she caressed him sweetly afterwards like a child
he had dreamed this scene over and over in prison and Synth had helped him come in spite of the guilt
his naked penis squirting in the darkness of the cell without him touching it or anything—just like right now
amazing
yes, Synth was almost as amazing as love
and almost (almost)
just as good
Five. Region 2
In the emptiness of his office, Markus spun on his chair, the PersoReader between his hands, wondering who the hell could have written that book. Maybe Ole or Nick had managed to smuggle out a manuscript—although he had never imagined they had any special talent for writing—but to whom?
There was a publisher’s name on the first page. Worker’s Books. He’d looked them up and they didn’t exist. Anywhere. He’d cross-checked with all possible databases—nothing. Markus sighed and scratched his head, putting the PersoReader down on his desk.
The name was a provocation.
He knew about provocation. Agit-Prop. He had been there. The Potemkin Crew proved it.
With the great results everyone knew about.
He felt like a coffee and stood up to go to the vending-machine. He hadn’t slept very well. Not surprising, considering he hadn’t slept well in the last ten years. But tiredness hung over his shoulders today like a heavy blanket. Too many dreams about Karen. Visions, rather. Not vivid enough to be Synth creations, and buried too deep, as if he only saw—or felt—fragments floating on an opaque surface. Woke up many times, breathing hard.
Maybe another symptom of Synth letting go.
He thought he had been taking it regularly—how many since his last visit to Dr. Sojo? He had bought 24 and now he had . . . His fingers fished the cellophane bag from his pocket. 22 left. Impossible. He had taken one with Mardou and given her one. And then . . . He couldn’t remember. But he hadn’t taken only one—not for such a long trip. He had to ask Dr. Sojo if he’d given him some extra pills without telling him. He was his best customer after all. Good business move. Or maybe it was a new form of Synth. Stronger. Yeah, well, in any case 22 was good news.
But coffee was calling. He opened the door and went out.
The corridor was empty and all doors were closed. Kafka. To say the least. Orwell? Yes, Orwell. And Huxley for the drugs. If anybody wondered what literature was about, there it was, plain and simple: comforting references. You weren’t completely alone in this world. The books whispered their words in your ear. The same with music. A tune for every move. And the links were never down.
*
Markus had put the PersoReader aside and was now concentrating on the CashCard. Sørensen had been right. It was valid alright—it had a twenty-two billion account. He tried to find the algorithms linked with the pin-code, but there weren’t any. Not in the conventional sense, anyway. He checked again. There were figures, but they didn’t make sense. Nothing logical. Series of numbers and letters, changing every second or so. Alive?
The result was that the card didn’t need a pin-code.
It wasn’t protected.
You put the card into the machine and punched any number you wanted—it worked.
A skeleton key for cash.
Impossible. And yet . . .
Markus felt like the carpet was being softly pulled from under his feet. This was a new phase in hacking—if this was indeed hacking.
He suddenly wondered if Christensen was a spy on a mission from another city-state—Babylon, Petersburg or some other. Even Samarqand—rumor was that their technological capabilities were rising fast. But this fast?
An unprotected twenty-two billion CashCard.
Still, he had to start somewhere. Try to come up with something for Sørensen and his freedom. What would happen if he failed? Black sweat.
He looked for the account-number on the other side and punched it into his database.
Nothing.
Where in the hell did all that money come from?
He decided to let the matter rest for now and connected Christensen’s hard disk. The Viborg City Security specialists had done a great job, recovering most of the data. He found the program Christensen had used to attack the central systems. Not very advanced—that’s why he had been so easy to catch.
But something bugged Markus.
What was a mediocre hacker like Christensen doing with a novel you couldn’t download from any existing site and a phantom CashCard so advanced it was absolutely untraceable?
Ghosts. He sighed and reclined in his chair. How could he fight ghosts? More important: did he want to fight ghosts?
He checked Christensen’s Net favorites. Nothing interesting, apart from the usual Russian and Korean hacker sites. So he really was—or wanted to be—a hacker.
Sørensen had also given Markus the family background. A normal Cred family, with a father working in a furniture store and a mother employed as a nurse in the city hospital. A younger sister, still in high-school.
Synth suddenly sent Markus home—where he hadn’t been since his parents had left the city, right after his sentencing. His father had been a professor of economics at Viborg university, his mother taught in a local high school. No siblings. Every hope concentrated on him. Of course, he had crushed those hopes. Now, once in a while, an email. They believed he was still in prison. For life. If only they knew—it might have crushed their hopes a little more. His parents were liberal-socialists. Believed in the goodness of mankind expressed in the free market. Markus had argued with his father so much about that, while his mother considered his radical choices a logical consequence of university.
“But Jens, remember our youth . . . We were quite red, also.”
His mother, hair cut short, worried blue eyes, sitting at the other end of the Ikea wooden table. His father, balding, deep set eyes rolling upwards as he chews a piece of steak.
“I’m not red,” Markus says. “I’m red and black.”
“There you have it,” his father says. “Red and black. Extremists. Tell me, what will you do when your revolution takes place? Shoot us?”
Markus shrugs and gulps some wine.
“Right now we are fighting against the war. Revolution can wait.”
His father leans forward angrily, still chewing.
“This war is, unfortunately, necessary. South-East China is threatening the free world. It has to stop.”
“The experts we sent still haven’t found the super laser long-range cannon or whatever . . .”
“They will. You saw the satellite pictures. You can’t defend South-East China.”
“I’m not defending South-East China. I’m defending democracy.”
His father laughs and his mother makes a disapproving clicking noise with her tongue. Markus can’t tell if it is directed at him or at her husband.
“You’re defending democracy by defending China?”
“No, all I’m saying is that we shouldn’t have attacked first.”
“And let them threaten us and world peace?”
“There are no proofs. And we’re the ones threatening world peace right now.”
“Guess what I’ve baked for dessert . . .”
*
After lunch at the cafeteria, he went back to his office and shut the door. He hadn’t encountered anyone on the 14th floor in the last two days and he was beginning to think he might very well be the sole occupant. The last man on earth, still working for the Man. The irony made him smile.
The PersoReader and the CashCard were still on his desk, next to the flat screen. Familiar yet completely alien objects. What could he do? Trace, Sørensen had said. Trace what? Christensen hadn’t confessed anything and he was the key, the answer. Maybe he didn’t know himself. Maybe these things had been planted on him and they were trying to test their efficiency on Markus. Another conspiracy theory. A good one, at least. But too complex or evil to be true. One thing he had learned working for the Man these past ten years: the Man was
n’t dumb, but he wasn’t necessarily smart either.
He sat down at his desk, the half-empty polystyrene cup in hand. The problem here wasn’t technical—well, wasn’t only technical. It was a source problem. To identify, you had to know what you had to identify. In this case, what? A book and a bank account. That was all and yet it seemed impossible for now, unless Christensen spat it out. He thought about telling Sørensen, then he remembered his comment about torture. Could they really do that to Christensen? There were international conventions and laws . . . Yet, everything had been suspended during the South-East China operations—another reason for the Potemkin Crew to interfere—and nothing had been really clear since.
Christensen had done nothing terribly wrong yet—he had tried to break some security codes that would have led to other security codes, using tools that were desperately inadequate. It was the potential that scared Sørensen, summed up in the book and the CashCard. The potential and the unknown. How many books? How many cards? Where?
The invisible threat.
Ghosts.
The old primitive, irrational scare.
Using Markus the Ghost to track other ghosts.
Like Gloria.
Synth materialized her avatar and the familiar Erewhon® surroundings. She smiled at him as she used to, in her strange floating gestures. He sat next to her. Could he have been in love with her? Had she really meant so much to him? He tried to remember what she’d represented to him and thought he’d failed, until Synth recreated the exact sensation for him: comfort.
Yes, comfort.
The familiar silhouette waiting at the end of the day. The superficial chats with someone you could trust because there was no way she could ever know you and her eyes would never linger a few seconds too many on your anklet . . . His heart dried up and a feeling of emptiness invaded him, not unlike the symptoms of a Synth withdrawal.
Markus connected to the Cyber Magic® main server. He typed a few keys and was in after a couple of minutes. He hadn’t unofficially hacked a site in ten years. He wondered if there would be a trace of his intrusion. He hoped not, otherwise who knows what could happen? A puff of the proverbial pipe and a trip back to prison. Fortunately, he had an alibi: the CashCard and the book. They gave him a palette of plausible explanations.
He typed ‘Gloria’ in the avatar list and found sixty-eight names and IP addresses. Fortunately, the picture of the avatar was shown next to the name. She was number thirty-four. Badia Khan. And she lived in the Strindberg Residence, a few doors away from him. His heart was beating fast as he scribbled down her address on a yellow Post-It®.
Finally, he knew what he was going to do after work.
*
The subway car was almost empty for once, and Synth hummed nice electric songs for him as he tried to relax after his long and boring day.
His eyes lazily examined the stainless steel wall and found two political posters framed over the opposite window. He had forgotten that elections were coming up soon. Work and surviving his own shame had literally cut him off from everyday reality—and Synth didn’t help, of course. One poster promoted the National-Liberals, in charge as he rode in the empty train, the other the Social-Liberals. Blue versus red. Symbolic colors of nothingness. He remembered his fights with his father. The Potemkin Crew believed you should burn all flags, including the black one. They had even put out a manifesto, some time before the Metal Thunder Operation. The leftists had screamed outrage. People needed symbols, it seemed.
“I am what you are not.”
Big deal.
Was he becoming nihilistic?
Was Synth making him depressive?
Was it time for a holiday?
*
Markus double-checked the address he had scribbled on the Post-It®. It was fun to imagine he had probably crossed paths with Gloria in the supermarket without realizing it. He pushed the door open and as his shoe landed on the first step of the concrete staircase, he suddenly wondered if she was ugly.
*
Number 342. He knocked, as the doorbell hadn’t worked. No name on the door. His heart was beating. A romantic moment no doubt. Somebody fumbled with the locks. Face of a man in the opened door. Young, mid-twenties. White t-shirt. Blond hair, of course. Handsome.
“Yes?”
Her fiancé? Husband? Brother?
“Er, does Badia Khan live here?”
The young man shook his head.
“No, she moved. Three days ago. We shared the apartment.”
Like an elevator crashing to the ground, his heart dropped.
“Do you know where she went?”
Face shook his head again.
“No. Probably Sorgbjerg, since she couldn’t pay the rent any more. She lost her job last month. She’s a NoCred now. Shit happens.”
A compassionate room-mate. Warmed the heart.
“Thanks.”
“Sure. If you know anybody interested in sharing a flat, let me know, ok?”
Markus nodded.
*
Sitting in front of his computer again, Markus wriggled on his chair. Just a flirt, bitch. NoCred, man. Big time loser. Should he? Could he? Hell yes? Hell yes.
*
Ministry of Welfare and Social Crisis, List of Registered No Credits. There were seventy two Khan and eight had a first name starting with B. She was the seventh one. And she did live in Sorgbjerg now. Markus wrote down the address.
*
Sorgbjerg central station stood around him like a cathedral. Fire in the hole. Millennium. Black plague. Shell-shock. Strange associations collided in his brain. Black sweat. Metal tasting tongue. Crossfire. Heavy losses. Jerusalem. Markus crossed the busy hall to the men’s room. Terrible smell and blinding white light. Hell? Already? The two sinks were taken and there was a short line in front of him. Waiting on the line. Your country wants you. Allahu akbar. Markus felt his veins turn to lead, his hand stuck deep inside his pocket, squeezing the cellophane package. It struck him he had at last become a junkie.
For real.
Hell? Already?
*
“No, man, these pills are the same as last time. No tampering, no new batch. The same. Exactly. Why?”
*
Dr. Sojo opened the door and let Markus in. A cloud of blue smoke pervaded the living-room, like a foggy morning.
“Don’t tell me you need more,” Dr. Sojo said, half jokingly.
Markus sat on one of the Arab stools. He wondered why he was here. Fear? Maybe. In a way. Somewhat.
“No, no, I still have plenty. Actually . . .”
“You know Wayne almost bought everything I had in stock? Man, he loved the stuff. Reminded me of you.”
Dr. Sojo’s eyes glimmered behind his glasses.
“Wayne?”
Dr. Sojo nodded.
“He was enthusiastic. Told me Synth is the greatest drug since LSD. That its popularity would grow exponentially. That I would become a millionaire. Actually, he might not be wrong. Have you seen today’s paper?”
Markus shook his head.
“No, I’ve been somewhat . . . disconnected, the past few days.”
They both grinned. Dr. Sojo pointed to the first page of Aftenbladet lying on the couch.
The new drug destroying our children, the headlines read.
With a black and white picture of junkies doing something.
“A revolution is on its way,” Dr. Sojo said. “Nothing more dangerous than spoiled rich kids messing with mind-bending chemicals.”
He laughed. Markus smiled politely. He knew that rich kids on dope were still rich kids. They would rebel, yes. A little. But not revolt. They had absolutely no reason to.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Well, I need to know if the pills you gave me last time are different from the ones before?”
“No, man, these pills are the same as last time. No tampering, no new batch. The same. Exactly. Why?”
*
“Wow,” Dr. Soj
o said. “Wow, wow, wow. Twenty-four hours. That’s a long trip. Be careful man. The Final Frontier, you know?”
Markus shrugged.
“The withdrawal was no worse than before. Actually, it felt shorter and milder. But that could also be a Synth thing.”
Dr. Sojo agreed.
“Wow,” he said again.
*
The Herman Bang Social Projects stood behind the station, four gray blocks with grayish-blue window-frames. At least the city wasn’t lying about the bleakness of NoCreds’ living conditions. Nothing like a straight stare in the eyes and a swift kick in the balls. Speaking of which . . . Was he ready? Was he not ready? How ready was he? His hands were buried deep in the pockets of his coat and his misty breath preceded him by a few inches. Stars turned overhead because they just had to. He stopped on the parking lot, hesitating.
All the windows of the five-storey building were lit, like a gigantic luminous chess-board. Synth began to move, but Markus stopped it. He wanted his corny metaphors to remain his own and he wanted to face Gloria/Badia as she was, not like some gigantic chess-queen or whatever.
He stood fretting, then moved on. His hand pushed the entrance door open and his eyes scrutinized the names on the mailboxes. B. Khan, fifth floor, 505. Finally, he had found her. Good cop. Have a donut.
A crown of sweat beaded his forehead. What would she say? What would her fiancé say? Why am I here? He didn’t know, but it was as if a magnet pulled him up the stairs, slowly, steadily. She had been his only friend, that’s why. His only flirt. His only human contact, although it had been virtual. The wonders of science. Weird science. He missed her already. He felt like an abandoned child looking for its mother. I don’t care if she’s a prostitute. I don’t care if she hates me. I don’t care if she’s butt-ugly. I want to meet her. I do, I do, I do.
His body weighed a ton and grew heavier and heavier. Soon his feet would sink into the concrete steps and the stairs would collapse under his weight, burying him alive. A grave of gravel, concrete, rusted steel and piss yellow paint. How romantic.
*
“Yes?”
Markus opened his mouth and closed it slowly. Things were never as one imagined them.
For instance, he imagined her fiancé opening the door, and all his own courage disappearing like dirty water down the drain, with white shaving foam and minute black hairs.
The Song of Synth Page 5