COUSIN LLOYD, luckily not into the NYC dating scene, where haste like this would earn him instant rejection, calls Maxine early the next day. He sounds so nervous that Maxine decides to lull him with generic accounting-fraud talk. “Right now it’s all converging on a think tank down there called TANGO? You’ve heard of them?”
“Oh. Very much the hot property in town right now. Quite popular with Double-U and his crowd.”
“One of their people, an operative named Windust, is proving a little problematic, I can’t seem to find anything about him, not even an official bio, he’s password-protected to the max, firewalls behind firewalls, I don’t have the resources to get past any of that.” Little me. “And if it turns out he was involved in, oh, let’s say… embezzling…”
“And, not wishing to presume… you two are… chums?” managing to surround the word with guttural slime.
“Hmm. Once again, whoever’s listening, I am not numbered among Mr. Windust’s fan base and know next to nothing about him, except he’s some kind of Friedmanite hit man, working 24/7 to keep the world convenient for people perhaps much like yourself, Mr. Thrubwell.”
“Oh, dear, no offense I hope… I will try to see what I can do from this end. Our databases—they’re world-famous, you know. I’m cleared pretty much all the way to Eyes Only, it shouldn’t be a bother.”
“I so look forward.”
Thanks to the thumb drive Marvin delivered, of course, Maxine has most of Windust’s résumé already, so putting Lloyd on his case is not for informational purposes, especially… In fact, Maxine, why are you harassing the man? Some honorable obsession about nailing the likely murderer of Lester Traipse, or just feeling neglected, missing the old pantyhose ripper’s curious notions about foreplay? Talk about ambivalent!
At least, if Lloyd is half the idiot his cousin Cornelia thinks he is, Windust should become aware of CIA interest in a fairly short time. No reason he shouldn’t start watching his back like everybody else. Right now petty molestation is about all that’s available to Maxine, down here in the small time, without anything you could call a moral sight line, no way to know how to compete at that elite level, that planetary pyramid scheme Windust’s employers have always bet everything on, with its smoothly delivered myths of the limitless. No idea of how to step outside her own history of safe choices and dowse her way across the desert of this precarious hour, hoping to find what? some refuge, some American DeepArcher…
33
Maxine has a purseful of time-sensitive passwords from Vyrva, changed every fifteen minutes on average, for getting into DeepArcher. She can’t help noticing this time how different the place is. What was once a train depot is now a Jetsons-era spaceport with all wacky angles, jagged towers in the distance, lenticular enclosures up on stilts, saucer traffic coming and going up in the neon sky. Yuppified duty-free shops, some for offshore brands she doesn’t recognize even the font they’re written in. Advertising everywhere. On walls, on the clothing and skins of crowd extras, as pop-ups out of the Invisible and into your face. She wonders if— Sure enough, here they are, lurking around the entrance to a Starbucks, a pair of cyberflaneurs who turn out to be Eric’s ad-business acquaintances Promoman and Sandwichgrrl.
“Nice place to hang out,” sez Sandwichgrrl.
“Not to mention do business,” adds Promoman. “Joint’s jumpin. A lot of these folks who look like only virtual background? they are real users.”
“Really. There’s supposed to be all kinds of deep encryption.”
“There’s also the backdoor, you didn’t know about that?”
“Since when?”
“Weeks… months?”
So that 11 September window of vulnerability Lucas and Justin were so worried about, for good reason apparently, has allowed not only unwelcome guests to sneak in but somebody—Gabriel Ice, the feds, fed sympathizers, other forces unknown who’ve had their eye on the site—to install a backdoor also. And easy as that, there goes the neighborhood. She clicks away, reaching at length a strange creepy nimbus like a follow spot in a club where you know you’ll get sick before the evening ends, has a moment of doubt, ignores it, clicks on into the heart of the nauseous blear of light, and then everything for a while goes black, blacker than anything she’s seen on a screen before.
When the picture returns, she seems to be traveling in a deepspace vehicle… there’s a menu for choosing among views, and, switching briefly to an exterior shot, she discovers it’s not a single vehicle but more like a convoy, not quite simply-connected, spaceships of different ages and sizes moving along through an extended forever… Heidi, if asked, would say she detected some Battlestar Galactica influence.
Inside Maxine finds corridors of glimmering space-age composite, long as boulevards, soaring interior distances, sculptured shadows, traffic through upwardly thickening twilight, pedestrians crossing bridges, airborne vehicles for passengers and for cargo busily glittering… Only code, she reminds herself. But who of all these faceless and uncredited could have written it and why?
Popping up in midair, a paging window appears, requesting her presence on the bridge, with a set of directions. Somebody must have seen her log in.
On the bridge she finds empty liquor bottles and used syringes. The captain’s chair is a La-Z-Boy recliner of distant vintage, hideous beige and covered with cigarette burns. There are inexpensive posters of Denise Richards and Tia Carrere Scotch-taped to the bulkheads. Some sort of hip-hop mix is coming from hidden speakers, at the moment Nate Dogg and Warren G, doing the huge mid-nineties West Coast hit “Regulate.” Personnel come and go on various errands, but the pace is not what you’d call brisk.
“Welcome to the bridge, Ms. Loeffler.” A loutish youth, unshaven, in cargo shorts and a stained More Cowbell T-shirt. There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves.
“So where’s everybody? the captain? the exec? The science officer?”
Raising one eyebrow and fingering the tops of his ears as if testing for pointiness, “Sorry, prime directive, No Fuckin Officers.” Gesturing her over to the forward observation windows. “The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”
“Awesome.”
“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.”
An antenna swivels. “Lucas, is that you?”
“Bus-tiiid!” The screen filling for a moment with psychedelic iTunes Visualizer patterns.
“So you’re in here dealing with what, backdoor issues, I hear?”
“Um, not exactly.”
“They tell me it’s wide open these days.”
“Downside of being proprietary, always guarantees a backdoor sooner or later,”
“And you’re all right with this? How about Justin?”
“We’re good, fact we were never comfortable with that old model anyway.”
Old model. Which must mean… “Some big news, let me guess.”
“Yep. We finally decided to go open source. Just sent the tarball out.”
“Meaning… anybody…?”
“Anybody with the patience to get through it, they want it, they got it. There’s already a Linux translation on the way, which should bring the amateurs in in droves.”
“So the big bucks…”
“No longer an option. Maybe never was. Justin and me’ll have to keep on being working stiffs for a while.”
She watches the unfolding flow of starscape, Kabbalistic vessels smashed at the Creation into all these bright drops of light, rushing out from the singular point that gave them birth, known elsewhere as the expanding universe… “What would happen if I started to click on some of these pixels here?”