by Warren Ellis
“What kind of business?”
“Internet business. You?”
“I’m a private investigator.” I laughed as he instantly turned paler than ghost shit. “Relax. I’m not from around here, I’m already on a case, and I never heard of you. I’m staying with a friend of a friend…hell, somewhere back over there, I’m a little bit kind of totally fucking lost at this point. And it’s a lost property case. So, you know, go me. You can restart your heart now.”
“That obvious?”
“’Fraid so. Whatever your business is, I give you my word I couldn’t care less.”
He blew out a breath, sagging in his skin. “Jesus. This is why I don’t leave the server room. You’re from out of town?”
“Manhattan.” I struggled my wallet out and gave him one of my few remaining business cards. The ones that survived going around the washing machine six weeks earlier. “The trail led me here, though I don’t hold out a hell of a lot of hope. And, well, I think I just fucked things up with a girl, and I’m walking, and…”
“And here you are. Girls are nothing but trouble anyway. They are not like us.”
“This one especially. Trust me.”
He grinned. “You look like a man who could use a drink. And I never met a real live PI before. You want a beer?”
“That is the first sane thing I’ve heard all day.”
“C’mon. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”
We went into the building’s lobby, where I was blasted half to death by L.A.-style arctic air-conditioning. A sour-looking girl gave me a handwritten visitor’s badge on a lanyard stolen from an adult movie expo in 2001 at Zack’s request.
“So what do you farm here, Zack?”
“Money. Information. Also cum.”
Pushing through the big double doors at the end of the lobby, we entered a massive space filled with three-walled cubicles. I leaned around the missing wall of the first one. The cubicle had been made to look like a teenager’s bedroom. On the single bed was a young woman in schoolgirl gear and a headset preparing to do something disgusting and probably quite painful with a pink rubber dildo the size of my entire arm. There was a laptop on the bed next to her. Set in the doorway was a camera on a tripod, thick cables running out of it and chasing into the floor.
I looked at Zack. “The hell?”
He pointed ahead, smiling proudly. Every cubicle I looked in had a similar arrangement. Some of them replaced girls with boys. A few had boys dressed as girls. One had a woman in her late sixties. The only cubicle with two people in it featured a pair of Japanese girls doing something just frighteningly hideous with a bucket of baby eels. Every last one of them was performing sex acts in front of a dedicated camera.
We went through the next set of heavy double doors, into a corridor.
“What did I just see, Zack?”
“One part of my business. Cool, no?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I just saw.”
“Okay. You go to one of my Web sites. The Web site connects to the laptops in the cubes. The girl with the laptop performs to the camera. The camera connects to the Net. The video from the cam shoots down the Net to the Web site. You see the girl in the cube. The whole thing’s on a ten-second delay. The signal basically wraps around the world before it comes to your computer. Legal reasons, I’m not going into it. You pay for the video by credit card, I sanitize the sale in Russia, we’re all good.”
“But…Why so many? Jesus Christ, man, why the eels?”
Zack giggled. “Because everyone has a different kink, man. The more Web sites with unique content I provide, the more customers I get. Not everyone gets off on a softcore murder mystery on Skinemax, you know? And once the infrastructure was down, adding new sites was almost costless.”
“Kinda fringe-y, though, surely? I mean, girls with eels in their…Is there a lot of call for that?”
“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”
“Exploded television.”
“Exactly. Exploded television. I am the ultra cable company. This is the way of the future. Anything you want, on a computer screen, whenever you want it, through a subscription or a micropayment of a few bucks through your credit card. That eel thing? For a buck a time you can download the day’s highlights to your iPod and watch it while you’re in the can. Huge in Japan. And it pays for all kinds of interesting stuff.”
“Whoa. Hold up.” I wanted a minute to catch up with this. “You’ve got like fifty people in wired-up video Internet sex boxes out there…and that’s not the whole thing?”
“It’s not even the whole of the cubicle farm. We’ve got another hundred people upstairs.”
“Yeah, I get that you have a porn army in here. But you’re leading me to believe that this isn’t all about you getting richer than God. Because if you’re not bullshitting me then you have got to be richer than God.”
Zack opened the nearest door and gestured for me to go in. “Oh, hell, yeah. I could buy Paris Hilton and sell her body to medical science while she was still alive if I wanted to. And, believe me, there are times I’ve considered it. In here.”
The door led only to a small gray cell with another door, much heavier, on the opposite wall. This one had a keypad lock. Zack made a sheepish face as he shielded the keypad with his body to input the number code that popped the door. And pop it did, with a hiss: hermetically sealed.
It opened on what I can only describe as Nerd Mission Control. Rows of desks with flat computer screens and keyboards, racks of machinery on the walls, cables carpeting the floor like a mass of snakes. Three guys and two girls who all looked like they popped out of the same pod as Zack, uniform in bad T-shirts and baggy jeans, sat among the screens, moving from desk to desk, tapping or mouse-clicking the occasional command.
“This,” said Zack with pride, “is what I’m talking about.”
“Looks like you could launch a space rocket from here.”
“Ha!” Zack liked that. “Elon Musk only wishes he had a setup this sweet.”
“Who?”
“The guy who sold PayPal to eBay for one point five billion. He used the money to create his own space-launch company.”
“A guy from the Internet has his own space rockets now?”
“Yeah, welcome to the late twentieth century there, Mike.”
“Funny. So if you’re not launching the next probe to Mars in here…”
Zack sat down at one of the workstations, calling up a window with a sweep of its mouse, peering intently at the string of numbers it coughed up for him. “Do you even know why people want to go to Mars? I don’t get it. There’s nothing there except probably some bacteria, if we go up to look at the bacteria then the bacteria we carry will kill it and therefore we’ve made life on Mars extinct, we can’t learn shit from the geology because the gravity isn’t the same and gravity commands geology and—”
“Zack.”
“—yeah. I know. I do that sometimes. No. Not sending a probe to Mars. Though if I did it would rock and would almost certainly drop a base on the moon on its way. But no. What I’m doing in here is changing the nature of democracy. Did you ever read science fiction novels?”
“Not really.”
He gave me a sour look out of the corner of his eye. “No kidding. Well, see, this seriously cool guy called Alfred Bester wrote a novel in the 1950s and I’m not going to get into it way deep except for there’s this bit at the end where the guy in the novel has gotten hold of this stuff called PyrE, which I guess could be pronounced pyr-ee because the e is like a capital letter? And this stuff is thermonuclear explosive that c
an be detonated by thought alone. Like you could stash it someplace and then just think at it and it’d go off. And what he does is, instead of keeping it for himself, he scatters it among the people of the world. Which is an awesome thing. Because not only does it put the ability to fight power in ultimate weapon-of-mass-destruction mutually-assured-destruction kinda terms, but it also means that the ability to destroy the world is in the hands of people rather than governments. You got a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it the kind with the camera in?”
“Yeah.”
“Take it out.”
I fished my phone out of my pocket and showed it to him. Zack pointed at it. “PyrE.”
“No no no. Phone. Fff oh nnnn.”
He laughed and snatched it out of my hand. “Don’t be giving me that shit. You’re like a century out of date. You’re a technological Neanderthal. You make fire with sticks. And fuck chimps out on the savannah. Or maybe dinosaurs.”
My gag reflex convulsed.
Zack pulled out his own phone, something small and freaky-looking, and began ambidextrously operating both devices at once. “See, what these things do is put the ability to fight power in the hands of the people. And what denotes power, right now?”
“WMDs? Terrorist strikes? Shock and awe?”
“Old thinking, my brother. What’s the one thing Osama bin Laden does that touches everyone on the planet?”
“Kills three thousand people in my fucking city?”
“Dude. He makes a video. He’s made more videos than he’s committed acts of terrorism. He controls the message, he controls the media outlets who fall all over themselves to give airtime to fucking Satan, and he controls the Western governments who blow days and weeks on hunting through the runtime for hidden messages to decode and clues to decipher. When all he’s really doing is getting people to listen to what he’s saying. Some old shitbag in a cave with a camera, man. That’s the power. Getting the footage and getting it out.”
Down the goddamn rabbithole again. I pulled up a chair. “Can I smoke in here, Zack?”
“Sure you can. Have one of mine, in fact. Robbie? Robbie! Can you gank us an ashtray from the other room?”
One of Zack’s sticky-armpitted clones spoke in a wheedling tone that probably got him slapped around a lot in school. “We don’t got any ashtrays in the other room.”
“Jesus Christ, Robbie, I got a guest here. I need an ashtray.”
“Got pizza boxes.”
“Do any of the boxes still have pizza in them?”
“I think maybe Natalie didn’t have the last slice of three-cheese.”
“So that’s our ashtray. Go get it. I’m really sorry about this, Mike. These people here are total fucking geniuses, but social skills? Forget it. Where was I?”
“Zack, I have no clue. Something about Osama bin Laden and cameras.”
“Yes. Dude. It’s all there.” He passed me a cigarette, I tossed him the lighter. “The guy with the camera and the proximity to extraordinary information and the access to the media—that guy wins.”
He tossed me the lighter back, and I thought a moment as I lit up. “So this is about cell phones with cameras.”
“Right. People with the proximity to extraordinary information—that’s anybody who happens to share a location with a sudden event, right? It used to happen with camcorders, people taping cops beating guys up for no reason other than that it got them off. But the thing about camcorders is that it’s pretty easy to see you’re using them.” He held up his cell phone. “What am I doing right now? Am I reading a text message? An instant message? Trying to dial a number? Taking a photo of you? Shooting a video?” He angled the phone down. “Holding it like this, I’m not shooting a video. But I could be recording audio. And these phones are everywhere, Mike. They’re in Iraq.”
“Soldiers in Iraq have cell phones?” Robbie put half a pizza box on the desk Zack was at, and Zack tipped ash on the rotting slice of pizza in there, which had to be at least a week old.
“Yeah.” Zack giggled. He liked this bit. “In fact, there was a bit of a scandal. U.S. troops were racking up insane phone bills calling home. There were charity initiatives to get prepaid cell phones to troops. So I created phones-forourboys.org. I’m paying for a lot of their phones. And every soldier in Iraq who turns on a cell phone? They get a text message from me. A text and a configurator, which is a program sent over the air to their phone that installs itself. Now, for one thing, you’ve got to love the idea that porn is buying cell phones for soldiers, right? But that’s not the bit that makes me fucking Einstein. The configurator is the bit that makes me fucking Einstein. Because it ties the phone to my system.”
I just smoked and waited, as he grinned. I didn’t need to prod him to keep talking. He was too into it, and I got the strong impression he didn’t meet too many new people, especially not people prepared to listen to him talk.
“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.” He laughed. “If you take a picture or shoot some video on a cell phone, it gives you the option to send it to someone, right? On a phone I’ve configured, it gives you an extra option: send it to me. Send it to me, and it goes to one of the servers, the big computers, that I keep in other countries. Because I don’t need that shit on a computer in the U.S., you know? The content goes to me, and then my program sanitizes your phone. Deletes the content, the log of you sending it, everything. Did you catch the news this morning?”
“Five minutes in the airport at Vegas. Something about another clusterfuck in Iraq.”
“Lousy video quality, right?”
“Right. Yes. No. Hold on. You’re saying…”
“Yeah.”
“That was you? You got that footage out?”
“Yeah. Some grunt on the ground didn’t like the way things were going that day and grabbed thirty seconds on his phone. And sent it to me. Not that he knew it was me, of course. No names, no pack drill. Fronts and cover companies, like a CIA operation, dude. Heh.”
Zack jabbed out his cigarette in the pizza. There was a smell like plastic cooking over an uncleaned toilet. “You want a beer? Robbie, get us a couple of beers. Get beers for everybody. The cooler’s full, right? So I co-locate this stuff all over the world. So when the Russian cops come for the front company in Moscow, the pictures of Mafiya paying off Duma members that have been captured by ordinary people on the street aren’t on the servers in Moscow, you with me? They’re in Tuvalu or South Africa or some fucking place. And this here”—Zack gestured broadly at his Mission Control—“this tells me where all my information is, all over the world. Cell phones and Internet-connected computers, dude. It’s incredibly fucking simple. A support system for citizen journalism. News with no filters. And when we get something good, out it goes into the world. PyrE, see? I’ve given people all over the world the ability to fight power.”
Beer came. I hoisted my cold dewed bottle to Zack Pickles, mad scientist and the first genuinely decent guy I’d met in what seemed like forever.
Chapter 46
The clock ticked around a couple of hours, and I figured it was time to call it a day. Or at least lunch. My mood was much improved. I had no idea how to get back to the place, but, with the little information I had, Zack did some Internet wizardry and got a printer to spit out a map with X marking the spot. He gave me back my phone—“my email, phone number, a few other bits, gimme a call, this was fun”—and had Robbie drive me back to the house.
There was a big, black, shiny car in the driveway. The door was unlocked. As I pushed it open, I heard the unmistakable sound of Trix having an orgasm.
And, a few seconds later, the new sound of a complete stranger, quite definitely male, having his own orgasm.
Chapter 47
I decided to stay outside for a little while, and have a cigarette and concentrate hard on not killing anyone. I think I finished the first one in two minutes, just dragging the life out of it, the last minute of which I spent watching a black l
imousine creeping down the street toward me. As it pulled up outside the house, I dug my hands into my pockets and waited. The sleek dark curve of the car opened up like a boiled mussel, and the chief of staff slid out, blinking in the sun.
“California’s not fit for humans,” he said, squinting at the bright sky. “Whole goddamn state should be sawed off the mainland and floated out into the Pacific. We’ll get to that, mark my words. Except for Disneyland. I like Disneyland. We’ll keep Disneyland. Staple it onto the end of Arizona or something. I always thought Disneyland should be its own state. Disneyland, the fifty-first state of America. Has a ring to it. California? Point the whole state toward Japan and kick it in the ass, that’s what I say.”
I felt like needling the old bastard. “What, the state that gave Ronald Reagan to politics?”
“Ronnie Reagan was no goddamned good to anyone,” he snapped, surprising me. “Everyone knew he had Alzheimer’s while he was president. He was only ever useful as a patsy. ‘Ever met Ollie North, Mr. President?’ ‘I have no recollection of that because my brain is turning into a pile of scabs, Your Honor.’ All he was ever good for. Everybody knows. Those episodes of The West Wing where the president has multiple sclerosis brain-farts? What do you think he was alluding to?”
I laughed. “So you did watch that show.”
He found a pair of black shades in his jacket and fumbled them on. “CIA’s been running Aaron Sorkin for years. He leaks this stuff out under cover of fiction to test the waters. Every time he gets too cute we plant crack on him in airports. Or make him write Studio 60.”
“You’re full of shit.”
He gave that creepy split-skull grin. “Want to know how much we paid Jim Nabors to shoot Reagan with a sniper rifle? Nothing. It was all done for the love of Rock Hudson.”
“Can you do anything but lie? I mean, seriously?”
“I’m a politician, boy. I haven’t told the truth since I was seven.”