by Jim Nelson
Today, hypernovels are consumed by the yottabyte. Virtual reality doesn’t mean experiencing a new life. It means erasing the current one for a few hours.
As the credits to Gray Rain rolled, I pried out my memex, turned off all the lights in my apartment, and drew open my window blinds. The rain against the glass melted the neon city lights into an impressionistic blur of cool blues and hot reds. Sitting in my easy chair staring out to the nighttime, I slugged back the Pharjé and waited.
In the dark, my audition with Melody played out in my mind. Once more, I relived it in full. A crashing tide of blue waves swept across my periphery. A moment later, the blue-out consumed me—the whale swallowed Jonah—and I do not remember an iota more of the night.
23.
Max waited at the gate to Pier 43 with his hands on his hips and a cruel grin across his face. It was eight in the morning and he sported five o’clock shadow covering the bottom half of his face like an inked thumbprint. He wore a wool cap, a leather coat, and dungarees. As I approached, his cruel grin widened. Before I reached him, I knew he was going to rib me about my face.
“Good morning,” he announced through the rain. He cocked his head as though inspecting my face for the first time. “You look like you stepped in front of a beer truck.”
The bruise across the right side of my face had receded. It was no longer a deep purple, but it shined. “Let’s get on with it,” I said.
He made a sarcastic exhale and shook his head. “Follow me, tough guy.”
He keyed through the dock gate and held it open for me. He did all of this left-handed. His left-hand knuckles were scraped up.
“I work on boats all day.” He'd noticed my attention on his hands. “Only techies have lotion hands.”
Moored at the end of the dock was a cherry-red speedboat with yellow racing stripes. Without a word, he began preparing for our departure. Helpless, I stepped into the craft and watched his work. He didn’t need my help. With a wooden oar, he pushed off the dock and, engines idling, slowly maneuvered the boat out past the seawall. Then he opened it up.
The speedboat had two engines, big blocks of chrome and aluminum, each suitable for an eighteen-wheeler. Where the Alcatraz ferry muscled its way across the water, the speedboat’s razor hull knifed the waves in two. With nothing more than a tarpaulin sheet for a roof and curved safety glass as a windshield, we remained surprisingly dry ripping across the bay waters. The hydrogen-powered outboard motors roared like twin banshees. They spat gargles of water into the bay, their waste by-product. Seated in the back of the boat and holding a rail for dear life, the engines’ sterile ozone exhaust made me slightly ill.
Ahead of us, the bay waters smashed with Herculean force into the base of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Whitewater sprayed up like Fourth of July fireworks. The sheet of rain and waves past the bridge seemed impenetrable from a quarter-mile away. Speeding at sixty miles per hour straight at them looked like suicide. Standing at the wheel, Max peered back at me as though bored, or at best perturbed for having to chauffeur a landlubber like me. He directed the boat through the bay turbulence like an old salt. I did not make him as more than thirty years old.
We sped under the Golden Gate Bridge, its suspension looming two hundred feet overhead. The wall of rain and waves rose to the heavens. The speedboat stabbed the sheet of water like a dart. A crash roared all around me; the boat shook left and right; and before—
The whistling of the wind and the grinding of the waves ceased. We were no longer in chaotic watery hell. Max cut the motor. The boat coasted. Other than the delicate sound of the still water beneath us, it was a dead calm past the Golden Gate. The sheet of rain behind us sounded like a great waterfall. The sound grew distant as we advanced across the Pacific.
“I always kill the engine when I pass the Gate,” Max said. The Marin Headlands loomed to the north. The cliffs of China Beach ran jagged to the south. So silent out there, Max’s voice would have echoed off the cliff walls if he’d shouted. “There’s nothing like it in the world.”
The ocean was calm here. Ahead of us, clouds like steel wool exchanged lightning bolts. The sea stirred ahead of us like a hungry man wringing his hands in anticipation of his next meal.
“Lands End,” Max explained. “We leave one kind of hell and cross into another.”
He turned over the motor and gunned it hard. The speedboat shot forward as an arrow of unadulterated inertia. Soon we were crossing the magnificent spectacle I’d witnessed from the cliff tops two nights earlier. The sea whipped and whisked tidal swirls, a thousand blue-green rosettes fringed with salt cream spanning the surface of the Pacific. Max navigated the tidal swirls like a downhill competition skier clipping flags with each change of direction. Churning gray clouds padded the sky. They blended like cake batter being steadily mixed by an unseen hand above. Lightning flashed. The rumble followed. Miles ahead, bolts crashed down to the ocean surface: Samson’s pillars electrified.
Thirty minutes later, three earthen cones grew on the horizon, islands of bare orange rock. Soon I could make out buildings on the largest island. A series of steel-gray structures shaped like flying saucers stood on stilts, each a different height. Belts of green-tinted glass lined their perimeters. Suspended walkways ran between the structures.
A metal dock painted safety orange extended from the main island. Several small watercraft were moored down its length. Max quit slaloming the boat now. He steered straight for the dock and pushed the engines harder. He cut them when we were a hundred feet away and coasted it in. Only when he tied up the speedboat and helped me up to the pier did Max speak.
“Welcome to the Farallon Islands,” he said.
Nauseous from the hospital-smell of the engines’ ozone, cold and shaky as all hell from the ride in, I somehow managed to ask, “George Drake works out here?”
“This is his home,” Max said. “Didn’t Cassandra tell you?”
“No. She did not.”
With the buildings on stilts and the walkways between suspended on chains, it looked like the Swiss Family Robinson had shipwrecked on Burroughs’ Mars.
“Those buildings are his home?”
“The island is his home,” he said matter-of-factly. He looked as shaken from the boat ride as a yawning seventeen-year-old stepping down from the Disneyland steam train.
“I didn’t think the Farallons were for sale.”
“It’s a long story.” Max nodded toward the end of the dock. “You can ask him yourself.”
A squat tan man with thinned silver hair and a considerable amount of silver mustache sauntered toward us with a purposeful stride. He wore corduroy shorts and a frayed silk Hawaiian shirt. The top three buttons were undone, revealing a chestnut chest covered in wiry silver hair like a thousand optical fibers. He carried under one arm a wet wood box dripping a clear liquid from the rear corner. Hand out in greeting, he offered me a grandfather’s smile and disarming hazel eyes.
“George Drake.” His voice was low and buoyant. “Nice to meetcha.” His handshake was a carnival test of strength. “How was the ride out?”
“Like the flight of the Valkyrie.”
He laughed a coughing laugh, a smoker’s laugh. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “At a trade show in San Jose. It was March of 1996. You’d formed Antic Corporation and were demonstrating your new web site.”
“I’m afraid I don’t recall," he said.
I would have been a different sight back then: Overweight, ungainly, the face of Howdy Doody atop the body of McDonald’s purple Grimace. Even if I’d not had plastic surgery and lived through twelve years of raw fish and jogging, I doubt he would’ve remembered me.
“You offered me a job with Antic on the spot,” I said. “I think you were desperate for engineers. You were the first businessperson I’d heard who understood the Internet was going to be the biggest thing since the printing press. I knew you were onto something.”
“I was sixteen years old.”
“I’m sure I didn’t care,” he said. “If you were excited about Antic, I wanted you on board.”
“Trust me. I regret it. I should’ve dropped out of school and signed up.”
“I hate to tell you this,” he confided, “but if you’d joined Antic in March of 1996, you’d have been employee number three. Antic Corporation was me and my ex-wife at the time. We took the company public two years later.”
It did not take a lot of higher-order math to calculate my net worth if I’d been Antic’s third employee. I would have become, without exaggeration, a multimillionaire at age eighteen. The history of Silicon Valley is swamped with these kinds of stories.
“I’m surprised you built with metal,” I said. “Don’t the electrical storms—”
“Anodized aluminum,” Drake said proudly. “The dock, the buildings, all of it. Nonconductive, weather-resistant, and expensive as all hell.” He issued another smoker’s laugh. “As long as no one crashes into any of it. Crumples like a beer can.”
The conversation faded off. Max looked bored as hell. I began to speak. Drake interrupted. He nodded over my shoulder toward the churning Pacific behind me. “You up for a boat ride?”
“Ride?” I peered back and forth between them. Max smirked at my instant panic. “I just got here.”
“Not a motorboat ride, a real boat ride,” George said. “My newest hobby.”
Max motioned to an exquisite sailboat docked beside us. It was all polish and waxed wood and gleaming brass moorings.
“Climb aboard,” George Drake said with a grin.
*
The sailboat was christened Thomas Edison. It drifted across the sea like a single cube of ice in a punch bowl at the end of the night. The listless Pacific air couldn’t muster enough gumption to fill the sail.
“Guess how much that sail cost me,” Drake said.
“I don’t know anything about boats.”
“Just guess.”
“A thousand dollars.” Round number.
“Eighteen thousand dollars,” he announced. He would have announced it no matter what price I named. “You know what it would have cost me before they banned synthetics?” He didn’t wait for me to guess this time. “Twenty-five hundred. That’s the cost of moving to a world with tight controls on synthetics and chemicals.”
“We’ve managed,” I said.
A rumble of thunder growled from the west. Drake sat at the fore of the sailboat in a deep-sea fishing chair mounted to the deck. His burly hand was wrapped around a mug of carved wood. I held one too. He’d produced them from the leaking wood box. It was filled with daggers of hand-cut ice and a triangular bottle of Grant’s whisky. While we drank and admired the hell on Earth man had created, Max ran around the boat adjusting the sail and steering from the aft bridge. At some point after casting off the dock, he’d acquired a .38 snub-nosed pistol and a belt holster. He carried it the way a carpenter always has a hammer handy. When I'd asked Drake about it, he ignored me.
“Not north,” Drake called to Max. “Take her south.”
From the bridge, Max called back, “We’ll get better wind off the Headlands.”
“Take her south. I want to see Lands End. And the windmills.”
It was tropical out on the water. I stripped off my jacket and loosened my tie. After ten more minutes, my armpits were sopping with perspiration. The boat drifted lazily south and eastward. The cliffs of Lands End neared.
“I have a joke for you,” Drake said. “A marketer, a hardware engineer, and a software engineer attend a technology conference at the peak of the Alps. On their drive down the mountain, the brakes give out. The car careens left and right, and almost goes over the side of a mountain. They would most certainly have met their deaths, but the car slams to a stop on an embankment.”
I knew this joke. It was an old joke. I let him tell it.
“All three climb out of the wrecked car to survey their situation. The marketing person says, ‘This is not a setback, this is an opportunity. Let’s convene a meeting, get our story straight, and devise a strategy for moving forward.’
“The hardware engineer says, ‘We should create a set of operating parameters for the car’s braking system. From that list, we can produce a proposal for a rigorous battery of tests to determine the braking system’s failure points.’
“The software engineer says, ‘We should push the car back up the hill and see if the same thing happens again.’”
Drake didn’t laugh at his own joke. He sighed. I smiled and stared down at my drink, attempting to appear amused. Drake made a helpless, fateful hand motion toward the electrified atmosphere fighting among itself across the water. Sensing he could do nothing about the climate, he reached down to the wood box and poured us both more whisky.
“Software is a plastic art,” he said. “Programmers aren't engineers, they're sculptors working with wet clay. If you make a mistake, if you introduce a bug, you fix it and issue an update. And if your update introduces a new bug, well, you just fix that bug and issue another update. The clay never dries. It’s always open to changes or additions. Computer programming has produced two generations of coders who think every problem can be solved by beta releases and quick-turn updates.”
He swiveled around and pointed behind us, eastward. Behind the perpetual sheet of rain, the Golden Gate Bridge was consumed with crashing waves from below and enveloped with fog above.
“They only got one chance to build that bridge,” he told me. “If they screwed up, there was no going back and patching the mistake. That bridge collapses and hundreds of people die. You can’t update a bridge. You can’t update an airliner while it’s midflight. But the software mentality spread like a bad cold. Architects and aeronautical and civil engineers, they all think like programmers now.”
He pointed toward the sky. “This is what happens when you let today’s engineers think they can solve global warming. The builders before our time, they understood what it meant to have only one chance to get it right. They had one chance to build Hoover Dam. The Eiffel Tower. The Great Pyramid. Engineers today think you just patch your way out of problems.” He spread his arms as though presenting the spectacle of dry lightning and roiling clouds to me for the first time. “Then they created a problem they couldn’t patch. Every fix they proposed would only make this worse.”
“They stopped global warming,” I said.
“And this is the price we paid,” Drake said. “Perpetual electromagnetic storms from Fort Bragg to San Luis Obispo. Big Sur—abandoned. Monterey a ghost town. No more shipping in and out of the bay. Rain three hundred sixty-five days a year in sunny San Francisco.”
“No one ever called San Francisco ‘sunny.’”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “To solve global warming, they tested out their version 1.0 on San Francisco and botched it royally. The rest of the world got version 2.0 of the system, the one that corrected our climate problems. Reno got Mediterranean summers and Key West winters. We got stuck with this nightmare.”
I swirled my whisky in my cup using the dagger of ice as a swizzle stick. It was kind of early to be drinking. It was also the best whisky I’d drunk in a while. With the ban on synthetics and glass at a premium, most of the whiskies I drank came from single-serving paper cartons.
“You were the first person to start a company whose entire focus was on the Internet,” I said. “There must be some opportunity here everyone else is missing.”
“Make another billion dollars?” he said. “Off becalmed seas and unending electromagnetic storms?” He chuckled and stomped the deck with one foot. "Maybe that is my next project, huh?"
Max peered down from the bridge on us with curious eyes. Drake’s booming, expansive voice carried our entire conversation over the water.
“Your ex-wife told me how Elgin Clift took the Old Internet from you,” I said. “It doesn’t s
ound like it was done fairly.”
He pouted at the mention of Clift’s name. “That wolf stole a life’s work from me. A better man would’ve forgiven him by now.” He stabbed a finger toward me. “Of course, better men retire on couch cushions and golf courses. This—” He pointed at the deck. “This is where I want to live and this is where I want to die. In that sense, I should thank Clift.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The islands. The Farallons. When Clift got the government to steal my backup of the Old Internet away from me, I demanded compensation. I told them I’d take my lawsuit to the Supreme Court. All the way to The Hague if I had to. So they gave me the Farallon Islands. Clift got Alcatraz, that dump heap in the eye of the storm. I got a front seat to the best show in town.”
The clouds roiled and rumbled. Lightning like hairline fractures crackled in the sky.
“I don’t really own the Farallons, of course, just like Clift doesn’t own Alcatraz. The government leased the islands to me for ninety-nine years, with the usual lawyer provisos and riders that allow them to kick us off for just about any reason they gin up.” He leaned forward and grinned. “Just so you don’t think I engineered some kind of land grab.”
The sailboat continued to glide across the surface of the ocean. The tidal rosettes caused the boat’s direction to steer sporadically west and east as though unable to make up its mind. The sailboat didn’t so much head for the coast of San Francisco as it rhumbaed to it.
