The Word Exchange (38 page)

Anyone could enter the contest, and beaming in new words was free. But popular terms fared best—the more popular, the better. “Liking” a word was cheap, 5 cents per click. Bidding was more of an investment—the ground-floor offer was $25—but helped boost a word above the morass of submissions, considerably increasing one’s chances of winning.

The official vote was scheduled for nine p.m. EST. But while players feverishly liked and bid on their just-minted “words” in the last minutes leading up to the tally, I was trying to buy a ticket to London. And the web page wouldn’t load. The address field tried to flood blue but aborted. The loading wheel spun and spun, like a lazy Susan. Then a gray phrase appeared:
“You are not connected.”
Impatient, I clicked to a new page. But home wouldn’t load either.

“There’s something wrong with your Internet!” I yelled down the hall to Phineas, betraying my infraction. Then I tried to navigate back to the discount ticket page. For a few seconds it appeared clearly, listing Sunday flights from JFK to Heathrow. But there seemed to be an error: a direct flight that left at six a.m. was listed at $12,000. Further down, another, with two layovers, said $6,500. The cheapest one I saw was $3,900, and it was on Inuit Airlines, with a stop overnight. I assumed that the site had been hijacked, especially when it reloaded with prices in yuan. And then, after another minute, refused to load again.

Confused, not really thinking, I quickly logged on to Life for the first time in weeks, to see if other problems had been reported. And just as Dr. Thwaite hobbled in, irritably grumbling, “What are you shouting?” the feed filled with the most incredible things. Some intelligible—“Is the Internet broken?”; “Can’t access $ in my account!”; “I think I just heard gunfire”; “I see flames”; “Looting on Nostrand”; “hell’s kitchen 2”; “LA”; “herd there clsingthe borders Get out wil u can”—and many more I couldn’t read—“
e
dlesteelest
3
a
H
e”; “Kajia S0111”; “
acha boo chew”—before the site’s formatting collapsed, language unspooled, and characters deluged the page.

“Shut the computer off!” Dr. Thwaite commanded. In shock, I hesitated, and he shoved me roughly aside. Ripped the power cord from the wall.

“W-what’s going on?” I stammered, dazed.

But Dr. Thwaite didn’t say a word.

It now seems dangerously naive, but before that night I’d never really believed that an outbreak could turn so quickly into an epidemic: the steadily rising waters abruptly rushing above our heads. That a virus we’d only just learned about—that had by then infected only hundreds of people—could very quickly sicken tens of thousands. Hundreds of
thousands. More. That we could be derailed in other ways: infrastructure wracked. Language devastated. I always thought we’d have time—to prepare our citizens, shut schools, develop more and better treatments. Of course the schools were closed. But by then it was too late.

On the night of December 7, at 8:57 p.m., just minutes before results of the gala’s Meaning Master contests were meant to be unveiled, all those who’d logged in to play or watch the party on a Synchronic website had received a message on their devices. The same warning appeared on a giant screen projected inside the museum. According to scattered, conflicting reports, it said something like the following:

Machines that received this communication were instantly wiped clean of data and shut down, their putative users locked out. Scores of people were also infected—millions, by some estimates, in that one night alone. Some only with a peculiar aphasia. Others with a virulent, life-threatening disease.

We now believe that Synchronic created what has come to be called the Germ virus several years ago, at the same time that its employees were designing the Aleph—and developing the very first, secret prototype of the Nautilus. The Germ, too, appears to have been a kind of prototype: an early version of the malware Synchronic would later develop far more effectively with Hermes’s help. Like much of Synchronic’s hard- and software, it was designed overseas, in a lab outside Beijing. (It’s speculated that the virus was created in China at least in part to insulate the company from blame—try to shift suspicion to foreign workers if the Germ were ever traced back to Synchronic’s devices.) But it hadn’t worked as Synchronic wanted, it seems, and it had triggered lots of glitches, slowing the Aleph, shuttling users to strange websites. It was also highly contagious, spreading even to machines in which it hadn’t been tested. And it had other unintended effects.

When it was clear that the Germ experiment had backfired—Brock
largely faulted it for the Aleph’s failure, which had badly damaged Synchronic’s reputation, perhaps nearly killed the company—Synchronic worked to eradicate it. They also hurried to release the Meme as quickly as possible. And the whole idea of profit-driven malware was apparently set aside for a long time—until last spring, when Max appeared at exactly the right moment to revive it, arriving opportunistically, like a virus, to exploit a seemingly perfect set of circumstances.

By then the Meme had been around for years, and users had started to show clear signs of dependence. Synchronic was also preparing to release the Nautilus—likewise long shelved—before Christmas, and executives evidently believed that their new device would further encourage “user-machine integration.” The Word Exchange, too, had become dominant. And when Max came along to pitch Meaning Master to Synchronic, Brock had recognized an opportunity to revitalize his virus. The game seemed like a good delivery system: it could infect every device that played as well as every device with which that device “communicated.” It also generated neologisms. That was a boon; it meant Synchronic wouldn’t have to hire many word workers, like those I’d seen in the Creatorium. With the game, it could farm the work out: gamers would unseam language themselves. Pay for the privilege, in fact.

The more the virus proliferated, the more people would visit the Exchange. The more who came, the more, in turn, who would discover Meaning Master and subscribe to the game. The more who played, the more fake terms would be created—and embedded in limns, emails, texts, and beams—and the more people would pay to decrypt them. On and on, in a destructive spiral. That’s how it was supposed to work, and did, when it was released in the first week of November—and for nearly a month before everything was upended.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about the language virus even now, nearly two months later. But I’ve heard one very cogent hypothesis, explained to me by a postdoc in genetics here—Dr. Barouch, a laconic brunette with luminescent eyes who speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth—and I’ve done my best to outline it as well and faithfully as I can.

In the human genome there are millions of what she described as “ancient viruses,” called retrotransposons, which exist in each of our cells: teeth, hair, organs, skin. They’re found in many other organisms,
too; we inherited them through evolution. Over millions of years, genomes learned to keep these viruses in check with a kind of “genomic immune system.” Antidotes, in a sense, Dr. Barouch said.

The Nautilus, she believes, disrupted that carefully balanced system. And while it seems to have happened entirely by accident, the effects have been no less than devastating.

Nautiluses, like Memes, even like more antiquated machines, transmitted a steady stream of data about their users to the Internet: where they were at any given moment (home, work, the Fancy), new people added to their contacts, etc. But because of the way Nautiluses functioned, their settings also involved users’ specific neuronal structures: how they processed sight, sound, touch, smell, taste; language, ideas, memories. Its cellular fusion meant, too, that the Nautilus encountered retrotransposons constantly. And the result was that millions of these ancient genetic viruses began to be sent from every user of a Nautilus back to the server and into cyberspace.

Most of these strings of code were completely harmless, Dr. Barouch explained. Billions and billions of them moved inertly through the Internet doing nothing at all, as far as we know. But at some point—which could have been years ago—the retrotransposons of an unknown, anonymous user happened by sheer chance to encounter another pernicious bit of data: Synchronic’s Germ malware. When those two strands of code met, they recombined and created a new sequence that has come to be known as S0111.

Because the Nautilus functions by integrating with users’ cells, Dr. Barouch said, the new sequence was able to make its way to them when it was transmitted back through the Nautilus—downloaded, in a sense. Moreover, because the device constantly interchanges binary code it receives from the Internet with the DNA code in which it computes data, it translated this new S0111 sequence, too, into DNA. But the new sequence, as it happens, has a biological meaning; when it was translated, it encoded a pathogenic virus capable of infecting and harming neurons. Thus, any Nautilus that came in contact with S0111 gave its user a neurotropic illness—fatal if left untreated—whose hallmark early symptom was aphasia. Aka word flu.

Uninfected Nautiluses, of course, worked perfectly. But there was another, very salient reason that the device wasn’t initially suspected
of triggering word flu—the increasing ubiquity of a disease that had started to appear before the Nautilus was even released. A “disease,” ironically enough, that was caused by the infection of a different Synchronic device: the Meme—itself so ubiquitous, so integrated into people’s lives, that it wasn’t seriously suspected either by many people in the beginning.

Infected Memes produced strikingly similar indications in victims: their users also presented with a kind of aphasia. But the Meme “sickness” was benign. It wasn’t pathogenic; it was a misfiring of the device. An infected Meme had an overreactive propensity to send its user onto the Exchange. It anticipated wrongly, and overzealously, when he’d forgotten a word and needed to have one supplied. But most “words” it manically provided were neologisms invented by Meaning Master gamers and sweatshop laborers.

This bizarre effect was initially difficult to trace to Memes partly because it seemed to persist even after users removed their devices. And that was those who could; the millions, maybe tens of millions, who’d clandestinely had microchips implanted could not. It’s now believed that these users’ brains have been harmed by way of Memes’ formerly touted EEG technology. Electrical signals surge through chips and Crowns, triggering the death of cells. Even “benign aphasia,” in other words, isn’t entirely benign. (It also might not be entirely accidental; some experts speculate that the symptom was designed to mimic word flu intentionally, in order to amplify confusion and chaos.)

Of course, we knew none of this at the time—we didn’t know what was causing people’s symptoms or why some of them were dying. We didn’t know how to protect ourselves against the virus. Because what we did know was that it seemed to be transmitted through language: communicable incommunication. In a few recordings taken at the time that have managed to survive, it seems actually to leap from person to person.