The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  He started walking. I didn’t care where we went. I just wanted to follow. “What’s it like being on it?”

  “Like a hand massaging your thoughts, leading you away from negativity and worry into a false world of bliss. It’s a weeklong mushroom trip, but twice as strong. Colors are more vibrant, your cheeks balloon from all the smiling you do. I remember in the Santa Cruz Uplift they showed us shark attacks, violent shit of people being eaten, and we’d have to write up our thoughts. Reading the shit afterward, you’d think they had just showed us Finding Nemo.”

  I gazed at him bewildered. He read my look.

  “It’s a cartoon. You’re too young. Anyway, it’s shiny, happy people shit. I doubt you’d remember that either. It’s another dopamine drug, genetically engineered. A lot of people don’t mind going in when the alternative is jail. Most go back even after they’ve been camping. Those released and charged again, who face the same choice—ninety-five percent of them choose to go back. You got folks clamoring to get into the Uplifts, people pretending to be anarchists for the free high. But they’ve been pretty successful weeding people out. They’re spinning it as a place people want to go. They’ll only take limited numbers. But that’s all a lie. We know who they’re sending there—the threats.”

  I was silent as we walked on.

  “Listen, Shane. This hits hard at our stomachs, but the blue pill has been taken, man. We can’t just shrug our shoulders at it.”

  I nodded and thanked him, shook his hand then wandered back to the hotel and found Promise reading a book on a couch in the lobby. When she saw me, she stood and walked outside. I went to the front desk and asked if I had received any messages. After the desk attendant told me I didn’t, I went outside and saw her lingering at a shop window across the street. I followed her to a secluded park with a fountain inside, the noise enough to smother any listening device.

  I sat down next to her on the ledge of the fountain, rivulets of water spraying my arms as I waited for her to speak. She peered into my eyes, reading me. Perhaps for a sign of forgiveness. She didn’t seem the type.

  “Thanks for the lullaby,” I said, putting her at ease. Her lips curled up cautiously, avoiding a full-blown smile, the emotional show enough for her to crawl back into her static mode of observation. Another thirty seconds went by. I dipped my hand in the pool, the water cold and biting. “Why did you join?”

  “Why does anyone join?”

  “To make their lives mean something. Isn’t that what it’s all about?” It was a borrowed line from my father. Staring through my Dobson telescope when I was a kid, he’d ask, Do you ever wonder what’s it’s really all about?

  “And why do you feel that’s necessary?” Her words almost drowned in the tumbling water behind her.

  “I asked you first.”Her lips pressed together. “Not directly.”

  “Indirectly then. But I asked you first.”

  She smiled, looked down and shut her eyes, thinking. A second later, she flashed them open, eyes now white as teeth. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It might reveal too much.”

  “The stars reveal too much, Promise. They tell us we’re going to die before their light can even get to us. Perhaps you don’t trust me?”

  “Who does?”

  It wounded me and I ingested a heavy breath, swallowing it like a hairball. A bit of facial drama was thrown into it, a childhood tactic my brother used to make a point.

  “You’ve not proved anything yet,” she said. “Besides your ability to kill someone.”

  “That hurts.”

  “You seem to want praise before it’s merited.”

  “How so?”

  “Look at you last night. Swaggering around, trying to pick me up. Had you forgot your reasons for being here?”

  I brushed a hand over my head. “I didn’t forget. You’re right. What can I say? I caved into desire. You know where I’ve been. You know what I’ve been through.”

  “Yeah, I know what you’ve been through all right.”

  “You proved yourself out in the jungle then.”

  She stared at me hard, looking at me as if a bitter memory had sprung to life. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  “Don’t you want to feel human every now and then? Do we have to give that up too?”

  “You showed a lack of discipline.”

  “I’m not denying it, Promise. How much longer do you want to beat me up about it?” I took another breath recognizing my short fuse, then lowered my voice. “Aren’t we supposed to be discussing something else now?”

  “We’ll get to that,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out whom I’m working with. This is not a fucking game, so tell me something real—something that matters and I promise you I’ll reciprocate.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  She sharpened her eyes. “I’ll call it off.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Damn straight I would.”

  I saw an indefatigable will within her stuck there her entire life. This bond was our common ground. Even though we had given a hundred percent, our lives failed to turn out how we imagined.

  “I killed my father accidently,” I said.

  “You know I know that. Try again.”

  I fixed my eyes on the ground. “My brother’s a drug lord. He almost killed me.”

  “Okay, that’ll do. Go on.”

  “After my father was killed, I was cleared by the police shrink and started coming off the meds. Then I was put back on the street. No one wanted to partner-up with me, so the sergeant assigned me a rook. About a week later, dispatch called in with a domestic in progress. It was in our beat, so we rushed to the scene and heard a man and woman shouting inside. We knocked, said our lines, and the door opened. They were giving us the sweet-ass routine, so we holstered our weapons and started asking questions. Then a smoke grenade rolled down the stairs from the upper floor. My partner darted out of the door and ran directly into the ambush. They tasered and cuffed him. I was knocked unconscious by someone inside and moved to a different location. I woke up in a garage somewhere. Then one of my brother’s boys told him it was rise and shine, and he appeared out of the shadows and beat me senseless. At the end of it, he put a gun to my head. What he didn’t count on was that I would grab it, put in my mouth, and try to pull the trigger.”

  “What happened?”

  “He pulled it away, called me a crazy motherfucker, beat me some more, and let me go. I guess I proved to him I hated myself more than he did.”

  “You’ve been angry a long time, haven’t you? Looking at you now, I can tell. You’re overwhelmed by rage. But that’s not going to help you. You’ve got to channel that anger elsewhere. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Your turn,” I said, cutting her off.

  She grabbed me by the neck and squeezed. Her knuckles turned pale as I let her take my breath away. My eyes sunk into hers with the same sort of purpose as the day my brother had the .45 cocked and pointed at my temple.

  “Don’t dismiss me because you don’t think I know what I’m talking about. I know what anger is.”

  The collision of eyes continued, slow moving like the second hand of a clock. But I wasn’t the only one under her grip. Her own self-loathing wringed tightly from her fingers. The hate as clear as the tears dripping out of her eyes.

  Her nails clawed deeper into my neck. Then she yanked her hand away. After another moment, she said, “I was raped at The Abattoir.”

  I rubbed my neck, feeling her claw marks. “Did you know it was coming?”

  “No, but it wasn’t unheard of at The Abattoir before me.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A guy caught me in the jungle,” she said. “I wasn’t careful.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Is it important? I killed him in The Pit.”

  “You fought in The Pit?” I asked incredulously, remembering Briana hadn’t.
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  “If you think women are treated any differently, you are mistaken. It is quite the opposite. We’ve got a pussy to protect.”

  I thought of something to say, but nothing meaningful came so I stood up.

  She looked up at me. “Are you a man with a conscious, or just a shark who will die when you stop moving forward?”

  “This is my country too,” I said. “And I don’t give a fuck what you believe. I’m going to fight for it.”

  “That’s what I needed to hear,” she said.

  I edged away, moving to the park’s exit. “Last night,” I said. “Did you mean it?”

  “Mean what?”

  “The lullaby.”She blushed. “Go away, bird without a beak.”

  I smiled. “It’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a while.”

  She nodded, waved a hand dismissing me. “Early. Tomorrow. We’ve got a worm to catch. Meet me here at 6:00 and I’ll tell you how it’s going to go.”

  Chapter 23

  “We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.”

  -George S. Patton

  In the lower lobby of the Moscone Center, I had breakfast at a coffee shop next to the Datalion Partners area. It was 7:30 a.m. and not many had arrived. I sipped a steaming cappuccino out of a paper cup, waiting for the plan to be set in motion.

  A businessman a couple of tables down sat alone with his smartphone out on the counter, hunched over and eyeing it like a precious gem. He was the ilk of a certain breed of men, the techno species of gadget-lovers, the TED Talk junkies, the lambs in the flock of iLove.

  The herd.

  He pulled a screen wipe from a matchbox-sized cardboard packet and wiped down the screen, rubbing it obsessively, an obstinate grandmother polishing silverware. He held the phone to the light, catching the glare, gleaning it for fingerprints. He spent four minutes and eleven seconds at this task, wiping the device, again lifting it into the light, closing an eye as if one of them failed to see the purity in the gadget. Once he was through, he grasped the sides, carefully avoiding smudging the screen. Gently, he put it back into its flappable protective case and into his breast pocket. He pulled himself up from the table. Stepping over to a table where someone had left a tray, he quickly glanced down at the forgotten receipt. Leaving it because his receipt was bigger, he searched another table where a receipt was stuffed in an empty coffee cup. Here he had to dig. A man without scruples, he scooped out the receipt, flicking it in the air to free the drops of coffee that had spilled on it. He peered at it and then pocketed it. Was this the state of the middleclass nation? A heap of suited technocrats scampering around for receipts to rip off their companies for a few dimes?

  An hour later, the throng streamed into the main auditorium. I was an early bird, securing a second row center seat. The low clatter of a thousand voices came from behind as others rushed in to claim a good spot. Stadium-sized screens suspended from the steel rafters played a video as the sound system cranked alive in a techno hum. On the screen, a vehicle zoomed into the middle of a passing lane on the Information Superhighway. Blue and yellow lines swished by as a Datalion car peeled forward. The road veered back and forth, and under the purview of the 3D screens, the flashing lines floated into a data mirage. The picture zoomed out and the transonic speeding lines melted into the blinking lights of a Datalion Ziggurat server, majestic in its size, rising above the atmospheric information cloud.

  The curtain rose. A banner swaddled the podium on center stage with the Datalion logo. Stacks of hardware littered the stage around it, racks of disk arrays with a million blue and yellow lights, skyscraper servers reaching for the rafters blinking chaotically. But this was all a lie. It was a Potemkin display of amplifiers you see at rock concerts—a wall of speakers that was in reality a collection of hollowed-out cabinets. Dazzle them with lights and flash, and they’ll believe anything, the substratum of Datalion marketing blitz and gleam.

  The stereos cranked up louder, building to the epiphany. The speakers thumped. A subwoofer bass rumbled in the stomach. The auditorium pumped out a hard-edged rock-n-roll distortion. Electric guitars screaming over crashing drums and synthe-sizers—no voice because no one else was allowed to speak. The audience went mad with cheers as someone hiding in the shadows stepped into the spotlight.

  At this moment, the flock of techies stopped tinkering with their iPhones and Galaxies, tablets and laptops, and fixated on the bobbing head of CEO Blake Thompson, the Datalion prophet, the self-proclaimed father of neo-modern technology, waving his fist up in the air as if he was Castro having just won the Revolution.

  I peered down the line. Ten yards to my right, lurking behind the tallest man in the front row was Promise, dressed in a prim navy blue business suit. Hair pinned up, she wore a set of thin tortoiseshell designer glasses. Sensing eyes watched her, she turned and gave a quick piercing glance toward me, her hands still clapping bombastically.

  The applause slowed, and Thompson finished his bows. Then, he crept up to the podium and said into the microphone, “Three years ago, one of our largest government clients was handling fifteen petabytes a year—a huge sum for the times. How do you handle that much information if grid computing is not an option?”

  Thompson gave the audience a moment to contemplate the question, letting the crowd stir. Then he continued, “Back then, BigData was screaming for BigAnalysis. Imagine trying to drink Lake Shasta with a straw. Well, this is what it was like for our government customer. So what did we do? We built BigAnalysis to tackle the humongous data-mining problem. We gave our customer SmartElasticity within their internal cloud such that the system itself could dynamically decide when to stretch the limits when resources were needed most. BigAnalysis wasn’t going to crush the system when BigData was hungry.”

  A lion appeared behind Thompson swallowing the logo of a competitor company named ServerWired. Laughs and applause. If The Anthill was correct and Rose still existed in its old programmatic form, then SmartElasticity was a pseudonym for part of her.

  I glanced over at Promise again, but this time only her profile was visible. She held a black pen in her mouth, the design a bit fat and unwieldy, a purposeful architecture to disguise its length.

  “Most companies out there in the competitive landscape are interested in having a dialogue directly with the consumer. You want to be in their heads with a loudspeaker shouting at them why your product is better. We all know the shotgun approach to advertising is dead, and now it’s all about social. Besides Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and now the irrelevant Yahoo—other contenders are out there stampeding on the social domain. Companies like BrainSmart Marketing, Kazookoo, and Yadaloo. If you’re not thinking social in today’s world, you’re a bug in search of a windshield of irrelevance. You’re a skid mark on the Information Highway. If your company is going to think social, you have to think about BigData, and if you’re thinking about BigData, you’ve got to think about BigAnalysis.”

  Thompson approached Promise’s side of the stage, pointed to the tall man sitting in front of Promise, and said, “I see the VP of marketing for Kazookoo out there nodding his head. Robert Yance knows what I’m talking about.”

  Applause accompanied Thompson’s rolling fist in the air. The herd.

  “Kazookoo grew revenues two hundred percent last year. The stock flew up about the same percentage. I was happy to have a stake in the company before that happened. Do you want to know how they did it?”

  Thompson cupped a hand over his ear as he shuffled around the stage. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, taking away his hand from his ear. “BigData they had floating out in a DL Cloud, but BigAnalysis they needed. They replaced their suite of Hadoop products and bought DL Data Mine, the biggest toolset of the BigAnalysis suite and were soon integrating them into their popular on-line game Intrusion. Soon they were profiling customers by using the tight integration between their game response logic, BigData, and BigAnalysis. Their MIPs sunk,
CPU utilization throughout their cloud declined from ninety percent to forty percent allowing their computing resources to once again breathe.”

  Promise had a contemplative look on her face. The pen dangling out of her mouth was not a simple blowgun. It had an embedded camera used for a sight, an accurate range of thirty yards, and was field-tested in The Anthill on live human beings. She took the pen out of her mouth and jotted something down while Thompson moved back toward center stage.

  Thompson twirled a finger around the side of his head. “Buying Kazookoo stock was a no-brainer. I knew what they were about, understood their problem, and knew once they chose the Datalion solution, they would no longer be choking on data and those unread bits sitting on their servers would begin turning into dollar signs.”

  Had she missed the shot? Promise appeared to still be scribbling in her notebook. She looked up, then scribbled again. It was a small detail the security guards on the sides of the stage were missing. Paper and pen were anachronisms, relics from the past in the new digital age. They weren’t even giving them away in the DL Conference paraphernalia welcome pack anymore.

  Blake Thompson was moving my way. “The parabolic growth in data in the future will challenge even the best systems today. Tomorrow is all about getting the raw power at a reasonable price so BigAnalysis can do its job without constraint.”

  I opened the DL conference backpack and got out the pen Promise had given me. Then I pulled out a burner phone, put the battery in, turned it on, and after it was up, finally logged into Theresa Ross’s Gmail account for the last time, checking the Drafts folder. My message from earlier was still there, but now it said: Dear Betty, Walmart shopping finished. No need to come.

  Blake Thompson began to wobble back to the podium. Someone in the front row gasped, but Thompson kept his feet. Once he balanced himself on the podium, he took several labored breaths and then finally said, “Success stories like this make us proud to introduce to you—”