Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  Somehow Bash found himself naked in a hotel room with Dagny. Sex occurred in lurid kaleidoscopic intervals of consciousness. Afterwards, Bash remembered very little of the perhaps enjoyable experience.

  But much to his dismay, he clearly recalled some boastful pillow talk afterwards.

  “Hadda put a trapdoor in pro’eopape during testing. Lemme get inna operating system to debug. Still in there! Yup, never took it out, nobody ever found it neither. Every single sheet, still got a secret backdoor!”

  Dagny, eyes shuttered, made sleepy noises. But, as evidenced by the subversion of Bash’s Boston Globe on the morning of June 25, when his newspaper had played a symbolical version of their harsh breakup on the shoals of Bash’s eventual honesty during their aborted second date, she had plainly heard every word.

  5

  The Fugitive

  Bash stood up from the breakfast table. His dead newspaper continued slowly to absorb the juices of his abandoned breakfast. The fish-scale wall clock morphed to a new minute. Everything looked hopeless.

  Dagny Winsome had hacked the hidden trapdoor in proteopape, the existence of which no one had ever suspected until he blurted it out. Why hadn’t he eliminated that feature before releasing his invention? Hubris, sheer hubris. Bash had wanted to feel as if he could reclaim his brainchild from the world’s embrace at anytime. The operating system trapdoor represented apron strings he couldn’t bring himself to cut. And what was the appalling result of his parental vanity?

  Now Dagny could commandeer every uniquely identifiable scrap of the ether-driven miracle medium and turn it to her own purposes. For the moment, her only motivation to tamper appeared to consist of expressing her displeasure with Bash. For that small blessing, Bash was grateful. But how long would it take before Dagny’s congenital impishness seduced her into broader culture jamming? This was the woman, after all, who had drugged one of MIT’S deans as he slept, and brought him to awaken in a scrupulously exact mockup of his entire apartment exactly three-quarters scale.

  Bash felt like diving into bed and pulling the covers over his head. But a moment’s reflection stiffened his resolve. No one was going to mess with his proteopape and get away with it! Too much of the world’s economy and culture relied on the medium just to abandon it. He would simply have to track Dagny down and attempt to reason with her.

  As his first move, Bash took out his telephone. His telephone was simply a stiffened strip of proteopape. His defunct newspaper would once have served the purpose as well, but most people kept a dedicated phone on their persons, if for nothing else than to receive incoming calls when they were out of reach of other proteopape surfaces, and also to serve as their unique intelligent tag identifying them to I2 entities.

  Bash folded the phone into a little hollow pyramid and stood it on the table. The GlobeSpeak logo appeared instantly: a goofy anthropomorphic chatting globe inked by Robert Crumb, every appearance of which earned the heirs of the artist one milli-cent. (Given the volume of world communication, Sophie Crumb now owned most of southern France.) Bash ordered the phone to search for Cricket Licklider. Within a few seconds her face replaced the logo, while the cameras in Bash’s phone reciprocated with his image.

  Cricket grinned. “I knew you’d come looking for some of the good stuff eventually, Bashie-boy.”

  “No, it’s not like that. I appreciate your attention, really I do, but I need to find Dagny.”

  Frowning, Cricket said, “You lost your girlfriend? Too bad. Why should I help you find her?”

  “Because she’s going to destroy proteopape if I don’t stop her. Where would that leave you and your fellow Dubsters? Where would that leave any of us for that matter?”

  This dire news secured Cricket’s interest, widening her iguana eyes. “Holy shit! Well, Christ, I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen her since the Woodies. She might not even be in town anymore.”

  “Can you get the rest of your crew together? Maybe one of them knows something useful.”

  “I’ll do my best. Meet us at the clubhouse in an hour.”

  Cricket cut the transmission, but not before uploading the relevant address to Bash’s phone.

  Bash decided that a shave and a shower would help settle his nerves.

  In the bathroom, Bash lathered up his face in the proteopape mirror: a sheet that digitized his image in real time and displayed it unreversed. The mirror also ran a small window in which a live newscast streamed. As Bash listened intently for any bulletins regarding the public malfunctioning of proteopape, he took his antique Mach3 razor down from the wall cabinet’s shelf and then sudsed his face from a spray can. Having been raised in a simple-living household, Bash still retained many old-fashioned habits, such as actually shaving. He drew the first swath through the foam up his neck and under his chin.

  Without warning, his mirror suddenly hosted the leering face of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Bash yelped and cut himself. The Hunchback chortled, then vanished. And now his mirror was as dead as his newspaper.

  Cursing Dagny, Bash located a small analogue mirror at the bottom of a closet and finished shaving. He put a proteopape band-aid on the cut, and the band-aid instantly assumed the exact texture and coloration of the skin it covered (with cut edited out), becoming effectively invisible.

  Bash’s shower curtain was more proteopape, laminated and featuring a loop of the Louisiana rainforest, complete with muted soundtrack. Bash yanked it off its hooks and took a shower without regard to slopping water onto the bathroom floor. Toweling off, he even regarded the roll of toilet paper next to the John suspiciously, but then decided that Dagny wouldn’t dare.

  Dressed in his usual casual manner—white Wickaway shirt, calf-length tropical-print pants and Supplex sandals — Bash left his house. He took his Segway IX from its recharging slot in the garage, and set out for the nearby commuter-rail node. As he zipped neatly along the wealthy and shady streets of Lincoln, the warm, humid June air laving him, Bash tried to comprehend the full potential dimensions of Dagny’s meddling with proteopape. He pictured schools, businesses, transportation and government agencies all brought to a grinding halt as their proteopape systems crashed. Proteopape figured omnipresently in the year 2029. So deeply had it insinuated itself into daily life that even Bash could not keep track of all its uses. If proteopape went down, it would take the global economy with it.

  And what of Bash’s personal rep in the aftermath? When the facts came out, he would become the biggest idiot and traitor the world had ever tarred and feathered. His name would become synonymous with “fuck up”: “You pulled a helluva applebrook that time.” “I totally applebrooked my car, but wasn’t hurt.” “Don’t hire him, he’s a real applebrook.”

  The breeze ruffling Bash’s hair failed to dry the sweat on his brow as fast as it formed.

  At the station, Bash parked and locked his Segway. He bounded up the stairs and the station door hobermanned open automatically for him. He bought his ticket, and after only a ten-minute wait found himself riding east toward the city.

  At the end of Bash’s car a placard of proteopape mounted on the wall cycled through a set of advertisements. Bash kept a wary eye on the ads, but none betrayed a personal vendetta against him.

  Disembarking at South Station, Bash looked around for his personal icon in the nearest piece of public proteopape, and quickly discovered it glowing in the corner of a newsstand’s signage: a bright green pear (thoughts of his parents briefly popped up) with the initials BA centered in it.

  Every individual in the I2 society owned such a self-selected icon, its uniqueness assured by a global registry. The icons had many uses, but right now Bash’s emblem was going to help him arrive at the Dubsters’ club. His pocket phone was handshaking with every piece of proteopape in the immediate vicinity and was laying down a trail of electronic breadcrumbs for him to follow, based on the directions transmitted earlier by Cricket.

  A second pear appeared beyond
the newsstand, on a plaque identifying the presence of a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, and so Bash walked toward it. Many other travelers were tracking their own icons simultaneous with Bash. As he approached the second iteration of the luminous pear, a third copy glowed from the decorative patch on the backpack of a passing schoolkid. Bash followed until the kid turned right. (Many contemporary dramas and comedies revolved around the chance meetings initiated by one’s icon appearing on the personal property of a stranger. An individual could of course deny this kind of access, but surprisingly few did.) The pear icon vanished from the pack, to be replaced by an occurrence at the head of the subway stairs. Thus was Bash led onto a train and to his eventual destination, a building on the Fenway not far from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  As he ascended the steps of the modest brownstone, Bash’s eye was snagged by the passage of a sleek new Europa model car, one of the first to fully incorporate proteopape in place of windshield glass. He marveled at the realism of its “windows,” which apparently disclosed the driver—a handsome young executive type—chatting with his passenger—a beautiful woman.

  The car windows were in reality all sheets of suitably strengthened proteopape, utterly opaque. The inner surfaces of the “windows” displayed the outside world to the occupants of the car (or anything else, for that matter, although the driver, at least, had better be monitoring reality), while the outer surfaces broadcast the car’s interior (the default setting) or any other selected feed. The driver and passenger Bash saw might have been the actual occupants of the Europa, or they might have been canned constructs. The car could in reality hold some schlubby Walter Mitty type, the president-in-exile of the Drowned Archipelagos or the notorious terrorist Mungo Bush Meat. (Suspicious of the latter instance, roving police would get an instant warrant to tap the windows and examine the true interior.)

  Returning his attention to the door displaying his icon, Bash phoned Cricket.

  “I’m here.”

  “One second.”

  The door opened on its old-fashioned hinges and Bash stepped inside, to be met by Cricket.

  Today the woman wore an outfit of rose-colored spidersilk street pajamas that revealed an attractive figure concealed the previous night by her formal armor. She smiled and gave Bash a brief spontaneous hug and peck.

  “Buck up, Bashie-boy. Things can’t be that bad.”

  “No, they’re worse! Dagny is going to bring down civilization if she keeps on messing with proteopape.”

  “Exactly what is she doing, and how’s she doing it?”

  “I can’t reveal everything, but it’s all my fault. I inadvertently gave her the ability to ping and finger every piece of proteopape in existence.”

  Cricket whistled. “I knew you zillionaires bestowed generous gifts, but this one even beats the time South Africa gave away the AIDS cure.”

  “I didn’t mean to pass this ability on to her. In fact, all I did was drop a drunken clue and she ran with it.”

  “Our Dag is one clever girl, that’s for sure.”

  Bash looked nervously around the dim narrow hallway full of antiques and was relieved to discover only dumb wallcoverings and not a scrap of proteopape in sight. “We should make sure to exclude any proteopape from our meeting with your friends. Otherwise Dagny will surely monitor our discussions.”

  Following his own advice, Bash took out his phone and placed it on an end table.

  “Wait here. I’ll run ahead and tell everyone to de-paperize themselves.”

  Cricket returned after only a minute. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Walking down the long hall, Bash asked, “How did you guys ever end up in a building like this? I pictured your clubhouse as some kind of xinggan Koolhaus.”

  “Well, most of us Dubsters are just amateurs with day jobs, you know. We can’t afford to commission special architecture by anyone really catalyzing. But our one rich member is Lester Schill. You met him the other night, right? The Schills have been Brahmins since way back to the 1950s! Big investments in the Worcester bioaxis, Djerassi and that crowd. But Lester’s the last of the Schill line, and he owns more properties than he can use. So he leases us this building for our HQ for a dollar a year.”

  “Isn’t he concerned about what’ll happen to the family fortune after his death?” This very issue had often plagued the childless Bash himself.

  Cricket snickered. “Lester’s not a breeder. And believe me, you really don’t want to know the details of his special foldings. But I expect he’s made provisions.”

  Their steps had brought them to a closed door. Cricket ushered Bash into a large room whose walls featured built-in shelves full of dumb books. Bash experienced a small shock, having actually forgotten that such antique private libraries still existed.

  Close to a dozen Dubsters assembled around a boardroom-sized table greeted Bash with quiet hellos or silent nods. Bash recognized Flanders, Mexicorn, Diddums and the enigmatic Schill himself, but the others were strangers to him.

  Cricket conducted Bash to the empty chair at the head of the table and he sat, unsure of what he needed to say to enlist the help of these people. No one offered him any prompting, but he finally came up with a concise introduction to his presence.

  “One of your West Coast associates, Dagny Winsome, has stolen something from me. The knowledge of a trapdoor in the operating system of proteopape. She’s already begun screwing around with various sheets of my personal protean paper, and if she continues on in this manner, she’ll inspire widespread absolute distrust of this medium. That would spell the end of our I2 infrastructure, impacting your own artistic activities significantly. So I’m hoping that as her friends, you folks will have some insight into where Dagny might be hiding, and also be motivated to help me reach her and convince her to stop.”

  A blonde fellow whose face and hands were entirely covered in horrific-looking scarlet welts and blisters, which apparently pained him not a whit, said, “You’re the brainster, why don’t you just lock her out?”

  Bash vented a frustrated sigh. “Don’t you think that was the very first thing I tried? But she’s beaten me to it, changed all my old access codes. She’s got the only key to the trapdoor now. But if I could only get in, I could make proteopape safe forever by closing the trapdoor for good. But I need to find Dagny first.”

  Cricket spoke up. “Roger, tell Bash what you know about Dagny’s departure.”

  The jaundiced ephebe said, “I drove her to the airport a day ago. She said she was heading back to LA.”

  “Did you actually see her board her flight?” asked Bash.

  “No….”

  “Well, I think she’s still in the Greater Boston Metropolitan region. The time lag between coasts is negligible for most communications. Even international calls ricochet off the GlobeSpeak relays practically instantaneously.” Bash was referring to the fleet of thousands of high-flying drone planes—laden with comm gear and perennially refueled in midair — which encircled the planet, providing long-distance links faster than satellites ever could. “But she wouldn’t want to risk even millisecond delays if she was trying to pull off certain real-time pranks. Plus, I figure she’ll want to finally pop out of hiding to lord it over me in person, once she’s finished humiliating me.”

  The toothy Indicia Diddums spoke. “That raishes a good point. This looksh like a purely pershonal feud between you two. You’re the richesht plug in the world, Applebrook. Why don’t you just hire some private muschle to nail her assh?”

  “I don’t want word of this snafu to spread any further than absolutely necessary. I spent a long time vacillating before I even decided to tell you guys.”

  Lester Schill stroked his long beard meditatively before speaking. “What’s in this for us? Just a continuation of the status quo? Where’s our profit?”

  Bash saw red. He got to his feet, nearly upsetting his chair.

  “Profit? What kind of motive for saving the world is that? Was I thinking of profit when
I first created proteopape? No! Sure, I’m richer than God now, but that’s not why I did it. Money is useless after a certain point. I can’t even spend a fraction of one percent of my fortune, it grows so fast. And you, Schill, damn it, are probably in the same position, even if your wealth is several orders of magnitude less than mine. Money is not at the root of this! Proteopape means freedom of information, and the equitable distribution of computing power! Don’t any of you remember what life was like before proteopape? Huge electricity-gobbling server farms? Cell-phone towers blighting the landscape? Miles of fiber optics cluttering the sewers and the seas and the streets? Endless upgrades of hardware rendered almost instantly obsolescent? Big government databases versus individual privacy? Proteopape did away with all that! Now the server farms are in your pockets and on cereal boxes, in the trash in your wastebasket and signage all around. Now the individual can go head-to-head with any corporation or governmental agency. And I won’t just stand helplessly by and let some dingbat artist with a grudge ruin it all! If you people won’t help me without bribery, then I’ll just solve this problem on my own!”

  Nostrils flaring, face flushed, Bash glared at the stubborn Dubsters, who remained unimpressed by his fevered speech.

  The stalemate was broken when a segment of the bookshelves seemingly detached itself and stepped forward.

  The moving portion of the bookcases possessed a human silhouette. In the next second the silhouette went white, revealing a head-to-toe suit of proteopape. This suit, Bash realized, must represent one of the newest third-generation Parametrics camo outfits. The myriad moletronic cameras in the rear of the suit captured the exact textures and lighting of the background against which the wearer stood, and projected the mappings onto the front of the clothing. The wearer received his visual inputs on the interior of the hood from the forward array of cameras. Gauzy portions of the hood allowed easy breathing, at the spotty sacrifice of some of the disguise’s hi-res.

  A hand came up to sweep the headgear backward, where it draped like a loose cowl on the individual’s back. The face thus revealed belonged to a young Hispanic man with a thin mustache.