by Bright,R. F.
“No,” he said, apologetically.
She waved it off then aimed her palms at the squad room’s cubicle farm. “You’re down there, in the corner with a window. Take any dorm room you want. Downstairs. They’re all available. Just like you? I guess?”
MacIan joined her pretense. “And you? I hope.”
“Ahhh,” said Cassandra. “If only I were thirty years younger.”
MacIan gave her a silly, one-eyed once-over. Her hair was dyed a fiery red and she had extraordinarily penetrating eyes, which she credited to being part Akwesasne Mohawk. “Or I thirty years older,” he offered.
She flicked a wrist at him. “I already got that deal, but who knows? I could trade up, if he ran off with the upstairs maid.” They both laughed, which sealed the deal on their relationship for Cassandra. “Someday you’re gonna be thirty years older and you should hope to have someone like me around to wipe your ass.”
MacIan started off toward his corner. “Live in hope . . .”
“. . . die in despair, sweetheart.”
MacIan walked through the eerily silent squad room, wondering how things worked here. He and three much older Troopers were the only police for approximately six percent of the entire state. Luckily, there were few people living in these inhospitable mountains. In areas like this, the Peregrine made all the difference. It was not the number of bad guys that made policing difficult here, it was the distances. And crime had become somewhat scarce, at least the kind of crime people wouldn’t put up with.
The three older Troopers observed MacIan as he went to his cubicle, distancing themselves with lukewarm nods.
With only four Troopers to occupy the enormous squad room, everyone got a corner office marked out by eye-level dividers the same grey-blue as the old Trooper uniforms. MacIan entered his cubicle, pulling off his topcoat and tossing it across a chair. It blended into the decor.
He tossed the dead man’s wallet onto his desk, plopped down, and prodded its various pockets and hiding places. He took the driver’s license out of its see-through sleeve and inspected it. “Arthur Gager,” he mused, fanning out several credit cards like a poker hand. “Arthur Gager, Arthur Gager, Arthur Gager. Must be Arthur Gager.”
The dead man’s name was the only thing on these. Those who could afford driver’s licenses and credit cards were often the focus of kidnappers. Privacy laws prevented anyone from disclosing the addresses of the — protected class. Arthur was obviously one of them. MacIan picked up the desk phone and pressed the first button.
Cassandra’s voice came back, crackling clear. “You’ve got to stop calling me here.”
“I have this guy’s credit cards. Can I find out where he lives?”
“You can’t,” she said, “but ya never know about these things. What’s the name?”
MacIan gave her what he had and they hung up. He picked up the wallet again. It was obviously expensive. Fairly new. Made of indestructible rip-stop nylon, trimmed in genuine alligator, polished to a deep, oxblood-red, and hand-worked tightly enough to take some wear and tear. It had lots of room and hidden compartments.
The speaker phone crackled. “Arthur Gager, 7301 Farragut Place, Guttenburg, New Jersey,” she said. “You didn’t hear that from me.”
He smiled ear to ear.
MacIan’s Peregrine rocketed out of Bedford Barracks into the eastern sky. He leveled off, and said, “7301 Farragut Place, Guttenburg, New Jersey.” A heads-up display splashed across the wind-dome. He’d never heard of Guttenburg, NJ and now knew why. It sat on a magnificent, white limestone bluff straight across the Hudson River from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Lincoln Center used to be. He flew out of the mountains, across the Susquehanna Valley, over a series of foothills, and there it was, the New York skyline. It was far more impressive than Arthur’s fancy wallet and looked even more expensive. As he got closer, dashboard alarms sounded. He was being tracked.
The heads-up display flashed Threat Options: > Warn > Suppress > Destroy. He assumed these trackers were harmless neighborhood surveillance systems, traffic sensors and civil service monitors. He tapped the option > Warn. Every tracker in range panicked. They’d caught a Peregrine.
MacIan waited patiently as the list of potential threats grew shorter, remembering similar moments filled with actual threat. His new position as a member of the NPF, which he saw as an extension of the Navy’s Peregrine Fleet, hadn’t soaked in yet. He felt a little lost. But his faith in Admiral Carson was unshakeable.
The domestic Peregrine Fleet’s legend began with Admiral Carson’s Act of Defiance. Congress, when it was still in D.C., tried to force the Peregrine Fleet to submit to tracking. The proponents won by a huge margin and were very pleased with themselves. Until Admiral Carson’s Peregrine strafed a warehouse filled with tracking devices. A big explosion sends a big message.
Congress is the problem.
Problem solved.
When called to task for the assault, Admiral Carson proudly appeared before a Captain’s Mast, presided over by the Supreme Court. No pictures were taken, so everyone imagined their own heroic tableau. A highly decorated naval officer in full-dress. Dazzling! Standing defiantly before his disreputable accusers cowering beneath their black robes. Admiral Carson steps forward with absolute confidence and answers the charges with these laconic words, “Kiss my ass.”
He walked out—no one dared stop him—and was raised upon the shoulders of several hundred thousand veterans waiting for him on the courthouse steps. The government, and its pretense of representation, lost all credibility that day, and the veterans gave Washington D.C. a purifying dose of fire. But what they so vehemently destroyed immediately reemerged. Their attack on the politicians in D.C. led to the hijacking of the government in New York, where the politicians’ bosses lived.
But a seed of possibility had been planted in the soil of universal sentiment, and it became the custom to say ‘kiss my ass’ any time a problem actually got fixed. This kept the Peregrine Fleet ever in the people's hearts, since there were a lot people fixing a lot of things without regard to their so-called representatives. Ignoring them was the only way to get something done.
So the formerly unknown Admiral Christopher Carson appeared to have gained some power. Some authority. Some celebrity. And to everyone’s amazement, this apparent power morphed into real power. He locked himself away in his Spartan quarters at Quantico and wrote the Peregrine Fleet Mission Statement.
MacIan read it over and over again. Its stance on human dignity, integrity, justice and autonomy kept him heart and soul in faithful service to the fleet.
“Vessel on approach, please identify!”
MacIan snapped out of it. “Trooper MacIan, NPF.”
“Destination, please.”
“Guttenburg.”
A long pause. “Will you please notify if you intend to cross the river?”
A Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment is hard to resist. “Why?”
A longer pause. “It would be nice.”
“OK.” Maybe he’d have a closer look later, if he had time.
The Peregrine came to a hover directly above 7301 Farragut Place, a well maintained mid-sized apartment tower only a hundred or so years old. It had one of the most magnificent views of Manhattan possible, perched on the New Jersey Palisades overlooking the Hudson. He marked a spot on the parking lot with a laser-tag and let the auto-pilot complete the landing while he gathered himself.
He got out and took a quick account of the people milling around the entrance trying not to look curious. As he approached, two large men with machine pistols emerged. He gave them a calm but assertive nod. They smiled respectfully and opened the door.
MacIan nodded his thanks. “The Gagers?”
“Twenty-four-F,” said the other guard. “But I don’t think he’s home. Haven’t seen him for a while.”
MacIan showed them the wallet.
“Oh, I see. His daughter’s up there. Saw her this morning.”
&
nbsp; MacIan entered the lobby, a typical minimalist common space, and walked up to a doorman behind a tall reception desk stacked with packages.
“Sir?” the doorman said.
“Gagers.”
“I’ll see if they’re in.”
The doorman poked the button marked 24F on an old-fashioned wall mounted intercom and put the clunky plastic handset to his ear. “Someone’s here to see you. Um hmm. The National Police. Um hum, OK.”
MacIan waited for the condo protocol to play out.
“Go right on up, sir,” said the doorman, pointing to the elevator.
MacIan rode the elevator up, confronting the emotional potential of what he was about to do: tell Arthur’s daughter that her father was dead. An involuntary shudder gritted his teeth and his stomach clenched.
The door to 24F was standing open when he got off the elevator, a young woman in the doorway. MacIan tried to smile. “Mrs. Gager?”
“No,” said the woman. “I’m Arthur’s daughter.” She backed into her apartment, extending her hand. “I’m Camille. Camille Gager.”
MacIan took her tiny hand in his huge paw. It was cold and he could feel her strength draining as she waited to hear what she already knew. “Trooper MacIan, NPF,” he said, pulling the wallet from his inside coat pocket.
She stared at it for a moment, as though it were from a bad dream, then her eyes filled with tears. She reached for it, but at the last second pulled her hand away. “I bought that for him.” She touched the wallet with a little pat, but didn’t take it. “Fiftieth birthday.” She was falling under an ominous spell. “Are you sure, or is it just the wallet?” Her color came back to half a skin-tone, and she leaned hopefully in MacIan’s direction.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Body’s back in Pennsylvania.”
“Pennsylvania? He was looking for someone. A Harbinger Corporation guy. But Pennsylvania?”
MacIan’s ears perked up. Harbinger? He knew Harbinger. As a kid, he’d had a game console and a stack of first-person shooters, all from Harbinger. “Look, ah, maybe this isn’t the time,” he stammered. “I can come back . . .”
“No. This has been coming for a long time. It’s just — now it’s real.” She made a ghostly motion for MacIan to sit on the couch. “Give me a minute.” She raised a finger and backpedaled down a long hallway.
He started to sit, but the Manhattan skyline stopped him. He tip-toed to the floor-length windows lining the east side of the entire building. The sun felt warm on his face, despite the snow down on the road running along the edge of the Palisade. He felt shamefully giddy, considering the morbid circumstances, as he gazed out over the Hudson’s liquid blur at the most spectacularly contemptible place on earth.
An anger he thought he’d quelled coursed through his whole body. The moment he’d stepped into the elevator, his emotional igloo had started to thaw. He wanted to run away before Camille could see him disintegrate. He had been to therapy and knew what to do. Be here. Be here. In the present. Just be here. In this place. Look where you are, he kept repeating to himself, look where you are.
He focused on the room. He hadn’t been inside an American home in eleven years. He grew up in a nice home, but not this nice. He studied the sleek living room, imagining his mother in this fashionable place. Snap out of it, he thought. No nostalgia. Be here. Right now. Right now! Right now! Right here . . . The sound of a door opening down the hall jolted him.
He slipped back onto the couch and opened his collar. Damn, it was hot in here.
8
Across the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Thomka and Murthy were enjoying a late lunch at Pescadores Pronto. Thomka traded witty barbs about Murthy with the haughty waitress delivering their entrees: two applewood-smoked trout, raised in tanks on the roof, and hothouse asparagus grown in trout manure. Thomka slurped his Chilean Merlot and swished it around in his mouth. “You’re not going to hit on,” he tilted his head at the waitress, “what’s-her-name?”
Murthy’s face gnarled into a lump of disappointment. “She lives in a far too poetic dimension, believes in things that can never happen. And! She’s not speaking to me. And I’m OK with that. There’s other fish in the Pescadores Pronto.”
“You could make it up with a big tip,” he chided. Murthy was a bad tipper, which was embarrassing, unnecessary and everyone knew it.
Murthy shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject. “Hey, you know what?” He dragged a sweet potato fry through a puddle of truffle-infused gravy. “That guy from Jersey, the guy who’s looking for Tuke. We tracked his call to a cell-tower in Pennsylvania.”
Thomas’s fork hovered over his honey-roasted carrots. “And?”
“And! Ta-dah . . . I called the Leprechauns. They are on the case, my friend. It’s all over but the River Dancing.”
A worried breath drifted out of the corners of Thomka’s mouth. “I don’t think you understand who you’re dealing with.”
“I’d be worried if you weren’t worried,” said Murthy. “They’re just regular old fashioned rent-a-thugs. A little quirky. You know they claimed the street that runs beside the wall they built across Pittsburgh. They call it New Hibernia. A brand new and sovereign nation, inside the U.S. Now that takes some blarney.”
“You can’t play these guys,” warned Thomka, “you don’t have the wit for it. If you piss them off, and I assume you will, they’ll cut off your little tandoori balls and stuff them up your nose, in Times Square.”
Murthy dropped his fork. “Not while I’m eating.”
“They do that kind of thing. They’re very expressive. And don’t make fun of their one-street nation. They’re dead serious about that.”
Murthy knocked over the salt shaker, and said indignantly, “Let me handle the Leprechauns. Keep your nose out of it.”
Thomka agreed with a tipsy grin. “My eggheads briefed me on Tuke’s game — The Massive. I didn’t get it, even after they explained it ten times. I was completely baffled!” They both cracked up and Thomka filled Murthy’s glass so they could toast their shared lack of comprehension.
“Here’s what I do understand,” said Thomka, “aside from the social games. What those are . . . I don’t have a clue, but millions of sophisticated players, many of whom work for us, most are just regular people out on their own, log on to The Massive. They’re given a mission based on some problem. They use whatever computers they’ve got, have built or stolen, to create data webs. They do it collectively. All the data they create along the way is available to everyone all the time. That’s part of their ‘open source’ lifestyle. Non-zero sum games philosophy. Whatever that is. Nobody owns the win. Talk about leaving chips on the table.”
They sipped their wine and shook their heads in utter disbelief.
Thomka continued. “So let’s just say, someone posts a question concerning some mission. Other players respond with whatever they have for an answer. Then others add to those answers, no matter how trivial, on and on: metadata, links, tags, stats, histories, any damn thing at all. They call that ‘progressive enhancement.’ They keep enhancing the data until they come to some kind of conclusion. How is that a fucking game? Non-zero sum? What the fuck is that?”
Murthy wiped a drop of lemon butter from his chin with his thumb. “You win a conclusion!? Everyone wins? That’s not right. Not a game. A social activity, for losers.”
Thomka shrugged his shoulders. “He has hundreds of millions of players all over the world. And you know what? They wouldn’t keep playing if it wasn’t rewarding, or at least fun. It’s got to be fun, or they wouldn’t play.” He wedged the stem of his wine glass between two fingers and lifted it. “This is dangerous, the potential staggering . . .”
Murthy choked off a laugh. “That’s you, my friend,” he pointed to Thomka’s wine, “philosopher in a bottle.”
Thomka howled, then continued as though thinking out loud. “Tuke uses technology he’s been developing for decades, game theory he won the Nobel Prize for, and the p
sychology of crowds to — create solutions. Unencumbered by politics.”
“Yeah,” said Murthy. “Sounds very, very Quakerish.”
“Fucking Quakers.”
“Just imagine the size of that database,” Murthy said enviously.
“And I hear Tuke is really, really rolling in it.”
Talk of money always enlivened Murthy. “Oh my, yes. Some of those missions led to incredible inventions. And! For a price, I’ve heard he’ll turn any problem you have into a game. Calls the service — Gamification. The science of turning something into a game. The Massive handles the organization. The players solve the problem. It’s brilliant.”
Thomka stabbed a chunk of buttery trout. “There’s still at least a hundred and fifty million Americans on the other side of our walls. That’s one big mob. And let’s not mention the veterans. If we let this Tuke asshole whisper in their ears, we’re done for.” He swallowed, then burped. “We’re not focused on solutions. We’re focused on distractions.” He burped again.
“You’re a pig, Al. You know that?”
“And I hate Petey’s idea of flushing Tuke out by threatening his staff and friends. Does he even have a staff?”
“Oh yeah. They’re scattered around the world. They work over that satellite network of his.”
“He has his own satellite?”
“Several.”
“How’d he get them?”
“Bank auction — highest bidder. The only bid, they say. How curious is that? No office building. No headquarters. Everybody’s on their own. Fully independent. Unlimited reach. No one knows how many members he has. But we do know who the members of the development team are. He thanked them in an email to the Nobel Prize committee.”