Complete Short Fiction, page 99
The silence stretched. By this point Duster would have realized that the truck was a distraction, and would be back with the rest of his team to cut off all routes of escape. As I thought about that, I found myself irritated with Maureen for not taking this obvious opportunity. In a real sense, it didn’t matter if we were lying or not. If she didn’t do something, her AI was done for.
“Ah, screw it.” Max flipped a switch and the tractor motor hummed back to life. “She’s too dumb. I’m taking this out. Ten percent finder’s fee is better than nothing. Better than sitting around down here trying to slap some sense into an Al-worshipping interior decorator.”
“Wait!” Maureen turned to me. “Is this true? You’re letting me go?”
That was quite unnecessary. What made her trust me all of a sudden? “Yes. But not because we want to.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She hopped on the tractor and hummed off into the dark tunnel.
“Okay,” Petra said. “Have we really just let that thing go?”
“Nah,” Max said. “Me and Taibo, we’re all set. Now, let’s see what the smoothies do when they show up.”
“I have to say, Taibo, that was a nice try with the truck.” Chet smiled at me. “Anton’s pissed, though. I’d suggest staying out of his way when he finally turns up.”
Chet’s team had arrived. Guys in long coats had spilled out of sedans with dark-tinted windows and smoothly closed off the mall. There seemed to be dozens of them, each with a stack of gear, a support vehicle, and a separate online channel of coverage. I was no doubt showing up on thirty different feeds right now, edited in different ways, with various explanatory text crawls on my chest. I tried to look iconically like the Losing Team. It was surprisingly easy.
“Anton” had turned out to be Duster’s real name. He had chased that truck for much longer than we’d anticipated. Max’s hopped-up spiel to the driver had persuaded him to expect desperate plant hijackers, and he had led Duster and his team a merry chase along various Amish-cart-blocked roads down toward Lancaster. Duster, I gathered, had gotten a bit out of hand at the seizure, and been arrested by some local cops. The fact that the truck had come up completely clean of any AI activity would not do him any good at any hearing. Chet’s team would have to finish their job here before anyone could try to get him out of the Upper Leacock lockup.
“What are you going to do?” I asked in bewilderment. “Why are you here?”
“We’ve got to take this over, Taibo.” He managed to sound sad and reluctant, as if it had really not been something he wanted to do. “This has gotten completely out of hand. I had hoped you would be able to handle . . . well, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Some things look really easy when others do them, but then turn out to take a great deal of skill. Just remember that, next time.”
It took every ounce of my willpower to keep from punching him. That was nothing you wanted to do while on two dozen channels of net coverage. People would be critiquing my form—“too much arm, not enough body”—before I was even under arrest.
“So . . . I still don’t understand. Are you helping us out?”
“No,” he said. “We’re not helping you out. We’re formally taking over this operation. All of it. It’s the only way, Taibo. I’m sure you understand it.”
There. He’d finally gotten it out formally, though I was sure he’d also filed the necessary permissions. Along with the Al, he’d just taken on all the liabilities associated with the operation. Whatever happened, all the property damage was now entirely Chet’s problem.
“This is a really dangerous Al, Chet.” I got all goggle-eyed and paranoid. “You have no idea—”
He smiled and patted my shoulder. “Come on, Taibo. Let’s go in, and you can see how the big boys do it.”
PETRA RAISED THE LID. “Who had the pork and coconut?”
“Me.” Max shoveled most of the bowl onto his rice and started eating. Petra looked at me and shrugged. We’d all earned a decent meal.
“Shrimp and baby corn. You on a diet, Taibo?” She knew I usually went for pork.
“It’s going to be a long haul, Petra. I don’t want to weigh myself down.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
The aromas of curry, fish sauce, and galangal mingled in the air.
It had been an uncomfortable scene. Chet’s crew had torn the place apart. No Gardener. No aicons. Nothing. Just a huge hole in the floor and some astronomical liability. They’d found Petra in the barewear shop trying on some delts she didn’t need, and hauled Max out of his hidey hole behind a fish tank. The exposed orchid aicon had been the biggest risk. Max hadn’t yet said anything about what might have happened to it, and Chet had spent a lot of time looking for it, based on the description Duster had phoned in from his holding cell.
Chet had spent some time telling me what an idiot he thought I was, how he had played me the whole way, how I had never had a clue. In the end, he had managed to imply that I’d somehow taken advantage of his generosity to an old and unsuccessful friend in order to betray him. I’d invited him to join us for lunch.
As it happened, he had other plans.
Petra glanced at Max, who still had his face buried in his food. “Okay, Max. Come up for air and tell us where the aicon is.”
Max looked up, vaguely irritated, and, instead of answering Petra’s question, signaled a waiter. “Hey! Where’s the extra?” He then grinned at us. “I ordered another dish for us. From the fish tank. Stuff like that’s always best when it’s fresh.”
“From the—stop screwing around, Max.”
“You gave me the assignment . . . ah, here we go.”
The waiter pushed up a cart. Max grinned at him and took the covered tray from it.
Petra stared at it. “How—”
“Can’t show it yet. Taibo’s buds are still staring at us. The orchid’s in a doggie bag. We can haul it out with our lefties. I shoved it through the basement maintenance hatch of the fish tank with an almost-neutral floater. It’s an old drug smuggling trick. Thing looks just like some bit of kelp or something. Floated right up past these guys while they were charging around.”
“Well, Max.” Petra sat back. “Very enterprising.” She looked at me. “You don’t look too happy about it, Taibo.”
I had been moving my food around, but not eating it. “I—I don’t actually like shrimp that much.”
“Hey, man, you scared that Maureen won’t like you when you come after her supersmart gardening machine?” Max laughed, spilling rice down his chin. “You got a steady job. She’ll forgive you.”
I didn’t look at him. He was my buddy, but sometimes he really annoyed me.
“That really was good work, Taibo.” Petra sat back in her chair. “We have a link back to the Al. Beagle & Charlevoix have been forced to assume all the liability for this job, by formally taking it over. It’ll bankrupt them, guaranteed.” If I hadn’t known her dedication to AI hunting, I would have thought that the most pleasing aspect of the job was the damage it would do to her former employer. “But shorn of aicons, with its processing reduced for transport, this Brenda or whatever it is will still look like the Donald we originally thought it was.” She glanced at me, looked away. “Maureen’s looking for support from the acolyte underground, but it will be a few days before she manages to find it.”
Neither Max nor Petra understood my position. I’d been mediocre in various positions in the past. But now I had a job I was good at. It was in a declining industry, natch, but you can’t have everything. The next step, in addition to being good at it, was to be successful at it.
“Let’s grab our leftovers,” I said. “Who’s driving?”
Wrong Number
Regarding this story, Mr. Jablokov says: Once, in an impoverished period, I owned a Subaru GLF that I had bought from a nonimpoverished friend who had abandoned it behind his house after it stopped working. It was an earnest car, a hard-working car, but its upbringing had resulted in many bad habits, among which was a heed to visit the local repair shop every couple of months. Bob, of Uncle Russ’s, had one piece of advice, which he gave me whenever I brought the car in: “Sell the car.” Eventually I did, and then missed my visits. Uncle Russ’s is gone, replaced with a crisply efficient Valvoline, and so “Wrong Number” will have to stand as a belated Valentine to that vanished crew.
STEPHANIE FOUND HERSELF wide awake at 2:13 A.M., remembering a phone number. Hers, but with one digit wrong.
She could see the thing, rounded numbers on a cocktail napkin with a blue ship’s wheel on it, her handwriting. The digit was wrong on purpose.
She hadn’t thought of that night since . . . well, probably since it happened. She’d been working on the campaign of a state rep, and had started talking with some guy vaguely associated with the rep’s auto leasing business at the low-key victory party. Decent-looking guy, nice jacket, with, as she remembered, an interest in collecting antique cars. Everyone was in a great mood.
Then he began to seem creepy. Maybe it was the excessive emphasis on the size of the garage he kept his car collection in, or the way he made sure that she could see that the buttons on his jacket sleeve really buttoned, or the fact that along with the sleeve she also observed that he neither trimmed or cleaned his fingernails regularly. Whatever, she lost interest and decided to go home.
Despite her watch checking and “now, where’s my coat?” scan of the rack by the entrance, he didn’t catch on, and asked for her phone number. She didn’t want to give it to him. He became insistent, in an oddly compelling way. She was there alone, and, at that moment, felt weak. After a moment’s hesitation, she wrote down a fake number, changing the fifth digit of the actual number. She’d heard of obsessives working their way through all ten variants of a wrong last digit, but the fifth seemed safe.
And it worked. The feared call never came, and she forgot about the incident.
Until now. But it was more than a memory now, it was a compulsion. She could not stop thinking about it.
Around four, she gave up on trying to get back to sleep, and watched a couple of old episodes of Law &) Order.
It was like something on a camera lens, showing up in every picture. That number. That wrong number. It seemed like the worst thing she had ever done. Worse than the time she had called her seventh-grade friend Fran, who had a limp, “gimpy,” in a failed attempt to get the class queen bee, Mandy Beekman, to like her. Worse, even, than not calling her grandmother Eleanor in the last week before she died, even though it was clear that the kidneys had failed and that was it. When she’d gotten the call from her mother on Monday morning, with the funeral date, she’d implied without actually saying so that she’d had a chat with Gran just a day or two before the end. Nothing really interesting, no great revelations, but it was really nice that she had managed to talk once more to Gran before it was too late . . . and it was that, that implied—no, real—lie to her mother that stuck with her.
“Quick update,” her friend Marlene said. “You’ve been an incredible troll this past week.”
There didn’t seem to be a good reply to that, so Stephanie just looked at the dead spider plant that had been on the bookshelf in Marlene’s office for at least six months.
“Is it still that stupid thing about the presentation?” Marlene said. “Everyone knows Edith was way out of line on that. Not your fault, and who cares anyway? Nobody even noticed.”
“ ‘Everyone’ has been paying a lot of attention to things ‘nobody’ cares about.”
Marlene tossed her blond hair. She’d gotten a short cut last week, seemingly just so she could do that. “Okay, you’ve uncovered the logical flaw in my argument. You’re still a troll.”
“I need a drink.”
“Brilliant suggestion.”
The Cromlech was their high-end Friday after-work bar. None of their usual cronies had been able to make it that week, so Stephanie and Marlene were on their own. They picked seats near a mixed-sex group from some other workplace, away from bathrooms, drink pickup, and dart board, hoping to discourage drive-by sexual suggestions.
As soon as the drinks arrived, Stephanie told Marlene about the phone number.
“Isn’t stuff like that just murder?” Marlene sipped her margarita across the salt. “Why do our minds have minds of their own?”
“But it’s not like some dumb pop song you can’t forget. Somehow. . . .”
“What?”
“More is hanging on it than that.”
“Like what? Futility? Mortality? Still no children? Existential meaninglessness? Drooping boobs?”
“They’re not drooping!”
“God didn’t invent support garments, honey. Madame Olga did. Another reason to doubt.”
“Do you ever regret having done something?” Stephanie asked.
“Sure. ‘Why did I get the maple walnut? Wouldn’t a scoop of the coffee have been a better choice? I don’t even like maple, or walnut. What made me think the combination would be better?’ ”
“You know what I mean!”
Marlene examined her. “Okay, I guess I do. Do you think this guy could have been important to you? Like in a house-and-kids kind of way?”
“That’s just it. I don’t. He was just a nice-looking guy who turned out to be not so nice.”
“Millions of those.”
“Exactly. So why am I obsessing about this one?”
Marlene did not have a quick answer to that, so Stephanie sipped her own drink. Once she tasted the bite of the tequila under the lime juice and Cointreau, she couldn’t stop. The Cromlech did not use a flavored corn syrup mix, but delivered something a grownup could drink. She drank steadily until there was nothing but a couple of bits of lime membrane at the bottom of the glass. The bartender, noticing her single-mindedness, had another ready even before she raised her finger.
“Whoa,” Marlene said. “You better watch that. Best way to make sure you make decisions that lead to another such pointless discussion some time in the future.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Stephanie suddenly found Marlene’s hip-yet-wise attitude intolerable. The second drink tasted even better than the first. She tried to take it slowly, but failed.
“Let me tell you a story.” Marlene, who never had a second drink, and wasn’t even finished with the first one, ordered another one as well. “Junior year of college I got involved with this guy. Archaeologist. Not my usual line, you understand. You know I like ’em big and stupid. I’ll accept complexity in a Cabernet, but never in a man.” Seeing Stephanie’s impatience, she hurried on. “I guess maybe we all go through our outdoorsy phase, just like we all once liked horses, even if it was just My Little Pony. Spencer had that tang of wood smoke. Specialized in Anasazi stuff, out in the Southwest. Got to go to a lot of pretty places.
“Anyway, he was going away for a semester, to a dig in southern Utah. He wanted me to go with him. I didn’t know we’d gotten that serious. I didn’t want to go. I had other things on my mind, like getting through school, and wasn’t interested in spending four months in a tent somewhere out in the desert, watching him clean dust off some potsherd with a camel’s-hair brush.
“It became kind of a big thing, and we had a fight, and he left. He published a few papers about his excavation, I think. My next semester didn’t go well. Bad relationship, too much partying, failed a couple of classes. Everything kind of turned to crap, in other words. And I started to think about Spencer, about the clean dry desert, about the wind, about the clear blue sky, and the canyon walls, and the mysterious ruins, and realized how badly I had screwed up. I searched for him and found him, already junior faculty at San Francisco State. I planned a trip up there, thought I might surprise him, see if, at least, we could have dinner, and think about maybe fixing up what had gone wrong between us.
“I was packing. I remember that. I had a bunch of clothes in stacks on the bed, and I reached in the back of the closet and pulled out a bag I hadn’t used in a long time. I’d forgotten I even had it. It was the perfect size for an overnight bag. I opened it up. Inside was a photograph. It was of me and Spencer at some stupid party, our arms linked, holding drinks, smiling at the camera. Well, he was smiling. My head was gone. Someone—Spencer—had cut it out with scissors, and replaced it with a dog’s head.”
Stephanie found herself resisting asking what breed of dog. “He called you a bitch?”
“Stephanie, he cut my head off!”
“You must have been devastated.”
“I was furious! But relieved. I don’t know if I’d ever really believed something would be different if I could see him again, and go sit in the sun somewhere and drink lukewarm water out of Nalgene bottles, but this corked it. But how gracious of him, I realized later, to have made it so clear that that hope was ridiculous, and that I’d made the right choice in the first place. That none of it was my fault. Like salespeople who get nasty with you when you give their product a pass. Kind of lets you off the hook.”
“But this is different, Marlene. This is something I’m doing to myself.”
“Don’t be so sure, girlfriend.”
Stephanie stopped herself from ordering another drink, but only by finishing Marlene’s second, virtually untouched one.
“What do you mean?”
“You free tomorrow?” Marlene said. “I need to get some body work done on my car.”
“I didn’t notice anything wrong with your car.” They’d driven over in it.
“I guarantee you’ll see it tomorrow.”
“This looks really recent.” The mechanic, a tall blond man with a serious face, knelt and examined Marlene’s shattered right taillight.
Stephanie wondered what the mechanic would say if she told him that Marlene had, in fact, backed deliberately into a Dumpster just that morning, after picking Stephanie up.
