Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “I wonder how a heavy operator like Wolverine ended up with all these retirees,” Mr. Judy said, lowering her binocs. “You think the parabolic mike can pick up any conversation from on board?”

  “Not at this range,” Starlitz said.

  “How about the scanner? Ship-to-shore radio?”

  “Worth a try,” Starlitz said, brightening. He slid into the driver’s seat and began fiddling with a Korean-made broadband scanner, rigged under the dashboard.

  An elderly woman with a luggage trolley descended the pier to the edge of the parking lot. She took off a large woven-straw sun-hat and waved it above her head. “Yoo-hoo!”

  Vanna and Mr. Judy traded looks.

  “Yoo-hoo! You girls, you with the van!”

  “Mother of God,” Mr. Judy muttered. She flung her braids back, climbed into the passenger seat. “We gotta roll, Leggy!”

  Starlitz looked up sharply from the scanner’s elliptical green readouts and square yellow buttons. “You drive,” he said. He worked his way back, between the cryptic ranks of electronic equipment lining both walls of the van, then crouched warily behind the driver’s seat. He yanked a semi-automatic pistol from within his vest, and slid a round into the chamber.

  Mr. Judy drove carefully across the gravel and pulled up beside the woman from the cruise ship. The stranger had blue hair, orthopedic hose, a flowered sundress. Her trolley sported a baby-blue Samsonite case, a handbag, and a menagerie of Mexican stuffed animals: neon-green and fuchsia poodles, a pair of giant toddler-sized stuffed pandas.

  Mr. Judy rolled the tinted window down. “Yes ma’am?” she said politely.

  “Can you take me to a hotel?” the woman said. She lowered her voice. “I need—a room of my own.”

  “We can take you to the lighthouse,” Mr. Judy countersigned.

  “Wonderful!” the woman said, nodding. “So very nice to make this rendezvous…Well, it’s all here, ladies.” She waved triumphantly at her trolley.

  “You’re ‘Wolverine’?” Vanna said.

  “Yes I am. Sort of.” Wolverine smiled. “You see, three of the women in my study-group have children attending Michigan University…”

  “Maybe we better pat her down anyway, Jude,” Starlitz said. “She’s got room for a couple of frag grenades in that handbag.”

  Wolverine lifted a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals on a neck chain and peered through the driver’s window. She seemed surprised to see Starlitz. “Hello, young man.”

  “Que tal?” Starlitz said in resignation, putting his pistol away.

  “Muy bien, señor, y usted?”

  “Get her luggage, Leggy,” Mr. Judy said. “Vanna, you better let Sister Wolverine sit in the passenger seat.”

  Vanna got out and helped Wolverine into the front of the van. Starlitz,, his mouth set in a line of grim distaste, hurled the stuffed animals into the back.

  “Be careful,” Wolverine protested. “Those are for my grandchildren! The pills are in the middle, hidden in the stuffing.”

  Vanna deftly ripped a seam open and burrowed into the puffed-polyester guts of a panda. She pulled out a shining wad of contraband and gazed at it with interest. “Where’d you find Saran Wrap in Cancún?”

  “Oh, I always carry Saran Wrap, dear,” said Wolverine, fastening her shoulder harness. “That, and nylon net.”

  “Lemme drive,” Starlitz demanded, at the door. Mr. Judy nodded and crept lithely into the back, where she sat cross-legged on the rubber-matted aisle between the bolted-down racks of equipment. Vanna slammed the van’s back door from the inside, locked it, and sat on Wolverine’s Samsonite suitcase.

  Starlitz threw the van into gear. “Where you wanna go?” he said.

  “Bus station, please,” Wolverine said.

  “Great. No problem.” Starlitz began humming. He loved driving.

  Mr. Judy broke the sutures on a lime-green poodle and removed another neatly wrapped bundle of abortifacient pills. “Great work, Wolverine. You been doing this long?”

  “Not long enough to get caught,” Wolverine said. She removed her bifocals, and patted her powdered chin and forehead with a neatly folded linen handkerchief. “‘Wolverine’ will be somebody else, next time. Don’t expect to see me again, thank you very much.”

  “We appreciate your brave action, sister,” Mr. Judy said formally. “Please convey our very best regards to your study-group.” She rose to her knees and extended her hand. Wolverine turned clumsily in her seat and shook Mr. Judy’s hand warmly.

  “This certainly is an odd vehicle,” Wolverine said, peering at the blinking lights and racks of switches. “You’re not really Christian evangelists, are you?”

  “Oh no, we’re Goddess pagans,” Mr. Judy declared, carefully disemboweling another poodle. “Our associate Leggy here bought this van at an auction. After Six Flags Over Jesus went bust in the rape scandal. We just use it for cover.”

  “It rather worried me,” Wolverine confessed. “My friends told me to watch out carefully for any church groups. They might be right-to-lifers.” She glanced warily at Starlitz. “They also said that if I met any tough-looking male hippies, they were probably drug enforcement people.”

  “Not me,” Starlitz demurred. “All D.E.A. guys have pony-tails and earrings.”

  “What do you do with all these machines? Are those computers?”

  “It’s telephone equipment,” Mr. Judy said cheerfully. “You may have heard of us—I mean, besides our health-and-reproductive services. People call us the Pheminist Phone Phreaks.”

  “No,” Wolverine said thoughtfully, “I hadn’t heard.”

  “We’re do-it-yourself telephone operators. My hacker handle is ‘Mr. Judy,’ and this is ‘Vanna.’”

  “How do you do?” Wolverine said. “So you young ladies really know how to operate all this machinery? That certainly is impressive.”

  “Oh, it’s real simple,” Mr. Judy assured her. “This is our fax machine… That big noisy thing is the battery power unit. This one, with the fake mahogany console, is our voice-mail system…And this one, the off-white gizmo with the peach trim, runs our satellite dish.”

  “It’s the uplink,” Starlitz said, deeply pained. “Don’t call it ‘the gizmo with peach trim.’”

  “And these are home computers with modem phonelinks,” Mr. Judy said, ignoring him. “This one is running our underground bulletin board service. We run a 900 dial-up service with this one: it has the voice generator, and a big hard worm.”

  “Hard disk. WORM drive,” Starlitz groaned.

  “You know what a bridge is?” Vanna said. “That’s a conference call, when sisters from out-of-state can all relate together.” She smiled sweetly. “And you bill it to, like, a really big stupid corporation. Or a U.S. Army base!”

  Mr. Judy nodded vigorously. “We do a lot of that! Maybe you’d like to join us on a phone-conference, sometime soon.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Wolverine asked.

  “We think of it as ‘long-distance liberation,’” Mr. Judy said.

  “We certainly do use plenty of long-distance phone service in my group,” Wolverine said, intrigued. “Mostly we charge it to the foundation’s SPRINT card, though…”

  “You’re nonprofit? 501(c)(3)?”

  Wolverine nodded.

  “That’s really good activist tactics, getting foundation backing,” Mr. Judy said politely. “But we can hack all the SPRINT codes you want, right off our Commodore.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s easy, if you’re not afraid to experiment,” Vanna said brightly. “I mean, they’re just phones. Phones can’t hurt you.”

  “And this is a cellular power-booster,” Mr. Judy said, affectionately patting an oblong box of putty-colored high-impact plastic. “It’s wonderful! The phone companies install them in places like tunnels, where you can’t get good phone reception from your carphone. But if you know where to find one of these for yourself, then you can liberate it, and re-wire it. So now, this is
our own little portable cellular phone-station. It patches right into the phone network, but it doesn’t show up on their computers at all, so there’s never any bills!”

  “How do you afford all these things?” Wolverine asked.

  “Oh, that’s the best part,” Mr. Judy said, “the whole operation pays for itself! I’ll show you. Just listen to this!”

  Mr. Judy typed briefly on the keyboard of a Commodore, pausing as Starlitz forded a pothole. Then she hit a return key, and twisted an audio dial. A fist-sized audio speaker, trailing a flat rainbow-striped cord, emitted a twittering screech. Then a hesitant male voice, lightly scratched with static, filled the van.

  “…just don’t like men anymore,” the voice complained.

  “Why don’t you think they like you?” a silky, breathy voice responded. “Does it have something to do with the money?”

  “It’s not the money, I tell you,” the man whined. “It’s AIDS. Men are poisonous now.” His voice shook. “It’s all so different nowadays.”

  “Why is it all so different?”

  “It’s because cum is poisonous. That’s the real truth, isn’t it?” The man was bitter suddenly, demanding. “You can die just from touching cum! I mean, every chick I ever knew in my life was kind of scared of that stuff…But now it’s a hundred times worse.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” the voice soothed. “You can tell me anything.”

  “Well, that’s what’s so different about you,” the man told the voice unconvincingly. “But goddamn Linda—remember I was telling you about Linda? She acted like it was napalm or something…”

  Mr. Judy turned the dial down. “This guy’s a customer of ours; he’s talking on one of our 900 lines, and he’s paying a buck per minute on his credit card.”

  Vanna examined another console. “It’s a VISA card. On a savings-and-loan from Colorado. Equifax checkout says it’s good.”

  “You’re running phone pornography?” Wolverine said, appalled.

  “Of course not,” Mr. Judy said. “You can’t really call it ‘pornography’ if there’s no oppression-of-women involved. Our 900 service is entirely cruelty-and exploitation-free!”

  Wolverine was skeptical. “What about that woman who’s talking on the phone, though? You can’t tell me she’s not being exploited.”

  “That’s the amazing beauty of it!” Mr. Judy declared. “There’s no real woman there at all! That voice is just a kind of Artificial Intelligence thing! It’s not ‘talking’ at all, really—it’s just generating speech, using Marilyn Monroe’s voice mixed with Karen Carpenter’s. It’s all just digital, like on a CD.”

  “What?” said Wolverine. “I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Judy patted her console; the top was out of it, revealing a miniature urban high-rise of accelerator cards and plug-in modules. “This computer’s got a voice-recognition card. The software just picks words at random out of the customer’s own sick, pathetic rant! Whenever he stops for breath, it feeds a question back to him, using his own vocabulary. I mean, if he talks about shaved hamsters—or whatever his kink is—then it talks about shaved hamsters. The system knows how to construct sentences in English, but it doesn’t have to understand a single thing he says! All it does is claim to understand him.”

  “Every two or three minutes it stops and says really nice things to him off the hard disk,” Vanna said helpfully. “Kind of a flattery subroutine.”

  “And he doesn’t realize that?”

  “Nobody’s ever complained so far,” Vanna said. “We get men calling in steady, week after week!”

  “When it comes to men and sex, being human has never been part of the transaction,” Mr. Judy said. “If you just give men exactly what they want, they never miss the rest. It’s really true!”

  Wolverine was troubled. “You must get a lot of really sick people.”

  “Well, sure,” Mr. Judy said. “Actually, we hardly ever bother to listen-in to the calls anymore…But if he’s really disgusting, like a child-porn guy or something, we just rip-off his card-number and post it on an underground bulletin board. A week later this guy gets taken to the cleaners by hacker kids all over America.”

  “How on earth did you start this project?” Wolverine said.

  “Well,” Mr. Judy said, “phreaking long-distance is an old trick. We’ve been doing that since ’84. But we didn’t get into the heavy digital stuff until 1989.” She hesitated. “As it happens, this van itself belongs to Leggy here.”

  Starlitz was watching his rear-view mirror. “Well, the van,” he mumbled absently, “I got a lot of software with the van…this box of Commodore floppies tucked in the back, somebody’s back-ups, with addresses and phone numbers…About a million suckers who’d pledged money to Six Flags Over Jesus. Man, you can’t ask for a softer bunch of marks and rubes than that.” He turned off the highway suddenly.

  “Pretty soon we’re gonna branch out!” Mr. Judy said. “Our group is onto something really hot here. We’re gonna run a gay-rights BBS, a dating service, voice-mail classified ads—why, by ’95 we’ll be doing dial-up Goddess videos on fiber-to-the-curb!”

  “Problem, Jude,” Starlitz announced.

  Mr. Judy’s face fell. “What is it?”

  “The blue Toyota,” Starlitz said. “It picked us up outside the harbor. Been right on our ass ever since.”

  “Cops?”

  “They’ve got CB, but I don’t see any microwave,” Starlitz said.

  Vanna’s blue eyes went wide. “Anti-choice people!”

  “Lose ’em,” Mr. Judy commanded.

  Starlitz floored it. The van’s suspension scrunched angrily as they pitched headlong down the road. Wolverine, clinging to her plastic handhold above the passenger door, reached up to steady her dentures. “I’m afraid!” she said. “Will they hurt us?”

  Starlitz grunted.

  “I can’t take this! I’m sorry! I’d rather be arrested!” Wolverine cried.

  “They’re not cops, they don’t do arrests,” Starlitz said. He crossed three lines of traffic against the light and hit an access ramp. Both Vanna and Mr. Judy were flung headlong across their rubber mats on the floor. The van’s jounced machinery settled with a violent clatter.

  The speaker emitted a crackle and a loud dial-tone.

  “God damn it, Leggy,” Mr. Judy shouted, “okay, forget ‘losing’ them!”

  Starlitz ignored her, checking the mirror, then scanning the highway mechanically. “I lost ’em, all right. For a while, anyhow.”

  “Who were those people?” Wolverine wailed.

  “Pro-life fanatics…” Mr. Judy grunted. “Christian cultist weirdos…” She clutched a slotted metal column for support as Starlitz weaved violently into the fast lane. “I sure hope it’s not ‘Sword of the Unborn.’ They hit a clinic in Alabama once with a shoulder-launched rocket.”

  “Hang on,” Starlitz said. He braked, fishtailed ninety degrees, then struck out headlong across a grassy meridian. They crossed in the teeth of oncoming traffic, off the gravelled shoulder, then up and down through a shallow ditch. The van took a curb hard, became briefly airborne, crossed a street, and skidded with miraculous ease through the crowded lot of a convenience grocery.

  Starlitz veered left, onto the striped tarmac of a tree-clustered strip mall.

  Starlitz drove swiftly to the back of the mall and parked illegally in the delivery-access slot of a florist’s shop. “This baby’s kinda hard to hide,” he said, setting the emergency brake. “Now that they’re onto us, we gotta get the hell out of this town.”

  “He’s right. I think we’d better drop you off here, Wolverine,” Mr. Judy said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  Vanna unlocked the van’s back door and flung herself out, yanking Wolverine’s Samsonite case behind her with a thud and a clatter.

  “Yes, that’s, quite all right, dear,” Wolverine said dazedly. She touched a lump on the top of her scalp, and examined the trace of blood on her fingertips. She winced, th
en stuffed the Mexican straw sun-hat over her head.

  With brutal haste, Mr. Judy palpated the stuffed animals for any remaining contraband. She flung them headlong from the van into Vanna’s waiting arms.

  Wolverine opened the passenger door and climbed down, with arthritic awkwardness. The tires stank direly of scorched rubber. “I’m sure that I can call a taxi here, young man,” she told Starlitz, hanging to the door like a drunk from a lamp-post. “Never you mind about little me…”

  Starlitz was fiddling with his broadband scanner-set, below the dash. He looked up sharply. “Right. You clean now?”

  “What?” Wolverine said.

  “Are you holding?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Starlitz gritted his teeth. “Do you have any illegal drugs? On your person? Right now?”

  “Oh. No. I gave them all to you!”

  “Great. Then stick right by the payphones till your taxi comes. If anyone gives you any kind of shit, scream like hell and dial 9-1-1.”

  “All right,” Wolverine said bravely. “I understand. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Shut the door,” Starlitz said. Wolverine closed the door gently. “And lose that fuckin’ ugly hat,” Starlitz muttered.

  Vanna heaved the leaky stuffed toys into Wolverine’s arms, kissed her cheek briefly and awkwardly, then ran to the back of the van. “Split!” she yelled. Starlitz threw it into reverse and the rear doors banged shut.

  Wolverine waved dazedly as she stood beside the florist’s dumpster.

  “I’m gonna take 26 West,” Starlitz announced.

  “You’re kidding,” Mr. Judy said, clambering into the front passenger seat. She tugged her harness tight as they pulled out of the mall’s parking lot. “That’s miles out of our way! Why?”

  Starlitz shrugged. “Mystical Zen intuition.”

  Mr. Judy frowned at him, rubbing a bruise on her thigh. “Look, don’t even start on me with that crap, Leggy.”

  A distant trucker’s voice drawled from the scanner. “So then I tell him, look, Alar is downright good for kids, it kills pinworms for one thing…” Starlitz punched the radio back onto channel-scan.

  Mr. Judy bent to turn down the hiss.

  “Leave it,” Starlitz said. “ELINT traffic intercept. Standard evasive tactics.”