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 has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed,” he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. “Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn’t get us anywhere because it’s language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—”
“We don’t need to go there right now,” Corvallis said.
“‘Slut,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘hag,’ ‘fatty,’ all the bases need to be covered. If we generate traffic in the gigaBraden range—which I think is easily doable—but it’s all skewed toward, say, ‘feminazi,’ then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot—”
“I think we get the idea,” Corvallis said.
“—why, then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole.”
“Pluto, we sort of missed the part where you explained the whole premise of what you’re doing,” Corvallis said.
“I’m glad you said so,” said Maeve, “because I was wondering if I had blacked out.”
“What I’m gathering is that you have been developing some kind of bots or something …”
“Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said. “I took the liberty of drawing up a logo.”
“Please don’t show us programmer art, Pluto, it’s not—” But it was too late, as Pluto had swiveled his laptop around to display an unbelievably terrible drawing of an animal that was just barely recognizable as some kind of ape. One shaggy arm had its knuckles on the ground, the other was whipping overhead as it hurled a large, dripping gob of shit. Wavy lines radiated from the projectile as a way of indicating that it smelled bad. It was even more terrible than most of Pluto’s programmer art, but he was smiling broadly and even sort of looking at them, which counted for something. Worse yet, Maeve liked it, and laughed. Corvallis hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.
“By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.
“What do you mean, arbitrary?” Maeve asked.
“As many as he wants,” Corvallis said.
“As many as I want.”
“Don’t they cost money or something?”
Pluto looked startled for a moment, then laughed.
“Pluto has ten times as much money as I do,” Corvallis said.
“Nineteen,” Pluto corrected him, “you don’t know about some of the interesting trading strategies I have been pursuing.” Redirecting his attention from Corvallis’s shoes to Maeve’s prosthetic legs, he went on, “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”
“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.
“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.
“You