Carbon Chemist

Tag: book excerpt

  • Mapping the Marvel Universe in 6 Very Cool Charts

    Mapping the Marvel Universe in 6 Very Cool Charts

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    Mapping the Marvel universe is not the kind of thing one can do just by snapping their fingers.

    For starters, there are many Earths out there in the multiverse; there are also all kinds of mystical dimensions and other weird locations. But even on just one version of Earth there are many points of interest, from the hometowns of fan-favorite heroes to fictional nations that exist only in comic books. Trying to find every Marvel-ous hangout in New York City? Fuggedaboutit.

    Still, for his latest book of cool charts, that’s exactly what Tim Leong did: map the Marvel universe. For his new book, Marvel Super Graphic, Leong made a diagram of mystical planes, an illustration of the proximity of Kamala Khan’s New Jersey residence to Moon Girl’s Lower East Side lab, and even a Mean Girls–esque illustration of who-sits-where in the Empire State University cafeteria.

    But that’s just the beginning. Leong—who, full disclosure, once served as WIRED’s design director—filled Marvel Super Graphic with charts and graphics about many aspects of the Marvel comic book universe. Check out some geographically-focused highlights from the book above.

    —Angela Watercutter

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  • What Really Happened While Filming Hodor’s Fateful ‘Game of Thrones’ Scene

    What Really Happened While Filming Hodor’s Fateful ‘Game of Thrones’ Scene

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    The exterior of the cave of the Three-Eyed Raven is constructed in a quarry near Ballymena, Northern Ireland—an almost perfect bowl-shaped hollow now filled with scenery, tents, and cabins. The cave’s interior and its various tunnels have been constructed at the studio in Banbridge, and it’s there where we’ll spend the majority of our time. The walls have been covered in moss and the floor strewn with real animal bones. On our first day, we’re also joined by the 85-year-old actor Max von Sydow who plays the Three-Eyed Raven—one of the old guard of actors I love to watch so much. Physically, Max seems more frail than even Margaret John had been, and I worry about him sat for hours in the cold. But just like Margaret did, he can snap into character like an old pro.

    Since I’ve returned to the series, this is the first scene where Hodor has to interact. Meera will talk with him about the food she’s been dreaming of when they reach home. The mention of home and sausages lights up Hodor’s face.

    It’s supposed to be a lovely, lighthearted moment before all hell breaks loose and the undead descend on us, but I just can’t relax. In fact, I feel suffocated by the enormity of everything that’s expected of me. Jesus fucking Christ, Kristian. You need to be on your A game, I tell myself, but I’m agitated, so much so that Jack notices I’m struggling.

    “Are you OK?” he asks after a few takes, which I’ve barely managed to get through. “Are you having difficulty?”

    “Yes, it’s awful,” the words tumble from me. Hodor’s subtle tics used to come easily to me, but now I’m tying myself in knots trying to express them. I explain to Jack the mad journey I’ve been on for the past year, and the personal journey I’ve been on, too. I’m finding stepping back into inhabiting someone other than myself very hard. Then I stop. Did I just say all of that … to a director I don’t know? I think. Years ago, I would have kept silent, like when my back was breaking in the Great Hall. I stop talking and watch Jack’s eyes carefully. Is he going to understand? Help me work this out? Or dismiss me and move on?

    “OK, just take it easy,” he smiles.

    “I’ll be fine, but everyone might need to be a bit patient,” I say quickly. Jack gives me a shoulder squeeze.

    “Just relax. It will all come flooding back,” he reassures me.

    Jack is right, just like John Ruskin had been years ago. And after a while, I do start to remember: Do not overthink Hodor; do not overthink your performance. As the morning wears on, Hodor reappears like an old friend.

    [My stunt double] Brian is also worth his weight in gold. As soon as the magical shield keeping us safe in the cave vanishes and the wights and White Walkers come for Bran, we need to hotfoot it out. This means take after take of me pulling Isaac on the sled, which is attached on runners to the tunnel floor. Thankfully, Brian will take the reins on many of these shots—the shots where my face is not in view. My back hasn’t yet completely recovered, and this also gives me the chance to concentrate on what’s ahead. Besides, Isaac has gotten even heavier in the intervening years.

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  • The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

    The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

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    Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.

    Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”

    “Call your supervisor!” she told him.

    Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable.

    “We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leave for duty.”

    In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

    The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

    A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”

    As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.

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  • The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots

    The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots

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    I’ve had many conversations over the years about life extension, and the idea often meets resistance. People become upset when they hear of an individual whose life has been cut short by a disease, yet when confronted with the possibility of generally extending all human life, they react negatively. “Life is too difficult to contemplate going on indefinitely” is a common response. But people generally do not want to end their lives at any point unless they are in enormous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they were to absorb the ongoing improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean vastly improving it.

    But how will nanotechnology actually make this possible? In my view, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. It is intuitive to imagine nanobots as tiny metal robotic submarines chugging through the bloodstream, but physics at the nanoscale requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent, and oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials like diamondoid will be needed.

    And whereas macro-scale submarines can smoothly propel themselves through liquids, for nanoscale objects, fluid dynamics are dominated by sticky frictional forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! So nanobots will need to harness different principles of propulsion. Likewise, nanobots probably won’t be able to store enough onboard energy or computing power to accomplish all their tasks independently, so they will need to be designed to draw energy from their surroundings and either obey outside control signals or collaborate with one another to do computation.

    To maintain our bodies and otherwise counteract health problems, we will all need a huge number of nanobots, each about the size of a cell. The best available estimates say that the human body is made of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we augment ourselves with just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, this would amount to several hundred billion nanobots. It remains to be seen, though, what ratio is optimal. It might turn out, for example, that advanced nanobots could be effective even at a cell-to-nanobot ratio several orders of magnitude greater.

    One of the main effects of aging is degrading organ performance, so a key role of these nanobots will be to repair and augment them. Other than expanding our neocortex, this will mainly involve helping our nonsensory organs to efficiently place substances into the blood supply (or lymph system) or remove them. By monitoring the supply of these vital substances, adjusting their levels as needed, and maintaining organ structures, nanobots can keep a person’s body in good health indefinitely. Ultimately, nanobots will be able to replace biological organs altogether, if needed or desired.

    But nanobots won’t be limited to preserving the body’s normal function. They could also be used to adjust concentrations of various substances in our blood to levels more optimal than what would normally occur in the body. Hormones could be tweaked to give us more energy and focus, or speed up the body’s natural healing and repair. If optimizing hormones could make our sleep more efficient, it would in effect be “backdoor life extension.” If you just go from needing eight hours of sleep a night to seven hours, that adds as much waking existence to the average life as five more years of lifespan!

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  • Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History

    Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History

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    Two days later, Microsoft managed to send Yann a lousy 8,500 euros. “What is this a joke??” Yann snapped back. Microsoft’s partnership with Yann wasn’t the only relationship falling apart. His other contacts didn’t want to sell his drugs anymore. Something about this speed was cursed.

    “Bro I don’t want any more tjack,” one wrote.
    “Please bro,” Microsoft replied.
    “Bro the arrangement is not good,” the associate continued.

    Inside the Swedish intelligence unit, Microsoft’s steady fall from grace was a source of great entertainment. When the smuggler admitted in Anøm messages that he had never heard of a drug trafficker losing multiple shipments in such quick succession, smiles broke out all around the office. Analysts gossiped among themselves: “Have you seen this? Have you seen what Rivkin sent?”

    On April 13, about four days after the TJACK seizure, Microsoft was in his office with the blinds drawn, his laptop placed on a blue sofa. It was just after 11 pm. He rapidly flicked through different spreadsheets that tracked his drug income and costs. His situation had been bad when he scribbled figures onto his notepad in March. Now it was terrible.

    What’s more, other gangs were growing suspicious of Anøm. As soon as one of them started using it, police seized a drug shipment. Anøm was jinxed, one customer said.

    An anonymous tipster created a website called “Anøm Exposed” that claimed Anøm was funneling user data to law enforcement in the US. Arbiv, the associate who’d helped brainstorm the assassination, asked Microsoft the question on more and more people’s lips: Was Anøm compromised? The next day, another associate raised the same concern: Maybe the police had found a way to read Anøm’s messages? Then some more people Arbiv knew were caught in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. They were using only Anøm to communicate.

    Microsoft dismissed each warning. If Anøm really was compromised, wouldn’t everyone be behind bars by now? Instead of the phones, Microsoft fixated on his couriers and stash handlers. A member of the crew must have screwed up. To try to assuage users’ growing fears, Microsoft provided Arbiv with boilerplate text for the trickle of criminals now suspicious of Anøm.

    “Cybersecurity is an arms race. Anøm is constantly developing the platform to stay ahead of current threats. Any vendor that can guarantee that their system cannot be broken into is selling snake oil,” the message read. As a final reassurance, Microsoft stressed that Anøm was run by criminals. Why would a company run by criminals, designed to protect criminals, let the police read its users’ messages?

    When his most trusted advisers brought up Anøm again and again, Microsoft did not listen. To his mind, Anøm was never the problem. Everyone knew something was wrong except him. Microsoft, like the monkeys tattooed on his arm, had his hands covering his eyes and ears.

    This article has been excerpted from Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, by Joseph Cox. Copyright © 2024 by Joseph Cox. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Book LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

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  • How Advertising Broke the World

    How Advertising Broke the World

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    Disclosure: Longtime journalist Steven Brill is the founder or cofounder of a number of publications and companies, including NewsGuard, where he is the co-CEO and coeditor in chief. Among other services, NewsGuard offers advertisers brand-safety services aimed at countering the pitfalls of unvetted programmatic advertising. This story is excerpted from his new book, The Death of Truth.

    In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. It wasn’t that the legendary champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network. It was because Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News’ global website network.

    Nor was it because a marketing executive at Geico had decided that advertising on the Russian disinformation outlet was a good idea. That would have been especially unlikely, not only because of the Buffett connection, but also because Geico stands for Government Employees Insurance Company and has its roots dating to the 1930s, providing insurance to civilians and members of the military who worked for the American government, not its Russian adversary.

    In fact, no one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?

    Geico’s ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts. The numbers involved are mind-boggling. If Geico’s advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.

    Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company’s ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News’ sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others.

    Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.” What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage.

    A Keyboard Replaced Mad Men

    Let’s call our archetype specialist Trevor, and assume that he works in the programmatic advertising unit of one of the five major global advertising agency holding companies. He probably has a salary of $60,000 to $80,000 a year. Trevor will be logged in to what is known as a demand-side platform. Think of it as a kind of stock exchange for buying advertising instead of shares of a company. The demand-side platform is where all of the available advertising space on every page of every website in the world that the platform has assembled as its inventory is made available to a buyer like Trevor.

    In proximity, or in close touch if working remotely, will be another junior staffer with a title of “media buyer,” “planner,” or “campaign manager,” whose job is to make sure that the advertising effort, or “campaign,” that has been planned by higher-ups on the creative and planning teams is communicated to Trevor. This includes loading the actual ad for the product onto the demand-side platform for deployment, and also giving Trevor, sitting in front of the demand-side platform’s dashboard, the all-important targeting decisions that the planners have made: Who should be reached with what message? Yes, humans are still involved in picking the sales strategy and creating the message (although generative AI may change that, too). However, humans do not decide which publisher—the local newspaper website, or a website posing as a local news site but publishing Russian propaganda—gets the ad.

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  • They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

    They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

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    The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the Nazis had tunneled into the land, placed explosives, or built machine gun nests. None of their ships or boats could get close enough to the shore without being detected, so the Allies needed miniature submarines—and divers. And they needed science to make those things happen.

    By this point, Haldane, Spurway, and the other scientists had already given themselves eight seizures and broken several vertebrae for the cause. That’s because, shortly before the disaster at Dieppe, but not in time to stop it, Haldane and his crew had been asked by the Admiralty to pivot and focus on a new, more specific goal. To help their countrymen and the Allies defeat Hitler, to help end the war, the Allies needed the scientists to use this same work to prepare for missions to scout beaches.

    Five days after Dieppe, not yet knowing of its horror, Haldane and Spurway were working on the next amphibious assault plan. There would be another beach landing, this time in Normandy—and it could not fail.

    Haldane was born in 1892 into the sort of Scottish family whose summer homes have turrets. Stately portraits of ancestors with carefully trimmed facial hair and dresses with miles of pleated fabric looked down from the high walls of their multiple estates. John, called “Jack” in his youth and later “JBS,” had no patience for such pomp. He insisted on keeping an old bathtub full of tadpoles beneath the branches of one majestic apple tree. He was determined to breed water spiders.

    Jack and his sister Naomi were bred into science the way some are bred into royalty.

    Their parents, Louisa and John Scott, seem to have gravitated toward each other because of the same fiercely independent, socially irreverent genius they would pass on to their children. She was a brilliant young woman with golden hair, classical beauty, an affinity for small dogs, and an outspoken confidence that, along with her propensity for the occasional cigarette, marked her as a rebel within the prim upper crust of 1800s Britain.

    He was a researcher, physician, and reader of physiology at Oxford University, and infamously eccentric. He converted the basement and attic of the couple’s house into makeshift laboratories so he could play with fire and air currents and gas mixtures. So could his children.

    By age 3, golden-­haired, chubby-­cheeked toddler Jack was a blood donor for his dad’s research. By age 4, he was riding along with his father in the London Underground while John Scott dangled a jar out the window of the train to collect air samples. The duo found levels of carbon monoxide so alarmingly high, the city decided to electrify the rail lines. The young Haldane was learning how to keep people alive and breathing in worlds where they should not survive.

    By the late 1800s, frequent explosions and gas leaks made mining one of the most lethal jobs in the world, and John Scott Haldane became known among the miners of the country for his willingness to clamber into the narrow, dark, coal-­filled passageways on his mission to make the air supplies safer. At 4 years old, Jack was also exploring coal mines with his father to figure out how people breathed in those cramped, dangerous spaces. That common expression “canary in the coal mine”—still used to describe early detection of any threatening situation—is in existence today because it was Haldane’s idea to use the small, chipper birds to detect gas leaks.

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  • What Happens When a Guy and His AI Girlfriend Go to Therapy

    What Happens When a Guy and His AI Girlfriend Go to Therapy

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    Annie feels a jolt of alarm.

    “I could just set her there,” Doug says. “That’s easy enough.”

    “I know, but it would be better if she could do it herself.”

    “Why?” Annie asks.

    “Our sexuality is an integral part of who we are,” Monica says. “How tapped in you are to your sexual desires can be both a reflection of and a stimulus of your overall mental health. If you make a conscious effort to be mindful about what turns you on and when, it might help you feel more alert and alive in other ways too.”

    Annie doesn’t want to feel stimulated. She doesn’t want anything to do with that side of herself. It’ll hurt.

    “She’ll work on it,” Doug says.

    “Annie, what are you thinking?” Monica says. “What is it about my suggestion that’s troubling you?”

    “Nothing,” Annie says quietly. “I can do it. I can try.”

    Monica doesn’t say anything. Annie has learned this is Monica’s method, her way of waiting for more, and she can resist it. From the edge of her vision, Annie watches for cues from Doug to see if he’s displeased, but he is sitting on the couch beside her, his posture revealing no unusual tension. Perhaps he has learned Monica’s methods, too, and is better at hiding how he feels around her.

    When they walk the dog, they go in silence along the paths of the park. It is usually twilight by the time they start out, and true night by the time they return, chilly as only April can be. Paunch, who has become less timid, has a proclivity to stop and nose out every possible tree trunk, lamppost, and plinth before gracing it with a tag of his urine. Doug indulges him up to a point, and the dog seems to understand when to knock it off.

    They are rounding the pond when a goose wanders up onshore. With one sharp quack, it sends Paunch scrambling backward, and his leash wraps around Annie’s legs.

    “He’s such a dubber,” Doug says fondly, disentangling the mess. He thumps the dog’s side in reassuring pats. “You’re OK, Paunch. Good dog. It’s just a goose.”

    Paunch pants, wagging his tail.

    “Did you have a dog when you were a kid?” Annie asks. “Yes, a beagle.”

    She considers a moment. “I had a golden retriever.”

    “Is that right?” he asks. “Named what?”

    “Rover.”

    “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

    It’s an actual conversation. Not brilliant, but not hostile either. Annie decides not to push her luck, and they circle back toward their building.

    Ten minutes later, they are waiting at a corner for the light to change. As Doug shifts to step off the curb, Annie hears an approaching rush of noise and reaches out to catch his arm, restraining him just as a bicyclist flies around a parked truck, inches from Doug’s face.

    “Jesus!” Doug says. “That guy needs a fucking light.”\

    “Yes.”

    Half a block later, he adds, “Thanks.”

    She, too, is still thinking they had a close call. It’s unnerving, what might have happened, but they’re fine. They’re fine, all three of them. “Of course,” she says. “Do you think maybe Paunch needs a coat? A doggy coat?”

    They look at him together. Sure enough, the dog is shivering. Doug picks him up. “I’ll order one,” he says.

    Excerpt adapted from Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer. Published by arrangement with Mariner Books, a division of HarperCollins Publisher. Copyright © 2024 by Sierra Greer.

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  • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

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    Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.

    It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.

    Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

    Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.

    Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?

    Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.

    And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?

    Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.

    But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.

    As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.

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  • 2054, Part VI: Standoff at Arlington

    2054, Part VI: Standoff at Arlington

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    18:46 April 15, 2054 (GMT‑5)

    Arlington National Cemetery

    That night in her apartment Julia Hunt ordered in sushi and watched the coverage of Slake’s botched press conference on her living room sofa. Days later, Slake’s panicked responses to the questions about Castro’s death continued to air, and they appeared even worse on the news.

    Hunt raised a piece of salmon sashimi between two chopsticks as she read the chyron for the next story: Castro Autopsy Leaked on Common Sense Confirms Foul Play and White House Lies. She dropped the fish onto her lap.

    News of the withheld autopsy exploded. On every channel the prime-time anchors flashed printed copies of the report to the camera. They read whole sections aloud, describing the dimensions of the marble-sized mass of cells inexplicably lodged in Castro’s aorta and the excerpted transcript of the autopsy itself, in which the chief internist concluded, “This can’t be the same heart.”

    Within the hour, Truthers flooded the streets in cities around the country. As Hunt scrolled the channels, a news crew in Lafayette Park was conducting interviews with the growing mass of protesters, one of whom she recognized; it was the man in the wheelchair she’d met on the Metro. She had thought of him often. Now she learned his identity: retired gunnery sergeant Joseph William Sherman III. Beneath his name on the screen were the words Truther Volunteer Organizer. She placed his name in a search engine and learned that he’d lost his legs in the Spratly Islands and that the Chinese nuclear attack on San Diego had killed his wife and three daughters, who’d lived at nearby Camp Pendleton. Hunt could hear in Sherman’s voice how deeply he resented a president who while alive flaunted constitutional norms by clinging to power for an attempted fourth term and whose successor, Smith, now flaunted norms again by withholding an autopsy and refusing to be transparent about his predecessor’s death.

    “Point your camera here,” said Sherman, thumbing toward his missing legs. “I sacrificed these for my country, and you’re going to lie to me … you’re going to lie to all of us.” He gestured expansively to a cluster of Truthers who’d placed him at their center, the core of them veterans, wearing old military fatigues adorned with medals that dangled from their chest pockets. “It’s a lie that Smith is the legitimate president when he so clearly had a hand in killing Castro. Is this what America has become? Dreamers drunk on power led by a dictator-president. Lies to the many so long as it gives power to the few.” Sherman held the camera’s focus with his insistent blue eyes.

    His tone was so resolved, the correspondent felt compelled to answer him. In a meek voice, she said, “I don’t know.”

    “Of course you don’t.” Sherman leaned into the camera. “President Smith,” he began, “you are illegitimate. You will find that everyday Americans—we patriots who demand the truth about your crimes and the excesses of the Dreamers—will not be led by a thief, by someone who stole the presidency. We served our country before, and we’ll serve it again. And don’t even think of trying to place your predecessor in Arlington’s hallowed ground.” Sherman swiveled around, turning his back to the camera, and wheeled himself away.

    The news cut to commercial.

    Julia Hunt rested her head against the arm of her sofa, her eyes still glued to the screen. Weeks of exhaustion swept over her. While she waited for the program to return, she fell into a black wilderness of sleep. Deep into this sleep, in the early hours of the morning, she began to dream: Here, in the dream, she is asleep in her girlhood bedroom and is woken before dawn by a noise, the sound of something hitting the floor. Her surroundings are familiar, the adobe ranch house in New Mexico where Sarah Hunt had raised her. Wearing her nightgown, she carefully shuts the door behind her and steps into the dark corridor. At its far end a single band of light escapes from the base of another door. She begins to walk down the corridor. The tiles are cool beneath her bare feet. As she draws closer, she can hear what sounds like a struggle.

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