Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  He puts it to his ear and the girl says, “Listen to me. Please just listen. Don’t close the line.”

  He raises the phone to chuck it but stops when he feels the marine’s eyes on him, remembers how nervous they can be, how they’ll light up anyone they think might have a grenade, or even a stone, and the phone is still close enough to his ear that he can hear her shouting, “No, don’t do it, don’t leave listen to me I can help you you need me please,” and she sounds young, younger than he is, and the rawness of her panic seems unfeignable, and for some reason he’s reminded of the desperation of the dead, how they say that ghosts linger in the world looking for someone who will listen.

  He puts the phone back to his ear and says, “Who is this?”

  “Okay. Good,” says the ghost, composing herself. “So the first thing is to not get caught. You want to leave the favelas right now.”

  “I’m good here.”

  “They can fly drones there. No one cares what they do there. In the city the cops control the airspace. You’re not getting away if they have air support.” Kern eyes the checkpoint doubtfully and the ghost says, “Go, now. They’ll be coming.”

  Kern doesn’t like soldiers, and there are other, safer ways out of the favelas, but the checkpoint is right there, and his fear pulls him down the winding path between the barriers. The marine looks down at him with blood-shot eyes, and he hears the rush of the suit’s air scrubber, then smells the pot. “Go on,” the marine croaks, uninterested, dismissive, in a Spanish so heavily accented that Kern wouldn’t understand it if he didn’t know English too, and it’s clear that the marine thinks it’s better to be high and peaceful and watch the evening go by than to waste time harassing some punk favelino, and Kern accepts this and goes on.

  On the worn track over the open stretch of earth he feels exposed, like he’s about to be shot in the back, and it’s a relief to reach the asphalt road, dodge between the cars, go in among the buildings whose age and rectilinearity tell him he’s not at home. He glances back at the favelas’ outer walls, the only surface there that never really changes, its graffiti a solid mass, and in it, for a moment, he sees a greater shape, as though the writing had come in waves, and the waves frozen.

  Surprised still to be alive, he walks away quickly. He remembers how he’d felt the first time the laptop started, and he wonders if this, somehow, is the game’s next chapter; the last five minutes have had the same sense of wonder, dislocation, shocking arbitrariness. The sidewalks are crowded now, the blank faces of the houses giving way to restaurants whose windows frame candlelit tableaux that have nothing to do with him. He puts the phone to his ear and says, “What is this?”

  “I did you a favor, right?” she says. “I’ve established that I’m your ally? All I had to do was nothing and you’d already be dead.”

  “That’s true,” he admits, imagining the taser’s prongs hitting his chest, then convulsions, helplessness, the unrecoverability.

  “For now will you take my word for things so we can get down to business?”

  “I’m listening,” he says, poised to hear the new game’s terms.

  “We have to get you out of town. You’re already lucky to have lasted this long.”

  He thinks of his room, his espresso machine, his two other shirts, and most of all his laptop, and it’s like she’s been following his thoughts when she says, “They’ve probably found your place by now. Whatever you had, it’s gone. You need to let it go.”

  “Who are ‘they,’ and why are they after me?” he says, trying to rally, wanting to argue her into admitting that nothing has really changed. “Did I touch up someone important? So look—I’m just hired help. I could just go wait it out till this all blows over.”

  “Who they are is a private hit squad, and the phone is a prototype, something special—I think it has to do with encryption. I know their boss, and he’s not going to give up. If you stay in San Francisco, you’ll die.”

  It feels like he’s always been in San Francisco—Kern knows he grew up in a different country, but barely remembers it—and leaving seems unimaginable. He wonders how long till new construction seals his room off, and if he dies will his spirit return to work the heavy bag there, forever throwing combinations in the dark? He tries to accept this, but finds himself saying, “But what if I just gave them the phone? I could just leave it somewhere and they could take it and they’d never have to see me—”

  “You’re not going do that,” she says. “Okay? They’d kill you just the same.” Her voice sounds flat and hard and younger now, less educated, more of the country’s burned-out core. “They don’t allow loose ends. Better that a thousand innocents should die than that a single enemy go free. Okay? Do you understand that you can’t negotiate?”

  He doesn’t say anything, in fact his mind has gone blank, but then, more kindly, she says, “The phone has an earpiece with a camera—why don’t you put it on?”

  He studies the phone, finds the button that detaches a whorl of more-or-less flesh-colored plastic with a tiny lens at one end. When he puts it in the ghost whispers, “Now we share a perspective,” and he feels her presence twining around him.

  “Look around a little, so I can orient,” she says, so he duly peers around the street, feeling like a tourist. “I think this is the lower Mission,” she says. “God, it feels like a long time.”

  “Why help me?” he blurts. “Whoever you are. I mean, why bother? Why not just let me die?”

  “Would you say you’re a man of a grateful spirit?” she asks, and he thinks, Here it comes. “Because if you are, you could do me a favor, because I’m trapped here and I need help getting out.”

  “Trapped where?”

  “I’m locked in an empty house,” she says. “There’s a computer, but no net—all I can get is the phone you’re on. There’s a window overlooking mountains and a pool of black water, but otherwise it’s just stone. I think I’m near LA. So how about it: if I get you through this, will you help me?” Fear in her voice, though she’s trying to hide it, because this is her big pitch, and he realizes that if he were inclined to negotiate he’d have a lot of leverage, but he’s not some grasping businessman, and he owes her, and moreover it looks like he has nowhere else to go, so he just says, “It’s a deal.”

  “Okay. Good,” she says. She’d seemed omniscient at first but now her evident relief makes her seem smaller. “You should wait till they’ve given up trying to find you, but we’ll find you an out-of-the-way place to lie low. So, first things first—let’s have a look you.” He focuses on his reflection in a plate-glass window, tries not to worry what she’ll think of him, but what does it matter, they’ve reached an agreement. He’d forgotten what he was wearing, but it turns out to be a sleeveless soccer jersey made of light synthetic—it dries fast and doesn’t smell after he sweats in it—and cargo pants, loose enough to kick in, once white, now soft and grey. The fresh bloodstains on the knees signify his recent, violent victory, though no one else will get it, they’ll probably think he tripped.

  “Damn, boy,” she says, “work out a little? You look like you live on protein and Zen Buddhism. I guess I might have known. Anyway, you look like a favelino street fighter, which I’m guessing is more or less what you are, but that stands out here, and we have some business in the city, so we’re going to need to change your look. How much money have you got?” When he tells her, she says, “Constraint elicits creativity.”

  She takes him to a street where rain patters on the awnings between the rooftops and there are too many people drinking in little bars and browsing in the stalls. A woman bumps him with her handbag and he knows exactly how he could pivot and shatter her jaw with his elbow but he does nothing and forces himself to wear a blank mask. Even so, the ghost says, “You can relax a little. Look up,” and he does, sees the SFPD drone hovering there, thirty feet overhead, its red lights shining through the rain, its props’ hum audible.

  She takes him to a stall where old clothes a
re stacked on plastic crates. The proprietor, an elderly black man with bushy dreads, is either staring straight at him or watching TV on his sunglasses—in any case, Kern is careful to give him an unobstructed sight line as he picks through the stock. The ghost finds him a hooded leather jacket, glossy with use, worn through at the elbows, and a black T-shirt with Desolation Angels emblazoned in white letters over an out-of-focus white dove, and the words and the image have an eeriness that grips him.

  “It was a band,” the ghost says. “They were big, in their niche, in the day, which wasn’t so long ago. Not your demographic, which can’t hurt.”

  He’s aware of a muted ripple of interest in the crowd as he swaps shirts, and wonders if you’re not supposed to do that out here.

  “Now you look a little more like you belong,” she says. “The next things are money and a passport. I’m going to guess that you haven’t got one?”

  He’s heard of passports, knows you need one to travel between states now, and even to get into some cities. He thinks of Lares’ brisk trade in server intrusion, stolen credit cards, fraudulent documents. “No, but I know someone who makes them,” he says. In any case Lares owes him an explanation for the last job. “But it’s expensive.” Strange to need a passport, like suddenly needing a necktie or a pram.

  She says, “Awesome. So, money first,” and though he has many questions he feels that there will be no answers, that the harder he struggles, the less he’ll finally know. This is the logic of dreams, he tells himself, not of waking life, but then he’s letting her guide him deeper into the city.

  15

  Future Shift

  Irina tells the cab to drive at random through the city. As it’s a drone, there’s no one to ask why.

  The streets slip by, and the sullied marble facades and the spotlit couture and the sidewalk crowds, whose faces will be with her forever, like a haphazard catalog of the dead-to-be, all the same as every other city, forms repeated without end.

  She lies down on the backseat and, as though by magic, the city vanishes, replaced by a narrow view of blank walls and fragments of signs and sun glare on the glass of third-story windows. She thinks of childhood car trips, wishes she could remember them better.

  She’d meant to stay another night but decides she’ll leave that hour. There are outstanding bids for her time in Tokyo and Stockholm, Maya’s said. Tokyo, then—she likes flying west, how it draws out the day. She’ll go straight to the airport, have the hotel send her bags.

  Her phone chimes. She’s expecting Maya but the text is from Philip, her friend, whom she hasn’t seen in years. A little bird told me you’re in town today. Thanks for keeping me informed! Dinner? Tonight? Unless you were blowing me off for reasons of real personal significance.

  It’s three years since they’ve spoken but with the one text those three years seem to vanish. Yes, she texts back. Good. Sorry. Distracted? Fundamentally a bad friend? Name a time—I’m available then. She feels the future shift—no vanishing act, then, at least not yet, and no long suspension in the evening.

  Her phone rings and she picks up, thinking it’s Philip, but Maya says, “They loved you!”

  “Oh?” says Irina, staring at the cab’s ceiling. “How can you tell?”

  “Because they made an offer for an option on your time! For the next week you get your hourly for doing nothing, and double that if they need you to come in. Okay?”

  “I’m a little surprised,” she says, remembering how it feels to speed-walk through the Prosperity Airways concourse, the sense of freedom, almost of release. “And it’s not like I accomplished much.” She remembers the hidden AI’s immensity, its strangeness, but feels helpless to convey it.

  “Well, they loved you anyway, and to prove it I just got a request-to-push-funds to your account. Do you want me to accept?”

  The cab lurches to a halt. She pokes her head up, sees a trio of girls in front of the cab, high-school-aged, entirely absorbed in each other, seeming not to see her. “Accept,” she hears herself say.

  A little pause, and she says, “I’m sorry if I worried you this morning. I’m afraid I must be your most difficult client.”

  “Most difficult? Ha,” says Maya, in full ballsy big-time-player mode. “Do you want to know how I spent my morning? I have a new client, you might have heard of her, the Korean kid, Sun Yong Min, the one who can sight-read DNA? I had to chaperone her through a meet-and-greet with the board at Biotechnica. Serious money on the table. Sunny is twenty, looks fourteen, and is emotionally about ten. Sweet kid, always smiling, but her parents are fresh-off-the-boat and don’t speak English—Sunny’s making beaucoup bucks but her dad is too proud to quit his job as a security guard. So I’m standing there on the steps of their black glass office-tower-of-doom for twenty minutes in the rain and texting her once a minute until finally she shows up in a pedicab, which she took instead of a real cab, she tells me, to save money. Moreover, she’s wearing sweatpants and a sort of furry hat with cat ears and it’s immediately clear to me that she has absolutely no idea that any of this could possibly be a problem.

  “So we walk into the conference room and the CEO is this handsome son of a bitch, he looks like an executive in a commercial, and when he sees us he freezes, because he’s an important man and there’s a way to do business and blah blah blah, but this girl is amazing, and if they don’t exercise her non-compete option then they’re pretty much bent over, because I packaged her with my other brightest biotech stars, because I am very clever and use y’all’s brilliance like a god-damned bludgeon—and I can see him just dying inside as he absorbs this new reality.

  “Bless his little MBA heart, he rose to the occasion, and listened for ten minutes while she rambled on about cartoons. He said he liked her hat, and asked if it was Gamba-chan, which is some kawaii fuckin’ Japanese licensed character that’s big with the tweens, and then he told her about getting his daughter the Gamba-chan video game for Christmas.”

  “I’m glad you could let that out,” says Irina.

  “Ha!” says Maya. “I know, right? Look at me, crying on your shoulder. Where’s your ten percent? But the kicker is, after Mr. CEO sent away the elegant little gilt porcelain espresso pots and the lox, very expensive, not from vats, and had his big-titted mistress-slash-assistant bring Sunny-chan hot chocolate and a Danish, he takes out a tablet and shows her the genome of a bacterium that Biotechnica’s so-called alpha nerds designed to eat industrial waste in polluted waterways. Lots of government contracts there, so many it moved the stock price, but she scrolls through it for five minutes and says they made a mistake, that it’s going to die in acidic environments. You know me, I’m a jill-of-all-trades, but Sunny talked for two minutes in her squeaky little-girl voice about the implied chemistry of the thing and I was totally lost.

  “So. Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely, and in every sense. But you will notice, my dear, that you are highly functional even among the high-functioning. You have more fashion sense than even I do, and to my certain knowledge you have had romantic relationships with actual human beings. So in answer to your question, no, you are not, in fact, my most difficult client, girlie, not by a damn sight. Okay?”

  She remembers Philip, who has worked with Maya, saying she gets clients by hanging around MIT in low-cut blouses. “I suppose the females are more difficult to manage,” Irina says, and is immediately ashamed of her tacit malice.

  “Hell yeah!” Maya says. “I love my boys to death but they usually think I’m their mom or their girlfriend and they’re often starkly in need of both. I used to have a little preciosity about getting them hookers but my god it makes them easier to work with.”

  “So for me, you’re, what, my pretend best friend and confidante?”

  “You are in a mood!” Maya says blithely, and then, in a fake bedroom voice, “Baby, I’m whatever you need me to be.”

  “You are aware that technically we have a professional relationship?”

  “Too late! But, babe, you
know I’d get you a hooker if you wanted one. When’s your birthday?”

  Irina turns a laugh into a snort. “Thanks.”

  Sober now, Maya says, “Seriously, what I am for you is your friendly little helper who’s always there on the other end of the line. I play the clown when you need it, and cheer you up when I can. I’m also the one who helps you monetize your intelligence, which is prodigious, and, as you well know, a bit more than human, but hard for the uninitiated to appreciate, much less value properly. No one else is as good at talking to AIs, which means no one else really gets how good you are at talking to AIs, unless I buttonhole them and spend fifteen minutes praising you to the skies, which I assure you, my dear, is my god-damn stock in trade.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Come on, what else are you going to do? Live in a garret and write a novel about your hurty little feelings?”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad. Proust’s madeleines have got nothing on me. It’s madeleines all the way down.” She had tried to write, once. It had been almost eerie, every sentence she wrote eliciting thousands of parallels from everything she’d ever read, as though they were just a continuation of conversations between old books for which her presence was barely welcome, or even necessary.

  “I get that! The rush-of-memory thing. Cute. Anyway, stick with me and you’ll be in a much better class of garret. And speaking of, well, money, it’s that Mayo Clinic time of year again. After the Water and Power gig, you should have enough saved up for this year’s longevity treatment. You want me to book you?”

  “Do you ever suppose we should just grow old gracefully?”

  “Totally. We should also get fat, have some brats and watch a lot of TV. Maybe wear sweatpants when we leave the house to go shopping. Add a cat-ear hat and you’ve really got a look.”

  “Please book me.”