Bleeding Edge (8 page)

The signs say D
EEP
A
RCHER
L
OUNGE
. Passengers waiting here have been given real faces, some at first glance faces Maxine thinks she knows, or ought to.

“Nice to meet you, Maxine. Going to be with us for a while?”

“Don’t know. Who told you my name?”

“Go ahead, explore around, use the cursor, click anywhere you like.”

If it’s a travel connection that Maxine’s supposed to be making,
she keeps missing it. “Departure” keeps being indefinitely postponed. She gathers that you’re supposed to get on what looks like a shuttle vehicle of some kind. At first she doesn’t even know it’s ready to leave till it’s gone. Later she can’t even find her way to the right platform. From the sumptuously provisioned bar upstairs, there’s a striking view of rolling stock antiquated and postmodern at the same time vastly coming and going, far down the line over the curve of the world. “It’s all right,” dialogue boxes assure her, “it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.”

Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself. According to Justin, Lucas is the creative partner in this. Justin’s the one who translated it into code, but the visual and sound design, the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins, all are due to Lucas.

Maxine locates at last a master directory of train schedules, and when she clicks on “Midnight Cannonball”—bingo. On she is crossfaded, up and down stairways, through dark pedestrian tunnels, emerging into soaring meta-Victorian glass- and iron-modulated light, through turnstiles whose guardians morph as she approaches from looming humorless robots into curvaceous smiling hula girls with orchid leis, up to a train whose kindly engineer leans beaming from the cab and calls out, “Take your time, young lady, we’re holdin her for you . . .”

The instant she steps on board, however, the train accelerates insanely, zero to warp speed in a tenth of a second, and they’re off to DeepArcher. The detail of the 3-D countryside barreling past the windows on both sides is surely on a much finer scale than it has to be, no loss of resolution no matter how closely she tries to focus in. Train hostesses out of Lucas and Justin’s beach-babe fantasies keep coming by with
carts full of junk food, drinks with Pacific subtexts like Tequila Sunrises and mai tais, dope of varying degrees of illegality . . .

Who can afford bandwidth like this? She mouses her way to the back of the car, expecting grand vistas of trackscape receding, only to find, instead, emptiness, absence of color, the entropic dwindling into Netscape gray of the other brighter world. As if any idea here of escaping to refuge would have to include no way back.

Though she’s on board the train now, Maxine sees no reason to stop clicking—she clicks on the hostesses’ toe rings, on the chili-glazed rice crackers in the Oriental Party Mix they bring, on the festively colored toothpicks which impale the chunks of tropical fruit on the drinks, you never know, it could be the next click—

Which eventually it is. The screen begins to shimmer and she is abruptly, you could say roughly, taken into a region of permanent dusk, outer-urban somehow, no longer aboard the train, no more jolly engineer or bodacious waitstaff, underpopulated streets increasingly unlit, as if public lamps are being allowed to burn out one by one and the realm of night to be restored by attrition. Above these somber streets, impossibly fractal towers feel their way like forest growth toward light that reaches this level only indirectly . . .

She’s lost. There is no map. It isn’t like being lost in any of the romantic tourist destinations back in meatspace. Serendipities here are unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen.

She senses dope smoke in the air and Vyrva at her shoulder with coffee in a mug that reads
I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER
. “Holy shit. What time is it?”

“Not that late,” Justin sez, “but I think we should log off pretty soon, no telling who’s monitoring.”

Just as she was getting comfortable.

“This isn’t encrypted? Firewalled?”

“Oh, heavily,” sez Lucas, “but if somebody wants in, they’ll get in. Deep Web or whatever.”

“That’s where this is?”

“Way down. Part of the concept. Trying to stay clear of the bots and spiders. A robots.txt protocol is OK for the surface Web, and well-behaved bots, but then there’s rogue bots who aren’t just ill-mannered, they’re mighty fuckin evil, the instant they see any disallow code, they home right in.”

“So better to stay deep,” Vyrva sez. “After a while it can get to be an addiction. There’s a hacker saying—once you’ve gone Deep, never get back to sleep.”

They have reconvened downstairs at the kitchen table. The more loaded the partners get and the more smoke in the air, the more comfortable they seem to grow talking about DeepArcher, though it’s hacker stuff Maxine has trouble following.

“What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”

“The crazy shit VCs used to go for,” as Justin recalls. “Back then, ’98, ’99, some of the places they were putting their money? You’d have to be a lot weirder than DeepArcher to even get them to raise their eyebrows.”

“We were almost too vanilla for them,” Lucas agrees. “Our design precedents happened to be pretty solid, for one thing”

According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.”

“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”

“At random.”

“At pseudorandom.”

To which the guys have also added designer linkrot to camouflage healthy pathways nobody wants revealed. “It’s really just another maze, only invisible. You’re dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on . . . an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”

“But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”

“Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and . . . no wait, that’s something else . . .”

R
eg’s paranoia has the side effect of warping his judgment about places to eat. Maxine finds him in the strange crowded neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge, sitting by the street window of something called Bagel Quest, eyeballing the foot traffic for undue interest in himself, behind him a dark, perhaps vast, interior from which no sound or light seems to emerge, and waitstaff rarely.

“So,” Maxine sez.

There’s a look on his face. “I’m being followed.”

“You’re sure?”

“Worse, they’ve been in my apartment too. Maybe on my computer.” Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.

“You could just let this go.”

“I could.” Beat. “You think I’m crazy.”

“I know you’re crazy,” sez Maxine, “which doesn’t mean you’re wrong about this. Somebody’s been showing some interest in me too.”

“Let’s see. I start looking under the surface at Ice’s company, next thing I know, I’m being followed, now they’re following you? You want
to tell me there’s no connection? I shouldn’t be freaking out in fear of my life or anything.” With a suspended chord also, about to resolve.

“There’s something else,” she noodges. “Any of my business?”

A rhetorical question Reg ignores. “You know what a
hawala
is?”

“Sure . . . yeah, uh, in the movie
Picnic
(1956), right, Kim Novak comes floating down the river, all these local people put their hands up in the air and go—”

“No, no, Maxi please, it’s . . . they tell me it’s a way to move money around the world without SWIFT numbers or bank fees or any of the hassle you’d get from Chase and them. A hundred percent reliable, eight hours max. No paper trail, no regulation, no surveillance.”

“How is this possible?”

“Mysteries of the Third World. Family-type operations usually. All depending on trust and personal honor.”

“Gee, I wonder why I never ran across this in New York.”

“
Hawaladars
around here tend to be in import-export, they take their fees in the form of discounts on prices and stuff. They’re like good bookies, keep it all in their heads, something Westerners can’t seem to do, so at hashslingrz somebody has been hiding a lot of major transaction history down behind multiple passwords and unlinked directories and so forth.”

“You heard about this from Eric?”

“He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.”

“Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?”

“It’s, actually it’s a Furby.”

“Excuse me, a—”

“Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—”

“Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours
hacks Furbys
?”

“Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance
there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.”

“Such as this
hawala
that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.”

“Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular
hawala
is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”

This is true. An offshore angle, with more dimensions than angles are supposed to have, has not escaped Maxine’s attention. She has found herself consulting current updates of the always useful Bribe Payers Index and its companion list the Corrupt Perceptions Index, which rank countries around the world for their likelihood of bent behavior, and hashslingrz seems to have dodgy linkages all over the map, particularly in the Mideast. Lately she’s been picking up certain tells for the well-known Islamic allergy to anything interest-bearing. Bond activity is rare to nonexistent. Instead of selling short, there is a tendency to go to elaborate sharia-compliant workarounds like arboon auctions. Why the concern for Muslim phobias about charging interest, unless . . . ?

Unless Ice stands to make a bundle in the region, what else?

Convection currents in Maxine’s coffee keep bringing something to the surface just long enough for her to mutter “Hey, wait . . .” before submerging again too quickly to ID it. She isn’t about to put her finger in and explore. “Reg, say your guy cracks all the encryption. What are you planning to do with what you find?”

“Something’s up,” impatient, also anxious. “Maybe even something that’s got to be stopped.”

“Which you think is more serious than simple fraud. What could be that big of a deal?”

“You’re the expert, Maxine. If it was a classic fraud haven, Grand Cayman or whatever, it’d be one thing. But this is the Mideast, and somebody’s going to way too much trouble to keep secrets, as if Ice or somebody in his shop ain’t just squirreling it away but bankrolling something, something big and invisible—”

“And . . . funneling sums over to the Emirates in the Hefty Smurf range can’t be for some totally innocent reason, because . . . ?”

“Because I keep trying to come up with innocent reasons and can’t. Can you?”

“I don’t do international intrigue, remember? Well, maybe Nigerian e-mails, but usually I’m down here with the bent baristas and the pigeon-drop artists.”

They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.

“Keepin that Tomcat in your purse there, I hope.”

“Oh, Reg. Maybe it’s you that should be carrying.”

“Maybe I should be finalizing travel plans, like, far, far away. Eric needless to say keeps getting more spooked the further into this he goes. Insists now on rendezvousing down in the Deep Web instead of in the subway, and frankly I’m a little reluctant.”

“What’s to be reluctant about?”

“Were you ever down there?”

“Not long ago. Seems like a nice secure place to meet.”

“You’re so comfortable with it, maybe you should be the one to go down there and talk to Eric. Cut out the middleman here.”

“Maybe, long as you don’t mind.” Is she thinking about
hawalas,
hashslingrz, even Reg’s personal safety, actually no, it’s that deco-derivative shuttle terminal of Lucas and Justin’s that might or might not
get her access to DeepArcher. Whatever that turns out to be. She isn’t quite ready to admit it, but she’s already entertaining the first draft of a fantasy in which Eric, sherpa of the Deep Web, faithful and maybe even cute, helps her find her way through the maze. Nancy fuckin Drew, here. “Maybe if I made a realworld approach first. Face-to-face. See how much we trust each other.”

“Good luck. You think I’m paranoid? These days you even go near this guy, he freaks.”

“I can make it an accidental meeting. Pretty standard maneuver. Can you give me a list of his hangouts?”

“I’ll e-mail something to you.” And soon Reg, taking a quick gander around at the street, has gone sidling off in the direction of downtown, miles away in the springtime shimmer.

•   •   •

AMONG MAXINE’S MORE USEFUL SENSORS
is her bladder. When she’s out of range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any particular interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans, or stock tips from which she’s likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has reliably steered her to enough significant restroom walls that she’s learned to pay attention.

This time she’s down in the Flatiron District when the alarm goes off. Against her better judgment, she steps into the dimly lit grease- and cigarette-smoke interior of Wall of Silence, once a tech-bubble hot spot, since fallen into greasyspoondom. The way to the restrooms is not as clearly marked as it could be. She finds herself wandering among customers at tables, who seem to be either unhappy couples or single men, possibly help-line candidates. One of whom, actually, now seems to be calling her name, with some urgency. Well, there’s urgency and there’s urgency. She squints through the gloom.

“Lucas?” Yep, and signs of seedy personal disarray even in this light. “You happen to know where they keep the toilet around here?”

“Hi, Maxi, listen, while you’re in there could you do me a favor—”

“You just broke up with somebody,” this being the kind of place you’d naturally choose for that, “and want to know how she’s doing. Sure. What’s her name?”

“Cassidy, but how did you—”

“And where is it?”

Back through the kitchen, down some stairs, around a couple of corners. Lit no more brightly than upstairs, and some would call this being considerate. There is a smell of cannabis purposefully alight. Maxine scans the short row of stalls. No blood coming from under the doors, no sounds of uncontrollable sobbing, good, good . . . “Yo Cassidy?”

“Who’s that?” from inside one of the stalls. “The bitch he’s dumping me for, no doubt.”

“Nah, thanks for the guess, but I’m in enough trouble already. Just gonna go in here for a minute,” stepping into the stall next to Cassidy’s.

“I should have known what was up the minute I saw this place,” Cassidy sez. “Better if we’d handled everything out in the street.”

“Lucas is having a little guilt, wants to know if you’re OK.”

“Not a problem, I came in here to piss, not open a vein. Lucas who?”

“Oh.”

“Figures, these fuckin clubs I keep ending up in. He told me Kyle.”

They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making. Meantime Cassidy is outlining some unsold pilot about dysfunctional dating south of 14th Street in which Lucas, near as Maxine can tell, only gets a walk-on. That’s until, inexplicably though only so for a moment, Cassidy is on to the topic of DeepArcher.

“Yeah, that splash screen,” Maxine kvells, “it’s awesome.”

“I designed it. Like that chick who did the tarot deck. Awesome and don’t forget hip,” half, but only half, ironic.

“Wait, awesome and hip, where have I heard that.”

Yep, turns out when she first met Lucas, Cassidy was working for hwgaahwgh.com.

“Did you have any kind of a contract with Lucas, Kyle, whatever?”

“No and I wasn’t doing it out of love, either. Hard to explain. It was all just coming from somewhere, for about a day and a half I felt I was duked in on forces outside my normal perimeter, you know? Not scared, just wanted to get it over with, wrote the file, did the Java, didn’t look at it again. Next thing I remember is one of them saying holy shit it’s the edge of the world, but frankly I can’t see a way they’re going to build any traffic. If I was a new user, coming to it cold, I’d be like, Public Void Close in a real hurry and try to forget about it. Better if they go for the single customer, Gabriel Ice or somebody.”

Presently, through strange toilet ESP, the ladies emerge at the same moment from their stalls and have a look at each other. Maxine is not too surprised to find tats, piercings, hair of an orchid shade not on any map of the human genome, an age somewhat south of legal for anything. The way Cassidy’s looking back meanwhile makes Maxine feel like Hillary Clinton or something.

“Can you check upstairs and see if he’s still there?”

“Happy to.” She ascends into the murky bummersphere again. Yes he’s still there.

“Startin to get worried about both of you.”

“Lucas, she’s twelve. And you better start paying her royalties.”