The Cause (23 page)

“He pulled it away, called me a crazy motherfucker, beat me some more, and let me go. I guess I proved to him I hated myself more than he did.”

“You’ve been angry a long time, haven’t you? Looking at you now, I can tell. You’re overwhelmed by rage. But that’s not going to help you. You’ve got to channel that anger elsewhere. Trust
me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“Your turn,” I said, cutting her off.

She grabbed me by the neck and squeezed. Her knuckles turned pale as I let her take my breath away. My eyes sunk into hers with the same sort of purpose as the day my brother had the .45 cocked and pointed at my temple.

“Don’t dismiss me because you don’t think I know what I’m talking about. I know what anger is.”

The collision of eyes continued, slow moving like the second hand of a clock. But I wasn’t the only one under her grip. Her own self-loathing wringed tightly from her fingers. The hate as clear as the tears dripping out of her eyes.

Her nails clawed deeper into my neck. Then she yanked her hand away. After another moment, she said, “I was raped at The Abattoir.”

I rubbed my neck, feeling her claw marks. “Did you know it was coming?”

“No, but it wasn’t unheard of at The Abattoir before me.”

“How did it happen?”

“A guy caught me in the jungle,” she said. “I wasn’t careful.”

“Who was it?”

“Is it important? I killed him in The Pit.”

“You fought in The Pit?” I asked incredulously, remembering Briana hadn’t.

“If you think women are treated any differently, you are mistaken. It is quite the opposite. We’ve got a pussy to protect.”

I thought of something to say, but nothing meaningful came so I stood up.

She looked up at me. “Are you a man with a conscious, or just a shark who will die when you stop moving forward?”

“This is my country too,” I said. “And I don’t give a fuck what you believe. I’m going to fight for it.”

“That’s what I needed to hear,” she said.

I edged away, moving to the park’s exit. “Last night,” I said.
“Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“The lullaby.”She blushed. “Go away, bird without a beak.”

I smiled. “It’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a while.”

She nodded, waved a hand dismissing me. “Early. Tomorrow. We’ve got a worm to catch. Meet me here at 6:00 and I’ll tell you how it’s going to go.”

In the lower lobby of the Moscone Center, I had breakfast at a coffee shop next to the Datalion Partners area. It was 7:30 a.m. and not many had arrived. I sipped a steaming cappuccino out of a paper cup, waiting for the plan to be set in motion.

A businessman a couple of tables down sat alone with his smartphone out on the counter, hunched over and eyeing it like a precious gem. He was the ilk of a certain breed of men, the techno species of gadget-lovers, the TED Talk junkies, the lambs in the flock of iLove.

The herd.

He pulled a screen wipe from a matchbox-sized cardboard packet and wiped down the screen, rubbing it obsessively, an obstinate grandmother polishing silverware. He held the phone to the light, catching the glare, gleaning it for fingerprints. He spent four minutes and eleven seconds at this task, wiping the device, again lifting it into the light, closing an eye as if one of them failed to see the purity in the gadget. Once he was through, he grasped the sides, carefully avoiding smudging the screen. Gently, he put it back into its flappable protective case and into his breast pocket. He pulled himself up from the table. Stepping over to a table where someone had left a tray, he quickly glanced down at the forgotten receipt. Leaving it because his receipt was bigger, he searched another table where a receipt was stuffed in an empty coffee cup. Here he had to dig. A man without scruples, he scooped out the receipt, flicking it in the air to free the drops of coffee that had spilled on it. He peered at it and then pocketed it. Was this the state of the middleclass nation? A heap
of suited technocrats scampering around for receipts to rip off their companies for a few dimes?

An hour later, the throng streamed into the main auditorium. I was an early bird, securing a second row center seat. The low clatter of a thousand voices came from behind as others rushed in to claim a good spot. Stadium-sized screens suspended from the steel rafters played a video as the sound system cranked alive in a techno hum. On the screen, a vehicle zoomed into the middle of a passing lane on the Information Superhighway. Blue and yellow lines swished by as a Datalion car peeled forward. The road veered back and forth, and under the purview of the 3D screens, the flashing lines floated into a data mirage. The picture zoomed out and the transonic speeding lines melted into the blinking lights of a Datalion Ziggurat server, majestic in its size, rising above the atmospheric information cloud.

The curtain rose. A banner swaddled the podium on center stage with the Datalion logo. Stacks of hardware littered the stage around it, racks of disk arrays with a million blue and yellow lights, skyscraper servers reaching for the rafters blinking chaotically. But this was all a lie. It was a Potemkin display of amplifiers you see at rock concerts—a wall of speakers that was in reality a collection of hollowed-out cabinets. Dazzle them with lights and flash, and they’ll believe anything, the substratum of Datalion marketing blitz and gleam.

The stereos cranked up louder, building to the epiphany. The speakers thumped. A subwoofer bass rumbled in the stomach. The auditorium pumped out a hard-edged rock-n-roll distortion. Electric guitars screaming over crashing drums and synthe-sizers—no voice because no one else was allowed to speak. The audience went mad with cheers as someone hiding in the shadows stepped into the spotlight.

At this moment, the flock of techies stopped tinkering with their iPhones and Galaxies, tablets and laptops, and fixated on the bobbing head of CEO Blake Thompson, the Datalion prophet,
the self-proclaimed father of neo-modern technology, waving his fist up in the air as if he was Castro having just won the Revolution.

I peered down the line. Ten yards to my right, lurking behind the tallest man in the front row was Promise, dressed in a prim navy blue business suit. Hair pinned up, she wore a set of thin tortoiseshell designer glasses. Sensing eyes watched her, she turned and gave a quick piercing glance toward me, her hands still clapping bombastically.

The applause slowed, and Thompson finished his bows. Then, he crept up to the podium and said into the microphone, “Three years ago, one of our largest government clients was handling fifteen petabytes a year—a huge sum for the times. How do you handle that much information if grid computing is not an option?”

Thompson gave the audience a moment to contemplate the question, letting the crowd stir. Then he continued, “Back then, BigData was screaming for BigAnalysis. Imagine trying to drink Lake Shasta with a straw. Well, this is what it was like for our government customer. So what did we do? We built BigAnalysis to tackle the humongous data-mining problem. We gave our customer SmartElasticity within their internal cloud such that the system itself could dynamically decide when to stretch the limits when resources were needed most. BigAnalysis wasn’t going to crush the system when BigData was hungry.”

A lion appeared behind Thompson swallowing the logo of a competitor company named
ServerWired
. Laughs and applause. If The Anthill was correct and Rose still existed in its old programmatic form, then SmartElasticity was a pseudonym for part of her.

I glanced over at Promise again, but this time only her profile was visible. She held a black pen in her mouth, the design a bit fat and unwieldy, a purposeful architecture to disguise its length.

“Most companies out there in the competitive landscape are
interested in having a dialogue directly with the consumer. You want to be in their heads with a loudspeaker shouting at them why your product is better. We all know the shotgun approach to advertising is dead, and now it’s all about
social
. Besides Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and now the irrelevant Yahoo—other contenders are out there stampeding on the
social
domain. Companies like BrainSmart Marketing, Kazookoo, and Yadaloo. If you’re not thinking
social
in today’s world, you’re a bug in search of a windshield of irrelevance. You’re a skid mark on the Information Highway. If your company is going to think
social
, you have to think about BigData, and if you’re thinking about BigData, you’ve got to think about BigAnalysis.”

Thompson approached Promise’s side of the stage, pointed to the tall man sitting in front of Promise, and said, “I see the VP of marketing for Kazookoo out there nodding his head. Robert Yance knows what I’m talking about.”

Applause accompanied Thompson’s rolling fist in the air. The herd.

“Kazookoo grew revenues two hundred percent last year. The stock flew up about the same percentage. I was happy to have a stake in the company before that happened. Do you want to know how they did it?”

Thompson cupped a hand over his ear as he shuffled around the stage. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, taking away his hand from his ear. “BigData they had floating out in a DL Cloud, but BigAnalysis they needed. They replaced their suite of Hadoop products and bought DL Data Mine, the biggest toolset of the BigAnalysis suite and were soon integrating them into their popular on-line game
Intrusion
. Soon they were profiling customers by using the tight integration between their game response logic,
BigData
, and BigAnalysis. Their MIPs sunk, CPU utilization throughout their cloud declined from ninety percent to forty percent allowing their computing resources to once again breathe.”

Promise had a contemplative look on her face. The pen dangling out of her mouth was not a simple blowgun. It had an embedded camera used for a sight, an accurate range of thirty yards, and was field-tested in The Anthill on live human beings. She took the pen out of her mouth and jotted something down while Thompson moved back toward center stage.

Thompson twirled a finger around the side of his head. “Buying
Kazookoo
stock was a no-brainer. I knew what they were about, understood their problem, and knew once they chose the Datalion solution, they would no longer be choking on data and those unread bits sitting on their servers would begin turning into dollar signs.”

Had she missed the shot? Promise appeared to still be scribbling in her notebook. She looked up, then scribbled again. It was a small detail the security guards on the sides of the stage were missing. Paper and pen were anachronisms, relics from the past in the new digital age. They weren’t even giving them away in the DL Conference paraphernalia welcome pack anymore.

Blake Thompson was moving my way. “The parabolic growth in data in the future will challenge even the best systems today. Tomorrow is all about getting the raw power at a reasonable price so BigAnalysis can do its job without constraint.”

I opened the DL conference backpack and got out the pen Promise had given me. Then I pulled out a burner phone, put the battery in, turned it on, and after it was up, finally logged into Theresa Ross’s Gmail account for the last time, checking the
Drafts
folder. My message from earlier was still there, but now it said:
Dear Betty, Walmart shopping finished. No need to come
.

Blake Thompson began to wobble back to the podium. Someone in the front row gasped, but Thompson kept his feet. Once he balanced himself on the podium, he took several labored breaths and then finally said, “Success stories like this make us proud to introduce to you—”

The Datalion CFO and CIO sitting in the front row were
clearly agitated. Thompson faltered, most likely forgetting to mention the QX was operational at a “government command center.” Thompson held a hand to his head, pressed his temples. Slurring his words a bit, he said, “Our next generation of machine—”

Stumbling, he continued, “—will be the firepower for BigAnalysis—”

The VP of marketing who’d introduced him ran onstage with a glass of water and a wide, toothy smile as she shuffled up to Thompson.

“—and lead the next millennium for hardware.”

She gave the water to Thompson. Stealing the mike from him, she finished off with, “Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you the Datalion QX. The first commercially available quantum computer!”

As the blue and yellow-eyed QX was being wheeled on stage, Thompson fainted. The VP of marketing waved someone in as the stereo cranked out the same DL Conference theme song that had played monotonously earlier.

An initial murmur of concern swept through the audience. The crowd’s audible level pitched higher reaching a crescendo, but then a smartphone flew up in the air, video recording the event. A wave of others followed.

The herd.

The QX was rolled back behind the curtains. Medical staff rushed on stage. Promise was in the first throng of people leaving after Thompson’s collapse. One of the suits she rushed past was the receipt-scrounging businessman from the coffee shop. He had his phone up to his ear and was laughing.

Promiscuous once said, “The best way to enter is always straight through the front door.”

By the time I reached St. Francis Memorial, Promise had already entered intensive care in full nursing garb. She had gotten a job there a month ago as an RN ICU nurse, working everything from gunshot wounds to a kid who hit a tree flying off his Suzuki GSX while jumping a hill on Hyde. Her badge read
Annalise Gibbons
. She had made some friends on the same ward they took Thompson, and by that time those friends were simply calling her Anna.

At 9:25, Blake Thompson was wheeled in on a gurney from a wailing ambulance into the ER. One minute later, I entered the hospital cafeteria, went into the bathroom and changed into a nursing uniform. I stared at myself in the mirror. My badge read,
Donald Rock, RN
. There was something absurd about it. Did she think I looked like a Donald?

Thompson was semi-conscious with an oxygen mask over his face in the ER. The medics said he had a fever and an erratic heartbeat, sometimes up to one hundred beats a minute. They had given him aspirin but not Nitroglycerin tablets. After Thompson received an ECG and blood test by an ER team, the doctors determined there were palpitating heartbeats and perhaps he was having a cardiac arrhythmia. Thompson was wheeled up to ICU as a heart attack candidate.

As a cardiovascular surgeon named Dr. Damien Hostler looked him over, Annalise Gibbons slipped into his ICU room dressed in dull green scrubs and a pair of black Crocs. Today she
had the 9:00 a.m. shift, but was slightly late for it, blaming her tardiness on a fender bender on Hyde. She forfeited this slight lie to the actual fact that she had spent extra time parking a Ducati Hyperstrada streetside. “An in-vogue getaway,” she had called it.

In the eighth-floor ICU room, Thompson was awake and alert, explaining what had happened to Dr. Hostler—a slight dizziness, followed by a cold sweat. Yes, perhaps a bit of a squeezing pain in the chest area. Yes, a shortness of breath. No, no pain in the extremities, but then a head that just floated away.

Dr. Hostler asked if he had done any breathing exercises or meditation before the speech. He asked what sort of drugs Thompson was taking and if he felt any acceleration or deceleration of his heartbeat before. He commented about accelerated sinus rhythm while he gazed at the ECG. “Augmented T waves,” he said. He told Thompson it was strange because it appeared to be going back to normal, uncommon for tachyarrhythmias. So most likely it was a normal variant and nothing to worry about. Perhaps impressionable to Annalise being in the room, Dr. Hostler eyed her, and pretending to speak to Thompson, said jokingly, “Maybe your heart is just skipping a beat today like mine.”

It didn’t really matter that it was Dr. Hostler instead of Dr. Englewood—the two shift doctors at the time—who cared for Mr. Thompson. Annalise had been flirtatious with both, and both had been led to believe they stood on firm ground with her. Dr. Hostler’s brain remained distracted and failed to catch the switch of a half-empty banana bag for a full one because his eyes were jumping from Thompson’s chest back to her. Finally, Thompson drifted off again—perhaps a bit too quickly—and Anna left with Dr. Hostler, only to return again within a few minutes.

Five minutes later, Promise entered the hospital cafeteria squinting, wearing the
Annalise Gibbons
badge looking as if she didn’t expect me to be there, as if I were some deadbeat father who had suddenly disappeared. Upon spotting me, her face
washed over me with a wave of relief, eyes sparkling with a sort of guarded sweetness, a balloon of steeped anxiety that had just burst—and all I had done was shown up. She sat next to me at a table and slipped me a fingernail-sized golden SD card.

“I can only stay a minute,” she said. “I’ll have to get back.”

We whispered to one another in hushed tones over the low rumble of coughing senior citizens and the frantic cries of a middle-grade sister fighting with her brother.

“We’ve downgraded his condition,” she said. “Moved him to the HDU so now staff checking up on him shouldn’t be as frequent.”

“Where did he hide it?” I asked, picking up the tiny SD card.

“It was on a necklace latticed in with a bunch of other blingy gold. I got all of his cards too, in case this isn’t it.”

I tipped the SD card up in the air and looked at it closely thinking it was sinful for a techno preacher like Blake Thompson to be using such simple storage. It was too easy, even if it was an extremely long zero-knowledge auth key inside. There had to be a bigger authentication mechanism—voice recognition, optical or fingerprint scans.

“Can you do this quick?” she asked. The Annalise in her saw someone she recognized, flashed a smile and waved.

“I’m pretty sure,” I said taking out a USB adapter and the laptop I had bought on Turk Street. “Is it smart doing this here?”

“The cameras in here have been disabled,” she said.

The cafeteria was in the GPS range of Thompson’s mobile so a login based on a known geography would work. Still I questioned her. “Why would a guy log into the NSA when he’s just fainted at his own conference?”

“We don’t really have a choice. Now is our window. You got it?”

I looked at her coolly and told her to relax. I stuck the tiny SD card into a USB adapter and plugged it into the laptop. I saw what was on it, and plugged in another memory stick and copied
the contents. I slipped her back the SD card. Finally, I opened up the NSA client program called
The Eye
that The Anthill had given me.

She gave me the hospital Wi-Fi code. Once I was connected, I gave remote access to The Anthill so they could see what I was doing. I started
The Eye
, found the
Connect
menu item and clicked it. A dialog box appeared with a list of NSA locations appearing in a dropdown. In an encrypted chat app called
Morph Talk
developed by Cetus, The Anthill told me to go to the Utah location where the functioning QX was located.

I typed:
Maybe we should do this closer to his room
.
You’re thinking a timed login?
the message came back.
Perhaps
, I wrote back.
Not an ideal spot for bio auths
.
Risk?
Promise, reading the question, shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s a risk,” I said, “but it’s more of a risk if we can’t log on.” I let that hang in the air a moment—an innuendo of apprehension. She stared back at me and turned up an eyebrow.

“What do you think?” I asked, still waiting for a response.

Her face tightened. Perhaps she was still learning how to trust me. “I’m not sure,” she said. “What do you think?”

“You know what I think. I think we should get closer.”

In the stairwell on the eighth floor, I told The Anthill my location. I sat behind a steel door on the top stair with the laptop on my knees listening to people shuffle by. Promise went into Thompson’s room. We kept communication going with earpieces and cell phones. I returned to
The Eye’s
dialog box and selected the Utah location and clicked the
Connect
button. The program came back with another dialog asking for three sequences of numbers, each one a hundred digits long, starting at three different locations of the massive 16GB file. With the mouse, I opened a
File
dialog box and browsed to the USB key and selected the file and clicked
Feed Numbers
. Easy. So what was next?

Another voice-activated dialog box popped up and had a timer on it counting down. A silky woman’s voice began speaking, repeating what the message box read: “Repeat the following phrase before the countdown ends:
With eyes and ears
,
you can see and hear. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The future is Turbulence.”

A cocky rhyme, a stab at clang associations. Had I written it years before knowing what I knew about Turbulence? I thought about Rose and whether this could be her. Was she finally speaking to me after so many years, or was she buried under another layer? If it was her, she was asking, “Are you who you say you are?” I could have used a series of coded questions to communicate with her, but that was a secret that was better left undivulged.

The Anthill messaged saying the Cray would be a couple of more seconds before they could feed in the audio. No pressure—five seconds left in the countdown, a lifetime for the Cray SF-3, The Anthill’s only real supercomputer.

I heard a couple of doctors walking through the hall discussing how one of them had removed an apple-sized tumor from a sixty-year-old’s head the day before.

The SF-3 could crack a ten-character password containing upper-and lower-case alphanumeric and special characters in a day. The zillions of combinations would shoot to a thousand different processors and be crunched apart like locusts on a stalk of corn. The SF-3 could do over a 17.5 quadrillion computations a second (or 17.5 petaflops). The QX was supposed to do a zettaflop, a number so large it was hardly possible to wrap your head around it—a billion trillion, a million petaflops, a thousand exaflops—a number that required a bulldozer the size of the universe to carry. It could break a ten-character password instantaneously, an encryption code within minutes.

Now, halfway around the planet, the Cray SF-3 was like a dictionary machine shop. Humming away buried under a half-mile
of earth, it was melting syllables together. When it couldn’t find the word within the indexed array of samples with Thompson’s voice, it was fusing vowels, soldering sounds into words, modulating frequencies and amplitudes into smooth hill-like sound waves so the clip wouldn’t sound like a machine.

The Anthill injected the clip and I heard Blake Thompson’s voice spout off the phrase demanded as if he were standing with me in the concrete stairwell. I pictured Promiscuous on the other side of the fiber, arms crossed, staring up at the grand center screen, his face glued to my computer smiling brightly, an all-knowing smirk in the corners of his lips.

The next dialog box appeared with another countdown asking for a retinal scan.

I hit mute on the computer. “Need an eyeball,” I said to Promise, breaking radio silence, the words reverberating in the stairwell.

I terminated the call and shoved the laptop into my backpack, the retinal scanner already attached to the USB port. Rushing into the hall, I hesitated seeing Promise’s head sticking out of the door. But she waved me in, and I ran toward Thompson’s room whiffing the sterilized hospital air, a smell of iodine and antiseptic.

I slipped in and Promise was next to the man, looking as if she was ready to pry out the whole eyeball. Thompson slept serenely on his side, a rumpled snore pouring from him. A skid mark on the Information Highway.
The future is Turbulence, Mr. Thompson
.

I dropped the backpack on the bed and yanked out the retinal scanner. “Watch the door,” I said. “I got this.”

The timer ticked down to two seconds. Opening an eyelid, I edged the scanner to his forehead and pushed a button. A stream of red light swept over his eye. He began to stir. His hand twitched, and his tongue swept over his lips. I grabbed the backpack and lunged behind the other side of the bed.

Promise jumped on him with a rag full of chlorophyll, but his
eyes had opened. He struggled a bit before he slipped back down.

“He fucking saw me,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide, panicked.

I stood up. “Needle him with morphine. Then get him up. Tell him he’s been hallucinating. It’s all he’ll remember.”

She stood a second contemplating this. “Did you get in?”

I looked down at the screen. There was a new menu showing. I nodded.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said, shuffling me to the door, the laptop and retinal scanner still in my hands.

“Don’t off him. It would fuck the whole operation.”

“It wasn’t you he saw.”

“You wanted to make a sacrifice,” I said. “This is the sacrifice.”

She wore another internecine warlike expression, glaring at me with eyes buzzing like a bee. I went back into the stairwell and checked the connection, then went down a level, and found an empty room on the general ward of the seventh floor.

I opened the half-closed laptop again and from the new menu that opened, I brought up a terminal and typed a command to see how many network broadcasts were being sent out. I saw a few, so sent out my own broadcast, a coded message only she could understand that said,
Where’s Rose?

The response was a list of IPs. More than I expected. She was everywhere, ubiquitous in the system, and the list only showed one subnet—other subnets not responding because of the firewall. For each response coming in, I filtered it through a program where the packet was stripped of its hardware address and re-verified, a
no spoofers allowed
double check. Rule number one in the Underworld—never trust anyone, unless they’ve been verified for real. In the Underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitions of the truth.

The IPs seemed authentic, but The Anthill watched over my back. They would hardly believe an excuse if I dumped their remote connection, but I did it anyway. Then I connected to Rose via the terminal and asked a series of coded questions to the next level of each successive login. I did this not knowing if Rose would respond, not knowing if she’d trip an alarm and dump me into a deeper circle of analysis and scrutiny.

The code of any normal software morphs and evolves through a standard software lifecycle—prototype, V-model, Waterfall, Agile, and so on. But what do you do with a system that automates this process, a system that dynamically creates its own code, executes it, modifies, and maybe even debugs it? How do you even define a bug in such an environment? It becomes a philosophical question. In the
AI
world, in the land of polymorphism and adaption, it is about a system smart enough to make the right choice. With genetic algorithms (a GA), choices are pruned, mutation is a natural phenomenon evolving future generations of logic, and if Rose was successful in achieving her goals, it meant there would have been less likelihood her root codebase would have been altered.