Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (29 page)

“What?”

“A black hole. The nearest one to us,” prompted Straw.

“I don’t know. A trillion miles away?”

“No. Right in your face.” And here Straw reached out and touched Mark’s face, lightly. “Your eyes. They are black holes. They take in light; they absorb information.” His fingers lingered on Mark’s cheek as he waited for Mark to appreciate the depth of the observation. “The machine you saw today is like that. Not just some computer you dump data into, but an organ that needs to make sense of the world. That’s not really something you’d want to stand in the way of, is it?” He didn’t wait for Mark’s answer. “So, I suppose you tell the part that you can tell, which, yes, until we really unveil the product, is not the whole story. And I know it’s going to be hard—that’s why I want you. You’re the best.”

“And what is the product, exactly?” asked Mark, a little desperately.

“It’s a product
and
a service,” said Straw proudly. “It’s
order
. It’s the safeguarding of all of our clients’ personal information and assets. But it may be a while before our clients discover that they are our clients. So you’ll have some time to work on that part.

“And there have lately been some information breaches, Mark. We’ve had some close calls. I don’t know much about that. That’s Parker’s department. He says his people are dealing with that, rolling that up. If exposure should begin before our planned unveiling, we may need you to generate some interim explanations for what we’re doing. If we can stay discreet, as we are now, then we need you to keep telling the story of the Node. We’re getting excellent results with the Node, but we need one hundred times the saturation we have now. In five years, I want every non-impoverished
Homo sapiens
to be carrying a Node. Also, SineLife, the new socialverse we’re rolling out. You know how the youth today won’t make a move without consulting their little circles online?”—he didn’t wait for a nod from Mark—“We need you to get everyone doing that.”

He sat up in his lounge chair, a little man, too tan, tufts of springy white hair on his shoulders. “We need you to do what you do so well: Don’t sell them on it, convince them of it. Something like ‘SineLife sets you free—to concentrate on what’s really important.’ But say it in that way you do.”

Clients who do not yet know they are clients? Mark saw the twisted beauty of it: in this plan there were no victims, only indentured clients.

And then Straw named for Mark a starting salary. It was the kind of money that Mark had actually
stopped
thinking he was ever going to see; the kind of money that really does simplify the moral calculus of a thing. He could trade in Dumbo for Tribeca, browse the Argentine estancias listed for sale in the back of
Superyachts Monthly
.

And yet. That terrible spying. “But is it legal? What did Cole mean, the implied-consent decree of 2001?”

“It’s not only perfectly legal under ICD 2001,” said Straw, “but also right and moral under natural law, which, I think we can all agree, allows me to pick up and use something that another man has thrown away. And as long as we operate from within one of our sovereign parallel platforms”—Straw gestured with a flourish of his fingers at the ship they were on—“we need obey only the laws we acknowledge. You taught me that.”

“I taught you that?” Mark asked, his voice squeaking a bit.

“‘Build the world you want to be a part of.’ That’s you. Page seventy-seven.”

Oh fuck
. What hideous project was using his stupid banalities as cover? He had even objected, at the time, to the
world you want to be a part of
line, thinking it was too obviously lifted from Gandhi, or from the Internet Gandhi at least. But he had not considered the risk that something benign like that might give comfort and encouragement to a fascist consortium declaring itself free of all laws and building a data sink on a leviathan freighter.

Up here, poolside, it was faint, but there was still that high whine somewhere, a ringing. Not like a mosquito. Like a distant alarm.

“Does the ringing sound bother you?” asked Straw suddenly.

“What? Yes. You hear that?”

“No. Not anymore. Here, try these contact lenses. They make the ringing go away.” He handed Mark a clear vial, the size of a film canister, with lenses on a little wand inside.

All Mark could do was claim seasickness. “I think I need to lie down before dinner,” he said. A lithe pool boy brought him belowdecks, and Singh escorted him the rest of the way to his cabin.

In his berth, horizontal, he heard the ringing more keenly than he had on the terrazzo. He was closer to the beast. There was a tiny cycle to the ringing, and a regular modulation in amplitude or whatever. Mark folded his pillow around his head like a helmet, but he could still hear it inside him.

He had no trouble indulging megalomania. Obviously. He was a writer, so the egotists always saw him as their ethnographer, like he was Margaret Mead or whatever. But this was something else; this involved intimate surveillance of everyone in the world, and a computer with scaffolding, a computer like an engorged penis that ejaculated other little computers that swam away with stolen data.

He didn’t know what to do. He willed himself into a stuporous nap; he had the shirker’s hope that somehow, something about the thing he had to do would be easier tomorrow or next week or when he woke up. Sometimes that hope is rewarded.

Dinner was lobster. Mark thought lobster sickening. All that rich tissue, and the cracking sounds. Pope, sitting next to him, was sloppy with his melted butter and splashed some on Mark’s cheek. He also turned out to like telling racist and unfunny jokes in what he thought was a comical Indian accent.

“Where can I find your assistant Tessa?” Mark asked Pope when dinner was finally over.

“She’s not my assistant. She’s an attorney. And she is lesbacean”—this part he said in his “Indian” accent—“so you can forget about it.”

“Actually, there are some legal issues I’d like to speak to her about,” said Mark. “If I’m to be the SIC here, I’d better make sure I’m clear on what it is we do.” This despite the fact that he had written copy for a biogenetics company for six years without knowing the difference between a gene and an allele.

“If?” said Pope, a fork erect in his fat fist. “James, I thought you said your boy here was on board.”

“He is. He is,” Straw assured Pope. “He’s just doing due diligence.” Straw handed Mark a little card that looked like a magnetic key card—no text on it, just a pattern of colored bars, with a little clip to clip it to your pocket. “That lets you go anywhere on the ship,” said Straw, “you talk to anyone you want to talk to.”

Mark knew that his cleverness wouldn’t help him too much here, so when Tessa came to the door of her stateroom, he just said, “I have some pretty basic questions.”

“I thought you might,” she said.

She led him through some maze work of ship to a room that looked like a staff canteen; maybe ten people in the room, eating off plastic trays, and three dudes playing cards. Tessa nodded at some of them.

“You want anything to eat?” she asked Mark.

He said no but changed his mind when he saw the little plastic clamshell of rice pudding in one of the fridge cases along the tray course. Tessa chose an egg salad sandwich and a piece of pie, and they sat down together at one of the Formica tables.

“How can it possibly work?” he asked her.

“It’s working right now,” she said.

“But, I mean, you guys are going to get busted.”

She didn’t look scared. “By who?” she said, expressing a sachet of bright yellow mustard into her sandwich. “There’s nothing to bust, is our position. We’ve been going for years, anyway.”

“Captain Konstantin told me this ship is a year old,” said Mark.

“Who?”

“Konstantin? Konstantinos? Constantinople? The captain guy.”

“Oh, yeah. A year sounds right. Before the ships, we were land-based. I think we still have some of those terrestrial facilities in Burma and North Korea.”

“I guess I don’t understand the payoff, though. I mean, how is this ever going to be worth the expense?”

She put down her sandwich and looked at him. “You don’t understand because you still live in a time when you can access analog knowledge. But that won’t last much longer. Soon you won’t be able to do much of anything if it’s not online. You’re skeptical, I can see, but that’s because you think being online means being in front of a screen, using a keyboard. Because your imagination is limited, and because most computers still look like typewriters. But we’re on the edge of some technologies that will change all that—”

His imagination was limited, was it? He interrupted her. “Everyone around here sounds so fucking ominous. What technologies
will change all that?
Because I remember hearing an awful lot about virtual reality and how I’d never have to go to a real beach again.”

Tessa did a beckoning thing toward the table where three dudes were playing cards. One of the dudes, handsome, sauntered over. “Mark, this is Chris,” Tessa said.

“Ryan,” said the dude.

“Sorry. Ryan,” said Tessa. “You were working in Inputs back in California, weren’t you?”

“I worked Inputs for six years. Biosampling, mainly.”

“Tell Mark here about some of the best stuff you’ve gotten to work on.”

Ryan did this raised-eyebrow thing and ticked his head at Mark.

“It’s okay,” said Tessa. She nodded at Mark’s little colored-bars card. Ryan straightened up.

“Pharmaceuticals that transmit, I guess,” he said. “That was pretty cool. But then the nano people kinda robbed us of that one.” He thought. “This wired contacts, though. I’m part of that shop, and we’re doing amazing things.” His pride was sincere and evident.

Tessa did a very subtle closure gesture and Ryan cleared his throat, nodded, and went back to his card game.

“Wired contacts?” said Mark. “What? That dude invented LinkedIn or EliteNet or whatever?”

“Contact
lenses,
Mark. It’s called visual-channel-collection technology, and we’re five years into it.”

“Who would wear such things?”

“I’m wearing them right now,” she said and looked him right in the eye. He could see no contacts in her eyes, only the brown, with a hazel fleck in the left. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever known before,” she said.

He was adrift. They were serving egg salad sandwiches and building a secret world around him, around everybody.

“We’re early adopters; we’re stakeholders, Mark,” said Tessa. “We want to be part of what’s next. Don’t you? Or do you want to be one of those people who would have been, like,
Thanks, no, Industrial Revolution, I’ll stick with my loom and my gaslight
? You want to be left behind?”

She was eating her pie now. “These ships are just a small part of what’s next. And yes, right now this part runs up against something called the ‘right to privacy’”—she made air quotes—“which is a notion that hasn’t really meant much in thirty years and means less every day. You may as well defend people’s right to own steamboats.
Someone’s
going to control access to all the data and all the knowledge. All of it. Everything that every government, every company, and every poor schmuck needs to get through the day. You want that to be the other guys? Once everyone’s on our network, the old, unwired world will be worthless.

“And that’s how you guys will make a lot of money out of this,” said Mark, trying to be all bottom-line-y.

“
Money
does not come close to describing what we’ll make a lot of,” said Tessa.

When sleep finally came for him that night, Mark was tossed deep into a grandly staged drama where his mom told him not to take this job.
Do not take this job,
she said, pulling away from
Sine Wave 2
in her old lavender Dodge Dart, which was now also a helicopter. And he went back inside the ship, which was no longer the ship but had become his childhood home, and he grappled with Tessa beneath his Luke Skywalker bedspread, the sweetness of the grappling cut with anxiety that James Straw would walk in on them.

L
eo,” said James. “Leo.”

Leo woke. The jasmine was still in the air. He had fallen asleep with his shoes on, which made him feel dangerous.

“Your sister’s here.”

“What? No.”

“Yes. At the smoking station.”

Leo clawed at the light in the room. He’d been asleep for less than an hour, he was certain. Unless he had been asleep for twenty-four hours. “That’s not possible. I mean it’s highly unlikely.”

“Ah. Okay. Someone pretending to be your sister is here, then,” said James.

Leo got upright and started moving out of the room and down the hall, still napped-out and confused. James was right behind him and they moved briskly. A woman at the men’s smoking station would be a level-one breach of Quivering Pines’ gender-segregation policy and would probably set in motion some sort of regime response. They were racing the clock.

“I left her out there, but I couldn’t keep Clive from talking to her,” said James. “He thinks he just won the lottery. Hurry. He’ll bore her sideways.”

The small knot of men in the lounge were also aware of Leo’s alleged sister outside. But they had gone into prison-yard mode, and no one wanted to be called a snitch. Leo realized that they liked him, that they didn’t want him booted from their midst. He passed through the lounge and stepped out to the patio, and as he did, one man posted himself along the corridor to keep a lookout for counselors, and another clutch of men arranged themselves in front of the patio doors and busily scribbled in raggedy notebooks to distract from and obscure the transgression taking place outside.

Leo saw a girl there and in the bright sun was a little dazzled. Clive was talking to her. She was dark like Leo. No, darker. Very pretty. But too small to be a Crane. Cranes leaned back on the air behind them; this girl leaned in. He stopped at the edge of the patio. James stopped beside him.

“Yeah. That’s not my sister,” he said.

“Really?” said James. “You sure about that? This is important.”

“I’m serious. That’s not my sister. Look at her.”

The woman turned around just then and looked at Leo.

“Shit. I guess you’re right,” said James. “Well, she said she was your sister. I’d better come out there with you.”

They walked to the smoking station. “Clive,” said James when he and Leo had reached the smoking station, “come back in with me. I want to talk to you about something.”

“In a minute,” said Clive.

“No, Clive. This can’t wait,” said James.

Clive copped on. He quickly dug a business card from the breast pocket of his fleece top and handed it to the woman. James gave Leo two of his menthol cigarettes and then escorted Clive back to the facility.

Leo gave the girl one of James’s cigarettes. “Here,” he said, “look like you’re smoking this.” He demonstrated by taking a fake drag. “So you’re my sister,” he said.

“Yeah. No,” said Leila.

“You’re not my sister?” It came out like a question.

“No, I’m not.”

“I know. I know you’re not. Why’d you tell James you were?”

“The lady at the front desk kind of supplied me with that one. It seems that your sister was expected. I needed to see you.”

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

This was a relief. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here because of your broadside. I’m with the people resisting the thing you warned about, and we want to know what you have on Deveraux.” She held her cigarette like she’d seen them held in the movies, but she took a passable fake drag, and then did a good fake exhale.

“You read my broadside?”

“I did.”

Leo noticed that the eye of the stanchioned cigarette lighter was glowing orange. Behind the girl was the medical building; a slender telescoping satellite antenna had sprouted from its roof.

“Did you drive here?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Are you in the lot?”

“Yes. It’s a little black Toyota. Two doors. Beneath the basketball hoop.”

“How about I meet you there in four minutes?”

“Copy that,” said Leila.

Leo turned and walked quickly back to the patio. The summer buzzed in his ears. He was elated. More. New. Information. James fell in with him when he strode into the lounge. The onion-shaped counselor had come down the corridor and was sniffing at the frisson in the room. He looked perturbed. Leo motored back to the dorm room, James right behind.

“What’s up?” said James when the door was closed.

“Couldn’t rightly say,” said Leo.

“You packed?” said James.

“No. They packed for me,” said Leo. He dropped the Dopp kit into the duffel and slung the whole thing over his shoulder, like a sailor. He stepped up on the windowsill. “James, I’m going to leap out of this window now,” he said.

He leaped, and landed twenty-four inches below the window in the loamy softness of the Quivering Pines bark-mulch moat. A ceanothus scratched at his legs. “I’ll see you on the outside,” he said to James, through the window.

“Go with God,” said James Dean.

Leo made his way across the landscaped
zona
that surrounded the residential wing. He bobbed and weaved a bit between the bark-mulch inner ring and the hedgerow before the parking lot. He saw the girl in a Toyota where she said she’d be. He dashed over to it and tried to get in on the passenger side. But the handle lifted, clickless and impotent. He rapped on the window. She looked at him. He saw that she was beautiful, eyes full of intent.

A clunk came from the door. But Leo was impatient and tried the handle again before it had finished and the door had fully unlocked. He saw the onion-shaped counselor come out of the front door of the main building and look his way. Leo dropped to a crouch on the ground. The girl opened the door from the inside, and it bonked into his head.

“Ow,” said Leo.

“What?” she said. “Where are you?”

Leo slithered around the car door and slunk into the passenger seat. He sat spinelessly and below window level, like an adolescent not wanting to be seen in a car with his mom.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Is there a man coming toward us from the main building?” he asked her.

“What man?”

“Guy looks like an onion.”

“Um, yeah, actually.”

“Okay, we gotta go.”

“Who is that guy?” the girl asked.

“No, I mean, right now.”

“Are you allowed to leave?”

“It’s not a locked facility. Go-go-go.”

So she did. She reversed zippily from the spot and then saw the man from the building quicken his stride. Briefly, she choked and forgot she was in neutral, and the engine roared unengaged. The onion man broke into a trot. “Shit,” she said. Then she found her gear and the little car leaped, and they flew down the leafy drive and walloped over a speed bump. Leo unslumped himself and tried to catch mirror glimpses of Quivering Pines receding.

“Okay, what’s that up ahead?” asked the girl, alarmed suddenly.

Leo looked. Something was happening to the next speed bump. It was rising from the surface of the drive, like a mechanical maw. The girl braked hard and skidded a bit and ended up stopped a yard from its solid jaw.

“You said this wasn’t a locked facility.”

“That was my understanding,” said Leo. In the rearview, he saw the Onion crest a hillock on a speeding Segway.

The girl reversed rapidly down the drive, looking for a break in the deep gutters that lined the sides of the road. Finding one, she shifted, and they left the road sharply. She was trying to go around the embassy-anti-car-bomb pie wedge. But once off the road, Leo saw that the potted cacti beside the drive were positioned in a pattern that prevented a direct path through the field beside the road. The girl had to slalom around the cacti at low speed. When they passed very close to one of them, Leo could see the large planters for what they were: steel and concrete vehicle blockers. The Segway was getting closer.

The girl managed to drive them between the planters. She got the Toyota back on the road beyond the raised pie wedge. Then she sped down the rest of the driveway and over the little railroad crossing that marked the boundary of Quivering Pines.

They came into the city on I-5, from the south, up over the long upper-deck stretch of the Marquam Bridge and down its poorly cambered and vertiginous far side. Mount Hood was clear in the distance, sharp and faceted, like the mountains on beer labels. The girl’s car smelled hotly of new and petroleum-based upholstery. He rolled down his window. A tumult of summer air whooshed through the car and buffeted his head, cooling the prickle of sweat that had broken on his brow.

He was visited by a sharp memory from childhood: Coming down the Henry Hudson Parkway in the backseat of a Volvo on a summer Sunday night. His dad steered a sirocco beside sheer walls of Manhattan schist, beneath the massive arched feet of the George Washington Bridge. The hot city air met the cooled layer of the river over the green verge of Riverside Park, smelling of Dominican barbecues and backed by an elm-ish funk.

Returning to the present, Leo tried to steady his mind. He had to rule out the possibility that this girl was a figment. If she was, then he had met the requirement for suicide; that was the deal he’d made with himself.

And yet—still. Here again was the world he had imagined; here was life. There was evil afoot and he was being asked to oppose it. Why had he been chosen for this counterintervention? Would Quivering Pines give chase?

They slipped along the concrete channels of the freeway like they were riding a log flume at a water park and exited onto a street of car dealerships—tubular wind-sock men and Mylar glitter bunting dazzling drivers-by. They passed the hospital and the derelict Wonder Bread factory, slated for demolition, backhoes and breakers waiting dinosaurishly in its fenced-off yard.

“I never introduced myself,” said the girl at a red light, the first they’d come to. “My name is Lola Montes.”

That was odd, he thought, she didn’t look Latin, and she’d paused between the first and last names.

“Leo Crane. Would you get in the left lane here?” he said. What would a sane person do now? “Bring me home and I’ll make us some coffee and we can talk.”

But when they rolled up to his house, he saw someone standing on his porch, so he didn’t tell Lola to stop there. When they’d gone a block, he asked her to pull over. Then he adjusted his side mirror until it reflected his porch.

“Something wrong?” asked Lola.

“That was my house back there. But the letter carrier’s lingering.”

Lola adjusted her rearview, and they both surveilled.

“Is that not your regular mailman?”

“I got a few. I must be on a crappy route. Sometimes it’s this very fit, too-tan lady. Sometimes it’s a Sikh dude who wears the whole outfit, you know? The cape and what I think may be a postal-issue turban. Sometimes it’s a slacker in, like, a Slayer T-shirt. But I don’t think I’ve seen this guy before.”

They both discreetly observed him as he left Leo’s porch and walked across the street to a little USPS minivan. He popped the lift gate at its back. It looked to Leo like he was sorting large envelopes back there and scanning bar codes, as mailmen sometimes did midroute. Then the guy got in the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the van. He unwrapped a sandwich and started to eat it.

Sure. Could be lunch,
Leo thought. “Would you tell me more about your people,” he asked Lola, “the ones you said are resisting the thing?”

Lola seemed to collect her thoughts. “We’re called Dear Diary. Though I think that’s supposed to be ironic or something. I’m very new. Anyway, that’s just a sort of a placeholder, you know, as a name. We’re in a state of flux.”

“And there are lots of you?”

“There are tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”

“And the other side? The ones you’re resisting?”

“They’re called the Committee, and they’re building an extralegal, nation-replacing, wealth-protecting, fee-based data-rights system.”

“A system?”

“Yeah, like, ‘Hey, sign up now, richest point-zero-zero-zero-five percent of the world, for our data-protection plan. That way, when we cripple the electronic infrastructure, your shit is safe and everyone else is a fucking peasant.’”

“So is it as I described?”

“You embellished. The Scientologists aren’t involved. And it has nothing to do with your illustrious ancestors.”

Yes. He had bragged about his illustrious ancestors, written that he was descended from the American intellectual elite. How mortifying.

“But you were right about SineCo,” she said encouragingly, as if sensing his embarrassment. “Straw is using that search-and-storage empire of his for something very bad indeed.”

The search-and-storage empire. Yup, that’s what had first aroused Leo’s suspicions. “We’ll Keep It Safe” was the tagline for SineCo’s new, unwired socialverse. And Lola was telling him that SineCo was only the part you could see.

“It’s like a network or a club. The Committee owns some companies outright. Not just SineCo, but Bluebird—the private-army people—and General Systems, that company that makes thermostats and breakfast cereal and airplanes. And then there are hundreds of other assets that they just control—the word they use is
claim
. Dams and mines and airports and pharmaceutical companies and TV networks and hospital corporations and a couple of the big NGOs.”

“It’s a cabal,” said Leo.

“Yeah, a cabal, I guess.”

“A shadow government.”

“Well, if they’re not that yet, that’s what they aim to become.”

Whipsawed. That’s how he felt. Where was the flatline? How he longed for a quiet brain, trusty, like a pony. He would need days with this Lola Montes stuff. To let it sink in, to untangle the real from the imagined. But she was clearly in a hurry. And even bipolars receive startling emotional news, right?

Leo tried to channel James Dean the way James had been when he helped Leo work through the plot the other night. Leo turned his attention from the passionate emotions to the reasoning faculties.
Follow the plot, don’t drive it
.