The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  For the first time in nearly three decades she is alone with her mind. Unlike Ralf, she never liked her boost, blaming it for the sadness of her life, her dead husband, the two distant children, her solitary existence in Montclair, the tragedy of the United States. She spent days on end ignoring her boost, living the thoughts and feelings of the wet brain she was born with. Yet it was always there—a presence, a tool, a powerful link to the rest of humanity. Without it, she feels vulnerable and out of touch.

  She turns sideways on the bed and looks at her boost’s plastic sarcophagus. Whoever holds that box, she knows, is in danger. She considers throwing it out the window, onto the cobblestone street of old-town Alexandria. But that would be irresponsible. Someone might pick it up and find himself arrested by private security guards, like the two that she and Suzy confronted yesterday. She catches her breath at the memory of that scene. She remembers zapping those two men, the looks on their faces as they crumpled to the ground, and then the one who ran after her and reached through the open door for her arm. She thinks of Suzy. Where could she be now? She composes a quick message for her—“You okay?”—and then remembers that she has nothing to send it with. This is the limitation of her new wild life.

  Stella hears a knock on the door. It opens a crack and a familiar Asian face peers in. Bao-Zhi. He wears a gentle smile. He pushes open the door and walks in wearing white surgeon scrubs.

  “How did you know I was here?” Stella asks, before remembering that Bao-Zhi doesn’t speak a word of English. She doesn’t even have her boost to guide her in writing the Chinese characters for him.

  “We traced your boost,” he says in clear, if accented, English.

  “You speak English!”

  “When I choose to,” he says, smiling.

  Over the next few minutes, Bao-Zhi prepares Stella for the transition to wild life. He gives her two bags of food, one protein, one vegetable. “It will taste vile,” he says, strutting his vocabulary. “But you won’t starve.” Then he hands her a small box with a simulated boost signal, which she puts in her black purse. “You can’t do anything with it,” he says, “but when they scan the highway, at least your car doesn’t look wild. I would have given one to Ralf,” he adds, “but the shipment just came in day before yesterday.”

  “You said ‘my car’?” Stella asks.

  “The green one that brought you here,” he says.

  They continue their conversation, in hushed tones, on the way out of the clinic. Stella carries her black purse over her right shoulder and the two bags of food in her left hand. She notices that Bao-Zhi greets the doctors and medical personnel with familiar smiles and waves. He tells her that he does jobs for them.

  “Did you take out Ralf’s chip?” she asks.

  “No, that was an intruder,” he says. “An amateur.”

  “And did you”—she lowers her voice to a whisper—“kill him?”

  Bao-Zhi smiles. “Do you believe everything John Vallinger says about me?”

  Minutes later, the green Sheng-li, following directions to a Mesa Street address in El Paso, pulls out of the driveway. Stella, newly wild and emotionally drained, starts off the trip stretched out in the backseat. She carries the black box with the simulated boost. But the plastic case with her own boost, the one carrying decades of memories, remains behind, in the pocket of Bao-Zhi’s white smock.

  Forty-three

  3/13/72 9:15 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  The March winds blow in from the west. They pick up balls of tumbleweed and bits of garbage and send them dancing through the dusty outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. The winds also seem to lift a big part of the Chihuahua Desert into the air and carry it toward downtown and beyond—maybe, thinks Oscar Espinoza, as far as the Big Bend. Espinoza feels the desert grit in his teeth, which makes him wish he could wash them one more time in Juárez, preferably with a plate of chimichangas, or a bowl of steaming menudo. He’s had his fill of goat.

  A meal doesn’t look likely. Several paces ahead of him, a determined George Smedley marches into the west wind. He leans forward to keep his balance. In one hand, he clenches his Panama hat, still sporting its battered brown feather. Placing the hat on his head in this wind would be something like a ritual sacrifice, Espinoza thinks. This leads him to wonder if the ancient Indians in Juárez ever ripped out people’s hearts. He knows the narcos did.

  Before breakfast this morning, he and Smedley were relaxing in their cots, waiting for the expected invitation to Don Paquito’s headquarters, when they heard a knock on the back door. Smedley thought it was just windblown debris. But the señora opened the door to two visitors. It turned out to be Don Paquito, a trim man who walked with a cane. He smiled a lot and did most of the talking. He was with his son Simon, who nervously twirled his ponytail around a finger. He seemed grouchier than his father. “We came through the back way to avoid that big ugly machine out front,” Don Paquito said, referring to the drone.

  Once the four sat down around the metal card table at Trastos, Espinoza expected Smedley to push for Ralf Alvare, and his boost, to return to Washington. He knew Smedley had no intention of paying any money, and it was no sure thing that John Vallinger, once he had Alvare in custody, would make good on any promises. But still, Espinoza wanted to see how much Smedley offered, and how the bargaining went.

  But Smedley immediately talked to Don Paquito as a fellow publisher. As the señora poured them more coffee and placed a basket of pastries on the table, Smedley talked about the big story in the newspaper. “I don’t like this development one bit,” Smedley said. With the Respect function in their boosts, he said, people would bow down to their bosses. This might turn him into “a slave to John Vallinger.” Espinoza was startled to hear Smedley denounce Vallinger, especially to a Mexican drug lord, of all people. Smedley said that the Respect function would favor large businesses over small. As an entrepreneur, he said, this was worrisome.

  “An entrepreneur?” Don Paquito said.

  “I’m a publisher, sort of like you,” Smedley said, looking proud for the first time. “Except my business is more modern. It’s in the boost.” When Don Paquito asked for details, Smedley walked him through it. “When you sell your newspaper,” he said, “you sell an experience. I’m just guessing here, but I would bet that when your ideal reader picks up The Tribune, he steps into the newspaper, in a sense. He lives the stories.”

  “In a sense,” Don Paquito said with a shrug.

  “Well, in my businesses, my customers get to live in the worlds my team and I build. You could say that they not only consume the editorial content, but also, by interacting with each other there, they create it.”

  “You mean that you sell virtual worlds.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I know all about them,” Don Paquito said as he dipped the corner of a croissant into his coffee and bit it off. “I participate in the modern world, even as a wild man who sells a product printed on paper.” He smiled as Smedley tried to excuse himself. “So I would imagine,” he went on, “that most of your content on these sites is sexual. That’s where the market is, if I understand it.”

  Smedley coughed. “We do a bit of that,” he said.

  “What’s your circulation?”

  “We’re midsized,” Smedley said. He paused to elevate the number, and ended up multiplying it by ten. “About 30 million unique visitors a month,” he said.

  At this point, Simon surprised the two by breaking into the conversation. “I think I’ve been on your sites,” he said to Smedley. “I was in one in Istanbul. It was quite a beautiful experience. A bedroom overlooking the Bosporus.” Smedley nodded uncomfortably. “Then there was another place, in a Cuernavaca hotel called Las Mañanitas. Is that your site, too?”

  Smedley, his face bright red, nodded and reached for his coffee. Don Paquito watched his son with a perplexed smile.

  “I absolutely loved it there,” Simon said. “Congratulations. I mean, really. Had a fantastic time. So what I was
telling my dad,” he went on, “is that there might be some sort of way to collaborate, bringing together the digital and the molecular, sort of like we did in Cuernavaca.” He smiled at Smedley. “Maybe some kind of synergy.”

  Espinoza looked across the table at Don Paquito and shrugged his massive shoulders. Then, battling his instinct to pick up a pastry, he stood up from the table and walked out into the street where the drone, like a faithful pet, was still waiting. He stood out in the cold for another half hour, feeling the west wind grow stronger. Finally, the three other men came out. A black car appeared. Simon and Don Paquito stepped into it and took off for downtown. As Smedley approached Espinoza, he pointed to the north. “Tunnel,” he said.

  Espinoza started to say something about lunch, and Smedley interrupted him. “No time for food.”

  3/13/72 12:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  John Vallinger is regaling his aide about his days in Mountain View with the founders of Google, Larry and Sergei. They were on a first-name basis, he says. “They had this huge airplane that they parked over at the Moffett Field—”

  Tyler Dahl puts his hand up. He sees a new message in his boost.

  “What is it?” Vallinger asks.

  “It’s just—”

  “Just what!”

  “Smedley’s back from Juárez.”

  “With Alvare?”

  “No.”

  “Then with Alvare’s boost?”

  Dahl shakes his head. “No, he’s just asking us to turn off his headache.”

  “Tell him to get some results, and I’ll consider it,” Vallinger says. “Otherwise, he can crawl back to Juárez with that big friend of his.”

  “He says we have one minute to turn it off.”

  “Or what?”

  “He’s not saying.”

  “Amp it up then,” Vallinger says.

  “Do you think that’s smart?”

  “AMP IT UP!”

  Dahl has the controls in his boost, and tells Vallinger that he’s made the adjustment. Then the two men wait. Dahl can hear Vallinger’s labored breathing. Dahl walks to the window and looks out at the sparse Sunday traffic on K Street. He envies the people circulating in the early spring drizzle. Some might be heading to a hockey game or even spending real time in real space with their families. They don’t know about the coming update, much less the Respect function. They have never given anyone a digital headache. Only a few of them have suffered one, and they probably thought it had something to do with the sinuses, or perhaps an impacted molar. None of them have to deal with John Vallinger. Those people, he thinks, lead happy lives.

  His reverie is interrupted by another message from Smedley. “Oh my,” he says.

  “What now?” Vallinger asks.

  “Smedley says he’s at war with us.”

  3/13/72 10:09 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  George Smedley, his aching head in his hand, sits on the hood of Oscar Espinoza’s KIFF. It’s still parked on the abandoned Santa Teresa golf club, within a nine-iron shot of the sand trap tunnel to Juárez. He has his Panama hat wedged between his thighs to keep it from blowing away. The feather is now gone, probably somewhere in the tunnel. Espinoza sits inside the truck. He has the seat reclined and is sleeping loudly.

  The boost reception here is spotty, but strong enough for the suffering Smedley to carry out his business. After his exchange with Dahl, he calls his Pentagon connections and cancels the drone escort in Juárez. It just gets in his way over there.

  Then he turns to the more pressing business. Smedley has brought back a special copy of yesterday’s Tribune, one without watermarked pages. This, Simon told him, will allow him to distribute images of the pages.

  It still feels odd to be doing business with a man who, as a female avatar, has had his way with Smedley’s body. But when it comes to sex, Smedley prides himself on his open mind, and he is content to accept Simon as his lover—especially now that he’s at war with John Vallinger. He and Simon share a common cause. Smedley finds it ennobling to be so open-minded. To be fighting against John Vallinger places him for the first time among the defenders of freedom. Smedley would entertain nothing but wonderful feelings about himself and his life, he reflects, if he didn’t have a splitting headache.

  Holding the paper flat against the hood of the KIFF, he captures images of the first page, and then he turns to the inside page with the rest of the lead story. He captures the image, and then sends both of them to his tech team in Singapore with explicit instructions.

  When he receives confirmation that the pages have arrived, he pounds on the windshield and gestures toward the sand trap. Oscar Espinoza descends from his KIFF with a wistful air. He pauses to take in the mammoth brown vehicle one more time and then trots after Smedley, who is already digging through the white sand, and reaching for the trap door to the tunnel.

  3/13/72 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  On their Sunday afternoon rambles, thousands of visitors to the virtual world Hard to Miss an Artemis come across something unusual. Their avatars pass through the usual gateway to the site, but posted to one side, right next to the bulletin board, is a sign with a simple command: “Read This!” Most of the visitors barely pause to take it in. But a few stop, and what they see is The Tribune’s lead story on the Respect function in the coming chip update. Smedley’s tech team in Asia designed the sign as a peel-away pad of paper. Visitors who want copies of the article can tear off a sheet, fold it, and place it in their pockets. Then, when they mingle with others on the site, they can hand out copies. Once off the site, the papers vanish and turn into links to Smedley’s virtual world. One of the ideas, after all, is to drive new traffic to Hard to Miss an Artemis.

  In the first hours, the results are discouraging. Of the 14,643 people who visit the site, only 420 stop to read the article. Of those, only 84 tear off a copy and place it in their virtual pockets. Seeing these numbers, the Singapore team turns to more pressing business: the long overdue upgrade of the Tasty Twins site, which is losing market share to a host of competitors, some of them featuring quintuplets. Sex sites, it seems, are no place to break political and tech news.

  But the story picks up through the course of the night. Although only a small minority stop to read the news, each person who takes away a copy of the story passes it on to an average of four people, and those people share it at about the same rate, inside and outside of the site. The Tribune article is going viral. By Monday morning, traffic at the Artemis site is up to more than 96,000 every hour—14 times the usual number. Most of the new visitors are barely looking into the virtual world. They skip the hook-ups with cheerleaders, the Second Empire boudoirs, and the new weekly feature—topless Artemi dressed as Pocahontas, paddling canoes. Most simply read the news and grab copies for their friends. A few stop to leave comments on the bulletin board. Some complain about the Artemis site, calling it “tasteless” and “disgusting,” even when compared to other sex sites. But some of the notes on the board are of a different flavor. “If you don’t like this news, come to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Monday at 5,” one said. “Bring your friends.” Others call for protests in San Francisco, New York, Washington, and Dallas.

  Forty-four

  MONDAY, MARCH 14, 2072:

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/14/72 9:16 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  In the woods near Vienna, Virginia, stands a large cube made of black glass. This three-story building, with ten thousand square feet of office space, is Varagon Inc.’s interrogation center. In addition to the professional rooms, provided with cutting-edge surveillance technology and cabinets packed with various medications, the center features luxury bedrooms, an exercise gym, and a sauna, with a pool and basketball court outside. On Monday morning, Tyler Dahl pads down to the kitchen in search of breakfast protein. Dahl spent all day Sunday at the facility, in the company of an anesthesiologist and an armed guard, on the off chance that the newly wild Flynn bro
thers would bring in Suzy Claiborne with a story to tell. They never did. Dahl assumes they’re lost forever, even dead.

  As he forages for food, he sees that seventeen messages are waiting for him. Three of them discuss the Washington Capitals hockey game Sunday night. The Flyers wasted the home team, 9-0. One is from Vallinger, asking for news of Suzy Claiborne. The other thirteen are all links to a message board in the Hard to Miss an Artemis virtual world. Dahl visits the site and reads the article, which by this point he knows verbatim. Then he scans some of the calls for protests on the bulletin board.

  Fortunately, it’s only reaching a few people on this site, Dahl thinks, and it’s not one of the popular ones. If this is the extent of Smedley’s mischief, Vallinger will be relieved. Standing at the entrance gate of the virtual world, Dahl tears off a copy. Then, on a whim, he dons an off-the-shelf male avatar and takes a free introductory stroll around the site. Dahl wasn’t planning to have a sexual encounter. In fact, he knows he should hurry to send a copy of the article to his boss. But he soon finds himself sitting on the floor of a canoe crafted from bark and looking into the eyes of the loveliest Pocahontas imaginable. Naked above the waist, she paddles up the virtual James River, past herons and egrets perched on a single leg. Her paddle strokes leave a series of perfect whirlpools on the glassy surface of the water. A bald eagle swoops down in front of the canoe, crosses the river, snaps up a gray hare in its talons, and flies off. The Indian princess regards Dahl’s avatar with soft green eyes and says, “Can you believe this shit?”

  Dahl is dismayed to hear Pocahontas stray so far from character. “Believe what?” he asks.

  “The news about the Respect function in the update,” she says. “I had no idea.”

  Dahl says he agrees with her.