“But why did they pick me? What do I have to do with the FRF? Why do they keep using my name?”
“The answer to all those questions,” Armando says, “is, Who knows? It’s all essentially random. It’s done by computer.”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“Computers don’t need explanations,” Armando says. “Computers just do what they do.”
“Should I send them some money? What should I do?”
Armando clutches his head. “What’s the matter with you, Caspar? Send them money! Don’t you have principles?”
“I’d send them some money if I knew where they were. The FRF. It sounds postcolonial.”
“Can’t you see?” says Armando. “This is what they want. This is what terrorists do. They get into your head. It’s not about what you do, Caspar. It’s about how you feel.” He points through the screen. “I’ll tell you what you need to do. You need to get off the grid. Before this spreads.”
“Spreads? Do you mean—?”
But I have to end the call. My supervisor, Sheila, is coming through the cubicles.
“Caspar,” Sheila says, “can I ask you something? Can I ask you why people are being butchered in your name?”
I see that she has a sheet of printout in her hand.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself,” I say.
Sheila looks at my desk, which currently displays a smoking pile of severed feet.
“I don’t want this to be awkward,” Sheila says. “But I just talked to Danny, out in the lobby. He says he heard screaming when you came in. He says it began the moment you entered. He says it was a pretty awful way to start the morning.”
The severed feet are gone. My desk now shows a picture of a sobbing baby sitting in a pile of bloody soda cans.
“You don’t need to tell me,” I say.
“The thing I want to say,” Sheila says, “is that we’re a very modern office. You know that. We’re more than just coworkers here. We’re cosharers. We’re like thirty people, all ordering and sharing one big pizza. And if one person orders anchovies…”
The desk shows a falling building. The concrete cracks and showers into a blossom of dust-colored cloud. I can’t stop looking at the printout in Sheila’s hand.
“I didn’t order anything,” I say. “The anchovies just found me.”
Sheila holds out the printout. I take it and read:
Caspar D. Luckinbill, do you know what you have done?
You have been complicit in the deaths of thousands.
Payments made in your name, Caspar D. Luckinbill, have contributed, directly or indirectly, to supporting the murderous HAP party of the FRF. With your direct or indirect financial assistance, thugs and warlords have hurled this once-peaceful region into anarchy.
Over two hundred thousand people, Caspar, have been tortured, killed, or imprisoned without trial.
One hundred new children a week are recruited into the sex trade, and twice that many are injured in unsafe and illegal working environments.
While you sit idly by, Caspar, a woman is attacked in the FRF every eighteen minutes. An acre of old-growth forest is destroyed every fifty-seven seconds, and every half second, sixty-eight liters of industrial runoff enter the regional watershed. Every sixteen days a new law targeting vulnerable groups is passed by dictatorial fiat, and for every seventeen dollars added annually to the PPP of a person in the upper quintile of your city, Caspar, an estimated eighty and a half times that person’s yearly spending power is subtracted monthly from the FRF’s GDP.
Caspar D. Luckinbill, YOU have enabled this. YOU have helped to bring about these atrocities.
YOU have heard the cries of women in agony.
YOU have learned the names of murdered men.
YOU have seen the faces of suffering children.
Caspar D. Luckinbill, what are you going to do?
“This was posted to the company news feed,” Sheila says. “It went to my account. It went to everybody’s account. It appeared on our public announcement board. There were pictures. Horrible pictures.”
“Aren’t there filters?” I say. “Aren’t there moderators?”
“It got through the filters,” Sheila says. “It got past the moderators.”
“Someone should do something about that.”
“Indeed,” Sheila says, and looks at me very frowningly.
“It’s not my problem,” I say. “It’s like spam. It’s a technical thing. It’s mediaterrorism.”
“I understand,” Sheila says. “I understand everything you’re saying. What I also understand is that we’re a very modern office, and we’re all in this together. And right now, some of us who are in this are being made to feel very unproductive.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, and turn back to my desk.
I spend the rest of the morning looking up the FRF. There are no sovereign nations by that name, none that I can find, not in the world at this time. There are several militias, two major urban areas, five disputed microstates, seven hundred and eighty-two minor political entities, ninety NGOs, most of them defunct, over a thousand corporate entities, over ten thousand documented fictional entities, and a few hundred thousand miscellaneous uses of the acronym.
I check news stories. An island off the coast of the former state of Greece once claimed independence under the name FRF, but it’s now known as the ADP and is considered part of the new Caliphate of Istanbul.
I spend my lunch break obsessing about a phrase. Payments made in my name. What payments in my name? I don’t make donations to murderous regimes. I give to charity. I eat foreign food. I buy clothes from China and rugs from Azerbaijan. Tin-pot dictators? Not my profile.
I call my bank. I call my credit card companies. Money circulates. Money gets around. The buck never stops, not really, not for long. Is it all a big bluff? What payments in my name?
No one can tell me.
I obsess about another phrase: directly or indirectly. It strikes me that the word indirect is itself, in this context, extremely indirect.
I spend the afternoon looking up mediaterrorism. Armando’s right. It’s a thing. It can come out of nowhere, strike at any time. Once you’ve been targeted, it’s hard to shake. It’s like identity theft, one article says—“except what they steal is your moral complacency.”
I call the company IT department. They say the problem is with my CloudSpace provider. I call my CloudSpace provider. They say the problem is with my UbiKey account. I call my UbiKey account. They say it sounds like a criminal issue. The woman on the line gets nervous. She isn’t allowed to talk about criminal issues. There are people listening. There are secret agreements. It’s all very murky. It’s a government thing.
I call the government. They thank me for my interest. I call the police. They just laugh.
While I make my calls, I see the mutilated bodies of eighteen torture victims, watch tearful interviews with five assault survivors, and peer into the charnel-laden depths of three mass graves.
Children’s faces stare from my screen. They are pixelated and human. Their eyes seem unnaturally wide.
At the end of the day, I call Armando. “I’m getting nowhere,” I say. “I’ve been researching all day.”
Armando looks confused.
“My problem,” I remind him. “My mediaterrorism.”
“Aha. Right. Well, at least you’re keeping busy.”
“I’m going in circles, buddy. I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” Armando says. “Go home. Watch TV. Break out the Maker’s Mark. Get in bed with your lovely wife. Put everything to do with the FRF out of your mind. Your mission now, Caspar, is to be a happy man. If you’re not happy, the bastards win.”
I’m almost home when I remember.
Lisa! The new TV!
I run the last two blocks, slapping the pavement with my toothy shoes, nearly crashing into the ad-drone that’s painting a half-naked woman on our building.