CHAPTER 19

Melody in the past had never watched the news, because it was all either terrible or vapid, or terribly vapid. Now, she watched the news, and it was even worse. Countries around the world were going to war. Aggressive dictatorships were invading their smaller neighbors—annexing, the media and analysts called it. This country annexed this territory. That country annexed that territory. Did they call it that, she wondered, because if they called it what it was, military invasion, they might be obliged to take action against it? That seemed like the sort of game politicians might play, but it struck her as unexpected that the news media would play along. Were they, too, afraid of facing reality?

It was becoming difficult to ignore, though. Too many aggressive moves in too short a time, by too many hostile foreign powers. Her own country and its allies now had troops building up in, what? Four or five hotspots around the world? Plus several more contested seas and straits? The headline on every news feed described tensions as high as they had ever been, and every article asked the same question: “Are we on the brink of a World War?”

Commentators spent hours each day discussing the possibilities, describing the worst-case scenarios, and hopefully cautioning one another that no one truly wanted to go to war and in all likelihood diplomacy would win out any day now. Some crowed of the end times, while others bent over backward to explain how none of it was as bad as it seemed and that the greatest threat to world peace was excessively apocalyptic rhetoric.

In any case, these events gave every media outlet a good excuse to continue ignoring the lead Melody had been serving up to them over the past few weeks. Not that they needed an excuse. Even when the body-cam footage of the entity had been all the front-page rage, not a single domestic publisher had volunteered to investigate the notion that something similar had been involved in a shooting on home soil. Melody had received one email reply asking for more information. She had written back with some elaboration—more than she had intended to offer, as she had envisioned providing them the lead and letting them dig up the rest—but to her knowledge no further investigation had ever occurred, and her follow-on messages to the reporter had gone unanswered.

How? she wondered. How could this not be news?

The only explanation she could devise was that the government had buried it, that all of the police reports and initial local news reports from the shooting had somehow been sanitized, leaving Melody a lone voice, unsubstantiated, crying for attention.

If that was true, though, it still required a complicit, uncurious journalist corps, and if it had been so buried, that would be easy enough to verify. Melody closed the news feed in her browser and picked up her phone. She began making calls.

An hour later, she was sure it was true. The police department was unable to provide her with material relating to her case, including her own statements. It took her some time, sorting through ancient text messages, to track down the phone number of the officer who had taken that first statement from her in the hospital, but when she called him, he informed her that he was not permitted to speak on the matter. She searched the website archives of local news organizations but could find nothing referring to her experience. Melody called their offices, but the people to whom she spoke were unable to find anything on the subject.

Round and round she turned in her swiveling chair, hugging her knees and thinking. Was this a government cover-up? Was this what a cover-up looked like? Had they all, including the reporters, signed NDAs as willingly as she?

Was it okay? That was the question no one ever asked. In stories—in movies and shows—there was always the intrepid reporter trying to expose everything, and the government cronies trying to cover up everything, and these two sides fought it out, but no one ever thought about which secrets were appropriate to keep and which were not, much less how to make that determination. If the writers did address the question, it would be to the extent that at some point a character would admit the question was “hard,” and that would be that. They would then continue their fight to the movie’s climax, and “the truth would come out” if the good guys won, or it would be buried if the bad guys won. Where was the balance, though? Would it do harm for people to know the truth about what she had seen, or about the AI operating quietly across the whole of the Internet?

Would it do good? Was there a purpose to be served by informing the public of what she knew, or the doubts she held about the popular narrative regarding the demon-like apparition which had made appearances around the world? If the appropriate people, the people in power, were aware of the clandestine forces which seemed to be manipulating the world situation, was that not sufficient? Was it not the purpose of informing the public that the message would eventually reach the people in a position to do something about it? Given what Melody had seen of Mr. Sing’s conference, it seemed to her that the people who really needed to know that something was going on already knew, and they were working to counter it.

“How successfully?” was another question Melody acknowledged as she thought about the headlines she had closed and now refused to reopen. The world seemed to be tumbling toward global war, or at least the next worst thing to it. Was that because, even though people in power were doing their best, the forces arrayed against them were insurmountable? Or was it because the people in positions of power were acting incompetently, or with insufficient vigor, or—the possibility had to be acknowledged at least—in collusion?

If there was a reason to push for public exposure of an issue, that was it: to subject the actions of those in charge to public scrutiny. To Melody’s mind, though, there was another dimension to it: In TV shows and movies, the government concealed impending disasters—even the inevitable ones—because “there would be mass panic,” and they concealed world-shaking discoveries (usually aliens) because “people aren’t ready for” or “people wouldn’t be able to handle” the truth. Was that true, really? What actually would happen if people discovered that aliens existed? Melody knew what she would do: she would be very interested, but she would still have to buy groceries and finish her homework the next day. She did not have time to run through the streets carrying signs or shouting at the sky. If she were to learn that the world was going to end tomorrow, she would go home to her parents, perhaps after surprising Doran in a couple of ways. She certainly wouldn’t riot; who would? Who, really, would riot, except people who already rioted at the drop of a hat? Meanwhile, if the government kept the secret from her— if people in power took it upon themselves to decide that she was not prepared to face a great revelation and choose her own reaction to it—that would be… wrong. Why? She knew in her heart it would be wrong, but why did she feel so strongly that it was important for people to be able to react to things about which they had no control?

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Except it wasn’t about control of the event. It was about control of oneself, about how one lived one’s own life. If the world were to end, or aliens landed, these revelations would dramatically change what people knew about their world and their lives. It would change how they addressed fundamental questions of morality. To deny them the knowledge of impending extinction might deny a few of them a chance to riot—maybe, but probably not so much—but it would deny far more of humanity a chance to speak with their loved ones, to make amends to those with whom they were in conflict, or to do the good things they had been putting off because they thought they had more time. To deny them knowledge of extraterrestrial contact would deny them the chance to reconsider their place in the universe and how they related to their fellow man. It was… In a way, it was about information as in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Any learning system could not learn or grow without exposure to information. To deny people knowledge was to deny them the most fundamental access to self-determination and growth. It was like building a machine-learning program and then never letting it learn—or at least, never letting it learn the truth, never exposing it to data reflecting the universe in which it would be required to operate.

What was the point?

And if this was true of such shattering hypotheticals as alien contact or proximate doom, then was it not true of lesser but still consequential knowledge such as she possessed? If someone was manipulating the entire world’s information infrastructure, that was important to know for people who used it—which was, basically, everyone. If there was something… something moving in the world that defied explanation, something that seemed by all rights supernatural, and it was involved with this conspiracy to co-opt the Internet, was that not even more dramatic? Melody could not say what it meant, how that knowledge alone would affect the choices of a random individual far away, but at the very least it implied more. If these facts were true, then what else remained unlearned? What more was there to the conspiracy, and how quickly could the implications rise to a world-shaking level, if the facts had not done so already? What if it was a conspiracy to start a global war? Was a global war not essentially The End Of The World?

Melody understood the case for national security. If she had uncovered some sort of espionage activity taking place on the Internet, revealing knowledge of it could put people in jeopardy—had done, said the scar on her chest—and moreover could reveal or jeopardize her own government’s efforts to thwart it. The ability of the government to do its job had to be protected.

Suddenly, Melody realized that the question, the real question, was not quite as she had first imagined it. It was not so much a question of balance between the job of the government and the need of the people for truth, but rather a question of just what was the job of the government. The government preserved its secrets in order to preserve its mission, and its mission was, supposedly, to preserve the safety of the people. But what was the point of protecting people if to do it one had to shield them from the very information that gave meaning to their lives? What was the point of protecting people by forcing them to live a lie?

Happiness? That only lasted until the apocalypse finally arrived, or the aliens finally attacked, and then a world full of happy people would suddenly realize that they had been happily blind, denied a chance to do the bad things and good things that made them human.

So the question was one of a shallow happiness versus… She struggled for a name, and once again she back to “learning.” The chance to evolve in response to new information. The chance to make choices and, indeed, to make oneself. If the government’s role was to protect the people, then what did it mean to protect the people? What really was to be protected? Many would say happiness, but Melody found herself disagreeing. To her mind, it was the chance to learn. Learning was more important than being happy moment to moment, because happiness could be meaningless without learning, but learning was always meaningful.

That still left some secrets which needed keeping, though, to protect the government’s ability to protect the people, so that the people could live long enough to learn, and so they could live in a world where learning was possible. Melody crouched down and pulled her file box from under her desk. In this world of all-consuming digital information systems, it amazed her how much paperwork one still accumulated, but among her collected junk documents were those she had been given by Mr. Sing. The NDA itself had been—presumably still was—just as classified as the information it covered, so they had not given her a copy of it. She had, however, signed and received copies of many ancillary forms, permitting them to conduct a background check on her, giving them the information they needed for her visitor’s pass, and ultimately employing her as a contractor for the brief time during which she helped them rebuild her Consciousness Layer. Through these she now rifled, skimming them and tossing them aside, until at last she found the phone number for which she was searching. She dialed it and then sat back against the wall, listening to the ring at the other end.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Is this Mr. Sing?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“This is Melody Ritter.”

“Miss Ritter! Uh… W-what can I do for you?”

“Uhm, well, I was just…” Melody took a deep breath. What did she want? And how could she ask for it? “Mr. Sing, I want to help, if I can. With everything going on, I was just—I just want to contribute. I want to know that… that everything that can be done is being done, you know?”

He did not reply immediately. She waited. She knew it was a tall order, that she was likely asking for the impossible, but that was only a part of her intent.

“Miss Ritter,” he said at last, “I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing I can really do for you. You’ve already done everything you can do, everything we can ask of you. You should… you should really leave this alone.”

His answer did not surprise her. “Yes, sir, but it’s getting hard to leave it alone. You see what’s happening, right? The news?”

“I’m aware.”

“And the video? From Avos?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that, too. Miss Ritter, you know I can’t discuss this with you.”

“Can you just tell me that it’s being taken care of? That your team has it under control?”

“It’s being taken care of,” he answered, but he gave this answer after a moment of hesitation that was just long enough to sap away all of Melody’s confidence in it.

She pursed her lips. What was going on? What had happened? Why did he sound evasive, and like he did not believe his own reassurances? “Mr. Sing,” she said, “what’s going on? I know that Agent Raines was killed. Has anyone else been hurt? Are you aware that someone tried to contact me— someone I think is associated with—”

“Miss Ritter—” He cut her off sharply. “—you need to let this go. I’m telling you this for your own safety. I can’t protect you. Drop it.”

It was like ice and fire in her chest at the same time, fear and anger settling in and fighting one another. Something had happened; something bad.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll trust you, Mr. Sing. Please be careful.”

“I will. You too, Miss Ritter. Be careful. Don’t talk about this to anyone.”

She took the phone away from her face and moved to touch the end-call button, but he hung up before she could. Call ended, her phone said, and then it shifted back to the keypad.

Melody selected Doran’s contact from her favorites and dialed it.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

“Can we talk? Tonight?”

“Yeah, babe. Your place?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask what about?”

“Current events,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

“Okay. Love you—” Melody hung up, and then sat there on the floor, her arms across her knees, tapping the back of her phone with her fingers as she considered her options.