Changeling

(112): The War on ‘Error’.

Nestra looked at the pictures of her target. The ‘troll farm’ was an innocuous series of buildings forming a compound on the southern edges of the city, near the limit of fully controlled lands. The buildings were a boring corporate white and as bland as possible. Were it not for the antenna masts and the cooling tower she associated with heavy server loads, she would not even have guessed this was some sort of IT related place. Could have been any factory, really.

“Doesn’t look like much,” she grumbled.

“What, did you expect gothic towers of black stone with red LEDs?” Jones said. “The Internet Research Institute likes to hide in plain sight. Even their fucking name means nothing. They see themselves as ‘businessmen’ or ‘journalists’. Some of them even are. No, this is the plain, boring, ordinary, everyday sort of evil.”

He focused on the screen, the light blue reflecting on his features in the depths of the bunker. Disinterest and lip. That’s what Nestra got for turning back to her human form.

“Mind getting off my case, mate? Last I checked, we’re on the same side yeah?”

“Yes. Yes, sorry,” Jones said earnestly. “Look, I’m going to be intense about this.”

He brushed his close-cropped hair. In the darkness, his eyes were almost yellow, but the light augs on his neck marked him. He gave Nestra a measuring glance.

“Look, I’ll be honest. I worked for them.”

Nestra nodded.

“You don’t seem surprised.”“Freelance IT guy with an in-depth understanding of the biz right down to knowing where their HQ is? Figured you were a disgruntled ex-employee.”

“I am not a disgruntled ex-employee," Jones spat, his anger more directed at the picture in front of him than at Nestra. “I’m someone who decided to leave so I could correct my mistakes. And I will.”

He remembered she was there.

“With your help.”

“Of course. When did you quit?”

He paused.

“Two years ago.”

His voice was flat. Nestra nodded once more. His aggression was slightly getting on her nerves. He was tall, lean, and muscular and a bit too close which would have been threatening except she was a C-class gleam, and for a baseline facing her, he was being a bit too free with his emotions. The contrast rubbed her the wrong way. But she was not going to fly in his face because he was clearly having a moment and she was an adult with great emotion management.

“I figure the company is a bit of a black box.”

“You can say that again,” Jones grumbled, interrupting her.

She was an adult with fantastic emotional management who absolutely didn’t need the memory of heavenly or even Aszhii society where the weak showed proper respect for the strong popping into her head just now.

“So part of your information might be outdated,” Nestra finished.

A thick silence hung between them. Jones bit back a remark. In order to facilitate the dialogue and not because her patience was thinning, Nestra cycled mana in her eyes until they shone like a thunderstorm over Antarctica. Jones finally sat back in his chair.

“I have an informant. I kept contact with her. She’s keeping me up to date.”

“Will we need to extract her?”

“No. She should be fine.”

“Are you sure?” Nestra asked again.

Jones hesitated, then he gave her words consideration.

“Ok, we probably should. Yeah. No, you’re right. We should.”

“Explain the plan to me.”

“Ok.”

He pulled an overhead view of the site, probably taken by a high-altitude drone at an angle which must have been pretty risky.

“Here it is. There is a perimeter with a guard house at the entrance. Unfortunately, the fences are three meters high, electrified, and there is a surprisingly dense network of cameras which means we’ll need to enter the old-fashioned way. I’m going to get... my friend to fill in a janitorial request.”

“The old janitor infiltration trick? What year is this, 2030? I’ll fly us over.”

Jones frowned. He stood up and crossed his arms which was ‘hella rude’ as Aunt Claire would put it.

“And can you fly us over with over 50 kg of fragile gear?”

“I can fly us over with your fucking van.”

Jones didn’t seem convinced. That was it. Nestra stepped forward. One moment, Jones was staring down at a blonde woman in a fashionable Threshold shirt. The next, he was looking at the layered scales over Nestra’s true chest. His eyes traveled up to two pools of abyss. True Nestra was over two meters and a half tall at this point. Jones’s heart skipped a beat, which Nestra heard with her nice long ears.

“I said, I can fly us over, human.”

She hissed softly.

“I can also walk through walls, teleport, carry stuff in a spatial pocket, and cameras and sensors don’t detect me.”

“Alright.”

“I can take the average B-class squad and wreck the shit out of them.”

“Noted. Look, I get it. Back off, please? Damn.”

Nestra did so.

“You were rude,” she told him. “I told you, I’m on your side.”

“Ok, sorry. Look, as I said, it’s a difficult time for me. I apologize. I guess it’s easier to be angry than to feel guilty. I helped build this system, and now they’re destroying my country in front of my eyes. And it’s my fault. Well, partly my fault.”

Nestra reverted to her human form on the spot which clearly weirded him out but at least he was more thoughtful than aggressive now.

“And my trip has left me a bit too sensitive to what I perceive to be provocations,” she allowed. “It’s... Well, some of the other societies out there are very hierarchical. Anyway. Start over?”

Maybe Nestra was having a weird moment of culture shock.

“Ok for me,” Jones said.

“We’ll make it right,” Nestra told him. “We’ll tear those assholes to the ground. You have me now. I may not look like it, but I’m a menace. Remember what I can do, and let’s change the plan.”

“Yes... Were you serious when you said you could go through walls?”

“Up and down and no limit. Obviously I can still be seen with the good old mark I eyeballs but besides that I’m as sneaky as they come.”

“Right... that changes things.”

His expression grew slack. The view of the farm changed to one of a gray-haired black woman leaving a helicopter. Her face was stern and wrinkled, while her dark business suit was impeccable despite the wind. A pair of bodyguards covered her.

“This is our primary target: Annalisa Rice, CEO and founder of IRI. We need her to get into her office to retrieve the master file. Let me explain. The troll farm doesn’t just employ people to shitpost all day long. That’s the least of their capabilities, the bottom of the pyramid, if you will. There are fake account operators handling larger accounts, others who handle bots, IT support staff — that was my role. All of those provide the basics of all operations. Above us were supervisors who identified targets, found the angle, wrote the articles and basically planned each project.”

“So, the strategists?” Nestra hazarded.

“Not just that. They’re also project managers and creatives. Journalists as I said, only, they don’t report the truth, but a careful fabrication of their own making. They meet the clients to decide targets, report on the effects the campaigns have... It’s a front-desk job with a decent salary and a good public image. Contacts in the government and companies only see a, hmm, a think tank leader of sorts. Someone with connections. Annalisa is the Queen Bee of the IRI. She handles not just the supervisors but also the associates who helped us accomplish our goals: cousin websites with similar agendas, influencers, bloggers, the works. The more respectability someone has, especially as a contrarian dickwad, and the more they get paid pushing a narrative disguised as ‘questioning the status quo’. You are familiar with the attack on transformation gleams?”

“Intimately,” Nestra grumbled.

“Before the Festival Massacre, the government tried to show transformation gleams in a positive light because most smart politicians would in fact prefer to keep groups of powerful raiders on their side. We’re not the new continent, but there are still more than enough monsters for everyone. The IRI got a massive switch to operate by flooding the social networks with made up statistics. That was Annalisa’s work through her proxies.”

“I’m impressed at how much of a bitch she is.”

“You have no idea,” Jones said, expression somber.

He shook his head to chase away unwanted memories..

“Those are the people at the top. Those at the bottom are also journalists, by the way. Well, graduates who couldn’t find a job because they were not connected enough to do so. Talented rejects, if you will. Trained to write well, but they’re paid shit, the hours suck, so do the benefits, there is no room for advancement or transfer to another company, and the work, it eats at you. Most of those who start working don’t immediately know what they’re supposed to be doing. I once saw someone quit on the spot, but Annalisa’s people are smart. They target the desperate. Shit, I need a drink.”

Jones opened a nearby fridge to take out two bottles of beer, offering one to Nestra who accepted because it was the polite thing to do and because, seriously? Beer? She’d expected him to whip out something strong. Aunt Claire would be laughing by now. But at least he’d stay sober for the rest of the meeting.

“I hope you don’t plan on killing the low-level employees?” Jones said with sudden worry.

“I don’t intend to, and if everything goes well we won’t have to kill anyone. Ragnarok was adamant that I should shed as little blood as possible and ideally kill no one at all.”

“Good because I already feel like shit helping a foreigner attack my compatriots,” Jones said a bit defiantly.

Nestra shrugged.

“Consider this: we’re both working to avoid a war between our two people. My side’s already won over. I'm just helping yours.”

Jones nodded with his beer though it was hard to say if he were truly convinced. Nestra used the lull to ask a burning question.

“I might sound a bit naive but surely, all of this is extremely illegal?”

“It is, but Rice is connected. Honestly, if they didn’t have to settle here because of the post-incursion internet occasionally breaking down when a kaiju eats a sea cable, IRI would be based on another continent entirely and significantly bigger for it too. Less risky that way. Decades ago, you could get hundreds of people managing tens of thousands of bots for a fraction of the cost by outsourcing to Asia and Africa. In order to compensate for the lower number of ‘account operators’, Annalisa’s worked on developing that network of loosely connected influencers I mentioned. The master file we’re after contains everything that keeps her empire functional. We’re talking admin logins for her websites, mission statements, signed contracts with Rebirth, content contracts with influencers, payrolls. Everything. We get her in her office, and we can take control of the entire structure all at once, and then sink it. But we need her in her office. She’s with Rebirth. One word out, a ringing alarm, and we’ll have an entire army on our asses.”

“I can work with that,” Nestra said. “Alright, let’s start the war on disinformation.”

***

Jones wasn’t having a good time. The balaclava made him feel like a gas station robber, but that was nothing. The alien girl had just disappeared a good five cubic feet of supplies by looking at them. Now they were flying over the compound he’d sold his soul to, the remaining heat of the day making him sweat through his robber suit. He also hated being held in front of Nestra’s chest like a doll. And finally, there was the way she was flying: gravity had given up on them. They were just pieces of space flotsam drifting in the endless expanse of the Great Nothing.

Why was he thinking that? He breathed, refraining from wiping the sweat sticking to his disguise. It chafed. Below, he recognized the server room in its separate enclosure with the cooling towers above, the guard room, the parking lot, the main building, and there, the roof access. There were two guards patrolling the edges of the spot. He could see the break terrace where Leah hopefully waited. One of the guards looked up and Jones’ heart skipped a beat but then there was nothing.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Literally nothing. He was floating in a perfect black. His arms grabbed the alien’s girl/s powerful forearms, like gripping steel. They were the only thing he could really feel. His breath was the only thing he could hear. And then, the particles of oxygen floated out like diamond dust in... where was he? His breath shortened. There was nothing here to breathe. There was nothing here to feel. It was cold, colder than anything else, the perfect absence of movement waiting there at the end of everything when the entirety of creation was doomed to fade long after the last star had burnt out, the last black hole had dissipated, the very end, in —

UTTER

DARKNESS

His feet touched the ground.

“Motherfucker.”

This was the break room terrace, and everything was fine. The windows were dark inside barring the lights of the fridge and coffee machine. The smell of tobacco hung pungent in the air despite a light wind. A red ember flared in the darkness near the door. Nestra wasn’t worried so neither was he. Leah stepped forward, the dim light bringing her into stark relief. Her thick hair lay forked and dull over her shoulders. Her cheeks were gaunt. She’d lost weight.

“Wow, you look like shit,” he said without meaning to.

“And you look like your rob grandmas for fourteen dollars and a sandwich. Is she it?”

“Yes,” the demon purred. “I am it. You two stay here while I prepare the ground.”

Nestra moved forward, disappearing in a puff of darkness. Jones was left with Leah on the terrace, the guards far above him and unaware of his presence. It was quiet here. He had nothing to do until Nestra took over the security room.

His first operation was a mix of the incredibly tedious and amazingly stressful.

“So,” Leah said after another drag. “How have you been?”

***

Nestra smoothly walked through the wall, appearing in a janitor’s closet. She listened for heartbeats beyond the door, and finding none, another passe-muraille carried her into a corridor that exuded depression. The walls were clear piss yellow, with buzzing lights overhead showing the sad carpet in all its misery. She ignored the security camera as she moved closer to the second third floor meeting room. This place was deserted.

As soon as she was above the security room, she floated through the floor, stopping above a hurried man in a gray suit smelling of stale sweat and cigar smoke. Probably one of the supervisors. He was in a hurry. As soon as he was through, she dropped down and passed again. She was now in the security room above two guards in flimsy body armor. They were nursing coffee mugs. Nestra checked the time. Four minutes past rotation. She waited another minute stuck to the ceiling just to be sure, then she dropped down. In the same movement, she injected the prepared doses of anesthetics into their necks with Threshold’s provided pens. The two guards softly collapsed in their seats without so much as a sigh, fingers vainly grasping at their throats. She gently dropped them at the back of the room, then she pulled the central unit from her dimensional pocket. It was a matter of seconds to find a plug and a free port, but then she hit the first snag.

“The signal’s not going through,” she told Jones.

“Told you so. This area is out of coverage. We’ll need access to the antenna.”

“Ok. I’ll guide you to me.”

Nestra took over the security cam. She used it to guide Jones and Leah to herself. Jones was hard to read since he was still wearing his balaclava but he was moving with nervous energy. Leah was a wreck, though.

“Stop here. Go into the meeting room to your right.”

Nestra had them wait while another supervisor rushed to his office.

“Coast is clear.”

Nestra looked again.

“Annalisa Rice is on the move.”

“She will debrief every supervisor in turn before their big meeting,” Leah explained in her brand new earplug. “She might go to her office afterward to prepare.”

The pair quickly descended down the stairs. Nestra checked the lower staircase’s cam, which also had a microphone attached. It was surprisingly good to the point it could be zoomed in. Apparently, the guards were not above eavesdropping. Or the IRI was just paranoid which explained why personal phones were neither allowed nor able to connect anyway. Rice was there alongside the first supervisor Nestra had spotted.

“Ma’am, we’ve dedicated two teams to the national security angle.”

“With disappointing results,” Rice’s voice returned, cold and confident. “The topic lacks emotional depth and worse, immediacy. You will reallocate those resources to the invasion aspect instead.”

“We’re not even sure...”

“Four witnesses positively identified the alien’s Bellerophon pattern armor. She is here, and she will resurface. Threshold’s culture demands results and the use of every possible opportunity. They are predictable that way.”

“They might not want to take the risk.”

“Risk assessment is another thing they’re really good at. The alien is an infiltrator. They will try something, and likely succeed on their first attempt. We will work on the violation angle as it resonates the most with the female and older 30+ demographics. Avoid the military LF. Go for alien instead. It will tie in with the immigration phobia.”

“I think we can leverage the military lexical field if we associate it with humiliation,” the supervisor replied, having apparently rallied from his earlier terror now that he’d been given a new purpose.

“Good idea. Go for it.”

Jones and Leah were at the door. Nestra let them in. Leah’s eyes went to the supine form of the guards.

“They’re just asleep,” Nestra told the mole whose smell was getting aggressive in close quarters: a mix of cigarettes, acid sweat, and damp clothes.

Leah nodded. Jones was already back in his keyboard jockey element, plugging his aug into the system.

“They haven’t even changed the access code in two years!” he exclaimed, eyes widening.

So paranoid yet lazy. Typical.

“You can remove the balaclava now, before you melt,” Nestra helpfully suggested.

“Ok thanks. Will you go to the antenna then?”

“Antenna, then Rice. Keep the door locked.”

Nestra moved out. Infiltrating the building was a trivial task for her now that she was B-class. It would take much more than what they had to stop an Aszhii, but she still took it seriously. In the meantime, Jones was already accessing archives which would at least help Threshold understand how Rebirth operated. She obtained antenna access through the expedient means of just having Jones give her the code. Once deployed, Jones started sending files back to Threshold. It was only a matter of time before an engineer realized something was wrong though. They were on a timer.

“Operator here,” a new voice said in her coms.

Threshold spook. She even recognized the voice.

“Hello Mr W,” she greeted.

Agent Winslow chuckled. He was the placid guy who’d accompanied the Palladians to China to rescue Aunt Claire. His rare steam affinity made him a great infiltrator as well. He sounded positively giddy.

“And you too. Time to catch the big fish. I’m going to lure her into her office.”

“You could suggest they found information on me,” Nestra said. “She knows I’m here.”

“... good idea. That’s great bait.”

She made her way upstairs while Winslow kindly let them listen in on his coms. His voice was modulated with a perfect midwest accent that reminded Nestra of her mom when she got angry.

“Yes, ma’am a package about the Palladian alien. Addressed to you. We checked it for anomalies but it’s just a hard drive and a bunch of papers. I rerouted it to your office.”

“You did what?” Rice’s voice replied with the heat and gravitas of a cracking iceberg.

“I... I thought you’d want to —”

“You thought wrong. Never move something to my office without express authorization, Mitchell. It’s locked for a reason.”

“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am.”

“Was there anything else?” Rice continued, voice returning to normal.

“No, ma’am.”

Rice hung up. Nestra pushed up to her office at the same moment. It was dark and elegant, possibly the only space in the building that didn’t reek of utilitarian mediocrity, and yet the lack of personal mementos made it cold. She climbed her way to the ceiling. It wasn’t long before footsteps echoed outside.

Rice moved in, flanked by two auged bodyguards with actual SMGs strapped to their backs. Nestra allowed herself to fall. She stabbed both guards with tranq pens, shoved an interdictor drive in Rice’s exposed neck implant, grabbed her by the collar and then lifted her until her perfectly styled hair brushed the faux wood panels overhead. Rice yelped. Her feet danced a little jig though Nestra wasn’t actually strangling her yet. One of the nice mocassins fell off in the battle. Rice’s brown eyes widened when she spotted Nestra.

“I heard you were looking for me?” she hissed with a smile.

Rice’s face went flat as she effortlessly morphed her fear into productive planning, then she frowned.

“That’s an interdictor drive,” Nestra explained while wiggling the small half-sphere lodged against Rice’s port. “It will spoof anyone monitoring your vitals or positions while preventing you from sending messages. I’m given to understand that your intelligence agencies were the ones to come up with those, actually.”

Rice focused. This was... problematic, but the alien girl was young and, according to her reports, still regrettably human. It was common knowledge that she had received significant support during her escape. That support extended to her closest family. That meant leverage.

“You may be in control now but you have no idea about who you’re facing. The power and reach of the people you are trying to provoke means that no one will be safe. Not you, nor your friends, or your family. I can’t convince you to give up —”

“You’re right,” the alien replied, and with a flat expression that really sold that she was actually an alien. What Rice found hardest to tolerate was the lack of visible pupils. It made staring at those orbs... unsettling.

“You can’t convince me to stop. There is nothing you can threaten me with that Rebirth wouldn’t use if they got their hands on me. Operative word: if. I know that. I’m also trying very hard to calm things down before... something unfortunate happens to Earth. That makes me really motivated. It also makes me very much unimpressed with your pathetic attempt at manipulation. There is a vast multiverse out there, Annalisa. I have met entities that have issued threats far better than you ever could. So no deal. Give me the file.”

“The file?”

“The master file that contains the admin codes to all of your bot accounts, websites and so on. You know the one.”

Rice started to laugh. It was a sinister sound she knew made people uncomfortable but the alien woman just looked bored, and Annalisa stopped before wiry fingers pressed her neck a little too tight.

“You either interrogated or are working with one of my little lambs. Don’t worry, I’ll find out who it was. The truth is... I can’t give you the master file. Because it doesn’t exist.”

The alien sighed, patience thinning but Annalisa wouldn’t stop.

“The files are a lie I tell my employees as a misdirection. You see, I am a woman with perfect recall. My eidetic memory means that I can pull up passwords on the spot, or recreate contract lists from scratch as needed. The only master file that exists is the one in my head. You’re wasting your time.”

Annalisa smiled with slightly more confidence than she felt.

“Is that so?” the alien asked with a half smile. “Then show me. Get access to one of those fake accounts. Say, a mid-sized one. BathrobeDiogenes.”

Annalisa was dragged to the laptop. The alien shoved her in the seat. Annalisa’s eyes went down by reflex, which was a mistake. The alien’s abyssal eyes were on her face.

“Hmmm?”

She bent forward which reminded Annalisa of how massive the woman was. The face and proportions were right until you paid attention and realized she was probably a good eight-foot-four in height.

“Oh, a panic button. Nice try.”

The woman swiped her arm and the panic button disappeared alongside a part of the mahogany desk and an inch of wiring. They were just gone. The giantess opened the laptop, had Annalisa input the password, and then moved to the world’s largest social network.

“Go on then.”

Annalisa hesitated on what to do, but she realized it was too late when the alien woman spoke again.

“Unless, of course, you’re full of shit and this is yet another delay tactic. Because I sincerely doubt you didn’t keep a very tight record of the original contracts you signed with your influencer associates. You have to keep your leashes, obviously. Secondly, BathrobeDiogenes is an account I just made up.”

Shit.

“Which someone with eidetic memory would have reacted to. Now, if you delay me one more time I’ll just accept that I won’t get the files, and I am not going to torture you for them. So I’ll kill you instead. Your call.”

Annalisa was almost sure the woman wasn’t bluffing, but she had to try anyway.

“I know you’re not going to kill me,” Rice said. “You didn’t kill the guards. You want to avoid spilling blood on American soil.”

Darkness crept at the edges of the room.

“You think wrong. Your death isn’t a failure, merely a suboptimal result. I will neutralize the IRI, either by taking control over your assets, or by taking your life. After I kill you I will take this computer’s hard drive and your corpse. You’d be amazed what Threshold’s forensics can access with so much to work with.”

“This is a sanctioned operation. Killing me would be a warcrime. You won’t do it.”

“Yeah, nah. The thing about peddling falsehoods for the mighty is that it puts you on the radar on account of, you know, your cunt associates coming after my sister. So no, I will kill you. Look at me, Annalisa.”

Her seat was abruptly turned to face the alien. No rage could be found on her features. They were perfectly neutral, and yet Annalisa was almost convinced. Almost, because she hated losing. She couldn’t accept losing to a young little bitch after she’d hired security specifically to avoid this sort of incident.

“I could break your fingers but I think I have a better idea. I’m going to use some of my mana. Apparently it makes other people really uncomfortable with death as the end result. I stop when I see the files or when you’re a shriveled, radiation-cooked cadaver. Don’t wait for too long.”

The woman smiled. Annalisa had no idea what she meant until the shadows crept in from the edges of the room. The light dimmed, then went out. She frowned. It was so strange.

The floor disappeared under her. Her feet brushed nothing. She knew there ought to be a carpet there but there wasn’t, and it was suddenly very cold. Her breath puffed out as a cloud of tiny diamonds, and there was no air to replace it.

No air at all.

Annalisa drew panicked gulps, in vain. The cold viciously bit at the tips of her fingers and the edges of her ears. Her hair formed a halo around her head. Only the desk still existed here, floating through nothing and still mysteriously powered, the only reminder that her home reality was still connected to the ends of those wires. She gripped the edge of the desk rather than float away. Her seat was gone. The only thing left that moved besides her was the alien woman happily bobbing around as if this weren’t an endless void. Or perhaps because it was.

She was going to die here.

By the time her fingers reached the keyboard, there were no thoughts left for scheming.

***

“I still think you could have gotten faster results by breaking a finger. Individuals like Rice have built a world of control around them. Physical violence breaks that self-constructed image,” Winslow said in Nestra’s ear.

“And I thank you for the advice but I think this is cleaner and a little faster. It’s hard to type with broken fingers.”

“You got the results,” Winslow allowed, closing the conversation. “Anyway, we’re going over everything and it looks like we have all of it and more: she also kept bank account details in there. Not the main ones but those used for more covert payments. We’re transferring the funds to accounts we will place under your control so you can fund your operations.”

“I want to buy a grill.”

“Your sabotage operations. You can leave now. We have what we wanted.”

Nestra zipped through the floor and down to the security room. The two baselines yelped when she popped up. Nestra noticed they’d been holding hands.

“Flirting mid-infiltration?” Nestra accused.

“No! I mean, nothing to report!”

The supervisors were still hanging around in the meeting room waiting for the return of their queen. That was the issue with having people terminally scared of you: they never came to check in on things or help. Not that they’d be able to wake Annalisa up within the next six hours.

“Uhu. I don’t mind, by the way. Anyway, we got what we wanted. Time to leave, people.”

“I can come with you, right?” Leah asked.

“Yes, we already agreed,” Nestra said as she packed the tools she’d used to take control of the security system.

And by packed, she meant throw everything in her dimensional pocket.

“I wasn’t sure.”

“This is the real world,” Nestra corrected. “The ‘you have served your purpose now die’ is mostly a cartoon thing.”

“And how do we get out of here, oh benevolent overlord?” Jones asked with a smile now that he was finally relaxing.

“We leave through the fence since the cameras are ours. I’ll open the way. Take the side exit while I leave a little present in the server room. Winslow will guide you.”

Nestra grabbed some explosives from her magic pocket.

“I thought the servers were of secondary importance?” Jones reminded her.

“They are but they’re still expensive and in a separate building with no risk of loss of life, we can use the distraction, and finally I really love blowing shit up. Off you go now.”

Leah grabbed another cigarette.

***

Clara was an angry woman. She was angry at a great many people ranging from DMV employees who were too damn slow to those children down the street making noise at ungodly hours. She was mad at the trash collecting van for showing up too late, it was on purpose for sure. She was mad at the cashiers acting rude and clumsy and disrespecting her when the only thing she asked was basic competence. She was mad at waiters for being idiots. She was mad at them for looking at her with contempt. She was also mad at larger, more diffuse groups like the immigrants, the Catholics, the French, the Thresholders, the Government (any branch), the Town Hall, the police (too soft on crime and too hard on her for parking illegally when her feet hurt). She was very mad and worked very hard at staying this mad. It was now seven in the morning and Clara had woken up because her belly hurt (probably the market’s fault for selling her shit meat). She grabbed her phone to feed that anger. The moment she opened the first thread, she knew something was wrong. Her first feed of the day was TruthSeeker25 who had a good head on his shoulders. The message made her brain freeze.

“Hello, the owner of this account was paid 271 000 dollars by the Internet Research Institute to push a hateful narrative, in return for which the account owner allowed IRI admin access for monitoring purposes. You will find the contract here, and the corresponding e-mail chain here.”

The first comment below was just as frustrating.

“This is a bot account. The influencer who started this thread was paid, or received a promise of support from the Internet Research Institute, for its content. Here is proof.”

There were dozens of identical responses, all admissions of bot accounts with similar links, all upvoted for visibility. It took eight to find the first human one which was basically just an emote of hilarity. Annoyed in a very unpleasant way, Clara checked her list. Two of her favorite people were posting normally but the three others were showing the same ghastly message, with varying numbers of course. Annoyed beyond measure now, she went to read the news.

“This website was taken down as it was a tool of disinformation reporting false information backed by bogus studies. If you read any of their articles, you were manipulated.”

That couldn’t be right. She checked another, and another. Only one of the websites was still up, and it hadn’t been updated yet. She turned on the only trad TV channel she still tolerated. They were talking about a massive leak of unknown origin proving that Rebirth and a corporation called the Internet Research Institute had cooperated on a massive campaign of disinformation and public manipulation.

But Clara preferred being mad so when TruthSeeker25 created a new account that afternoon and claimed this was all a hoax, she just accepted at face value. Who cared if he got paid to say what was the truth anyway? The good guys deserved to game the system too.

***

“Polls show as much as a third of Rebirth’s more moderate supporters turned against the group,” Winslow said with a smile in his voice. “We’re still watching the shockwaves. The op room is having a religious experience over everything we found, you have no idea.”

“Only a third?” Nestra complained, aghast. “Are people really ok with being fooled like that?”

Winslow’s happiness couldn’t be smothered.

“Short answer, yes. Proof doesn’t matter to those who’re totally absorbed in an outrage loop. That’s just human psychology. We were never going to reach them so we never tried. It’s those on the fence we needed to target. But even if the results are not as spectacular as you hoped, you should still take heart. We’ve disgraced and permanently deleted hundreds of influencers, organizations, and their accounts. Their reputation will not just take an impact, it will take years for them to accumulate the follower counts they had patiently built up over the past decade. The public opinion needle is also edging towards peace now, something that our diplomats have already noticed. We did well, Nestra. This was never going to end the war, but it sure will help. Now, would you like to go back, or?”

“No. I’m ready to get started.”

***

“Sir, we may have a problem.”

The man grabbed the offered datasheet. One tap, and a video played. His eyes went to the name of the channel.

Cooking with Crescent.

It was active again? But then his attention turned to the pink-haired woman in sunglasses standing in the street. He recognized the place because he’d campaigned there a few times. It was South Street, in Philadelphia proper. It took him a moment to recognize her because of the dyed hair, hat, and sunglasses. There were shiny rectangles on her skin he associated with AI-fooling patches, something used by agents to confuse monitoring AIs, but there was no mistaking it. It was her, in human form.

“Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Cooking with Crescent! For my grand return we’re going to do something a little special. Instead of raiding a portal world, I’ll be raiding a store called Wawa in hostile territory, just so I can purchase the ingredients for a Philly Cheesesteak! That’s right. And because we’re not savages, we’re going to use real cheese instead of American plastic.”

The man tuned out the rest of the show. The recipe itself didn’t matter. This was a message, one that would let the entire world suss out the Rebirth leak was the work of Threshold by means of a sassy alien woman. It was also a threat, and a warning.

The B-class alien infiltrator was here to stay.

The PR war had only just started, and they were down two points. Even the more aggressive comments defended American cheese rather than attack her for being an actual enemy combatant. Some verified Philadelphians were giving her cooking advice laced with insults, mostly arguing about bell peppers. A killer capable of devastating entire guilds had infiltrated the territory and people only cared about food.

“We do have a problem.”