The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “Do the Americans know about this? Does the government?” Ralf asks.

  “Oh, yeah,” Simon says. “They’re big subscribers. If you need to know things, you can’t ignore it. That’s why we can charge so much.”

  “And Mom?”

  “Something tells me she’s going to figure it out pretty soon.”

  Twenty-eight

  THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2072:

  SIX DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  9:07 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  “Your family news business.”

  Vallinger’s words have been echoing in Stella’s ears for a full day. It’s hard for her to believe that Simon, who’s running a tavern in El Paso, would be operating secretly as a newspaper publisher across the border. And Ralf, who lost his boost just a week ago, would not likely hurry down to Ciudad Juárez, of all places, and launch a new career in journalism. She sprinkles protein onto a little mound of green on a plate, the fixings for her usual lunch, a salade niçoise. A full day after John Vallinger’s visit, Stella is still mulling his line about her family. Could her cousin, Ted, a musician in Red Bank, New Jersey, be playing some role in Juárez? The idea’s too crazy even to consider.

  Suzy walks into the kitchen, still in her striped pajamas, and pours herself a cold cup of coffee. Then she joins Stella in the living room. She sits on a corner of the blue satin couch last occupied by John Vallinger.

  “I’m still thinking about the ‘family news business,’” Stella says

  Suzy points to the copy of The Tribune still lying on the coffee table. “He just meant that Ralf and Simon are talking to reporters from that paper,” she says. “Or at least he thinks they are.”

  “I think it’s more than that,” Stella says. “But I can’t do any research about it in this house. I’ve been looking through the documents I have in my boost, and there isn’t anything about The Tribune.”

  “Go outside!” Suzy says. “They already know we’re here.”

  She’s right, of course. Stella hurries to the closet, pulls on a black overcoat that Ralf bought at a vintage store, and for the first time in more than a week, she steps outside. Startled birds fly away from the neighbor’s feeder as hundreds of messages and updates cascade into Stella’s boost. She’ll read them later.

  She searches for the publisher of The Tribune, in Ciudad Juárez, and comes up with nothing. It’s not even mentioned. Maybe, she thinks, Vallinger had it wrong. She looks for Tribune references in Tijuana, Laredo, Nogales, and Brownsville. Nothing. She looks for facts about Juárez and finds a full dossier: The Tragedy of Ciudad Juárez: City Gone Wild. She downloads it and walks back into the warmth of the house. Reading while she eats lunch, she learns that the city of three million people has the highest murder rate in the world. Its economy is based almost entirely on the shipment of drugs and other contraband. Diseases long eradicated in the rest of the world, including HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, rabies and even bubonic plague, all flourish in Juárez, where the average life expectancy is a mere thirty-six years old. Horrified, Stella reads on. The de facto leader of Juárez is a drug lord known only as Don Paquito, an Argentine who rose to the top by eliminating his competitors through a series of gangland executions. Stella tries opening a photo of Don Paquito, but nothing comes up. She reads that he has a harem in his Juárez palace, and that he has tigers as house pets. He lost an eye during some battle decades ago, and he likes to pop out his glass eye as a gag. Sometimes he drops it into other people’s cocktails. He is rumored to be a drug addict.

  Stella hurries to an ancient bookshelf that stands in the dark corridor between the living room and the kitchen. Just yesterday, Bao-Zhi was crouched behind the same shelves before launching his attack on John Vallinger. The books are caked with dust, their bindings dried and cracking. Stella quickly finds the one she’s looking for. It’s called Donkey Show, and it’s written by her grandfather, Tom Harley. It tells the story of a journalist in El Paso—a thinly veiled Harley—who is on the track of a notorious drug lord in Juárez, Gustavo Jiménez. Stella, who read the book as a girl, flips through the early pages looking for a passage she remembers. She finds it on page fifteen:

  Everyone had a story or two about the local drug lord. One man claimed that Jiménez had pet tigers roaming through his mansion on the east side of Juárez. He had a harem, too, he said, and threw all-night parties. The cop added that Jiménez sometimes popped out his glass eye and dropped it in people’s drinks, for a laugh.

  “Suzy!” Stella runs with the living room, where Suzy is stretched out on the floor, still in her pajamas. She has one leg up in the air and is pulling her knee toward her face. “Take a look at this,” Stella says, putting her finger on the passage about Jiménez. “A story in the boost says exactly the same thing about a drug lord in Juárez, Don Paquito.”

  Suzy lowers her leg and reads the passage. “You mean there are two drug lords in Juárez, this guy and the one you read about in your boost, and they both have tigers?”

  “And a harem,” Stella says. “And a glass eye.”

  “I can’t imagine that every drug lord over there has … all those things,” Suzy says.

  “I think they copied it from the book,” Stella says.

  “Why would they do that?”

  Stella stands up and walks toward the kitchen. “Because they’d rather tell us stories than the truth.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Suzy calls from behind her.

  Stella starts to answer, but is startled by the form of a man in the window of the back door. The messenger. He wears his helmet on the back of his head and arches his eyebrows as if to smile. She opens the door and he comes in, blowing on his cold hands. “What was going on with that creepy-looking guy you had in here yesterday?”

  Stella doesn’t answer. It occurs to her that she failed to draw up a report on Vallinger’s visit to the DM, and has yet to pass along the very significant fact that their cover has been blown. She was so wound up about the “family news business” that she forgot about the entire movement. She should have a detailed report ready for the messenger, but has nothing.

  “I mean, no offense, if he’s your father or something,” the messenger says. “You’d probably think my grandfather looks creepy.… Hey,” he says, picking something up off the floor, “You didn’t see what I delivered yesterday. I slipped it under the door.” He deposits a small packet on the kitchen counter. Then he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a much thicker wad of papers. “They sent over a big one today,” he says. “I think it’s from something the Chinese guy told them. Is he coming back?”

  “Wait a second,” Stella says. She hurries into the living room and retrieves the sketch pad and charcoal pencil that she and Suzy used for Bao-Zhi’s Chinese calligraphy. She scrawls a short message on a clean sheet of paper: “Cover blown. Vallinger visited house, issued threats. Bao-Zhi attacked him before leaving. Send no more messages.” She folds it into quarters and hands it to the messenger. “Take this to them,” she said. “Never come back here again.”

  Twenty-nine

  3/10/72 11:29 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Ralf lies belly-down on the bed he shares in Francisco’s headquarters with Ellen. He’s fully dressed in clothing his father bought for him: new blue jeans, a gray woolen sweater, and tall leather cowboy boots with elevated heels and pointed toes. The boots, freshly shined, leave brown spots on the white bed cover. But Ralf can’t be bothered. He lifts his head from the pillow. “Let’s go to the Kentucky Club,” he says.

  Ellen sits on the side of the bed and strokes the back of his head. “We can’t go drink margaritas every time you’re feeling down,” she says softly.

  “Maybe just this once,” he says.

  It was just an hour earlier that Ralf received the diagnosis he’d been dreading. The neurologist in Juárez, an affable young doctor named Ocampo, had opened an incision over Ralf’s temple and concluded, after a painful five minutes of poking around, that Ra
lf’s connection, or “jack,” had suffered too much damage for the boost to be reinserted. “Who operated on you?” he asked Ralf in fluent English.

  “I don’t know,” Ralf groaned.

  “An animal could have done this,” Ocampo said, peering into the wound. “It looks like he pulled it straight out with his teeth, or maybe his talons.”

  Ralf asked if the jack could be fixed. “Perhaps,” the doctor said. “But it would require brain surgery.”

  “Not the kind of thing I could have done today?”

  The doctor, thinking Ralf was joking, just laughed.

  After the doctor stitched up his despondent patient, he removed Ralf’s boost from the blue snuff bottle and inspected it through a microscope. “The chip actually looks okay,” he said. “All of the damage seems to have been inflicted on the jack.”

  “That means it could go in someone else’s head?” Ralf asked.

  “In theory, yes. But it’s not something I’d want to do.”

  “You mean to host my boost in your head?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t want that. But I wouldn’t want to put my boost in someone else’s head. It would be like letting someone into my life.”

  “But you don’t have a boost.…”

  The doctor assured him that he did. “Not all of us are wild over here,” he said. He told Ralf that a couple years back, during a brief diplomatic thaw between Juárez and Mexico, he had traveled in a government-authorized van to Durango and had a reconditioned chip fitted into his head. His new chip provided math and translation, lots of music and video, and “basically the world’s entire medical knowledge base.” Chips in Juárez aren’t as useful or fun as elsewhere, he said, because they aren’t on a network. “We can’t visit virtual worlds, which makes a lot of people unhappy. Then again, unlike you, we’re free of surveillance.”

  Ocampo said he was hoping for a chance at some point to cross the bridge into El Paso, or even to Chihuahua City, and refresh the content on his chip. “What I have up there is getting kind of stale,” he said. Then, remembering that he was talking to a person likely to remain wild the rest of his days, he tried to steer the conversation away from technology. “Food’s better in the wild world,” he said. “Have you tasted the chilaquiles verdes around here?”

  Ralf walked the several blocks back to Francisco’s headquarters. He didn’t bother delivering the bad news to Simon or his father. Instead he marched straight to his bedroom, shut the door behind him, jumped on the bed without saying a word to Ellen, and buried his head in the pillow. Ellen could guess right away what he had learned. But it took her ten minutes of cajoling to get him to provide details.

  A half hour later, Ralf still shakes his head. “He kept repeating, ‘An animal could have done this,’” he says to Ellen. She’s sitting on a corner of the bed and holds a hand on his cheek. “When he was saying that,” Ralf recalls, “I was actually feeling offended—on behalf of the animals.” He smiles for the first time. “I mean, we’re all animals, when we get right down to it. We just allow ourselves to forget it sometimes. The chip makes it easier.”

  Ellen manufactures a supportive smile and nods, even though she’s not sure where Ralf is going with the argument.

  Ralf, now serious, reaches across and touches Ellen’s face. “You’re like chilaquiles verdes, or whatever they’re called,” he whispers.

  “Huh?”

  “I was just remembering what the doctor said, when he was trying to make me feel better. He said the food tasted better in the wild world. It’s true. Then, just looking at you, I was thinking that the same thing might be true about people, and relationships.”

  “You mean,” Ellen says slowly, “that you and I might do better paying attention to each other than to all of the … virtual stuff?”

  “I know, it sounds like a cliché,” Ralf says.

  Ellen nods. This is hardly new terrain for them, and she worries that soon they’ll be making the same old and painful comparisons between her “real” but blemished avatar and the exquisite but “false” Artemis she has become.

  “Even when I’m being faithful to you, in my boost,” Ralf says, “I do mash-ups of our good times. It’s just easier to manage … memories of you—which are all good. Great, actually. Than to manage the relationship in … real time.”

  Ellen takes a few moments to digest Ralf’s semi-coherent words. He has admitted that he’s not faithful to her in his boost. That’s not exactly news, but still, it’s the first time he has said so. She notes that twice he used the word “manage” to describe their relationship—or more specifically, what he does to her. It’s not an especially warm word, she thinks. Where does “love” fit into what he’s trying to manage, or for that matter, what she’s managing? She knows she is not blameless. She too avoids the physical Ralf and spends much of her free time with others, or with memories of Ralf, in the boost.

  While these thoughts occupy Ellen’s mind, Ralf reaches across her back and lifts her blouse.

  “Oh no,” she murmurs.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’m a wild man looking for sympathy in the form of old-fashioned, molecule-to-molecule love, which is all I can hope for anymore.” He raises the blouse over her head and inspects her naked torso. “And,” he continues, “that in my efforts to make the best of my new life—I’ll immediately describe this real-life experience as ‘superior’ and ‘deeper.’ And that, you’re thinking, could grow to be very tiresome.”

  He leans over and plants a lingering kiss on her mouth. “You’re thinking,” he says as he pulls back from her lips and looks at her, “that living with an evangelist for the wild life could be a nightmare. You worry that eventually I might become fanatical about it and push for you to have your own chip taken out—though, hopefully, not by animals.” By this point, he is brushing her breasts with the back of his hands. “You might even worry that I’ll insist on settling down with you in Juárez.”

  “Just five minutes ago, I worried you were feeling suicidal,” she says. “Next thing I know, you’re comparing me to Mexican food and getting turned on. I never thought that you might turn out to be an evangelist for the wild life. But now that you mention it, it does sound … unpleasant.” She reaches for her blouse and starts to put it back on.

  “Bear with me,” Ralf says, taking the blouse from her hands, and tossing it back on the bed, beyond her reach. He jumps to his feet and strips off his clothes. It ends up taking a lot of pulling and pushing, and even a helping hand from Ellen, to pry off the new boots. Ellen, resigned by this point, takes off her pants and underwear, and snuggles close to Ralf. She kisses his neck and reaches with a hand down his back.

  Like new lovers, they explore each other. They find that the smells and tastes are different from the boost, and they bump into each other with an awkwardness that they had forgotten. Rolling over, Ellen clocks Ralf in the cheek with her elbow. In virtual love, Ralf thinks, as he rubs the spot, the inside of the elbow is engineered to be a mild erogenous zone. But the elbow’s bony outside, the weapon he just encountered, simply ceases to exist. Ralf feels a wrenching in his back—something he never experiences in virtual sex. He rolls over and pulls Ellen on top of him. He stares into her radiant eyes. How lucky he is to be with her, he thinks, and how foolish he has been to spend so many days and weeks living away from her in his boost. Yes, she has issues about the face that she gave up all those years ago. But together, without taking the easy refuge of virtual worlds, they can work those things out. He strokes the back of her thigh, marveling at the smoothness of her skin, and then dips his hand between her legs. At that moment, he feels himself losing control.

  “Shit,” he says.

  Ellen laughs and hurries into the bathroom. “It’s okay,” she calls back. “I wasn’t really in the mood.”

  Thirty

  3/10/72 1:33 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  “They say here,” Stella reads, “that he’s called the Viceroy.
Did you know that?”

  “A viceroy?” Suzy says.

  Stella doesn’t bother responding. She leans over the thick memo the bicycle messenger delivered. It is spread out on the kitchen table, and she is studying every word. It’s a profile of John Vallinger, lifted from the most recent edition of The Tribune. It details the career of the ninety-nine-year-old lobbyist, who made a career out of spotting technology trends and tying them to business.

  “I didn’t know any of this,” Stella says, shaking her head. She reads on. Vallinger later became the leading lobbyist in Washington, virtually the only link between the xenophoic America First! party and the power in China.

  Vallinger, she reads, has almost single-handedly pushed through the opening of the surveillance Gate 318 Blue, which is due to be released in the coming national cognitive update. The lobbyist, who agitated for the change for fifteen years, managed to include a control on the gate—which his company will operate.

  “This can’t be true,” Stella says. “Get this. It says that he—quote—‘will harvest a micropayment every time one of his clients—a who’s who of global blue chip companies—burrows into the boosts of 430 million Americans, whether looking for facts, behaviors, desires, social connections, or national security issues.’”

  “That’s the gate I showed Ralf,” Suzy says.

  “It’s like he controls the whole thing,” Stella says. “He’s the gatekeeper.”

  Suzy, with a glass of water in her hand, looks over Stella’s shoulder. “But is it really that surprising,” she says, “that they’re looking at all this stuff? I always assumed people were snooping on my chip.”

  “I don’t think it’s ever been quite this bad,” Stella says. “He also has investments in a company, Connectomix. Ever hear of that?”

  Suzy takes a sip and thinks about it. “I don’t think so.”