Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

  “What their research showed was that I was broke. On fumes and rice for dinner. I was desperate for the job.”

  “But you’re not a Rilkean.”

  “Turns out, no.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lion spots a motorcyclist in a black full-face helmet and head-to-toe riding leathers, idling in the middle of the road. Watching them in his side-view mirror, is what Lion thinks—but perhaps it’s nothing—as the rider kicks the bike into gear and vanishes around a corner. He turns his attention back to Bo. “How come that fact didn’t show up in Arctic’s research?”

  “That I wasn’t a Rilkean? That mine was just your typical boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-drugged-kidnapped-and-tattooed story?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stupidity.”

  “Arctic doesn’t strike me as stupid.”

  “Not them, me. The woman, Sarah, that’s her name, the silver-haired kidnapper, I was really into her. Even after everything that happened, I was kind of hoping for—” Shrugs. “I don’t know what I was hoping for.”

  “But you didn’t call her?” asks Lion, passing the joint back to Bo.

  “Did you miss the part about her being in a psycho-cult that brands new members?”

  “Yet?”

  “Yet, okay, I entertained the idea of calling her. Which is why Arctic’s research never turned anything up. I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. Figured if I told anyone, I’d also have to tell my mother. Chinese, right? Like I said, tight families. Plus, my mom’s Dick Tracy. Even if I didn’t tell her, she’d have dug the truth outta my friends or my sisters.”

  “And can’t introduce Sarah to Mom, if Mom knows Sarah’s crazy.”

  Bo snaps his fingers twice. “Exactly, exactly.”

  “Don’t tell me you do that too?”

  “Meme contagion,” says Bo, smiling.

  “What does this have to do with Penelope?”

  “Since I was the only Rilkean she ever found and I wasn’t actually in the club, Penelope became Jenka’s assistant and Arctic took a … a different approach.”

  “Different how?” asks Lion, looking up and down the street again. Something still not quite right or residual dragonfly paranoia made worse by the recent application of Ghost Trainwreck—he can’t quite tell.

  “Again,” says Bo, “could just be chatter. But something about Jenka starting Rilkean rumors about Shiz.”

  “The honeypot.”

  “The what?”

  “Not important,” says Lion, brushing away the question with a wave of his hand. “Go on.”

  “Nowhere to go. That’s about all I know. But want to hear something ironic? Penelope looks a little like Sarah. I didn’t notice it until she got the tattoo, but afterwards, there’s something similar.” Bo stops walking. “Now can I ask you something? That podcast I heard. The guy talked about em-trackers having a higher than usual suicide rate.”

  “Emo-stim overload,” says Lion.

  “Uh-huh,” says Bo. “He said that. Also said there was more to it, a kind of loneliness that comes from knowing, pretty much upon meeting someone, exactly how that relationship will play out.”

  “Yeah,” says Lion, noticing they’ve rounded the block and are now back in front of Torah Toro. “It’s a little more complicated in real life, but the basics are right.”

  “More complicated?”

  “The loneliness for sure…” Trying to find the right words. “Humans are social mammals, hardwired to seek attention. As an em-tracker, if I really pay attention to someone, to them, it feels like we’re really close. Like we go way back. To me, they still feel like a total stranger, but to them, we’re lifelong friends.”

  “Sounds like an unfair advantage on a first date.”

  “Only fun for a while is my point,” says Lion.

  Bo touches his earlobe and the shiny mobile hums to life. Headlights wink up, driver’s door cracks open. Must be a sensor built into the licking-pug implant.

  “You still walking?” he wants to know.

  Lion nods.

  “Am I driving you to the airport tomorrow?”

  He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Maybe.”

  “Then maybe I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night, Lion.”

  “Night, Bo.”

  With that, Bo taps the rim of his cap in a farewell salute, climbs into the SUV, and pulls away from the curb. Lion looks up and down the street again. No Richard or Jenka or source of his unease. No one but the restaurant’s doorman, a solemn rabbinical student with a peach-fuzz beard.

  Lion walks over to him, “You know where Hudson’s is?”

  A hand lifts to rub the peach fuzz. “The cigar place?”

  “Yeah.” Thinking to himself: the cigar place where Bo got kidnapped. “The one with the big ashtrays.”

  The doorman points down the road. “Ten blocks up, a couple east.”

  Lion sets off, thunk of boots on pavement, whoosh of cars on asphalt, and down the street. He nearly makes the corner before he realizes that Penelope’s old job title … If he says yes to Richard, doesn’t he, de facto, become Chief of Rilkean Relations? And when was the last time he had an actual job title?

  Good question.

  It takes him a while to figure it out, eventually settling on his last journalism assignment. Technically, an embedded reporter joining an Animal Liberation Front raid on a National Institutes of Health primate lab, but the judge threw that distinction out after he was caught on camera releasing a family of rhesus monkeys from their cages. It was the last straw for Lion’s editor, his four arrests in six months having totally destroyed any pretense of objective reporting. The tabloids had already gotten hold of the story; his prominent byline had become a problem. His writer-at-large status was revoked. His last title lost.

  “Lion Zorn,” he says aloud, “Chief of Rilkean Relations.”

  So maybe his life isn’t so small after all.

  THE CAT EYE OPEN SOURCE PROJECT

  A few blocks from Hudson’s, nearing the corner of Gansevoort and Greenwich, Lion spots the motorcycle again. Same black riding leathers, same black bike. Down the block and tucked in between a delivery van and an ancient Tesla roadster. A good hiding spot. It would have kept the rider totally invisible except for the helmet’s visor catching the moonlight for a momentary starburst and nabbing his attention.

  Pretending not to notice, Lion ambles over to a storefront. One of those 3-D-printed confectionaries, Cosmic Chocolates, according to the sign. He feigns interest in five tiers of a dark-truffle-blend wedding cake sculpted to resemble the Gates of Mordor, complete with an army of orcs hidden behind the casements. Really just checking out the motorcyclist in the reflection.

  Still there.

  He feels it then, the lengthening of gargoyle shadows, the incoming creep of paranoia.

  Strolling onward, he stays close to the storefront windows so he can use the occasional reflection to keep an eye on things. The angles are wrong from the front plate of a newsstand, but a mirror hanging in the window of the upscale furniture shop reveals the motorcycle hasn’t moved.

  Idling by the van, the helmet’s visor pointed in his direction, the dark shield of the faceplate staring after him.

  Could be a coincidence. Could be a lot of things.

  Lion tries to think of the things it could be. By now, he’s not putting anything past Arctic, but Richard and Jenka both looked genuinely surprised to hear about the drone dragonfly. And if they’re not the ones following him, then who?

  He has absolutely no idea.

  Another glance into a storefront window, another glimpse of the rider in the reflection. The tilt of the head, the cant of the visor, Lion can tell, he’s definitely being watched.

  His heart rate picks up and pattern recognition system kicks into gear, pawing the databanks for appropriate ass-saving information. Then he remembers—this is not the first time he’s been followed. Fifteen years ago, when the Animal Liberation Front story first broke, one of the tabloids
put a tail on him. Also when he learned that the CIA teaches agents to bore tails to death. Go slow. Don’t do anything interesting. Make cover stops, pausing at places with absolutely no meaning to disguise true intentions.

  But the map is not the territory.

  Before he can stop himself, Lion picks up his pace, then picks it up again. Not bothering with storefront reflections, he whips his head around and sees the motorcyclist slipping into the street, moving impossibly slow. Creeping down the middle of the road, sizing him up.

  Adrenaline washes over him. Drop-down menu in his mind offers fight, flee, or freeze as available options. Autonomous nervous system selects flight, and so much for disguising true intentions. He cuts hard left into an alley in full sprint mode. Boots bashing pavement and arms pumping wildly for a couple hundred feet before a wash of anger makes him pull up short and whirl around.

  The alley’s empty save for blowing trash.

  Did he imagine it?

  Twitchy legs make walking difficult. Takes him too long to get out of the alley. But nothing happens along the way. He makes it onto a side street; the buildings are brownstones on diets, impossibly thin, made from very old brick. To his right, one of those all-night road crews slicing into concrete with a water-cooled laser. Mist rising, air shimmering, and a spotlight drone hovering over the whole operation, the halogen shine of its million candle-watts blinding his eyes.

  Lion blinks against the glare, lifting an arm as a shield, using the motion to cover a backward glance.

  Nothing to see.

  He turns around and surveys the whole street.

  Still, nothing.

  But his heart is pumping and his legs are trembling and the paranoia feels here to stay. A couple of deep breaths to steady himself. When this fails, he tries the Herbert mantra. Fear is the mind-killer.

  That seems to help.

  Feeling a little more under control, Lion starts walking again. This brings the return of rational thought and the rise of the questions. What the hell, for starters. Did that actually happen? What would Lorenzo say: “You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist.”

  Perhaps there’s a different truth at work.

  As much as Lion doesn’t like admitting it, this week has been more fun than last week. And the week before. And the week before that. Something inside him is starting to wake up. It’s entirely possible that Lorenzo would have chosen a different retort: “Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland.”

  Lion smiles at the thought, walking past the tail end of the work crew on the right, the storefront of a syn-bio hacker space on the left. A scrolling screen embedded in the lab’s window advertises a Saturday afternoon meet-up for the Cat Eye Open Source Project. Lion knows about the Project. Another emerging poly-tribe, hard-core Silicon Valley strain of the bio-hacking movement crossed with hard-core Eastern European strain of the vampire movement—the former in it for the science puzzle, the latter looking for DNA tweaks that will give them actual cat eyes.

  And spreading.

  Richard said that animals are next and he might be right, but staring in the storefront, Lion suspects synthetic biology might intercede. The tech makes human-animal hybridization available to anyone who wants to learn a little code. Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to omnisexual teenagers taking hormones. This time no different. Won’t be long before injections are available at every tattoo parlor, just the next step for the body-mod crowd.

  But, he also suspects, the trend will likely produce an ugly prejudice, a keep-humans-pure backlash, another hatred we didn’t know we had until its hostility was fully upon us.

  Thinking about this, Lion makes it two-thirds of the way down the street before suspicion sneaks back into his evening. He slows his pace as he reaches an old pickup truck with extra-wide side mirrors, parked by the side of the road. Casually stopping beside the truck, he removes his tobacco pouch from his pocket. Rolls a cigarette while watching the mirror.

  The reflection reveals nothing. There’s no one chasing him.

  He leaves the truck and makes his way to the corner, finding the street suddenly crowded, the way it happens in New York. A small swarm of people waiting for the light. Lion stops a few feet away, smoking his cigarette, watching for anyone looking in his direction, any sign of the motorcycle.

  Nobody glances his way. The street stays empty. But the fear, the fear stays with him.

  BETTER THAN DISNEYLAND

  It takes ten minutes to backtrack to the corner of Hudson and Horatio, then a quick dart across the street and Lion strolls up to the front entrance of Hudson’s. A pair of burgundy velvet ropes attached to polished brass stanchions rest in the middle of the sidewalk, a rectangular awning above, a doorman in a suit beneath.

  “Good evening, sir,” he says, not bothering to scan Lion’s ID.

  “Evening.”

  A last look around the street and he walks inside. Like stepping back in time. Panels of dark oak, walls of books, and the dense fog of cigar smoke everywhere. A couple of steps forward and the smoke lifts enough that he can see the rest of the room: a long and narrow rectangle with a gleaming hardwood bar stretching down the left side, a row of wooden small tables down the right, and a pair of black curtains revealing a small VIP seating area in the back. Lion looks past the curtains and sees a trio of blockchain billionaires, familiar from an article he read somewhere, and an older Japanese man sitting knee to knee with a very attractive young blonde who—you never know—just might be his niece.

  Spotting a couple of empty seats toward the end of the bar, Lion takes one, sets his sling-pack on another. Cocktail napkin slides into place in front of him. Bartender from another era. A tie. A jacket. “Good evening, sir.”

  “Please,” he says, “just Lion.”

  “Lion?”

  “It’s better than sir.”

  “That it is, sir,” but smiling. “Roberto. It’s nice to meet you, Lion. Cocktail?”

  “I was thinking whiskey.”

  “Anything specific?”

  Now it’s his turn to smile. Lion reaches into his pocket and pulls out the Amex Centurion card, which he’d taken possession of at dinner, telling them he’d give it back if he decided not to take the job, not telling them he had other ideas. He lays it on the bar, knowing exactly how much this tab will annoy Jenka.

  “Surprise me.”

  Roberto looks from card to Lion. “How big of a surprise?”

  He taps the card with his forefinger. “Very big.”

  As Roberto goes about choosing, Lion looks around the room. Despite his hopes, Hudson’s really doesn’t seem like a Rilkean hangout. The vibe is more Rat Pack than subcult. Another slow pan, this time zeroing in on the backs of people’s necks. No one seems to be sporting a bar code tattoo. Also, while there’s clearly a back door somewhere, he sees only one exit, up near the front of the room. Highly visible from pretty much everywhere. Nothing about the place explains why Sarah chose it as the spot to abduct Bo.

  Lion opens his sling-pack, removing his well-thumbed copy of Dune, which he sets on the bar with a conspicuous thump. A tumbler appears beside it, a slosh of amber inside.

  “Yamazaki single malt,” says the bartender, “the forty-year variety.”

  “Thank you,” says Lion, picking up his copy of Dune, tapping the spine against his palm a couple of times to draw in Roberto’s attention, then using the book to point at the whiskey. “Would you like to join me?” Smiling, “I’m buying.”

  Roberto nods once, then opens a menu to the whiskey page. He places his finger on a price. Yamazaki, 40 yr. $305.

  “You sure?”

  Lion looks at the price, looks back at Roberto. “Definitely. I’m still buying. Celebrating, in fact.”

  He scans the room once more, fifteen patrons by his quick count. Here goes nothing. Wavin
g Dune above his head like a signal flag, Lion raises his voice above the music. “I just got promoted. So I’m buying all you fine people a Yamazaki.”

  Heads turn. A handful of nods, a chorus of thank-yous. A couple of African businessmen puffing Montecristos raise their glasses. Lion hates the attention but tries on his big-smile disguise, making sure to keep the book lifted and visible for just that extra couple of seconds.

  “Celebrating,” says Roberto, lining rocks glasses up on the bar, filling them carefully.

  Lion takes a sip of his drink and cracks open Dune. “The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future,” reads a familiar refrain. The collected sayings of Muad’Dib, and not much else going on.

  Lion waits. Time passes. A handful of patrons come by to thank him. He makes sure to make Dune a part of every conversation, watching for any sign of recognition. A number of people are familiar, but no other signs forthcoming.

  He orders another drink, deciding to give it another half hour. Maybe he just blew four thousand of Arctic’s dollars on nothing. Well, the expense will annoy the shit out of Jenka.

  That’s something.

  His drink arrives. He takes a sip, noticing a trio of circular water stains on the bar, a sign that someone else sat here. Probably a lot of someones, a whole stack of lives piled onto one stool, all trying to feel a little less for a little while.

  This reminds him of an empathy-expansion exercise Fetu used to have him run. Zero in on some detail in the environment: a blade of grass, a mark in the wood of a park bench, and work backward. Feel through all the lives—plant, animal, human—that colluded to produce this particular history. The mouse that ate the seed that shat the tree that begat the wood that became the bench. The craftsman who built the bench, the workers who installed it, the lonely teenager who carved his initials, the angry attendant who tried to sand them out—but Lion’s too amped up to play that game.

  Yet little else happens in the next half hour. The Africans leave; a couple of college students in Plushy drag pop their heads in. Furry rabbit and something that resembles a hedgehog on steroids. But not their kind of scene, so gone almost as soon as they appear.