by Seth Fried
“Renovations on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf.”
“Santa Cruz, California. Median household income just over $60,000.”
Then, as if answering a question he felt confident I was about to ask, he said, “Look, I know Garrett and I have a past, but that’s not what this is. Freezing is something he inherited and I’m sure he hates it as much as I do. But I’m not willing to sign on to his brand of compromise. The only option is to destroy the system as it is. Give it a healthy death.”
I was struck by his use of the word “freezing,” an echo of his last message to the agency, the strange text that had appeared on all our phones during the attack in Suitland. At the time I had mistaken it for a threat, but to hear Kirklin talk, it sounded as if he had actually been describing the nature of his complaint with the agency. But what was freezing? And why did he mention it as if I already knew?
“This is all perfectly fascinating,” OWEN said in my ear. “But do you think you could get him to share some actual information?”
“So what’s next,” I said, taking in the room from our booth and worrying about what Kirklin had meant when he mentioned a long transition. “Are you going to blow up every restaurant in Metropolis?”
I wanted to exaggerate his position to demonstrate how insane it was, but Kirklin nodded as if I’d impressed him.
“It’s a good thing we caught you when we did,” he said.
“You don’t—”
“Not all of them. Just a few dozen of the popular ones. After the museum district, we’re hoping that some evenly distributed restaurant explosions over the following weeks will discourage the type of volume most fine-dining establishments need to stay afloat. Meanwhile, we’ll be starting up our campaigns against the high-end grocery stores and retail chains. That should give the more skittish bourgeois the clue that it’s time to get out and the tourists can all start spending their three-day weekends in Toronto. Over time we’ll see a new city emerge, one organized around human relationships, a place where businesses are owned by members of the same community they’re serving, where development and renewal is driven by the interests of the people it will directly affect.”
“When does this start?”
Kirklin put down his glass and looked at his watch.
“We destroy the Mallory Club in an hour and a half.”
“Okay,” OWEN said. “I just called in a bomb threat at the Mallory Club. They should be clearing it out now. I’ve also recorded Kirklin’s confession and can send it to the authorities along with the GPS location to this place and the underground facility. But we’ll need to get you out of here first so we don’t get caught in a shoot-out with the National Guard. Keep drawing him out. I’ll let you know when it’s time to go.”
OWEN’s promise to get me out of there gave me courage, but staring Kirklin’s madness in the face made it difficult to keep my voice from shaking.
“What about the patrons?”
“At the Mallory Club?” Kirklin squinted as if from my question he was no longer sure I understood anything he had just told me. “They’re bourgeois scum.”
“The staff?”
“This isn’t an art project, Henry. The world needs to change. That’s why we built this place. It’s our way of saying good-bye to those parts of the old world we’ll miss. The parts we’re sacrificing to make this city better.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
He frowned.
“I was just making conversation.”
That was when I saw Sarah Laury approach over Kirklin’s shoulder. She was wearing a red cocktail dress and matching lipstick, both of which made her look older and younger at the same time. She touched Kirklin’s arm as she took the seat next to him, then leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. He smiled and took her hand as she whispered something in Esperanto in his ear, most of which OWEN managed to catch.
“They’ve been running tests on your old suit, but didn’t find anything.”
“Because you’re here,” I said.
“Pardon?” Laury answered.
She leaned into Kirklin, regarding me with something like disgust.
“No, nothing,” I said.
Kirklin’s expression had changed as soon as he got the news about my suit, like he was doing his best to conceal a mounting frustration.
The waiter arrived with my octopus salad. It was a shallow white dish of julienned carrots, pea sprouts, and grilled tentacles. It all smelled of lemon and vinegar and the neat rows of suction cups had a slight char that made them look a little obscene.
“I want to see at least two big bites,” OWEN said.
“He’s a flesh eater,” Laury said. “I should have known.”
This comment seemed to break the tension and Kirklin laughed.
“Sarah and I have never agreed on the ethics of eating animals.”
She smiled up at him, suggesting that what he was referencing was the source of an intense flirtation between the two.
“Well, as long as you’re both fine killing innocent people, I suppose that’s all that matters.”
I speared one of the octopus tentacles with my fork and took a big bite off the thick end, making sure to maintain eye contact with Laury.
“How’s your nose?” she asked.
“Sarah, please,” Kirklin interrupted. “I’d like to keep this interview as civil as possible.”
She settled back in the booth, keeping her eyes fixed on me as I chewed my mouthful of tentacle. I was happily envisioning OWEN’s processors back in Suitland churning through the probabilities for a speedy and safe escape. Though I realized that his mind was perhaps elsewhere when he exclaimed sotto voce in my ear, “Gross! I can’t believe you actually ate it.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying your meal,” Kirklin said, looking slightly put off at the overlarge wad of octopus in my cheek. “And you should know that this whole conversation is happening as a courtesy. Not because you’re from Suitland, but because you managed to find Sarah’s train and stop my team at the Museum of History. Obviously we don’t see eye to eye on the best future for Metropolis, but I’m sure we can both accept that as enemies we’ve earned each other’s respect.”
“You had mine until recently.”
“Well, then, for old time’s sake, I’m asking you to level with me, Henry. We need to know what kind of technology you’re working with. We didn’t find any hardware on your suit. We didn’t find anything on your person. So I want to know how you’re managing these images.”
I moved the salad to the side and washed the rest of the tentacle down with whiskey.
“Why would I tell you anything? According to you, I’m already dead.”
“Yes, but we think the same way. When you were trying to stop me, you went after someone I cared about. You’ve maintained your composure here enough to convince me that you really are selfless, that you don’t care if you die. But what if I were to have a team of guys grab Garrett and let him watch while we burn USMS headquarters to the ground? Or how about I arrange it so the police find the old man OD’d on heroin in some motel room outside Baltimore?”
The specificity of this last threat led me to believe that such contingencies must have already been in place, a thought that made me feel short of breath.
“That would be more bad publicity for us,” I said, trying to appear calm. “It just came out that our station chief in Metropolis is a pedophile.”
Laury reached across Kirklin for his glass and threw the rest of his whiskey in my face. A hush fell over the tables around us and some of Kirklin’s people turned to look in our direction. The music from the front of the room continued to play and, when Kirklin held his palm up to the other tables, the swell of conversation around us gradually resumed.
Laury leaned toward me with her teeth clenched.
“You have no ide
a what the hell you’re talking about, vi mizera vermo.”
Kirklin said her name. It was hard to tell whether he was reassuring her or asking her to be quiet. She sunk back in the booth again. The cut on my nose burned as I used my napkin to wipe the bourbon from my face.
“You might not agree with our aims or our methods,” Kirklin said. “But the fact of the matter is that we’ve been downright surgical up to this point. Unless we get some cooperation from you, I’m one phone call away from putting your worst nightmares on the front page of the paper. And for your information, someone having sex with children and a middle-aged man dating an eighteen-year-old genius are two completely different pathologies.”
Sarah smiled wryly to herself.
“You want to cool him off a little?” OWEN said. “I don’t care for all this burning-down-headquarters talk. I’m headquarters. Stroke his ego or something.”
“What does it matter?” I said. “Whatever this technology is, it obviously hasn’t gotten me anywhere.”
“This should be interesting,” OWEN said.
“I’m your prisoner and you demolished all but one of the places you set out to demolish. What could some gizmo Klaus cooked up possibly matter to someone who’s prepared to take on the National Guard?”
OWEN groaned when I mentioned Klaus and I realized my mistake.
“I don’t say this enough,” OWEN said. “But you’re bad at everything.”
Kirklin picked up his now empty glass and tapped it in view of a passing waiter.
“Nice try,” he said. “Klaus only works on OWEN projects and this tech couldn’t be.”
I was grateful my slip hadn’t given away OWEN’s interface. I thought it might be a good idea to push the subject, try to make it seem even more like misdirection.
“How can you be sure?”
Kirklin shared a look with Laury and laughed before turning back to face me.
“Haven’t you noticed anything strange about OWEN’s performance lately?”
“Our technicians rooted out the virus. HQ has been up and running for days.”
“You’re talking about the lights going out, the doors locking themselves, the self-destruct sequence on your phones. That was just the virus being uploaded. You would have to do a complete memory wipe to get it out.”
Kirklin observed my confusion and looked almost hurt by it.
“We installed an update to OWEN’s artificial intelligence to render its interface nonfunctional. Klaus has been talking about giving that thing a personality for years, so I did him one better. I turned it into a lunatic.”
I listened for OWEN to interrupt, but he was silent. No. Not quite. There was a deep, soft static in my ear. Meanwhile, Kirklin’s frustration seemed to be growing over the fact that nobody at Suitland had noticed what he felt was the defining flourish of his attack on the agency.
“What about its new propensity for insults? The vanity? The impulsive behavior? No one found any of that strange?”
Kirklin laughed in exasperation. There was no way for him to know that everyone had been avoiding OWEN-tech since the virus. And Klaus had been in such a rush to prove the value of his new interface that he apparently hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary as he sent it into the field. A knot began to grow in my stomach that I couldn’t attribute to the octopus or the liquor. I waited for OWEN to defend himself, to call Kirklin out on a shameless deception, but the static in my ear only grew more distinct.
“Tell him it was hallucinogens,” OWEN finally broke in, though he sounded distracted.
As I took in what Kirklin had just said, it occurred to me that maybe I was alone after all. At a nearby table a man accepted a martini from the waiter, then said something droll in Esperanto that caused the members of his party to laugh. I was trying to figure out what the virus meant in terms of OWEN’s loyalties, whether his eccentricities were genuine or just a complex sabotage. I kept an eye on the man’s martini and remembered that it had been OWEN’s idea that we start drinking in the museum. When I broke down by the river, getting me a drink had been his first suggestion. Suddenly I was thinking of all the times OWEN had discouraged me from contacting the authorities. But before I could pursue this notion further, I heard myself already repeating OWEN’s lie to Kirklin, who seemed unconvinced.
“You mean Garrett signed off on a plan to send a man into the field with weaponized hallucinogens?”
“Yes,” I said, not quite sure how to make this sound more plausible. “I guess you have him feeling a little reckless.”
“All of my men described the same creature attacking them at the museum.”
“Power of suggestion,” OWEN said.
“It’s a hallucinogen,” I said. “You start shouting about a clown monster and everyone sees a clown monster.”
“Why was Sarah only partially affected?”
“Ventilation system,” OWEN said.
“The ventilation set up on your train was more sophisticated than we anticipated. The dose she received was reduced.”
“Tell him to test his men’s blood,” OWEN said.
When I did, Laury still looked dubious, but OWEN’s quick thinking seemed to have convinced Kirklin, who was now stroking his beard and looking lost in thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. For now I’m going to thank you for your cooperation and send you off with some of my agents, who will take you to a secure location and hold you there. I’m going to run blood tests on Sarah and the team that was at the history museum. If you’re lying to me, I will proceed with what we discussed with respect to your worst nightmares. But if, as you say, your advantage over my men and Sarah involved some sort of hallucinogen, I will give you a relatively quick death. Of course, you did admit to giving Sarah a psychotropic drug against her will, and so you should be prepared to receive thirty to forty minutes of torture. Understood?”
I nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Now, you barely touched your salad. Can we give you a few minutes to eat in peace or would you rather leave now?”
“I’d like to leave,” I said.
Kirklin shrugged. “You can go out the way you came. My men will take you to the car.”
“Okay,” OWEN said. “Get ready to hustle.”
I rose from my seat as the waiter finally arrived with a fresh drink for Kirklin. He bowed when he saw Laury, asking if he could get her anything. She shook her head no and smiled graciously, the same warm face I’d seen on the cover of so many magazines.
“Before you go,” Kirklin said, “we’d also like to know how you found out about Sarah’s train.”
“I read her play,” I said.
For the first time since she had found me out on her train she looked at me with something other than revulsion. It was the alert look of a young writer whose play had been read by a stranger.
“It must have been difficult to grow up with so much attention. If everyone started to treat me like an object, I suppose it would be easy for me to start thinking about them as objects too. But there are good people out there, Ms. Laury, and they’re going to get hurt.”
“Good people are already being hurt every day by the status quo,” she said. “But they’re poor, so no one but us seems to care.”
She turned from me to ask the waiter to remove my salad from the table.
Kirklin laughed at her last remark and kissed her on the temple, then gave me a friendly wave good-bye.
“I admire your will, Henry,” he said. “You might not think so, but this is a good death.”
He looked back down at Laury. They smiled at each other and immediately were wrapped in an impenetrable intimacy.
I didn’t bother to say good-bye, just headed toward the door leading to the foyer where Kirklin’s men would be waiting for me. It was hard to shake the feeling that the whole roo
m was watching. Tables grew quiet as I passed, and I heard a few chuckles as the band up front began to play a brassy rendition of Nat Simpson’s “A Death in the City.”
“Why did you tell him to test their blood?” I said under my breath.
“One thing at a time,” OWEN said.
“What’s the plan?”
“Just keep walking. I’ll take care of it.”
I was thinking about the virus as I started to open the door leading out of that dining room, trying to do the math in my head to figure out whether OWEN had saved my life more times than he had jeopardized it. Looking back, he seemed to be always doing both simultaneously. That was the extent of my optimism as I prepared to face Kirklin’s people with only a warped supercomputer at my side.
In the waiting area, the maître d’ was nowhere in sight, but two of Kirklin’s men were waiting for me near the empty podium. They began to approach me, then stopped.
One of them asked something in Esperanto. I followed their eyes and saw Kirklin standing over my shoulder. He answered them in more Esperanto, which OWEN translated in my ear.
“I’ve decided to walk him out myself,” he said. “But while you’re here I need you to go back and tell the kitchen to rush two octopus salads to the Bernard booth.”
The men seemed confused, but answered, “Jes, kolego.”
If they had looked closer, they might have noticed that Kirklin’s eye color had changed from dark brown to a striking blue, which I myself didn’t notice until he grinned and made an after-you gesture toward the open hallway in front of us. Kirklin’s men stepped through a panel door built into the wall that must have led back to the kitchen. OWEN called out to them as we began to head down the hall.
“One more thing.”
“Jes, kolego?”
“Have the waiter tell the people at the Bernard booth that the salads are from Agent Thompson.”
The men answered, “Jes, kolego,” again and left.
I picked up my pace down the hall.
“That bit with the salads wasn’t exactly necessary,” I said.