by Matt Ruff
“You do have to admit it was an epic troll,” he says. “One for the ages.”
“Yeah, really epic,” I say. “Do you know Jolene just got shot downstairs?”
Long pause. “Well, I didn’t shoot her,” he says, sounding offended by the implication.
“And if you’re such a fucking genius,” I continue, “how come the gangsters got onto you?”
“That was your fucking fault. The first withdrawal went smooth as silk. But you made me go back for more, and I guess that time they noticed. They’ve been on my ass ever since I picked up the cash at the bank.”
I’m crouched beside the longboat now. Gripping the gunwale with both hands, I stand up, stick my head over the top. He’s sitting on the floor inside, looking up expectantly.
“Boo,” he says.
Ordinarily it would be unhealthy to think about punching a guy who has a gun, but having finally grasped the rules of the game he and I have been playing, I know that even if I broke his nose, he would probably just laugh. But before I can put this theory to the test, I glimpse movement out of the corner of my eye, and some late-arriving reflex of self-preservation makes me hop over the gunwale and squat down beside him.
Posed on the prow of the longboat is a figure of a drunken dwarf, dancing a highland jig. Peering out through the gap beneath his kilt, I see the male contingent of the trio headed our way with their guns out. The younger guy looks nervous—no doubt this has to do with the sound of approaching sirens outside the building—but the tough older guy just looks focused, like he’s cool with being arrested as long as he gets to kill someone first.
My boat mate elbows me in the side. I turn to him, and he offers me the Desert Eagle, holding the gun in his left hand while showing me his right wrist, which is swollen and badly bruised. “Recoil,” he mouths, by way of explanation.
“Idiot,” I mouth back. I don’t take the gun. I shift back in the boat and look over the gunwales, trying to decide if there’s any way to run that won’t get us instantly shot.
That’s when I see Bamber. She’s crouched by the corner of the Panda Express kiosk where I was a few moments ago, and she is holding an elvish longbow. The bow is a replica of Helios, a legendary loot drop from the Fields of the Sun. Bamber briefly makes eye contact with me. Then she nocks an arrow in the bow and fires it in a high arc over the heads of the approaching gunmen. The arrow lands with a clatter in the distance and the gunmen spin around at the sound.
Bamber nocks another arrow. Then she freezes, and I see a look of frustration come over her face. She tosses the bow and arrow to the floor and raises her arms. The female member of the trio, her pistol pointed at the back of Bamber’s head, marches Bamber into the open.
“Everybody come out,” the gunwoman says, “or I shoot her now.”
I stand up and put my hands in the air. The boy in the hoodie stays crouched below the gunwale.
“Everybody,” the gunwoman says. I look down, scowling, and my boat mate rolls his eyes and says, “Fine.” He gets up, leaving his own gun on the floor.
We exit the longboat and stand next to Bamber. By this point the gunwoman’s confederates have joined us. The young guy keeps his Beretta out, but the tough guy holsters his pistol, and then, to my consternation, reaches into the other side of his jacket and pulls out a cleaver.
“Where is the money?” the gunwoman says.
Bamber answers: “In a safe in our hotel room.”
“What hotel?”
“The Sony, on Hollywood.”
“What room?”
“Suite 10A.” Glancing down: “The key card is in my pocket.”
The gunwoman makes no move to take it. “Tell me about the safe. Is it a number combination, or”—nodding in the direction of the guy with the cleaver—“a biometric lock?”
“It’s a voiceprint lock,” the boy in the hoodie says. The gunwoman points her pistol at him, but he looks back unblinking with a screw-you expression on his face that makes me wish I’d punched him when I had the chance. “Go ahead, shoot me,” he says. “Shoot all of us. You won’t get the cash back.”
“Motherfucker.” The young guy, really on edge from the sirens now, raises his own Beretta.
“Wait!” the gunwoman says. She turns back to Bamber, and then, reconsidering, zeroes in on me. “You,” she says. “Is your friend here telling the truth?”
And I just gape at her, trying to think how to sell the lie, which of course means I’ve already blown it. In a moment of rising panic I see something flitting through the air behind her. I glance at it, look away, then look back again, even as my brain warns me not to.
The gunwoman sees it all in my face. Eyes narrowing in suspicion, she turns, pistol at the ready, but the drone is small, no larger than a pack of cards, and it’s much faster than she is. The instant her gun is pointed away from us the drone fires, hitting her in the neck, dumping more voltage into her body than any civilian Taser would be allowed to. She does a jittering dance, and the men, each tasked with their own drone, dance too. All three of them go down.
The Taser drones settle into a protective hover, and a larger drone glides into view from behind the Panda Express kiosk. The big drone has a camera mounted inside a dome on its underside. It pauses to scan the trio, confirming that the Real Threats have been neutralized, then glides forward until it’s right in front of me. As it comes to a stop, it does this little side tilt, the way a person might cock their head, and through this gesture I intuit who the driver is.
“Hi Mom,” I say, and I tilt my own head towards the dude in the hoodie at my side. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Darla.”
Epilogue
88 Names
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
—Mark Twain
* * *
“The Great Impostor” — Sobriquet of Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. (1921–1982), an American folk legend who used stolen identities and forged credentials to obtain work as a prison warden, college dean, sheriff’s deputy, civil engineer, and numerous other jobs for which he was technically not qualified. In what became his most famous exploit, he assumed the identity of a Canadian doctor, Joseph C. Cyr, and served as a trauma surgeon aboard the destroyer HMCS Cayuga during the Korean War. Despite his lack of medical training, he performed several successful operations, speed-reading medical reference books to learn the necessary procedures. Demara’s stated motivation for his many impostures was “Rascality. Pure rascality.”
—The Book of Lulz
* * *
He wants to see me.
Darryl Joseph Carter (aka Darla Jean Covington, aka Smith, aka Mr. Jones, aka Ms. Pang, aka Nameless White Guy, aka Mr. Bungle) is being held in the John McCain Special Housing Unit at the Federal Correctional Complex in Victorville. The McCain SHU is an ultramax-security facility designed for the sort of prisoners who used to be held at Guantanamo Bay. Darryl’s incarceration there has less to do with his alleged crimes than with the circumstances of his capture. The government’s logic goes like this: Darryl was the target of a Zero Day operation; Zero Day exists to hunt down super-dangerous terrorists; QED, Darryl deserves the Al Qaeda treatment. Don’t get on my mom’s bad side, is the moral of the story.
The SHU does not have regular visiting hours. Even the prisoners’ lawyers must apply in advance to meet with their clients. As a civilian with no security clearance, I require an escort to get inside the facility. For a while Mom talks about doing this herself—she’d love an excuse to fly in and spend some time with me and the other West Coast relatives—but other work duties keep intervening, so eventually she sends her latest Zero Day recruit in her stead.
Jolene picks me up at LAX. This is the first time I’ve seen her in person since the day she got shot. She’s looking much better; her broken ribs have healed, and she’s thrilled about the new job. “Almost worth taking a bullet for,” she jokes.
Our appointment at the prison isn’t until two, so we stop for lunch at a diner in
the San Gabriel Mountains. Over burgers, Jolene asks me how the sherpa business is doing. Not well, I tell her. I’m working without a crew these days. “Anja left right after you did.”
“You told her the truth about the malware?”
I nod. “I thought about pretending that Darryl hacked her medical pod without my help, but that just didn’t feel right. So I came clean.”
“Good,” Jolene says. “How pissed off was she?”
“More sad than mad, I think. She didn’t actually say she was quitting, just told me she was going to take a break and spend some time with Javier. Did you hear about Ray?”
“Oh yeah, I heard.”
In the movie version of this story, Ray’s reward for saving the life of the cop Jolene shot will be full recognition of her American citizenship. In the real world, Ray knew better than to count on that ending—after the SWAT team escorted her and the cop and Jolene out of the Arcade to where paramedics were waiting, she managed to slip away. But her face had been captured by Tempest’s security cameras, and the LAPD IDed her as a fugitive with an outstanding ICE warrant. Mom tried to run interference by claiming that Ray was a Zero Day asset, but the local cops were upset that she hadn’t told them about the op in advance, and ICE just didn’t give a shit. Rather than back off, ICE demanded, and eventually got, Ray’s home address, which Mom knew from having traced her internet connection.
Ray was living in a rented trailer outside of Barstow. ICE raided the place two weeks ago. The agents shot a stray dog on the property, but Ray herself was nowhere to be found. From the look of things, she’d cleared out just hours earlier, taking her computer and VR rig with her.
ICE is mad. They think Mom warned Ray that they were coming. I thought so too at first, but now, listening to Jolene say, “Oh yeah, I heard,” it occurs to me that someone else might have given Ray the heads-up.
“So anyway,” I say, “I’m working solo now, when I’m working at all. It looks like my fifteen minutes’ of fame from that People article are over.”
“That’s a shame,” Jolene says, not sounding too broken up about it. “Especially since you lost all that money.”
Just as Mom predicted, the government confiscated the half million dollars Darryl had given me. Or as much of it as they could get their hands on: The ten thousand I paid Anja for her first week’s cut is safe in her bank in Argentina, and Ray cleared out her PayPal account before ICE could freeze it. I assume Jolene had to give up her share, but since she was working undercover all along, she never expected to keep it. “Yeah, I’m back in the poorhouse where I started.” I shrug. “It happens.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll pay for lunch,” Jolene tells me, and she does. While we’re waiting for the waitress to bring her change, she says: “So listen, it’s none of my business but I’ve got to ask. You and Darla. When the two of you were having your thing together, whatever that was, did you ever . . .”
“Have cybersex? Yeah. A few times.”
“Yeah, OK. So is it weird for you, to find out that she’s . . . well, I want to say ‘a guy,’ but maybe that’s making assumptions.”
“I don’t think Darryl’s trans, in the traditional sense,” I say. “And even if he was, I think he’d think it was funny that you were worried about the etiquette. You didn’t watch the recording of his FBI interview?”
She shakes her head. “I was going to check it out, for today, but I didn’t get around to it.”
“His gender identity came up. One of the agents asked him if he felt ‘like a woman trapped in a man’s body,’ quote-unquote.”
“How’d he answer?”
“He laughed his ass off. Then he told them no, it wasn’t like that, he just wasn’t hung up on the whole male-female thing.”
“Hmm. And you?”
“I’m a little hung up on it. I’m not going to pretend that Darla being a girl was irrelevant, because I liked the way her avatar looked—the way I thought she looked. But that was never the main attraction. The thing that got to me about her was her talent, and that was real.”
“I don’t know. I think I’d still be pretty upset, if it was me.”
“It’s the internet,” I say. “Nobody’s ever exactly what they seem like. You know what does freak me out, though? Unless Darryl erased it, the feds have the bullet I made for Darla.”
“You worried they’re going to send a copy to your mom?”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
We’re at the prison at two o’clock, but it’s closer to three by the time we make it past the gates, doors, ID checks, pat-downs, and scans. Near the end of the gauntlet, Jolene and I part company. She heads for a security office to watch on closed-circuit television while I go up to the interview room alone.
The room is like something out of the Combine interrogation center in Half-Life 3: an octagon assembled from poured concrete slabs, divided down the middle by a curtain of armored Plexiglas. Small circular grilles of titanium mesh are set into the Plexi to allow sound to pass through. On either side of the barrier, a broad strip of floor has been painted red, with signs warning of dire consequences if this no-go zone is violated; God help you if you actually tried to pry one of the grilles out, or messed with the cameras mounted on the ceiling.
The chair on my side of the Plexi is an expensively padded and ergonomic office number, the kind of thing you’d want under your butt if you were settling in for a marathon session of online poker. The prisoner chair is a hardback plastic seat that you might buy in bulk if you were shopping for an underfunded school district. This might seem like needless cruelty, and it is, but it’s also logical from a business perspective: As much as any private corporation, the Department of Corrections knows the difference between its clients and its products.
I take a seat in the comfy chair. I’ve still got a few minutes to wait, so I have another look at the crib sheet on Darryl that Mom had prepared for me.
He is twenty-four years old, and he does not live in Oregon. It’s true that his parents are divorced, but the whole family still resides, as they always have, in Palo Alto. Darryl’s dad works for Apple. His mom is a deputy in the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
Darryl’s own occupation, which he seems to have pursued full-time for at least the past several years, is pretending to be other people on the internet. Principally Darla, whose stories about visiting Dad in Arizona or attending family reunions with her mother were a scheduling strategy to block out time for her different online relationships. The FBI and Mom’s people are still working to compile a full list of contacts, but so far they’ve identified four individuals who Darla spent significant time with.
The first is Darla’s hacker friend, Orville. A positive ID is still pending, but they believe he is Orville Slusarski, a forty-nine-year-old former NSA employee who quit the agency under a cloud of suspicion and took some stuff he shouldn’t have when he left. Orville, an avid League of Avengers player whose favorite alter ego is Lex Luthor, was apparently tutoring Darla in the dark arts of cyberwarfare. The crib sheet doesn’t say what Orville got out of the deal, but I think it’s a safe bet that Darla lied when she told me she and Orville weren’t fucking. Not that I care.
The second name on the list is Martin Duncan, a New Mexico schoolteacher and Star Trek Online devotee who’d been sending Darla gifts of cash—paying Darryl’s rent—in hopes that she would one day agree to meet with him in person. Then there is Jason Hoyt, a physical therapist and Call of Duty leaderboard champ from Boston who used to send Darla gifts of cash, until he lost patience and decided to stalk Darla instead. Hoyt is undergoing some serious physical therapy of his own now, after tracking Darla to a house in New Haven that actually belonged to a Navy SEAL.
Individual number four is yours truly. Zero Day’s psych profilers are divided on what my relationship with Darla meant to Darryl. One theory is that he was grooming me to be a replacement for Martin Duncan, which if true would be pretty funny, given the difficulty I often had paying m
y own rent. My preferred hypothesis is that Darryl saw me as a more age-appropriate version of Orville. I believe Darla’s passion for game design was real, and that Darryl was sincere about wanting to go into business with me—however dim the long-term prospects for that might have been. Why else would his revenge have taken the form that it did?
Mom, after hearing me out at length on the subject, agrees with me. She thinks Darryl did regard me as a kind of peer, a friend even. But she also pointed out that being befriended by a sociopath, like being hired to work for a dictator, is not really something I should be proud of, or flattered by. And I know that she’s right, but it feels a lot better than being taken for a sucker.
The door opens on the other side of the room and Darryl comes in. He is dressed in orange prison scrubs, and his arms and legs are shackled. His hair has gotten longer, and he is sporting a thick growth of beard whose unkempt nature gives him the appearance of a hermit. He stops just inside the threshold and looks around, taking in the dimensions of the room, which is significantly larger than the cell they’ve been keeping him in. Before sitting down, he does a brisk circuit of his side of the octagon. Despite the chain between his ankles, he doesn’t shuffle, he walks, maintaining a short graceful stride, and in this, and in the way he comes right up to the edge of the red zone without going over, I see Darla’s talent, that thing I found so compelling in her.
But I see him, too. At the Arcade that day, there was too much going on for me to ever really take a good look at Darryl, but now, as he takes his turn around the room, I have a chance to check him out. I think about that question Jolene asked me at the diner, and find myself wondering how things might have played out if Darla ever had given me her home address.
I identify as straight, and have never been with a guy in real life, but I like to believe I’m cool enough to be open to the possibility. The masculine physique isn’t a problem for me. I’m attracted to athletic women, a polite way of saying I’m not a huge boob guy, and Darryl, from the neck down, could pass for a flat-chested Valkyrie. Kind of. The beard, though, really doesn’t work for me.