Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  The next thing that seems definitely real is a soft feminine voice speaking words I can’t quite hear. Then an entrancing smell of cigarette smoke. My chest clenches with must-have-right-now urgency. I open my eyes to assess the possibility of getting one.

  At first I’m optimistic. The mahogany furniture, impersonal floral wallpaper, and decorative molding place me in a premium hotel suite. But my hopes fall as I take in the adjustable bed, IV stand, and nearby heart monitor, which is reproachfully recording my nic fit. I try to lever myself up, which makes me realize that I’ve also been shot just over the right hip. Combined with my chest wound, this makes almost any movement excruciating.

  I lie still, but a section of my brain is pumping out some sensational anxiety messages. I look around for clues to their cause.

  In a sunny alcove off to my right, I see Blythe Randall chatting on her cell. She’s wearing a gauzy dark-gray suit. And despite the setting, she’s smoking. I’m struck by how beautiful she looks. But then I remember my recent history and conclude that maybe I should be afraid.

  Thinking of my email bomb makes me start wishing I hadn’t survived. My phone sits on a table next to me just within reach. A few clicks reassure me that it never went out.

  Now, how could that be?

  I guess Red Rook was farther up my ass than I imagined.

  My sigh of relief gets Blythe’s attention, and her phone flips shut. I test her attitude by placing two fingers sideways at my lips.

  She shakes her head, but the crinkle at her eyes conveys “What are we going to do with you?” not “I’m going to strangle you for shooting my brother.” She steps over and places her cigarette between my lips. I inhale deeply, ignoring my suspicion that a coughing spasm might kill me.

  Blythe sits next to me and says, “You’ve had us a bit worried.”

  I have so many questions, it’s hard to know where to begin.

  “Where am I?”

  “Well, you’re not in Secaucus bleeding to death.” Her cool tone implies, “Though that could be arranged.”

  “Good . . . But—”

  “We thought after . . . everything, you might need a break. So you’re at a private clinic on Long Island. Where you’ll receive the best medical care known to man. For the full duration of your recovery.”

  Does that mean I’m effectively a prisoner? Do I care, as long as they keep the Fentanyl flowing?

  I’m just amazed Blythe isn’t ripping my eyes out.

  “What about—” I realize belatedly that I’m heading into dangerous territory.

  Blythe is a step ahead of me. She takes some papers off the nightstand and hands them to me. “We’re going to need you to confirm this as soon as possible.”

  I take the pages warily and start skimming.

  The document is Xan’s statement to the police. She’s given them a background précis very close to the truth, but substituting in place of the Dancers some crazy porno NOD build Mondano and Blake wanted to set up. We’d gone to the warehouse to discuss ramping up security on the project due to Billy’s attacks. Halfway through the meeting, Blake shows up and starts screaming threats at Mondano about something having to do with his little brother.

  The key paragraphs read:

  In response, Mr. Mondano produced a firearm from his waistband and pointed it at Mr. Randall. At that point, the two security personnel [Unknown #1 and Unknown #2] appeared outside the room, both armed as well. Their arrival seemed to surprise Mondano, who called them “worthless traitors” and pointed his gun at them. I gathered that Randall had co-opted these men and arranged for them to intervene in case of any altercation. Randall then drew his own pistol and aimed it at Mondano, who reacted by pulling Mr. Pryce out of his chair and stepping behind him. Randall fired his weapon, hitting Pryce in the chest and hip areas. Mondano shot at Randall, hitting him in the chest.

  Mondano kicked over the table, blocking my view of subsequent events. There were a number of shots fired, and I believe that Mondano shot both Unknown individuals. But when Mondano moved to inspect the room, one of them shot him in the head. I then fled the premises.

  The first thing I realize upon absorbing this is that Xan has lied extravagantly to protect me. In her account, I have been made into an unarmed bystander.

  What about my gun? Is it possible that Xan had the presence of mind to get rid of it?

  I reach to remember what really happened. No, I never fired it, so there won’t be traces for ballistics. The only guns I fired were Mondano’s.

  But they would have my fingerprints on them, wouldn’t they? Is it possible that Xan wiped them and then ran them back through his hands?

  What about the Dancers? They’re not mentioned, so she must have hidden them as well. Not hard to pull off in a warehouse full of sex toys.

  And why would Xan do this anyway?

  I think back to that picture Billy took of her shaking hands with Blythe at Gina’s funeral. Xan had said she was just offering condolences, but what if it was more than that? What if they struck up an acquaintance? That led to a business arrangement. Could Blythe have asked Xan to “keep her informed” like she did with me?

  So when things blow up at the warehouse, Xan calls Blythe, and she sends McClaren to perform triage. They concoct a tale for the police, and the responding officers buy it.

  The sickening second insight follows on impatiently: for Xan to have felt free to deliver such a fabrication, there must be no other surviving witnesses. And that means that Blake Randall is dead. I glance cautiously at Blythe, once again wondering if I’m next in line.

  She looks at me steadily. “My brother’s been laid to rest, James.”

  I clear my throat. “You seem—”

  Her eyes flash. “I am shattered with grief for him.” She takes a long breath and calms. “But I saw more clearly than anyone how dedicated he was to reliving my father’s life. And that couldn’t have ended well, could it? I mean, consorting with a psychopath like Mondano?” A hint of bitterness creeps into her voice. “The way Blake would rail about our ‘crazy half brother.’ When all the time, he was the one losing touch with reality. The Randall family curse.” She brushes the corner of her eye with the back of her hand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I had hoped you might be able to protect him. Though I’m not sure if anyone could have by that point. He was so bent on . . . Well, anyway, Xan tells me he shot first. And I’m inclined to believe her.”

  “I’d thought it was over. I don’t really remember pulling the trigger.”

  “I think you’d better forget it. He was a big believer in destiny, and he reached for his fate with both hands. You had the bad fortune to be present at the reckoning.”

  “And your other brother?”

  “After the police found him”—she shudders slightly—“it didn’t take them long to piece together what they’d done to him and why.”

  “Are Xan and Garriott okay?”

  “They are. Garriott’s here. Recovering nicely. Maybe you two will find yourselves on the shuffleboard court soon. Xan is fine. You are indebted to that woman.”

  She adds a sharp glance at the papers I’m holding, commanding me to endorse this fantasy for the police. That feels dangerous. There are dead bodies here, and lying about what happened, if it unravels, would be a good way to get a murder jacket rather than a shot at justifiable homicide.

  But the tale has already been told.

  I’m holding the official version in my hands. If mine should deviate, I not only lash myself to all four corpses, I also make Xan a perjurer. She may not be completely innocent in this affair, but she must have made her statement for my sake.

  Easy choice.

  “I know. She saved my life.”

  We sit in silence. Blythe gives me another drag off her cigarette. I watch her smoke for a moment. She French-inhales, which makes me think of someone else.

  “And Olya?” I ask.

  Blythe’s nostrils flare at the name. “Th
at one remains an outstanding issue. She found the strength to check herself out of the hospital well before anyone would have thought her able. Head injuries can be like that, I’m told. We have people looking for her, but she seems adept at covering her tracks. Our best information is that ‘Olya Zhavinskaya’ isn’t even her real name. McClaren tells me there are some unsavory Russian gentlemen trying to locate her as well. Something to do with a previous enterprise. Even so, there’s no telling where she went, though I understand statuesque blondes can find all sorts of diverting work in Kuwait. But with the burn scars . . .”

  I close my eyes, remembering her.

  “No doubt men all over New York are tearing their hair that she’s gone. But you’ll heal. I’m sure next year’s model will be even better.”

  “So what happens now?”

  Blythe waves toward the window framing a priceless view of white sand and sparkling water. “For you? You’ll understand that your relationship with IMP can’t continue, but I’m prepared to offer generous severance.”

  I shoot her twin brother, and she’s offering me severance?

  My surprise lessens as she continues. “After such a tragedy, I’m sure I don’t need to say the word ‘plomo’? With all these nasty perforations, I suspect you’ve had your fill of the heavy metals.”

  Disconcerting for Blythe to pose a question immortalized by the hall-of-fame kingpin Pablo Escobar: Plata o plomo? Silver or lead? A joke, but an edgy one.

  She glides a finger just above my chest wound. “What happened was awful, but one day I’m sure you’ll treasure these scars. There’s something so attractive about a man with the power to stop bullets.”

  77

  After my release from the hospital, I’m tempted to slink back to Red Rook, but that doesn’t feel quite right. Blythe bore the cost of patching me up, so I figure the least I can do is spend some of my separation pay to fix the two parties who helped save my life. Ginger’s neck is broken in several places, and of course Fred needs to be remasculated.

  I try to recruit Garriott and Xan to help, but they seem fairly traumatized by what happened and want no further part of the roborotica business. And they aren’t going to have Blythe Randall pulling strings for them forever. We agree that they’ll keep their shares of any new company, but otherwise I get free rein.

  Though it turns out Blythe is pulling strings for me as well.

  Something I find out after fielding a call from my old poker buddy William Coles. He begins by saying, “Dude, I’m totally into fucking robots.”

  He’s taken a page from his father’s playbook and gone into currency trading, though his company, Philosopher’s Stone Financial, works with virtual currencies. Spinning gold out of silicon. Blythe tipped him off to my new enterprise, thinking he might be an ideal investor. We set up a meeting for a demo.

  He closes the call by saying, “And at this meeting I want to fuck Whitney Houston. Like pre-Bobby? No wait, an octopus! No . . . Uh! All three Olsen twins! Wait, can what I’m fucking change in the middle?”

  I then call Adrian to convince him to work with me full-time on bringing Fred and Ginger back to life. He quickly agrees, saying, “The margins on manufacturing virtual snatchola are going to be obscene.”

  A few weeks later, I pass a newsstand on my way home. The front page of the Journal shows a picture of a black-clad blonde emerging from a limo into a crowd of photographers: Blythe Randall returning triumphant from the closing of her TelAmerica deal. The article lauds her “iron resolve” in getting the transaction done after it was plunged into uncertainty in the “amazingly brief” period of chaos at IMP caused by the deaths of both her brothers. While Blythe has never addressed the press, the article quotes from the statement made by an old Randall family spokesperson:

  Ms. Randall is deeply grieved by these developments and asks that the media respect her privacy in this difficult time.

  Of course, the media is not in the business of respecting privacy. From my hospital bed, I’d read some of the coverage in the weeks after Blake’s death. You could hear the reporters gnashing their teeth as the police conducted their investigation with unusual dispatch and discipline. They quickly concluded that Billy had been murdered by Mondano’s two dead henchmen, and that the warehouse shootings stemmed from a fight that escalated to a lethal pitch. This determination relied on the testimony of two eyewitnesses whose identities had to remain confidential for fear of reprisals. All those suspected of violence were now deceased, so the case was closed without the glorious spectacle of a trial.

  The verdict on Blake was, “Rich kid, under too much pressure from an early age, cracks. Tragic consequences ensue.”

  Two weeks later, Israel reinvaded Lebanon, a photogenic toddler was kidnapped, and an earthquake re-destroyed Port Au Prince. The story dissipated.

  Billy’s Unmasking stayed with us for a bit longer. There were trials to cover, public disgrace to bestow, and tearful confessions to extract. But once the worm was contained and the source of new victims dried up, the sex scandals, being primarily virtual and involving mostly regular folks, lasted no longer than they usually do. Remarkable more for their simultaneous disclosure than anything else.

  While there was a short and sharp drop-off in certain online activities, and perhaps a quicker uptake of browsing anonymizers, Lucifer quickly reasserted control over the world’s computer screens. I came to agree with Blue_Bella’s prediction that Billy’s trick would produce more eyes opened in wonder than it did heads hung in shame.

  I had little doubt that the Dancers’ reception would be a warm one.

  78

  Ten months later, I’m starting to question whether they’ll be received at all. There’s a critical bug we can’t seem to stamp out.

  The problem is that Ginger can have exactly eight orgasms in a session, and then she inexplicably dies. We want to have test units reviewed by a group of influential Sex 2.0 bloggers, and we can’t send them out until we squash the bug.

  At ArrowTech, our “erotic technology” company, my team has been bickering about it nonstop. Since thirty hours have passed without a solution, I tell them I’ll take it over.

  Eight hours in, all I can think is that I’m not even supposed to be doing this. Though I’m in charge of our tech efforts, I haven’t openly picked up a screwdriver or written a line of code in six months. The last time I tried, it caused a vitriolic argument with Adrian about my wasting time in the weeds. He said that whenever I’m tempted to do anything useful, I need to pick up the phone and tell our HR coordinator to hire someone to do it for me. With the lavish funding from Thrust Capital, Coles’s new venture fund, I’ve already conceded the “get erect fast” argument. But this whole time I’ve been secretly indulging an urgent need to get my hands dirty. Which is why I’m here at two in the morning hunting this pesky critter.

  We started by establishing that the bug exists in the original version of the Dancers’ code, in Fred’s orgasm-detection routines. So I’ve been poring over Garriott’s old files to see if we missed anything.

  After a long time searching, I begin to feel another presence in the code. In a few places, generally the most complicated parts of the program, the ones you can’t quite understand upon first seeing them, I find some constructions that don’t seem like Garriott. Like someone is speaking with a different voice. A coder whose head is altogether closer to the machine: lots of complex class structures, fancy recursion, and elegant bit manipulation. Garriott is a very good engineer, but his code gives the impression of a rigorous proof. This stuff looks like poetry.

  No one would ever write sample code like this, so where did it come from?

  The answer’s obvious: Gina.

  Reading her syntax elicits a welter of emotions. Sadness that I never got to meet this tortured genius mixes with creeping guilt over my exploitation of the project for which she was murdered.

  I’m trying to parse a particularly thorny section when I get a feeling of déjà vu. This code is di
stinctive enough that I must have seen it before. I do a global search and find, in a totally unrelated library, an almost identical function.

  My screen-burned eyes finally focus on the difference:

  Function 1 is called: O_fill_packet

  Function 2 is called: O_fi11_packet

  Only a couple of shifted pixels separate the lowercase L from the number 1 in most default programming fonts. A discrepancy so easy to overlook that the names must be intentional. We hackers often use such lettering tricks when trying to disguise files or processes on a target’s machine.

  The only difference between the two functions is that O_fi11_packet has a single line allocating a variable that creates a huge memory leak.

  Someone intentionally put a bug into the system.

  I restrain myself from immediately stomping this guy, and instead I check the value of the wayward variable when Ginger goes into her post-coital depression. It reads:

  This little death I exalt n

  For I’d rather halt n

  Than make a pillar of salt n

  Gina Delaney n

  03.21.1980 - 10.29.14 n

  Gina put in an Easter egg.

  The practice of embedding hidden treasures into software has a storied history. There’s the Hall of Tortured Souls in Excel ’95 wherein, by executing an obscure series of keystrokes, the user can enter a Doom-like 3D world. The infamous “Hot Coffee” pornographic cut scene in Grand Theft Auto actually prompted Senate hearings, with Hillary Clinton, of all people, acting particularly aggrieved. But generally Easter eggs are credit reels for underappreciated programmers.

  Strange for Gina to put hers in a critical bug. This critter has caused enough ill will that any normal coder would remove it immediately. I fix the memory leak but decide to leave her secret memorial. She deserves it.