Echo Chamber Page 6

  I don't know.

  I don't know him. Never knew him.

  Tap tap tap.

  Before I say anything, the door opens and a stream of sharp light pours over Steph's head into the dark room. "Damn, Mia, you need some light in here." She swings the door wide. "You said to tell you if anything important happened."

  "Yeah?"

  "You're gonna want to hear this."

  Her harsh tone tells me this isn't a suggestion. It's a demand.

  7

  Steph looks…not concerned exactly…pissed off is more accurate.

  Possibly enraged.

  I gesture to her usual chair. "What's up?"

  She ignores the chair and paces angrily between the doorway and the potted plant in the corner. Post-it leaps away from her and onto my lap.

  I've only seen Steph this mad once, years ago, when a guy she was serious about cheated on her with a coworker. A double betrayal.

  "Steph, what is it?"

  Without looking at me, she says, "The interview Peter gave, when he mentioned the thing Justine Hall is doing in Ohio and Michigan."

  "Yeah?"

  She goes quiet, thinking, pacing. It's starting to freak me out. "Steph, stop pacing. What the hell is going on?"

  "That lying sack of—"

  "Who?"

  "Benjamin!"

  Carefully avoiding her path, I walk around the desk and close the door to my office. If Steph is mad at her boyfriend, I don't want the whole office to hear about it. Even though I don't see him out there right now, Benjamin could be within earshot.

  Sitting, I begin to prepare a speech about the danger of office romances. Given my relationship with Peter, I'm hardly one to talk. But still.

  She stops pacing and tosses me her cell phone, which lands in my lap. Luckily, Post-it is now under the desk or it would have landed on his head. "Read that."

  For Immediate Release

  Justine Hall to Host Series of Town Halls in Key Industrial States

  Will tout her major economic program—The Hall Green Jobs Initiative—and propose nationwide expansion based on successful pilot program created in Denver.

  [Denver, Colorado, May 15, 2019]

  Denver Mayor Justine Hall will host three town hall meetings in key industrial states in the next two weeks.

  During the events, Ms. Hall will hear from voters in Ohio and Michigan directly, laying out her green jobs program, a key piece of the national economic program she plans to run on if she wins the Ameritocracy competition.

  "America is behind China in the solar power industry, we're behind India in the coding industry. In Denver, we created sixteen thousand new green jobs in the last four years. We taught industrial machinists to code, we taught ranchers how to build wind turbines. We partnered with the Governor of Colorado to incentivize two leading solar power companies to take advantage of our magnificent, plentiful sunshine. As president, I'll bring this same progressive, pragmatic thinking to the American economy."

  The Hall Green Jobs Initiative focuses on four areas:

  1. Education. Through a series of seminars, industry events, and public forums, we will educate citizens and businesses regarding the financial and environmental value of green industries.

  2. Job Training. Through partnerships with state and community colleges, we will offer job training to allow efficient movement between positions.

  3. Policy. Using the leverage of smart regulation, and, where necessary, deregulation, we will incentivize rapid green job creation.

  4. Advocacy. By acting as an intermediary, we will bridge the divide between industries, unions, individual workers, and governments.

  I scan the rest of the release, which contains details about the events, plus locations and contact information for those wishing to purchase tickets.

  I don't see what would make Steph angry. "This isn't exactly groundbreaking. She's done stuff like this before, and what does this have to do with Benjamin?"

  "Look at the time on the email." Steph's frustration is palpable.

  "This is a PDF, not an email."

  Steph grabs the phone and taps it. "It came in an email at 11:01 a.m." She shoves the phone in my face and points at the date and time stamp on the email. "Fifteen minutes ago. I have notifications set up so I get every new position paper and press release Justine Hall sends through the Ameritocracy server. She had this announcement scheduled to post on her Ameritocracy page at 11. I got it at 11:01."

  "So?"

  She looks at me like I'm a fool. "She didn't announce this before that moment. Not anywhere."

  I stare blankly, then it hits me all at once. "Peter's interview?"

  Steph takes three deep breaths, like a mother trying to calm herself when faced with an unruly kid. "Peter mentioned her events in Michigan and Ohio before she publicly announced them."

  I ponder this for a moment. "Maybe she mentioned it in an interview or tweet or something."

  "No. She did not."

  "How do you know?"

  "She's my favorite candidate. I track all her moves. I would have known. Plus, her staff sent out an email, a tweet, a Facebook post, and even dropped a video on Instagram, all at exactly 11 a.m. This was a coordinated release, planned to cause the biggest splash in the media. Justine Hall runs a tight ship. There's no way they leaked it early. Peter knew about her events before she mentioned them publicly."

  "And she had the press release written and uploaded to our site—"

  "Yesterday. I checked. She created the post and scheduled it for 11:00 exactly."

  "So you're thinking…" I go quiet. The implications are too much.

  "I'm saying that if Peter knew about her events before anyone else, he has a mole in her organization. But that's not possible because she has a staff of three who have been with her for years. So—"

  "He has one in ours."

  I walk to the window, head racing, rationalizations flashing through my mind at light speed. Maybe he had an intern hack Hall's Facebook account and that's how he found the press release. Maybe he bugged her office. He probably bugged the offices of the others in the top seven as well. This thought gives me brief comfort, which is absurd. But right now it sounds better than the alternative.

  I'm amazed at the mental gymnastics I'm willing to go through to avoid the conclusion she's reached. Finally, I say it."Benjamin?"

  She nods, slowly. Her anger has transformed to a blank, icy stare. "We are totally fucked."

  Ten minutes later, we sit at a booth in the corner of Baker's Dozen, the restaurant on the ground floor of our office building. I've convinced Steph not to confront Benjamin in the office, for now.

  When our wine arrives, Steph takes a long swig of merlot. "Stop me at one glass. I want my mind clear when I fire Benjamin's lying ass."

  I bring my glass of sauvignon blanc to my lips, but think better of it. Steph is usually my rock, but the tables have turned. I set the glass down. "I'm calling a five-minute moratorium on talking about Benjamin and Peter. Let the wine hit your system first. I need to check Twitter anyway."

  "You don't need to check Twitter, but fine. First get a five-minute hit on your social media crack pipe, then I'll tell you about how I'm going to throw Benjamin from the third floor window."

  Watching Steph out of the corner of my eye, I scroll through a special Twitter list I made containing the feeds of my top candidates and their staffers.

  Hall's feed usually shows no personality, and recent tweets are no exception. The last twenty focus on her green jobs program.

  Tanner Futch's recent tweets promote an upcoming radio show, on which he promises to reveal the final evidence that 9/11 was an inside job.

  Marlon Dixon's last eight tweets are videos of him giving speeches to groups of Christian women over the last five years, an effort to combat the stories he's been hammered with for the last twenty-four hours.

  Nothing leaps out until I notice a formal press release from Maria Ortiz Morales' feed. It's three pages
detailing her history of military service, medals won, and testimonials from men and women with whom she served.

  Without context, the press release strikes me as odd. The same information is already on both her Ameritocracy page and her official U.S. Congress page. Why would she release this now?

  It doesn't take long to figure it out.

  Clicking Twitter's Trending Topics, I see Maria Ortiz Morales at number seven. Apparently a group called Veterans for Truth and Integrity released a sixty-page document early this morning. Its aim was simple: destroy Morales's credibility.

  The document questions every aspect of her military service. It also accuses her of sleeping with female officers to gain promotions.

  "Oh no," I whisper.

  "I see it, too." Steph is on her phone. "Oh, God. There's a video. Slide over."

  I join Steph on her side of the booth and together we stare at her phone, which is loading a video called "Morales: The TRUE Story."

  Over the next ten minutes, we watch the short film twice. In it, multiple men and women in uniform question Morales's service, suggesting she exaggerated her combat experience for political purposes. A woman in a white Navy uniform claims that Morales won promotions by performing "indecent acts" with female officers.

  But it's a gaunt man missing an arm who makes the most outlandish claim. "I lost an arm serving in Afghanistan. Lost it under enemy fire protecting the country I love. And I'd do it again. Maria Ortiz Morales didn't lose a leg on a hillside outside Kabul, as she so often claims. I was there." He's fighting back tears. "Ask her how she really lost it."

  Morales's heroism has been public record for years, so the claim comes off as patently ridiculous. But the media will ask her about it now, and no amount of ridiculousness has ever kept a claim from gaining traction online.

  "It's already got a hundred thousand views," Steph says as I move back to my side of the booth. "First Gottlieb, then Dixon, now this?"

  I take a deep breath. "Okay, this is bad. Can we…we need to set this aside for a minute. I..."

  Steph lets out a bitter cackle. "Now you wanna talk about Benjamin?"

  "We need to focus on something we can control."

  "Like walking upstairs and chucking Benjamin's sorry ass out the window?"

  "Well, maybe. Before you go there, are there any other plausible explanations?"

  "No! That's why it took me fifteen minutes to come into your office after I got the press release. I was stewing, thinking through every possible explanation."

  I slide my wine glass gently from side to side on the table, trying to keep it between two parallel lines in the wood grain.

  "I can see you racking your brain," Steph says. "There. Is. No. Other. Explanation. I should have gone up to him and busted his head open with his keyboard."

  "Thank you for not," I say with a tight smile. "Not only would that have gotten you arrested, it would have messed up the system upgrade the tech staff is working on."

  "How can you joke? Our tech guy is a mole. He's feeding information to the guy who bankrolled our site. And, and, he's also my basically-boyfriend. I am having a hard time maintaining here." She meets my eyes. "Seriously, Mia, what are we going to do?"

  "Okay, first, the fact that Peter mentioned her events doesn't prove anything. What if he bugged her office? What if he hacked her Facebook account? She probably had the post scheduled days in advance there as well. What if he got wind of it through one of the event organizers on the ground in Michigan or Ohio?"

  "Mia, listen to yourself. You're trying really hard not to see what's in front of you. You think I didn't come up with the same stuff? Maybe it was bugs, maybe hackers, maybe magic time-traveling ghosts, maybe it was anything but the super-obvious explanation we both see. Just no."

  "Okay, but 'just no' isn't good enough. You're usually the sane one in this relationship, but today I am and I'm saying we don't have proof."

  Steph finishes her wine. I push her water glass into her hand. "Drink this."

  She gulps the water, then lets out a heavy sigh. "Mia, look. I've been with Benjamin for almost a year now. I knew from the jump he was odd. He's on the spectrum a little, and that's fine. He's been a good guy, a decent guy. When Peter entered the competition and we confronted Benjamin, I wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe he didn't know Peter was going to enter. So did you. When you count on someone, you want to believe them. Neither of us could do his job, neither of us wanted to find someone else who could. We wanted to believe him." She sighs again, and this time she's close to tears. "I never really did, though. After that conversation, things felt off between us. We haven't had sex for a few weeks now and…you know how sometimes you just know something?"

  "Half of the things I 'just know' turn out to be wrong."

  "I'm not wrong. Benjamin fed Peter information about Justine Hall, probably about all our candidates. He's cheating. That lowlife lying bastard. That motherfu—"

  "Steph, calm down."

  I'm surprised by how firm I sound. How confident. I'm faking it, of course, consciously borrowing the tone Steph used on me multiple times in the early days after we moved Ameritocracy to Santa Clarissa. But faking it is better than nothing.

  "If you're right," I say, "we have three issues."

  "Only three?"

  "Okay. Three immediate issues. First, we need to fire Benjamin. Get him out of the building. Second, we need a new tech person. ASAP. Like, yesterday. Someone we trust. Third, we need that person to do a complete check of the system. The voting, the email, the…I don't know. That's part of the problem. Neither of us understands our own system. Benjamin has been here since day one. If he's feeding Peter information, he could be…"

  I can't even finish the thought. Staring at my glass of sauvignon blanc, my eyes go soft. My vision blurs into a wavy, green-gold haze. From the beginning, we trusted Benjamin to create our app, install protections against hacking, and set up the physical infrastructure of our site. He beat back 4Chan losers and Ukrainian hackers. He worked his butt off to expand our platform to support traffic from millions of unique users. Thoughts of a compromised voting system race through my mind, but I ball them up and stuff them away for later.

  Our food arrives—Cobb Salad for me, a fish sandwich for Steph. We eat in silence until our plates are half empty. Both of us have gotten into the bad habit of skipping breakfast because as soon as we wake up we're hit with a hundred urgent messages. The food makes me feel better, and it seems to calm Steph as well. I stab at a slice of avocado and pop it in my mouth, hoping Steph will come up with an idea.

  Steph grabs a cherry tomato off my plate. "What are we gonna do?"

  "I'm going to call Alex and try to get us a new tech person. Then we're gonna walk upstairs and fire Benjamin."

  On the sidewalk in front of Baker's Dozen, I call Alex, stepping under the awning of a cellphone store to get out of the midday sun.

  "I haven't found out about that thing you sent," Alex says as soon as he answers, "but my guess is you're right. Likely a catch and kill. Colton has done stuff like that before."

  "Thanks, but that's not what I called about."

  "Everything alright? You sound...I don't know."

  "I need a new tech person. Someone good. Someone who can understand the Ameritocracy system, the app, hire engineers. I don't know everything they'll have to do, but it'll be a lot. I don't want to say too much about why. It needs to be someone good, someone you trust, someone who definitely doesn't know Peter Colton or secretly work for him. Someone not from Silicon Valley."

  Alex is quiet for a long time, a rarity for him. He likes to hear himself talk, and he's usually eager to help.

  "Alex, you still there?"

  "I am," he says slowly. It occurs to me that he's one of our biggest donors and can probably tell how freaked out I am. "You said a lot. I'm thinking through the ramifications. If you're getting rid of Benjamin less than two months before the final vote, something serious happened. If you don't want to say
what it is, I respect that. If you need someone who 'doesn't know Peter Colton or secretly work for him,' that means…well, that means something very serious happened?"

  "Alex, can you help me? What about Stephen?"

  "He left The Barker three months ago. Works seventy-hour weeks for Amazon."

  "Moira?"

  "She took over for Stephen. Works seventy hours a week for us. You know I want to help, but we can't afford to lose her. Plus, she's four months pregnant and I doubt she'd move to California."

  I step out from under the awning and tilt my head back, allowing the sun to hit my face directly. As a somewhat pale redhead with freckles, I can't take too much direct sunlight without burning, but it feels good. "You know anyone down here?"

  "No. I mean, maybe a couple people, but I don't know them well enough to recommend them. I don't know if they've worked with Peter, or know him. You need someone you can trust completely, right?"

  "Of course."

  "How important is it to you that the person be, well, sane?"

  I pause and consider his question. "Um, pretty important. What do you mean?"

  "I have someone in mind. She's…unique."

  I scan through every tech person we had during my tenure at The Barker, wondering whether he might be talking about someone I know. "It's not that lady Senji, or Seji, what was it?"

  "It was Saw-ji, and no. Not her. She overdosed on energy drinks. Last I heard she was in some kind of caffeine detox. It's not anyone from The Barker."

  "What's her name?"

  "I…do not actually have that information."

  I wait for him to explain, but he doesn't. "Uhh, Alex?"

  "You want me to try to reach her?"

  "You don't know her name?"

  "Not anymore," he says.

  "But you trust her?"

  "I trust her integrity and her skills. I know for a fact she's damn smart and doesn't fall apart when things get weird. I just can't promise she's what you'd call, y'know, sane."

  "Call her. And if she's interested, tell her to get down here as soon as possible."