The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.”

  “What are we doing the rest of the day?”

  Before he can answer, she receives Ralf’s message from El Paso. With a gasp, she jumps out of bed and begins throwing on her clothes.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “You prick.”

  “What is it?”

  “Have you been given orders … to kill me?”

  “Who says that?” He sits up in the bed.

  “Have you?”

  “I can explain.”

  She rushes toward him and punches him hard in the side of the face.

  “Stop it!” he shouts. “I can explain!”

  She reaches down into the sheets, grabs his scrotum, and gives it a terrific squeeze.

  “Stop it!” he moans.

  She relaxes her grip. “Okay. Explain.”

  He tells her that he got a message from Vallinger that he was supposed to “euthanize” her for an analysis of her connectome. “But of course, I didn’t plan to do it.”

  “He’s waiting for you to kill me?”

  “Well, not me. Ted.”

  “Who’s Ted?”

  “The anesthesiologist. The guy downstairs.”

  “The bald guy with the stun gun?”

  “No, that’s the guard.”

  Suzy listens and hears the faint clinking of silverware and two voices talking in the kitchen. “So you just figured you’d screw me, tell Ted to blow off his orders, and tell John Vallinger tough luck. Is that it?”

  “Well, I hadn’t really thought it through to that level of detail.”

  She squeezes her fist again.

  “Ouch!”

  Sixty

  3/15/72 1:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  By lunchtime on Tuesday, The Tribune’s news coverage of the coming software update is convulsing the nation. Software hackers have devised a work-around so that people can share the folded copies of the articles without bothering to visit the Hard to Miss an Artemis site. More than half a billion copies circulate in the boost-sphere—more than one per citizen. Demonstrations have erupted in two hundred cities and towns. And worried Americans are contacting everyone with power, from multinational companies to politicians, to voice their concerns about the coming update—and especially the Respect function.

  In the K Street offices of Varagon Inc., twenty stories above a sea of protesters in Franklin Square, John Vallinger is feeling shaken. Minutes ago, he received a threatening message from Ralf Alvare and suffered ten seconds of excruciating pain. When he fell to the floor and moaned, several staffers hurried into his office, fearing he was suffering a stroke. Since then, Vallinger has recovered his strength and revamped his strategy. He now sees that it’s far too late for a connectome analysis. The potential value of the information, he understands, is dubious at best. It was more the scientist in him, or the voyeur, than the pragmatic businessman who came up with that idea. He’ll shelve it. At this critical juncture, icy pragmatism must rule. If Suzy Claiborne is already “euthanized,” he’ll simply have Dahl dispose of the body.

  Vallinger is more concerned about business. In the last hour, several more customers have canceled contracts, and he’s hearing from senators and congressmen—the same ones who have been following his orders for decades—that they might call for investigative hearings and postpone the update.

  Meantime, Vallinger has learned from security sources that Stella Kellogg is still circulating in Washington. Her signal was picked up on the Metro yesterday. Then she spent time this morning in the Woodley Park neighborhood before moving east, “at jogging speed,” to the Red Line Metro stop at the zoo. Attempts to apprehend her “have so far been unsuccessful.” Vallinger has urged his contacts to “interdict her sooner rather than later, dead or alive.” Walking toward an emergency staff meeting, he adds that she’s a “highly dangerous agent in the pay of foreigners who wish to bring us down.”

  His staff awaits him patiently. Entering the conference room, Vallinger lowers himself haltingly into the chair at the head of the long oak table. Glowering from one side to the other, he tells his employees that they have to “brave this storm just one more day.” Once the nation’s boosts are updated, the outrage will subside, he predicts.

  His staffers nod. They exchange uneasy glances and trade messages across the table, but no one utters a word. Many of them, Vallinger knows, have to be wondering if the Respect function could possibly render them even more sheeplike than they already are. Vallinger misses Tyler Dahl, his only employee capable of independent thought—that is, if he doesn’t include Smedley. Vallinger shudders at the thought of the porn entrepreneur who is now “at war” with him.

  As his staffers message back and forth, comparing status notes on their clients and no doubt wondering about the future of the firm, Vallinger messages Dahl: “Losing clients, but just have to make it one more day.” Then he adds, in a postscript: “What’s the status of SC?”

  He hears back immediately. “Hang in there. Some changes in status of SC.”

  Vallinger switches to voice and hears from Dahl that Suzy Claiborne somehow found out what was up and managed to take control of the Detention Center. She has locked the anesthesiologist and the guard outside, Dahl says. “I can hear them pounding on the kitchen door. They probably need to use the bathroom.”

  Vallinger is mystified by this news. “Why don’t you just let them in?” he asks.

  “She has me locked in the supply closet. And if I manage to get out, she has it rigged so that all this crap will fall on my head, including one of those antique clocks from the living room.”

  Vallinger leans back and sighs. “Get control of the situation,” he orders. “If you come up short, I’m coming out there myself.”

  Sixty-one

  3/15/72 2:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  The leading DM protesters in Washington get word in early afternoon to move their troops from Franklin Square down to the White House. This doesn’t seem to make sense. The opposition should stay focused on Vallinger, who stands to make a fortune from the Respect function. This is business. The president is a bit player in the drama, if she’s involved at all. But the DM organizers obediently round up a couple hundred of their grumbling forces and march them over to 16th Street.

  As they pass McPherson Square, Bao-Zhi, still wearing his Yankees cap and dark glasses, bounds out of the Metro and joins them. When they reach the White House, the group resumes its chants. Shielded by protesters, Bao-Zhi reaches through the black iron fence and hides Stella’s chip behind a boxwood shrub. He tosses some dirt on it and then jumps to his feet and joins the protesters. After a few minutes, he slips away in search of a place to sleep.

  Sixty-two

  3/15/72 3:02 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  Stella walks into the newsroom, looks out at a room full of café tables and potted palms, and sees her husband sitting alone. He is drinking a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper. He’s thinner than he once was, with gray hair at his temples. The way his head is tilted, she can’t see the bottom half of his face. But as he turns the page of the newspaper, she sees his hands and remembers how small they were.

  Francisco looks up. He sees her and smiles as he gets to his feet.

  Stella dreamed of this moment for decades, time and again through all of those years that she thought he was dead. And she has been anticipating this meeting, nervously, ever since she figured out that Francisco was Don Paquito, and that she would be seeing him in Juárez. For the last day, she has been awash in emotions. Being without her chip has added to the intensity since the wet brain, unlike the boost, wraps feelings into every thought or calculation.

  Yet now that the moment has come and Francisco is limping toward her, Stella feels nothing. Why is he limping? she wonders. And why do I feel so blasé?

  Francisco, an inch shorter, reaches with his small hands and places them on her cheeks. He looks into her eyes and tells her that she is still
beautiful and that he’s sorry.

  All Stella can think is that he has practiced this line. Emotionally, she is not engaged. She looks into his eyes and inspects them not as windows into a soul, but as shiny tools. She studies the yellow specks in the brown of his irises. At the bottom of each one she sees the reflection of her own white blouse. The image reminds her of an art history class she took with Francisco. Dutch painters in the fifteenth century, she recalls, used to capture such details. She remembers the name Jan van Eyck.

  Francisco has stopped talking. He pulls back from her face and waits for her to say something. In her anticipation of this moment, Stella realizes, she failed to prepare any lines of her own. Finally, feeling the pressure to deliver a line, she says, “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t dead?”

  Francisco starts to answer. He repeats that he’s sorry and starts talking about the chip wars and Paraguay. Stella can tell, even half listening, that he has practiced these lines, too. She doesn’t want to hear them. Maybe later, but not now.

  She’s aware that people are looking at them. Ralf and Simon are to her left. Two other men are on the other side, one of them enormous with something dreadfully wrong with his nose. Francisco keeps talking, something about people he met in Bolivia.

  She interrupts him: “What can you do to save Suzy?”

  Sixty-three

  3/15/72 7:02 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Rush hour is winding down in Washington and evening has fallen. For the last hour, the demonstrators in Franklin Square have blocked traffic on K Street for a “vigil.” They’re holding candles and chanting. John Vallinger cannot hear them through his window, which is a small relief. He sees that some of the people blocked in traffic are stepping out of their cars—abandoning them—to join the protest.

  He returns to his desk and continues to read Tribune articles in his boost. He’s interrupted by a message from a security source. Stella Kellogg was tracked riding on the Metro from the zoo to Metro Center, he learns, and from there to McPherson Square, where she apparently joined a parade of demonstrators to the White House. “She’s there now?” Vallinger asks.

  “Her signal has vanished. But that tends to happen around the White House.”

  “So then she’s there. Go arrest her.”

  “We went. Couldn’t find her.”

  Vallinger feels enraged. This woman’s son has delivered a dose of the greatest pain he has ever suffered, and is threatening to turn the rest of his life into a living hell. Her husband is running a newspaper whose sole aim, it appears, is to destroy him. The woman who appears to be orchestrating this all stands five blocks away—and they can’t find her.

  “Have you considered that she may be engaged in a plot against the president?” Vallinger asks.

  “Well, no…”

  “I would call it a reasonable assumption,” the lobbyist says. “If she is spotted again, I would urge that she be dealt with preemptively.”

  “Understood,” his source says.

  Vallinger returns to his reading. Even though he gets The Tribune every day, he must have missed a few of these stories. One of them describes his “brilliant” strategy of planting the leak about the open surveillance gate to divert the attention of his enemies, including the DM, from the much more controversial Respect function in the update. A source close to Vallinger quotes him describing the maneuver as a “head fake.” The article explains the obscure basketball term “from early in the century” and how it relates to the case.

  Vallinger stops and rereads the paragraph. He remembers discussing the head fake, but with whom? He goes into his boost and surfs back to Thursday. Even before watching the scene, he remembers it. Then he sees the video. Tyler Dahl stands before him as Vallinger describes—a bit laboriously, in retrospect—a basketball term from his childhood. He hears his own proud voice: “They took the story we wanted them to run with, and not the one we wanted to hide.” The image of Dahl stands before him, nodding.

  Vallinger remembers the rest of the conversation. That was when he told Dahl, in absolute confidence, about the Respect function. Within minutes, he thinks, the young aide who appeared so much more intelligent than the others, and infinitely more trustworthy than Smedley, was off blabbing to a reporter at The Tribune.

  Dahl is the leak. This means that Stella Kellogg, whose death he has just ordered, may be innocent—or at least not as guilty as he thought. Vallinger briefly considers messaging his security source and calling off the kill order. But that would make him look weak and indecisive, which is the last thing he can afford at this juncture.

  Plus, he’s busy. He has to figure out how to deal with the mole currently locked in the bedroom of his detention facility. For a half hour, Vallinger sits at his desk and thinks. Then he comes up with an idea. At the end of a long and harrowing day, John Vallinger breaks into a smile.

  Sixty-four

  3/15/72 7:02 p.m. Juárez Standard Time

  It isn’t until the cocktail hour, when Stella sips her first margarita in decades and tries out her Spanish, that she feels herself warming ever so slightly to Francisco. They’re standing in the playa, next to the tallest palm, and Stella recalls, in her halting and rusty Spanish, that afternoon at Middlebury, when the professors discussed the startling news about the “capped” workers in China.

  “Do you remember what you said?” she asks him.

  “It was something about a dictatorship,” he says.

  “Yes, but you said that those of us without chips were going to be Neanderthals, while everyone else became Cro-Magnon,” she says. “Do you still believe that?”

  “No,” he says. “I had stopped believing that even before we moved to Washington. I became convinced that people were confusing tools with intelligence. They still do.”

  “That’s a relief,” Stella says, “because we’re Neanderthals now, you and I.”

  Francisco smiles and offers her another drink.

  “This one will do,” she says with a cool smile. She heads off to talk to Ellen.

  Later, at dinner, Stella finds herself sitting between Simon and an enormous man named Oscar Espinoza, a colleague of Smedley’s. He seems very pleasant and tells her that he was once a boxer—a conclusion anyone could easily have drawn, Stella thinks, from one look at his face. Her conversation with him draws to a close as the food arrives.

  Stella feels uneasy talking to Simon, who worked with his father for more than three years without telling her that Francisco was alive. They’ll discuss that later, she decides, and instead asks him where he lives in El Paso.

  “A neighborhood called Sunset Heights,” he says. “A historic district. If you climb up on the roof here, you can actually see it. It’s less than a mile away.” He pauses and unwraps the corn husk from a tamale. “Listen, Mom,” he says, turning to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Papa. I should have.”

  “We weren’t talking much about anything, you and I,” she says. “Or any of us, for that matter.”

  “We will be now.”

  A voice interrupts them, saying, “Don Paquito!” It’s Smedley, still wearing his yellow golf shirt. “Don Paquito,” he repeats, “I think we should revisit the idea of printing your entire newspaper on one of my sites, every day.”

  “I told you I’d think about it,” Francisco says.

  “The time is now,” Smedley says. “The update is tomorrow night. Just the release of the articles on the Artemis site…” He stops, evidently embarrassed by his reference to his sex site. He looks at Ellen and says, “Excuse me.”

  Then he continues, “Just the articles on that one site have stirred up the whole country. People are in the streets for the first time in decades. As one publisher to another, you’ve got to get the news out. If you publish the paper tonight in the boost, you’ll have 200 million readers tomorrow. It could change history.”

  Francisco shakes his head. “How many of those people will pay?”

  “Ask for donations and you’ll
probably get a mint.”

  “Sacrifice my whole business model, the economics of this entire city, for the promise of donations?” Francisco says. “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  No one says anything. The only noises are the clinking of silverware and the sounds of chewing and swallowing, which are especially pronounced, Stella notices, to her right.

  Then Ellen speaks up. She recently heard, she says, about the day when students at Middlebury learned about the Chinese experiments with enhanced workers in Shanghai. “Of all the students,” she says, turning to Francisco, “you were the only one who stood up against it. Isn’t that right?”

  “There might have been somebody else,” Francisco mumbles.

  “And you warned about dictators using chips to control people, right?”

  “I think my argument was essentially Darwinian,” Francisco says. “But I probably made a point about dictators. That was on my mind back then.”

  “Right. So now what you predicted has come true. You’ve helped me to see this. And tomorrow they’re going to turn us into something like slaves…” Ellen’s voice starts to break, and she takes a sip of her margarita. It makes her cough. She stops, dabs at her eyes with her handkerchief and takes a sip of ice water, and then starts again. “Look,” she says, changing her tack, “we all screw up. We cheat, we lie, we do all kinds of things we’re ashamed of. And then sometimes, if we’re lucky, we have a chance to do something good, to make up for things, or at least to try to.” She looks up the table at Francisco. “You have a chance to give the world something so … wonderful.…” She breaks into tears again, as Ralf puts his arm around her shoulders and kisses the top of her head.

  “All right, all right,” Francisco says. He looks at Smedley. “She’s right. Go ahead with it.”