Australia in general, and this winery in particular, were fine places to reside while a stupendous onslaught of Miasma defamation was launched against Maeve Braden. Astonishing birdcalls were woven through its dry, quiet air, which was scented with eucalyptus and softened with a haze of reddish dust filtering down from the great desert to the north. Broad tin roofs and heavy steel screens sheltered them from sun and bug while somehow making them feel they were right in the middle of the trees and the vines. The design of the place was simple and comfortable without any taint of what was normally thought of as luxury. Verna’s bedroom opened onto a second-story verandah under deep eaves, which felt like a treehouse. Maeve would sit there for hours with her, chatting and drinking tea, while Mary Catherine bustled and fussed. She was first-generation Irish-Australian, messily divorced from the father of Maeve and Verna, who had some kind of complicated-sounding dual citizenship that enabled him to flee to America when his relatives in Oz were sick of him, and vice versa. The Miasma had long since doxxed him and gleefully posted mug shots commemorating his brushes with the law in jurisdictions that were so improbably far-flung as to deliver a certain dry comedic payload. Mary Catherine’s obsessive devotion to small, nearby, concrete matters, such as scones and the doings of nearby birds, was the perfect antidote to the Miasma.
As Verna got her energy back, he spent more time with her. In the early going, Maeve was always in the room to keep an eye on things and nudge the conversation forward when it stalled, but as the days went by the discourse between Corvallis and Verna became more and more geeky, and Maeve withdrew by degrees, sitting in the corner reading or knitting, then absenting herself. Verna turned out to be the real deal: a programmer, largely self-taught, who, once the chemo fog had abated, was able to hold up her end of a conversation with C-plus. Had the situation been different, he’d have considered hiring her. She’d have come in for interviews. Other programmers would have circled round her warily. They’d have reached the conclusion that she was “awesome” but they’d have found reasons to reject her due to a lack of cultural fit, and they’d have passed her on to smaller, more off beat startups run by friends. All of which was still possible in theory. But having cancer was still going to be a full-time job for her for a while.
He wished he could have introduced her to Dodge.
He checked in with Pluto, who had ensconced himself in the most expensive hotel suite that was to be had in Adelaide. He contacted Corvallis every few hours on a “burner” phone that Corvallis had picked up on arrival in Australia, when he’d discovered that his usual phone number had been doxxed and rendered useless by a festival of reckless hatred originating from a cluster of racist conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t until forty-eight hours after they’d landed in Australia that Pluto was ready to spawn his troop of APEs, and Lyke was ready to fend them off. Pluto called Corvallis to inform him that his right pinky was hovering over the Enter key on his keyboard, and that if said key were momentarily depressed, it would all happen.
Corvallis received the call while pacing aimlessly around the villa’s ground floor. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay as in you have understood what I just said?” Pluto asked. “Or okay as in ‘Yes, go ahead and do it’?”
“Go ahead and do it.”
“Do you want to check one last time with Maeve?” Pluto inquired, showing, for him, an unusual degree of sensitivity.
“If I ask her one more time she’ll probably slap me,” Corvallis said. “Here, it’s a done deal. She and her sister are discussing what to do next—hatching a plan.”
“Okay, here goes,” Pluto said, and let Corvallis hear the key getting whacked before hanging up the phone.
Corvallis sent a text message to his colleagues at Lyke and then shut off his phone.
If everything went according to plan, the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking would now issue a press release announcing its existence and explaining what it was doing. It would include a signed statement, as well as a video clip, from Maeve Braden, announcing that she was completely fine with all of this. Also included were links to servers where all of the APE-related code was available in the form of a carefully documented open-source code package, complete with sample projects that programmers could use to modify and extend it in various ways. Following up on an idea that had emerged during the conversation on the jet, ENSU also made public a list of several hundred completely imaginary, nonexistent people against whom campaigns of reckless slander and defamation could now be unleashed, as well as an easy-to-use tool that anyone could exploit to create new such fake persons and reasonably convincing social media shaming campaigns that would make those fake persons the object of real, genuine, sincere obloquy on the part of millions of social media users who were dumb enough to believe everything that scrolled across their screens. Following a brief pause for all of this to propagate, the APE troop would come online at an initial pace of one gigaBraden. Pluto would sit up for a few hours watching its progress through a control panel UI he had running on his laptop, which would plot various metrics for him in real time, using a comprehensive suite of data visualization tools. Then he would sleep for eight hours. Then he would get up and take stock of how it was all going, and make any adjustments he felt were necessary, such as upping the pace to ten gigaBradens if that seemed like a good idea.
Corvallis got a deck of cards out of the cabinet in the living room and played solitaire for half an hour. Then he went for a walk with Maeve, who was, at least for a day, the most famous woman in the world. She told him about an idea she and Verna had been hatching, somewhere between tech startup, performance art, fashion accessory, and political manifesto. They were going to bring back the veil.
They waited three more days before holding a press conference. They announced it only an hour ahead of time, then drove into Adelaide and held it in a conference room at Pluto’s hotel. The short notice ensured that it was dominated by Australian media. This worked well. They could be every bit as superficial and tabloidy as media elsewhere, of course, but there was something about this project that seemed to appeal to their collective sense of humor. The atmosphere in the room was jokey and celebratory, and pervaded by a general sense that the Aussies had pulled one over on the rest of the world and that everyone here was in on the joke.
It was a week before the Bradens went back to something approximating their normal life. By then Pluto had already flown home. Corvallis went back alone on the jet, and Maeve followed him two weeks later. By that point it was possible to stand back and tally the numbers from the Moab hoax and from the ENSU project, which were now increasingly being viewed as two phases of the same basic event—the week that the Miasma had fallen.
Corvallis and Maeve carried on an odd, colorful long-distance relationship for the next two years. She got pregnant and moved in with him to a big old house in an expensive Seattle neighborhood, which they fixed up for the purpose of raising a family. It was a boy; they named him Vern, after Verna, who died from another recurrence of her cancer a month before he was born. Lucid to the end, Verna donated her brain to science. Specifically, she entrusted it to the Forthrast Family Foundation. The legal documents by which she did so grew more and more complex as the lawyers dreamed up more and more hypothetical contingencies. Having literally no time for such things, she ended up cutting the Gordian knot by saying she wanted “most favored nation” treatment, meaning that whatever was done with Richard Forthrast’s brain should also be done with hers. When Verna’s condition took a turn for the worse, Corvallis and Maeve flew her to Seattle, so that when she died her remains weren’t encumbered by any discrepancies between Australian and U.S. law.
On a ranch just outside of Moab, they maintained a second home. This did double duty as the headquarters of the Moab Project, a nonprofit organization funded by Corvallis and others—mostly people who had made a lot of money in social media—to sift through hoax-related