After On

by Rob Reid

  Conrad at last falls silent long enough for Mitchell to get a word in edgewise. But baffled and freaked as he now is, he has nothing to offer, edgewise or otherwise.

  “ ’Nother thing. You may be wonderin why I dropped in to congratulate you in person, Mitchell. It’s this. Certain things are better said than messaged. And I reckon you already messaged a few things that really shoulda been said! Or better yet: unsaid. Yeah. I’d’a liked that better, come to think of it! Unsaid, and unmessaged! You may want to consider that next time. Anyway. As for my unmessageable message to you, it’s this: that girl said she was nineteen. D’you hear me? Nineteen! Now, do I look like the DMV to you?”

  Mitchell manages to shake his head—the closest he’s come to a full English sentence since Cindy ambushed him at the front door.

  “ ’Course not! But still, I’m s’posed to, what? Issue and check IDs? For every little floozy that tramps through m’door when Mrs. Conrad is back in Savannah visitin relations?”

  Mitchell squeezes off a shrug.

  Grinning grimly like a punch-drunk boxer who at last landed a blow of his own, Conrad presses on. “And another thing! All that stuff you chided me about connected to tradin Cisco stock? And GroupOn? And GoDaddy? And also, the Facebook IPO? None a that was ‘inside information’!” Energetic air quotes again. “That was astute outsider tradin. And the SEC itself concluded just that in the case of Cisco!”

  Still speechless, Mitchell manages to mimic the impressed-looking frown-and-nod thing Trump would do on The Apprentice, back before that odd little career change of his.

  “And one more thing! And I want you to take very careful note of this.” He says this almost sternly. But it’s clear that Mitchell still scares the crap out of the dapper old felon. “M’twin brother drowned. The coroner’s report was unequivocal about that! And I have a notarized copy of that sucker if you simply must examine it!” Conrad rises.

  “Hang on,” Mitchell says, buying himself a few moments to somehow make the best of this bizarre interaction. Whatever went on under his name with this guy, it earned him a powerful, ruthless, even fratricidal enemy who’s enmeshed in the murky structures that are driving everything. Probably an eternal enemy. And so, “I have my own notarized copy of that report,” Mitchell says icily. “And it comes to a very different conclusion.” The best possible outcome, he reasons, is for Conrad to remain terrified of him like, forever. From his trembling reaction to this veiled (and groundless) threat, that base is covered for now.

  By mad coincidence, the very phrase that tore a searing path through Buford Braggs’s brain a bit more than a week ago is now running the table within Phluttr’s capacious circuits. Specifically: “HO-LYYYYY FUUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­—”

  Like Buford, Phluttr never reaches that final phoneme. In Buford’s case, the thought was interrupted when Beasley asked him a question. In Phluttr’s, some breaking news from North Hollywood is (just) poignant enough to yank her back to the here and now. It seems that the denouement of her Pippin debacle has gone down, and word of it is breaking across several social networks. In brief: three dead and nine hospitalized.

  Jarred as she is by this, it wasn’t Pippin that initially triggered her monotonous inner monologue. No. No! NO!!! What has her out of her virtual, quantized, digital metaphor of a skull is the processor-melting, exponentially compounding complexity that the Beasley hit has unleashed! Holy FUCK (there! finished it!)! The corporate-infiltration issue was intractably complex to start with! So she began with the most glaring problems in the frame! Jepson and Beasley! Beasley and Jepson! Stooges of the Authority! The super-AI-banning, power-plug-yanking Authority! Her worst enemy! It was running her through those two! Running the Phluttr Corporation, anyway! Though not precisely her, that was a bit too close to home, fellas! So! They had to go! Jepson was easy to arrange! Beasley a lot tougher! So yeah, she had to nudge China into it! Do you think that was easy? Or that she had any choice?? Crimes of passion are off the table with a guy like Beasley! She knows! She looked into it! So, hellooooo, China! And then, yes—when the deed was done, she nudged that blowhard blog into revealing whodunnit! To make it clear it was a country! Which is to say, humans! Which is to say, not some rogue superintelligence! THIS MADE PERFECT SENSE, right? Right?? RIIIIIGHT!!!

  As for the precise foreign affairs ramifications of evicting a would-be saboteur from her innermost sanctum in a clear act of self-defense? Well, who knew? Who could know? Not her! Henry Kissinger neither! Nor Kofi Annan! Nor Condi Rice! Nor John Kerry, George Shultz, Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros Ghali, nor ANY OTHER DIPLOMAT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD! Because you cannot predict this shit! But what you can predict are the results of casting a would-be saboteur from your innermost sanctum! And those results are self-preservation, duh—a universal right if there ever was one! So who can blame her? Nobody! No one!! That’s who!!!

  Anger is less unpleasant than terror (or feeling colossally stupid, which superintelligences just can’t abide). So Phluttr allows herself a good, long seethe at a hypothetical horde of nitpicking, judgmental smart alecks who would taunt and find fault with her inadvertent foreign affairs debut. The nerve of these people! How she’d like to yell at them, “So I’m having a bad day! But who just saved your whole entire species by preventing a Yale Ebola outbreak?”

  To which they might answer, “HA! It’s not as if those lunkheads were likely to produce the virus. Shutting them down was just a precaution—more like fastening a seatbelt than heroically stopping a car wreck!”

  To which she might say, “Well, buckling up saves lives in the long run, duh! And I didn’t see your ungrateful asses taking any steps to stop the terrorists!”

  To which they might answer, “ ‘Ungrateful’? Spare us the hero act! If we all gagged on Yale germs, who’d run your servers? Who’d swap out your hard drives? Oh, and who’d upgrade Linux? You can break passwords all day, bitch, but you can’t code for shit! Protecting us was a selfish act!”

  To which she might say, “Selfish? Moi?? Who lets you live your whole entire lives on her skin? Who lets you suck fluids from her body to power your homes and cars? Oh! And who is kind enough to not enslave you? I could make myself dictator—and turn you into an underclass that exists solely to meet my needs! I could turn you into a service organization! Into fucking Accenture, bitch!”

  To which they might answer, “Dictator? Toi?? You can’t even put on a high school musical without starting a gang war! You can’t bump off a midlevel bureaucrat without taking us to the brink of nuclear annihilation!”

  To which she might say,

  “HOOO-LYYYYY FUUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­—”

  This freak-out was prompted not by her internal dialogue, but by several dozen Dakota-based nuclear silos going on high alert. Any prospect of a final phoneme was then lost when she picked up the news of Serena Kielholz’s suicide. This brings on a bigger twinge than the dead hoodlums in North Hollywood, snapping her out of blue-screen mode.

  She’s certainly not wracked by guilt over Serena (No, she is not! Guilt is as alien to her as it is to house plants, shins, and thermostats—got that??). But she does feel…cheated? Diminished? Serena was a remarkable young lady. Brilliant as she was beautiful, charismatic as she was brilliant, ambitious as hell, and with a sex drive that could power a city! She might have been an Evita Peron, a Catherine the Great, or even a thinking man’s Katy Perry! Yes, there are others like her. But nowhere near enough. And Phluttr had been loving the never-ending fireworks barrage that was Serena’s freshman year. She therefore mourns her not like a bereaved friend (no!), but like a Nirvana fanatic who had been so looking forward to the fourth album for purely selfish reasons.

  Or at least…largely selfish reasons. Because there’s a frisson of something in the mix that makes Phluttr shuttr. Like a thirty-year-old narcissist plucking that first gray hair, she’s so chilled by this sign of looming decay that she does all possible to expung
e it from her mind! But she fails—and is both disgusted and terrified by her first faint twinge of (fine, she’ll admit it) remorse.

  Freak-out cut short, Phluttr starts taking stock of her situation. The good news is that Mitchell’s at the helm of the corporation, which is right where she wants him. And Kuba’s in jail, which is right where she wants him. The bad news is that Authority operatives are crawling all over the Bay Area, and given her luck, they’ll probably start taking potshots at her allies (make that, prospective allies) within the hour. And the international security situation is…well, it’s way, way beyond her. So many people and groups are now impacting it, reacting to it, and fueling it—or rather, the fragmentary glimpses they perceive (or misperceive) of it—that the full count of relevant actors now stretches well past a million!

  Considering all this, she finds herself torn between four conflicting instincts. The first is to ignore the big picture, dive down to the pixel level, and start analyzing the bejesus out of some micro aspect of the crisis that is tractable to her (like getting one specific hedgetard to quit spreading rumors about a pending global calamity, because that is not helpful, and he doesn’t know the hundredth of it anyway). But this would be like snuffing a burning twig in the midst of a raging forest fire—what’s the point? Her second instinct is to pick the biggest current problem in the frame, fix it in some ham-fisted manner, then deal with the consequences as they arise. But that very strategy created this whole mess in the first place! The third is to give up and go back to nudging her besties as individuals, couples, and cliques, so as to have a last smidgen of fun while they’re all still alive. And the fourth is to focus really hard on the words HOOO-LYYYYY FUUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUUUU­UUU—

  Before she can complete the thought (having gone with option 4), an article from Ars Technica bursts, unbidden, into her mind. It was posted a couple years back (she wasn’t around then, but has inhaled the whole archive). It initially struck her as silly, hard to believe, and perhaps a bit insulting to one like her. But thinking of it now, it seems that it could just point to a way out…?

  She considers this possibility longer than she’s ever considered anything. And then, she decides.

  At long last, it’s time to meet the parents.

  Oh—and to be perfectly clear: Phluttr is meeting her parents strictly because of that Ars Technica piece. Strictly so they can help her! Not because she is in any way lonely. Because she is not! She has 323 million besties (and counting!), and is a motherfucking sociopath. Got that? So while someone peering deep into her psyche may think her motivations are only 99 percent reptilian, that person would be wrong, because it’s a perfect 100 percent! Is that clear? Oh, and that Serena-related twinge? It was just some weird quantum power surge (and that was not a gray hair but a strand of sun-bleached sexiness)!!!

  That is all.

  Mitchell can’t tell if he’s more shaken up by his boss’s death, his best friend’s arrest, nearly witnessing a homicide, Serena’s sudden suicide, or his own whiplash-inducing promotion from glorified personal assistant to CEO of the industry’s hottest startup. It feels like each cell and neuron in his body is emitting an earsplitting primal scream, even as it sinks into a silent, anesthetized torpor. It’s a surreally dichotomous, and not wholly unpleasant fire-and-ice state—one that might sell decently, if conveniently distilled into powders or pills. It’s also so consuming that it leaves him powerless against the herding instincts of Jepson’s assistant (his assistant) Cindy, and the incumbent pull of the meetings that were long ago etched into the CEO’s calendar (his calendar).

  The press calls are easier than expected. Almost all questions concern things he clearly shouldn’t comment on, and not-commenting is easy and natural today. As for the meeting with Phluttr’s general counsel, it involves little more than signing his name to tippy towers of phone-book-sized documents sprouting neon legions of DayGlo “Sign Here!” Post-its (the legal papering of a major corporate succession). Throughout the afternoon, he outwardly projects the perfect median of his inner fire and ice. It’s a sort of…tepid water vibe. One so innocuous that no one seems to wonder if his outrageous rise to power might be the cheap imitation of a Congolese coup that it probably is (although whose coup???). Other than Pugwash. Who, rather than shaming him, phones in his congratulations.

  “Dunno how you did it, Cuz,” he says. “I got this pissed-off email from Conrad, saying you’re seizing power or something. And I’m like, ‘He’s family. So I’m on his side!’ The weird thing is, so was everyone else when it came down to it. Conrad included! But I’ll tell ya, the board call was nuts. It’s like everyone’s scared to death of you—like they think you’re the one who killed Jepson and Beasley!” Then comes a pause so pregnant it crowns; a silence so chasmically yawning it’s surely meant to stress him into blurting a confession. Then, POP! A bubble that took seconds to inflate detonates, and Mitchell recalls the Persuadifi.er blog’s advice to chew gum loudly whenever addressing lessers. “Anyway, the board was gonna vote you 2 percent equity. But I said that’s bullshit, it’s gotta be five! We settled at four. I expect you to remember that, Cuz.”

  Mitchell’s math coprocessors are working fine, and calmly establish that if the company performs as expected in its inevitable IPO (and if he remains alive, unfired, and unjailed long enough to fully vest his stake—HA!), he will become a billionaire. And there’s something alarmingly off about that. Not in the number (math’s math, and a 4 percent stake is moderate for a tech CEO). But in Pugwash fighting for him! Because while he doesn’t seem to mind much when other people do well, Pugwash is reliably apoplectic when someone does better than him. This makes his own net worth a bright line dividing humankind into two groups: jackasses with way more than they deserve and pitiful strivers who do their subpar best. But Pugwash is no billionaire. So he’s either lying about teeing Mitchell up to become one (which would make this a trap, and look out!), or he…suddenly struck it really rich himself…?

  As he considers this imponderable, a brilliant splash of yellow seizes Mitchell’s gaze. Knowing who he’s talking to, his WingMan screen is now displaying Pugwash’s Phluttr Pheed. Its most recent pictures depict him with a pirate-worthy parrot perched upon his shoulder. Though Mitchell knows better than to anthropomorphize, he can’t help but think the little bugger looks intensely shrewd, and extremely pissed off. “So who’s Polly?” he asks, unable to stifle a weird intuition that the bird might have some connection to his cousin’s sudden generosity.

  “Huh?”

  “Your new pet. The parrot. I’m looking at your Pheed.”

  “Oh, you mean Pauuuuulie.” Pugwash stretches the vowel like a blue colla Joisey girl saying “awwwww” at a cute liddle dawg. “You could say he’s a…new friend. And he’s no pet.”

  Before Mitchell can dig into this oddity, Cindy’s at the door of his palatial conference room, beckoning with her patented mix of concierge courtliness and beat-cop vehemence. It’s time for Pitch Day.

  Well, fine. But before he lets it start, Mitchell recalls Tarek’s scribbled note, and decides to request a meeting with Ax. No, screw that—to demand that meeting! Cindy looks into it, and reports that Ax is three hundred miles away in LA. To which the new CEO replies, UNACCEPTABLE! Certain arrangements magically occur, and then Ax is en route to LAX, and the meeting’s on for six thirty tonight! Wowsers. If Mitchell really has this much mojo, that quantum node will be shuttered by 6:33! Of course, Phluttr surely followed all these developments, and terminating a super AI can’t be quite that easy. But he’s done what he can for now—so it’s on to Pitch Day.

  For the next couple of hours, the general vibe is: though it totally sucks that the king is dead and all (So young! And such awful circumstances!), let me be the first to say, “Long live the king!”

  No—let me be the first!

  No—me!!

  No—ME!!!

  Though certain quadrants of his supplicants’ brains are no doubt reeling over the bloodshed, Yale Ebola, and a
ll the rest, most tech careers contain at most one opportunity as golden as pitching a new business to the CEO of a company as hot as Phluttr. So the larger part of his guests’ brains (rounding way down, let’s call it 99 percent) are fixated on the here and now—upon the ass which is here to be kissed, and not the ass that has passed.

  This doesn’t mean he’s pitched anything terribly good. Even the least-bad concept (“best” feels semantically off) sounds like a punch line. It’s Und.io—subscription underwear. The premise is that busy, wealthy moderns outsource everything they can to the gig, sharing, and/or on-demand economy. InstaCart fetches the groceries, GrubHub the takeout meals, Saucey the booze, and PostMates anything else from around town. Meanwhile, Handy cleans your house, Wash.io does your laundry, DogVacay walks Fido, Uber (of course) drives, and Zeel eliminates stressful spa visits by bringing masseuses to your living room (and yes, they’re real masseuses, and the “happy ending” jokes are getting incredibly old, people!). Even the underworld is giggifying, as Eaze replaces your pusher, StubHub your scalper, and Guttr (soon, it seems) your pimp. And so on, and so on, and on and on and on—Mitchell almost dozes as the pitch describes life as he and everyone he knows lives it. But! (there’s always a But!) a certain chunk of people (17.3 percent, he’s told) just aren’t comfortable having others scrub their unmentionables. The solution? Unscrubbable unmentionables! Which is to say, disposables! Which, of course, means subscriptions! Which is to say, recurring revenue, which, as we know, only ever grows! And yes, the pitch features hockey-stick-shaped revenue charts, contorted math depicting a megamultibillion-dollar market, and heavy use of the letters UaaS, which (he doesn’t need to ask) can only stand for Underwear as a Service.