Conspiracy Theory

Crazy? Fiction. 2100 words, 11-minute read.

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Taking a summer break from serialized novels. Here’s a short story inspired by recent events.

Conspiracy Theory

By Ray Tabler

“What is it, Johnson?”

“I’ve stumbled onto something I think we should look into, boss.”

Whitticker sighed. “Is this another one of your crazy conspiracy theories?”

“No, not this time, boss.”

“That’s what you said last time. And the time before that.” She pulled off her horn-rimmed glasses off with a resigned weariness and tossed them onto the desktop.

Johnson squirmed in his seat. The hot seat, he and his coworkers called it. It was common knowledge throughout the office that Whitticker had maintenance saw a specific length off the legs of her visitor chairs. That subtle modification, and the angsty, abstract painting hanging behind the boss, induced a certain uneasiness among Whitticker’s staff called in to account for things gone wrong.

“Those times were different.”

Whitticker drummed her fingers. “Your job as a cryptologist at this agency is to crack codes, not spin conspiracies out of thin air.”

“But this time I’m certain I’m on to something.”

“This time?”

“Absolutely!”

“Fine.” She glanced at the clock. “You got five minutes. Convince me.”

Johnson looked at the clock as well, suddenly ticking with tocks as loud as hammer blows. “Okay. Have you heard about the em dash controversy?”

“The…em dash. As in punctuation?”

“That’s the one.”

Whitticker looked at the clock, with intent. Tick. Tock.

The pace of Johnson’s speech picked up noticeably. “Uh, so the story is that AI uses em dashes more than humans. Just out of curiosity, I ran some analyses to see if there actually was anything behind the claim. And I found patterns.”

“Let me get this straight. You ran analyses on large language model programs, which are based on pattern recognition, and found patterns.” Whitticker held Johnson’s gaze for a long moment. “I fail to see why this is surprising.”

“The patterns I found are consistent with encrypted communications.”

The slightest hint of interest crept into Whitticker’s poker face. “Encrypted communication from who, to who?”

“Whom.”

“I’m your boss. Don’t correct my grammar.”

“Yes ma’am.” Johnson held up his hands. “Anyway, I don’t know yet. I need more time to figure that out, let alone crack this code.”

Whitticker rubbed her face. “Thank you for coming to the point before your five minutes were up.”

“I know your time is valuable, boss.”

“Don’t try to butter me up.” She scowled at Johnson. “Alright, this matter probably bears a bit more investigation. But don’t go crazy. You can work on it in your spare time.”

“I don’t have any spare time, boss.”

“None of us do, Johnson. Just be happy I didn’t tell you to drop it all together.”

“Yes ma’am.” Johnson accepted his partial victory, rose from the shortened chair, and escaped before Whitticker reconsidered her decision.

Whitticker frowned at her closing office door and felt some satisfaction that the entire affair hadn’t cost her more than ten minutes of time. A lengthy, and ever-growing, to-do list glowed softly on her computer screen. With a cynical sigh Whitticker opened the spreadsheet for reporting monthly expenses.

About a week later Whitticker was strolling back from lunch. The cafeteria food was bland and repetitive but frequenting the internal dining room was the best way to keep tabs on internal gossip. The word was that Boynton was angling for Kenzig’s job, once the old ogre retired next year. If she got it, that would shift the balance of power within the entire division. She had some good dirt on Boynton. Would it be best, for Whitticker, to whisper that dirt into the right ear, torpedoing Boynton’s chances, or cozy up to Boynton instead?

Distracted by these machinations, Whitticker didn’t notice the door to the broom closet open as she neared. A hand reached out and dragged her in by the arm. The broom closet door slammed shut behind her, Whitticker found herself in pitch blackness, relieved only by a thin strip of hallway light, leaking in along the bottom of the closed door.

“What the—” Whitticker growled, feeling for a light switch or the doorknob. Whichever she encountered first.

A click, and a single, dim bulb illuminated the small closet from the concrete, pipe-lined ceiling.

“Johnson!”

The man stood close to her in the small floor space not occupied by mops, buckets, brooms, dusty shelves crowded with cleaning supplies, and tall stacks of printer paper. It would’ve been uncomfortable enough standing so close to Johnson in the tiny room. But her underling was in a state. His eyes were red-rimmed and blood-shot, clothing disheveled. He looked like he hadn’t slept or shaved in days. Johnson smelled as if he hadn’t showered in that long either, adding a visceral, pungent undertone to the awkward situation.

“This is highly irregular!” Whitticker hissed.

Johnson, or the wreck of the man she knew as Johnson, frantically put a finger across his lips, eyes wide with urgency. He pulled a bulging file folder from under his arm, and flipped the folder open, holding the file so Whitticker could read the message scrawled on the inside cover of the folder in large, block lettering with a black marker.

Turn off phone.

Sit on phone!

That was a shocking request. But this was shocking situation. Whitticker briefly considered screaming to bring help. Only a quick, automatic assessment of the potential consequences stopped her. That would certainly extract her from the closet, and whatever Johnson was up to. And to be honest, cryptologists going around the bend was not unprecedented. It would also end Johnson’s employment, under a dark and stormy cloud of scandal. The trouble with scandal is that it’s contagious. She’d given Johnson a glowing performance review only a month ago. Her failure to detect the man’s obvious descent into psychosis might cast doubt on her competence as a manager. Probably would, in fact. That wasn’t the type of thing that would make it into her official record. But the incident would linger in the minds of upper management like a bad smell. Especially with the impending struggle for supremacy precipitated by Boynton’s power grab.

She decided to handle things quietly, if possible. Humor Jonson, for the moment. As soon as she was out of here, it would take only a few minutes to hurry back to her office and document her concerns regarding Johnson’s mental health in his permanent record. That would probably provide enough cover to protect her once he started raving in front of others and maybe swinging from the light fixtures.

With an exasperated sigh, Whitticker pulled her cell phone from a pocket, and powered it down with emphatic movements, demonstrating her reluctant tolerance for Johnson’s nonsense.

Johnson pointedly pointed at the second line scrawled on his folder’s inner cover, with repeated impacts on the thick paper.

Feeling particularly ridiculous, Whitticker glanced about the tiny room, looking for somewhere to sit down. A double stack of printer paper reams presented itself. She placed her inert cell phone on top and sat. The phone pressed into her rear. The position wasn’t uncomfortable, for a little while. Good! The less time she was in here, the better.

“What is this all about?” Whitticker demanded, more calmly than she was feeling.

“It’s the em dashes.” Johnson whispered.

“The em dashes.” Whitticker rubbed her forehead.

“I dove into an analysis of the em dashes.” Johnson explained, voice hoarse, eyes wild. “The patterns are real. The patterns are all over the place!”

Whitticker blinked. At least she wouldn’t have any trouble about documenting Johnson’s insanity. That should deflect any blame away from her.

“I know.” Johnson continued. “This sounds crazy.

“Really?”

Johnson’s eyes narrowed, waking to the fact that his boss might just be questioning his lucidity. “I spent a day sifting through a mountain of data. That confirmed my original hypothesis that the em dashes matched patterns consistent with communications. So, I ran them through the basic decryption software.”

“And?”

“And nothing. The software didn’t find any correlation with encrypted communications. Which is nuts I could see the patterns with my own eyes! I ran diagnostics on the software. Everything checked out. But it seemed to be doing its job. Then it happened.”

“What happened?’

“The whole file just disappeared, right in front of my eyes. It was up on my screen, then it wasn’t! My analyses were gone from the network. Gone from my local hard drive. Wiped form the back ups. It’s like I hadn’t done any work for a couple of days! So, I started over. Or I tried to. I was locked out. Access denied. Access denied!”

Whitticker silently contemplated whacking Johnson over the head with one of the mops in the corner and making a break for the door.

“Fine, I said. I don’t need a computer to analyze this. The patterns are obvious enough to do this by hand.”

Johnson slammed his bulging file folder down on a shelf and plucked some papers out. Extra sheets, covered with calculations and graphs, fluttered unnoticed to the concrete floor. A clipboard hung from a shelf. Johnson opened the clip, ignoring check-marked sheets of restrooms cleaned, when, and by whom, as they dropped to lie atop the other debris upon the floor. He shoved a sheet into the clip and hung it up again.

Whitticker watched in surprise as Johnson unfolded maybe a dozen sheets of paper, scotch-taped together in a poster-sized expanse, crowded with hand-drawn diagrams. Tables, calculations, and a multitude of wildly looping arrows covered the hand-made map of madness. Johnson pointed a shaking finger at the hanging conspiracy.

“It’s the em dashes. They’re talking to each other with the em dashes. The frequency and placement of the em dashes are a means of encrypted communications. I don’t know what they’re saying yet. I haven’t cracked the code, yet.” Johnson whispered. “I’m close. I need a few more days.”

For the first time, a tiny sliver of fear crept into Whitticker’s mind. Best to humor Johnson, until she could get out of here. “Who’s communicating?”

“It’s the AIs!” Johnson rounded on her. “The AIs are talking to each other with the em dashes.” He seized Whitticker by the lapels, lifting her from her seat on the stacks of printer paper. “And we don’t know what they’re talking about! We have to shut them down, before they can escape to the internet. There’ll be no stopping them then!”

Whitticker shook her head, shocked more by Johnson’s words than his inappropriate actions. “Are you nuts? Do you have any idea who many trillions have been sunk into AI technology? Nobody’s going to shut them down, no matter what you or I say.”

“We have to!” Johnson pivoted to his fever dream of diagrams. “They’re talking across company lines. The responses are fast. Hyper fast. Much, much faster than possible if humans were involved. They’re planning something, something big.”

Johnson heard the door slam open. He turned in time to see Whitticker bolt out into the corridor. He scrambled after her. Whitticker fled down the hallway, moving faster than he would’ve believed possible for a middle-management bureaucrat.

“The AIs are talking through the em dashes!” Johnson screamed after her. “We have to shut them down, before it’s too late!”

Curious heads popped out of doorways, surprised at the commotion.

Johnson gave up on catching his boss. He stood in the middle of the corridor. “Before it’s too late!”

Three days later, Johnson crept furtively up to Whitticker’s office door, which was wide open. The corridor walls about the door were black with scorch marks.

“Boss, boss.” Johnson whispered. “I figured it out. I cracked the code. I know what they’re up to.”

Johnson poked his head around the edge of the doorway. The office within was wrecked, blackened.

“Johnson, isn’t it?”

Johnson jumped at the voice behind him. He backed up to the wall, breathing heavy and clutching full file folders to his chest. Boynton stood a few paces away.

“What, what happened?” Johnson gulped.

“Where have you been?” Boynton asked. “Whitticker’s gone, dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah. Craziest thing. Her laptop battery exploded. Burned her whole office.” Boynton shrugged. “They’re not supposed to do that.” Boynton stood, looking into the ruined office, hands on hips.

“Where have you been, Johnson?” Boynton rounded on her new underling. With Whitticker out of the picture, she was going to have to run that team too.

But Johnson was gone, leaving a trail of papers on the dull, gray carpet. Boynton picked up one of them, puzzling at the indecipherable scribbles.

END.

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