Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (43 page)

“Speaking of,” said Leo. “You fire all your judges?”

“What?”

“That book you wrote. The inside-out one.”

Here was his chance to do this, at least. “Leo, I’m sorry. The toy heir in the book wasn’t supposed to be you. Your family makes games, not toys, right?” Leo gave him a scrunched-lip
bullshit
face. Mark stopped. “I’m sorry. I really am. My bad.”

“Thanks. I’m over it,” said Leo, and he really did seem to be. “But I’m kinda baffled by the part where you wrote something really good and then sold it and yourself to that creepy outfit. Your book was absolute crap. How much money did they give you?”

“Not enough,” said Mark.

“Would any amount be enough?”

That pissed him off, the pious tone. “Oh yeah. I can think of some amounts,” Mark said. “You have a price too, my friend, everyone does. Yours is just distorted by a trust fund.”

He thought that would sting—Leo was super-touchy about the trust thing. But all Leo said was “Probably.” Then he seemed to inhale the whole night before him. His chest swelled.

“But I don’t know, Mark. If I had written something as good as you did in that little essay, I can’t imagine letting anyone turn it into shit like you let them do.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for the input,” said Mark. But he knew that Leo was right. He finished the spliff and rolled off its ember in the little ashtray beside the terra-cotta pot. “But just go easy on the revolutionary stuff, okay? It’s a bit rich to see you playing Che Guevara in there.”

“I think Che was just some bourgeois kid, actually.”

“You grew up in a
town house,
Leo. Now you’re sober for a week and you get tangled up with this United Front of Whatever, these anarchists, and you think you know why the caged bird sings.”

“Oh, we’re not anarchists,” Leo said.

Oh, yeah. It was
we
now. Mark snorted.

“But I’m damn sure on the side of the bird, not the cage, you know?” said Leo, wandering off the porch.

“Where are you going?” asked Mark.

“Over to the barn. I wanna see what that pony’s all about.”

A moment later, the door
skkrring
ed again, and it was Constance, come out to give her five hundred cents once more.

To head her off, Mark said, “This is good pot your man has.” It was. Its effect was clean and rapid, like they make smoking pot look on TV. He offered her the spliff. Constance did a wavy dismissive thing that made her distaste clear.
Fine
.

“You want some to take home? We have plenty,” she said, and she gestured to the odd forest that ringed them.

“Those are pot plants?”

“Not primarily, no. They’re a novophylum. But the pollen—that green fringe on the leaves? That’s a kind of cannabinoid, apparently. That characteristic has proved useful on the rare occasions that our farms have been discovered by the police-front agencies. They think we’re pot farmers with advanced botanical skills. They burn or destroy the plants without looking to see what they really are.”

“What are they really?”

“Well, I guess someone like you would call them computers.”

“Someone like me?”

“Straight. Untested.”

“How about you? What do you call them?”

“Well, they’re just plants, you know? They live in a parallel world right beside us. But these ones we can communicate with.”

Mark didn’t understand. A plant computer? A computer plant?

“Look,” said Constance. “We came down out of the trees, we made up a language, we learned to write it down, then we learned to encode it electronically as ones and zeros and store it on tiny devices.”

“You’re talking about, like, from the Stone Age to the 1970s, right?”

“More or less. Okay, but what we have here is something different. Turns out there was already a language that we’ve been sharing all along. Maybe we knew it better when we were still in the trees. It’s in the air, the soil, the water. They won’t be able to take it away from us. It’s all around us all the time. The other guys are still writing everything down with circuits; they’re still using hard drives, essentially. They call it the cloud, but that’s wrong, isn’t it? Their cloud is heavy and metal and whirring.”

“So if your thing is so much more advanced than theirs, why are you playing defense? You and your plants should be able to bring these guys down.”

“Mark, we need years to figure out what to do with this knowledge. It’s so new. The eye test is still a mystery to us. These laptops we make here are very, very basic. And since that motherfucker Pope came on board, the Committee has started coming after us hard. They may even have found a way of cheating on the eye test. Some bad apples have been let through, and we’ve had security and intelligence breaches like we’ve never had before. There’s not that much time, Mark. There just isn’t. The Bluebirds are coming after us. They’re hunting us down and taking us out one by one. It’s getting more dangerous every day. And if they get us, they’ll take all this—our plant science, our brain science. They’ll classify it, monetize it. Corporate seizure, civil forfeiture, the spoils of the War on Terror.”

Mark looked into the blue night. “You probably aren’t supposed to be saying this to an untested, are you? Though I suppose you could always render me unbelievable. Or feed me to your plants.”

“I can tell you this because you’re going to join us.” She leaned into him. “Isn’t that true? Isn’t that why you came out here alone? To get high and screw up the courage to do it?”

Mark took another languid drag in the night. “But Leo said I’ll have no more secrets. I don’t want that to happen.”

“Yeah. Crane is a strange one. That’s a very low number he has. It’s almost like he was already one of us. Anyway, I don’t agree with him on the secrets stuff. There’s a whole load of shit in my life I’d rather not share. I think Crane’s response tonight has more to do with the, you know, organic nature of the situation.”

Mark shook his head to make her explain.

“He’s in love with that girl,” she said, like Mark shouldn’t have needed that explained. “It’s scary, Mark, I know that, to join with others. And I’ve been giving you a hard time tonight, but I actually like that you’re a skeptic. I was. I am. We need people like you. Don’t worry about your precious self. He’ll stagger on. This just adds a dimension. The test makes the too-sure hesitate and the torn know what to do. It makes the strivers reflect and the slackers react; the cynics more forgiving and the hopers more careful. It helps you to see what you’re supposed to be doing here, in this life. And it will give you a number. We’ll know who you are and that you’re with us. We can’t ask you to do what we need you to do if there’s any chance you’ll chicken out and turn back.”

“What if it gives me a bad number? Says I’m a bad apple?”

“I don’t think you are, Mark. Do you?”

No, he didn’t.
Well, look at that
.

Back inside. The big wooden table. “What’s this going to feel like?” Mark asked Roman.

“Most Diarists report that the experience is intense, pleasant, brief. There’s a spike in connectivity that comes right after the test usually. But it will recede—the grand feelings will, I mean. What matters is what’s left behind.”

Mark knew a bit about grand feelings, and their receding. “I can handle the high. I just want to make sure I’m not going to end up some stupid jihadi in your project.”

“I promise you that won’t happen,” Constance said to him. For a moment, Constance looked and sounded like his mom twenty years ago, his mom when he was a boy.

Mark looked at the screen.

He felt he was taking in an enormous breath…and then it was over. He was just sitting at a table again. Wait, again? Wow. It could have been a night and a day, but all the evidence—everyone else in exactly the same place—indicated that it had been about a second. Like that hallway craze back in junior high where you hyperventilated and then got hit hard in the chest and fainted. He tried a check-in: he was in some Cascadian Brigadoon with a band of hackers and spies. He still wanted another drink and a hot shower; he still thought that command economies were a bad idea. Excellent, no pinwheels.

Constance read out to him his number. Even as she read it to him he was anticipating it. There were three- and four-digit sequences inside it that made images for him that were components of the larger image that the whole number made. He knew his number forward and backward; knew it like he knew his own name.

“Can I have a drink?”

Trip Hazards poured some whiskey in a jam jar for him.

“So that’s it?” he said to Constance and Roman. “I’m a Diarist now?”

“With all the rights and responsibilities thereof,” said Roman.

“The benefit and the burden both,” said Constance.

He thought he was going to say,
I get to choose a stupid code name now,
but in the event, he left out the
stupid
part, because he already knew what he wanted to be called. He wanted to be called Dixon Ticonderoga.

Roman started to explain to Mark exactly what Dear Diary wanted him to do. The eye test had deffo shifted something in him, but he couldn’t yet say what, and he didn’t know how long the effect might last. Mark had had years of practice studying drug reactions through his body and mind, so that’s what he did in this case. He
was
feeling articulate and rapid-fire-y, as if under the influence of a stimulant. But there was none of that fake-bulletproof, ignore-everyone-else thing that coke does. He was listening and seeing clearly, and not as if through the too-clean windowpane of amphetamines. What it felt like, physically, was like he had access to some new, shared channel. Like he was just putting his hand in a swift cold stream.

They wanted him to mule a pathogen; they wanted Mark to be a disease vector.

“But a computer virus?” he said skeptically. “Is that really going to be enough? I mean, I imagine these guys have pretty good antivirus software.”

“They actually don’t,” said Roman. “What they have is a closed system. There are only six servers, six entry points. Two subterranean, two orbiting, one on an offshore derrick in the South China Sea. The master drive is on Straw’s yacht,
Sine Wave
. That’s where you come in.”

Wait. “You mean
Sine Wave,
the two-hundred-eighty-foot Italian sloop with the five decks, carbon fiber sails, surgical theater, and herbarium?” asked Mark.

Constance and Roman nodded. They must have read the same article in
Superyachts Monthly
. “That’s where your asset said you would find this master drive?” Constance and Roman nodded again. “And the digital pathogen I’m to deliver to there—that wouldn’t happen to have, like, any Dear Diary technology that could perhaps be reverse-engineered?”

Constance stopped him. “You’re wrong, Mark. The asset is ours. She’s been eye-tested. She’s one of Straw’s close counselors. She’s in real danger, by the way, doing what she’s doing.”

She?
“Oh, you really do need me,” said Mark, and he tipped a splish of whiskey from the jam jar down his throat. “There are no females close to Straw. Well, a few secretaries and stewardesses; the girl who pushes the sandwich cart around the executive lounge. He generally refers to women as ‘conniving cunts.’ Sounds to me like you got an eye-test cheater sending you the wrong way.”

“No,” said Constance, but Mark could see she was wavering. “Straw has something on that yacht that he considers
very
valuable. We keep
Sine Wave
under near-constant surveillance. It’s in the North Sea now. That’s where we’ll need to get you.”

“The valuable thing on
Sine Wave
is probably Straw’s collection of erotic statuary,” said Mark. “And while you were keeping
Sine Wave
under near-constant surveillance, was anyone keeping an eye on
Sine Wave Two
?”

Constance and Roman and Trip each leaned forward five degrees.

“You want to get these guys, I’ll help you do it,” Mark said. “But I won’t help you walk into a trap.”

It was Constance who asked, after a few seconds, “What’s
Sine Wave Two
?”

“A seven-hundred-thousand-ton tanker? Death Star of the high seas? Floating cage for a computer they call the Beast, clamps on to undersea data cables and glugs until it’s engorged with our stuff and then ejaculates solid-state atomic drives into deep ocean trenches? I guess it’s the computer you were just telling me is planning our annihilation. You sure you people were
totally
unaware of this?”

Neither Roman nor Constance nor Trip had an answer.

“So I’ll get this pathogen of yours onto
Sine Wave Two
. But I hope Dear Diary has submarines. Because we’ll need to take care of their backup drives, to be safe. Hazards, do we have submarines?”

“A few. We’ll need to make them offensive, though.”

“Well, put some people on that. And reverse direction on that asset of yours. She’s feeding you
misinformation
and probably providing the Committee with target lists. Forget about
Sine Wave
. I need to get back to
Sine Wave Two.
That’s where I’ll upload this pathogen of yours,” said Mark, “the one with the silly name.”

“It’s not a silly name,” said Leila, who had been quiet since Mark had come back in. “My sister named it, and she made it for us. It’s called Prodigium Two: This Time It’s Personal.” Now she showed Mark a Node, his Node. “It’s loaded onto your phone. Just get it close to that computer. It may require some sleight of hand, Mark. You’re good at that.” Then she said, “Where’d Leo go?”

“He was headed toward the barn,” said Mark.

Leila excused herself.

“But listen,” said Mark to the three left. “I fucked up in Portland. At Nike. Apparently, I was on thin ice already, with Pope, at least. He and I don’t get along.”

“Yeah,” said Hazards. “We know. His guys have been on you like stink on shit. They were on you last night at the strip clubs, and then at that lingerie-modeling place on Columbia.”

Lingerie-modeling place on Columbia?
Eww, gross. He was disgusting. He was glad Leila hadn’t heard that.