A Song Called Youth (22 page)

He almost wavered at that. “I’ll check it into a locker. Pick it up someday. Thing is—if they watched us with that bird, they saw me with you. They’ll assume I’m part of it. Look, I know what you’re doing. The SA’s looking for you. Right? So that means you’re—”

“Okay, hold it, shit; keep your voice down. Look—I can see where maybe they marked you, so you got to get off the raft, too. Okay, you go with us to Malta. But then you—”

“I got to stay with you. The SA’s everywhere. They marked me.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a soft whistle through her teeth. She stared at the floor. “You can’t do it.” She looked at him. “You’re not the type. You’re a fucking
artist.
”

He laughed. “You say that like it’s the lowest insult you can come up with. Look—I can do it. I’m going to do it. The band is dead. I need to . . . ” He shrugged helplessly. Then he reached up and took her sunglasses off, looked at her shadowed eyes. “And when I get you alone I’m going to batter your cervix into jelly.”

She punched him hard in the shoulder. It hurt. But she was smiling. “You think that kind of talk turns me on? Well, it does. But it’s not going to get you into my pants. And as for going with us—What you think this is? You’ve seen too many movies.”

“The SA’s marked me, remember? What else can I do?”

“That’s not a good enough reason to . . . to become part of this thing. You got to really believe in it, because
it’s hard.
This is not a celebrity game show.”

“Jesus. Give me a break. I know what I’m doing.”

That was bullshit. He was trashed. He was blown.
My computer’s experiencing a power surge. Motherboard fried. Hell, then burn out the rest.

He was living a fantasy. But he wasn’t going to admit it. He repeated, “I know what I’m doing.”

She snorted. She stared at him. “Okay,” she said.

And after that everything was different.

Part Two:
KESSLER

• 10 •

His name was James Kessler, and he was walking east on Fourteenth Street, looking for something. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He was walking through a misty November rain. The street was almost deserted. He was looking for something, something, the brutally colorless word
something
hung heavily in his mind like an empty frame.

What he thought he wanted was to get in, out of the weather. Walking in rain made him feel naked, somehow. And acid rain, he thought, could make you naked, if you wore the kind of syn-threads that reacted with the acids.

Up ahead the eternal neon butterfly of a Budweiser sign glowed sultry orange-red and blue; the same design since sometime in the twentieth century. He angled across the sidewalk, pitted concrete the color of dead skin, hurrying toward the sign, toward the haven of a bar. The rain was already beginning to sting. He closed his eyes against it, afraid it would burn his corneas.

He pushed through the smudge-bruised door into the bar. The bartender glanced up, nodded to himself, and reached under the counter for a towel; he passed the towel across to Kessler. The towel was treated with acid-absorbents; it helped immediately.

“Get any in your eyes?” the bartender asked with no real concern.

“No, I don’t think so.” He handed the towel back. “Thanks.” The tired-faced men drinking at the bar hardly glanced at Kessler. He was unremarkable: round-faced, with short black hair streaked blue-white to denote his work in video editing; large friendly brown eyes, soft red mouth pinched now with worry; a standard printout grey-blue suit.

The bartender said something else, but it didn’t register. Kessler was staring at the glowing green lozenge of a credit transferal kiosk in the back of the dim, old-fashioned bar. He crossed to it and stepped in; the door hissed shut behind him. The small screen on the front of the fone lit up, and its electronic letters asked him: D
O YOU WANT
C
ALL OR
E
NTRY?

What did he want? Why had he come to the kiosk? He wasn’t sure. But it felt right. A wave of reassurance had come over him . . . 
Ask it what your balance is,
a soundless voice whispered to him. Again he felt a wave of reassurance. But he thought: Something’s out of place . . . 

He knew his mind as a man knows his cluttered desk; he knows when someone has moved something on his desk—or in his mind. And someone had.

He punched ENTRY and it asked him his account number and entry pin. He punched the digits in, then told it he wanted to see his bank balance. It told him to wait. Numbers appeared on the screen.

$NB 760,000.

He stared at it. He punched for error check and confirmation.

The bank’s computer insisted that he had 760,000 newbux in his bank account.

There should be only 4,000.

Something was missing from his memory; something had been added to his bank account.

They tampered with me, he thought, and then they paid me for it.

He requested the name of the depositor. The screen told him: U
NRECORDED.

Julie. Talk to Julie. There was just no one else he discussed his projects with till they were patented and on-line. No one. His wife had to know.

Julie. He could taste her name in his mouth. Her name tasted like bile.

Julie had been home only a few minutes, Kessler decided, as he closed the door behind him. Her coat was draped over the back of the couch, off-white on off-white. She liked things off-white or gray or powder blue, and that’s how the place was decorated. Kessler liked rich, earthy colors, but she considered them vulgar, so that was that.

She was bent down to the minifridge behind the breakfast bar. She stood up, a frosted bottle of Stolichnaya in her hand. “Hi, Jimmy.”

She almost never called him Jimmy.

Julie came out with a vodka straight-up and a twist of lime for each of them. He’d learned to like vodka. She padded across the powder-blue rug in bare feet, small feet sexy in sheer hose; she was tall and slender and long-necked. Her hair was the yellow of split pine, cut short as a small boy’s, and parted on the side. She was English and looked it; her eyes were immaculate blue crystals. She wore her silk-lined, coarse-fiber, off-white dress suit. She looked more natural in her suits than in anything else. She had “casuals” to wear at home, but somehow she never wore them. Maybe because that would be a concession to home life, would almost be a betrayal of the corporation family she belonged to. Like having children. What was it she said about having children?
If you don’t mind, I’ll continue to resist the programming of my biological computer. When DNA talks, I don’t listen. I don’t like being pushed into something by a molecule.

He took off his coat, hung it up, and sat down beside her on the couch. The vodka, chilled with no ice, waited for him on the glass coffee table. He took a drink and said, “There’s seven hundred and sixty thousand newbux in my bank account.” He looked at her. “What did they take?”

Her eyes went a little glassy. “Seven hundred and sixty thousand? Computer error.”

“You know it’s not.” He took another sip. The Stoli was syrupy thick from being kept in the freezer. “What did you tell Worldtalk?”

“Are you accusing me of something?” She said it with her icy Oxbridge incredulousness then, like, I can’t believe anyone could be so painfully unsophisticated.

“I’m accusing Worldtalk. And . . . you’re
theirs.
They do as they like with you, Julie. If Worldtalk says it’s not
team-playing
to have kids, you don’t have kids. If Worldtalk says listen for anything that might be useful, you listen. Even at home. You know, you wouldn’t have had to quit your job—I can understand you wanting to have a career. We could have had the kid with a surrogate or an artificial womb. Gotten a nanny. They don’t want employees, at Worldtalk, they want to
own you
 . . . ”

“It’s childish to go over and over this. Worldtalk has nothing to do with my decision not to have children. I worked
eight years
—”

“I know it by rote: you worked eight years to be assistant second vice prez in the country’s biggest PR and advertising outfit. You tell me
having children
is demeaning! Eight years licking Grimwald’s boots—that’s demeaning! Going to Worldtalk’s Family Sessions for hours at a time—”

She stood up, arms rigid at her sides. “Well, why not! Corporation families
last.
”

“A ‘corporate family’ isn’t a real family. They’re using you. Look what they got you to do! To
me!
”

“You got some seven hundred thousand newbux. That’s more than you would ever have made on any of your harebrained schemes. If you worked for one of the big companies you’d be making decent money in the first place. You insist on being freelance, so you’re left out in the cold, and you should be grateful for what they—” She snipped the sentence in two with a brisk sibilance and turned away.

“So we’ve dropped the pretenses now. You’re saying I should be grateful for the money Worldtalk gave me. Julie—
what did they take from my memory?
”

“I don’t
know!
You didn’t tell me what you were working on and—anyway I don’t believe they took anything. I—goddammit.” She went to the bathroom to pointedly take her Restem, making a lot of noise opening the prescription bottle so he’d hear and know it was his fault she had to take a tranquilizer.

Kessler was in a bar with his attorney, Bascomb. Herman Bascomb was drunk, and drugged. The disorder of his mind seemed splashed onto the room around him: the dancers, the lights, the holograms that made it look, in the smoky dimness, as if someone was there dancing beside you who wasn’t. A touristy couple on the dance floor stopped and stared at another couple: horned, half-human, half-reptile, she with her tongue darting from between rouged lips; he with baroque fillips of fire flicking from his flattened nostrils. The touristy couple laughed off their embarrassment when the DJ turned off the holo and the demon couple vanished.

Bascomb chuckled and sucked some of his cocaine fizz through a straw that lit up with miniature advertisements when it was used, lettering flickering luminous green up and down its length. Bascomb was young, tanned, and preppie; he wore an iridescent Japanese Action Suit.

Sitting beside him, Kessler squirmed on his barstool and ordered another scotch. He wasn’t comfortable with Bascomb like this. Kessler was used to seeing Bascomb in his office, a neat component of Featherstone, Pestlestein, and Bascomb, Attorneys at Law, friendly but not too friendly, intense but controlled.

My own fault, Kessler told himself; chase the guy down when he’s off work, hassle his wife till she tells me where he hangs out, find out things I don’t want to know. Like the fact that he’s bisexual and flirting with the waiter.

The bar was circular, rotating slowly through the club, leaving the dance floor behind now to arrive at the cruising rooms. As they talked it turned slowly past flesh-pink holographic porn squirmings and edged into the soft music lounge. Each room had its own idiosyncratic darkness, shot through with the abstracted glamour of the candy-apple-red and hot-pink and electric-blue neon running up the corners to zigzag the ceiling like a time-lapse photo of nighttime traffic. The kitschy design was another annoyance for Kessler.

Bascomb turned on his stool to look at the porn and the live copulation; his mouth was open in a lax smile. Kessler looked over his shoulder. Again in the dimness the holos were nearly indistinguishable from the real article; a drunken swinger tried to fondle a woman with four breasts, only to walk through her, discovering her unreal. “Do we have to talk here?” Kessler asked, turning back to the bar.

Bascomb ignored the question and returned to an earlier one. “The bottom line, Jim, is that you are a nobody. Now, if you were, say, a Nobel-Prize-winning professor at Stanford, we might be able to get you your day in court, we might get a grand jury to investigate the people at Worldtalk . . . ” Bascomb was talking without looking away from the intermingling porn and people. “But as it is you’re a mildly successful video editor who makes a hobby of working up a lot of rather ingenuous media theories. Every day some crank or someone looking for attention announces a Great Idea has been stolen from their brains, and ninety-nine percent of the time they turn out to be paranoids or liars or both. I’m not saying you’re a paranoid or a liar.
I
believe you. I’m just saying I’m probably the only one who will.”

“But I have the seven hundred sixty thousand NB . . . that shouldn’t be there. That ought to be proof of something.”

“Did you request the name of the depositor?”

“Unrecorded.”

“Then how are you going to prove a connection?”

“I don’t know. But I know an idea was stolen from me. I want it back, Bascomb. And I can’t work it up again on my own from scratch—they took all my notes, files, recent research, everything that could lead me back to it.”

“Sucks.” Bascomb said sympathetically. They had rotated into the lounge; people on couches watched videos and conversed softly. Sometimes they were talking to holos; you knew when you were talking to a holo because they said outrageous things. They were programmed that way to ease the choking boredom of lounge-bar conversation. “I want it back, Bascomb.” Kessler repeated, his knuckles white on the rim of the bar.

Bascomb shrugged and said, “You haven’t been in this country long; maybe you don’t know how it works. First off, you have to understand that . . . ” He paused to sip from his cocaine fizz; he became more animated almost instantly, chattering on: “You have to understand that you can’t get it back the way it was taken. Whoever it was probably came in while you were asleep. Which adds credence to your theory that Julie was involved. She waits up or pretends to sleep, lets them in, they gas you to keep you out, shoot you up with the receptivity drug. They’ve got microsurgicals in the big box they’ve brought with them, right? They look at the screen they’ve set up that translates your impulses into a code they can understand. They get some dream free-association maybe. But that tells them they’re ‘on-line’ in your brain. Then they put a request to the brain, fed into it in the form of neurohormonal transmitter molecules they manufacture in their box—”