Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

The two of them ran side by side through the streets of Arlington, bundled up in nearly Arctic running gear, their heavy wool caps rolled up just far enough to expose their ears’ bottom halves, which allowed sound into the eardrums so they could hear each other over the noise of traffic without shouting or completely freezing their ears. Very soon they would be moving with Diane over to the Old Executive Offices, right next door to the White House; this would be one of their last runs on this route. But it was such a lame route that neither would miss it.

Frank explained what had happened in Maine, in short rhythmic phrases synchronized with his stride. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody about it. Almost a physical relief. One vented, as they said.

“So how the heck did they follow me?” he demanded at the end of his tale. “I thought your friend said I was clean.”

“He thought you were,” Edgardo said. “And it isn’t certain you were followed. It could have been a coincidence.”

Frank shook his head.

“Well, there may be other ways you are chipped, or they may indeed have just followed you physically. We’ll work on that, but the question now becomes what has she done.”

“She said she has a Plan C that no one can trace. And she said it would get her down in this area. That she’d get in touch with me. I don’t know how that will work. Anyway now I’m wondering if we can, you know, root these guys out. Maybe sic the president on them.”

“Well,” Edgardo said, elongating the word for about a hundred yards. “These kinds of black operations are designed to be insulated, you know. To keep those above from responsibility for them.”

“But surely if there was a problem, if you really tried to hunt things down from above? Following the money trail, for instance?”

“Maybe. Black budgets are everywhere. Have you asked Charlie?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should, if you feel comfortable doing that. Phil Chase has a million things on his plate. It might take someone like Charlie to get his attention.”

Frank nodded. “Well, whatever happens, we need to stop those guys.”

“We?”

“I mean, they need to be stopped. And no one else is doing it. And, I don’t know—maybe you and your friends from your DARPA days, or wherever, might be able to make a start. You’ve already made the start, I mean, and could carry it forward from there.”

“Well,” Edgardo said. “I shouldn’t speak to that.”

Frank focused on the run. They were down to the river path now, and he could see the Potomac was frozen over again, looking like a discolored white sheet that had been pulled over the river’s surface and then tacked down roughly at the banks. The sight reminded him of Long Pond, and the shock of seeing those men striding across the ice toward them; his pulse jumped, but his hands and feet got colder. The tip of his nose, still a bit numb at the best of times, was even number than usual. He squeezed and tugged it to get some feeling and blood flow.

“Nose still numb?”

“Yes.”

Edgardo broke into the song “Comfortably Numb”: “I—I, have become, comfortably numb,” then scat singing the famous guitar solo, “Da daaaa, da da da da da-da-daaaaaa,” exaggerating Gilmour’s bent notes. “Okay! Okay, okay, Is there anybody in there ?” Abruptly he broke off. “Well, I will go talk to my friend whom you met. He’s into this stuff and he has an interest. His group is still looking at the election problem, for sure.”

“Do you think I could meet him again? To explore some strategies?” And ask a bunch of questions, he didn’t say.

“Maybe. Let me talk to him. It may be pointless to meet. It depends. I’ll check. Meanwhile you should try your other options.”

“I don’t know that I have any.”

“Are you still having trouble making decisions?”

“Yes.”

“Go see your doctor, then.”

“I did! I mean, I’ve got an appointment. The time has almost come.”

Edgardo laughed.

“Please,” Frank said. “I’m trying. I made the call.”

But in fact, when the time came for his doctor’s appointment, he went in unhappily. Surely, he thought obstinately, deciding to go to the doctor meant he was well enough to decide things!

So he felt ridiculous as he described the problem to the doctor, a young guy who looked rather dubious. Frank felt his account was sketchy at best, as he very seldom tasted blood at the back of his throat anymore. But he could not complain merely of feeling indecisive, so he emphasized the tasting a little more than the most recent data would truly support, which made him feel even more foolish. He hated visiting the doctor at any time, so why was he there just to exaggerate an occasional symptom? Maybe his decision-making capability was damaged after all! Which meant it was good to have come in. And yet here he was making things up. Although he was only trying to physicalize the problem, he told himself. To describe real symptoms.

In any case, the doctor offered no opinion, but only gave him a referral to an ear nose and throat guy. It was the same one Frank had seen immediately after his accident. Frank steeled himself, called again (two decisions?) and found that here the next appointment available was a month away. Happily he wrote down the date and and forgot about it.

Or would have; except now he was cast back into the daily reality of struggling to figure out what to do. Hoping every morning that Emerson or Thoreau would tell him. So he didn’t really forget about the appointment, but it was scheduled and he didn’t have to go for a long time, so he could be happy. Happy until the next faint taste of old blood slid down the back of his throat, like the bitterness of fear itself, and he would check and see the day was getting nearer with a mix of relief and dread.

Once he noticed the date when talking with Anna, because she said something about not making it through the winter in terms of several necessary commodities that people had taken to hoarding. She had gotten into studying hoarding in the social science literature. Hoarding, Anna said, represented a breakdown in the social contract which even their economy’s capacity for overproduction in many items could not compensate for.

“It’s another case of prisoner’s dilemma,” Frank said. “Everyone’s choosing the ‘always defect’ option as being the safest. Or the one in which you rely least on others.”

“Maybe.”

Anna was not one for analogies. She was as literal-minded a person as Frank had ever met; it was always good to remember that she had started her scientific training as a chemist. Metaphors bounced off of her like spears off bulletproof glass. If she wanted to understand hoarding, then she googled “hoarding,” and when she saw links to mathematical studies of the economics and social dynamics of “hoarding in shortage societies,” those were the ones she clicked on, even if they tended to be old work from the socialist and post-socialist literature. Those studies had had a lot of data to work with, sadly, and she found their modeling interesting, and spoke to Frank of things like choice rubrics in variable information states, which she thought he might be able to formalize as algorithms.

“It’s called ‘always defect,’” Frank insisted.

“Okay, but then look at what that leads to .”

“All right.”

Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. “Why don’t they just do the math?” she demanded.

A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.