Maiden Lane

by Christopher Blankley

  “Red Shield was damaged when the towers fell,” Eve continues. “But not beyond repair. When we were able to get back into its vault, three days later, and we got it back online. Considering the overall paralysis of the world economy – with planes grounded and the markets closed – there was very little long-run fallout from the attack. The terrorists had failed in their ultimate goal, but they were not totally unsuccessful. Even members of the First Foundation had to face the truth: admit that the damage to Red Shield was too extensive to ignore. It couldn’t continue to run indefinitely in its damaged state. Eventually it would malfunction, and no one alive possessed the knowledge to repair its clockwork mechanisms. So it was agreed by all parties to construct a new machine – a second Red Shield – to replace the dying original.

  “Junior?” Logan asks.

  “Junior,” Eve acknowledges. “But this time, Red Shield would be no machine of springs and gears. The original genius of Barthman was long since forgotten, even by his progeny. No, the new Red Shield would be the most powerful computer ever constructed, based on the century of study the Second Foundation had poured into Megalytics. As the World Trade Center site was cleared, room after room of server farms were installed in the old, Red Shield vaults, underneath. The race was on, to replicate the function of the original Red Shield before it turned its last gear. Six years later, and millions of lines of code written, we were ready – ready to cut across to the new machine. Junior represented a technological masterpiece. We’d spent a full third of the U.S. GDP in its construction. Below the 9/11 memorial, a full hectare of computing space sat humming away. We leveraged the latest quantum storage technologies, connected it to every, major Internet backbone. Junior could collect and calculate over a zettaflop of data in a second. Fully correlate and calculate the actions and motivations of the whole of humanity in real time.”

  “All the inputs and the outputs,” I mutter.

  “On February 2007, we turned control of the Federal Reserve over to Junior. We switched the feed, taking the original Red Shield off line. After two hundred years, we hoped that the senior Red Shield could finally be retired...”

  Eve pauses in her story, looking back at the window, wistfully.

  “And?” Logan prods.

  “Things went better than 1929,” Eve shrugs. “But not by much. We kept Junior hooked up to the controls for almost a whole week. But, we soon had to cut the feeds back to the old Red Shield. You might remember a small housing bubble that bust. We had contingency plans in place this time around, of course. If things went wrong. We had agents imbedded in the major media outlets. Full control of social media, the Internet. We were able to easily distract attention away from the total and complete systemic failure of the world economy.”

  “And that’s when your realized–” I start.

  “That Megalytics doesn’t work with money?” Eve finishes. “Oh yeah, we learned that the hard way. But it didn’t make any sense! And it doesn’t make any sense now that everything we know about Megalytics comes from studying a device that exclusively applied its principles to finance. If anything, it should ONLY work with money.” Eve grunts in frustration.

  “So you needed someone to figure out what was wrong?” I say.

  “Right. Our best calculations indicated that it’d take twenty years for the economy to recover from the damage Junior had caused. And we had nothing like that sort of time left before the old Red Shield turned its final cog. We needed to fix Junior, and we needed a fix fast. And to do that, we needed to figure out what was wrong with our mathematics. Luckily, even if our $10 trillion mistake was useless for controlling the money flow, it was not totally without its uses. We had, after all, built the world’s first Megalytic computer and it is very good at doing what Megalytic computers could do. Like predicting the course of very complex, dynamic systems...”

  “So, Junior couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with itself, but it could tell you, out of the whole human race, who could?” I smile.

  “Exactly!”

  “And that’s when you showed up, at Cal-Tech, with a bag of weed and some crazy ideas about really large numbers.”

  “The Rubric calculated that you were our best chance at repairing Junior and getting it online within the mean time to failure of the clockwork original. Junior predicted that, left to your own devices, you would one day formulate the principles of Megalytics all on your own. But we had nothing like time to let you figure things out for yourself. So we–”

  “Let him crib off your Second Foundation notes!” Logan laughs. He’s loving it all.

  Eve nods and gives me a weak smile.

  “Wait,” Logan is no longer laughing. “You were just pretending to be my girlfriend so you could plant the idea of Megalytics in Roderic’s head?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Eve shrugs. “It was nothing personal.”

  Logan looks genuinely hurt. Deflated. I can’t blame him.

  I try quickly to change the subject. “So you really think I can reprogram this $10 trillion computer of yours? And save the world economy?”

  “Oh no, you’re not anywhere near ready,” Eve said. Like Logan, I’m a little hurt. “No, and it turns we didn’t have anywhere near the time we thought we did. The cogs and gears inside Red Shield ground to a halt yesterday at 6:17 in the afternoon. We cut the feeds across to Junior the moment Red Shield failed, but everything going on outside is what happens with Junior running the show. And it’s only going to get worse and there’s no one alive, even you, who knows how to stop it.”

  I can feel a ‘but’ coming. “But?” I ask.

  “But...” Eve breathes in. “...Junior calculated a Rubric with a very small chance of...well...sort of kick-starting you. It predicted that if you were subjected to just the right mix of romantic entanglement and personal peril, that it might...”

  “Focus my genius?” I suggest.

  “Make him drop a brilliant brick?” Logan tries.

  “Save the world?” Eve suggests.

  At that, we all retreat into our own thoughts. Outside, we can still hear the kids cheering as the car burns. There are gunshots.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” I state the facts.

  “No,” Eve nods. “No, it didn’t.”

  “And here we are,”

  “Now what?” Logan asks, finishing his beer.

  “Yes,” Eve shrugs and looks at me. “Now what?”

  “I would think it’s obvious,” I say as I put my beer down and climb to my feet. I pull my hoodie over my head and put my hands in its pockets.

  “Not to me,” Logan objects, getting to his feet as well.

  “No, me neither,” Eve looks at me, curious.

  “There’s really only one thing we can do,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Go see what lies at the end of Maiden Lane.”

  Chapter 19

  “This is going to take forever,” Logan says from behind the wheel of his Audi. I’m in the passenger seat, Eve is in back, her knees tucked up under her chin. We haven’t even made it a block. There’s some sort of mass demonstration clogging Broadway. It’s part protest, part Mardi Gras parade. Someone has even broken out the Macy’s Day Parade balloons. People are clapping, singing, dancing and screaming. It’s all heading south. The direction we want to go.

  “We’ll have to take another street,” I start, but when I look back over my shoulder, I can see police lights behind us.

  “The cops!” Logan panics. “Crap!”

  “Wait, are those the real cops?” I ask Eve. “Or...you know, like before...”

  Eve looks slightly offended. “I will have you know, that the President of the United State is an agent of the First Foundation. The authenticity of his police cannot be questioned.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “I do not!”

  “But...” Logan watches the cop cars approach in his rear-view mirrors. “...you’re all on the same side, right? You said the Foundations made up
! Years ago. They’re not here for us, are they?”

  “Ah yes...” Eve looks a little less offended. “Well...you see, there’s sort of been a little bit of a disagreement about the whole ‘Let’s get Roderic Gant’s great, big brain to figure things out for us’ plan. Where Junior predicted that you could be cajoled into helping us...”

  “What? What?” I panic.

  “Tusk and the First Foundation don’t think we have the time to be so subtle.”

  “Is this the whole Gitmo thing again?”

  “I think the boat for Gitmo thing has long since sailed. I think we’re at ‘Hold a gun to your head until you fix Red Shield’ sort of tactic now.”

  “Oh hell!” I reach for my seatbelt. “Drive!” I tell Logan.

  “No, no. Get out,” Logan answers, calmly.

  “What?” Some friend!

  “No, you’ll make quicker time on foot. Join the crowd. It’s heading in the right direction. I’ll turn the car around. The cops will follow me. I can buy you some time.”

  The lights are getting closer. There’s no time to argue. “Come on!” I yell back to Eve.

  The car doors haven’t even closed and Logan is reversing. He flips the car around and accelerates. At a corner, he fishtails off to the north. As predicted, the police cars give chase.

  Eve and I join the protest. We blend right in. People are singing, chanting, banging on drums. Signs vary from John 3:16 to Workers of the World Unite! There are plenty of Impeach Tusk! signs as well. The air is a cloy mix of burning incense and car fires.

  A naked man, totally painted orange, is dancing on a platform, carried by a dozen stout men. He does a handstand, but overcompensates and comes crashing down into the crowd. He’s instantly lost in the chaos.

  “Three beers and I think I’m only a tenth as drunk as everyone else here,” I say to Eve. I have an arm around her, fearing that she’ll get dragged away by the throng.

  “This is New York,” she says. “Any excuse for a party.” She has to yell, I can only just hear her.

  “So, how did you find me?” I ask a minute later. She can’t hear me. “How did you find me?” I bellow and point back at Logan’s apartment building.

  She understands. “You don’t need a Megalytic computer to realize you’d go see the only person in New York you know.”

  I pull Eve away from the marching crowd so I can hear a little better. “But Junior didn’t figure that out?”

  “I doubt anyone bothered to ask. We’re outside the predictions of the Rubric now. Way outside.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Junior got it wrong,” Eve dismisses.

  “That sounds unlikely. Junior can predict the future. He knew that one day, I would have invented Megalytics. It can predict my random movements around town well enough to continuously keep you one step ahead of me and give your plenty of time for a costume change. And you say it got something wrong? What? It didn’t know I’d escape from Tusk’s mansion?”

  “No, it knew you’d do that. It was critical that you did that. But you were supposed to steal the letter opener off his desk in those few moments you had before Tusk came into the library. With that, you were to stab one of the Secret Service Agents in the leg, steal his gun, and shoot the other two. With blanks, of course. Then you would have made your way out into the party, where I would have been waiting, miraculously returned from the dead. The first words from my mouth would have been all too predictable: ‘What lies at the end of Maiden Lane?’ In that scenario, there was a 56 percent chance that you’d fall madly in love with me, right then and there.”

  “Madly in love? Fifty-six percent?” I’m appalled. “Was this some sort of sick game?”

  Eve isn’t listening, or can’t hear me. “Instead, you took a baseball. You somehow used it to start a fire, and I have no idea what happened next. Why would you take a baseball? Who takes a baseball? There was a weapon right in front of you, and you took a Willie Mays autographed baseball!”

  “I guess I always liked sports,” I say as some sort of defense.

  “Anyway, that shot the Rubric’s predictive matrix all to hell. And there was nowhere near time enough to recalculate a new one. All we were left with was the truth. That’s why I showed up at Logan’s apartment.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I say, looking down at Eve. She looks up and smiles. I’m glad she’s there. Wherever we’re going, whatever happens next, I’m glad she’s there with me. I’d hate to have to try and save the world on my own.

  “Watch out,” Eve says suddenly. I think we’re having a moment, and then she elbows me in the gut.

  “What?” I cough.

  “Agents,” she says, pointing down the street.

  Sure enough, the demonstration is slowly pouring into Columbus Circle, in front of the Tusk Tower. The three Secret Service agents from Tusk’s mansion are moving beside the crowd, searching it from behind mirrored sunglasses.

  This was a mistake.

  “We’re marching right back into their hands,” I say.

  “This way,” Eve grabs me by the hand. We break from the crowd, still well clear of the circle, and take a side road. Things are much quieter here. I can hear myself think again.

  “So, up until the baseball,” I ask, after we’ve walked in silence for a few blocks. “You knew all of my movements? Weeks in advance?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s all probabilities. Mostly you stayed within the standard deviation, but occasionally you threw us for a loop.”

  “I understand how you’d know I’d be in the elevator. But the limousine?”

  “That was Tusk’s people. The First Foundation. Junior predicted they’d attempt to grab you on the ride to JFK. I needed to make contact before. There was a 15 percent chance that you’d accept their offer, or stay in the car too long.”

  “But how’d you know I’d get out at 23rd Street exactly?”

  “If I kept you talking in the elevator to exactly 9:51, 23rd would be the first red light you’d hit up Broadway.”

  “Seriously?” I laugh.

  “That’s the Rubric.” Eve laughs too.

  We’re walking alone, down a New York street, brownstones on either side. It’s like we’re on a date. Except the world economy has collapsed. And the streets are totally empty, except for the occasional burning car.

  “So you get to the hot dog stand ahead of me. Because I’m going to be heading for the subway, but...”

  “There was more than a 94 percent chance that you’d stop for something to eat. Something authentic. The odds were on pizza, but I played a hunch: hot dogs.”

  “And the agents in the subway?”

  “They were in an SUV behind the limo all the way from the hotel. Tusk doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  “And you?”

  “One stop up on the 4 train. They were holding the train, waiting for me. All the people who got off at your stop were our people. Running interference, helping you get on the train, but not looking like they were running interference and helping you get on the train. It worked out pretty well.”

  “And you were in there waiting, pretending to be?”

  “Croatian,” Eve rolls her eyes. “I had to study those lines for four months! Do you know how many ways there are to call somebody a sick pig in Croatian?”

  “I bet you do.”

  “I do. But, oh!” Eve grabs my arm in genuine excitement. “This is when we almost lost you! You come out at Wall Street and, as predicted, checked out Maiden Lane. But there’s a 61 percent chance that you call an Uber and head for the airport. But you didn’t!”

  “I called Logan.”

  “Exactly. And there I am, in a Hyundai, waiting for you to tap the app.”

  I get a strange sensation. “You didn’t have your hair up in dreadlocks, did you? Wearing a rastacap?” I ask.

  “No,” Eve looks at me, confused. “Red, leather jacket and a sequined cap that read Fresh.”

  “Okay, good,” I sigh in relie
f. “I’d hate for things to get weird.”

  Eve is about to say something, but a police car cuts across in front of us, running with lights and sirens. We freeze in place. I’d almost forgotten we were running from the cops. We take cover behind a stoop and listen as the sirens fade.

  “I don’t think he saw us,” I venture.

  “We need to get off the street,” Eve says. “They’re going to realize we broke away from the protest and start searching the blocks by quadrants. It’ll only be a matter of time.”

  “And it’s still a long way to Maiden Lane.”

  “I have an idea,” Eve grabs my hand. “Come on!”

  Chapter 20

  We find stairs that lead up to the High Line Park and hop the gate. Even if the world wasn’t coming to an end, and it wasn’t three in the morning, the park would have been the perfect way to stroll leisurely downtown. The city stretches out to our left and right, and the trestles of the old, raised railroad are solid underfoot.

  We walk in the moonlight, with the wind blowing through the trees.

  “It’s a nice night,” I say.

  “A nice night to save the world?” Eve replies, dreamily.

  I laugh. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Oh, I have faith,” Eve says. “More than faith. After all, you’ve been my full-time job for the last eight years.”

  “Well, that’s not creepy at all...”

  It’s Eve’s turn to laugh. “Oh, don’t get all excited. It’s not like I’ve been watching you sleep or anything.”

  “No, just predicting my every, nuanced move – oh! That’s right!” I run ahead a few yards, stop and face her. I clap my hands together. “Where were we? At the airport! Of course, you knew I’d go to the airport.”

  “Of course. One-hundred percent certainty. We originally planned on contacting you there, but the chances that you might accept Tusk’s invitation to the party – or his thugs managed to manhandle you into their car – were just too great. We had to make contact first, in the elevator of the apartment. Tilt the Rubric well in our favor.”