Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  Kreisler nodded like a child expecting a scolding. “We haven’t talked money, to be sure—”

  “Not at all. I haven’t made a movie in twenty years. My skills are more Mystery Science Theater than MTV. With Joseph’s money, you could hire anybody you want. So why me?”

  “Actually, no,” Weinstein said. “We’ve already spent most of it.”

  “Bills,” Kreisler said, his lip curling and voice deepening in disgust.

  “We’re looking for someone different,” Weinstein said. “Honestly. Not retro, but unexpected. Why not sell sexy technology the way you used to sell sex, the old-fashioned way, holding back a little? We have ever so much to hold back, and ever so much to offer. Your techniques are a natural. Compared to Hollywood today, you are innocent. So are we. But we’re also the real thing. A true whiz-bang.”

  “Perhaps you are like wide ties and bell-bottoms,” Kreisler suggested. “You are taken from the closet every thirty years, back in fashion.”

  “Gee, Arpad,” Weinstein said, wagging his finger in warning.

  Peter listened in concerned silence. They would not take no for an answer. There was more here than met the eye. Arpad seemed friendly enough, but Peter was getting cold feet—and not just because of the prison atmosphere. He was afraid of falling flat on his face all over again. He could not afford another failure. And for that reason, he was about to screw himself out of a job, if he didn’t pull back and think things through. “Maybe,” he murmured.

  “You are not too expensive?” Kreisler asked.

  Peter laughed. “I doubt it,” he said. “I need the money and I could certainly use the work. I just want to be truthful.”

  Kreisler looked touched. “Five years ago, six of our people—one my wife, beautiful lady—walk away with fifty million dollars. They do us a favor—we are not even a blip when tech stocks and telecoms melt. Two trillion dollars go south, what me worry? But they delay us by years. Not so good after all. Truth is something we honor. I think you are our man, Mr. Russell.”

  “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Weinstein said, cupping his hands around his ears.

  “I tell you more,” Kreisler said, his voice dropping even lower. “When Stanley says he meets you, I am thrilled. I use your books to learn to read English when I am young, in Kiev. American TV-show paperbacks. I am a fan. I tell Stanley you are famous. Honor to meet you.”

  “What did I know?” Weinstein confessed.

  Peter crinkled his eyes. Despite himself, he was touched.

  “Stanley has told you the basics already, no?” Kreisler asked. “We are here to solve imminent crisis.”

  “Amen, save the world and make money doing it,” Weinstein said.

  Kreisler smiled indulgently. “Three billion people will own wireless phones and computers by year 2030. Houses, cars, refrigerators, televisions, wristwatches, eyeglasses, earrings, all will talk to information centers and receive news, guidance, entertainment, and upgrades for essential services. Companies will sell whole-body sensors that transmit data to doctors and hospitals around the world. No one will ever need to be alone and in danger again. That is what we have been promised. But the truth is much otherwise. In less than twenty years, world will run out of bandwidth. Radio, TV, cell phones, wireless, all will halt screeching growth.” He smiled. “But world’s problem is solvable. I have solved it.”

  Kreisler rose and started to move his arms, slowly at first, then describing large arcs. “No need for waves, for radiation. I discover new source of bandwidth, forbidden information channels, not truly radiation at all, unknown until now. Channels in what I call Bell continuum, after John Bell. He is famous physicist. Trans is like the way photons and electrons and atoms, everything tiny, sing to each other all day, every day, tell each other where and who they are, to balance the books and obey the laws and keep everything real. We send our messages along similar channels. That means you can use Trans anywhere. No degradation to huge distance.”

  Peter’s eyes were playing tricks again. Whenever he blinked, he could still see the outlines of the office, the former cell. The new furniture was not there, however: just a bunk, a wall-mounted steel toilet and sink, and a small set of shelves—a prison cell, nothing more. The cell was unoccupied and still, except for an ankle-deep layer of dust.

  Between blinks, the dust moved.

  “In fact, for Trans,” Kreisler continued, “distance means nothing. Plus, so far as we can measure, our data travels instantly.” His voice had risen to dramatic heights. Now it sank to an intimate whisper. “From this time forward, nothing is the same.”

  “Damned right,” Weinstein said. Whatever stress they were under, Peter could tell that, for them, Trans was much more than money. It was their meat and drink and religion besides.

  “Faster than light?” Peter asked, rubbing his hands on his pants. He was going over the edge once again, hiding behind hallucinations, just to avoid that most dreaded F-word—failure.

  “We agree, it may be a philosophical problem,” Kreisler said. “But that is what we measure. Evidence is everything, no?”

  With his eyes closed, Peter saw the cell as if it were drawn in glowing blue ink on black paper. If he kept his eyes closed for more than a second—which fortunately the circumstances did not permit—the colors started to shift to the hues of bruised flesh.

  He worked hard to keep listening.

  “Like cell phones, Trans units always tie into network. They are always on. What is more remarkable, as they work, they actually change surrounding space, perhaps permanently. They alter information permittivity. Do you know permittivity?”

  “No,” Peter said, then remembered his electrical training from three years in the army. He struggled to fight back, to seem competent and calm. “Is that like capacitance?” His chest was starting to bind. He wanted to shove his fingers under his ribs, but instead took short breaths. Soon the sweat would start. I am so screwed.

  “Yes, but we use term as metaphor,” Kreisler said. “A capacitor stores up charge. Space stores up information, but over time, it fades, dissipates. When Trans accesses the forbidden channels, she increases space’s permittivity. Information does not fade, but builds up until it jumps like a spark. Sometimes this happens in nature already. As if space has weather, and currents of permittivity sweep past. As Trans units change space, they become more efficient. Eventually, over less than a year, our transponder will carry many, many more signals than now. Billions of units, large and small, will make our communications revolution last forever. Trans for everyone on Earth, no problem. And they will use no more energy than flies buzzing. Perhaps, in time, we even carry power. Trans can do that, you know. Power without physical power lines. An entirely new industry. And we hold all the patents.”

  There were footprints in the dust beside the lower bunk, the marks of big, old-fashioned shoes with flat soles. Peter could not help himself. He bowed his head and rubbed his eyes, just to take a better look, whatever the consequences. The footprints moved, sliding about slowly on the concrete. They kicked up low, dark puffs. Peter pulled away his hands. The footprints were not Kreisler’s or Weinstein’s.

  Different shoes, a different time.

  “Changing space. Faster than light. That isn’t impossible—maybe dangerous?” Peter asked abruptly, hoping he wasn’t sounding like a complete idiot.

  “We never feel it,” Kreisler said. “Trans reaches below our world, lower than networks used by atoms or subatomic particles, to where it is very quiet. Down there is a deeper silence than we can know, a great emptiness. Huge bandwidth, perhaps infinite capacity. It can handle all our noise, all our talk, anything we have to say, throughout all eternity. Even should we expand to populate entire galaxy, we can never hope to fill it.” He approached the white board with marker in hand. “Are you mathematician, Mr. Russell?”

  Peter thought he had heard that silence, soothing and peaceful. “Not so’s you’d notice,” he answered after a pause. His eyes stung. Weinstein was c
atching on that something was wrong, but seemed determined not to queer their deal.

  Kreisler laid the marker down with a look of amused tolerance. “You can take our word for it?”

  “Why not?” Peter said. Despite the delusions, the footprints, his attempts at self-sabotage, he knew this was his last chance to snatch the ring and win a prize. And there was something in Kreisler’s attitude that drew him in.

  “Do you have an attorney to handle your side of the deal?” Weinstein asked.

  “I have an agent,” Peter said, just managing to avoid a hiccup. Weinstein was watching him like a hawk. “Sorry, but I still don’t have a clear picture of what you want. Commercials? Previews for trade shows? A documentary?”

  “All perhaps, in time,” Kreisler said, encouraged. “First we start with low-budget promotional video. Something to present to companies with whom we wish to partner. Perhaps later we edit to a tantalizing commercial, thirty-second spot. We emphasize universal need, practicality, how solid are the patents.” He smiled. “We have never designed such a rollout. We would like to hear concepts.”

  “We’ll be starting with just one short media component and in time work it up to an entire campaign,” Weinstein said, still focused on Peter. “As Arpad says. Drum up partners and investors. Cash is going to be slim for a month or so. You’ll have your finder’s fee . . . We’ll write you the finder’s-fee check before you leave here today. Pretty substantial. Five grand.”

  “Ten,” Peter corrected.

  “Right.” Weinstein did not miss a beat. “Can you coast on that for a while? During the conceptual phase. Once we get our bearings on our relationship and firm up the contract, we can put things on a more professional footing.”

  Peter did not like that sort of arrangement, but he had no choice. He hated desperation, and hated begging worse. “I can cruise on the check for a while,” he said. “But I will need a cash advance. I’m pretty short.” He did not say, I helped pay for a friend’s cremation.

  The tension seemed thick, and then Kreisler began to snicker. He broke into a guffaw, and Weinstein joined him.

  Terrific, Peter thought. Red-eyed, acting half drunk or crazy, then hitting them up for a loan. I’ve become local color. The true smell of old Hollywood.

  “We have some petty cash,” Weinstein said when their laughter slowed. He lifted his hands and explained to Kreisler, “His friend died last week. He’s also up here to attend the wake. It’s been a rough time.”

  “Sorry,” Peter said.

  “Not at all. We are sorry,” Kreisler said. “Loss of friend, that is worst.”

  Weinstein opened his wallet and gave him three hundred dollars. “All I’ve got except grocery money.”

  Kreisler pulled out his own wallet.

  “More than enough. Thanks.” Peter folded the crisp new twenties. “I’ll drive home and get to work. When should we talk again?”

  “Soon. Trans will be good for reaching you, no?”

  “Of course,” Peter said.

  “And for our next meeting, in a week or so, we’ll spring for airline tickets. Coach, I’m afraid.”

  Kreisler said good-bye, returning to his desk and piles of papers. Weinstein walked Peter out of the cell and the block of offices.

  “Kreisler likes you,” he said. “That’s good. He can be thorny. It is so damned difficult to teach great people how to do great things.” Weinstein tapped his cranium and put on a conspiratorial look. “Want to see something truly cool?”

  He led Peter deeper into the building, down a long corridor lined with windows covered with thick wire. They passed other Trans employees, sitting in converted cells, gathering around tables in former guard stations made into meeting rooms, sharing open boxes of pizza. A low buzz of talk and activity. Weinstein exchanged greetings with a few young men and women hustling from place to place. All had bags under their eyes.

  “It’s part of our rental block, centrally located to all our spaces, available, and, well . . . empty,” Weinstein said. “Absolutely glowering with history. Could be wonderful material for a promo. Besides, we didn’t know what else to do with it. It’s not as if we’re going to open it to tourists, right?”

  Peter’s eyes stung with the effort of not blinking. He followed Weinstein around another turn. They passed an old steel door marked MEDICAL EXAMINER ONLY. The next door, spaced along the outside of a gentle curve, carried a placard saying OBSERVERS. A third door immediately adjacent, also along the curve, was marked GOVERNOR/WARDEN. All three were padlocked.

  “We keep server farms in these rooms,” Weinstein said. “Earn extra money running corporate Web sites and advertising ventures.”

  “Spam?” Peter asked.

  “Spam,” Weinstein confirmed without any trace of embarrassment.

  They approached a portable privacy curtain on wheels. Weinstein shoved the curtain aside, knocking loose a plume of dust. Through a heavy iron gate, chained and padlocked open, they entered a short hall. In passing, Weinstein jangled the chain with a swipe of his hand. More dust. “Great place for a Halloween prank, don’t you think?”

  Peter slowed and then stopped as the hall abruptly opened into a high-vaulted space. He looked across and up and slowly spun full circle, surveying an octagonal turret over seventy feet across and eighty feet tall, topped by a high cupola. Dark iron beams supported the peaked copper roof. Between the beams, small windows set all around permitted a haze of light to suffuse the upper air.

  Motes flashed in the distant rays.

  “They used to call this the chancel,” Weinstein said, his voice sliding into uncharacteristic reverence. He stepped to one side. “Like around an altar. Are you Catholic?”

  Peter reluctantly drew his eyes down from the tiny spill of daylight. Pressing close to the opposite wall, resting on a concrete foundation, almost lost in shadow, stood a hexagonal chamber with its own smaller peaked roof, like a bizarre, diminutive chapel. An iron rail formed a half-circle around the chamber. The floor beyond the rail was divided by grated black iron drains, a sinister ornamental border. The chamber walls were plates of riveted forged steel enameled a sickly green. Three thick glass windows set in bolted frames afforded a view of the black interior. Someone had mounted a bumper sticker on the middle window. It read: HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. Peter saw nothing else inside the chamber but a few blinking lights: red, white, and green.

  To Peter’s left and facing the chamber, three long single-pane picture windows dominated the concrete inner wall. All were curtained on the inside. The curtains were drawn. Peter deduced that the doors along the convex outside wall opened to rooms behind these windows. He imagined special visitors walking into the rooms, concentrating their view until they saw only the chamber. Focusing on the death to come.

  “Voilà,” Weinstein said. “What kind of spin can we get from this? Out with the barbarian past, in with the bright, gleaming future. Out of death comes talk. Something like that. You’re the artist.”

  Peter looked up, stuck his hands deep into his pockets, turned around again. He did not know what to say.

  “They used to treat this whole place like a church,” Weinstein said, eyes still bright. “Except the priests wore Sam Brown belts and thirty-eights and the penitents wore orange suits and shackles. Processions. Step by solemn step. Everything but organ music. Now it’s ours. Well, we rent it anyway.”

  Peter tried to imagine this awful place as one’s last stop on Earth, a prisoner’s last view of this world; antique, lightly corroded, filled with crude, scientific efficiency. “Tear it down,” he said, swallowing a lump.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I’d bring in the wrecking ball. Break it to pieces.”

  “You don’t think we can use it?”

  Peter made a sick face. He knew a little about capital punishment, had read up on it while brainstorming ideas for horror films. Watched Susan Hayward being led to this very chamber, or one just like it, reconstructed on a Hollywood set. I Want to Live. Pa
ying state employees to turn human beings into limp meat.

  For a moment, he forgot not to blink. As he closed his eyes, seeking blessed relief from the dryness, the pain, the chamber, he saw:

  Nothing.

  Just the dim, descending sunlight, reddened by the blood still pulsing in his eyelids.

  But below the calm, like magma below a dormant volcano . . .

  Stop it, damn it. He blinked several times. Nothing. Nothing yet. He took a deep breath. Seeing the death chamber had to force everything into a brutal perspective. You’re still alive. Get on with it.

  “Well, fuck, what do you do with a place like this?” Weinstein asked. “Give it the high-tech finger, I say. So we put our heart in there, the heart of Trans, the most advanced piece of electronic equipment on Earth, Arpad’s transponder. We didn’t even have to upgrade the power supply. And you know, they never did use the electric chair. Just hanging, gas, and lethal injection.” Weinstein swung about and tapped the chamber’s thick window. “You can almost see them in there, can’t you?”

  Peter glanced away.

  “Strapping them down.” Weinstein’s eyes widened with speculation, and his throat bobbed. “Letting the pellets drop—isn’t that what they did, way back then? Gas spewing up from tanks of acid. Cyanide. Or being strapped to the table, letting the doc pinch up your artery, insert the needle. Did it sting? Did they use alcohol first, to clean the skin? What was the point? The patient didn’t have to worry about infection, right?” He was really into it now.

  With some embarrassment, Peter observed that Weinstein had a small but obvious bulge in his pants.

  Weinstein pointed up at the iron arches. “I don’t think they ever hung anybody.”

  “Not in here,” Peter said, feeling ill. “They built scaffolds outside.”

  BACK IN WEINSTEIN’S office, the young man wrote him his advance check, returned Peter’s Trans unit with a magician’s flourish, and said they would be speaking again soon.

  They had a deal.

  Outside, Peter blinked regularly as Weinstein escorted him to the guard booth. He could not make out the faint black-and-blue world beneath the daylight. They shook hands firmly and Peter returned his pass to the guard.