleeping bags. The entire op ops team is in one of their regular huddles, crouched around a laptop as someone gives an impromptu presentation. Alice looks like she wishes she’s anywhere else, and her blonde hair falls in a loose tangle. For a moment, we pace in silence, then she turns and walks out of the foyer into the darkness of London. At a loss for what to do, I follow her.
“I’m fine,” she mutters. The Georgian houses have acquired a sinister dimension in the dark, their haunted facades walling us in on the left and right.
“You seem a bit… drained.”
She laughs. “Who isn’t? It’s three in the fucking morning, Will.”
“Are you sure you don’t need a break?”
“I can’t take a break. Everyone’s counting on the GQ system to be done to get the best hires.”
“Well, you won’t finish it if you fall into a coma.”
She snorts, stumbles, picks herself up, waves me off. “I’ll finish it. You don’t need to worry about me. Worry about your report for the next CI.”
“But-”
Alice looks at me for the first time. Her eyes are wild, unfocused. “I mean it. Stay in your lane, Will. You don’t know anything about what I’m doing.”
“Do you?”
She pauses for a moment, then rushes at me. I don’t expect her to suddenly shove me back, and the impact forces me off balance for a second. When I look back up her eyes are glinting in the dim moonlight.
“I’m three years older than you, Will. I thought this was my chance to prove myself. To show everyone that I’m not just good at theory and talking big. To come out of uni and help change the world. It’s been six months since I was hired and I still can’t answer your fucking question.” She turns, starts walking back to the Group building. “What are we even doing? Extracting people from random corners of the world, putting them to work for what? Our investment arm? Did you even know we have an investment arm?”
“Simon has a plan, doesn’t he?”
“Do you know what that plan is? Because I sure as hell don’t.”
“Let’s ask him, then,” I say, trying to catch up. “He’s still awake, we know that.”
“You go. I can’t look at him for longer than thirty seconds without getting a panic attack at this point.”
And so I find myself on the second floor again, staring at the muted screens turned to night mode, trying to work up the courage to knock on Simon’s door. He knows I’m outside, of course, but he lets me sweat for a good thirty seconds before the door swings open.
“Come in, Will. It’s late, you must be tired.” The mess is just as prominent as ever, but as I come in he walks over to a gap between two bookshelves and activates a built-in panel, which swings backwards into some sort of hidden room. “Grab a chair from in there.”
I don’t know what I expect to see as I cross over to the gap. A bedroom of some sort, perhaps, or a private toilet. Instead, I see a space that resembles a college dorm room, with a small smart bulb lighting up a grey, ratty mattress on the floor. A large sack contains even more books and assorted items nestled in the gap between the wall and a heavy steel work surface with a battered, ancient laptop on top. Tucked underneath the work surface is a wooden stool and a large plastic cooler. Simon’s voice trails in behind me, weak and weary. “One finds it useful to have a Faraday cage and discreet storage area in a building this size these days. Do try not to unplug Mephisto, his battery’s from 2010 and holds about five minutes of charge at this point.”
The chair is heavier than I expect, but eventually I put it in front of the desk-island and perch myself on it. One of the legs is slightly shorter than the other three, making the chair rock slightly as I shift my weight.. This late at night in the dimmed light of Simon’s office his glasses seem to be glowing, making it hard to look directly at his face.
“Now, how can I help you? I’m afraid I haven’t quite gotten around to putting you in the system yet, so if you’re asking for your paycheck that’ll be next week after we get your NDA. But that’s not why you’re here, is it?” He chuckles lightly. Next week is my last week at Radix. He waits for me to say something.
“Simon, what are we doing here?”
“I was wondering when you’d ask that.” As he speaks, Simon picks up a well-read hardback from his table, the same one that I saw the first time I came into the room. The title of the book reads Biopower, Psychopower, Neuropower: Control Beyond Guttari, Deleuze, and Foucault. I can’t make out the author’s name. “Why do you think we’re here?”
“To collect talented people and change the world together.”
He nods. “Yes, but how? How does one change the world?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Fair enough.” He opens the book as if he knows it by heart, and begins to read. “To make change in the world is to assert your agency, your ability to choose a different future. Max Weber tells us that agency is the ability to achieve what an actor desires in the face of resistance. To overcome resistance, whether overtly or covertly, requires exploiting an advantage—social, economic, intellectual, physical. To have an advantage over your opposition is to have power over them in some way. Therefore, change requires power.”
“What is this, 1984s?”
“No, William. This is instrumental convergence. To make the change you want, whether it’s buying a house or running for president, you need to accrue the power to make that change.”
“And what does ‘accrue the power’ look like?” I have a feeling I won’t like the answer.
“We live in capitalism, and there is no alternative unless you beat capitalism at its game. Therefore, power is capital—it’s in the name. We accrue financial capital in New York and London. We accrue human capital around the world. We accrue technological capital with our research. And now…” he begins tapping out something on one of the monitors, looking away from me. “We accrue political capital. Come here.”
I walk until I’m behind him. For the first time, I notice that Simon doesn’t recline in a massive leather contraption, or some ultramodern seat. He sits on a flat, hard-backed wooden chair, of a distinctly different style from the rest of the room’s decorations. There’s also no sleeping bag, and I realise that he probably sleeps on that mattress I saw earlier. He shunts the chair to the side with a quiet grunt and I lean down, down towards the flickering screen in the dim light.
Some sort of script is running on the computer. Names pour in one by one, followed by a string of data. I try to read a row at random:
{‘name’: ‘Jonas Zhang’, ‘id’: ‘211bb0f0-bd31-49ed-8a7c-3096f2ab7cd1’, ‘big5’: {‘o’: 0.8372, ‘c’: 0.1159, ‘e’: 0.4725, ‘a’: 0.5612, ‘n’: 0.4891}, ‘story_bestfit’: {‘inno_7b’: 3.7, ‘tech_1a’: 1.15}, ‘targets’: {‘facebook’: True, ‘instagram’: True, ‘twitter’: True (...)} (...) ‘convf’: 7.4011}
The program keeps on going for some time. I can sense the quiet satisfaction radiating out from Simon. “What is this?”
“The latest out of our friends in R&D—Psychographic data on a test set of 1000 individuals in California who downloaded our app which gave us access to their browsing history, social media, and contact data. Similar collected aggregate data sources across the US give us 62% coverage of the adult voting population. The techniques we use were pioneered by Cambridge Analytica in 2016, but we will perform them with greater accuracy than ever before, across multiple social media platforms.”
The name rings a bell. “Cambridge Analytica. The company that…”
“Allegedly helped manipulate the 2016 American elections through targeted Facebook advertising, yes. They were foolish enough to sell their services and get caught. We won’t make the same mistake.”
He quits the first program, opens up a tab on Chrome. It’s Facebook, but it isn’t his account. As he scrolls down I see pictures, memes, joke posts, birthdays.
“Our team of identity makers have been hard at work, creating clusters of deep cover bots with years of plausible history and social relationships. This will be the second prong of the strategy, public rather than private.”
My heart sinks. “This is why you wanted people who can write. Humanities graduates.”
“Exactly.”
“And what narrative will you push this time?”
He smiles, shakes his head. I can’t see his damn eyes. “You’re still thinking in the box. There is no narrative. We don’t have nearly enough capital to run an organisation the size of Fox News, one with a singular agenda. In that kind of head on head contest the side with more capital wins every time, and the forces of reaction outspend us by a factor of a million. No, we’ll use what we have to achieve an asymmetrical advantage.”
“Asymmetrical.”
“Yes. Our superior analytical and data-gathering capabilities mean that we will be able to create a suite of narratives tailored to different demographic groups with different psychographic qualities.” With a click, Simon brings up a folder with some 70 files and summons one at random. I can see a jumble of phrases like “appeal to insecurity re: job opportunities” and “capitalise on climate doomerism”. Simon can see me attempt to make out the words.
“I can put you on the strategy enclave, if you want. Of course, I had to silo you somewhere harmless for a while to see if you were trustworthy, but I think you’ve proved yourself by now.”
I turn at him in shock. “What?”
He smiles that same genial, wise smile from our first meeting, one that I realise he has probably trained himself to perform. “I’m showing you this because I want to hire you as a full member of Radix, Will. Unlike your friend Alice, you seem to catch on to things quite quickly.”
“This… This is insane.”
The smile wavers, reasserts itself. “This isn’t insane. It’s the way we’ll save the world.”
“You’re manipulating people to vote in ways they wouldn’t.”
He sighs, closes the file. “Our opponents outspend us by a factor of a million to convince millions of otherwise decent people that being gay turns you into a serial murderer and that God wants people to own ten guns, and you talk to me about manipulating people? Based on our current trajectory we’re five years off from the Jewish conspiracy becoming a mainstream talking point again, Will, and the planet doesn’t have another five years of inaction left in it.”
“And you’ll do all the same things they do, but better, because you have the correct plan for humanity and they don’t?”
“This is the only way things change. You have to play the game and win before you can set the rules.”
“And what about those rival metaorgs? Are they trying to do the same thing?”
“Broadly, yes. There are seven, eight, nine groups of people who are pursuing similar theories of change, depending on your definition. They have names like the Global Optimisation Foundation, the Visionary Group, the Lighthouse, and so on. Opposition Operations was set up to keep an eye on them, since similar kinds of talent and capital are required to execute plans past a certain scale. Our methods are, while not the same, within the same category.”
“But—and let me make a wild guess here—they have different plans for the world after they’re done taking over.”
He sighs again. “Yes, William, if you must put it in those terms. Some of these people I know quite well, and at least one group is essentially neo-fascist in nature. Now do you see why matters are so urgent?”
“So stop them. Don’t be like them.”
There is a pained look in Simon’s face. “We have no time for business as usual, for society to sort itself out. Change must happen, as soon as possible.”
“And what does your vision of the world look like?”
He looks down. “Competence, to begin with. Look at how this damn pandemic has been handled.”
“So technocracy. Rule by our benevolent expert philsopher-kings.”
“And?”
“I thought you were good at Latin. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
“That’s a matter of after—”
“No, it isn’t. Who died and made you the saviour of humanity, authorised you to do whatever needs to be done?”
His voice becomes a shaky growl. “William, we are in a state of emergency. We must act now. Morality comes after we save the world.” His electric blue eyes, I notice for the first time, are filled with the radiant intensity of the desperate.
Wait, I can see his eyes.
Simon, too, seems to be momentarily taken aback. “My monitoring feed has stopped. The wifi’s cut out. Did you do this?”
“I—”
As if by a coordinated signal, the lights in the room and the monitors turn off simultaneously, plunging the office into darkness. “William. Light, now!” I fumble for my phone, but Simon is faster. In the white glow of the phone torch he resembles an ancient ghost, pale and trembling. “What the fuck is happening?”
The door slams open. It’s Alice. “Will, Simon, there’s a mole. Someone’s cut power to the building. They’re trying to lock us in.”
Simon is tapping furiously on his phone. Raising it to his lips, he mutters a chain of random words. “The backup generator should kick in in thirty seconds. We’re going to the main hall.”
By the time we reach the central chamber the lights are already back on, a dim and ominous orange compared to the usual fluorescent white. The hall is filled with people stumbling around, having just woken up by the din. None of the computers have power, and people are pressing buttons and tapping on keyboards with increasing panic. Near the security outpost Karl, the guard, has pinned a man to the floor. He doesn’t look up as we approach.
“Caught the mole dialling home near the mains room, sir. He tried to run.”
“Good work.” Simon crouches down, inspects the unconscious man. “Michael Paisley. He’s from Logistics. Could have been worse.”
“It is worse.” Lee Chang-dol is standing above us now, alongside someone from op ops. In the emergency light he looks ashen, waxy, unreal. “Michael knew op ops was onto him, so he struck first. Before he did this he also gained unauthorised access to a lot of credentials and identity files with social engineering, mostly by asking around in DMs. Our remote backups have been partially corrupted, our GPU clusters are down, the local RAID setup almost caught on fire. Cold storage is fine, but the last partial write was a month ago, before our current push. We’ve lost weeks, maybe months of progress, and we don’t know what he’s snuck out before now.” He is holding, I notice, a large silver fire extinguisher in both hands.
The confidence seems to have returned to Simon, “Nothing we can’t recover from with the talent in this building. I want everyone to go home tonight. We’ll have an emergency CI tomorrow, assess the damage, then—”
The op ops person cuts in while looking at his phone. “Streetcam footage says there are two police vans coming towards us, Simon. They’re coming towards us right now.”