David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

What the fuck? thought Leila. “Rox, what do they mean when they say you won’t take the project to the next level?”

Roxana had collected herself. “You know those SineLenses, the contacts that permit computer interface?” Leila did, but she had found the idea creepy even before all this started. “Well, these guys are working on a similar platform, but one that can actually implant devices for the purpose of data collection. See, they can do retinography from the surface of the eye just fine. But that’s still like standing on the viewing deck at the Grand Canyon, you know?” Leila did know. Not about retinography, but about that August driving vacation in — was it 1982? One of Cyrus Majnoun’s Honor America tours. “Now they’re sort of able to stash the retinography equipment in the back of the eye via these contacts.”

“What retinography equipment?”

“Tiny camera, tiny light, tiny transmitter.”

“Christ, Roxana.”

“There are great uses for that technology! For research. To find out about how information comes in, Leila. It is a very important field. There would need to be years of lab trials, obviously, and then animal trials.” Leila was shaking her head at her sister, disappointment clear in the set of her eyes and mouth.

“I know,” said Roxana. “I guess I was stupid to believe them. Vain, maybe. But they wanted me to write something that allows instructions to be sent to the back of the eye. That’s the one I said I wouldn’t work on. I’ve told them no three times, but they still send me new data every day.”

“Well, what are you gonna do?”

“What the fuck do you mean, what am I gonna do? You think I would let these people use me? That I could allow this to happen while I’m around?”

Leila shook her head. “No. Not that. I meant operationally. I mean how do we stop them?”

Roxana softened. “Well, I’m putting my shoulder to the wheel, anyway.” Was that a pun from Roxana? About her condition? Unheard-of. “Your friend Sarah Tonin has a job for me.” Pause. “They want me to make them something.” Pause.

Roxana, like their mother, was a fan of these pauses. “What, Rox?”

“A piece of terrible jewelry to pin right on the chest of their whole network.”

Since she had started writing code, at thirteen, Roxana had always called her programs jewelry; it annoyed the exclusively male cohort she’d had to endure in that particular swath of her arc upward. Terrible jewelry meant a computer virus.

This was like the old times, when Leila would help Roxana execute the teasing defense strategies she needed to endure an armless adolescence. Old times, but with everything at stake.

“What’s going to make it so terrible?”

“One hundred percent circuit collapse on their network,” said Roxana, all ho-hum. “You want to make malware, you copy the guys making biomalware; they’re a few years ahead of the curve. Hand me that big manila, would you?” Roxana meant the big interoffice envelope she had carried in from the front desk. “And the Express envelope too.”

Roxana drew from the envelope a sheaf of papers and started to leaf through them. It wasn’t just papers. It was photos and X-rays and metered waves chittered out on thermal graph scrolls and pages dense with numbers.

But Sarah had told Leila that Dear Diary couldn’t get anything on their network, because it was solid-state or something. “Even if you can make this virus for us, how are we supposed to get it on their network?”

“I dunno. Apparently, some guy you met in a bar was their best shot at that,” said Roxana. “Sarah said they’re working up another way.” When Roxana came to the end of the sheaf, she turned her attention to the other envelope. “Uh, Leila. You know a Lola Montes?”

Leila snatched the envelope from her sister and examined it. “Recipient: Lola Montes, c/o Roxana Majnoun, LACLAF, Los Angeles, CA.” The handwriting was tiny. There was also a zip + 4. Leila pulled the cardboard ripcord on the envelope and removed a single sheet of paper from within. It was brittle, blank. She turned it over and over. Was this from Dear Diary? No, she had just been on the phone with them. Was there a return address? She looked for the envelope, but Roxana had already retrieved it from Leila’s lap with her left foot and was examining it closely.

“Who’s the sender, Roxana?” she asked impatiently.

Roxana seemed to be peering at the tiny script, or else she was pausing for effect again.

“Leo’s Lightbulbs and Lemon Juice?”

Leila waited until she was home and in the small room beneath the stairs. She took the tacky lampshade off the little lamp on the Ikea bedside table. She held the paper close to the light, passing it over the 60-watt bulb delicately, as a careful plumber is delicate with the blue of the torch flame on the copper pipe. She began in one corner, and as the typewritten words started to appear, she could tell up from down, right from left; she warmed the page again, this time from the upper left. The words appeared, embrowning on the raggy paper:

Dear Lola or whatever your name is, I have this way of remembering numbers. I guess it’s a mnemonic: the numbers suggest little pictures to me, and I remember the pictures. Sometimes, that’s more confusing than it is helpful. But in this case, it may get me back to you.

In the dining car of an underwater bullet train, two tree surgeons are playing pinochle. That was the picture I saw when you rattled off that phone number when you were on the phone with your sister the other night. Sorry for eavesdropping. But not really. That phone number only got me the LA County Large Array Facility, though. Is your sister an astronomer?

I know you were trying to keep me from the specifics of your situation, but there’s this Internet they got now, and “middle-school principal” + “FBI” + “Los Angeles,” and I saw the news about your father. I saw what it is they’re doing to him. And so I know your surname is Majnoun. The LA Times mentioned your sister because I guess she’s some kind of prodigy. Maybe your real name’s not that important. Lola suits you fine.

Did you ever hear the joke about the guy who goes to his shrink? Guy says, Doc, sometimes I think I’m a teepee and sometimes I think I’m a wigwam. Doc says, The problem is, you’re two tents.

Now, I know that this joke is nominally about the double homophone. Or maybe the joke is supposed to be funny because it’s so lame, like a hardy-har-har kind of joke. But see, what I like about it, the poor schmuck just went cycling back and forth between two ideas of himself. He’s the guy, in the whole canon, who gives clearest voice to a common problem — the problem where your mind runs back and forth, binarily, between two opposite notions of itself while all the time your mind somehow also knows — because why else would the guy go to a shrink if he didn’t? — that the two poles of that endless back-and-forth cycle are probably not useful reference points anyway. Teepee? Wigwam? Were those ever really even the right words to denote distinct styles of Native American housing? And then you have the capper, where the health-care provider mocks and dismisses the patient and his complaint, which I think is pretty biting. That’s how I feel: I’m a teepee, I’m a wigwam; I’m a genius, I’m a loser. I am connected, I am alone. Yes, I concede: the drink and weed pulled that out of me more. So I’ve stopped all that. For my sisters. And for myself.

I fear, though, that beneath my bad habits, there is still the teepee/wigwam problem. It’s always been there, it’ll always be there; it’s like the water table or something. It’s just a condition I’ll have to manage my whole life, I guess. Lots of people have those, right?