by Jim Nelson
“And George?”
“Well, I expect to talk to him shortly.”
Clift drew close to me. “I forbid it.”
“What are you, Moses?”
“I fail to see how he’s the least bit relevant to—”
“When you said an angry, self-loathing man was seeking revenge on you, isn’t that who you were talking about? George Drake, the man you wrestled the Old Internet from?”
“No,” he said. “I thought the angry, self-loathing man was you.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Knock it off. You’re not fooling me—”
“We know it was you,” he said coldly. He was dead serious.
“Don’t hand me that—” I struggled to emit a laugh. “You’re trying to throw me off.”
“It was you in that film,” he said. “Detachment. You’re the lead actor.” He cut off my weak denial. “I’ve seen the film from start to finish. You were humiliated, and as Leigh’s research uncovered, people kept watching that film for years. No doubt people did not forget your face. You couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. I can fully understand why a man would want to delete all copies of that video from this planet. I cannot allow that to happen.”
Was I capable of hacking the Old Internet while I was in a blue-out? I honestly do not know. I have no idea what I’m capable of when the blue has washed over me. There is so much I remember, and that means there’s so much to forget. Since the invention of Blue Pharjé, there is so much I’ve forgotten entirely.
“How do you know?” I said.
“That you’re the actor? When I showed you the list of missing web sites and the name of the film, you practically passed out. I was confused at first, but after you left, I pieced it together. You apparently have had some work done on your face, because I don’t recall you looking as you do now in the film—”
“Why did you watch it in the first place? Of all the things on the Old Internet to view—”
“Because Leigh was studying it,” he said calmly. “She was doing her research and that film was to be analyzed in her paper. We watched it together. It’s a disturbing film.”
After a moment, I managed to tell him, “I didn’t hack your network.”
“You have all the skills for it,” he said. “You’re a security expert. You know the Nexternet’s technologies inside and out. That would get you through our frontline defenses. And you know the Old Internet technologies through and through. That would get you into our custom storage system and access to all backup copies we maintain. You used our fix-up system to cover your tracks after doing the damage.”
“Leigh Blessing—”
“Leigh loves the Old Internet like life itself,” Clift barked at me. “Who could have perpetrated this?” He counted off with fingers. “Leigh Blessing. George Drake. Cassandra Chancellor. They all want nothing but to preserve the Internet for posterity. George and Cassandra spent a lifetime gathering this collection. They would never do anything to harm it. They’re allergic to even losing a single byte of data.”
“You.” It was a feeble jab. “You could have done it.”
He laughed. “I have a degree in Business Administration conferred at the end of the Reagan years. I’ve never programmed a line of code. I don’t even have a memex.” He rubbed the back of his neck, the skin there no doubt pristine and tan. “I am incapable of this kind of theft. The only way I could destroy our data is if I spilled a milkshake on one of the machines.”
Clift advanced on me.
“But you could have done this,” he said. “You could have done this while under one of your blue-outs. You wouldn’t know now if you’d hacked into our servers, but you could have done it all the same.”
“I didn’t steal that data brick.”
“A misplaced data brick? What’s one brick more or less?”
“It’s enough to hold the data you’re missing,” I said. “How do you know I drink Blue Pharjé?”
He cocked his head. “You think I’m the reason Leigh drinks her precious Blue Pharjé?"
"And how do you know that?"
"What’s your reason? What memory are you running away from?” His hands clenched. His knuckles shook. “If Detachment is enough to drive you to dye your brain blue, then it’s enough to make you hack into our system and delete the final remaining copies.”
I thought he would lunge at me, he was breathing so hard. I felt drained. I felt out of ammunition.
“You want to give me the axe,” I said. “But you can’t.”
“I want to do worse than fire you,” he said, quivering.
“If you let me go, I’m free to talk to the police,” I said. “Or go to work for George Drake.”
“Unacceptable on both counts,” he said.
“And I’m ready to walk away from this job,” I said.
“Do that,” he said, “and I’ll turn you over to the police and the FBI. Oh, I know. The actor in that film was banned from using the Old Internet.” His eyes blazed on me. “Those laws carry forward to this day. Just having a memex in your neck is a parole violation."
"How did you—" How had he put all that together so quickly?
"Mr. Naroy, we are stuck with each other. You can’t quit. I can’t fire you. What a conundrum. But I will concede one point: You did not leave the island two weeks ago with that data brick. I don't actually believe you are behind the loss of the film. I'm not sure I trust you to locate it, however."
“All signs point to Leigh Blessing,” I said. “Or her boyfriend.”
“Her boyfriend is as thick as the walls of this building.”
“Gannon came over here and made a stir,” I said. “I hear Brill had to restrain him.”
“Brill has a belt in judo. You may think he doesn’t look like much, but he’s a capable young man.”
“What if Gannon slipped away during the party and stole the data brick? Leigh tells him where it’s at and Gannon uses the commotion to steal the brick itself? Hell, I walked right up to the machine and stuck my fingers in it. Who’s to say Gannon isn’t behind this?”
Then I added, guessing more than anything, "What if someone we haven't mentioned stole that brick?"
He began to dismiss the notion outright. Something about my suggestion stuck in his throat. A look of worry seeped across his face. He marched to his tennis bag, which he’d left on the floor beside the door. He scooped it up and hitched it over his shoulder.
“Someone is desperate to find that film,” he said across the court. “Over the past two weeks, we’ve detected a user employing high-grade anonymity filters attempting to locate the film. Nothing intrusive, mind you, nothing you would call hacking, but a person is persistently searching the corpus for all traces of Detachment. Our systems are reporting a temporary service problem for all those queries. Someone knows the video existed and they’re insistent on finding it. At some point, it will start to look like we’re hiding it. We can’t paper over this forever. Who would spend that much time looking for a twenty-five-year-old student film? Perhaps that would be a fruitful avenue of research for you.”
He edged open the door. Cold wind howled in.
“One more thing, Mr. Naroy,” he called out. “Some recent information has come my way. I believe you should focus your investigation on a psychiatrist named Dr. Daryl Lund.”
I sank my hands deep in my trouser pockets. Clift's accusations and threats had left me feeling hollowed out, scooped clean. “And just how did this information land in your lap?”
He pushed open the door fully. The elements blasted inside with a high-pitched wail. “Seek out Dr. Daryl Lund,” he yelled over the banshee. “I believe she is the key to this mess.” And he exited the church, leaving me alone with Christ to think upon my sins.
22.
At a twenty-four-hour soul food place off Octavia Street, I motioned for the counter waitress. “I need the landline.” From under the counter, she produced a long wrapped cord held with twist ties. She unfurled it a
loop at a time until it reached my seat. I ordered lunch and coffee.
At the loose end of the cable was an old-fashioned quarter-inch stereo jack dangling by a twist of copper wire and hand-soldered points. I rummaged through my satchel for a quarter-inch plug. I also produced a set of wireless ear buds with an embedded microphone. An old-fashioned numeric keypad hung loosely from one ear bud, the angel-hair copper wiring dangling precariously by my own amateur soldering job.
Behind me, a guy at a window table spoke with a blaring voice, that brash and cocky laugh that’s the hallmark of boorishness. I turned in my seat and verified he was on his memex speaking to someone across the Nexternet. With virtualization, his caller appeared seated before him, but of course they were in some other location, maybe even another continent. His memex projected her presence for the rest of us in the diner so we knew he was not some madman ranting to himself. The translucent apparition of his caller hovered in the booth across from him. He was so loudmouthed, I knew the name of his caller. Martina something-or-another.
I snapped the stereo jack of my jury-rigged device into the landline plug. I heard nothing. With the keypad, I sent an ATTN signal down the line to the trunk, just as a telegraph operator would clear the line with a series of dots and dashes. After a moment, a dial tone droned in my ears. I tapped in the phone number and waited.
An answering machine picked up. Its announcement was curt: “Leave a message and a number and wait for my call.” I said into the machine I’d worked with Gillette in the past and needed some help. I repeated my name and the diner’s endpoint number twice before killing the connection.
Behind me, the guy in the booth continued using his outdoor voice. He was talking politics. He was talking the wrong politics, the kind of politics people in San Francisco don’t appreciate. He was being particularly vocal about things no one here vocalizes. The other diners could not help but hear.
The waitress returned with a hamburger steak hold-the-gravy, coleslaw, a soft-boiled egg, and hot black coffee. She served it to me while staring at the loudmouthed man across the diner.
Halfway through the steak, my memex lit up. Maybe fifteen people were dining. The loudmouthed man had put out enough people to trigger a vote. In the corner of my vision, my memex projected a yes-no question on whether to send the man to Room 101. I dismissed the virtual vote without casting a ballot and returned to the lunch growing cold before me.
"Anything else for you?" the waitress asked.
My memex is programmed to monitor my nutrition. It suggests meal choices and nags me if I go over my caloric limit. It’s cleared to suppress me from eating if I reach a hard maximum in my daily allowance. Before I could ask for a slice of pecan pie, my memex intervened and ordered a bowl of fruit salad, the words emerging from my mouth like the ventriloquist’s dummy I am.
The vote concluded. I had to wonder if he was so engrossed in his Nexternet conversation that he failed to notice it happening. Usually, if the offender knows they’ve triggered a vote, that’s enough to curb the offending behavior. He continued blaring his politics to the remote caller and his room. The vote passed without a single nay cast.
Room 101 is virtualized social isolation. When the vote passed, the memex of every person in the diner coordinated to blank the loudmouthed guy at the booth. He was erased from our minds. None of us heard him any longer. Our memexes filtered out his voice and image. He became invisible. He was washed out of view. In a blink, the man was gone as well as the apparition of his remote caller. He’d been scrubbed from our shared reality.
A minute after the vote, the loudmouthed man apparently realized his situation. The waitress passed his now-empty booth with a tray of meals. She snapped around as she passed, as though a powerful vacuum was pulling her back by the elbow. She yanked free and kept moving. The sugar pourer on the booth table lifted, seemingly by poltergeists, and crashed down three times on the tabletop. A spray of sugar arced through the air with each drumbeat. The patrons looked up, knowing full well who was causing the commotion, but they could see and hear nothing. A plate of half-eaten food—a bone of fried chicken and half a mound of mashed potatoes under brown gravy—lifted off the table by its own accord. The meal crashed down on the tile floor, sending bone and potatoes up and out. The plate bounced topsy-turvy with hard plastic bangs against the checkerboard floor. It rolled to a standstill like a coin spinning flat. Swivel chairs along the counter spun in succession. A violence heaved against my shoulder and caused me to spill my coffee. With a hard bang, the front door of the diner smashed open. It remained open for a long time before its pneumatic arm carefully, quietly retracted it into place. Only then did the waitress gather a mop and bucket and begin cleaning the mess on the floor. This is Room 101.
My landline contraption lit up. I tapped an ANSR signal down the line. The voice on the other end told me to come around noon the next day. It was Gillette. No, tomorrow noon was the best he could do. He pulled the line and the circuit went dead.
*
At the Hotel Gerasene, I showered while drawing a bath. I swabbed a cake of gritty shaving soap in my hands and lathered up two foamy paws of the stuff. I scraped the foam on my right paw off on the other to make a pile. With my left out like a painter's palette, I scooped and smeared it across my jaw. My craggy face, more rough and uneven than any on Mount Rushmore, was slowly buried beneath the soap foam. With a safety razor, I scraped off the stubble, leaving my face feeling slick and tight. Feeling tight, not looking tight. My face remained a great prune, bumpy and ridged like an exposed brain.
In the bath, finally relaxed, I took the personal tablet down from its wall mount and tried connecting it to my Wiki server. It was purely out of habit. A NOT FOUND error floated on the waterproof screen. It had only been a few hours and I’d already forgotten someone had stolen my personal data server.
A message arrived while I was in the tub. Cassandra Chancellor's assistant Dana informed me I was to meet George Drake tomorrow morning at Pier 43. It struck me as a strange place to meet a multibillionaire.
In my terrycloth robe, I searched my kitchen for a late-night snack. I was peckish. My memex’s programming nagged me to abstain. I’d edged up to my caloric limits the past few days. The diner hamburger steak would have to last until morning. I drank cold unsweetened green tea and ate a stalk of green onion. My memex soothingly praised my choices using the sensuous voice of an experienced woman.
I never programmed my memex to dampen my Blue Pharjé cravings. It wasn’t possible back then. Alcohol and barbiturates could be controlled via memex software, but not Blue Pharjé. For Pharjé junkies, it was a badge of honor that our medicinal of choice remained beyond the jurisdiction of biotech. Even if I could reprogram my cravings for the blue, I wouldn’t have. Cold green tea and green onions are no substitute for erasing the memories.
From a frosted teardrop bottle, I poured a long slug of Pharjé into a fluted glass. I corked the bottle and let the drink sit. Anticipation makes the experience that much better.
With my memex inserted, I floated around the Nexternet for an hour. It was a quick hit, a cheap dopamine rush. The Nexternet offered an way to feel emotions other than friction and remorse.
Experienced one way, the Nexternet is a perpetual party of sensual delights. Elation and fulfillment drizzle upon you like a syrupy rainfall. Experienced another way, the Nexternet is acid thrown in your face, an onslaught of umbrage and outrage and lofty principles dictated smugly from eight billion perches on high. We preach our politics to one another with a zeal even Tocqueville would find extreme. Neither experience suited me. I was of the wrong age for this. I possessed the wrong sensibilities. The Nexternet is built on notions of people building communities. No one asked if those communities supported their members, though. And no one ever thought to ask what good would come from fragmenting the single human race into a billion shards. A billion communities on the Nexternet—a billion clans—and I could claim membership in zero of them.
; I connected my memex to a hypernovel I’d been meaning to experience for a couple of months, Gray Rain. In it, I was Carl F. Naroy, a San Francisco photographer circa the late 1990s. With a 35mm camera, I wander the city by day snapping photographs of urban life. After dinner, I develop the film in chemical baths under red light. At night, I share beds with two women, one my raven-haired ex-wife and the other a blond wayward pixie experiencing The City for the first time.
By the end of Act One, the three of us are—improbably—living together. In the second act, an old acquaintance of the blonde passes through town, discovers our situation, and threatens to reveal our situation to her estranged husband. We conspire and kill the man, only to discover he’s already posted a letter to the husband. In the final act, the three of us travel by gas-powered car to Mississippi to confront the blonde’s gun-loving husband and claim custody of their eight-year-old child. Lust, murder, revenge—the sugar, salt, and fat of the American storytelling diet.
I remember when virtual reality was all the rage in the 1990s. We thought technology would allow us to experience anything we wanted to experience. What we got wrong was the burden of decisions. We thought virtual reality would enable us to be Superman or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. People want all that, of course, but they don’t want to be saddled with the decisions those characters make. The pleasure was in watching the decisions made for us.
The first hypernovels were massive failures. People grew exhausted puzzling over clues and interrogating witnesses and devising a plan to defeat evil Dr. Blauwahnsinnig’s nefarious plan for world domination. Literary hypernovels fared even worse—who wants to live through someone else’s dysfunctional life when our own lives are dysfunctional enough? A guy in a bar once told me, “I didn’t get a hole drilled in the back of my head to experience reality.”
So hypernovels changed. Now we experience ourselves in the third-person. C.F. Naroy is not the star of Gray Rain. An idealized C.F. Naroy plays the role of Carl F. Naroy, photographer and love machine. He’s free of blemishes and wrinkles and plastic surgery scar tissue. He’s twenty years younger and twenty pounds lighter. No, nineteen pounds lighter—a hefty pound of fresh thick brown hair sits atop his chiseled face. His ex-wife can’t keep her hands off of him and the blond Southern girl can’t keep her clothes on. Carl Naroy is good with a gun and always has the witty quip on hand. I passively watch my alter ego play out the hypernovel like a screenwriter invited to the set of the movie he wrote. Carl F. Naroy takes on the burdens of love, extortion, and murder. C.F. Naroy watches with pleasure how effortlessly he makes those decisions.