Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  Recess, he called them.

  RabbidUnicorn had a mean sense of humor.

  And from RabbidUnicorn, M had learned the language you worked in telegraphed your identity. Ruby or PHP: soft. C or Assembly: brawny. So on. He wanted to be legitimate, so he had spent hours tinkering with the least efficient codes. You could do that there, mean what you wanted by taking the long route, do what meant who you wanted to be.

  He built programs to model poker hands and made pages of famous maneuvers. He showed his work to people he knew only by prose style. They began to call him the one-eyed king, a Cyclops or Oedipus programming strokes of fortune. The King of Diamonds. He was invited into an internet relay chat channel. The name of the channel was dynamic, fit to lock out malicious intruders. He wore their name for him: OneEyedRoyal.

  Late night, he had stayed up in the screen of ideas, the electronic breath of vigilante dialogue. He got in arguments over whether a line of code should contain more than eighty characters. Sometimes, RabbidUnicorn would give him word problems to solve in algorithm. He was testing M, or it was the way he played, or both. It was training or it was evangelizing or it was ritual, and maybe it didn’t matter because M liked to listen with his eyes to RabbidUnicorn’s ideas about human rights: Most people deserved pursuit of happiness; major party politicians deserved to be pursued by anthrax twat napkins. The freedom to usurp. So on.

  But M had wanted to perform addition, create a sum. He thought up ways to bring everyone from the boards into four walls. He thought of establishing a software company or a custom computing service. They could build precise inventory systems, genealogy trackers, systems that counted all the expense and profit accumulated. They could turn detective computers, matching frauds with crimes, find the people who opened credit cards and never paid.

  They would need capital to start.

  Big games, official ones were the way, he had believed. Vegas. Tournaments. The polygraph detects fear; not lying, he read, and so the intrepid liar could beat even machines. He decided to be fearless in order to lie well enough to win. This meant hedge his play with a series of identities. A person was only a pattern. Inanimate objects were animated by these repetitions, life by logical shapes. If, M thought, his self was only a well-formed series, he could resequence it, iterate.

  He multiplied within in his own bones. In frumpy T-shirts, under the names he’d taken, Jack Heart and John S. Pade and Raj Diamond and Mack Sean, he won and lost big at the casinos. They were winners and losers on a mission. He paid losses under ten grand. Otherwise, he’d shed a name and avoid the casino property for a while. He imagined a circuit of computers strung around an open office like Christmas lights.

  But a streak hit him. He lost big. He lost bigger. At home, he watched television. He read up on tech companies, how they moved from garages to offices to publicly trade. He read about Vodafone and Mannesmann, MCI acquiring Sprint. These were large companies becoming huge, some rich men becoming very rich.

  One night, M told RabbidUnicorn the new proposal. He watched the letters come up on the screen, backtracked, typed again, riled. He stayed at his computer waiting for the time when RabbidUnicorn would answer in his window.

  It’s like if you knew which college ball players would put on weight in the pros. Hack the merger lawyers, you can buy who’s becoming a giant before anyone trading. Then, when the stock price shoots up after the merger, you sell.

  Why would we do that? RabbidUnicorn said.

  It would be a disruption.

  He remembered how even as he had typed those words, something had shifted. He remembered RabbidUnicorn’s last words to him.

  You don’t know how to disrupt anything. You only know late capitalism two point oh. You’re a slave, OneEyedRoyal. A house negro, but still a fucking slave.

  “That must have hurt,” Lyle said. He did not look up from the blur of his own hand taking notes.

  “Is that what Ingrid would say?” M said.

  “Ingrid,” Lyle said.

  “Marina’s mother. Ring a bell?”

  They looked at each other. M’s pupils were big black caviar in his face, and Lyle swallowed a tight, dry swallow. He lay his pen down.

  M raised his eyebrows, winked. “She’s one in a million, kiddo. The Micellis used to know the value of family.”

  “You hacked me.”

  “Laugh, Michaels,” M said. “It’s funny.”

  Lyle’s head was ringing. He closed his eyes. The red behind his lids was vibrating. His chest was. He opened his eyes and M’s eyebrows pulled together, and he was crossing his arms.

  “Your phone, Michaels,” M said.

  His fingers fell into the normal choreography of the answer. Bring device to ear. No answer.

  When he finished the call, M was gone. Lyle had not seen him leave.

  Chapter 12

  There was an explanation, and it was autonomic. It was neuroendocrine activation. Jeremy was thinking thalamus, amygdala, hypothalamus. He was thinking noncritical system go down. It is all very sensible, the body. Efficient. Delay digestion. There is danger.

  But it was not danger. It was just a room of middle-aged people, expectant and holding pamphlets. There were so many pamphlets here in China.

  love is a two-way street.

  questions are good.

  when strangers become forever families.

  During the adoption orientation at the hotel, all the couples sat in a circle, talking about their current and future families. Dan and Amy from Texas. Steve and Betsy from Arkansas. Jen and David from San Francisco. They were thick, kind people, and they called children blessings. They talked about God, what God had done for them, and it was always family.

  That afternoon, they went to the Great Wall as a group. They went to the Forbidden City. All Jeremy could see were the cameras. The cameras in phones. Everywhere there was sound, and nowhere was there a signal. The signal was simple.

  We are here for him.

  And so they followed the two tour guides, Chinese-Americans who’d been adopted by the agency themselves. They smiled at people. His eyes were wide and unseeing. There was a study of rats. Evidence of activity in the prefrontal cortex long after the physical response to danger. The stimulus might never be rubbed completely out.

  The tour guides were clapping their hands. They were telling the group to clap their hands if they were listening.

  Chapter 13

  To listen was to animate the evidence in time, bring it to now, carry the audio files into the moment of knowledge, Lyle had to believe that. He had left the apartment to clear his mind, just a meal, knife and fork, this technique of survival in the cutting and spearing at which it was simple to succeed. Roast chicken.

  Back home, his parents whispered their beautiful granddaughter was sleeping God bless her. His father said it was not so far to Queens that a visit once a week would be too much. His mother promised to take Marina shopping. She urged just call and she’d do the shopping for supper. And when they were gone, when he had switched on the light that spun stars over the walls and ceiling where Marina slept, and Lyle had checked that the door was locked, he dug into piles and files.

  The dates divided the interviews. The sentences differed. Yet somehow all of it together is supposed to answer who is M? Can the man who hacked him be the one man who will tell the truth about US intelligence?

  He looked at his notes, and he knew it had been foolish to refer to M as M when Lyle knew his name. But the code had given the project weight, secrecy. It was a gesture that imagined eventual subpoena, that the book could reverberate that much, displace an order. Marina lay sleeping in her bed, and that her face was true was something for Lyle to remember, but his breath caught in his chest: a thought inflicted. And he was terrified suddenly of the day when he could first catch her in a lie.

  Believe the facts are thicker than paper. Authe
nticating details.

  Lyle wondered now whether he’d misread M from the beginning. Perhaps Lyle had missed something.

  “I’ve met your type,” M had said that first time they made contact. “You think adversarial journalism is ipso facto moral high ground. You think the more adversarial, the more it’s a public good. Whoever stirs the most anger is the most meaningful. The biggest spoon you call impact.”

  Lyle had shifted in his seat. He had wanted to show M around his ethics like a museum. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “As complicated as you’re messing with my sister, I’m guessing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lyle said.

  “Pee-pees and vaginas, Michaels. Fitting and separating. Birds, bees. They breed babies that way, communicate the drippy diseases. You said you’re a ‘friend’ of hers. I’m not such a shut-in I’m too shut-in to be a cynic.”

  He’d not thought the antagonism would extend beyond the night. He’d thought it was a test, or the performance of a test. M didn’t talk, exactly. He orated. Speech bleak as the ramblings of a failed actor, and always stringing code.

  The second time they met, M had brushed the bottom of the bar with his hands quickly, knelt to peer beneath the chairs. He had sat down and took a long sip of tequila. It had seemed to Lyle that if he could only break past the first barrier, no more would be erected.

  “You think what I say I remember is evidence,” M had said. “The beakers are clear, but bent glass warps if you know what I’m saying. You forget it is harder to prove the truth than to tell it.”

  That should have scared Lyle. But Lyle had only shrugged. “You know better.”

  “I am a lie.”

  “The liar’s paradox,” Lyle said.

  “All Cretans are liars, says the Cretan.”

  “To begin, I believe you.”

  “A man of faith,” M had said. M had sneered.

  And Lyle had figured autobiography was part of it. M had grown self-sufficient with secrets, back channels, pretend profiles and counterfeit cards, a whole network of corroboration, reference on reference pointing both nowhere and only to him, just like any other fact. He had manufactured reality so easily, it was nearly a joke.

  “You were a good poker player.”

  “Are. Is that what my sister told you?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything about you. She doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “Then who’s the liaison? Two strangers in a room. I want to know what got us here.”

  Lyle had selected his words like grocery fruit. “I think Glen Close is exciting work, all that intellect in a room, the opportunity to stop pretending instinct is empirical.”

  “I do miss intellect in a room. What chips do you bring to the table?”

  “To begin, I know who knows what you’ve been up to.” A lie. The tip had been anonymous. “I know who knows you have a story.”

  M had sounded his own knuckles in his fist, efficient cracks rendered with a blank face. “Ten minutes, Michaels. Your move. Are you diddling my sister?”

  “I’m not fucking her. She’s married.”

  “So’s any executive with a secretary on the side,” M had said. “But you wonder because you see she is becoming one of them. They will steal your attention in every direction they can, so everything you know is something the architect of search engines decided met the metric of relevance. Sweaters in our communications, between swiped lives! And somewhere, eventually, we aren’t needed for thinking. They have automations, convenient as a microwave dinner, one-click shopping. They want to keep us at our desks, complacent and clicking away.”

  “You’re angry with her.”

  M had bit a lime, leaving a deflated fringe of cellulose attached to the rind, dropped it right into his already empty glass. A swooped finger brought two more glasses. He had looked over a hunched shoulder, leaned his elbows on the table. “That your opinion, Michaels?”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  Lyle remembered M’s eyes then, glossy and large as black olives. “You’re an ex-blogger, Lyle, Lyle, pants on fire. Please don’t play make-pretend objectivity.”

  “I will write this book. Question’s who do you want to tell your story? The Senate Intelligence Committee?”

  “The politicians with a direct line to media can’t,” M had said. “They have no idea what I did. They don’t understand the mechanisms, the rhetoric embedded in the code. All they know is the fairy tale that Little Red Riding Hood isn’t tricked. What gives away the wolf in the sleeping bonnet, Michaels?”

  “They greenlit the project.”

  “They greenlit money for science,” M had said. “Numbers. They think quant’s the prefix for self-evident in Latin. I gave my declamation: after a terror, the signal is always clear. Hindsight is.”

  “But you signed on anyway,” Lyle had said. “Why?”

  “Because if I did it, I’d have wrung out a paradox,” M had said.

  Lyle had followed M’s words with a pen on paper. “What does that mean?”

  M had put his glass down. He had neatly fanned a jacket over his shoulders, as he turned away said, “Tell Lex I said hello.” Lyle had perceived then that M must feel that Lyle was his connection, not hers, if he were to allow Lyle to report the story. He had believed trust would somehow pass between him and M so long as he did not speak of their meetings with Alexandra Chen.

  Chapter 14

  Alexandra and Jeremy did not speak. Mahogany tables topped with bottles of water. Parquet floors. What is there to say? They waited in a conference room. They were living in an era when there was not even the ticking of a clock. There was the mute shift of light.

  And then there, there he was: a little boy, bigger than he’d been in the photograph, a fat lollipop bulging from his cheek, outfitted in small shoes, one with a picture of a giraffe on the toes, the other with leaves, and both affixed with rubber squeakers in the soles, there, here really, was his son. This was not the image he’d returned to again and again. It had not occurred to him that Han was someone who would be aging as they waited for him to become their son. He had been two in the picture. He would be four now.

  For one horrible second, there was something in Jeremy’s throat. This beautiful boy with the cheek full of lollipop, his tan, squat little legs and his chin tucked in—he, too, would die.

  Tether to now, he thought.

  He wanted to stop time.

  A woman spoke his language. Han twisted his torso. There was an emotion to it, the torque, and he ran behind her leg, but she was waving her palm to herself, waving Alexandra and Jeremy closer.

  Han began to cry.

  Something in him cracked, carnation petals in his chest, and when he looked at Alexandra, he realized he’d never before seen her afraid.

  When they left the orphanage, Han cried for hours. They sat in the hotel room with the red bedcover and a boxy television. There was a cot set up, and there was Han in his blue T-shirt. His striped pants and the shoes with flora, fauna. Inarticulate in his language, Alexandra held his hand. Alexandra picked him up. Alexandra bounced him.

  “Bouncing is the universal gesture of consolation, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What sound does a giraffe make?” Jeremy asked, and Han cried louder.

  Alexandra smiled. “What sound does a giraffe make?”

  Jeremy looked at Han and Alexandra with helpless love in his eyes. He ventured a soft word sometimes, but mostly he was shy. He would feel energy in his hand, a directed fidget of affection, and then something in him would be arrested with the maybe-mistake of it. He would do it right with his son. He wouldn’t falter.

  The rats with the fear in their cortex.

  The rhesus monkeys, with all the ACTH levels like their mothers.

  “What is he feeling?” Alexandra said. �
��Everything is a mystery until he learns the words.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Jeremy said.

  Jeremy turned on music from his phone. It was soft piano, dusky and slow. Alexandra was speaking, and he couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t know if he was stupid with the child’s cries, the endless noise of it, or if it was something else. But all he could think was toy? Or thirsty? All he could think was that he must do better for their Han.

  “Should we take a picture?” Alexandra asked.

  “When he stops crying.”

  “You say it as though you’re sure he will.”

  That night, after dinner, after the revelation that a child could cry and eat at once, they put him to bed. Jeremy tried to think of a way to say his thought, or his feeling, and by the time he did, Alexandra was asleep. He wondered how anyone could ever manage to return such an expansive thing as love, let alone a child, whether real love meant not caring about the outcome or requite. He thought he could love that love, one that needn’t be turned back. He already did.

  But that night, Han crawled from his cot, and suddenly Jeremy felt a warmth at his back. He felt a bunching of his shirt—a hand. Jeremy was terrified with the happiness of it, didn’t move. And for many minutes, he couldn’t sleep. This small breath. His son had come to him.

  PART SIX: AEQUUS

  Charm is not an episteme.—One Rock

  Chapter 1

  Alexandra began to know him in gestures. The raised shoulders: humor. The dimples that spread. She preserved him in her phone. She showed him around at work. This was Sunday. Thank you. He is. We’re lucky.