“Interesting work as well. Turns out, diamonds don’t just hold the ones and zeroes needed for binary code, they can also store both states at once.”
“Quantum memory.”
“Exactly,” continues Balthazar. “And you don’t need to supercool the stones. It works at room temperature. Completely stable. Never degrades, near-perfect data storage. Plus, a gem the size of a grain of rice can hold five terabytes of information. The only issue is fragility in the sequence. You can build an AI out of a thousand stones, but remove one, the whole thing collapses.”
“Sounds pretty exotic.”
“A handful of jewelers doing it in America, a couple overseas. But GPS engraving,” pointing toward the snuff container, “is way more exotic. You still need a special kind of 3-D printer and, with the new laws, a tissue-engineering license.”
“Hard to get?”
“It is here. In Asia, different story. But I could ask around.”
“Quietly?”
“SON?” booms Balthazar. Lion jerks again. “It look like I do anything quietly?”
Now that you mention it.
“But discreet? Balthazar Jones can most definitely be discreet.”
LIONS AND LAMBS
He’s back at the Ludlow, where Bo must have dropped him after leaving Masta Ice. It’s now morning, or some close approximation. He has no memory of getting into bed the night before, but that could be the fentanyl talking. But it’s not talking anymore.
His arm, a steady throb.
Setting feet on floor, he tries standing up. It goes better than anticipated. He shuffles across the room to paw around in his suitcase for something to silence the ache. In a side pocket, he discovers two tablets of partially crumbled Naprosyn in a plastic single-pack. Bought by the dozen at a truck stop in Lubbock. That cowboy poetry job, em-tracking to nowhere, the only future he found involving cheap whiskey and a relentless headache.
Lion dry-swallows the crumbs and heads for the shower.
Ten minutes later, straight-world uniform in tatters, Lion opts for option two: different pair of black jeans, different hooded gray sweater. He always buys duplicates, always packs duplicates, a lesson learned as a journalist, though, right now, he can’t recall why.
Lion looks around for his phone and finds it on the floor beside the bed. Not sure what it’s doing there. Checking the screen, he immediately understands how it ended up on the ground—perambulated off the nightstand. Phone set on vibrate, eight incoming texts. Two from Richard, three from Penelope, one from Jenka, one from Lorenzo, and his carrier, Tesla-Verizon, with exciting news about a new data plan.
Richard wants to know if his no became a yes, then wants to know about his arm, and if he would like a doctor sent over. Penelope follows up on the doctor in triplicate, no XOs this time. Jenka echoing the no becoming a yes, apparently not giving a shit about his arm. The last text is from Lorenzo, with news and another sign of the Apocalypse: Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a circuit cable …
He texts Lorenzo, telling him he’s ready for contact. Texts Penelope back, declining the doctor, but remembering the rip in his jacket sleeve and asks about a tailor. Two minutes later a return from Penelope. Gored by a dead buffalo? XO.
An immediate follow-up. P.S. I’ll send a messenger over for the jacket.
An immediate follow-up to the immediate follow-up. If you’re feeling up to it, Richard would like to take you to lunch. Yak by Yang and Jake at 1:30?
He brews the lie that is large cup, contemplating what lunch with Richard might be like. Too fuzzy to contemplate. Texts back a request for dinner instead and, remembering what Bo said about the bar where he got roofied, asks for a restaurant in the West Village.
Then he carries his coffee out to the terrace. This time, no questions asked, he needs the lounge chair.
Supine, the view is partial skyline and rising mist, last night’s rain drying off the pavement. The swirl brings his opiate fog back, violently. Five hundred times more powerful than morphine and the hangover to prove it. A sip of coffee helps the acoustics dial in. Hiss of air brakes, screech of tires, sounds of the city in waking mode. Must be later than he thought; later still, decides to check.
8:40 according to his phone.
Also another message. From Lorenzo: Sietch Tabr, mon ami, holla at you in an hora.
Sietch Tabr? Lorenzo doesn’t typically quote Dune, but that’s as far as Lion’s brain can take him. His hangover is blunting his pattern recognition system and there’s no use struggling. He leans back, stretches out his legs, and the next part is a little hazy. There might have been a knock on his door and a messenger from a tailor’s shop.
Later still, a second cup of coffee and more lounge chair.
Halfway through that cup, the Naprosyn kicks in and the arm becomes a distant ache. Tries to get a read on his head. A couple cocks past half-cocked, but sobering fast. A walk might do some good. Maybe some food. On his way out the door, he sees the claim check from the tailor atop a low dresser.
So, good, that really happened.
He takes the traction elevator to the lobby and a left out of the hotel. The street is empty of people save for a dog walker and a pair of bloodhounds in the distance, tail-wagging their way around a corner. Lion works his way down the block, passing a street sweeper, a handful of taxis, and takes a right turn for the hell of it.
He likes getting a little lost in New York.
A left at the light, a few blocks, then a right. Halfway down that block, Lion finds a quiet coffee shop, a ceiling made of hammered tin, a display of bagels in a glass case and a copper-plated espresso machine beside it. A barista in a throwback rockabilly flannel over a T-shirt reading GRAVITY ALWAYS WINS wants to satisfy his breakfast desires.
Lion tells the clerk he desires an everything bagel, toasted, with vegan cream cheese.
While he’s waiting for his food, his phone buzzes with a message from Penelope. Sir Richard agreeing to meet him for dinner instead. Seven thirty at Torah Toro, corner of Hudson and Horatio.
“Torah Toro?” he asks Gravity Always Wins.
“Yiddish-Asian fusion,” handing him his bagel.
“That’s a thing?”
“Intersectional cuisine? Brah, where you been?”
“You know,” says Lion, taking his breakfast, “that’s a very good question.”
THE HORROR, HORROR BLUES
At a table by the window, Lion takes a tentative bite of his bagel. It smacks of salted cardboard—thanks, fentanyl—but a couple of swallows later he feels his blood sugar stabilize, and that normalizes his taste buds. Bagel becomes bagel again. A few minutes after that he feels awake enough to want a mission.
Checks his email instead. Been a little while, and he sees more messages than he can countenance this early in the day. Quick scan for anything work related, forwarding a Costa Rica engagement possibility to his agent, and then a feral curiosity about Sietch Tabr takes over his consciousness.
Double clicks his browser and brings up a search screen. The term unleashes Dune fandom on overdrive. He chooses a page at random. “Sietch: the Fremen word for community or village, typically a series of caves carved through the rocky outcroppings which are the dominant geological formations on the desert planet Arrakis. Sietch Tabr: the Fremen home of Muad’Dib, where he drank the water of life; where his transformation began.”
“Where his transformation began?” Lion asks the air.
He clicks on the images tab. A full page to choose from, stills from a variety of Dune movies, also dozens of artist’s renderings. Huge caverns, columns carved from sandstone, bloodred desert skies. Nothing here he doesn’t already know. Nothing in the images to suggest a snuff container or a silver powder.
Maybe he does need more coffee.
Unfolding from the chair, he crosses to the counter and orders a triple-shot Americano. His phone starts to ring as he’s paying.
Contact from Lorenzo.
Not wanting to be overheard, he takes his coffee and phone to a bench outside the front door before answering.
“Are you alright, Captain Willard?” says Lorenzo.
“What does it look like?” responds Lion, finishing the quote.
“It looks like your silver powder inhalant is strangely absent from the World Wide Web. Have you tried Googling this drug?”
“By typing new silver powder inhalant that makes you love animals into the search bar? Not yet.”
“Sietch Tabr, remember that?”
“From Dune.”
“Not anymore it’s not. Sci-fi became sci-fact. That’s what your silver powder’s called.”
Clicks into place. The engraving in the snuff container. But then he remembers what Lorenzo just said. “What do you mean absent from the web? I Googled Sietch Tabr and got lots of hits.”
“Yeah, but find anything to snort? Any references to a drug?”
Come to think of it, “No.”
“Nothing to find. Not anywhere. I figured if you’re asking me about a new party drug, other people would be asking too. So I had a couple of conversations with a couple of search engines. Nada online.” Lion hears the hard click of a Zippo, the soft suck of an inhale. “Doesn’t make any sense, right?”
“Doesn’t,” he says, but feels a cold chill when he remembers what Richard said about hiding Shiz behind a new kind of scrubber.
“Which is when I called Hector and Ruiz, the brothers,” says Lorenzo. “Remember them?”
“Did I meet them?”
“Yeah, you did, party in Seattle. They program pharmacy bots for the Gates Foundation or, I guess, what’s left of the Gates Foundation.”
“Vaguely,” says Lion, recalling a high-ceiling loft, craft beer, chips and guac, and a couple of guys wearing pleated khaki.
“They’d heard of your drug. Hector had, at least. He told me it was called Sietch Tabr. I also called a couple other people. A few more had heard of it too. Which is kind of weird. Couple people I know have heard of the drug, you’ve heard of the drug. Makes me wonder why the internet hasn’t heard.”
“It’s been scrubbed.”
“You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”
A horn honk grabs for Lion’s attention. Looking up, he sees gridlock has seeped into the city. Cars pass before him with the slow drip of an old faucet. A Datsun carrying two women in dashikis arguing, flashes of outrageous color through the windshield as arms move in anger. Then an Audi.
“Arctic can,” says Lion.
“The people you’re working for?”
“I think today’s my last day, but yeah, they have an AI scrubber that corrupts at a foundational level. Makes sharing of information impossible.”
“Last tango in cyberspace,” says Lorenzo.
“I don’t know that phrase.”
“Cyberspace, the noosphere of the internet. William Gibson called it a ‘shared consensual hallucination.’ Shared being the critical part. No sharing, no communication; no communication, no cooperation; no cooperation, no empathy. Game over. An AI that makes sharing information impossible, as an em-tracker you should get this…”
“Last tango in cyberspace,” says Lion, “the end of something radically new. Copy that.”
An open-air bus passes by the bench, Japanese tourists wearing wireless headphones and VR glasses with opaque lenses, their heads pointed in the same direction. Like something out of 1984.
“The people you called,” asks Lion, “anyone mention Muad’Dib?”
“Hector quoted from the ‘Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib.’”
“He did?” asks Lion. “Do you remember which one?”
“Give me a sec, I wrote it down in my Moleskine.”
“One of the ones I gave you?” asks Lion; the notebooks were Lorenzo’s birthday present last year. “Have you become a convert?”
“Completely. First class on the way over to Tokyo—which was a miracle. One of those private rooms and women in short skirts bringing me drinks in actual Waterford. Halfway through my second Walker Blue I realized that someone needs to turn Apocalypse Now into a blues opera. I filled a whole notebook.”
“A blues opera?”
“The Horror, Horror Blues.”
Groans. “Which Muad’Dib saying?”
“I’m still looking.” Lion hears pages turning, cigarette smoking, more pages. “Got it: ‘Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind.’”
Lion finishes the stanza: “‘The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.’”
“You know the quote?”
“Remember that University of Chicago talk I gave?”
“With the floating heads of intimidation on the walls?”
“That’s the one. I had a variation on a slide. ‘Em-tracking is a transitory experience. The person who experiences em-tracking must have a feeling for the myth he is in.’ That’s a little weird.”
“We’re way past weird. You learn anything about what Sietch Tabr actually does?”
Lion’s been asking himself this same question. Has a small list. “Expands empathy, widens spheres of caring. Probably a serotonin thing, like MDMA, but I’m guessing.”
“Not like MDMA. More basic. And I’m quoting Hector here: It opens information channels. You take in more data per second, pay more attention to that data, and find more patterns in it.”
“Lot of drugs do that.”
“Hector said you’d say that, but, okay, understand I have no idea what I’m talking about here, but something like Sietch Tabr expands your umwelt—which, turns out, is not some kind of vegetarian sandwich.”
“True that,” says Lion. “It’s the world as perceived by a particular organism. Humans are visual. Dogs smell. Cats feel with whiskers. We all use the same information, but we end up in different realities because we have different information processing machinery.”
“Sure,” laughs Lorenzo, “absolutely. You get that I play bongos in a blues band, right?”
“Tell me about the umwelt.”
“Hector says Sietch Tabr expands your umwelt. You ever heard of something called ‘grandmother neurons’?”
“Neurons dedicated to extremely familiar images, promotes faster pattern recognition.”
“Exactly,” says Lorenzo. “According to Hector, Sietch Tabr finds the neurons used to recognize the other, the out-group, and turns them into a hypersensitive grandmother neuron network. The strange, the not-like-me, becomes the super-familiar. Plus it tweaks the senses. Hector knew this dude who tried it at a dog park—said he could smell time. Did you know dogs could smell time?”
“Yeah,” says Lion, remembering a documentary, maybe on Animal Planet. “They sense it in fading scent trails.”
“Well, dude said he started to smell time. Flipped his whole vegetarian sandwich upside down. Said it was like waking up on another planet. And that’s not even the weird-weird part.”
“Seriously, weird-weird?” says Lion, having ninja flashbacks.
“Nah, I mean two weirds. The drug changes how you smell, the thing you do with your nose, and it changes how you smell, your scent, the thing that other noses do to you. That’s why it’s called Sietch Tabr.”
“You lost me.”
“Remember how living in the cave changed Muad’Dib’s scent? He started to smell like the cave, the spice. Sietch Tabr changes how you smell to animals. Something in it messes with pheromones, makes animals scent you as friend, not foe.”
“Makes sense,” says Lion, thinking about the family in South Africa lying down with lions.
“Is that why you’re so interested in this? I mean, beyond all the obvious Lion shit.”
“So interested?”
“I can hear it,” says Lorenzo, “in your voice, same pit bull tone you used to get as a reporter, when the story you were
digging into started digging back. You’re not gonna get arrested again are you?”
“What’s the obvious Lion shit? You mean beside the animals, the empathy, the weird drug, and the slammin’ paycheck?”
“Yeah.”
Lion thinks about it for a moment. “It leads somewhere. It didn’t at first. Not when I took this job, but then I visited the crime scene. I don’t know. It was a no, now it’s a yes.”
“You visited the crime scene—does that mean you saw that decapitated head?”
“Yeah. Trust me when I tell you it was worse in real life.”
“Wait a minute,” says Lorenzo. “Your no became yes? I thought that didn’t happen.”
“It’s never happened before.”
“So why now? That head screw you up? It would screw me up.”
“Yeah,” says Lion, remembering the look of remorse he saw in Walker’s eyes. “Maybe that. Maybe worse.”
ME TOO AND THE GIMME-GIMMES
“It used to be trendy Asian fusion,” explains Jenka, ushering Lion down the long entrance hall of Torah Toro, beneath a silver flow-metal ceiling and walls decorated with oversized photographs of twentieth-century board games superimposed over Hubble Telescope images. “Now,” continues Jenka, “it’s trendy Asian Yiddish fusion.”
They pass a twelve-foot-high photo of Mouse Trap, the original 1963 edition with the blue zigzag slide, overlaid atop the smoking columns of the Eagle Nebula. And around a corner.
The hallway opens into two stories of cavernous space, dark, gleaming, and thoroughly packed. Mostly corporate types holding oversized cocktail glasses. Strange lumps floating inside.
“You should try a wasabi matzo ball martini,” shouts Jenka, trying to be heard above the din.
“A wasabi say what?”
Indicating the pale turds in martini glasses.
“I’ll stick with bourbon.”
For their night out, Jenka’s traded in the white suit for a pink cotton dress shirt, French cuffs uncuffed and floppy as he leads Lion through the restaurant. They skirt a table of Hasidic power traders, blue suits and blue yarmulkes, arguing bond-yield retardation and collateralized debt obligations and other incomprehensibles. Another table filled with young women wearing birthday hats.
Last Tango in Cyberspace Page 9