Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  Eden watches Nick look at the guy. Nick is the driver of the rental, too. He said it was because he was the only one who had already turned 25.

  “Finn,” says Nick.

  Finn nods.

  All the windows are rolled down on the car. Eden is in the back, behind Nick, where the window only rolls halfway down. She looks over the edge of the window at their host. His black T-shirt is faded to the color of primer. He has a piece of metal tied into his hair.

  Finn looks back at her.

  “You all need some help with your stuff?” he asks.

  “No,” says Eden. She opens the door. “Pop the trunk, Nick.”

  “Yeah, sure,” says Nick.

  “You can leave the extra eyes in the car,” says Finn.

  Nick looks at him through his specs.

  “Yeah, okay,” says Nick. “They don’t even recognize you.”

  “Good,” says Finn.

  Eden tries to remember how she got here.

  ◊

  The plane from New York to Austin is new. It smells like a dental office. The plastic is the color of whitened teeth.

  Through the porthole you can see the world in tilt shift. You try to figure out where you are. The river from space looks like ice, but it’s August, and you realize that’s the reflection of the sun.

  A river of mercury flows through the heartland. It’s how they power all the things we let them make us carry to stay connected.

  The whine of the jets shuts out other noise. Each turbine turns at ten thousand revolutions per minute, faster during takeoff. You wonder how they count that. You wonder how much a giant machine like this costs. Three hundred million dollars.

  You wonder how many revolutions you could buy for three hundred million dollars.

  There are people, individual people, who have that much money. There are people who have ten times that much money. You are not one of them.

  In the future, we will all be richer.

  We will each have our own robots.

  We will live in cities covered in green.

  We will live without rulers in true democracies.

  You wonder how much it would cost to buy your own tiny island and declare it a separate country.

  One time you read a post about this guy who declared his house in the suburbs an independent kingdom. Guess who the king was.

  The little television in the seatback cannot be turned off. You cannot hear it without headphones, but the closed captioning reads it out for you. Even the ads. Mostly the ads. Sometimes the computer translator makes mistakes. Other times it spews gibberish. You wonder if it is a secret code.

  You imagine you are a spy who keeps the one-time pad in her purse, to translate the messages from control.

  When you land in Austin, the first thing you do is sneak outside on the upper level to smoke a cigarette. You do this even though you know some of your old friends are already here, looking for you downstairs, excited to see you, waiting with strong hugs.

  It is really fucking hot here. Almost too hot to smoke, but not quite.

  You see a corporate hotel over there on the other side of the parking garages. A Hilton. The building is a squat cylinder. You imagine the inside. You remember a movie you saw once on TV. Inside an office building like that, they were experimenting on captured aliens.

  When you all get in the car, and pull onto the freeway, the first thing you notice is the billboards. There is one for a strip club, one for a real estate development on the shores of a man-made lake, and one for a political candidate.

  BELTRAN

  The candidate is in profile, looking up at an angle like he’s watching the planes come in. He wears a red tie and a white shirt. His jacket is off, slung over his shoulder. His skin is white and his hair is dark.

  THE FUTURE IS NOW

  The second thing you notice is how stubby the trees are here. Like they’re not getting enough water. Never will.

  Nick says the trees that were meant to be here all died.

  We are killing the world. You are helping.

  ◊

  Finn shows them around the place.

  It’s not as bad as it looks from the outside.

  They will sleep in the rooms on the first floor. The couples will take the two bedrooms. Eden takes the couch in the hall between the rooms. This was all agreed to before. Nick and Shannon are the ones paying for the whole deal.

  They share the first floor bathroom. It is clean enough. They clean it up some more before they go out.

  Eden’s hallway is across from a room full of books.

  This is the library, says Finn. Help yourself. Take one, leave one.

  There is a small bookshelf, a big leather armchair, and a beat-up old rug. There are stacks of books everywhere, stacked so high they touch the bottoms of the old postcards pinned to the wall. Some of the stacks are ready to fall over. You can smell the words going slowly back to pulp.

  There is some old fucking hippie dude sitting in the armchair, reading. This was not in the pictures on the website. The color of the guy’s hair and beard is the kind of white that used to be blonde. The color of milk gone bad. Maybe she thinks that because the guy smells so much like cigarettes.

  “Who’s Gandalf?” says Eden.

  Finn laughs. “That’s Billy. He’s my roommate.”

  Billy smiles. “What’s up.” He has a real Texas accent. Which is a weird thing to hear coming out of a hippie.

  “Whatcha reading?” asks Eden.

  “Wild stuff,” says Billy. He smiles, holds up the book in one hand. It’s an old paperback. The cover shows two women and a man standing in the ruins of a city, a giant sun blazing behind them. “The orgy at the end of the world.”

  Ewww.

  Finn shows them the kitchen. It is crammed full of hardware.

  “Is that a 3D printer?” asks Nick.

  “Two of them, actually,” says Finn.

  “Government surplus,” says Billy. “From the labs.”

  “Need to find a better place to put them,” says Finn.

  Finn shows them where the coffee is, how the water filter works, and where he keeps the beer. He says they can help themselves to the beer, but please don’t mess with the printers.

  The beer has its own fridge. Mostly cans. There’s some other stuff in there, too. Opaque white Tupperware, labeled in black script. Dates.

  The back of the house looks over the river from a tall bluff overgrown with viney trees. You can see downtown off to the west. Directly across is an old gravel pit. A crater lake of dirty rainwater next to a small mountain of asphalt.

  “Indians lived here,” says Nick. “Just upriver was a low water crossing for the Chisholm Trail.”

  Finn looks at him.

  Marley holds his hand.

  ◊

  Job descriptions.

  Marley, Nick, and Honda all work in marketing.

  Marketing means math. Certain words or images produce certain results. People are numbers.

  They put the words into semi-autonomous machines whose job is to sell things.

  Basically, the job of the machines is to monitor people and figure out which ads are the best ones to show to get the people to buy stuff. Or at least to get the advertisers to pay to get their flash in front of the people’s eyeballs.

  Shannon is in law school.

  Eden works for a magazine. Which is really a website. They think of themselves as digital muckrakers. They are looking for a story that will drive enough traffic to get them more eyeballs and more money from advertisers to pay for more muckraking.

  The pay sucks.

  Collectively, it will take the five of them approximately ninety-two years to pay off their student loans.

  Whatever.

  What if everyone stopped paying?

  ◊

  There are hipsters on horses here.

  The first one they see is a guy in selvedge jeans and a hat like you might see an Australian wear in a war movie. The dude has
a moustache that looks like it gets almost as much attention as the horse.

  The horse is big, mostly black.

  They see more as they walk the long blocks to Proteus from the spot where they park their car.

  The riders tower over the pedestrians. Everyone smiles at them. The idea is still new.

  Two women ride appaloosas. Eden knows this because she had plastic toy appaloosas as a child. One woman wears leather motorcycle pants and a sleeveless T-shirt that shows off her art. The other has a wrinkled chambray button down and waxed leggings.

  “Chaps?” says Marley.

  “It’s like a post-apocalyptic Western,” says Eden. She wonders when the whimsy will run out.

  Nick tells them about it, relating what his glasses tell him. How the municipal code expressly permits horses on the road, a relic of old times purposely protected in anachronistic pride. How nobody ever really took advantage of it until a year or so ago, when the owner of a bar on the East Side opened up a stable in the property next door.

  They are talking about making them put crap catchers on the backs of the horses.

  They are talking about taking the idea to other cities. Organizing cross-country trips that follow old trails.

  They stand right next to one of the horses waiting to cross the boulevard. You can hear it breathe. It draws flies.

  Eden is thinking about touching it when the sirens come.

  Police on motorcycles, windscreens flashing, pull up to the crowd waiting to cross and block the way. Their machines emit a horrible tone, a flat electronic cut, crazy loud, designed to cut off all other thought. The horse next to them freaks out. Rumbles and neighs. The hipster in the saddle does not handle his horse like a guy in a Western.

  Patrol cars follow, traveling fast, escorting two black Suburbans. As they pass through the intersection they slow just enough that you can see inside. The bright sun penetrates the tinted windows. He is sitting in the back seat of the first Suburban, talking, oblivious to the crowd. You’ve seen the profile a thousand times.

  Beltran.

  “Beltran!” screams someone in the crowd.

  “Fucker!”

  “Fascist!”

  “Turn the eyes on Beltran!”

  Somebody throws something at him. A full bottle of beer. It breaks across the unbreakable glass shielding Beltran’s face. He looks out at the people.

  The motorcade accelerates. Except for the last Suburban. It diverts, pulling up between the two motorcycles.

  Men in suits get out of the Suburban carrying guns. The kind of guns that take two hands to carry. Black metal.

  “MOVE BACK,” says the disembodied machine voice of the Suburban.

  The motorcycle patrolmen dismount. They pull little wands from their belts. Crack them with flicks of the wrist. Turn them into metal whips.

  The motorcycle cops wear jodhpurs and riding boots.

  The Suburban emits that tone again. It’s like the sound your phone makes sometimes. The Citizen Emergency Alert.

  The tone is designed to make humans freeze and obey. That’s what Nick says, later, when he asks his wearable.

  Nothing about what it does to horses. Especially when men are coming at them with guns and truncheons.

  The horse next to Eden rears.

  It’s a crazy thing to see from that close.

  The horse ejects its hipster.

  People are screaming.

  Boys are screaming.

  Girls are yelling at cops to stop.

  POP.

  A suit fires a shot. Into the air.

  Another horse bolts. Runs right through the intersection, for the trees of a traffic island on the other side.

  The horse next to Eden comes right down on the motorcycle cop who is yelling at it with a metal whip in his hand. Knocks him down hard. You can hear his helmet hit the pavement. Then you hear the sound of hoof on helmet.

  BADDADADADDADADABDADADADADABABADAT. Machine gun burst, from one of the suits.

  The horse stumbles, goes down.

  People start running, in every direction.

  Eden runs behind the 24 Mart, into the weeds grown up around the fence at the base of a cell phone tower. She hides in there, for what seems like forever, but isn’t.

  There are sheets of paper on the ground. Abandoned homework.

  1776.

  They are teaching little kids about revolution.

  ◊

  A while back Eden got hooked on watching the coverage of a revolution in another country. The people of the country took the streets and stood up to soldiers and tanks. The movement coalesced online. Actions coordinated on an obscure dating site called Flingue. The media kept looking for a leader to personalize the movement, but there wasn’t one. All there was was everyone.

  ◊

  They find each other later at Proteus. The festival is just down the road. The show goes on. Few people there even know about what happened.

  Nick and Shannon drink, beer and tequila. Honda and Eden share a big bowl, good stuff Honda brought from California. Montana mutata. You’re not supposed to take it on the plane, but no one really cares. Half the airport security guards are probably high. You can see it when three of them gather around the X-ray screen, debating what that green outline is. The flight attendants are definitely high. Legalization has increased job happiness, if not productivity.

  Proteus is a festival of networked music. There are no guitar solos.

  At Proteus, there really aren’t even any bands. There are improvisational instigators, who initiate prompts that carom through the mesh and come back in cascading responses.

  Eden watches the improviser known as la Sirena take her place on the platform. La Sirena walks up five old chipped steps onto the concrete foundation of a building demolished years ago. La Sirena does not really look like a mermaid, but when she puts the reed in her saxophone and blasts a series of tones out into the air and over the airwaves, Eden remembers the riddle from grandma’s game.

  Con los cantos de la sirena, no te vayas a marear.

  Eden already feels dizzy before the song starts, from the high-altitude herb, and what happened before.

  Eden remembers then to turn her phone back on. She turned it off when she was hiding from the cops, behind the cell phone tower, hoping to disable the geolocation.

  Proteus is an app, and a network, and a festival, and a movement, and a corporation.

  The app lets her program her own response to la Sirena. And to the four thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two others it says are participating in the piece. Two-thirds of those people are here, inside the fenceline with her. The others are in the cloud.

  The sound from the amps is generative polyphony, electronic and analog and something else entirely.

  Nick and Marley are dancing at the base of the platform. Marley is barefoot. Nick is wasted. Eden can see the beats their moves generate, Dionysian release incubated in the cubicles of hypercapital.

  Honda and Shannon are spooned on a blanket next to Eden, in partial retreat, blissing out on Texas sun and networked trance.

  Eden turns on her node and holsters her phone. Puts in her earbud, to elaborate the layering. Feels her way into an improvised asana. Channels a long, pitched tone that is a response not just to the piece, but to the harsh control tones of the police vehicles, and the sounds of the flyover. An alarm that turns into a jet turbine and then an endless siren aum.

  The algorithm pulls her out, puts her in the front of the layers. Then she loses the pose.

  She loses the pose because another app interrupts her with a preemptive alert. A pinq. Three pinqs, actually.

  She goes back into the piece before she looks at who they are.

  ◊

  Pinqi is a proximity matcher. Its algorithms are tuned to rapid connections. You can play with the settings as your mood and needs suit. Eden retuned hers on the flight down, sitting there in her window seat, thinking about hanging out with her coupled friends.

  Ther
e are three thumbnails dancing on her screen. A dude named Paxton, a woman named Lara, and a guy named Federico.

  “Oh yeah?” she tells Federico, as they sit across from each other in the rest area twenty minutes later. “My grandma was from San Antonio. When I knew her at least. Before that she was from Matamoros.”

  “Matamoros is crazy,” says Federico. “There used to be a port there. During the Civil War. For smuggling guns and stuff. They called it Baghdad. ’Cause of the dunes.”

  “Really,” says Eden.

  She takes a long drink from the water, which is served in a chalice of 3-D printed corn byproduct. The concession sells glacial melt, bottled at the source. Federico suggests the Volta, but Eden picks the Whitechuck.

  “Do you know any gun smugglers?” asks Eden.

  “Uh, no,” says Federico.

  “Too bad.”

  Eden looks at the tableau relief rendered into the chalice. Strange animals, diminutive monsters, freaky chimera, cavorting in a fantastic forest.

  She looks at Federico. Tries to assess the integrity of the gaze. She does not trust the herb when it tells her it can tell.

  “Are your friends from New York, too?” he asks.

  “No. I mean they all live in California now. We met in school. I guess Nick grew up in New York. He works for Proteus.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  “Wait until they start embedding the ads.”

  “Yeah.”

  Eden looks at the contrail drawing itself against the sky, behind Federico’s head.

  “Did you hear about that shooting or whatever?” he asks.

  Eden nods.

  “I wonder what that was about,” he says.

  Eden looks at him. Reads the face that just said that.

  “You fucking elected him,” says Eden. “That’s what it’s about. And now we all have to deal with him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Beltran,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “It was his motorcade. I was there.”

  “Wow.”

  Wow. “I don’t like your future,” she says.

  “I was there, last summer, at the Capitol,” he says, pleading. “I got arrested. I know.”

  “It didn’t work. You people need to do something about him. He’s going to run for President. And he’s going to win.”