Distraction - Bruce Sterling [38]
“The Senator hasn’t. But you sure have. Repeatedly.”
Oscar shrugged. “Okay, obviously we haven’t much use for the Governor. The guy’s a crooked demagogue. But we’re not pushing that. As far as the scandal goes, if anything, we’re Huey’s tactical allies at the moment.”
“Don’t be naive. Green Huey doesn’t think the way you guys think. He’s not some go-along get-along pol, who makes tactical deals with the opposition. Huey is always the center of Huey’s universe. So you’re for him, or you’re agin him.”
“Why would Huey make unnecessary enemies? That’s just not smart politics.”
“Huey does make enemies. He enjoys it. It’s part of his game. It always has been. Huey’s a smart pol all right, but he can be a one-man goon squad. He learned that when he worked in Texas for Senator Dougal.”
Oscar frowned. “Look, Dougal’s out of the picture now. He’s finished, history. If Dougal wasn’t in the dry-out clinic, he’d probably be in jail.”
Fontenot glanced around them with reflexive suspicion. “You shouldn’t talk like an attack ad when you’re standing inside a place that Dougal built. This lab was always Dougal’s favorite project. And as for Huey, he used to work in here. You’re walking in Huey’s footsteps. When he was the Senator’s chief of staff, he twisted arms around here hard enough to break a few.”
“They built this place all right, but they built it crooked.”
“Other politicians are crooked too, and they don’t build a goddamn thing. East Texas and South Louisiana—they finally got their heads together and cut a big piece of the pie for themselves. But things have always run crooked in this part of the country, always. They wouldn’t know what to do with clean government. Old Dougal fell down pretty hard in the long run, but that’s just Texas. Texas is ornery, Texans like to chew their good old boys up a little bit before they bury them. But Huey learned plenty from Dougal, and he doesn’t make Dougal’s mistakes. Huey is the Governor of Louisiana now, he’s the big cheese, the boss, the kahuna. Huey’s got himself two handpicked federal Senators, just to shine his shoes. You’re bad-mouthing Huey up in Boston—but Huey is sitting just over yonder in Baton Rouge. And you’re getting in Huey’s face.”
“All right. I take the point. Go on.”
“Oscar, I’ve seen you do some very clever things with nets, you’re a young guy and you grew up using them. But you haven’t seen everything that I’ve seen, so let me spell this out for you nice and careful.”
They turned around a riotous bougainvillea. Fontenot assembled his thoughts. “Okay. Let’s imagine you’re a net-based bad guy, netwar militia maybe. And you have a search engine, and it keeps track of all the public mentions of your idol, Governor Etienne-Gaspard Huguelet. Every once in a while, someone appears in public life who cramps the style of your boy. So the offender’s name is noticed, and it’s logged, and it’s assigned a cumulative rating. After someone’s name reaches a certain level of annoyance, your program triggers automatic responses.” Fontenot adjusted his straw hat. “The response is to send out automatic messages, urging people to kill this guy.”
Oscar laughed. “That’s a new one. That’s really crazy.”
“Well, yeah. Craziness is the linchpin of the whole deal. You see, there have always been a lot of extremists, paranoiacs, and antisocial losers, all very active on the nets.… In the Secret Service, we found out a long time ago that the nets are a major intelligence asset for us. Demented, violent people tend to leave some kind of hint, or track, or signal, well before they strike. We compiled a hell of a lot of psychological profiles over the years, and we discovered some commonalities. So, if you know the evidence to look for, you can actually sniff some of these guys out, just from the nature of their net activities.”
“Sure. User profiles. Demographic analysis. Stochastic