Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Heidi? Heidi is…” But there she has to put it on pause. Doesn’t she. The ethical thing about now might be to, well, not warn, maybe just happen to mention one or two of Heidi’s minor character zits. But Conkling, poor zhlub, is so desperate here to talk about her, oh and what’s her sign and who’s her favorite band, and, and…

  Please. “You want what, my blessing? Thinks I’m the Rabbi here. How about I write you an audit opinion, I could manage that.”

  Wistfully though rehearsed, “I think you and I took it about as far as it was going.”

  “Yes we could’ve been an item,” Maxine pretends to reflect.

  “With Heidi you don’t think—it’s just the Naser, do you?”

  “You want to be appreciated for yourself.”

  “Bring out the Naser once, people jump to conclusions. Some women can’t resist a military connection, however remote. I was never a field type, in my heart I’m always behind some desk. Not like—”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  It is insanely unlikely he was about to mention Windust. Insane, right? But who else, then?

  22

  At three in the morning, the phone rings, in the dream it seems to be the siren of some cops who are chasing her. “You don’t have all the evidence,” she mumbles. Gropes for the instrument and picks up.

  Sound effects on the other end suggesting an unfamiliarity with telephones, “Wow, these things are weird. Hey, now what’s it doing—is it gonna time out on me, jeez…” It seems to be Eric, who’s been up since the previous 3:00 A.M. and is about to grind and snort another fistful of Adderall.

  “Maxine! You talked to Reg lately?”

  “Hmm, what?”

  “His e-mail, his phone, his doorbell, it’s all dangling links anymore. Can’t find him at work or on his mobile. Like everyplace I look, suddenly no Reg.”

  “When were you in touch with him last?”

  “Last week. Should I be starting to worry?”

  “He could’ve just split for Seattle.”

  Eric hums a few bars of the Darth Vader theme. “You don’t think it’s anything else.”

  “Hashslingrz? They fired him, you knew that.”

  “Yeah, meaning I got fired too, Reg being a class act sent me a nice severance check, but you know what, with core privileges now that let me go anywhere inside hashslingrz, lately the more of my business it ain’t, the more I can’t stay away from it. Fact, I was just about to go down there again but thought I’d better call you…”

  “While I was asleep, thanks.”

  “Oh shit, right, you guys sleep, hey, I’m—”

  “It’s OK.” She gets out of bed and shuffles over to the computer. “You mind some company? Show me around the Deep Web, maybe? We did have a date.”

  “Sure, you can come on my network, I’ll give you the passwords, walk you through it…”

  “Just putting coffee on here…”

  Presently they’re linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms… down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyberthugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined…

  “Some nice foot-lover sites too,” Eric comments casually. Not to mention more forbidden expressions of desire, beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there.

  It surprises Maxine how populated it is down here in sub-spider country. Adventurers, pilgrims, remittance folks, lovers on the run, claim jumpers, skips, fugue cases, and a high number of inquisitive entreprenerds, among them Promoman, whom Eric introduces her to. His avatar is an amiable geek in square-rim glasses wearing a pair of old-school sandwich boards that carry his name, as do those of his curvaceous co-adjutor Sandwichgrrl, her hair literally flaming, a polygon-busy GIF of a bonfire on top of a manga-style subteen face.

  “Deep Web advertising, wave of the future,” Promoman greets Maxine. “Thing is to get position now, be in place, already up and running when the crawlers show up here, which’ll be any minute.”

  “Wait—you’re actually seeing revenue from ads on sites down here?”

  “Right now it’s weapons, drugs, sex, Knicks tickets…”

  “All that real recherché shit,” puts in Sandwichgrrl.

  “It’s still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonizers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There’s already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web—”

  “Is that,” Maxine wonders, “like, ‘Ride the Wild Surf’?”

  “Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything’ll be suburbanized faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’ Then it’ll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom’ll have to saddle up and head somewhere else.”

  “If you’re looking for bargains,” advises Sandwichgrrl, “there are some nice ones around the Cold War sites, but prices may not stay reasonable for long.”

  “I’ll bring this up at our next board meeting. Meantime maybe I will just go have a look.”

  It isn’t a promising neighborhood. If there was a Robert Moses of the Deep Net, he’d be screaming, “Condemn it already!” Broken remnants of old military installations, commands long deactivated, as if transmission towers for ghost traffic are still poised out on promontories far away in the secular dark, corroded, untended trusswork threaded in and out with vines and leaves of faded poison green, using abandoned tactical frequencies for operations long defunded into silence… Missiles meant for shooting down Russian prop-driven bombers, never deployed, lying around in pieces, as if picked over by some desperately poor population that comes out only in the deepest watches of the night. Gigantic vacuum-tube computers with half-acre footprints, gutted, all empty sockets and strewn wiring. Littered situation rooms, high-sixties plastic detailing gone brittle and yellow, radar consoles with hooded circular screens, desks still occupied by avatars of senior officers in front of flickering sector maps, upright and weaving like hypnotized snakes, images corrupted, paralyzed, passing to dust.

  Maxine notices that one of these maps is centered on eastern Long Island. The room has a familiar look, austere and unmerciful. She is visited by one of those rogue hunches. “Eric, how do we get into this one?”

  A brief tapdance over the keyboard and they’re in. If it isn’t one of the underground rooms she saw out at Montauk, it’ll do. The ghosts here are more visible. Strata of tobacco smoke hang unstirred in the windowless space. Scope wizards attend radar displays. Virtual underlings pass in and out with clipboards and coffee. The officer on duty, a bird colonel, regards them as if about to ask for a password. A message box appears. “Access is limited to properly cleared individuals attached to ADC from AFOSI Region 7.”

  Eric’s avatar shrugs and smiles. The soul patch pulses incandescent green. “Crypto’s all pretty old-school, give me a minute here.”

  The colonel’s face fills the screen, broken up sporadically, smeared, pixelated, blown through by winds of noise and forgetfulness, failing links, lost servers. Its voice was synthesized several generations back and never updated, lip movements don’t match the words, if they ever did. What it has to say is this.

  “There is a terrible prison, most informants believe it’s located here in the U.S., though we also have Russian input comparing it unfavorably to the worst parts of the gulag. With classic Russian reluctance they will not name it. Wherever it is, brutal is too kind a description. They kill you but keep you alive. Mercy is unknown.

/>   “It’s supposed to be a kind of boot camp for military time travelers. Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don’t just climb into a machine, you have to do it from inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption—of, or from, anything.

  “Given the lengthy schooling, the program prefers to recruit children by kidnapping them. Boys, typically. They are taken without consent and systematically rewired. Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative histories which will benefit the higher levels of command who have sent them out.

  “They need to be prepared for the extreme rigors of the job. They are starved, beaten, sodomized, operated on without anesthetic. They will never see their families or friends again. If by accident this should ever happen, during an assignment or simply as a contingency of the day, their standing orders are immediately to kill anyone who recognizes them.

  “Standard strategies for deflecting public attention are considered to be in effect. Rapture by UFOs, disappearance into the correctional system, MKUltra-type programs have all proven useful as diversionary narratives.”

  Supposing… OK, say a preadolescent boy was abducted circa 1960. Forty-some years ago. He’d be fifty by now, give or take. Walking among us though liable to disappear without notice, sent again and again into the cruel wilderness of Time, to overwrite destiny, to rewrite what others believe is written. Probably these wouldn’t have been local eastern–Suffolk County kids, better to snatch them from further away, thousands of miles from home, they’d be disoriented, easier to break.

  Now and who, among the previously unsuspected hundreds in Maxine’s Rolodex, would fit a description like that? Long after she’s surfaced again, left Eric to get on with his early morning, back among the unpoetic demands of the day, she finds herself imagining a backstory for Windust, an innocent kid, abducted by earth-born aliens, by the time he’s old enough to understand what’s being done to him, it’s too late, his soul is theirs.

  Maxine, please. Where has she picked up the cockamamie idea that nobody is beyond redemption, not even a murderous stooge for the IMF? Even allowing for Internet unreliability, Windust can be ticketed with a harvest of innocent souls that puts him easily into the company of more renowned Guinness Book murderers, except it’s all happened slowly, amortized one murder at a time, in faraway jurisdictions where neither the law nor the media will discommode him. Then you finally get to see him in person, the scholarly demeanor, the not exactly endearing fatality for wrong fashion choices, and you can’t get the two stories to connect. Against her better judgment, possibly because there’s nobody else to take it to, Maxine knows this has to be brought to Shawn’s attention.

  Shawn’s out seeing his own therapist, so Maxine sits in the outer office looking through surfing magazines. He comes breezing in ten minutes late poised on some wave of blessedness.

  “One with the universe, thanks,” he greets her, “and yourself?”

  “You don’t have to get pissy, Shawn.”

  From what Maxine can gather, Shawn’s therapist, Leopoldo, is a Lacanian shrink who was forced to give up a decent practice in Buenos Aires a few years ago, due in no small part to neoliberal meddling in the economy of his country. The hyperinflation under Alfonsín, the massive layoffs of the Menem-Cavallo era, plus the regimes’ obedient arrangements with the IMF, must have seemed like the Law of the Father run amok, and after enough of it Leopoldo came to see too little future in the haunted city he loved, so he gave up his practice, his luxury suite in the shrinks’ quarter known as Villa Freud, and split for the States.

  One day Shawn was in a phone booth here in town, out on the street, one of those calls he really needed to make, everything possible was going wrong, he kept shoveling quarters, no dial tone, robots giving him shit, finally working himself up into the usual NYC rage, slamming the receiver against the unit while screaming fucking Giuliani, when he heard this voice, human, real, calm. “Having a little trouble, there?” Later on of course Leopoldo copped to drumming up business this way, hanging around places where mental-health crises are likely to occur, like NYC phone booths, after first removing any out-of-order signs. “Maybe a little ethical shortcutting,” Shawn figures, “but it’s fewer sessions per week, and they don’t always last the full fifty minutes. And after a while I began to see how much Lacanian is like Zen.”

  “Huh?”

  “Total bogosity of the ego, basically. Who you think you are isn’t who you are at all. Which is much less, and at the same time—”

  “Much more, yes, thanks for clearing that up, Shawn.”

  Considering Leopoldo’s history this does seem like a good moment to bring up the topic of Windust. “Does your shrink ever talk about the economy down there?”

  “Not much, it’s a painful subject. Worst insult he can think of is to call somebody’s mother a neoliberal. Those policies destroyed the Argentine middle class, fucked with more lives than anybody’s counted so far. Maybe not as bad as getting disappeared, but totally sucks loquesea. Why do you ask?”

  “Somebody I know who was in on all that, back in the early nineties, nowadays working out of D.C., still up to the same nasty kinds of business and I’m worried about him, I’m like the guy with the red-hot coal. I can’t let it go. It’s hazardous to my health, there isn’t even anything beautiful about it, but I still need to hold on to it.”

  “You’ve developed a thing for, like, Republican war criminals now? Using condoms, I hope?”

  “Cute, Shawn.”

  “Come on, you’re not really offended.”

  “‘Not really’? Wait a minute. This is a cast-iron Buddha here, right? watch this.” Reaching for the Buddha’s head, which of course, as soon as she touches it, will turn out to fit her grasp perfectly, as if designed expressly as a weapon handle. In the instant all unfriendly impulses are calmed.

  “I’ve seen his rap sheet,” trying not to edge into Daffy Duck mode here, “he tortures people with electric cattle prods, he pumps aquifers dry and forces farmers off their land, he destroys entire governments in the name of a fucked-up economic theory he may not even believe in, I have no illusions about what he is—”

  “Which is what, some misunderstood teenager, only needs to hook up with the right girl, who turns out to know even less than he does? This is high-school again? competing for boys who’re going to be doctors or end up on Wall Street, but all the time secretly yearning to run with the dopers, the car thieves, the convenience-store badasses…”

  “Yes Shawn and don’t forget surfers. What, excuse me, gives you authority here? What happens in your practice, when you want to save somebody but lose them instead?”

  “All I do is try for what Lacan calls ‘benevolent depersonalization.’ If I got hung up trying to ‘save’ clients, how much good do you think I’d do?”

  “A lot?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Um… not so much?”

  “Maxine, I think you’re afraid of this guy. He’s the Reaper, he’s on your case, and you’re trying to charm your way out of it.”

  Oof. Isn’t this the moment to go stomping out the door with a dignified yet unequivocal over-the-shoulder fuck-you? “Well. Let me think about that.”

  23

  Brooke and Avi finally show up back in the States looking like they’ve spent the year at some strange anti-kibbutz dedicated to screen-staring, keeping out of the sun, and not missing too many meals, Elaine taking one look at Brooke promptly conveys her over to Megareps, a neighborhood health club, and negotiates a trial membership while Brooke loiters at the snack bar on the ground floor, contemplating muffins, bagels, and smoothies in a less than objective way.

  Maxine isn’t that eager to see her sister but figures she has to do at least a drop-by. Turns out at the moment Elaine and Brooke are down at the World Trade Center eyeballin
g the unexplored shopping potential of Century 21. Ernie is supposed to be at Lincoln Center watching some well-received Kyrgyz movie but has actually snuck over to The Fast and the Furious at the Sony multiplex, so Maxine finds herself for an enchanted hour and a half in the company of her brother-in-law, Avram Deschler, who is minding a Tongue Polonaise of Elaine’s, which has been slowly cooking all day in the kitchen, filling the place with a smell initially intriguing, soon compelling. The matter of the federal visits can’t help but come up.

  “I think it’s only about my clearance.”

  “Your…?”

  “You heard of a computer-security firm called hashslingrz?”

  A pointed look at the bottom of her shoe. “Dimly.”

  “They get a lot of federal work, NSA and so forth, and they’ve offered me a job, and in fact I’m starting week after next.” Waiting for at least dazzled admiration.

  That’s all the federal house calls were about? Sorry, somehow Maxine doubts it. Security clearances are routine low-level chores, and there is some deeper horseshit in progress here.

  “So… you met the big guy, Gabriel Ice.”

  “He actually showed up in person, in Haifa, to recruit me. We did breakfast at a falafel joint in Wadi Nisnas. He seemed to know the owner. I told him what I wanted for salary, benefits, and he said OK. No hondeling. Tahini all over his shirt.”

  “Just a regular guy.”

  “Exactly.”

  As if only ditzing from topic to topic, “Avi, you know anything about a piece of software called Promis?”

  A pause maybe a week or two further along than blue lines on a stick. “Kind of an old story in the business. The scheming and counterscheming at Inslaw, the court cases, the FBI stealing it away, and so forth. A cash cow for Mossad, however. From what people tell me.”

  “And the rumor about a backdoor…”

  “There wasn’t one originally, but certain customers insisted, so the program got modified. More than once. In fact, it’s an ongoing evolution. Today’s version, you wouldn’t recognize it. Or so I’m told.”