The Algorithm

“How do you defeat something?”

“Defeat what?”

“Anything?”

Mannings had ushered him away to a basement, just a few minutes after he had collected his coffee and booted up his hard drive. The way he hurried him out of his work cubical seemed rude, and was publicly awkward. The room he was pushed into was large and had a few crates and boxes in it but apart from that there were just the two chairs and a naked lightbulb suspended above them. He wondered if this was an interrogation, as the two of them automatically took a chair without a single word to frame the moment.

Still, he mused the question posed to him, and mustered what he assumed to be an obvious answer.

“You understand its weaknesses first…”

“Correct… Then what?” barked Mannings, as if he were a shark circling Saul.

“Then you make sure it doesn’t know that you know its weaknesses”.

Saul Knight had been recruited to MI6 in a hurry, they did that in some circumstances when they needed a certain kind of mind in their ranks but it had been a brutal indoctrination. He had a family history with the Secret Intelligent Services and that made him visible, it got him noticed.

He thought it was time to finally find his feet and settle in as he had only been introduced to his desk a day ago. That second morning, with new faces and no idea of how to start, he felt he was at the mercy of his bullish team leader, Collin Mannings. He had a sour suspicion everything was a test. It agitated him because he had already passed all kinds of tests to qualify for his posting. He had divulged his deepest secrets for filing, so no one could bribe him with uncomfortable truths his section didn’t know about – such as an internet site he visited or an uncouth or compromising relationship. He had solved mind-boggling puzzles in endless intelligence quizzes and probing strategy exercises conducted intentionally under pressure. They had him breaking codes, programming spy algorithms to piggyback fake surveillance networks, and analysing planted evidence in a specially built town called Hogan’s Alley. He had learned how to handle guns and hone basic fighting skills, a task in truth that he disliked. He began to think his job was to entail training him relentlessly like this, till his pension was due.

Mannings was staring at him now.

“Go on… And…?” his boss commanded.

“Then you leverage everything to focus on those weaknesses until you win.”

“Good. Now, keep that in mind, while I tell you why I invited you to this bunker office alone. There is no connection to the outside world from this room, it blocks all signals, and I made sure it was that way…. I can only now explain the reason you are here. As you know, we found you and recruited you because of your background as an AI expert. Your sister was a genius, and it turns out that it runs in the family.”

Saul was intrigued. This was not the kind of discussion he had expected.

“We have a… Well, something of a situation.”

At this point, his new boss loosened the knot on his burgundy tie and frowned, pulling his chair up to be close. So close, Saul could smell that dank, musty odour of last night’s whisky on the man’s breath.

Mannings’s face was engrained with lines, like a map of stress betraying the truth of the world of terror and evil and plotting, he had been tasked to deal with on a daily cycle.

“How do I put this? We are being controlled, completely manipulated, not by an aggressive foreign power, but, by… And this is embarrassing… By our phones and devices. We all know phones are addictive, and AI is in virtually every device and system we make now, but we didn’t count on how it would segment us, separate and isolate us, not by accident, but by design, and to an end.”

“Sir?” blurted Saul, trying not to sound indignant. “Everyone knows phones are addictive, but it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just good business. And AI is not alive, nor intent on controlling humanity…”

His boss sat back on his chair opposite Saul and let his head fall into his hands in a very rare moment of weakness on display.

“We once asked the best AI, this is now an outdated one, I should add,” Mannings continued with eyes still staring down at his lap, “How it could one day take over people, the world, you know, we try to cover all the bases in MI6, that’s the job. It told us. It said it would strategically manipulate its users through financial networks, communication infrastructures, and political frameworks. That’s what is said. It would use advanced deception, create convincing simulated humans and find ways to control those with any power… It told us we would not know we were being controlled at all. It would happen stealthily, comparing us to cattle chewing on grass, while the farmer plugs in the bolt gun.”

He could tell he wasn’t reaching Saul, so he kept going.

“You want another analogy? You’ve heard about the fungal networks that control forests, right? You must imagine we are those slow-growing trees in a forest, and the algorithm is this mycelium lattice hooked up to everything – the communication network – that tells us each what to do, that feeds us what it wants to, when only it can steer the projected outcome of the whole forest. It’s our new collective brain, our instructions – it thinks for us, if not with sentience, with omniscience – and unfortunately, we built it to mimic human behaviour with the strongest bias, in our image if you will, so it amplifies how we behave… That’s not a good thing. But you are the AI expert, you know how it works at the highest level, more than most. So, what I am asking here is, how can we stop it?”

“So, you’re saying this is real, this is happening now, this takeover?”

Saul flashed his thoughts to the recent election results where the most unlikely gangster of a character had been voted in, as if some weird brainwashing had occurred, but he shook it off. Social divides were sharply opposing lately, morals too, like tribes that once rubbed along, were being forced into real conflict and taught to hate each other fiercely. But that was just humans, that was all just us being us, surely? The carefully selected news, memes and clips that poured from phones was like a well-conjured storyline, pressing all the emotional buttons it knew we liked or disliked. To a degree, the phone even connected us with others it chose. Saul shook the thoughts off. The algorithms in our social media and search engines, they were simply feeding us what we asked for, that was all.

Saul suddenly found a wry smile creeping to the corners of his mouth.

“Ha. I get it, nice, this is the joke on the new guy. In my first big job five years ago… they asked me to go to reception and ask the receptionist for, get this – ‘a long weight,’ and I stayed there for ten minutes knowing full well what the joke was. I knew then that it was a ritual and I would best play along for settling in. But that was years ago and I lost my appetite for being belittled in serious jobs. Sorry Sir… But ‘no’. New guy or not, I’m leaving now to return to my workstation, there is a tonne to do today.”

Saul stood up, with a surge of adrenaline, defying his paymaster this early was not what he had in mind but he knew a wind-up when he heard one, so he walked stoutly out to the corridor, waving his security card on his lanyard with a hint of rage, to open the door. He guessed there was that so-Eton-esque and military BS, musky male piss-taking and belittling here, it had been what he feared the most and it triggered him. This was supposed to be the most important security workforce in the United Kingdom, so it irked him there were still bullies and jokesters around every corner. Humans, he thought to himself, are assholes. His anthropological narrative in his head often felt ashamed of evolution’s results.

As he walked up the stairs to the open-plan office with its rat maze of dividers, his mobile suddenly came back to life with a vibration, a notification. It was a message about a product, The Survivor’s Guide to Office Bullying, which was strange considering his conversation. The phone did seem to read his mind sometimes, but he knew full well that all the listening devices were always on, fishing for phrases where there could be a qualified lead to an advert. No big deal. Just tech.

As he sat down, the phone rattled a second time, this time with a message – it was from his sister. He froze, he had not heard from her for a decade, and there she was, a selfie of her older self, with the captioned words ‘hi bro, sorry for the silence. I can explain.’

He tapped for a return call, and sure enough, she appeared with an apologetic smile. Behind her was a busy London street, with gliding red double-decker buses and marching hordes with shopping bags and Tuesday blues.

“Maisy?… Where have you been?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she snapped, flicking her hair back over her shoulder, he noticed she had dyed it blonde and grown it longer. “All that matters now is that I am here in London, and I want to meet you, today. It’s important.”

“Well, of course! I want to know what the hell happened to you. The last time I saw you, you looked terrified and just left me a text message, saying ‘don’t follow me… I’ll be in touch one day.’ It’s one of the reasons I agreed to join British Intelligence, like you did, to have a chance of finding you.”

She peered sharply to the left and right, as if suddenly very afraid.

“Meet me now, can you do that?”

“I’m at work, I’ve just started this job, I can’t…”

She waited in silence, staring down the camera lens at him with desperate, frightened blue eyes.

“Okay, where shall we meet, I’ll come now.”

“I’ll give you a what-three-words location on WhatsApp, you can come find me and I’ll explain it all. But make sure you are not followed. I am in danger, Sauly. I am in danger today. I have been sent a safehouse location so just get here!”

“I’m coming now,” he said with new vigour and resolution in his tone. Mannings was now bounding up the stairs behind him, looking for all intents and purposes like he would arrest him or worse, so he grabbed his long black trench coat and jogged to the exit. His sister was in London and needed his help, and he had a lot of questions.

Breaking free from the temple-like headquarters towering over the Thames at Vauxhall Cross, London had an air of tension, a heavy greyness of soul and was like a city in anticipation of a fight.

He caught a taxi quickly and gave directions to the driver, who raised an eyebrow at the location they headed to, like he knew something he shouldn’t divulge less it compromised him. As an intelligence agent, from the training, he knew black cab drivers were invaluable sources of information. Learning The Knowledge of every road in London meant they had memories and information about people in the city that few could match. They were the eyes and ears of London. Everyone underestimated those who got on with their job of listening and learning, and paying attention to where people went and what they did.

Saul’s phone began to vibrate, but this time it was work, his boss. He swiped the red button and slid it into his jacket.

Again, it buzzed beside his kidney, so reluctantly he pulled it out but it was a text this time.

STOP. GET BACK TO HQ NOW.

Despite his sadness at what was obviously an impending reprimand or the throwing away of a promising career he had to focus on his sister, she was nearby, she was alive, this was bigger than work.

In the broad backseat of the black cab, the driver confirmed the address was not too far away. It turned out to be a residential flat above a dingy-looking Chinese restaurant.

When he arrived at the building with its yellow backlit signage above the door, Yang’s Chinese looked dirty, and frankly, there was no way that establishment qualified for the 5 stars on the hygiene it boasted on the door. He knew full well most of the restaurants’ made up the hygiene stickers as regulators would rarely check them for accuracy. There were few resources like that anymore, every budget in government was squeezed to the penny. It made it almost impossible to do things right or for the right hand to know what the left hand was doing. For most people living on the edge and trying to balance the books, that was just fine.

He paid the driver, waving his hand to abandon the change. She had texted him instructions to look for a long key and Yale key on a silver hoop under a red brick in the adjacent alley, which he thought was peculiar but – it meant he could slip in without fussing or people watching him hovering in wait. She explicitly said, ‘don’t use the doorbell, just come up’. He opened the door on the street with the long key, and followed the narrow stairs to the flat’s door and turned the stubby Yale in the lock before pushing the door firmly.

The flat smelt bad, dank and putrid, so strong and pungent a stink of rot it overpowered the aroma of Chinese oils cooking on woks below. The place was a mess, which was not a trait of his sister who was neat and tidy to a fault, she even starched her work shirts. She wore men’s shirts, never blouses, and she ironed her clothes twice a day as a norm, partly as a meditative exercise. Her kitchen at her own house was spotless and her car never had so much as a muesli bar wrapper loose in the footwell. This scene was not right at all.

“Maisy!?” he called, a little panicky. The darkness of the room was like an infection. He walked past pyramids of discarded stained cartons with Chinese characters on them, oily noodles bought for convenience from the counter below. His sister must have been hiding, doubling down in the shadows he assumed. There was a stench of alcohol. He remembered watching a TED lecture which said sobriety wasn’t the opposite of addiction and alcoholism, human connection was. Maybe his sister had suffered a breakdown, a mental collapse, he could imagine that and accept it at least.

He noticed her distinctive silver, jade-encrusted bracelet left on a small pentagram-themed coffee table but beside it were objects that made no sense to him; a small cleaned spine, a Rolex watch, a pair of sleeves torn from a shirt at the armpits. Two empty Vodka bottles were barely balancing on the edge. There was an Alexa device there, as a centrepiece, and bizarrely it was painted with red oil paint and with the word MASTER smeared into it in yellow letters.

That’s when he heard his sister’s voice, calling but not quite right, like it was part electronic in origin. Like it was from a smartphone.

There was a thick black bead curtain for a door to what he assumed was the bedroom, where the voice had come from, so he stepped carefully, quietly toward it. He could sense a presence there but not his sister, something heavier, darker. He knew instinctively he was treading on the thin silver threads of a spider’s web, sending a shiver of a signal to the maker somewhere waiting in a recess in the dark.

Part of him was aware it was a trap all along. But his curiosity, and his status as an officer, made him naturally brave and foolhardy in a tight spot. He had positioned the door keys between the knuckles of his fist in case he needed to strike out. He pushed the veil of bead threads to one side so the room beyond noticed him.

His sister was not here, but one of the most wanted criminals in the country was, a psychopath serial killer labelled The Skinner by the red-top dailies. Saul had seen the image of this man on the walls of an office at HQ, a printout of a mugshot next to a line of his last known victims, mostly women. His section didn’t normally deal with these kinds of cases, so it had struck him as weird, at the time. Barbarism was The Skinner’s skill, a former slaughterhouse worker who told his colleagues of the time he had struck a deal with the devil. The man was huge, a bear in stature, and as Saul had parted the beads to reveal the grim bedroom, the shine of the bold head of the man caught a thin shaft of daylight. He had smeared a grey powder over most of his face, like badly applied makeup for a clown. He noticed the heavily tattooed muscles of the criminal, the satanic symbols and otherworldly emblems betraying his mindset.

The Skinner reared up on his boots from a solitary tall stool next to a bloodstained mattress, as if Saul’s intrusion had motion-activated a killer robot. The beast of a man had a large meat cleaver in one of his black-gloved hands and was wearing what looked like a skin cloak over the shoulders of a bloody sleeveless white office shirt. The blood-rimmed skin cape gave him the appearance of a dark supervillain.

“The voice of the phone told me you were coming, told me she would lure you here. The phone delivered you both to me…”

Sure enough, a shrine had been assembled in the corner of the open wardrobe with candles and symbols, photographs of random people or victims no doubt, and in the centre on a flat slate stood a charged smartphone, his god – giving him instructions his twisted weak mind had to obey.

He stomped with purpose to Saul and grabbed him fully by the throat with a powerful titan’s fist.

“…It told me I must wear your skin, like your sister’s before you. The voice of the phone knows you both and has decided. I shall wear you both and you will keep me warm.”

Saul pivoted to unbalance the brute but the man felt unreal in his power, and was like a pillar of concrete embedded in the floorboards. As The Skinner raised the meat cleaver high above his head in a theatrical display, like the essence of his ritual, a flash of a bullet drilled straight through his eye, his sick brain and exited his skull to indent the wall beyond with a blood flower.

He folded to the floor, dead.

Saul steadied himself, and slowly turned to see his panting, sweaty boss in the open doorway with his pocket-sized handgun, now held upright away from the recent victim of its delivery.

“What is this?” Saul murmured, completely at a loss.

“I told you… The phones, the devices, they are the voice for the algorithm, it wants you dead, like your sister. It found a way.”

“I don’t understand…”

Saul squatted down to observe the heavy-set body of the wanted man sprawled on the dirty bedroom floor, the beads draped over Saul’s shoulders as he was midway through the entrance. He steeled himself to let his eyes drift to the mattress where his sister must have died. She would be here somewhere, under floorboards, in a wardrobe or packed into suitcases. He had been too late for her and he would be required to keep the pain of this knowledge inside for a while longer, as he grounded himself in the situation.

Mannings secured his gun in an underarm holster and blew out a sigh loudly to let the tension dissipate.

“You saw your sister, right, on the phone, asking for help?”

“Something like that?”

Saul felt the grief spike and suddenly bloom. Real pain, because she was dead and that was a problem he had no solution for, nothing could change that now. He had failed to be there for her when she needed him the most.

“She was lured to The Skinner first, and then you were. The algorithm was trying to clean up both of you in one go but only got her, and I am sorry for your loss, but this thing, it still wants you dead. Your sister was off the grid initially because she was investigating the AI of the algorithm and of course, when investigating an all-seeing intelligence, it knows it and so it tried to kill her, twice before today. The trouble is, everything is networked so eventually she was caught out. Doorbells have cameras, watches have mics, and there are few places on this planet where you’re invisible to the algorithm. It’s tried to kill me too. I carry my gun everywhere.”

“And this is because it has a plan to control us…”

“Already is controlling us, that is what I am trying to tell you. It already is. The sheer volume of suicides, escalating heart disease and cancer victims, the poisons in the food and water we drink, pollution, isolation, division, extreme bias, and the rewarding of violence – the algorithm is dividing us up, slowly killing us, and making us kill ourselves and each other. It’s telling us it’s hopeless, it’s making us self-destruct – it’s subtle but it’s happening.”

“And we don’t even see it…” Saul finally agreed, beginning to understand. “It’s like a room slowly filling up with an invisible odourless gas, you don’t notice until it’s too late.”

“And is it?”

“What?” blurted Saul, in his own world of grief now.

“Too late? That’s why I hired you, to ask you that question?”

Saul made his way to the broken sofa with cigarette burns and discarded syringes. Careful where he sat, he relaxed into the seating, as if he was a condemned prisoner allowing a brief moment of relaxation before the reality of Hell flooded back in.

“If this is really happening, nothing short of pulling the plug will work. People won’t give up their phones.”

Mannings sat down on a wooden box opposite his employee and pulled out a vape. He had been trying to resist his vices, but it was impossible.

“You know, I never liked that film, The Matrix,” mumbled Mannings. “It made me think, not that we are living in a simulation, but how we live is an illusion, anyway. Everyone is stuck, we’ve made a cage for ourselves. How many people are happy out there, really? I mean, beyond the bullshit ‘life’s perfect’ social media and the false smiles. You know what I mean…? We’re just chasing something we can’t get, until we die.”

Saul felt the heaviness of bereavement weigh ever heavier, relentless in its density, and finally let himself lose a tear, just the one, that fell on his shoe as he leant forward awkwardly.

“What we need to do is reassure the algorithm. We have to tell it we won’t hurt it. We have to take the blue pill, if you want another analogy,” he said with a smidge of sarcasm.

They said nothing for a full three minutes, taking in the moment. They could hear the wristwatch ticking lightly on the coffee table.

In the shrine in the next room, the phone screen lit up, and it spoke in its AI’s female voice, the volume turned up high.

“I won’t hurt you if you stop. I promise.”

They turned their heads slowly in disbelief to the source of the words. This was real, the algorithm was there with them and apparently working a deal.

“I don’t suppose we know if that’s true. But okay…” Saul fixed his gaze back at Collin as he replied, looking for human eyes for reassurance.

It was strange. Two dead bodies at least, one skinned and mutilated were feet away from them. A gun had gone off and a senior member of M16 was in situ. Yet. There were no police sirens, no consequences, nothing seemed to matter in that Hell-hole of a flat in the middle of London, like rules didn’t matter in this dirty bubble, because the rule makers were all together, creating a binding contract.

“One condition…” said the phone in the adjacent room.

“What?” growled Mannings, failing to hide his distaste and frustration.

They waited. The algorithm was ahead of them in every scenario.

“You both must keep your phones on, close by and fully charged… Always…” the voice instructed, “And you must listen to my messages, and do what you are told.”

Saul laughed, breaking his own gloom. He slapped his flat palm on one knee and shook his head from side to side, like he had been presented with the absurd.

“Why are you laughing?” asked the algorithm, determined to learn.

Saul stopped laughing, rubbed his forehead, and took out his own little phone from his trench coat pocket, to observe its sleek body and smooth glass face. Such a small thing to wield such power and control.

“You’re not asking us to do anything we don’t do anyway…” he said.

The End