Silhouette

by Dave Swavely

  I didn’t need to be able to read the signs in order to identify the many virtual- and real-sex shops, either. China had experienced their sexual revolution late, like their technological one, but when it had finally arrived, it had done so with enough force to be referred to as the “Big Bang.” Just as the absence of a Judeo-Christian ethical hangover had given them a leg up on the competition in the cyber wars, so their lack of inhibitions had led them to pioneer a new form of the oldest profession, which had now become one of the Underground’s biggest commodities.

  Behind many of these storefronts, some of which I was passing on my way, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women (and perhaps some children) who were paid to give up their bodies while their minds were elsewhere in cyberspace. I remembered someone’s explanation of the popularity of this almost necrophilic version of prostitution: the customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has always been the name of that particular game.

  I glanced at Paul to see if he noticed these places, but he was consumed with looking for a certain storefront. I didn’t like some of the feelings bubbling up within me, which probably arose from the fact that I might never see my wife again, so I turned my attention to the people we were passing. And I noticed immediately how “cyberized” this culture was, reflected even in the fashions worn by a majority of the denizens, especially their youth. Hoods, hats, and headbands equipped with trodes and jacks were everywhere, allowing the wearers to have one foot in the real world and the other in a virtual one. I imagined that they were viewing music, talking with friends across town, or even experiencing pornography as they shopped or loitered in the mall. And I thought of the frightening potential of mind control for these masses, now that I knew the technology had passed the threshold of mere communication and entertainment.

  Abruptly, Paul sat down on an empty bench and patted the spot beside him. When I took it, he put his arm around me and leaned over to my ear like a lover.

  “You need to go in, because I don’t want to have to retire this disguise,” he said, then looked at one of the storefronts, which was walled in and much more plain than the rest. He leaned back over.

  “Tell them you want to know how long of a window we have to cover, for security purposes.”

  “Okay,” I said, and stood up and walked to the door in the center of the storefront, which displayed a small group of Chinese letters. Though I can’t read Chinese, I knew they translated to “Cyber Hole,” because that was the name of this mecca of wetware, the unlikely corporate home for a group of Chinese supertechs who could have played the Silicon Valley like a harp, had they had any such inclination.

  The door was open, so I tugged on it and walked in. Ahead of me was a brown hallway that did indeed look like a horizontal hole in the ground. I walked forward in the hall, which was empty except for the small piece of scanning equipment that followed me silently along its track in the ceiling. I recognized it as one made by BASS, too expensive to be afforded by most small countries, or any corporation with fewer than a hundred thousand employees. Cyber Hole had only eight, so that meant we were very appreciative of the fine work they had done on Min.

  I assumed the little machine had identified me, since I wasn’t cut to ribbons by lasers, so I opened the door at the other end of the hall and stepped into the next room. It was empty except for a few used beer cans, a cardboard box, and a pair of sneakers. The walls were also bare, except for some little black squares of holo equipment and a dried brown splash that I guessed had come from one of the beer cans.

  The door on the other side of the room opened with a jerk, and a nervous tech in a yellow smock stumbled in.

  “Mistah Ahhris,” he said, rubbing his hands together and blinking. Then he said something in Chinese that from his expression I guessed meant “sorry.” He giggled anxiously, then shrugged and pointed to himself. “English, no.” He smiled at me apologetically.

  “You can speak Chinese,” I said, pulling out the glasses and pointing to them. As I began to put them on, the poor fellow suddenly realized that we were standing in a blank room. He let out a yelp and backed through the door, bowing repeatedly. Through the still-open door, I heard him barking at someone, and a few moments later I was standing in the observation room at the top of the Statue of Liberty, looking out upon New York Harbor through the slats in her crown. It was a nice holo, but the effect was ruined by the door, which was still half open. The tech appeared in it soon, only to yelp, retreat, and bark at someone again. Soon the room changed into a polished corporate lobby, and the tech appeared one more time, his face bright red. He started talking again, in Chinese, and I flipped through the glasses’ menus until I found the translation program.

  “… You not expecting!” Laughing again. His lips were moving one way, but I heard something different through the glasses, like one of those dubbed foreign holos. “Our English man is here only in day. No night horns atlas.” The translation program was obviously going to have some trouble with his dialect.

  “Can you understand me?” I asked, slowly and clearly. He nodded.

  “Yes, but tiny.” A little—I got the gist.

  “Good,” I said. “What I want is very simple.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said through the translator. “I am very sexually aroused.” He was smiling, and I smiled, too. He must have said a word that meant “very excited.”

  “Mr. Rabin’s bodyguard, Min, is coming here tonight.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “He no home young. He is our best … produce.”

  “What time is he coming?” I pointed to my wrist, though my only “watch” was in my glasses.

  “Yes, yes.” He nodded, then looked puzzled. “Why is you ask this?” I was caught off guard for a second, but then I remembered what Paul had said. So I told him about the “security window.” He made clucking noises that seemed to convey understanding.

  “Four hour, in the morning,” he said, holding up four fingers.

  “And when will he be done?” I asked. “Finished?”

  “Difficult to say.” That was a good translation, I thought. “He will urinate easily or he will require adjustments.” That wasn’t, I thought, but then I figured it out. In the etymology of the dialect, that concept must have developed into the terminology for “checking out okay” or requiring no treatment. The tech continued, but I stopped him.

  “When would be the earliest that he would leave here?” I asked, then realized that this was probably not the best thing to ask, in case the man was suspicious of me. He didn’t seem to notice, however, or maybe he didn’t understand. So I asked if Min would be done before the sun rose, at about 6:00 A.M. He said no.

  “Thank you very much,” I said, and shook his hand.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, smiling again. And then, as I turned to walk back through the door, he bade me well by saying, “May you grow obese on your rice!” As I walked back through the brown hallway, I took the glasses off.

  Very fat, I thought with a another smile of my own, and I exited the Cyber Hole.

  I sat back down next to Paul and his bandanna, leaned into his ear, and told him, “Four to six, at least.”

  He told me that this would be the last time we could talk about this, that I should find my way back to the castle on my own, that I should show up at the summit later on, stay cool, then wait in my office for a call sometime after 4:00 A.M.

  “Get some sleep, if you can,” he said as he walked away from me. “You don’t look too good.” I waved at him, and realized that I didn’t feel too well, either. I added up the hours I had slept in the last two nights, and I could count them on one hand. But I noticed on a nearby clock (the only readable thing around) that it was only an hour before I needed to be at the summit.

  I headed to the surface to catch a taxi, and only stumbled twice on the way. The escalators were moving a little too fast for me.

  17

  Saul Rabin was driving the taxi an
d Lynette was being led along the sidewalk beside me by her mother—until I realized what was happening.

  My body had relaxed just enough, after taking a seat in the back of the cab, to spiral into a somnambulant, mildly hallucinatory state. I had experienced similar trips, induced by fatigue and stress, after long stints of training in the insertion coffin during the Taiwan crisis. I had never thought it would happen to me again—but even though this was a different kind of war, it was a war nonetheless.

  In an attempt to keep myself awake and alert, I put on the glasses and called Lynn at home, on her cell, and in her car. All of them gave me a recorded message, so I left my own on each one, asking her to please call me and give us a chance to work this out together. As I did this, I had a horrible feeling, as real as a blow to the face, that I would never see her again. The feeling sent my adrenaline coursing again, and revived my anger at the old man. But I remembered Paul’s warning about the summit, and how I could ruin our chance to confront him if I didn’t control myself during the meeting.

  I slipped into the dream state once more before the taxi arrived at the castle and jarred me back to reality. In the dream, I was in the big meeting room where the important people were coming to meet with the Mayor. We were all standing around in formal wear, sipping drinks and eating hors d’oeuvres, and I was scanning the crowd, trying to recognize somebody. One minute I was in my right mind, and the next I was walking like a robot to a fake plant, where I found a hidden disk bomb, like the one I had used twice in the last three days.

  You must also destroy the chip in your head, the old man’s crackling voice said inside my brain, so I armed the disk, stuffed it inside my mouth, and walked toward the center of the room.…

  Before I could experience my own atomization, the scene shifted to D’s house on the night of the murder.

  I had just finished looking over the smoldering wreckage of the car, smelling the unmistakable aroma of what was left of its occupants, and already I wished from the bottom of my soul that I could undo what I had just done. I stared down at the right hand, which had thrown the bomb, opening and closing it repeatedly while I prayed for a pill that would make me forget. Half conscious, I felt my mind trying to make the drug appear in the dream, but my hand remained empty until I awoke.

  * * *

  I reached the plush waiting room, high up in the castle, a few minutes before ten, and splashed some cold water on my face in its bathroom. When I came out, Paul was in the room, greeting me with a look that contained a mixture of sympathy and warning. He had traded his black-on-black, beard, and bandanna for an inauspicious blue business suit.

  “You’ll have to leave the boas here, of course,” he said as a small storage compartment slid out from the wall in response to his touch. “And your glasses.”

  I reluctantly removed my jacket and the gun belt, placing them in the drawer and watching it disappear when Paul touched it again. I felt naked, and realized then that I was definitely not dressed appropriately for the most significant meeting that I had ever attended.

  “Don’t worry about your clothes,” Paul said, sensing my discomfort. “They’ll assume you intended to dress that way. They all have their own style, and they don’t follow any rules.”

  I suppose that’s what it means to be powerful, I thought.

  “It’s past ten, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Each party waits in one of these rooms until everyone has arrived. They’re all scanned thoroughly while they wait, and when the last one arrives, they have to be scanned, too. We always start late.”

  “Who will be here?” I said.

  “No one knows until we’re in there,” he answered. “Safer that way.”

  After a few quiet minutes, the door slid open and we walked into the big Parthenon Room. Other figures were stepping out of doors along the two walls to my left, but I didn’t look toward them, not wanting to act like a newbie. Instead, I observed the room ahead of me. In its middle was a huge table with numerous extensions reaching out to the thick chairs around it. It was cleverly engineered to make each of its occupants feel that he was sitting together on the same board, while still retaining a sense of individuality.

  Paul gestured at a chair to the left of the one he was taking, and as I sat down in it, I noticed for the first time that Saul was already seated to Paul’s right, with the massive bodyguard standing silently behind him. Not wanting to meet the old man’s eyes, I resumed my study of the room, taking in the two far walls in front of me, which were made of transteel and afforded an impressive view of the city’s lights.

  The transteel was punctuated by a series of ornate pillars, which extended all the way from the floor to the high-vaulted ceiling. The pillars also lined the two opaque inside walls, combining with the proliferation of marble surfaces to make the room fit its name. They also served a utilitarian purpose, because inside each one were components of the most sophisticated communications-jamming system ever developed. In surveillance terms, the system rendered this room one of the most quiet and invisible places on the planet.

  “Welcome, men,” Saul said after everyone was seated, and I briefly glanced around to see that the colorful group was indeed entirely male. I wondered if this was the case only this time, or if the old man refused to invite women leaders to these summits. I looked at him, feeling a cold sweat start to break out across my skin, because my quick look had given me the impression that most of the guests were looking at me. Perhaps it was just my imagination, however, because Saul went on as if I weren’t there, diving straight into business without any pleasantries whatsoever.

  He announced that there were two new innovations from the Sabon technology that he wanted to demonstrate for them, and the first was our recent combat test of the bugs during the tunnel assault. For a moment, I thought he might refer to me at this point, but he merely introduced a holographic report on the bugs’ performance, which appeared suspended above the center of the table and was quite impressive in its production values. I did notice, however, that the producers conveniently left out the part about our casualties and the hidden compartments the bugs had failed to find on their first pass.

  I already knew about what the holo was depicting, and I knew that the guests would be watching it intently. So I took the opportunity to survey these men who exercised singular authority in their respective realms, since the age of the global net had elevated corporations to the level of nations and turned nations into corporations with very little pretense of democracy. They were all watching the holo with appropriate interest, and none of them wore the proud look one would expect from a man who ruled millions.

  The trip to the castle had a way of humbling them, as the old man had told me once. They came in by helicopter or ground car, as the aero technology they did not have swirled all around them. And the castle itself filled their vision with a reminder that Saul Rabin exercised a degree of control over his small kingdom that they would probably never enjoy in their big ones. Money talks, also, and each of these guests was paying an astronomical fee to BASS for the privilege of attending this one meeting.

  The first individual visitor who drew my attention was by far the most important. General Zhang Sun (pronounced “soon”) sat almost directly across the table from me, but I could see him under the bottom of the holo. The heads of the two thick bodyguards standing behind him were obscured by the holo, but I could tell that they were creations similar to Min, though not as big. Their presence spoke of the importance of the Chinese leader, because all the other guests had been required to leave their bodyguards in the waiting rooms. It also implied the prowess of Min, because the old man would certainly not have left himself at a disadvantage in protection. Apparently the combination of Cyber Hole and Silicon Valley artistry had made our machine-man a match for at least two of theirs.

  Sun sat upright, his back not touching the chair. He wore a dark three-piece suit with a white shirt and tie—a style that had been in vogue a generation earlier. This was
strangely symbolic of the “sleeping giant” quality that had left China playing catch-up with the West for a long time. Although the current premier of the Chinese Empire was a woman (a symbol that they had begun to catch up), those in the know were aware that she was merely a figurehead compared to this man, who exercised the real power.

  While I was studying him, the Chinese general slowly rotated his head toward me and met my eyes. And though his stone face remained utterly expressionless, I felt an almost extrasensory impression that he was directing aggression toward me, or even hatred. It may have been my imagination, again, or a form of paranoia, brought on by my fears in the current situation. But he did hold my gaze for what seemed an abnormally long time, before his head swung unhurriedly back to its former position.

  To my left was Oscar Otero, the CEO of Macrosoft. He stole my attention away from Sun when he hoisted a pair of cowboy boots up to the edge of the table in front of him and rested them there, while he reclined farther in his big chair. Above the boots were a pair of well-worn blue jeans, and above the jeans was a new and ridiculously expensive Hanprin shirt, stretched over his muscular but aging torso. I didn’t know too much about him, but I remembered that he had once been a soldier like me, with real combat experience.

  To his left was Stanford Glenn, considered by many the most influential leader in the American Confederation. America was similar to China in that its president was a woman, but it was said that the buck stopped with this man. His black skin seemed even darker in contrast with his bright white sweater with a high collar, and the whites of his eyes. He had been a professional athlete, like D, and I think they had known each other fairly well. Also, like my dead friend, Glenn was tall and built well, even into his fifties. His official title was Foreign Statesman, a combination of the old offices of Secretary of State and Minister of Foreign Affairs. And in that office lay his power, because in the global economy of “spaceship earth,” the survival and prosperity of nations depended on their relationship with the rest of the world. This was especially true of the AC, ever since the semi-decentralization of the government and the loss of big resources like the Bay Area, plus the rise of China and a consolidated Europe. I also remembered hearing that Stan Glenn’s position was crucial to retaining Mexico as a part of the confederation and keeping its people from causing the problems they had before their assimilation.