Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  “Wait. Don’t look yet,” snapped Constance.

  Jeez. Leo looked away. How calm he felt. All this strangeness around him, and it seemed to him just like a summer evening, playing board games with his sisters on the still-warm flagstones around the pool.

  Leila was sitting near him. He looked at her. She gave him a nod and a smile. Oh yeah, that’s why he was calm. He smiled back at her.

  “Okay, look now,” said Constance.

  Leo looked. His eyes swam a little bit, like they’re supposed to when you look at an eye-tripping postcard. “Which way do I read it?”

  “Any way. Just take it in.”

  “I did. Is that a fish?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask questions,” said Constance, put out.

  “You’re not supposed to even want to ask questions,” said Roman.

  Leo thought that was unfair. He looked at Leila. She gave him another nod.

  “Are you looking at it?” Constance asked him.

  “I am. I did.”

  “It’s not giving you a number,” said Constance.

  “That’s not my problem,” said Leo.

  “Can you look at it differently?”

  Leo looked at the screen again, differently this time, and he saw the screen behind the screen, which was another set of symbols, or the same set reordered. He felt a surge of connections fire in his brain. Like a truth hole, but this time it was coming from inside of him. He rocked forward a bit. Was this a seizure? No, it was not unpleasant. All reports of seizures had them as unpleasant. But there was a gluey slowing of time that he recalled from febrile night terrors he’d had when he was sick as a little boy. He was an often-sick child, out of school for weeks at a time, weeks when it was just he and his mom in that big town house. She’d stir the bubbles out of ginger ale, put her cool hand on his burning brow, and together they’d watch game shows. Not so bad. But at night, running a temp of 104, his hearing went too-acute and the closets throbbed with a dark knowledge. This eye test was like that, except that the knowledge was good news, or at least unthreatening. The table spilled tableness out of its being. Light and wonder poured through the windows. Faces dappled on bodies, luminous, open.

  “Leo?”

  He swam through his own mind, toward her voice, and broke the surface.

  “Aaaaand you’re back in the room,” said Mark, from across the table.

  Leo laughed at the joke.

  “Leo?” Leila asked. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” And he was. “That’s a real kick in the pants,” he said. Though, coming out of it, he also saw that it wasn’t unlike a good bong hit, or a gust of wind off a river, or going steeply downhill on a bike.

  “You like your number?” Leila asked him.

  “I do.” It was the phone number of the Riverside Drive place. The fire had gutted the building. Its innards had been rebuilt, its facade remade of cheaper materials. His home was a dermatology clinic now, with a hypnosis-cult thing on the top two floors. Leo had never been in.

  “Why does he get only seven digits?” Leila asked Roman.

  “He’s got an eight-zero lead-in, I guess. It’s also the thirty-fifth Fibonacci number, though,” said Roman.

  “And a Markov number,” said Trip. “I’ve never seen a number as low as that. That’s a lot of white space.”

  “Maybe Leo’s just a very…flexible person,” said Constance.

  That’s what I am, thought Leo.

  Chapter 30

  Fuckin’ Leo, thought Mark. Just sits right down for an eye test like that. Had he not been listening when they said there was no way back? You get only one set of eyes; you should guard them, thought Mark, who would concede, though, that he wasn’t the strictest guardian of his own temple. Leo was doing it for the girl, probably. He had been that way in college also; he wooed with too much ardor. Girls had gotten cheesy dorm-room deliveries of flowers and cupcakes and poems. Had he never learned that the good ones liked to do some of the work themselves? Now that Leo was eye-tested, Mrs. Red Brigades over there was really going to lean in on him, Mark feared.

  “Now you, Deveraux,” said Constance, giving a chair a little scrape on the floor to make the point.

  He stayed seated, reclined, even. “What if I won’t do it?” he asked her. “Now that I’ve been here, to the Little House in the Satellite-Cloaked Alpine Crater, I mean. How would you mitigate the…liability I represent?” Step Eight: Make Them Say What They Mean.

  After a pause, Hazards seemed to concede that the question had fallen to him. “In that event—I mean, if you were threatening to compromise us, or if we couldn’t be certain that you wouldn’t, we would render you unbelievable.”

  “Render me unbelievable?” echoed Mark.

  “Certain compounds could be gotten into you that would make it so that no one would believe what you were saying,” said Hazards. “Plant-based compounds. Self-limiting. Pretty benign.”

  Mark looked at him. The passive voice, the could be gotten into you; the way Hazards had looked straight at him when he’d answered. How would he deal with Trip Hazards and his plant-based compounds? Someone like that was probably always on the lookout for the head-butt. And the run-away? It was just those Dr. Seuss trees and the moonlight out there, a steep ridge and piney mountains beyond that. A twisted ankle, a pack of wolves.

  “Just tell me what you want me to do. I don’t need to take that test.”

  “No way,” said Constance. Roman shook his head also.

  “Why won’t you take it, Mark?” said Leo, unhelpfully. “You should take it.”

  “Because I don’t want to be you,” he said in a raised voice, losing some cool. He didn’t mean just Leo. He meant all of them, and he used his hands to include the whole table. “No offense intended. You can keep your connectivity. I want to be me. Just me.”

  “But you are such a shit,” said Constance. “You only want to keep your money, your privilege.”

  “I worked for that money,” said Mark.

  “Please. That’s not work. That’s cheating. Have you ever really worked?”

  What about Grill Ride? Or what about at Harvard, where he’d faced daily the mean fact that he would never have half the money that most of those kids already knew they would have. He had worked like a fucking beaver then, deep in the passages of Widener, to prove that prep school had been a waste of their parents’ money. How about when the financial aid had dwindled, and Mark had to take a leave of absence and work full-time? What friends he had drank their junior years away in Barcelona and Prague while he took a subdignified job as a chiropractic-office manager. Who had had to open the office at a moment’s notice, on a Saturday, to see that the wind chimes were switched on and that there was plenty of oolong tea on the little drinks table? Mark, that’s who.

  Never worked hard, indeed. How about the fifteen years of work of keeping a dream alive, of just knowing somewhere deep inside that you are smarter than most people and that there must one day be a chance to leverage this fact? How about the work of holding it all together? The work of making sure your mom gets the best care there is? The work of keeping your story straight? Besides, there is the scrape of luck in everything, from the missed bus, to the dinged chromosome, to the hurtling asteroid.

  “If by worked you mean the book you wrote, that smug nonsense about how everyone can be more effective and richer and more self-centered, no one here’s buying it.”

  This too stung. “Yeah, I didn’t really write that one. They did. My next book will address some of those complaints, I think. I hope you’ll read it. Well, not my next one, actually. You should skip that one. But the one after that. I’m going to call it Try Again Tomorrow.” He was so proud of the title.

  “See, there’s your problem right there,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you call it Try Again Right Now?”

  Shit. It was like a tiny missile landing on division headquarters. She was precisely right. Try Again Tomorrow was an excuse in the guise of exhor
tation. But Right Now? Like, Right Now right now?

  “You really find it so unbelievable, Mark,” said Roman, “that people could get along and share what’s here? That we could finally see the common good, instead of all of us toiling away to buy ourselves the same stuff? Didn’t you go to first grade? Haven’t you ridden a city bus, or even waited in line for a movie?”

  Mark had done all those things. But he hoped to never ride a city bus again, actually. “We might get there, I suppose. But I can’t be sure that you know what the common good is. And I bet you’ve all benefited from the system you say you oppose. You people are clearly top-of-the-heap types. You really want this great redistribution to go down? You ready to toil at the bottom? Mine that mineral they need for cell phones? Cellphonium or whatever?”

  “I’m not a top-of-the-heap type,” said Constance. “I’m down here in the thick of it.”

  Mark ignored her. “You talk about how it’s going to be like a chore wheel, everyone just stepping up to do his part. You know who else thought highly of the chore wheel? The Khmer Rouge, that’s who. Oh, and Stalin and Mao, and probably some of those crazy African motherfuckers too. Idi Amin and What’s-His-Nuts, the guy who’s not dead yet—Mugabe.”

  “You’re just making a lot of noise here, you do realize?” said Constance. “You’re only invested in seeing things not change because of who your bosses are. No one here is going to buy any of your excellence-of-the-individual shit.”

  Well, it seemed that Constance Nozzikins had watched at least one of his most popular webinars.

  “Look,” Mark said, “you want to redistribute your way to a better world? The distributors always become the assholes. You’ve just got to let everyone scrabble it out, even if some people are always going to end up with more.”

  “You just called yourself an asshole, right?”

  “No. I’m a scrabbler. I was saying you guys are gonna be the assholes.” Mark turned to Leila. “You took this thing? This eye test?”

  Leila nodded. “It was after we met in Heathrow, Mark. I’m new like you. Come in. The water’s fine.”

  Creepy. Kinda hot, but creepy.

  But Leila wasn’t the bossable or suggestible type. He knew that from playing cards with her in Heathrow, and from today, when they’d fled Nike and tramped through the forest. How would they have gotten her to do this?

  “How’d they get you to do this?” he asked her.

  Leila glanced at Roman Shades. He nodded a tiny assent.

  “They said they would help me if I joined them. And they did.”

  “How?”

  “Your people fucked with my family. Framed my dad, gave him a heart attack—”

  “My people?” Mark interrupted. “Look, if you mean Straw, SineCo, the Node, all that…I know it’s data mining, and it’s no damn good. But we’re not giving anyone a heart attack. Or I’m not, anyway.”

  “Yeah. Data mining, Deveraux. Sure. That’s what it is,” said Constance, sarcastic as a teen. “They just want to sell your address to Sunset magazine.”

  Mark had no immediate reply.

  “Information insurance?” said Constance. “Is that what Straw told you they’re at?”

  That was the euphemism Mark recalled was most often applied to the activity taking place on Sine Wave 2. She was right, information insurance didn’t really capture it.

  “Because that’s not the plan at all,” said Constance.

  “Oh yeah? What’s the plan, Nozzikins?” Mark tried to say her name sarcastically.

  “They intend to influence the thought and language and culture and the social order by controlling the means by which we communicate with one another. First they’re going to get us used to the idea of giving up to their systems all of the information in our lives—”

  “No one will do that,” objected Mark. “People guard their secrets. Or if some people want to do that, I suppose that’s their thing, and they deserve what they get.”

  Constance waved his objection aside. “Really? What about that new SineLife app where you activate the video feed on your SineLenses and record for a day, and your Sine ‘writes’ an account of your day: They have people clamoring to beta-test it.”

  The Screenplay: You app; yes, Mark knew of it. That was part of what he was supposed to have been cross-promoting at Nike.

  “And once they have all this, this book on us, there are lots of bad things they can do with it. Maybe it’ll be a plain old pyramid scheme, where one cent on every dollar in the world flows to them. Maybe they’ll pretend to be North Korea or Ukrainian cyberthieves, and they’ll collapse everything and then sell back to you your master password, the one you didn’t know you had, the one that it turns out you’ll need if you want to recover your bank balance, your birth certificate, the title to your house, your right to your genetics. Whatever it is, it’ll be pay-to-play, across the board. Maybe they’ll just go the bleed-us-dry route. Like, make the world into a rubber plantation, with Committee principals safe in their armored superyachts and private continents.”

  What she described did sound like Straw and Pope scheming over their snifters in buttoned club chairs. He wished she would stop talking, give him a minute.

  “But that’s not what I think they’re planning,” she went on. “Or I think maybe they’ll do that first, but the real plan, their final solution, is a targeted genocide. I think the Committee principals are like those Georgia Guidestones people. At the top, anyway. I think they’ll need about ten years to collect enough biological and genetic material on us before they can ask their big computers which five percent of the human population should live so that they may begin the world again with their new project, which they call Enhanced Humanity, by the way. One of their writers came up with that. That’s the kinda shit you’ll be doing.”

  He had to get out of here. “Does anyone here have any weed?” he asked the table. No one responded. He asked again. “Weed? Pot? Ganj? The chron?…Trip, you look like a man who knows his way around the business end of a bong. You holding?”

  Hazards gave him a long look, then said, “Zip-lock in the terra-cotta pot on the porch, to the left of the door.”

  “Thank you,” said Mark, standing up from the table in a manner that he hoped conveyed affront and impatience. He didn’t want to look like a scared, tired, confused man jonesing for a fix.

  On the porch, he found the bag of pot, more than he was expecting—not a crinkly little baggie, but a folded freezer bag the size and heft of a dead pigeon. And what was this? A little tin of tobacco also. Yahtzee! He rolled a spliff and sparked it. He sat there in the night. The dark ring of the crater around him in the distance, a pink moon in an indigo sky. He could smell wet meadow and wood smoke.

  A minute later, the screen door skkrringed open and it was Leo, coming out alone. Leo approached, and Mark spun the spliff around, smooth as a sailor on watch, to offer it to his old friend. Leo made the faintest declining gesture.

  “Oh yeah. You’re in recovery,” said Mark. “Though I see you still allow yourself neurotransformative eye tests.”

  “It’s not like that, Mark.”

  “What’s it like?” He was really asking.

  “It’s like—you know how sometimes you wake up and you know just what to do? And you’re not baffled, and you’re not afraid of being found out, and you have no secrets, and you forgive the trespasses and are forgiven for your own?”

  “Ah, yes. The mythical Huey Lewis drug,” said Mark.

  But, yes, Mark did know those times. When he was with that last, lost love of his; for a while in college; some earlier times, back in the mists of his easy, humble childhood. Easy? Sure, the coop-flown dad. But we all have our things. There was the safety of his home, his mom, and Monopoly. Maybe that’s why all the drugs. Maybe he was just trying to get back to that.

  “Really?” he said, squinting at the lit tip of his spliff. “They scan my retina and I am found?”

  “It’s not a scan; you just look at this
screen,” said Leo, trying hard to explain. “You know, like on a pachinko board, how the little ball drops randomly on one side or the other of all those little pegs? It’s like that. The way your eyes traverse the field makes a unique identifier, and you get a number. The test doesn’t take anything from you or leave anything behind.”

  “Like a pachinko board?”

  “Yeah, except much, much bigger. And instead of pegs, your eyes bounce off ideas. Actually, I guess I don’t necessarily know what pachinko is. And the screen looks back at you.”

  “How can a screen look back?”

  “I don’t know. But this one does,” said Leo. “Maybe it’s the Second Coming.”

  “Say again?”

  “Well, why wouldn’t it happen that way? You know? Online, I mean. They wouldn’t try another guy-in-slippers thing, I don’t think.”

  “Who are they, Leo?” asked Mark. “And don’t you mean sandals?”

  “Yeah, sandals. You know: They. Our judges. You’re the one who taught me to think of them as judges, Mark. Don’t you remember?”

  Vaguely. In those months after Leo’s parents died, when he was flailing. The sisters were all older when it went down. For Leo—not a child, not really a grown-up—it hit hard. So Mark took him off to Maine, out of view, away from the sisters and the lawyers and that creepy grief counselor. On the drive up, they’d divined this whole cosmology in which there were angel-y spirit things that looked down on the poor earth, but they were not omnipotent or even omniscient; they were just way older than the corporeal people, and they had some pull in the world. These were the judges. You picked your judges specific to the situation, was the loophole. That made it a forgiving cosmology.

  “Speaking of,” said Leo. “You fire all your judges?”

  “What?”

  “That book you wrote. The inside-out one.”

  Here was his chance to do this, at least. “Leo, I’m sorry. The toy heir in the book wasn’t supposed to be you. Your family makes games, not toys, right?” Leo gave him a scrunched-lip bullshit face. Mark stopped. “I’m sorry. I really am. My bad.”