by David Shafer
Mark sat before his unfinished sherbet cup. He hated sherbet. Was that a title? What would be the compensation? If he was going to play this right, he had to quit letting Pope rattle Straw. He had to get Straw away from Pope. “I’m intrigued, James,” Mark said. “But I’m also exhausted. Let’s discuss it tomorrow, you and I together.”
Then a quick rap at the bulkhead, and a hot, butchy woman stepped into the dining room. “Excuse the interruption,” she said. “Mr. Pope, you’ll need to be on the next call. The prince is irate.”
“That fucking cum-guzzler,” Mark definitely heard Pope mutter, presumably of the irate prince. “Thank you, Tessa. I’ll be right there.” The woman stepped back but remained nearby. She was waiting for Pope in a way that made it clear to Mark that she was his first assistant. Pope pushed back his chair. “James: Until tomorrow. Marcus: Congratulations on the storyteller thing.” Then he looked straight at Mark and said evenly: “It’s the last job you’ll ever take.”
That night, Mark woke like a shot from a dream of a cigarette. His plan had been to get by with nicotine patches—he didn’t want Straw to know he smoked. But the patches made him feel thin-blooded and their effect lingered, making sleep into a briar patch. He paced the cabin. His porthole laughed at him. All he wanted were a few smoke-moderated breaths in the night air.
He decided to chance it. He found the two cigarettes he’d nicked from the Israeli grandma in the fumoir, and he slipped out into the hallway. He just had to find some access to a deck or gangway. But he was immediately confused by the labyrinth of the giant ship. It was like being in the gut of something. His first many steps took him away from the porthole in his cabin; then he made a right and then a right and then went up a flight of metal stairs. And then he could swear he was in the same place he’d been in thirty seconds ago. His heart began to beat faster. Singh the steward hadn’t exactly ordered him to stay in his room when he’d escorted Mark back there after dinner, but there was definitely a stay-in-your-room, Agatha Christie–type vibe on this ship, like dinner was the last scheduled event of the day, and then it was curfew.
So when Mark heard very intentional steps heading down the corridor intersection he was approaching, he slipped quickly through a nearby doorway. The move would have been superslick and graceful but for the fact that it landed him in a cabin that belonged to Pope’s assistant, the woman who had interrupted dinner. She was standing at a desk, leaning over a computer, wearing what he believed was called a camisole.
“You did not just sneak into my room,” she said.
There are times you go straight to the truth. “No. You are correct. I did not,” said Mark. “I was trying to get outside, on deck or whatever. I want to smoke this cigarette”—he held up a thin cigarette as proof—“but I got lost. This boat is nuts. And then I was kind of ducking to hide somewhere, because someone was coming, and I’m afraid of that creepy steward, and I know that’s stupid…” She wasn’t buying it; her expression said, Uninterested in the particulars. “Look, sorry, please excuse me,” Mark said, and he stepped into the corridor, out of her space. But she did not move to shut the door behind him. He looked left and then right. Then he turned around to her again and said, “Any chance you could help me out here?”
Tessa’s room was more of a stateroom than a cabin. It was twice the size of his. But it looked like she spent a lot of time in it. There were four laptops and a dozen other assorted technological devices blinking away in corners, paperwork in legal-type binders piled on two desks, empty cups and glasses marooned on ledges, and three huge duffel bags stacked in an open wardrobe.
But the salient feature of Tessa’s room was its balcony, or whatever it was called on a ship. That’s where they sat and smoked, listening to the slap and slosh of ocean ten decks below. Tessa smoked a Lucky Strike. Mark suffered through one of the Israeli woman’s fey cigarettes.
“I guess it was pretty dumb of me to sneak around,” said Mark, his mind having been made still and clear by the nicotine. “I mean, we’re guests here, right?”
“Well, yes and no,” she said. Some light fell on them from her stateroom, but the dark sea and moonless sky beat it back; he couldn’t see her face well enough to read any information that it might have held.
“Let’s talk about the no part, shall we?” he said.
That amused her. And then: “You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”
“Well, I guess not about this, no. But maybe there’s stuff I know that you don’t know.”
“What I don’t know is how you even got this far,” she said. But then she must have thought that too harsh, because she leaned a bit toward him and said, “I mean, you must have skills; Straw is mad about you. You want a less silly cigarette?” And she offered him one of her Luckies.
He took the cigarette. “He’s a close reader. He told me that my book inspired him to begin this big project of his, the thing he’s calling New Alexandria.”
“But you don’t know what he meant by that?”
“James and I don’t really discuss operational specifics, just goals. Abstractly, more or less.”
“Oh, you’re the kind of therapist I want,” said Tessa.
She had a point. In one of their recent sessions, when Straw had implied that New Alexandria involved data collection on an unprecedented scale, Mark had only agreed that it was a good idea to collect knowledge. When Straw veered off on a rant about how after the correction, there wouldn’t be so many damn people braying about their information rights, Mark didn’t say, Wait. What correction are you talking about? He just tried to steer Straw back to the stuff about how we all benefit by making our interactions more transparent.
“I guess tomorrow you’ll get more of the operational specifics,” said Tessa. “Though as our new SIC, you’ll want to go light on that part.”
“Ess-Eye what now?”
“Storyteller-in-chief.”
“Yeah, that. Listen, I haven’t actually said I’ll take the job yet. James and I are going to talk about it tomorrow.”
“Your thing with him looks pretty complicated.”
Mark thought that was very perceptive of her. Complicated it certainly was, at least for him: he had to act like a dutiful son but one who gave counsel to the father; manage Straw’s egomania; say enough to display his mind’s agility but not too much, lest he betray the sizable gaps in his knowledge.
“Have you always gone in for older men?”
Mark snapped to. “Pardon?”
“I just mean, you know, the age difference between you. I was once in a relationship like that. I found it challenging.”
“I’m James Straw’s counselor,” said Mark slowly. “I counsel him. That’s all.”
She leaned forward and into a bit of light. She looked sincerely confused. “Really?”
Mark nodded.
“Oh,” said Tessa. “Huh. You’re not his…partner?”
Shit. Who else thought this? “I’m straight. You know that, right?”
She made a tiny big-deal sign with her eyes. “Well, I guess I do now. Do you know that I’m queer?”
“I couldn’t decide,” he said. “What, exactly, made you think I was gay?”
“Pope said Straw was bringing his boy into the operation. And since you’re not his son, I thought he meant the other kind of boy.”
This was terrible. People thought he was Straw’s boy. There came to his mind a fleeting image of what it would be like to service Straw, to be pressed against his skinny, limp flanks, hold his mottled hand.
“It’s strange, though, you know?” said Tessa. “Because I read your book, and I must have missed the part where you advocate for the construction of a diffuse remote network of offshore data vaults.”
Diffuse remote network of offshore data vaults? “Well, I believe I did go on about preparedness,” said Mark. “You know, as a generality. I suppose remote whatever offshore data vaults kind of fit in with that.”
She definitely thought he
was funny. He tried to get more out of her about the scope and nature of what the ship was engaged in, but she would say no more about it. A bit desperately, he tried the direct approach—“But there’s nothing illegal about New Alexandria, is there?”—and the way she immediately clamped down told him all he needed to know.
And then she said, “Listen, I actually have loads more work to do tonight. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully, after you’ve taken the tour.” It seemed likely that when this woman pleaded work, she actually meant she had to work. Various of her devices had blooped repeatedly with incoming messages, and the binders on her desk were too big to be for show. She saw him to the door of her stateroom and used her long-fingered hands to scribble for him in the air a route back to his cabin.
There was a klaxon splitting the air. Mark leaped from his bunk, forgetting how elevated it was, and one ankle buckled beneath him and he yelped in pain and ran to the door of his cabin in his underwear. Opening it, he found Singh standing outside, as still as a queen’s guard.
“Good morning, Mr. Deveraux,” Singh said rather loudly, because the klaxon was as deafening in the corridor as it was in the cabin.
“Where’s the emergency?” yelled Mark, but even before he’d finished the question, the klaxon quit klaxoning, and his yelling was suddenly strange.
“There is no emergency, Mr. Deveraux,” said Singh. “That was the morning bell. It is six thirty. Breakfast will be in half an hour.”
Breakfast was smoothies and sardines on toast, served in a sort of officers’ mess, not the wood-paneled dining room of the night before. Straw was there and was very excited. Pope was there too, slathering sardines on his toast. Hovering nearby him was an attractive female assistant twenty years his junior, but it wasn’t Tessa, who Mark figured was probably above hovering.
“We’ll join you again just as soon as you’ve seen the ship,” Straw said to Mark. “I thought that you and I could take the afternoon to relax.”
The first half hour of the tour was docented by a bearded and barrel-chested Greek who clearly didn’t want to talk about anything other than life rafts and bow thrusters and nautical miles and who kept correcting Mark whenever he failed to use a feminine pronoun for Sine Wave 2. Anyway, Mark was too boggled by the size of the ship to do any good ferreting. From a cornice high on the pilothouse, looking out over the length and breadth of the vessel, the thin line of the horizon strung across its distant bow, Mark felt that Sine Wave 2 was the center of the universe, that it could bend things into itself. Or into herself.
“So what does it carry?” asked Mark in some exasperation, indicating the quarter mile of mysterious volume that extended from the ship’s superstructure like a titanic boner. The Greek simply shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t know what this ship carries?” Mark asked the Greek’s back. He was docenting the tour at a fair clip now.
“Not my department,” he said with such blank-wallness that Mark understood he was done talking about this.
Luckily, the guy who the Greek handed Mark off to was chattier.
“Mark Deveraux. It’s an honor. Big fan. Big fan,” said Tony, pointing two thumbs at his own chest.
They stepped into a room that Mark could have mistaken for the bridge—it ran the width of the ship and had windows on three sides and was buzzing with people and bristling with screens and devices; serpents of bundled data cables snaked the allées between the workstations. But Mark had begun his tour on the ship’s bridge, at least four decks up, where he’d seen a dozen handsome officers in uniforms sharp with pleats and insignia. Most of those guys were looking at radar screens and gauges and the actual ocean, binoculars in leather cases on the walls behind them.
The people in this room weren’t part of the ship’s crew, though there was something tight, controlled, synchronous about them. Near silence, just the low buggish background of plastic keyboards. Near stillness, just dudes (they were all men) intent in Aeron chairs, oblivious to the sea.
The room looked as serious and data-heavy as Mission Control at NASA, but the techies weren’t middle-aged guys with too many pens. They were Asian guys and white guys and a few black guys, all under thirty-five, wearing Gap jeans and oxford shirts. Their stations showed those minimal attempts at cubicle decoration usually seen in all-male IT departments: snapshots from epic weekends, ironically offered action figures, pinups from windsurfing magazines.
Mark and Tony stood at the center of the large room near a well-stocked deli tray set up on a folding table: a shiny coffee urn; Danish; little ramekins of Splenda. Mark was boggled and back-footed. Was this New Alexandria? There was a tiny, keen ringing in his ears. To cover his distress, he poured himself a coffee. Tony was talking.
“The feed comes in from the computer”—he gestured forward vaguely—“and in this room, we do four things.” Tony indicated each of the four corners of the vast room as he spoke: “You got your gatherers, your bundlers, your amalgamators, and your gleaners. Once the gleaners do their thing, we move the data, in tranches, over to Processing and Encryption, and that’s when it gets written on the whales and launched.”
“The whales?” said Mark. If you repeat the last thing your interlocutor said with a rising lilt in your voice, it’s like politely saying, What did you just say?, and the sayer usually then feels obligated to offer more clarity. Mark centrifuged a sugar packet. He didn’t take sweetener in his coffee, but fwapping those little envelopes made a man look unconcerned and in control.
“The serve-whales,” Tony resumed brightly. “Well, I guess, technically, they’re remote seabed servers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them. But when you see one launched, it’s just hard not to think of a whale. The way they spin and dive, that sound they make.
“There’s Mr. Cole,” said Tony. The airsick net mender was coming toward them. Tony began to introduce Mark to Cole, but Cole outranked Tony and so flattened him. The SineCo culture intensified the male penchant for hierarchy; every interaction had a top and a bottom, and everything, even the air in the room, was zero-sum, get-your-own. Anyone who liked getting ahead had to like seeing people behind him.
“Sure. Sure. The writer,” said Cole, as though writer were a funny antique job, like falconer. “We met coming in.”
“Of course,” said Mark, like it was some historical event instead of yesterday.
“Come with me,” said Cole. “Pope wanted you to see what the gleaners do.”
Cole walked Mark down a line of workstations. He moved like a teacher seeking his pet, and when he stopped behind the desk of an overweight guy in a Liverpool jersey, the guy sat up a little straighter in his netted chair. He had about ten screens before him, keyboards like snare drums in the orbit of his left hand, and his right hand stroked a post-mouse input device that Mark had never seen before. Two of the screens really were just running code, but at a clip so fast it was barely discernible, so the effect was like one of those little plug-in Zen fountains from the SkyMall catalog. The guy was wearing a flip-down visor across his eyes that looked like it could be used for telesurgery. He seemed to be selecting items on the screen and moving them around—dragging and dropping—but at a speed that Mark had never conceived of. It was like watching a dervish.
“Do you know what he’s doing?” Cole asked Mark.
Not really. Mining data? “I do. But you’re the information architect. Why don’t you tell me?”
Cole nodded, as if to say Fair enough. “So the material these guys are working with has already been enriched. This isn’t Sears cards and DMV photos. This is the cream of the cream that rises to the top of the ten exabytes per day.” He said the exabytes part like Mark should know what that meant. Mark nodded.
Cole went on. “So you’re talking deep financials, all the way back to birth; full medical, obviously, HIPAA data and biosampling; kinship; relational; ownership; political. Then we do hopes and dreams, fears and desires, stills and video, voice and text…” He did this and-on-and-on motion
with one hand.
“Voice and text?” said Mark, just choosing at random.
“Everything the subject’s ever said or written over a digital line.”
“How everything?”
Cole just shrugged. “Everything everything. Capturing it’s easy. Well, not easy, but…you know, achievable. It’s just always been a question of jurisdiction, interpretation, organization, and storage. Once we beat those, it was a cinch. Here, put these on.” He handed Mark a visor with a flip-down screen, like the one the gleaner was wearing.
Mark donned the visor. One large screen was plain before his eyes; ten little ones encircled it, as in a kaleidoscope. He could still see the room they were in, though; he could still see his hand before his face.
“Say a name,” said Cole. “Any name.”
The name came instantly, unbidden. The Lost Girlfriend. Five years ago was the last time he’d seen her. He gave the name. “I think she lives in New York. She works for—”
But Cole wasn’t listening. The gleaner sitting beside them swiveled and stroked his devices. And in seconds, she was there, on the large screen before his right eye. And it wasn’t some mug shot, DMV photo, or surveillance still.
One of the smaller screens blossomed for a moment. Skype call with mother. T-16 days, it said on the screen. Another small screen showed the mother.
Margaret, still beautiful, at a kitchen table with a little girl. The girl looked like Margaret. So she had gotten the baby she wanted. And then Margaret stood and beamed and showed her rounded belly to her mother, to Mark and Cole and the fat guy in the Liverpool jersey.
“We’re not saying the names yet to anyone, but I’ll tell you. If it’s a boy, we’re going to name him Hershel.” Hershel was her dad’s name. Her dad had died of a heart attack while running with Margaret when she was a teenager. That had screwed her up for years.
