The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Pegg thought he might be having a heart attack. His chest was alive with syncopation and stutter steps. His heart doing a frantic two-step, his guts aflame. But they were getting somewhere here. Maybe the machineries of fame and anti-fame were nasty fraternal twins. The one crass, known and symbolic; the other serious, concealed and terribly real. And maybe there were kills involved either way to make us feel secure, to keep the public peace. Kills symbolic and kills real. Maybe Mov the lunatic was right in his way.

  But that wasn’t the story. Or not the heart of it. Because in the madness of Gang Stalking, in the madness of that long list of license plate numbers loomed a darker dimension.

  “There’s more to this,” Pegg said, coughing, gagging, recovering. “I’m just getting it.”

  “And me about you too,” Mov said. “Our moment has arrived. Epiphanies all around.”

  Two goggled creatures, surrounded by the sounds of fear, the smell of death.

  “You really are sick, aren’t you?” Mov said.

  “Not feeling so great at the moment, I admit,” Pegg answered.

  “But you’ve actually got something. A real medical condition.”

  “I can’t confirm or deny that,” Pegg said. “But about you . . .”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” Mov pressed. “Sclerosis.”

  “This is more than revenge for you, isn’t it, Mov? More than just payback. Make no demands. Remain silent. It’s not revenge, or not revenge only.”

  “How long do you have?” Mov asked, leaning forward. “A humid summer, a lousy fall. A couple more winters and it starts getting speculative. You running on fumes, Thom?”

  “It’s about turning people against themselves,” Pegg said. “I just realized this part. That’s what you’re trying to do here: turn us all in on one another. Turn the machinery onto itself.”

  They sat in silence for several seconds. Then Mov sat back, sharply. “Or no,” he said. “No, no, no. Oh God, how could I have missed this?”

  Pegg waited. He’d been right in his reading of Mov, he was certain. Now, it occurred to him, Mov was about to be right about him.

  “You’re a hypochondriac!” Mov said, a smile spreading across his face. “Acute, fucked-up, self-diagnostic. I love it!”

  The great uncovering. From the Greek word apokalupsis. The two men staring at each other. And it was a little like the old days, Pegg had to agree. The story cracked open. The head-rush of truth. Only no pleasure in it for Pegg this time.

  He wanted his night-vision gone. He reached up and unbuckled himself. Freed himself of sight, if not of knowing. But in the darkness there was only deeper clarity, as if he could finally see the man and all the invisible agony to which he had contributed even as it had shaped him. Pegg saw it all laid out in the blackness. Mov’s final bid for restoration was a great monkey wrench thrown into the guts of the machinery that had destroyed him. And when he was finished, nobody would know who to blame, who to fight, who to hate, who to punish or sacrifice including themselves. Chaotic malfunctioning. Generalized madness and paranoia. All against all. And not just any event could be used to precipitate such a state of affairs. Mov knew his stuff on the topic of beating out of people the response required. Keep them in darkness. Strip away the layers. Listen for the sound of links breaking within. Alice in Wonderland.

  “It was critical the hostages be children, wasn’t it, Mov?”

  “It’s not exactly a new idea,” Mov said. “History is strewn with tiny, perfect skeletons and infant mummies of ideal stature. Look under the Pyramid of Tenochtitlan or on top of Mount Ampato, under the grass at Woodhenge or in the ashes of the fires at Carthage.”

  “But it’s going to be just the one, in this case,” Pegg said, his throat constricting. “You’re going to drag this all out until only Hyacinth is left, aren’t you, Mov?”

  “They picked her, Thom. They made my job even easier than I could have predicted. I’m only following the course that was pre-selected.”

  “You can’t do it,” Pegg said. “You’re saying the words. That means you understand what you’re doing. That means you won’t really be able to do it.”

  “But there’s the beauty of it,” Mov said. “I don’t have to do anything. As soon as you leave, Thom, as soon as you’re out there in front of those cameras—and you can bet there will be a lot of them—they’ll come and do it for me. The men will come. The men whose names are secret, whose existence is denied. They’ll come and do what they do. But there’s no getting around the briefcase in my hand, either. It is what it is.”

  Pegg was sobbing. It was around midnight, Friday. About the point in the Moscow crisis when one of Barayev’s men fired a shot out of the theater and over the barricades because he wanted to make things happen. Those ghosts in the Russian Special Forces heard him loud and clear. They consulted amongst themselves, then granted him his wish: the convulsive act by which they no doubt hoped that peace would finally be restored.

  And here all of them were quite similarly poised, and hoping just as much in vain. They were waiting for nothing here, less than nothing. No amount of death would bring about the cathartic reversal, the turning aside, no matter how apocalyptic an event Mov managed to invoke. Because something had soured, all right, prepping that young man for interrogation. Something curdled, went rancid. But not just in the soul of Mov—in all of them. Killing the young man had obviously earned them nothing. No information, no temporary calm, no saved lives, no return of peace, not even a minute’s worth, for their bottomless investment in death. It had only spawned more war and more death and the newspapers were full of it. And that failure wasn’t just driving Mov crazy, it was driving them all crazy. It was making everybody suspicious, seeing things in the shadows behind everyday objects, people, events and currents. Gang Stalkers. Well, exactly. Pegg used to think: nine parts psychiatric to one part real. But that wasn’t the explanation. Gang Stalking was one hundred percent social infection, a cultural contamination of the deadliest and most contemporary kind. It was what you got when the machinery stopped working. Distrust gone 360 degrees. Pegg knew it well, having been infected once himself. And now Mov wanted to contaminate them all. Set them shaking and shimmying downwards into patterns like this one. Huddled together in a feverish dream, counting missing hubcaps and memorizing license plate numbers. Wearing indigo ribbons in support of the Targeted Individuals who were everywhere. Everybody quivering in the hood of darkness, waiting for the return of normal.

  And all entirely without point, since nobody would survive to tell the true story and so nothing could possibly be learned. Not from Mov clearly, who dead or alive would be someone’s dark secret. Not from Pegg either, who knew in his heart that he’d been thrown into the fire.

  Something sudden, Thom. But you mustn’t be frightened. Wait for that critical moment. Then hit Play.

  Pegg’s fingers fumbling blind for the button, for the sequence of beeps that would bring the machine to life. Pegg didn’t know what Haden would do on hearing this. He wasn’t supposed to know. Pegg was a walking microphone, Haden’s ear on the inside and nothing more. Dispensable. A sacrifice. He might push this button and cause the blade to fall. But he didn’t care. Pegg needed to hear the recording himself, right that second. Nothing else mattered.

  Midnight. And from the air now, a tiny voice. It warbled up from the past and into the pressed moment.

  Micah Swenson Pegg. He lived with his mother in the house where they had all once lived. Pegg felt the egg crack, the yolk spill. He heard the boy say what he had said to his father, clear-eyed and unprompted: “What did the skeleton say when he walked into a bar?”

  They waited a beat. One very long beat.

  EVE

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, RABBIT HAD TOLD HER that he’d meet her downstairs at the Panda Grove with whatever information Jabez was able to produce. So that afternoon, at the time they’d chosen, Eve made her way down those Stofton sidewalks, past the crowds milling in front of the corner stores, dark shape
s in brown light.

  In the Panda Grove front bar, Eve watched the crowds watching the news, grumbling amongst themselves. Flames and smoke were now rising from the darkening plaza, some kind of vigil bonfire. Or more than one, as there seemed to be rival camps. Tents had gone up under the raking cameras. The Call lined the far sidewalks, standing or sitting in folding deck chairs, singing I know my savior lives ... while across the way the Black Bloc gave interviews and denounced the media. A camera had been broken, a crew from a cable news program chased away, pieces of brick thrown. Everywhere, sudden movements. A truck lurched to a stop, black smoke coughing from a vertical pipe. A group of young men ran from an alley. A shout went up from somewhere. A banner failed in the steady wind, ripping free of its wooden frame, the paper winging across the plaza, crumpled and tumbling. There were jolts and starts in the air. Eve felt it as a tension in the body. A reflected jitters, as if everybody around her were poised to run, poised to do something. Act now. Act first. On the Beaufort scale, somewhere below a storm there was a rating for the kind of wind that picked up only garbage.

  The release of the four children late on Friday afternoon didn’t ease the mood. For the first time there was a press conference involving the released, two girls, two boys. They sat with their parents, straight and quivering. They moved hair back off their faces with open palms and tried to smile. When the questions came pouring towards them, they did not flinch, blanch, cringe. One of them, named Ashley, turned away at the end and cried in her seat. She was five. She said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Mixed reactions on the streets. There was evidence of a deepening dread in interviews. Some horror was shaping itself. People were sure of it and nobody could avert their eyes.

  “What does it mean that the hostages have been winnowed down in this fashion? From over one hundred to just six now?” a host asked an expert. “Is the breakthrough coming?”

  “No,” the expert said, dark circles under his eyes. Everybody working around the clock. “There’s no reason this has to end soon, except that law enforcement authorities typically do not let things go very far past the third day.”

  Eve watched the television over the heads of the crowd. She felt the expert’s discomfort, his eyes continually sliding and shifting to objects off-camera. Then they went to commercials: lawn-care products, a pet insurance program, a Mexican resort destination for single seniors. The crowd at the Grove grumbled and speculated.

  In a minute, the host was back. “To clarify, we have no information at this point about any planned assault on the building. Meanwhile in financial news, markets have reacted to . . .”

  A jeer went up and Eve looked away. The Grove smelled of must, mildew, hidden fungal growth. Eve could hear the Beach Boys coming from a back room: Wouldn’t it be nice ... She walked through a room of dancing girls, all in jeans, sockless in vintage sneakers, T-shirts and coral necklaces. She found the stairs at the back of this room and went down. In the basement she could not see Rabbit immediately and was swamped with the thought of a seven-thousand-dollar check written to a man she didn’t know to help another man she didn’t know. She felt her heart rate tick upwards at the idea that this all could have been such a simple and dismal thing. A con.

  Then Eve saw him, and was flooded with a mix of feelings. Relief, automatic thoughts of the night before. Their faces closing, his touch. But something else, stronger, woven through the moment: anticipation. Eve felt momentum, the pull of a current, the sense of unknown events in store. It had become an unfamiliar feeling, she thought, the future brimming with surprise. It excited her.

  Rabbit was sitting under a mural of a dragon breathing a rolling geyser of fire, all colors mingled and sorted at the moment of destruction, from the white core out through the spectrum of reds and oranges and violets and iridescent greens to the final black singe of smoke that licked along the trailing edges, the final syllable of what the flame had to say.

  She slid in next to him and brushed his shoulder with hers. Then she put a hand over his, squeezing lightly. “Hello,” she said.

  He took her hand carefully in his. Then he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and folded it into her palm, gently closing her fingers around it. He held her hand closed now, looking her squarely in the eyes.

  “Secret stuff,” Rabbit told her. “Address, phone number. Invitation to dinner. It’s all there, passed along by Jabez.”

  “Wow,” Eve said. And she breathed in deeply.

  Rabbit let go her hand and she opened the paper, smoothing it flat on the table. He watched her hands, fine fingers, clean nails. The address was written in Rabbit’s neat block letters. Eve said: “East Shore.”

  So that was it. Ali out there, not down here. Ali in a house, with a yard, with a driveway. What could it possibly mean for her to feel disappointment learning that? She didn’t know. But there it was.

  Eve looked up at Rabbit. Again the sense of pull, a future with renewed possibility. “Come with me,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Moral support?”

  “Just come,” she said.

  Out to the street, then. Over three blocks to the truck. The air was smoky, distant fumes. Car alarms in the distance. In the truck she paused with her hand on the key. Rabbit was tracing a crack in the vinyl dashboard with his finger.

  He said: “Ever bought an art installation before?”

  Eve shook her head. “Ever sold one?”

  “Never.”

  She waited for him to say whatever else was on his mind. But he was looking past her now, distracted. A man was standing on the far sidewalk swinging a mangled baseball bat against the iron grating on the front of a convenience store. People on the sidewalk nearby were standing back, watching. He hit the grate and the metal bars rang. He might have been doing it just to hear the sound. There were posters on the wall here, advertisements. A masterpiece. The most. The last. The first. No joke. Unbeaten.

  There was a practiced quality to the second swing. But then a man came out of the store with a gun and people scattered. He waved the weapon in the air, then lowered it and stood in a quivering stance. There were shouts from farther down the way. Blunted voices.

  Rabbit turned to Eve, returning to his thought. “I don’t know why I need to tell you this.”

  “Because you’ve never told anyone else,” Eve said.

  “Maybe that’s it,” Rabbit said.

  She waited.

  Rabbit said: “About Oregon.”

  SO NOW EVE ALONE KNEW WHAT HAPPENED to Rabbit in Oregon. It didn’t worry her to be in that position. It galvanized her interest in him. Eve now had different mental pictures to work with. Rabbit in a clean laboratory. Rabbit in conference rooms with team members. Rabbit waking up uncomfortably to how his ideas were actually going to be used.

  “Nobody was dying as a result of my work, I realize that,” Rabbit told Eve. “There were jobs at Raytheon and Intel where I could have worked on control systems for cluster bombs and joint stand-off weapons. I was working on a phone. I was helping design the newest, latest, hottest version of a device most people use to order pizza, text their friends.”

  But what a phone. What an idea. From a technical standpoint, it had been fun to work on. Naturally it was also an internet device and a video camera and a GPS and a music player. And yes, the prototype was also designed with an integrated biometric fingerprint and retina scanner, so the device was useless if it was stolen, and it could also log user medical information like blood pressure, blood type, pulse rates, et cetera. But the fact that it could do all those things was secondary to the phone’s chief innovation, which was a function that would ultimately be invisible to its users.

  “And what was that?”

  “It listened to you,” Rabbit said.

  Eve thought about that one for a second or two. “Don’t all phones listen to you?”

  “Not actively,” Rabbit said. “They just transmit. And even so, they generally don’t transmit unless you’re on a call.”


  Eve was trying to work this through. “The phone was designed to eavesdrop?”

  User intelligence, they called it. Or sometimes: behavioral fingerprinting. The phone was designed to sample the life of its user: ambient noises, television shows on in the background, music choices. The system then synched that data up with all the other information collected—downloads, GPS logs, voice traffic, medical data—and built a user profile that allowed the device to assemble phone books or web links, push ads and suggestions at you through the browser, even dial 911 and transmit medical data in the case of certain medical emergencies.

  “Which was maybe a little more phone than some people would want,” Rabbit said. But what was a lot stranger, what really got into Rabbit’s head and wouldn’t come out, was the client-side request late in the project timetable for silent dial-out functions.

  “Silent what?” Eve asked.

  Dial-out. These capabilities enabled the phone to upload user profile data to pre-set third-party locations.

  “As in, without people knowing,” Eve said.

  Rabbit shrugged. Conceivably without them knowing, yes. The phone could have been designed to do that. He, personally, never got that far with it.

  “Because you realized all this would be completely illegal?” Eve asked.

  “It wasn’t illegal to test it,” Rabbit told her. “We were designing a prototype. A feasibility study.”