Wetware (11 page)

He was bothered by another matter too, in that he hadn’t done the code all at once, but by sections—for eye color, say, or skin texture or the ability to write music—and each of these had been enhanced on the basis of hundreds of thousands if not millions of reproductions, and so each section had possibilities for tampering. Would the sabotage have been done in some exceedingly unobtrusive way, such as adding something to the qualities of the hypothalamus or the lining of the lung, or to the covering of the spinal cord? Or would it be in some more obvious spot, as in the development of the frontal lobes? It was like trying to guess where a cancer might be found: a mole on the skin, or a tumor in the pancreas. And if the changes were hidden away like this, how did they work? He didn’t know.

Mostly he flipped here and there aimlessly, and what gave him the creeps was that he wasn’t going about this in an orderly fashion, with a method, but just taking a look here and there. What would he find in the mess?

Then he tried to come up with a method: Should he divide the code he had into discrete sections and look through each one, on the basis of anatomical systems, or should he start right at the bottom, at the feet, and work upward through everything—nerves, bone, blood vessels, lymph system, muscle, skin, even the light down on Kay’s arms and on her thighs, and which could only be seen when the sun was on it? Could it possibly be something as small as a change in the code for a hair?

He realized it was hopeless. There was no way he would be able to tell by the finished code what was what or how it had come to be, since at this stage everything was seamless and looked so natural that all he could see was the endless complexity of a living thing. How was he going to pick out the one significant detail of that? What he needed, he realized, was not the details of the finished versions, but the log of how they were put together, the ongoing record of just how each detail came into being. The clue would be sudden appearances of traits that no one expected or wanted or that, according to his idea of things, suggested the ungraceful, the ugly, and the brutal.

He had always thought that one of his jobs was to make an estimate of the whole by the parts, and there was something in the escape that left him trying to be specific about what had been done to Kay. If he had added love and desire, mathematical brilliance, an instinct for music, why, then it would have been possible for someone else to add other qualities, like fury, a delight in power, or the worst possible instinct for doing injury, as though darkness were an irresistible and delicious way of knowledge. Whose ideas were dominant anyway, his or someone else’s?

CHAPTER 4

March 22, 2029, 4:30 A.M.

BRIGGS CAME out of the Galapagos building, hearing the squeak of the logo and smelling, too, the sea-stink of iodine. He turned down the avenue, walking with his hands in his coat. The last thing he wanted now was to go home and sit by the phone for the next call that was surely coming. His boss would tell him to come to a meeting. No. Not his boss. His boss’s assistant would tell him to come to the meeting, and his voice would betray the slightest impatience, the first sign that Briggs was being diminished.

Briggs walked toward the lights up ahead, where there were some bars and diners with antiquated neon signs. He listened to the sounds of the street behind him, and from time to time he stepped into the doorway of a building and waited in the shadows. Well, he wasn’t being followed yet, he supposed, but it wouldn’t be too much longer before he was.

Then he turned and went up the street toward the cherry-colored neon of a gaming parlor, which looked like a combination of an arcade where kids used to play video games and a casino with cocktail waitresses in short skirts. The games were at one side of the room: these were set up in little booths with a clear membrane, like soft glass, that you could walk through when the game was available. Two cots were inside. It was on these slender beds that the people who played against each other stretched out in their full skin-suits, which were connected to the game’s network. People gambled on the games, and this gave the fictional world of the games a sense of risk. It was like being in a movie that could affect your life.

The most important aspect of these games was that they couldn’t be changed. They were tamper-proof. In fact, Briggs had done a lot of work to make sure of this: he had had a knack for it, and this job had been one of the things he had done right out of school. No one knew the complete key, but if anyone did, Briggs was close. It was inconceivable that anyone could obtain an advantage by changing a game. Billions of dollars were involved, and no one was going to be allowed to interfere with that by tampering with a machine. It wasn’t a local business, but an international one. Every now and then you heard a story about someone who had penetrated the first protective shell of a game, and the next thing you knew he was gone. Just like that. No questions asked. Briggs stood just outside the gaming parlor, but he had no real interest in going in.

In the years when Briggs had smoked a lot of opium, the entire process had been ritualized, and part of the ritual had been the beginning, in which he began to build a case for letting go: he was working too hard, he had been successful, a little break would make everything easier, he worked better after a little relief. After all, he wasn’t made of steel, was he? Anyway, he wasn’t really going to do it. He was just out for a walk.

After a few minutes he stopped at the entrance of an alley.

Even from the entrance he could smell it, at once harsh and filled with promise. The alley had brick walls, fire escapes, trash cans fluted like Greek columns. Here and there a puddle of water was filled with light. Briggs remembered being here one night when the moon was reflected in the thin layer of water. He had often stood here, smelling the opium and telling himself that he wouldn’t go back to the end of the alley.

Maybe he’d just have a “look around.” He lightened his step, if only because he was sure that everything was under control. He had faced up to the temptation and was probably going to defeat it. Adversity did build character. Then he came to the end of the alley.

Just a little fun, wasn’t that all he needed? Just think of how tense things were. He knew what was in the basement at the rear of the alley. The receptionist had dark hair, and she usually wore a jade-colored dress, the material of it clinging to her figure, the bones of her shoulders disappearing into the green fabric, the folds falling from her hips and swinging over her legs when she walked. She wore red lipstick and a string of pearls. Everything about her had the musky scent of opium.

Briggs had often stood here thinking about her, the shape of her lips when she saw him come in. Never a smile, just a look of keen understanding. It was all right, she seemed to say, she understood.

He went to the end of the alley and down the steps into the light below. He could smell it.

“Hey, Briggs,” said the doorman at the bottom of the stairs. “Where you been? Haven’t seen you for a long time.”

“Here and there,” said Briggs.

“Uh-huh,” said the doorman.

Briggs went into the room. The golden light, the flowers in the vase, the woman who stood in the green dress, the clean walls were right there, as though he hadn’t been away at all. “So, hey, good to see you, Briggs,” said the woman.

He sat down on a chair by the door.

“I need to think for a minute,” he said.

The woman smiled. Of course. He could think all he wanted. She knew what the outcome would be.

He closed his eyes and thought of Kay. He knew she was out there, but what was she doing? And why didn’t she contact him? Maybe she was too smart for that. Then he thought of a dream he had had, of the blue sheen on Kay’s legs from the sky. He had been with her in an apple orchard in bloom, under the snowlike fall of petals. She had said to him, “Can you cry from happiness?” In the dream, he had felt the slight heaving of her chest. She had wanted him to taste the tip of her finger, salty with tears: the taste of happiness. All bound up with other things she didn’t understand, but still, would he taste it? It was the taste of childbirth, of passion, of everything that was so vital one cried in the face of it.

Now he opened his eyes.

“I just came in for a moment,” he said.

“Sure. Any time,” the receptionist said. “We’re always here.”

“I know,” said Briggs.

He turned and went up the stairs, nodding to the doorman, who said, “Some other time, I guess.”

“I guess,” said Briggs.

At the mouth of the alley, where it opened into the street, Briggs heard a steady brushing sound, a
hush, hush, hush,
and when he looked up he saw a man, a dumpy one with short hair like indoor-outdoor carpet, who was sweeping the street. He had a wide push broom and he came down the street, propelling a growing moraine of dust and dirt. Every now and then he stopped to tap the broom a couple of times on the sidewalk. He put his hand to his head and rubbed it through his coarse hair, but he didn’t look around, and he stood there, resting, eyes on the ground ahead of him. One of the early ones, Briggs thought. Brutish, short, but dependable. Then the man started sweeping again, the
hush, hush, hush
haunting Briggs as though it had been a cry.

A couple of young men came up the street, nineteen or twenty years old, one with an earring and the other with a black plastic coat that had been fashionable a couple of months before, and when they bumped into the sweeper, they stopped and looked back.

“Hey,” said one of them, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“He’s just a dummy,” said the other. “Ain’t that right. Yeah. You. I’m talking to you.”

He stuck his finger into the sweeper’s chest.

“Sorry,” said the sweeper, keeping his eyes down.

“Sorry,” said the other. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

“I didn’t mean nothing,” said the sweeper.

“Yeah?” said the first. “Well, you don’t know anything about meaning, either.”

“Come back in here,” said the other. “I want to show you something.”

“Is it a job?” said the sweeper.

“Sure,” said the first. “It’s a job.”

“I’ve got to do all the way to the corner,” said the sweeper.

“You won’t have to worry about that,” said the other one. “Come on.”

“Leave him alone,” said Briggs.

“Yeah?” said the first one.

“Yeah, leave him alone,” said Briggs.

“What’s it to you?” said the other.

Briggs turned and slowly looked at this one.

“Go home,” he said.

They stood there for a while. The sweeper started to use his broom, pushing the dirt he had collected with short, brutal, yet efficient strokes. His shoulders were somewhat dropping, and he kept his head down, working his way to the corner.

“Ah, shit,” said the first one. He was the one in the black plastic coat. “Come on.”

The two of them walked back into the alley, going toward the stairs to the room at the bottom. Briggs waited until they were gone, and then the sweeper came back and said, “Thanks, mister. They were going to hit me. They do that sometimes.”

“I know,” said Briggs. “Why don’t you finish your sweeping?”

The sweeper looked up, his eyes dull under his hair.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.”

Briggs considered going back to the end of the alley, into the clouds of opium smoke, but instead he found himself looking at the sweeper. The man shoved his broom, a little cloud of dust rising and turning white with each repetitive movement. The sweeper’s insistence was a small echo of the one thing Briggs knew how to do, which was to persist. The sweeper limped up the street, his progress marked by the silver puff of dust, and everything about him, the sluggishness, the brutality, the single-mindedness of this drudgery, appeared to Briggs as an omen, since it left him considering the dangers of his own steadfastness. He had always depended on it, but now, as the figure limped up the street, so obviously doomed, Briggs wondered if his own perseverance was making things worse, getting him in deeper. He stood there, smelling the distant scent of opium and hearing the
hush, hush, hush
of the broom.

CHAPTER 5

March 22, 2029, noon

KAY AND JACK went down the street on which there were some signs in Ukrainian, and in the cafés and coffee shops, Kay saw people sitting at a counter where they ate pierogis, little dumpling-like items that were filled with potato or cheese. They passed an old man dressed in black, head down, carrying a book. The buildings had shops on the street level, and one window had been cracked and patched with transparent tape. Newspapers and wax wrappers formed a small drift in the recessed doorways, and people had written on the sidewalk with colored chalk. Awnings could be cranked down from the storefronts, and they gave the impression of a circus tent that is being used for its last season. A couple of bookstores were open, and in their windows were displayed volumes in many languages, some of them dead (Latin, Greek, Russian, and Polish). The entire neighborhood was at once impoverished and somewhat intellectual. An immigrant spirit imbued almost everything, the clothes people wore, the food they ate, and a hidden but still profound belief in progress perfectly mixed with a desire to hang on to everything familiar. Dead rabbits hung in the window, skinned, the membranes on them looking like ice.

Jack and Kay were sweating even though it was cool. Kay took a handkerchief out of her pocket and pressed it to her forehead. Thin rills of moisture ran out of Jack’s hair and along the sides of his face, which he wiped with his sleeve.

He stopped in front of a building.

“This is the place,” said Jack. “Doesn’t look like much.”

Kay shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It has a . . . well, a certain vitality.”

“Vitality?” said Jack. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Yes. Vitality,” she said. “There’s a difference between vitality and newness.”

“Words,” said Jack. “You are into words now. Jesus.”

“Maybe I’m into accuracy,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Come on,” he said. “The place is on the second floor.”

He had the newspaper turned back to the want ads, and he took one last look before dropping it into a trash can. Even now, people liked to read newspapers, and a few were still published. The paper fit perfectly in this part of town. Then Jack opened the door, and both of them looked up the stairs, which went up twenty steps or so and stopped at a landing, and then went up another twenty. Fluorescent lighting. More smells of cooking that is done on a hot plate. At the top, from the musty depths of the building, they heard a piano. The same piece, played again and again. Like two people going into the rain, they went into the sound and up the stairs. Kay shivered. Her nose was running. Her breathing had a wet, diminished wheeze. At least she had bought some Kleenex. She guessed that she had some allergies, but she hoped nothing else had gone wrong.

The door of the office they wanted was brown, although the paint was chipped and underneath it the metal of the door showed through. In the middle was a round brass peephole, over which Jack put his thumb.

“Frankly,” he said, “I don’t know why you want to do it this way.”

“It seems like a good thing,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. Then he took his thumb away and knocked. Once and then again, harder the second time. From beyond the door they heard someone making a scurrying sound. The noise suggested a pile of paper on a desk, newspaper that had held fried food, pierogis from the coffee shop. The man inside was rolling the greasy sheets up, but he probably didn’t have the energy to do more than stick the greasy paper in an overflowing trash can or, at worst, into the pocket of a jacket. The door opened.

The man who stood inside the doorway was about six feet tall, fat, and he wore half-glasses. He was bald, although he combed some strands over the top of his head, and his eyes, while small, were quite bright. They moved from Jack to Kay. He had crumbs on the front of his cardigan sweater, which he brushed in a slow, methodical, and yet absentminded way, as though he weren’t so much trying to get rid of the crumbs as thinking over what the appearance of these two people at his door could possibly mean. He had a paper napkin, one that had been used more than once, and he wiped his lips. He had a mole on one cheek. His eyelids were red, and his sweater was dim green, but the combination of his inflamed eyes and the color of the sweater was somehow fertile.

“So,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“You put an ad in the paper?” said Jack.

“And since when has it been against the law to advertise?” said the man.

“He just wanted to know if we came to the right place,” said Kay. She smiled. The man looked at her for a while, as though it had been a long time since a woman like Kay had smiled at him that way.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” he said. “Come in.”

The room was filled with bookshelves that sagged like old barns, and on the floor, books were stacked in columns that looked about to fall over. The cloth covers of many of them were an antiquated oatmeal color from an era in which books like these existed in libraries where there were leather chairs, green-shaded reading lamps, and long oak desks. Here, in this office, the light from a lamp came down in a golden cone on a book the man had been reading, and now one of the pages slowly rose from one side of the open book and flipped over to the other side, making a little
tick.

He looked from one of them to the other and said, “So, have you got a cold?”

“It’s nothing,” said Jack.

The man didn’t look convinced.

“Are you a musician?” the man said to Jack.

“This one,” said Jack, gesturing to Kay. “She’s got the talent in this group. But I play a little.”

“Umm,” said the man. “Talent. Uh, talent. A lot of people think they have talent. But, I don’t see so much of it, not really. And I suppose you want rehearsal space?”

“Yes,” said Kay.

“With a piano?” said the man. “We have them with pianos and without.”

“With,” she said. “Or, I think I would like to look at the piano and decide.”

“Oh, so you know pianos?” he said. “She knows pianos.” He said this last as though there was another person, invisible, in the room. “This is a good thing, because I have a good piano for you. If you know pianos, you will be able to tell.”

By the door he had a set of keys hung on cup hooks, and he reached out for one now, his fingers picking out one and then taking it down. He turned back to Kay and said, “Come on. Come on. If you know pianos.”

In the hall the landing creaked under his weight. For a moment he turned and looked up the stairs and listened to the sound of the playing. He nodded to himself, as though he had had a suspicion confirmed.

He turned to Kay.

“And so do you think that is talent?” he said.

Kay listened for an instant, the turning of her head, the lifting of her eyes, the judgment all happening with a speed that was almost like a nervous tic.

“No,” she said.

“So, you make decisions fast. Is this a good thing, do you think?”

Then he started climbing, doing so with the slow, patient gait of a man who knew that the thing he was doing was going to kill him one day, but what else could he do?

“But between you and me,” he said, panting. “That is not talent. No.”

They got up to the next landing and the man put the key into the lock of a door and turned it.

He said to the door, “My name is Stone. What’s yours?”

“Kay Remilard,” she said.

“Ah, and where have you studied?” said Stone, pushing the door open, into the musty rehearsal room. Light slanted in through a dirty window, and on the floor, the shadows of pigeons moved as they fluttered up to the sill outside. “Kay Remilard?”

“Here and there,” said Jack.

“Ah, many people have studied here and there,” said Stone. “But, for instance, was it here and there in Europe or here and there here?”

“Europe,” said Kay.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. So it’s Europe. I wonder where? Somewhere near Salzburg? Or Vienna? Or was it a little farther north?”

“Farther north,” said Jack. “Is this it?”

Stone went over to the piano. The pigeons on the sill flew up, marking the floor and the walls again with sudden shadows.

“Of course,” said Stone. “They have pigeons in Europe, too. Did you notice?”

But by now Kay was looking at the piano. She sat down and worked the pedals. They made a little squeak. Stone shrugged. Jack went over to the window and looked out at the pigeons. The top of the piano was not open, and in front of Kay, on the surface, a layer of dust dulled the finish of the instrument. The dust was the color of the light that came in the window. Stone came over and opened the top of the piano, propping it up. Kay hit a note, just one, listening as it hung so definitely in the empty room as to seem as real as a clothesline stretched from one side to another. As it lingered, she looked up, almost as though she could see it. Then she hit another key and waited.

“So it needs to be tuned a little. What can I tell you? If it needs to be tuned, I will have it tuned,” said Stone. “I am not a fraud. Do you think it is a good idea for a man to say he is one thing when he is really another? So, what do you think of the piano?”

“It’s suitable,” said Kay.

“Suitable, is it?” said Stone. “Unh. But is it enough for talent? That is the question.” He turned to his imaginary companion. “You see, maybe my piano is not good enough for someone who has talent and studied in Europe. North of Salzburg.”

Jack looked at Stone. The lack of movement as he stood there was a little odd, as though he were not himself but a photograph of himself. Absolutely still. Stone reached into his pocket, making some paper rustle there. Jack shrugged, as though he had made a decision that he didn’t really like. Maybe later.

“Why don’t you play?” said Jack. “Isn’t that what we came for?”

“Yes,” said Stone to Kay. “Play.”

Stone took a chair from the wall and was about to sit down, but then thought better of it.

“Maybe I will just stand,” he said. “I’m a busy man these days, and I may have to go back down to my office. So play. If you think you can play.”

Jack looked out the window. Kay sat at the piano, her hands in her lap. Her hair was damp, and she pushed it away from her forehead. The only sound in the room was Stone’s asthmatic breathing. He reached into his pocket and rustled the papers there, took out a napkin, and rubbed it between his fingers. It was as though the bits of paper he carried around were worry beads and that when he was thinking things over, he wanted to have them in his fingers to help him come to some decision. He was old enough now not to care if anyone saw him or if he was dismissed as dowdy. So, dowdy, they call me? So, and what are you? His eyes weren’t dowdy, though, and he stood there, rustling around in his pockets and watching Kay’s hands.

She straightened her shoulders, rested her hands in her lap. She stared across the room, although she didn’t seem to notice the dirty, cream-colored wall in front of her. The wall had existed like a barrier for the musicians who spent time in this room, a fact that they could never get over, because even the best musicians, or particularly the best ones, repeatedly came up to a limit. Sometimes it was a technical matter, although the worst was one of feeling or lack of understanding. Sometimes they managed to push the barrier farther away than at other times, but it never disappeared.

“What are you waiting for?” said Jack. He was shivering now too, like Kay.

“I don’t know,” said Kay. “I guess I’m just thinking about things.”

“What’s to think about?” said Jack.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Kay.

“So what?” said Jack. “You’re not going to go soft on me now, are you?”

“No,” said Kay.

“Glad to hear it,” said Jack.

“It doesn’t hurt to think about how far you’ve come and what it cost you to get here,” said Kay. “Or about people you miss.”

“You want to know what I think about missing people?” said Jack.

Kay shook her head.

“It’s just that we came a long way,” said Kay.

“Especially if it’s from Europe,” said Stone. “I wonder where it was. You don’t have an accent, or not much of one.”

“You can get farther away than Europe,” said Jack.

“Oh, can you? Maybe you’re talking about Australia?” said Stone.

Jack went on looking out the window. Over the piano lid, the shadows looked like pieces of black nylon that were slipping to the floor. Jack shrugged. Stone went on breathing with a heaving sound. Kay began to play.

She started with some easy pieces, just exercises really, and as she played, the shadows of the birds slid across the piano and the floor of the room with a silence that was like dark ghosts of the notes she played. She moved on to Chopin, and as she did, the room was filled with the audible intake of air as Stone gasped. He listened without moving, as though caught in amber. She played other pieces, going up the order of difficulty, and as she did, Stone took a seat on the chair. Jack looked out the window. There were other pieces she went to now, not only more intricate, but also allowing for more interpretation, and as she went through them, she concentrated on the phrasing, on the slow, lingering moments in which the approach of silence allowed the full access to emotion, just a hesitation here and there, which for her had to do with the most profound longing, the uncertainty that is at the heart of any real love, if only because of the risk such devotion involves. She tried to recall that blue light and saw not only snow, but Briggs’s face. She had reached up to put her finger right against his, on the transparent material that had been between them. She tried to imagine what it would be like to touch him, without anything between them. When would that happen? Or when would she ever feel complete? The phrasing took on other shades, like the sensation of life making its tragic approach, right into her skin and muscles, into her bones, the ache and wonder of it leaving her with a keen, almost sexual excitement. How could this sensation be so filled with pleasure and promise, and yet have such a profound threat built into it, some accounting of time, some inexorable diminishing of everything that was precious?