Jericho Iteration

7

(Thursday, 12:05 P.M.)

Tiptree’s rent-a-goons escorted us out the front door, where they confiscated our smartbadges and pointed the way to the road. John and I didn’t say anything to each other until we reached his car and had driven out of the company parking lot. When we had passed through the front gate and were heading back down Clayton Road toward the highway, though, the first thing John wanted from me wasn’t an apology.

“Okay, what was that all about?” he asked. “I thought you were just talking to that guy.”

He wasn’t pissed off so much as he was bewildered. I felt a headache coming on, so I lowered my seat-back to a prone position and gently rubbed my eyes with my knuckles.

“He said it was because I had taken a picture of Steve Estes,” I said, “but he was just looking for an excuse. I could have complained about the catering and he would have tossed me out just the same.” I let out my breath. “He had no problem with you. You just happened to be with me, and that made you an accessory. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Hmm … well, don’t worry about it. What’s done is done.” He stopped to let a mini-cat rumble across the road in front of us; the machine was carrying a load of broken cinderblocks away from a collapsed convenience store. The flagman waved us on, and John stepped on the pedal again. “So you think he did that just to get rid of us? I don’t-”

“For the record,” I went on, “the jerk’s name is Paul Huygens.” I hesitated. “He used to work for CybeServe, maker of the fine line of CybeServe home VR products … specifically, the VidMaxx Dataroom. Ring any bells with you?” John’s face was blank for a moment, then Big Ben tolled the midnight hour. He cast a sharp look at me. “I’ll be darned,” he said slowly. “Is that the guy who got you canned at the Clarion?”

“One and the same, dude.” I gazed out the window at the ruins of a collapsed subdivision, remembering an unsigned note that had been faxed to me only a few years ago. “One and the same …”

Time for another history lesson. Today’s lecture is how Gerry Rosen, ace investigative reporter, once again tried to get a good story and, not incidentally, save a few lives, but instead ended up losing his job. Take notes; there will be a quiz on this at the end of the postmodern era.

Three years before, I was working as a staff writer for another weekly alternative newspaper, this one the Back Bay Clarion, a muckraking little rag published in Boston. I had been assigned by my editor to follow up on a number of complaints against a medium-size electronics company based in Framingham, a Boston suburb that has been the heart of the East Coast computer industry since the early eighties. As you may have guessed, this was CybeServe.

CybeServe was one of many corporations that had cashed in on the virtual-reality boom by manufacturing home VR systems for the consumer market. It had previously lost tons of money on the cheap-shit domestic robots it had attempted to sell through department stores, so its VidMaxx line of VR equipment had been one of the few products that were keeping the company afloat. All well and good, but the problem lay in their top-of-the-line product, the VidMaxx Dataroom 310.

The Dataroom 310 was much like its competitors: the unit could transform any vacant household room into a virtual-reality environment, transporting the customer into any world that could be interfaced by the CPU-the sort of thing for which Jah now wanted to write programs. Want to see exactly what the NASA probes on Mars are doing right now? Experience a role-playing game set in a medieval fantasy world? Go shopping in the Galleria Virtual? If you had all the right hardware and enough money to blow on on-line linkage with the various nets, the Dataroom 310 would take you there toot sweet.

However, unlike similar equipment marketed by Microsoft-Commodore or IBM, CybeServe’s VR equipment had some major flaws. First, there was no built-in interrupt timer; anyone who plugged into cyberspace could stay there indefinitely, or at least until hell froze over and you could build snowmen in Cairo. Also, because of various bugs in the CybeServe’s communications software sold with the hardware, anyone with a little knowledge could hack straight through the security lockouts installed by sysops to prevent users from accessing various commercial VR nets without ponying up a credit card number.

This type of bad engineering had made the CybeServe Butler 3000 the joke of the robotics industry; CybeServe tended to do things fast and cheap in order to cash in on a marketing trend. But most people were unaware of the subtle flaws with the Dataroom 310 when they bought it and had it installed in their homes. Their kids, though, soon discovered those glitches that allowed them practically unlimited time on whatever nets they were able to access, with or without authorization. Blowing three grand on phone bills to Madame Evelyn’s House of Love is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat.

That’s bad. What’s worse was that, according to the tips my paper had received from distraught and angry parents, several kids were losing themselves in cyberspace. They would rush home from school to lock themselves into the datarooms and, using various commands and passwords they had learned from their friends, jack into the VR worlds of their choice … and some of them, because of the lack of an interrupt toggle, wouldn’t come back home again. It became a form of avoidance behavior for children who didn’t like genuine reality, much as drugs, excessive TV viewing, or 1-900 phone services had been for previous generations. A few emotionally disturbed teenagers had even attempted suicide this way, trying to starve themselves to death while locked into an unreal world they refused to leave.

When I checked into it, I found that CybeServe was aware of the problem yet had done nothing to solve it. The corporation had a consulting psychologist on its payroll, whose only job was to jack into the system and talk kids out of virtual reality. The company offered generous “refunds” to their families if they kept their mouths shut about the accidents that had befallen Junior and Sis and didn’t file any lawsuits. Yet CybeServe had not recalled the Dataroom 310 to install timers nor made any effort to update the communications software to prevent hacking. Instead of fixing its mistakes, the company had concentrated solely on keeping potential buyers and the company’s competitors from learning about the product’s defects.

A few local families wanted to talk; so did a couple of their kids, particularly a thirteen-year-old boy from Newton who had spent six months in a New Hampshire psychiatric hospital after he had attempted to kill himself by locking himself in the household dataroom for nearly three days. They had tipped off the Clarion, and I was put onto the story.

CybeServe’s public relations director was Paul Huygens. He had started off by affably refuting the accusations during a long phone interview. He also offered to have a unit installed in my house-free of charge, of course, for “research purposes.” When I didn’t wag my tail and roll over, he circulated an in-house memo to all key company personnel, tacitly threatening job termination to anyone who didn’t hang up as soon as I called.

It could be said in Huygens’s defense that he had only been doing his job. That’s fair; I was doing mine. After several weeks of hangups, I managed to find a disgruntled former CybeServe R amp;D scientist with a guilty conscience who told me, in a not-for-attribution interview, about the fatal flaws in the Dataroom 310. That, along with all the real and circumstantial evidence, allowed me to write an exposé about the company. It was published in the Clarion after nearly two months of grinding work, and within a couple of months after its publication, the Dataroom 310 was taken off the market and CybeServe was forced to deal with dozens of civil-court lawsuits regarding the product.

By then, I had lost my job. Almost as soon as the article was published, Huygens called Boston-area companies that had business with CybeServe, all of them electronics retailers that advertised in the Back Bay Clarion. These stores, in turn, swamped the Clarion’s publisher with threats that they would yank their ads from the paper unless an editorial retraction was published and I was fired.

Like most alternative weeklies, the Clarion was a free paper, its existence dependent solely upon ad revenues. Most publishers-like Pearl, bless his rancid heart-have an iron rod thrust down their backs, knowing all too well that advertisers need the papers just as much as the papers need the advertisers and that editorial wimp-outs only invite further intimidation. Earlier that year, though, the Clarion had been sold to a greedhead who was innocent of journalistic ethics and didn’t have the common sense not to let himself be cowed by hollow threats. This jellyfish, confronted with the notion that he might not be able to purchase a summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, knuckled under.

Two weeks after the publication of my CybeServe story, I was on my way to work when I stopped off at a Newbury Street deli to have coffee and read the Globe-Herald. This made me twenty minutes late for work. I had done it many times before with no previous complaints, but when I showed up at the office, my termination notice was already pinned to my door. The reason given was “chronic tardiness.”

I was cleaning out my desk and putting all my files in cartons when my printer began to hum. I looked around to see the handwritten fax as it dropped into the tray:

Never fuck with the gods.

The fax came unsigned, but when I double-checked the number at the top of the page against my Rolodex, I saw that it had originated from Huygens’s extension at CybeServe. His company was going down the tubes, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take me with him.

And now here I was, in another place and another time, fucking with the gods again.

“Huygens wanted to get me out of there,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something he doesn’t want me to know about. I screwed him up once … he doesn’t want that to happen again.”

John nodded his head. “Could be. Could be …”

“I spotted the woman I met last night,” I said as I cinched my seat upward again. John drove up the eastbound ramp to I-64, the car sliding into the dense midday traffic heading downtown. “Just before Huygens found me. She was across the room from us …”

“You did?” Tiernan looked mildly surprised; he passed a tandem-trailer rig that was chugging down the right lane and squeezed in behind a twenty-year-old BMW with Illinois tags and an expired gas-user decal. “What did she look like?”

“African-American, about five-six … um, sort of plump, about forty to forty-five. Some gray in her hair. It was her, all right.” I hesitated, then added, “I used the camera to zoom in on her badge.”

“Yeah?”

“Found out her position, too. Printed right on the badge.”

“No kidding …”

“No kidding.”

I fell silent. He waited for me to go on. “Well?”

I pointed at the shitbox ahead of us. Pale fumes billowed from its exhaust pipe. “Can you believe that they’re still allowing cars like that on the road? I mean, I thought they were supposed to be enforcing the phase-out laws, and here’s this clunker-”

“Gerry …”

“I think I’m going to do a column about this. I mean, I don’t mind much if someone like Chevy Dick’s got an antique in his garage and takes it out once every now and then, but when you see something like this in broad daylight … y’know, it’s just disgraceful …”

John sighed. “Okay, okay, knock it off. What do you want to know?”

I grinned. It was an old game between us dating back to our college journalism days: quid pro quo information trading. You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine, tit for tat. Sometimes the game had been played for higher stakes than this: when he wanted to know the name of the cute brunette in my Econ 101 class, I traded it to him for the home phone number of the university chancellor. It worked out pretty well; I was able to call the chancellor on a Sunday afternoon while he was watching a football game to ask him embarrassing questions about next semester’s tuition hikes, and for this John received the name of his future wife.

“Ruby fulcrum,” I said. “What’s it mean?”

John sighed. “It’s a code phrase of some sort. To be honest, I don’t know much about it myself, except that it has something to do with the Sentinel program. This lady keeps mentioning it, though, so it must be important somehow.”

He suddenly snapped his fingers, then reached above the windshield to pull down the car’s flatscreen. “Let’s see if CNN has anything on the launch.”

“‘Don’t know’ doesn’t count …”

“Okay, okay.” Keeping one eye on traffic and one hand on the wheel, John switched the CTV to bring us CNN. “Ask me another one.”

“Why are you talking to this woman?” I asked. “What’s this story all about?”

John didn’t say anything for a moment. On the screen, the CNN anchor was reading a story about the deployment of Army troops on the Oregon border. Footage of rifle-toting soldiers tramping down the ramp of an Air Force transport jet, APCs and tanks rolling down highways between coniferous forests, antiwar demonstrators attempting to barricade military convoys …

“It has to do with a murder,” he said, carefully picking his words. “My source-and yeah, I think it’s the same lady, though I’ve never seen her-says that a Tiptree scientist was killed recently. Even though the police are still calling it random homicide, she claims it’s part of a conspiracy and has something to do with this Ruby Fulcrum business.”

The footage on the screen changed back to the CNN newsroom; a window in the right corner displayed the NASA logo. “Here we go,” John said as he turned up the volume.

“… launched a half-hour ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida,” the anchorwoman intoned as the screen switched to a shot of the shuttle Endeavour lifting off from its pad. “In its cargo bay are the final components of the Sentinel 1 ABM satellite.”

Animated footage of the massive satellite, identical to the holographic image that had been displayed in the Tiptree atrium, replaced the live-action shot. “Linkup between the shuttle and the twenty-billion-dollar satellite is expected sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“A murder?” I asked. “What’s this got to do with-”

“Forget it.” John reached up to switch off the CTV as he finally found room to pass the BMW. I caught a glimpse of the driver as we moved around the clunker: a redneck wearing a baseball cap, a cigar clamped between his teeth. “That’s all I’m giving you,” he continued, “and I shouldn’t have told you that much. Your turn.”

“Beryl Hinckley,” I said. “Her badge listed her as a research scientist. If you want, I’ll get Jah to print you a copy of her photo so you can recognize her when you meet her at Clancy’s tonight.”

John nodded. “I’d appreciate it.”

We fell silent for the next few miles as the suburbs thinned out and the towers of the uptown business district of Clayton hove into view. Clayton had come through the crisis pretty well: new office buildings, rich homes, not many indications that a 7.5 earthquake had socked this part of the city. Of course, much of the federal disaster relief funds had been channeled in this direction. The government had been fully aware of who was wealthy enough to be able to repay the loans, and everyone in St. Louis knew where the influential voters resided.

“Stay out of it,” John said after a while.

“Excuse me?”

“Stay out of it,” he repeated. “I know you’re looking for a good story, and I know you’re nervous about your job, but … just let me handle this one by myself, okay? If I need help, I’ll call you in and we can share the byline-”

“C’mon. You know that’s not what it’s about …”

He looked askance at me and my voice trailed off. It was a lie and John knew it. No, I wasn’t nervous; I was desperate. If I didn’t deliver something impressive PDQ, Pearl was going to find a new staff writer and I’d be back on the street. At best, I’d be some poor schmo freelancer, peddling video reviews to the Big Muddy for nickel-and-dime checks while living in a homeless shelter.

I didn’t want to encroach on my friend’s rightful territory, but this bit with Tiptree and Beryl Hinckley and Ruby Fulcrum was a hot potato I couldn’t afford not to catch.

“C’mon, man,” I said, “you can’t-”

“I know.” John kept his eyes locked on the highway ahead. “Look, you’ve got to trust me on this one. This is serious business, and not a little bit dangerous. Just … y’know, let me handle this by myself. All right?”

“All right.” I raised my hands. “Okay … whatever you say.”

John didn’t have my problems. He still had everything I had lost. A nice car, a house in the ’burbs, a wife who didn’t despise him, a job that was secure. A kid who was still alive. I envied him, sure …

For a moment, despite our long friendship, I caught myself hating him. He must have read my mind, because he nervously cleared his throat. “Look, if you want my advice,” he began, “you’re going to have to put some things behind you.”

He hesitated. “I mean, your situation’s tough and all that, but … well, Jamie’s gone and you’re just going to have to-”

“Right. Jamie’s gone and I’m going to have to live with that. I know. Time to get a life.” Out of impulse, I switched on the CTV again. “I think it’s time for Batman. You know what channel it’s on?”

John shut up. I found the station showing the favorite cartoon show of my misspent youth. The theme song swelled to fill the car as we sailed the rest of the way downtown: one man with a firm grip on reality, the other trying to avoid it at all costs.

Get a life. Sure, John. I had a life.

And boy, did it suck.