“Does it have electricity? Cable?”
“Nothing. But the country has a president you can do business with. He was president of the coca growers’ association when he got elected. Did he stop being president of the association? No way! That’s what I call style. President of Bolivia and the coca growers’ association. He screwed me on the lithium thing, but it was the right thing to do if you were him. And now he owes me. I can make the introduction. I can lease you Los Volcanes for a dollar a year. Throw in ten million for infrastructure improvements and operating expenses—you’ll want to lay a fiber-optic line.”
“Why would you do this for me?”
“You need a secure base. I need black-swan insurance. Belize is working for me now, gotta love the police here, but we’re still pre-Singularity. If people like you and me are going to re-create the world, we may need a place where we can ride out transitional disruptions. Also, I don’t see Greenland melting down before the Singularity, but if it does, nuclear weaponry could be utilized. We’ve backed away from nuclear-winter capability, but there could still be a nuclear autumn, a nuclear November, in which case the equator’s where you want to be. Isolated valley in the center of an untargeted continent. Make sure you’ve got some comely young females, some spare parts, some goats and chickens. You can make the place cozy. I’d hate to have to join you there, but it could happen.”
Tad stopped talking to stab at his fish and consume it with distrustful, snapping lunges with his mouth. Then he pushed his plate away as if disavowing something shameful.
“I’m not sure how to say this except bluntly,” Andreas said, “or why I’m bothering to say it with your cameras sending this conversation to the cloud. But it would be important to me that no one know where the money is coming from.”
Tad frowned. “Do I embarrass you?”
“No, of course not. I think we understand each other. But I have my own identity in the world, and … how to say this? Your legal troubles don’t mesh well with it.”
“My legal troubles are nothing compared to yours, my friend.”
“I violated German official-secrets law and American anti-hacking law. That plays well even in the mainstream media. Certainly better than a sex charge.”
“The old media live to smear me. I am the Primary Disruptor, and they know it.”
“I get some of that, too. Which is why—”
“Of all the antenimbusian systems, the legal system is the most intellectually offensive to me. ‘One size fits all’—my God. It’s even worse than brick-and-mortar commerce. Why on earth, when we have the computing power to individually tailor everything else, do people still think the law should apply equally to everyone? Not every fifteen-year-old is alike, believe me. And am I exactly the same as every other sixty-four-year-old male?”
“It’s an interesting point.”
“And the rules of evidence—it’s not a search for truth, it’s an affront to truth. I have the truth, I have it recorded. And the lawyers cover their ears with their hands, literally cover their ears, and tell me they don’t want to hear about it. Can a system be any more fubar than that? I am counting the days until a ‘trial’ consists of nothing more than sitting down and viewing the digital truth.”
“But in the meantime…”
“It’s fine,” Tad said, somewhat crossly. “You can keep my name out of it. The Volcanes place is registered to a Bolivian corporation I set up to get around their foreign-ownership nonsense. There’s three layers of shell there. The Bolivian entity can disburse the money.”
“You really don’t mind?”
“We’re both truth-tellers, but I’m the more radical one. I have the guts to look you in the eye and tell you that your form of truth-telling is lesser than mine. But you’re more likable. You can be truth-telling’s friendlier public face.”
“Sounds good to me,” Andreas said.
The bad incident occurred after he and Tad had walked out to the compound’s main gate. Not seeing the Escalade there, Tad phoned the driver, who said he was returning from a gas station. A few minutes later, as the gate was opening inward and the Escalade coming through it, a bald man with a camera, a gringo in a many-pocketed khaki vest, popped out from behind a palm tree across the road. He auto-fired at least ten shots of Andreas and Tad, with Tad’s house behind them, before Andreas took cover behind the Escalade.
How could he have been so stupid as to stand in plain sight? It was bad, and it got worse. Tad had assumed a firing stance, aiming his revolver at the photographer, whose shutter Andreas continued to hear clucking. “Drop the camera, asshole,” Tad shouted. “You think I wouldn’t do it? You think I’m afraid?”
The gun was surprisingly unsteady. Tad’s driver jumped out of the Escalade, looking bewildered. There was a scuffle of footsteps from the road. Tad lowered the gun and ran to the cages along the wall by the gate and released two of his Rottweilers.
Thus endeth my run of good luck, Andreas thought.
He and the driver followed Tad through the gate and watched the dogs tearing up the road after the photographer. This was the point at which the Killer made its presence known. The photographer stumbled against a parked minivan, and the dogs caught up with him and lunged without hesitation, one of them biting his arm, the other his leg. Andreas found himself hoping the dogs would kill him.
Tad was hustling up the road with his gun.
Andreas got in the Escalade and told the driver to do the same. By the time they were through the gate, the dogs were mewling and staggering—the photographer must have pepper-sprayed them—and the minivan was heading straight at Tad, who seemed to have lost interest in confrontation. He wandered off the road, his gun hanging loosely in his hand. The driver had to jerk the wheel of the Escalade to avoid collision with the minivan.
“Turn around and follow him,” Andreas said.
The driver nodded, not very happily, and didn’t hurry. By the time he’d turned the vehicle around, the road was empty. “He’s gone,” he said, as if this settled the matter.
Apparently nothing had changed. The Killer hadn’t gone anywhere. Andreas felt like a dreamer awakening to an existence that had grown all the more desperate in the decade he’d been happily asleep. Instead of love, he had fame. Instead of a wife or children or real friends, like the friend Tom Aberant could have been, he had Tad Milliken. He was alone with the Killer.
He instructed the driver to take him to the nearest clinic. The photographer’s minivan was parked outside it. Drops of fresh blood on the asphalt led to a red smear on the linoleum inside the door. Two Belizean women and four sick children were in the waiting room.
“I need to see my friend,” Andreas told the receptionist. “The one who was bitten.”
This being Belize, he was ushered right in to an examination room where a young doctor was cleaning a gnarly wound, one of several, on the photographer’s arm. “Please wait outside,” the doctor said without looking up.
The photographer, on his back, rolled his head toward Andreas. His eyes widened.
“I’m a friend,” Andreas said. “I want to make this right.”
“Your friend tried to kill me.”
“I’m sorry. He’s insane.”
“You think?”
“Please wait outside,” the doctor said.
The camera was sitting on a chair. Easy enough to walk away with it, but the pictures were only part of the problem. Money would have helped with the rest of the problem, but he was famed for having none. Famed for the Gandhian simplicity of his existence, the suitcase and briefcase in which his earthly possessions fit. Mostly this worked in his favor, but it wasn’t working now.
Out in the parking lot, under a roasting sun, he called his former girlfriend Claudia, in whose family’s beach house the Sunlight Project was currently conducting operations. The family’s patience with being denied access to their own vacation place, and with being billed for the Project’s expenses, was wearing perilously thin, but Claudia’s l
oyalty was still solid and cost him nothing but submission to her teasing. It was only midnight in Berlin. She was at a Spree-side club when he reached her and directed her to cover the photographer’s medical expenses. “I’ll text you the number,” he said.
Claudia laughed. “Do you want me to hop on a plane and bring you a latte while I’m at it?”
“Low-fat milk, half caffeinated.”
“It wasn’t like I was sitting down to dinner with my friends or something.”
Andreas knew very well that the only thing that could make her shine brighter in her friends’ eyes than taking a midnight call from him was leaving the club to do important business for him. They knew she’d been his girl for six months, back in the middle of the sweet decade that now was over, the decade when fame was all good and no bad. He’d received interesting sex from Claudia, along with other considerations worth at least two hundred thousand euros, and yet she was the one who felt more grateful, because he was the famous outlaw hero. How sweet it all had been.
The photographer, whose name was Dan Tierney, emerged from the clinic an hour later. His shaved head made him seem older than he probably was. The bandages on his arm and leg didn’t look too serious. “Somebody in Berlin seems to have taken care of my bill,” he said.
“A friend of mine,” Andreas said. “How are you feeling?”
“The benchmark for me is getting stung on the eyelid by a scorpion. I’m maybe at four out of ten on that scale.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“No. I’m going back to my hotel room and taking a Percocet.”
“Rum goes well with Percocet.”
“So you’re my friend now? I wonder where you were when Insane Person was pointing a gun at me.”
“Hiding behind a sport-utility vehicle.”
“Rain check on the rum drink. Sorry.”
“Do you mind if I ask who you work for?”
Tierney limped toward his minivan. “It varies. The Times is doing another Milliken story. The macaw thing, the local police. Tech world’s biggest creepizoid, et cetera. It’s hard to see how my image of him pointing a gun at me changes anyone’s opinion.”
“I don’t suppose I can persuade you to delete the images of me and not tell anyone you saw me at his place.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To help the Sunlight Project.”
Tierney laughed. “You want me not to shed sunlight on your being pals with Insane Person. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I’m never sure which term is appropriate.”
“Call it all three if you want,” Andreas said.
“Chutzpah. That’s a fourth term.”
“The thing is, I’m not Tad’s pal. You’d be shedding false light.”
“Really. I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“The Internet is radiant with it.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that.” Tierney unlocked his vehicle and got in. “Or half surprised. It’s not that I don’t like what you do. Your batting average is pretty good in terms of going after the right people. But I have to admit I always sort of figured you for an asshole.”
Hearing this, the Killer stirred again in Andreas. If Tierney had figured him for an asshole, it was likely that many other people had, too. He felt a sudden strong anxious need to get to a computer and find out who they were and what exactly they were saying.
“I have nothing to offer you,” he said to Tierney, “except the truth. Can I buy you a drink and tell you the truth?”
It was his best line, the line he’d used over and over in the past decade. He used it even when he didn’t have to, because even when a woman had already signaled availability he loved to see the effect the line had. Everybody wanted to hear the truth from him. He watched Tierney think it over.
“I admit you’re not a man I ever expected to meet in person,” Tierney said. “There’s a bar at my hotel.”
At the bar, Andreas began with his boilerplate TSP speech, the list of governments he’d embarrassed and the longer list of corporations and power-abusing individuals. He hurried through the latter because Tierney seemed impatient. “So the truth has two parts,” he said. “The first is that the Project lives or dies on the public’s perception of me personally. The reason we’re still thriving and WikiLeaks is going under is that people think Assange is an autistic megalomaniac sex creep. His tech capabilities haven’t changed. What’s changed is that people with dirt won’t go to someone dirty. People who expose dirt do it because they’re hungering for clean. If you don’t help me out, we’re in danger of going the way of WikiLeaks.”
“Oh, come on,” Tierney said. “It’s one picture of two Internet titans inside a gated compound. Unless you’re telling me this is just the tip of an iceberg—”
“That’s the second part of the truth. This is where you really have to believe me. There is no iceberg. I lead a clean life. I was wild in my twenties, but I was living in a sick country and I was young. Given the level of scrutiny I’ve been under since then, do you think that if anyone had any dirt on me it wouldn’t be all over the Internet?”
“I think if someone did, your hackers would be especially good at getting it buried.”
“Seriously?”
“OK, so you’re clean. Whatever. It only proves my point. One photograph is not a big deal.”
“My being seen with Milliken is a disaster for the Project. It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”
Tierney shifted in his chair and grimaced. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this. But you are one strange dude. Who cares if your sheets are a little pink? Everybody’s sheets are a little pink. People still go to Hugh Grant movies. People like Bill Clinton more than ever.”
“Their business isn’t being clean. Mine is.”
“What were you doing at Milliken’s anyway?”
“I was begging for money.”
“Then I really don’t see how you have anyone but yourself to blame for this.”
“You’re right, I don’t. I was desperate and I had shit luck. You have total power over me.”
“Is this the point where you offer me money?”
“If I had money, I wouldn’t have been at Milliken’s. And I’m less hypocritical than you think. I wouldn’t offer money even if I had it. That would be a true betrayal of Project principles.”
Tierney shook his head as if confounded by Andreas’s strangeness. “I can probably get a couple thousand dollars for a picture of you two. I was also attacked by Rottweilers.”
“If it’s a matter of simple compensation, not hush money, my friend in Berlin can pay you a fair market rate.”
“Nice friend.”
“She believes in the Project.”
“No matter what you say, you want me to not do to you the thing you do to other people.”
“That’s the truth.”
“So you are an asshole.”
“Sure. But I’m not Tad Milliken. I own nothing. I live out of a suitcase. Repressive governments hate me. There are only about ten countries in the world I can safely travel to.”
This sounded good, came out well, and Tierney sighed. “Get me five thousand dollars,” he said. “I’d be suing your pal Tad if I thought I could win a lawsuit in Belize. I’m still going to report him to the police. They’ll ask who else was there. Do you want me to lie?”
“Yes, please.”
“Of course you do.” Tierney turned on his camera and let Andreas watch while he deleted, one by one, the images in which his face was visible. Andreas was reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he’d scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! “It’s over now!” What’s that supposed to mean? It’s as good as if it never was.
But it hadn’t never been. All Tierney had to do was mention the incide
nt somewhere online, and it would stay in the cloud forever. In the weeks following the incident, while Andreas was closing down the beach house and exchanging strongly encrypted emails with Tad Milliken, his paranoia spread roots and flourished. With every different keyword he entered with his name in every different search engine, he was no longer content to read the first page or two of results. He wondered what was on the next page, the one he hadn’t read yet, and after he’d looked at the next page he found yet another page. Repeat, repeat. There seemed to be no limit to the reassurance he required. He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. The eyes of the world, even the eyes of his followers, didn’t matter for their own sake, in the physical world. Who even cared what a person’s private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn’t exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn’t exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet’s image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The Internet meant death, and, unlike Tad Milliken, he couldn’t take refuge in the hope of a cloud-borne afterlife.
The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization. Once he was up and running in Bolivia, he created a small team of truest-believing hackers and female interns who performed SEO by means both fair and foul. Tad’s dream of luxury reincarnation may have been technically unrealistic, but it was a metaphor for something real: if—and only if—you had enough money and/or tech capability, you could control your Internet persona and, thus, your destiny and your virtual afterlife. Optimize or die. Kill or be killed.
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