Concrete Underground

by Moxie Mezcal

  Aside from that, the story was a Choose Your Own Adventure. Turn to page 23, Max loses his virginity to a window hooker in Amsterdam while tripping on LSD and mushrooms, and the experience is terrifying to both parties involved. Turn to page 32, Max falls madly in love with a teenage ladyboy in Bangkok. Turn to page 42, Max gets in a bar fight in the eastern side of Berlin with a group of skinheads and ends up slicing open one's throat with a broken whiskey bottle. Turn to page 66, Max joins up with an underground sect of Kali worshipers and participates in at least one ritual killing. At a certain point, I began to suspect that Max was deliberately leaking misinformation, but he vehemently denied this, instead preferring to compare the retelling of his life story to a game of Japanese Whispers.

  In the end, all that really mattered was that the Max who returned to his home town two years later was no longer the shy, introverted kid who would rather stay inside pouring over lines of code than go outside and play baseball or talk to girls. The new Max wasted no time in making the rounds to potential investors to pitch his new startup, Abrasax.

  Initially just a search engine, the company quickly expanded its reach to include e-mail, social networking, online storage and hosting, software development, and finally the web-based operating system Envisage that moved the user's entire computing experience onto Abrasax's servers. Max promoted it as giving users the freedom to access their documents and run their applications anywhere, any time, and on any computer. Critics complained that Abrasax would share user's data with advertisers to help target their marketing and in the process drive up Abrasax's own fees. However, the company's overwhelming surge in users and ad revenue ensured that critics were swiftly marginalized.

  ---

  Max led Columbine and me to a remote part of the warehouse through a confusing series of twists and turns that I couldn't have possibly replicated. I would have sworn for a while it felt like we were just going in circles, except we never passed the same point twice. We finally arrived at a dead end wall – a real solid wall, not just more black curtains. It had three doors, each a different color – red, black, and white. There was a small white plastic placard affixed to the wall between the first and second doors, which read:

  Gallery of Locked Doors

  Or, Bell Out of Order

  In the lower right corner was the same small crown and globe symbol from the back of the rave card.

  There was another group of people looking at the gallery – two couples, visibly drunk, laughing hysterically as they tried unsuccessfully to open the doors, twisting and yanking on door knobs and knocking repeatedly. They straightened up as they saw us approach and started to walk away.

  As he passed me, one of the men said, "Good luck."

  Once they turned the corner, leaving no one in sight but the three of us, Max pulled out an old-fashioned bit key made out of red metal. He slid it into the lock of the red door and turned the knob. It opened, and he stepped to one side to let us through.

  "Who needs luck when you've got a key?" I said as I passed him.

  "Precisely," Max said, tapping the butt of the key to my chest.

  The door led to a descending flight of stairs. As we started down, I asked Max, "What's that symbol about on the placard out there?"

  "That's the symbol for the Highwater Society. It lets us know where to find each other," he answered.

  "And what exactly is the Highwater Society?" I pressed.

  "You're about to meet them."

  The stairs brought us into a large, dimly-lit room adorned lavishly in reds and blacks. One side was a lounge area with a wet bar where about twenty people were hanging out – all young, beautiful, and immaculately dressed, drinking and talking too loudly in the way that only people who are desperate to be noticed can, like they are daring you not to eavesdrop.

  Brian was there. So was Lily. Neither seemed happy to see me.

  Columbine walked over to the bar and greeted Lily with a hug. Max exchanged brief greetings with a few of the other guests before being approached by a short man with prematurely thinning hair in an ostentatiously expensive suit.

  "It's getting late. When do we start?" he asked testily as he tapped his watch.

  Max reached out to pinch his cheek and cooed condescendingly, "Patience, Peterman. I have to be a gracious host and show my guest around."

  "We've been waiting here for two hours," the other man responded.

  "Then I'm sure you can wait a little bit longer. In the meantime, why not try enjoying yourself a little? Everyone else seems to be," Max replied, and then added with a vicious grin, "And if you get really bored, I'm sure Lilian will be happy to entertain you."

  "How am I supposed to do that?" Lily asked.

  Max formed his lips into an "O" and held his right hand up in front of his mouth, curling his fingers into a circle and jerking it back and forth rhythmically while digging his tongue into the inside of his cheek to mime a blowjob. Lily fumed silently, not daring to fire back at her boss.

  Max let out a small chuckle and led me by the arm to the far side of the room, which was dominated by a wall of video monitors, mixing boards, and other heavy-duty A/V equipment. The monitors displayed feeds from the surveillance cameras in the main art galleries. Six people sat in a row in front of the monitor bank, each wearing a pair of headphones that were plugged into the mixing consoles and presumably wired into the microphones upstairs.

  Three of them were clustered in a group, obviously drunk and having a laugh. They giggled and commented back and forth playfully on what they were seeing and hearing.

  Another was a serious young woman who was watching with a furrowed brow and scribbling notes furiously. Venturing a guess, I decided she looked like an anthropologist or sociology grad student doing research for some kind of dissertation or whatever it is that people who actually went to college do.

  The man at the far end was obviously getting his jollies off. All of his monitors were tuned into cameras showing young women, and he had one hand buried discreetly under the mixing desk.

  The man at the central console was older than the rest, with salt-and pepper hair and a strange blue birthmark on the bridge of his nose that was shaped kind of like a question mark. He sat back in his chair as if to take in as much as possible; he looked like a king surveying his kingdom. I stepped in for a closer look. His eyes darted to and fro quickly, jumping from one screen to the next in a seemingly random sequence.

  I felt Max move in behind me. "That's Ben Garza. You should step back. Watchers rarely like it when they're the ones being watched."

  I picked up one of the free headsets, which was plugged into a jack labeled Confessionals, and raised it to my ear. A woman's voice came through sounding raw and sullen, as if she had been crying. There was something familiar about it. She said, "I wonder if I ever even had a chance of being happy. Like if I had made different choices, if I hadn't fucked things up so bad, would it have made a difference? I wonder if there's some other world out there, some alternate universe where I ended up happy."

  I realized why it sounded familiar – it sounded a lot like Lily. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her sitting next to Columbine. The two of them were laughing wildly, each holding a martini glass, as they chatted like good friends.

  I glanced back at the video monitors and caught a brief glimpse of one of the feeds, a grainy, monochrome image washed in blue. It showed a man sitting on the edge of a bed in a nearly empty room. A digitized numeric display in the bottom right corner read: 00033.

  I suddenly felt light-headed and took a couple steps back from the console, letting the headphones drop from my grip. Max reached out a hand to help stabilize me.

  I closed my eyes and tried to regain my bearings, muttering, "Jesus Christ, the bum was right."

  "Pardon?"

  "I met a bum on the train a couple days ago – wild orange hair, crazy blue eyes. He said he used to work for you and was ranting about how you were spying on people."

  Max smil
ed indulgently. "Spying implies a violation of trust, an assumption of privacy that is betrayed. We made no secret about the surveillance methods upstairs, so there is no assumption of privacy. Our equipment is in plain sight, and many of the art pieces themselves used it as an integral part."

  "In other words, you 're saying it's okay to invade someone's privacy as long as you give some notice, however perfunctory."

  "I'm saying that privacy as you understand it has become an archaic concept."

  I smirked. "Of course you would say this. You've made selling your customers' private information into a business model."

  Max scoffed, then responded in a raised voice, taking on an almost professorial tone. "People willingly give my company access to their information when they use our products. We take that information and use it to give them the best possible customer experience. I make no secret of my company's business practices. And I'm sure anyone who complains about the price of gas in an e-mail and then suddenly sees an ad for the latest hybrid car knows exactly what I'm doing."

  "Spare me the corporate spiel," I groaned. "What about the people that don't want you tracking what they buy and what sites they look at and what they talk about in their e-mail?"

  "Then they can patronize our competitors," he replied dismissively. "Or realistically, they should stay off the internet altogether."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Very serious," he replied, and I realized he was no longer talking to just me – the rest of the room was listening as well. "The web has truly become the great democratizer of information in the most literal sense of the word – rule of the people, plural. Information is no longer the sole property of any one person. The question isn't why shouldn't you have the right to keep things to yourself? It's why shouldn't your business partners, your employers, your friends and family have the right to know who you really are?"

  "I call bullshit," I said. "Even if you accept that argument, it's only valid based on the assumption of a social good. But what's the social good in all this?" I pointed at the monitors.

  "The same social good that exists in any real art – purification of the human soul. Hold a mirror up and make us confront who we really are."

  "Now I really call bullshit."

  Max laughed. "Let me put it to you this way – I put forth to you that the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us.

  "Let me give you an example. You criticized my company for collecting users' personal data, but people are voluntarily and intentionally sharing the most intimate minutiae of their lives everyday, and they love doing. Even as we speak my phone is being bombarded by tweets, e-mails, blog posts, and social network status updates from personal and professional acquaintances. Privacy is passé; it simply no longer exists as a social value. No one wants to toil in obscurity. Fame has become the new social currency of the 21st century. In the 19th century the struggle was between the working class and the ruling class over the means of production. By the end of the 20th century, the paradigm was made obsolete by new classes – the leisure class, the creative class, the consumer class. Now there's a whole new emerging class bringing another sea change, the celebrity class. Suddenly we have an entire stratus of people who are famous just for being famous. It doesn't matter if you aren't the most talented, or the most virtuous, or even the most beautiful, as long as people know who you are. We've built a brave new world where every man and woman can be a star."

  His eyes locked in on mine as he presumably waited for me to respond to the depth and profundity of his argument.

  "Jesus, are you still talking?"

  Max broke into a chuckle and threw an arm over my shoulder.

  "Brave New World, huh? That is the second Huxley synchronicity I've had tonight."

  "Every one belongs to every one else," he quoted.

  "Whatever. I just want you to tell people that I didn't lie in my article. Help me take some private information and hand it over to the masses," I said, relishing the chance to throw his own bullshit back in his face.

  Max sucked on his teeth and made a disinterested expression. "I gave Lilian my statement, which she relayed to you accurately. I don't really have any interest in pursuing the matter further."

  I didn't let up. "Why did you give me your statement in the first place?"

  "Because, D, life is a game. And sometimes, to keep things interesting, you have to change the rules."

  "I don't get what you--"

  Suddenly, I felt a presence behind me. "We're all set, boss," said a loud, deep male voice.

  I turned to see the man from the flophouse towering over me – the Bad Seed. He was wearing a black t-shirt with a distorted image of a bull that I recognized as a detail from Guernica.

  "Ah, Saint Anthony. Always impeccable timing," Max said.

  The two men shook hands, then the larger man hooked his thumb in my direction. "What's he doing here?"

  "Oh, don't worry about him. He's a journalist," Max said, putting a derisive emphasis on the last word. "Mr. D Quetzal, I'd like you to meet Saint Anthony, my special advisor."

  "Special advisor? What's that mean? And what the fuck kind of name is Saint Anthony?"

  "It's a nick name," Max explained. "He's had it for years, on account of him being such a devout Catholic."

  "Yeah, I bet," I scoffed.

  "Saint" Anthony stared me down like he was two seconds from kicking the holy fucking shit out of me.

  Max clapped his hands together to get the attention of the entire room. "Everybody upstairs. Curtain time in ten minutes."

  "We're going back to the art show?" I asked.

  "No," Max replied. "I mean all the way upstairs."

  * * *

  8. Everyone Needs a Good Scare, Now and Then

  I stood on top of the warehouse's roof, watching about three dozen of the city's best and brightest stand around and freeze their asses off. And, truth be told, I was enjoying the spectacle, even though it meant I was freezing my own off right along with them.

  The anemic, refugee-thin heiresses shivering in their barely-there party dresses. The effete dot-com executives in thousand-dollar "distressed" jeans trying to look unaffected by the cold that's cracking their lips and shriveling their dicks. It warmed my spiteful, jealous little heart.

  Columbine was busy circulating through the crowd, handing out sheets of paper, one a head. When she finished, she came over to sit with me on the parapet.

  "What's this all about?" I asked as I grabbed one of the leftover sheets off the stack on her lap.

  "This is tonight's game," she explained. "Scavenger hunt."

  I looked down at the paper in my hands, which contained a list of items neatly printed in three evenly-spaced columns. The items were pretty far out there, things like an albino, a monkey's paw, a transgender prostitute, an original Matisse, a three-legged dog, a pickled punk, an ounce of heroin, and a human spleen.

  "Scavenger hunt?" I repeated skeptically.

  "Yeah. You have to try to find as many of the things on this list as you can and bring them back."

  I rolled my eyes. "Yes, I understand the concept of a scavenger hunt. I'm just wondering why a group of grown adults – the city's richest and most powerful bright young things, no less – would spend their Saturday night on one."

  I heard footsteps behind me on the parapet, and then a new voice joined our conversation. "Imagine you were filthy rich, richer than any human being has any right to be. You can literally do and have anything you want. You've traveled the world, had the dirtiest sex imaginable, imbibed the filthiest narcotics. What would you do for kicks when you grow tired of the same old thrills?"

  I craned my head to the right and saw Max standing atop the parapet, hovering over my head. He grinned like a deranged Japanese oni, the cold night air turning his breath visible as it streamed o
ut of his nostrils.

  "All right, kids, listen up!" he called out to everyone on the rooftop. "We're going to get started. I trust you've all had a chance to look over the list for tonight's game. I see a few new faces, so let me bring you all up to speed.

  "The object is simple – whoever brings back the most items from your list by sunrise is the winner, and whoever brings back the least is the loser. Aside from that, there are no rules. Steal, lie, cheat, break and enter, wander around the bad parts of town, work your connections, get your assistants out of bed, cash in all your favors."

  "So, what exactly do you get for winning?" I interjected.

  He dug a small red metal box from his pants pocket. It was rectangular in shape, no more than five inches long and two high. "The winner gets what's inside this box,"

  "And what's that?" I pressed.

  "I swear to you, we didn't script this," Max said as an aside to his audience. A few light chuckles rippled through the crowd. "To find that out, D, I guess you'll just have to win."

  "I guess so," I replied. "And what if I lose?"

  Max turned to smile at me once more, but this time he didn't offer any further explanation.

  "Weatherman says the sun rises just after seven. You have five hours give-or-take, children. I suggest you get moving."

  As everyone else cleared off the roof, Max put a hand on my shoulder, indicating that he wanted me to stick around. I noticed Saint Anthony and Lily were also not moving to leave – Anthony's hand gripping her wrist tightly, her head hung sullenly.

  Max paced back and forth along the parapet while his eyes darted back and forth among the three of us, that grin of his still fixed in place. This went on for several minutes, even after the last of the other guests had left. The three of us just stood there in the cold and waited for Max to do something. I was miserable, Anthony didn't even seem to notice the weather, Lily was shivering so hard I thought her bones were going to shake right out of their sockets, and Max looked like he was savoring every second of it.