The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Stella reads: “The Baltimore-based company, with angel financing from Vallinger, specializes in decoding the connections of the human brain, and re-creating people’s knowledge and memories.” She puts the paper down. “I wonder,” she says, “if they can read people’s brains without killing them. Seems like something they should mention in the article.”

  “They’re talking about the wet brains, right?” Suzy asks.

  “Yes, wet. They get the data from the boost through the surveillance gate, and then the wet brain by studying the connectome, which I guess is each person’s map of neural connections. Looks like he has all his bases covered. Reading this,” Stella goes on, “I’m not so surprised that Bao-Zhi tied him up.”

  “Bao-Zhi was up to date on all that stuff,” Suzy says knowingly.

  “He was?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “If I were to study your connectome, what would I learn about Bao-Zhi?”

  Suzy giggles as she walks out of the kitchen. “You’d have to kill me first.”

  Stella digs into her boost and replays her last conversation with Vallinger. She watches him throw the crumpled trench coat over his shoulders, and say: “If you manage to organize resistance to it, or manufacture outrage, we are going to rain down on your operation with a force that you’d be hard-pressed to imagine.”

  What an ass, she thinks.

  Turning her attention from her boost, Stella begins to process her situation in what she imagines are ancient, reptilian nodes of her wet brain—the parts focused on survival. Vallinger, she knows, believes that she is feeding reporting to this newspaper in Juárez. He has warned her against “manufacturing outrage.” The next thing he sees—assuming that he subscribes to The Tribune—is a story not only designed to stir up outrage, but also casting him as the demon behind it all. Would it be so terribly surprising, Stella wonders, if Vallinger dispatched forces to Montclair to “rain down” on her operation? She thinks it’s a safe bet that he will.

  Thirty-one

  3/10/72 4:17 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  John Vallinger, his feet up on his gun-metal desk in his K Street offices, pages through Thursday’s Tribune. Vallinger looks much like his old self. He has cleaned the gummy remains of Bao-Zhi’s packing tape from his forehead, and has combed his white hair into the familiar V. He wears an old-fashioned gray woolen business suit. One of the last men in Washington who still wears a necktie, Vallinger has adjusted his to a bright shade of scarlet.

  It matches his jaunty mood. It’s only six days until the national cognitive update, and the investigative piece in The Tribune—the one his sources warned him was brewing—has left him largely unscathed. Earlier in the morning, when an El Paso source first messaged the details of the story, Vallinger was exultant. “They took our head fake,” he told his aide, Tyler Dahl. He explained that in basketball, a sport popular in his childhood, a player faked with his head, making it look as if he were going to shoot the ball, and drawing the defender into the air. Then, when the defender landed, the shooter would launch his own shot, sometimes being fouled in the process.

  “Oh,” Dahl responded, not understanding for one moment what his ancient boss was talking about.

  “What I mean,” Vallinger said, “is that they took the story we wanted them to run with, and not the one we wanted to hide.” The news about the open surveillance gate, he explained, wasn’t likely to shock anyone. Everyone had assumed for decades that governments and businesses were spying on their boosts, notwithstanding the pious vows from politicians. Powerful commercial interests, including most of Vallinger’s clients, had indeed found easy access into the boosts. They had been burrowing in the heads of capped humanity since the very dawn of the technology, in the 2040s. The new open gate, Vallinger said, only “harmonized” the American chip to the Chinese standard, and “removed the friction” from data mining on a global scale.

  “So what’s the news you didn’t want them to know?” Dahl ventured to ask.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t tell you,” Vallinger said, breaking into his peculiar smile, with the lips turned downward. It resembled, in everything but its context, a grimace.

  Only later in the afternoon does Vallinger begins to wonder where the reporter got all of his facts. He had assumed that the source was Stella Kellogg. But the details about the way Vallinger carries out business, from his trusted contacts in Beijing to the way he pounds his fist, when angry, on the mahogany table in the conference room … How would she know about that?

  Vallinger thinks about the Chinese fanatic who attacked him in Kellogg’s house in Montclair. Where did he go? Could he be a source? Vallinger doesn’t know. He wonders about George Smedley and the secrets that he leaked on the sex site. Maybe the information is coming from him. Yesterday, he and Espinoza disappeared from Vallinger’s map, apparently crossing into the dead zone of Juárez from a border town near El Paso.

  The relief that Vallinger was feeling when he first read the Tribune article has evaporated. “Tyler!” he shouts.

  The young man appears in his doorway.

  “Get in touch with your sources in El Paso,” Vallinger says. “Find out what Smedley and his friend are up to in Juárez.”

  3/10/72 3:11 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Midafternoon at the Kentucky Club. The winter sun streams through the closed window, lighting up a constellation of dust motes. One customer leans forward on a bar stool, nursing a Bohemia. Another has fallen asleep in one of the leather-upholstered booths. In the back, a noisy game of darts has been going on for nearly an hour.

  The telephone sitting on the bar rings, and the bartender answers. “¿Bueno?… Okay,” he says in Spanish. “Right.” He listens. “I’ll pass it along,” he says. “Got it. One man with a feather, another one with the nose.” Then he calls back to the Tribune reporter who’s been playing darts. He hands him the phone. “It’s for you,” he says.

  Thirty-two

  3/10/72 7:34 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  As servants cleared the dinner table. Francisco and Ralf heard a hubbub and hurried off to the newsroom. Simon is nowhere to be seen. Ellen remains alone at the table, her chin resting on her hands, thinking.

  How much of the life of a twenty-nine-year-old woman, she wonders, is in her boost? She has all the scenes of her school days. She has her first piano recital in Nutley, where she botched a Beethoven sonata and cried. She has countless scenes featuring the little girl with wide blue eyes and a gap between her front teeth—a face that one day ceased to exist. She has the wrenching ride with her mother to the aesthetic specialist, and all the arguments she and her mother put forth about becoming an Artemis. What would happen, Ellen thinks, if she simply ditched all of those memories? The wild humans in Juárez, these people carrying the dishes into the kitchen, they don’t lug around decades of recorded memories in processors in their heads. Do they miss them?

  Ellen has been digging through the archives in her boost to research history of memory. In the early years, she’s learned, humans had to trust their wild brains for every single recollection. Of course, they didn’t always agree on what they remembered, and these conflicting versions often led to quarrels, even wars. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, a German goldsmith named Gutenberg invented the printing press. In the centuries after that, it became more common for people to supplement their memories with books. The shelves were like an annex of the brain. People could look things up.

  Then there was this scientist named Gordon Bell, Ellen learned, who in the first years of the Internet tried to record every moment of his life. He recorded his strolls through San Francisco, his conversations, his meals. He wore a movie camera around his neck and covered his body with different types of sensors. He had this idea that each person could carry around a supplementary electronic memory recording the bits of their lives. This would free up the wild mind for more creative jobs than simple data storage. Bell, it seemed, anticipated the boost. But his company, Microsoft, seeing only a
small market for this concept, didn’t invest in it. Within a few years of Bell’s explorations, people could record much of their lives with their cellular phones and networked glasses. These gadgets carried their messaging, images, videos, and they tracked their movements through the world. They seemed at the time to capture people’s lives. As the machines morphed into jewelry that clipped to clothing or the ear, they behaved more like the boosts that eventually replaced them.

  Ellen reaches across the table and pours herself a small cup of coffee. All of those scenes in her boost, she now understands, are not memories at all. Memories occur only in the wild brain. That’s where she experiences life. The archives in the boost are valuable only as prompts for the real memories, in the wild brain. If she called up that piano recital—which she’ll never, ever do—it would trigger the feelings first of panic, then anger and shame, a powerful stew of emotional memories that overwhelm the dry stream of data issuing from the boost.

  Then she thinks about time. By a certain age, people carry in their boost more recorded memories, both from virtual worlds and flesh-and-blood life, than they have time left to watch them. Like everyone, Ellen has only a limited number of days on earth. It makes more sense, she thinks, to use them to create new memories, and not to spend them watching reruns.

  So does she need her boost? When she crosses back to the United States, which she’s determined to do, she’ll certainly need the processing power and messaging links of the boost, along with such essentials as credit swipes and at least a few apps to make the commodity food palatable. So she will need a boost. But will she need hers?

  Ralf strolls into the dining room, clomping loudly in his new cowboy boots. “They’ve got a big story breaking down there,” he says, pointing toward the newsroom.

  Ellen, deep in thought, doesn’t acknowledge him. She takes another sip of her coffee.

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  “Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  Ellen sighs and looks up at him. “What would you say,” she asks, “if I told you that I’d take your boost?”

  “You mean put it in your head?” He sits down, wide-eyed, and pulls his chair close to her.

  She nods.

  Ralf thinks about it and taps his boot nervously against the table leg. “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “No, but I wanted to talk about it.”

  Ralf is tapping his boot so hard that Ellen’s coffee is sloshing in its cup. “Will you cool it with the boot?” she asks.

  “Okay.” He stops. “So, you’d need to do it tomorrow, and we’d have to go over to El Paso, because you’d have to transmit the data to me. Then I’d need a computer of some sort to hack.…” He pauses and thinks some more. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he says flatly.

  “Why?”

  “You’d lose all your memories, and you’d gain all of mine. It probably isn’t a healthy thing, or fun. Have to say, though, it would be pretty weird.”

  “Those aren’t really memories,” Ellen says.

  “They’re close enough.”

  Ellen lowers her head. “You’re worried that I’d see things you’ve been hiding from me,” she says.

  Ralf doesn’t rise to her challenge. “There’s got to be a different way,” he says.

  3/10/72 9:27 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  “I don’t know about you,” George Smedley says. “But tomorrow I’m going back. I don’t give a hoot about Alvare’s boost or Vallinger’s update.”

  Smedley is stretched out on one of the two cots in the Trastos store on the west side of Juárez. It’s the second night of sharing these close quarters with Oscar Espinoza, and he’s not happy about it. The dirt and grit of Juárez have turned Smedley’s white running suit gray. The knees are still brown from Wednesday’s crawl. Even his Panama hat, sitting on piled cases of powdered milk, looks defeated. The falcon feather is bent nearly in half.

  Worse, Smedley feels sick to his stomach. Oscar Espinoza, using the smattering of Spanish he knows, found some people in the neighborhood to cook large portions of goat, and Smedley and Espinoza have eaten it today for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Smedley burps, and the oily taste of goat, which to his mind has just a hint of urine to it, coats his mouth.

  Espinoza has never looked happier. He hums as he gets ready for bed and pries open a can of peaches. “I’m telling you,” he says, popping half peaches into his mouth like peanuts, “if you want to get downtown, you find some way to call off the drone. They’re not going to let us march down there with an armed escort. Someone will just shoot us.”

  Espinoza has talked, in his fashion, with the people at Trastos, who have connections with Don Paquito. They’ve let him know that as long as the drone is with them, they’re stuck. Someone from Don Paquito’s operation will be out to see them tomorrow—though probably not the Don himself. No one seems to recognize the name of Ralf Alvare, he says to Smedley as he strips off the clothes he’s worn for three days straight.

  “If you had just told them how important this is—that we’re representing John Vallinger—Don Paquito would have come out today and spared us this,” Smedley says. He rolls over on his cot to avoid the spectacle, only inches from his head, of the naked Espinoza crawling between the sheets. “You think they have a shower here?” Smedley asks.

  “Most likely,” Espinoza says. “Or maybe just a hose.”

  “You might ask them tomorrow morning if you can use it.”

  Thirty-three

  FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2072:

  FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/11/72 8:12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Even though Stella told the messenger never to return, he’s back first thing Friday morning, rapping at the kitchen door as Stella washes dishes. He wears the red bike helmet and an apologetic smile.

  “I know, I know,” he says as Stella opens the door. “But they woke me up and insisted.” He hands her another packet of papers. Then he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a tool made of curved black plastic. He explains to her that it’s a zapper, made in China. “If they’re about to capture you, you’re supposed to zap yourself,” he says. He adds that it’s dangerous, telling her to hold the tool at arm’s length—“not right next to the temple.”

  Stella turns over the device in her hands. It’s surprisingly light. She doesn’t tell the messenger, but if the zapper is so dangerous, it would make more sense, she thinks, to shoot at their captors—and not direct it against Suzy and herself.

  The two women each have a bag packed. They plan to head out to El Paso in Suzy’s car tomorrow morning. Stella came up with the idea yesterday. Going through the hundreds of old messages that poured in when she stepped outside of her electronic refuge, she found a few from her sons. One from Ralf especially touched her. “Captured. Working with you after all this time. They’re taking me across the Potomac, into Alexandria. I love you.” That was followed a day later by more messages from Simon. The first said simply, “Ralf’s here, with girlfriend. Wild. Other than that, okay.” Another was an image of Ralf on horseback, looking sunburned. (Didn’t Simon know to give his brother sunscreen, and a hat?)

  It wasn’t until after lunch that she spotted a piece of paper on the kitchen counter. It was the message dropped off while Vallinger was holding forth in the living room. The next day, the messenger had picked it up and put it on the counter. But with all the excitement, she had forgotten about it. When she opened it, she learned that both of her sons had crossed from El Paso into Ciudad Juárez. This was no surprise. Her messages to Simon had been bouncing back, leading her to suspect that he had crossed into the dead zone. What’s more, if people were chasing him in El Paso, where else could he go?

  That afternoon, Stella decided to join her sons on the border. It was the logical move. For the first time ever, all three of them appeared to be working on the same side, and facing the same enemy. This was a chance for Stella to piece together the remains of her br
oken family. When she announced her plan to Suzy, her housemate was in the living room, kickboxing.

  “When?” Suzy asked. She leapt and performed a scissor kick in the direction of an antique Chinese lamp, one of Stella’s favorites.

  “Maybe Saturday.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “The trip will be dangerous,” Stella said.

  Suzy managed to shrug while holding a powerful leg straight in the air. “Then it’s better if there are two of us,” she said. She lowered her leg and bent toward the floor, where she planted her hands and lifted herself into a graceful handstand. “I’ll start getting my stuff together,” she said as she flipped to her feet and bounded upstairs.

  “I don’t know…,” Stella said.

  Suzy paid no attention. “We’ll take my car,” she shouted from the second floor.

  Vallinger has technology on hand, Stella knows, to track their boosts. If he wants to blow up their car or have it pushed over a bridge, he simply has to issue the order. Still, the national cognitive update that obsesses him is only five days away. Nothing Stella and her cohorts are doing seems likely to derail it. She hopes that Vallinger might just relax, leave the two women alone, and celebrate his triumph.

  As the messenger leaves, waving good-bye one last time through the kitchen window, Stella considers the road trip to El Paso. Should she and Suzy make their way west through Pennsylvania and Ohio before turning south? It might be more fun, she thinks, to angle south through the Alleghenies, seeing West Virginia and Kentucky.

  She casually opens the messenger’s packet and takes a look. When she takes in the hand-copied headline from The Tribune, she gasps. She speed reads the summary and then calls upstairs. “Suzy! We’re leaving. Now!”

  “You said tomorrow,” comes the reply from upstairs.

  “Okay, but first thing.”