by David Shafer
“That’s actually what I need to talk to you about. Not about your being a jerk. I’m used to that”—a smile, to show that this was just play—“but about the people who got us the proof. Rox, I need your help finding them again.”
“What do you mean?”
Leila’s plan was not to get into the politics with her sister. Politically, Roxana was well to the right of Leila. Always had been. When Leila, at ten, had sat behind a cardboard box soliciting donations for Save the Whales, Roxana had really grilled her: Do you even know what they do with the money you send them?
So when Leila told Roxana the story, she told a truncated version. She told Roxana about Ned and Ding-Dong.com, how the owl icon had appeared on and vanished from her desktop. She said she’d been “diverted” to Dublin, and that she’d met some people there who had told her that they had proof that their dad was framed by a totally evil cabal. She said the Dublin people had asked her to meet with someone in Oregon to find something out for them, and that, in return, they would provide this proof that might clear her father.
Stumbling through it, Leila saw that she was leaving sizable gaps in the story, gaps that Roxana would probably want filled in before she’d help. Leila kept talking, hoping to race past the gaps. “So if there were, like, a hidden Internet—like, hidden inside the real one—would you know how it could be accessed? Or would you know someone who knows? Weren’t you doing that kind of work for a while, at PARC, that place in Pasadena? Because this woman in Dublin definitely said I could find her through the Dear Diary homepage.”
Roxana didn’t ask about how Leila had been diverted, and she didn’t ask about the people in Dublin, and she didn’t ask about what they wanted Leila to ask the guy in Portland about. Roxana asked only one question.
“So this is your fault?”
Leila sat there, stomach-punched.
“Isn’t that what you said Ned said? That the evil cabal people did this to Dad because you went snooping around where you didn’t have any business being, like you do?”
“Like I do? What the fuck, Roxana? Do not choose right now to pick me apart. Why would you do that?”
Leila had wanted to slug her sister one thousand times in her life. She had succumbed only once, at her own eleventh birthday party, when Roxana had stolen the love and pity and admiration of the room yet again, and on purpose. She’d learned then that slugging the armless is considered very poor form.
“If Dad gets hurt by this—” Leila said, after catching her breath.
“If?”
“—if Dad gets more hurt by this, I will never forgive myself, okay? I will hate myself, actually. Every day. I promise. Please, Rox. Right now, just help me find these people.”
Roxana’s face was set hard, but something gave in her eyes, and she spun in her netted chair. There was a mouse and a joystick below her desk; she worked them swiftly with her toes.
“You said ‘Dear Diary’?” she asked.
Leila nodded confirmation.
Roxana entered the words in a search field, using an eye-line entry device, flitting her gaze over a keyboard on a screen.
“I already put the name into all the search engines,” said Leila.
“Yeah. These aren’t really search engines,” said Roxana snootily.
As Roxana searched she asked Leila more about Dear Diary. Leila tried not to sound like a jabbering nutjob when describing it. But Roxana used a stay-silent trick that made Leila blab to fill the void, until Roxana said, “Leila. This totally evil cabal thing—you sure that’s not just…is it possible that you, you know, went native a bit when you were in Burma?”
Roxana, with her pretending not to know that the neocolonialist language bugged the shit out of Leila.
“Went native?” said Leila, ticking her head to the side.
“Just be sure these people aren’t playing you. Sometimes you want to do good so bad that you forget to be careful.”
Ah, the Roxanian condescension. The big sister’s knowing know-it-all-ness. “Well, they obviously didn’t play me, Roxana, because I didn’t get them what they wanted and they still helped us out.”
“Yeah. Dylan told me what their ‘help’ amounts to. Dad pleads to some dinky shit, and everyone still thinks he’s a pedophile. You said they use fifteen-digit identifiers?”
Leila nodded. She had decided to go with they, not we; she had omitted mention of the eye test, just as she had with Dylan.
“Okay, did she say the Dear Diary homepage or a Dear Diary homepage?” asked Roxana.
“‘The.’”
“I just don’t want you mixing with the wrong side,” said Roxana. She was really pressing her advantage here, the fact that Leila had asked for her help and had to just sit there and take this.
“The wrong side?” said Leila. “You serious? You looked outside of your bubble recently? Shit is going down out there.”
“Look, Leila,” said Roxana, “did a squeegee man give you a particularly pathetic look today? I know you’re always out there swinging for the dispossessed, but remember that it’s only because we got here that you can swing for anyone. Only because they let us in.” This was the line she was always returning to. “You think I would have done okay under Ahmadinejad?”
“Once he realized you could calculate rocket trajectories, I bet you would’ve done fine.”
“I would have been dead or behind some dumb wall before that. You know it.”
Leila rolled her eyes. She wanted to stamp her feet. “Look. Yes. You’re right. I do not think you—or any of us, actually—would have done okay under Ahmadinejad.” Roxana didn’t look appeased. “Rox. I’m proud to be an American. Okay?”
“Are you really, though? Aren’t you one of those apologetic Americans? That’s kind of what you do professionally, isn’t it?”
“Screw you, Roxana. I’m not out there apologizing for the Bill of Rights. And just so you know? Every year, wealth and power are becoming more concentrated in a smaller mafia. Five hundred men, fifty multinationals. The way to get really rich is still—still, Rox, and we’re well into the new millennium—to take advantage of all the poor schmucks beneath you. The way we have it set up now, there have to be thousands of poor people to offset each rich person. You think I apologize too much? Maybe you should be apologizing to some girl who has to shit in a canal while you have people building you prosthetics.”
“Okay. Okay,” said Roxana. Leila’s burst of anger had worked. “I’m sorry I said that about your job. I actually think that what you do is admirable,” Roxana conceded, shrugging her pear-like shoulders. “But you’re wrong about how we have it set up now. All those poor people are welcome up here, with us. I love this country, Leila. And I think anyone talking about its overthrow is misguided. And I think that so-called radicals are dangerous, because they move too quickly, like children. And, like children, they fall off walls. They usually end up bringing about something other than what they intended.”
“I’m not trying to overthrow America. Have you considered that it’s the other guys who are doing that, that they’re the ones subverting and co-opting and rigging things? We’ve got to push back before it’s too late to push back. We’ve got to at least be ready.”
“But you said it’s a postnationalist organization,” said Roxana. “That sounds to me like a bunch of affluent anarchists. Turtleneck types with tiny glasses of red wine.”
“Okay. You’re affluent now,” said Leila, moving in. “You know that, right? Like, more affluent than I am; more than Mom and Dad are. Any idea or politics you have is, by definition, affluent.”
“I’m just saying. Either your new friends have pull or they don’t. They can help us or they can’t.”
“They definitely have pull, Roxana. I saw things.”
“Mysterious much?” prompted Roxana.
“Just, you know, the way they switched my papers in Heathrow, the way they kept me safe in Dublin. They have a robust network. But I can’t access it since I got back
here. They gave me this weird phone, Roxana.” Leila reached into the white deli bag and pulled the little Nokia from the extra mayonnaise sachets and napkins and sugar packets (for bulk) and creamer pucks (for the signal confusion said to be caused by the reflective racket of the foil lids).
“You aren’t supposed to have that in here,” said Roxana. This pleased Leila because it laid bare for a moment the brown-nosey quality in Roxana, which the magazine profilers never mentioned since they were generally there for the overcame-adversity angle. “It won’t work, anyway. The whole building’s shielded.”
“Fine. But just look at it. When you called me when I was in Portland, your call rang through to this one. I also used it to exchange text messages with the woman from Dublin. But it hasn’t made a peep since I left Portland. Now when you call me, your call comes to my BlackBerry, the BlackBerry I left at the front desk. This one, the Nokia, the Dear Diary—its little green light stays on always. The clock knows the time zone. It’s not a smartphone. Like, there are no apps. I can compose a message, but when I try to send it the screen just reads, No secure path available.”
“When I said you aren’t supposed to have that in here,” said Roxana, “I meant you aren’t supposed to be able to get transmitting electronics—any type or kind of transmitting electronic device—past the sally port in the lobby. This is a hardened, unwired facility.”
“Well, they didn’t look between the chicken salad sandwiches, okay?” said Leila, waggling the phone.
“Let me see that.”
Leila handed the phone to Roxana. Usually—all their lives—this had meant that the object would pass from Leila’s hands to Roxana’s feet. But since she was wearing the tester prosthetic, Roxana put out her graspy-whisk-on-a-desk-lamp thing. Leila, who had never once expressed discomfort with Roxana’s armlessness, shuddered a little as she handed the phone into her sister’s bionic prosthetic.
“Yeah, I know, it looks weird,” said Roxana. “The final product will be covered in fake skin or whatever. This is the mechanics.”
Leila was embarrassed to have been caught shuddering, and she saw now that the whisk thing was more like an ingenious paddle, with nesting, Teflon-coated wires forming a sort of cupped paw. Roxana could hold the little phone securely and even manipulate it more precisely than a human hand might.
But after a minute of close scrutiny, Roxana dropped the phone from her bionic paw and caught it with her feet. She felt the phone with her naked feet, the way you might feel a piece of fruit before eating it.
“I think I see how this phone got in the building,” she said. “It’s not electronic. There’s no signature. You sure this isn’t just, like, a gum dispenser?”
Despite the crack, Leila could see that Roxana was intrigued by the Nokia, and she kept it before her on her tall desk as she started back in on her screens.
“Okay, all I’m seeing is a strange deficit in the frequency that the words Dear Diary appear in Speechwave.”
“What’s speech wave?”
“Cool new software we got with foundation money. It samples daily human speech from all over the world, in real time.”
In real time? “Samples it from whom, Rox?”
“Everybody. You and me, probably. Whenever we pass through a collection point.”
Leila’s mouth must have dropped open a bit, because Roxana continued, “Oh, no. It’s not like that, Leila. There’s no risk to privacy. It’s deeply blinded; the data is completely severed from its source.”
Wow, and you’re supposed to be the genius in this family? thought Leila. But she said only, “So what’s so strange about the deficit?”
“It’s just strange. Statistically significant. Why are those and related words being used less frequently in the last five days? There’s also been less crying and more laughing. That’s correlated with anticipation.”
Wait. Since when are astronomy facilities in hardened, unwired buildings? thought Leila, suddenly looking around Roxana’s office. The door was four inches thick.
Then Roxana was consulting another screen. “Let me ask you this, sis,” she said. “Did these Dear Diary people do anything to you? Like, did they administer a test, or a substance? Were you disoriented at any point?”
“What are you working on here, Roxana?” asked Leila, partly to dodge the question, but also because it suddenly seemed germane. “I mean, in the LA County Large Array Facility? I thought you were working on something about content-free static grammars. You’re not an astronomer now, are you?”
“No. But I don’t think there’s even a telescope left in this building. Most of it’s leased to New Solutions. That’s who has the money for these nice computers. I get to use the computers to work on my thing, and I’m just expected to put in a few hours a week on one of their projects.”
“What’s that project?”
“Sorry. I’m not supposed to tell you.”
Leila made a really? face.
“I’m not. I signed papers about this.”
“What’s New Solutions?”
“They’re a pretty big IT contractor. I think they used to be called Blu Solutions/Logistics.”
“That’s a defense contractor, Roxana.” Leila was scolding her sister and had grounds to do so. Roxana had always kept on the other side of that line. She had turned down lots of money before. She wouldn’t work for the hackers either, though. She used to say it had to be real research; it had to be public. Everything she did, she wanted to go right in the public library.
“Okay, maybe,” conceded Roxana, suddenly defensive. “There is a lot of that around here. And you’re right—it’s not my scene. I don’t like not being able to talk about what I do. But it’s not like anyone ever understood me before. Of course I liked SNARC better. I’ll probably go back there. I was at SNARC, not PARC, by the way. PARC is in Palo Alto, not Pasadena. And my thing, the thing I’m working on like forty hours a week, is context-free stochastic grammars. You never pay attention to my career either.”
Fair point, thought Leila. SNARC, the I am Jim’s sandwich place.
Roxana was doing more justifying and rationalizing: “This is a one-year fellowship. The money is…good. I can pull more data here than I can anywhere else. Anyway, the thing they want me to help them with is totally good.”
“The thing you can’t talk about?”
“Well, the software is classified. But the application, Leila…”
Leila waited. She just knew her sister was going to blab.
“It’s a gaze-capture device,” said Roxana proudly. “A screen you work with your eyes.”
“You’ve been typing on one of those for years.”
“Yeah. Typing. Big whoop. This thing helps thoughts come out.”
Leila looked blankly at her sister.
“Leila, I may be like this”—she straightened up in her chair, to display her disability—“but I feel lucky when I think of the people locked in. Cord injury, Parkinson’s, the myelin-sheath disorders. This machine could give those people a new way out.”
“There are other things that machine could do, Roxana,” said Leila. “How far along are you guys?”
“We’re there, pretty much. We’ve built one. But it draws a ridiculous amount of energy. I think maybe that’s why the fifty-tesla magnet on the third floor, actually. But the people working on that part say they may have found a way. They have a device they’ve been trying to reverse-engineer for months. They want my help with that too, but they’re super-cloak-and-dagger about it—like, I would have to sign still more papers. I told them to find someone else.”
Then both women jumped in their chairs, because the Dear Diary phone rang, loudly, with one of those skeuomorphic old-timey rings, and vibrated too, and scattled across the broad laminate surface of Roxana’s desk. Roxana picked up the phone with her foot.
“Who is it?” asked Leila.
Roxana brought the phone to her face, squinted at the little screen. “Sarah Tonin?” she said.
Leila grabbed the phone from her sister’s left foot, pressed ACCEPT.
“Sarah?” she said into it.
“Yes. Lola?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you talk?”
Annoying to be asked that when you’ve been trying to get in touch with them for days.
“Um, yes. Hold on.” She put the phone to her chest. “Roxana, do you mind?”
It took Roxana a moment to understand. “You want me to leave my own office?”
“Do you mind? Five minutes. Please.”
Roxana got up and left, huffily.
When she’d gone, Leila said, “What the fuck, Sarah? Why’d you guys go quiet on me. I have a lot of questions.”
“It’s not just on you, Lola. When the network can’t carry signals securely, it won’t carry them. That’s just protocol. You’re in LA. It’s pretty wired up there. Not a lot of green space. Sometimes you get only about an hour a day of secure transmission out there, usually late at night. The equipment we use…it cycles, you know? Like breezes do; like tides. What happened with Crane in Portland?”
“The thing he had was Super-Eight film of Deveraux beating off, back in college.”
“Eww,” said Sarah.
Leila felt the need to defend Leo. “I don’t think it was like that. It was supposed to be funny. Deveraux was a sperm donor. It was some joke about that. I think he was making fun of himself.”
“Well, anyway, you can forget about Deveraux. After you met him in that airport lounge, he went aboard Sine Wave. That’s Straw’s yacht. He’s probably wearing their contacts by now, and out of our reach. He was a good lead, though.”
“But Sarah?”
“Yeah?”
“I was right, right? I mean, we wouldn’t engage in that kind of blackmail?”
There was a longish pause. “I think you made the right call under the circumstances. That’s not really the kind of incriminating we were looking for. But, I suppose, if it were important enough…Leave that aside though, Lola,” said Sarah. “I’m calling about Rusty Trombones.”
