David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Who designed it? Was there a Dear Diary before the eye test?”

“Oh, there was, yeah. Dear Diary’s been around for twenty years, I think, though it’s been called by various names. The eye test is newer. It was made by a Diarist called Dr. Hugo Cranium. He was a sixteen-year-old who did biometrics work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in America. He wrote remote lie-detection software. And — well, to cut a long story short, he walked away from the place with the whole state of their art. That’s why the machine’s called a Cranium’s Enumerator.”

“What happened to him?”

“The Committee put a bomb under his Segway.”

Leila laughed.

“I know, it sounds mental. But I’m serious.”

“Oh.”

“The first Enumerators were big clunky machines; they were like planetarium projectors. We had to use a totally dark room and play space music and it worked on only the ten percent who were really, really relaxable. Anyway, we got better at administering the bloody thing now, and once our genomics people were able to move the technology from, you know, electronic computers to the kind we can grow—”

Leila made a little whachutalkinabout? face.

“No one told you about how we grow our computers?”

“Yeah, no.”

“Crap. Well, I don’t really understand it. I’m Operations. But our computers don’t need to be plugged in, although they do need to be watered and given sunlight, and they can talk to each other without, you know, the Internet. About a year ago, the IT people got Cranium’s machine shrunk down to where they could put it in one of our computers, which look totally innocuous. That allowed us to distribute them more widely than we could before. We’re trying to make it possible to put the eye test on the ordinary Internet, but the risk there is that the Committee will get ahold of it, reverse-engineer it.

“After even just a few months with the new laptop machines, there were enough people, with enough numbers, that some clever clogs noticed that the numbers generated for each subject could be considered mathematically.”

Leila made a whaddya-mean? face.

“So, nine is not just nine — it’s also three squared. Your number is related to you. Deeply. That’s why the first thing everyone knows after the test is his or her number. And you probably know eight to thirteen digits of any other Diarist the moment you meet him or her. Sometimes, with the real sphinxes, it might be only six or seven. But in general, like. Anyway, it’s a new science, or a new art, or whatever you’d call it, these numbers. Some Diarists are a bit spooked by it and try not to look too closely at their own. I see their point. But the numbers do mean something. And we really still understand nothing about our minds and how they work, the electro-limbic-chemistry part, right? We’re pre-Newtonian when it comes to that. So why should this mystery stand out among the others? Maybe this is just the next gravity or something. A new age, and us at its birth. I can’t really explain why, but when I saw your number, I knew that the logistics job wouldn’t be the right one for you. Roman agreed. We asked some number people to put your number against what we need done now and come up with something that would suit you better. And I told them that you needed to be home within forty-eight hours.”

“Thank you.”

“So here’s what we need you to do. You remember that guy who was working his moves on you in the Heathrow lounge? You didn’t recognize him, but he’s a bit famous. His name’s Mark Deveraux. He’s this life-change specialist lad; he wrote a book that loads of people loved.”

“The card-trick guy?” Leila had found the jack of spades while she was putting her carry-on in the overhead bin. That was a damn good trick. “How do you know about that?”

“The bartender in the first-class lounge. He’s a Diarist. And a Dubliner. Look, Lola, mostly, the Committee is a closed shop. It’s a South Korean who doesn’t leave his armored skyscraper; a Belorussian with food tasters and no photos on record; a pair of German twins in their seventies who manufacture seventy percent of all the pharmaceuticals outside of Asia. But SineCo is pretty much the Committee in North America; it’s the front for all its operations. And the SineCo CEO — he’s called Straw — he’s not as isolated as these other fellows; he needs a certain amount of attention. He has that basketball team, and he’s always endowing business schools and that sort of malarkey. And all that carry on makes SineCo one of the Committee’s most exposed flanks. Right now, Straw is devoted to Deveraux. Deveraux has influence. We need to get to Deveraux.”

“Yeah, but just because he played some card trick on me…”

Sarah shook her head. “You’re not going to Deveraux. You’re going to Portland, Oregon, to find a lad by the name of Leo Crane. Leo Crane went to college with your man Deveraux, and a few weeks ago he printed this odd broadside that more or less describes what’s going on, and in the broadside he claims to have ‘incriminating footage’ of Deveraux.” She handed Leila a crinkly piece of paper folded four times. “Read it before you get there. We want you to find out what he’s talking about.”

“Why don’t you just ask him? Sounds like he’d be glad to hear from you.”

“You are us, Lola. But we don’t want a full-recruit on Leo Crane. He might just be unwell, or fragile. He added some flourishes to his description of the Committee’s plot that make it a little silly. Scientologists and the like. We don’t administer the eye test to people whose grasp may be slipping.

“Lola, right now there are hundreds of Diarists working angles on how to get to someone in the SineCo organization. It’s hard. The Committee runs a tight ship. Deveraux holds promise. We got started on the Leo Crane thing only when someone passed us this broadside he’d printed. But it may have become urgent. The Committee turned Crane’s scrutiny numbers way up; he’s currently under observation at a Committee-affiliated facility, which also makes it hard to extract him. So we’re sending you to him, just to talk, to find out if he really has something useful on Deveraux or if he’s just a pot cripple with a grudge and a good imagination. Plus, it’s pretty much on your way home. Will you try?”

She would be home in forty-eight hours. Would she talk to some guy on her way home? Leila nodded.

“Okay. So listen. You’re going via JFK. You’re ticketed through, so there’ll be no funny business or swaps, I promise. You’ll be traveling as Lola Montes. When you get to Portland, your phone will direct you to Leo Crane. We’ll try to route your civilian calls to the Diary phone also. Your own devices are in the duffel. But they won’t work until you’re back in LA.”

Leila was bothered by something. “If it’s the Committee that’s doing all the evil spying and data collection, how is it that we know so much?”

“You said we, ” said Sarah, and smiled. “But yes. We made a compromise. The Committee spies on everything. We tap their lines. So yes, we are spying too. But we’re spying on their spying. And when we come out in the open, we’re going to stop doing that. And to come out in the open, we need to organize — and to organize, we need the data they’re collecting. At least until our transmission network is up and running. But we’re losing access to their data. They’re moving their whole operation — probably because people like you keep running across their facilities. We think maybe they’re bunkerizing, going underground. Or maybe they’re putting it all in orbit. Anyway, there are fewer and fewer trunk lines to tap. That’s why we need someone high up in this SineCo thing they’re calling New Alexandria: to tell us where they’re keeping the data.”