The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “Oh yeah,” Ellen says as he catches up to her. “Forgot about that.”

  Forty-nine

  3/14/72 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  The demonstrators begin to gather Monday afternoon, near the Museum of Natural History on the Mall. It’s just a few dozen at first, several of them carrying signs. One says: “RESPECT OUR FREEDOM!” They mill about, exchanging their outrage and fears. Some laugh that the news-breaking story about the Respect function in the software update came on a sex site; others seem embarrassed by that fact. No one can remember attending a political demonstration before, though they have heard of them in the pre-boost era. Didn’t Martin Luther King deliver his “I have a dream” speech near here?

  It starts to drizzle, and umbrellas pop up. The crowd grows to one hundred, and then to several hundred, and late in the afternoon they start to march. A long trail of umbrellas snakes its way north on 12th Street. Instead of turning left toward the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, they proceed north. More fall into their ranks as the demonstrators pass. When they reach G Street, streams of people emerge from the Metro Center station and join the crowd. At K Street they turn left. By five o’clock, thousands are jammed into Franklin Square. Protesters stand on benches and hang on to low branches of trees. A few are draped on the statue of Commodore John Barry, a Revolutionary War hero. They shout up toward the top floor of the Tongyi Tower. “Stop the chip! Sell out! Don’t play with our minds!” Then a chant begins, and it grows louder as more protesters join. “Vallinger, traitor! Vallinger, traitor! Vallinger, traitor!”

  John Vallinger, standing in his office on the twentieth floor, looks down on the crowd. He cannot hear through the soundproof windows, but he can read the signs. Two of his assistants mingling below are sending him updates.

  “I heard one guy say he wants to kill you,” one of his aides reports.

  “Get an image of him!” Vallinger responds. “The police should know about this.”

  Earlier in the afternoon, one corporate client canceled its contract with Vallinger. “One of the provisos,” the CEO told him in a boost-to-boost talk, “was that this would stay quiet. You haven’t held up your side of the bargain.” Two others—a food giant and the nation’s largest insurer—have left messages that they want meetings right away. Someone also called from the White House.

  Vallinger’s team is busy creating news stories and videos blaming the demonstrations around the country on “wild exaggerations and lies” spread by terrorist organizations and “drug traffickers based in the wild outpost of Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of the world.” The objectives of these groups, according to Varagon Inc., is to stymie the economic advance of the United States, to foment chaos in the country, and eventually, to return the country to its wild state. “This would result in economic collapse and mass starvation and—for all intents and purposes—the end of the United States of America.”

  “We just need time,” Vallinger says to no one in particular. He steps away from the window and sits at his desk. When the software is updated, in two days, people will fall into line. Protests will evaporate. Clients who are nervous now will clamor to bid for high Respect rankings in the boost, which will guarantee them rich profits. Yes, it’s difficult now, Vallinger thinks. But who said that building the richest business in the history of the world would be easy?

  He just has to make sure that no more damaging news seeps out in the coming hours. For this, he calls his source at the Joint Chiefs and sics the military on two terrorists conspiring to bring down the country. Stella Kellogg of Montclair, New Jersey, and “a Chinaman named Bao-Zhi.”

  “We have thousands of Bao-Zhi’s around here,” his source complains. “It would be like looking for a terrorist named Fred, or John.”

  Vallinger provides images and background material on the two, and instructs his source to take “the most energetic measures against them.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ll let you interpret that as you may.”

  Vallinger turns back to the window. Someone in Franklin Square beams a search light on his window, turning the centenarian into a silhouette presiding high above the demonstration.

  “There he is!” People shout, pointing up. The chants resume. The ancient lobbyist places an ear to the glass but still hears nothing.

  “Two more days,” he murmurs to himself as he puts on his raincoat and prepares to leave for the day.

  Fifty

  3/14/72 4:51 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Ralf walks into the Kentucky Club, followed by Ellen. He waves to the bartender and immediately picks up the phone on the bar. A moment later he is talking to his mother. She’s sobbing. “Ralf, you have to save her,” she says. Over the next few minutes, between sobs and hiccups, Stella explains to him that Suzy is imprisoned in one of John Vallinger’s hideaways, somewhere in northern Virginia, and that “the monster” has given orders to “euthanize her.” One of Vallinger’s assistants, he says, talks regularly to Chui, and he just got the word from Vallinger. “You have to save her,” she repeats. “You cannot let this happen.”

  Ralf is dumbstruck by the news. He has no clue how to save Suzy from John Vallinger. And his mother seems highly emotional.

  “Mother,” he says, “have you been drinking?”

  “What’s that have to do with anything!” Stella says. She then tells him a disjointed story, something about leaving Suzy with wild men in Virginia and then going to Alexandria and becoming wild herself and running into a Chinese guy who, a few days earlier, had bound Vallinger like a stuck pig in her living room in Montclair. As it turned out, he knows how to speak English. “I gave him my boost,” Stella says.

  Ralf makes little sense of it.

  “You have to save her,” his mother repeats, sounding sober. “You just have to.”

  “Okay,” Ralf says, “I will.”

  “Good.”

  Since the conversation is already careening wildly, Ralf decides to drop the bombshell. “Mother,” he says, “do you have any idea who Don Paquito is?”

  “Yes,” she says quietly. “I figured that out.” She explains that she was working on her Spanish on the way down, and at one point she started to review nicknames. “Some of them are strange,” she says. “Pepe comes from Jose, Kike comes from Enrique. Then I get to this bar, and the bartender’s name is Chui, and I think, ‘That comes from Jesus.’ And he starts to tell me about this Don Paquito, and I immediately think, Paquito comes from Francisco. Well,” she goes on, “Chui’s a very nice man, and very discreet. But eventually he tells me that Don Paquito runs the newspaper, and that both of my sons are in touch with him. Or for all I know you work for him. And I think: that son of a bitch ducked out thirty years ago, and now he’s grabbing back my family.”

  Ralf doesn’t know what to say. “Well, it’s not quite that simple…,” he stammers.

  “Listen, Ralfie,” Stella says. “Maybe he’s a nice man. Maybe he’s a good father. I don’t care. It seems like he’s become powerful and rich. Tell him to save Suzy.”

  3/14/72 9:56 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Simon bursts through the newsroom and into the playa. His cheeks are red from the wind and his eyes bug out. He rushes up to Smedley, who’s sitting at a Corona table with a bowl of soup. Oscar Espinoza is at the next table, working his way through a plate of chilaquiles with green sauce.

  “Your site is going nuts,” Simon says to Smedley. “Thirty-three million visitors in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “You can’t be counting the zeros right,” Smedley says.

  “Oh I am. I checked and double-checked. More than a million messages are on the bulletin board. It’s out of control. People are setting up demonstrations all over the place.”

  Smedley asks him if he has news on the demonstrations. “No,” Simon says. “There’s nothing worth looking at in the boost. But I see all kinds of statements denouncing erroneous reports coming from drug traffickers and terror
ists. So I think somebody must be worried.”

  Francisco emerges from his office. He’s limping more than usual and looks weary. “We’re following the story,” he tells Simon. “Big demonstrations all over the country. Your mother, who’s at your tavern and apparently drinking heavily, just appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, along with a Chinese friend of hers. John Vallinger has arrested the woman she was traveling with. He has issued an order to kill her.”

  Simon sits down heavily, all of his excitement gone. “What are we going to do?”

  “Just you watch,” Francisco says. He motions to Smedley, who follows him into his office.

  Fifty-one

  TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2072:

  ONE DAY BEFORE THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/15/72 7:58 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  A fisherman wearing dark glasses and a blue Yankees cap crosses Connecticut Avenue from the zoo into Washington’s Woodley Park neighborhood. He hurries up Cathedral Avenue and then breaks into a jog.

  There’s little time to waste, Bao-Zhi knows. Ever since last night, when he and Stella appeared on the Most Wanted list, her boost has been attracting loads of attention. Bao-Zhi isn’t too worried about himself. He has no boost for them to hunt, and the chip he carries in his backpack emits a commodity boost signal. He can blend into crowds, and police no longer know how to find people the old-fashioned way—by scanning their faces, scooping up DNA, or asking friends to identify them.

  The danger comes from Stella’s boost. Last night, police stopped his Metro at McPherson Square and checked every person in the train. He got through. But he knows that a closer hunt, with handheld detectors, will zero in on her chip, exposing him. He wandered the city all night, hiding the packet with her chip behind trees and between cars, and then snatching it when he saw surveillance starting to mount and moving it to another spot. It was exhausting. He’s tempted simply to destroy it. But he knows the chip has value.

  Early this morning he spotted a fishing rod leaning against a porch in Mount Pleasant, near the zoo. He stole it and tied the plastic container with the boost to the line. Then he dropped it in Rock Creek. He let it drift far downstream and then reeled it in. If someone came, he thought, he would cut the line. But when he heard the brakes of a police car screech in the parking lot behind him, he abandoned his own plan. He reeled in the chip and took off through the zoo.

  On an empty section of 28th Street NW, Bao-Zhi kneels down by a storm drain. It’s shaded by a towering sycamore tree. He looks around. No one seems to be watching him. He reaches into the drain with Stella’s chip and flips it past the concrete shelf, into the water below. He hears a tiny splash. He lets out some line, and then some more. Eventually, he releases hundreds of yards of line. Then he detaches the reel from the rod, and jams it into a squirrel hole in the sycamore. He hides it with wet and rotting leaves.

  When Bao-Zhi reaches busy Connecticut Avenue, he hears a buzz. Three tiny drones fly over his head, missing him by only inches. He watches them fly to the middle of the avenue, where they circle over a manhole. He hears an air patrol approaching.

  Bao-Zhi turns around and again walks up Cathedral Avenue. He needs a better plan.

  Fifty-two

  3/15/72 8:02 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Spring in Virginia, Suzy Claiborne sees, is at least a couple of weeks ahead of Montclair. A magnolia tree out the window is flowering, and the forest’s new lime green leaves shimmer in the morning sun. Suzy heaps two piles on her breakfast plate, one of protein, the other of fruit, and she sits down at the kitchen table with Tyler Dahl. Suzy is wearing her blue running clothes. She was hoping to take a morning jog before breakfast. But Dahl steered her instead to the treadmill in the exercise room. “I could get in trouble if you go out,” he explained.

  “Wouldn’t want that to happen,” Suzy said, flashing a brilliant smile.

  She takes her breakfast as eggs benedict and slices of mango, and immediately regrets it. The mango app makes it taste like candy. She pushes the fruit to one side and moves to the eggs. She’s surprised to see that Dahl has prepared an old-fashioned pot of coffee. Its aroma fills the kitchen.

  “So,” she says, “yesterday you were taking a little look-around in my boost. See anything interesting?”

  Dahl, startled by the question, pauses. “Did you grow up in the South?” he asks.

  “Little Rock,” she says.

  “I saw one scene, I think with your dad. Did he have a drinking problem?”

  “I don’t think he’d call it a problem,” she says. “He drank all the time and beat my mother and scared my brother out of the house at age sixteen. But if you asked him, I don’t think he’d say he had a problem with his drinking. We did.”

  Her father, she says, dominated their lives. One day her mother woke her up and told her she had a doctor’s appointment. “That was when I found out they were going to turn me into an Artemis,” she says, adding, “I used to have red hair and freckles. Most people thought I was pretty cute.”

  Dahl nods, but holds back from telling her that he saw that in her boost.

  It wasn’t until years later, long after the procedure, that she heard from her mother that before their marriage, her father had had an Artemis girlfriend. “She dumped him, probably because he was a drunk. Then he wanted me to look like her. Of course, I was disgusted,” she says. “I shaved my head, which really pissed him off. We had a few … disagreements. Then I left home.”

  Dahl asks her how she landed her job with the DM.

  “I’m not very political,” Suzy says. “But it was a job. A professor at college told me about it. The pay’s not great, but you meet interesting people.” She smiles at him, which highlights her dimples.

  “What I want to know,” she goes on, “is how you got tied up with that slimy boss of yours.”

  “He’s very powerful, you know,” Dahl starts out. “Of course the pay is good. Or actually, great.” He goes on to tell her that he mapped out his career in mathematical terms. If he wanted to exert his influence on global affairs, it made “more sense to have moderate influence over a powerful force than large influence over a weak one.”

  Suzy scrunches her nose. “Why don’t you just say the money’s good, and leave it at that?”

  “No, seriously,” he says. “I have clout there.” He boasts that he is the “sole intermediary” between Vallinger and The Tribune. And he also has the power to soften some of Vallinger’s punishing dictates. The other day, he says, Vallinger told him to “amp up” a punitive headache on one of his employees. “And I ignored the order,” he says proudly. “Blew it off.”

  Suzy doesn’t have to say one word for Dahl to realize how foolish he sounds. “Well, it wasn’t that big a deal,” he says, taking a sip of coffee. Then he asks if she’d “mind answering a few questions about Stella Kellogg.”

  “Sure,” she says, pouring herself more coffee. “You’ll get a lot more by talking to me than digging around in my boost.”

  Over the next hour, Suzy gives Dahl what she calls “a worm’s eye view of the DM.” She tells him how someone got her a job in the Update Division at HHS and gave her instructions to befriend Ralf Alvare. “He’s sort of a genius,” she says. “Nice guy, but has some social issues.” Then she got word, probably from DM sources in China, that her segment had an open surveillance gate, and that she should show it to Alvare. Next thing she knew, she was whisked away to a big depressing house in New Jersey. “It felt like a jail.” She looks around the kitchen of the Detention Center. “A little like this,” she says. “But this one is actually more cheerful.” She smiles at Dahl, leading him to believe that perhaps it’s his presence that helps to lighten the mood.

  In the Montclair safe house, she found herself “mossing out” with Stella Kellogg, “a real sweetheart, but very sad. She’s basically lost her family.” The other occupant of the house was a wild Chinese guy named Bao-Zhi. “I think I would have died of boredom if it hadn’t been for him.
”

  “He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list,” Dahl says.

  “Bao-Zhi?”

  Dahl nods. “So is Stella Kellogg.”

  Suzy almost drops her cup, and a few drops of the coffee splash onto the kitchen table. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “Seriously.”

  “She doesn’t know anything! We’d see that paper, The Tribune, and it was all news to us.” Suzy places a hand on Dahl’s. “Tyler,” she says. “Remember how you were saying that you were a moderate force in a powerful organization?”

  He nods and swallows.

  “Listen to me now,” she says, looking deeply into his eyes. “You’ve got to use that power to help Stella. They’re going to kill her, and I’m telling you, she’s not even close to the decisions.”

  At that moment, a message from John Vallinger pops into Dahl’s boost. He leans back, freeing his hand from Suzy’s, and reads it: “Status please.”

  Fifty-three

  3/15/72 9:07 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Traffic is backed up on Connecticut Avenue. Police cars are gathered at the center of the street. A navy flier hovers above. As his Houyi inches along, John Vallinger leans back in his recliner. Frustrated that Tyler Dahl is not answering his messages, he tries something new: He visits a sex site: Hard to Miss an Artemis.

  A crowd of avatars is gathered at the gate. Vallinger figures they’re reading yesterday’s story about the Respect function. He moves up and sees that the article is still posted on the wall, and the bulletin board next to it is overflowing with notices and comments. But the people at the gate aren’t reading that material. They’re lined up to select avatars.