Paradise Tales (11 page)

That night Jazza and I finally go for a beer at the bar in the Happy Farm, but J’s in bad shape. He just sits staring. Neurobics make him dizzy. They got a new timed drug dispenser on his wrist. He does a little jump and groans when they dose him. We’re hanging out with Gus.

Gus does this sweet little hippie routine. He says that he sold plankton to places like Paraguay so they could get carbon-reduction credits. Now. Everybody who was awake knows that it didn’t work and nobody made any money at it. In fact they lost their shirts.

So I ask myself: Where does Gus’s money come from? I mean, you got this greasy little dude who took too much whizz. His dialog is just too sussed for an eco-warrior.

“You heard about this VAO stuff?” he asks me.

“Only ’cause my granddaughter got mugged. I didn’t know they filter our news.”

“I got something that filters the filter,” he says. “This is news we need to know.”

“About my granddaughter?”

“No. Look me in the eye. The guys that do this are a crew. It’s several crews all over the country, but they’re all linked, and they’re all old guys. And they’re doing this kind of stuff a lot.”

Suddenly, I am aware of the surveillance all around us. “So?”

“Kind of blows our story, doesn’t it? Sweet little old guys playing computer games and taking physio.” Gus’s eyes are steady as a rock.

I knew it. Gus is a player.

I ask him, “How much are you, uh …
tipping
Curtis?”

His face and smile are less expressive than an armadillo’s behind. “Too much,” he says. His eyebrows do a little jump.

“Anybody else?” I ask him, meaning who are the other Players. It’s nice to know that even at our age we can make new friends and acquaintances.

“Oh yeah,” he says looking around. “You could start with The Good Fairies.” The Good Fairies are a couple, been together fifty years. They look up from their table, and they look pretty mean to me.

“I’ll get you that filter,” says Gus.

Good as his word, I get mail. Takes me a while, because it downloads as dirty pictures. I try a couple of times and finally get the code. Load it up and I got a different personalisation on the news.

So I fill up my newspaper and I read the backstory. This crew has been at it for months. Old guys who hijack armed intelligent cameras, old guys who spray clubs with paralysis gas or shoot electricity through whole trainloads of commuters. They edit out every single last purse and wristwatch while the ordnance that is supposed to protect the punters is turned around on them.

There are zapped grannies, zapped babies, zapped beautiful teenage girls who should have been left to enjoy life. I never had any respect for direct-action crime. Money is magic, it’s a religion. All you gotta do is just walk into the temple and help yourself and nobody gets hurt.

Not these geeks. For them, hurting people is part of the point. They’re not even really crooks. Crooks want to be invisible. These guys are so stupid and vicious that they want everybody to know about them.

They got this crazy leader who calls himself Silhouette. Aw, Jesus, can you believe that? He probably grew up wanting to be Eminem or something. He still does that dumb thing with the splayed-open hands pointing down. Silhouette is skinny like a model. His knees are fatter than his thighs and ho-hum he’s all in black and he has his whole face blanked out, just black, no eyes no mouth. Oh, Daddy Cool.

I take one look at this guy and I know just who he is. My generation, you know, we never fought a war. We grew up watching disasters on TV and worrying about our clothes. This guy is sitting there and he’s holding his face so that we can see he’s got killer cheekbones. The guy’s probably eighty and he’s worried about his looks.

And of course he’s got a manifesto. He croaks it at me, in this real weird voice, until I figure out it’s been recognition-masked. No voiceprint. It makes him sound like he’s talking underwater.

“You sniff money on old people, and just because we can’t run and can’t hurt you back you strip us naked. You leave us in cold-water flats and shut us up in expensive prisons you call Homes. You don’t pay us the pensions you promised. When we get sick, you tell us our insurance that we paid for all our lives doesn’t cover the cost of care. You want us to die. So. We’ll die. And we’ll take everything from you when we go.”

You want to know the spookiest thing of all? I know where he’s coming from. I know exactly what Silhouette means.

“Age Rage,” he says and clenches a fist.

So the next day I’m back down in the bar with Gus. I got Jazzanova with me like he’s my good-luck charm. Gus has his squeeze Mandy. Mandy used to be a lap dancer. She’s still got a body, I can tell you.

She’s also got a mouth and the brains to use it. Her cover is that she used to be in property development. Well yeah maybe. A certain kind of old babe has the hardest eyes you’ll ever see.

Mandy says, “The trouble with that scum is they’ll turn the heat up on all of us.”

“Yup,” says Gus. “We’ll end up on the street.”

“I’ll take Curtis with me,” I promise. “I got evidence on the guy.”

Mandy’s not impressed. “Good! You can share the same cardboard box. Hope it makes you feel better.”
We’re too old for fear. We just turn our backs on it. If we get the fear at all, it takes us over and our legs don’t work and we go little and frail and old. So we got to be like old dried leather. It used to be soft, but now it’s as hard as stone.

The Good Fairies sit listening. They are as cerebral as fuck. I mean these guys are the only people I know who can tell their genitals what to do. They got married fifty years ago and they’ve only fucked each other since. I blame AIDs.

The Good Fairies sometimes talk in unison. It’s like twins who’ve been locked up in the same closet since they were born. “We have to take out Silhouette.”

Beat, as we cogitate. True. Beat. Us? Beat.

Then we all start roaring with laughter. Mandy coughs like a dog with its vocal chords cut out. Gus squeaks. I know I sound like gravel being milled. Jazzanova stares into outer space, and doesn’t want to be left out, so he laughs at the strip lighting and then he swallows a chip off the table edge, thinking it’s a pill.

Mandy is barking. “The Neurobics Crew!”

The Good Fairies sit holding hands, sipping their cigarettes, and they don’t move a muscle.

Fairy One says, real calm, “It’ll be real funny inside that cardboard box.”

“ ’Specially when it rains,” says the other. This guy is five foot two with a dorky beard. He looks like a failed Drag King, but he calls himself Thug, which has to be some kind of joke.

“Yeah, but you guys,” says Mandy. “I can hear where you’re coming from, but what are you going to DO?”

Fairy One calls himself JoJo, but I bet he’s really called George, and he says, “We ask him to stop.”

“Oh yeah? Sure!”

“His position doesn’t make sense. He says he does it because he’s old. But it is the old he’s hurting.”

Mandy shakes her head. “He’s in it for the money.”

Thug disagrees. “He’s in it for the showbiz. Money won’t be enough.”

JoJo says, “We show him how to get on TV and say something that makes sense for a change. I’m sure that most of us have something to say on the position of the old.”

Mandy says, “How you gonna do that?”

JoJo says, “I used to make TV shows.”

Thug says. “All we gotta do is find who Silhouette is.”

And I get this real weird, sick feeling, and I don’t know why.

Mandy jerks like she’s laughing to herself. She flicks cigarette ash like it’s going all over their pretty little dream. “You better get hacking,” she says.

The next day my dear Dr. Curtis runs in to tell me we’re all about to get a visit from the cops.

Curtis looks terrified. He looks sick. He leans against my door like they’re going to hammer it down. Plump smooth-skinned pretty little doctor, he’s got so much to lose.

“How’s your system?” he asks, smiling like he’s relearning how to use his facial muscles. He’s got something he doesn’t want to say in front of the ordnance.

I don’t get it. “What’s it to you?”

He makes a noise like someone’s jammed a pin in his butt. His eyes start doing a belly dance toward the window. I look out and see that the front drive of the Happy Farm is stuffed like a turkey with police cars.

I just say, “A shape outlined against the light?”

I mean a silhouette. Curtis sorta settles with relief and nods yes. “You’ve been following the news.”

I get it. The cops are here to find out if any of us nice old folks are funding Silhouette’s reign of terror. That means that they’ll be going through our accounts. For once Curtis and I have exactly the same self-interest.

I’m a thief and I’ve never been caught and that’s not because I’m smart, but because I know I’m not. So I worry. So I prepare.

I got about ten minutes and that’s all I need. I start running my emergency program. It looks like a rerun of pro golf. Curtis hangs around. He wants to see how I do this. I need to put on my specs, but I don’t want him to know about the transcoder.

“Curtis, maybe you should go talk to our guests.” I mean slow them down. I mean get out of here.

Then there’s a knock. In comes the Kid. Maybe he’s come to tell me about the cops, too. He sees Curtis, and I swear his eyes switch on with hate like lightbulbs.

“Joao, maybe you could take Dr. Curtis out to greet our guests.” And that means: Joao help me get him out of here.

That Kid is sussed. “You,” he says to Curtis, and punches the palm of his hand. Curtis understands that, too. Note. Not one of us has said anything that would sound bad in court.

I hear the door shut. Finally I put on my specs and the transcoder shows me data download on one eye lens and data upload on the other.

It’s a fake I’ve had worked out for years. It’ll cover my whole account and make it look like I’m some kind of gaga spendthrift, that I gamble a lot on a Korean site, lose my dosh, win some dosh. It matches, transaction for transaction, money in, money out.

That’s what’s uploading. On the other lens, I’m encrypting my old data. I got maybe five minutes now.

Just having some encrypted data on my system will be enough to make trouble. I’m ghosting the encrypted file, and then I go to get it off my disk. It starts to squirt into my transcoder.

I hear big heavy boots. I hear Dr. Curtis babbling happily. I hear a knock on the front door. Mine? No next door.

Six … five … four … stuff is still downloading. Three two one zero. Right, off comes the transcoder. It looks like one of the arms from my glasses. On my hard drive, iron molecules are being permanently scrambled. Sorry, Officer, I’m just this old guy and I’ve been having these terrible problems with my system.

I go take a shower. They monitor your heartbeat and video your keystrokes, but the law says they can’t perve you in the shower.

And while I’m in the shower I take the transcoder and like I rehearsed a hundred times, I push it up the head of my penis.

The transcoder’s long, it’s thin. In an X-ray, it’ll look like a sexual prosthetic.

When the knock on my door comes, I’m out, I’m dry, and I’m in my nice baggy shiny blue suit. I am the picture of a callipered, monitored neurobic modern Noughties Boy. With money of his own.

The Armament comes in. He looks like somebody who divides his time between weightlifting and V-games, hairy golden biceps, a smile like a rodent’s and heavy-duty multipurpose specs. His manner is unfriendly. “You’re Alistair Brewster. Hello. We’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“I don’t see what’s stopping you.” I don’t do polite even with Armament.

“Fine.” He sits down without being asked. His specs have a little blinking light. Smile, you’re on candid camera. “Mr. Brewster, you used to work for SecureIT Inc.”

“Was that a question or a statement?”


He blinks. “You worked on the design of security systems.”

There is no lie as effective as the truth. “That’s how I made my money. I came up with some of the recognition software, the stuff that means the ordnance knows who it’s dealing with.” I try to make it sound rich.

He nods and pretends to be impressed. “I was wondering if you could help us understand some of the ways in which these safety checks could be subverted. During the recent spate of thefts.”

Now, this is trouble. It’s coming from an angle I was not expecting. They don’t think I’m a thief. They don’t think I’m a donor.

They think maybe I’m part of Silhouette’s crew.

I stall for time. “Can I confirm your ID?”

“Sure.”

“I’m not talking security until I know who you are.”

“Very wise, Mr. Brewster.”

“Not wisdom. Habit. You get by on habit at my age Mr. …”

Secret Squirrel here won’t give me his name, just a look at his dental work. So he leans forward, and my TV checks out his retinas. We share a polite, stone-cold silence as it chews over this for a while. Then out comes his stuff.

Secret Squirrel is thirty-six years old, has a tattoo on his right knee which sounds real romantic and is validated as Armament, Security Status Amber … oh, it takes me back to the good old days. It still won’t give me his name. Psychological advantage.

I always hated Armament, for the same reason I hate Silhouette. They shoot people. Also, they never once gave SecureIT a clear brief. “OK, Secret Squirrel, shoot. I don’t mean that literally, by the way. Feel free to make a few more statements you already know the answers to.”

“Smart ass,” says the Armament.

“Look, Squirrel, I’m rich, I’m happy, I don’t have to take anything from anybody, and it was difficult getting to the point that I can say that with confidence. I didn’t ask you in here, and I don’t have to cooperate. In fact, I signed a nondisclosure agreement with SecureIT when I left. What they would prefer and what I would prefer is that you go talk to them instead of me. So. You want me to be nice to you, you start thinking nice thoughts about what a sweet old guy I am and how much you respect me.”

“Age Rage,” he says sweetly, calmly. “You’re a suspect, Mr. Brewster, not an information source.” He keeps smiling and waits for me to fall over in shock.

I just do Mr. Rich Disgusted. I roll my eyes. And hold up my hands like, I live in this place, so why would I have Age Rage?

He keeps his poker smile. “So, Mr. Brewster, it is in your own interests to cooperate fully. In the first place, Mr. Brewster, it is true that you came up with a lot of this stuff, and it is also true that it is all patented in the name of SecureIT and that you didn’t get a bean. Isn’t that so.”