“Hi, Bob. How’re things?”
“Good.”
Janine leaned forward, squinting at Dresner as he chatted. “How is he controlling those icons and scrolling through the names? Is it tracking his eye movements?”
Smith had been wondering the same thing. “I don’t think so. You’d see the screen image moving around. He was looking straight at the crowd when that app opened.”
“Maybe this was all set up beforehand. Maybe the system’s just in some kind of demonstration mode.”
“I don’t know. Maybe…”
Dresner pulled out his Bluetooth headset and laid it on the lectern before walking back to center stage. “I’ve always hated those things. They hurt my ear. How about you, Bob?”
“Um…” Stamen said, missing a few beats as he wrestled with the same thing everyone else was — why was Dresner’s voice still being picked up by the PA and why could he still hear the phone call? “I don’t like them.”
“Exactly! Me neither. So I thought, What if I just had a tiny microphone built into a custom cap that clamps to one of my back teeth? And on top of that, what if I had a much smaller and more sophisticated version of my hearing implants route sound directly to my brain?”
There was complete silence in the auditorium for a few seconds before everyone started talking at once. The tone wasn’t necessarily excitement, though. More of an impressed skepticism apparently shared by the young woman sitting next to him.
“Okay, he’s definitely into cool nerd territory now, but if you find your Bluetooth so uncomfortable, there are a bunch of companies that will make you a custom earpiece. That’s gotta be cheaper and easier than getting a dentist to make something that fits on your tooth and getting studs screwed into your skull.”
“I dunno,” Smith responded. “I’ve worked with a lot of people who use Dresner’s hearing system and they all say it aches a little for a couple of days and then you forget the studs are even there until they need to be recharged. And he’s saying he made them even smaller.”
She scowled and leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her chest again. If there was any great truth, it was that her generation was virtually impossible to impress where technology was concerned. They always wanted more.
“Thanks, Bob. I’ll talk to you later,” Dresner said. The color drained from the phone icon and it tucked itself back into the side of the massive screen.
He started pacing again, the audience following his every move. “I’ve had terrible vision my entire life and I know I look ridiculous with these huge lenses but I’ve never been able to get comfortable with contacts.”
He took his glasses off and let them hang loosely in his hand. Instead of the screen behind him suddenly tracking the floor, the image of the audience held steady but turned distorted and blurry.
“I don’t get it,” Janine muttered, but Smith ignored her. He was pretty sure he did understand, but he was having a hard time believing what his mind was telling him.
Illegible words appeared across the top of the screen and he concentrated on them as they slowly came into focus.
PROCESSING VISION CORRECTION
Confused silence prevailed as Dresner returned to the lectern and leaned against it. “So then I thought, if I can send sound to my audio cortex, why can’t I send images to my visual cortex?”
This time there were no voices at all. The only sound was of a hundred people attacking their cell phones in a desperate effort to be the first to text word of Dresner’s new miracle to the world.
5
Gerhard Eichmann slid his chair farther into the shade and tried again to wave off a shoeshine boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. A few stern Arabic words from a waiter finally got the job done and the boy retreated into the road, dodging the chaotic traffic in search of a less resistant customer.
Despite having lived in Marrakech for more than a decade, Eichmann had never been to this particular outdoor café. Most of the tables were surrounded by local men drinking tea. The only other white faces belonged to a French couple battling the midday heat with bottles of overpriced local beer.
Eichmann nervously examined the people flowing by on the sidewalk, occasionally making eye contact that gave him hope this would soon be over. Every time, though, he ended up watching them hurry off toward the walls of the old city and the crowded markets beyond.
It was the constant motion, the tumult, the mix of modern and ancient that had convinced him to make Marrakech his home. It offered anonymity to those who craved it, without stripping away all the trappings and conveniences of the civilized world. It allowed him to be a ghost suspended between the past, present, and future.
A man in a sweat-stained linen shirt and blue slacks emerged from behind a cart piled with oranges and jogged onto the sidewalk. This time the eye contact was more than fleeting.
“Can I join you?” he said, pointing to an empty chair pushed up against the tiny table. “I twisted my ankle shopping in the souks.”
Eichmann’s mouth went so dry, he found it difficult to respond. “Of…of course. The cobblestones here can be treacherous.”
He hated this — leaving the tiny world he’d so carefully closed around himself, coming into contact with these types of men. But he’d been forbidden to use the Internet. It was too uncontrollable, too populated by clever and curious eyes.
“Do you have it?
The man — Claude Géroux — waved a muscular arm in the waiter’s direction and used French to order a sparkling water.
“Do you have it?” Eichmann repeated, hiding his fear but letting his irritation come through. He was scheduled to leave for North Korea in less than three hours and after everything he’d gone through to get permission for the trip, he would not let this meeting delay him.
“Of course,” Géroux said, switching to accented English. “And you?”
“Yes.”
The Frenchman didn’t display his fear either, but in his case that was likely because he felt none. Why would he? Eichmann knew he looked like exactly what he was: an academic reaching an age when thin became frail and pale became sickly. Géroux would look on him with little more than amusement.
Comfortable that he had the upper hand, the Frenchman casually handed a thumb drive across the table. Eichmann pulled a small laptop from its case and slid the drive into the USB port. After a quick glance to confirm that the only thing behind him was a cracked wall and the feral cat perched on top of it, he entered the agreed-upon password and opened the video file that appeared.
Skipping through the violent footage for a few moments, he felt the strange mix of fascination and revulsion that had become so familiar to him over the last quarter century.
“I didn’t think there was anything new under the sun,” Géroux said, accepting a bottle of water from the waiter and falling silent until he’d moved on. “They didn’t fight back or even try to save themselves. The Afghans always fight. In fact, you could say that it’s all they do.”
Eichmann ignored him, connecting the laptop to the Internet and pulling up a bank account in Yemen.
“Was it the plastic boxes they had strapped to their waists — the ones that were taken from them? Was it drugs?”
Eichmann continued to concentrate on what he was doing, acting as though he hadn’t heard. The boxes Géroux was referring to did not contain drugs; nor did they still exist. He had confirmation that they’d been delivered to an obscure military outpost and incinerated more than twelve hours ago.
“It’s done,” Eichmann said, shutting down the laptop and slamming the lid shut.
Géroux kept his dead eyes on him and took another sip of his water before pulling a smartphone from his pocket. A nearly imperceptible smile broke across his lips as the screen registered the funds transferred into his account.