Wetware

by Craig Nova

  “You can trust me,” she said.

  “Do you promise?” said Blaine. “Look at me. Will you come back?”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “You won’t make me send people to find you, the police, a detective, my own staff . . . ”

  “I’ll come back,” she said.

  “All right,” said Blaine.

  She got into the cage. The elevator door squeaked shut and the cage descended, leaving Blaine in the hall. Then he turned and went inside. There he walked through the apartment that had been so reassuring for so many years and that now appeared to him to be something he had used up and no longer needed. What had he been doing all these years, anyway? Playing the fool? He sat down in the library and looked at the polished surface of the piano. Then he put his head on the keys. They made a sound that was nonsensical, as ugly as everything random and yet ill-meaning, and Blaine sat there listening to it, wondering if it revealed just how shallow he had been all these years.

  CHAPTER 11

  April 13, 2029

  THE DECORATIONS of the subway station were stylized arches and aluminum reliefs, muscular men and woman with slabs of hair. Intense faces, not necessarily happy, but all having a purpose. Briggs got into the train, where the lighting was at once golden and filled with brown shadows. The train ran into the darkness beyond the station, and Briggs saw all the passengers, himself included, reflected in the windows. It all looked so ordinary and dull, just men and women sitting on benches, their clothes brown and gray, their eyes hidden in the shadows of their brows as they went into the darkness of the tunnel.

  The train came into the station and Briggs smelled roses and orange blossoms, orchids. A florist had a shop underground, and Briggs saw the petals, stems, and slick leaves, the flowers that trembled now with the rumble of the departing train. Briggs reached down and put his nose into a rose. He thought of Kay.

  Small manufacturers had originally put up loft buildings in this neighborhood, and while these brick and mortar structures still looked the same from the outside, inside they were filled with new enterprises. It was like being in a new country where one’s own language is spoken. Briggs was reminded, as he walked down the street, of the first time he had been to England. Everything seemed all right on the surface, but what barely suspected and incomprehensible activity took place beyond what he had been able to see?

  Briggs stopped in front of the contract outfit that had done a lot of the work on Kay and Jack. While it was housed in what seemed to be just another old loft building with glass-and-wood doors, brass hinges, and an antiquated doorknob, it nevertheless had the air of being intensely modern. Narrow venetian blinds, a brass plate with logo, an intensity of maintenance that would have been unthinkable when the building was new. Beyond the door, the light had a green tint, as though filtered through leaves in springtime. Fresh and clean. He opened the door and went in.

  The receptionist’s hair was cut into a flat top and dyed purple. She wore a red latex dress and shiny boots.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  Her smile wasn’t warm.

  “This isn’t a sales call, is it?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not a sales call.” Beyond her he saw a hall with a hardwood floor. White walls with framed prints and posters. “No. I wanted to talk to someone about some trouble I’m having.”

  “What firm are you with?” she said.

  “Well, right now I’m working out on the strip,” he said.

  “Is that right?” she said.

  At the end of the hall, the light looked as though it came through an old Coke bottle.

  The receptionist went down the hall, her feet clicking on the hard floor, her back and hips in shiny latex. She came back and said, “Down there.”

  Briggs went into an office with that same greenish light. Venetian blinds. The usual machine on the desk.

  “Briggs?” said the man. “Haven’t we met somewhere? Maybe at Galapagos?”

  “Maybe,” said Briggs.

  “Well, my name is Strick,” said the man. “This is Leslie Carr.”

  Briggs turned and saw a woman in a black dress on the sofa behind him.

  “Hey, Briggs. How are you?” she said.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Oh, time flies. But, yeah, it’s been a couple of years,” she said. “This is where I landed.”

  “No kidding,” he said.

  “Perhaps he wants some tea,” said Strick. “I like a nice cup of tea at this hour.”

  “He doesn’t want tea,” said Carr.

  “No?” said Strick.

  “He wants something stronger than that,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Briggs said.

  “How did you know?” said Strick.

  “Intuition,” she said.

  Carr went to the pantry at the rear of the office. A cupboard opened and closed, and Briggs heard the hard thunk of a glass on a counter, the thock of a cork being pulled from a bottle. The trickle as it was poured. He thought how ordinary the sound of a man being given his dinner on a tray sounds, and yet how filled with dread it must be if this is the sound of a last meal being given to a condemned man. Carr came back, her hips swaying a little under the clingy material, and gave him the drink. Their fingers touched.

  “Thanks,” said Briggs.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said.

  “I guess you’ve been keeping busy,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have. And then I have a couple of small projects I’ve been working on. Private items. You know about them, don’t you? I mean, you’ve done a couple of private things, haven’t you?”

  Briggs took a sip.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “In fact, I seem to remember your doing a little of that kind of work a few years ago. Didn’t you?”

  “If you say so,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Did you like it? Did you get anything out of it?”

  Briggs shrugged.

  “Come on,” said Carr. “You’re among friends here.”

  “Don’t bank on it,” said Strick.

  “His bark is worse than his bite,” said Carr, gesturing to Strick. “Tell me, did you get anything out of what you did? I mean, has it worked out the way you wanted?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “See?” she said. “Just when things are going the way you hoped, something comes along and causes trouble. I feel sorry for you.”

  Briggs concentrated on the heat of the liquor in his mouth.

  “Come to the point,” said Strick. “What’s wrong with the product we sold you?”

  Carr sat down in a chair opposite Briggs. Without looking at Strick, she said, “I think I’m the one he wants to talk to.”

  “How do you know?” said Strick.

  “Just a lucky guess,” she said. “Look at him. He’s desperate to ask a question. Can’t you tell?”

  Strick looked at him.

  “I don’t know,” said Strick. He turned to Briggs. “Do you want to ask a question?”

  Carr smiled, and then sat back and crossed her legs, bouncing one foot up and down.

  “Yes,” said Briggs. “I’d like to ask Carr a question.”

  “So?” said Strick. “Ask.”

  “It’s private,” said Briggs. He looked right at her. “Isn’t it?”

  She bounced her ankle up and down, smiling at him.

  “That’s right,” she said. She turned to Strick. “I’ll take him someplace and find out what he wants.”

  “Fine,” said Strick. “You do that. I’ve got better things to do than to sit around like this.”

  They went out to the street, into the cool air, Carr walking with a businesslike stride, looking straight ahead. Briggs felt not warmth from the liquor, but disorientation. Some birds flew down the street, just above their shadows, their wings beating with a repeat
ed snap, like sheets on a clothesline in the wind.

  “In here,” she said.

  The place was a coffee shop with venetian blinds, and they sat down in the slats of light that lay in bright strips across the table. Carr slid over, making a little squeak on the seat of the booth. She lighted a cigarette and then spoke puffs of words.

  “What did you add?” he said.

  “Just like that,” said Carr. “You come out and ask. You are a direct man and I like that. No beating around the bush, no trying to trick me into saying something I didn’t intend to say, no expressions of false friendship.”

  “Would you go for that?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  She sat there smoking her cigarette.

  “I learned a lot from you. I really did,” she said.

  He looked across the table, the slats of light falling across her nose and cheeks. It made her lips seem very red.

  “You really do nice work,” she said. “It took me a long time to see that you had such a delicate touch. You remember those parts about innocence? About devotion? About recognition of another human being? Of delighting in life? Of the thrill of the moment just before orgasm, when one human being really knows, without any doubt, that this is the true test of being alive. That if you love someone enough, matters of right and wrong become a part of one’s attempt to be worthy of someone else’s love.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  She bit her lips, shifted her weight in her seat. The slats of light made her skin radiant, her hair a mass of filaments.

  “I guess you didn’t add anything like that?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  The waitress came over and they both asked for black coffee, which came in heavy cups, the black circles of the liquid swinging back and forth. Carr put her lips to the cup and tasted the bitter coffee.

  “You didn’t answer me,” said Briggs.

  “No,” she said. She looked right at him. “I didn’t add anything like that. I don’t care about things like that.”

  “No?” he said.

  “I had my weak moments,” she said. “And you know what happens to you if you have a weak moment? You aren’t the same as you were before you made the mistake. You see things differently. It’s amazing how things can get turned inside out, love turned into fury, beauty into ugliness, order into the attractions of chaos. And make no mistake, chaos has its own attraction. You’ve got to see that.”

  “Carr, Carr,” he said. “We used to be friends.”

  “We were never friends,” she said.

  She smoked her cigarette, letting the clouds rise above them with a slow, swirling motion.

  “I hope you like surprises,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  She took a sip of coffee.

  “You’ve been devious,” he said.

  “You’re scarcely one to talk about that,” she said. “But then you would probably say that in the service of the good and the beautiful, you can afford to be devious. Isn’t that the way you think? It all starts so innocently, right? Well, let me tell you it doesn’t always work out so nicely. You think it’s going to. What can be wrong when you let yourself feel the best of what humans can feel? Well, plenty. One day you aren’t the same person anymore.”

  She gave him a look of contempt.

  “You haven’t told me what you added,” said Briggs.

  “Well, let’s just say it wasn’t what you added.”

  Her hands were shaking.

  “How did you do it?” he said.

  “I contacted Jackson,” she said. “He wasn’t making much money and he wanted to have a little something extra, and he liked the idea of doing something antagonistic to those people who made him sit there at night and smell the stink of the stuff they used to clean the floors. I gave him code to add.”

  “But Jackson was a guard,” Briggs said. “What did he know about it?”

  “I wrote some applets that did the work. They searched through your code to find the right place to put things. All Jackson had to do was to load it in. Nothing to it.”

  “Oh,” Briggs said.

  “That’s the way it is,” Carr said. “So it’s going to come down to you or me. Is she going to do what I want, or what you want?”

  “Time will tell,” he said.

  “But not much time,” she said.

  “Maybe she has ideas of her own,” Briggs said.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I really do. She’s angry. And that’s something you can depend on.”

  In the street, Briggs felt the last irritating effect of the drink, which left him at once restless and tired. He walked through the blue shadows of evening that fell into the alleys and doorways where the gloom was even darker yet, and as he glanced into these entrances and back lanes, he had the desire to step into one and sit down, just for a moment, to rest. But he was afraid of giving in, and so he went up to the subway station and down into the noise of the arriving trains and the perfume from the underground florist’s shop.

  CHAPTER 12

  April 14, 2029

  BRIGGS SAT down at the machine in his apartment. Surely Kay was using the networks. This must have been one of the things she would try, since she understood machines, or thinking machines, better than anyone did. After all, there was a lot she didn’t know, and yet she would learn very fast. All she needed was information, and God knew the networks were a good place for that.

  Briggs had been stealing software from work, and while he hadn’t sold it, which was far too risky, he had nevertheless used it. He had a library of utilities right there at his fingertips, and he picked up the first one, which was a hacker’s bible. The first thing was to get a list of all new accounts that had been set up on the East Coast in the last week or two. Mostly, of course, these would be kids, since almost everyone was assigned an account when they were twelve, and then they kept it, like a social security number, until they died. It was an odd thing for an adult to set up an account for the first time.

  He guessed it would be pretty easy to sift through the new accounts and decide which was which. For instance, while without a password he couldn’t see precisely what the new accounts were looking at, he could still find out what the general pattern was. Sex manuals, pictures of women with no clothes on or those that showed them in various acts, and a record of various sports teams: obviously this would be a boy. The girls did a similar thing, although instead of sports it was Calvin Klein and pages that dealt with skin care. So it was easy. He put together these patterns and worked through the new accounts again, setting up the search so that these patterns were eliminated. The numbers fell. Almost all the accounts had gone for sex. The few that were left could be looked at in one glance: thirty-five or so.

  He guessed that a lot of these might be from immigrants, although mostly people kept their old accounts, since using them didn’t require being in any particular country. Citizenship, in a lot of ways, didn’t matter quite the way it used to. The New Waves hit every place with the same intensity, and you couldn’t hide just by being in Switzerland rather than South Africa. So he went through this handful of accounts. Maybe some of them were people who had had amnesia or had been in prison, or in some other way had been out of the loop for a while. Surely a large number of the new accounts read the news, and he supposed this might be explained by amnesia. There was only one account that had accessed a library.

  This was the one that intrigued him, and he brought it up and started to work on it. He had another utility to help with a password, but this just ground through an endless number of possibilities, and even with a high-end machine like his, it could take a couple of hours. If he was onto the right one, he should be able to guess the password. So he tried Kay1, and Kay2, then Remilard1, then Portman, Portman1. He went through the date when they had gotten away. Nothing. He tried running their names backwards, combinations of both of their names. He supposed they were in the older part
of town someplace, although he wasn’t sure about this. For all he knew, they were in Europe by now, or Australia, but he didn’t think that so. So he tried the names of some of the streets in the old neighborhoods. Nothing. He tried Phalaenopsis, the species of orchid that he had chosen. Nothing. Then the name of the hybrid, Deventeriana X violacea. Nothing. Often the variety of an orchid was referred to by the contraction of Phalaenopsis to Phal, and he tried Phal Kay, Phal Jack, Phal Briggs. Bingo.

  He thought, No. This is something I might have picked, not her. She wasn’t supposed to know anything about the names of the flowers.

  He swallowed and looked around. Outside he heard a siren as a fire engine went by. Well, maybe she just knew one of the words and had chosen it out of random association. Something unconscious. After all, if he was going to choose something at random, wouldn’t it be a word with associations that he couldn’t articulate? He guessed that was it.

  Phal Briggs. He was in. There was a list of the items she had accessed. She had used the local directory, and had gotten his address. There were other items she had searched for too, such as repositories of sheet music and a number of titles of books. These were in the library.

  Of course, the Gutenberg Project had gotten a lot of the books copied onto a machine, but after a while it became apparent that this was wasted effort. No one read them. It was easy to erase them from a computer, but harder to get them out of the libraries. Although there had been some agitation, as part of one of the New Waves, to get rid of the books in the library, the idea had been resisted: the argument had been that the books were like rare plants that needed to be protected, not because they were beautiful, but because they might produce something practical, just as a rare plant might produce a cure for an emerging disease. Who knew what was squirreled away on those dusty shelves?

  All Briggs had were the call numbers of the books she had tried to get. He printed them on a slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Then he turned off the machine.

  The clock said, “Briggs.”

  “What?” said Briggs.

  “You haven’t been sleeping much,” she said. “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”