Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  And as Leila moved back into the main room, she tried to pinpoint what was different about the world, or her place in it. It wasn’t much, actually. Or the effect wasn’t cognitively intrusive. But there was something. Like a flush; like when you come downstairs after a thrilling sexual experience with a secret all through your body. But this wasn’t fuzzy and sensual, like that feeling was. This was crisp and cerebral…and shared. Everyone in the long library was in on it. An open secret. These were the same strangers that had been in the room before she’d looked at that shimmering screen, but now they were known to her. Not in any intimate way. What’s the opposite of intimate? But not the opposite of intimate as in estranged; the opposite as in abstract, as in broad. That’s the way in which they were known to her, and she to them. So much information is conveyed by glance and stance; so much can pass between us. She trusted everyone here.

  Some of her faculties seemed sharpened. Her eyesight was definitely better. She could dart her gaze around the room, hawklike, and take in a lot; she could read titles off spines at ten feet. Her sense of smell was unchanged, but that had already been excellent. Maybe her taste had ticked up, or maybe the empanadas were just very good and she was hungry.

  When Sarah returned, Leila was in an alcove of atlases, traveling the world, an empanada pressed to her forehead.

  “Are you all right?” said Sarah.

  “Never better,” said Leila.

  “You’re probably just getting used to the effect.”

  “The effect?”

  “Don’t worry—the trippy feeling will wear off soon. Then it’s just a new way of being.”

  “I wasn’t really worried,” said Leila.

  “Fair enough. Some people don’t really like the connectivity part. You’ll see that you can make as much or as little use of it as you need to. It’s going to feel like you can speak a new language—but it’s not a language you speak; you just kind of transmit it and receive it. It’s dormant in all of us, though it comes out stronger in some people than in others. We call it the Common Language, but no one has a clue how to use it yet, really, or what to do with it. You’d better eat hamburgers while you still can, though, because the Talk to the Animals people are fierce excited about the Common Language.”

  “But can I go back to the way I was before?”

  “No”—Leila had known this would be Sarah’s answer—“you can never go back. But Lola, I’m saying to you right now, hand on heart, that I’ve never wanted to go back. Not once. I’ve never wished for that smaller world. I lost nothing of myself when I joined with others. In a weird way, I see now that I always wanted this, that I’d always known it was possible. Anyway, get your skates on, missus. We need to get you to the airport.”

  Back in Dermot’s car, lunging through Phibsborough, Leila asked Sarah, “Don’t you need me to get machines to remote parts of the world or whatever?”

  “Yeah, don’t be worrying about that,” said Sarah. Her window-side hair was getting severely tousled by the late, dark summer air. “We’re generating a new task for you.”

  “But we’re still doing a deal, right? You’ll clear my dad if I do something for you?”

  “We’ll do our best,” said Sarah. “But does it still feel to you like we’re doing a deal here? Because it shouldn’t feel like that anymore.”

  It didn’t feel like that anymore. They were offering her a chance to be part of something grander than herself. These were her people now. She would put her shoulder to the wheel.

  “You should have asked me straight out, though,” Leila said. “About the eye test. You should have said there’s no going back.”

  “There’s no going back from anything, Lola. You learn something true, it sticks with you.”

  They were stopped at a light, Dermot’s black car puttering. Leila noticed precisely the way traffic signals were mounted over Dublin intersections. This information belonged to her forever, as if she were storing it on an external hard drive. Was this another part of what Sarah called the effect?

  “That’s Bertie Ahern’s boozer,” said Dermot, from the front. He was pointing at a pub off their left flank. He drove like a jockey, his left hand rarely off the stick. Her dad drove that way. Cyrus Majnoun’s number-one favorite thing about America? Drive-in restaurants. The man nearly wet his pants at the prospect. Had their father been in charge of meal planning in the Majnoun household, Roxana and Dylan and Leila would all have grown obese. “Look: we are kings and queens,” he would say to his children as they sat in the family Tercel beneath ten thousand lumens, burgers on trays cantilevered from their rolled-down windows.

  “But when will I know what it is I’m supposed to do?” she said to Sarah.

  “Roman’s working out the details. I’ll get onto him now.” She slipped her phone against her Leila-side ear.

  A few minutes later, they rolled down a steep driveway and were admitted via another swiftly operated mechanical door into a bright warehouse arrayed with neat aisles of metal shelving twenty feet tall. Like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dermot rolled to a stop beside what appeared to be a staged living room: a cardboard TV before a coffee table and a leather sofa.

  Leila got out of the car. “Are we in Ikea?”

  “It’s a new arrangement,” said Sarah. “At night, Ikeas are Dear Diary dormitories.”

  “Whatever,” said Leila.

  “They’re ideal. They’re right beside the airport, they can sleep eighty comfortably, and if you’re hungry, there’s the meatballs. Kidding. Don’t eat those meatballs. They come in on pallets.”

  “Absolutely. It’s a good idea. It’s just—you know—not widely known.”

  Sarah led Leila upstairs and through the circuitous showroom; they took the shortcut between Media Storage and Children’s, walked against the arrows toward Bedroom. Leila shrugged a Hey-there at a trio of pajama-clad, toothbrush-holding Asian dudes. They Hey-there-shrugged back.

  Sarah brought her to one of those little pretend apartments meant to show how an untethered urbanite might live in five hundred square feet: all you needed was squared magazines, three shirts, and a colander. Leila knew that that was a marketing deceit; she was relatively untethered, and she had more crap than would fit in this place. Plus, she and Rich had broken up in an Ikea—the one in Elizabeth, New Jersey—so the environment was not emotionally unladen for her.

  But there was something funny about this demo apartment. She looked closer. It was real! The sink was plumbed—she turned on the cold tap and splashed herself—and there were sheets on the bed. She tugged at the string of the blinds and found behind them a real window, a view of a grimy annex of the airport beyond it. She turned and saw her green North Face duffel at the foot of the Malm bed with the Kvist bedding. Sarah stood at the door to the real pretend apartment.

  “Are you staying here with me?” said Leila.

  “No. Feargal and I have to clean down the Parish house.”

  Leila opened her duffel, put her hands on her own things. Her bag had not been tampered with—she always rigged a tube of moisturizer in a way that would tell her if it had been. (Once, in Sierra Leone, she had faced a skinny customs man who was wearing her sunglasses while examining her passport.) “That sounds dangerous. What if those dudes come back? What if they do here what they did in London and Berlin?”

  “Don’t mind that. It’s different here.”

  “Here Ireland? What’s Ireland got?”

  “Twisty roads and an abhorrence of tyranny,” said Sarah.

  “So you guys will just melt back into the countryside?”

  “Pretty much. Feargal and I just have to make sure no one leaves any hardware lying around.”

  “Like those eye-test machines?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “What was that, Sarah?”

  Sarah sat down at the little table in the little kitchen. “Here, I know it’s a lot to take in. Come here to me and I’ll tell you what I know about the eye test.”

&
nbsp; Leila stopped fussing with her bag and sat beside Sarah.

  “First of all, you know that sensate keenness you’re probably still feeling? Well, that’s more of a secondary effect; it’s not actually what the eye test was designed to do. The eye test was designed to give a secure unique identifier to each human subject looking at that screen.”

  “It gave me a number.”

  “Or maybe it made up a number to represent some immutable and unique quality of you. But either way, everyone gets fifteen digits, and no two Diarists have come out with the same number. Not yet, anyways.”

  Leila counted in her head, looking up the way you do. “Mine’s not fifteen digits.”

  “Sorry, it’s fifteen places. There are two zeros that precede your thirteen numbers. They’re silent. I’ve got four silent zeros. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Who designed it? Was there a Dear Diary before the eye test?”

  “Oh, there was, yeah. Dear Diary’s been around for twenty years, I think, though it’s been called by various names. The eye test is newer. It was made by a Diarist called Dr. Hugo Cranium. He was a sixteen-year-old who did biometrics work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in America. He wrote remote lie-detection software. And—well, to cut a long story short, he walked away from the place with the whole state of their art. That’s why the machine’s called a Cranium’s Enumerator.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “The Committee put a bomb under his Segway.”

  Leila laughed.

  “I know, it sounds mental. But I’m serious.”

  “Oh.”

  “The first Enumerators were big clunky machines; they were like planetarium projectors. We had to use a totally dark room and play space music and it worked on only the ten percent who were really, really relaxable. Anyway, we got better at administering the bloody thing now, and once our genomics people were able to move the technology from, you know, electronic computers to the kind we can grow—”

  Leila made a little whachutalkinabout? face.

  “No one told you about how we grow our computers?”

  “Yeah, no.”

  “Crap. Well, I don’t really understand it. I’m Operations. But our computers don’t need to be plugged in, although they do need to be watered and given sunlight, and they can talk to each other without, you know, the Internet. About a year ago, the IT people got Cranium’s machine shrunk down to where they could put it in one of our computers, which look totally innocuous. That allowed us to distribute them more widely than we could before. We’re trying to make it possible to put the eye test on the ordinary Internet, but the risk there is that the Committee will get ahold of it, reverse-engineer it.

  “After even just a few months with the new laptop machines, there were enough people, with enough numbers, that some clever clogs noticed that the numbers generated for each subject could be considered mathematically.”

  Leila made a whaddya-mean? face.

  “So, nine is not just nine—it’s also three squared. Your number is related to you. Deeply. That’s why the first thing everyone knows after the test is his or her number. And you probably know eight to thirteen digits of any other Diarist the moment you meet him or her. Sometimes, with the real sphinxes, it might be only six or seven. But in general, like. Anyway, it’s a new science, or a new art, or whatever you’d call it, these numbers. Some Diarists are a bit spooked by it and try not to look too closely at their own. I see their point. But the numbers do mean something. And we really still understand nothing about our minds and how they work, the electro-limbic-chemistry part, right? We’re pre-Newtonian when it comes to that. So why should this mystery stand out among the others? Maybe this is just the next gravity or something. A new age, and us at its birth. I can’t really explain why, but when I saw your number, I knew that the logistics job wouldn’t be the right one for you. Roman agreed. We asked some number people to put your number against what we need done now and come up with something that would suit you better. And I told them that you needed to be home within forty-eight hours.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So here’s what we need you to do. You remember that guy who was working his moves on you in the Heathrow lounge? You didn’t recognize him, but he’s a bit famous. His name’s Mark Deveraux. He’s this life-change specialist lad; he wrote a book that loads of people loved.”

  “The card-trick guy?” Leila had found the jack of spades while she was putting her carry-on in the overhead bin. That was a damn good trick. “How do you know about that?”

  “The bartender in the first-class lounge. He’s a Diarist. And a Dubliner. Look, Lola, mostly, the Committee is a closed shop. It’s a South Korean who doesn’t leave his armored skyscraper; a Belorussian with food tasters and no photos on record; a pair of German twins in their seventies who manufacture seventy percent of all the pharmaceuticals outside of Asia. But SineCo is pretty much the Committee in North America; it’s the front for all its operations. And the SineCo CEO—he’s called Straw—he’s not as isolated as these other fellows; he needs a certain amount of attention. He has that basketball team, and he’s always endowing business schools and that sort of malarkey. And all that carry on makes SineCo one of the Committee’s most exposed flanks. Right now, Straw is devoted to Deveraux. Deveraux has influence. We need to get to Deveraux.”

  “Yeah, but just because he played some card trick on me…”

  Sarah shook her head. “You’re not going to Deveraux. You’re going to Portland, Oregon, to find a lad by the name of Leo Crane. Leo Crane went to college with your man Deveraux, and a few weeks ago he printed this odd broadside that more or less describes what’s going on, and in the broadside he claims to have ‘incriminating footage’ of Deveraux.” She handed Leila a crinkly piece of paper folded four times. “Read it before you get there. We want you to find out what he’s talking about.”

  “Why don’t you just ask him? Sounds like he’d be glad to hear from you.”

  “You are us, Lola. But we don’t want a full-recruit on Leo Crane. He might just be unwell, or fragile. He added some flourishes to his description of the Committee’s plot that make it a little silly. Scientologists and the like. We don’t administer the eye test to people whose grasp may be slipping.

  “Lola, right now there are hundreds of Diarists working angles on how to get to someone in the SineCo organization. It’s hard. The Committee runs a tight ship. Deveraux holds promise. We got started on the Leo Crane thing only when someone passed us this broadside he’d printed. But it may have become urgent. The Committee turned Crane’s scrutiny numbers way up; he’s currently under observation at a Committee-affiliated facility, which also makes it hard to extract him. So we’re sending you to him, just to talk, to find out if he really has something useful on Deveraux or if he’s just a pot cripple with a grudge and a good imagination. Plus, it’s pretty much on your way home. Will you try?”

  She would be home in forty-eight hours. Would she talk to some guy on her way home? Leila nodded.

  “Okay. So listen. You’re going via JFK. You’re ticketed through, so there’ll be no funny business or swaps, I promise. You’ll be traveling as Lola Montes. When you get to Portland, your phone will direct you to Leo Crane. We’ll try to route your civilian calls to the Diary phone also. Your own devices are in the duffel. But they won’t work until you’re back in LA.”

  Leila was bothered by something. “If it’s the Committee that’s doing all the evil spying and data collection, how is it that we know so much?”

  “You said we,” said Sarah, and smiled. “But yes. We made a compromise. The Committee spies on everything. We tap their lines. So yes, we are spying too. But we’re spying on their spying. And when we come out in the open, we’re going to stop doing that. And to come out in the open, we need to organize—and to organize, we need the data they’re collecting. At least until our transmission network is up and running. But we’re losing access to their data. They’re movi
ng their whole operation—probably because people like you keep running across their facilities. We think maybe they’re bunkerizing, going underground. Or maybe they’re putting it all in orbit. Anyway, there are fewer and fewer trunk lines to tap. That’s why we need someone high up in this SineCo thing they’re calling New Alexandria: to tell us where they’re keeping the data.”

  Sarah’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. “Shite, okay, I have to head out. Listen, Lola, when you get your computer back, or with any computer or smartphone you might use in the future, put a piece of black electrical tape over the webcam.”

  Leila scrunched her face, like Are you serious?

  Sarah’s phone buzzed again, and this time she stood up. “Okay. You know what, Lola? Don’t look directly at any nonhuman lens, okay? The Committee doesn’t have anything like the eye test; it’s not clear that any of them even understand what the Enumerator does. But we fear they’re trying to make something like it. So just never look directly at something that might have a camera in it. Ar eagla na heagla.”

  “Air oggla na hoggla?”

  “It’s Irish. ‘In the fear of the fear.’ It means ‘just to be on the safe side.’” She was backing out of the little Ikea home. “Let me know when your father’s safe, will you?”

  “Yeah. How do I do that?”

  Sarah waggled her phone. “You have my number.”

  “I do?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Leila looked hard at Sarah. She did know Sarah’s number. And knowing it, she knew some things about Sarah. The little crush wasn’t for nothing. Sarah was a good woman, kind and fair and fun. Impatient, though, and ill at ease with children. All this Leila knew as if she’d known Sarah for years.

  “If the phone won’t let you call, find me through the Dear Diary homepage,” said Sarah, walking away quickly.

  “What homepage?” Leila called after her. But Sarah had her phone to her ear again and was talking urgently into it, moving swiftly through a sea of furniture.