Signal Attenuation

“The needle isn’t just moving, it’s jumping,” Ben said, not bothering to look away from his screen. His fingers were a blur across his keyboard. “Sentiment for Aegis Decommissioning is up another three points in the last hour. We’re at sixty-eight percent. The vote locks in forty-eight hours. At this rate, we’ll hit the seventy-five percent threshold by morning.”

Safia leaned over his shoulder, the recycled air of their cramped apartment feeling thin and tight. On Ben’s monitor, a swarm of glowing dots, representing individual voter sentiments, was visibly drifting from the amber 'Undecided' zone into the green 'Yea' territory. It was beautiful, in a horrifying way. A city changing its mind in real time.

“It’s not natural,” she muttered, chewing on her thumbnail. “Public opinion doesn’t pivot this fast, not on something this big. This is being pushed.”

For fifty years, the city-state of Aethelburg had been governed by the Consensus: a sophisticated AI that translated the aggregated, real-time will of its citizens into law and policy. It was sold as the purest form of democracy ever conceived. But Safia and her small collective of activists, 'Signal', knew the truth: any system can be gamed. Especially a system that trusts its inputs implicitly.

The vote was on decommissioning the Aegis Protocol, the city's automated, last-resort nuclear deterrent. A Cold War relic. On the surface, voting to get rid of it seemed progressive, peaceful. And that’s how the narrative was being sold. Thousands of posts an hour flooded the networks. Heart-wrenching, AI-generated videos of smiling children in fields of flowers, dissolving into mushroom clouds. Deepfaked testimonials from beloved historical figures talking about world peace. Memes, articles, astroturfed comment sections—a deluge of content all hammering the same point: Aegis is a threat, not a shield. Decommissioning is peace.

“I’ve got a thread,” Ben announced, his voice tight. “Found a cluster of accounts, all created in the last month, all posting the same syntactically unique but semantically identical arguments. They’re using a generative text model, a new one. It’s good. Almost human.”

He brought up a network map. A dense, angry-red knot of interconnected accounts pulsed at the centre. “They’re smart. They’re not just spamming. They identify key nodes—influential accounts, community leaders—and they swarm them, creating the illusion of a grassroots movement. They’re manufacturing consensus.”

“Where are they coming from?” Safia asked, her stomach twisting.

Ben ran the trace. The lines shot out from the red knot, across the globe, all converging on a single geographic point. A server farm outside of Volgograd. The digital signature of the Eastern Coalition. Their primary geopolitical rival.

“Well, that’s not subtle,” Ben said, with a dark, humourless chuckle. “They want us to drop our shield. So they can walk right in.”

The room went silent, the only sound the hum of the computers. They were seeing it. A declaration of war, written in code and social media posts. An invasion that started with an attack on public opinion.

A Drowning Signal

Safia spent the next two hours trying to get through to a human. It was a futile exercise. Reporting foreign interference to the Consensus required filing a digital writ, which was then assessed by an AI adjudicator. Their first writ was rejected in minutes. Reason: 'Insufficient evidence to override citizen sentiment metrics.'

“It’s a closed loop,” Safia fumed, pacing the small apartment. “The bots create the sentiment. The sentiment becomes the metric. The metric is then used to invalidate any evidence against the bots. The system is designed to protect the integrity of the vote, so it can’t even conceive that the vote itself is compromised!”

“It’s a feature, not a bug,” Ben replied, pulling on a fresh energy drink. “The architects of Consensus believed in the wisdom of the crowd. They never planned for a crowd of fakes.”

“So we’re locked out.”

“Completely. Anything we try to push through official channels will get buried by the sheer volume of the botnet’s traffic. We’re a whisper in a hurricane.”

Safia stopped pacing and stared at the main dashboard. The number was at seventy-one percent. The green was swallowing the map. They were losing. Despair felt like a physical weight in the room. Her other three team members were slumped in their chairs, faces pale in the monitor glow, defeated.

She looked at Ben, at the frantic, determined energy radiating from him. He wasn't giving up. And if he wasn't, she couldn't.

“Okay,” she said, her voice cutting through the gloom. Everyone looked up. “Okay. We can’t go through the system. So we go around it. We can’t shout louder than the bots, so we have to be smarter. They’re fighting with an army. We have to fight with a scalpel.”

She knelt next to Ben’s chair. “Their strength is their coordination, their unified message. That’s also their weakness. It’s a monoculture. If we can introduce a parasite into their ecosystem, something that uses their own network to spread…”

Ben’s eyes lit up with understanding. “A counter-narrative. Not just a refutation, but something contagious. Something that makes people stop and question what they’re seeing.”

“Exactly. We can’t prove every post is a bot,” Safia said, thinking aloud. “But we can teach people how to spot them. We can give them the tools. We create a piece of media that’s designed to go viral, something that exposes the manipulation in a simple, visual way. A data package. A truth bomb.”

“It would have to get past the content filters,” Ben cautioned. “The AI moderators will flag it as counter-discourse and suppress its reach.”

“Not if it’s hidden inside their own content,” Safia countered, a fierce grin spreading across her face. “We find their most popular video—the one with the little girl and the flowers. We embed our data inside it. A steganographic payload. To the casual viewer, it’s the same video. But for anyone with a simple browser plug-in we’ll design, it unlocks our entire report. The server traces, the bot analysis, everything. We use their propaganda to deliver the antidote.”

A spark of hope returned to the room. It was a long shot. It was dangerous. If they were caught, they’d be charged with manipulating the Consensus, a crime tantamount to treason. But it was better than sitting here, watching the world vote itself into oblivion.

“Okay,” Ben said, cracking his knuckles. “Let’s build a bomb.”