The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “That’s what they were saying in the update division,” Suzy says. “Even Ralf talked about it.”

  It’s a hard line to oppose, Stella thinks. Those who dare to face crippling headaches. They find relief by seeking shelter in safe houses equipped with electronic jammers, like Stella’s own. It amounts to self-incarceration. The only other remedy is to rip out the chip. Stella herself doesn’t know how she’d handle life in the wild.

  3/8/72 8:16 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  George Smedley wakes up to the sound of rain pounding the glass sunroof of his Kalorama condo. His feet are tangled in his black silk sheets and his forehead drips with sweat. His head is killing him. Smedley had a nightmare that even by the pale morning light seems vivid and real. He was walking down the main street in an old Western town, a place lined with saloons, wooden banks, and feed stores. From second-floor balconies, women in various stages of undress—all of them Artemi—shouted at him, taunting him, daring him to stop. He wanted to so badly, but he couldn’t. He had to keep walking, and cross a river. Those were his orders, and everyone knew it. Smedley was someone else’s puppet. His legs drew him forward toward a terrifying place he wanted to avoid. Every second, he moved closer.

  The sun in this dream shone down relentlessly, like a punishment. Smedley could not avoid it. He saw no shadows, no sign of relief. He didn’t know his mission, only that he must continue.

  His head hurt, and he had this idea that when he crossed the river he would find relief. Yet as he started to cross, people warned him to stay put. A bearded beggar told him to beware. Behind him, Artemi shouted at him, their warnings blended with ridicule and cruel laughter.

  Smedley had an idea. He would escape into his boost, into a safe and welcoming virtual world. Yet as he tried to toggle from his wet brain into his dry, pain shot through his head. It seemed to start in a lower molar and burn up into his temple. He cried, and the laughter from the balconies grew louder. Smedley began his solitary walk across the bridge. The pain only grew as he approached the other side.

  It was then that he realized, to his great relief, that he was dreaming. He could end the pain simply by waking up. Sure enough, when he awoke, sweaty and tangled, the world seemed to return to normal. Gone was the dusty Western town, replaced by his modern bedroom, with its tones of white, black, and gray, and highlights of pink. The searing sun was but a memory. Cool rain-scented air streamed in through his cracked-open windows. Everything from the dream was changed except for the punishing headache, which continues to hammer his right temple.

  Smedley holds his hand to his head and tries, as he battles the pain, to formulate a plan.

  Twenty

  3/8/72 8:40 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  They both hear the sputtering and the roar coming from around the corner. Ralf dives from the dirt road into a pile of garbage by a shack. He assumes it’s a drone. But Simon, who has spent time in Juárez, identifies it. “A gasoline engine,” he says. “A truck.”

  Ralf climbs to his feet, and moments later a square-shaped truck painted red and green hurtles down a side road and turns right in front of them. It stops with a screech of the brakes. He sees a General Motors truck, at least sixty years old. The metal grill, only inches from their faces, looks like the grimace of a large animal, perhaps a bear. The truck belches a cloud of smoke from the rear. Simon looks to see who’s driving, but the early-morning sun reflects off the windshield. Still, he can guess who’s inside from the purple and yellow flag dangling from a pole soldered to the cab.

  “Revolutionary Militia,” he says.

  The driver turns off the ignition. The truck shudders for a couple of seconds, and then is quiet. Three young men climb down from the cab. They look to be in their early twenties. One is tall and skinny, and wears a black Boston Red Sox baseball hat. The other two are short and square. One of them looks at them through round-rimmed glasses; his friend wears a red knit cap and holds his hands in his pockets, as though he’s freezing. All three are in blue jeans and blue jean jackets, each one embroidered with the same purple and yellow banner. The skinny one carries in his right hand a metal pipe about two feet long. The men walk up to Ralf and Simon, looking grumpy. They say nothing. They stop, all in a row, looking the brothers in the eyes. This appears to be a routine they’ve practiced.

  “Hola,” Simon says.

  They don’t answer.

  The shorter man wearing glasses finally says, “Cabezudos.”

  “Yo sí,” Simon says and adds, pointing to his brother, “Pero no él.” He says to Ralf, “I told these guys that I’m capped, but that you’re not.”

  “That’s what ‘cabezudo’ means?” Ralf asks.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why do they care?”

  “¡Cállense!” says the man with glasses, who appears to be the leader.

  “That means ‘shut up,’” Simon whispers.

  In the following minutes, the man with the glasses interrogates Simon, while Ralf and the two others look on. He asks him what they’re doing in Juárez, how long they plan to say, and if they plan to meet anyone. Simon, speaking Spanish like a native, explains that they ran away from some “bad people” in El Paso who work for the “dictatorship.” When asked where they crossed, he points toward the west and says “Santa Teresa.” He explains that his brother, after living his entire life as a cabezudo, was captured in Washington and had his chip removed.

  That seems to interest the three, who look back and forth at each other and nod.

  Simon shows them the bandage, now dirty, above Ralf’s right ear. The tall man carrying the pipe steps forward, reaches for the bandage, and tears it off.

  “Ow!” Ralf says, shielding the wound from the others. But the tall man pries Ralf’s hand from his head and exposes a small patch of skull, recently shaven. It has a puffy red line a half inch long.

  The man steps back, and Ralf puts his hand to the wound to make sure it’s not bleeding.

  When asked to explain their presence in Juárez, Simon explains that they’re planning to see Don Paquito, and hoping that he can help them recross the border far from the “bad people” who are chasing them.

  The three Mexicans huddle briefly. Then the short one with the red cap grabs Simon by the elbow. The tall one reaches for Ralf. They load them into the truck and attempt to blindfold them with red-checked bandannas. Their knots are slipshod, and the bandannas keep falling. The man with the glasses shouts at his colleagues, calling them “pendejos.” He finally grabs two large brown paper bags and stuffs them over Ralf and Simon’s heads. Then the truck roars to a start and takes off toward the west.

  Several minutes later Ralf and Simon are prisoners in a garage, the bags off their heads. Their hands are bound behind them to their metal stools with the same bandannas. They sit at opposites sides of a table. It has old jars and cans of paints and coatings and is covered by a stained brown blanket. The two short men have departed, leaving the tall one to guard them. The door of the garage doesn’t close, and through the opening Simon can see a bit of the scene outside. It looks like a war zone. Across the dirt road is a burnt-out building he’s never encountered before.

  Ralf’s wrists hurt from the bandanna. The way his hands are bound to the stool forces him to twist in a way that he knows is going to be unbearable within minutes. He looks at his brother. Simon’s gray T-shirt is riding up his belly, exposing a white patch of flab. But he sits straight up, his feet tucked neatly under the stool’s metal rung, his hands behind him like a soldier who has shifted from attention to “at ease.” Ralf watches his brother looking out the crack in the door, back at the guard, than outside again. He looks fully engaged, and almost happy. He must love Juárez, Ralf thinks.

  “Could you ask the guy to redo my wrists so I can sit up straight?” Ralf whispers.

  “Shhhhh.” Simon purses his lips and shakes his head. Then he leans forward, steps off his stool, with his hands still tied behind him, and climbs back on again. It’s a demon
stration. Ralf tries to step down. He stumbles, almost bringing the stool down on top of him.

  “Eh!” the guard yells.

  But Ralf quickly climbs back onto the stool, as Simon did, with his torso straight and his feet behind the rung. It feels much better, even though the wrists still hurt.

  Simon asks the guard in Spanish if he can talk to his brother, “just to pass the time.”

  “Okay,” the guard says in accented English. “But I listen.”

  “Good. Maybe you’ll learn something,” Simon says. Then he launches into the history of Juárez, starting with the U.S. manufacturing operations that moved from the U.S. Rust Belt to the Mexican border in the 1980s.

  “Just tell me who these guys are,” Ralf says, “and what they want.”

  “I’m getting to that,” Simon says. “Once Juárez turned into an export capital,” he explains, “it became a capital for illegal exports, too. Like drugs.”

  “I know that,” Ralf says.

  “That’s when Mother’s grandfather, our great-grandfather, got famous. He was working at a newspaper in El Paso, and he wrote articles about how the maquiladora captains were exporting drugs. His girlfriend at the time, who was later his wife, used information he had to make investments. It was probably illegal, or at least unethical, because it hadn’t been published yet. She made a shitload of money. That’s what they used to buy that big house in Montclair.”

  Ralf knows nothing about financial markets. “So what does that have to do with these guys?” he asks.

  “Not much. I’m just telling you that we have roots down here.” Simon takes a breath and considers how to abridge his historical narrative for an impatient audience. The Mexican guard, he sees, is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. He has his head tilted to one side. His eyes are shaded by the rim of his red baseball cap. He might be asleep.

  “These guys,” he says, gesturing toward the slumped-over guard, “are from the militia of the Revolutionary Brigade, or Brigada Revolucionaria. Their goal is to keep Juárez wild.” He goes on to explain, in more detail than Ralf would have chosen, how Juárez, starting in the 2040s, developed into the capital of the wild world. The early years were a period of great optimism. Immigrants streamed in from all over the world. Writers, artists, film directors, even a few billionaires came in from Paris, New York, and Silicon Valley, and built mansions up by the mountains. The rest of the world was heading into a techno-world developed by software engineers in the employ of multinational companies and dictators. Ciudad Juárez—long known as the murder capital of the world—was suddenly the capital of native human intelligence, the same genius that produced Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, Jesus Christ. If the rest of the world was going digital, Juárez would build a franchise on knowledge, ideas, and the potential of the analog world.

  Ralf snorts. “That’s a bit much, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Maybe,” Simon admits. “But the key was freedom. The boost-sphere was controlled. Juárez was free, all things being relative. At least not all the information was tied to commercial messages and political propaganda.”

  “It is in the boost?”

  “You tell me.”

  Ralf considers the question for a few seconds and then says, “Go on.”

  “It was a glorious vision,” Simon says. “But of course it came up short. This was a poor, corrupt city, after all. A hellhole. It couldn’t turn overnight into Athens in the age of Pericles. The drug business dried up in the U.S., as people turned to virtual drugs. The narco lords, at least the ones that stuck around, had to stay alive. They went back to the old lines of business. Prostitution, gambling, drugs for the market over here. It was small-time stuff. They weren’t billionaires anymore. But they had enough to buy off the police departments. Same old, same old …

  “But what really threatened it was economics,” he says. He explains that both Washington and Mexico City viewed Juárez as a threat. If their populations saw that the wild could run a thriving and free city, people might push to go wild. It would be a viable alternative, and governments might lose control.

  “Of course, they could have just bombed Juárez and destroyed it,” Simon says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they considered it at some point. But instead, they demonized it. They blockaded it, starved it economically, and then held it up as a model for the failures and backwardness of the wild world. If the public complained about the boost, and all the surveillance and control that comes with it, the governments could just say, ‘Look at Juárez.’ And that’s exactly what they do. What’s more,” he adds, “the Juárez they describe is much worse than this!” With a sweeping motion of his face, he surveys the garage, as if its grimy walls and the used tires piled in puddles of grease represented the city itself. “With their control of the boost, they’ve turned it into a caricature,” he says. “They tell people that Juárez makes its money from drugs—even though the export market has been dead since the ’40s.”

  Ralf is eager for Simon to tell him about the “militia” that has them trussed to stools in this dingy garage. But there’s no hurrying him, he sees.

  “So the people in Juárez look across the river to El Paso, and what do they see? It’s a richer place. It’s modern. It has new cars that don’t stink. People over here,” he adds, “can’t understand why any of us would ride around on horses. We tell them about the surveillance over there, the mind control. But they see that we can go anywhere we want. It’s a different kind of freedom. We’re freer to move our bodies, to travel. They have privacy in their heads. But some of them long for the boost. It provides a whole world of entertainment. We can go to the movies in our head. We can participate in them. That’s still a radical concept in Juárez. They also think the boost makes us smarter.”

  “It does!” Ralf says.

  “That’s a whole other discussion,” Simon says. “But the point is this. They look at their kids, and they see them growing up wild and without a future outside of Juárez. It’s like a small island. So people have started to sneak down into Mexico, with their kids. They’re getting capped, becoming cabezudos. It’s a big mess, of course. Unlicensed doctors and vets are giving them chips from dead people—the same thing you were after. People die in the operation. Some go crazy with the new chips. Some rip them out. But for some people, it works. Now there’s this entire cabezudo minority. They have all kinds of advantages. Even without a network, they can do all the math, they can store data, images, memories. They get better jobs, and their kids clean up at school.

  “So,” Simon goes on, “how do you think that makes the locals here feel? They’re still wild. They maintain this vision of Juárez and the glorious analog economy, the modern-day Athens I was telling you about. But they’re getting infiltrated. If things keep going the way they’re going, Juárez is going to turn into a two-tiered city, with the wild on the bottom. That’s why these militias are growing. They’re defending the status quo.”

  “What are they going to do to us?” Ralf whispers.

  “Puh,” Simon says dismissively, shaking his head. “They’ll take us downtown and report us and feel like they’ve accomplished something.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll go talk to Don Paquito, and see what we can do about our problem in El Paso.”

  Ralf starts to ask Simon about Don Paquito when a familiar roar drowns out his voice. Next comes the sound of screeching brakes. The spindly guard springs to life as his two buddies push open the door, flooding the garage with the sunlight and racket of a raucous neighborhood.

  Twenty-one

  3/8/72 8:55 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Ellen lies in her bed and gazes out the window at a busy pigeon nest on the ledge. She’s been awake for more than an hour, lying in bed and surfing archived music and videos in her boost, when she hears a knock on the door. The same young woman comes in carrying a silver tray with a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee, and a bowl of what looks like creamy yogurt. “Breakfast?”
she says.

  Ellen nods and thanks her. The woman opens up space on the bedside table by moving a framed photograph. It features a young Don Paquito, his hair black, his face crinkled into a broad smile, posing with a stern-faced woman. She deposits the tray, nods solemnly at Ellen, and departs, closing the door gently behind her.

  Ellen takes a small spoonful of the yogurt. The bitterness surprises her, and she quickly cloaks the taste with a maple-syrup app from her boost. Even without network coverage, she’s relieved to see, the food apps still work. She wonders what her boost would feel like after a few years in Juárez. It would be like bookshelves in her grandparents’ days, she thinks: Lots of stories and history, but with no connection to what’s happening today.

  Finishing her yogurt, she wonders if she’ll see Ralf today. If not, will she be free to go home? She’d be happy to skip El Paso altogether, and fly straight to Washington, or maybe New York. This brings to her mind the idea of “wild” airplanes from Juárez. She pictures airplanes with no computation on board, no messaging or ground-scans, just humans in a bare cockpit using their ears and eyes to steer clear of mountains and skyscrapers and other traffic, humans peering through clouds to spot landing strips. No, she thinks, they would never let wild planes into U.S. airspace.

  She thinks about Don Paquito, and those tricks he does with his eyebrows. He’s so foreign, and yet at the same time, there’s something playful about him, and familiar. Last night at dinner, he suddenly started interrogating Ellen about her looks, about the Artemis line, and why her family made the investment. “What did you look like before?” he asked.