Last Tango in Cyberspace

by Steven Kotler

  “Yeah,” agrees Lorenzo, “but if he’s not coming for me, then I’m coming for room service, a shower, and a nap.” He points toward the spiral staircase, “You’ll find me later at the Shack?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’m out,” striding away. “Gonna make sure our equipment isn’t sitting in the rain.”

  Lion watches Lorenzo start up the orange metal stairs before crossing to the elevator. The doors are sliding closed as he arrives. A split-second decision, spinning sideways and slipping through. On the other side, he finds himself alone in the car save for a stately brunette in an evening gown, a long leather glove, and a small snowy owl perched atop it.

  Pure white feathers on head and breast, black flecks on crown and tail, and those ever-inquisitive yellow eyes.

  But not this time.

  Unlike the coyote, unlike the hornbill, the owl ignores him, completely. Not even an errant blink in his direction. This chills Lion, maybe more than anything else that happened today.

  “Do you like my owl?” asks the woman.

  “Usually animals like me,” he says, and then it clicks. “It’s not real, is it?”

  “No,” slight shake of her head, “animatronic.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Very.”

  “It looks real.”

  “And before the operation,” she says, smiling, “I looked like Johnny Cash.”

  Stepping out of the elevator, he’s shaky in the hallway. Key in lock, clothes on floor, and into the bathroom to inspect his eye in the mirror. Not the full-bloodshot cyclops he’d imagined, more like a razor-thin scar on the right side of his right cornea.

  When he slips off his jacket, his arm tells a different story.

  The dead-buffalo cut had sprung back to life. Banging into the doorway when Lorenzo bull-rushed him out of Allah Bling. And now, semi-coagulated blood in a thick line from elbow to wrist.

  The hot water helps, the blood coming off in the shower. Close inspection afterward and it doesn’t appear to be much of a problem. The cut is closing on its own, but he should probably dress it. He wonders if he can have the front desk send up gauze bandages, maybe some codeine. He doesn’t wonder for long. The thought of having to have a conversation, with the desk clerk, with whomever delivers the bandages, unbearable.

  A wave of exhaustion threatens to pull him under. He wraps a towel around the wound and walks into the bedroom. Cool sheets and, once he clicks off the light, total darkness.

  But sleep doesn’t come.

  He can feel his thoughts starting to race. Adrenaline memories flood in: Tajik’s moustache twitch, the gun mashed against his cornea, the red satin shirt, jaw clenched, eyes bulging with electricity, as Penelope hit him with the taser. Lion can feel himself wishing for the unconsciousness that seemed, only moments ago, his certain fate.

  Seconds later, maybe minutes, could it be an hour? There’s a steady knocking on his door. Some kind of twilight fog seeping through his brain as he tries to make sense of sound. Did he ring the front desk to order bandages? Pretty sure he didn’t place that call. Could it be Lorenzo? Tajik? What about Penelope?

  Now he’s awake.

  Lion sits up and clicks on the light. The knocking continues. Getting out of bed, he looks around for a weapon. Doesn’t even see a heavy object. A pen? If it’s Tajik, he could stab him in the eye with a pen. Fitting justice. But he doesn’t even see a pen.

  Lion settles on a ’50s-era Bakelite handset from the hotel phone, unclipping the cord from the base and carrying the receiver toward the door. A decent heft, possibly enough to knock someone out, definitely enough to break a nose.

  No peephole. What kind of hotel room door doesn’t have a peephole?

  Lion grabs hold of the handle and turns it slowly, feeling the lock disengage. Then he whips open the door, holding the receiver high above his head like a war club. A flash of green, a familiar army jacket.

  But not Penelope wearing it.

  Standing in his doorway, it’s the woman from Hudson Bar and Books. Blond wig gone, silver hair now visible.

  “Sarah?” he asks, totally confused.

  “Bloody hell,” she says, a Scottish accent Lion definitely doesn’t remember from the bar, pointing at his crotch, “yer tadger’s out the windae.”

  He glances down. His tadger is, in fact, out the windae. He’d forgotten he got undressed.

  And why does this keep happening?

  “An what,” she continues, poking a finger toward the receiver, “g’wan mash me? Well, git on with it, laddy.”

  He lowers the receiver, trying, if only for a moment, to cover his crotch, but the results are even more ridiculous.

  “Fuck it,” he says, chucking the handset onto the bed and walking back into the room. “Come in, if you’re coming.”

  “Get dressed,” she says, stepping into the room and closing the door behind her. “My sister’s waiting for us on the roof.”

  “Your sister?” he asks, pulling on his jeans. But then a shiver down his spine as the details stack: the army jacket, the Scottish brogue, the resemblance—data bit finds data bit, alright. That ratchet-click of certainty makes him feel … not quite the detective. More like a sucker.

  “You’re Penelope’s sister,” no longer a question.

  “My twin,” she says.

  Lion flashes on the Black Power twins, Shiva and Kali, and hears Luther’s boom: “The Bene Gesserit stay strapped.”

  Son-of-a-bitch.

  “You’re both Rilkeans,” he says. “The sisterhood. You’re…”

  “Guardians of Muad’Dib,” explains Sarah. “Now get dressed.”

  A FUTURE IN MEAT PACKING

  The heavy rain has subsided into a misty drizzle, leaving the roof of the KL Journal shrouded in fog. The ground is covered in puddles. Lion can hear the hum of conversation, wafting up from the beer garden, like ten stories below him now.

  A few steps out of the elevator and the scene starts to coalesce. A rooftop pool deck surrounded by a metal railing. The view over the edge is cumulus towers of water vapor and the wet twinkle of the city at night, occasionally visible in their midst.

  Inside the railing, a rectangular infinity pool, lit from below and surrounded by a checkerboard of black, white, and gray tile. Beyond the tile, along a far edge, there’s an elevated wooden deck striped by a trio of long wooden picnic tables. And in the back corner, a tent made of clear poly-something, maybe twelve feet square and streaked with rain.

  “We’re this way,” says Sarah, leading him across the tile and toward the tent.

  Approaching the plastic wall, Lion sees candle-flicker and two shadows, one large, one small. Another step closer and the shadows firm up. The smaller one crystallizes into Penelope. The large one looks like someone reading a newspaper. Then Sarah opens the main flap.

  Through the slit, Lion can make out a low acrylic table flanked by couches. A glass bowl filled with water sits in the table’s center, and a half-dozen candles float on the surface. In their flicker, Lion sees Penelope wearing a pair of faded blue jeans, combat boots, and an old Sisters of Mercy concert shirt. He sees the newspaper is written in a language he doesn’t speak. Cyrillic? Bhutanese? Then the paper folds in half and you’ve got to be freaking me …

  “Luther?”

  “Good evening, Lion.”

  “What are you doing here?” But as soon as he asks the question he knows the answer. “You’re not Shiz’s bodyguard—you’re Muad’Dib.”

  “Sit down,” says Luther, nodding toward a chair. “Want a drink? We’ve got a little bit to discuss.”

  Information goes whirring around his head, his brain trying to process everything he’s learned in the past ten minutes. Sarah is Penelope’s sister, and they’re both Rilkeans. And Luther is Muad’Dib. Booze is definitely not going to help him process any of this.

  “Got coffee?” he asks.

  Luther nods toward Sarah, who disappears behind a back flap in the tent. Penelope walk
s over to him, kisses him softly on the cheek, whispers, “Nice to see you again, darling.”

  “You as well, darling,” he says, surprised by how little effort it takes to play along.

  Sarah reappears with a silver pot of coffee and four white mugs. Pours and distributes. Lion carries his cup past Luther and over to a tall table in the back corner of the tent, beside a brick wall. Sees a stairwell doorway to his left. A quick exit if he needs it, and with the wall, no one can sneak up on him.

  “I’m listening,” he says, starting to roll a cigarette.

  “I grew up in Louisiana,” begins Luther, “did you know that?”

  “How would I know that? Don’t you deploy an AI scrubber to keep the Rilkeans out of the news?”

  “Actually,” says Luther, “we don’t.”

  “Doubtful,” he says.

  Luther shakes his head. “Why would I lie?”

  “Jenka’s the numpty fud using the scrubber,” snaps Sarah. “He’s the one been keeping the Rilkeans a secret.”

  “Jenka?”

  “I grew up in Louisiana,” repeats Luther, this time with an eyebrow raised toward Lion.

  “Whatever, man, tell your damn story.”

  “We started out a big family. No money, but my father was a tough bastard. A grinder, if you remember the term. He worked in a slaughterhouse, no choice really, it was just about the only gig in town. Got his first job at sixteen, running the bolt gun on the killing floor.” Luther turns his hand into a gun, puts his finger to his temple and pulls the trigger. “By eighteen, he’d balled up to foreman. Then Katrina. Our house collapsed, my mother drowned, and without her, Dad was lost.”

  Lion was in grade school during Katrina, but remembers the images. An elderly woman in a tattered nightgown on the roof of a chicken coop. Remembers thinking that the phrase “natural disaster” didn’t quite cover it.

  Luther takes a sip of coffee and keeps talking. “It happened slowly, then quickly. He started snorting oxy. My sister joined him. Dad overdosed when I was twelve. My brother went to jail. Somebody had to keep the lights on.”

  A gust of wind rattles the tent flaps. Lion glances out through the slit, seeing a police car, sirenless but with lights whirling, slashing down a distant street.

  “I showed up at the slaughterhouse when I was fifteen.” Luther shrugs, his massive shoulders rumbling beneath black cloth. “I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I could walk into my father’s old job. The floor manager nearly fell over laughing when I tried. But he knew my father, and ducked union rules. Put me on nights and weekends so I could stay in school. I started where my dad started, on the killing floor, running the bolt gun.”

  “So you’re a killer?” Lion says, aiming for a journalist’s detachment.

  Luther glares at him.

  “That’s the moral of this story?”

  “If I was you,” says Luther, “what I’d want to know is why Arctic hired you, why Penelope drone-stalked you, and why Tajik shoved a gun in your eye.”

  “Drone-stalked—that’s one way to put it.”

  “Have some manners: You should thank Penelope; she did save your ass earlier today.”

  “And I’ve seen his ass,” adds Sarah, her Scottish accent melting into So-Cal valley. “It’s like cute-cute.”

  Everyone stares at her.

  “Just making nice-nice,” she says with a wink.

  “What’s Katrina got to do with the Rilkeans?” asks Lion.

  “I’m trying to tell you where this started,” says Luther. “I’m trying to explain that you’ve been in this for a lot longer than you think you’ve been in this.”

  This catches his attention.

  “Two decades ago, two trends were showing up in slaughterhouses. The first was the more humane treatment of animals. Later on, you were part of that movement.”

  “Sonya,” says Lion. “The Animal Liberation Front.”

  Luther nods. “All of you became the sharp end of that stick. The dull end was a woman named Temple Grandin—famous for trying to make slaughterhouses more humane. You remember her?”

  “The world needs all kinds of minds, she said that, right?”

  Luther nods again. “She did. In fact, she actually said it to me once.”

  Penelope walks over to his table, picks up his pouch of tobacco, and asks, wordlessly, if he minds. He doesn’t mind. In fact, he realizes, he actually likes that she almost didn’t bother to ask.

  “Toward the end of her life,” continues Luther, “Grandin was hired by the slaughterhouse where I worked. Ownership wanted her there, management could give a shit. They assigned her to me. I was the lowest guy on the totem pole, but I had a mind for science. And I got to know her. Grandin was on the spectrum. Completely nonverbal and incredibly detail oriented. She thought in pictures, which is also how cows think. It gave her a way in, a way to learn the language.”

  “She spoke to the animals,” says Lion. “I saw the documentary.”

  “She taught me how to speak cow. It’s just pattern recognition, like every other language. And I practiced. That’s what changed everything.”

  “Changed it how?”

  “Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”

  A puzzle piece slots into place. “After Grandin taught you to speak cow,” says Lion, “you couldn’t kill ’em anymore.”

  One of the floating candles reaches the end of its life, flickers once, then fades to black.

  “Exactly,” says Luther.

  “So this is why the Rilkeans got into animal welfare?”

  “No, not the Rilkeans,” says Luther. “They didn’t start out with leaders. It was more of a hacker collective. Deep experimentalists. We lived for living the questions, and empathy, according to Rilke, is the best way to run that experiment. The animal rights agenda was just a by-product.”

  Lion hears the “we.” So Luther started out just another Rilkean? But he asks a different question, “By-product of what?”

  “I’m telling you where Sietch Tabr came from,” says Luther. “Like I said, there were two trends sweeping the slaughterhouse biz. The first was Grandin’s goal—make the killing more humane. The second was synthetic biology. Grow steak from stem cells, no more killing. Everyone knew this was the future. The slaughterhouse where I worked, the owners hired an in-vitro meat expert, a woman from California who brought in a tissue-engineering squad. And if Temple Grandin pissed off management, the syn-bio team drove them totally nuts. Between them and the slaughter bots, gonna be no jobs left for the brothers.”

  “But,” says Lion.

  “But I needed the money, and I was sick of the killing. I volunteered to be the go-between, between the biologists and the rest of ’em.”

  “You learned synthetic biology in a slaughterhouse?”

  Luther nods.

  “And Sietch Tabr?”

  “The intersection of these two trends, courtesy of Lion Zorn.”

  “How?”

  “Back when you were a reporter, one of your early articles on animal welfare. It was called ‘In the Beginning Was the Word’. Know what I’m talking about?”

  Lion nods. He remembers that article, remembers writing it perched on Sonya’s old couch.

  “You said that ‘empathy,’ the word, the term, showed up in the late eighteenth century. And you said the word worked, when nothing else did. Religion has been trying to get people to treat each other fairly for eons, with little success. Yet, ten years after the word ‘empathy’ enters our language, slavery has been abolished most everywhere, the women’s rights movement gets started, and animal welfare isn’t far behind.”

  “Language crystallizes the nebulous,” says Lion, quoting Richard.

  “That’s what happened to me,” agrees Luther. “Grandin taught me to s
peak cow. I learned the language and it produced empathy. A fuck ton of empathy.”

  “Bet it changed your relationship to animals,” says Lion.

  “And I wanted to change others. But the whole process took too long, took too much effort. The only way I could get other people to feel what I was feeling was to teach them the language. But it’s too slow, the Sixth Great Extinction, fifty percent of all mammals gone by the end of this century…,” shaking his head, “there just wasn’t enough time.”

  “I get that,” says Lion, thinking back to his conversation with Changchang on the roof of the Shack—and was that only last night?

  “By then,” says Luther, “I’d gotten busy. Darknet psychopharmacology tutorials, some Howard University online classes, and the syn-bio I picked up at the slaughterhouse—put it all together and I found a way to bypass the language learning process entirely. That’s one of the things Sietch Tabr does: It creates new connections between the limbic system and the language centers. Makes you feel like you speak another’s language—even if you don’t. It was your article that gave me the recipe.”

  It takes him a second to take this in. Then it registers. “You tested my recipe on civilians,” says Lion. “Tajik’s brother, Nassir.”

  “There was no other way. We had to test it on the unsuspecting. But Tajik and Nassir are hard-core psychonauts. Wasn’t unusual for one of them to dose the other without telling him first. After Tajik joined the Rilkeans, after we decided we needed to test Sietch Tabr on outsiders—Nassir did drugs, was a zookeeper—he was about as low risk a choice as we could make.”

  “What about the South Africans? Was that low risk?”

  “The family on safari? Those are Sarah and Penelope’s people. Ask either of them, they’re a junk show.”

  “They do love their mind-altering substances,” Sarah explains.

  “No one forced them to do anything they wouldn’t have done just about any Saturday night,” adds Penelope.

  “And you should hear Aunt Karyn prattle,” says Sarah. “Waking up with lions, just about the best experience of her life.”

  “What about Walker?” asks Lion. “Was having his head cut off one of the best experiences of his life?”