I shove the sleeves of my ratty sweater up to the elbows and rest one forearm across the counter. The tattoo stands out vividly against my spudlike flesh, and in my peripheral I can see your eyes glance up for a moment, taking in the black rectangle, the skull, the crossed fish. Then I pretend to get self-conscious. I step back and pull my sleeve down again - don't want you to see that the tattoo is only about a day old.
"No reservation for Stark," Evan says, right on cue. I'm cool, I'm expecting this; they lose all of the reservations.
"Dash these computers," I say. "You have any empty rooms?"
"Just a suite. And a couple of economy rooms," he says, issuing a double challenge: do I have the bucks for the former or the moxie for the latter?
"I'll take one of the economy rooms," I say.
"You sure?"
"HIV-positive."
Evan shrugs, the hotel clerk's equivalent of issuing a 20-page legal disclaimer, and prods the computer, which is good enough to spit out a keycard, freshly imprinted with a random code. It's also spewing bits upstairs to the computer lock on my door, telling it that I'm cool, I'm to be let in.
"Would you like someone to show you up?" Evan says, glancing in mock surprise around the lobby, which is of course devoid of bellhops. I respond in the only way possible: chuckle darkly - good one, Ev! - and hump my own bag.
My room's lone window looks out on a narrow well somewhere between an air shaft and a garbage chute in size and function. Patches of the shag carpet have fused into mysterious crust formations, and in the corners of the bathroom, pubic hairs have formed into gnarled drifts. There is a Robobar in the corner but the door can only be opened halfway because it runs into the radiator, a 12-ton cast-iron model that, randomly, once or twice an hour, makes a noise like a rock hitting the windshield. The Robobar is mostly empty but I wriggle one arm into it and yank out a canned Mai Tai, knowing that the selection will show up instantaneously on the computer screens below, where you and Evan will derive fleeting amusement from my offbeat tastes.
Yes, now we are surveiling each other. I open my suitcase and take my own Spew terminal out of its case, unplug the room's set and jack my own into the socket.
Then I start opening windows: first, in the upper left, you and Evan in wide-angle black-and-white. Then an episode of Starsky and Hutch that I happened to notice. Starsky's hair is very big in this one. And then I open a data window too and patch it into the feed coming out of your terminal down there at the desk.
Profile Auditors can do this because data security on the Spew is a joke. It was deliberately made a joke by the Government so that they, and we, and anyone else with a Radio Shack charge card and a trade school diploma, can snoop on anyone.
I sit back on the bed and sip my execrable Mai Tai from its heavy, rusty can and watch Starsky and Hutch. Every so often there's some activity at the desk and I watch you and Evan for a minute. When Evan uses his terminal, lines of ASCII text scroll up my data window. I cannot help noticing that when Evan isn't actively slacking he can type at a burst speed in excess of 200 words per minute.
From Starsky and Hutch I surf to an L.A. Law rerun and then to Larry King Live.
There's local news, then Dave comes on, and about the time he's doing his Top
Ten list, I see activity at the desk.
It is a young gentleman with hair way down past the epaulets of his tremendously oversized black wool overcoat. Naked hairy legs protrude below the coat and are socketed into large, ratty old basketball shoes. He is carrying, not a garment bag, but a guitar.
For the first time all night, you and Evan show actual hospitality. Evan does some punching on his computer, and monitoring the codes I can see that the guitarist is being checked into a room.
Into my room. Not the one I'm in, but the one I'm supposed to be in. Number 707.
I pull out the fax that Marie at Kensington Place Worldwide Reservation Command sent to me yesterday, just to double-check.
Sure enough, the guitarist is being checked into my room. Not only that - Evan's checking him in under my name.
I go out into the streets of the city. You and Evan pretend to ignore me, but I can see you following me with your eyes as I circumvent the doorman, who is planted like a dead ficus benjamina before the exit, and throw my shoulder against the sullen bulk of the revolving door. It has commenced snowing for the
11th time today. I walk cross-town to Television City and have a drink in a bar there, a real Profile Auditor hangout, the kind of joint where I'm proud to be seen. When I get back to the hotel, the shift has changed, you and Evan have apparently stalked off into the rapidly developing blizzard, and the only person there is the night clerk.
I stand there for 10 minutes or so while she winds down a rather involved, multithreaded conversation with a friend in Ireland. "Stark," I say, as she's hanging up, "Room 707. Left my keycard in the room."
She doesn't even ask to see ID, just makes up another keycard for me. Bad service has its charms. But I cruise past the seventh floor and go on up to my own cell because I want to do this right.
I jack into the Spew. I check out what's going on in Room 707.
First thing I look at is the Robobar transcript. Whoever's in there has already gone through four beers and two non-sparkling mineral waters. And one bad Mai
Tai.
Guess I'm a trendsetter here. A hunch thuds into my cortex. I pop a beer from my own Robobar and rewind the lobby security tape to midnight.
You and Evan hand over the helm to the Irish girl. Then, like Picard and Riker on their way to Ten Forward after a long day of sensitive negotiations, you head straight for Elevator Three, the only one that seems to be hooked up. So I check out the elevator activity transcript too - not to be monotonous or anything, but it's all on the Spew - and sho nuff, it seems that you and Evan went straight to the seventh floor. You're in there, I realize, with your guitar-player bud who wears shorts in the middle of the winter, and you're drinking bad beer and Mai
Tais from my Robobar.
I monitor the Spew traffic to Room 707. You did some random surfing like anyone else, sort of as foreplay, but since then you've just been hoovering up gigabyte after gigabyte of encrypted data.
It's gotta be media; only media takes that many bytes. It's coming from an unknown source, definitely not the big centralized Spew nodes - but it's been forwarded six ways from Sunday, it's been bounced off Indian military satellites, divided into tiny chunks, disguised as credit card authorizations, rerouted through manual telephone exchanges in Nigeria, reassembled in pirated insurance-company databases in the Netherlands. Upshot: I'll never trace it back to its source, or sources.
What is 10 times as weird: you're putting data out. You're talking back to the
Spew. You have turned your room - my room - into a broadcast station. For all I know, you've got a live studio audience packed in there with you.