Wetware

by Craig Nova

  “Armor,” said Blaine. “It makes the car quiet.”

  His driver got in.

  “Jimmy, we’d like to go home,” said Blaine.

  The car slid up to the building like a long shadow. Blaine got out first, looking one way and then the other, and reached in and took her by the tips of her fingers, as though they were at dancing school. They went in, under the green canopy, past the doorman in his blue uniform with the gold trim, across the black and white order of the tiles of the lobby, and into the elevator, which was paneled with dark wood and had a mirror, in which Carr glanced at herself. She looked at her skin, her eyes, her hair, the somewhat disordered appearance of herself, which made her look as though she were in the midst of a fall, rather than rising in the cool elevation of the machine. It was all so smooth and easy, and she still felt that sense of almost lubricated movement when in the morning she left the apartment and found that the housekeeper had fixed her shoe and left it by the door, just as she found the car waiting for her, as though the driver had never gone home, but had been waiting there for her.

  At work, she told herself that she had to get a grip on herself, that this was wonderful, but she still had a job to do. She started going through Briggs’s code more carefully.

  CHAPTER 4

  January 15, 2027

  AT 8:00 A.M., Blaine walked through the marble lobby of the building where he worked, carrying nothing at all, not a piece of paper, not a briefcase, nothing. As he passed under the dome, he glanced up at the stern angels. He went through the swirling hush of people, nodding here and there to people he liked, only raising a brow to people he tolerated, and ignoring a fair number of people altogether. Upstairs, he came into the room where staff meetings were held. These morning assemblies were known, by the people who attended them, as the Hit Parade. The room where they were held was just a little too small, and some people who came late had to stand. The others sat around a dull gray table.

  The head of each section (Currency, Trade, World Interest Rates, Stock, Futures) named one item that was cause for concern. Bad loans in Russia, an attempt to corner the futures market in copper in Brazil, erratic and seemingly chaotic movement in the Asian stock exchanges, the fact that some currency speculators had started to move against the UAD (United Asian Dollar, a currency modeled on the euro). Sometimes, when a section head was worried, the speech went on too long. And when they were close to panic, they tried to be cool, but this only made matters worse, since subdued hysteria only accentuated it. At these moments it was as though someone had released a rattlesnake on the floor and everyone tried to ignore it. When a department head went on too long, Blaine raised his fingers in a small gesture of dismissal and said, “I understand. Next.”

  At the end of the day, he asked his secretary if Leslie Carr had called, and he was told that she had and that he could reach her at home. He dialed her on his private phone, where he had put her number in its memory, idly wondering, as he did so, how long it would stay there. Blaine was not used to casual affairs, and so his curiosity was more a matter of ignorance than experience. It went without saying that the schedule of his life—the meetings, the time spent waiting for news of the markets, the execution of his strategies (talk or action)—established the hours in which he was able to see Carr.

  When they agreed to have dinner, she came to his apartment and kissed him at the door. He took her coat. They went into the library and sat in the comforting browns and greens, in the glow of the lights, beyond which the gilt titles of books gleamed. They heard the domestic clatter as the housekeeper worked in the kitchen, and as they sat together, Carr having a brandy and swirling the fluid around and watching the film of it on the crystal glass Blaine pressed into her hand, she found that she began to relax, and there, in that comfortable room, she realized how brittle and tense she had been during the day. Her relaxation came in a series of steps, the first one being his call. Then she went home and bathed and came to his apartment, getting a little relief at each ritualized moment. It built as she came into the lobby and then increased as she rose up to the twelfth floor, and continued through the drink and was amplified at dinner, a meal that they found set for them in the dining room. White china, delicate glasses, the roast beef, or pheasant, or venison on a silver platter, and the creamed spinach or roast potatoes or Yorkshire pudding in a silver bowl with a silver lid.

  After dinner, with the taste of a chocolate soufflé in her mouth and the tickle of champagne in her nose, they went into his room with its enormous bed, and out the window she saw that blue light from distant office buildings. She removed her dress and her bland, black underwear and stood there with her skin awash in the blue tint from the distant light. The sheets were Egyptian linen, and they were tinted blue in that romantic light. He sat down next to her, the enormous bed creaking with a piercing intimacy. It was the small, private sound she had been waiting for all her life. On the first night there, she started with what she thought of as her tricks, which she did with the intensity of someone beginning a long sprint, but after a few minutes Blaine said, “Shhh. Don’t worry. I just like being with you. Here. Let me put my arm around you.” She sat back and looked at the lights, concentrated on letting him hold her or whisper in her ear, all the while feeling that relaxation turn into a warmth and a slowly building intensity that left her mystified. When she fell asleep it was in the fading rustle of the Egyptian linen and in that blue tint from the light outside.

  From time to time, when she came home from work, she found a box of roses with the doorman of her building, and while she tried to dismiss this as nothing more than sentimentality, she took them upstairs and put them in a vase. She walked by the flowers, at first touched that Blaine thought of her in such a way, and that he had been discreet enough to send them to her apartment rather than her office, but as much as she tried to dismiss them, she still got up and walked over to look at the yellow dust at the tips of the pistils, the sharp-edged red petals, their moist texture giving off an aroma that was indistinguishable from that relaxation and certainty which seemed to be part of those evenings she spent with Blaine. The transformation from cynic to heart-sick woman was sudden and complete, and while she tried to deny it, she enjoyed the frame of mind that allowed popular songs to seem profound, or that left her inhaling the fragrance of these flowers with such wistful pleasure.

  She was almost disoriented by the changes she had to make. In order to love him (and she finally had to admit that that was what it was), she had to abandon the methods by which she was accustomed to doing things, such as withholding approval, or not getting involved, or seeing people as creatures who were like life-sized photographs of themselves. More and more at work, she found that she couldn’t handle people the way she had in the past. She was desperate to keep people from knowing how vulnerable she was, but just when she needed the tools that had gotten her where she was, she was least able to use them. More and more she wanted Blaine’s advice, his affection, his crisp, even charming approval when she said something keen or clever.

  They went to concerts in the evenings. She noticed that Blaine was following a young Russian woman named Tatyana Barokova, who played the violin. She performed with precision, and yet she nevertheless had a sultry desirability. On a couple of occasions they had gone backstage and into the young woman’s dressing room, where she sat with her short blond hair and her lacy black top. Her blue eyes had an Asiatic quality. Carr had never seen a woman who so perfectly suggested “the other,” the distant and the exotic. Blaine spoke to this young woman in a way that he had never spoken to Carr, and Carr waited, her face flushed, while he did so (mentioning, in passing, that Mozart had never owned a piano, although Tatyana knew this). Tatyana appeared to dismiss Carr as a needy woman of no particular importance, and this left Carr with a jealous fear that was indistinguishable from nausea.

  Later, she and Blaine walked along an avenue where the buildings stretched away like walls bespeckled with lights, and in the fog, the lights
from the shop windows made a golden haze. In one window, Carr saw diamonds and platinum, bracelets and necklaces, the impossibly bright gems suggesting everything she loved about being with Blaine, and while she wasn’t able to be precise about what this was, she knew that part of it was the affection of a powerful man. Just looking at the diamonds soothed her, as though, if she had them, they would reassure her anxious brooding.

  The next evening she found a courier with a package waiting for her at her apartment, and in the carton she signed for, buried in masses of rustling pink paper, she found a hinged box. She took a bracelet from it, which swung back and forth as it hung from her fingers. The sparkle made her skin white, and the tug of it on her wrist gave her the sensation of being part of a world that soothed her and filled her with a profound sense of ease. It wasn’t the expense or the value of the bracelet that she admired, so much as its suggestion of dependable affection. When she was afraid of what had happened to her, she looked at the bracelet. Blaine had known that she wanted a gesture, and had given it to her.

  At work, a couple of assistants took one glance at the slight bounce in the way she moved, the glow in her skin, and hearing the lilt in her voice, one of them said to another, “What do you think Carr has been smoking?”

  CHAPTER 5

  February 15, 2027

  CARR SPENT a lot of evenings waiting for Blaine. She worked harder, since it was obvious that her job made her more interesting to Blaine; when she made plans, she thought of how she would appear to Blaine in a year or two when she had Mashita’s job. Then Krupp’s. She was more careful than before and more uneasy that her supervision of Briggs had been pro forma. She started to go through Briggs’s work in earnest.

  At first she had nothing more than suspicions, a collection of details that she thought were unnecessary, such as Kay’s eye movements, which were established in such a way as to give an almost infinite variety of expressions. In particular, Kay had the ability to mimic, not in parody, but in understanding, the glance of someone she was speaking to. At first, Carr supposed this was a refinement of the specifications, but when she checked the appendices, she found that there had been almost nothing about eye movement, or about the muscles of the face surrounding the eyes. The original plan called for a “pleasant visage,” but that was all. It was hard to say where “pleasant visage” ended and the expressions of intimacy began, but she was sure there was a threshold.

  When she thought about this, she considered the evenings she spent with Blaine. Often, when they were sitting together, in the library or in that enormous bed, she was able to convey by a glance, by the movement of her eyes, just how much such moments meant to her. Just a look. It was better than words. It was like two people who had lived through the same cataclysmic event, and had developed out of this experience a private understanding that was perfectly revealed in their expressions. As she looked at the details of Briggs’s work, it was like opening a book at random and finding a line of prose or a fragment of a poem that seemed preternaturally to apply to one’s own circumstances. The details she saw, given her current state of mind, suggested intimacy and the beauty of articulating something that was almost impossible to express. How could she object to that? When she found a new detail, the economy and precision of it thrilled her like a haiku that perfectly invoked love and desire. She was infatuated with these details, since they illuminated her own experience, which even now seemed somewhat mysterious to her, but when she saw something in Briggs’s work that she understood perfectly, she felt the self-righteousness of the newly reformed. She became strident in defense of her own new feelings.

  She kept a diary of these intimate details, and when she made a notation of what she thought each one was, she saw that her entries made a fractal pattern that was repeated almost everywhere, although it was completely submerged in the structure of the elements she looked at (the membrane on the ganglions, the hair follicles, the reticulations of the brain’s surface, the color of a fingernail). What she saw in Kay’s ability to play music alone reminded Carr of her own most private and satisfying experiences with Blaine, such as those evenings in bed when the lingering effect of music blended with the warmth of his affection and the promise of it, too. To see these moments described and encoded, not as something that was mechanical, but more as a matter of possibility and longing, left Carr trembling and thinking, Yes, I have felt that. Yes.

  There were occasions when she recognized something she hadn’t really known she had felt, and in the instant when she did so, she fell that much more in love. She was able to articulate a reason that she had only been hazy about before. It left her sighing with relief mixed with fear. This wasn’t so much a matter of having her experience summed up, as of exploring parts of it she hadn’t previously understood. It was a matter of increasing her sense of scale. And underneath Kay’s ability and talent, her steadfastness and intelligence, her beauty, Carr detected an unstoppable vitality, and this left her reassured by the power of women.

  Late at night, when she was noticing these details, she knew that she was making a mistake. It didn’t matter that the mistake was beautiful or attractive, or that it reflected on her own personal circumstances. Her job was to make sure Briggs was doing what he was supposed to be doing and nothing else. That was what she was paid to do, and she justified her pleasure in what she saw by telling herself that she still had plenty of time before her inaction would pass into complicity. Even though she thought she had time, she knew the moment of complicity would arrive, as it did, when she found the forms in her mailbox for a quarterly review of Briggs’s work.

  She wanted to think clearly about it, and she cleaned off her desk at home, putting the list of suspicious details on one side and the forms on the other. The forms were printed on heavy paper that had the Galapagos logo at the top and, underneath it, the slogan, LIFE. IN ALL ITS FORMS. She went down the boxes on it, and the scales for each element of performance. At the end there was a place to add extra sheets if she needed to expand on any “events unexplained by the checked boxes and the standard scales.” Well, the time had come.

  In the morning she still hadn’t filled it out. She wondered if Briggs had any idea of the jeopardy he was in. Surely it was no secret what happened to people who tampered with Artificial Life, or the intricacies of the Gaming Patents. The only good thing was that the project was still in the architectural or planning stage and they were a long way from spending money on putting the code into production. But no matter which way she looked at it, she knew that it was her goodwill that stood between Briggs and the street, the loss of his license, and the rest.

  At Galapagos, she stopped at the door of Briggs’s office.

  “Hi, Leslie,” he said. “Come in.”

  “Do you mind if I close the door?”

  “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you’d like.”

  She pushed the door shut, the enormous glass slab swinging around to the metal latch. The glass walls trembled.

  “I was just filling out the performance reviews for this quarter,” she said. “I’m doing yours first. I’ve been going through your work pretty carefully.”

  “Have you?” he said.

  Beyond the glass walls of his office she saw other such walls. The place looked like an insurance office or news room. Here and there someone had taped up a poster or a photograph on one of the walls, and these appeared suspended, as though the entire place were in free fall and some of the things in it were floating. She glanced back at him and saw that he was sweating.

  “Did you find anything?” he said.

  “Well, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said.

  “No time like the present,” he said.

  “You think so?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess I do.”

  “I’ve found your work to be economical and precise,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. But he went right on looking at her. “Is there something else you want to tell me?�
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  “I wonder how closely you read the specifications,” she said.

  “I’ve read them,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve missed much.”

  “So, then, if you made a mistake, you’d know what you were doing?”

  “I’m paid to be informed,” he said.

  “That’s not what I asked,” she said. “I’m asking about a matter of intention. Did you know what you were doing?”

  He dropped his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And why did you do it?” she said.

  “There are some things it’s hard to give up.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

  “Sure you do,” she said. “Come on.” She gave him the smile that she had given many other people over the years when she had been trying to get them to rat on themselves. Then she dropped that. “Look. I need some help here. What’s hard to give up?”

  “Being attached to another human being,” he said. He looked right at her. “The idea of it. The sense of it.”

  “You mean love, don’t you?” she said.

  “You could call it that,” he said.

  “You remember the business about how Kay perceives love as that moment when the ordinarily beautiful becomes ominous. Do you remember?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Tell me. What should I do?”

  The form between her fingers started to shake. She hadn’t seen it until now, but, yes, her entire life with Blaine was lived in that region where beauty kept rising into the realm of the ominous. This was at the heart of the thrill she felt when she stood with Blaine and looked out the window of his bedroom and saw that the lights of the city had been transformed in a way that was at once so delicate and yet so appallingly large. She swallowed. The form went on trembling in her fingers.