? ? ?
When the strange men had appeared in his apartment, Sai had imagined torture chambers, mental hospitals, faceless guards parading outside of dark cells. He had not imagined that he would be sitting across the table from Christian Rinn, Founder and Executive Chairman of Centillion, having white tea.
“You got pretty close,” Rinn said. The man was barely in his forties and looked fit and efficient—kind of like how I picture a male version of ??Tilly, Sai thought. He smiled. “Closer than almost anyone.”
“What was the mistake that gave us away?” Jenny asked.
She was sitting to Sai’s left, and Sai reached out for her hand. They intertwined their fingers, giving each other strength.
“It was his phone, on that first night he visited you.”
“Impossible. I shielded it. It couldn’t have recorded anything.”
“But you left it on your desk, where it could still make use of its accelerometer. It detected and recorded the vibrations from your typing. There’s a very distinctive way we strike the keys on a keyboard, and it’s possible to reconstruct what someone was typing based on the vibration patterns alone. It’s an old technology we developed for catching terrorists and drug dealers.”
Jenny cursed under her breath, and Sai realized that until that moment, on some level he still hadn’t quite believed Jenny’s paranoia.
“But I didn’t bring my phone after that first day.”
“True, but we didn’t need it. After Tilly picked up what Jenny was typing, the right alert algorithms were triggered and we focused surveillance on you. We parked a traffic observation vehicle a block away and trained a little laser on Jenny’s window. It was enough to record your conversations through the vibrations in the glass.”
“You’re a very creepy man, Mr. Rinn,” Sai said. “And despicable too.”
Rinn didn’t seem bothered by this. “I think you might feel differently by the end of our conversation. Centillion was not the first company to stalk you.”
Jenny’s fingers tightened around Sai’s. “Let him go. I’m the one you really want. He doesn’t know anything.”
Rinn shook his head and smiled apologetically. “Sai, did you realize that Jenny moved into the apartment next to yours a week after we retained Chapman Singh to represent us in the suit against ShareAll?”
Sai didn’t understand what Rinn was getting at, but he sensed that he would not like what he was about to find out. He wanted to tell Rinn to shut up, but he held his tongue.
“Curious, aren’t you? You can’t resist the pull of information. If it’s possible, you always want to learn something new; we’re hardwired that way. That’s the drive behind Centillion, too.”
“Don’t believe anything he says,” Jenny said.
“Would it surprise you to find out that the five other paralegals in your firm also had new neighbors move in during that same week? Would it also surprise you to learn that the new neighbors have all sworn to destroy Centillion, just like Jenny here? Tilly is very good at detecting patterns.”
Sai’s heart beat faster. He turned to Jenny. “Is this true? You planned from the start to use me? You got to know me just so you’d have a chance to deliver a virus?”
Jenny turned her face away.
“They know that there’s no way to hack into our systems from the outside, so they had to sneak a trojan in. You were used, Sai. She and her friends guided you, led you by the nose, made you do things—just like they accuse us of doing.”
“It’s not like that,” Jenny said. “Listen, Sai, maybe that was how it started. But life’s full of surprises. I was surprised by you, and that’s a good thing.”
Sai let go of Jenny’s hand and turned back to Rinn. “Maybe they did use me. But they’re right. You’ve turned the world into a panopticon and all the people in it into obedient puppets that you nudge this way and that just so you’d make more money.”
“You yourself pointed out that we were fulfilling desires, lubricating the engine of commerce in an essential way.”
“But you also fulfill dark desires.” He remembered again the abandoned houses by the side of the road, the pockmarked pavement.
“We unveil only the darkness that was already inside people,” Rinn said. “And Jenny didn’t tell you about how many child pornographers we’ve caught, how many planned murders we’ve stopped, or how many drug cartels and terrorists we’ve exposed. And all the dictators and strongmen we’ve toppled by filtering out their propaganda and magnifying the voices of those who oppose them.”
“Don’t make yourself sound so noble,” Jenny said. “After you topple governments, you and the other Western companies get to move in and profit. You’re just propagandists of a different ilk—for making the world flat, turning everywhere into copies of suburban America studded with malls.”
“It’s easy to be cynical like that,” Rinn said. “But I’m proud of what we’ve done. If cultural imperialism is what it takes to make the world a better place, then we’ll happily arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race.”
“Why can’t you just be in the business of neutrally offering up information? Why not go back to being a simple search engine? Why all the surveillance and filtering? Why all the manipulation?” Sai asked.
“There’s no such thing as neutrally offering up information. If someone asks Tilly about the name of a candidate, should ?Tilly bring them to his official site or a site that criticizes him? If someone asks Tilly about ‘Tiananmen,’ should ?Tilly tell them about the hundreds of years of history behind the place or just tell them about June 4, 1989? The ‘I Trust You’ button is a heavy responsibility that we take very seriously.
“Centillion is in the business of organizing information, and that requires choices, direction, inherent subjectivity. What is important to you—what is true to you—is not as important or as true to others. It depends on judgment and ranking. To search for what matters to you, we must know all about you. And that, in turn, is indistinguishable from filtering, from manipulation.”
“You make it sound so inevitable.”
“It is inevitable. You think destroying Centillion will free you, whatever ‘free’ means. But let me ask you, can you tell me the requirements for starting a new business in the State of New York?”
Sai opened his mouth and realized that his instinct was to ask Tilly. He closed his mouth again.
“What’s your mother’s phone number?”
Sai resisted the urge to reach for his phone.
“How about you tell me what happened in the world yesterday? What book did you buy and enjoy three years ago? When did you start dating your last girlfriend?”
Sai said nothing.
“You see? Without Tilly, you can’t do your job, you can’t remember your life, you can’t even call your mother. We are now a race of cyborgs. We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains. The electronic copies of yourselves that you wanted to destroy are, in a literal sense, actually you.
“Since it’s impossible to live without these electronic extensions of ourselves, if you destroy Centillion, a replacement will just rise to take its place. It’s too late; the genie has long left the bottle. Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us. We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.”
“So what do you want with us?” Jenny asked. “We won’t stop fighting you.”
“I want you to come and work for Centillion.”
Sai and Jenny looked at each other. “What?”