The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  She nods.

  “God,” he groans, rolling over on his face. “What a way to kill the mood.”

  3/8/72 2:37 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Don Paquito ordered up a feast. He dispatched four assistants from the newsroom to the Mercado Central, and they came back an hour later with a side of lamb and baskets brimming with fruit, cheeses, avocados, big bunches of cilantro, and chilies of all shapes and colors.

  As they sit down for lunch, Ralf avoids the place next to his father, and instead slides in between Simon and Ellen. He’s determined to steer clear of all personal issues, especially any that might concern his mother.

  Ralf has never known life with a father and has no idea how to deal with this one, or even whether to accept him. He misses his boost. If he had a networked boost, he could read up on this man, study maps of Juárez, calculate the time it would take him to walk from this drab dining room, decorated with what looks like framed documents, to El Paso. With his boost in place and functioning, he could slip off into a virtual world. He could escape. The wet brain, he thinks, provides no relief. It’s just me and my life. I’m stuck with myself.

  An elderly waiter wearing a pleated white shirt and a clip-on black bow tie carries large plates of food from the kitchen and arranges them carefully on the table. As Paquito—or Francisco, as Ralf has decided to call him—passes around the plates, he pronounces each item slowly in Spanish. He hands the stuffed peppers to Ellen, and says, “Los chiles rellenos,” with an extravagant rolling of the R. He lowers his nose toward a steaming basket, and says, “Tortillas.” He closes his eyes, inhales, and shakes his head slowly in appreciation. He pulls out a yellow corn tortilla, spoons a slice of avocado onto it, and adds a small mountain of chunky salsa, with tomato and onions and cilantro. “Aguacate con pico de gallo,” he says, rolling the tortilla and taking a small bite.

  “God,” Ralf thinks, “he’s trying to teach me how to talk.” To cut short the lesson, he blurts out a question: “All those people in the newsroom. What exactly do they do?”

  “Those are my reporters and editors,” Francisco says. “They put out a newspaper. La Tribuna, or The Tribune. That’s my business. I’m a publisher.”

  “A newspaper?”

  “We have 290,000 subscribers,” Francisco says proudly, taking another bite from his rolled-up tortilla.

  “Three hundred thousand now, Papá,” Simon says. The word “Papá,” coming from his brother’s mouth, makes Ralf cringe.

  “Three hundred thousand?” Francisco smiles and calls to the elderly waiter. “¡Pepe! Que nos traiga una botella de tequila, de los buenos,” he says. “We’re going to have to celebrate three hundred thousand with excellent tequila.”

  Ralf, who has rolled some refried beans and pico de gallo into a tortilla, had no idea that newspapers still existed. It still makes sense for the wild world, he supposes. But he finds the idea pathetic to the point of sad. All of those people work in that room, he thinks, to create a product that dies on paper. Their words go nowhere. They cannot get their work onto the boost. No one can forward their stories to anyone. Their words just feed the wild brain, where they’re stuck until they’re forgotten, which is probably about the same time that the next paper shows up.

  He watches Francisco, who beams as he pours golden liquid from an old dust-covered bottle into four small glasses. For him to be so proud to have a measly three hundred thousand subscribers, Ralf thinks, makes it even more pathetic. More than 10 billion people have boosts, he knows, maybe 11 billion by now. Certain games and virtual worlds reach billions of them. For big time publishers, an audience of three hundred thousand people amounts to a rounding error. What’s more, the tiny readership that waits for a physical paper to arrive at their door must be from the most backward and ignorant segment of the wild population. He wonders how much they can afford to pay. As Ralf takes his first sip of the fiery tequila, he experiences a shift in sentiments toward the publisher who’s busy raising toasts at the head of the table. Gone, at least for the moment, are his anger and resentment, his sense of betrayal and distrust. Now he finds himself feeling sorry for the man.

  Ralf ends up drinking four shots of tequila and wolfs down a mountain of food. His emotions during the meal careen wildly, but he keeps quiet for the most part, preferring to engage his mouth for food and drink, not words. He barely listens as Francisco regales the group with old stories from the South American chip wars.

  It’s not until after lunch, feeling groggy and a bit dim-witted, that Ralf makes his way through the newsroom and the sunlit café room, or playa, and knocks with his knuckles on Francisco’s open office door. He steps in and plunks himself down in a wooden chair under the poster of Emiliano Zapata. Francisco, misinterpreting the visit, starts talking about family. Ralf interrupts him, saying he wants to talk “business.”

  “Look,” he says, “I don’t know how much you know about me. But they’re going to be updating the boost in the U.S. next week. I need to put a fix into the software. For that I need to find someone, either here or somewhere else, who can put my boost back into my head.”

  Francisco looks at him gravely. “You have the chip with you?”

  Ralf nods and points to his pocket.

  “There are people around here who do that kind of work. It doesn’t always … turn out well.”

  “I know,” Ralf says. “Simon told me. Think we can get it done tomorrow?”

  “Probably not until later in the week.”

  Ralf squirms in his chair. “Listen, it’s kind of a long story, but I’m in a hurry. We have a deadline coming, and I…”

  Francisco looks at him with a sly smile. Then he raises one eyebrow into a tall arch, and slowly brings it down. He reaches into a desk drawer and pulls what looks like a packet of folded paper from his drawer. He tosses it into Ralf’s lap. The banner of the paper, written in Gothic lettering, is simply THE TRIBUNE. The headline on the lead story reads: SURVEILLANCE GATE OPEN IN COMING UPDATE.

  Ralf starts to read the story. Then he notices another article at the bottom of page one: LEADING GOVERNMENT CHIP DEVELOPER ON THE RUN IN EL PASO. The article, which, for Ralf’s “own security,” avoids naming him, mentions that the software engineer was nabbed at work at the Department of Health and Human Services, rushed to a clinic in Alexandria, from which he was later “liberated,” and is now “reputed to be newly wild.”

  Ralf looks up at his father. “How did you learn this?” he asks.

  Francisco gestures toward the people working in the newsroom. “Those people are professionals,” he says dryly. “The best in the world.”

  Twenty-four

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 2072:

  SEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/9/72 8:09 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Stella, still in her black kimono housecoat, sits quietly in the living room in Montclair, sipping a cup of coffee. She looks out the window at the birds jostling for places at the next-door neighbor’s front-yard feeder. Suzy is still upstairs. Bao-Zhi has not yet begun his drumming or chanting. In another month, Stella thinks, the early spring flowers will start to bloom, the daffodils along the front walk and the forsythia out back. She wonders what will be happening to her son Ralf by then, and whether she and Suzy and Bao-Zhi will still be holed up in their electronic refuge.

  A massive black Houyi pulls up at the curb, scaring the birds away. Stella has never seen the Houyi before. It sits there for minutes on end. Finally a door opens on the curbside. Out steps an elderly gentleman wearing a shiny maroon trench coat and carrying a leather briefcase. He walks out to the sidewalk and then turns left up Stella’s walk. He moves with a slight stoop and carries a worried expression on his haggard face. He has white hair, which falls onto his forehead in a V.

  Stella gasps. She rushes to open the door before he rings, and she greets John Vallinger with a simple “Hello.”

  “Been a while,” he says with only the chilliest trace of a smile. He steps
inside the Montclair house. “I understand that my communications go kaput at the door,” he says.

  Stella forces herself to smile, but without acknowledging his point. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asks.

  Vallinger shakes his head and makes his way, uninvited, into the living room and drops down on the blue satin couch. He places the coat to one side and lays the briefcase on the carpeted floor.

  Stella pauses in the hallway to assemble her thoughts. Her operation is exposed. That much is clear. Vallinger’s organization must have learned about Suzy from her runs in the park. Then it was easy to trace her signal back to the place where it went dead, which led them straight to this house. Now Stella, so careful for a decade to cover her tracks, is in the open. She wonders if the old man knows about the wild Chinese activist on the third floor, who for some reason is not yet making his typical noises. What else does Vallinger know? She sits across from him in her mother’s old rocking chair. The floor is cold on her bare feet. She shifts her weight to one side and pulls her legs up under herself.

  “I know what you’re up to,” Vallinger says, looking straight at her.

  “That makes one of us,” Stella says, forcing a smile.

  “I’ve come here…” Vallinger pauses for a moment to deliver a line he has prepared for the occasion. “… to ask for your help. I think you’ll find that we share common interests.” Stella says nothing, and he continues. He tells her that she probably “misconstrues” the nature of the coming chip update. Stella remains quiet as he recites the virtues of the enhanced chip. The theme appears to excite him. He leans forward, plants his elbows on his knees, and clasps a pair of hands dotted with liver spots. The update, he says, will nearly double the processing power, raising it above the current Chinese level. This is “strategically vital” for the United States. New security features will make it nearly impossible for hackers to get access to the boosts. “You wouldn’t believe how exposed we all are right now,” he says.

  Stella concentrates on looking directly into his watery blue eyes. She refrains from any sort of nod or other affirmative gesture that could be interpreted as agreement. She is listening carefully to other noises in the house, and worrying that Bao-Zhi will wander down, as he often does, looking in the pantry for his herbs or potions. She hears nothing.

  “You’re probably wondering about the so-called surveillance gate,” Vallinger says, with another attempt at a smile.

  Stella, still avoiding nodding, says: “What about it?”

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” he says, as if they’re old confidants. “It has to do with counterterrorism. Frankly, police have asked for this adjustment. They will be looking at certain anonymized data in the boosts. This doesn’t represent a threat to normal citizens. But if they see certain patterns in the data, which are proven to be tied to terrorism, then they can get a warrant to intervene. It’s really just to make us safer.”

  “What was it that I misconstrued?” Stella asks. “And how can you claim to know what I’m thinking in the first place?”

  “My point is that you’re describing this surveillance gate as a fundamental shift,” Vallinger says. “Where actually it’s just part of an evolution. There’s been a certain type of anonymous surveillance on the chips for years. Decades.”

  “You say I’m describing something?” Stella asks, lifting her voice for the first time. “Excuse me, but how in the world do you know what I’m describing?”

  Vallinger leans down and digs for something in his briefcase.

  At that moment, Stella sees a movement in the window. The messenger has leaned his bike against the same tree in the front yard, about ten feet from Vallinger’s Houyi. On his way to the back door, no doubt he has noticed the meeting taking place in the living room. He is ducked behind the rhododendron, probably wondering if he should figure out some way to deliver the message before attempting to sneak away unseen. Stella can see the top of his red bike helmet reflecting the morning sun.

  Duck lower, she thinks. Lower!

  Vallinger finally pulls a packet of paper from his case and tosses it onto the coffee table. It’s a newspaper, The Tribune, with the headline about the open surveillance gate in the next update. Below it is the news about the unnamed Ralf in El Paso. Stella got the gist of the news yesterday in the pigeon-carried message she received. But it startles her to see the paper, faceup on the coffee table, with its bold headline about her son. In all her years of hearing about The Tribune, Stella has never seen the newspaper before. Someone in her movement—she doesn’t know who—has access to it and spreads its news through pigeon and courier networks.

  She reaches down and picks up the newspaper, the first one she’s held in her hands since she was a child. It’s only sixteen pages, four large pieces of folded paper. But it has a heft to it that she doesn’t associate with information. Its smell is musty. She touches the headline, and her finger leaves a small black smudge. She reads the story and is taken aback to see the detail about Ralf’s extracted boost. Who did the reporting for that? This reminds her of her grandfather, who lived into the ’40s. He had been a newspaper reporter in El Paso, and she remembers hearing journalism stories from him. She wonders if there might be old copies of his newspapers packed in boxes in the attic. That reminds her of the current inhabitant of the third floor, Bao-Zhi, who remains oddly silent. No noise from Suzy, either. Stella steals a glance out the window. The messenger’s helmet is no longer in the rhododendron, but his bike still leans against the tree.

  She looks back at Vallinger. He appears weary, she thinks, or ill.

  She holds up the paper. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Let’s not be naive.”

  It occurs to Stella that Vallinger is mistaking her for the source of the stories in the paper. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, she’s on the opposite end of the chain, receiving only tidbits of news small enough to wrap around a bird’s leg. Yet somehow he believes that she sits at the nexus of a potent intelligence network—that she’s powerful. Stella says nothing and wonders what she can gain by appearing to know more than she does.

  “Now tell me,” she says. “You said we had shared interests. What are they?”

  “The U.S. of A.,” he says.

  She says nothing and resists the impulse to roll her eyes.

  Vallinger launches into a lengthy monologue about the makeup of the Democracy Movement. As he describes it, some of the activists are loyal opponents of government policy. He places Stella in this category. “You worry about personal freedoms,” he says, “about Chinese control of the chip. Sometimes you think we get carried away. But you want what’s best for this country.” On the other side of the movement, he says, are “revolutionaries.” He says they’re affiliated with “Chinese terrorists and Mexican drug lords pursuing a radical global agenda.” Stella’s thoughts turn to Bao-Zhi. Would Vallinger consider him a terrorist? Most likely, she thinks, glancing again out the window. She hears a rattle at the kitchen door, and then a moment later sees a red helmeted figure dart past the living-room window, jump onto a bike, and pedal down Christopher Street.

  Vallinger, caught up in his narrative, misses the drama outdoors. He sits forward on the couch and gestures with his bony hands as he describes a vast Luddite conspiracy. He says it’s committed to reversing evolution, turning humans back into Stone Age farmers, even hunter-gatherers. “Last time we tried the Stone Age, there were a couple hundred million people on earth, max. Most of them keeled over by the time they were thirty. Now,” he goes on, “we have 10 billion. This planet cannot sustain us in our primitive state. These people—your colleagues, with all due respect—are pushing us toward starvation on a scale never seen, and global war.”

  “So you think I’m working with people whose goal is to destroy humanity,” she says.

  “With all due respect,” Vallinger says. “Many of them. But not all.”

  “Why would I do that?”


  “I would imagine there’s a bit of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Vallinger says. “Plus, I would argue that you might not know the views of all your colleagues that well.”

  “As well as you?”

  “I know some things.” He purses his lips and, for the first time in the meeting, looks pleased with himself.

  “So,” Stella says. “If you and I have shared interests and my colleagues, at least a certain number of them, are out to destroy humanity, how would you propose that we work together?”

  “We could talk about that. But I think I’ll need to accept your offer of a cup of coffee.”

  Stella unfolds herself from her chair. She pads on bare feet toward the kitchen. Deep in thought as she makes her way down the broad shadowed hallway, she doesn’t notice the coiled figure of Bao-Zhi crouched behind a bookcase.

  3/8/72 8:43 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  In her decade as a Democracy Movement activist, it’s one question Stella never considered, even as a hypothetical: What kind of coffee would John Vallinger like? Ever since the afternoon she walked out of the job interview with him on K Street, dismayed by the man’s vision of their country as an obscenely profitable networked subsidiary of China Inc., she had reclassified Vallinger as a reptile, albeit a diabolically intelligent one—not someone who would be sitting in her ancestral living room in Montclair awaiting a cup of coffee. She reaches for the worst ground beans she has, a house-blend decaf that’s been moldering on a shelf for a year or two, and drops a few tablespoons of it into the pot.

  Childish behavior, she thinks. But who invited him? Stella decides to take her time. She puts a kettle on the flame—the old-fashioned way—sets it to low, and wipes the kitchen counters as she waits.

  She wonders why Vallinger would assume that she was a source for The Tribune. She doesn’t receive the paper and wouldn’t even know how to buy it. She lives hiding—at least until today—in an electronically jammed refuge from which she can communicate only by a messenger on bicycle. Would she be sending reports by means of cyclists and pigeons to the editor of a newspaper she never sees? Unlikely.