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 days, the key persons at Corporation 9592 had made use of an iPhone app that enabled them to track each other’s locations on a map. It saved a lot of messing around with text messages whose sole purpose was to establish someone’s whereabouts. Corvallis had shared his location with Dodge and with Pluto. Dodge was dead. Pluto he had forgotten about. He made a mental note to turn the feature off. Not that he didn’t trust Pluto. But it was bad practice to just dumbly leave that stuff running.
“Your luggage is of impressive size and weight,” Corvallis observed, “and I note you have purchased a new sun hat.” For the price tag, and the tiny documentation booklet, were still dangling from Pluto’s headwear.
“Because of the ozone hole,” Pluto began, in a cadence suggesting he had a lot to say about it.
Maeve interrupted him, though. “This person is coming with us?”
“His name is Pluto,” Corvallis said. Then, before Pluto could correct the error, he amended his statement: “Nickname, I meant to say.”
Pluto seemed to finish whatever business he had been conducting on his laptop and peered over the lenses of his reading glasses at Maeve’s legs. Pluto’s general habit was to stare at people’s shoes when he was talking to them, and so Corvallis interpreted this as Pluto’s gearing up to engage in conversation. Maeve saw it as gawking at her prostheses. Corvallis, whose arm was still draped around behind Maeve, reached down to give her shoulder a squeeze and a pat.
“It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet,” Pluto said, “and so I am here to destroy it.”
“Destroy what?” Corvallis inquired.
“The Internet,” Pluto said. “Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t work over the Pacific Ocean.”
Pluto sighed. “Then it will have to wait until we have reached Australia.”
“I didn’t like your friend at first,” Maeve said, “but I’m warming up to him.”
“That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation.”
“It’s already destroyed, haven’t you seen a bloody thing?”
“It is not sufficiently destroyed yet,” Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop. “The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand. Peak traffic occurred yesterday, at four point five kiloBradens.”
“What’s a kiloBraden?” asked Maeve, taking a personal interest since her last name was Braden.
“A Braden is a unit of measurement I coined for my own purposes, equal to the number of hostile posts made in an interval of one hour. It has now slumped to just over one hundred Bradens as the focal point of the attack has shifted to your mother and …” Pluto’s brow furrowed as he read something from the screen. “Someone called Lady?”
“Her Lhasa apso,” Maeve sighed. For the dog had been heard yapping incessantly on the soundtrack of Maeve’s mother’s front-stoop press conference, and was now receiving death threats.
“Anyway, we need to get that up into the megaBraden or preferably the gigaBraden range in order to achieve saturation,” Pluto intoned, “and we need much wider ontic coverage.”
“Ontic?” Corvallis asked, so Maeve wouldn’t have to.
The jet’s pilot entered through the door that communicated with the tarmac and gazed at Corvallis in an expectant way. “One more,” Corvallis told him, since there’d be paperwork. To Pluto he said, “Passport?” and then regretted it.
“A passport and a visa are required for entry to—” Pluto began, a little confounded by the question.
“Never mind. He has a passport and a visa,” Corvallis called to the pilot.
After they had walked to the plane and got settled into their seats, Pluto resumed the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “This kind of thing