The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “Listen,” Espinoza says. “A woman like you shouldn’t be shopping down here, not so close to the border. I’m supposed to make sure that you stay north of here.” He gestures up Kansas Street. “You should go to Cielo Vista Mall. They have nice places on the west side, too.”

  Ellen has been sending a stream of images to Simon, and is now getting back fragments of responses, which distract her from what this man is saying.

  Espinoza swivels in his chair and pulls a black plastic object from his pocket. “See this?” he says, holding it close to Ellen’s nose. He lowers his voice to a raspy whisper. “It’s called a zapper. If I pull this part right here”—he runs his thumb across a black button—“it sends out a charge that will wipe your boost clean. Everything on it. That’s what a zapper does.”

  Ellen stares at him, speechless. She sends an image of the zapper toward Simon. It seems to take forever.

  “Now I’m told you have some very valuable data on your boost,” Espinoza continues. “I say, ‘Good for you.’ But the authorities want to make sure that you take your valuable data far from here, maybe, as I say, up to Cielo Vista Mall. Up north of I-10. Down here it’s a security hazard.”

  Ellen nods blankly and says nothing. The saleswoman returns with boxes of the shoes. She asks Espinoza what he’s looking for. He wonders if they have the same lines of Catspaws in size 14. She says they might and goes back to look for them.

  A coherent message from Simon finally arrives. “Ask him who he works for.” Ellen transmits the question, and he answers: “Don’t you worry your pretty head.” He’s staring at the parting of her silky blond hair, where the individual strands are rooted to the skull.

  She opens a box of black Catspaws and tries to fit them on the models of her feet in her boost. It’s not working.

  The saleswoman returns, her arms piled high with five enormous boxes, which she plops at Espinoza’s feet. He opens a box of “popcorn” Catspaws. They look more like something a lion would wear. He tries to engage his boost, and seems to fail. “Something’s funny about the signals down here,” he says. Resigned to trying on the shoes the old-fashioned way, he unlaces one of his black army boots and pulls it off, exposing a dirty white sock with a big toe poking through.

  At that moment, Ellen dashes out of the refrigerated store and onto the hot and crowded sidewalk.

  “Hey, hold up!” Espinoza shouts. He runs out the door with his one socked foot, and hobbles after her south on Kansas.

  Ellen darts among the pedestrians and vendors on the sidewalk. She looks over her shoulder. Espinoza’s head towers above the crowd, moving crookedly. He’s losing ground to the younger and faster Artemis. She races across the street, right in front of three horses and a bus, to the opposite sidewalk.

  Her goal is to reach the market on South Mesa. Lots of people will be there. She calls up the street map. It appears with blurry edges. Still, she sees her dot inching along Kansas Street. But the map is twisted—as if there’s a glitch in the transmission, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s moving north or south. The dot blinks erratically. She passes East Seventh and looks back. No sign of Espinoza. She reaches East Ninth and turns right. This is where the market should be. But she sees only a row of abandoned warehouses. She keeps running. She sends images to Simon, but most of them bounce back. She reaches Stanton Street. Is the market on the other side?

  She starts to cross the street, only to see a huge coffee-colored KIFF bearing down on her. She turns back and retreats down an empty alley. At the end of it stands a large shade tree, a mesquite—an unusual sight in the sun-scorched barrio. It seems to beckon to her, offering shelter. She imagines herself climbing to safety. She heads toward it.

  Running down the alley, she looks over her shoulder. Espinoza is on foot, sprinting in her direction, wearing one boot and carrying another in his hand. “Stop!” he yells. “Let me talk to you!”

  She keeps running and reaches the tree. The branches are far too high for climbing.

  Espinoza is getting closer. He has the zapper in his other hand and is pointing it toward her.

  Ellen steps to the other side of the tree. She sees a chain-link fence with a child-sized hole in it. It’s too small for Espinoza. She captures an image and attempts to send it. A single wooden plank extends away from her on the other side. She wriggles through the fence and scampers along the plank, over a dirty creek. As she runs, she instinctively raises her hands and her shopping bag to the back of her head, to protect herself from Oscar Espinoza’s zap. It doesn’t come. Reaching the end of the plank, she steps down into a marshy thicket of salt cedars and desert willow, and tromps into a very different world.

  PART II

  Juárez

  Eight

  3/7/72 11:33 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Oscar Espinoza stands by the mesquite tree, staring at the hole the lovely Artemis slipped through. He was close enough to zap her. He probably should have. But he couldn’t bring himself to kill or maim such a gorgeous creature. They might meet again one day, he tells himself, as he returns the zapper to his pocket. When that happens, he will let her know that he chose to save her life—at great risk to himself.

  He turns around and walks north toward his double-parked KIFF. A message pops into his boost: “Status?”

  Espinoza wonders how to respond. He climbs into his KIFF, tells it to carry out an illegal U-turn and head north, toward I-10. The vehicle tells him that a U-turn is not feasible, and proceeds instead to circle the block and drive north.

  “Where are you?” Espinoza messages Smedley, avoiding, if only for a minute or two, the bad news he must deliver.

  “Now I’m at Vallinger’s HQ,” Smedley tells him. “I have the machine on. I see you driving north on Stanton Street. Where’s the Artemis?”

  “You don’t see her on the map?”

  “No.”

  “The reception’s miserable close to the border.”

  “She’s close to the border?”

  “Very.”

  “Then why are you driving away from it?”

  Espinoza comes up with a new idea. “She is not the domed Artemis,” he messages.

  “How do you know?”

  “Her hair is connected to her skull. I saw the roots.”

  Smedley ignores the issue and returns to the unanswered question. “Where is she?”

  “She isn’t wearing a wig.”

  “Where is she?”

  Espinoza gives up and responds with a single word: “Juárez.”

  A moment later, waves of pain surge through his skull. He lies back and moans as the KIFF drives north toward the mountains.

  3/7/72 11:35 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Ellen emerges from the muddy grove of salt ashes into the sunlight. The bag of blouses dangling from her hand. Her shoes glisten with mud, and drops of it dot the bottom of her leggings, which are still camouflaged in the colors of a South El Paso brick wall. But she’s not in South El Paso anymore. That much she knows. She calls up a map in her boost and gets only the archived grid of El Paso. The network connection is dead. She walks onto a shadeless dirt street lined by rows of houses painted brown, pink, and a light shade of blue. A small boy dashes across, glancing at her for a moment before reaching a door. He pounds on it, yelling “¡Abre!” It opens, and he disappears inside, taking one more look at her as he pulls it closed behind him. Now the street is deserted. Ellen looks at a street sign and reads Calle Lerdo.

  She was hoping at first that she had simply crossed a creek in El Paso into a slightly more Mexican neighborhood. But this is a different country. She walks down the middle of the street, like a gunfighter in an old movie. The stores, she sees, are all closed. She looks at the zapateria, with only two pairs of identical black shoes in the window, the peluqueria, with the old-fashioned red-and-white barber pole, the bufete de abogados Sanchez y Quintanilla. She tries looking up “abogados” in the boost, and is relieved to see that the translation app is stored in her archiv
es. Abogado means lawyer. It cheers her a bit to think that this city of the wild, reputedly one of the most dangerous places on earth, keeps lawyers employed. Doesn’t that mean there’s rule of law?

  Ellen’s idea is to parallel the border for a block or two, and then cross at another point, hopefully hidden from the man with the brain zapper. She’ll then take refuge inside a store and send an urgent message to Simon, something along the lines of, “Save me!” She might be in an alien world, she tells herself. But civilization, and home, is only a couple hundred yards to the north.

  She takes a right on Avenida Malecón. Three boys are playing with a tennis ball in the street. When they see her, they run away, yelling something in Spanish, and vanish around the corner. Ellen can see people peering at her out their windows.

  In the distance, church bells ring. Then she hears the whir of a motor and the sound of tires on the road. She reaches the deserted Calle Francisco Villa and takes a right. The vehicle is getting louder. Ahead, she can see the vegetation along the river. It’s only a few yards away.

  A door opens and a young woman with long black hair and a red blouse runs directly toward Ellen, saying, “Venga, venga.” She’s followed by a young man. Before Ellen can run away, the woman wraps her arms around her. She and the man drag the struggling Ellen onto the sidewalk, up three steps, and into a house. Then they slam shut the door.

  3/7/72 12:17 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Simon cannot think of anything in the physical world to lighten his little brother’s mood. Ralf has been shuffling around the apartment most of the morning, mumbling to himself. He worries about Ellen, naturally enough, and is powerless to communicate with her. Simon knows his brother is fed up with him for being such a klutzy go-between. The last image Simon got from Ellen was more than an hour ago. The grainy image featured a meaty male hand cradling a piece of black plastic with a button on it. Simon had no idea what it was. He made the mistake of telling Ralf about it, and was then unable to tell him what it was, or even what it looked like.

  A few minutes later, Simon finally heard from his source about getting a used chip for Ralf. In a message, he told Simon that stealing chips was a violation of national security laws. “They’re scared folks in Juárez are going to get their hands on a few and send them back with viruses.” He counseled Simon to forget about it.

  When Simon passed on this intelligence, Ralf looked skeptical. “The encryption’s pretty sophisticated,” he said. “I don’t think a few wild people can—” He stopped mid-sentence. Even the mention of wild people filled him with gloom. He fell back on the couch and stared blankly at the ceiling.

  Simon can understand his pain. Ralf has dedicated his career to the technology in chips. In all likelihood, he’ll live the rest of his life without one. Ralf without a boost, he thinks, is like Van Gogh without hands. Or maybe without eyes.

  And because of the mess Ralf’s in, a man known to be a killer is stalking his girlfriend in South El Paso. Simon again calls up the last image Ellen sent. He attempts an image match in his boost, but comes up with far too many results: snuff bottles, scarabs, water pistols, diaphragm cases, old gas-fed cars called Bugs. Other people manage to call up precise results for their image searches, but Simon always falls short. His search this time seems to bring every possible black object with a curved surface. He doesn’t mention this to Ralf. It will only frustrate him.

  “You know,” he says to Ralf, “I think it would have made you feel weird to carry around a lifetime of someone else’s experiences in your head.”

  “I’d just delete them and use the processing power,” Ralf answers.

  “Do you have any idea how long it would take to erase years and years of video?”

  “Maybe I’d just cordon off all the other person’s shit,” Ralf says, sitting up on the couch. “There’d be plenty of room for mine.”

  “You know,” says Simon, “there are still some computers around. You don’t necessarily need to have it in your head.” He tells him about a technology museum at UTEP that has one of the first data centers from Googun.

  “That would be Google,” Ralf says. “That was a company that actually provided a lot of the search for the original boost, at least the American version.”

  “Whatever. So I was thinking you might be able to go over there and use it. You know. To do your work.”

  This brought a high whinnying laugh from Ralf. “That would be a crack-up,” he says. “Me at the controls of a seventy-year-old machine that uses about as much electricity as this whole valley. I would bet,” he continues, “that that machine hasn’t been turned on since the ’30s, or maybe even earlier. Functionally, I’d say, it’s slightly less useful than an abacus.”

  Simon doesn’t hear him. He’s immersed in his boost, inspecting an image that just arrived from Ellen. He sees some mesquite branches with a bit of chain-link fencing behind them, and what looks like a wooden plank. The image is grainy. It comes with no message, and is time-stamped 11:30 a.m.—or almost an hour ago. He doesn’t know where it is. But the fact that it’s grainy and took an hour to make its way to his boost tells him that it was sent from an area with spotty coverage. And that plank. He scrutinizes it. It appears to be crossing something, leading somewhere. He decides to keep worrisome thoughts from his brother, at least for now.

  He glances down at Ralf. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s ride the horses over to the tavern.” He doesn’t mention that he has a phone call to make.

  Nine

  3/7/72 12:54 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Coming in from the blazing sunlight, the windowless Cavalry Club at first looks pitch black. As Ralf’s eyes adjust to the darkness, he sees a solitary figure lying faceup on a long table. That would be Chui. Ralf can see that he has his eyes open. He’s tensing and relaxing his fists, but his mind is clearly occupied in a virtual world far from the El Paso tavern.

  Simon grabs Chui’s arm and gives it a shake. “We could have been draining your beer,” he says, as Chui sits up blinking, regaining his bearings.

  Ralf walks over to the bar and studies the old-fashioned telephone. “Do you think I could call Ellen on this thing?” he asks, reaching for the receiver.

  “Don’t touch that!” Simon yells.

  Ralf pulls his hand back, startled. “I was just—”

  “Sorry,” says Simon. “It’s just connected to a business associate of mine in a different … time zone. It could wake him up.”

  “You mean this thing actually works?”

  Simon ignores the question and tells Chui to serve drinks. “Want a beer?”

  “Well, it might make me a little sleepy in the middle of the day,” Ralf says, “but sure.” He’s still thinking about the telephone. The only people who might get woken up from an El Paso phone in early afternoon would have to be on the other side of the earth, maybe China. Unless, he thinks, the associate is a Mexican who takes siestas. But that wouldn’t be a different time zone, would it?

  He gulps down half of his beer. He was thirsty, he realizes, and didn’t have the boost to monitor his body and alert him to add fluids. The beer washes away the dust caked in his mouth and down his throat. He drinks more and wonders if the growling in his stomach is also trying to tell him, the old-fashioned way, that he’s hungry. If he doesn’t get a new chip, Ralf is going to have to learn to read new signals.

  As Chui draws another beer, Ralf asks him if there’s anything to eat. Chui nods, reaches below the counter, and promptly deposits a plate of blue lunch pellets on the bar, protein 150. Ralf eats a couple of them and finds them utterly tasteless. He has eaten the same lunch hundreds of times, turning the experience into moules frites, Cobb salads, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In the last month, he’d been enjoying a new app for couscous with merguez sausages and a spicy harissa sauce. “Do you have any normal food, with taste?” he asks Chui.

  “We don’t usually serve people like you,” Chui says, adding a sympathetic shrug. He tells Ralf about a d
owntown restaurant called Chancho’s that serves real food. Lawyers and bankers eat there, he says. “Normal people can’t afford it.”

  Behind them, at the end of the bar, Simon is hunched over the telephone, talking to someone in low tones. Ralf wonders if it might have to do with Ellen.

  “You ever use that thing?” Ralf asks, gesturing with his head toward the phone.

  “Nope,” Chui answers, making it clear with his eyes that further questions will get nowhere.

  As Ralf piles the tasteless pellets into his mouth, it occurs to him that Simon’s troubles in messaging Ellen might have more to do with Simon’s boost mismanagement than with Ellen. He asks Chui if he remembers the woman from last night.

  “The Artemis?”

  “Yes, Ellen. You were messaging with her, right?”

  Chui, apprehensive about the direction of the discussion, nods slowly.

  “Could you do me a big favor and message her? Just tell her I’m here and wondering where she is.”

  Chui tries. He pauses for a second and concentrates, and then shakes his head. “It bounced back,” he says.

  “It was a long-shot,” Ralf says, and he downs half his glass of beer. It works a lot better than the euphoria option on the beer apps in the boost. The lightness in his head is offset by a grounding in his gut, which somehow feels just right. He wonders if this is how it feels to be an animal. That gets him to thinking about how special it is to ride on an animal like Clover, the beast his brother lent him. He burps loudly. This produces a new and different beer sensation for which, he’s sure, there’s no app. When Ellen comes back, Ralf thinks, they’ll make love, the old-fashioned way. They hardly ever do that.

  Ralf feels bad about Ellen. She knows that he’s attracted to every Artemis he sees. She’s not blind, or dumb. Ralf wonders how many of the people with genetic packages end up like Ellen, regretting the face they lost, and the individuality. Given a choice, he imagines, most of them would still choose collective beauty over the risk of being uniquely ugly. Still, plenty of Artemi go to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the beautiful crowd. They often fail. Suzy, for example, shaved her head, only to find that she was in a large subgroup, the domed Artemi.