I know this tone of voice, it’s one of Nico’s favorites, glib and self-satisfied; it was her tone at UNH when she told me what was in the duffel bag: guns, maple syrup, human skulls.
Jordan stoops to tug a ratty yellow T-shirt from one of the disheveled piles on the ground and pull it on over his head. The room smells like mildew or mold. I look around at the clustered mannequins, some dressed and some undressed, some raising hands in greeting, some staring into the room’s dusty corners. Two of them have been arranged to shake hands, like one is welcoming the other to a board meeting.
“Jordan,” I say, “Is it possible…”
“Yes?”
He stretches out the word, simpering, like an obsequious butler. The shirt Jordan has selected has Super Mario on it, mustachioed and hydrocephalic and mock heroic. If I am remembering this incorrectly, or imagining it, what Nico told me on the helicopter, I am going to sound like a moron—I am aware of that. On the other hand, this man, of all the people in the world, already finds me ridiculous: my aesthetic, my attitude, my existence.
“Is it possible that you have an Internet connection in here?”
“Oh, sure,” he says, unhesitating, grinning, proud. “Why? You want to check your e-mail?”
“No,” I say. In my chest there is a starburst of excitement, possibilities sparkling to life like fireworks. “I need to do a search.”
We tiptoe past Sleeping Beauty to a door marked MANAGER’S OFFICE, where Jordan asks me to stare at the floor while he runs the numbers on a combination lock and lets us in. And there it is, in the tiny claustrophobic office space, jammed between a three-drawer filing cabinet and a small unplugged break-room refrigerator with a missing door: a desk of particleboard and glass, with a big ugly Dell computer, the tall processor tower listing alarmingly. Jordan sees my skeptical expression and brays laughter as he plops into the spinning office chair behind the desk.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he says, leaning forward to depress the power button. “Do you think the head of the National Security Administration is offline right now? What about His Honor the President?”
“I can’t say I’ve really thought about it,” I say.
“Maybe you should,” he says, swiveling in the chair to wink at me. “You heard of sipper?”
“No.”
“No?” He spells it, S-I-P-R. “Never heard of that?”
“No.”
“What about nipper?”
“No.”
He cranes his head around, chuckles. “God. Wow. You’ve heard of Google, right? It starts with a G.”
I ignore him. I squint hopefully at the screen, feeling like I’m in the middle of some kind of elaborate practical joke. Indeed, in that long uncertain moment, waiting to see if the monitor’s black screen will come to life, I suddenly feel like maybe the whole thing is a practical joke, that this whole final year of human history is just a prank that’s been played on me, on gullible ol’ Hank Palace, and that all the world is going to jump out of the closet here in the manager’s office at Next Time Around and say “Surprise!” and all the lights will come on and all the world go back to how it was.
“Ah, come on, Scott,” says Jordan idly, interrupting my reverie. He’s staring at the still-blank screen, playing drums on his thighs.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s this jackoff in Toledo who’s never up and running when he says he’s going to be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s because of your limited policeman’s mind.” Again, I don’t take the bait; again, I remain impassive, waiting to get what I need. “The Internet isn’t one big thing hovering in the sky. It’s a bunch of networks, and people can’t get to the networks anymore because the devices that got them there are powered by lots and lots of electricity. So we built new networks. I got this shitty computer and three landlines and a 12.8 modem and a gas tank’s worth of juice, and I can connect to some dudes I know in Pittsburgh with the same setup, who can connect to Toledo, and so on into the beautiful forever. It’s like a super-old-school mesh network. Do you know what a mesh network is? Wait, lemme guess.”
He blows a bubble, pops it with one dirty fingernail. It’s maddening; he’s like an obnoxious seven-year-old that someone has installed at the helm of a vast international conspiracy.
“Of course, all the sites are mirrors, so a lot of stuff is missing or corrupted or what have you. But still impressive, right?”
“I would be a lot more impressed,” I say, “if we weren’t still staring at a blank screen.”
But even as I say it, the screen glows to life with the shimmering variegated panes of the Windows 98 logo, flickering ghostly like a hieroglyph on a cave wall.
“Oo,” says Jordan, leaning forward. “That kind of made you look like an asshole, the way that played out.”
I listen to the familiar hiss then click then beep of a dial-up modem making its connection. There’s a prickling sensation from deep somewhere in the nerves of my injured arm. I reach over with my left hand and squeeze the right biceps in its sling, massaging it with two fingers. Jordan clicks on the Start menu and calls up a blank screen, cursor blinking. He cracks his knuckles ostentatiously, like a maestro, while my mind buzzes and flits. I’m suddenly deep back into my casework, trying to decide what information I need most, what’s worth trying for. Jordan, however, makes no move to cede me the chair.
“You tell me what you’re looking for, and I find it for you.”
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”
“Okay, so we move to option B, which is you fucking yourself.” He grins at me. “The way this thing works, you can’t just type in what you want. I gotta run code for every search.”
“Fine,” I say. “Fine.”
“And just so you know, in general the more trivial the information that you’re looking for, the less likely you’ll find it on our server. But of course, we all have different definitions of trivial, don’t we?”
Behind us we hear a rustling and Jordan yells, “Abigail? You’re awake?”
“Yes,” the girl calls back. “And not happy about it.”
“Can we get started?” I say, and Jordan tells me to fire away and I fire away. “I need to search something called the NCIC.”
“National Crime Information Center,” says Jordan, already typing.
“How did you know that?”
“I know everything. I thought you had that figured out?” he says, fingers still dancing across the keys. “Hey, you don’t need to access the Pentagon by any chance, do you?”
“No.”
“Oh well.”
I give him the details: Rocky Milano. White male, age approximately fifty-five to sixty. No known aliases.
He types. We wait. It works slowly, streams of text flutter past, the monitor flickers from gray screen to gray screen. All of the familiar soothing icons of human–machine interaction are absent: the hourglass, the whirling circles of light. Finally Jordan squints at the screen, shrugs his shoulders, and turns around.
“Nope.”
“Nope, what? It’s not working?”
“It’s working. I’m in there. But there’s no listing.”
“Is it possible you don’t have the whole thing?”
“The whole database?
“Yes. That this is an incomplete—what did you call it?”
“Mirror,” he says. “An incomplete mirror of the original archives.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Is it possible?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “Very possible. Probable, in fact.”
I grimace. Of course. Nothing for good. Nothing for certain. I direct Jordan to get out of the FBI database and execute a simple Web search for Rocky’s name, setting us up for a fruitless fifteen minutes of scrolling through hundreds of hits—on the real Rocky and on dozens of other Rocky Milanos.