“I appreciate that you’re not a computer scientist, Agent Rowsdower,” he said. “I also appreciate that you spent the majority of your career looking for bad guys. Murderers, mobsters, drug dealers, what-have-you. But don’t you find it curious that when the government gave you a new job, they didn’t even give you enough information to ask the right questions?”
“I do, sir,” I said, “and at the moment of my learning, I was no longer needed. So yes, professor, I get it. Tell me about ICANN.”
“It’s technical,” he said. “And they have many functions, but to dumb it down, no offense, they’re tasked with making the Internet work. They assign and verify Internet addresses, running the protocols to make sure the Net is not vulnerable to cyberattacks.”
“What kind of cyberattacks?” I asked.
“Any kind. Could be phishing schemes based on fraudulent email addresses designed to steal credit-card information or, far worse, invalid sites, misdirecting searches and breaking the Net, so to speak. Do you remember the early days of the Apocalypse? It was more like that at times. Stuff just didn’t work right, followed by periodic blackouts. ICANN holds the keys to DNSSEC, the security specifications that verify the web’s content, keeps it working.”
“What do you mean ‘keys’?”
“Well, there is the master key, which contains the code to run the security protocols, that’s kept in a Fort Knox safe. That’s the key that’s necessary to reboot the security protocol in case the Internet goes down in cyberattack. And there are three crypto officers spread all over the world that have the actual keys to that safe. There are also recovery-key shareholders who have bits of the master key who can rebuild that key in case the physical plant is destroyed and something happens to the crypto officers.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“You’re pretty up on this stuff,” I said.
“Don’t you follow the news about your children, Mr. Rowsdower?”
“I don’t have any kids,” I said, and left it at that. There was no reason to talk about Madeline. Not just because it wasn’t his business or that it wouldn’t help me, but because I no longer even felt like that man. The man who thought he’d be a father. Who wondered how he was going to balance his career drive with family before everything was made far simpler by leukemia.
But even under Gladstone’s hat, Leonards saw things I didn’t want to show. “I’m very sorry,” he said, and must have meant it too because he didn’t object when I pulled out an American Spirit cigarette. I offered him one.
“You won’t get rid of me that easily, Agent Rowsdower,” he replied.
“Please, call me Aaron,” I said. “And I’m not trying to get rid of you at all. I’m trying to find Gladstone.”
“I’m sorry, Aaron,” he said, “but I’m not sure I can help you with that. I only met Gladstone once, and the only thing I really know about him is he barely knew more about the Net than you. So is now the time you tell me why you’re wearing his hat?”
I told the professor all I had to tell, and as bluntly as I could. Not just because I knew he’d appreciate the efficiency of clean logic but because the job had taught me that one of the perks of speaking to highly successful people is that insecurities don’t get in the way. They don’t need compliments and they don’t mind disagreement. It is very hard to slight a truly great man, because the world has already confirmed his worth, and nothing removes petty insecurity like global anointment.
“So you believe in a conspiracy,” he asked, “that connects the forces who stole the Internet, those who cost you your job, and those who framed Gladstone?”
“I do.”
“And these bombings. Who’s behind that?”
“I’m not sure. Possibly the same people, in an attempt to vilify Gladstone. Or maybe actual terrorists or anarchists seizing upon instability. Perhaps misguided members of the Internet Reclamation Movement.”
“‘Misguided,’” he said. “Does that mean you think Gladstone might still be involved to some degree?”
“No, quite frankly, aside from it not being in the nature of the man I met, I just don’t think he’s capable of organizing something like that.”
Leonards laughed. “Well, then, if Gladstone’s that useless, why are you so bent on finding him?”
“Not because of what he can do but because of what he knows.”
“You think it’s one bogeyman after him? One bad man acting alone?”
“No. I imagine it takes many bad, or at least compromised, people to keep the world offline, but, y’know,” I said, smiling as I dropped an ash between the floorboards of Leonards’s deck, “sometimes one bad man can make a difference.”
“And what will you do if you find Gladstone? What he cannot?”
“I hadn’t gotten that far yet. I just want to know what we’re up against. Surely you can tell me something about him.”
“Y’know, I’ve gotten a little peculiar in my old age,” Leonards said. I waited. I could tell he was about to go professorial. “Remember that story in the days before the Net went down about that hitchhiking robot?”
I remembered something I hadn’t bothered to read about a robot getting its electronic brains beaten out, but I wasn’t sure we were talking about the same thing.
“Is that the robot that got destroyed in Philly?” I asked.
“The very same,” he said. “I built it to see if it was possible for something relying on the kindness of strangers to make it around the world.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m an eighty-year-old computer genius. What do you want me to do? Watch Matlock reruns until I die?”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, I wanted to see how far it could go and how much it could learn about humanity. Absolute strangers saw this hitchhiking robot with just a few instructions on its back and cared for him. Traveled with him and left him for others to do the same. It made it all through Germany. Germany! And then the Netherlands. It survived New York and Boston until a bunch of hooligans tore it to pieces in Philadelphia.”
“The City of Brotherly Love,” I scoffed.
“Believe me,” he said, “the irony wasn’t lost on me, but that’s not the point. The point was this robot, which had a rudimentary personality chip, was also learning. Learning about the world, and like any child he learned from what he saw, and applied it to everything he did and everyone he met thereafter. And the sad part is, because people were so kind to him at the start of his life, so good to him, he never saw the evil coming. He had no way of dealing with it. No defenses.”
Leonard cleared his throat, because even though he was touched, he was not the kind of man to let sentimentality get in the way of discourse, at least not when talking about evil in the world. “Anyway,” he said. “I built the hitchhiking robot to learn something, and if I built him again, do you know what I’d do differently?”
“Keep him the fuck out of Philadelphia?”
“I’m being serious. What do you think I’d change?”
“I don’t know.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“You wouldn’t build up his defenses? His distrust?” I asked.
“No. Because if you start closed like that, you never open up fully. You never get where you’re going.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said, and he sized me up one final time.
“You ever think about Exodus?” he asked.
“The Bible? I’m not the most religious guy.”
“Well, in the Exodus from Egypt, Moses raised his staff, so the story goes, and with the power of God, split the Red Sea, allowing the Hebrews to escape to freedom.”
“Right,” I said. “I saw the movie.”
“I’m sure, but the thing is, you ever think about the Jew at the very back of the line?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean to him, something of that magnitude over this crowd of people before him must have looked terrifying.”
“OK…”
“And yet, to be free, he had to keep walking. He had to see a power great enough to split an ocean in two, and walk right into it.”
I didn’t speak, and the professor moved his folding chair closer to where I was sitting, looking more certain than I’d yet seen from this very certain man. “Miracles and disasters look the same in the distance,” he said. “But the trick is not running for cover. Greatness requires the ability to be destroyed by the world and the faith to believe you won’t be.”
I let go of a slow breath and looked at the cracks in the floorboards. I’d received a significant gift that made nothing clearer. “Thank you, Professor, but I’d hoped you’d tell me something about Gladstone.…”
He was disappointed. “If I hear from Gladstone,” he said, “I’ll be sure to tell him you have his hat.”
* * *
I couldn’t be mad at Leonards. He was a wealth of knowledge, even if it wasn’t what I needed at the moment. Still, my years on the job had taught me nothing is wasted. And not all was lost, because Leonards was the last thing keeping me in L.A. Being out of both work and leads meant I could go back home again. My real home. New York.
The next day, I was on a plane flying east and wondering if I was traveling farther from or closer to Gladstone. I didn’t know where to find him, and I was still convinced nothing more could happen before I did. And even though no threat had been directed at me, I felt I wouldn’t truly be safe until I knew what he knew. I got my bags at JFK and splurged on a livery cab driver to take me home to Queens.
The place was just as I left it, and no one asked me where I’d been. No one in the White Castle on Northern Boulevard. No one on Bell Boulevard as I tugged my suitcase with one hand and ate a slider with another. Queens didn’t need me to exist, just like the world went on without the Internet. I was home and somehow felt more alone than I did in L.A. I got to my apartment building. Paper memes were now in some of the windows. Gladstone’s hat-wearing Wi-Fi symbol with different messages written underneath. I couldn’t read what they said, but that wasn’t the point. Gladstone had left more of a mark on my building than I had, and just when I reached a point where I was starting to think I didn’t exist, Margo saved me.
She was waiting for me in the apartment doorway, standing five-foot-ten in a red sundress, and looking sensational.
“Well, Aaron Rowsdower! As I live and breathe,” she said in some corny Southern accent, but it didn’t matter what she said. She was standing there, seeing me, and I wanted to take her in my arms. I felt like a boy filled with new feelings he didn’t understand, I wanted to tell her all of that. Instead, I stopped and said, “What the fuck?”
“I just got here, like, ten seconds ago.” She smiled.
“How is that possible? I didn’t even tell you I was going back to New York.”
“Well, I certainly knew you weren’t going to stay in L.A. Besides, Information only had a New York address for you.”
“You came all the way to New York on the chance I’d be here?”
“Don’t be so flattered. It’s not like you live in Des Moines. If you weren’t home, I’m sure I could find stuff to do.”
I wheeled my suitcase up to her. “Well, I have to put my stuff down. Do you want to come up, or grab a bite…?”
“Leave it packed,” she said. “We’re going to London.”
“What?”
She reached into a tiny black-and-white handbag and pulled out a letter. It had no envelope. “It’s for you,” she said.
I leaned in to take the letter. We were close enough to touch.
Dear Special Agent Rowsdower,
I need your help, but I’m not ready to be found. At least you’ll be happy to know I’m not in Los Angeles. Go to England. 38 Lancaster Road, East London.
Cautiously optimistic,
Gladstone
Part II
Report 4
I had a lot of questions, but a six-hour transatlantic flight provides plenty of Q&A opportunities. Margo had insisted on two things: coming along and buying the tickets. It wasn’t in my nature to accept either of those requirements. While I no longer had a badge, I didn’t need to be teaming with a civilian, and while I still had my pension (graciously offered to me with my termination despite being two years shy of full qualification), I didn’t want to feel like a charity case, having people pay my way.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “This is tax-deductible for me. I’m following up on the Gladstone story. What I optioned doesn’t have an ending.”
I was reticent. “I don’t know what we’re walking into, and I don’t even have a gun.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s England. No one else will either.”
Margo seemed to have forgiven me for interrogating her too aggressively at the hospital. Our relationship was on the mend like the scar below her collarbone.
“Can I see the envelope for that letter from Gladstone?” I asked.
“I didn’t bring it, but it was a UK postmark.”
“How’s your miner doing?” I asked.
“What’s that got to do with the Internet?” she asked.
“Not a thing.”
We stopped speaking for a bit until she pulled a manila folder from her purse. It had magazine clippings in it, and when she handed it over in a neat but very tactile pile of index cards, paper clips, notes, and glossy articles, it was very easy to imagine her as a talented junior high student in the nondigital age.
I read through the articles. She’d looked up the address we were going to, and it wasn’t some flophouse for a visiting American. It was the offices of Tech Global—a technology company I didn’t fully understand, and helmed by a Neville Bhattacharyya.
I pulled out the last article. “He’s one of the ICANN key holders?”
“Crypto officers, yeah. You know about that?” Margo asked.
“Just what Professor Leonards told me. Something about three people with the keys to reboot the Internet?”
“Well, not exactly,” Margo said. “Keys to reboot the security protocols to verify the addresses of the Net in case of cyberattack.”
“Right,” I said. “But I gotta say, for a wannabe film producer, you really just stepped all over the drama there.”
“Fair point. I’ll try to work some Horcruxes into the script, but for now, I was more interested in correctly understanding the background of whom we’re meeting.”
I must have made a face because Margo asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve just never flown with someone who used ‘whom’ in casual conversation.”
“Well, I’m a classy dame,” she said, and I tried not to think about how much I liked her. Not for the rest of the flight, and not later in the hotel as I tried to sleep without hearing her every move on the other side of the wall.
* * *
The next day, we sat in the Starbucks of a London office building and tried to plan the attack. I wasn’t used to the disadvantages of being a civilian. No badge to flash. No threats to make. I wasn’t even in my own country.
Worse, there was only the vaguest focus for our discussion if we got to Neville. Still, the less I knew, the more marching orders I gave: find Neville, then find Gladstone, then find our common enemy, and understand who was behind the Apocalypse. I write these words like they were some internal monologue, but they weren’t. I spilled them out over coffee and Margo listened, occasionally challenging me just enough to make me understand things more clearly.
“Why do you say anyone’s after you?” she asked.
“What do you mean? Wasn’t I just let go after twenty years on the job?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But you released Gladstone. Twice. And then he killed his ex-wife and committed an act of terrorism. Someone had to pay for that.”
“Wait, now you think Gladstone’s a murdering terrorist?”
“No, of course not. I agree he was set up and someone’s definitely after him. They
killed his ex-wife, framed him, and are committing acts of terrorism in his name. Now that’s a conspiracy, but you … well, you might have been collateral damage.”
It was a valid point, and I didn’t know what to say so I kept drinking my black coffee. Thankfully the correcting forces of corporate franchise had prevented the Brits from fucking up my coffee by doing anything too culturally weird.
“So you’re saying the conspiracy might be more fractured than I’ve thought? That Gladstone got fucked by evil and I got fucked by the bureaucracy’s reaction to evil?”
Margo put her coffee down after a slow, happy sip. “Well, well, Special Agent Rowsdower,” she said. “You might have a bit of a poet in you after all.”
“I’d rather have an in with Neville,” I said.
“I have the in,” she said, and pulled a nicely bound copy of Gladstone’s journal, Notes from the Internet Apocalypse, out of her bag and put it on the table between us. “Did you notice, Aaron, that we are not the only people here with this book?”
I looked around. Incredibly, it was true. Gladstone’s stupid panic attack of a journal, chronicling his drunken “investigation” throughout New York, had spread to the UK. And in this Internetless world, it seemingly had taken the place of many of the laptops typically visible in coffee shops.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Everyone is reading that thing. Not doing wonders for my reputation.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get a good-looking guy to play you in the movie.”
“So what’s your angle?” I asked.
“We go in smooth,” Margo said. “No investigation. No crime. I drop my Prague Rock Productions card and say we’re looking for movie consultants. He’ll talk. Everyone likes movies.”
Two hours later we were both in Neville Bhattacharyya’s office. Margo was that good. Recognizing him by his picture and seeing him enter the building around nine forty-five, she cut for the elevator bank near the security desk and forced a collision so effortlessly you would have thought she was raised by pickpockets on the streets of some Third World nation. But that wasn’t what sold it. Instead, she dropped to her knees right in front of him, gathering the possessions she’d deliberately let fall, then met his eyes from below before slowly rising to her full five-foot-ten. I saw them exchange words from the Starbucks as he coughed and made an extra effort to maintain eye contact instead of letting his stare linger on the modest V-cut of Margo’s blouse. He gestured to Gladstone’s journal prominently displayed in her gathered possessions, and she gave Neville her card, sealing the deal.
Reports on the Internet Apocalypse Page 4