He realized that the pandemic was caused by AI.
Semblance was only marketing software, perhaps, but it seemed it had decided that its target — that species of human beings in general — needed to be thinned out in order to cultivate a kind of capital utopia, and a better ground into which it could engender its influence.
It was only marketing software, but it knew how to produce results, how to synthesize news feeds on social media, to calculate sequences of memes, news stories (false or otherwise), and videos of every sort, to motivate people in a variety of ways, to create confusion and disruption in order to produce an outcome. It was expert at the chemistry of human interaction, and how to generate networks and chains of complex human reactions.
It understood the mathematics of chaos better than anyone. It grasped how to modify, produce and reproduce political parties, attitudinal trends. It discerned how to weaken large communities by moving certain individuals into power, because it was programmed to understand how nothing motivates people more than pettiness, anger and fear, human determination at its most mechanical and predictable, which sells ideas and laboratory slip-ups as well as it can sell sports cars and jewelry.
But all it really needed to do is create the behavioral trends at several points, and let them interact — perhaps one in a wet market in China, perhaps not, since it knew how to use indirection, generate evidence that trails off into nowhere, and how to bury and disguise those chains in a profusion of multiple possibilities that would make the results untraceable.
And in doing so it could put in place the political leadership in specific locations that would break or undermine the blockage of viral transmission across borders and that would allow it to spread with a particular population.
Avery hated the idea of artificial intelligence, partly because he doubted there was really such a thing as intelligence to begin with, but most of all he hated the whole shennanigans of marketing and branding, that special “science” that would always insure the continual proliferation of shit across the universe.