Predicting an Online Nuke Attack Conspiracy

The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.

It had occurred before daybreak, at about 5:20 A.M. local time. The earliest postings were from insomniacal passengers and crew on coast-to-coast red-eye flights, reporting a sudden flash so bright it dazzled them from hundreds of miles away. This had faded too rapidly for people to snap pictures of it, but descriptions had been tweeted and Facebooked via the planes’ onboard Wi-Fi systems, and retweeted and reposted a millionfold by the time Corvallis saw them.

One Larry Proctor, a blogger who knew his way around the military and intelligence world, had picked up some traffic that had leaked to the civilian Internet from a .mil site, making a cryptic reference to a possible radiological event in southeastern Utah. Personnel stationed at nearby military bases were reporting that leaves were being canceled and units being mobilized. All of this was probably supposed to be kept under wraps, but nothing could prevent spouses and teenage kids from chattering about it. Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening. A fourteen-year-old Texas girl’s emoji-splattered post, featuring grainy driveway footage of her camouflage-decked mom heaving a duffel bag into the back of a pickup truck and burning rubber down the street, went viral and was shown over and over on network news sites for lack of anything more definite from the actual scene of the disaster. Moab was a long way from anywhere, situated at an X made by the Colorado River and a two-lane highway. No Internet or phone traffic was coming out of it.

Corvallis slowed down and looked in through the window. The video feed was from LAX, where the first of those red-eyes had apparently just landed and disgorged its passengers. News crews were waiting to gang-tackle witnesses as they emerged from security. Most of the people on that flight had slept through the event, and many didn’t want to talk, but one alert fellow—a fashionably scruffy actor who had been flying from New York to L.A. for a job—had seen the flash in the corner of his eye while playing a game on his phone, and switched it over to video camera mode in time to capture the roiling orange mushroom cloud. So the first broadcast video of the destruction of Moab was simply a close-up of this man’s phone, held in his shaking hands. And, as far as it went, it sure enough looked like a mushroom cloud.

Much of the radio coverage simply consisted of reporters summarizing what was turning up on the Miasma. Pictures of military roadblocks were being massively upvoted on discussion forums. Comment-thread geeks were zooming in on details and pegging various items of equipment: radiation detectors, dosimeters, containers of pills you were supposed to swallow in the event of radiation exposure. From time to time they would cut away to the financial desk for a report on the inevitable stock market crash. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was already suspended for the day. Foreign leaders were expressing grave concern and offering assistance. A jihadist website had apparently posted a video describing the annihilation of Moab as a warning shot, and making it known that they had another such weapon planted in a major American city.

By the time Corvallis had reached the airport, another network had come through with even better imagery from a truck driver’s dashboard camera. Apparently the driver, having witnessed the mushroom cloud from twenty miles outside of Moab, had turned his vehicle around and driven back out to the next town where he could get Internet access.

Weather forecasters, as a public service, had taken to posting maps based on current and projected wind patterns, showing the area likely to be contaminated by the fallout plume. A traffic jam had formed on I-70 near Grand Junction, Colorado, as residents fled and commenced banging into each other. A meme cropped up claiming that Moab had actually gone off the grid two days earlier as most of its residents had fallen victim to an explosively contagious plague that had presumably escaped from a nearby bioweapons facility, and that the president had made the decision to sterilize the whole town with a nuke. The roadblocks on the surrounding highways weren’t there to prevent curiosity-seekers from getting in. They were to stop any infected survivors’ getting out. The call went out for all armed citizens living anywhere near Moab to set up watch posts on hills and rooftops and to report, or shoot, escaping zombies. This and other alternative versions of reality were shouted down by stentorian typists even as they were being embellished on fringe talk radio programs and fervently taken up by upstart networks of true believers.

Corvallis didn’t believe for a moment that a bioweapon plague had actually struck the town. This was clearly the work of trolls. The only open question was whether they were nihilistic trolls who just liked to see the world burn, or motivated trolls with some vested interest in gulling credulous millions into clicking on this or that link. But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like C—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans.

On a Miasma news feed, some scientists in white lab coats were giving a press conference in front of a backdrop covered with many copies of the logo and name of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Corvallis listened to it for a while. It was perfect. The actors portraying the scientists were well cast: There was the eminence grise who didn’t say much but who conveyed huge gravitas and authority when he did. The engaging young beard who did most of the talking and reminded you of your favorite science teacher who rode around campus on a recumbent bicycle. The demure, middle-aged, maternal, but still-kind-of-hot woman. The introverted Asian dude showing flashes of wry humor. Whoever had produced this counterfeit had completely nailed the sound: you could hear chairs scraping, shutters clicking, fingers pounding laptop keyboards, people’s cell phones going off, all conveying the sense that a hundred journalists were crammed into the room. The payload—the informational warhead on the tip of this social media rocket—was that they had performed isotopic analysis of fallout collected by volunteers downwind of Moab and confirmed that it matched the fingerprint of half a dozen Soviet-era suitcase nukes that had gone missing in Uzbekistan some years ago.

Even as C was admiring the quality of the pseudoscientific dialogue being spouted by these actors, the “news conference” was suddenly “shut down” as the room was invaded by a squad of beefy-looking guys in beards and wraparound sunglasses who looked like they had just stepped out of a casting call for a SEAL Team Six movie. Their leader’s face was visible only for a few frames as he reached out and swiped at the camera’s lens. The camera ended up on the floor, sideways, transmitting a close-up of a knocked-over Starbucks cup and some chair legs, with murky sound of the scientists protesting as they were hustled out of the room.

A logo at the bottom of the screen claimed it was live on CNN. Which was by definition wrong, since Corvallis wasn’t actually watching it on CNN. He had found it on YouTube by clicking on a Twitter link in which some concerned citizen watchdog claimed that they had captured this sensational footage earlier on the live CNN feed and were just posting it for the benefit of the general population and that everyone should download it and copy it and post it everywhere before the government suppressed the news.

Out of curiosity, Corvallis went over to CNN’s Twitter feed and found a tweet from twenty minutes ago insisting that the press conference footage on YouTube was not genuine CNN content, had never aired on CNN, and was some sort of hoax. It had already drawn thousands of angry and skeptical replies from people saying that CNN was obviously being controlled by deep-state actors.

These people—the people who had done this—were awesome. They knew that some people would see through the hoax and denounce it as such. Those skeptics couldn’t be silenced. But they could be drowned out. So, the hoaxers had inoculated the Miasma with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone’s uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect. If you were a member of the reality-based community who suspected that it was a hoax, you had to wade through a hundred zombie-related postings in order to find one that made sense, and wherever you went on the Miasma to argue for a skeptical and reasoned approach, you were lumped in with the zombie truthers, ridiculed and downvoted.

By this point, all of the networks had scrambled their art departments and produced screens and banners to flash up when they cut back from commercial breaks. A typical example was NUCLEAR TERROR IN THE HEARTLAND, in a scary-looking typeface, superimposed on a montage comprising a mushroom cloud and a map of the United States with a red crosshairs centered on southeastern Utah. Corvallis wondered if the wording had been run by the networks’ lawyers. To call it a “nuclear strike” or “nuclear disaster” would be to suggest that it had actually happened. “Nuclear terror” only meant that some people were terrified. The network was hedging its bets. Because at some level, the people in charge must have figured out by now that it was a hoax. To come out and say as much would be to lose all of their viewers to competitors who were still acting as if it had really happened. Calling it “terror,” on the other hand, was no lie, and enabled them to keep pumping shit onto the air.

The president came online and announced to the world that Moab, the states of Utah and Colorado, the United States of America, and indeed the entire world had been the victims of a hoax that had been perpetrated almost entirely on the Internet. Nothing had happened here, save for a denial-of-service attack, originating overseas, that had shut down its Internet service and its cell phone towers. There had never been a bright flash of light; this was just a pattern of fake social media posts. The young actor at LAX was just that—a performer who had been hired to play a role, under the pretext that it was some kind of reality television show. Local police departments had been conned into setting up roadblocks by telephone calls that had originated overseas but been digitally tweaked to look as if they were local. A similar call had summoned the SWAT team in Las Vegas. They’d found nothing more than an empty suite that had been booked and paid for online. No one had ever checked in, but a package had arrived from overseas and been delivered to the suite by hotel staff. It turned out to be some old radium-dial watches in a scary-looking box: enough to make the cops’ Geiger counters click but not in any way dangerous. A similar gambit had been used in Manhattan. All of the confirmatory posts that had hit the Internet in the next hours—the burn victims, the fallout samples, the Los Alamos press conference—had been faked and injected onto the Internet via social media accounts and domains controlled through untraceable overseas shell companies.

Seventeen years later:

This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level.

The border, of course, was not a line on a map; it couldn’t be, because it did not legally exist, had no official reality. It was a blended zone that straddled that belt of the outer suburbs where Walmarts tended to exist.

There was a multimegawatt holograph of an animated mushroom cloud running on infinite loop and surmounted by yellow block letters proclaiming THE TRUTH ABOUT MOAB!

This turned out to be the first of several such advertisements spaced at intervals along the hundred and sixty miles to the Moab turnoff. It became clear that there were at least two different Moab-truther sites vying for their eyeballs and their mindshare: a “visitor center” and a “museum.” Both were founded upon the premise that Moab had been obliterated and its obliteration covered up by a vast global conspiracy. Both seemed to be very much for-profit tourist traps in the threadbare trappings of old-school nonprofit institutions. In addition a third attraction seemed to await them; this was much less heavily advertised, and such branding as it did have was understated in a way that Sophia associated with National Public Radio. It was called either the Moab Official Welcome and Information Center or the Nest of Lies, depending on your edit stream. It could be inferred that it had been put there by members of the reality-based community, perhaps bolstered by infusions of cash from a desolate Moab Chamber of Commerce.

The Nest of Lies, a newish prefab building sporting a lot of bullet holes. Or to be precise, dents, since it seemed, on closer viewing, to be bolted together out of something with a lot of layers, a materials science tour de force that could stop most rounds in common use. A single car, a sensible sport-utility vehicle, was parked where it would be shaded by a photovoltaic panel during the hottest part of the day. Out of some sense that the place was worthy of their patronage, Sophia overrode the car’s nav program and guided it into a spot near the sport-ute. That vehicle’s license plates were not issued by Utah but by the Municipal Authority of Moab. And Sophia—who had been reading about this—already knew why. The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk.

“Welcome to the Nest of Lies!” said the sole occupant

“Thanks,” Sophia said.

“Is it your intention to keep driving south into town?”

“You mean Moab? Yes.”

“Then you know it exists.”

“Yeah, I’ve actually been there a few times.”

“Did you drive in or fly in, those times?”

“Flew.”

“Okay. Well, as you drive in, you’re going to see roadblocks. One or two, depending on time of day. They’re not real. You don’t have to stop. Just turn off your autopilot and drive slowly through them and ignore the bros with guns waving their arms.” The woman recited all of this in the intelligent, matter-of-fact tones of a park ranger explaining what to do if you saw a bear.

It came to pass just as the woman said: five miles farther along, at the end of a long straightaway, a few dusty pickups and old-school SUVs were parked almost-but-not-quite blocking the road. Someone had erected a rude arch of lumber over the road and, at its apex, nailed up a sheet of plywood painted highway-sign green and blazoned in hand-painted white letters:

DANGER

RADIATON

NO ADMITANCE

About the time they got close enough to read those words and to begin remarking upon the misspellings, the car’s autopilot became concerned about the clutter on the roadway ahead, emitted a warning tone, and slowed down. Sophia shut it off and assumed manual control, then, for good measure, stifled any additional warning beeps that might be forthcoming.

On an RV parked by the side of the road, a door flew open and a man, still in the act of shrugging an assault rifle over his shoulder by its strap, pounded down an external staircase and turned to face them. Watching on the other side with only mild curiosity was an older man standing before a smoking steel drum and using tongs to flip hot dogs. The one with the rifle strutted into the road and began waving both arms above his head.

Sophia had her glasses up on her forehead. She was tempted to flip them down and see if they could face-rec this guy and if so find out who his editor was—or more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind.

Following the instructions from the woman in the information center, Sophia kept the car moving at maybe five miles per hour and simply drove around the guy, slaloming around a series of barriers that did not quite block the road and passing into the uninhabitable radioactive wasteland beyond. The road negotiated a few curves and dips that limited visibility for a while, and then came out in full view of a Starbucks.

“What was it like before?” Sophia asked

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.