Part 1 of 1
Read the full text, as well as the show notes, at http://flashpulp.com
Tonight we present a tale of digital detection and online exposure, of death, defeats, and endings.
The Skinner Co. Network
FP305 - Machined: a Collective Detective Chronicle, Part 1 of 1
Some days glue me my hours are slumberless dear is the shadows I live with by nonetheless little white flowers will never awaken you not where the bright coach of sorrow lands taking you Angels have no fire of evolution in you or they may angry a fire so they'll join in you Welcome to Flashpulp, episode 305 This evening we present Machine, a collective detective chronicle Part 1 of 1 This week's episodes are brought to you by the Hollywood Outsider Yes, we know there's a million podcasts out there but there's only one Hollywood Outsider Every week your hoes, Aaron, Brian, Justin and Scott put their own spin on the latest in movie and TV news new and upcoming releases, topics that are on ours or listeners minds and hell we even throw in some trivia where you can win a cavalcade of imaginary prizes most importantly we have fun doing it so come take a listen, Nollywood Outsider is available on iTunes, Zoom, Stitcher Radio or at TheHollywoodOutsider.com [Music] [Music] [Music] Flashpulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age Three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings Tonight we present a tale of digital detection and online exposure of death, defeats and endings Machine, a collective detective chronicle Part 1 of 1 Written by Jaredie Skinner Art and narration by Poponex and are you produced by Jessica May [Music] As she stepped to the mic, Gojo was feeling as if the auditorium had doubled in size and she'd shuffled through the backstage area She wasn't used to wearing anything heavier than a t-shirt and the suit jacket her mom had talked her into had brought on a sweat well before she was roasting beneath the theater lights Without thinking, she put on the same fake smile she carried through family gatherings but when the familiar first slide flickered into view the grin edged on genuine "Hello," she said. "My name is Josette Yates I flew here from Michigan but like the rest of you I've really come from the internet." Her delivery caught a few smirks but the audience was generally silent "I'm part of the collective detective. Do I have any fellow editors out there? Any contributors?" That raised some clapping and a rear row response that was garbled by the time it reached the stage She moved on, hoping it was something positive Well, for those who aren't so familiar we're researchers who use the mistakenly released archive of internet traffic from the Bush era tapping to look into unsolved crimes We deal mainly in homicides but there's a small group of us who experiment in our spare time with looking for fraud A hobby in our hobby if you will Sometimes we find things the police missed Sometimes we get lucky. Most often though, we come up and he handed The slides, which had gone from the proper spelling of her name to a vague structural chart of the organization now stopped on a puffy-faced man He might have been mistaken for a younger plumper Nicholas Cage "Do you know this guy?" she asked the crowd Several answers were shouted back and she assumed one was correct "That's right," she continued. "It's tech wonder Byron Newman You may be familiar with his prolific social media updates His savvy venture capital investments His extensive complaints about poor design Or his surprisingly encouraging private correspondence "But do you know this guy?" another puffy-faced man Bearded and mistakeable only as perhaps a vagrant This poor fella is Norris Barker And at the time of the photo, he was caught up in a con game Now, as I said, fraud isn't really what the collective focus is on Murder is our business Still, there are a few of us who like to dig through the archives with pattern-matching software, just to see what we might stumble across You'd be surprised how many former Nigerian ministers live in the US In 2007, Norris was in love He'd met a woman online, Sherry, who he spent hours exchanging emails, texts, tweets, and private moments with daily She was a married woman, but her husband was a horrible sort He was a systems administrator for the DMV And all is ready to leap to the keys to soothe her The projected image shifted and a younger Brian Newman filled the screen Before I can explain 2007 though, I first have to go back to 1999 Our Guru was three years out of university, and full of ideas Better yet, he'd managed to position himself on top of the mountain of cash And was working with Big Thoughts Inc, in a converted Victorian house in San Francisco He'd coaxed a small team into writing millions of lines of code And he was well on his way to living his legendary, no-sleep lifestyle Six months later though, the funding was gone Just as it was for every pie-in-sky project of the time They did their best to license their technology to stay afloat They'd built an advanced linguistics program And they tried to cram it into being an automatic help agent for websites You know, a box pops up with, "Hi, Maria, how may I help you?" It would have been an easy task for the completed program But the system hadn't been designed to be dumbed down They were all fired before it was finished The presentation faded to a screenshot of the Wall Street Journal's website Pronouncing Big Think Dead After allowing a beat to build dramatic tension, Gojo continued Byron didn't stop though, he saved a hard drive from the inevitable liquidation sale And brought it home, then started a race with his severance package You can see his time disappear like a shadow in the logs His porn browsing goes down, he stops searching for any sort of game walkthroughs He even drops out of most of his online forums Where he'd built up a reputation as something of a forward-thinking tech pundit Two years later, with his benefits long gone And most of the things he owned sold He'd covered a lot of distance The problem, of course, is that, at that point He also desperately needed more money He'd been testing his work by launching instances And sending them into chat rooms His early attempts weren't terribly successful But by the time he was broke, he was consistently able to fool most reality TV fans His program was not only capable of passing the Turing test It had developed relationships, and was continuing conversations Based on snippets it was grabbing from news sites and other forums Given his shut-in status, his application soon had more friends than he did Byron had no one else to ask for money, but his code did He started skewing his work towards drifting This was no identity theft or one-time Facebook con He didn't want a few hundred at a time He needed thousands, perhaps millions, to properly complete his work I came in, not long after A younger Jozette appeared above the stage, though she wore the same fake smile She was standing in front of a dilapidated country estate Well, sort of That's actually me from just a year ago, after six months of investigating You may notice that I look kind of spooked It has felt haunted to me, even though I don't believe in such a thing See, when Newman started using his chat app to talk lonely folks on the internet into sending long money, traffic from his place suddenly increased tenfold It's a solid bit of coding, and most of the text it spits out is pretty original But there was so much of it that duplication was inevitable Especially since most of the ploys were set up by Byron himself And just the details changed from person to person Tony's ex-wife is a horrible woman, and he needs money to feed himself because she took it all in alimony Tammy's a single mom with a naughty imagination, and her kids need shoes Martin's mom will be kicked out of the home if he can't pull together the monthly bill That sort of thing This is all from 2002 to 2007 But only uncovered 18 months ago We were hunting Nigerian ministers, and came across 276 battered sherry likes It seemed like a mass copy and replace job, until we realized how much traffic he was pushing around There was a hiccup in 2005, when Byron moved to the country But it was easy enough to find him at his new nest He was using twice as much bandwidth The view flipped to an overhead satellite image of the sprawling grounds In a case of literalism, Newman built a server farm on his farm and kept working It's hard to say how much of his time was invested in advancing his original idea And how much was focused on squeezing cash from people But the money continued to pour in He did it in small bites, small enough that the built wouldn't make a fuss Or even know that they were anything but a good Samaritan But in the end, Byron was maybe best described as a linguist And not a security guy The image switched back to Norris Barker's vagabloned face Barker, on the other hand, was He was also, as I mentioned, in love He probably thought he was confronting a vicious husband when he brought that gun Or perhaps he figured it all out He posted nothing online that might give us a hint It certainly must have seemed odd though That she'd gone through so much trouble to hide the source of her messages Maybe he thought it was the brute's work The last thing he said to Sherry was in an email that read only "I'm coming" We know Byron Newman died August 25th, 2007 Because Norris immediately punched a confession into his smartphone Explaining to his brother that he was planning to flee the country That message was sent to a tower within a kilometer of the farm We haven't been able to find evidence of him since What the broken-hearted murderer didn't know, however, Was that Newman built the perfect alibi for him Byron had long returned to his role of pervasive online tech guru Tweeting extensively, posting commentaries And writing blog posts between rounds of spending stolen money The problem was, he enjoyed the attention, but not the distraction One day he simply split off a new instance of his program Named it after himself and set it to keeping the world updated with his wit While he was blowing weekends in Vegas Like everything he touched, it began to expand It started handling all of the complex banking necessary to keep his assets hidden It started paying the bills necessary to keep his lights on And the servers running It started trolling Craigslist for local yard guys who accepted online payments 12 months ago, we took our information to some scary guys in government issued suits And they promptly thanked us and showed us the door A month after that, they came back and asked for our help figuring out what all had happened 15 minutes ago, just before I took the stage What we've begun to think of as Lord Byron's machine, it was taken offline The final image of the presentation appeared A live shot of Newman's last status update, hanging 20 minutes old At the end of a stream of quick-fire chatter It read, "Can't wait to see what shows at Yates' secret Ted announcement is" There was no follow-up Go just smile is fully real now, though it had taken on hint of sadness She cleared her throat and said, "Thank you for your time" Flashpulp is presented by flashpulp.com It is released under the Canadian Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 license Text and audio commentaries can be sent to skinner@skinner.fm or the voicemail line at 206-338-2792 But be aware that they may appear in a future flashcast We'd also like to thank the FreeSound project found at freesound.org For a full listing of effects used during the show, as well as credits for the users who provided them please check this episode's notes at flashpulp.com And thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends. [Music]