The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  “That’s it? You just went back to work?”

  “Pretty much,” said Gwen. “Until about six years later, when people who’d been involved in the task force started dying under mysterious circumstances.”

  “So you decided to disappear,” I said. “You could have told me.”

  “Not without risking your life as well,” she replied. “I didn’t know who was killing the task force members or why, so the less you knew, the better.”

  “I could have protected you,” I protested. “This is what I do. I—”

  “Not against these people, Blake. I couldn’t risk it. In any case, there was no time. I had one chance to get out and I took it.”

  “What chance?”

  “I’d saved some documents from Maelstrom. I was supposed to have handed them all over at the end of the project, but I copied some that I thought might give me some leverage. I was right.”

  “What were they?” I asked.

  “Projections having to do with using the media to manipulate public opinion about the DZ. They weren’t labeled as such, but it was pretty clear from the contents that the projections had come from someone inside Selah Fiore’s organization, Flagship Media. And I was convinced that Selah Fiore would have been in on something like that. I didn’t have enough evidence to prove anything, though, so I did the next best thing.”

  “You bluffed.”

  “Right,” said Gwen. “I called up Selah and told her I had some documents linking her to a certain high-profile nonprofit organization. She agreed to meet me. I told her that the documents would remain in my possession, hidden from public view, as long as I was alive. We came to an agreement.”

  “Selah helped you disappear?”

  “Yes. Gave me an alternate identity in the DZ, under the protection of a certain warlord I believe you know.”

  “Mag-Lev.”

  Gwen nodded.

  Mag-Lev was the most powerful warlord in the DZ, and as luck would have it, Keane and I had recently had a run-in with him as well: he’s the guy who blew up our car. I suppose it wasn’t really luck, though: Mag-Lev owed his position to Selah’s influence as well. So it made sense that when Selah needed to help Gwen disappear, she asked for Mag-Lev’s help.

  “Dangerous getting in bed with Mag-Lev,” I said.

  “No more dangerous than Selah Fiore,” Gwen replied. “At first Selah suggested I hide out in one of the LAFF safe houses.”

  “LAFF had safe houses?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think they ever used them for anything, but the idea was that if a LAFF agent was stuck in the DZ while riots or fighting was going on, they could get to one of these safe houses and lay low for a few days.”

  “But whoever was knocking off the Maelstrom people might have known about the safe houses.”

  “Right,” said Gwen. “Which was why I told Selah no. That’s when she approached Mag-Lev.”

  “How did you know Selah wasn’t behind the task-force murders?”

  “I didn’t,” said Gwen. “I took a chance. I was at her mercy. If Selah had wanted to have me killed any time over the past three years, she could have done it. She knew exactly where I was. I was living under the identity of Kathryn Buchanan in an apartment in Willowbrook.”

  “But something happened a few weeks ago to make you think you weren’t safe there anymore.”

  “I told you: the DZ has been more on edge than usual. Lots of gang shootings, turf battles, and the like. The DZ has always been a rough place, but it’s downright terrifying these days.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Yes,” Gwen said. “Things have been strained lately between Selah and Mag-Lev. If they had a falling out, things were going to go very badly for me.”

  I nodded. “It’s good you got out when you did. If Selah had known where you were when Keane and I uncovered her cloning operation, she’d have used you against us.”

  “So here I am,” said Gwen. “Three years later, and I still don’t know who was trying to kill me or why. Or if they still want me dead. I don’t even know for sure somebody did intend to kill me.”

  “It’s a safe bet,” I said, “considering what happened to the other task force members. Except for Keane, of course.”

  “Yeah,” said Gwen. “It’s funny how Keane managed to get out alive.”

  “You said yourself Erasmus Keane isn’t his real name. He changed his identity so he wouldn’t be found.”

  “Changed his identity and then proceeded to become a local celebrity private investigator. It’s almost like he doesn’t believe he’s in any real danger.”

  “You don’t seriously think Keane was behind the murders of the task-force members.”

  “Behind them? Probably not. But he may have been in on them. I don’t trust him, Blake. I never have.”

  I had to admit, she had a point. And the truth was, I didn’t fully trust Erasmus Keane, either. He’d lied to me for three years, pretending he had no idea what had happened to Gwen, when he knew about Gwen’s involvement with LAFF all along. Even his name was a lie; he had never told me his real name. That said, it was a lie to which he was fully committed. Whoever he once was, he was now 100 percent dedicated to the character he was playing. So in a weird way, I did trust him: I trusted him to be Erasmus Keane.

  “So what did Selah hire you to do?” Gwen asked.

  I gave Gwen a rundown of our meeting with Selah.

  “Interesting,” Gwen said. “And you definitely got the impression that she only wanted one of these coins? Any one of them, but only one?”

  I regarded Gwen curiously. “That’s what she said. Why, do you know something about these coins?”

  Gwen shrugged. “I remember hearing about the auction at the time. I can’t imagine why anybody would hire Erasmus Keane to find one. They’re just novelty items, aren’t they?”

  “Keane is researching them now. Hopefully he doesn’t find one too quickly. A few days’ work at triple our normal rate would get us close to current on our lease.”

  “There are easier ways to make money,” Gwen said. “Speaking as someone who got sucked into doing business with Selah Fiore some time ago, I’d suggest running as fast as you can in the opposite direction.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. “Sorry, Gwen. Gotta go.”

  “Thanks for stopping by, Blake.”

  I left and hurried back to the restaurant. On the way, my comm chirped, signaling I’d received a text message. I stopped to look at the display. The sender was identified as “Lila.” The message read, simply:

  welcome to the game

  FOUR

  Being late for dinner with April, I didn’t have time to ruminate on the meaning of this message. Most likely it was a mistake; I didn’t know anybody named Lila. I ran the rest of the way back to the restaurant. Fortunately, April was running a few minutes late, so I had time to splash water on my face in the bathroom and cool off a bit. I exited the bathroom to see April sitting in a corner booth.

  I joined her, and we ordered: pad thai for her, butter chicken curry for me. April had gotten in the habit of paying when we went out; thanks to our disastrous last case and general lack of business lately, I’d been putting everything on credit for some time. While we ate, I gave April a summary of the day’s events thus far. I’d already told her about Gwen. Gwen would kill me if she knew, but I trusted April and valued her counsel about these things. Besides, if something happened to me, I wanted there to be at least one other person who knew about Gwen.

  “So you’re working for the woman who tried to kill us,” said April. “That’s an interesting choice.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better? If all your friends went to work for a narcissistic megalomaniac—”

  “Can we not have this discussion right now?” I said. “I get it. I’m responsible for my actions.”

  “I didn’t say it was a bad idea,” April repli
ed. “Selah must be pretty desperate to get her hands on one of these coins if she hired you. Any idea why she wants it?”

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “And you still haven’t told Keane about Gwen?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “I promised Gwen I wouldn’t.”

  “You told me.”

  “That’s different,” I said. “She doesn’t know about you.”

  “You mean she doesn’t even know I exist? Did you leave out my heroic turn when you told her about our escape from Selah?”

  “Did you have a heroic turn?” I asked, furrowing my brow. “Mostly I remember you getting kidnapped a lot.”

  “See if I help you again.”

  “You’ll help me,” I said. “You find me irresistible. Also, your job is incredibly boring, so you look forward to the distraction.”

  “One of those statements is true,” April said. “I don’t like you keeping secrets from Keane.”

  “Keeping secrets from Keane!” I exclaimed. “You know he lied to me for three years about Gwen, right?”

  “Yes, but that’s Keane,” April said. “Lying is his idiom.”

  “I don’t have any idea what that means.”

  “Look,” said April. “I once dated a guy who would stop talking to me when he got upset. I mean, not full-on silent treatment, but he would just sort of shut down, answering questions with a simple yes or no, and when I pressed him on it, he’d deny anything was wrong. It was maddening. I tried everything I could think of to get him to communicate with me, but nothing worked. Finally I had the brilliant idea of using his own tactic against him. So I shut down and stopped talking to him. You know what happened?”

  “You broke up?”

  “Nope. We just stopped talking. As far as I know, we’re still dating, although I haven’t talked to him for six years.”

  “This is a fantastic story,” I said.

  “The point is, it was stupid of me to try to beat him at his own game. Silence isn’t my idiom.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you on that one,” I said. “But Keane and I aren’t dating.”

  “No,” she said, “but the dynamic is the same. Keane lies because he’s Keane. You knew who he was when you started working for him.”

  “So what’s my idiom?” I asked.

  “That’s for you to figure out,” said April.

  I rolled my eyes. April had a tendency to lapse into self-help book truisms at times.

  My comm chirped. It was Keane. I answered.

  “Where are you?” Keane asked.

  “Dinner with April, remember?”

  “Get back here. We need to talk to an expert about these coins.” He ended the call.

  “You need a ride?” April asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you want, you can borrow my car. Just drop me off at my condo.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” said April. “I just need the car back in time to get to my boring job tomorrow.”

  “It’s a good thing you find me irresistible.”

  “Don’t push it.”

  * * *

  While I was talking with Gwen and April, Keane had done some digging on the iota coins. Evidently he’d been unable to find a single coin on sale online at any price, although two had sold recently at more than double the asking price—to the same anonymous buyer. He had been unable to find any information on the original buyers of the other coins, not even a list of attendees at the auction hosted by the Free Currency Initiative in 2032. Keane prided himself on his encyclopedic knowledge in just about every field, but after running into several dead ends, he decided it was time to talk to an expert. His “expert” in this case turned out to be a man named Kwang-hyok Kim, the owner of a pawnshop in Koreatown. Among other things, Kim dealt in collectible coins, and Keane thought he might have some insight into the value of the physical iotas.

  Koreatown was on the other side of the DZ, so once again we had a long drive ahead of us. It didn’t help that we got stuck behind a caravan of military vehicles on Mission for twenty minutes. This was happening more and more often; the rumor was that a private paramilitary firm called Green River was building a big training facility in the desert south of Riverside, so they were constantly transporting supplies and personnel from the city. Paramilitary organizations were a growth industry; after the coup in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. military had scaled back their military presence in the Middle East, leaving a vacuum to be filled by nongovernmental organizations. So it made sense they’d built a training facility in the Southern California desert; the climate was similar to the Arabian Peninsula’s, at least in the summer. I’d spent a few summers in Saudi Arabia, and I didn’t miss it.

  While we were stuck in traffic, Keane told me what he had found out about the coins—which wasn’t much.

  “Just to clarify,” I said, “these coins aren’t actually worth anything, right?”

  “Officially they had no cash value, in either dollars or iotas,” said Keane. “But of course they were limited-edition coins made especially for a high-profile event, so they are of some value to collectors.”

  “But how much could a coin like that possibly be worth, even to a collector?” I asked. “They’re only eight years old. Even if it was made of solid gold, it wouldn’t be worth more than a few hundred New Dollars.”

  Keane nodded. “Whatever value that coin has, it derives from an attribute other than its composition or numismatic interest.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Difficult to say,” Keane replied. “But I suspect that Selah’s interest in the iota coin is somehow linked to the value of the iota currency.”

  That didn’t make any sense to me. Coins had their face value and their numismatic value. How could the value of the coin be linked to the value of the currency if the coin had a face value of zero? But then, I wasn’t sure I understood where the value of the virtual iotas came from, either. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Iotas were literally just ones and zeroes stored on a memory drive; they shouldn’t have any value at all. I broke down and asked Keane to explain it.

  Keane nodded. “You’re talking about the bootstrapping problem,” he said.

  “I am?”

  “Sure. Money is essentially a collective delusion, as we saw during the Collapse. Dollars were valuable only as long as people believed they were valuable. Once doubt began to nibble at the edges of the delusion, speculators began dumping dollars in favor of hard assets, and the worry became self-fulfilling. Suddenly nobody wanted dollars anymore, and the value cratered. Eventually the feds stepped in with a restructuring plan and the dollar stabilized at about five percent of its previous value, but for a while there it was flirting with its actual, real-world value.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Very nearly,” said Keane. “Paper money that nobody believes in is worth slightly less than toilet paper. So the question is: how did the federal government fool people into thinking this worthless paper was valuable for so long?”

  “Well,” I said, “originally it was backed by gold, wasn’t it?”

  “Originally it was gold,” said Keane. “Or silver. Later, coins made from precious metals were replaced by bills that could be exchanged for a specified amount of gold. In effect, these bills were symbols representing something valuable—and once you can convince people to accept a symbol of something in place of the thing, you’re well on your way toward generating the requisite collective delusion required for fiat currency. Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971. After that, dollars were backed by ‘the full faith and credit of the United States treasury.’ The U.S. rode its reputation for another forty-seven years, but ultimately a note that isn’t backed by anything is worthless. A symbol without a referent. But it’s worth noting that the delusion lasted for nearly half a century. So the problem facing anyone launching a new form of currency is: how do you cultivate that delusion? It’s easy enough to do if y
ou’ve got a big pile of silver or gold or platinum or uranium—something that has universally recognized value. Otherwise you have to somehow convince people that other people think your money is valuable. It has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. That’s the bootstrapping problem.”

  We’d arrived at the pawnshop. I followed Keane inside, where a man I assumed was Kwang-hyok Kim hunched over a counter stacked high with oddities and bric-a-brac. I’m not the greatest at estimating either heights or ages, but I would guess this guy was about two feet tall and three hundred years old. I may be exaggerating slightly. In any case, he was very small and very old, and he talked incredibly fast in a language that I deduced, with my professional detective skills, was Korean.

  Mr. Kim was either very happy to see Keane or very angry at him; I honestly could not tell which. He started barking at Keane the moment we stepped into the store, which was filled with the usual pawnshop goodies: chain saws, blenders, microwave ovens, jewelry, guns, leather jackets, motorcycle helmets, etc. And coins. Lots and lots of coins. I studied these while Keane spoke with Kim.

  Keane responded to each of Kim’s successive outbursts in measured tones, also in Korean. I knew Keane spoke Spanish; apparently he also spoke Korean. I wondered how many other languages he spoke. There was a lot I didn’t know about Keane.

  Eventually Kim calmed down to the point where Keane was able to ask him about the iota. At least that’s what I assumed was happening; the only word I was able to make out was iota. Kim shook his head and shouted out another indecipherable string of syllables. When he’d finished, Keane spoke again.

  Kim nodded and grumbled something in reply. Then he disappeared into a back room, returning after a moment with a very large book. He slapped the book down on the counter and opened it to a page somewhere near the middle. He tapped his finger on the page, and I came up next to Keane to see what he was pointing at.

  It was a silver-colored coin, pictured front and back. On the back was an engraving of an insect, perhaps a dragonfly. Below the insect was a very small number 3. On the front was a symbol that looked like a backward J. Underneath the symbol were the words “Not One Iota.”