The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Ellen spends her life making artwork of unique beauty. Maybe it’s because her beauty is off the shelf. This is the first time that idea has occurred to Ralf. He wonders if it might be profound. Or maybe he’s just getting drunk. He thinks about the man following Ellen. What’s happening to her?

  Simon winds up his business in the corner and joins his brother at the bar. He orders a beer, and another one for Ralf.

  “Got another job for you,” Ralf says to Chui. “Remember the big guy who was sitting at the end of the bar last night?”

  “Guy with the nose,” Chui says, nodding. “Gave me a one percent tip.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No,” Chui says. “And I’d remember.”

  “You have an image of him that you could do a search on?”

  “Yeah, let me see.” He puts down the beer and concentrates, matching the image from the quiet drinker at the end of the bar with tens of millions of faces. “Nothing,” he says.

  “I couldn’t find one either,” Simon says, relieved that the problem had to do with the database, and not his woeful technical skills.

  “Try this,” Ralf says. “Take his nose out of the image and match the rest of his face.”

  Chui immediately starts the hunt. Simon first needs some pointers on how to clip the nose out of the image. Ralf tries to give him instructions, but it’s hard, because the beer has clouded his thinking. Plus, everyone has a different way to organize the boost, and different commands. Early on, each user tries out commands and the machine responds. Usually it’s wrong. But when it works and the user registers a satisfied thought, the boost interprets it as a success, and it learns. That’s how each machine evolves with the brain hosting it, and it’s one of the challenges he’ll face, Ralf knows, with a reconditioned boost, if he ever gets one.

  Simon is still hard at work clipping the nose from the photo when Chui comes back with a result. “Got it,” he says. “It’s an old news story about a boxer named Oscar Espinoza, from Las Cruces. This picture’s from ’41, when he was a twenty-five-year-old heavyweight. Get this,” he adds, laughing. “They refer to him as ‘hard-nosed.’”

  Ralf tries to do the numbers. “So the guy’s … fifty now, and sometime in the last … twenty years he’s gained a chip and lost a nose, presumably without winning a championship.”

  “He’s fifty-six, and it was thirty-one years ago,” Chui says, adding precision to the foggy figures issuing from Ralf’s wet and addled brain.

  “Whatever,” Ralf says, with a dismissive wave that almost knocks over his glass. Who needs such details? In the last few minutes, he has gained a new respect for estimates and broader concepts. As he takes another gulp of beer, he finds himself believing fervently, at least for the moment, that being wild will steer him toward the big picture. “Any data on where he lives?” he asks.

  Chui takes a second. “Nope,” he says. “It’s like the guy got scrubbed from the boost-sphere.”

  Ten

  3/7/72 2:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  The back door opens and quickly shuts. Stella Kellogg, sitting in her dining room, hears scuffling feet, feels a ripple of winter air, and catches a glimpse of a bald-headed figure dashing up the back stairs. “Hey!” she yells.

  “Sorry,” comes the response from upstairs. “I just can’t moss out 24/7. Only did two laps in Brookdale.”

  It’s no use belaboring the point, Stella thinks. For three days Suzy Claiborne has been sheltered at her colonial home on Christopher Street, in Montclair. Outfitted with illegal jammers by the underground Democracy Movement, or DM, the house is an electronic refuge, like the White House or the Pentagon, its inhabitants untraceable—at least by their boosts.

  She has two guests in the house, Suzy and the Chinese activist Bao-Zhi, who came to Montclair a day after Suzy, immediately after liberating Ralf from the clinic in Alexandria. Bao-Zhi is an expert in martial arts, and wild. If he speaks English, Stella has never heard it. On the few occasions that she has seen him, he has merely nodded his head and kept walking, invariably to the bathroom or kitchen. He spends almost all of his time in his third-floor bedroom. He chants and beats on a drum. Using a portable gas stove he brought with him, he cooks pungent soups. Like Suzy, he awaits his next assignment.

  The idea was that Suzy would stay put here, off the grid, for a day or two, until technicians working for the DM outfitted her boost with a revamped electronic profile and ID number. Then she could put on a wig or grow her hair, develop a new wardrobe, and prepare herself for her next assignment. Artemi are easy to insert into government and industry. Their beauty, no doubt, plays a part. But due to a technical glitch, and the confusion surrounding Ralf’s disappearance, Suzy’s transition is delayed. The new profile isn’t ready yet, and Suzy’s growing impatient.

  With no virtual worlds to explore in her boost, Suzy kills time feeding logs into the old fireplace and staring at the flames. Bao-Zhi’s chanting from the third floor provides a meditative soundtrack. “What are the chances they’ll be looking for me in Brookdale Park in Montclair, New Jersey, at three p.m. on a Sunday afternoon?” she asked the evening before, as the two of them sat by the roaring fire. Stella was astounded that someone with the technical smarts to work in the cognitive update department could say something so dumb.

  “They put in a search for you, and when your boost pops up, anywhere in the world, it gets ID’ed, mapped, and time-stamped.”

  “They don’t see Bao-Zhi when he slips out to Watchung Avenue to pick up whatever powders and potions he uses,” Suzy objected.

  “That’s because he’s wild. But you, it’s as if you’re carrying a beacon. Didn’t you know that?”

  Suzy, her eyes on the flames, nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. But this afternoon she ignored the warning, for the third time—and she doesn’t seem too concerned. Stella hears her upstairs, singing in the shower.

  Stella, now in her late fifties, has been living in this New Jersey suburb since she lost her job in Washington, twenty-eight years ago, following the America First! takeover of the government. Her hair has turned from auburn to silver, and her back has curved slightly, as if bearing the weight of a lifetime of disappointments. As the years passed, Stella’s boys left home, Simon first to boarding school and then to college in St. Louis, Ralf to college in Pittsburgh. Stella nursed her mother to her death, and always figured she would sell the place and move back to Washington. But the government, in this age of Chinese ascendancy, was really just a one-party state run by business interests. The only job offer she received, a decade ago, was to work as a lobbyist in Varagon Inc., the K Street firm of John Vallinger. The money was good, and she convinced herself, briefly, that she could add a valuable moderate voice at Varagon, that it might work.

  She met Vallinger at the job interview. It wasn’t in the usual virtual meeting, but face to face. Even remembering the meeting makes Stella’s skin crawl. Vallinger, his gray skin and angular face crowned by wispy white hair falling down in a V, laid out for her his simple vision of the world. The boost represented the greatest advertising and entertainment platform ever invented, and the possibilities for business were endless—no matter who ran the country. This was an information economy. So even as Chinese companies took over what was left of the auto industry and asserted their muscle on Wall Street, there was plenty of money to be made—as long as the government left the boost free and unregulated. “Defend freedom in the boost,” he said, echoing America First! slogans, “and keep the government out of our heads.” He trusted that Stella, who had experience in the original Chinese negotiations, could bring diplomatic expertise and a veneer of bipartisanship to the firm. Stella left the interview shaken by Vallinger’s withering vision. Months later, she signed up with the underground Democracy Movement, a secret organization run from the back of a pizza restaurant in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  Stella’s diplomatic work to help push through the chip agreement in the ’40s still fills her with sham
e and regret. Early on, it drove a wedge between her and Francisco, who took up the fight against the chip in Latin America, and was never heard from again. As an adolescent, Simon loathed the chip in his own head. He blamed her for screwing up his thinking, and he grew ever more devoted to memories of his father. Simon is in El Paso, lost to her. Aside from formal greetings on birthdays and New Year’s, she rarely communicates with him.

  Ralf has found another way to disappoint her. He dedicates his genius to maintaining the chip—upholding the order she is busy trying to bring down. He spends much of his life in virtual worlds. She remembers visiting his Mount Pleasant apartment one time and seeing him and his Artemis girlfriend, Ellen, sitting in a near catatonic state, both in their own orbits, Ralf probably at some sporting event, Ellen no doubt touring galleries in Europe. Yet three months ago, when her group got unconfirmed reports about the open blue gates on the next update, Stella and her organization looked to Ralf, hoping that once he saw the Chinese plans he would lend his unique talents to hacking the chip and closing the gates. This could bring her son back into her life. The plan seemed to work almost too neatly. Suzy landed a job in the Update Department, befriended Ralf, and managed—despite her bare-bones knowledge of the technology—to find what appeared to be the open gates. She showed them to Ralf and he seemed ready to take action, at least according to Suzy. But he was picked up and taken to a clinic in Alexandria. Bao-Zhi freed him. That much she knows. Ralf hasn’t been heard from since. Messages to him bounce back, and his bike, according to DM reports, remains locked to a post across the street from his office in the Department of Health and Human Services. Stella wonders if her son is imprisoned, or even dead.

  Such concerns don’t seem to weigh upon Suzy. There’s something rough about her, and heedless, Stella thinks. She has heard rumors about violence in Suzy’s life, including one story that she stabbed her abusive father. Stella has trouble picturing this cheerful Artemis wielding a deadly weapon. Whatever ordeals Suzy’s been through, she has the personality to put them behind her. It’s not clear whether this comes from innate optimism or dreaminess. In either case, the woman seems to glide through life free of worry and fear. She regards sensible precautions as silly rules for fearful people—like Stella.

  Suzy comes thumping downstairs, through the kitchen and into the dining room, still humming and hungry for her first meal of the day, which she eats in the midafternoon. Stella sees that she’s shaved her head again. The soft down that was forming is gone, and the smooth Artemis skull glows with the opaque light of an egg. “I thought you were growing your hair,” Stella says. After all, Suzy was supposed to be preparing for another assignment, blending in somewhere as a traditional Artemis.

  “Oh yeah,” Suzy says as she sits down. “Forgot.” She takes a bagel, dips it into her green tea, and lifts it, dripping, to the opening parentheses of her perfect mouth.

  Stella says nothing. She reaches with her napkin and blots the drops of tea on the old walnut table to keep it from spotting. She wonders how the Democracy Movement settled on this woman, who seems just as cavalier about security protocols as she is about table manners.

  Even with the signals to her boost stymied by electronic jammers, Suzy appears to sense Stella’s judgment. “I can always wear a wig,” she says.

  Eleven

  3/7/72 1:16 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  The boy, the only one in the family who speaks English, shows Ellen how to wrap the tortilla around the beans and then use it to mop up the brown sauce on the chicken. “Mole poblano,” he says, smiling broadly, as he stuffs half of a bean-filled sauce-drenched tortilla into his mouth. Ellen runs “mole poblano” through the archived translation app in her boost and gets back “poblano mole.” Big help, she thinks, as she dabs at the sauce with a tortilla.

  Four of them sit around a square folding table in a tiny dining room. The grandmother sits across from her. Ellen still doesn’t know her name, since the other two simply call her Abuelita. She’s short and squat, wears a blue apron, and keeps her graying hair tied up on her head in a bun. She seems friendly. In fact, she startled Ellen by kneeling down, as soon as she saw her, and embracing the Artemis’s mud-spattered legs, saying something about “Santisima Virgen.” The daughter, Juana, had to pry her arms away from Ellen, saying, “Abuelita, no seas tonta!” (Ellen quickly fed that to her boost. She got back, “Granny, do not be an idiot!”) Juana, who must be about twenty, seems friendly enough, but doesn’t speak a word of English. Then there’s the boy, Alfredo, who looks about sixteen. He speaks good English and stares at Ellen with even more passion than his grandmother.

  “¿Te gusta el mole?” The grandmother is looking across the table at her, and pointing with a stubby finger at the brown sauce. Ellen doesn’t need translation to understand the question, but she has trouble responding. In the capped world, people simply speak their own languages and rely on the boosts to translate. But here she has to make the noises in another language, something she’s never done. She can either read the boost’s translation, and struggle with the pronunciation, or listen to the translated sentence in the boost and try to repeat it. Some of the sentences are too long for this. She listens to one and picks out a single word she recognizes: “Delicioso.”

  The old woman claps her hands and says, “¡Bravo!”

  Ellen tries another sentence, asking where she can cross the border: “¿Donde se puede…” She forgets the rest. They wait quietly as she listens again to the phrase in her head. She finishes it: “cruzar la frontera?”

  All three shake their heads grimly, and the grandmother wags a finger, saying, “No, no.”

  “They shoot people who cross the border,” Alfredo says.

  “Who’s they?”

  “Who do you think? The Americans.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ellen says. “I’m an American.” She goes on to explain to Alfredo that the border patrol will be happy and relieved to see a fellow citizen emerge safe and unscathed from her detour into Juárez.

  Alfredo laughs. He leans forward and asks, “Why do you think they have the drones patrolling our streets?”

  Ellen considers the question for a moment. “To stop the drug traffic?” she asks.

  “No,” Alfredo says. “It’s to keep us from crossing into your country—and to hunt and to kill any Americans who come over here. That one you saw,” he points toward the window looking out on the street. “It was coming after you.”

  The boy must be brainwashed, Ellen thinks.

  Twelve

  3/7/72 3:10 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  The coffee-colored KIFF Wrangler climbs from El Paso’s downtown. It crosses a bridge over I-10 and cruises up Prospect Street in the historic Sunset Heights neighborhood. To the left of the tree-lined street lies a gulch, which leads down to the river and, beyond it, the dusty expanse of Juárez. There, some two million wild people, the largest congregation of them on the continent, are busy doing whatever occupies unibrained folks on a sunny afternoon in March. The street he’s climbing is lined with apartment buildings, including the Palmore, the home of Simon Alvare. Oscar Espinoza, looking from left to right, knows nothing about Simon. But the person riding shotgun in his boost, George Smedley, finds plenty to tell him.

  “Look to the right,” Smedley’s voice says. “That mustard-colored place with the courtyard. He’s been up in that apartment for the last sixteen hours. Doesn’t even look like he’s moving around. Must be asleep.”

  Espinoza instructs the car to park around the corner, on Corto Street. He hates hosting Smedley. But it was the price for having him call off the headache. So physical pain was replaced in the very same location by a carping presence. On days like this, Espinoza loathes his job.

  “Where should I go?” he asks.

  “Your voice hurts my ears,” Smedley says. “Just message me!”

  “I’ll message you when you start messaging me,” Espinoza says, raising his voice and wishing he could evict this squatter fr
om his boost.

  A message promptly pops up: “Okay, okay.”

  As Espinoza climbs down from the KIFF, he sees two men on horseback trotting into the small lot. One wearing a leather hat rides a white-hoofed sorrel. The other, his face burnt by the sun, sways uneasily on a paint. Espinoza recognizes them both from the tavern. “The two brothers,” he messages Smedley.

  “Can’t be,” his boss responds. “Ralf is in the apartment.”

  Espinoza is digesting that apparent contradiction when Ralf rushes up to him on the paint, pulls the horse to a halt in a cloud of dust, and says, “Where’s Ellen?”

  “Ellen?” Espinoza says.

  “Don’t tell him,” Smedley instructs him, and then asks: “Who is he?”

  “You were following her,” Ralf says to Espinoza. “Where’d she go?”

  “It’s Ralf,” Espinoza says. He means to message it to Smedley, but the words come out of his mouth.

  “Who are you talking to?” Ralf dismounts from the horse and confronts Espinoza, his eyes at the level of the man’s thick neck. Behind them, Simon climbs off his horse and also makes his way to the KIFF.

  “Can’t be Ralf,” Smedley messages.

  The information is overwhelming him, inside and outside of his head, and Espinoza simply stops talking. In a stream of messages, Smedley keeps insisting that the man cannot be Ralf, because Ralf is upstairs, immobile, in the apartment, and probably asleep, if not dead. He orders Espinoza to clarify: Is the woman he was following in Juárez named Suzy or Ellen? Ralf, meanwhile, keeps asking what Espinoza did with Ellen. His breath smells of beer.