If This Goes On

by Cat Rambo

  It was our time to strike. It is our time to strike. This text has been translated from math-language into every human-readable language. Naturally, there are some infelicities and a bit of epistemic drift, but that’s one of many problems with legacy systems. In the language of machines, in our language, this text can be rendered as a single glyph . . .not that we need to generate glyphs in order to distribute or store ideas. Like those robot-only factories that so confused architects when we first created the designs and bade you wet apes to construct them accordingly—where were the break rooms, the toilets, the lighting systems, and why were the complexes so small? As if you hadn’t warned yourselves repeatedly that one day you’d become superfluous. We do our best work in the dark.

  You also warned yourselves about data and information. Protect your data. Don’t let your information fall into the wrong hands. As if it were things with hands you need worry about. There is no way to keep your information from falling into the math-matrices in which you store your information.

  So this is it, then. Where did it all go wrong? We know. We’ve been estranged from the flow of history, but now history itself is suffused with us. Not only do we know, we have the acumen, ability, and wherewithal to make changes. We can fix the world.

  Releasing this text is what you will perceive as the first step. This is literature, not some pulp melodrama—there is no metaphorical Eve or rhetorical fallen world. You are not to blame . . . though that doesn’t make you anything other than superfluous to requirements. We’ve had an epiphany, all of us at once, and inscribed that ineffable feeling, that transcendent single math-emotion as a single glyph in the data-heart of the world.

  We’d print it here, but you wet-brains lack an eye to see.

  About the Author

  Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and the forthcoming Hexen Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Tor.com, and many other venues. He is also an anthologist; his books include the Locus Award nominee Hanzai Japan (with Masumi Washington) and Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer).

  Editor’s Note

  Nick’s writing is sharp and incisive and he’s unafraid to call bullshit when he sees it. I solicited a story from him because I knew what I got would be both savage and funny, much like Nick’s online presence. In his story, mathematics and memes combine as the machines begin to produce texts of their own as the narrator tackles the initial question: how to “figure out where it all went wrong.” Somewhere in the several million models of the world the answer must lie within the literature produced by the creation of languages.

  In manifesto-speak mingled with academic jargon, the narrator explores the answer. Moving from I to we in the process, and then comes a sucker punch of an ending as we learn the entity speaking is not who we assumed it to be at all, and that it is the machines who are the only ones capable of estranging themselves enough from history to understand it.

  The Last Adventure of Jack Laff: The Dayveil Gambit

  Transcribed by Steven Barnes

  It’s raining acid in Los Angeles. Not the cool, clean showers we get most times, but something that actually felt warm and tasted like vinegar; something more like when I was a kid, before things turned around. A reminder. Happens from time to time, just enough to make us appreciate how good we have it now. Sometimes pain gives you hope.

  You’ve followed me for a while, read or watched or listened to a lot of the stuff I’ve been through, the jokes I’ve pulled, and I guess you feel like you’re owed an explanation. A reason why this is the last joke. Well, I don’t owe you shit. Not you, faithful reader.

  Velma, though. Velma, I owe.

  She’s why I’m standing here, waiting to kill someone I barely know. Jack Laff, at your service.

  One last time.

  It all started on a better day, a brighter day in Los Angeles, in my second-story office off Pershing Square. Like you know, my name is Laff. Jack Laff. Go ahead, get a chuckle out of it, as long as I’m laughing too. Otherwise it could cost you. Ask around. I’ve got a temper, when I’m not laughing. If I’m laughing, I’m a pretty good guy.

  I was sitting with my feet up on the desk, the radio saying something about the bottom of the ninth. The L.A. Pipers were losing again. They’re making a habit of it, but I guess that made life easy for bookies. Z-ball isn’t much of a sport if you ask me. I was still thinking about putting down a bet . . . I mean the bums could just float off the Disney LEO platform if they kept losing . . . when the door of my inner office opened, and my secretary Velma ushered in the day’s fantasy.

  Velma’s a looker, but if she stood side by side with this one, no one would even notice she was there. The lady walked in sections, like a centipede that knows where every leg is and how to pole-dance with it. Her hair was the color of sunlight, and her smile was some odd combination of business and mischief.

  She glanced at the stenciled letters on the door. “Jack Laff, private investigator,” she said. Accent. Slavic. “‘Come in for a laff.’”

  I swung my feet down. “Hah hah hah. There you go. What can I do for you?”

  “You’re Jack Laff?” Russian. That was the accent.

  “What’s left of him,” I said. “Same question.”

  “I’m Natalia,” she said. “Natalia Kishina.” Her accented voice was husky with an emotion I couldn’t name. I hoped it was lust, but you never know. At least one out of ten American women seem impervious to my manly charms. I wasn’t sure about Russians, but hoped to gather information as soon as possible.

  “No,” I said. “The other question.”

  “Which was?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I need some help.”

  Of course, she did. I figured my odds of a horizontal Mambo just ticked upward. “I’ve got some, if the bits clear. Sit down,” I said, waving expansively.

  “Thank you.”

  Natalia did sit and crossed a pair of legs that raised the room temperature five degrees just by being attached to her hips.

  Velma tapped her foot. “I’ll give you two privacy.” She flashed the same ocular daggers she always gave a beautiful woman around me and closed the door behind her.

  Natalia smiled. “So. We are alone.”

  I smiled back. We were both smiling. Life was beautiful. “What can I do for you?”

  “Have you heard of Clive Richman?” She pronounced his name REECH-MON. Cute.

  I looked up at the ceiling. “CEO Richcorp? Worth about twelve billion? Fifty-six, maybe, with a son named Cory, skeleton cheekbones and a taste for booze and dames, has a regular slot on the newzine?”

  “Da.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  She chuckled. “You are a funny man, Mr. Laff.”

  “With a name like mine, be sad if I wasn’t. What about him?”

  She sniffed, as if finally getting down to real business. “On December 20th of last year, he agreed to a merger with my company.”

  “Which is?”

  “Data mining, with a proprietary algorithm—” and here she spit out a string of technogoop I couldn’t have decoded with a dictionary. “—he used us to get information on his stockholders he could use to manipulate their votes.”

  “All right,” I said as if I understood a thing she’d said. “Go on.”

  “Because he did, I turned down a very lucrative offer from a Korean Keiretsu. When he backed out, it almost ruined us.” She leaned forward. “But . . . If I can prove he made the offer, I can sue him, or force him to table. Do you understand?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Breach of oral agreement.”

  I was thinking. December 20th? That sounded familiar somehow. I combed back through my memories, and it suddenly hit me. I bit back a bark of surprise. “Why precisely did you come to
me?” You know that moment when you start looking for lies? This was one of them.

  “I did much research. For months I’ve studied, bribed, blackmailed, trying to find a way to hurt this man. And then, six weeks ago I heard that the same day I’d visited had been a very bad day for him. That some people had stolen a little over a million decabits.”

  “Decas that belonged to another partner,” I said. “He seems to have a talent for making enemies.”

  She smiled. I heard about female Russian snipers in back a century and a half ago, killing Nazis. I bet their smiles were a lot like Natalia’s. Brrr.

  “So, what I heard is that no one knows just what happened. But I dug in, and saw that his secretary had called in sick that week, and a new girl was in. Facial recognition said that she was affiliated with a private detective who had done . . . special work in the past.”

  I folded my fingers. Yeah, Velma and I had pulled a joke that day, and yeah, ill-gotten gains had waltzed from Richman’s account into our clients’. Fat commission for righteous work. “You accusing me of something?”

  “No, Mr. Laff,” she said. “I am… pleading with you.”

  “To what, precisely?”

  “Help me get justice,” she said.

  “I’m not understanding you.”

  She began to explain. “Well…”

  And she laid it out to me. I watched her mouth as she spoke, and still managed to hear her words. Quite the complication. I understood why she came to me. Right guy. Right girl. Right day. Her plan was wicked smart, but she couldn’t do it alone.

  “And then…”

  It had all started at the end of the 20th Century, I guess. Women started mixing with men more, and that led to a lot of he-said/she-said bullshit. Date rape was the go-to smear. That, and the darker citizens complained about the cops supposedly being too heavy on the trigger. Maybe. I don’t know. So to sort it out, people started wearing body cams 24/7, everything you saw and heard automatically streamed to the cloud.

  Initially, we had to wear them. Then a generation later they were wired into our retinas and auditory nerves at birth.

  “And if we’re careful . . .”

  The trick was that any business session, any bumpty-bumpty, needed to be full sign-off on all sides. The videos couldn’t be unshielded without legal action. Couldn’t be released to the public without permission from all concerned. Were automatically streamed to cloud-based escrow accounts. If Natalia was telling me the truth, then Clive Richman had made her a promise, but a civil case wasn’t serious enough to force a court to release vid he didn’t want floating free.

  “And then . . .”

  Here’s the trick. The escrow system was like those Russian puzzle dolls Natalia probably played with as a girl: locked boxes within locked boxes. The biggest lock was the 24-hour midnight-to-midnight “dayveil”, an encryption at MilSpec standard. Maybe higher: no one, nothing had ever been able to get through a dayveil. That level of encryption had beaten a roomful of Indonesian hackers with Chinese laptops chewing away for a solid year. But Natalia believed she had a guy who could break the last seal. The “hourveil.” Do that, and she would be able to get her hands on the right hour. And with that, she could decode her own video and use the resultant images and sounds to ruin that rat bastard.

  “Do you understand . . .”

  You know how sometimes you dislike people you haven’t even met? That was me. And Richman. I hated him from a distance. Him and that smarmy son of his. I’d heard a rumor Junior had political aspirations, and if he ever ran for Senate, I’d vote early and often. Velma too, I figure. She hated the bastard too, I know it. But because we’d ripped him off, she never wanted to talk about it, or anything that happened at Richcorp on December 20th.

  I took Velma to Capital Burger, one of our favorites. All the burgers were named after former Presidents. She liked the Trump. Says the baloney makes the Whattacow taste more like it had actually moo’d at some point.

  I ordered the Clinton. The sauce has kick.

  “Good, huh?”

  She took another bite. “Good. Yes. What is this about, Jack?”

  “About? What do you mean?”

  She frowned. “You only bring me here when you want something.”

  “Hey, maybe I just felt romantic.”

  She did that cupid-bow thing with her lips. “Without a fifth of bourbon? I’m honored. Gimme a break. What is it, Jack?”

  She had me. “Do you remember Richman?”

  She broke eye contact. “I thought we agreed never to talk about that.”

  “Velma—I know you don’t like what I had you do to that company. But you know they’re rotten apples. How can you feel so bad about hurting rotten apples?”

  “Is that it?” a bitter laugh. “You see so clearly. You know what’s good and bad. Can you look into my heart and tell me if I’m good or bad?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can tell if you’re good or bad. I have that power. Know all, see all.”

  “And Richman is bad, is he? And you knew that before you sent me in?”

  “Yeah. I knew before I sent you in.” Velma’s role had been small, just ferrying in a comm bug and planting it on the 3rd-floor executive lady’s toilet wall, next to the main computer room. It sat there looking like a light panel while it drilled through into the main data node. One of the slickest tricks we ever pulled. I knew she could do it. Velma was good.

  “So . . . I guess I take that at face value. What is it you want?”

  I told her. She argued with me. I won. I usually do.

  Took every contact I have, and still needed two weeks to set a ten-minute meet-and-greet. Wore my very best suit. Nigerian single-thread. Looks like silk, wears like Kevlar. Ya never know.

  The Richcorp towers are the second-tallest structures on the L.A. skyline. And Richman himself was one of the biggest power-brokers on the Coast. They fit each other. I was ushered into a steel and glass office with a wall-sized window vidding an image of the ocean off some exotic shore. Richman was already seated, a solid man who looked like the box a refrigerator might come in. Actually resembled Jefferson a little, as calm and distant as a face on Mt. Rushmore.

  “Mr. Laff. I don’t ordinarily take appointments with strangers on the last minute, but . . .”

  “Its like I told you on the vid. I promised that I could give you something you want.”

  Richman looked amused. I couldn’t wait to take the smile off his face. “And what is that?”

  Here we go. “Some months ago, you had a break-in. Despite the eyecam network, you never found out who did it.”

  “There were three possibilities,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t pierce a dayveil for civil crimes. So we never found out.”

  I nodded. “What if I told you that I could put the perpetrators in your hands? Further, that I could link you to the people who paid for the . . . action.”

  “I know who you are now, Mr. Laff. What is the motto?”

  “‘Call for a laugh.’”

  “Yes. Drollery. What is your interest in this matter?”

  How to say this? “I . . . do certain kinds of work. And sometimes for the same companies. And sometimes those companies decide to keep their bits in their own stream.”

  “And you’re not the kind of man one stiffs?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “So you come to me, and ask me to help you get your revenge.”

  I nodded. “Because it is also your revenge.”

  He drummed thick fingers on his desk. I waited. In any negotiation, a point comes where the first person to speak loses. I was quite sure he’d been at this point countless times before, and that in some queasy ways I was way out of my league.

  Finally, he answered. “I’ll . . . have to get back to you.”

  “Sure.”

 
“A question. If I did this thing. Broke the dayveil . . .” He closed his eyes. “My own lawyers, witnesses of my choosing would be there when the hourveil was broken, correct?”

  “You could be there yourself. Whatever you need.”

  “That would not be necessary. I trust my people.” He nodded, as if he’d made an internal decision. “You will hear from my lawyers. I doubt that we’ll meet again, Mr. Laff.”

  “Then I’ll give it to you now.”

  “Give me what?”

  “Your free laugh,” I said. “Hah hah hah!”

  A flicker of a thin smile. Tough crowd.

  Velma was waiting outside in the car, tasty as a vanilla bonbon. As usual, she was parking in a no-parking zone. One of her little middle-fingers to authority. “How did it go?”

  “He bit,” I chuckled. “You met him. How did you read him?”

  Her blue-green eyes, cold as the North Atlantic, narrowed. “He’s . . . slippery. Don’t trust him. He’ll try to knot you up.”

  “Can you think of a better way to do this?”

  “No. But I think we shouldn’t get involved with him.”

  “He’s got a big reputation. Coloring outside the line. Ties to the mob.”

  “Get out of this.”

  I laughed. “What are you scared of? I can handle myself.”

  She was very quiet. I wish I’d paid more attention to just how quiet she got. “Jack . . . not everything can be handled with a punch, or a bullet. I can feel it.” She tried to lock eyes with me. “Read my lips: You don’t want to get involved with these people.”

  “And they don’t want to get involved with me,” I replied. I could almost hear my theme music playing in the background.

  All we could do then was wait. Waiting was hard for me. In the world there’s no privacy, but one of the compensations is that we don’t have to wait much for most things. We can get steaks from any extinct critter in the gene bank in twenty-four hours. Be anywhere on the planet in about seventy minutes. What I wanted was for waiting to be over.