Chinapat stepped into Jaul’s office, finding crude, out-of-date furniture and equipment. The primitive quality of Jaul’s software made his computer system no better than a toy. A porn site with several naked actors on a sofa flickered on the computer screen.
“What do you want?” Jaul asked, looking at Chinapat and then at Seven. “A job?”
There was a twinkle in his eye as he mentally undressed Seven.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
Jaul understood exactly what she meant. “Pray tell me your wish.”
“The money,” Seven said. He followed her eyes to the open safe door. Pimping clearly was more lucrative than murder.
As Jaul swung around to close the safe, Chinapat caught him along the side of the head with a 9mm Glock. There was nothing like hardened plastic to send a man to dreamland. A gush of blood dribbled down Jaul’s cheek. His attempt to fall back over his keyboard was interrupted by the bulge of his stomach, leaving him in the no-man’s land of being half-suspended in space. “Someone named Jaul should make better choices,” said Chinapat.
Seven rolled her eyes, knowing that Chinapat had accessed the Arabic dictionary as he stuffed the 9mm into the waistband of his jeans.
They cleaned out the safe, stuffing Seven’s suitcase with over a million baht. Jaul remained unconscious as Chinapat left first, carrying the suitcase. A moment later Seven followed.
At the Nana and Sukhumvit Road intersection, beside the police traffic control box on the corner, they met and climbed into a taxi. “How do you know this isn’t another trap?” Chinapat asked.
Seven held the suitcase on her lap. “Soon the Japanese will be looking for you.”
He knew there was no going back to Queen Sirikit Center. “Do we have enough money?”
Seven nodded her head. “For the startup, yes. Then we’ll need financing. Worry about that later.”
Not only had she saved Chinapat from falling into a trap laid by the Japanese, but she had the most calming effect when it came to assigning worry to a future to-do list. He could love a woman like that.
3.0
Where are you?
Bangkok Port
Located at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok Port—people also called it the Port of Klong Toey—had been a trading hub since the ninth century. A lot of sailors, pirates, traders, merchants and adventurers had walked the docks. As the taxi pulled to a stop, the sky was dotted with large cranes like columns of dinosaur skeletons erected up and down the shoreline of the Chao Phraya. Beyond the cranes were cargo ships, rice barges and fishing ships at anchor. Waiting.
Wires from Seven’s cell phone ended inside her ears. She talked as they walked down the road. Chinapat shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other. Real cash had a certain heft; the weight of money, though, never seemed heavy. They walked for fifteen minutes, and the sun was overhead and hot. Sweat rolled down Chinapat’s face, but Seven’s skin was cool and untouched by a single drop of perspiration. That’s when they saw a skinny whitehaired farang man with a broad smile, waving, in the distance. As they came closer, the man could have passed for late forties to early seventies. He introduced himself as Mr. Shockley and led them up the gangplank of the ship with “DOLPHIN SHEPHERD” stenciled on the bow.
“Welcome, partners,” Shockley said. “Let me show you around.”
First stop, and his point of pride, was a crane equipped with a large metal claw—a giant version of the fairground arcade game. Chinapat exchanged a look with Seven.
“Are you the owner?” asked Chinapat, frowning under his baseball cap.
“I am authorized to act on behalf of the owners,” he said. “As chunks of ice shelves calf into the Antarctic, we bring the ship alongside and harvest the purest drinking water on the planet. Australia is running out of fresh, pure water. So is Japan. The future of water is locked in icebergs.”
“How do you drink an iceberg?” asked Chinapat.
“You bottle it,” Shockley said.
Seven took the suitcase from Chinapat and handed Jaul’s pimping money over to Shockley. “Aren’t you going to count it?” she asked.
“No need,” he said.
“Now that we are partners, shouldn’t we know who our partners are?” Seven asked, wondering if this was the first time that brothel money had been laundered through an iceberg business.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Chinapat. “Partners shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”
Shockley had hoped they would have taken more interest in the machinery, the engineering work that had gone into the crane, and shown some curiosity about where the ice was stored on board and how it was transferred to the bottling plants. He loved telling others stories of the early days of trial and error, testing, equipment breakdowns and violent storms at sea, where it was like riding an eighteenstory building struggling sideways over forty-foot waves. He led them to a stateroom and sat them at a conference table. There was a huge computer screen, and Shockley clicked the mouse to fill the screen with what looked familiar to Chinapat. A fishing village in a small bay.
“That’s a village in Japan. It’s Taiji,” said Chinapat.
“Our new bottling plant will be located here,” he said, directing a cursor to a point near the village center. “We will employ most of the able-bodied men in the village.”
“Who is ‘we’?” asked Seven.
The problem with the word “we,” she thought, is that the edges break off when it comes to describing the merger of intelligences that include human interfaces. Unscrambling the nodes and networks is a messy business.
Shockley scratched his chin and smiled. “The original settlers of the Antarctic,” he said, looking at the two new partners and trying to read their reaction. “Those who know the icebergs better than anyone.”
“Dolphins,” said Chinapat. “We’re back to dolphins again.”
“We are returning to the sea,” said Seven with a smile.
“The water inside icebergs is thousands of years old. Some icebergs have drinking water older than man,” said Shockley. “There is no manmade tradition older than iceberg water. We have approached the Taiji people, who have agreed to give up killing dolphins for harvesting pure water. The new harvest carries the dignity of the past, and it is the past they worship.”
As the Dolphin Shepherd sailed from Bangkok Port, Chinapat caught a glimpse of the two rows of Japanese men with long swords and megaphones shouting slogans as they ran along the docks, waving and shouting, and Jaul waddled behind, trying to keep up. He looked like an old walrus, shaking his ham-sized flipper and barking. Bringing up the rear were hundreds of Nana Plaza bar girls. As they set sail, Chinapat grasped the railing with both hands. Seven stood beside him. They watched as the women gutted and slaughtered the black-suited men, turning the Chao Phraya River red. The swords dissolved in the hands of the Japanese. The megaphones fell silent. By the time they reached the sea, the water was again clean and pure.
Bangkok Port soon was a tiny rim on the horizon. Shockley produced a device the size of a cell phone, running his fingers across a small screen until it lit up. He offered the device to Seven. “It’s the owners. They want to communicate directly.”
She held the device close to her ear and smiled. Then she handed it to Chinapat, who pressed it against his ear, a big smile crossing his face. It was somewhere between the rush of the sound from a large seashell, running water and music coming from a thousand crystal glasses, each filled with different levels of water. The background songs registered from deep inside the electromagnetic spectrum.
4.0
Where are you?
Chinapat: Still at Dolphin Shepherd, Simulation 28478, GENESIS 32 Vector
Where are you?
Seven: Meet you at Login node loading hydrogen atoms to emit microwaves at the frequency “21-centimetre line” sequencing EXODUS 4:24-26 router
4.1
Where are you?
Queen Sirikit Center, Bangkok, Th
ailand
Inside one of the smaller conference rooms, the air-conditioning blasting multiple streams over the audience. In the back sat a youngish Asian woman—still in her teens, her hair long and dyed red in streaks. The young woman was dressed in the white pressed cotton blouse and black short skirt of a university student. The too tight skirt just fit inside the outer perimeters for a certified conservative sexual university outfit found in Bangkok. The Gucci handbag also fit. The .38 Smith and Wesson inside the handbag was non-standard university issue. Seven had the confident and alert look of a woman-girl whose attention floated across the room, perching, sensing, flying off to another perch, constantly on the move.
Seven could never sit in quiet serenity like Chinapat. That was his problem. All that meditating had over-focused his attention on one thing. For example, she thought he’d complain of the tropical heat inside the room. The temperature was like a sauna. Many in the audience had wilted like unwatered flowers.
Inside the hotbed was the object of Seven’s first professional job.
A middle-aged Japanese woman in dark glasses, old enough to be her mother, had sat with her in the back of a BMW. Looking her over the way a mother looks over a daughter before a first date—part pride, part doubt and disapproval, as if her expectations had been exceeded and dashed at the same time—the Japanese woman had showed her a photograph of a woman named Tanaka. She was an activist filmmaker, and she had drawn an audience of activists, artists, journalists and NGOs to hear her speak about her dolphin film documentary, showing a terrible, cruel slaughter.
In the parking lot a couple of dozen Japanese men in dark suits used threats to stop people from going inside. Only a few people were intimidated enough to leave. The others filed past the Japanese men with tattooed necks and missing small fingers.
“Eliminate Tanaka,” the Japanese woman in the car had said.
Even though Seven hadn’t asked why the activist was scheduled for removal, the middle-aged Japanese woman felt obligated to give a reason. “She’s a troublemaker.”
Chinapat slipped into the seat next to Seven and whispered, “It’s a trap.”
Seven smiled, glancing over at him, squeezing his knee. “I have the cheat code.”
He frowned, pretending to be above easy shortcuts. Chinapat had a cheat code to get out of virtual prison, but only if nothing else in his source code kit worked. Cheaters ran up the white flag of surrender before experiencing any real degree of panic or desperation or being black-boxed and cut into pixels. He never thought of Seven as a cheater. Before he could object, the large screen behind Tanaka filled with a video of dolphins churning in blood red waters. The volume of their high-pitched squeals rolled through the room, echoing off the walls, ceiling and floor.
Seven leaned down and rummaged inside her handbag until her hand emerged gripping a .38 Smith and Wesson. She rested it on her lap, looking straight ahead. As she began to rise from her seat, two men from the row of seats behind her grabbed her arms. The gun dropped on the floor. The sonar whelp of the dolphins murdered on screen masked the sound of the gun hitting the floor.
4.2
Where are you?
Below deck, Dolphin Shepherd
As far as Seven could see, she was surrounded by mountains of shaved ice. From the port side, she wiped icy fog from the window pane and looked out at the calm blue sea. A ridge of white foam passed beside the ship. She shivered, moving from side to side, but nothing seemed to bring warmth. The ice had gone straight into her blood, lungs and brain. She sat in a corner, arms folded around her chest. She’d never seen so much ice in a room.
The bulkhead door opened and Shockley stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He wore a hat, mufflers and a heavy coat. Unwrapping the scarf from around his neck took several minutes. When he finished, he handed it to Seven, who looked up with a smile.
“Using an old cheat code to game the system,” he said, slowly shaking head.
Seven took the scarf and cocooned herself like a larva. “How long do I have to stay here?” she said, sighing.
“Until you earn their trust,” said Shockley. “And that won’t be easy, given your last jump. But they have all the time in the world.”
“Chinapat?” she whimpered.
“He’s harvesting pure water from our iceberg factory. The dolphins trust your friend,” said Shockley.
“Can’t you release me to Chinapat?”
Shockley smiled. “No one is stopping him from coming for you.”
Seven blinked, only her wet eyes visible through a slit in the scarf. Hot tears froze halfway down her cheek as she wondered if Chinapat had left her behind, jumping to the next router. She hung her head. On all sides heaps of pure ice thousands of years old seemed to grow, crowding her into a small corner. Her arms wrapped around her raised knees, she rocked back and forth. “When will he come?”
4.3
Where are you?
The Cove, Taiji, Japan
Chinapat sat alone on the long sandy beach, facing the sea and the Dolphin Shepherd, anchored in the harbor. Small skiffs ferried ice from the ship to the shore. The cranes on the ship loaded ice onto skiffs. The clear sea surrounding the ship boiled with dolphins, jumping and diving, swimming alongside the skiffs and guiding them to docks that dotted the shore.
Seven started to run as she saw him in the distance. His large head and broad shoulders were unmistakable against an almond sky. She sprinted the last thirty meters, feeling the warm sand between her toes. Shockley’s scarf trailed behind her until at last it fell from her, leaving a long silk wound in the sand. Reaching Chinapat, she fell on her knees next to him.
He took her hand, not taking his eyes off the Dolphin Shepherd and the skiffs.
“I told you it was a trap,” he said.
“The Sim felt so real,” she said. “The ice, the cold. Shockley. The scarf.”
He turned his head, looking at her eyes for a moment and then behind her. “But it was real.” The scarf had turned into a scarlet red river in the sand, gurgling as it flowed toward the sea. Baby dolphins dropped one by one, as if from an assembly line, into the sea. They both watched as the cove teamed with dolphins.
“The scarf was from you,” she said. “You trusted me.”
He shrugged. Chinapat had never thought of giving another person a cheat code for release from virtual prison reality. He had only one. Once it had been used, that was the end of it. There was no second code. If things went wrong now, he’d remain in a limbo with no hope of escape. It wasn’t necessary to tell Seven the obvious consequences of his decision to help her.
“We are going back home?” she asked. Chinapat smiled, knowing that her idea of home was far away from the dolphin world.
He nodded his head. “We’re not finished. Tonight we sail for Bangkok on the Dolphin Shepherd. This time we can’t make any stupid mistakes. We play by the rules.”
“But I played by the noir subset of rules,” she said, a tone of anger creeping into her voice. “It is permissible.”
Seven was a literalist. And she believed in free will. Bangkok, the epicenter of noir, had enticed her to take any contract and take any risk. She’d ignored that the underlying source code for intelligence and purity perimeter violations established a deterministic but chaotic system not bound by entropy. But the old assumptions died hard. Bottom line was that no free will patches could be deployed to destroy predetermined outcomes. Emerging intelligent systems and water source purity were jointly linked and encoded with a level-eight firewall, which even the best cheat codes couldn’t breach. They returned to Bangkok, not as observers, but as partisans taking their place inside a deterministic noir world where their mission had already been predetermined.
Once Seven reviewed and uploaded the operative conditions, she’d understand that her feelings of pain, pleasure and emotions were real. Her problem arose from the perception of freedom and liberty, which felt also overwhelmingly real. In fact they were illusions in the system where th
e fundamental unreality was hidden at the quantum level. These mental conditions were bought and sold through administrator level cheat codes. Seven believed freedom and liberty were a natural right. It was a common mistake.
The question in Chinapat’s mind was whether she’d learnt her lesson.
Chinapat would find out the answer in Bangkok on a stormy night when the Japanese mafia came to greet the arrival of the Dolphin Shepherd at the Port of Klong Toey. They stood under umbrellas in the rain waiting for the ship. Armed men with swords and guns would take a stand, one consistent with their huge appetite for dolphin meat. Icebergs, no matter how pure, were no substitute for that sensation of pleasure.
“What do they expect?” Seven asked as the Dolphin Shepherd left the cove.
“They will offer you another contract,” said Chinapat.
“Am I free to accept their offer?” she asked.
Shockley joined them on the foredeck. He handed Seven a glass of pure iceberg water. “Ten thousand years ago, this water froze into ice. Today it is water again. When was it free? As ice? As water?”
“Water just is. How can water or ice be free?” She looked troubled. “Am I free to upload to home base?”
Shockley turned to Chinapat. “She is free to drink the iceberg water. Ten thousand years a sip. Once you’ve swallowed and digested the water time, you can phase back. Meanwhile, you’ll have another offer to consider.”
Bangkok Noir Page 10