The Conspiracy Artist

by C.H. Irons

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It was ten to midnight, and the artist still hadn’t decided what his name was.

The diner was far from his ideal work environment. Harsh fluorescents, the tang of black coffee gone cold, and old music blaring over blown-out speakers. Overpowering stimuli that made it impossible to focus on the info core hovering inches from his face.

All the pieces were there. Everything fleshed out except for the keystone, the lynchpin that would tie it all together. But no sooner did an idea enter his head than it drowned in the white noise.

Needed to be something punchy, the artist thought. Something with weight. One word, short and memorable, easy enough for people to squeeze onto cardboard signs or chant in front of a burning statehouse.

He’d learned that early in his career: the easier a name is to remember, the faster it would spread. The same could be said for the ideology accompanying it, the fleshed-out mythos of delusion that filled his implant in so many disjointed fragments, leaving gaps for interpretation, for invention. Let the masses have the framework, and they’d build on it, calcify around it, until the thing took on a life of its own. His skeleton would vanish beneath the finished product as the rabbit hole covered his traces for him.

Now, what was his goddamn name?

His fingernail traced scratches on the tabletop as he pulled that scene back into his mind. The burning state capitol complex, the zealots swarming around the politicians with their police escorts. But what are they chanting? Whose name is written on those banners, stitched into those flags?

Light flared through the window beside his booth, the arc of high beams turning off the interstate. Beyond the haze of his info core, a luxury sedan pulled up alongside one of the gas pumps, eased to a stop.

The artist balled a fist in frustration. He was out of time.

He surveyed the parking lot, an expanse of rain-slicked asphalt reflecting the solar lanterns’ sickly glow. His brain seized on the first word that came to mind, and with a subconscious confirmation he added it to the info core. Materials gathered, he wired the price of his meal to the diner’s A.I. and slipped out the exit.

His client stood framed in green lantern light, one cuffed sleeve draped over the sedan door. A fine mist hovering somewhere between rain and snow had settled on his shoulders, dampened his hair.

“What do you have for me?” his client asked, too loud, as he approached.

No formal introduction, then. That was fine by him. He was busy, and tired, and his stomach churned from too much diner coffee, so the sooner this transaction was over and he could get back on the road, the better.

“Fairly standard schema.” The artist pulled a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one loose. “Religious overtones foreshadowing the apocalypse. Deep state collusion with foreign powers. Elitist influences hijacking corporate media with the end goal of stripping away civil liberties.” The rehearsed flick of a lighter, a burst of flame, the paper igniting at the perfect moment to punctuate his elevator pitch. “All tailored to your specifications, of course.”

He prodded the air with the smoking tip of his cigarette, drawing a circle around the web to condense it. A flick sent the entire info core and a few stray sparks drifting toward his client.

The client’s eyes lit up as it unfurled before him, hundreds of branches and tendrils splintering across his pupils in fine white filaments. News articles, grainy videos, doctored photos, all appended to the central claim. The real and the sensationalized and the fabricated seamlessly intermingled.

In truth it was a hack job, a lazy last-minute pull-together, but the artist wasn’t going to admit that.

“Not bad,” the client murmured, taking it all in. “Although I was — forgive me — expecting something more original.”

The artist’s cheek twitched in annoyance. The clients never seemed to understand that originality was counterproductive in his business. The point of creating a new theory was to build on the existing mythos, not to undermine it. Try to create something new, and the holes that once served as fertile breeding grounds for conjecture, for fresh mutations, would become weak points instead.

“Your audience doesn’t want original.” The artist hesitated, trying to recall the explanation he kept prepared for cases like this. “They have their fears. Their paranoias. They want those, fed back to them in a new package. The same outrage in a different costume. Disrupt that, and the whole business model is broken.”

“And you think this one will take off?”

“I know it will.” He took a drag and tossed over another info core, this one enclosing his research data. On his implant it left a trail like a shooting star, fired at point-blank range toward his client’s forehead. “I ran trials. Incubated it in a few test forums, highly populated but with no threat of outside contagion. I measured a one hundred percent rate of exposure in twelve hours.”

“And the rate of engagement?”

The artist chewed on the inside of his lip. This client had come prepared. “Ninety-three percent,” he conceded.

“That’s not great.”

“With more time, I could’ve gotten it higher. But I’m optimistic the rate will increase once this is in the wild. My work has that tendency.”

“So I’ve heard. That stunt in Harrisburg was impressive.”

He allowed himself a smirk. Harrisburg. It hadn’t felt real when he first watched the news coverage. The crush of bodies against the barricades, the arms and broken bottles lashing out toward the fleeing lawmakers. He still couldn’t grasp that, of all his theories, that was the one to catch fire — a haphazard narrative about a lieutenant governor shielding human traffickers, with dashes of xenophobia and Evangelical Christianity added for texture.

The sale had barely earned him enough to cover a month’s rent. But the boost to his reputation, the praise lavished on him by other artists and prospective clients, more than made up for the return on investment.

“It certainly outperformed my models.” He stuck to the clinical terms, maintaining his professional image. “Mind you, the engagement rate for that theory was only eighty-nine percent during testing.”

“And ninety-seven percent in the wild, I believe.”

“You’ve made my point for me.”

A sigh escaped the client’s lips, trailing vapor that mingled with the smoke rising from his own. His gaze retreated inward, to the core drifting across his implant. Giving it another cursory glance before making up his mind. “It’s good.” A blink, and the spiderweb cracks vanished from his pupils. “You’ll get your money.”

The artist nodded, extending a hand to shake. “Appreciate your business. The core is yours to deploy, but I’ve recommended some intrusion points based on your target demos. All high engagement and high contagion.”

The client thanked him and declined the offer, saying he’d hired his own strategists to launch the theory. The artist disagreed but didn’t protest.

After a few more pleasantries, the client was closing the door of his sedan and hitting the ignition. The car accelerated just a few feet before he stopped and cracked open the window. “Oh, I wanted to tell you — I enjoyed that bit about the covert informant. Really ties it all together.”

The artist, with his back propped against the gas pump, stifled a laugh. Was his last-second addition so impressive? The high-clearance government bureaucrat turned courageous informant for the people, battling censorship and corruption at every turn. A hero the masses could — and would — adore. The algorithms had proven it.

“Snowbird.” The artist savored the name, rolling it over on his tongue in a way he hadn’t earlier. He held out a hand, caught a few flecks of snow on his palm, watched them melt. “Innocent enough to sound ominous, right?”

“It’s perfect,” his client affirmed, rolling up the window.

As soon as the sedan pulled out of sight, bleeding into the constellation of taillights whipping down the interstate, the artist tossed his cigarette into a puddle. The show was over, and he hated smoking.

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Snowbird.

All alone with nobody to hear him, the artist scoffed, shaking his head. His quiet, sleep-deprived laughter rose over the thrum of the engine, as if testifying to the empty highway that he knew how ridiculous it sounded.

What a stupid name.

Maybe he was losing his edge. Maybe he’d never had it at all. Maybe what happened in Harrisburg was a stroke of dumb luck, a game of algorithmic roulette that tipped the evolutionary scales in his favor, that set the State Capitol dome ablaze and carried whispers of his name with it.

He pounded a fist against the dash. With his implant wired into the steering console, there was no manual labor needed to pilot his car down the highway, his subconscious more than capable of doing the work for him. That left his conscious mind free to dissect the info core he’d left open on his display — to pick apart its many flaws, places the information was too rigid, too dense, too coherent to allow for new growth.

Sure, he’d made the sale, but what would happen to his reputation once the theory was in the wild? When it collided with the existing conspiracy mythos and broke apart, like the snowflakes exploding against his windshield?

And that name. So distinctive. So unmistakably his. When the theory failed, the other artists would have no difficulty tying it back to him.

A trembling hand wrenched open his glove compartment. His fingers found the bottle of stims rolling around inside, deactivated the biometric seal, unscrewed the cap — and slipped. A dozen chemical capsules scattered across his passenger seat. He plucked one out and laid it on the center of his tongue, letting it melt.

The artist wasn’t worried about fame this time. Just results. What had his client wanted, anyway? To kill some obscure piece of legislation? Take down a small-time political rival? Sideline a corporate competitor? He couldn’t remember.

And even if he could, there was no time to dwell on it. The orders were still piling up. The bright red notifications badge, hovering always in the upper corner of his field of vision, pinged every few minutes to signal a new request. Trying to rush his art.

The campaign officials and the industry groups and the lobbyists — the power brokers who wouldn’t have given him a second glance a month ago — all wanted a piece of him now. Taking all the stims in the world wouldn’t be enough to help him meet demand. Not to say he hadn’t tried.

Moments like these he welcomed the fall. Let himself become eager for the day when his fifteen minutes of fame on the theory market were up, when he could slip back into obscurity and crippling debt and crawl into some dingy studio apartment to die. Like so many artists who had come before him.

Road signs and shuttered strip malls whipped by at eighty, ninety, one hundred miles per hour. Anger or anxiety or the oncoming stim rush misread as a command to accelerate. He took a deep breath and yielded driving control back to his subconscious.

The edge was gone. And he was certain his creation would prove that, once it was out in the open.

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But it didn’t.

In the cold and dark of his hotel room, snapshots of the chaos came through one at a time. Overturned cars spouting flames. Shattered windows. Billowing clouds of tear gas. The spire of some symbolic building, wreathed in smoke. Trampled children. Discarded masks in the likeness of movie characters. Bewildered black-clad police officers with shields up and rifles drawn.

What he saw on the television screen — written across the shirts and signs of people crowding the streets, painted on banners hoisted from overpasses and occupied buildings — was unrecognizable. The mutations were so numerous he could barely distinguish the bones of his concept buried beneath the fat and flesh of it all.

Were those rubber bullets or live fire? He couldn’t help but wonder. The film of sleep and stim crash made it all seem unreal.

He struggled to piece together the theory’s trajectory, his attention bouncing between the screen and a few analytics apps opened on his implant. The narrative hadn’t died, it seemed, but evolved. Promulgated along the vectors of information, spawning new variants in every network it touched. Branching into subspecies that reconverged, collided, and fractured without warning.

It was like an experiment in ideological natural selection, except all the participants were hopped up on amphetamines. Only the most provocative, the most inflammatory versions had survived, while all others died off.

He checked the calendar in the bottom corner of his implant. It had been five days. 

Without him realizing it, his hands had tightened around the bedsheets. Sweat dampened his palms, his neck, his armpits. He felt himself begin to shake.

Was this panic? No, he’d moved past that by now. He’d fully embraced the lessons they taught him when he entered this industry, the advice his mentors had drilled into him over, and over, and over again.

“Separate yourself from the work,”they’d told him once, over a poker game with some other amateur artists. “The theories will emerge whether you make them or not.”

And another piece of wisdom, this one slurred over a barstool somewhere near Memphis: “You either control the mythos or get controlled by it. Which side you gonna be on?”

The artist relaxed as he tasted the old mantras on his lips, forcing himself up and out of the bed. His anxiety was probably just a product of the stim crash. A few more pills in the morning, and he’d be fine.

The dozen half-started cores floating in his periphery jostled for attention, each with its own encroaching deadline. He pulled them up one at a time, outlining new threads to factor in the riot unfolding on-screen. His customers would expect him to incorporate such a major event in the new schemas.

Pacing kept his nerves at bay, even though the room was too small to pace in. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn. On one side, the lights of whatever mid-sized Rust Belt city he’d stopped in twinkled through a gossamer curtain.

Halfway through the task, a call came in on his implant.

He didn’t recognize the address but picked up anyway. His greeting came out as a rasp. “Hello?”

“Ninety-nine percent engagement,” the familiar voice echoed inside his skull. At the sound of it, the artist recalled snow drifting past the solar lanterns, the cuffed sleeve over the sedan door. “Ninety-nine goddamn percent. I can’t believe I doubted you.”

Over the implant’s noise-canceling effect, his ears picked up snippets of screams and gunfire from the television. He fired off a subconscious mute command and plunged the room into silence. “I’d agree it exceeded my expectations.”

“It did more than that,” his client shot back. “Have to admit, if I knew it was going to spread this quickly, I might not have hired you.”

“There’s a reason I come highly recommended.”

“So there is. It certainly got the job done.”

His client filled in what he’d failed to put together so far, describing exactly how the theory had grown and changed. How each forum and subculture it touched added something new to keep it alive. And once it had attained critical mass, the newfound believers mobilized, moving so fast that the authorities had no hope of anticipating them.

The artist cleared his throat, and just for a moment, he let the veil of professionalism fall away. “Do you think people will realize this is my work? The mutation rate seems pretty high, at a glance. Nothing easily identifiable as mine.”

“Ah.” His client sounded amused. “So you’re worried this won’t boost your reputation.”

Blood rose to the artist’s face. Only now did he realize how petty he must’ve seemed. “My reputation is my livelihood, unfortunately. So, if you could let the right people know, maybe put in a good word…”

Silence from the other end of the transmission. Interrupted, after a few moments, by the crackle of laughter. “Don’t worry, you’ll get my enthusiastic recommendation. But I don’t think you’ll need it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you listening to it, right now?”

“No.” He gestured to the screen, then realized the movement was pointless. This was an audio feed, no visual or sensory. “I have it on mute.”

“Turn it on.”

With that, the connection cut out.

The first messages started rolling in as he unmuted the television. New orders, a whole flood of them. The pings came as fast as the crack of gunfire from the television speakers.

There was another sound, too. A chant rose up from the mob surrounding the charred remnants of what might’ve been a federal building, or a company headquarters, or a church. A single word. Two syllables.

And through the smoke, the name on their signs and their shirts and their banners stood out in bright, stark capitals:

Snowbird.

He shook his head. What a stupid name.

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C.H. Irons is a writer and journalist alternatively based in Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere. His short stories have appeared in outlets including Analog, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod.

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