A few quick breaths of the outside air — he could taste the metallic tang of pollution in it — and he went back to work. On his sleek bamboo desk sat the current quarterly report for his company, Wright, which played at the boundaries of ecology and commerce — snapping up money right and left by making a cleaner world profitable. On top of the report rested a Forbes article that described Alan Wright as “the man who has singlehandedly done more for the planet than anyone before him.”
Most men would have been content with that, but not Ash. Repairing the planet one tiny piece at a time was pitiful. People had to learn to consume less and reproduce less, and it drove him crazy to see how sleepy and stupid they were, even when their self-interest was concerned. It didn’t matter how often or how clearly the message went out — most people weren’t listening.
So he had created the hacktivist network Spooky. Spooky’s name came from Einstein’s quote about quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” The world was entangled whether policymakers recognized it or not, and each tiny human was a force with a spooky amount of power that could stretch around the world.
In the beginning, he had secretly played all the parts — creating bots and identities that interacted with each other and pulled off brilliant hacks. Once, Spooky sent pictures of oil-soaked pelicans, open-mouthed dead fish, and fires burning on the surface of the ocean to every employee of the oil company responsible for a giant spill. A few examined their consciences and talked to the media.
Then, he hacked the senior executives’ emails and posted their ass-covering, contemptuous correspondence about the spill on the Internet. In the media firestorm that followed, he’d lunched with some of those very same executives as a peer, commiserating over the violations to their privacy, as if their privacy were more sacred than the ecosystems they destroyed for profit.
That action launched Spooky. He’d built it, and they finally came — young, eager hackers willing to risk everything to change the world. Powerless kids who suddenly felt as if they might have a chance to expose the powerful, to use their brains to even the odds of survival for the planet had poured into Spooky’s secret chat rooms to plan and execute their own actions.
He’d intended to turn over control of Spooky and let the young ones bear it forward. But he loved the freedom his online anonymity gave him and, in the end, he couldn’t give it up. In real life, Alan Wright was always deferred to for his billions, his brilliance, and his meteoric success.
In Spooky’s world, he was merely Ash — either the wood used to stake a vampire or what remained after a fire. Both meanings were about transformation.
Ash tapped a button to open a secure window on his monitor. He’d finally hacked one of his favorite hacktivists — Geezer. Geezer was the oldest of the fluid consortium of troublemakers that swirled around Spooky. Geezer had helped build the Internet infrastructure they hacked, and he knew secrets that went deeper than the youngsters, but he sometimes missed obvious intrusions into his own space. Ash had finally nailed down his real IP address and accessed Geezer’s camera. He liked to put a face to the name.
A man in front of a computer in an untidy room showed on Ash’s screen. He hadn’t expected Geezer to be bald as an egg. He had expected the long, unkempt beard and the tie-dyed shirt. The man’s bloodshot eyes bulged, like Marty Feldman’s, and he looked too thin to be healthy.
Geezer’s long fingers were typing away, logging into a dark chat room often frequented by members of Spooky. Ash took a long sip of coffee and eavesdropped. This was better than television.
quantum: u don’t have the courage of ur convictions, old man. spooky would be better off without u
geezer: I don’t answer to you
quantum: i don’t ask u questions, because u don’t know anything. maybe u used to, before ur Alzheimer days
geezer: Wisdom is earned
quantum: courage is born, and u didn’t get any. u’ll never do anything great, old man.
Quantum could be cruel, but his tactics ensured that only the strongest and most committed members stayed with Spooky.
geezer: I have access to something great
quantum: viagra? old news, old dude
Quantum was trouble. Ash had researched him when his importance within Spooky grew. He knew his real name, Michael Pham; his current location, also New York City; and that Quantum had been in and out of prison for hacking, stalking, and assault. He was brilliant, but unpredictable, violent, and more radical than the others. At some point, Spooky might have to cut ties with him and disavow that he had ever been part of their group. But not yet. He might still be useful.
So far as Ash could tell, Quantum and Geezer didn’t know each other off-line, or even know they both lived in New York. Good. Ash liked having an overview that others didn’t. Information was power.
geezer: Any Nikola Tesla fans out there?
quantum: who isn’t?
Ash sat up straighter. He had been obsessed with Nikola Tesla since he was a boy.
geezer: I know a guy with a box of Tesla’s original designs.
quantum: sure u do
geezer: Including the Oscillator.
Ash leaned forward. Plans for the fabled Earthquake Machine? Nikola Tesla had said he had once used the Oscillator to create an earthquake in Manhattan, frightening local police. But those words came from an elderly Tesla, one whose lucidity was often disputed. Tesla had said a lot of kooky things, but he’d also said enough brilliant ones that you never knew what to take seriously. The Oscillator was one of his more intriguing claims.
quantum: the one he said could ‘knock down the empire state building with 5 lbs of pressure?’
geezer: That one.
Ash looked around at the steel and glass that encased him. He’d headquartered his company here because of everything the building represented, including reaching for the sky using green technology.
He certainly hadn’t come here for the neighborhood. He shared a floor with the third-largest privately owned corporation in the United States. The Bakers, although he called them the Breakers because all they did was break things, were a brother-and-sister team. Their oil-drilling empire perpetuated legendary environmental destruction, and they were well-known for spending huge sums to finance the right-wing agenda. They were destroying the world faster than Ash could save it, and he had to be reminded of them every time he got out of the elevator.
They had moved into fracking, and were drilling deeper than had ever been possible. Their actions were causing earthquakes and widespread water contamination. They were set to expand their fracking activities into national parks in six months. No place on Earth would be safe from their depredations. Ash had his lobbyists working against theirs, of course, but he’d run out of time.
In weak moments, he thought of moving to another floor entirely, but he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. He’d tried to buy up the floor, but the Bakers had deeper pockets, and a deeper attachment to their office space because they had spent so much to set it up. They lived in paranoid fear of being hacked, so they had spent a fortune to install a top-notch security system. Their walls were shielded against electromagnetic emanations to keep out any kind of detection, including devices designed to recognize and reconstruct keystrokes. They didn’t even send their data to be backed up off-site. Every single bit of intelligence about their company was in this building.
Could this building be brought low by a device so small it would fit in a pocket? It was a ludicrous thought, but Nikola Tesla had claimed that it could. He’d said more incredible things in his time — and gone on to prove that they were true.