Virtually True

by Penenberg, Adam L.

  Losing Reiner is no easier the second time. Worse, for this is real.

  “What was the scoop?” Greed tinges Rush’s words. What’s the digital equivalent to that, True wonders, what mix of 0’s and 1’s? He rewinds, freezes Tokyo’s ghost, the metropolis.

  “Where’s Reiner?” Rush lagging behind the brain curve.

  “Reiner’s dead, though she wouldn’t be if you hadn’t killed Aslam.”

  The brittle mask of a bad liar. “What are you talking about? Those psychotropic patterns pop a synapse in you brain or something?”

  “You hated Aslam. He offered you an exclusive, then yanked it. I didn’t even notice you were gone, since most of our work is conducted over the link. For a while I assumed you never went. But I was wrong. You know why Aslam did that to you?”

  Rush, wary. “Since you’re making this up as you go along... you tell me.”

  “He tapped WWTV’s database with your wrist-top and codes. Then he had one of his commando hackers plant a message for me. I’m sure he sucked every piece of information he could out of there. Unfortunately, he probably found what I did: There’s nothing in WWTV’s database about Sato’s weapon. As for you, you’re lucky to be alive.”

  Furious blinks. “You’re crazy.”

  “As a jungle insurgent, Aslam was exposed to a variety of stomach ailments, two being bilharzia and giardia. Bilharzia’s new to Luzonia, giardia common in areas outside the city. Since you both suffered from these same afflictions, I assume you and he shared time and space.”

  “I never said I had giardia.”

  “Giardia’s signature is sulfur belches and farts. When you visited me in the hospital, you smelled like hell’s brimstone. Then I knew.”

  Rush catches Eden’s eyes, holds, releases. He tunes in True again. “So what if I met that psychopath? What’s that have to do to with you blaming me for killing Reiner?”

  “It must have been humiliating and horrifying. You must have been scared when you found out all they wanted was your wrist-top and access codes. You were expendable.”

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  “But—”

  Rush is third-generation talk show trash but chooses to tuck these memories away, as if nothing happened. “I begged them to stop.”

  “What did they do?”

  Rush steals a glance at Eden, at True. Looks at his shoes.

  “How long were you held?”

  “I don’t know how long it went on, but I was in the jungle a total of a day. Aziz got me out, drove me to Nerula himself, dropped me on the outskirts.”

  “It wasn’t Aslam’s fault.”

  “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have been there.”

  Rush right for a change. “ADC contacted you, offering a finder’s fee, one that would let you score a little revenge in the process. You jumped at it. Didn’t it seem like too much of a coincidence? Weren’t you suspicious?”

  No answer, so no. True keeps on. “You subcontracted the deal to the Rajput, someone known for tackling jobs like this. You instructed her to find a girl to get close to Aslam. Why? ADC provided the plan. They knew Aslam’s vulnerabilities—after all, he worked for ADC, too, although he didn’t know it. The Rajput kept her end, and Aslam was blown to shit.”

  Rush’s aqua velva eyes. Words from far away in his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What you didn’t count on is how sloppy reality is. First, you didn’t know I was Aslam’s friend and was with him when he died. So you had to get rid of me. ADC assured you all you needed to do was spike my water supply with FREEze and I’d be done for. After all, it worked before. ADC needed me to fall into virtual reality so I would go into the information net for them. But you didn’t know this, and didn’t want to take any chances. You hired Bong Bong to get me. Even after he couldn’t get the job done, you thought you were home free after the Ghetto Tourney. But meanwhile, the Rajput kept coming back for more money, threatening to implicate you in Aslam’s death. Bong Bong said he’d implicate you in my death. So you were being double-blackmailed. No doubt, the money ADC paid you doesn’t amount to much now.”

  Rush calculating his next plodding move, his career floundering on cloudy denial. “No.”

  “I went through your logs. Aslam inviting you to the jungle. You confirming. The Rajput’s calls, everything.” Eden’s hand disappears into the medkit. She’s nonchalant so Rush doesn’t see.

  “I won’t let you do this to me.” Rush levels a laser pistol at True.

  “Bong Bong’s dead. So’s the Rajput. You have nothing to fear from them.”

  “Bong Bong, dead?” Palpable relief. Then, “I can’t afford a scandal. I’m this close”—thumb and forefinger brush—“to getting my own show.”

  “You’re this close to implicating your ADC contact.”

  His-s-s-s. Eden jabs Rush with an air syringe. Rush falls, splashing laserfire. True’s bed chemicalizes into viscous flames. Rush collapses, face down, asleep.

  “What did you give him?” True checks Rush’s breathing, pulse. Slow, steady, like Rush.

  “Condensed valium. He’ll be asleep for a while.”

  “Don’t kill him.”

  Eden sporting instant shock. “Why would I kill him?”

  “Just don’t. We have to prep for broadcast.”

  * * *

  Nerula’s sinking into civil war. The result of Bong Bong’s death is a power vacuum; and the police, like a prisoner who’s been garroted, convulse, flail blindly at the populace. Teens swarm the downtown. Soldiers, who haven’t been paid in months, join the rampage. The military is sent in to quell the police: female versus male, the first gender war. But True knows this is inconsequential compared to his story.

  He, Eden should get to the airport, but he has to file this last story, complete the model, itself a cycle of birth to decay. Anarchy leaking into his neighborhood. Eden clicking at 3-D power grids. True putting the final touches on his script. Rush slumping and snoring in the bathtub.

  Eden’s fingers tight in her palms. “Keep your toes crossed.”

  “Fingers, toes, legs, and balls. They’re all crossed.” True accesses the emergency broadcast link, plugs in his password. The computer scans True’s retina and, five clicks of the clock later, grants access. A live feature, virtually unheard of in these days of touch-ups and make-overs. The last time? Reiner: earthquake coverage and the corporate war. Now it’s his turn.

  The computer requests his broadcast icon. As is, he types.

  Ready. Testing. One-two-three-four-go.

  “True Ailey reporting live from Nerula, Luzonia, with a WWTV exclusive.” He feels his voice. A little on the upside of the pitch. He tries to relax. “As Tsuyoshi Sato and his corporation battle the American Defense Corporation, there’s a parallel story, a story that will shake the world.”

  True has the sense that as he speaks, satellites dotting the sky are picking up his transmission, distributing it in nano-seconds, sending a ripple of shock that will swell as it spreads.

  “Tsuyoshi Sato inherited control of a keirestsu of enormous wealth, but he wasn’t satisfied.” A 3-D photo of Sato is lodged at screen’s bottom. In it, he’s drinking champagne, looking imperious. “Before Tokyo’s massive quake, Sato disinvested himself of all companies vulnerable to loss due to a massive quake. He plowed the money from these sales, plus the windfall from large tracts of Tokyo real estate, into controlling shares in construction firms and import companies, two sectors that have thrived since the quake. He also invested heavily into R & D abroad. When the quake devastated Tokyo, Sato not only didn’t suffer losses, he miraculously profited.

  “But was it clairvoyance? Did he stumble onto a technology that accurately predicts these temblors? Or was he plain lucky? Whatever the case, after the quake, Sato’s company, through a variety off screens, bought up much of Tokyo’s land at bargain prices.” A grainy photo of Japanese toughs standing near devastated residential sites. “If he hadn’t
had the political strength to push for the capital remaining in Tokyo, he would have been stuck with millions of acres of worthless land. Instead, he’s amassed a fortune.

  “But it wasn’t only greed that drove Sato. It was the awareness his nation has plunged into economic and cultural malaise.” Pie charts of declining output of the Japanese economy, 1980 to the present, illustrating the drift. “A declining exchange rate, an aging population, a lack of high paying jobs, the ascendance of regional trading blocs, the push for factories to be built overseas which sucked jobs out of Japan, all of this led to Japanese economic stagnation.

  “Sato postulated his nation would never return to the world stage unless a disaster was the catalyst for economic growth. But not even Tsuyoshi Sato can cause an earthquake. Or can he?” True lets this soak in, then: “In a WWTV exclusive, this reporter gives you Tokyo as it really is.”

  Nonverbal clues of haste to Eden, who doesn’t need them, already at work. First, nothing, as her pulses are parried. It’s nighttime in Tokyo, lights yellow and tan. The camera pans over post-quake rubble. A few people mill around, sleep in doorways. True looks at Eden, his eyelids brushing eyebrows. Then a cosmic shift transforms Tokyo. Piles of rubble are congealed into skyscrapers and wooden homes. Bent cars are recast factory new, or like new, parked in neat rows. The earthquake is gone. Tokyo’s people are left in bewilder-awe, expressions captured by WWTV robocams.

  “There was no earthquake; only an illusion, a sophisticated interactive virtual reality program used to enslave millions.”

  Eden’s relays are blocked, the city back to the usual illusion.

  But it’s too late. Everyone knows.

  “True Ailey, WWTV, Nerula, Luzonia.”

  CHAPTER 30

  True’s message board reels under the weight of electric-mail—congratulations, criticism, conspiracy theories, offers of love, requests for advice for a career in journalism, threats of litigation, job offers from competing networks. WWTV’s editorial board eye-needles a message through: Dear Reporter. Keep up the good work. Regards. No signature but promises of a plum job and pay raise appended. He deletes them all.

  Eden is battling e-rain, billions of digitized messages sluicing through the cracks in her net site. She looks, shrugs at True. “Someone’s overwhelming the e-shield.”

  True’s been expecting this. “If it gets through, can he fix on our location?”

  Eden slaps frustration. She can’t believe they’re vulnerable to message attack. “I can prevent that, but you never know what or who he has working for him.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  Tsuyoshi Sato’s hologrammed icon blazes before True. It’s blinding, resolute. “You are a remarkable reporter, True Ailey.”

  True skips pleasantries. “So there’s no misunderstanding, you realize I’m funneling this conversation directly to WWTV’s head office?”

  Sato’s icon is out of time, out of synch, reception deteriorating. Sato’s mouth hinges, the words a fraction late. “On the con-con-contrary. We understand each other all t-t-t-too well.” There is a waterfall of pastels as Sato’s icon shatters, reforms. Some words are lost, but True gets the gist. “—exhibit more caution now than you did innnnnnn”—an electrical buzz, then—“reporting this story.”

  “Are you saying it’s inaccurate?”

  More nasty static, then “—only part of the story. You engaged in corporate espionage.”

  “I was tricked into delving into your information banks and taking your virtual reality technology by the American Defense Corp. This is all documented and in the possession of the legal board at WWTV in New York. Your tech—”

  “—breaking up.”

  “What?”

  “Your transmission is breaking—”

  A slitting sound. Then True can’t believe what he sees: Odessa and Reiner filtering into Sato’s hologram. Realizes Odessa must have hitched on Sato’s transmission. Sato seems unaware.

  “I’ll be brief. I had to balance the corporate power. Soon, someone will develop an inexpensive software to stifle this VR application. An illusion is an illusion only until people know the truth.”

  “You stole from me?”

  “My crimes pale next to yours.”

  Sato is assimilating True’s words. There’s an irritating time-lag, bolts of interference. Finally Sato says, “You will die, True Ailey.”

  “How about you? Do you think your Global Fortune 1000 competitors will let you live? You’re a marked man.”

  “The situation in Nerula at this moment, I’m told, is extremely-ly-ly unstable.” Sato’s mouth is moving but no sound. When his mouth locks, True hears, “Anarchy, blood in the streets. You have only minutes. It’s a shame I won’t have a hand in ending your pitiful life, but I’ll rest easy in the knowledge that you are—”

  Silence. True says, “What?”

  Mouth movement and words are random. Sato fizzes from sight, sucked away. But his final words linger. “You will suffer for this. You’ll be dead in minutes. Dead. Dead.”

  Buzzing silence. Electric glow.

  “What an asshole,” Reiner says.

  True hugs Reiner’s and Odessa’s holograms. “What happened to you two?”

  “Odessa got caught up in some informational Milky Way in Sato’s database. He figured out what was going on and got out in time for us to rig a VR shield, which blacked out our conversation. A little later, I turn on the news and there you are cracking the story wide-open.”

  Odessa steps forward. “Right after you aired, every corp in the Global Fortune 1000 turned on Sato. Pulled the plug on the greedy bastard.”

  Reiner’s expression changes to concern. “Now your advice from me. Get out of Nerula. Sato’s right. It’s falling into anarchy.”

  Eden close to him. She whispers. “We have to go.”

  “Not yet.” He says to Reiner and Odessa’s image: “I’ll contact you later.”

  He strangles transmission and now it’s just True and Eden, like it was before all this. With a difference. “There’s nothing I can do about ADC. They’re the big winners, but as Aslam told me, it was necessary to balance corporate power.” True places himself between Eden and the door. No escape for either. “But I can uncover an ADC operative.”

  Eden stands defiant.

  “I was like some video game icon. You formulated the computer model to predict my every move. How? Because you’d been testing VR on me from the moment we met.”

  “Don’t do this, True. Don’t ruin what we’ve rediscovered.”

  He notices a gold ring, swirling etchings, around her finger. Their wedding band. When did she put that back on? “I became suspicious when I found out your company, Six Days, Inc., had been a Sato subsidiary until ADC launched a hostile takeover. Backed by U.S. courts, they took over the company. The only reason ADC did that was because they knew you were onto some hot technology. They offered you… what? Money? Glory?”

  “Both.”

  “But Sato’s not stupid. He sucked out every byte of data from Six Days. All your work was inside Sato’s infobanks. You had no way of getting it back. All you had left were the programs you’d tested on me—not the algorithms, not their formulas. You knew it would have taken years to recreate what you did. But there was an easier way.”

  “You.” Eden twirls the ring around her finger absentmindedly.

  “Get me to trip into those data pools for you, liberate the technology you’d invented. You constructed an interactive character model. The net result was ADC’s plan to use Aslam to get to me. The model calculated I wouldn’t allow his death to go unsolved. Aslam, meanwhile, was planning to steal the technology himself from Sato, although he had no intention of turning it over to ADC. He was going to use it on all enemies of the insurgency.

  “You got Rush to dump one of your VR programs into my home entertainment unit and spike my house with FREEze. I chipped away at the mystery for you in VR, flowed into the infonet, actually leaving VR. Ironically, the only real
ity I experienced during that time was when I was skimming through Sato’s database, stealing that chip technology. For ADC. For you.”

  “Are you done?”

  “No. What I couldn’t figure was why you snuffed Bong Bong. When I left you that day, you were panicky. Later I said I’d seen two men melted that day, but you didn’t ask. You knew about Maxi at that point but couldn’t have known about Bong Bong, unless you were there. You also never asked me what happened to my wrist-top or why I was calling from a local phone bank. I guess the computer model didn’t take everything into consideration.”

  Millimeters separate her finger from her thumb: almost OK. “It’s close, not perfect. Something I’ll have to work on when I patent the upgrade.”

  “You said the plastic packaging spilled in solvent by accident. I know from covering terrorism that napalm can be made out of styrofoam soaked in kerosene. That’s what you dropped on Bong Bong from the clock tower.”

  “I had to make sure you didn’t stray too far from the model. I was unlucky I was put in the position of having to save your life. The Rajput shouldn’t have called from the same phone bank twice; definitely shouldn’t have bought off-the-shelf technology next to the phone bank.”

  True wonders what Eden finds more galling, the Rajput’s calling from the same phone bank or that she bought off-the-rack software. “Bong Bong heard you, which is why he went upstairs in the clock tower. How’d you get up there?”

  Eden flexes, mocks him. “I climbed out of the window, used the clocks for footing. It was easy. Bong Bong didn’t check the roof. I only wished I could have seared that legless bitch.”

  “You used me.”

  She brushes this aside. “Everybody uses everybody. You’ve known for a while now, but you didn’t confront me because you needed my help.”

  “I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead. Bong Bong, Sato, ADC would have iced you.”

  “Why not kill me after I stole the chip from Sato?”

  “You had to break the story. Much better coming from a TV journo than leaked to the press. It was imperative the leak wasn’t traced to ADC. Who the hell would have believed it anyway, especially with all the bad PR in the States over the trial?”