Wetware (10 page)

CHAPTER 3

March 22, 2029, 3:30 A.M.

BRIGGS STOOD at the door of Galapagos. He opened it and stepped into the cloud of cleaning mist. It was a fish-belly color, somewhere between white and sickly gray, about six inches thick, and it smelled like a combination of Clorox and wax. The cloud was laid down at 3 A.M., and it hung over the stone floor for about a half hour before it was sucked away by little vents in the bottom of the walls. It left the floor with a bright shine, like polished onyx.

Briggs went to the end of the lobby, his shoes making spirals in the mist and a noise too, a
tock, tock, tock
that reminded him of something. Chambering a round. That was it. Chambering a round and putting on the safety. Brass hulls, copper tips. It was funny the way things didn’t work out sometimes. For instance, those high-speed rail guns had never come to anything, and people were still using gunpowder. After all these years.

A security guard sat at the black, horseshoe-shaped desk. His name was Jackson, and he was a retired military man who was glad to get the job to supplement his pension. The cleaning mist had a medical drawback, and a lot of the late-night guards complained about respiratory problems. The shine was good, though. No one could deny that. Jackson appeared to be floating on a cloud.

“The mist won’t take but a minute more,” said Jackson. “This new stuff works a little faster than the last muck they used. Stinks a little more, but, Jesus, talk about a shine.”

When he spoke, he looked down at his hands, which were next to a blue diskette case that sat on the desk, the kind that held extra-dense CDs, about the size and thickness of the wheel of a dolly. Briggs guessed that, like a lot of security guards, he was stealing software and selling it.

“Aren’t you supposed to wear the respirator mask when the mist is out?” said Briggs.

“It’s uncomfortable,” said Jackson.

“Maybe it would be a good idea to wear it,” said Briggs.

“Well, shit,” said Jackson. “Have you ever tried to wear one? Jesus. It feels like I’m suffocating.” He coughed.

Briggs stood in the mist. The stuff moved along the floor now with a tidal motion, a misty flow that reminded him of wisps of vapor on a river at dawn. They both stood there in the mist. It was withdrawing now. Briggs thought about that train coming: the trouble you could see from so far away. Briggs said, “You know, you’ve got to look for another job.”

“This is pretty good,” said Jackson.

“The mist makes you sick. See? You understand what I’m trying to tell you?” said Briggs.

“Come on, Briggs,” said Jackson.

“Well, think it over,” said Briggs.

“I’m just glad to be working,” said Jackson. “You know? Anyway, you’re supposed to go downstairs.”

“What do you hear about that?” said Briggs.

“I hear all kinds of things,” said Jackson. “Rumors.”

“Like what?” said Briggs.

Jackson shrugged.

“You better go downstairs,” he said.

“How bad is it?” said Briggs.

“You better go look for yourself,” said Jackson.

He shrugged.

“You know how it is,” Jackson said.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t leave those diskettes around where everyone can see them,” said Briggs.

“Oh, Christ,” said Jackson. He reached out for the diskette case and put it in his pocket. “You won’t say anything, will you?”

“No,” said Briggs.

Briggs waited, hoping that Jackson would look up at him. Surely it was a bad sign that Jackson didn’t want to look at him.

“Have you been here all night?” said Briggs.

“No,” said Jackson. He licked his lips. “I had to go home for a while. I wasn’t feeling so good.”

“What was wrong?” said Briggs.

“I had to take some aspirin. Headache,” said Jackson.

“Well, I hope you feel better,” said Briggs. He turned and started walking toward the door at the back of the lobby, but after he had gone only a few steps, Jackson said, “Hey, Briggs.”

“What?” said Briggs.

“You remember how you used to come in late at night and I’d tell you a joke? You remember the one about the lawyer and the polar bear?”

“Sure,” said Briggs.

Jackson grunted. Then he looked right at Briggs and said, “We were always pretty good friends.”

Were,
thought Briggs.

“Yes,” he said. “We were.”

“Well, I just wanted to say good luck,” said Jackson.

“Thanks,” said Briggs.

“And to ask you one other thing. Since we were good friends,” said Jackson.

“What’s that?” said Briggs.

“Don’t think badly of me,” said Jackson.

“You mean in case the stink here gets you? Because you wouldn’t wear the dumb respirator?” said Briggs.

“Yeah,” said Jackson. “In case of that.”

Briggs looked around.

“They’re waiting for you,” said Jackson.

Briggs’s feet sounded in the stairwell as he went around and around, spiraling downward, passing the doors on each landing. In the hall he looked at the bulbs on the ceiling, which were in baskets. He had always thought that this was a military style, or the way the lighting was done in the halls of places where people were interrogated. He took a deep breath. What, after all, was the difference between anxiety and fear? Did he know it or didn’t he?

The growing platforms were empty. The blue plastic tubes that carried the growing medium, the masses of red, yellow, and green wires that had been connected to the gauges and computers, the clear bags of nutrient, the pneumatics, with their wires still attached, the bright edges of the cutters, all looked like the objects in a ransacked apartment. The steel covers had been pushed back, and were off their runners, and the vapor from the platforms condensed at the edge and made a steady dripping sound as the drops fell. Light came from the ceiling, but now, in the disorder of the room, in the torn and broken materials, in the curdling of the vapor, the place was filled with a clutter of shadows, triangular and black shapes like pennants of ill intent. A little snow still fell, the lines of it erratic and slowly diminishing, like a storm in which the temperature rises and the flakes turn to rain.

A technician came in and stood there in his disposable clothes.

“They’re gone,” said the technician.

“That’s what it looks like,” said Briggs.

“This is a first,” said the technician. He was scared, too. After all, it had happened on his watch.

Briggs sat down on a stainless-steel bench.

“Christ,” he said.

“You know what everyone is asking,” said the technician.

“What’s that?” said Briggs.

“How did they know to escape?” said the technician.

“I don’t know,” said Briggs.

The technician stared at him.

“Uh-huh,” the technician said. “And there’s something else everyone is asking about. If they know how to escape, just what else do they know?”

Briggs got up and went over to what had been Kay’s platform. Her shape was outlined in the soft material, which had the texture of a womb, although it was the color of aluminum foil. He ran his finger along the depression, which was still warm.

“I’m asking you a question,” said the technician.

“You’ve got me there,” said Briggs. Could anyone hear the quaver in his voice? He looked around the room. “What a mess.”

“Well, that’s not my lookout,” said the technician. He looked around. “I’ve just got to keep my records straight.”

Briggs looked at the platform that had been Kay’s.

“You don’t need me for anything, do you?” said the technician.

“No,” said Briggs. “You better see to your records. They should be in order.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Go on,” said Briggs.

“All right,” said the technician. “I will. You don’t have to get huffy.”

“This isn’t huffy,” said Briggs. “You want to see what huffy is?”

“You don’t have to talk to me that way,” said the technician. “I don’t have to take that. This wasn’t my fault.”

Briggs shrugged.

“Time will tell,” he said.

The technician looked at Briggs for an instant.

“I guess that’s right,” the technician said.

He went out through the door.

Briggs heard a dripping sound and turned toward Kay’s platform. Liquid collected in a crease and then dripped from it to the floor with a
tick, tick, tick.
It was clear, the basis of lymph fluid, sweat, secretions of one kind or another. Briggs looked at it and then took a glass tube from the rack on the stainless-steel bench and held it out to collect it, the drops filling the container slowly. It looked just like the fluid in a blister. He held it up to the light. It was clear, like liquid diamonds, nothing obviously wrong with it, but of course you couldn’t tell just by looking. Briggs capped it and put it in his pocket.

Then he sat down on the floor next to the wall, and put his head in his hands. All right. He sat there, on the cool floor, thinking,
There’s no
going back now.

In the clutter of the room, in the mess of broken equipment, in the shine of the stainless steel and in the dripping of fluids, he confronted what seemed to be obvious here, the perfidy of the human heart, but what drew him up short and made him even more troubled was his suspicion that the heart that had betrayed him was his own. After all, he had gotten himself into this.

Upstairs, Briggs went across the floor that looked like black ice.

“Well,” said Jackson. “Finito, huh? Things aren’t looking so good.”

“No,” said Briggs.

“How long, do you think, before you have to clean out your desk?”

“I don’t know. I might be able to hang in here.”

“You got a problem,” said Jackson. “It’s against the law to convey human desires to these creatures.”

“No one knows that better than me,” said Briggs.

Jackson gave him a long look.

“Come on,” said Jackson. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Some hick?”

Briggs thought all he really wanted now was to go home and sleep for a while. Maybe he could come up with something if he could just get a little sleep. He was still a little nauseated.

Briggs shrugged.

“I’ll be upstairs for a while if someone wants me,” said Briggs. “Then I’ll be at home.”

He walked across the black floor, thinking,
Can Jackson keep his suspicions to himself, or is that another worry?
No, not worry. Fear. After all, Jackson knew the number of times Briggs had made unnecessary visits downstairs. They had never talked about it, but Jackson knew that Briggs had gotten something out of those occasions in the middle of the night. Even at their best, those visits would make it look as though Briggs cared too much, just like those technicians who had become overwrought at the effect of smallpox. Maybe that was what was bothering Jackson: he was uncomfortable knowing things about Briggs that he wished he didn’t. It made them accomplices.

Briggs went up the stairs with the steel mesh landings, and when he was at the second floor, he stopped to think for a moment. What he wanted was to be someplace between where he had been and where he was going, since each place he had been, or had yet to go, was filled with details that suggested questions he couldn’t answer. He kept thinking that he had never actually written in anything about escaping. And if he hadn’t, who had? The question was enough to make him close his eyes, but all he saw were explosions of color, swirling shapes that gave him no comfort at all. Even his eyes were playing tricks on him. And if someone else had been adding things, what had they been?

Upstairs, the walls of his office had just been cleaned, although this was done by running a charge through the glass that turned all the smudges, the fingerprints, the marks left by sticky fingers, into a fine dust that was collected by a vacuum at the base of each wall. The glass smelled like Windex, and Briggs guessed the odor of Windex had a way of suggesting a new beginning. He looked into the other offices, which were empty. He supposed his chances of starting over weren’t good, and as he admitted this, he instantly longed for the clarity of innocence. For Briggs, innocence had disappeared slowly, like vapor condensing out of a clear summer evening and gradually obscuring the stars. He closed his eyes to recall some youthful memory that was reassuring, but this effort only enhanced his sense of innocence’s elusiveness.

The port of the machine on his desk appeared like a dark rictus. He had some of his records, all on CDs as thick as bagels, and now he loaded them in, feeling the heavy mechanism inside take hold.

He wasn’t sure there was going to be any evidence of . . . what should he call it? Sabotage? This, surely, was not the issue. He hoped. Manipulation, was that better? While sabotage was a possibility, it still didn’t seem right.
Tampering
was the word he thought he could live with. Neutral, or less. Almost a prank. There it was again. He simply had to stop using the words to hide what was really happening. When would he learn?
Prank.
He felt ashamed that he had even tried to put it in those terms.

If anything had been done, where would it have happened? He supposed that tampering would be hard to detect, because whoever did it would have the common sense to use his style, which, to the untrained eye, might look indistinguishable from others, but in fact it was a lot like the touch on the key that Morse code operators used to have: each of them had an identifiable “voice” that was instantly recognizable to other operators.

He rarely considered the complexity of what he had done, since he often worried about details rather than an overall pattern. As far as coherence was concerned, he trusted to a general sensibility that allowed him to make changes in any particular section. He did this like a painter who lets each brushstroke be guided not only by the object it delineates, but by the intended effect of the finished painting. So Briggs scrolled through the miles of code, not sure what he was looking for. Something that just didn’t look right. An ugly sensibility.

There was another matter too, which made it more difficult for him to determine whether anyone had tampered with what he had done. Briggs had written the basics, which by any standard didn’t have the delicacy of a living, breathing creature. To get the detail, the delicacy, and the beauty too, not to mention the stability of a living thing, Briggs had set up a method of amplification in which the code had been reproduced again and again. When spontaneous changes occurred (data could be corrupted by cosmic radiation, just like genes), they were retained, at least to the extent that this process enhanced his designs. If they worked to the design’s disadvantage, such changes were discarded. But these variations took place at the most elemental levels, and as far as he could tell, there had been millions of small adjustments, maybe even billions. As he searched, he didn’t know whether what he was looking at was a matter of the process he had set up, the artificial natural selection, or something that had been added by someone else. How could he tell the difference between a mutation that had been retained and something that had been added with the appearance of being harmonious with the original design?