The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Thirty-four

  3/11/72 8:19 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Papers are strewn across the floor and piled up on desks in the newsroom in Juárez. The electric relic of a coffee pot, left on all night, gives off a fungal aroma. At some point, after the Friday paper went to press, the beverages switched from caffeine to alcohol. Three empty bottles of tequila lie on the floor, in a large puddle of spilled green salsa. The Tribune staff, it’s clear, broke a big story and then partied.

  Ralf, who struggled to sleep with all of the commotion outside his door, emerges from the bedroom with weary eyes. He picks his way in bare feet across the playa and into the newsroom. Finding a computer that’s on, with a story still displayed on its screen, he sits down in a swivel chair. Simon, coming from another bedroom, walks up behind him. He’s wearing a royal blue housecoat and slippers. His long hair, missing its rubber band, hangs down his neck. “The story you’re looking for is on this one,” he says, pointing to the next computer. Ralf rolls his chair to it. Simon leans over his shoulder, and the two brothers read the article together.

  BOOST UPDATE TO COMMAND RESPECT, the headline reads. The subhead, in italics: Chinese Software Incites Millions to Bow to Authority.

  “Whoa!” Simon says.

  “Shh!” Ralf puts his finger to his mouth and continues to read. The article details the “Respect” feature in the coming update. Already in place in China and a number of other Asian markets, the software automatically determines the voices of authority in a society, both government and corporate. Each time a person heeds those voices, the new Respect software sends signals to the brain, which trigger a flow of endorphins from the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. This produces a wave of euphoria, similar to that associated with opiates. With the new Respect function in their boost, billions of people, according to the article, will not only feel eager to bow to authority, “they could even develop an addiction to it.”

  Ralf reads to the bottom of the screen and stops. “Isn’t there any more?” he asks.

  Simon reaches past his brother’s shoulder and runs his finger across a rounded piece of plastic. More text moves onto the screen. “It’s called a mouse,” he explains.

  “Very cool,” Ralf says, as he continues reading.

  The article says that John Vallinger, the renowned lobbyist, pushed the legislation on behalf of his blue-chip clients. Leading companies plan to establish themselves as “authorities.” If they succeed, consumers will experience a “rush” when they purchase products or services from market leaders, which should allow these companies to raise prices. “Marketers have been working to associate their brands with pleasure for centuries,” says one branding expert. “But this takes the guesswork out of it.” He points, however, to economic risks: Small companies and start-ups might find themselves locked out of markets, which could stifle innovation. “Why should the big companies invest in developing new stuff, when everyone is already bowing to them and emptying their pockets?” he asks.

  For now, according to the article, developers have refrained from implementing the negative option available in the Respect software. This would punish people, triggering emotions associated with guilt or even physical pain when they bucked authority. “We don’t think we need to go negative on it at this point,” says one software developer, who asked to remain unnamed. “Positive reinforcement should be sufficient. I mean, we’re talking about addiction.”

  One political scientist, also unnamed, cites the potential complications of the software. If the boost’s machine-learning algorithm determines that the American government is taking orders from the Chinese, he says, U.S. citizens may get a rush from bowing to the Chinese. But he says that this would only reinforce an established trend. “When it comes to governments, Chinese dominance is not exactly new.”

  The crucial link between the Chinese government and multinational corporations, according to the story, is Varagon Inc., the K Street office of John Vallinger, “the centenarian who stands to make a fortune from the Respect software.” His firm is reputedly charging companies “platinum prices” to skirt the algorithms and achieve a “pre-loaded” ranking as “authorities.” To maintain their dominant positions, they will have to pay hefty annual fees. Rumors circulating in Shanghai, according to Chinese sources, speculate that Vallinger, working with Chinese authorities, might hold monthly or even daily auctions in every industry, granting the prized “authority” ranking to the highest bidder. Conceivably, companies could bid state-by-state, which would create yet more revenue for Vallinger.

  The story goes on to say that Vallinger’s Chinese partners released news of an open surveillance gate a month ago in hopes that this story would occupy the opposition, including America’s Democracy Movement (DM). “They figured that the old-guard opposition would go nuts about the surveillance stuff,” says one source close to Vallinger. “But they’d have trouble getting the public excited about it.”

  The government briefly considered testing the update in a regional market, according to officials. But that proposal has been scrapped. Now, with the exception of top Washington officials, the entire population will be updated the night of March 16, says a source within the Department of Health and Human Services. “There was a perceived risk that people would find out about the Respect function and make a big fuss,” he says. “They’re far less likely to do it once the update has been achieved.”

  Ralf pushes his chair back from the desk. He looks at Simon and shakes his head in wonder.

  Simon asks if Ralf’s chip, still sitting in the blue snuff bottle, carries the code for the Respect function.

  “It might be on the code Suzy sent me,” Ralf says. “Her segment had social mores, I think. But it won’t make much difference unless I get the boost into somebody’s head who can find it.”

  “We’ll work on that,” Simon says. But he has his mind on something else. He starts searching around the chaotic newsroom. He sticks his head into Francisco’s empty office, and then walks down the hall toward the print shop. He returns with two copies of the paper, and tosses one to Ralf.

  “You know that guy who was chasing us and then rescued us?” he says.

  “Of course. Guy with the nose.”

  “He’s out at Trastos with his boss, and a drone escort.” Simon says that a man named George Smedley, who works for Vallinger, apparently wants to negotiate with Ralf and Don Paquito. “I’m going out there to talk to them first,” he says, waving the paper as he walks toward the door. “I’ll give ’em a look at the news.”

  Thirty-five

  3/11/72 10:16 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Simon recognizes his virtual lover the moment he steps into the Trastos store. George Smedley looks up at him blankly. He sits in a plastic beach chair and has his hand in a bag of Sabritas potato chips. He’s wears a dirty white leisure suit of some kind with brown spots on his knees. On his lap he holds a Panama hat with a bent brown feather sticking out of it. He hardly looks like an ambassador from the richest and most powerful lobbyist in the world. He is, however, almost identical to the avatar Simon has hooked up with repeatedly in three different virtual sex sites. His face is the same, if a bit more wrinkled, and his body has almost the same form, though shorter and dumpier in the molecular version. Smedley’s avatar even insists on carrying that same brown feather everywhere he goes. At least twice he has introduced it into bedroom activities, with mixed results.

  It was during long and languorous afternoons with Smedley’s avatars that Simon heard about the man’s life. He learned that Smedley owned the very site they were on, as well as several others. He was very proud of this and bragged about the tens of millions of customers in five continents. In passing, he told Simone about the open surveillance gate in the chip, and about the software engineer—a genius, by all accounts—who had lost his boost and was heading down to El Paso.

  Simon brought this reporting back to the reporters at The Tribune, but never told them how he had coaxed
the intelligence from his source. He didn’t disclose that his avatar, Simone, was turning into a virtual version of the Mata Hari.

  Simon, in fact, has mixed feelings for this lover. He considers him self-centered and a braggart. But they are on intimate terms, and he has to restrain himself as he walks into Trastos from reaching down and stroking his hand softly along the side of Smedley’s upturned face and then kissing him deeply.

  “You must be…,” Smedley says, without getting up.

  “Simon,” he says. He reaches down, but instead of caressing Smedley’s face, he grasps a hand still covered with bits of potato chip and gives it a bone-breaking shake.

  It’s only then that Simon looks past Smedley and sees a familiar giant figure seated at the same table, devouring meat covered with gravy. He waves at Oscar Espinoza, who smiles and gestures toward his plate. “Goat?”

  Simon shakes his head. He sits down with them and smiles broadly. He can hardly contain himself. This is the first time in his life that he has been with a flesh-and-blood lover—or at least something very close to one. The fact that he is encountering him as a man, as Smedley, and that this man is in the dark, makes it doubly exciting. He wonders if Smedley recognizes his eyes, which are practically the same as Simone’s. He remembers thinking years ago as he designed his avatar that if Simon and Simone dressed as Muslim women, with a hijab, the two would be indistinguishable. Part of him longs to share the secret with Smedley.

  Simon realizes, of course, that telling Smedley could be disastrous. In his experience, straight men detest the idea that the lovely female avatar they’re with might actually be another man. This knowledge can unhinge them. Simon, as Simone, has disclosed this unwelcome fact to a couple of his online lovers, and both of them took angry swings at his virtual face before storming away. Their surprise is idiotic, really, since it’s widely known that loads of men prowl sex sites as females. Many straight men hunt for lesbian sex, and they often end up making love to female avatars operated by other men. Smedley has to know this, Simon thinks, if he really owns these sites.

  Simon is so lost in his thoughts that he barely hears what Smedley is saying.

  “So, as I said, we’re willing to pay Ralf and Suzy richly for returning with us to Washington and going through this small and safe surgical procedure,” Smedley says.

  “Suzy?”

  “Suzy Claiborne.”

  “I told you,” Espinoza butts in, “that the domed Artemis—”

  “Quiet,” Smedley says with a single hatchetlike gesture of his right hand.

  Simon changes the subject. He pulls the latest Tribune out of his shoulder sack and drops it on the table. “You might want to take a look at this,” he says.

  “I’d heard about this newspaper,” Smedley says, picking it up. “But I’d never seen it.”

  “Try reading the story,” Simon says.

  He watches Smedley’s eyes racing back and forth across the text. Espinoza, behind him, moves his eyes more deliberately. “Hey wait!” Espinoza says, as Smedley turns to the continuation of the story. Smedley pays him no attention. When he finishes the story, he puts down the paper and looks straight at Simon, right into the eyes that have hovered before his own during moments of the most intense passion. In virtual idylls, from Cuernavaca, Mexico, to Istanbul, Smedley has swum in those eyes. Simon doesn’t flinch. He stares back, inviting whatever may come from it.

  But Smedley pursues a different tack. “What’s your circulation?” he asks.

  “Huh?”

  Smedley waves the newspaper. “How many of these things do you sell?”

  “Well, that information—”

  “It can’t be too many,” Smedley says.

  “It has an influential readership.”

  “Who publishes this?”

  Simon doesn’t answer. The interview with his lover isn’t going as he imagined.

  Thirty-six

  3/11/72 10:19 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  In the sunlit La Luciernaga Café, just beyond the anti-drone barriers, a special booth is reserved for Don Paquito and his friends. It has an antique oblong table with faded red Formica coating, and is surrounded by brown leather seating. The location may appear unusual for the press lord of Juárez—right across the narrow corridor from the men’s room. But as Francisco sits down for breakfast with Ralf and Ellen, he explains that it’s useful to be near the back door. That, he says with a smile, came in useful one time many years ago.

  He’s practically inviting the question, but Ralf doesn’t oblige. “So,” he says, “you were telling me about the boost processing facility near Fort Bliss.…”

  “Shhhh,” Francisco whispers. “Keep your voice down.” He tells Ralf and Ellen about a machine in a building on Paisano Drive, near Bowie High School, which can operate the boost “just like a head.” The army, he says, uses it “to interrogate the deceased.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Ralf says.

  Francisco shrugs. “We’ve written a story about it.” He signals to the waitress, who pours coffee and ice water and drops a basket of steaming tortillas on the table. Francisco orders huevos rancheros for the three of them before asking Ellen, “You like eggs, don’t you princess?”

  Ellen nods and smiles as Ralf rolls his eyes.

  “Hot sauce?” Francisco asks. “¿Salsa picante?”

  After Ellen nods again, he says, “Good,” and returns to chip discussion. “So you find it hard to believe,” he says to Ralf.

  Ralf avoids his father’s eyes, this time by studying his own finger as he draws letters with it on the side of his water glass. He explains, a bit too thoroughly for the other two, that the chip works only with commands established over time in its host brain. Each interface is unique, he says, just like each brain. “You might take a bite of this tortilla,” he says, reaching for one, “and the flavor and texture will create a pattern of behavior in the neurons in your brain. It might have to do with what’s going on with your teeth, the smells, the memories. It might be connected to your language, how the word ‘tortilla’ sounds, where you were when you first heard the word, what other words and sounds you connect it to.

  “My ‘tortilla’ signals,” he continues, tracing a “T” on the glass, “are going to be entirely different. Now over time, my boost has learned to trigger certain patterns in my neurons that respond to my understandings of words and concepts. It has also learned to interpret them. It understands me, and I understand it. But if you or Ellen were to put my boost in your head, it would take you time to retrain it.”

  He looks up from the glass to his father. “So I guess I could see how they could download data from a boost in this machine you’re talking about. But I don’t understand how it can behave like a boost—since it will be missing the human brain.”

  “But if you’re sitting at the machine,” Ellen says, “and you’re giving it commands, then the brain is yours.”

  “I … guess,” Ralf says. “But I’m not at all clear on how the interface would work.”

  “We will traverse that bridge when we reach it,” Francisco says cheerfully as the eggs arrive. “The key question,” he says, dropping to a whisper as the waitress departs, “is how to get you and your chip over to El Paso, and at the controls of that machine.”

  Thirty-seven

  3/11/72 10:49 a.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Deep in thought, Simon steps out of Trastos and stubs his toe on the cinder block steps. The pain is intense and Simon flies into a rage. He swears loudly in English and reaches down toward his toe. He can’t do much for it, since it’s throbbing inside his shoe. So he grabs a fistful of loose dirt from the road, bunches it in his fist, and hurls it onto the ground. The drone, nearly as wide as the street itself, looks on impassively, no doubt recording the scene and transmitting it to its overlords in the American Department of Homeland Security.

  The woman who runs the store pokes her head out the door. “¿Todo bien, Señor Simón?”

  Sim
on composes himself and nods. He sees Smedley’s face, marked with obligatory concern, peering behind her. He hurries off, away from the drone, embarrassed.

  Simon is angry, and feels hurt. As he walks back toward the bus to take him downtown, he finds himself berating George Smedley. Even if Smedley failed to identify his virtual lover by his eyes, he had to know that Simon held a critical position in the enterprise. More than a simple courier for Don Paquito, he runs the finances. Simon told him as much. But Smedley, sitting there in his exercise suit, seemed to look right past Simon. As far as Smedley was concerned, it was clear, Simon fell into the same ranks as the omnivorous Oscar Espinoza: the servant class. Smedley entrusted him with a message for Don Paquito and practically dismissed him.

  Maybe it’s his ponytail, Simon thinks, running his hand to the back of his head. Did he look like a less than fully serious adult?

  But as Simon waits alone at the open air bus stop, his toe throbbing and The Tribune still folded under his arm, he understands that George Smedley isn’t his problem. The Smedleys of the world will come and go, in virtual and physical worlds, some of them paying more attention to him than others. No, the enduring issue for Simon, the one that looms above his entire life, is his father. Francisco is proud, proud of his power in Juárez and his place in the world. He’s proud of The Tribune’s sterling reputation—at least among a tiny elite—as perhaps the only source of trustworthy news in the world. Francisco seems to have pushed to one side the nasty details of his climb to power, the double-dealing and occasional brutality, and has come to associate himself with the ideal of press freedom, even truth.

  This might not bother Simon so much if Francisco didn’t take him for granted. But he does. Simon efficiently handles his job, taking the billions that pour in and parking them as investments all over the world. Working with Chui, he distributes money, often secretly, to suppliers who skirt the economic embargo of Juárez, shipping vital paper, ink, and machine parts into the wild city. He sprinkles payments—or bribes—among the police and military on both sides of the border to keep Francisco’s industrial machinery humming. Without Simon’s work, The Tribune wouldn’t last a month. Yet from Francisco’s perspective, the work simply happens—perhaps because it’s supposed to, or thanks to his inspired leadership. He has engineered a marvelous system. The journalists, the delivery boys, the cleaning and maintenance teams—they’re all interchangeable components, as are Simon and Chui.