1414° by Paul Bradley Carr
About 1414°:
Now someone is giving them what they deserve.
Journalist Lou McCarthy has spent her career exposing powerful predators in Silicon Valley. Her crusade has cost her everything: Her apartment, friends, relationships, and any hope of promotion. And for what? Readers don't care, her boss and workmates pity her, and the billionaire bro-ciopaths she writes about continue to fail upwards.
But when two of her highest profile subjects are killed on the same night, their deaths staged as gruesome public suicides, Lou's work is suddenly and violently thrust into the spotlight. Blamed for the deaths, fired from her job, and pursued by vengeful trolls who have already attacked her mother, Lou has only one chance of survival: To find the killer obsessed with her work, and stop them before anyone else dies.
Or perhaps not. Because the more Lou discovers about the ingenious killer's past, and their methods, the more she becomes determined to help them succeed.
Excerpt:
1%
THREE BLOCKS SOUTH, in the newsroom of the Bay Area Herald, Lou McCarthy glared at the prompt flashing on the screen of her computer terminal.
Are you sure you’re ready to publish? Y/N
She silently cursed whichever software engineer had programmed such a moronic question.
In the past five years, she’d keyed maybe five hundred stories into the Herald’s aging “news management system” and always hesitated over this last step. Can any journalist truly be sure they’re ready to publish a story? Of course not. There are always more sources to chase down, more quotes to confirm, more on-the-ground reporting to do, more all-nighters to pull, more shitty instant coffee to drink. News is called the first rough draft of history for a reason: at some point you have to publish what you have and let the chips tumble.
This morning, three gallons of Kirkland House Blend down and no sleep for twenty-six hours, the question took on an even more weighty significance.
Are you sure you’re ready to pick a fight with the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley history? Y/N
Are you sure you’re ready to take a woman’s worst trauma and turn it into public property? Y/N
All on the basis of a single leaked document from an anonymous source?
Are you out of your fucking mind?
Y/N
Lou glanced up at the IBM schoolhouse clock on the wall: 8:26 a.m. She might not be out of her mind, but she was definitely out of time. In precisely four minutes, Stephen Camp would crash through the newsroom door, briefcase overflowing with papers, unnecessary umbrella wedged in his armpit, cursing the slowness of the elevator and the fresh crop of idiots he had encountered on BART, and Lou’s window of opportunity would pinch closed forever.
She read back her headline, still visible behind the dickish pop-up window.
RAUM EXECUTIVE ACCUSED OF RAPE
A fine headline. No hyperbole. No ambiguity. Just the bare facts, as laid out by her source.
But at the same time it was almost comically understated. Alex Wu was an executive at Raum in the same way that Neil Armstrong was an engineer at NASA. As the inventor of the Raum Band, Wu was widely considered to be the most powerful man in all of Silicon Valley. Not the richest—that would (soon) be his equally repugnant boss, Raum’s CEO, Elmsley Chase—but certainly the most influential.
It was Alex Wu who, as Raum’s chief technology officer, decided how quickly your vRaum car arrived, or your RaumService food delivery, or your RedRaum hookup. It was Alex Wu who, as inventor and custodian of Raum’s top-secret algorithm, could with a single line of code fill a million stomachs, create a hundred thousand marriages, or bring an entire city to a standstill on polling day—as several antagonistic lawmakers had learned the hard way.
And now it was Alex Wu who, according to the draft lawsuit that had dropped into Lou’s inbox last night, had modified that same algorithm to locate and track young women who matched his own sick victim profile, using the alcohol sensors in their Raum Bands to notify him when they were alone and intoxicated. Who, two months ago, had offered a paralytically drunk twenty-two-year-old college student (listed in the suit only as Jane Doe) a ride home in his Tesla Model π .
Amazon | Bookshop.org
About Paul Bradley Carr:
Paul has spent 20 years covering the dark side of Silicon Valley for publications including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Private Eye, PandoDaily, and Techcrunch. He was also founder and Editor in Chief of the infamous NSFWCORP in Las Vegas.
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