Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  “Now bring it forward and extract fears and relevance,” said Cole to the gleaner.

  And from a bud in his ear came scratchy audio, hissing like old tape. One screen in the corona blossomed again: baby monitor, daughter, husband, T-3 days.

  A man was singing a lullaby:

  …speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing…

  “Where’s Mommy?” asked a small girl’s voice.

  “Mommy’s sad right now, bug.”

  “Why is Mommy sad?”

  “She’s sad because your little brother’s not coming,” said the man’s voice. “But it’s okay, bug, we’re going to try to make you another little brother or sister.”

  “But I want that little bruddah,” whined the girl.

  And the man said, “I did too, bug. I did too.” And then he was sobbing and stifling his sobs and Mark tore the screened visor off his head.

  Seamus Cole was staring at him evenly, like How now, guru guy?

  “Why the hell would you be collecting shit like this?” Mark said, looking straight at Cole.

  “It’s public. It’s over our network. We call dibs on it.”

  Dibs? They were calling dibs?

  “But it’s illegal, to spy on people like this.”

  “Information is free. Storage is unlimited,” said Cole, totally unbothered. “Our privacy policy is reviewed regularly, and our mandate to collect is spelled out in the implied-consent decree of 2001. We’re just keeping this stuff safe, anyway. The other server giants have terrible vulnerabilities; they could be erased so easily.” Did he just smirk? “But that’s not really my department.”

  “What is your department?”

  He brought Mark to a little elevator, and the two men rode four decks down and then walked through two negative-pressure rooms with sticky floors. There were men coming the other way, peeling off paper gowns as they walked, as the handsome surgeons on the hospital shows do. Now the passageways were tubular, striated with cabling and cancerous with little blinking boxes. Mark and Cole arrived at a sort of viewing platform, a room with a glass wall. Mark had to get right up close to the glass before his eyes could make any sense of what was on the other side.

  It was a machine. But what kind? A death ray? They were standing at one end of it, and it appeared to extend the length of the ship. On the other side of the glass, men in paper gowns were walking alongside the machine on little scaffolds. It hummed at some primordial frequency. Mark’s fillings were ringing.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s a beast,” said Cole. “A beast that’s all brain. We feed it information—all electronically transmitted information, all the time, over any line we claim—then it builds models: predictive, algorithmic. Ten moves out, twenty, but the pieces aren’t chess pieces, they’re people pieces. And then it extracts anything of value and makes a copy of both those files—the everything file and the anything-of-value file—and writes those files onto solid-state atomic drives and launches the drives down to the ocean floor.”

  There was no way Mark could continue to hide his surprise. “Well, fuck me,” he said, a little under his breath.

  “Yeah. I think what Straw wants from you, at least until we unveil, is more like a cover story.”

  The “relaxing” that Straw had mentioned was, as Mark had feared it would be, entirely unrelaxing. It took place beside a swimming pool in a little stone-tiled terrazzo cloister that was carved into the middle of the top deck of the pilothouse of Sine Wave 2. By means of a remote control that seemed to both dazzle and baffle him, Straw fought with a vast louvered-glass roof that opened and closed across the cloister. Mark kept getting scorched and blinded by shafts of equatorial sun that flooded the poolside whenever Straw accidentally commenced a louver retraction.

  “Damn it,” said Straw. “You ask for one thing to be done right…” Then he buzzed thrice and angrily a little buzzer that sat beside his iced tea; a crew member hustled out from one of the glass walls of the cloister, wearing a sort of waiter’s jacket and shorts. “Close this stupid ceiling,” Straw barked at the guy.

  Shorts were the thing around here. On this upper deck of the ship, the maritime vibe was replaced with a Mediterranean villa vibe, and the male crew were all in snug shorts. Mark had tried Sorry, I forgot my suit, in an attempt to avoid time poolside with Straw, but to his horror, Straw said, No worries, I have one here, and whipped out a particularly abbreviated pair.

  So Mark had to stay reclined in a lounge chair beside Straw’s lounge chair while he tried to get some specifics on the job that Straw seemed to have no doubt he would accept.

  Having spent a year allowing Straw to be vague about SineCo business, Mark was having a hard time determining the nature and extent of what was really going on here. Straw moved from half-formed notion to ill-formed conclusion via cloudy and self-serving thought processes.

  “But you told me that New Alexandria was going to be like a library,” said Mark, “that it would serve the public.”

  “It will. And a library can ask you to obey its rules; it can ask you to apply for a library card, pay late fines, and, yes—if it is the best library the world has ever known—pay a nominal fee for membership.”

  “But if the books that the library, um, collects are already the property of the people the library wants to loan the books to…if you take something and then ‘loan’ it back to its original owner for a fee…” He left the rest of the sentence unsaid, but Straw seemed totally unbothered by the implication, so Mark had to recalibrate. “James, can you see why this”—he made a little sweeping gesture meant to take in the ship and its mission—“would be a hard story to tell?”

  “Mark, let me ask you this,” said Straw. “Can you tell me where the nearest black hole is?”

  “What?”

  “A black hole. The nearest one to us,” prompted Straw.

  “I don’t know. A trillion miles away?”

  “No. Right in your face.” And here Straw reached out and touched Mark’s face, lightly. “Your eyes. They are black holes. They take in light; they absorb information.” His fingers lingered on Mark’s cheek as he waited for Mark to appreciate the depth of the observation. “The machine you saw today is like that. Not just some computer you dump data into, but an organ that needs to make sense of the world. That’s not really something you’d want to stand in the way of, is it?” He didn’t wait for Mark’s answer. “So, I suppose you tell the part that you can tell, which, yes, until we really unveil the product, is not the whole story. And I know it’s going to be hard—that’s why I want you. You’re the best.”

  “And what is the product, exactly?” asked Mark, a little desperately.

  “It’s a product and a service,” said Straw proudly. “It’s order. It’s the safeguarding of all of our clients’ personal information and assets. But it may be a while before our clients discover that they are our clients. So you’ll have some time to work on that part.

  “And there have lately been some information breaches, Mark. We’ve had some close calls. I don’t know much about that. That’s Parker’s department. He says his people are dealing with that, rolling that up. If exposure should begin before our planned unveiling, we may need you to generate some interim explanations for what we’re doing. If we can stay discreet, as we are now, then we need you to keep telling the story of the Node. We’re getting excellent results with the Node, but we need one hundred times the saturation we have now. In five years, I want every non-impoverished Homo sapiens to be carrying a Node. Also, SineLife, the new socialverse we’re rolling out. You know how the youth today won’t make a move without consulting their little circles online?”—he didn’t wait for a nod from Mark—“We need you to get everyone doing that.”

  He sat up in his lounge chair, a little man, too tan, tufts of springy white hair on his shoulders. “We need you to do what you do so well: Don’t sell them on it, convince them of it. Something like ‘SineLife sets you free—to concentrate on what’
s really important.’ But say it in that way you do.”

  Clients who do not yet know they are clients? Mark saw the twisted beauty of it: in this plan there were no victims, only indentured clients.

  And then Straw named for Mark a starting salary. It was the kind of money that Mark had actually stopped thinking he was ever going to see; the kind of money that really does simplify the moral calculus of a thing. He could trade in Dumbo for Tribeca, browse the Argentine estancias listed for sale in the back of Superyachts Monthly.

  And yet. That terrible spying. “But is it legal? What did Cole mean, the implied-consent decree of 2001?”

  “It’s not only perfectly legal under ICD 2001,” said Straw, “but also right and moral under natural law, which, I think we can all agree, allows me to pick up and use something that another man has thrown away. And as long as we operate from within one of our sovereign parallel platforms”—Straw gestured with a flourish of his fingers at the ship they were on—“we need obey only the laws we acknowledge. You taught me that.”

  “I taught you that?” Mark asked, his voice squeaking a bit.

  “‘Build the world you want to be a part of.’ That’s you. Page seventy-seven.”

  Oh fuck. What hideous project was using his stupid banalities as cover? He had even objected, at the time, to the world you want to be a part of line, thinking it was too obviously lifted from Gandhi, or from the Internet Gandhi at least. But he had not considered the risk that something benign like that might give comfort and encouragement to a fascist consortium declaring itself free of all laws and building a data sink on a leviathan freighter.

  Up here, poolside, it was faint, but there was still that high whine somewhere, a ringing. Not like a mosquito. Like a distant alarm.

  “Does the ringing sound bother you?” asked Straw suddenly.

  “What? Yes. You hear that?”

  “No. Not anymore. Here, try these contact lenses. They make the ringing go away.” He handed Mark a clear vial, the size of a film canister, with lenses on a little wand inside.

  All Mark could do was claim seasickness. “I think I need to lie down before dinner,” he said. A lithe pool boy brought him belowdecks, and Singh escorted him the rest of the way to his cabin.

  In his berth, horizontal, he heard the ringing more keenly than he had on the terrazzo. He was closer to the beast. There was a tiny cycle to the ringing, and a regular modulation in amplitude or whatever. Mark folded his pillow around his head like a helmet, but he could still hear it inside him.

  He had no trouble indulging megalomania. Obviously. He was a writer, so the egotists always saw him as their ethnographer, like he was Margaret Mead or whatever. But this was something else; this involved intimate surveillance of everyone in the world, and a computer with scaffolding, a computer like an engorged penis that ejaculated other little computers that swam away with stolen data.

  He didn’t know what to do. He willed himself into a stuporous nap; he had the shirker’s hope that somehow, something about the thing he had to do would be easier tomorrow or next week or when he woke up. Sometimes that hope is rewarded.

  Dinner was lobster. Mark thought lobster sickening. All that rich tissue, and the cracking sounds. Pope, sitting next to him, was sloppy with his melted butter and splashed some on Mark’s cheek. He also turned out to like telling racist and unfunny jokes in what he thought was a comical Indian accent.

  “Where can I find your assistant Tessa?” Mark asked Pope when dinner was finally over.

  “She’s not my assistant. She’s an attorney. And she is lesbacean”—this part he said in his “Indian” accent—“so you can forget about it.”

  “Actually, there are some legal issues I’d like to speak to her about,” said Mark. “If I’m to be the SIC here, I’d better make sure I’m clear on what it is we do.” This despite the fact that he had written copy for a biogenetics company for six years without knowing the difference between a gene and an allele.

  “If?” said Pope, a fork erect in his fat fist. “James, I thought you said your boy here was on board.”

  “He is. He is,” Straw assured Pope. “He’s just doing due diligence.” Straw handed Mark a little card that looked like a magnetic key card—no text on it, just a pattern of colored bars, with a little clip to clip it to your pocket. “That lets you go anywhere on the ship,” said Straw, “you talk to anyone you want to talk to.”

  Mark knew that his cleverness wouldn’t help him too much here, so when Tessa came to the door of her stateroom, he just said, “I have some pretty basic questions.”

  “I thought you might,” she said.

  She led him through some maze work of ship to a room that looked like a staff canteen; maybe ten people in the room, eating off plastic trays, and three dudes playing cards. Tessa nodded at some of them.

  “You want anything to eat?” she asked Mark.

  He said no but changed his mind when he saw the little plastic clamshell of rice pudding in one of the fridge cases along the tray course. Tessa chose an egg salad sandwich and a piece of pie, and they sat down together at one of the Formica tables.

  “How can it possibly work?” he asked her.

  “It’s working right now,” she said.

  “But, I mean, you guys are going to get busted.”

  She didn’t look scared. “By who?” she said, expressing a sachet of bright yellow mustard into her sandwich. “There’s nothing to bust, is our position. We’ve been going for years, anyway.”

  “Captain Konstantin told me this ship is a year old,” said Mark.

  “Who?”

  “Konstantin? Konstantinos? Constantinople? The captain guy.”

  “Oh, yeah. A year sounds right. Before the ships, we were land-based. I think we still have some of those terrestrial facilities in Burma and North Korea.”

  “I guess I don’t understand the payoff, though. I mean, how is this ever going to be worth the expense?”

  She put down her sandwich and looked at him. “You don’t understand because you still live in a time when you can access analog knowledge. But that won’t last much longer. Soon you won’t be able to do much of anything if it’s not online. You’re skeptical, I can see, but that’s because you think being online means being in front of a screen, using a keyboard. Because your imagination is limited, and because most computers still look like typewriters. But we’re on the edge of some technologies that will change all that—”

  His imagination was limited, was it? He interrupted her. “Everyone around here sounds so fucking ominous. What technologies will change all that? Because I remember hearing an awful lot about virtual reality and how I’d never have to go to a real beach again.”

  Tessa did a beckoning thing toward the table where three dudes were playing cards. One of the dudes, handsome, sauntered over. “Mark, this is Chris,” Tessa said.

  “Ryan,” said the dude.

  “Sorry. Ryan,” said Tessa. “You were working in Inputs back in California, weren’t you?”

  “I worked Inputs for six years. Biosampling, mainly.”

  “Tell Mark here about some of the best stuff you’ve gotten to work on.”

  Ryan did this raised-eyebrow thing and ticked his head at Mark.

  “It’s okay,” said Tessa. She nodded at Mark’s little colored-bars card. Ryan straightened up.

  “Pharmaceuticals that transmit, I guess,” he said. “That was pretty cool. But then the nano people kinda robbed us of that one.” He thought. “This wired contacts, though. I’m part of that shop, and we’re doing amazing things.” His pride was sincere and evident.

  Tessa did a very subtle closure gesture and Ryan cleared his throat, nodded, and went back to his card game.

  “Wired contacts?” said Mark. “What? That dude invented LinkedIn or EliteNet or whatever?”

  “Contact lenses, Mark. It’s called visual-channel-collection technology, and we’re five years into it.”

  “Who would wear such things?�
��

  “I’m wearing them right now,” she said and looked him right in the eye. He could see no contacts in her eyes, only the brown, with a hazel fleck in the left. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever known before,” she said.

  He was adrift. They were serving egg salad sandwiches and building a secret world around him, around everybody.

  “We’re early adopters; we’re stakeholders, Mark,” said Tessa. “We want to be part of what’s next. Don’t you? Or do you want to be one of those people who would have been, like, Thanks, no, Industrial Revolution, I’ll stick with my loom and my gaslight? You want to be left behind?”

  She was eating her pie now. “These ships are just a small part of what’s next. And yes, right now this part runs up against something called the ‘right to privacy’”—she made air quotes—“which is a notion that hasn’t really meant much in thirty years and means less every day. You may as well defend people’s right to own steamboats. Someone’s going to control access to all the data and all the knowledge. All of it. Everything that every government, every company, and every poor schmuck needs to get through the day. You want that to be the other guys? Once everyone’s on our network, the old, unwired world will be worthless.

  “And that’s how you guys will make a lot of money out of this,” said Mark, trying to be all bottom-line-y.

  “Money does not come close to describing what we’ll make a lot of,” said Tessa.

  When sleep finally came for him that night, Mark was tossed deep into a grandly staged drama where his mom told him not to take this job. Do not take this job, she said, pulling away from Sine Wave 2 in her old lavender Dodge Dart, which was now also a helicopter. And he went back inside the ship, which was no longer the ship but had become his childhood home, and he grappled with Tessa beneath his Luke Skywalker bedspread, the sweetness of the grappling cut with anxiety that James Straw would walk in on them.

  Chapter 17