by James Smythe
‘It’s better if we spend some time together,’ he says. She stamps her feet, but only a little. They order Chinese takeout for dinner, and they let her pick the dishes. They let her pick the movie to watch afterwards as well (and she chooses from the Disney shelf, which was almost inevitable), and they all sit on the sofa and let her stay up well past her bedtime. Laurence doesn’t say anything, or watch the movie. He’s there but his eyes are elsewhere, glazed and looking through the TV and the wall and the house, off into something else.
Deanna listens to Laurence saying goodnight to Alyx after that, putting her into bed. He offers to read to her. He hasn’t done it in years, and she tells him that she’s okay; she can read to herself. She likes the sound of her own voice in her head. His voice cracks as he wishes her goodnight. He comes downstairs then and he takes the glass of wine that Deanna pours for him but then doesn’t sip from it, and he doesn’t watch the television or talk to her. Instead he keeps his eyes mostly shut while Deanna tries not to watch him.
‘I need a bath,’ he says after a while. ‘I need to think.’
He goes upstairs. Deanna is alone.
Amit’s apartment is both too warm and too small. He forgot to take the trash out before he left, which was a mistake, because it’s stewed in his absence: a reek of stale doughy goods, pizzas and submarine sandwiches that he only ever ate half of because of his near constant state of perpetual rush. He puts his phone onto charge – it’s a cell reception black hole in here, buried in the middle of hundreds of apartments as he is – and then checks his messages on his land line. There’s only one, from his father, practically begging him to call when he gets the chance, but he knows that he doesn’t have the time for his family right now, that he’s very busy with work: the usual guilt-trip stuff. As he listens to his father’s tinny voice snaking around his apartment, he opens the windows to try and let some clean air in and some of the stale out.
He checks the fridge, and there’s the usual stale milk and hardened yellow cheese. He doesn’t even know why he keeps paying rent on this place: might as well get rid of it and stay in hotels on the few nights he isn’t actually on the road. But, he thinks, maybe this is wise; not to put all of his cards into the campaign. What if Laurence is a time bomb? He dismisses the thought. He’s the candidate. He’s always been the candidate. There’s a torn-out editorial article stuck to his fridge door, from one of the last print newspapers’ politics sections. It’s dated the week before Sean died. This is going to be Laurence Walker’s race to lose, it says. And they’re talking about the presidency, not even the nomination, predicting where they were going to be two, nearly three years after that point. It mentions Amit – Princeton wunderkind Amit Suri – as a key part of Laurence’s success. They’re a team. Amit wonders what they would make of the ClearVista video. No: he wonders what they would make of Laurence’s reaction to it. Because he was afraid, Amit knows, that maybe, somehow, it could be true.
He opens the video on his computer and streams it to the TV. It’s a new set, bought to celebrate getting Laurence back on the road: state of the art, the nicest set within his budget. The salesman assured him that HoloGas – 3D images, right in the middle of your living room – was the next big thing. Amit has barely used it, and he’s never bothered to replace the gas canister that actually makes it work. It’ll have to be glorious old-school, flat-as-life-isn’t, instead. He sits on the sofa and watches the images on the TV, larger than he’s seen them before. Still, the video is the same. He doesn’t know what he expected. He flicks the channels to something else, the normality of television where they’re not talking about politics. A fashion show, a cookery show, a cartoon. He tries to switch himself off as much as possible and just take this for what it is. He sleeps a little, shutting his eyes and then opening them when an hour has passed. This is, he tells himself, no way to live.
He stands and stretches, and then sits in front of his computer and opens his emails. A few days’ worth of the unimportant stuff, the stuff that he can probably just abandon and forget about if he really wants, but that he should probably answer. Can Laurence do this? and We were wondering if Laurence … He marks some as important and forwards a few to his assistant (who works out of her old office at the moment, where she’s a law clerk), and deletes the most banal. Laurence Walker might be interested in the plight of the road-wolves: delete. He checks his email again, refreshing it, because ClearVista haven’t sent the new results or video through yet. They’ll be in no rush, he reasons. It’s probably all automated anyway. He stands up, steps away from the computer, and then the familiar ping of an incoming email sounds. A watched pot never boils, he thinks.
Please find attached your ClearVista report, reads the subject line. We have run these a second time, for optimization. Amit opens it and flicks straight to the end of the file, praying that this time the final numbers are different, but they aren’t. He hoped for error – either human or in the numbers, he doesn’t care which – but the results are exactly the same. It’s disappointing but obvious. He hopes that the video will be different, but he knows that it won’t. So, he reasons, there’s a problem somewhere else down the line. There’s a glitch somewhere that they can’t see. It’s fine: they just don’t release the fact that they ever even had a report made. Spin that: Homme needed to prove that he’s honest; Laurence Walker doesn’t need to convince anybody of such an obvious truth.
But then there’s the issue of the delegates. They won’t go for not releasing the video; and, if they do, it will only be after some heady persuasion. He doesn’t want them to see the video or the report; it might scare them. Maybe some of the people he worked with back at ClearVista could help? It was years ago, and there was a mass exodus not that long after he left, but a few people saw it through. They’ll know much more than him about how this works; might even have some contacts still there who can dig in for him. Back when they all started working there, they spent the first year examining other people’s algorithms and systems; looking at them in an almost terrifying level of detail, trying to work out how they did what they did. Their first job was to reverse-engineer previous systems and algorithms, to see what they did. As a team, they turned them into useable data and picked holes in them; looked for ways to improve them, to turn the system in on itself, use it to predict something else. They fine-tuned it by adding in extra information, worked out exactly how to start pinpointing this stuff, how to make it less fallible. They were all good at deciphering the results and understanding the hows and whys, but Thomas Hershel was the best.
Hershel – he went by his surname, an affectation that everybody understood, somehow, from the minute that they met him – was the closest thing that they had to a savant in their research group. He was a natural mathematician. He scammed an online casino when he was in high school, breaking systems that were meant to be infallible; but he was brilliant, avoiding a prison sentence on a technicality. After that, he went to university on a grant that precluded him from gambling, so naturally he spent his days smoking pot and doing coke and farming money from MMO subsystems. He was part of the cabal that broke Bitcoin way back, was the rumor, rendering the entire currency useless overnight. ClearVista poached him during his final year, throwing money at him – money, and the opportunity to make his name in the field that he understood better than almost anybody else. But it was a job that was weirdly below him. If he had given half a shit, Amit knew, Hershel could have changed the world. As it was, he was headhunted by every statistics company in the world, finance companies, futurists and banks. He didn’t bother turning up for interviews or open days, but everybody still wanted him. ClearVista gave him power and told him he could keep his own hours. That was enough for him. He was there when Amit quit, but then – rumor was – left a couple of years later, when the algorithm was done. Like everybody else when there was little more work to be done, he cashed out.
Amit searches his name in his emails. He doesn’t have a telephone number for Hershel, but
he’s got other details. Facebook, Twitter. No sooner has Amit sent his DM, making contact, than Hershel has replied. Always in front of a computer of some sort.
Amit long time no hear u good
I’m fine, Amit writes. I have something I need to talk to you about. Totally off the record, black ops stuff. You interested?
Sure okay you want to get together 4 lunch nxt wk
Amit replies. I was thinking sooner. Where are you living?
Georgetown
Seriously? That’s only twenty minutes away.
srsly
Can I come over now?
Bring pizza u got a deal
The message is followed by a map pin. The house is just behind the main stretch of shops. Expensive houses. Amit flicks to street view; it’s private, nothing to be seen past thick black metal gates. He changes his suit for a tracksuit and a faded T-shirt of a band he hasn’t listened to in years, and he pops his ear buds in, pulls his trainers on, and goes out into the night.
It’s been a while since he’s been in this part of the city, not since he visited a girlfriend who lived here back in his college days. She couldn’t have afforded the rent now. Hershel’s street is barely recognizable from how it was a decade ago; they’ve gated the ends, two large wrought-iron sealed egresses leading in, a security hut at one side. The houses here have been knocked through, it looks like, and what was once thirty or so on this stretch is now – going by the colors and doorways and paths – only ten, five on each side. It’s started to rain and Amit is soaked through, the pizza box clutched up to his chest. He goes to the small hut and knocks on the door, sheltering under the small canopy above the doorway. It swings open, the handle pulled by a security officer who has stayed sitting at his desk. In front of him, a bank of miniature screens shows the security cameras that obviously line this place.
‘Nobody told me they’re waiting for a delivery,’ the man says.
‘No,’ Amit tells him. ‘I’m here to see Hershel. Thomas Hershel.’
‘Mr Hershel?’ He rolls his eyes slightly, as if this is a common occurrence. ‘I’ll call it through.’ Amit waits there, the rain beating his back. The pizza box feels slightly damp in his hands, but warm still. ‘Mr Hershel? I’ve got a guest for you,’ the security guard says, and then waits before leaning back to Amit. ‘He says to send you through. Second on the left.’ He presses a button on the desk and the gates creak into life. They’re only barely apart before Amit’s squeezed through the gap and is running to the porch of the house. He gets to the door – finally, underneath an overhang, dry for a second – and looks for a doorbell, but there’s nothing. He knocks, and he waits; and when it opens, he barely recognizes the Hershel that’s standing there.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Hershel says. He’s changed. His teeth have been done, fixed and straightened. And hair plugs, Amit thinks, because before he was receding from both the front and the middle, and now there’s a full head, scraped back into a ponytail that’s held with a thick, yellow elastic band. He’s put on weight and he’s wearing a dressing gown and Croc sandals. Amit holds out his hand to shake Hershel’s, and then notices that his right hand isn’t all there: two fingers gone from it, from the outside. It’s been smoothed over, an excellent plastic surgery job, but it’s jarring. Hershel looks down and notices. ‘Jesus Christ! Where did they go?’ he shouts, and then he laughs, a dry roll that turns into a wheezed cough. He stands aside and waves the hand with a flourish. ‘Welcome to Casa del Hershel.’
The décor is gaudy: marble floors and faux-antique furniture, and paintings – or prints, Amit can’t be sure – of art, shapes and colors and canvases built up from noise. Money has been spent. Hershel pads through the house, showing it off, talking Amit through. Giving him a tour that he didn’t offer and that Amit didn’t ask for.
‘Two dining rooms,’ he says, ‘formal and informal. Whatever the sitch.’
‘Where do you want this pizza?’ Amit asks. Hershel spins on his heel, remembering the food.
‘Oh dude! Yes! I’m starving. You still smoke?’ Amit shakes his head. ‘I still smoke, which, you know. At our age, right? Come through here, come through. We’ll whatever.’ He walks through an arched doorway and into a living room that seems to stretch the width of the house. A fish tank lines one wall, a television the other, a HoloGas unit that’s hooked up to a videogame console. A boy and a girl, looking as if they’re barely out of college, swipe at the air with their hands held out like rackets, playing against digital versions of famous tennis players. There are five others here, Amit counts, all around the same age. Beautiful and tanned, like the models that work outside those pitch-dark clothes shops that line the malls. All of them seem to be wearing the same cut-off shorts and slackened vests. Amit wonders where Hershel met them: they don’t have the air of being his friends, that’s immediately apparent. He likely found them in some bar, told them what was at his place – drugs, games, money – and they flocked. There are bottles on the sideboards, empty, and a thick, heavy bag of powder by the fish tank, on a table all of its own. Amit puts the pizza on a table behind the tennis players and Hershel opens the box, pulling a slice out with his good hand, eating while he talks. ‘This is Amit,’ he says to the younger people sitting around the room, ‘I used to work with him. He’s a good guy.’ They all turn and wave. ‘You’ve been well – I’ve seen you, on the TV. Doing good work with that guy, seems like.’
‘Vote Laurence Walker,’ Amit says, in his best electioneering voice.
‘Yeah, I don’t vote,’ Hershel says. ‘You know how it is. All this,’ he says, and he swoops his arm around the room, as if that provides an excuse. ‘But you …’ He wags his finger. ‘Not like you can escape it.’
‘Not really,’ Amit says.
‘So what can I do you for, Amit? I’m guessing this isn’t a social visit.’
‘ClearVista,’ Amit says. ‘You still got contacts there?’
‘What do you want with them?’ he asks. He shakes his head. ‘They’re locked tight.’ He sits on one of the sofas, immediately slumping down on the soft leather. He looks over at the tennis players and smiles at one of the girls. ‘You know how I lost these?’ he asks Amit, holding up his hand, the soft section where there should be two fingers at the end that are simply not there any more.
‘Didn’t like to ask.’
‘I got it because I was a fucking idiot. I left a trail. Vegas, you believe that? This is some middle-ages level shit, doing this sort of thing. Like Joe Pesci in a movie, they took my fucking fingers. Since then, I have kept my nose clean.’ He grins; a golden tooth just off-center, next to perfectly gleaming porcelains that look like they cost a fortune. ‘Metaphorically, of course.’ One of the girls comes over and sits next to him, draping herself over almost a half of his body, and she kisses him, something in her mouth that she passes across, pushing it with her tongue onto his. ‘This is Cindy. Cindy, Amit and I worked together, once. Long time ago.’
‘It wasn’t that long.’
‘It’s a fraction of a life, Amit. It’s been, what, six years? That’s a tenth, a twelfth of the whole. It’s a huge amount of time. I thought maybe you were coming to me to ask for money.’
‘No,’ Amit says, ‘but if you’re offering it, I have a campaign to manage.’ He smiles as well. This isn’t the Hershel he remembers. He’s older than these kids in here by a decade at least, and he looks older still. He looks tired, playing at being a child himself.
‘What do you need with ClearVista?’
‘Circle of trust?’
‘Sure,’ Hershel says, sitting forward. Whatever he took from Cindy hasn’t set in yet, but it will. Amit thinks about how good Hershel’s mind was with this stuff, how he could decode things that the rest of them barely had a shot at.
‘It’s my client.’ He assumes that Cindy won’t have a clue who that is. ‘We got a report commissioned from ClearVista about his chances of success in the elections.’
‘Didn’t say what you
wanted?’
‘No. But, I mean—’
‘And that happens. It’s the algorithm. There’ll be something there. He likes abortion, right? It’ll be that.’
‘He doesn’t like abortion. Nobody likes abortion. He’s—’
‘Whatever. You can’t change the numbers. Like they say, the numbers don’t lie.’ He approximates the cold female robot voice of the video.
‘It’s not just that. It’s the video that was sent through.’ Hershel perks up, sitting forward, brushing Cindy off.
‘You went premium? Excellent. What did it show?’
‘It was awful.’ Amit lowers his voice. ‘It was his family crying. And Larry – Lawrence – was … I mean, I don’t know.’
‘Must have come from something.’
‘They’re in mourning still. Maybe that.’
‘Maybe.’ Hershel sits back and runs his tongue over his teeth. ‘Show it to me.’
‘What?’
‘The video. Show it to me.’ He snatches Amit’s phone and holds to sync it with the television. ‘It on here?’ he asks, and before Amit can answer he’s opened the video app and pressed play on the only file that Amit’s got saved. The models all groan as their game is interrupted, but they don’t make too much fuss, shuffling over instead to another of the sofas, where they spark up and dig in to the pizza.
