LJ Idol 9.9: Keep Calm and...

Ayn Pelletier took a deep breath, clutched the sheaf of files she held close to her chest, and knocked on her boss's door.

"Enter!" came the response. Pelletier opened the door, stepped inside the room, and closed the door behind her. The face of Andrew Chapman, the man behind the room's desk, displayed a slight trace of surprise at Pelletier's appearance, as very few things would cause the young woman to step away from her office, with its computers, whiteboards, and other analysis tools. "Sit," said Chapman, and though he did not mean it to, the word came out as a command. After Ayn sat down, Chapman softened his features and smiled as he asked, "To what do I owe this honor?"

"I'm pretty sure I've found a clandestine communications channel," said Pelletier, with no preamble. "I'm also pretty sure it's what Mansfield was trying to put his finger on when he went missing six months ago." Chapman pursed his lips and nodded. Mansfield's disappearance had wrought havoc within the agency—an agency so "black" that only the NSA was aware of its existence, and then only vaguely. After all investigations were complete and fingers pointed every which way, the agency's director had been replaced by a political appointee whose grasp of intelligence was as feeble as his campaign contributions were substantial.

Then Chapman smiled, for whenever Pelletier spoke, you could take what she said to the bank. "So, who's communicating?" he asked.

"You're going to find this pretty unbelievable, but you've got to hear me out," said Pelletier. Chapman nodded. He would sooner slice off one of his own fingers than not hear everything Pelletier had to say.

"Who's communicating?" Pelletier repeated the question, and then answered, "It's nobody. And everybody. You. Me. Some kid trying to hack the Great Firewall of China... basically everybody on the planet." She paused to see Chapman's reaction.

"That's some kind of 'clandestine channel'!" said Chapman, with a smile. "But never mind me and my smart remarks," he said, after a beat. "Please continue." He was still smiling.

"Have you ever heard of memes?" asked Pelletier.

"Sure," said Chapman. "My kids talk about them all the time. 'Memes' sound like a scholarly way of describing what, in my day, were called 'crazes' or 'fads.' Things like the hula hoop or telling people to 'look it up in your Funk-and-Wagnalls'. There's a lot more of them now, of course, thanks to the Internet. What do memes have to do with this channel of yours?"

"Well," said Pelletier, ignoring her boss's question, "a meme covers a bit more than just fads. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins devoted a section of text to the propagation of ideas and cultures, and how such propagation resembled what genes do. So he posited the existence of units he called memes, which included tunes, catch phrases, fashions, techniques for building arches—or nuclear reactors—or any idea at all, really."

Chapman held his peace. Pelletier continued: "Extending this line of reasoning suggests that we humans are vehicles for the survival of memes—of ideas—and if that's true, then it's entirely possible that when we act in concert with the ideas that we hold, our behavior is not substantially different from that of a mouse that has lost its instinctive fear of cats because it has been infected with Toxoplasma gondii parasite, whose 'goal' (inasmuch as a single-celled organism can be said to have one) is to end up in a cat's digestive tract, and from there, the cat's brain. So when we think we're being clever sharing something online, it's actually a meme's way of figuring out how to modify human behavior to maximize its own survival and propagation. In its own crazy way, what's going on is communication to achieve an end."

Chapman remained silent for what seemed like several minutes.

"Okay," he began, cautiously. "So what's the threat? Why should we worry about, say, a bunch of goofballs doing bad imitations of Miley Cyrus and her wrecking ball, or a ceramics company selling coffee cups that say 'Keep Calm and Drink Decaf'?"

"Because nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come," said Pelletier. "Or as Victor Hugo said it: 'On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées.'"

"'One resists the invasion of armies, one does not resist the invasion of ideas', right?" translated Chapman. Pelletier nodded. "But I still don't see the threat," said Chapman.

"You're not supposed to," said Pelletier. "I'm not supposed to. None of us are. That's the point. That said, for all we know, the creation of the Internet was something driven by memes to achieve the next level of their evolution, by creating a massive environment for their rapid propagation and mutation, to enable them to more efficiently shape themselves by shaping us."

As Chapman digested that, Pelletier took a deep breath and looked directly up at the ceiling. She then exhaled, lowering her chin and turning her head to the left as she did so. Her pensive gaze came to rest on a point a few feet to her left. She then raised her eyes to meet Chapman's.

"Frankly, if I were you," said Pelletier, "I'd think I'm crazy."

The thought had crossed Chapman's mind, but he said: "Nothing of the sort. Your analysis has always been spot on, but I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around what you've just laid out for me. Not only that, but I'll need evidence of some concrete act having been taken against this country before I can even think of taking this to the director. You mentioned something about Mansfield?"

"Yes, I was getting to that. The closest thing to what you'd consider 'evidence' was a series of anomalies I think I found in Mansfield's analysis," said Pelletier.

"What anomalies?" asked Chapman.

"I've spent a lot of time poring over his notes," began Pelletier, "hoping to find what others might have missed in the investigation into his disappearance. Instead, all I found was pretty exhaustive analysis of the dynamics of various memes—things like the IP addresses of the participants, changes various participants made to the root idea, and so on—and it finally dawned on me... maybe that's what was missed! It turns out that, starting three years ago, Mansfield began to find memes that originated from..., well,... nowhere. Which simply isn't possible. The first few memes fizzled out after a day or two, but then a few enjoyed moderate popularity, until finally, last year, one such 'anomalous meme'—Mansfield's name for them—resulted in the formation of a flash mob that caused the seemingly accidental deaths of three people in Venice. You remember that?"

Chapman nodded. "The ensuing investigation found no premeditation and no specific people to blame, though some of the flash mod participants did serve some jail time," he said. "Are you saying the deaths were caused by a meme?"

"The idea for that flash mob not only came from an anomalous meme, but it had just the right something to appeal to certain personality types who, acting in concert the way they did, could only have achieved the end that occurred. And it turns out one of the victims was a prominent economist who exerted a great deal of influence on European Union monetary policy as it relates to the United States," said Pelletier.

"That doesn't prove anything," said Chapman. "What has your own independent analysis turned up?"

Pelletier's brow furrowed. "To be frank, I was so taken with Mansfield's notes that I didn't even think of doing any analysis on my own until I fully understood what he was getting at, and once I did, it turned out I had done the right thing, because Mr. Chapman, I think Mansfield's own research—even from behind our agency's firewalls and using our proxies and virtual networks—was what caused his disappearance."

As he absorbed this and everything else Pelletier had said, Chapman thought about how the agency's director might react if he were to learn of Pelletier's analysis. It occurred to Chapman that, if Pelletier was right and there really were memes out there trying to bury what Mansfield (and now Pelletier) had discovered, the director's general cluelessness was more than adequate to serve that end. Chapman sighed. Long ago, as a young officer, he had learned to trust the instincts of his subordinates, and he was not going to second-guess himself now. If Pelletier was right...

"So what do you want to do?" he asked. "What do you need from me?"

"I need to figure out a fundamentally new way—a safe way—to do an analysis to check and expand on Mansfield's work," said Pelletier.

"So get on it," said Chapman. "I'll run interference for you. It occurs to me that—if Mansfield's analysis is correct—we may very well have embarked on humanity's first war, not of ideas, but with them."