THE FARM

摘要

news breaks l i k e a rain cloud, or a daydream. Roy arrives at his desk just in time to claim the story: Rival militias started a gunfight at a federal water pipeline that they both wanted to steal from. Nine people dead, another 17 injured.Roy feels a bump of pleasure as he shifts from weary commuter to seasoned journalist, digging into the bare-bones wire-service report to turn it into an article, with quotes from law enforcement and details about both groups. (The Clean Hands Militia say they just want to be left alone inside their walled-off commune; the Big-Wheelers aim to destroy the government-and may have been trying to poison the Billings water supply.) Roy files the piece, slugged MilitiaWaterWars0809X, and it goes to the Farm for vetting.Less than 15 minutes later, the article is kicked back to Roy's desk covered with red marks. The Farm has found fault with almost every word.Roy sighs. Once, The Daily Argus had fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers. Those people are gone now, and in their place there's the Farm: a virtual machine populated with copies of a few trillion different bots, scraped from the internet, living inside a fake social network.