.
Moab Project investigated and documented the operational details of the hoax in forensic detail, right up to the point where each separate trail of evidence dead-ended in perfect cryptographic anonymity.
The total budget for the hoax was estimated to have been less than one million dollars. The networks had actually paid out more than that for the privilege of airing fake footage supplied by the hoaxers. Those payments, made in Bitcoin, had gone to anonymous overseas accounts presumably controlled by the hoaxers. Between that and short-selling various affected stocks on Wall Street, it appeared that they had paid for the exploit many times over.
Which was a mere detail when set against the thirty-one deaths and the direct economic losses, which were way into the tens of billions. Lawsuits filed against social media companies—including Lyke—depressed their valuations, distracted their executives, and took years to resolve.
The culprit was at first assumed to be an arm of Russian or Chinese intelligence. But the further the investigation went, the less likely this seemed. Some of the fake footage had originated from a Chinese computer graphics firm, but this proved nothing. The scripts and other written material, such as fake blogs and social media postings, seemed to have been written by native English speakers.
More people than just Corvallis began to suspect Elmo Shepherd of being the mastermind. He was a major shareholder, or a member of the board of directors, of more than one company that would profit from what came next. He was libertarian minded, a Bitcoin advocate. And he was from Utah, with a lot of local practical knowledge of conditions on the ground there. And so one school of thought said that he must have done it.
The opposing school of thought said simply “nah.” Simply “nah.” It was too ridiculous—too far-fetched. The connection to El’s home state was a mere coincidence, or a deliberate scheme to cast suspicion on him.
Corvallis and Maeve visited Moab less and less frequently as raising Vern made a stay-at-home life seem like the best thing in the world. Two years later they had a daughter named Catherine, and a year after that they adopted Eduardo from Guatemala. Maeve chose not to work full-time. A nanny and a housekeeper, and the many less visible privileges of wealth, gave her enough free time to think about and to lay the groundwork for the VEIL Project, which she hoped would one day finish what she and Verna had started with Sthetix. The Moab hoax receded into the past with swiftness that seemed extraordinary when, years later, Corvallis would, from time to time, be reminded of it somehow, and have cause to review the events in his memory. He, along with many others in the tech world, had arrived at the conclusion that the answer to the riddle must be known by the NSA and other such top secret agencies that had the wherewithal to penetrate the cryptographic screen in which the hoax had been so meticulously shrouded. One day the answer would leak out as some disgruntled employee went rogue or some document was declassified.
When the answer came to him, it came from a surprising quarter. Corvallis attended a meeting at the headquarters of the Forthrast Family Foundation in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle. The meeting’s purpose was to go over some dry but necessary legal matters with people representing Elmo Shepherd’s nonprofit. After several years of intensive R & D, and the expenditure of nearly two billion dollars pooled by Forthrast-, Waterhouse-, and Shepherd-funded entities, they’d finally constructed an ion-beam scanning device capable of capturing the full connectome of a human brain, and the “back end” of hardware and software needed to process the data that would pour out of such a machine. Fifteen hundred patent applications had been filed: enough to keep a phalanx of patent attorneys and paralegals busy for years. Twelve different major universities and medical centers were involved. Brilliant young lawyers were building their entire careers around the attendant complexities. A few of them were in this meeting, presenting ready-to-sign documents on which they’d toiled for years. Corvallis, Zula, and others were there just to sign them.
One of the people on Elmo Shepherd’s side of the table was pretty senior—surprisingly so given that all of the big decisions had already been made by this point. He met Corvallis’s eye from time to time, and checked his watch, and gazed out the window in a manner that seemed significant, and indeed when the meeting concluded he approached Corvallis and inquired in the most gentle and polite way whether he might have a moment of private time with him.
His name was Sinjin Kerr. Depending on who was keeping score he was Elmo Shepherd’s first-, second-, or third-most important legal henchman. His role was generally that of Good Cop. In his appearance and grooming he was a straight-from-central-casting Harvard/Yale product with swept-back hair, rimless glasses, and an impeccable suit, protected for this occasion under an overcoat.
They ended up strolling down to the lakefront and, seemingly on the spur of the moment, renting a little electric boat from a business that catered to the tourist trade. Business was light because spring was being a little slow to turn into summer. It was cool and the lenses of Sinjin’s glasses were already flecked with tiny droplets of rain.
Sinjin sat down at the controls and piloted the boat out into the middle of the little lake. This had always been monitored by steep hills to the east and west but during the last couple of decades had been hemmed in along its southern reach by high-rise buildings occupied by tech companies. Some vestiges of old Seattle remained, including a seaplane terminal that helped make life good for tourists and for geeks who liked quick getaways to Vancouver or the San Juan Islands. Everyone who lived and worked within earshot had grown accustomed to the occasional sound of propellers coming up to speed as one of these planes made its takeoff run across the lake.
The water was a bit choppy, as the wind had come up and brought with it a gentle but assiduous rain. They deployed the boat’s folding canvas cover, snapping it to the top edge of the windshield. Sinjin dropped the throttle to the minimum needed to maintain headway and pottered about, keeping an eye out for outgoing and incoming planes. As this seemingly pointless idyll went on, Corvallis got the impression that he was timing some of his utterances so that the most important words would be spoken just when a seaplane was droning overhead. Sometimes Sinjin would turn toward Corvallis, prop an elbow casually on the boat’s dashboard, and raise his hand to cover his mouth. Only later, in memory, did Corvallis understand that he had done so to hide his message from any lip readers who might be tracking them through telescopes.
They’d been chatting about their respective families. Catching up with each other, as people did when they were maintaining these long-running, sporadic business relationships.
“You might find it a curious thing, Corvallis, that your family is an inadvertent, and happy, by-product of something that Mr. Shepherd was involved with,” Sinjin mumbled through his fingers as a plane buzzed past them at full throttle.
Corvallis was a while processing that news. There was only one way to make sense of it: El was behind the Moab hoax that had brought Maeve and Corvallis together.
Sinjin seemed to derive a bit of light amusement from watching him think about it. “Your next question ought to be, why did I just tell you that?”
“Not because you get a kick out of snitching on your client, I’m guessing.”
Sinjin thought that was funny. “Indeed. Otherwise I’d have a very fun, very brief career. No, it’s my job to look out for Mr. Shepherd’s interests. I’m divulging this to you, and you only, because the time has come when his interests are best served by allowing you, Corvallis, to have a broader understanding of the context within which Mr. Shepherd and his foundations and companies have been operating.”
“I’ve suspected from day one that El was responsible for Moab,” Corvallis said. “Up to a point it kind of made sense. The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants. So rotten that rot was the only thing that was holding it together. So I can totally see why El or anyone with a shred of crypto knowledge would want to just burn it down. To make it so that no one would ever trust it again. Moab was a pretty effective way of doing that, and ENSU came along right on its heels and dumped a 747-load of gasoline on that fire. But the other