by Kim Oh
“I am telling you.” Dalby poked his fork at the remains of the waffles, glistening in brown syrup. “If somebody like you – somebody as tough as you turned out to be – is too old, up here . . .” He tapped the side of his own head. “Then there has to be somebody different – somebody younger and tougher – if the future is going to be what I want it to become.”
“Really? And that somebody is Stinson, I take it?” I was taking a guess, but one I was pretty sure of. “He’s the future?”
“Not yet – or at least he wasn’t.” A deep, meditative gaze filtered into Dalby’s eyes. “But maybe . . .” He spoke softly. “Maybe he is now.”
“I think I’m starting to get the picture.” The coffee had chilled in the cup in front of me. “Yeah, this wasn’t any kind of contest – it was some kind of weird-ass training program for your boy Stinson.”
“Very perceptive of you, Miss Oh.” Dalby smiled. “Perhaps, if things had been different . . . in a different sort of scenario . . . there might’ve been a place for you in the world to come. You’re smarter than I expected . . .” A slow nod. “I could’ve made you into something that would’ve been of use to me.”
“What makes you think I would’ve let you?” I could feel my eyes narrowing into slits. “People like me . . . we don’t really like the idea of anyone using us. Making us into what they want. There was a time – a long time ago – when I might’ve gone for it. But not now.”
“I know,” said Dalby. “That was the problem I saw with Stinson. So much potential there . . . so close to being what the future requires. Those Beta Team fellows – they could never have become what Stinson is capable of being. Sure, they were smart – brilliant, even – and they had some great ideas. Profitable ones – with the start-up capital I could’ve given them, they would have made a lot of money for me.” His thin smile reappeared. “If you’d been their chief financial officer, you would’ve been very busy, counting it all up. But making a lot of money . . .” Dalby shrugged. “That’s already possible, in the world the way it is now. Plenty of people, just like the Beta Team, are doing it. But that’s not what the future is going to be about. They were smart, but just too soft for that.”
“And Stinson isn’t.”
“That’s right, Miss Oh. He’s different – rather like the way you’re different. You see . . .” Dalby set his elbows on either side of his plate and leaned toward me. “Up until now, the high-tech world – the Internet and all the rest of it, the whole connected thing – it’s been basically a nice and sweet and kind place. The people who run it, and the people who finance it – people like me – we’ve made our billions by giving people something. It’s an exchange. People give us their attention – they look at what we put on their screens for them to look at – or they give us their personal data, and they don’t mind giving it to us because they get something back for it. And that’s . . . nice.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s what people believe.” I gave a slow shake of my head. “But I never fell for it. I’ve always thought it’s pretty much some kind of shuck.”
“As I said – you’re different, Miss Oh. But you’re also in the minority. And it’s a good thing for people like me – and the future. Which isn’t going to be so nice. For the future to become what it needs to be – people have to stop getting something out of the whole high-tech world. Now that people can’t live without it, they can’t imagine being disconnected from it, even for a second . . .” He slowly nodded. “That opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Because when something is no longer an option – when you can’t live without it – then you won’t do things because you want to. You’ll do things because you’re afraid not to.”
Listening to Dalby, I could feel a chill draw my spine tighter. He was either crazy – and that was scary enough – or he wasn’t. And that was scarier.
“And that,” continued Dalby, “is why I need Stinson. Or rather . . . why I need him to be what he can be. He’s already pretty tough –”
“Yeah, you could say that about him, all right.”
“I was hoping that would be your assessment. From a person of your . . . shall we say . . . professional background, that means a lot. Because that’s what I was hoping to achieve with our little contest, as I had led him to believe it was. You see, Miss Oh, it’s one thing for a person such as Stinson to be tough by the standards of the high-tech world – that usually just means they can put in a lot of long hours writing code, or putting together a fairly ruthless business plan. But those are abstract things – they don’t have anything to do with the real world, the physical one that’s all around us. As hard as it sometimes gets, nobody ever actually dies from programming or running a business – well, they do actually, but that’s usually from them being so out of shape. But for Stinson – for him to be what I want him to be – I needed to make sure that he was capable of putting his life on the line. To get the start-up capital I was offering as the prize in the contest, he had to not only be capable of dying, he had to be capable of causing other people’s deaths as well.”
“You know . . .” I was about ready to pick up the coffee cup and throw its dregs into this lunatic’s face. “That kinda sucks. If you really want my professional opinion, that is. You’re screwing around with a lot of people who didn’t ask to be screwed around with. Including me. If you wanted to toughen up this Stinson guy so bad, maybe you should’ve sent him on some Outward Bound wilderness course or put the money on top of Mount Everest and told him to go climb for it, wearing nothing but his skivvies.” The tone of my voice got seriously heated. “But you should’ve just left me out of it.”
“Wouldn’t have worked.” Dalby shook his head. “Somebody like Stinson – he wasn’t manipulable before. You don’t tell him what to do. You have to find some way of coercing him into your plans, of going in the direction you want him to, without him knowing. And that’s difficult to pull off, with somebody as smart as him. Thus the contest – something designed to take advantage of his innate competitive streak. A chance to beat out and humiliate a group of high-tech rivals, like the ones I pulled into the Beta Team, and receive the massive amount of start-up capital necessary for his next project? There was no way Stinson could resist that, even if you disregard all the testosterone and adrenaline that would be involved in the chase.” Another thin smile. “And you performed more than satisfactorily, Miss Oh. Morton assured me that you would put up a good fight – and so you did. I rather believe that I’ve been able to make Stinson into what I wanted him to be, what I knew he could be. And a great deal of the credit goes to you.”
“Yeah, thanks. But I think I’ll leave that off my resume, if you don’t mind.”
“Suit yourself. The future, however, is going to happen whether or not people like you care for it. The world you know is already disappearing. The question you should concern yourself with is whether there will be any place for you in the world to come. But . . .” A shrug. “That’s not up to you.”
“Maybe not.” I leaned across the table, bringing my face closer to his. “And that’s because you’re so smart, isn’t it? Master of the Universe – that’s what you like to think.”
“Some things are just true, Miss Oh.”
“Like your making Stinson into what you want him to be. You did that. You took somebody who’s so scary, who would never let anybody control him – but you did.”
“Yes.” Dalby’s eyes closed, as though he were fully savoring the moment. “I did.”
“So now I know.” I took my hand from the gun in my lap and took the paper napkin off the table. “What this was all about.”
His eyes opened again, and he looked down at the cheap little burner phone sitting there. The tiny screen indicated that it was set to speaker mode.
“Now we all know,” I said.
We were so close, both of us leaning across the booth’s table, that he must have seen the reflection in my eyes. Two little points of light at the dark center of each iris, as
the pair of headlights switched on outside. He shot his gaze back over his shoulder, toward the diner’s plate glass window, as the familiar roar of a Dodge Challenger’s big-displacement engine rattled the cheap metal cutlery on the paper place mat.
Dalby’s eyes had gone wide when he looked back at me, but I only saw them for a second – I already was diving out of the booth, heading for the distant side of the diner. His reactions weren’t as quick as mine, or else he was frozen in place by what he had just realized. Which included the fact that no matter what he did, there’d be no escape for him.
A split second later, the Challenger dropped into gear and shot forward. The window shattered across its grille, the front bumper plowing through the short cinder-block wall beneath. With that much torque pounding along the drive train, the rear wheels spun and smoked for only a moment before they projected the muscle car straight into the middle of the diner, scattering chairs and tables like dry straw. One of the front fenders clipped the counter near the entrance, sending the cash register toppling to the floor.
I heard more than I saw of what happened next – I was curled under the table of another booth, as far as I could get from where Dalby was still trapped. My forearms pressed tight against my face, shielding me from the glass shards and splintered wood that rained across the diner’s interior. Rolling onto my side, I caught only a quick glimpse of Dalby as he scrambled to his feet, just before the gleaming nose of the Challenger hit the booth, demolishing the seat and crumpling its occupant like a sack of dirty laundry.
Stinson was nothing if not thorough. Lowering my arms a little, I watched as the Challenger backed up a few feet, then lurched forward again, bumping over the debris beneath its wheels.
A couple seconds passed, then things were quieter. The glass bits had stopped falling and now lay scattered and glistening across the floor and the broken bits of the diner’s tables. The only sound now was the throaty murmur of the Challenger’s idling engine, emerging from beneath the beat-up hood.
The whole left side of the car had taken some damage, from when it had rammed through the diner window. When the scraped and dented driver’s-side door creaked open, the rearview mirror dropped off the fender.
Stinson climbed out of the car, sliding his muscled frame from behind the steering wheel. He still had on the neck brace – the way it lifted his head taut, his gaze looked like the sights of a machine gun turret. I got to my feet, pushing myself out from beneath the other booth’s table. He and I stood facing each other, both of us looking down at what was left of Dalby. The Challenger’s left front tire was right on his chest, the car’s weight crushing him flat. I pulled a foot back from the widening pool that had started to spread beneath his corpse.
I drew the .357 out of my jacket and pointed it at Stinson. “Give me one good reason,” I said, “why I shouldn’t.”
Stinson brought his gaze up toward me. “I thought we had a deal.” He seemed calm, unfazed, and even somewhat amused. “When you called me.”
“I had a deal with him, too.” I gestured with the gun toward the body. “Those things don’t seem to count for a lot with you people.”
What Stinson had said was true, though. Right after Dalby had gotten me on the cheap little burner phone and had set up our meeting here at the diner, I had flashed on what I needed to do. What it would take to wrap up this whole stupid job. First I’d had to call Mason and get one last favor from him, which he’d agreed he owed me. Then, once I had Stinson’s number from him – his buddy Perry had gotten that, when they’d been setting up our encounter at the hospital – then all I’d had to do was push the right buttons and talk to Stinson. About what he’d started to figure out, and what I had. And arrange everything, so he’d be able to listen in and know just what Dalby had been up to all along.
“How about this?” Standing in the middle of the diner’s wreckage, Stinson nodded toward something behind me. “You just go on your way, and I’ll take care of the mess here. All of it.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the waitress and cook, with his arms around her as they stood in the kitchen doorway. They looked scared. Why wouldn’t they?
“Don’t do anything to them –” I turned back toward Stinson. “They don’t have anything to do with this. With us.”
“Don’t worry.” His smile was just as cold and ugly as when I’d seen it before. “You know I’ve got the kind of money that can make situations like this just go away. Like they never were. I don’t have to hurt anybody at all, to make that happen.”
I knew he was right about that. So I lowered the .357 in my hand. I’d be glad to get out of here, climb back on board the Ninja, and just go.
“So that’s it.” Stinson looked down at the corpse, its emptied eyes gazing up the diner’s ceiling. “Now the contest’s over.”
“Yeah . . .” I tucked the gun back into my jacket. “And he won.”
I walked past Stinson, stepping over the scattered bits of the broken tables, and headed for the door.
THIRTEEN
Whenever I go to San Francisco, I don’t do any of the touristy stuff. That’s all out by the Bay, and it’s all too crowded for my tastes. The Ferry Building’s okay, I guess – everything’s way too expensive, the restaurants I mean, but you can sit outside with a decent coffee and look at the Bay Bridge and Alcatraz and the boats going by, and that’s pleasant enough. But it’s not particularly real – you might as well have gone to Disneyland. That whole part of San Francisco stopped being real a long time ago. And I never even got to see it when it was cool – that was before I was even born. Thanks, dot-commers – you couldn’t have taken all your money to Gary, Indiana, instead?
So I usually wind up on the other side of the city, out toward the ocean. The Avenues, as the locals call it. Little less crowded, little funkier, not polished up by all that high-tech money flowing through the streets – but that’ll probably change soon enough, so see it now, folks.
This time, when I finally got into town, I wound up all the way out at the ocean’s edge. It was too early for me to make my delivery, so I watched the gray dawn slowly lift, as I leaned against the bike’s seat in the parking lot of the sandy beach right off the Great Highway. Even at that hour, there were cars lined along the road curving up to the Cliff House. I wrapped my leather-jacketed arms close around me, keeping the chill off best I could, and watched the slow waves roll in. They looked as tired as I felt. It’d been a long night, and I was glad it was over.
If I’d turned and looked behind myself, across the highway’s flat pavement, I would’ve seen one of my favorite San Francisco things. I’d spotted it before when I’d been up here and always considered it to be one of those weird, oddball – and maybe even a little demented – bits that this city provided. It’s just a street sign – that’s all. At the side of one of the streets leading away from the ocean and into the beginning of the city’s hills. And what the sign says, in nice big letters, is
TSUNAMI ESCAPE ROUTE
That’s all. Like I said, I love that. Basically, what it’s saying is that if you should happen to be there beside the Pacific Ocean, and you see some enormous wall of water barreling your way, then you should run away from it – to higher ground, even. Really? There are people who need to be told that? Gee, there’s a tidal wave coming – what do I do now? Maybe the signs were put up in the sixties, during the hippied-out Haight-Ashbury days, when there actually were a lot of people around who were so stoned that they needed help with tsunami avoidance. And then later, when everybody got more or less straight, they never bothered taking the sign down – just in case. There’s local history for you.
But for some reason, this time I didn’t want to see the funny old sign. So I just kept on looking at the ocean, tinted dark as my thoughts.
What I was thinking about was that diner I’d left behind me on the highway, with the big Dodge Challenger sitting in the middle of the wreckage it’d made. And that guy Stinson leaning against its scuffed-up fender, sh
owing me his cold smile, and saying he’d take care of the mess. Because that’s what money can do – as if I already hadn’t known that.
I’d had enough crazy-ass, violent things happen around me – a lot of them worse than a car crashing through a diner’s plate-glass window – that another one like that shouldn’t have bothered me all that much. In this line of work, it’s just what you get used to. But something about the whole business sat in my mind where I couldn’t get rid of it, like a door to an unlit room you don’t want to open all the way, because of what might be on the other side. What I finally figured out – and it took a little brooding – was that maybe that Stinson guy, with all his high-tech smarts and the way he thought about the world, maybe he was like a tsunami. The wave of the future, right? And it was rolling toward us, everybody standing there at the edge of the ocean. Coming toward me – and there wasn’t any sign around that would tell me where to go, to get away from it. Because maybe there wasn’t any place like that, no high ground to run to, where you wouldn’t be swept away to drown . . .
That’s what I’d meant, back at the roadside diner, when I’d said that Dalby had won the contest. Maybe he’d even been happy when Stinson had rolled the Challenger right on top of him. He’d wanted to create something, bring a new type of human being into existence. And he’d succeeded. Just one problem, though. As much as I might have issues with being screwed around with – who doesn’t? – for somebody like Stinson, the way he’d become – the way Dalby had made him – it’d be impossible. He’d just as soon take a pass on the pot of money – he could always get more – than let whoever had screwed with him go on living.
