by Jim Nelson
Dr. Clift had left two messages for me demanding a status update. I deleted them. Another message from a caller masking their identity asked to meet me in Union Square the next morning about a potential job. "I know what you look like," she said. "I'll find you in the underground park." It was too cloak-and-dagger for my tastes, but what could I do. I filed that message rather than delete it.
A message also waited from Leigh Blessing. We must have swapped Nexternet IDs while under the influence.
“It was lovely meeting you tonight,” Leigh’s message went. The audio played in my mind’s ear. I could hear her voice as though she stood invisibly before me. “I didn’t want you to worry about me. I just came out of the blue-out with a friend. He’s taking me to his house. I don’t know where you went off to. I’ll be at my friend’s place soon, so don’t worry about me. Let me know when you get home safely, will you?” The audio was quantum-signed, guaranteeing it originated from Leigh’s memex.
The warmth of being in the presence of a beautiful young woman returned. No exaggeration, I’d not felt this way in decades. At age fifty-five, face like an old baseball mitt soaked overnight in acetone, I told myself to tamp down this optimism. I pressed onward, eager to reach Park Presidio where I could hail a taxi.
Walking up Geary Avenue at a stiff pace, I transferred Leigh’s message from my memex to my pocket tablet. The message’s timestamp revealed Leigh had sent the message forty-five minutes earlier, perhaps twenty minutes before I emerged from the blue-out flat on my back.
Using the tablet to dissect the message’s metadata, it revealed her geolocation was attached to the message. It’s a common practice when messaging friends. Still, I was surprised a private person like Leigh would’ve released that information to me. Perhaps our talk before the blue-out was of more comfort to her than I’d realized.
The tablet produced a map of the city with the geolocation highlighted. She’d sent the message from Sacramento Street near Fillmore.
My Wiki ate fresh data like a dog at a bowl of wet dog food. It connected Sacramento Street with a property near Lafayette Park owned by Antic Corporation, the holding company with a stake in Leigh’s old Jones Street apartment. My Wiki came up with the street address and advised me on the quickest route from my current location.
It was well past one in the morning. With a teenager's logic, I pondered going over to see her. I devised various excuses for dropping in: checking on her well-being, arriving with take-out food to share, and more sodden, sad excuses for enjoying a few more minutes in her presence. Quit fooling myself. I’m a professional, I’d told myself. She’s a subject, a point of inquiry, a vector of interest—nothing more. Of course I’d fallen for her. Every man fell for Leigh.
Yet, at that moment, my loneliness felt as unique as a thumbprint. All thumbprints appear identical if you don’t know what to look for.
14.
On my way to the office the next morning, I stopped at a pharmacy and purchased an instant-cold pack and a wax-paper packet of ibuprofen. In the privacy of my office, I ripped the pack's seal to activate the cold gel and pressed it against the shining purple bruise pulsing heat across my right cheek. With my hand to my face, I paced a little and talked to myself. I wanted to shake free even a single memory of the prior night's events at Lands End but came up empty. Mentally, I was also preparing myself to take on Lotte's safe. Cracking engram-locks has its physical and mental tolls. Sleep-deprived, slightly woozy from the lingering aftereffects of the Blue Pharjé, and with a cold pack pressed against my face, I debated postponing on Lotte.
A personal call came in via memex. It was voice-only—a newfangled phone call.
“Naroy?” A man was speaking in my head. Taking phone calls with a memex sounds like a second consciousness inhabiting your mind. “My name is Max.” After a pause, he added, “Sometimes people call me Maximilian.”
I routed him through my pocket tablet so I could talk to him physically, like taking an old-fashioned video call. A young man’s face filled the tablet’s screen, a projection of his memex animating his voice. His projection was friendlier and more inviting than his real-life mien. It's de rigueur to touch-up one's own projection across the Nexternet.
"Who again?"
"The name is Max," he said. "We've not met before."
We'd not met, but certainly I'd seen him before. It was the young man who'd followed me from the Ferry Building when I returned from Alcatraz. I'd lost him in the lobby of the Zuckerberg Building after my swordfish dinner.
"I'm calling to offer you a chance to speak with Cassandra Chancellor," Max said. "Have you heard of the Chancellor Foundation?"
I sat up straight in my office chair. "As in the Cassandra Chancellor?"
“That’s right,” he said. "The inventor of the Nexternet."
More accurately, she led the team that developed the early Nexternet software, in particular the core neurotransmission protocols and the interfaces between memex and the worldwide wireless network. She was a major engineering force in the process.
"Any relation to Gannon Chancellor?"
"He's her son," Max said carefully.
“And you’re working for her? Or him?”
“I don't work for either of them. I'm on good terms with Cassandra, however. She wants to talk to you. Call it a pre-interview. A dress rehearsal.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Ms. Chancellor has some questions for you,” Max said. “If she likes what she hears, she’ll introduce you to the person you really need to be talking to.”
“And who’s that?”
“Ms. Chancellor first,” he said.
"And why do I 'really' need to be talking to this other person?"
"It has to do with Detachment," he said. "Look, I can’t tell you anymore.”
“Wait a sec,” I said. “I don’t have time for games. I’m not some pawn on a chess board—”
“No, you’ve been promoted to a rook,” he said. “Keep working at it and you’ll get promoted to bishop. But for now, this is the game and you’ve got to play the pieces on the board. Understand?”
"Gimme a sec.”
A group of six or eight young people were right outside my office talking about where to go for breakfast. They worked for the bike delivery service occupying the theater’s western balcony. Their voices boomed against the domed ceiling. I marched to my entry and stood mute and staring at them. Eventually, they got the hint and moved on. I returned to Max on the line.
“Tell Ms. Chancellor I’ll make time for her this afternoon. I’m booked all morning.”
“Will do.” He cut the call.
I spent twenty minutes on my pocket tablet catching up on the new interconnections my Wiki had fused together. Every piece of information I learned I dumped into the Wiki, right up to Max’s name and his nebulous relationship to Cassandra Chancellor and the Foundation. Data points made lines and lines made planes and spheres of connections. The associations were multiplying at a dizzying rate. My Wiki had built the scaffolding and now it was building the skyscraper. Two dozen names and corporations and locations and thousands of links between them all. There’s a tipping point with a Wiki where it’s coalesced so much data it can begin shearing unimportant details and paring down the relevant facts. At this rate, the Wiki would be telling me everything I needed to know to resolve this job and collect my payment. Really, the Wiki was the brains of this operation. I’m just the physical component of Naroy Security Consulting, LLP, a bad face and a firm handshake who collects the money when the job is over.
My Wiki told me two years earlier the Chancellor Foundation announced a scholarship fund to promote young women entering the science, technology, and engineering fields. The initial award went to one Leigh Blessing, a Stanford graduate student whose thesis regarded the Old Internet and its continuing influence on the Nexternet. The scholarship awarded Blessing an apartment on Nob Hill, a healthy stipend, and additional funding to continue her research, which included
an internship at the Old Internet Preservation Commission on Alcatraz Island.
“The Chancellor Prize is a yearly scholarship,” I asked the Wiki. “Who else has received one?” By my calculations, the Foundation should have awarded it to two or three more young women by now.
None, my Wiki reported. Leigh Blessing was its only recipient.
“Who’s this Max person?”
Most likely Maximilian Dorsett, my Wiki told me. Confidence rating, 92 percent.
“Who does he work for?”
Undetermined as of yet, my Wiki replied.
“Find out.”
Set in the stage floor behind my desk was a trapdoor with a steel lock and a brass ring handle. It led down to the trap room, the dark, foreboding, seemingly boundless area beneath the stage. The building management had partitioned the area in quarters, a storage pen for each office occupying the grand stage.
With flashlight in hand, I descended the ladder and searched my section of the trap room. My personal retention server was secured down there in a graphite-carbon safe the size and shape of an old tube-based television set. Bolts and carbon fiber cables secured the safe to anchors drilled into the concrete floor.
When I communicated with my Wiki, I was speaking to the software running on this caged server. Every thought and memory recorded by my memex was cryptographically transmitted across the Nexternet to this data node under my office. Years of personal unguarded thoughts were stored on holographic medium inside this computer. Writers since time immemorial have pondered the weight of a man’s soul. Did they ever consider where a man might store his soul? What protections he would erect around it? Who, if any, he could entrust it with?
Lotte’s engram-locked safe required particular equipment. I also needed the usual tech to translate neural streams between memexes. I filled a leather satchel with all the necessary equipment and a few other devices I might require if certain technical problems arose. I climbed up to my office, secured the trapdoor, and replaced the rug covering it. I locked up the office and headed on foot into the muggy, wet morning lugging the satchel.
It was after nine o’clock. I was dressed too warmly and I began perspiring almost immediately. The diner up the street served sirloin and eggs Saturday mornings. I planned to grab a bite and head to the Medical/Dental Building. Halfway to the diner, my memex reminded me of the message delivered the night before while I was tripping on the light show out at Lands End. A mystery caller had asked to meet me in Union Square's underground park. Grimacing because I was going to miss my breakfast, I headed east on O'Farrell Street and into Union Square.
With the perpetual rainfall now upon us, the square was not the destination it once was. Even with tarps and flying wings erected to protect park dwellers from the elements, the overgrowth made the park more jungly than most cared for. The city had retired the underground parking lot and converted it into an extension of the street-level park. Artificial turf and controlled plantings turned the old parking stalls and ramps into green runways lit by florescent lights hidden behind colorful translucent art. A spattering of people solo and in pairs strolled down the old car lanes.
A food truck parked against the far wall sold breakfast sandwiches. I devoured one in four quick bites. I waited near the Geary Street entrance, a six-lane ramp leading down into the old lot. Cyclists walked their bikes past me, heading for the bike track two stories down. Couples walked hand in hand past stalls and lush green flora growing from the wall planters. Parents chased stumbling toddlers and lifted them into the air with peals of laughter. I did my best to ignore them. It wasn't easy. The eye is drawn to the simple pleasures of others.
A woman descended the ramp with some trepidation. She shed her rain slicker and hat just inside the entrance. She approached me with the caution of a housecat approaching a steaming bath.
I recognized her right off. Her hair was once coal-black and fine and straight, bobbed tight around her jawline. Today, it was curled at the ends and softened, with streaks of gray shot though like soldering lines on a circuit board. When I last saw her, she had a small red mouth off-centered above the judgmental V of her chin. Today, her mouth was not so Puritanical and her chin and cheeks had rounded over time. This was unmistakably Cline Mayall, the student director who pressed me in 2010 to audition for her film Detachment.
She didn’t appear to recognize me. I’d shed a lot of weight since our last time together. I’d paid for so much damage done to my face that I was practically a new man, and that doesn’t count the damage done to my face the night before. At first sight of me, she blanched and retracted. The housecat had touched the bathwater and reflexively retreated.
“Mister Naroy?” she asked. She spoke as though dubious I could be of any assistance to her.
“I am,” I said cautiously.
“Are you…okay?” she asked, eyeing my bruises.
“Are you the person who left a message for me last night?”
“I am,” she said. “I was hoping to get five minutes of your time.”
"We could have met in my office. Someplace more private. Or in your home, for that matter."
"I don't live in the city," she said. "I'm only here for the weekend."
She did not recognize me at all. I could not fathom why she would come to me now, twenty-seven years after she'd destroyed my life, and seemingly not know me from Adam.
She introduced herself as Cline Mayall-Martin in a tepid manner, as though this was a distasteful business best gotten out of the way posthaste. "Can we walk and talk?" she asked.
We began to walk, ever so slowly, around the loop of the first level. No cars at all were allowed down there, so we had the full width of the old parking garage to stroll and avoid other park-goers.
She appeared ill at ease with our surroundings, which seemed silly, considering it was her call. Her soft flat shoes padded against the cheap turf the city had installed. She wore a conservative pastel blouse and a plain floppy skirt that fell to her shins. When I’d first met her in 2010, she carried a bike messenger’s bag. Now she carried an oversized designer purse with an excess of pockets and nonfunctional clasps and buckles, the kind of purse I uncharitably associate with old married women. A wedding ring stone sparkled beside the gold engagement band on her left hand.
“I’m really not sure where to begin.” She paused as though waiting for my reply.
“Why don’t you start with what led you to contact me.”
“I used to be in film school,” she said.
Again she seemed to be waiting for me to speak. “How did that lead you to me?”
“When I was in school, I made a film,” she said. “It went viral on the Internet. The Old Internet, not the one we have now.” The story began to pour out in clumps, like sour milk dumped from the carton. “Everyone around the world watched it. I was getting fan emails from Senegal and Turkey and Russia. For six weeks straight, it was the most-watched video on the Internet in North America. I had no movie studio backing, no outside money, no advertising or promotion at all. It just became this…thing.”
As inconspicuously as I could manage, I reached back and touched my memex. Its fleshy cap was warm and rounding like the head of a mushroom.
“You’ll excuse me, but I’m not a film buff,” I said.
"Have you ever done something you're not proud of?" she asked in earnest. "Something years ago you wish you could go back and redo?"
I wondered if she’d produced children. Her hips had rounded and her breasts had swollen since the audition. She was more top-heavy than when I first met her. Three decades is enough time to lead a full life. I wondered what she’d made of that full life.
"Sometimes I imagine a special kind of a time machine," she said, the corners of her mouth downturned. "You get one round-trip, one chance to go back in time and return when you left. And when you're there, you only have a chance to make one change to your past."
"And this film is that one thing?"
"I'm deeply ashamed
I made it." Her mouth remained downturned. She did not look ready to cry, but rather as though she'd cried about the film before. Dredging up the film was dredging up memories of tears too. “I have children now,” she said. “Two boys and a girl. The boys are in college. My angel is just starting high school. This film Mom made…it’s not something I want them to know about. I’m not proud of it anymore.”
“You see it as a youthful indiscretion?”
“That’s a way of putting it, yes.”
A homeless man lay among the Monterey cypress hedges lined up in boxes along the concrete walls. He'd made a blanket and bed from grocery bags and cardboard boxes ripped flat. A discreet hip bottle of Blue Pharjé lay among his greasy possessions scattered about. He was probably sleeping off a blue-out.
"It's so sad," Cline said.
"Forget it," I said.
"What do you mean, 'forget it?' It's horrible."
"There's nothing you can do to help him now," I said.
She unsnapped her purse to find a dollar bill.
"That money will only buy him more of the blue."
I led her away from the sleeping man. She needed a couple of moments to gather herself.
"The film I made," she said. "It's been on the Old Internet since I released it. My name has been attached to it all these years. I wrote it, I directed and produced it."
Another pause. "And?"
"Well, I recently discovered it's not on the Old Internet any longer."
We approached a coffee and tea stall. I ordered for myself. She did not ask for any.
She said, "I've been told you're looking for my film."
"Who told you that?"
"Mr. Naroy,” she spoke over my question, “I’m not asking you to quit looking for the film. I mean—yes, I would prefer it remain off the Old Internet forever. But I worry it will resurface, and when it resurfaces, it will become another viral sensation. You understand?”
I ditched the cold pack in the trash bin beside the stall. The coffee wasn't bad. Even with the space heaters placed on the walls around the underground park, it was quite chilly and a touch damp down there.
