3. Pythia
“Do you see a resemblance to the Pizzagate attack?” I asked for the second time.
‘Pizzagate’ was a conspiracy theory promoted by the Trump Campaign and Internet influencers. According to the promoters, Democratic party leaders tortured children in a Washington pizza parlor, then fed on their blood. It seemed a tasteless, crackpot joke until an earnest believer shot up the pizza parlor while trying to rescue the imaginary kids. You’d think that debacle would end it. But it didn’t, because it wasn’t a joke. It was the start of a new religion, and religions don’t have to make sense.
Katz frowned at her coffee cup. “Yes and no. If it had looked like Pizzagate at the start, I wouldn’t have …”
I gave silence a turn.
She took a breath and met my eyes again. “Okay, Dr. Arklow, here’s the story. Because of Pizzagate and Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Bureau set up a program to monitor social media. The idea was to identify fake stories spreading virally, provide intel about foreign sources to Homeland Security, and interfere with ones that influence people to do crazy things.”
“Like shoot up a kid-friendly pizzeria.”
“Yeah, or a kid-friendly priest.” Katz didn’t smile. She looked glum.
I cranked some more silence. Outside, a large black SUV with tinted windows cruised slowly by. Maybe the same one.
“The project had bi-partisan support from the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The Bureau hired AI experts and a new Deputy Assistant Director from a military contractor. Jackson Krome.”
“His name’s Chrome? Really?”
One corner of Katz’s mouth twitched. “Really. With a ‘K’. He gave the operation and the system their name: Pythia.”
“Pythia, as in the Oracle of Delphi?” I exclaimed, incredulous.
“Yup. The program’s been live for a couple of years. My assignment’s … my assignment was to do field investigations of alerts raised by the system.”
“How’d you get that spot?” I left the ‘was’ alone for a bit.
Katz folded her arms. She’d probably have crossed her legs, but the table wouldn’t let her. A brave-it-out posture. “I’ve a Masters in Computer Science from NYU. I worked for IBM Research for a while and hated it. So I quit and enrolled at the FBI academy. I wanted to do investigations, but because of my background, I could’ve got stuck in Quantico, you know?”
“With the boffins,” I said, sympathetically. “That’s what the Brits call them.”
“As a boffin’s pencil-sharpener. It’d be IBM again, with more restrictions and lower pay. No thanks. But the farthest away I could get was Pythia field ops in Washington.”
“Past tense,” I prompted, gently. I saw frustration in the set of her shoulders, the shadow of defeat on her brow.
She held my gaze. “I screwed up. Pythia raised an alert about Father Torres. It predicted an attack on him with a low probability. Someone—”
“Predicted,” I said, leaning forward. Now Pythia—the Ancient Greek name for the Oracle of Delphi, greatest of fortune-tellers—made sense. Notions of ’thought police’ and ‘pre-crime’ flitted through my head, and maybe that showed in my frown.
“Pythia’s not as clever as Krome wants to believe,” said Katz, with a wry twist to her lips. “Its strength is that it can monitor all the social media feeds at once—thousands of platforms, millions of channels, billions of messages every day. It needs to see several flags to raise an alert, but even when it does, most alerts don’t lead anywhere. False positives, you know?”
I nodded and leaned back.
“This time, the flags included Torres’ name being added to a child trafficker list on a message board Lohman reads. It flagged that Lohman posted a slur against ‘pedomex’ priests, and that someone posted the parish hall floor plan on another board. But we had no profile on Lohman. We’re not allowed to match message traffic to real people unless they have a federal record or we have a court order. Other red flags weren’t there, and the postings weren’t by an actor with a following, like QAnon.”
QAnon—the prophet of the Pizzagate conspiracists. For them, the faceless ‘Q’ was the President’s only ally against the ruling cabal of deathless, child-eating liberal elites. QAnon’s predictions were always wrong and always believed. Facebook*-*addicted homebodies lapped them up. Members of Congress had built shrines to ‘Q’ in their basements.
“Is Lohman a QAnon believer?” I asked.
Katz shook her head. “Anyway, we get so many alerts like that. So I closed it as a false positive. Next day, Father Torres was dead. The cops found the same floor plan in Lohman’s pocket.”
“Ouch.”
She closed her eyes, her expression like something was giving her a cramp. “Yeah—nearly made me throw up. There were some tough interviews, including with the agent in charge. I got sent over to Quantico to be interrogated by Krome.”
I made a sympathetic face. She was a rookie, still in the two-year probationary period. Any mistake could get her booted without a ’thank you’.
“Really, it’s a shit show,” said Katz, with feeling. She gripped her styrofoam cup hard enough to pop the lid. “The Pythia program hasn’t achieved anything and they say it’s likely to be canceled. The administration denies foreign interference exists. And I guess you know there was a shake-up in the FBI. The leadership now sees defending democracy as too political.”
I stayed quiet and let the pent-up words flow.
“Krome’s had to scale back the program to focus just on fake stories that lead to criminal violence. The field investigation team got cut from eight to four, which makes it impossible to follow up on all alerts. Krome desperately wants Pythia to prevent a massacre like the one in El Paso last year, and he thinks the Lohman case was its chance to shine, but I blew it. Now they’re re-examining other alerts I closed.”
She pushed her hair back behind her ear and turned her gaze to the street. She looked unhappy. Disappointed. And young.
“So, now …” I prompted.
Katz met my eyes again. “So, now I’m in North Philadelphia frisking a dead priest’s computer for child porn while they decide whether to fire me.” She grinned suddenly, like sunlight through cloud. “At least it’s field work. And it’s definitely your turn.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Let’s walk.”
