Idempotency (12 page)

Dylan clicked off his BUI and, lips pursed, marched back toward Simeon. Three full steps later he flung his fist at Simeon’s face, but it only glanced an ear as Simeon quickly ducked. Dylan lunged, but Simeon had gathered his wits and threw himself at Dylan’s midsection. He quickly used his sizable girth to drop Dylan to the ground, and in one motion he flipped Dylan over onto his stomach and wrapped Dylan’s arms behind his back. Dylan squinted and coughed, then swallowed hard. He opened his eyes and turned his head slightly to look over his shoulder at Simeon and saw flames wildly prancing up and around Simeon’s arm. Similar flames were dancing around Simeon’s pupils, which remained as black as a widow at night—it looked as if each eye were a small solar eclipse upon which sun flares were exacting some ungodly vengeance.

Simeon apologized. “Dammit, I’m sorry, Boxster. I should have gone with the wedding vid. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Fuck you! What the hell is wrong with you? I am going to sue your ass so far that I’ll reach your fucking mouth and pull out your fucking dipshit tongue back through your fucking anus.”

Simeon laughed. “Dude, that’s sick and it doesn’t even make sense. I’m not letting you up until you relax.”

Dylan struggled, slacked, then panted, “Fine.”

Simeon relaxed his grip and Dylan immediately rolled over and tried to take another swing with his freed left hand. Simeon grabbed the fist on its way up and promptly placed it back against the ground. At this point a small crowd had started to mill around the wrestling pair.

A security guard walked up just as Dylan had taken the second swing. The guard was a burly, tan-skinned man who seemed overly excited to have something to do. He grabbed the pair and made them stand. After a lengthy stare-down, the security guard berated them with several stern and hollow threats about banning them from the casino. But the security guard had been notified in his right ear that both customers had considerable funds and that their blood-alcohol levels were—while past the legal limit—low enough such that they could still gamble in a profitable manner. Dylan relaxed noticeably as soon as the guard had arrived, yet remained mute.

Simeon pleaded with the guard, “Seriously, Sir, we’ll stop. I apologize. We’re old friends and this is really no big deal. Just family stuff.” The guard raised his eyebrows questioningly and Simeon leaned in and whispered into the burly man’s ear, “I slept with his sister. You wouldn’t guess it by looking at him, but she’s fucking
hot
.”

The guard chuckled. “Look, you two get outside for a bit, get some fresh air, throw some punches on the lawn if you gotta. Come back in thirty minutes with cooler heads, and we’ll overlook this.”

The guard nodded at them and began to shoo away the crowd. Dylan instinctively headed toward the exit. Simeon wasn’t sure if he was intending to leave or if he was simply walking aimlessly. Either way, the pair walked at the same pace, Dylan leading by about two meters.

When they reached the large entrance tunnel, Dylan stopped abruptly and turned around. He put his hand up and Simeon halted, still a few meters away from him. Dylan asked calmly, “How did you get it?”

“We have our methods. I told you, a war is coming. We—SOP—don’t have a side, we’re just trying to make the sides equal,” Simeon replied.

“What’s your endgame? Is this some kind of corporate extortion? SolipstiCorp has patents, you know. A team of lawyers," Dylan prodded helplessly. He began to walk again.

“Yeah, I know. Boxster, you’re not thinking big enough.” Simeon smiled. “You don’t get it—we don’t want your tech. Well, maybe if it were open and free—but that’s a different issue altogether. What we
want
is to find out why
NRS
wants your tech.”

“Let’s assume that’s true for a second. Why the hell should I help you? Who cares if NRS wants our tech—they
should
want it! That’s more money for me, a higher stock price for my options, a bigger quarterly bonus. Apparently a pretty big one, too, if NRS is as interested as you say." Dylan’s pace quickened.

“Dylan, you should care, because they made it personal. They screwed up your uncle, and maybe even you. From your reaction back there, I’d say you haven’t exactly regained idempotency from your deathTrip. Come with me up to Seattle tomorrow. Let me show you a few things. One day is all it will take.”

“You’re lying," Dylan replied, not breaking stride. They had reached the end of the tunnel, and he was now walking toward the Porsche.

“I’ll sign a disclosure right now. Look, I’m sending over my encrypted public TaxID now." Simeon was waving his left hand in the air; he could have been miming for all Dylan knew. Simeon continued: “One day, that’s all I ask. If we were out to get you, why would I go to this trouble? There are better ways to extort money from corporations. Trust me, I know all of them.”

Dylan could see his car now, past rows of large, boxy transports. He lengthened his strides now that he had a visible purpose. Several different options tossed themselves around his head. He was emotional, angry, and drunk, and making a serious decision was the last thing he wanted to do in his present state.

“What do you want to show me in Seattle?”  Dylan asked.

“People. The other half—which now adds up to far greater than half, by the way. Also, I’ll introduce you to my friends—my team, SOP.” Simeon raised his hands and added, “Also, I’ll explain exactly how we got your holoVid, and the evidence we have on your uncle.”

“Oh, great—I get to meet your friends. That’s super exciting,” Dylan retorted.

As they reached the Porsche, the driver’s-side door flung itself open as it detected the driver’s presence. Dylan stood in front of the car, resting his arms on the roof of the short automobile. “The other half—what the
hell
does that mean?” He shook his head and sighed. “I’ll give you one hour in Seattle. And you damn well better explain the holoVid and my uncle. Then I’m headed back to San Diego, and either way you can expect to talk to our lawyers.”

Simeon smiled and laughed his bass-filled laugh. “Excellent—we’ll leave at ten tomorrow morning. I’ll find you.”

“You do that,” Dylan replied with a frown. He got in the car and slammed the door. Simeon yelled something else, but Dylan ignored it and pressed a button to turn on the car. He put the stick in reverse, grabbed the steering wheel, and pushed the gas pedal—hard. Nothing happened. A second later the car responded, “Mr. Dansby, your blood-alcohol level has been determined to be over the legal limit for this jurisdiction. If you would like to use the autoTransport features of this retrofitted antique Porsche Boxster, simply state your desired destination.”

“Screw this,” Dylan replied drunkenly, then pounded the steering wheel with his head.

“There is a corporation named ‘Screw This’ located in Reno, Nevada. Is this your desired destination?”

And with that, Dylan’s smile returned, albeit briefly.

The knocking of the bass was so deafening that Sindhu wondered if the DJ was attempting to reach into the heavens and get the attention of someone specific, but heaven wasn’t taking solicitors on this night. And chances were no one at the party in question would have been let through the heavenly gates, let alone allowed to step foot into the same zip code. The crowd that gathered at the decibelityFactory was of the deviant variety, and considering the cost of entry, it was fair to assume—as Sindhu correctly had—that all partygoers had the means to live extended lives. It wasn’t so much that the crowd hoped or intended to live forever; rather, they simply expected it.

The decibelityFactory was a club that resided in one of the oldest buildings in the SoMa district of San Francisco. The owners were savvy marketers, and this was not their first rodeo. After the SoMa district had been leveled in 1906, new buildings had sprouted up, providing low-rent warehouses for low-end shipping goods, and low-rent rooms for low-end shipping men. The decibelityFactory building had been simply a three-story warehouse, nothing more, nothing less. Before the turn of the millennium, the SoMa area had fallen into decay, and the city enacted several plans to invigorate the area. It worked insomuch that gentrification pushed out the poor and ushered in the hip technocrats who couldn’t have been more excited to work in the cozy confines of an anachronistic, early-1900s warehouse. Irony was a requirement for successful tech startups in those days; thus, fledgling Internet companies flocked to the area and it quickly became a hub of innovation.

But decades have a way of shifting populations, not unlike tides and tributaries, so when technology began to shift outside of San Francisco (and America, for that matter), so too did the wealthy from SoMa. And back in flowed the poor. The area likely would have turned into a full-fledged slum had it not been for the largesse of an anonymous donor who bought and donated a portion of land to the city with the agreement that the city would attempt to spur high-tech investment in the area through various tax and leasing breaks. Unending guesses were made as to the donor’s identity, but nothing was ever proven. Claims were especially rampant on the darkNets, with the usual guesses swirling around the Internet magnates of the early part of the century. Occasionally, someone on the darkNet would claim to have made the donation (and to have been an heir to a Jobs or a Bezos), but these claims were always refuted in time.

Toward the end of the twenty-first century, the donation of the land, coupled with intrigue over the identity of the donor, caused the tide to shift once more, and several high-end corps began leasing (for pennies above free) building space once again in the SoMa area. They hoped to spur tech innovation by creating a cool place for the brightest underground minds to congregate in realWorld. The corps would hire the best and brightest and attempt to start up difficult-to-trace subsidiaries, most of which worked in areas of technology that skirted the lines of legality. But this was San Francisco, and anything went on the left coast.

Sensing the burgeoning, refound excitement in the area, a pair of opportunistic club owners leased the building that would become the decibelityFactory ten years prior. The club quickly gained an infamous, underground status thanks to the club owners’ ability to harness the innately ironical aspects of the area. They played up the location’s history, stating it was once the office of several legendary tech startups, when in fact, it had never housed anything more glamorous than a warehouse for light fixtures and a fast-food sandwich shop. Further, the owners made it very difficult to get onto the door list, requiring at least two invites from folks with darkNet social endorsements of at least a thousand followers.

No matter—people flocked. The throwback decor included antique virtual-reality video games (including clunky headsets and gloves), lasers, glowing holoSticks aplenty, early-twenty-first-century houseBots (which delivered the drinks with curt manners and creepy smiles), and outdated projection screens brightening each wall, playing repetitive tech flatMovies from the turn of the twenty-first century.

Sindhu loathed it. All of it. She couldn’t stand the pageantry, never mind the pretense. Everywhere she looked, some young technorati darkVirtTripper was chatting up some other darkNet hacker, aniToos and aniFab clothing ablaze with moving lights. The sound of the music was nauseating; Sindhu wondered how many of these people would even know what a Mozart was. On the wall in front of her, a flatMovie was playing. The lead actor wore a long, dark trench coat as bullets tore past him. This place was about status, and Sindhu had great antipathy toward the desire of status for status’s sake.

“Awesome, isn’t it?” said the idiot whose arm Sindhu was doting upon.

“Oh, yes. Completely.” Sindhu flashed a wily smile.

“Lucky you bumped into me. You need to have over 10K darkVirt connections to get into this place. And if you don’t have a darkOcImp encryptChip—well, good luck getting a drink! You’re probably the only person without ocImps in this whole place!”

“You think?” Sindhu asked innocently as she turned around and grabbed two drinks off of a four-foot cylindrical houseBot that had been garnished with pulsating neon graffiti by an amateur. She let her “date” view her from behind for a few extra seconds, his eyes drifting up and down the slender portion of her back, which showed through the low-cut black dress she was wearing. He ignored the animated letters that gently fell down her shoulders, instead focusing on her less intellectual, but no less impressive, posterior.

She turned back around as the cylinder flashed its creepy grin and stated monotonously, “Thank you, enjoy your drinks. Yolo!”

A flick of Sindhu’s wrist, followed by two small sips of his drink, and Mr. I-have-ten-thousand-friends’s next memory was waking up in a bathroom stall, hands tied around his back, a mammoth security guard splashing water in his face, demanding he leave the premises immediately. Not a good night for Mr. 10K Friends.

Sindhu, now free of distractions, sought out the person she had come to find. As she meandered through the vertiginous club, she reflected on the past few months of her life. It hadn’t taken her long to become jaded at the lack of progress and influence she could make upon the world through a lowly nonprofit organization. She had gone to work for the largest nonprofit in the world and found they had a fraction of the resources (in the form of investment) of even the most lowly tech corp. Her work focused on class striation, and theoretically she had the means to bring the classes closer together, as they once were. But even after an entire year of effort, she felt that she hadn’t made a single, minuscule bit of difference.

Upon graduation, she had immediately begun tunneling into illegal darkNets, browsing and chatting with the few like-minded technical folks that existed in the world. Every discussion led back to the need for a virtual revolution. A groundswell movement bankrolled by the benevolently wealthy and machinated by the technically savvy. They had to open the eyes of the ignorant. If the common person only knew the plight of the lowCasters—if people were forced to know how the rest of the world lived—only then would people feel compelled to do something to help! But to make a true difference, Sindhu had to delve deeper into darkTech. She had to find SOP—if they even existed.