Free Nightwise by R. S. Belcher

again. We were both silent. The static made the shadows in the room dance.
    â€œYou sure you up for this, man?” Grinner finally said.
    â€œThat all you got for me?” I said. “Not much to go hunting on. Pretty light for twenty grand.”
    â€œFifty,” Grinner reminded me. “And I’m not done yet, corn pone.
    â€œPeople like Slorzack find me all the time to erase them from the Net, from life, to make them cease to be, and I charge them plenty for that. From the moment you are born, you are named, marked. A person’s true name used to be a secret thing, a sacred thing—it gave someone power over you. Today your true name is your social security number and we hand it out like it was candy at Halloween. So many agencies, so many powers and principalities have dominion over us, Ballard, and we have no clue, man. Credit score, police record, taxes, DMV, online shopping, GPS. We give strangers on the other side of the planet our exact location every time we walk into a fucking Starbucks with our cell phone. We are owned, Ballard, from the day we are born until the day we die. He’s out there, and he has chains, just like the rest of us. I’ve got a few more places to look, a little more voodoo programming to do, before I call it a day.”
    â€œLike what?” I asked. “Where else is there to look?”
    â€œYou remember those shared computer projects in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Grinner said. “SETI used them to look for Klingons and shit, and a bunch of other research groups got volunteers from all over the world to let them co-opt their home computers, to boost processing speed to churn the huge amount of data these groups had to mull over.”
    â€œYeah, I remember,” I said. “So?”
    â€œSo, some of the beautiful bastards that own everything saw some real potential in that, saw a way to forge another chain. The social media stuff—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instagram, Tumblr, all that shit—well, they networked them, all of them, into something called an SI, a swarm intelligence. It’s a nebulous, churning, cloud-based thing, made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. In this case, us and our social network. There are few rules in a swarm intelligence, no centralized control structure dictating behavior. Local and, to a degree, random interactions between each little cog in the swarm lead to the emergence of intelligent, predictable global behavior, and all of it is unknown to the individual parts of the system. Turns out we’re not so special, Laytham. We work on the same level as bacterial growth, ant colonies, flocks of birds, schools of fish. Animals being herded.”
    Grinner chucked drily, the way a guy dying of lung cancer might if asked if he was going to quit smoking now. “Herded. Jesus, we did this to ourselves. Stupid bastards, tending their virtual farms and sending out duck-lipped bathroom pictures, building fantasy football leagues and composing one-hundred-forty-character missives on what they had for lunch at Burger King. They are being used to mine data, like slaves, mining the data that shackles them, that defines their lives.”
    He shook his head slightly, his tiny eulogy for the human race.
    â€œIs this another pitch for Anomyous?” I said. Grinner flipped me off and went on.
    â€œThe good news is that I know how to get into that system, know how to read the patterns, the trends and forecasts. I can read the human race’s guts like the fucking Oracle at Delphi. Even if Slorzack managed to erase most of his trail, a rock hitting a pond produces ripples, and I’ll trace those back to him by scanning the pond.”
    â€œBig damn pond,” I said. “What if he’s in some third world shit hole, no Internet and no online stuff?”
    â€œDon’t exist anymore, man,” Grinner said.