The Boost
Page 2
They pass a sign for a Civil War battle at Honey Springs. A Civil War battle in Oklahoma? Ralf wonders if he lugged around that morsel of data, unknown and unread, in his processor for twenty-eight years. He considers the trove of information stored on that chip, entire years of video, every virtual world he’s ever entered, every song he has ever heard, every conversation he’s ever had, the full database of all his messaging, even much of his sex life. All of it gone.
“Listen,” Ellen says, stirring him from his reverie. “How about this? You tell me what you know. I’ll do the same.”
He pauses for a moment. “It’s classified,” he says.
In their three years together, she has heard that same phrase a thousand times. “Let me get this straight,” she says. “They tie you down, take out your boost, patch you up, and send you as a wild man down to El Paso, and you have to protect their secrets?”
Ralf wants to tell her what he knows. But first he’s attempting to run risk-reward calculations in a brain not built for such work. It’s painfully slow, and does not deliver answers, only ideas.
“They didn’t send me to El Paso,” he finally says. “That was my plan.”
“Because your brother lives there?”
“My family has roots there, too,” he says. “My grandmother grew up there. Her father was a big shot on a newspaper.”
“That’s quaint,” Ellen says, before returning to Ralf’s brother. “I thought you two didn’t get along. Now, he’s the one you run to?”
“I wouldn’t call it running, exactly.”
“No?”
“I’m taking a trip,” Ralf says.
“Semantics,” Ellen says flatly. She gestures toward the backseat. “So you usually take trips with no more luggage than that disgusting gym bag of yours?”
“Actually, I wasn’t even planning on bringing that.”
Ellen pauses and looks at him. He stares straight ahead, as if he were driving the machine. These kinds of conversations, he thinks, would be a lot easier if he had driving to focus on.
“Let me tell you what I worry about,” she says.
He glances at her and nods.
“I’m worried that you want to go to Juárez to be at home with all of those wild people. I love you, Ralf, I really do. But that is the single-most … It’s the scariest place on earth, and if you want to live there, or even visit, we’ve got a big problem.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “My destination’s El Paso, not Juárez.”
Ellen studies his profile and concludes, after a few seconds, that further questions will get her nowhere. So she sits back, and as the car hurtles west through Oklahoma, she tells him her side of the story.
Two days ago, Ellen says, she was working at home, creating herds of dinosaurs for a virtual safari site, when she got a message from her friend Robin. “She said they were rounding up every Artemis they could find. Tall ones, fat ones, every shape and flavor.”
“‘They’?”
“The government.” Then she stops for a moment, replaying the conversation. “Actually, she didn’t say that … but I assumed it was. I messaged you twenty-three times and couldn’t even leave a note.”
By messaging friends in her network, and friends of friends, Ellen learned that young men wearing green sweaters had arrested two Artemis women, or Artemi, at a lunch spot on Capitol Hill. Fifteen minutes later, they picked up one near Chinatown, and then one in Farragut Square. “I did the numbers and figured they were eighteen to twenty-three minutes from our house,” Ellen says. “So I got in the car.”
He asks her where she went.
“I didn’t know where to go, so I put it on a shuffle route in Georgetown,” she says. “Then Julie messaged me that she saw you on the 14th Street Bridge. She said you were walking and looked terrible.”
“Yeah, I love her, too,” Ralf says, ransacking his mind to come up with a face for Julie.
“She was worried for you.” Ellen goes on to say that she headed over to the HHS building on the Mall, figuring that Ralf would be there. When she arrived, he was bent over his bike, trying to wrench it free without the signal from his boost.
“So why do you think they were picking up Artemi?” Ralf asks.
“Call me naive, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the update, and that hole in your head,” she says.
He shrugs. “Then why do you think they didn’t stop us from leaving town?”
“Maybe I wasn’t the Artemis they were looking for.”
This leads the conversation straight to Suzy, a subject that they’ve agreed tacitly to avoid. Ralf dated another Artemis in grad school. This raises Ellen’s suspicion that he might be drawn to her largely for the beauty she shares with Suzy and a few thousand other women in the country, plus others in South America. No words from Ralf could put these doubts to rest.
“Why would they pick up all these people based on what they look like?” Ralf says. “Kind of primitive, wouldn’t you say? They have machines that can ID her boost in about two milliseconds.”
“Maybe her boost isn’t in her head.”
The idea, so simple, leaves Ralf stunned. He lowers his head and says nothing.
“What I don’t get,” Ellen goes on, “is why they rounded up all the normal Artemi and didn’t just focus on the one with no hair?” She considers it for a second, and then answers her own question. “I guess she could have bought a wig.”
Two
3/6/72 10:14 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
“Make it quick,” says John Vallinger. The world’s most powerful lobbyist, president and founder of Varagon, Inc., is pulling into the driveway of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest Washington. For Vallinger, who at age ninety-nine still plays racquetball twice a week, the visit is routine: just a fresh kidney. But it’s a busy day. Vallinger has to entertain a Chinese delegation tonight at the Kennedy Center, and then eat the usual pancakes tomorrow at the White House. It’s a courtesy he extends every week or two, to keep the president in the loop. He has no time this morning to referee the latest squabbles between his two top aides.
The voice of Tyler Dahl, the younger and more ambitious of the two, echoes in his boost. “Remember the two people who disappeared from the Update Division on Friday?”
“Right,” Vallinger says. He entrusted the case to George Smedley, and he can guarantee, without hearing even another word, that Dahl is about to tell him how badly Smedley screwed it up.
“There was the software genius, Alvare, and then the domed Artemis, Suzy Claiborne.”
“Spare me the details,” Vallinger says. He climbs out of his black Houyi—a car long enough to feature a full-length bed—and dispatches it to the parking lot. “Just tell me what happened.”
“Well, Smedley, for some reason, ordered a roundup of every Artemis in the Washington metropolitan area. It was a huge job for security. I think they got fifty-four of them.”
Vallinger steps inside the hospital foyer, for warmth, but continues his boost-to-boost talk. The lobbyist is tall and gaunt, and wears a shiny maroon trench coat. His white hair, parted on both sides, falls onto his forehead in his signature V. “Did he get the one he was looking for?” he asks.
“No,” Dahl says.
“Do we know where she is?”
“No idea.”
Strange, Vallinger thinks. His company has one of the two machines in the country that can locate and track the movement and behavior of virtually every American by his or her boost. It sits in its own refrigerated room in the company’s K Street offices, overlooking Franklin Square. Smedley should have tracked the two employees as soon as he learned they were missing. Suzy Claiborne, Vallinger figures, most likely works for the underground Democracy Movement. Within minutes of sharing the software code with the genius, she was probably rushed to a safe house and shielded from electronic surveillance. If Smedley had harnessed the machine quickly, he might have even exposed an entire cell of the subversive DM network.
But Vallinger will not give him that pleasure. He is aware that Smedley runs a smutty virtual business on the side, and that he was probably scouting the Artemi for talent, or maybe just for kicks. This would be a firing offense in many shops. Vallinger, though, finds a certain value in having such a rogue on call. Smedley is wise to the world in ways that the more intelligent Dahl may never be. To protect himself from Smedley’s excesses, Vallinger keeps him off the Varagon staff and pays him as an independent contractor.
“So what happened to the genius?” Vallinger asks his aide.
“Smedley had a contractor pick him up at work. They took him to a clinic in Alexandria to scrub his boost and ended up taking it out. An Asian went into the clinic. I’m told that he killed a couple of people and helped Alvare escape. I can’t confirm that. In any case, that’s the last anyone saw of him.”
“Where is the genius now?”
“We … don’t know.”
“You scanned for him and he’s not there?”
Dahl remains silent.
“Are you telling me,” Vallinger says, his voice rising, “that even after Smedley screwed up, you neglected to track whatshisname, Alvarez?”
“Alvare.”
“Whatever. The wild genius. Didn’t you track him?”
“I … was focused on Suzy Claiborne,” Dahl says softly. “We thought his boost would be scrubbed, or in Alexandria.”
“But you didn’t bother checking.”
“No sir.”
Vallinger should be angry. But he enjoys Dahl’s comeuppance so thoroughly that the corners of his mouth turn downward into what passes in his world for a smile. In any case, this incident at HHS doesn’t concern him.
John Vallinger’s nearly eighty years in the technology industry have left him with a rich perspective on setbacks and embarrassments. Those that appear most threatening, he has learned, often recede with time—provided that they’re handled smartly, or even ignored. Sometimes there’s money to be made from them. Vallinger made his first fortune while working in the mid 1990s as a barista at a Starbucks coffee shop on El Camino Real Boulevard in Sunnyvale, California. He came up with a phony business plan for an e-commerce startup and landed a million dollars in angel funding. He then maneuvered his way into the initial public offering for Netscape, the first Internet stock. Within months, he was rich.
He quit the Starbucks job and rented a small office suite on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Every morning, he lowered his willowy frame into a swiveling Aeron chair with a taut fiber back. He booted up a big fast Dell PC equipped with Windows 95, and scoured for business for his new investment boutique, Varagon, Inc. Vallinger’s first move was to short his Netscape stock, which he knew was headed for a dive, and to plow his fortune into high-flying stocks including Enron, WorldCom, and SDS Uniphase.
As his fortune climbed, Vallinger became a quiet fixture in Silicon Valley. If you look at pictures from that era, you can often spot his slender form and white sun-starved face, the blond hair already falling onto his forehead in the V. In barbecues in Woodside or champagne brunches in Mountain View, Vallinger is invariably off to one side, usually alone, staring into space. In one photo, taken at a party shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer, Vallinger appears to be chatting with Larry Ellison, the voluble founder of Oracle, the business software giant of the time (some of whose database code is still active in the boost). But if you study the photo closely, you’ll see that Vallinger is simply reaching around Ellison, probably to turn down the stereo.
You would think that in an era defined by hype and celebration, the antisocial Vallinger would be ignored. Yet Vallinger’s silent style created an aura about him, a mystique. People believed he was far richer than he was, that he had more friends than he did, that he must be having love affairs with senators or chief financial officers, or maybe that he was blackmailing them. In short, they thought he was onto something. That was what led a Stanford computer science professor to knock on his door one day and tell him about a project a couple graduate students were working on. It was a search engine called Google.
Vallinger’s angel investment in Google drove his fortune into the billions and landed him in Forbes magazine as one of the five hundred richest people on earth. His picture, displayed in profile, shows only one half of the V falling across his forehead. The one visible corner of his mouth is turned ever so slightly downward, a sign that Vallinger, in a rare bow to vanity, was attempting to smile for the camera.
It was on a trip to China with top Google investors that Vallinger had his greatest revelation. What he first noticed upon stepping off the plane was a security camera pointed right at his face. From that point on, in the hotels, on the junkets to the factories and universities, he sensed that his movements were being recorded, his gestures noted, his words captured. This was when he glimpsed the future. China was going to control its society, and its Internet. That authority would prevail. It might take a decade or two, or even three, but this command regime would drive China’s economy and its technology. With time China’s system, embedded on chips, would spread to the rest of the world. When it did, China would need an ally in America. For Vallinger, it was an epiphany. He would become a lobbyist.
All of his labors ever since, sixty-eight years of lobbying, are finally coming to a head. The next update, his crowning triumph, is sailing ahead and only ten days away.
A bit of leaked code isn’t likely to interfere.
“Get Smedley on the case,” Vallinger says, striding into the hospital. “Tell him to keep me abreast.”
Three
3/6/72 10:01 a.m. Central Standard Time
The car keeps rolling west, past Weatherford and Elk City. It maintains the precise distance, 1.3 meters, between the red Toyota ahead of it and the black Shar-pei that’s been tailing it since Fort Smith, Arkansas. In a sense, they’re no freer than the railroad cars, hitched end-to-end, that used to roll across these prairies on iron rails. Ralf considers making that point to Ellen. But he sees she’s busy in her head, probably on a design contract. Not so long ago, Ralf thinks, when his mother was a girl, people had the freedom to steer these machines wherever they wanted. They’d make phone calls, turn around to yell at their kids, even get drunk or fall asleep—all while driving a three-ton machine that was getting instructions from no one but them. It wasn’t only the people who were wild. Cars were, too.
He thinks about his mother, Stella. She went through a transformation like his, but in the other direction: from wild to enhanced. Stella played a role in the diplomatic drama with the Chinese that led to the enhancement in 2044/45 of 400 million Americans. The Senate committee she worked for needed someone on staff to have a beta version of the boost, so that they could understand the technology and have at least one person to match wits with the enhanced Chinese team. Stella was the guinea pig. She later grew to regret her role, to the point of resenting the machinery in her own head. Ralf’s father, Francisco, vanished before he was born, apparently a victim of the chip wars in South America between the U.S. and China.
Early in the century, when the Internet was still new, theorists predicted that by the 2030s, machines would blow past human intelligence. The next step of human intelligence, and evolution, would be led by these machines. This vision of the future was known as the Singularity. It was the rage early in the century.
The future came, and those big questions seemed to fade away. In 2032, when Stella Kellogg, a small dark-haired gymnast with a knack for foreign languages, graduated from Montclair High School, in New Jersey, wild humans still ran the world. Stella’s life didn’t look so different from those of her parents. Yes, cars ran by themselves, which still stirred controversy, and tiny machines that would have caused a sensation a generation earlier were stitched into clothing, embed
ded in jewelry and dog collars. Chip implants slowed the course of Parkinson’s disease and helped stroke victims regain body controls. But these microchips were not in the cognition business. So Stella went about her life pretty much as her parents had. She got tutoring for her SATs, improved her scores by ninety points, and was accepted as a freshman at Middlebury College, in Vermont, where she would major in Spanish and French.
It was at a Halloween party that she met Francisco Alvare, a fellow freshman who was dressed in pantaloons, a silk white shirt, and a blue jacket with epaulets. He said he was Simón Bolivar. “¡El Libertador!” he yelled in Spanish, when she asked him. “¿Y vos, quien sos?” Francisco was Paraguayan, and on his sixth Cuba Libre. She pointed to her cardigan sweater and knee-length skirt. “Sylvia Plath!” The music was loud, and he couldn’t hear her. Finally they sat on a couch and she shouted the name into his ear. It meant nothing to him. He understood her better when she spoke to him in Spanish. They spent the entire evening on that couch, the South American generalisimo and the suicidal poet, drinking rum and Cokes and talking politics. After midnight, Stella invited him back to her dorm. They made love. It was the first time for Stella, and about a month later she learned she was pregnant. That would turn out to be Simon, Ralf’s older brother, named—naturally—for El Libertador.
In spring of Stella’s freshman year, mud season at Middlebury, startling news arrived from Asia. It appeared that the Chinese, harnessing nanotechnology originally developed in San Diego, had placed microprocessors into the heads of two dozen workers at an air-conditioning factory in Shanghai. This wasn’t anything close to the Singularity, experts insisted. Instead of the merging of the wet and dry brains, this was simply putting them both into the same box, the head, and then joining them with billions of optical signals. It just moved the computer from its normal perches, on the wrist or behind the ear, to inside the head. It was just a change in geography.