Much of this was just placing an official stamp on information that legitimate news organizations had been piecing together all day but been unable to articulate loudly enough to be heard over the din. It brought out a kind of bloodlust in the assembled White House press corps, which was gathered right there in the middle of Main Street. During the wait, they’d had plenty of time to sample Moab’s impressive range of locally produced microbrewery offerings. Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, they were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine; beer; and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand. After the third such question, the president was handed a note by his press secretary. He read it, then raised his head and glanced over to his right, scanning his way down the line of nearby Moabites until he found the one person there whose last name could possibly be Kawasaki. “Why don’t you direct your questions to someone who knows? Mr. Kawasaki, from Lyke, has been here all day, working hard to establish the ground truth.”
Maeve didn’t want to think of herself, or to be seen, as someone who had been in need of getting rescued by a Prince Charming in a jet, and so this added a lot of texture to her relationship with Corvallis in the early going. Fortunately for that relationship, but not so much for Maeve and her family in Australia, those issues were soon swamped by something else.
All of the people in the Miasma’s conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters: the actor from the red-eye, all of the other performers in all of the fake videos, the cops who had searched the penthouse suite in Vegas, the sheriff ’s deputies who had manned roadblocks, et cetera.
And, of course, Corvallis Kawasaki and Maeve Braden. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States, and had been a reasonably well-known person to begin with. And she had been standing next to him. So within twenty-four hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him, and begun to evince interest in her; and within a week, she had become a figure of greater significance, in the collective mind of Crazytown, than he.
Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation. Toward power it felt some combination of fear and admiration, and Corvallis was powerful. Toward vulnerability it was drawn, in the same way that predators would converge on the isolated and straggling. Within a week, Maeve—who suffered from the fatal combination of being mysterious, vulnerable, and female—had been doxxed. Canyonland Adventures, as a business, had been destroyed by a flood of fake negative reviews and various other hacks. Maeve sought refuge at Angel Rock Ranch, but after a couple of days, Bob’s wife decided to believe some of the more wildly slanderous posts being made about Maeve on social media and decided it was time for her to leave. Tom, having nothing else to do now that the business was wiped out, bundled Maeve into a car, handed her a shotgun, and drove her to Salt Lake City, where he dropped her off (minus the shotgun) at the private jet terminal to await a jet that Corvallis had dispatched. Maeve only went into the waiting lounge long enough to use the toilet. Her legs were visible under the stall door. They were glimpsed in a mirror by a young woman who was standing in front of a sink freshening up. She was the best friend of another young woman who was the daughter of a hedge fund manager and private jet owner; they, along with other friends and family, were all on some kind of one-percenter vacation trip. The two young women, having recognized Maeve, took pictures of her and posted them on their poorly secured social media accounts. One of the pictures included the tail number of the private jet that Maeve boarded en route to Seattle. Its flight plan was obtained from the Miasma. More Moab truthers were awaiting Maeve in Seattle; they weren’t allowed into the private jet terminal at Boeing Field, but nothing prevented them from witnessing Corvallis’s arrival in his Tesla.
And so it went. All they could do was let it burn. Maeve’s harassment became the topic of hand-wringing coverage by the decent folk of the Miasma, but the mere fact that people were defending her only drove the truthers into higher transports of rage or made it that much more amusing for trolls to go after her. Maeve’s entire family was doxxed. Business records of Sthetix were pulled up from somewhere and laid bare. That she was now under Corvallis’s wing dampened the truthers’ ardor, since they were sadists and preferred to focus their energies on the helpless. But they did manage to find her sister, Verna, who lived in a bedroom community outside of Adelaide. After a first round of surgery and chemo, she’d enjoyed three years’ remission from her cancer, but it had now come back. She was on chemo again. Through a combination of social engineering and poor security precautions, a particularly avid set of nihilist hackers tracked her down to a hospital in Adelaide, and phoned in a bomb threat, and SWATted the place for good measure. All of the patients had to be taken out of the wing of the building where Verna was receiving her treatment. Not enough gurneys were available, and she was strong enough to walk with assistance, and so she ended up lying on the ground in the shade of a gum tree, dressed only in her hospital gown, still hooked up to the wheeled apparatus that was dripping the chemo drug into her IV line. A local truther, positioned outside the place with a long-lensed camera, was able to capture video of her rolling onto her side to puke. It went up on the message board favored by the truthers and became a humorous meme. The mother of Maeve and Verna got really angry and ventured out onto the front stoop of her house to denounce the hackers; a still frame of her indignant, tear-stained face became another meme.
Corvallis chartered a larger, longer-range jet to take him and Maeve to Australia. They drove to Boeing Field. The jet wasn’t quite ready yet and so they had to wait in the lounge for half an hour.
Shortly before they boarded, Pluto showed up.
Pluto had been one of the cofounders of Corporation 9592 and had made a corresponding amount of money. For a while, Corvallis had seen him every day, but after his switch to Nubilant, they’d lost contact and had not communicated at all except for a brief, awkward exchange at Dodge’s funeral. Pluto, well aware of his own social ineptitude, had obviously pored over an etiquette manual before showing up, and so, during his rote interactions with Zula and other immediate family members, had acquitted himself well if bizarrely, addressing them in high-Victorian grief speech straight out of whatever scanned and archived Emily Post book he’d memorized.
Pluto walked into the waiting area, which was furnished like a high-end hotel lobby, and shrugged his bag off onto a leather club chair. He seemed to have packed for a long trip. He sat down across from Corvallis and Maeve, who were in a love seat, just zoning out, not daring to look at the Miasma. Instead of greeting them, or even making eye contact, he opened up his laptop and pulled on a pair of reading glasses.
“Presbyopia has caught up with you, I see,” Corvallis said.
Maeve startled, and tensed; she hadn’t realized that this new guy and Corvallis knew each other.
“It would be unusual for one of my age not to have it!” Pluto scoffed.
Maeve had been sprawled back with her head resting on Corvallis’s outstretched arm, but she now sat up, the better to pay notice to this interloper.
Corvallis remembered, now, that back in the old