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“OK”, soothingly, “like, total disclosure? It’s been happenin to me too? I’m seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can’t be here but they’re here.”

They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes—family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore… the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who’ve kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready.

“I’m sorry, Shawn. What do you think it could be?”

“Besides how much I miss them, beats me. Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”

“You’d prefer retail?”

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window… that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is…?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs… planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

• • •

THAT EVENING UNACCUSTOMED LAUGHTER from the bedroom. Horst is horizontal front of the tube, helplessly, for Horst, amused. For some reason he’s watching NBC instead of the BioPiX channel. A diffident long-haired person in amber sunglasses is doing stand-up on some late-night show.

A month after the worst tragedy in everybody’s lifetime and Horst is laughing his ass off. “What is it Horst, delayed reaction you’re alive?”

“I’m happy to be alive, but this Mitch Hedberg guy is funny, too.”

Not a hell of a lot of occasions she’s seen Horst really laugh. Last time must’ve been Keenan and Kel’s “I dropped the screw in the tuna” episode four or five years ago. Sometimes he’ll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody’s laughing at something and he isn’t, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. “For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.” So what’s he still doing in town, by the way?

• • •

GOING IN TO WORK one morning, she runs into Justin. It seems accidental, but there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else. “Mind if we talk?”

“Come on up.”

Justin slouches into a chair in Maxine’s office. “It’s about DeepArcher? Remember back just before the attack on the Trade Center, Vyrva must’ve told you, everything got a little weird with the random numbers we were using?”

“Dimly, dimly. Did that ever get back to normal?”

“Did anything?”

“Horst says the stock market went crazy too. Just before.”

“You heard of the Global Consciousness Project?”

“Some… California thing.”

“Princeton, as a matter of fact. These folks maintain a network of thirty to forty random-event generators all around the world, whose outputs all flow into the Princeton site 24/7 and get mixed together to produce this random-number string. First-rate source, exceptional purity. On the theory that if our minds really are all linked together somehow, any major global event, disaster, whatever, will show up in the numbers.”

“You mean, somehow, make them less random.”

“Right. Meantime, for DeepArcher to be untraceable, we happen to need a high-quality supply of random numbers. What we’ve done is create globally a set of virtual nodes on volunteer computers. Each node only exists long enough to receive and resend, and then it’s gone—we use the random numbers to set up a switching pattern among the nodes. Soon as we found out about this Princeton source, Lucas and I were into the site, bootlegging the product. All goes well till the night of September 10th, when suddenly these numbers coming out of Princeton began to depart from randomness, I mean really abruptly, drastically, no explanation. You can look it up, the graphs are posted on their Web site for anybody to see, it’s… I’d say scary if I knew what any of it meant. It kept on that way through the 11th and a few days after. Then just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again.”

“So…” and like why is he telling her this exactly, “whatever it was, it’s gone away?”

“Except that for those couple of days, DeepArcher was vulnerable. We did our best with serial numbers off dollar bills, which do pretty good as seeds for a low-tech pseudorandom-number generator, but still, DeepArcher’s defenses began to disintegrate, everything was more visible, easier to access. It’s possible some people may have found their way in then who shouldn’t have. Soon as the GCP numbers got random again, the way back out would’ve become invisible to any intruders. They’d be caught inside the program. They could still be there.”

“They can’t just click on ‘Quit’?”

“Not if they’re busy trying to reverse-engineer their way to our source code. Which is impossible, but still they can compromise a lot of what’s in there.”

“Sounds like another reason to go open source.”

“Lucas says the same thing. I wish I could just…” He looks so perplexed that Maxine against her better judgment sez, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Guy’s walking around holding a blazing-hot coal…”

• • •

THAT EVENING, first thing in the door, she notices something sure smells good. Horst is cooking supper. Seems to be coquilles Saint-Jacques and daube de boeuf provençal. Again. Of course, the Guilt Special. By a strange invariance in the parameters of wedlock, Horst lately has been turning, all but insufferably, into a homebody. The other night she came in late, all the lights were off, wham, she’s suddenly assaulted at ankle level by a mechanical device, which turns out to be a robot vacuum cleaner. “Trying to kill me here!”

“Thought you’d be pleased,” sez Horst, “it’s the Roomba Pro Elite, brand-new from the factory.”

“With the spousal-attack feature.”

“Actually, it won’t be released till fall, got this one at an early-adopters preview sale. Wave of the future, honeybunch.”

Irony-free. Unthinkable a year or two ago. Meantime it’s Maxine’s turn now to have these, hmm, undomestic urges. Which, for those to whom balanced books appeal, seems fair. Guilt? What’s that?

Eric and Driscoll are in and out of the house together and separately and unpredictably, though they do respect school nights and an informal curfew of 11:00 P.M. Out any later than that and they make other sleeping arrangements, which everybody is cool with, besides relieving Maxine of some worry. The boys, in any case, like their father, continue to sleep so unperturbed that next to them the average sawmill inventory is insomniac.