“You’ll have to excuse my curiosity,” he said, beginning to rise. “I’ve fought in many wars, in many places. And this…”
He shook his head and threw down a hundred-dirham note before standing and weaving through the busy tables. Eichmann watched him wade into traffic, jogging athletically past a rusting cab as he made his way toward a median crowded with people waiting for an opportunity to cross the remaining lanes.
He was almost there when a truck piled with mattresses lost control and swerved out of its lane. It crossed into the median, catching him dead center in its grille with enough force that his head shattered the windshield. The entire vehicle listed right as terrified people dove out of the way and oncoming traffic veered onto sidewalks crowded with pedestrians.
Everyone in the café was on their feet, surging toward the accident and then retreating when a pickup slammed into a car parked at the curb. Eichmann, now completely forgotten by everyone around him, stood, fighting off a wave of nausea and slipping the precious flash drive into his pocket.
He stayed close to the wall, clutching his laptop to his chest until he was able to slip into an empty, urine-scented alleyway. He increased his pace, daring a glance behind him at the frantic people swarming the road and the bloodstained front of the mattress van.
Apparently, Géroux’s curiosity had not been excused.
6
Christian Dresner beamed from the lectern as the dull click of thumbs on cell phones filled the convention center. Smith didn’t have anyone to text since he still had no idea why he was there, so he just sat quietly and tried to wrap his mind around the potential of Dresner’s new hardware.
To call it revolutionary was an almost laughable understatement. Smith was one of the few people who had recognized Dresner’s hearing aid for what it was: a first hesitant step on the road to changing humanity forever. What made it so new — so extraordinary — was that it had been the first prosthetic that wasn’t a wildly imperfect facsimile of what had been lost. Instead, it was an order-of-magnitude improvement over what evolution had spent millions of years creating. In the end, his great accomplishment hadn’t been helping impaired people to hear. It had been demonstrating that we were entering a world where Mother Nature could be beaten at her own game.
This step, though, was in no way hesitant. Dresner was throwing humanity headlong into what could be the next phase of its existence. Where would it go? Where would it stop? Hell, where should it stop?
Smith looked over at Janine, but she was completely immersed in her iPhone — a device that had seemed so sophisticated a few minutes ago but now seemed a little like a steam-powered stone tablet.
Having said that, a few critical questions needed to be answered. First, did it really work? Innovative technology was great but if it was hard to use or impractical, it tended to fade pretty quickly. Touchscreens, headsets, and standard voice interfaces already worked pretty well.
The second was about the body modifications. He’d spent his life trying not to be perforated and, with the exception of a few stray bullets and a knife or two, had been fairly successful. Would average people want to have bolts screwed into their skulls for the privilege of getting rid of their smartphones?
He glanced at Janine again, noting the diamond nose stud and the colorful tattoo on her upper arm. There was his answer. The generation after his seemed to look at body modification with the same trepidation he felt when changing his shirt.
The sound of thumbs on plastic died down and Dresner began pacing again, the screen behind him following along as though it were connected to cameras embedded in his retinas. “As all of you know, a piece of hardware is only as useful as the software available for it. In the end, the Merge is just a platform. It’s what we’re putting on that platform that really interests me. Of course, we have all the basic apps you’d expect: phone, email, social networking, GPS, and the like. But we’ve also created applications for the financial services industry and politics — two areas that are critical to society and I think everyone agrees need help.”
“Oh, God,” Janine mumbled, a look of horror overcoming her youthful features. “He may have invented the coolest technology since the printing press and he’s going Boy Scout on us.”
Dresner seemed to read her mind. “But don’t worry. We’ve done some fun stuff too.”
On screen, the doors of the convention center burst open and a horde of blood-drenched vampires rushed in. It was realistic enough to elicit more than a few screams from the audience as they spun in their chairs to take in the empty room behind them. When they turned back to Dresner, he was holding his hand like a gun, happily picking off the ghouls as they charged up the aisle.
“No way!” Janine said, attacking her Twitter account again. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I once saw George Clooney in a Speedo.”
The monsters faded and Dresner looked out over the slightly ruffled crowd. “The strange truth is that the main idea here wasn’t the hardware — I just needed something to run the search engine I had in my head.” He paused for a moment, seeming to ponder his next words. “The problem with the Internet — and the world in general — isn’t the availability of information, it’s that there’s too much information. And most of it’s nonsense. But what if we had a way of instantly vetting the quality of what we’re taking in? And I’m not just talking about things we look up on the ’net, I’m talking about everything around us.”
He motioned to Bob Stamen again. “Could you stand up one more time?”
He did, if a bit reluctantly, and an icon on the screen that looked like a listing wedding cake activated. Suddenly Stamen was surrounded by a hazy green aura, and his name hovered over his head in subtle lettering.
“We’ve managed to crack the facial recognition problem by hijacking the brain’s built-in software for it. So you can see that my new search engine — LayerCake — knows who Bob is and gives him a nice green glow to tell me that he’s a good guy. Based on what, you’re probably asking. Well, based on everything available in the public record — Wikipedia, news articles, and so on. LayerCake goes through all those things, combines them to some extent with what it knows about my own personal values, and then gives me the benefit of its analysis. Now, why did I pick on Bob? Because he’s the very image of the person you want to marry your daughter — he runs a terrific charity, he has no criminal record, he has a perfect credit rating, and so on.” Dresner grinned. “Not everyone here would probably get quite that deep a shade of green.”
The laughter from the crowd was polite, but also a little nervous. Everyone was obviously pondering the same thing Smith was. What would LayerCake think of them?
The color of the icons running down the left side of the screen now made more sense, too. The stock market icon that had been pale green a few minutes ago darkened perceptibly, undoubtedly reflecting the real-time movement in Dresner Industries’ stock price as the texts and tweets of people in the crowd flew around the world. The weather icon went from green on the left to red on the right, probably reflecting the current sunny skies over Las Vegas and the storm front predicted to arrive that night.
“But it doesn’t just work on people,” Dresner said, walking back to the podium and looking down at the headset he’d discarded earlier. It had the same warm green glow as Bob Stamen.