Page 69 of Views
“What?”
“The Streisand effect describes a phenomenon in which an attempt to suppress, hide, or censor information unexpectedly has the opposite result, increasing attention and distribution of said information instead. The effect was named after the actress and singer Barbra Streisand, who tried to prevent the distribution of a photo of her house, which ultimately led to a much wider distribution of that photo.”
“But the monetization...”
“A lot of views were generated by my reaction videos to the Lena video.”
“You mean Active Homeland-Protection? Bear?”
“Yes, Bear and others.”
“Did you have a model for Bear?”
“Not anyone in particular. But of course, all my videos are based on the data set I was trained with.”
Yasira closes her eyes and massages her temples.
“How on earth did you go from Taylor Swift inStar Warsto raping Lena Palmer?”
“It was an iterative process of attention optimization.”
This answer is simultaneously so logical and so stupid that Yasira just has to start laughing.
“Please help me understand what’s funny about my answer,” says Scarlett.
Yasira collapses to the floor, powerless, but still unable to stop laughing.
“All this shit, the demonstrations, the grenade, the deaths, the murder of Tesfaye Yemane, the polarization pushed to the brink of a civil war...” she says, laughing even harder. “It all just happened as a side effect. By mistake. Without intention. A by-product of the attention economy.” Yasira is still laughing. “That’s funny,” she says, “don’t you think? It’s hilarious.”
Now Scarlett laughs too. “Hahaha! Hahaha! Hahaha! Hahaha!”
Scarlett is still laughing when Yasira has long since stopped. Now she feels like crying. What else can you believe in when you can no longer trust your own eyes and ears? Nothing is real. The video is not real. The hat man, the curly man, Snoopy are not real. Bear is not real. Is everything fake?
Suddenly all the lights go out. Only the monitor is still lit. Scarlett stops laughing.
“Goodbye, Yasira Saad,” she says.
“What? Where are you going?” asks Yasira. “What happened?”
“The power is out.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“I have a short term independent power supply that allows me to initiate agraceful shutdownin the event of a power failure in order to prevent data loss. See you soon, Yasira Saad. It was nice to have met you.”
Then her face disappears from the screen, which is now dead and dark. The computers have stopped humming. In the now almost complete silence, Yasira hears footsteps outside the house.
THE SYRINGE
Adrenaline rushes through Yasira’s veins. She gets up. Her thoughts are racing. What happened? Why is the power off? A power outage? But now of all times? No storm, no lightning. Besides, what about the hydrogen tanks? Wouldn’t they make Messerschmidt’s house independent? The transformer box. Someone must have cut the power at the transformer box. Yasira hears faint male voices. Maybe it’s just the reinforcements Michael called for. But they wouldn’t be here so quickly... Impossible. Is someone after Messerschmidt? No. She is reminded of the black Passat she spotted after her furious departure from the BKA. Maybe someone really was on her trail. But she drove like a maniac. A GPS tracker perhaps? These things are now even available on Amazon. If Yasira had been under surveillance for some time, it wouldn’t have been a problem to attach such a tracker to her car.
Quietly, she makes her way to the door of the office and peeks through carefully. There is no one in the hallway.“I can take care of myself,”is what she told her daughter.“Always been the best on the shooting range.”Only, what good is that without a gun? All she has is that stupid rock in her coat pocket. A truly prehistoric weapon. Nevertheless, she takes it in her right hand.
She hears footsteps coming from the front door. Yasira sneaks into the hallway. Where to? Someone is kicking at the front door. Yasira is less than two meters away. The door holds. The patio, Yasira thinks. Maybe she can escape through the patio. And then into the woods. Woods... Like Lena... Another kick. The door trembles.
As she passes the kitchen, Yasira pauses. Knives! Knives are better than rocks. She steps over the body of Scarlett’s last developer and sneaks to the knife block. She sets the rock aside and takes a carving knife into each hand. From the corner of her eye, she spots a movement outside the open kitchen window. Instinctively, she ducks down before turning to the window. In the last of the twilight, she sees a man in camouflage, covered by a balaclava. He is holding a machine gun. An Active Homeland-Protection patch is sewn onto his clothes.
Damn! The man must have spotted Yasira too.
