Spam, ham, sausage, and spam.
The white-noise roar of the cabin air-conditioning is augmented by a new noise, the wind rush from around the open nose-wheel door as the landing gear drops.
Most of the public don’t notice it, but the war on spam goes ever on, and it’s a war on two fronts. One front, your own, is fought by battalions of law-enforcement officers and prosecutors. The most egregious junk sells hard goods—stuff with a physical shipping address—to the vulnerable; fake pharmaceuticals to die by, trashy Tanzanian machine-tool parts, unlicensed herbal supplements from Nigeria, counterfeit designer clothes and handbags and heart valves made of shoe-leather. They show up, you order the goods, backtrace through courier and logistics to the mother-lode, obtain a warrant, pop goes the weasel, round and round the merry-go-round.
Spam, eggs, spam, spam, ham, and spam.
The brigades of system administrators and programmers on the other front tackle the problem from the opposite end, with ever-more-elaborate AI filters that scan message traffic and tell ham from spam. Ninety-five per cent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties. There are dumb filters and smart filters. Dumb filters look for naughty words. Smart filters look for patterns of diction that are characteristic of automatically assembled text—for much spam is generated by drivel-speaking AI, designed purely to fool the smart filters by convincing them that it’s the effusion of a real human being and of interest to the recipients. Slowly but surely the Turing Test war proceeds, as the spammers are forced to invest in ever-more-elaborate AI engines to generate conversations that can temporarily convince the spamcops’ AI engines that they are in fact human beings.
Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, ham, spam, potato, and spam.
And still you’re losing.
There’s a bump and rumble, and you’re shoved forward against your lap-belt as the regional jet’s thrust reversers cut in. Welcome to the Republic of Scotland, semi-privatized satrapy of the former United Kingdom and sock-puppet independent vote on the Council of Ministers—soon to acquire the extra clout of a pair of senators, once the tedious ratification treaty completes and the European Parliament upgrades to a fully bicameral legislature. You’re back, and this time you don’t have a posse of high-powered forensic analysts behind you, or diplomatic letters of marque and reprise, or much of anything in fact: just a dossier, a disturbing-to-terrifying trend analysis from a research team in the Sorbonne, and a suggestive pattern of murders smeared bloody-handed across the width and depth of the EU.
Spam, spam, spam, murder, and spam.
Seventy years of research and development into artificial intelligence failed to deliver HAL 9000, but they did provide a huge array of toolkits for tackling complex problems. Today, in the wake of the bursting of the worldwide higher-education bubble, the big funding sources in computational artificial-intelligence research are computer games and cognitive marketing services, from personalized message generation to automated spear phishing. Some say the spammers are pouring more money into Minsky’s inheritors than the US Department of Defense ever imagined. The spamcops retaliate. There’s an arms race in progress, and some experts mutter dark warnings of the Spamularity: the global chaos that will ensue once the first distributed spamming engine achieves human-equivalent sentience. Possibly the only thing holding it back is the multi-tiered nature of the darknet economy: Malware that supports spamware frequently carries virus-scanning payloads that immunize host computers and phones against rival strains of infection. After all, it’s a free-market economy, red in tooth and claw: And if you can’t count on a state to keep the opposition in check, you’ve got to see to your security yourself.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked memes, spam, spam, spam, and spam.
This week, for the first time in a couple of years, the machine-generated spew has faltered significantly. Most of the usual darknets are still vomiting forth the gibber fantastic, but their core semantic networks aren’t updating: It’s the same flavour of froth as last week’s, and thereby easier to filter out. No new botnets have surfaced, switching from build-out to broadcast mode: There has been a curious absence of new malware strains. Spam has actually fallen. It would be glad tidings, indeed, if not for the puzzling question of why. And those unsolved killings. Which is what your superiors have sent you to look into in Edinburgh: They skimmed the bullet point in your résumé and mistakenly assumed you’d be at home here, able to work hand in glove with the locals. Truly the jaws of irony are agape!
The battle against spam had grown into a bitter trench war fought on two fronts—and now a new front has been opened. Someone—or more worryingly, some thing—seems to have adopted a draconian approach to the problem you and yours have failed to solve in nearly four decades. And the question that everyone is worrying about is: Whatever next?
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Nothing but spam!
FELIX: First Citizen
When the First Citizen has a bad night’s sleep, he likes to share.
You have been recalled to the capital on urgent business—certain currency-triangulation transactions require your personal biometric signature, as one of the trustees of the national bank—and so it is no major surprise when your morning starts with the plaintive tweedle of the satphone. It sits on one of the fake Louis Quatorze bedside tables in your hotel suite. You roll over, dislodging the blonde Ukrainian girl from her death grip on the bolster (Why is she still here? Doesn’t she have a bed of her own to go to?), and pick up the handset.
“Colonel Datka, sir? This is Eagle’s Nest.”
“Yes, yes,” you say irritably, trying to focus on the illuminated dial of the alarm clock. It’s four thirty, but when the Eagle’s Nest calls, it is rash to hang up. “What is it?”
“His Excellency is asking for you. Are you presentable? We have a car en route.”
Shit, you think. Is Bhaskar all right? You recognize the voice at the other end of the line: It’s one of the First Citizen’s regular bodyguards, Dmitry something, an ethnic Russian. (Minor reassurance: A stranger’s voice would be worrying.) “I will be ready in five minutes,” you say, and stifle a fear-threaded yawn. “Is there anything I should be prepared for?”
“I don’t think so.” Dmitry sounds uncertain. “He had a very disturbed night. The usual, is all.”