David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“She’s sad because your little brother’s not coming,” said the man’s voice. “But it’s okay, bug, we’re going to try to make you another little brother or sister.”

“But I want that little bruddah,” whined the girl.

And the man said, “I did too, bug. I did too.” And then he was sobbing and stifling his sobs and Mark tore the screened visor off his head.

Seamus Cole was staring at him evenly, like How now, guru guy?

“Why the hell would you be collecting shit like this?” Mark said, looking straight at Cole.

“It’s public. It’s over our network. We call dibs on it.”

Dibs? They were calling dibs?

“But it’s illegal, to spy on people like this.”

“Information is free. Storage is unlimited,” said Cole, totally unbothered. “Our privacy policy is reviewed regularly, and our mandate to collect is spelled out in the implied-consent decree of 2001. We’re just keeping this stuff safe, anyway. The other server giants have terrible vulnerabilities; they could be erased so easily.” Did he just smirk? “But that’s not really my department.”

“What is your department?”

He brought Mark to a little elevator, and the two men rode four decks down and then walked through two negative-pressure rooms with sticky floors. There were men coming the other way, peeling off paper gowns as they walked, as the handsome surgeons on the hospital shows do. Now the passageways were tubular, striated with cabling and cancerous with little blinking boxes. Mark and Cole arrived at a sort of viewing platform, a room with a glass wall. Mark had to get right up close to the glass before his eyes could make any sense of what was on the other side.

It was a machine. But what kind? A death ray? They were standing at one end of it, and it appeared to extend the length of the ship. On the other side of the glass, men in paper gowns were walking alongside the machine on little scaffolds. It hummed at some primordial frequency. Mark’s fillings were ringing.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a beast,” said Cole. “A beast that’s all brain. We feed it information — all electronically transmitted information, all the time, over any line we claim — then it builds models: predictive, algorithmic. Ten moves out, twenty, but the pieces aren’t chess pieces, they’re people pieces. And then it extracts anything of value and makes a copy of both those files — the everything file and the anything-of-value file — and writes those files onto solid-state atomic drives and launches the drives down to the ocean floor.”

There was no way Mark could continue to hide his surprise. “Well, fuck me,” he said, a little under his breath.

“Yeah. I think what Straw wants from you, at least until we unveil, is more like a cover story.”

The “relaxing” that Straw had mentioned was, as Mark had feared it would be, entirely un relaxing. It took place beside a swimming pool in a little stone-tiled terrazzo cloister that was carved into the middle of the top deck of the pilothouse of Sine Wave 2 . By means of a remote control that seemed to both dazzle and baffle him, Straw fought with a vast louvered-glass roof that opened and closed across the cloister. Mark kept getting scorched and blinded by shafts of equatorial sun that flooded the poolside whenever Straw accidentally commenced a louver retraction.

“Damn it,” said Straw. “You ask for one thing to be done right…” Then he buzzed thrice and angrily a little buzzer that sat beside his iced tea; a crew member hustled out from one of the glass walls of the cloister, wearing a sort of waiter’s jacket and shorts. “Close this stupid ceiling,” Straw barked at the guy.

Shorts were the thing around here. On this upper deck of the ship, the maritime vibe was replaced with a Mediterranean villa vibe, and the male crew were all in snug shorts. Mark had tried Sorry, I forgot my suit, in an attempt to avoid time poolside with Straw, but to his horror, Straw said, No worries, I have one here, and whipped out a particularly abbreviated pair.

So Mark had to stay reclined in a lounge chair beside Straw’s lounge chair while he tried to get some specifics on the job that Straw seemed to have no doubt he would accept.

Having spent a year allowing Straw to be vague about SineCo business, Mark was having a hard time determining the nature and extent of what was really going on here. Straw moved from half-formed notion to ill-formed conclusion via cloudy and self-serving thought processes.

“But you told me that New Alexandria was going to be like a library,” said Mark, “that it would serve the public.”

“It will. And a library can ask you to obey its rules; it can ask you to apply for a library card, pay late fines, and, yes — if it is the best library the world has ever known — pay a nominal fee for membership.”

“But if the books that the library, um, collects are already the property of the people the library wants to loan the books to…if you take something and then ‘loan’ it back to its original owner for a fee…” He left the rest of the sentence unsaid, but Straw seemed totally unbothered by the implication, so Mark had to recalibrate. “James, can you see why this”—he made a little sweeping gesture meant to take in the ship and its mission—“would be a hard story to tell?”

“Mark, let me ask you this,” said Straw. “Can you tell me where the nearest black hole is?”

“What?”

“A black hole. The nearest one to us,” prompted Straw.

“I don’t know. A trillion miles away?”

“No. Right in your face.” And here Straw reached out and touched Mark’s face, lightly. “Your eyes. They are black holes. They take in light; they absorb information.” His fingers lingered on Mark’s cheek as he waited for Mark to appreciate the depth of the observation. “The machine you saw today is like that. Not just some computer you dump data into, but an organ that needs to make sense of the world. That’s not really something you’d want to stand in the way of, is it?” He didn’t wait for Mark’s answer. “So, I suppose you tell the part that you can tell, which, yes, until we really unveil the product, is not the whole story. And I know it’s going to be hard — that’s why I want you. You’re the best.”

“And what is the product, exactly?” asked Mark, a little desperately.

“It’s a product and a service,” said Straw proudly. “It’s order . It’s the safeguarding of all of our clients’ personal information and assets. But it may be a while before our clients discover that they are our clients. So you’ll have some time to work on that part.

“And there have lately been some information breaches, Mark. We’ve had some close calls. I don’t know much about that. That’s Parker’s department. He says his people are dealing with that, rolling that up. If exposure should begin before our planned unveiling, we may need you to generate some interim explanations for what we’re doing. If we can stay discreet, as we are now, then we need you to keep telling the story of the Node. We’re getting excellent results with the Node, but we need one hundred times the saturation we have now. In five years, I want every non-impoverished Homo sapiens to be carrying a Node. Also, SineLife, the new socialverse we’re rolling out. You know how the youth today won’t make a move without consulting their little circles online?”—he didn’t wait for a nod from Mark—“We need you to get everyone doing that.”

He sat up in his lounge chair, a little man, too tan, tufts of springy white hair on his shoulders. “We need you to do what you do so well: Don’t sell them on it, convince them of it. Something like ‘SineLife sets you free — to concentrate on what’s really important.’ But say it in that way you do.”