David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“You get assigned to be a travel agent, you should be a travel agent,” said Nicotine grouchily.

Kwame turned back to Leila. “We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with what we’ve built. Some of us wish to wait some more before announcing ourselves. But others say we must become something known so that everyone can decide if our way would be better. And okay, with all this violence from the Committee, we have been forced to move ahead. There is a chance they will destroy us before we let everyone know what is going on.”

“And tell me again what is going on?”

Nicotine leaned in. “A secret oligarchy has rigged the system past the point of its being correctable by legal political means. The world might tip the wrong way right now — toward the oligarchs. We probably have the technology to stop them — they don’t know how much we know; they don’t know what we have.”

“What do you have?”

“The eye test and something else that I can’t go into right here. Also, we’ve tapped their lines. Though we’re losing that too. A year ago we had thousands of access points, but now we’re down to…Kwame, you know the current number?”

“No, but Sarah knows. She spoke with Engineering this morning.”

“Did she get out of that fish store okay?” asked Leila.

From the next room came the sound of a door being double-locked. And then Sarah’s voice. “We had eight hundred twenty open portals yesterday,” she said, coming into the room carrying a heavy, clacketing trash bag over her shoulder. “But we’re losing them fast.”

Leila didn’t like the cavalier entrance; she had been worried. “So that’s why you’re kidnapping people before you can even explain your politics?” she asked all of them. “Because you’re afraid you’re about to lose a strategic advantage?”

“We can explain our politics,” said Kwame with confidence.

“Then why don’t I understand what’s going to be so different when you run the place?”

No one answered her.

Then Sarah: “You’re going to have to take the eye test.”

When they left, they left in a hurry, and Dermot was outside in the idling black car. They sat all squished together. Leila was pressed up against Sarah. Leila had diagnosed in herself a minicrush on Sarah, which was ridiculous and inappropriate and probably Stockholm-y.

Dermot drove swiftly through the city, like Pac-Man ahead of the ghosts. They went back down a long hill and across the river again. It was a warm summer evening in a city made of stone, and the people were out — peddlers yelled about oranges, girls in heels clacked out of taxis, and men swelled from the doors of brass-heavy pubs. Outside of one place, a crowd in powdered wigs was drinking raucously.

“Hey, Sarah?” said Leila, not whispering, but quiet. “You still promise you’ll get me my stuff back, and you’ll get me home after this meeting?”

“I do,” she said.

“How’d you guys do all this? What did Nicotine mean when he said you analyze people? And how did you swap my papers like that — the passport, the tickets? You did that in a food court.”

“We’ve tapped the Committee’s tap lines. So we can access as much data as they can. But we run different queries than they do. And we’re read-only. And the passports and tickets? They’re just basically bar codes and magnetic strips now anyway. That’s all just ones and zeros. We have very good people at the ones and zeros, and an excellent art department.”

The meeting was maybe sixty people in a long wooden library. For an hour, everyone just milled about and murmured; there were water bottles on a table, cans from a fridge. People spoke in hushed tones but looked excited, as if they were attending a surprise wake. Someone brought in long trays of empanadas and cake. Leila ate both, forklessly, from a plastic plate. She realized she was famished. At some signal, Sarah steered her into an anteroom, where she met a light-skinned black man in a sharp gray suit, gray like the breast of proud city pigeon. The man was in his forties and on the delicate end of handsome.

“You must be Lola Montes,” said the man. “I’m Roman Shades.”

Great. More suavery and pseudonyms. When would these people come clean? “Are you in charge here?” she said.

“We don’t do it that way.”

“Well, will you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“We need your help, Lola,” said Roman Shades. “We’ll do what we can for your father. You have my word.”

“What do you want me to do?” she said.

“Will you look at this screen?”

Leila hesitated one more moment, then nodded a tiny assent, and Roman put before her a normal-seeming laptop, the black-plastic-binder-size kind that had gone from exotic to ubiquitous in the ten years that Leila was an adolescent in America. By now there must be piles of these — mountains of them — lying junked and dying all over the world. Leila had seen shrink-wrapped pallets of laptops like these loaded into the bellies of planes. Actually, technically, and reluctantly, she’d been responsible for some of those pallets — outdated computer equipment being “donated” by first-world transnationals back to Africa to avoid the expense of recycling and to get the tax write-off.

But when Roman unfolded this laptop, there was no booting up or opening of anything. Just a luminous blue rectangle with numbers in rows and columns, plus a few symbols Leila couldn’t identify interspersed betwixt the numbers. The rows and columns weren’t exactly staying still — they were shimmering — and the screen was rolling up; not zippily, like in The Matrix , but slowly, as if there were a monkey turning a wooden crank handle behind the computer.

“Okay, what do I do here?” Leila asked the small scrum around her.

“You just did it,” said Sarah, who was receiving a little oblong sticker chittering out of a handheld printing device. Sarah and Roman and Feargal were quickly bent over it. “Do you want to know your number?” Sarah asked Leila.

“I know my number,” said Leila. “Eight five one four six one one three two six two two five.” She said it more easily than you could recite the rhymes your parents taught you.

“Yeah. But isn’t that brilliant?” said Sarah, tearing off and then handing Leila the little sticker with the same number printed clearly upon it. “It’s a fairly good number, actually.”

And as Leila moved back into the main room, she tried to pinpoint what was different about the world, or her place in it. It wasn’t much, actually. Or the effect wasn’t cognitively intrusive. But there was something. Like a flush; like when you come downstairs after a thrilling sexual experience with a secret all through your body. But this wasn’t fuzzy and sensual, like that feeling was. This was crisp and cerebral…and shared. Everyone in the long library was in on it. An open secret. These were the same strangers that had been in the room before she’d looked at that shimmering screen, but now they were known to her. Not in any intimate way. What’s the opposite of intimate? But not the opposite of intimate as in estranged; the opposite as in abstract, as in broad. That’s the way in which they were known to her, and she to them. So much information is conveyed by glance and stance; so much can pass between us. She trusted everyone here.

Some of her faculties seemed sharpened. Her eyesight was definitely better. She could dart her gaze around the room, hawklike, and take in a lot; she could read titles off spines at ten feet. Her sense of smell was unchanged, but that had already been excellent. Maybe her taste had ticked up, or maybe the empanadas were just very good and she was hungry.