Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

I just smoked and waited, as he grinned. I didn’t need to prod him to keep talking. He was too into it, and I got the strong impression he didn’t meet too many new people, especially not people prepared to listen to him talk.

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.” He laughed. “If you take a picture or shoot some video on a cell phone, it gives you the option to send it to someone, right? On a phone I’ve configured, it gives you an extra option: send it to me. Send it to me, and it goes to one of the servers, the big computers, that I keep in other countries. Because I don’t need that shit on a computer in the U.S., you know? The content goes to me, and then my program sanitizes your phone. Deletes the content, the log of you sending it, everything. Did you catch the news this morning?”

“Five minutes in the airport at Vegas. Something about another clusterfuck in Iraq.”

“Lousy video quality, right?”

“Right. Yes. No. Hold on. You’re saying…”

“Yeah.”

“That was you? You got that footage out?”

“Yeah. Some grunt on the ground didn’t like the way things were going that day and grabbed thirty seconds on his phone. And sent it to me. Not that he knew it was me, of course. No names, no pack drill. Fronts and cover companies, like a CIA operation, dude. Heh.”

Zack jabbed out his cigarette in the pizza. There was a smell like plastic cooking over an uncleaned toilet. “You want a beer? Robbie, get us a couple of beers. Get beers for everybody. The cooler’s full, right? So I co-locate this stuff all over the world. So when the Russian cops come for the front company in Moscow, the pictures of Mafiya paying off Duma members that have been captured by ordinary people on the street aren’t on the servers in Moscow, you with me? They’re in Tuvalu or South Africa or some fucking place. And this here”—Zack gestured broadly at his Mission Control—“this tells me where all my information is, all over the world. Cell phones and Internet-connected computers, dude. It’s incredibly fucking simple. A support system for citizen journalism. News with no filters. And when we get something good, out it goes into the world. PyrE, see? I’ve given people all over the world the ability to fight power.”

Beer came. I hoisted my cold dewed bottle to Zack Pickles, mad scientist and the first genuinely decent guy I’d met in what seemed like forever.

Theclock ticked around a couple of hours, and I figured it was time to call it a day. Or at least lunch. My mood was much improved. I had no idea how to get back to the place, but, with the little information I had, Zack did some Internet wizardry and got a printer to spit out a map with X marking the spot. He gave me back my phone—“my email, phone number, a few other bits, gimme a call, this was fun”—and had Robbie drive me back to the house.

There was a big, black, shiny car in the driveway. The door was unlocked. As I pushed it open, I heard the unmistakable sound of Trix having an orgasm.

And, a few seconds later, the new sound of a complete stranger, quite definitely male, having his own orgasm.

Idecided to stay outside for a little while, and have a cigarette and concentrate hard on not killing anyone. I think I finished the first one in two minutes, just dragging the life out of it, the last minute of which I spent watching a black limousine creeping down the street toward me. As it pulled up outside the house, I dug my hands into my pockets and waited. The sleek dark curve of the car opened up like a boiled mussel, and the chief of staff slid out, blinking in the sun.

“California’s not fit for humans,” he said, squinting at the bright sky. “Whole goddamn state should be sawed off the mainland and floated out into the Pacific. We’ll get to that, mark my words. Except for Disneyland. I like Disneyland. We’ll keep Disneyland. Staple it onto the end of Arizona or something. I always thought Disneyland should be its own state. Disneyland, the fifty-first state of America. Has a ring to it. California? Point the whole state toward Japan and kick it in the ass, that’s what I say.”

I felt like needling the old bastard. “What, the state that gave Ronald Reagan to politics?”

“Ronnie Reagan was no goddamned good to anyone,” he snapped, surprising me. “Everyone knew he had Alzheimer’s while he was president. He was only ever useful as a patsy. ‘Ever met Ollie North, Mr. President?’ ‘I have no recollection of that because my brain is turning into a pile of scabs, Your Honor.’ All he was ever good for. Everybody knows. Those episodes of The West Wing where the president has multiple sclerosis brain-farts? What do you think he was alluding to?”

I laughed. “So you did watch that show.”

He found a pair of black shades in his jacket and fumbled them on. “CIA’s been running Aaron Sorkin for years. He leaks this stuff out under cover of fiction to test the waters. Every time he gets too cute we plant crack on him in airports. Or make him write Studio 60.”

“You’re full of shit.”

He gave that creepy split-skull grin. “Want to know how much we paid Jim Nabors to shoot Reagan with a sniper rifle? Nothing. It was all done for the love of Rock Hudson.”

“Can you do anything but lie? I mean, seriously?”

“I’m a politician, boy. I haven’t told the truth since I was seven.”

“What did you do when you were seven?”

“Chopped down a cherry tree. She betrayed you, didn’t she?”

“What?”

“The girl. She’s in there with some lawyer pounding her like he’s drilling for oil off the California coast, right now. I bet he’s already bust a nut once and is still digging away to prove what an incredibly California buffed-and-tanned physical specimen he is.”

“What the hell has that got to do with you?”

“I warned you. I told you about her. I said she would betray you. You cannot trust women.”

“I can’t trust you.”

“No. No, you can’t. That’s very good, Michael. But you can trust money. Money cannot lie. It is a means. It is a tool. And a bad workman cannot blame his tool. What have you done with the tools I gave you, Michael?”

I didn’t say anything. He clacked his teeth together.

“You saved her life. That was good work. I bet she told you she loved you, after that. I bet she did. I bet she said nice things. But she lied, didn’t she?”

“I don’t think so. She just doesn’t see it the same way. The, you know, the words. It means something a little different to her, that’s all.”

“We’re in America, Michael. Telling someone you love them means only one thing, doesn’t it? That you’re not going to make the beast with two backs with the next warm body that falls in front of you. That’s the American way. Or is that what you want? An America where love means nothing?”

“Are those the choices?”

“Hell, yes, those are the choices. How many do you want? We are fighting many wars, Michael, on many fronts. And this is the war at home. The war of meanings. The war of cultures. And right here, right now, you’re on the line, Michael. I may be a professional politician with opiate lesions all over the front of my brain, but my money doesn’t lie. She may be a sweet girl who’s nice to you, but she’s upstairs right now making a lawyer fill her with his little suits. Taking my side means only that honest American love will win the day.”

“With this book? This thing, this reset button of yours?”

The shades made his eyes look like empty sockets. “A return to our roots. The mission would be easier if the book’s effects transmitted over TV or the Net, but it naturally leads us to a grass-roots politics from the times of Washington and Lincoln. Town hall meetings. Stadiums. We can devise a million different events where the book is brought into play in front of crowds from all cultural and subcultural areas. We’ve been breeding pop stars in L.A. for exactly this kind of thing. Take some piece of greedy cracker trash with symmetrical features, vacuum the Cheetos dust off it, train it in a Disney pod, stick boobs on it and have its videos made by porn directors, and everyone under sixteen is yours. Also, the gay people. I never understood that. You could retrain fifty thousand of them at a time, putting the book in front of them at a stadium concert. Instill proper morals in them. Erase the sicknesses in their heads and make of them proper Americans who know what love means.”