David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Speaking of,” said Leo. “You fire all your judges?”

“What?”

“That book you wrote. The inside-out one.”

Here was his chance to do this, at least. “Leo, I’m sorry. The toy heir in the book wasn’t supposed to be you. Your family makes games, not toys, right?” Leo gave him a scrunched-lip bullshit face. Mark stopped. “I’m sorry. I really am. My bad.”

“Thanks. I’m over it,” said Leo, and he really did seem to be. “But I’m kinda baffled by the part where you wrote something really good and then sold it and yourself to that creepy outfit. Your book was absolute crap. How much money did they give you?”

“Not enough,” said Mark.

“Would any amount be enough?”

That pissed him off, the pious tone. “Oh yeah. I can think of some amounts,” Mark said. “You have a price too, my friend, everyone does. Yours is just distorted by a trust fund.”

He thought that would sting — Leo was super-touchy about the trust thing. But all Leo said was “Probably.” Then he seemed to inhale the whole night before him. His chest swelled.

“But I don’t know, Mark. If I had written something as good as you did in that little essay, I can’t imagine letting anyone turn it into shit like you let them do.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for the input,” said Mark. But he knew that Leo was right. He finished the spliff and rolled off its ember in the little ashtray beside the terra-cotta pot. “But just go easy on the revolutionary stuff, okay? It’s a bit rich to see you playing Che Guevara in there.”

“I think Che was just some bourgeois kid, actually.”

“You grew up in a town house, Leo. Now you’re sober for a week and you get tangled up with this United Front of Whatever, these anarchists, and you think you know why the caged bird sings.”

“Oh, we’re not anarchists,” Leo said.

Oh, yeah. It was we now. Mark snorted.

“But I’m damn sure on the side of the bird, not the cage, you know?” said Leo, wandering off the porch.

“Where are you going?” asked Mark.

“Over to the barn. I wanna see what that pony’s all about.”

A moment later, the door skkrring ed again, and it was Constance, come out to give her five hundred cents once more.

To head her off, Mark said, “This is good pot your man has.” It was. Its effect was clean and rapid, like they make smoking pot look on TV. He offered her the spliff. Constance did a wavy dismissive thing that made her distaste clear. Fine .

“You want some to take home? We have plenty,” she said, and she gestured to the odd forest that ringed them.

“Those are pot plants?”

“Not primarily, no. They’re a novophylum. But the pollen — that green fringe on the leaves? That’s a kind of cannabinoid, apparently. That characteristic has proved useful on the rare occasions that our farms have been discovered by the police-front agencies. They think we’re pot farmers with advanced botanical skills. They burn or destroy the plants without looking to see what they really are.”

“What are they really?”

“Well, I guess someone like you would call them computers.”

“Someone like me?”

“Straight. Untested.”

“How about you? What do you call them?”

“Well, they’re just plants, you know? They live in a parallel world right beside us. But these ones we can communicate with.”

Mark didn’t understand. A plant computer? A computer plant?

“Look,” said Constance. “We came down out of the trees, we made up a language, we learned to write it down, then we learned to encode it electronically as ones and zeros and store it on tiny devices.”

“You’re talking about, like, from the Stone Age to the 1970s, right?”

“More or less. Okay, but what we have here is something different. Turns out there was already a language that we’ve been sharing all along. Maybe we knew it better when we were still in the trees. It’s in the air, the soil, the water. They won’t be able to take it away from us. It’s all around us all the time. The other guys are still writing everything down with circuits; they’re still using hard drives, essentially. They call it the cloud, but that’s wrong, isn’t it? Their cloud is heavy and metal and whirring.”

“So if your thing is so much more advanced than theirs, why are you playing defense? You and your plants should be able to bring these guys down.”

“Mark, we need years to figure out what to do with this knowledge. It’s so new. The eye test is still a mystery to us. These laptops we make here are very, very basic. And since that motherfucker Pope came on board, the Committee has started coming after us hard. They may even have found a way of cheating on the eye test. Some bad apples have been let through, and we’ve had security and intelligence breaches like we’ve never had before. There’s not that much time, Mark. There just isn’t. The Bluebirds are coming after us. They’re hunting us down and taking us out one by one. It’s getting more dangerous every day. And if they get us, they’ll take all this — our plant science, our brain science. They’ll classify it, monetize it. Corporate seizure, civil forfeiture, the spoils of the War on Terror.”

Mark looked into the blue night. “You probably aren’t supposed to be saying this to an untested, are you? Though I suppose you could always render me unbelievable. Or feed me to your plants.”

“I can tell you this because you’re going to join us.” She leaned into him. “Isn’t that true? Isn’t that why you came out here alone? To get high and screw up the courage to do it?”

Mark took another languid drag in the night. “But Leo said I’ll have no more secrets. I don’t want that to happen.”

“Yeah. Crane is a strange one. That’s a very low number he has. It’s almost like he was already one of us. Anyway, I don’t agree with him on the secrets stuff. There’s a whole load of shit in my life I’d rather not share. I think Crane’s response tonight has more to do with the, you know, organic nature of the situation.”

Mark shook his head to make her explain.

“He’s in love with that girl,” she said, like Mark shouldn’t have needed that explained. “It’s scary, Mark, I know that, to join with others. And I’ve been giving you a hard time tonight, but I actually like that you’re a skeptic. I was. I am. We need people like you. Don’t worry about your precious self. He’ll stagger on. This just adds a dimension. The test makes the too-sure hesitate and the torn know what to do. It makes the strivers reflect and the slackers react; the cynics more forgiving and the hopers more careful. It helps you to see what you’re supposed to be doing here, in this life. And it will give you a number. We’ll know who you are and that you’re with us. We can’t ask you to do what we need you to do if there’s any chance you’ll chicken out and turn back.”

“What if it gives me a bad number? Says I’m a bad apple?”

“I don’t think you are, Mark. Do you?”

No, he didn’t. Well, look at that .

Back inside. The big wooden table. “What’s this going to feel like?” Mark asked Roman.

“Most Diarists report that the experience is intense, pleasant, brief. There’s a spike in connectivity that comes right after the test usually. But it will recede — the grand feelings will, I mean. What matters is what’s left behind.”

Mark knew a bit about grand feelings, and their receding. “I can handle the high. I just want to make sure I’m not going to end up some stupid jihadi in your project.”

“I promise you that won’t happen,” Constance said to him. For a moment, Constance looked and sounded like his mom twenty years ago, his mom when he was a boy.