Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  The direction of momentum changes as Henrietta backs through a door. Quinn watches her conduct a quick occupancy audit, then she lifts the handset to eye height and summons a smile.

  “Hi, Ms. Mitchell!” she says with false composure.

  “It’s Quinn, remember?”

  “Quinn, I mean. Yes. Sorry.”

  “You sure everything’s all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Henrietta sings in an unconvincing pitch. “I’m just not supposed to take calls here, so I had to duck out of sight. And, sorry, but I kind of need to make this quick. Simon and I are just about to…” She pauses and shakes her head, pulling herself back from what Quinn suspects is an extremely technical and highly confidential ledge. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  Now that Henrietta is stationary, Quinn detects interference in the video feed. It is some kind of pulsating distortion—a pixel-twisting fisheye warp at the rate of about one cycle per second. The delay in picking up Quinn’s call and the hurried movement through the halls was not about finding a quiet place to talk. It was about trying to clear the prodigious, rhythmic emissions of whatever it is she is building—whatever she and Simon are about to try for perhaps the very first time.

  “I’m sorry to bug you. I just don’t know who else to ask.”

  “About what?”

  “Cryptocurrencies.”

  Henrietta’s face brightens. “What about cryptocurrencies?”

  “If you were an international serial killer who moved money around using crypto, how would you go about doing it, and who would you work with?”

  “PLC,” Henrietta says unhesitatingly. “Plutus Lakshmi Crypto.”

  Quinn is old-schooling it with a ballpoint pen against the back of her boarding pass. “Who or what is that?”

  “It’s a Qatari start-up run off The Grid.” She seems to have volumes more to disclose, but she wavers. “You do know about The Grid, right?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. PLC is the biggest crypto broker in the world. It’s like a hub. Nothing happens in crypto or alt-currencies that they don’t track.”

  “Who runs it?”

  “The twins. Naan and Pita.”

  “Naan and Pita,” Quinn repeats as she scribbles. “As in…the bread?”

  “Their parents were foodies, I think.”

  “Do they have a last name?”

  “Christakos-Dalal.”

  “How do I get in touch with them?”

  Henrietta draws her glossy pink lips back and shows her cute little teeth—a look that says to Quinn that she is not going to like what she’s about to hear.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if you can.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ve kind of…gone dark.”

  “I thought you said they were on The Grid.”

  “They are, but nobody has seen or heard from them in months.”

  “Is PLC still functioning?”

  “It seems to be, but Naan and Pita have completely stopped communicating. No visitors, no interviews, no posts. Nothing on social media.”

  “Wait a second,” Quinn says. She turns around and checks the flight board behind her. “I can be in Doha in ninety minutes. What if I just go knock on their door? Can you do that on The Grid?”

  “We can get you the necessary authorization,” Henrietta says. “But are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you want to figure out who the killer is, but you don’t actually want to find him, right? And you certainly don’t want to trap him. What I mean,” Henrietta says like a teenage daughter giving her single mother sage dating advice, “is that if you go on-Grid, you need to be very careful.”

  21

  ALTERNATE REALITY

  PLUTUS LAKSHMI CRYPTO, or PLC, is run by the two most famous names in alt-currencies, who also happen to be fraternal twins. Naan and Pita are half Indian and half Greek—the products of parents who met and fell in love twenty-two years ago in Dubai after opening high-end eateries across the street from each other and competing for the lucrative lunchtime business of the energy industry.

  After getting married, Dion and Anna Christakos-Dalal moved to Israel, where they opened an Indian-Greek fusion restaurant, and where Naan and Pita were welcomed into the world. As the twins matured, they found that they were far more interested in the Tel Aviv technology scene than in multiethnic cuisine, and when they were only thirteen, they figured out how to use the shadowphiles to reveal some of the most sensitive and confidential information on the planet: the identities of every Michelin Red Guide restaurant inspector currently in active service. Using cheap, off-the-shelf cameras and open-source facial recognition software, Naan and Pita were able to flag reviewers upon approach. The Christakos-Dalal family then provided their marks with an elevated and curated culinary experience, and eventually became the only restaurant in Israel to earn a coveted three-Michelin-star rating.

  But it was cryptocurrencies that ultimately captured the twins’ imaginations. In their minds, with the exception of DNA hacking and general artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies were about as profound as innovation got. Most entrepreneurs hoped to develop technology that would disrupt established markets in order to generate wealth; cryptocurrencies skipped the middleman and disrupted wealth itself.

  Value has always been associated with scarcity—a concept usually either unprovable or fleeting. Not only was there no way to know how much gold remained in the ground, but there were numerous efforts under way to mine asteroids, which threatened to instantly devalue every precious metal on the planet. In the realm of cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, scarcity was mathematically provable. Ownership was cryptographically verifiable. Done correctly, cryptocurrencies were objectively superior to legal tender and precious metals in every way that mattered—except that most traditionally rich and powerful people didn’t have any.

  Naan and Pita came to realize that every form of wealth was nothing more than a social contract—agreement among citizens as to what had value and what didn’t—and that, as in any social contract, the people had the right to renegotiate the deal any time they wanted. All it took was consensus. And generating consensus was exactly what cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies did best.

  Four years later, Naan and Pita landed on The Grid in order to protect themselves from capricious tax edicts and liberal interpretations of archaic monetary regulation designed to discourage international economic revolution. Even though their net worth as measured in USD sometimes fluctuated by as much as billions several times per second, they were undeniably the most extensive and wealthiest holders of cryptocurrency in history. But personal wealth had never been their objective. Naan and Pita wanted to fuel a revolution against greed and tyranny—to dismantle the planet’s system of rule, not through war, but through unity.

  Dion and Anna visited their children often. In addition to their immediate and extended families, the twins were also well loved by most of the crypto community, the media, several celebrities, a handful of progressive world leaders, and all of their exclave neighbors. Naan and Pita eventually became internationally famous for their tasteful gatherings featuring what Zagat proclaimed to be the most exclusive and sought-after buffet on the entire Arabian Peninsula, and the Qatari monarchy considered the twins to be the pride of the entire Grid.

  Naan and Pita were once willing to invite almost anyone into their extensive international social sphere. But all of that changed the day they met Ranveer and agreed to a proposal too intriguing to decline.

  * * *

  —

  Ranveer isn’t sure which of the twins he is looking at. They are both much more androgynous than they used to be—especially now that they have matching buzz cuts—and while they each have one half of a yin-yang
symbol tattooed on the inside of their forearms, he cannot remember which twin has which half. It isn’t until he is far enough into the kitchen to discern the minor protrusions of two small breasts beneath an outfit he can only describe as charcoal-gray medical scrubs that he realizes he is being greeted by Naan.

  Ranveer knows that, under the right circumstances, everyone has it within them to spiral. In his experience, acute internal distress is most commonly expressed through alcohol, drugs, food, or sex. But what he has witnessed in Naan and Pita is something new. The exclave that was once so full of family and life is now almost empty. The kitchen—once a visual and aromatic bouquet of ethnicity—now smells of nothing but disinfectant, and the only colors are the labels of empty liquid meal replacements. Now that PLC’s crypto business is maintained entirely by bots, walls that were once alive with mesmerizing data animations are now blank and tinted to keep the exclave dim and subdued. Naan is somehow pale in defiance of her Indian-Greek complexion, and her arms—everywhere but over her tattoo—are irritated from the adhesive of transdermal patches impregnated with payloads of sedatives and psychoactive compounds that keep her immersed in a state that she and her brother call “alternate reality.”

  The PLC exclave was the first one to be commissioned with a basement. The underwater chamber has intricate structures designed to keep hundreds of graphene processors cool. Most computational tasks are sliced up, distributed across a global computing grid, executed in parallel, and the results assembled and delivered in milliseconds. But there are some tasks for which no amount of latency is acceptable: tasks that jack directly into the brain. While he has never been down there himself, he knows that the twins rarely emerge anymore—that they connect each other to catheters, entomb themselves inside sensory-deprivation pods, smooth down fresh derms, and pull electrode nets over their heads. But where they go as they neurologically defy their confines, nobody but the two of them knows.

  “Where’s your brother?” Ranveer asks the girl.

  Naan drains a bottle with a coral label and finds room for it on the counter. Traces of the viscous liquid remain in the corners of her mouth and make Ranveer think of a sad clown.

  “In the—” She clears the gravel out of her throat and tries again. It’s obvious that she has not spoken in a very long time. “In the basement.”

  “Do you have it?”

  Naan opens a drawer in front of her, removes a small white portfolio, and offers it over the counter. Whenever Ranveer is baited into making a move, he instinctively reevaluates his surroundings. From where he stands in the kitchen, he can see through the airlock, and notes that the quadpad is empty. The walls are dim, but semitransparent, so Ranveer can see that they are alone. He already checked the corners for unobtrusive devices with cylinders protruding. And Naan only had a few minutes of warning that he was coming—just long enough to ascend back into consciousness—so it is unlikely that she would have had time to coordinate a trap. Ranveer finally decides that he is willing to go to the girl rather than insist that she bring the portfolio to him.

  As he accepts the device, he can see the diamond-shaped impressions throughout Naan’s scalp from the electrode netting—the cross-hatched channels where the hair has stopped growing. He imagines the interface settling easily into its grooves. Like all addictions, her affliction must feel as though it has always belonged.

  Ranveer places his case at his feet, releases the latch on the portfolio, and folds it open. At first, the silicone paper inside is gray, but a moment later, the e-ink manifests text. It only takes Ranveer a moment to see everything he needs to know.

  He folds the portfolio closed, and the magnetic latch snaps.

  “Did you read this?” he asks the girl.

  “No.”

  “How did you get it on here without reading it?”

  “I decrypted it in memory, copied the contents of the buffer onto the device using a shielded cable, then overwrote the memory addresses with random noise.”

  Ranveer peers into her wide amber eyes as she speaks and decides that he believes her. He nods and watches her long slender neck as she swallows, and he knows she has something more to say.

  “What is it?” he prompts.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  She blinks several times before she is able to form the words. “Is it us?”

  “That’s a pointless question, Naan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if the answer were no, I would tell you no. And if the answer were yes, I would still tell you no.”

  “Is it?”

  “No.”

  The response elicits a palpable reaction, but of what, Ranveer cannot tell.

  “All of this,” Ranveer says, indicating the portfolio and everything it represents. He uses its spine to push a few empties out of the way and sets the device down on the counter. “It’s taken a heavy toll on you and your brother, hasn’t it?”

  Naan blinks again, and Ranveer can see that her eyes are beginning to fill.

  “We just want it all to be over,” the girl says. Where there was resignation in her voice before, there is now a feeble plea. “We just want things to go back to how they were.”

  There are stools tucked beneath the counter, and Ranveer pulls one toward him. He picks his case up off the floor and places it squarely on the cushion, trips the latches, and opens the lid.

  “I know,” he says reassuringly. “Everyone has a moment in their past that they spend the rest of their lives trying to find their way back to.”

  Naan is watching his hands closely. “Even you?” she asks.

  Ranveer removes the stainless-steel canister from its foam enclosure.

  “Especially me,” he confesses.

  22

  BAD IDEA

  IT IS LATE for Moretti when Quinn virtually catches up with him while on the shuttle from Hamad International to Doha Port, and she can tell right away from his eyes that he’s had a Scotch or two, which she envisions him sipping with his ringed pinky finger protruding like an underwhelming erection. His study seems much more traditional than modern, and in the background, she can see plenty of paneling and complete collections of leather-bound books. The chair he’s swiveling in has those buttoned dimples like the walls of an insane asylum, and the kind of trim that looks like brass thumbtacks. Before another call comes in and he abruptly disconnects, Moretti paints a colorful if only marginally constructive picture of The Grid for Quinn.

  Apparently, there is a widespread assumption that the CIA and other law enforcement agencies hate micronation exclaves like The Grid and The Hive (a knockoff just off the coast of Kuwait with tessellated hexagons rather than squares). People think the fact that the well-moneyed but morally bankrupt of the world have carved out safe havens for themselves must endlessly irk those who get underpaid to attempt to apprehend them. But the reality is that the CIA secretly loves these new little communes of corruption and depravity. To the agency, it is self-incarceration without so much as an arraignment.

  Sometimes all the CIA has to do is leak semi-credible intelligence about an imminent operation at just the right time, and twenty-four hours later, a South American drug lord, or the president of a humanitarian organization that is actually a front for a Somali terrorist cell, or an African warlord sitting on millions in diamonds and backed by an army of Kalashnikov-wielding orphans hooked on cocaine cut with gunpowder is safely tucked away in the waters of the Persian Gulf, where they will piss away the last of their fortunes and die either of an overdose or from cirrhosis since they cannot risk leaving The Grid to be fitted with a newly printed liver.

  As a bonus, Moretti continued, you get an order of magnitude more information from a gangster who doesn’t know his exclave is bugged than from one who you’ve managed to flip. And if the CIA changes its mind and decides they’d rather have someone d
ead, it is a simple matter to slip a little ricin into the antibiotics regularly droned over from pharmacies in Doha and Kuwait City to clear up the gonorrhea that remains in constant circulation.

  Would it be more satisfying to see these people given a burial at sea by a team of rambunctious Navy SEALs? Or led out of a courtroom in orange jumpsuits, Kevlar vests, shackles, and Velcro sneakers? Fuckin’ A it would. But law enforcement, like everything else, is a numbers game. Investigations, surveillance, litigation, and incarceration cost millions. Tipping off a douchebag lawyer or duping a banana republic dictator into spending the rest of his life in a glass prison costs about a buck ninety-nine USD. If the tradeoff is that your perp gets to enjoy vintage brut instead of sock-strained prison wine, and conjugal visits from parasitic whores instead of getting bent over and soaped up in the showers, so be it.

  Getting hung up on by Moretti, Quinn has discovered, should not be viewed as an insult so much as an act of mercy.

  * * *

  —

  On-Grid and on edge, Quinn has something clenched in her teeth like an obstinate dog. She is gathering her hair behind her head in alternate fistfuls until she can grasp it all at once, at which point she takes the loop from between her teeth and goes to work like a rodeo roper. Wearing her hair up usually gives Quinn a headache—and, she thinks, makes her cheeks look like a chipmunk’s—but the breeze coming off the Persian Gulf has it plastered across her face like blond papier-mâché, and she is running as short on patience as she is on Dramamine, so it’s either get it out of her face or chop it the fuck off. Quinn was hoping to take one of those Dragonfly quadcopter things, but her budget request got rejected, so the complimentary ferry it is.

  But the advantage is that it gives her time to think about how she will approach the twins once she gets out to the PLC exclave. Tariq, back in the lobby of the Al Hujra Hotel in Oman, utterly obliterated all of her confidence in her go-to phrase. In college, Quinn nearly failed the mid-level English class in which she had to deconstruct Hamlet, but as a CIA intern, when tasked with writing the next edition of the propaganda pamphlet to be dispersed throughout Tehran, she drew on what she’d learned. The objective was to recruit assets. According to her instructor, the edition that was currently in circulation—promising thousands in USD and, in some cases, political asylum in exchange for verifiable intelligence—had lost its potency like an overprescribed antibiotic. Quinn’s approach did not emphasize material gain, but duty and humanity and legacy. On the cover, translated into Arabic, was her favorite line from Hamlet, spoken in madness by the tragic young Ophelia: