Wetware (2 page)

Many things had changed at Galapagos since the first models. Now the technicians kept regular hours, and worked with information that was gathered not by their own observations but from instruments, and even the instruments were removed from the technicians, because they were read by software, and then the software reported to the technicians, who, frankly, liked it this way. And, anyway, all they did now really was to monitor things that Briggs had planned and written a long time before. The technicians were in their rooms, which were outside of the shop where the growing platforms were. At least they were out of the way. They filled out the forms, signed them, completed the work that was done by methods discovered through the exquisite misery of those times in the past when things had gone sour. Everything was labeled, validated, stamped. Most people were numb to the scale of the work that was being done.

And as far as Briggs was concerned, the beginning of this next stage was the most satisfying. Maybe he would get a chance to compensate for the things he had done. He wasn’t sure in the beginning what it would be, but he knew he was looking for it.

His first task, when he actually went to work, was to come up with names for them. He had never liked the generic names, the ones that came out of the abbreviations of the titles: ALM-1, or COM-L-2, which always had the air of the bureaucratic, which by definition was obscure. After all, what, really, was an ALM-1?

Briggs had gone through the phone books, but there hadn’t been anything good there. He saw in the newspaper that a bank was getting ready to close some accounts of people who hadn’t done any transactions in a couple of years, or who had moved without leaving forwarding addresses. Often people just left. Then the banks went to work, and Briggs knew, too, that a crew went to clean up in the apartments of people who had taken off. Perhaps “taken off” was the polite way of putting it: exiled or terrified into fleeing was probably better, although sometimes it got rougher than that.

He wondered how the crew divided the things in an abandoned apartment. Maybe it was done by seniority, or maybe by force of personality. Or just by force. In any case, Briggs knew what the slang for the usable stuff was:
mungo.
It could be anything really, an indoor plant, some clean sheets. Maybe a little souvenir, some wetware junk that had been bought in Arizona or New Mexico. Originally, cleaning up these apartments where people no longer lived had been done by men, but like a lot of other jobs, washing dishes, digging graves, cleaning up in a mortuary, this was now done by the first models that Galapagos had produced.

Briggs had made some of these living souvenirs himself when he was between jobs, before he got lucky and landed a job at Galapagos. He had done the usual things, such as a living cactus that grew in such a way as to show, on its skin, a changing picture of the mountains in New Mexico: snow-covered peaks in the winter, flowers in the spring, the coming of fall. He had also worked on mice that were able to speak a few words: “Miami is the Fun Capital of the World,” or “I met you at the Seattle World’s Fair.” Cute items, badgers, small bears, little deer: all of them could be used in a living pitch for one product or another. Biological versions of matchbooks. A beaver sang a little song about toothpaste: the kids loved it.

He hadn’t liked doing it because of the shoddiness of the things he produced, a cheapening of life that showed up not only in the garish colors and in the materials that he had used, but in the fact that none of it was supposed to last very long. It had been built to die.

As he looked for the names, he tried to find something else too, a way to make up for something. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but he knew that his desire for it increased. And as he worked and felt the pressure grow, he thought about beauty. Or perhaps it is safe to say that this is where he started. Previously he had tried to keep beauty out of the code for wetware. Beauty was old-hat. Practicality was in. The engineered, techno look. Ugly as homemade sin. And what did he mean by beauty anyway, the merely physical, or something more elusive? What was really attractive? A spirit, an attitude, an instinct for understanding, weren’t these the qualities that mattered? Friendly spunk and an ability to love? And what about courage and trustworthiness, or desire? Weren’t these beautiful?

And as Briggs brooded this way, he found that he thought of other items, such as the sheen of a blue sky, say, on the bare legs of a young woman. Or the expression in the eyes of a human being who is doing what is necessary and right, and who is brave. He also thought of the scalded dishwasher’s two-toned cry, its plea for help. He couldn’t bear to remember the cry, but he couldn’t forget it, either.

He named the female Kay Remilard. Kay. He said the name to himself when he first came across it. Surely it was right for the first woman ever to be produced this way. He could even imagine how she moved (perhaps her earlobes were the color of barely ripe raspberries, the light, almost invisible fuzz on them silver, or more elusive than that, filamentlike). Kay. He thought of the shadow under her arms where she had shaved, the new-moon shape of the tips of her toenails . . . Kay sounded frank and sweet, which, of course, would be nice as a matter of contrast.

Jack Portman was what he decided for the male, since he wanted a name that suggested the solid, unflinching dependability of someone who knew what he had to do and when he had to do it.

Once a month or so, Briggs was called into the executive offices to explain what he had been doing. Krupp was the division’s head of future development, Briggs’s boss’s boss, and Krupp showed up in his rumpled jacket, his short haircut, his small round glasses, his chin and jowls needing a shave. He sat behind a borrowed desk in a corner office, the river out the window behind him looking lead-colored and as though only mechanical fish could swim in it. Krupp had scars around his eyes from a bad automobile accident, and these looked a little white when he was exhausted and had just gotten off a plane from Taiwan or Bangkok. When Krupp spoke, he reached up and squeezed the sides of his nose as though he had a headache that was so bad he had to do something, just a small gesture, to acknowledge the constant throb.

Krupp said, “So, what’s this on the time sheet about names? We’ve got a couple of names, don’t we? What are you wasting time for?”

At night, the sensibility of Krupp’s voice came back to Briggs, and he thought,
Cook the books for the time sheets.
Once he had crossed that barrier, the one where he hid what he was doing, it was easier. In fact, he realized he was free if he was willing to do the work in such a way as not to get caught. Late at night he looked up and saw the blue glow of monitors through the glass walls of his office. At these hours the office had the light of twilight in a dream—soft, but with a little something lurking in the shadows. It was during these hours that he had started to add the personal stuff: a sense of humor, gentleness, an instinct for the beautiful. A delight in the vital. The love of music. And, of course, he had paid attention to the specifications, such as the handgun stuff.

To add the personal details, he had started with blood-cell-sized robots, small scanning devices that he injected into his own arm and then used them to record the brain from the inside. He was able to get a little time with the big computers to decipher the noise of this into discrete elements: he isolated specific sensations or specific talents, and then encoded them to be able to convey them to Kay. And Jack. One of the beauties of the microscopic robots was that they were biodegradable, and all he had was a bad headache each time he did it. He had access, too, although no one knew it, to the recordings that had been done this way of musicians and mathematicians. Briggs took a certain amount of pride in the fact that he had been the one to produce artificial versions of these talents.

Mashita had hired someone else to keep an eye on Briggs, a woman named Leslie Carr. She was twenty-nine years old, a little younger than Briggs. She had studied biologic algorithms at Stanford, and had worked in advertising and in digital entertainment before coming to Galapagos. Carr had red hair and blue eyes, and her skin was lightly freckled on the shoulders. She liked to wear nylon stockings and short skirts with blouses that accentuated her broad shoulders and long neck. Her expression was one of sultry disapproval.

From the beginning, Briggs knew she was wasn’t paying much attention to the details of what he was doing, although every now and then, when he had been working so hard he had gotten shaky, he thought this might be her way of testing him, of giving him just enough freedom to make a real mistake. Then he considered it again and was certain that that was not her style. Mostly she got what she wanted by withholding approval, and through a mixture of brutality and delicacy, she hinted that if Briggs (and other people she kept an eye on, too) could just discover what she really wanted, she could be enthusiastic and even warm. It was obvious that she thought this was enough to keep people in line, and that she didn’t even have to look that closely at what Briggs had done.

He realized this was the case when he first began to add things. He gave this work to Carr and she sent it back with a pro forma comment, such as “Looks good,” or “Keep on with this,” or “I want to see more.” She never included a specific comment. His impulse hadn’t been to deceive her, but to try to make up for his sense of having done something wrong, not only in the first project, but more generally. Passion, beauty, love—weren’t these the antidotes to the worst and most infuriating limits of being human? They were the best of what Briggs had. Anyway, that’s how he had begun. Not with a plan, but with an impulse.

CHAPTER 2

March 2027

WENDELL BLAINE, the director of the Central Bank of North America, lived in a building that was solid but not ostentatious. It had twelve floors, and his apartment was on the top. He liked the vista, the conglomeration of lights, which in their reds and greens, in their radiant aggregate, suggested wealth, blue tinted diamonds, gold, rubies, and wet-looking emeralds. He often stood by the window, hands behind his back, thinking things over. The furniture in his apartment was dark but comfortable. He had a housekeeper who prepared his meals and put them on the table. Blaine liked well-cooked, simple food: a roast of pork with spinach and mashed potatoes and an endive salad with vinaigrette, and perhaps, if he was feeling that he had done something clever, something that would have an impact without leaving any signs of just what was going on, he would allow himself a small fruit tart.

Blaine was tall. The overall impression he gave was the essence of gray power. Limousine doors were opened for him and he seemed to exist in a world of office buildings with polished marble floors. His suits were perfectly tailored, his custom shirts were cut from Egyptian linen, and his ties were made of silk. He was capable of making billions of dollars disappear simply by raising an eyebrow at the right moment.

His routine was as regular as the ticking of a grandfather clock. Blaine came home, had his drink, read the papers, looked over some journals, opened his mail with an ivory opener, which he often used to hold a letter, spearing it by one corner, like a butterfly under a pin. When he was done with his mail, he liked to have his housekeeper announce that his dinner was ready. He came into the dining room, which was not bright but not dark, just golden and comforting, and when he had served himself and taken a bite of just about everything, the housekeeper came back and asked him if everything was all right. Invariably, almost like liturgy, he said, “Yes. Thanks.” The housekeeper waited behind the door in the kitchen until she heard the final scrape of his knife on his plate, and then she came in and asked if he would have dessert. He said yes or no. When it was yes, she put a pear tart on the table and he ate it, listening to her putting the few dishes in the washer, the squeak of her shoes on the floor, and then the diminutive click of the front door as she let herself out. The silence increased, like a room cooling when the fire burned down to ashes.

Often Blaine went into the library, where there was a piano, and he sat in a chair, by the shiny gloom of the instrument. He listened to some recorded music.

Blaine had always prided himself on one thing. It was not something he was born with, although he often acted as though it were, but a discipline he had learned over the years. It had cost him a great deal to learn it. He prided himself on the fact that he never allowed himself to be swayed by any feelings at all, and that when he had to make a decision, he did so with all the weight that a keen mind, untroubled by emotion, could bring to any problem. He faced up to everything: hard choices, hard decisions, the appalling implications of his actions. He had learned to do this by years of restraint, perfected by decades of discipline, like the exercises that Zen priests subjected themselves to, and at times he liked to think that this quality of mind was “tectonic.” He smiled when he thought this way, but underneath it all he was quite proud that he could make decisions that were so demanding.

The ability to make hard decisions had cost him more than he could admit. He had found that it was difficult to give in to the chaos of family life, to the messiness that went into having children and the uncertainty of his wife’s moods; so he had given up his family, or, more to the point, his family had given up on him, although he still saw his wife a couple of times a year for lunch at an elegant restaurant. She sat opposite him, despising him in her quiet, unmistakable way, accepting his advice about the markets, giving him monosyllabic answers to his questions about the children, who were now grown up. He may have been formed by years of exercise, by the practice of making decisions on the basis of what was best for the most people, but he was not stupid, and surely, given the passions that lay just beneath the surface and with which he struggled so continually, he was not unfeeling, either. So he knew, as he sat there and his wife looked across the table at him, the wine in her glass the color of the distilled sunshine of southern France, she was counting the days until he died, praying that she would have the exquisite luxury of being there to watch him lowered into the ground. He knew this and accepted it, but he woke at night, seeing that expression in her eyes. It always shocked him, whether he experienced it firsthand or just remembered it in the middle of the night, and the shock of it was like hitting a wall, just walking into a wall without knowing it was there. The emotional shock, the endless impact of it, required the discipline he had so carefully learned.

On one occasion when he and his wife were having lunch, he had reached across the linen tablecloth, over the organized shine of the silver, which was lined up like instruments for a medical procedure. He took her hand and she flinched, as though she had been struck. She put her hand in her lap, as though to wipe it on the napkin. He had wanted to say he had missed her and he was sorry about the way things had turned out, but he said nothing. Instead he cleared his throat and said, “The bass is quite good here. I think I will have the striped bass and the broccoli soufflé. And for you? Would you like something to start? Those small fish sausages are wonderful, really. Would you like some?”

She sat there, giving him that look.

He hadn’t realized, in the beginning anyway, that he had turned to music as a way of staying alive. After all, it would have been easier for him if he had just felt nothing, but he wanted to have a private life—one that, while lonely, was nevertheless full and intricate, and that allowed him an understanding of those aspects of being human that could only be felt.

So he had started going to concerts. Slowly he became a member of the various boards that oversaw orchestras and contests, too, competitions of one kind and another. Everyone was glad to have his expertise in financial matters and, of course, to receive his outright gifts, which were much larger than anyone could explain. The philistines on the committees he joined never gave a second thought to Blaine’s taste in music—he was “just a money man, for crying out loud”—but the musicians who served on it began to give him some grudging respect, which, in a way the musicians found hard to explain, segued into admiration and finally to a fond devotion, not only for the man but for his opinions, so much so that after a long association most musicians were more certain of the value of Blaine’s opinions than of their own. Blaine appeared to take such devotion as his due, but secretly he watched with pleasure the slow, inevitable advancement of the admiration the musicians showed him, seducing them by a raised brow, a smile that only a musician would understand, a slight sniff at something that was merely fashionable and empty. This respect was more important to him than he could say, but even this he refused to allow to interfere with what he considered his reason for existence: making hard financial decisions. He had never made a mistake. One of the ways he knew this to be true, or one of the ways he measured it, was by the personal, emotional cost of his efforts.

He had dinner once a year with his son. They ate silently, saying almost nothing, and then made a date for the next year.

Each morning he went downstairs and stood under the green canvas awning of his building, where his limousine was waiting at the curb. The driver usually stood against the wall, and when Blaine emerged, the driver opened the door of the car so that Blaine was able to get in without breaking stride: the door opened, and Blaine slipped in, folding up his legs like a drafting compass that was going into a box. The interior of the limousine smelled of the vacuum cleaner that had been used on it earlier in the day.

Often Blaine’s driver, Jimmy, had some sheets from Blaine’s secretary.

“You’re supposed to take a look at this,” Jimmy said.

“Yes?” said Blaine. “What?”

Then he would look down at the sheets to see what mischief there was to consider. For instance, a group of investors in India had been trying to manipulate silver futures, and now that they had been exposed, one had to consider how the world stock exchanges were going to react, and what to do about it if they reacted badly. How far was it going to spread? How big a bump was there going to be? Shares would fall. And what would people do as they tried to find a safe haven, as greed morphed into panic? At one point Blaine had done some work with models for the markets, and he knew what the difficulty was. The equations for the markets had to include, for example, nonlinear items, the financial version of friction, and it was these things that always caused trouble. There was always some infinitely small thing, hidden at first, that revealed itself later.

In fact, though, this was what he lived for: a disruption in the market, a panic, a need for liquidity, for reassurance. He was at his best in those moments. He liked to make hard decisions. In the beginning he had been aware that many people had this knack, but he knew, too, that it was usually good for only one business cycle. He didn’t want to be one of those who only lasted a single cycle. He had stayed up-to-date. But even though he had done so, he was careful about new ideas, since he didn’t want to confuse the merely clever with knowledge. Fads, novelties—these were the kinds of things that he had spent his life resisting. Knowledge, as far as he was concerned, was something you could depend upon, and while it was sometimes accidentally discovered, it had the quality of not being diminished by time.

The car stopped in front of the building where he worked. Jimmy pulled open the door and Blaine got out and went into the lobby. The floor was marble, and the shine of it was still maintained the old way, with buffing machines at night, and above it was a domed ceiling on which was painted sky and clouds with angels moving through them, stern ones to be sure. They reached out to touch one another, each of their fingers perfectly suffused with the roseate glory of God. Around the dome was a gilt edge. At regular intervals, chairs were arranged in the hall just far enough from one another so that anyone who sat in one of them couldn’t talk to someone else in another without shouting.

Inside, people went about their business, carrying papers, briefcases, murmuring to one another, although when Blaine came in, they all instantly hesitated. They seemed to say, in that momentary hesitation,
This is the man who knows what to do. Thank God he is here.
He nodded to one or two of them, and walked over the polished floor. The elevator waited. He went up to his office at the top of the building.