The Wheel

73. Chris

Have I heard this name before? No, it's some kind of a secret phone that isn't used in public; and its name sounds like iPhone.

This room full of crazy people, apart from me! They've destroyed everything! What's going to be with my life now? With my mother's life?! The anger is boiling inside of me and I'm ready to rip someone's throat out! They'll pay for what they've done to me! That miserable four-eyed host, who's obviously not much older than we are, finally looked at me. Veronica became hysterical again, wailing that she was scared to death, that she saw her life flash before her eyes, but Max decided to speak up.

"Ms. Spears, let's hear Mr. Royce out," he pointed his small palms at me.

"Yeah, let's do that!" my scream was heard all over the hall. "You'll pay for that, do you understand? I'll sue you: it won't be pretty – my family has the best lawyers! This Darknet of yours is a total crap!"

"It's not Darknet, it's DarkHOLEnet," this asshole Max clarified. "To get into Darknet you just need to download a special browser, and using a search engine, find how to get into the black market. DarkHOLEnet is, roughly speaking, Darknet inside of Darknet: we pick our clients rigorously and check them all the time. They pay pretty good wages as an entry fee, for example, to become a subscriber of our entertainment service – by and large, there is no way for you to know about us on any forum in the world. If there is even a subtle mention of us, it gets deleted immediately, and then we find the 'sleeper' and get rid of them."

"I don't give a shit about that! You ruined my life!" I shouted.

Max lifted his right hand and snapped his fingers. Our phones were lowered from above: there was no sign of the post on Instagram about my mother who I love more than anyone and our son. There were only those posts that I published myself!

"You haven't posted anything?" asked David, smiling a little.

"It's not hard to guess," this jackass Sam, who's the reason we are here, laughed viciously. "just don't touch it: it's for safety purposes. Have you ever heard of a precedent that a group of people, like yourselves, started sharing their deepest secrets on a social network? No, because it has never happened. There was a case when naked photos of some celebrities were posted on the Internet, but we don't do that kind of minor things."

My all encompassing anger faded down a little! But they are still a bunch of crazy people!

"So," Miguel supposed, "you made it look like that there were comments and likes below our 'candid' posts?"

"That's right," this damn host nodded, "we created your fake accounts beforehand on onePhones: it looked like people were reading, liking, and commenting your posts at that very moment. In fact, the comments were created automatically with the help of our special neural network Automaton: it analyzes and inspects the real comments of your followers and friends – for example, in two seconds it can find out how often one or another follower of yours comments you specifically, how exactly they write messages, whether they add emoji, make mistakes, and how often they add comments."

"By the way, about neural networks," Sam added, "Veronica, do you remember that call from your mother?"