The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Vallinger quickly learns that The Tribune has published other articles on the site. But to read them, people have to pick an avatar and pass through the gate. That’s Smedley, trying to expand his filthy business, Vallinger thinks. He looks up from his boost, sees the traffic is still stalled, and decides to try out the site. He selects the avatar that looks like a Roman centurion and makes his way inside.

  The scene is a mess. An angry minority of the customers have come for the sex. And yet most of the splendid Artemi, sculpted centurions, and Indian princesses turn out to be newspaper readers who rebuff their advances. Some call them perverts. Pushing and fighting breaks out.

  Vallinger angles his avatar to one side and studies a large billboard covered with newspaper articles. One of them, the profile he was so pleased with five days ago, features a large image of him. He sees other articles that discuss the open surveillance gate, the tight relations between China and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the censoring of news in the boost. Vallinger tears off copies of them all, stuffs them into his virtual pocket, and exits the site.

  When he next looks up, his Houyi is making its way through an angry crowd of protesters. They’re overflowing from Franklin Square onto K Street. One young woman recognizes him and yells, “It’s Vallinger!” A horde rushes to the car and beats at the windows with their hands and kicks at the fenders as the car descends into the underground parking garage.

  When John Vallinger steps out of the car and walks toward the elevator, he is alone and unharmed, but shaken.

  But when he gets upstairs, one of his technicians runs up to him with news. “Ralf Alvare has popped up.”

  “Where is he?” Vallinger asks as he ambles to his office.

  “Somewhere in the Southwest.”

  Fifty-four

  3/15/72 9:02 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Ralf pushes a button. A small hatch in the machine opens, exposing a titanium shelf.

  “That’s where you put it,” Simon whispers.

  “I know.” With a custom-built tool, which looks like a miniature spatula—the size a chipmunk might use—he removes his boost from the blue snuff bottle and places it gingerly on the shelf. He blows gently to coax it the last millimeter or two, and then pushes the button again. The shelf retracts.

  “You can wear this,” Simon says, holding up a helmet, “if you want to experience it.”

  “I think it might be depressing,” Ralf says. “You know … seeing what I lost.”

  “The interface should be a whole lot better.”

  “Okay,” Ralf says.

  “And you don’t have much time.”

  “I said okay!”

  It was just after dawn that a messenger arrived at headquarters with word that the chip facility in El Paso would be available at nine. Simon, working with Chui by phone from the Kentucky Club, had an hour to set up a security opening at the border and arrange for horses. A little after seven, the two brothers weaved their way through the anti-drone barriers, past the merchants setting up their taco and barbacoa stands, and to the plank that Ellen had crossed. Simon walked across first and wriggled his body through a gap in the chain fence. Ralf followed. The two horses were supposed to be tied to a lamp post on South Ochoa Street. They weren’t around.

  Simon messaged Chui and heard that they’d be there by eight.

  “Call them off,” Simon responded. “We’ll walk.” So the two brothers headed north to Paisano Drive and then east. As they approached, they could see the venerable Bowie High School on the right side of the street. But on the left, where the chip facility was supposed to be, they saw what looked like a vacant lot piled high with festering garbage. A homeless man came up to them pushing a shopping cart full of empty cans.

  “Simon?” he said.

  Simon nodded, and the man led them into the lot, leaving his cart to one side. He pulled a remote from his pocket and touched a button. A trap door opened. Ralf and Simon followed him into a bright illuminated space, its walls plastered with posters from early in the century. Simon pointed out a yellow-faced creature to Ralf and started to explain who Homer Simpson was, but Ralf, focused on the job ahead, wasn’t listening.

  “I think this was an old bomb shelter,” Simon said.

  “Uh-huh.” Ralf, scanning from left to right, spotted a stainless steel machine with an expansive bright screen. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said.

  As the machine reads his chip, Ralf puts on the helmet. No bigger than a yarmulke, it’s designed to cover just the crown of the head. “When I put this on,” he asks, “will they be able to locate me?”

  “No.” Simon shakes his head. “This place gets the same signal camouflage as the other national security sites, like the White House and the Pentagon. They’ll probably be able to tell that you’re somewhere in the Southwest, but that’s about all.”

  “Good,” Ralf says. As the helmet establishes contact, it’s as if he has his boost back. Ten days of messages are streaming in. His virtual worlds deliver reminders of pending sex vacations and basketball games. He doesn’t need the big screen. He sees everything in his head—just the way it should be. The demands on his attention leave him dizzy. But he concentrates and focuses on two segments of the update, his and Suzy’s.

  While Simon watches, Ralf picks apart the code. Except for his darting eyes, the activity is invisible. For Simon, who feels foreign to this technology, it’s as if his brother is composing a symphony in his head.

  Then a message from Chui pops into Simon’s boost. “Your mom wants to come join you. What do I tell her?”

  “Tell her no,” Simon answers. “Too dangerous. She should be over in Juárez now.”

  “I told her that. She won’t take a no.”

  Simon doesn’t dare interrupt Ralf. For twenty-five minutes the computer scientist works feverishly. “This is a lot of work,” he says, clearly enjoying himself.

  “Get it done in a hurry,” Simon tells him, “because Mom’s coming over.”

  Fifty-five

  3/15/72 9:28 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  “She was pregnant and had a ten-year-old, who was extremely difficult, and she had a big job. I cheated on her, then I left her. Made out that I was dead. So no, to answer your question, I’m not going to pretend I’m ‘excited’ that she’s here. I know I deserve it. I do. But the timing’s very bad. Couldn’t be worse.”

  Francisco is sitting with Ellen at a Corona table in the playa. He’s pushing fried plantains with cream back and forth on his plate. He has drained three cups of coffee but barely eaten a bite of his breakfast.

  Ellen is wearing a red cotton dress printed with flowers. She bought it for one yellow coin at the outdoor market. These dresses are the uniform in Juárez for thousands of women, in all shapes and sizes. When Ellen wears her new dress, tying the sash high around her waist, she looks like a 1940s-era movie star.

  She doesn’t have much time for Francisco’s self-pity. “You say you have timing issues?” she says, sounding skeptical.

  “The chip update is tomorrow night,” he says. “We’re the only paper covering it. For the first time since the ’40s, people are taking to the streets in the United States. This man,” he points to Smedley, who’s sitting across the room, “wants me to put the entire newspaper on one of his sites, even though there’s a chance no one will pay me for it. So I’m facing urgent business decisions.” He pauses to think of more complications. “My two sons are over in El Paso, taking great risks to break into a government installation, and this lobbyist in Washington has arrested a woman—my wife’s friend—and is threatening to dissect her brain looking for secrets. So no, it’s not the ideal day to work out thirty years of personal history with my wife.” He shrugs. “Or ex-wife.”

  “Can I be frank with you?” Ellen says, leaning toward Francisco.

  He looks up from his plate and nods.

  “All those years ago, you used what was going on in the world as an excuse not to deal with your family.
You left them to have your revolution, or whatever you had in Uruguay.”

  “Paraguay,” he says softly.

  “Paraguay. So now you feel guilty about what you did, and you’re using what’s going on in the world as an excuse again to avoid your wife. Or ex-wife.”

  “You may be right, but it would still be easier if she came next week.”

  “What’s she going to do?” Ellen says. “Make you feel guilty? You already do. I think you’re being a bit of a chicken, here.”

  “I have regrets,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “You want everything. You want money and power you’ve built here and the family you left behind.”

  “Am I so different from anybody else?” he asks. “So different from you?”

  Ellen, surprised at the turn in the conversation, says nothing.

  “You benefit from your beauty,” he explains. “But you don’t want to give up the honesty—lo auténtico—of the face you gave up for it. There’s two of you, and you want them both. That’s your problem.”

  Ellen sits up with a jolt. “Have you been talking to Ralf about me?”

  “Believe me, guapa, if I can get Ralf to talk to me about anything, it certainly isn’t you.” He recalls their lunch together, when he asked to see the photo of the pre-Artemis Ellen, and she showed him one of Julia Roberts. “That’s when I saw that you had issues. But then again, how can you have two different faces in life and not have issues?”

  “You recognized her?”

  “Of course I did. She was once a famous movie star.” He laughs. “You could have picked someone a little more obscure.”

  They’re interrupted by George Smedley, who walks up to their table. He too has gone shopping in Juárez. He’s wearing a pair of khakis with a razor crease, and somewhere he unearthed a yellow golf shirt with a logo resembling his trademark feather on its chest. “Don Paquito,” he says, “if we’re going to get the paper in the boost by tomorrow, we have to start loading it now.”

  “Give me more time,” Francisco says, waving him away. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  Fifty-six

  3/15/72 9:39 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Simon gets a message and hurries to the door while Ralf, wearing the helmet, continues his work. A minute later, Simon returns with Stella in tow. Her jeans and white shirt are coated with dust from her horse ride; her gray hair is a tangled mess. And Ralf has never seen her anywhere close to this happy. She rushes toward him, her shoes clattering on the polished tiles, and throws her arms around him, taking care not to disturb his helmet. She kisses him on the chin, the cheek, anywhere she can reach, and finally on the wound above his temple where his boost was removed.

  Ralf finds himself hoping she gave Simon an equally warm hello.

  She pulls back from him to see his eyes, and he notices the bandage over her own temple. Anticipating his question, she says, “Oh yes. I’m just like you.”

  Ralf is about to ask her why when a message arrives from John Vallinger. “We need to talk.”

  Ralf puts up his hand for silence and then tells his mother and brother that Vallinger is messaging with him. “What do I say to him?”

  Stella puts the tip of her thumb in her mouth for a moment, composing, and then says: “Tell him that if he so much as touches Suzy Claiborne, you’ll fry his brain.”

  Ralf considers it. “Probably not the best approach,” he says.

  “Let’s think strategically,” Simon says. “Why don’t you tell him that you’ll fly to Washington and would like to work to fix the software update? Make like you’re cooperating, and buy time.”

  “And what about Suzy?” Stella says.

  “Well, Ralf’s not going to work with him if he goes around euthanizing his coworkers.” Simon turns to Ralf. “You’d have to make that clear.”

  “Right,” Ralf says. Then his face contorts with pain and he lets loose a howl. He rips off the helmet and buries his head in his hands.

  “Headache?” Simon asks.

  He nods without looking up.

  Fifty-seven

  3/15/72 11:41 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Bao-Zhi can see that time is running out. For three hours, he has been sneaking to the storm drain on 28th Street, reeling in Stella’s boost and then, minutes later, letting out the line. The police have followed these underground movements, yo-yoing their squad cars and drones up and back, between Connecticut and Cathedral Avenues. Any minute now they’ll send agents into the sewage system with orders to fish out Stella’s dead body. Instead, they’ll find the plastic container holding her boost bobbing on the water. No doubt they’ll follow the fish line straight to the sycamore tree that the exhausted Bao-Zhi is leaning against. It’s just a matter of time.

  What Bao-Zhi needs is to find a digital refuge for the chip—a place to lay low until he’s ready to put it to use. He considers making a run to Stella’s radio-free house in Montclair. But it’s far, and now that she’s on the Most Wanted list, it’s bound to be under surveillance. Also, Bao-Zhi cannot afford to forget that he too is on the list. It is true that as a wild man with a commodity chip he’s much harder to track. But people still recognize a face from time to time.

  He thinks of other dead zones. Defense targets like the Pentagon, of course, are shielded. But that place will be crawling with security. Then there’s the White House.…

  Bao-Zhi hatches a plan.

  Fifty-eight

  3/15/72 9:50 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  The headache from Vallinger came into Ralf’s boost at 9:48 a.m., which means that he still has more than an hour to keep working at the machine. He must either replace the helmet, and endure the crippling pain, or learn how to navigate his chip the old-fashioned way, with hand gestures on the big screen. This is hard, because the elements of the boost that he knew as thoughts and memories are represented on the screen as files and folders, most of them with machine tags that Ralf struggles to recognize. As Stella and Simon look on, he scrutinizes the screen. Then he begins to touch it. He tries opening memories by separating his thumb and forefinger. It works. They watch a few seconds of a little league game in which a bored Ralf lies down in right field and looks up at the wind blowing in a towering elm. He skips ahead and opens another. On the screen they watch a hand gently stroking the neck and bare shoulder of a dazzling Artemis. With a pinch of his fingers, Ralf quickly closes the file.

  “How sweet,” Stella says, unaware that the Artemis Ralf was caressing was an avatar. Simon knows better.

  After a half hour, Ralf appears to have mastered the system. He has located both segments of the software update. Simon and Ellen watch wordlessly as he tinkers with the code. They hear him talking to himself as he untangles long algorithms. “Okay, let’s try this here … uh-huh … and then we’ll put that little bugger up there … and then … Shit!” As this continues, his tone grows angrier and more frustrated.

  Finally he looks up. “It’s not going to work,” he says. “It just isn’t. I could rewrite the code, but I’d have to test it extensively. And then I’d have to either hack into the system—tomorrow—or convince one of my colleagues there to let me do it. It just isn’t realistic. There’s no time.”

  “So what do we do?” Stella asks.

  “We can’t change the code by tomorrow,” Ralf says. “But we can force the people in Washington to—or at least to postpone the update.”

  “You mean with the paper?” Simon says.

  “That’s your tool,” Ralf says. “I’m going to be waging the battle in the boost. I think I’m off to a good start. But I’ll need to be back here tomorrow.”

  He moves to close down the system and Stella stops him, putting a hand on his. “What about Suzy?” she asks.

  “Oh shit,” Ralf says. “Forgot.” He looks at the time on the screen. 10:49 a.m. “Do we have any slack?” he asks Simon.

  “None. It’s a hard stop at eleven.”

  “Okay. Here goes.” He bends forward, and his fing
ers dance across the screen. He starts talking to himself again, but in happier tones. At 10:56, he leans back. “Got it.”

  “What?” Simon asks.

  “You know that headache Vallinger sent me? I’ve isolated the algorithm, and now that he’s messaged me, I have his address.” Ralf places a long string of code into a field on the screen and then dictates a message: “This is a ten-second sample. But if you or your people lay a finger on Suzy Claiborne, you will live with this pain until you die.” Then he touches the screen, sending the message and a dose of pain into the head of a centenarian on K Street.

  The three of them sit for a moment, contemplating Ralf’s work. Then Stella asks, “Shouldn’t we warn Suzy?”

  “Yes, of course,” Ralf says. “I forgot about that.” He looks at the clock. 10:58. “What should we tell her?”

  “How about this?” Simon says. “John Vallinger has sent orders to kill you so that he can study your brain.”

  “I don’t want to scare her too much,” Stella says.

  “Mom,” Simon says. “She has to know.”

  “We only have a minute,” Ralf says. He dictates the gruesome message.

  “Tell her I say hi,” Stella says.

  “Stella says hi,” he adds, and sends it just as the screen goes black and the machine spits out the tiny shelf holding his boost.

  Fifty-nine

  3/15/72 12:54 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  One unexpected bonus at the Detention Center, Suzy Claiborne notes, are the silk sheets. She’s also pleasantly surprised to be enjoying the company of her keeper, Tyler Dahl. He’s cute, she thinks, if a bit full of himself. It’s true that he can be a bit tiresome as a lover, certainly compared to the dexterous Bao-Zhi. Still, things could be worse.

  She rolls across the black silk sheets and snuggles against Dahl, who’s lost in a post-coital slumber. She gives him a kiss on the eye. He opens it slowly.