The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  Sixty-five

  3/15/72 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  A technician at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington presses a button to deliver the software update twenty-four hours ahead of schedule. Issued by special request, it goes to a single citizen identified only by a hash tag.

  Sleeping on the floor of a supply closet in Virginia, his head propped on a box of detergent and a spare mop head, Tyler Dahl dreams he is riding in a fast car. Something flashes in his boost and the car screeches to a halt, runs backward, and then takes off again. Dahl rolls over, wraps his arms around the mop head, and keeps dreaming.

  The technician in Washington receives a message: “Update successful?”

  He checks. For this he calls up Tyler Dahl’s boost on the large screen and enters through the new surveillance gate, 318 Blue. Stretching before him are seemingly endless aisles of memories and images. It looks like an entire life. The calculating division rises like a factory to his left.

  “Update appears successful,” he replies.

  “And the Respect function?”

  “Testing will be possible only when the subject is awake.”

  Sixty-six

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2072:

  DAY OF THE NATIONAL COGNITIVE UPDATE

  3/16/72 6:02 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Bao-Zhi strolls up Pennsylvania Avenue at dawn, still wearing his Yankees cap and sunglasses. He’s surprised to find a handful of protesters still carrying on their vigil. One is hunched over a poster stretched out on the sidewalk, writing: “March 16: The last day of American freedom.” Bao-Zhi walks past them and stops by the black iron fence to tie his sneaker. He looks through it, past the boxwood shrub, and sees a glint of plastic.

  Still there, he thinks. He’ll be back later, when there’s a larger crowd to blend into. He makes his way six blocks east, to Chinatown, where he knows a place that makes a tasty breakfast soup for a small and secretive wild clientele.

  Sixty-seven

  3/16/72 6:14 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  John Vallinger knows he should focus all of his energy on the job at hand: beating back growing opposition to the software update. It’s the defining event of his career. Pushing it through today will require smart and ceaseless diplomacy with his clients, politicians, and his national security contacts, maybe even the public. He has no time to waste.

  And yet, as the first morning light streams through his window of his lonely house in Cleveland Park, Vallinger sits in an armchair by his bed working intently on an experiment. It involves testing the Respect function in Tyler Dahl’s newly updated boost. For this, he needs to compose an effective message. In a sense, he thinks, the message is an algorithm—a set of commands. And yet the commands will not be processed by a machine, but by a discerning and intelligent person. Even with the Respect update in his boost, Dahl is not likely to follow orders that sound insane, or even unreasonable. Vallinger cannot tell him to lop off Suzy Claiborne’s head or to stab her in the heart with a kitchen knife. If Vallinger understands the software well—and he has sat through endless discussions about it, in English and Chinese—people with this program will still have their wits about them. But they’ll find themselves inclined to heed authorities, simply because it feels better. (Vallinger, prudently, has opted to skip the update himself.)

  So he must compose a reasonable note that nonetheless will lead Dahl to commit a crime, one serious enough to land him in deep trouble. This will be John Vallinger’s revenge on a once trusted aide who has betrayed him. In a day of unrelenting work, this will be his one bit of fun.

  He writes: “Subdue Suzy Claiborne when she brings you breakfast. Tie her up and punish her until she details the leadership structure of the DM. I expect you to have it by ten a.m. Don’t play soft. No holds barred. Leave the guard and doctor outside. They’ll only get in the way. Good luck. Your Boss.”

  Vallinger reads it through twice, admiring the restraint and the balanced tone. It’s worth a shot, he thinks. He sends it to Tyler Dahl’s updated boost. Then he rises to get dressed for what promises to be a long day.

  Sixty-eight

  3/16/72 8:31 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

  Tyler Dahl wakes up after a dream-filled sleep on the floor of the supply closet with his arm around a mop head. He has a crick in his neck. As he stands up and rubs it, he sees a new message from Vallinger. He reads it. The message reads like an order Dr. Frankenstein would give to his hunchbacked assistant, Igor. Better to ignore it, Dahl thinks, and he wonders for the first time if the pressure is unhinging his boss. Dahl is convinced that Suzy Claiborne knows almost nothing about the senior leadership of the DM. Beating her won’t do any good. Yet the idea behind the first part of the order—subduing her when she brings breakfast—makes sense.

  He calls out from the closet. “Suzy, I’m starving! Can you bring some breakfast? I promise I won’t try anything.”

  Suzy hears him and pays no attention. She cleans her teeth by putting toothpaste on a finger and rubbing them. Then she works out for forty-five minutes on a rowing machine in the exercise room, lifts weights for a half hour, and sits in the sauna. After showering, she gets dressed and sends a message to Ralf: “I have Dahl locked up and am alone in the house. Don’t know what to do. Ideas?” She sends it, but receives no confirmation of delivery.

  Hungry for breakfast, she goes downstairs, where Dahl’s pleas are louder and more bothersome. “Pleeeeese Suzy,” he yells, pounding on the door. “Just something to eat.”

  “Quiet,” she yells. She looks outside. The guard and the doctor are nowhere to be seen, and a red car that was parked in the driveway is gone. She figures that they went home, or maybe to a hotel.

  “Pleeese Suzy!”

  He won’t shut up. Suzy grabs a box of protein and walks toward the closet. She’ll open the door six inches, she figures, and jam it in. But when she opens the door, it hits a piece of twine which pulls out the leg from a shelf she mounted yesterday. The booby trap releases a cascade of canned food and knick-knacks onto her. An antique Swiss cuckoo clock, made of brass and dark wood, strikes the side of her head. She crumples to the ground, bleeding.

  Tyler Dahl steps out of the closet feeling a sense of great satisfaction. “She’s subdued,” he thinks. “I’m following his orders without even doing anything.”

  Suzy lies unconscious on the living-room floor. Dahl finds a towel and presses it to her wound. It doesn’t seem to be bleeding much. In the same supply closet he slept in, he finds a ball of twine and scissors. He puts his arms under Suzy and tries to lift her onto a coffee table. She’s big—taller than he is, and built like an Amazon. He remembers her tossing him around like a plaything in bed. He can barely budge her body. So he binds her wrists and ties them to the leg of a heavy couch. He does the same to her ankles and hitches them to the stairway banister.

  When she comes to, he figures, he’ll interrogate her. Maybe she knows more than he thinks. Dahl walks into the kitchen for breakfast. He’s smiling. And feels better about himself than he has in months. Could it have something to do with last night’s dreams?

  When he returns to the stairway landing, Dahl sees that Suzy has managed to roll over to her right side. Her bound arms are twisted, which makes her look even more like a prisoner, and more lovely. He’s tempted to kiss her, despite the beating she gave him yesterday and the miserable night she subjected him to in the closet. He kneels down and bends his face to hers. But instead of kissing her, he cuffs her cheek with his fist. He does it again, this time a little harder.

  She groans.

  Funny, Dahl thinks. He has never punched anyone in his life. Yet it seems to come as naturally as breathing. He gives her another punch, this time near the eye. It’s about the same place she punched him yesterday. Remembering that, he hits her again.

  She’s awake now, and tries to sit up. But the bindings hold her down. Her eyes flash at him. “Getting your kicks, Tyler?”

  He doesn’t
say anything, but punches her again. Then he reaches down to her neck and tries to grab her wind pipe between his thumb and forefinger. With a frantic movement of her head, she slips out of his grasp.

  She’s panting now, her head back on the floor.

  “You know,” Dahl says, “this is the first time I’ve ever hit anyone. I actually object to violence.”

  “Then why are you doing this?” Suzy asks in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t know. It just feels like the right thing to do.” He pauses. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. Okay?”

  She doesn’t answer and he slaps her face. Then he does it again.

  Suzy writhes, pulling at the bindings on her wrists and ankles. They’re tight. She sends a message to Ralf, telling him that Tyler Dahl has her tied on the floor and is beating her. The message doesn’t go through. “What do you want to know?” she asks Dahl. Maybe talking with him will buy some time.

  Sixty-nine

  3/16/72 8:32 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Ralf, Simon, and Stella drive up in Ellen’s Sheng-li to the garbage-strewn lot. They’re fifteen minutes late for their session. Originally they planned to cross again through the downtown fence. But Simon couldn’t arrange the security for it, and they had to ride fifteen miles west in Francisco’s gas-chugging Buick, crawl through the Santa Teresa tunnel, and endure the rush hour traffic back to El Paso on I-10.

  The software update is scheduled for midnight on the East Coast, only thirteen and a half hours from now. Ralf will have only forty-five minutes at the machine to derail it.

  He loads his chip onto the tray and inserts it, and the contents of his boost pop up on the screen. He sees two new messages from Suzy. With his mother and brother looking over his shoulder, he opens and reads them. They exchange glances but say nothing as Ralf responds. “I’m here. Is he torturing you?”

  She responds right away. “I think he’s doing it for fun.”

  Ralf asks her if he can ride shotgun in her boost, and she gives him the go-ahead. Ralf’s hands flit across the large screen, and a moment later the three of them are looking at a bright living room furnished like a hotel. The floor is strewn with cans of food and what look like pieces of a clock. As Suzy turns her head they see a young man with short blond hair and piercing blue eyes staring down at her. He’s smiling. Then a fist comes toward them and the image jolts to the right and shakes for a second or two. Then it returns to Dahl, who looks content.

  “Holy God,” Stella says.

  “Ask him why he’s doing this,” Ralf says.

  “Why are you doing this, Tyler?” she says.

  “I’m just asking you some questions,” he says.

  “But why are you hitting me?”

  “I told you,” he said. “It feels like the right thing to do. The right approach.”

  “Ask him if he got orders this morning from his boss,” Ralf says.

  Suzy relays the question.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. “He wants me to interrogate you.” He hits her on the shoulder, causing the image in El Paso to shake.

  “That prick,” Ralf mutters.

  He touches the screen and delivers a message to John Vallinger. “Did you tell your man to torture Suzy?”

  Vallinger is standing at his window, looking at the demonstration below when the message arrives. A handful of congressmen have joined the protesters’ ranks. He can see one who has benefited from Vallinger’s largess for decades. He’s shaking his fist toward Vallinger’s window. And there are reports that senators are pushing for emergency hearings. But to Vallinger’s relief, analysts doubt they can get them started before the end of the week.

  He reads the message from Alvare, and his heart skips a beat. It’s working—better than he could have imagined. Dahl interpreted his order for a “rough” interrogation just the way he hoped. Could the software be sophisticated enough to interpret the goals of the authority figure, and to look past the vague wording of a command? Vallinger wonders about that.

  It’s only then that he remembers Alvare’s threat from yesterday. The genius hacked and now controls the headache code. His shoulders sag. How stupid to have forgotten. This leads him to wonder if he might be losing his edge. Or maybe he’s simply overworked. In any case, he now regrets his early-morning experiment with the new technology. He cannot afford complications today.

  “I know nothing about it,” he answers.

  The response pops up immediately. “Liar.”

  A moment later, John Vallinger collapses to the floor with a crippling headache. Aides rush into his office and prop him back onto his chair

  Seventy

  3/16/72 8:52 a.m. Mountain Standard Time

  Ralf has only twenty-three minutes left on the machine. The screen is still showing what Suzy sees. For now, it’s an empty room. The picture rises and falls gently with her breath. Tyler Dahl has apparently stepped away.

  Ralf tells Simon and Stella that he’s given Vallinger a nasty headache. “What do I do now?” he asks.

  “Tell him to call off Suzy’s torture,” Stella says.

  “Okay, Mom. But we’ve only got twenty-two minutes to get Vallinger to cancel the update. We have to prioritize here.”

  “You will not arrange your priorities to abandon Suzy,” Stella says.

  “Okay, okay,” Ralf says. “But I’m going to break into this guy’s head.” His fingers fly over the screen. Nothing changes. Ralf stops, closes his eyes, and concentrates. Then he puts his fingers back to work. The scene on the screen changes. It shows the view out a window in Washington. Teeming protesters are gathered below. For as far as Vallinger and his copilots can see, from east to west, K Street is packed with angry people.

  “Get a load of that!” Simon says.

  Stella’s not impressed. “What about Suzy?” she asks.

  “Right,” Ralf says. He issues more commands, and the screen divides into two windows, one showing Vallinger’s point of view, the other Suzy’s.

  Ralf, his voice now active inside Vallinger’s boost, tells the lobbyist that he has twenty minutes to postpone the update. “Or you’ll have this headache for the rest of your days.”

  “Not going to happen,” Vallinger says. He turns around. On the left side of the screen, Ralf, Stella, and Simon watch as he moves. The image seems to lurch through his office, out into the lobby where concerned employees ask him if he’s okay. He ignores them and continues out the door. His finger presses the Down button on the elevator.

  “He’s not paying any attention to you,” Simon says.

  Stella, her eyes fixed on the right side of the screen, grabs Simon’s hand. “That guy’s coming back into Suzy’s room,” she says. The three of them look to the right. Tyler Dahl is looming above her, still smiling. A glint of metal shines in the corner of the screen. It looks like he’s holding scissors. Suzy looks away from him and closes her eyes. That side of the screen goes dark.

  On the other side, Vallinger is coming into a parking garage. Standing by the wall of the garage is a man wearing dark glasses and a blue baseball cap.

  “I could swear that’s Bao-Zhi,” Stella says.

  “The guy who was in your third floor, with the drums?” Simon says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Vallinger looks away from Bao-Zhi and makes his way toward an immense black Houyi. He opens the door and enters. In pained and halting words he gives the car an address in Alexandria. The car moves forward toward the exit.

  “He’s going to the clinic I went to,” Stella says. She touches Ralf’s shoulder. “The one we both went to. He’s getting his boost taken out.”

  Suzy’s eyes open and the picture appears on the screen. The scissors are out of her vision, but the image swings back and forth as she writhes. “Suzy,” Ralf says. “Listen to me. Tell him that we are recording absolutely everything he is doing. He’s committing a crime, and we’re watching.”

  Suzy tells Tyler Dahl that he’s being watched. He disappears from the room and comes
back with a big roll of gray masking tape. They hear a ripping noise, and then the screen goes black. They hear Suzy scream.

  John Vallinger’s Houyi inches through the sea of protesters on K Street. Angry faces press up against the glass, yelling at him. People holding signs pound on the windows with their fists. Two young men climb onto the hood of the car and beat against the windshield. But he continues forward and finally breaks free. The car turns left on 14th Street. As Vallinger puts his aching head in his hands, the image on the screen shows only blurred fingers.

  “We only have eleven minutes,” Simon says.

  Ralf touches the screen to talk to Vallinger. “You don’t have to get your boost taken out,” he says. “Just tell them to postpone the update by two weeks and get your man to stop torturing.”

  “You, young man,” Vallinger says, “can go to hell.”

  Another voice speaks into Vallinger’s boost. “We’ve spotted the target.”

  “Good,” he says. “Proceed with interdiction. Keep the messages vague,” he adds. “We have an interested party riding shotgun here.”

  “Roger.”

  “Who are you after?” Ralf asks.

  “Someone you might know very well,” Vallinger says. “Maybe you might consider taking off the headache.”

  The voice returns. “Target heading south on 14th Street.”

  “Northwest?” Vallinger says. “Which cross street?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “She must be following me!” Vallinger turns around in his seat and looks out his back window. He sees a stream of protesters heading west, toward the White House. He looks at the vehicles following him.

  “We can’t take action this close to the White House,” his source says.

  “Okay,” Vallinger says. “As soon as you can.” His car heads south toward the Mall. Again, he twists to look out the back window. “What kind of vehicle is she in?” he asks. “I can probably see her.”