“This Conrad friend of yours is real,” she said, as if she could barely believe her own words, “but you wouldn’t know it by looking at his dox. Do you know what this means? This means we can make him into anything we want. He’s a blank slate, a mystery, a tabula rasa! With the right strategy we can make him into anything at all. Do you know how rare this guy is? I mean, even the poorest little third world dreck has one or two terabytes of biographical info. This guy here, this Conrad Hicks, just has ‘Birds’! Once we bring him in no one is going to know what to make of him! There will be a stampede of eyeballs trying to figure out what he’s all about! For a crucial, brilliant fifteen minutes everyone in the world is going to want to know who the fuck Conrad Hicks is!” Natalya’s face held the glow of inspiration. “If we play this right we can build him up to be a star, a media god, whatever we want him to be!” Her focus then returned to Terri with a fixed glare. “You need to bring him to me tomorrow.”
“I don’t know,” Terri said. “You didn’t treat him too well the last time you two met. He was crying when he left.”
“Oh,” Natalya said, bringing her index finger up to her lips in thought. She then pointed at Terri and said, “All the better! It’s actually perfect! Since I’m now graduating and moving on to adult life I am reflecting on the stupid, juvenile things I’ve done as a child and I feel terrible, just terrible about the way I treated him.” She raised her hands to her head, grabbing her hair and saying dramatically, “How could I have treated the friend of my friend so badly? How could I have been such a little shit?” She shook her head with faux guilt. “It’s been gnawing at me. I have to invite him to dinner and plead for forgiveness. You have to arrange it Terri.” Her voice became serious. “We need to talk to him tomorrow, before he starts fucking up his own online identity.” Then Natalya started jumping up and down frantically. “Shit shit shit shit! My brain! Why did you mention him? Tonight of all nights! We need to keep focused on the party. We need to keep focused on Marja. Fuck knows what she has planned. Shit shit! Now all my brain wants to do is figure out what to do with our little Conrad, think about all the wonderful things—but we need to keep focused on the party tonight and Marja! We need all of our resources on Marja! Marja Marja Marja! I need to get the troops ready.” She pointed at Terri. “Get ready!”
Natalya disappeared.
Terri puckered her lips and exhaled through her mouth slowly and silently. She had no clue about how to bring this up with Conrad; he obviously still didn’t like Natalya, but Natalya would accept no rejection. And she would want Terri to record any exchanges she had with Conrad, to make sure she made a sincere effort.
Terri was stressed out about the graduation party—but unlike Natalya, her stress was secondhand. She could not just sit back and let loose, like people should be allowed to do at their graduation parties, she had to stay alert for any emergency Natalya might need her for—for whatever plans she had for Marjaana Kekkonen. Natalya did have something big planned, Terri knew. Natalya hadn’t confided any of the details to her, but Terri could tell it must be impressive.
If it failed, whatever it was, Natalya would be miserable all summer. And that would make for a miserable summer for everyone around her. So for everyone’s sake, Terri had to make sure whatever Natalya had planned was a success.
Chapter 3
Conrad hesitated in front of the brownstone building. Stairs led down from the sidewalk to the cellar apartment entrance, below street level. He clenched his hands together and braced himself emotionally before going down the stairs.
The window in the door had long ago been blocked with wooden boards, nailed on. The rusted nails looked like they had been originally pounded down in anger, not one straight, all bent and embedded in the wood. This was the door to his home.
The door locks, by contrast, were shiny stainless steel. They got changed every couple of years. As hidden cameras recognized Conrad several of the bolts were released from the frame by automated servos. Conrad took an old fashioned metal key from his pocket and used it to unlock a bolt. He placed his thumb on a smudged section of wall and the last bolt unlocked. If his dad believed in anything it was redundant security.
The air conditioning did what it could to mitigate the stale tobacco air. Conrad walked into the living room and as he closed the door behind him text scrolled in view declaring “Sheeta Network: Connection lost.” Hidden behind the masonry of the apartment walls were steel plates to block wireless signals.
The only furniture was a threadbare couch and a glass coffee table. A throw rug partially covered the concrete floor. Piled against the walls were hundreds of old books stacked in precarious columns. They added their own yellow paper mustiness to the air. Providing light were several scattered white LEDs on the ceiling. Conrad fell onto the couch and reclined. His first impulse was to hide his new smart glasses somewhere, but he knew that was as useless as hiding under a blanket from the boogey man. He might as well get this over with.
“What the fuck do you have on your face?”
Here it comes.
A door opened and closed and his dad raced from the hallway to stand over Conrad. He looked worse than usual. His gray streaked blond hair hung down in greasy strands to his shoulders. His gray beard needed a serious trimming. The belt of his plaid bathrobe hung loose over his pot belly—a belly that contrasted with his skinny stick legs extending from boxer shorts.
Conrad knew where all of this was going to go. There was no point in arguing.
“What the fuck do you have on your face?” His dad was pointing at the smart glasses.
“You know,” Conrad mumbled.
“What? What did you say? Look at me. You know you’re the one starting this. You know those don’t belong here.”
Conrad stood up and turned to go to his room. His father grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.
“You know those don’t belong here!”
“Dad, they don’t work here. They’re blocked.”
“You brought them to the door! I should never have let you get any glasses at all! They now know my door! They’ve seen my door and they know this room is blocked! They now know! Stupid! You’ve brought them to my door! I bet you didn’t even turn them off! They’re recording everything and they’ll upload it all as soon as you step out the door!”
“I turned them off,” Conrad lied.
“Give them to me!”
“Dad, I’m just going to go to my room.”
“No! Give me those glasses!”
“No Dad!” Conrad said, raising his own voice. “I paid for them myself, you can’t take them!”
“Oh yeah? Whose apartment is this? Do you own this apartment? Do you own the bed that you sleep on? Who pays for your food?”
“I pay for some of the food.”
His father sneered. “Like what? Once a week? You pay for like one meal a week and you think that means something. Like you can waltz in and do whatever you like in my apartment!”
Conrad made another try to turn away but his father spun him back by the shoulder with one hand and made a grab for the glasses with the other. Conrad blocked his hand and stepped back, almost stumbling over the couch.
“Don’t touch me!” Conrad yelled. “They’re my glasses! That’s why you block off this room—so you can be as crazy as you want and no one sees it! But I see it! I’ve been putting up with this shit all my life! Look at what you’ve done to my life! I’m nothing! Everyone else has thousands of friends around the world and I have nothing! What am I going to do with my life? Everyone else has moved on! And I’m nothing because I believed in your crazy shit! But I don’t believe it anymore! When I get enough money I’m moving out. I’m going to move into one of those ecoloplexes that have cameras everywhere and I’m going to broadcast my whole shitty life and I’m going to tell everyone what a crazy batshit father I have and they’re going to laugh and I’m going to laugh because it’s going to be so sad it’ll be hilarious. Because you’re a big joke
, and I’m a bigger joke for believing in you!”
When he stopped for a breath Conrad realized that his father had shrunk. His arms were now limp at his side and his shoulders sloped into nonexistence. He was looking down with his stringy hair covering his eyes.
Conrad knew he could now make a break for his room but something held him in place. He had never unloaded like this to his father before. But after seeing Terri today—seeing her and thinking about what might have been . . .
Conrad’s father turned and whispered something as he did so. Conrad didn’t quite catch it, but he thought it sounded like “Fuck you.”
His father retreated back to his room.
Conrad realized his hands were shaking. He sat back down on the couch. All he felt was a swirling rage. He made a menu for his smart glasses with his index fingers. Even though he was off-line he could still play some of the games. He knew his father had cameras in this room and could see him interacting with the smart glasses, but he didn’t care anymore. He selected ‘Games’ and rows of icons appeared. He just stared down at them, unable to think straight. They jiggled and moved for his attention. They were friendly and inviting with many big-eyed cartoon characters promising fun fun fun.
Conrad just glowered at them like an angry god.
After indeterminate minutes of frozen rage, Conrad heard his father came out of his room. Conrad watched him from the corner of his vision, not acknowledging his existence. He braced for another confrontation. To his surprise, his father was dressed, with a long khaki raincoat over his clothes and a beat-up backpack slung over his shoulder. He unlocked the door and left their home.
Conrad breathed a sigh of relief.
His father had said “fuck you.”
He then realized he could play back that moment and amplify the sound. The receivers of the smart glasses were better than human ears. Had his father really said “fuck you”?
Selecting ‘Playback’ on the menu, Conrad traced back a timeline, with pictures caught at ten second intervals displayed before him. When he reached a few seconds before his father spoke he hit ‘Play’, turning up the sound.
As his father turned around his whispered voice boomed in his ears.
His father said “I love you.”
Chapter 4
The district known as Stanwich was also sometimes called ‘The Helix’ after the name of its central landmark, which was in fact not a true helix, but a double helix, like DNA. When it was built thirty years ago it was the largest structure supported by carbon fiber—a show-piece of what was possible with the material of the future. Two carbon fiber tubes, shiny black, ten meters each in diameter, rose out of the ground five-hundred-meters apart. Maintaining that five-hundred-meter distance they made a complete twist around each other as they reached a kilometer into the air. Connecting the two tubes were ten platforms, stacked one above the other evenly spaced at one hundred meters.
The platforms, colloquially known as ‘slats’, were open to the sky and contained parks, civic entertainment centers, restaurants, and boutique shops. Slat 6 had a river running through it from water pumped up through pipes in one of the carbon fiber tubes. The river fell off the edge, making a waterfall that splashed into a small lake down on Slat 5. A bullet train station was at Slat 8.
Slat 9 had been rented out by Walter Borgan for his daughter’s high school graduation party. The bright lights made a dazzling glitter in the night and Slat 9 could be seen for kilometers around, party sights and sounds radiating out and reverberating off the adjacent buildings. The south half was taken up by a stage and dance floor—the north half by dining areas interspersed with small gardens and fountains. The edges of the slat were lined with small buildings—restrooms, viewing areas, and bars. Dinner had ended an hour ago and so far, remarkably, nothing of note had occurred.
Natalya was anxious, although she revealed no hint of it. She knew that she appeared to be calm and in control because a small screen projected onto the upper left of her vision by her contact lenses showed a continuous live third-person point of view of herself from various cameras on the slat. She was walking the dance floor, making sure she at least said hi to each of her guests. She was wearing a gold lame mini dress—the gold complemented a deep, rich tan cultivated by several top dermatologists to a physical and aesthetic perfection. Her petite, athletic body was a genetic inheritance from her mother, a former Russian Olympic gymnast. Her great blond mane of hair exploded from her head in intricate tangles that draped down and swished at her waist. She deftly worked the crowd from cluster to cluster in her gold stilettoes as the middling pop star Raquelsha sang and danced on stage and multicolored lights strobed the faces of the audience.
To Natalya’s left was Kurt Wu, slim and dapper. To her right was Terri, her Rockhead bulldog (although she would never call her that to her face). They both kept to her sides, like jets in formation.
As Natalya walked and talked among the people, occasionally joking with Kurt and Terri, smiling and laughing, she oh so subtly manipulated her computer workspace that was projected to her lower right. Few guessed that the delicate movements of her fingers that seemed to match perfectly the lilt of her conversation were interspersed with commands to her computer to perform surveillance of the party and maintain communications with dozens of people. This was aided with a small, surgically implanted electromagnetic detector in her throat that recorded subvocal nerve impulses and translated them into her voice, so when she thought words out carefully, she was essentially ‘thinking’ to the computer. This was the latest ‘it’ technology and most of her friends had subvocal implants, but it was expensive and she had paid for some of her less-well-off friends to get the procedure, like Terri. It was worth the expense—Natalya could to listen to her friends’ secret reports and read them back as they were transcripted to a text box in the bottom center of her vision.
One line caught her attention immediately.
She always tried to keep eye contact when she was pretending to listen to someone, but as the younger sister of one of her brother’s friends talked about the difficulty getting onto the lacrosse team, she couldn’t help but allow her eyes to flicker down at the text. She fixed a smile to her face and subvocalized.
This was it. Marja was making her move.
Her brother’s friend’s sister wasn’t giving her an opening to excuse herself. She brushed a hand lightly on Terri’s arm who immediately cupped her hands to Natalya’s ear and said loudly, “Remember that important thing?” and then gestured with her pointed finger over the crowd to a random direction. Natalya excused herself and the three of them pulled away.
They moved through the crowd, careful not to make any eye contact that might invite conversation, focusing more on their computer displays than to the people around them.
Natalya couldn’t help herself. She spun quickly to Terri, grabbed her arm, and said, “What? They’re here?” She immediately regained her composure and subvocalized.
loor. Linking video and tailing.”
It was the B-Twins all right. Tall, lean, impeccable suits with tasteful touches of bling. Rushi with his pony-tail, Raj with his shaved head. They walked with purpose. Apparently they had reconciled with each other. Natalya checked the guest list—they were last minute invites. Literally last minute—by Marjaana Kekkonen.
Natalya’s father was close friends with Marjaana’s uncle Ragnar, and one of his conditions for paying for the party was allowing Marjaana to invite her own guests. Natalya had known that nothing good would come from it.
As they walked, Natalya turned to Terri with a smile on her face and said “There once was a man from Nantucket. Blah blah blah fuckit.”
Terri laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world. Marja was certainly watching them now. They had to keep up appearances.
When they reached the ladies’ room Kurt leaned against the outside wall as the two girls went inside.
Terri took her position next to two other girls adjusting their make-up at the wall-length mirror while Natalya went into a stall. Putting the top seat down she sat and put her hands over her mouth, trying to regain her calm before deciding on a counter measure.
The bitch, Natalya thought. She had a quicky. She’s confident enough to have a fucking quicky.
This required an immediate response.
Natalya contacted her photoshop guy. Everyone had a photoshop guy, but Natalya’s was always available at a moment’s notice and produced nearly flawless pictures. She sent him images of Terri and Rodolfo and told him to make videos of the two making out hot and heavy and to post them on all the social boards. It wouldn’t be stamped by VuDyne—everyone would know almost instantly that it was fake—but it would change the direction of people’s attention for a moment, forcing a context-switch in their minds. It was a crude response, but Natalya had to do something to show she was still in the game. She did have a secret weapon up her sleeve, but it could only be used at a specific time. At one minute to eleven exactly. It was twelve minutes to eleven. She considered waiting in the ladies’ room until the last minute and then making a run for it, but that would be too obvious and sad. It was already getting undeniably obvious to everyone out there that she was hiding in the bathroom from the B-Twins.
Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1) Page 2