The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  It might be easier for a wild man just to go over to Juárez, where the whole system is based on old-fashioned living, at least as far as he’s heard. People probably carry some sort of money in their pockets, and wear wristwatches. Maybe they still carry phones. Espinoza likes the idea of a world full of gadgets, physical toys, and briefly warms to the idea of Juárez. Then he snaps out of it. If you go to Juárez and some mafioso dumps you in a vat and turns you into pozole, or one of the American drones roaming the streets mows you down, the wild life loses its charm.

  The man and the woman at the bar stand up. They look ready to leave. Espinoza prepares to follow. He messages the bartender for the check and beams the payment with a 1% tip. Clearly, the bartender has a boost—which means one of the other two is wild, or at least cloaked.

  Outside, the sound of trotting hoofs signals the approach of another horse. A moment later, the door bangs open and an older version of the guy at the bar strolls in. Maybe it is a package, Espinoza thinks, though he’s never seen this one before. His hair recedes in two deep troughs from his forehead, and he wears it longer than usual in back, tying it into a small ponytail. He shakes the younger one’s hand, and then tries awkwardly to turn it into an embrace. This doesn’t quite work. The young one pats his back and introduces him to the Artemis.

  3/6/72 6:28 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  “I had a feeling I’d be seeing you,” Simon whispers to Ralf.

  “How so?”

  “Just an inkling.” He smiles, taking in his little brother, a younger, thinner image of himself. “So,” he says, “you lost your boost?”

  Ralf nods. He can’t remember seeing Simon ever looking so content.

  “You were always one with your boost,” Simon says, still whispering. He has an eager look, as if he has rediscovered his brother. “I was the one born to be wild, not you!” He shakes his head and says, “My brother, the prodigy.”

  Simon’s words stir a sense of panic within Ralf, and an awakening of his childhood anxieties. He is eager to escape into a more manageable virtual conversation—an option he may never have again. Avoiding Simon, he looks toward Chui, who’s standing discreetly down the bar, still messaging with Ellen. At the other end stands a behemoth who carries on his face the wreckage of what was once a large nose. He’s looking in their direction. Ralf turns his back to the man, collects himself, and looks into his brother’s eyes. “I need your help,” he whispers.

  “What kind of help?”

  Ralf speaks the words quietly but clearly. “I need to get a new one.” The shift from personal to logistical issues brings a sense of calm. Conversations are easier when they come with a to-do list.

  “That’s what you came down here for?” Simon asks, looking crestfallen.

  Ralf nods.

  “And you think I can help?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  3/6/72 7:48 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  The brothers stroll out of the Cavalry Club, still talking, Ellen a couple paces behind. “Is this yours?” Simon asks, walking up to a massive coffee-colored KIFF Wrangler.

  “No,” Ralf says. He points to the Sheng-li coated with desert grit. The two brothers talk some more before Simon beams directions to Ellen and swings onto his horse.

  Oscar Espinoza lingers by the bar, pretending not to follow them. He reaches into his pocket as he bides his time, and fingers the smooth contours of the zapper. Meanwhile, he sends a message to Smedley: “Leaving the bar.” He includes an image of the two brothers talking. The Artemis stands to one side of them, looking directly at Espinoza.

  3/6/72 9:52 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  The dashing avatar of George Smedley is curled up on a bearskin with the avatar of an Inuit woman when the message from El Paso arrives. Smedley’s avatar is an idealized caricature of himself. It has the same sharp nose and sardonic smile. Like Smedley, it wears thick graying hair combed straight back. When dressed—which is the exception on these sites—the avatar even wears Smedley’s trademark falcon feather. The only difference in the avatar is its age. The physical Smedley has grown grayer and heavier with the years.

  This evening Smedley is busy testing a prototype for a new sex site, Arctic Love. It needs more work. Customers on other sites can have their trysts on tropical beaches, Buckingham Palace, even villas in ancient Pompeii. His developers, he thinks, have to give them a better reason to opt for an igloo.

  When he sees the message from Espinoza, he pops out of the virtual igloo and back into his physical world, a two-story apartment in Washington’s Kalorama district. He has just had it refurnished with antiques from the middle of the twentieth century. Sitting on a red “womb” chair signed by Eero Saarinen, Smedley opens the image from Espinoza and looks at the two brothers. He sees the Artemis behind them and gasps. Suzy Claiborne, he thinks. The domed Artemis is wearing a standard-issue blond wig. She must have traveled to the border with her coworker. Unlike Ralf Alvare, she carries the update code in her boost, and her boost in her head. She must not, under any circumstances, cross into Juárez.

  He sends a message to Espinoza: “Follow the Artemis.”

  Espinoza hurries outside and climbs into his KIFF. He sees the dirty Sheng-li turning south on Mesa. The other brother follows on a trail to the side of the road, trotting on a white-hoofed sorrel.

  Six

  MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2072:

  NINE DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/7/72 6:43 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Ellen blinks her eyes open. She’s stretched out on the dark blue sofa, wrapped in a knitted serape. Desert sunlight pours in from the patio window. The sturdy palm tree outside is leaning in the wind, which whistles past the window. Simon sleeps in the Murphy bed across the room, snoring gently. She looks down from the sofa and studies Ralf. He’s lying on a thin strip of foam rubber and wound up in a blanket. His face is buried in a pillow he improvised by bundling his shirt and jeans and wrapping them with a towel. He looks dead to the world. She wonders if the wild sleep better, and concludes that they probably do. Less interference.

  Ellen heard the brothers whispering late into the night. She must have been falling in and out of sleep, because she can only recall snippets. But she knows Ralf is counting on his brother to help him find a new boost. They talked about a “processing center” near Fort Bliss, and said something about dead people’s boosts.

  She thinks about putting someone else’s boost, a dead person’s, inside her head, then flipping through that person’s memories and photos, and receiving messages from his friends. She’d have to come up with a standard response. “No, I’m sorry,” it would say. “He’s dead. Could you please remove him from your list?” Or maybe simply, “He or she is no longer operating this boost.” Then Ellen contemplates her own boost. Will petabytes of her memories carry on, as clutter, in someone else’s head? She shudders at the thought.

  Stepping over Ralf, she makes her way into the bathroom and pulls on her only leggings. In a little closet, she finds a neatly stacked pile of Simon’s T-shirts. She tries on one with horizontal blue stripes, and adjusts the leggings to a navy blue. She looks at the unkempt Artemis in the mirror. Her hair’s a mess. Her face could use a micro-scrub. The grit in the desert seems to dig into the skin. Still, an Artemis could wake up in the gutter and manage, somehow, to look fabulous. It’s the nature of the package.

  Ellen walks to the kitchenette and finds a tea bag and a mug. Next to the sink, she sees an antique stove. She turns a knob and a flame leaps up. She waves her finger through the flame, quickly at first, and then more slowly, watching the fire wrap around it. The experience of fire is one area where simulations in the boost just don’t cut it, she thinks.

  She places a kettle on the flame and turns to consider Simon’s apartment by the morning light. The kitchen is lined with Mexican ceramic tiles, each one embossed with a hand-painted butterfly. She wonders about a man who would buy a stove like this and decorate the kitchen with suc
h lovely tiles.

  Ellen studies the delicate butterfly tiles. They’re unlike anything Ralf would ever buy, or even notice. This reminds her that Simon is supposed to be gay, according to Ralf. She knew that, but then forgot. Of course, lots of people act out their sex lives in their boosts, and leave it there. That’s no secret.

  The apartment’s bowed wooden floors look at least a century old, as does the Murphy bed. Ellen checks in her boost for the history of the building, the Palmore, and finds that it was built in 1913 as a refuge for rich Mexican children during the Mexican Revolution. Beyond the palm tree out the window she can see the expanse of Mexico. The wind stirs up dust devils among the shanties of Juárez, which extend to the brown mountains in the distance. One of the mountains carries white lettering, something about la Biblia. She wonders if wild people are more religious than everyone else. That would make sense, since they carry around more mystery in their lives—or at least fewer answers. They don’t know what diseases they’re most likely to get, or what food and medicine to take to avoid them. It’s like a crap shoot. They don’t know much more about their lives and their bodies than the cavemen did. Then again, even with all the advances from the boost, people still die with chips in their heads. Death just comes a couple decades later, barely a blink in eternity. So religion shouldn’t be that much less relevant, she thinks. The wild people just have more empty time to consider it. The subject of death reminds her of Ralf’s mission to get a used boost, which seems creepy.

  The water boils. As she pours the tea she catches the reflection of her striped shirt on the glass cabinets. It occurs to her that she could walk down to that market on South Mesa to take a closer look at those weavings. Why not? They might fit into a vintage design she’s doing for the Ritz Cracker app. For today, at least, she’s a tourist—and she suspects that she doesn’t fit into Ralf’s plans. She checks in her boost. It’s 1.5 miles, twenty-nine minutes on foot, to the far end of South Mesa. She just has to walk down Prospect Street, cross I-10, and make her way south from there.

  She leaves her tea steeping and is about to head out when Ralf sits up on the floor, bleary-eyed, and asks her what she’s up to.

  “About to take a walk,” she says.

  “You don’t want breakfast?”

  “I’ll pick up something in that funky part of town we went through yesterday,” she says. “You weren’t planning on my company.…”

  “No, not really.”

  “’Cause it sounded like you and Simon were going to go shopping for something.…”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “Involving recycled chips?”

  “It’s just something I wanted to look into,” Ralf says. “Probably won’t lead to anything.”

  Simon groans in the Murphy bed and rolls over, holding the pillow to his head.

  With a hand signal, Ellen asks Ralf to join her in the kitchenette. He climbs to his feet. He’s wearing only the same pair of red plaid boxers that he’s had on since they left Washington.

  Ellen whispers, “Why don’t you borrow some clothes from Simon?”

  Ralf nods impatiently. “We didn’t get around to discussing clothes last night,” he says.

  “But you told him about your boost.”

  “Well, he could tell. Anyone who gets within ten feet of me can.”

  “But you drove all the way down here with me, and barely talked to me about it.”

  They’re standing face to face in the kitchen, Ellen looking earnestly into Ralf’s eyes, Ralf inspecting the shelves, the pots and pans hanging on the wall, the hand-painted tiles, and then glancing into the living room, where Simon is snoring again.

  “Look at me,” she whispers.

  He looks at her and immediately leans forward and kisses her lips.

  “Stop that!” She pushes him away. “So why don’t you open up with me?”

  “I guess I’m only getting used to the idea now,” Ralf says. “Plus, I worried that if I told you too much, you could get in trouble if they found it on your boost.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’d get in trouble for something I know, and not for riding two thousand miles in my car with a guy who for some reason has had his chip surgically removed from his head, presumably by—” She’s about to say “authorities,” but the word sounds wrong somehow, as if she accepts that whoever took out Ralf’s boost had the right to do it.

  “By force?” Ralf offers.

  “No, I’m talking about who did it.”

  “Oh,” he says. “That.”

  Ellen says nothing, asking him with her eyes to open up, and tell her the story she’s now caught up in. He gives in, and recounts the story from the beginning. He tells her about finding the open gates on the Chinese update, uploading Suzy’s file, the guards who intercepted him, the dirty clinic he woke up in, and the strange wordless man who guided him to the door. He talks. She listens. Simon sleeps, or pretends to. These people are probably not following him, Ralf says, because he no longer has the chip with the update code.

  His hope, he tells her, is to get in touch with one of Simon’s friends who has a friend at the “reprocessing center” at Fort Bliss. A machine there uploads the data from used boosts, and adds them to a national archive. “They can’t read our boosts while we’re alive,” he says. “Or at least they’re not supposed to. But once we’re dead, they put all the data together. They analyze our shopping patterns, diseases, whatever.”

  “And you want to get your hands on a dead person’s boost?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Okay,” Ellen says, sounding unimpressed. Then she adds one more question: “Where’s Suzy?”

  Ralf shrugs. “I don’t have a clue.”

  Seven

  3/7/72 10:02 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Ellen first sees him as she peers out the window from Telas del Rio Bravo, a Mexican boutique in South El Paso, where she’s buying a new set of clothes. He sits in the café across the street. His mountainous body is perched on a tiny bar stool, the nose flattened against his face like a crushed carnation. She glances up and down the street and sees a coffee-colored KIFF Wrangler parked a block to the north. The same one from the parking lot last night. It’s so wide that it juts into traffic, forcing cars and horses alike to bend their paths.

  The sales lady comes back with a pile of flowered blouses. “This is all we have in six,” she says. Ellen tries to concentrate on the shopping, picking up the blouses and beaming them onto a model of herself in her boost, and turning it around to see the fit. But she can’t concentrate. Across the street, the big man on the stool is drinking a cup of coffee. He stares in her direction.

  Ellen pays for two blouses with a credit beam and asks the woman if the store has a back exit. “I think someone is following me,” she whispers.

  The woman nods, as if this happens regularly. She hands Ellen the blouses in a bag and leads her through a storeroom piled high with boxes. They brush past colorful garments hanging from rails. Pushing open a door, she guides Ellen into an alley. “That’s north,” she says, gesturing to the right. “West is behind us, out the front door.”

  “And?” Ellen asks, puzzled.

  “The border’s right over there,” she says, pointing across the alley. “You’ll want to stay away from there.”

  Despite this warning, Ellen takes off for the south. That’s where the market is. From the shaded alley she passes into the blinding sunlight of a parking lot, then turns to the left and peers around the corner of South El Paso Street. No sign of the man with the nose. Where the big KIFF was parked stands a single horse hitched to a street sign. Its head is disappeared deep into a trash can.

  “Why are they chasing me?” she instinctively messages Ralf. It bounces straight back. She finds Simon’s link from last night and sends a message to him: “A man is following me in South El Paso. What to do?”

  3/7/72 10:15 a.m. Mountain Standard Time


  “Do you think I’ll get the boost today?” Ralf asks when Simon finally climbs out of bed.

  “I’m not sure you’ll get it, period,” Simon says. He makes his way to the kitchen and drinks a glass of water. “If you do, it won’t come easy, or cheap.” As Simon walks through a series of morning rituals, from brushing his teeth to watering a lonely grape ivy in the kitchen window, Ralf follows him, asking questions.

  Simon explains that the reprocessing center, from what people say, is under tightened scrutiny. There are reports that agents from Juárez are getting their hands on chips, probably by bribing officials, and taking them back into their wild zone. It’s as if they’re appropriating American lives—or at least lifetimes of Americans’ experiences. The goal, some say, is to hack the chips and introduce some sort of virus that will crash the boosts in 430 million Americans—or even the whole world. Or maybe they want simply to control the enhanced population, or to steal billions.

  “Of course, I think this is all a lot of paranoid crap,” Simon says. “But I want you to understand the climate of fear around here. It’s going to make getting a chip a lot harder.”