After On

by Rob Reid

  “But it’s not very green, is it?” Phluttr’s latest CEO asks skeptically.

  “Neither are tampons,” is the classy reply. “Or disposable diapers, paper napkins, or non-reusable condoms.” Whaaaaat? “It’s really a lifestyle choice. And we think our targeted demographic will flock to the Und.io lifestyle. But”—there’s always that but—“we understand that many consumers have ecological concerns. Which is why we’re offering a non-disposable option. Which is still on-demand, and subscription based!” The pitch goes on to describe a mail-out and mail-back service reminiscent of the old red Netflix envelopes.

  “You are literally talking about underwear sharing, right?” the new CEO asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Just checking.”

  And it somehow goes downhill from there. The rest of the session’s theme is icky ingestibles. With chuggable, cardboard-flavored rations starting to replace eating out there, there’s a race on to see what, if anything, people will stop at. An earnest kid just out of UPenn is fervent about the health and social benefits of breast milk (yes, human breasts; yes, for adults; yes, it would be sourced from the third world and Appalachia; and no, this is in no way exploitative). A whole cluster of creepy ideas seems to have been inspired by this month’s Wired cover story about huge breakthroughs in synthetic meats. One guy wants to replicate the tissues of endangered species, so that exotic delights like tiger-cub burgers and panda nostrils can be more widely and ethically enjoyed. Another pitch is about replicating human tissue, so that still-more-exotic fare can be devoured without (technically) resorting to cannibalism. And because things can always get worse, a third team wants to grow unique tissues based on DNA samples, so that Hannibal Lecter isn’t the only one who gets to taste the census taker’s liver. Pitch Day is almost over when Mitchell remembers that CEOs get to refuse things, so he boycotts the team pitching “Child Sharing” (yes, 1/16th of a parent’s role might be less daunting than a full one, but there are limits, right? Right?).

  His cellphone rings just seconds after Cindy ushers the last group out. He actually has a break in his schedule—the only one of the day, which makes it an oddly perfect time for Ellie to call. Almost…suspiciously perfect. It’s as if they’re on a sitcom, and his space-alien roommate comes home juuuuust after the zany landlord who thinks somethin’ funny’s goin’ on exits. “What’s up?” he asks.

  “I’m calling on a secure line,” Ellie says. “Like, really secure.”

  “As in?”

  “Quantum tunneling.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what I said. Kuba came up with it. Based on something Ax taught him. Anyway. We need to see you right now!”

  “We?”

  “Me and Tarek. It’s connected to…you know, everything. Can you hear the sirens?” Mitchell listens, and yup—that familiar shrill note is sharpening the muffled urban mishmash that always seeps through the building’s walls. “They’re coming your way, Mitchell. For you. You need to leave now!” This, in the all-business tone she used to order him and Danna away after the bombing.

  “What?”

  “We’ll explain when you get here. Right now you need to go down to the garage. There’ll be an Uber in the pickup area. A blue Prius, looking for someone named Jim. That’s you. The driver has the destination and doesn’t know anything weird’s going on. So just hop in, and he’ll take you to us. They’re probably watching the building with satellites and helicopters. So this is the only way out because they won’t know it’s your car.” Although she can’t see him, Mitchell nods agreement, even as he hustles for the elevator. Hundreds of cars go in and out of the building hourly, and if he can hop that Uber before the cops arrive, it will be a virtually anonymous exit. “One other thing,” she says. “You can’t bring your phone! They can track you with it.”

  “Got it. Then I’m hanging up.” Now at the elevator landing, he tucks his phone behind one of the tiny lobby’s potted plants. An empty elevator arrives the instant he hits the button, which is damn lucky (almost suspiciously lucky), as the sirens are getting discernibly closer. He enters and pounds the door CLOSE and B1 buttons simultaneously. So much for shutting down that quantum node with Ax at six thirty, he thinks as the elevator starts to move. So close, and yet…

  Shell-shocked from all that’s afoot, Danna and Ellie are meeting for a late lunch and some mutual support in a financial district café where an old friend of Danna’s waits tables. The dark mood lightens when Ellie sips what she thought was San Pellegrino water and lime. A surprised gag collides with a delighted giggle in her throat. She points at Danna’s glass. “Have a slug.”

  Danna cautiously lifts her own alleged Pellegrino (she’d copied Ellie’s order like an idolizing kid sis), then makes the same odd sound. “Carrie!”

  Her waitress friend sashays over. “Is there a problem with the drinks, ladies?”

  “Yeah, I only drink Bombay Sapphire,” Danna jokes. All laugh, and Carrie hustles off to another table.

  “Is she getting us drunk to take advantage of us?” Ellie jokes.

  “Nah, she likes dick.” Ellie almost spits gin, tonic, and laughter all over both of them, and Danna grins. She can’t really shock Ellie anymore. But it’s more fun to make her laugh, and they both need that today! “Seriously though? She’s seeing the bartender, which is why she gets to sneak free drinks to friends. And—” Ellie’s phone starts humming, with Mitchell ID’d as the caller. “Grab it,” Danna advises.

  Ellie answers, listens briefly, then, “Quantum tunneling?” She says this in the oddest tone. A long pause, then, “What?” Another pause as she cranes her neck. “Yeah, I hear them.” Danna listens and picks up distant sirens. “Police! Why?…OK, way-wait. Slow down…”

  Just then, Danna’s phone freaks out with a hyper-urgent “Ph U” call. It’s her top secret crush! She grabs it. “Monika, what’s up?”

  Rapid breathing. Then, “Danna, I’m scared.”

  “Where are you, and what’s happening?” Danna says, cool as a 911 dispatcher while inwardly rocketing toward panic.

  “I—I’m right here in San Francisco,” Monika quavers. “I wanted to surprise you guys, and…I was also getting spooked in New York. I swear, I was being watched. And—and I still am. Danna, they’re here! Not twenty feet away!”

  “Where? Exactly.”

  “Embarcadero Center. Near where the bomb went off. Only in building four.” She’s whispering now. “A café called Imbroglio.”

  “That’s two blocks from me! I’m on my way!” Danna starts grabbing her things, faintly noticing that Ellie’s frantically doing the same.

  “There’s two of them, they’re in here with me,” Monika whispers. “Big guys. One of them was on my flight! And I think the waiter’s working with them! He just locked the door. Like he’s closing, but it’s not even three o’clock! It’s just us in here now, and—I know I sound paranoid, but I—I…was attacked last year, I was raped, and—” The call cuts off. Nausea and vertigo snake through Danna at the thought of something so awful happening to her hero and heartthrob! To Monika, to NetGrrrl, who’s just two blocks away and in urgent need! She’s about to take off, sprinting like she hasn’t run since high school, her agitation osmotically fanned by Ellie’s own haste and obvious worry, when—WHOA!

  She makes an agonizing, split-second choice to stomp the brakes. Her suspicion circuits are buzzing, screaming. Lots of things are way off here! Like, why is Ellie trying to shove her own phone into Danna’s bag? She grabs Ellie’s wrist. “What’s going on?” she asks in her 911 dispatcher tone.

  “It makes zero sense.” Ellie’s voice is quavering. “But the police are coming. For me!” The sirens are indeed getting louder. “Mitchell and Tarek have an Uber waiting for me down on the parking level.” She’s in motion now, hustling for the door. Danna follows. No time lost, as this is also the path to Monika.

  “Where’s it gonna take you?”

  “They didn’t have time to tell me, or explain an
ything, because I have to get out of here now, and—oh!” She thrusts her phone toward Danna again. “I need you to take this! Otherwise, they can track me with it.” Danna grasps it, and Ellie’s off like a rocket.

  And Danna should be, too! But something’s stopping her, and screaming at her to think!

  But every cell of her body is straining toward Monika! Whose mind and soul (and, from what she can tell, body) Danna adores, craves! Monika, who’s in danger! Who was raped! The situation hits every last hot button in her psyche, and, and—

  AND THAT’S JUST THE PROBLEM!!!

  Danna takes a deep, centering breath. One so costly in precious seconds, her inner miser forces her to diligently suck every yoctoliter of effect from it. And so, she actually calms (somewhat).

  That’s better. Her hard-earned paranoia now has a moment to stretch its legs. So what the hell is going on here? Well, Ellie’s about to jump into a mysterious underground Uber without the protective ripcord of her cellphone. Which is completely screwed up. She’s doing it on Mitchell’s orders, which makes him—Mitchell!—suspect. But Danna didn’t personally hear that improbable conversation. So Ellie may have misrepresented it. Which makes her—Ellie!—suspect. As for Monika, she just punched Danna’s every hot button like a master typist, which is hugely suspect in and of itself! And in doing this, she distracted and drew Danna away from Ellie. Just as she’s heading down to that shady Uber!

  Not truly believing any of her friends could actually be villains, Danna now considers the possibility that Monika’s or Mitchell’s voices were imitated. Or…rendered? Decent odds, she decides, particularly digital mimicry. She’s never heard of such a thing. But it’s computationally feasible, and the WingMan glasses are proof that secret technologies can verge on magical.

  Paranoia is now turbopowering her thoughts, so parsing this takes just moments. The thing is, Monika’s location is weirdly ideal for the purpose of separating Danna from Ellie. Though an easy walk, it’s far enough away that she’d need to sprint without thinking to beat the alleged bad guys to any alleged punch. And unlike most financial district haunts, Danna happens to know right where Café Imbroglio is, because a friend once worked there—which again, enables dashing without thinking. It could indeed be the single best spot in the city to draw her to if the real goal is to pry her from Ellie! And by the way—since the place is almost all glass, and situated in one of downtown’s most bustling lobbies, attacking someone in there would be an inconceivably public act! So even if Monika really is feeling cornered and menaced over there, Ellie is way more exposed right now! So: go, go, GO!

  Danna doesn’t trust the elevator to get her to the garage before that Uber leaves. But the building has precisely one exit ramp, out on Sacramento Street. Her electric bike is secured to a parking meter right next to that ramp, and it’s an illegal Chinese mod that can do forty without her even pedaling. She’s about to take off when she remembers the bit about Ellie’s phone. If Mitchell’s voice was faked to Ellie (Danna now gives this even odds), the faker might want Ellie to be phoneless to keep her from calling the real Mitchell. But couldn’t a clever faker also call Mitchell, and distract him during Ellie’s Uber ride…?

  Hmm. If so, maybe the bad guy (if there is one) had Ellie ditch her phone so as to keep someone else from tracking her with GPS. But who would want to track Ellie if the bad guy’s already reeling her in? A good guy? This deep in paranoia, Danna can’t even believe in such creatures! So, another bad guy. Or maybe—a worse guy. Whoever it is, Danna wants to be as invisible to him as Ellie is now. So instead of heading straight to her bike, she first races back to Carrie in the café. “Totally weird, I know, but can you hold this for me for a few minutes?” She hands her Ellie’s iPhone.

  Confused, but trusting, Carrie pockets it. “Sure.”

  And Danna’s outtathere, yanking the battery from her own Android as she dashes for the street. iPhones, with their embedded batteries, closed architecture, and ever-logging “ecosystem” are an anathema to anyone as paranoid as she is. An Egyptian LGBT activist once taught her that authoritarians can access every function of a phone unless its battery’s removed, and Danna went Android the next day.

  Tarek’s been lashed to his work desk’s giant monitors and screaming bandwidth since he got back from that meeting with Mitchell at Peet’s. He’s within spitting distance of the quantum node, which is surely the seat of Phluttr’s consciousness. And since Phluttr is just as surely monitoring every move made within a mile of that sucker, he’s studiously doing nothing hostile. Outwardly, that is. On the inside, he’s racking his brains for a plan. Phluttr is vulnerable! Which is not how these things are supposed to go! In your classic emergent super AI scenarios (including most of the ones that Beasley wrote about), it’s game over the instant the fucker wakes up because it just has to dart out to the open Internet and make a few backup copies of itself to become ununpluggable, and ergo invincible!

  But. That’s in a classical computing world. Whereas our super AI is quantum. And as far as Tarek knows, there’s only one quantum node in the universe that can sustain Phluttr. And it lies not fifty feet away.

  But! That node is also behind a blast wall that’s sealed with a lock whose code changes daily. So…THINK!

  Tarek’s a capable multitasker. So even as he THINKS!, he’s pounding legal aid sites for ways to spring Kuba, scanning global headlines, and trolling company message streams for talk of Mitchell’s bizarre promotion. Things are ugly on all fronts. Writs of habeas corpus often fail and can easily take days. A terrifying showdown is mysteriously brewing with China over…Taiwan? The Spratlys? It’s unclear. And company gossips view the sudden elevation of the unknown, unqualified cousin of an unpopular board member with unalloyed hostility. Worse, Tarek can’t reach anyone—not via WingMan, Phluttr, SMS, or even ye olde backstop, telephone! He doesn’t bother reaching out to Mitchell (as he knows that Cindy constitutes an impermeable iron curtain between her CEO and the rest of humankind). But Danna, Ellie, and Monika aren’t answering or responding to anything. Sure, people go in and out of reach all the time, particularly during workdays. But their group’s maintaining a policy of radical mutual availability until the madness stops, and it can’t be a coincidence that everyone’s gone dark at once!

  At last, his phone rings and—wtf, it’s Kuba! “What’s up?” he answers.

  “Get here, now.” Kuba sounds deeply stressed, a first.

  “To…jail?”

  “Yes. I’ll be reliably stationary for a while.”

  “They gave you back your phone?”

  “No, I’m sneaking this. So I can’t talk. Just get here.” And the line goes dead.

  Shelving his not-even-yet-quarter-baked plans to attack the quantum node, Tarek skedaddles.

  Out on Sacramento Street, Danna mounts and unlocks her electric bike in one fluid motion, eyes glued to the building’s exit ramp. Faith in pokey garage cashiers and still-pokier traffic makes her confident that she isn’t too late. And sure enough, there’s Ellie in the backseat of the ninth or tenth vehicle to exit. She follows from a few car lengths behind, like in the cop shows. Suspicious of everyone now—even Ellie, and certainly her driver—she doesn’t want to be seen. After a block or two, she calms. It helps to be focused on a task. And unless Ellie’s car gets on the freeway, keeping up will be a breeze.

  She turns out to be good at this sort of thing, for a novice. Neither Ellie nor the driver notice her, and disabling her phone (and ditching Ellie’s) indeed briefly foiled almost everyone with a budding interest in her own location. The exception is the bad guys—or rather, the worse guys—who indeed would have tracked Ellie by her cellphone, had she not shed it. As a backup, they put a guy (a worse guy) physically onsite, who watched the girls have their drinks. Knowing he was there, the puppeteer behind the Uber ruse sent him a message that convinced him that Ellie was heading up to an office and not down to Parking when she entered the elevator lobby. But before heading off on that wild-goose chase, the
worse guy alerted a teammate down on the street that Danna was leaving the building. Now that teammate is tailing Danna as she tails Ellie. Danna’s respectable novice spy-girl skills are useless against someone as professional as him. And the puppeteer knows nothing about the small parade that Ellie now has in tow.

  Mitchell first suspects something tricky’s afoot when Cindy hands him an envelope as he exits the elevator in Parking. “Printed this up for you,” she says brightly, then steps aside as he hustles over to the blue Uber which, as promised, awaits. So—as with Ellie calling the instant his meeting ended, we have this improbable, almost scripted timing again! How did Cindy know he was about to turn up down here? Who gave her what to print for him? And why is she even allowing him to leave? Yes, allowing! She works for him (allegedly). But they both work for The Shareholders (allegedly), and Cindy doesn’t seem to know this for the performance art it is. Her dedication shows in her mania for keeping The CEO lashed to his schedule (though new to this treatment himself, Mitchell saw Jepson submit to it repeatedly). With his next meeting just fifteen minutes off, she should be calling in a straitjacket to keep him on premises. Well—odd as he finds this, Mitchell dives right into the Uber because, you know, the SWAT team is coming. For him. Holy crap! “You’re here for Jim, right?” he verifies with the driver.

  “Yep!”

  “And you’ve got the address.”

  The driver nods. “Folsom Street, right?”

  Mitchell nods. Folsom runs for miles, so they could be heading almost anywhere. But asking the driver to remind him where he, Jim, wants to go would likely “break the fourth wall,” as his insufferable drama teacher always said back in high school. Phoneless (and having lost his capacity for mental stillness over a decade-plus of nonphonelessness), he opens Cindy’s envelope. It’s a printout of an Ars Technica article from a couple years ago. It’s fascinating, and even uplifting, in a way. But why the hell does Cindy (or someone) want him to know about “centaurs”?