The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  “Then it will cost you something else besides your silence. You can obtain things at a cost much more favorable for the sort of merchandise we would like to acquire.”

  “What sort of merchandise piques your interest?”

  “Drones.”

  “And what might be your need for those?”

  “The natives are getting restless, so to speak. We would rather utilize our resources for turf wars instead of thinning our men for the simple cause of limiting supply.”

  “So you mean to continue with your business? Not that we really care, because we don’t. It’s not our directive. But I do have an issue of whom you’re selling to. This is our youth we’re talking about.”

  “We will move it off U.S. soil if it pleases you. We would need certain resources to push into Asia, and we have not yet tapped into European demand. The world is a very big place.”

  “So your organization is concerned with money after all?”

  “Money is the cousin of what we’re interested in. You know as well as I what we’re interested in. Why not speak of it directly?”

  Montgomery smiled but said nothing.

  “Should we talk details?” Tetsu asked, lifting his glass.

  Chapter 21

  “A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

  -Albert Einstein

  Outside in the clearing, Kumo and Merrill packed up horses to ride me out of The Abattoir. “The world will be different,” Kumo warned. Bipolar adjustment, he called it. “Your mind will demure for the old, associating your new environment as Heaven after having just been put through Hell.”

  “Don’t let your mind trick you,” Merrill added.

  “It’s simpler than that,” Kumo argued. “A man with no belief has no footing. Remember your training and that you are a new man the world is not ready for. If not, you’ll be more fucked than ever.”

  Now, I was on a dopamine high cruising down San Francisco’s Market Street. The world buzzed with women flowing in and out of promenade shops dressed in knee-high skirts, legs garbed in mesh stockings. They trotted around in stylish high heels, swinging designer pocketbooks and loping in Rowland Dawl hoodies, the new in-vogue fashion, a veil-like piece of fabric that refracted light causing a blurred effect with one’s facial features and confused the cameras and drones from above. They wore Glasswear sunglasses—big, round insect-looking lenses covering parts of the cheek. The glasses came in different colors, swaths of tinted browns and stylish blues, guaranteed to dupe facial recognition software while not compromising a chic style. Out here were the people who had something to lose, that didn’t want to be tracked by CCTV cameras or battery-powered MAV drones posing as crows. Anti-surveillance apparel was taking off, and the retail marketing machines were latching on.

  A large police presence wandered the blocks; officers on every corner of the street, radioing to one another over CBs; cops shaking down street urchins, loading drifters into paddy wagons. I walked on toward the financial district absorbing the skyscrapers, trollies, and bustle of people as if they were fresh air to breathe.

  I turned right on Howard Street to a circus of ice-blue and lion-yellow, the block draped in Datalion banners. Pinned to the sides of buildings, they were mounted high up on rafters, pitched up on flagpoles, even tagged to FiDi drones doing flybys. The city was alight in Datalion glow, a marketing blitzkrieg covering the whole block, billboards of Rumble in the Data Jungle all the way up to Market Street. Signs pointed to the 2023 conference at the Moscone Center. I walked around the festooned tented camp, the compounds freshly erected. The spill of humanity overflowed the streets, and I bumped shoulders into a squad of geeks with badges tied up in shoelaces dangling around their necks. Sounds of jackhammers pounded the air. The rollick of construction workers fought to be heard over buzz saws and cranes.

  I slipped into the Moscone Center West building and down an escalator. Datalion tech-heads bustled around a massive Ziggurat rack plugging in network cables. The techies swarmed around it clad in DL colored T-shirts and tan chinos. I stood and gawked at the worker bees from the hive attaching the nest of cables.

  There I saw myself six years ago—one amongst the Blue and Yellow in the same spot, mounting up cloud-based Y servers with a thousand glittering green lights. I had just graduated with an MS in computer science from UCLA, a Freshy from SoCal, the most unlikely of career paths for a black kid from Crenshaw, the sense of the outcast driving me to prove myself. I would endure the equal-op looks at Datalion’s orientation day. I would work harder than the rest. Sleep there. Wake up bleary-eyed and waffle-faced from using the keyboard as a pillow. I would push forward through the dregs of other screenfaces working database security inside the cubicles of DL and prove who was the best amongst them all.

  But let me go back a bit further, all the way back to early youth, to that kid in the library cutting up encyclopedias, palming planet Earth in soiled baggies with holes in his pockets, slipping through sliding glass doors with a wink in his eye and a wave from his hand toward Mrs. Gomez the librarian. The outcast was stuck to me like web from a spider. I was an air-breathing arachnid moving around a world no one thought I belonged in. Any sense of cool I had would somehow get entangled. Trapped in the ‘hood, I was an insect wiggling in my own silky spinnerets. I took the cracks for being an egghead. Spit upon for answering a teacher’s question. Took the worst beatdowns not from neighborhood kids, but my brother, who was jealous of my doting parents who would ask him, Why can’t you be more like him?

  The outsider followed me like a stink into freshman engineering classes at the U—glowering contempt, the verbal rubdowns, everyone asking if I was free-ride, liberum scholaris. None held faith my high-school work was meritorious enough to walk amongst the anointed without the African American application checkbox. But the charity case would show them up in class by answering the tough questions no one else could. Glares turned tenuous, looks of subtle intrigue overpowered by yet deeper internal reflection they weren’t as smart as they thought they were. The outcast’s insecurity turned the outward world in, birthed the hacker Cerberus, and led me to the inner echelons of the DL elite, where all that mattered was bug-free code and burying your head in the blue and yellow dogma pouring from the DL heart.

  Caged in an isolated decompression chamber next to the Ziggurat was the QX Blake Thompson would surely tout. It was black and tall—my height—standing up like a two-ton refrigerator. The DL logo embossed in the dark covering. Blue and Yellow orbs of light glowed like eyes on the front panel. Datalion hype, but still, an undeniable allure. Inside, current flowed clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously at absolute-zero temperatures. Qubits inside in superposition, new doors opening to the Underworld. It was the first quantum computer I’d seen, and I moved closer trying to peer into the little porthole window on the side. Inside, the elements of a machine lurked—ion traps, superconducting circuits, quantum dots aglow trapping ions inside, suspended in their own space-time blankets.

  I was struck with a moment of dizziness—a flash of Burns floating down the river. I put my hand over my chest. The Earth photo, still there, beating with my heart. I gazed down at my palms, the tools that had choked the life out of Burns, slayed Conroy. The gash in one of my palms was barely visible now, the surface wound made by Kumo’s knife a fading cut. The Sons of Liberty had cut their own hands, mashed them together in a blood bond when I made the pledge—blood brothers bounded by a bushido chain, The Cause rising high above our bodies from the smoke of the Freedom Fire, the flame where we ceremoniously burned old beliefs and pledged the new. But I was in San Francisco now, about to attend one of the largest technology conferences in the world. I had just bought a new pair of trousers and a sports jacket, and the words of Kumo and Merrill seemed like a distant echo instead of a strong voice.

  Tomorrow, in this room, the lyrics of machinery would sing. The gods of technology would gather at the auditorium altar, step before the podium and offer fre
sh vision and speak about new paradigms. It would be the Timothy Skies dinner all over again. I had come full circle, back at Datalion. I rotated on an arc around both sides of the world, and returned where I started.

  Now, however, the context differed.

  A stream of encoded bits were speeding through a wire, pushing through the fiber at light speed, shooting through the Internet like a bug about to splatter a windshield. It would pass undetected through NSA algorithms, pattern recognizers, and filters—land innocuously in the mailbox of Theresa Ross, or Mary Heller, or another real person’s Gmail account recently hacked by The Anthill. It would be hidden away in a folder somewhere in a rabbit hole of cyberspace. And when read, it would hit the screen as a message from the Underworld, surfacing onto a monitor nebulously ordering its real-world allies to take action, and I, Cerberus, would do my duty.

  I heard a voice calling from behind the Ziggurat. “Isse Corvus? Is that you?”

  A square-shouldered man walked up to me, wearing the DL colors. He had a bushy mustache rumbling over the sides of his mouth. A paunchy belly pushed through the fabric of his shirt, a Techno Buddha, we used to call the type. He had one of those long, drawn-out corporate smiles you could emboss a logo on.

  He saw my eyes squinting for recognition. “You remember Rose don’t you?”

  “Mike?” I asked.

  He held out his hand. “In the flesh. Perhaps a bit more than before.” This statement brought out a booming laugh from him. He closed his eyes like an old seal. “How are you, Isse?”

  “Good, Mike,” I said, shaking his hand. “Now, you mentioned Rose. Which one were you talking about, the program or the woman?”

  “Both were beautiful,” Mike said. “Whatever happened to Rose Rossetti?”

  Rose Rossetti—a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. She had been the inspiration, the one I would run home to when I couldn’t take any more of the Rose in the office. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I said whimsically.

  “Didn’t you move back to L.A. and become a cop or something? I heard some bizarre ass shit like that.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “Did it for a while and then burned out. So finally I found a firm Datalion didn’t have their claws into.”

  “Hey, that’s cool, man. So you’re back in the game?”

  “Technical consultant.”

  “Nice,” Mike said. “Who with?”

  “ND Aerospace.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “It’s neural network stuff. Highly top secret. I’d have to kill you if I told you any of the type of shit we do.”

  We laughed at that, and he said, “I’m dead anyways. I’m still in blue and yellow.”

  I pointed up to a massive sign pinned to the wall below the vaulted ceilings where Datalion’s logo was wrapped in a swirl of blue and yellow, and asked the obvious, “So, you’re still working for these guys, then?”

  “Yeah. You know how it is here, same-old same-old.”

  “Seems like a lifetime ago we were working on Rose together.” I paused a moment, stared at him glassy-eyed. “Those were some of the best times for me here.” Another few seconds passed. I scratched my chin. The whimsical moment had sunk in.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” Mike said, “but you’re back in the game, right? I’m glad for you.”

  “I was a bit of a cowboy back then, Mike. I deserved what I got, but I’m better man for it today.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said.

  “I’m curious what Blake Thompson will have to say. Now that the cloud is old news, it’s all the QX now, right?”

  “Pushing the envelope,” Mike said, holding up two fingers, putting the words in quotes, smiling vaguely.

  “Is that what they’ve got you on now?”

  “No, I’m all about MegaData.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bigger than BigData.”

  I laughed and said, “You sound depressed.”

  He upturned a lip into a semi-smile. “It’s a job. I’m tired of being a coder.”

  “Mike, you’re still a coder?” I asked him in a raised voice. “I thought you’d be a management man for sure by now.”

  “No. That shit’s not for me. I’m looking for a change though. I’ve been with Datalion quite a long time.”

  “I hear you.” I stared down at my wristwatch. “Look, I got to run, Mike.”

  “Do you want to hook up later? During the conference sometime?”

  “Would love to,” I said. “You got a card or something?”

  Mike pulled out a wallet and thumbed through it. He yanked out a card and handed it to me. I took it, said goodbye, and left for Moscone East to pick up my conference packet and badge. There I stood in line with the herd until I was at the front. I was given the DL marketing bomb—the shoulder sack with brochures, lecture schedules, safari sessions, a free book (Coding for the QX), and a ticket for the Saturday-night Jungle Party with special musical guest Audacious on Treasure Island. The badge had Shane Carrier written on it in the DL colors, and I would stuff it in my pocket and use it only when needed at the conference.

  I walked a couple of blocks to 611 Folsom Street to the dull, silver-looking AT&T Building. At the bus stop on 2nd, I stared up at the nine-story building jutting up into the sky. One of the hearts of the Internet beat in there, arteries of fiber all converging into massive routers and switches, connecting together the nation’s ISPs. The trolls of the NSA were locked up in a room with a wire going in, tapping into cyberspace like a bloodthirsty mosquito, syphoning off bits of our lives, offloading them to processing sites where supercomputers crunched through every byte of data and stored them in DL cloud servers.

  Afterward, I hit the streets, wending my way through the throngs in the Tenderloin district. On Turk Street, the police presence had faded to one uniformed cop across the street pushing away a homeless man who had thrown over a bag-lady’s cart. The two screamed at one another in a scatter-mouth slur, rivulets of spit popping out of their mouths, only the expletives comprehensible.

  Small grocery stores had their prices jacked. Teenage Korean sons tattooed-up, wearing wife-beater Ts, were armed at their entrances, pistols out in the open in holsters by their hips. Several of the stores had been incinerated, charred interiors with melted counters, the pavement around them littered in glass. Looted cars rammed up on curbs had smashed-in windows, tires missing, the trunks popped open. One had a grimy navy-blue sleeping bag in it filled with a junkie taking a snooze.

  A small bazaar in the middle of Turk Street where traffic was closed off milled with people. Smoke from BBQs rose in the air. Most burned wood or old rags, smoking out aerial drones. CCTV cameras had been ripped off street poles, but judging from the lack of police presence, the authorities had surrendered this part of town.

  People crowded around different tables. I pulled up to one and pushed into a crowd of ragmen circled around an old bootlegger selling bathtub liquor. A drunken man, jaundiced and pocked, waved a bill up in the air. He had a burned-out cigar nub crunched in his yellow-gray teeth. Said something in a street tongue I didn’t quite catch.

  “What’s I’m gonna do with a dolla?” the bootlegger said to the drunk holding up the ten. “Time I run across the street it ain’t worth nothin’ but fity cent.” He turned away to another man, but the drunk raised his fist, doubling the offer to twenty bucks. The bootlegger said, “You got watches? You got jewelry? You got guns or ammo, then we talk. You want this shit cheap, you gotta pay with somin’ real.”

  I moved to another table where they were selling stolen laptops. I checked one of them out and made sure it worked. I haggled a bit, and after arguing about the use of cash, agreed to pay double the “gold value.” I put the laptop in a backpack and walked up Hyde. A crowd of people wrapped around the block, waited to get in a shelter on the corner of Eddy. On Geary, a McDonald’s near Union Square Park came into view. I sat down on a bench, took out the laptop, and jammed in a DV
D with a Red Hat installer. After the disk was reformatted and the new OS ready to use, I brought up a browser using the McDonald’s Wi-Fi. I logged onto the Gmail account of a Miss Theresa Ross, a divorced retired woman in her sixties living nearby whose life had been stolen by The Anthill.

  No messages were left from the party I was expecting in the Drafts folder. A silence I failed to understand. I wrote an email to Betty Smith, a person in the contact list and one within the cluster of compromised accounts. I wrote: Dear Betty, going to Walmart tomorrow in the afternoon. Weren’t you coming? I saved it as a draft, not sending it. Then I deleted all of the cookies, erased the history, and left with the laptop. It would be the second to last time for two things: the number of uses for the laptop, and the number of times Theresa Ross’s account would be used.

  I got to the hotel a half an hour later. At the bar, I sipped a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic. Sweet whiffs of a lemon peel scented my nose. Tonic fizzed in the glass, the light clamor of bubbles bursting against the sides. Staring at the ice cubes, I still believed I had wandered into a dream. I twirled the glass, studied the legs, gazed at the silvery liquid dripping off the sides. The simple pleasure of swishing a drink in your hands, dropping a cashew nut on your tongue and rolling off the salty skin after it’s been shelled. I told myself I’d made it—I was in the here and now—alive and kicking in the Homeland. With The Abattoir behind me, I savored every breath of American air as if I were a newborn babe. My mind didn’t dwell on the Tenderloin. San Francisco had always been a dump in that neighborhood. Real changes, I wasn’t yet ready to admit.

  Instead, I felt a little whimsical. I thought of my brother and whether he was still alive—Blue, wondering which new fighter he was turning out, how many contenders he’d have in line. I had no idea how to get ahold of my brother, but a thought flew into my head to give Blue a call, the idea rebuffed a quick second later realizing the booze had done its tricks.

  Conversations overturned around the bar, most about the forthcoming Datalion conference. The TV mounted behind the bar blared playback of a local newscast about renewed demonstrations out in Oakland. Several dissidents had been arrested the night before. Three men named as the leaders. A throng of cameramen swept around a set of cars as they approached a courthouse. Black-jacketed Homeland officers escorted them out of vehicles. The clip flashed to each of the defendants rising in front of a jury. Charged with looting, disturbing the peace, and assault on police officers. The caption at the bottom of the screen read each had been sentenced to the minimum-security McKay Creek National Wildlife Uplift Camp near Pendleton, Oregon. The reporter applauded the humane sentencing while condemning the heinous crime.