Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  So a week of peeking behind the curtains, a week of further SOOPE tweaking and twisting, a week of jostling ideas and elbows with Olivia Jaegal over dinner, and sometimes late into the night at the bar of Kevin’s hotel. By the end of that week, Jaegal had helped him negotiate a circuitous path of power up to the crowning final demo — a make-it-or-break-it meeting with generals of the J-3, the planning directorate of the Joint Chiefs.

  The generals and their aides were all smart men and women well-briefed on Complexity science and SOOPE theory. They took to Kevin’s simulation as if they were chowing down at a celebratory banquet.

  Which was exactly what Kevin and Olivia proceeded to do after the J-3 greenlighted Dunbar & Caety’s ‘Underdog’ proposal.

  What happened next was as predictable as it was astonishing to Kevin. On the morning he was due to fly back to Boston, he found himself being shaken awake in his hotel room by Olivia, who whispered in his ear as she passed him the phone:

  “It’s your wife.”

  Blinking at Olivia in shock as he grappled to take the receiver, banged it up against his ear. Listening to Cress ask if he was all right, ask what was going on. Hearing the suspicion in her voice, unable to do more than croak “I’m okay”. Unable to do anything besides watch Olivia Jaegal slip lithely out of his hotel bed.

  Unable even to recall how she’d ended up in it in the first place. Kevin had no memory of the previous night whatsoever.

  The room was spinning. Olivia was stepping into a pair of pants she’d carefully folded over a chair. Cress was coolly informing him that she wouldn’t be home when he got there, that she had decided to visit her sister.

  His wife’s sister lived in Seattle.

  Hearing himself wheeze, “Back soon. Come back soon. I’ll be back soon.” Dial tone.

  Kevin left the receiver dangling, heaved himself from the sheets, woozily stood, and stumbled naked past Olivia into the shower, where he threw up.

  She looked in on him when she’d finished dressing, flashed him a piteous smile — another man who couldn’t hold his liquor.

  It took Kevin a long time to get himself washed off, washed up, shaved, half-presentable as a human being. It took some doing for him to step out of the hotel bathroom.

  Olivia was gone. No sign that she’d even been there. No sign outside of the image blazoned in his mind: a cat’s paw tattoo on the small of her supple back.

  Oh, and the fact that Kevin’s briefcase was up on the hotel desk instead of on the chair.

  He found the briefcase wasn’t quite locked, and items within it were slightly rearranged; his notepad, for instance, was not in the pocket where he always kept it.

  Kevin managed to catch his early morning flight, still woozy, fuzzy about what had actually happened. He never drank more than a beer or two these days. And even back in his college days, when he’d drunk enough to pass out, he’d never been so drunk that he’d forgotten what had happened.

  Could he really sleep with a woman like Olivia Jaegal and not recall a single intimate moment of it?

  Besides the tattoo on her back, that is. But Kevin had seen that as she’d slipped out of bed this morning. And then there was his briefcase, intimately rifled through… He wondered who, exactly, decided to assign Jaegal to Kevin at the last minute. Wondered why her Advanced Decision Simulation Management group wanted to know so much about Dunbar & Caety’s future SOOPE projects. Wondered about his current SOOPE project, which ADSM had promised to ‘carefully look over’.

  Feeling sure the SOOPE was getting far more than a look-over.

  Then finally getting off the plane, trying not to think about the vow he’d made to Vlad, Rachel and Fiona. Nor about the vows he’d made to Cress, five years back.

  September 10th

  Kevin was glad Cress wasn’t home when he stepped through the door. He didn’t want to face her at that moment, didn’t want to deal with anyone at work, for that matter. So he did something he never did: took the day off without calling in.

  He spent the afternoon on the Net, running searches for any drugs that might cause memory loss, might be associated with the military, the spy trade. After a while, he dug up a cache of files describing a tranquillizer dubbed ‘D2’, just hitting the streets. D2 was rumoured to be a CIA-sponsored pharmaceutical. It mixed tastelessly with alcohol to produce not mere memory loss but full blown amnesia.

  The kicker: D2 was both an alcohol extender — made you feel drunk when you hadn’t drunk much — and a disinhibitor. One file called it ‘the coming campus date drug’.

  He tried to picture himself at the centre of a second war-front, a covert struggle for control over any future Pentagon SOOPE sims. He tried to see Jaegal as a weapon deployed against him.

  Or was he just trying to rationalize an affair?

  Needing to sleep off the rest of the wooziness, he logging off the Net. The phone immediately began to ring. It was Sammi, calling to say that Anton Caety was planning something at the office in an hour, a kick-off party for the DOD contract.

  Kevin barely had enough time to change, drive into the city, hurry up to the Dunbar & Caety boardroom. Anton was already there, and everyone else was crowding in, just like back on August 2nd. Smoked salmon, cheese, beers all around. Claps on the back for Kevin, two thumbs up from his marketing and finance VPs, high fives from Grant and Sammi. Rachel nodded politely, Vlad kept a cool distance.

  But the bustle distracted Kevin from his earlier bout of paranoia. And Anton actually managed to cheer him by saying:

  “They’re calling your sim ‘the Oracle’ in the J-3. Which makes this warehouse ‘Delphi’, doesn’t it?”

  Kevin agreed. “The spot where the future will be seen.” He’d loved the Greek and Roman myths as a boy. Delphi, high atop Mount Parnassus, was where Oracles issued prophecies from behind a curtain…

  Anton was calling for everyone’s attention. “I’ve brought along something that Kev admired, first time he visited my house.” Anton collected more than Pentagon contacts; he owned a large array of Roman armaments, artifacts. And now he ceremoniously placed an old Roman shield on the boardroom’s granite table.

  “As of today,” he addressed the staff, “you are all members of Operation Desert Shield — your new SOOPE’s part of the shield around our soldiers,” he explained. “Now come closer, take a gander at that metal jag in the middle.” Programmers and theorists leaned in for a look. “Called an ‘omphalos’.” Anton turned back to Kevin. “Believe it has something to do with Delphi… But on a shield, it means a deadly little link with an enemy.”

  Anton winked, clearly thinking about Underdog, the deadly little media-link that might catch out Hussein.

  Kevin frowned down at the shield’s wicked-looking metal jag, fighting back thoughts of Olivia Jaegal. He imagined the cat’s paw tattoo on her back, and reached out to touch the omphalos—

  “Careful there, Kev. It’s still sharp as a dagger.”

  After the party was over and the boardroom had cleared out, Kevin stayed late again, not wanting to go back to the empty house just yet. He spent the time on his laptop, looking up Net tales of ancient Delphi, skimming through Greek legends familiar from childhood.

  And after finding references to the ‘omphalos’ — an altar high in Delphi — Kevin told himself that his tantalizing memory had surfaced. That he knew the imaginary path he was climbing:

  It was the path leading to the summit of Mount Parnassus.

  October 1990 to January 1991

  The ensuing four months proved the most treacherous leg of Kevin’s ascent.

  By October, darkness was coming earlier, in the sky and in the house in Salem. When Cress finally came home — after nearly three weeks in Seattle — she didn’t say a word to Kevin. She treated him like he wasn’t there, wasn’t visible, wasn’t present at the dinner table on
the rare occasions when he was.

  And at work, Rachel and Vlad, the two most talented employees he had, the friends he used to invite back to the house for brainstorming barbeques… Now that Dunbar & Caety was officially working for the DOD, Rachel refused to meet his eyes and Vlad avoided him altogether. The pair were acting ridiculously guilty — as if they believed the ‘Oracle’ SOOPE had triggered the immense war preparation phase in the desert, had caused the Iraqi troops to start burrowing into desert bunkers.

  By November a cloud-ceiling was drawing over the eastern seaboard, and Kevin was high enough up his inner Parnassus to enter the cloud layer shrouding the summit, where it was easy to wander off the path and lose sight of important landmarks.

  He resented how far Cress was falling from him. He’d come home at night to find her sullen and silent on the couch. Any attempt to talk to her sparked a round of channel-surfing through the endless war-prep updates and debates about when the ‘mother of all ground battles’ would begin. Cress refused to understand what was going on with the world or with Kevin.

  But there was one person in his life who understood both all too well.

  Olivia Jaegal kept flying up for meetings at Dunbar & Caety, kept prying into Kevin’s plans for further SOOPE sims, and plying him with a spare keycard to her hotel room.

  By December Kevin was facing a slippery slope indeed.

  What with the cloud-cover dumping snow on the roads out to Salem, and the icy rebuff he would receive when he made it home, and the accusing looks he would get when he called his team-leads together, Kevin sometimes found himself taking up Jaegal’s keycard offer.

  On the occasions he did so, he refused to allow himself the usual outs or excuses. He wasn’t turning to Jaegal because power was an aphrodisiac, or because he felt so high above the ordinary masses that he was entitled, or because he was lonely, or experiencing a loss of control.

  No, the truth was colder, more calculated. He was turning to Jaegal of his own free will. Making a conscious choice to seize the high ground, stymie the second war-front that he sensed closing around him. Taking up Jaegal’s offer, Kevin began offering her what she wanted in return: hints of future Dunbar & Caety SOOPE apps.

  Of course, the apps he told her about were those he’d already decided against, had no intention of pursuing; Kevin was playing Jaegal’s game now, attempting to feed her misdirections, tease out of her the secrets she was holding. He knew what he was doing.

  Well, maybe not.

  But he knew, at least, what price he’d likely pay, what it would cost him to see clearly through the confusing cloud layer he was mired in, see what the Pentagon’s ADSM group was up to. See where they thought the future of SOOPE markets may lie.

  Off the path now, edging dangerously close to falling off the mountain…

  Kevin wasn’t wholly shocked when Vlad passed him an envelope containing photos taken by a private detective, photos of Kevin with Olivia Jaegal in her hotel room. Vlad threatened to give the photos to Cress if Kevin didn’t agree to let him leave the firm with ownership of all SOOPE algorithms Vlad had developed while at Dunbar & Caety.

  “And go where with them?”

  Keeping the rage from his voice for one more moment, his paranoia stronger than his fury. Seeing ADSM’s hand behind Vlad’s announced defection. Suspecting Jaegal’s complicity in the photos. Wondering whether the whole affair was orchestrated from the start to steal Dunbar & Caety’s talent, intellectual property. If Vlad told him Santa Fe, that would be okay, that would be better than—

  “Los Alamos,” Vlad reluctantly admitted.

  A fierce torch of rage lighting the way through the last of the cloud layer, turning him back onto the path. He would burn them down, Kevin thought.

  Burn Vlad and Jaegal down together.

  “The military lab, you mean,” he growled. “And you think I’m a sellout?”

  Vlad looked stung. “It’s pure research — you’ve no clue, Kevin. No idea who I’ll be working with.”

  “Oh yes I do.” Kevin slammed a hand onto the envelope as Vlad reached for it. “I’ll show Cress these photos myself. Now clean out your desk, get out. And Vlad, if any Dunbar and Caety path-code reappears elsewhere, I’ll sue you from here to the Gulf of Oman.”

  The fact that Rachel cleaned out her desk and accompanied Vlad didn’t surprise Kevin. The surprise was the two teams of junior SOOPE programmers that decided to walk out alongside their leads. With Christmas coming and the war about to break at any moment, half his company’s talent was gone out the door.

  Despite the scope of this coding coup, Kevin knew he had to keep his final vow to Vlad.

  So the morning after the walkouts he left the envelope of photos on his kitchen table, with a hand-written letter lying on top, detailing Vlad’s blackmail-attempt, Kevin’s suspicions about Jaegal and ADSM, his sorrow for what he’d done to Cress. He added a postscript suggesting she feel free to do what she must with the photos.

  When he returned to the house that evening, Kevin found the locks changed, his clothes and personal items dumped in the garage, and a handwritten reply lying on top of the pile that said simply:

  Feel free to find yourself a divorce attorney.

  That easy, that quick, just an omphalos prick, and it was over between Kevin and Cress. Over between Kevin and Olivia Jaegal. His company was over a programming-shortage barrel, his life was in free fall. And the Christmas ‘holiday’ he spent with his three younger sisters and his parents was a nightmare of recrimination. What had he done to lose lovely Cress, they wanted to know?

  Came a Sunday afternoon in mid-January, Kevin alone in a hotel room, his new home, turning to the TV for a respite, a temporary escape. Flipping through channels, avoiding the usual Gulf updates, then stumbling onto the truth in the form of a children’s matinee movie that was almost over. The scene was a vast room in the Emerald City, and the four travellers recently returned from vanquishing the Wicked Witch now stood before the curtains, gawking up at the chimera-image of Oz the Great and Terrible. Then Dorothy spotted the curtains parting, an old man half-hidden behind them—

  Kevin’s tantalizing boyhood memory came unstuck at last, and the overwhelming feelings he’d experienced watching this movie back when he was seven or eight resurfaced; he recalled imagining he was the one back behind the curtains, working the great levers of power; he recalled thinking he wouldn’t be such an old fake and a fool.

  In that moment, the last shreds of confidence that had survived Kevin’s recent trials crumbled away. He watched helplessly as Dorothy dragged the little old man out to confront those he’d tried to trick — then the film was interrupted by a special bulletin. Images just released by the Allied War Room in Riyadh filled the screen, looking like something out of a video game. The Gulf War was underway.

  And it was opening with a massive aerial infrastructure attack.

  January 17th to January 29th

  For a dozen days and nights, the video-game bombardment continued to rain down on Iraq. The Iraqi army remained dug in deep throughout this terrifying, endlessly televised bombardment. And throughout the bombardment, employees of Dunbar & Caety averaged fifteen hours a day in their converted-warehouse headquarters, restocking the Oracle SOOPE with actual times, numbers, and event-sequences streaming in over their new Defense Data Network feed, then cycling the SOOPE up through a simulated pathway that most closely matched the reality of the war.

  Kevin spent most of that period in the long boardroom, camped out below the big multi-channel wall screen, ignoring the crawl commentaries, just soaking up the surreal bombardment footage. The more the bombs fell, the deeper Kevin dug in and dug up.

  Turned out the two teams that walked out on him went to join

  MENNOCHIO

  That was the name he now wrote on his notepad. The name of a theorist working in th
e labyrinthine bowels of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A purist developing a new and generalized way of thinking about the global system-of-systems, busily laying the foundations of an entirely new field called ‘Civilization Studies in Complexity.’ And apparently a terribly disfigured genius, referred to by many as ‘the Monster’ of Los Alamos Lab.

  Turned out Vlad and Rachel hadn’t been lured away by some undercover arm of ADSM, after all.

  And turned out Cress had been more of a cornerstone for Kevin than he’d thought; part of his self-definition, his foundation. Lately he’d felt unmoored, loosed, lost without her to come home to. Oh, he’d done the right thing leaving Cress those photos as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card, go straight to divorce court. She was still in her early thirties, she still had a chance for happiness.

  And Kevin?

  Turned out his imagination knew no bounds.

  He could imagine a way to massage a war six months before it broke out, a way to trick a dictator into destroying his own army. He could imagine a path to the control room at the top of the world’s systems (okay, that turned out to be not the path up Parnassus but down the Yellow Brick Road). He could imagine an affair as a way of spying, and a way of giving his long-suffering wife her overdue ticket to freedom (okay, leaving her those photos had appealed to the lapsed Catholic in Kevin, fulfilling his need to confess and atone).

  He could even imagine what might make the gruelling ascent of the past half year worth everything it had cost him.

  UNDERDOG

  For a dozen days Kevin watched for signs of Dunbar & Caety’s designer-meme on the channels of his boardroom’s wall screen. That’s all he had the strength to do now. Watch, and wait, and hope that Riyadh’s War Room would actually put his company’s media-weapon into play. According to the Oracle SOOPE, the most fertile time-slot to introduce an Underdog-Strikes-Back meme fell between 12 to 16 days after the start of the Allied air campaign.