“Tell me you’re not that naive,” Milo said.
“I feel I am an optimal level of naive,” George countered. “I know people are greed personified and self-interest on two legs, but I have not succumbed to utter despair.”
Milo snorted. “Good luck with that,” he advised.
“Okay.” George stepped it up. “I’ll also spot you money being the source of all evil. Happy?”
But Milo just shook his head, his back to George as he admired the newbie’s view. “Money is so last century,” he said. “To do real evil nowadays, there’s just one word.”
“And that is?”
“Data,” Milo said. “You know, like ‘plastics’ from The Graduate? But this is actually a different movie, grasshopper. It’s All the President’s Men and Deep Throat and ‘follow the money.’ Except it’s data—grade A, primo, human behavioral data—that’s AI juice. It’s what keeps the chatbots chatting and the Terminator terminating and . . .”
“Allude much, Milo?” George asked.
“Hey, man,” Milo said, not missing a beat. “The wheel’s been invented and all the good stories written. Why waste time trying to be original? It’s all mash-ups and sampling, baby. And thus, I allude.” Pause. “But back to that AI juice. Quire is a ‘data acquisition and packaging company’—that shit’s in the corporate papers—and that ‘packaging’ euphie is where it’s all at, the real work behind the wizard’s curtain. All that stuff you saw on the tour, the AI and fMRI stuff. They’re trying to read, record, and play back people’s actual thoughts, claiming it’s the next step beyond voice for input capture, but once you start reading minds, how far away is it from controlling them?”
George sat in his desk chair, practicing paper-clip origami as he studied his Virgil’s back. If Milo was an intellectual hooker—which in many ways he seemed to be—his specialty would be blowing minds. Or trying to. George’s brain stem was barely stiff. After all, if all these secret projects were so secret, how come a human sieve like Milo was in the loop? Next thing he knew, the guy would be looking both ways as he slid the plans for Tesla’s death ray out of his pocket.
“You know about Stuxnet, right, the atomic bomb of cyber warfare?” Milo continued, turning around to face his audience of one. “That shit did actual damage in the real world by making Iraq’s uranium enrichment system spin so fast it tore itself apart.”
George nodded. He had the source code and had used chunks of it in his own exploits, back before he exchanged his black hat for this white hat gig. But what did Stuxnet have to do with a social-media company?
“They say it was a joint venture between the Israelis and the Americans, right? Well, that whole thing was started under W, and ‘the Americans’ meant contractors. Contractors like . . .”
George shaped the word Quire silently with his lips, while pointing down generically, a gesture intended to mean: “Here?”
Milo nodded.
“Bullshit,” George said, swiveling around so he could check his computer for email about what he was supposed to be doing instead of sitting here listening to Milo’s war stories.
Nada. Again. Still . . .
“God’s truth,” Milo said, resting his butt on the windowsill, his arms folded across his chest.
“Wait a second,” George said, swiveling back around. “You’re saying Quire has contracts with, what, DOD?”
“And NSA, FBI, DHS,” Milo said. “Which shouldn’t be a surprise. They do PSAs about it. ‘Wounded warriors walk again.’ It was on the tour.”
“But that’s all DARPA stuff,” George insisted, “like how they funded the internet. It’s the good military contracts.”
“Ah, the internet,” Milo said. “Cyber utopia. Security an afterthought.” Pause. “But you know that already, don’t you?”
Guilty, George thought. As was every other hacker he ever met online. The net’s security holes were what they lived for—that, and bloated code full of bugs, waiting to be exploited. “Well, somebody’s got to keep the serfs at Symantec busy.”
“And busy they are,” Milo agreed. “That’s because the government loves security holes, even more than hackers, especially if it finds them first.” Pause. “How many zero-day vulnerabilities did Stuxnet exploit?”
“Four, but . . .”
“And nobody would ever purposefully create a back door because the government was paying them for something else . . .”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying ignorance is bliss. And you can believe what you want to believe,” Milo said. “All I know is what I’ve heard. And I heard that V.T. once said that if people were going to die anyway, he’d prefer they do it in a manner for which he held the patent.”
George had heard the quote too. “But Snopes says he never said it,” he pointed out.
“You have to admit, it does have a nice Dr. Evil vibe to it, though.”
George knew what he was doing wrong with these visits from his self-appointed Virgil; he let Milo speak first. He’d leave his door open because he wasn’t busy—still hadn’t gotten anything to be busy with—and Milo would happen by, knock on the door frame, say, “Hey, you busy?” And before George could say anything, he’d let himself in, close the door, and start rubbing his hands over the juiciness of his upcoming disclosure. And so George positioned himself facing the open door and, before his informant’s knuckles met wood, said, “Hey, Milo, got a sec?”
“Sure.”
He waved his Virgil in, mimed closing the door, which Milo did.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” George said. “How long have you been working here?”
“Forever,” Milo said. “Five years.”
“That doesn’t seem . . . ,” George began.
“Five Silicon Valley years,” Milo clarified. “Factor in Moore’s law and that’s Methuselah old.”
“Meth—?”
“Old Bible guy,” Milo explained. “Nine hundred years old, back when being old was equated with being wise, as opposed to way past your expiration date.”
“So what do you—?”
“Content monitoring,” Milo said, not letting George finish his question.
“For five years?” George asked. He’d only been with Quire for a few days, and he already knew this about content monitoring: the burnout rate was crazy, as in a lot of CMs either burned out or went crazy.
“Yeah, I know,” Milo said, “lucky me.” He paused, shifted gears. “I’m not exactly . . .” Another pause. “My position . . . The thing is, I had an oopsie.”
“Oopsie?”
“The celeb brat splattercast?” Milo said. “Rupert Gunn Jr.?”
George nodded.
“I missed it,” Milo said. “I should have blocked it but must have been rubbing my eyes, trying to scour out some other atrocity our species came up with, and I missed it. By the time I yanked the vid, it was already going viral, leaping from platform to platform. The sick-puppy brigade kept reposting it faster than any CM could react.”