Mad Professor (20 page)

Ben's computers are a mess of old hardware cobbled together. His view screen, for instance, is six text lines high; he scavenged it off a Mattel Speak and Spell toy. I've been known to tease Ben by comparing his using retrofitted electronics to the tweakers making stuff out of like shopping carts. Ben insists that, even so, his stuff is better than mine. He's quite oblivious to the stellar quality of the superfine multiprocessor machines Dogyears assembles for their clients. My lovely white server towers are boxes the size of suitcases, with fans like kitchen ventilators.

On a normal day, I talk face to face with Ben when I come in. Ben always talks real fast about parallel computing and hyper-space and genetic algorithms, and I always tell him sure, sure. Usually after we do the voice greeting, I log into a chat window and talk some more to Ben across the room through the copper wires running through the building. Ben prefers old school chat over face to face. He'll be chatting to his mother, the Mummy Bum Cult group,
Rotten.com
employees, his girlfriend Hexy on the Peninsula, and me—all at the same time. On chat, he logs all the conversations and refers back to old chat sessions endlessly. He wants to devolve his neural net's need for in-skull short-or long-term memory.

Not that he's fully an out-of-it zombie. Today he instantly understands what kind of deal is going down, and he gives me a heartfelt look of sympathy.

The Feds yank out power and Ethernet cables from the Dogyears servers, hideously bringing down my ISP. My poor, orphaned customers! Ben yelps in pain and anger. Hearing the intensity in Ben's voice, The Boss senses the possibility of him turning berserker. He wheels around, his gun magically moved to his hand from his holster. It's up to him to show Brad how it's done. Ben returns to his hacking.

As my plugs are being pulled on my top two machines, I notice the power LEDs on the bottom three machines in my stack of five are cycling up and down. It reminds me of the Knight Rider car from that old TV show. That's my emergency Mummy Bum Cult backup system, watermarking my more recent files into the workers' porno library on an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. My list of customers is, like, being tattooed on some Scandinavian Bibi's boob. Glancing over at Ben again I can see an eye slyly rolled my way behind his honkin' big glasses. He's noticing my ongoing backup too. The Pig can try and stop us, but they'll never ever win.

The Muscle has the Prexy Twins server under one arm, and the FoneFoon hard-drive jukebox server under the other. At first I think they're going to spare my other servers; I have eight of them to host the Dogyears accounts and some bottom-feeder dotcom outfits who co-locate with me. But now the Boss takes out a conical device with copper windings around it and taps it on the six remaining servers, one by one. A directional magneto cone. Their RAM, ROM, and hard drives are wiped. My flashing LEDs are blank and dead.

As of right now, my customers have no service. They'll be
leaving me for Time-Warner-AOL if this goes on for long. Elephant poo.

+   +   +

Brad accompanies me to Texas on Southwest Air; the others stay in San Francisco. He and I sit in the front row of the first-class section. I've never flown first class before. Free drinks and shrimp cocktail. Under us the desert terrain of Nevada rolls by. I have the window seat, and wouldn't you know it, when we're passing Area 51, I look up and see a UFO high in the sky.

At first I want to think it's another plane, but it's not acting like a plane. It's a few thousand feet above us, matching our route and speed so accurately that I wonder if it might be some kind of reflection in the window glass. But no matter which way I angle my head, it's still there, a polyhedral shape, not an airplane shape, a tumbling polyhedron like a pyramid or a cube but with many more sides, rolling over and over and over like a wheel matching our pace.

“What are you looking at, Wag?” asks Brad.

“It's a UFO,” I say leaning back to he can push his head close to the window.

“I'd rather trade seats than lean across you,” says Brad. “You're in custody.” He doesn't want to expose his neck to a felonious karate chop.

So we swap, and Brad peers out and he sees the UFO too. He gets excited and calls the stewardess back to ask her a question or two, and the stewardess goes up to talk to the pilot. Right away the pilot's voice comes on the speakers, talking that relaxed low-blood-pressure Middle-American drawl. “If you
look out to our right, one o'clock high, you'll see a Nevada weather balloon”

“Some balloon,” mutters Brad, but he doesn't want to talk about it any more than that. Instead he jumps to a fresh topic. “You ever had oxblood burger?” he asks. “No? That's what the president likes to make. Juicy, mmm good.”

In Austin there's a couple more Men in Black to meet us. A burr-haired one is in charge, and the other one has a neck as wide as his head. To keep it simple for me, I garbage-collect their names and label them with the Boss_tx and Muscle_tx handles. That saves me a couple-three memory clusters in my skull-based neural nets.

The surprise in Austin is that they've shipped my Dogyears server with the jukebox-hard drive with us, wrapped up in a government courier bags. It's the first thing out on the baggage belt. Why exactly will I be needing the sixty terabytes of Fone-Foon data for this gig?

The Muscle_tx bundles the massive box under his arms like a notebook. And then we're out in the hot odorless air, boarding their SUV for the drive to Crawford, Texas.

It's early evening when we arrive. Pink light filters through thick barbeque smoke in the backyard of the presidential ranch. George is grilling with a NA Beer in one hand and a 3-foot Texas-size spatula in the other. There's a satellite dish on the ground next to his house, just like any other house in Texas. At first it looks like it's just George, some SS agents, and a middle-aged guy with flesh-colored frames on his glasses.

“Welcome to my spread, Wag,” says George. He jerks his thumb at the middle-aged guy. “This here's Doc Renshaw. He's a neurologian, a brain doctor, an asshole, and a jerk.” He doesn't
sound like he's kidding. He really doesn't like this guy. “Ren-shaw, this is Wag, the fella we been talkin' about.”

Breathing hard, the president hands the spatula off to Brad and pushes aside the hanging branches of a weeping willow tree beside the grill. Under the willow is a picnic table.

Jenna's sitting there, blank and drooling. It's almost like someone's held a directional magneto cone up to her head. Jenna's been erased! George and I sit down across from her, the SS guys hanging back a bit, Renshaw peeking in.

“She's gone to the circus, and she's not comin' back,” George says mournfully. “Go ahead and talk to her. She knows when somebody talks to her.”

“Uh, hi Jenna,” I say lamely. Here I finally am with Jenna, and that's the best I can do? She looks kind of hot with that thin stand of drool dripping onto her pale blue spaghetti-strap sundress. Immediately I have two thoughts: I can't think that way it's sick, and I hope I get her alone.

Gathering composure from the thought of getting Jenna alone and really giving her a good scrub with a wire brush, I turn on my charm for the president of the United States of America. I figure it's better to start with flattering him a little before trying to figure out what to say about blank Jenna. “That barbeque meat smells good,” I say. “Like oxblood.”

“Yep, we've got the oxblood burgers,” says George with no smirk, no cocky tilt of the head. He's just staring at Jenna, looking worried. This isn't the animatronic George of the news clips. “Let me cut to the point, Wag. Jenna has a problem, hell, you can see that yourself. Amsneezia, asphrasia—those twenty-dollar doctor words. She can't remember shit, what it is. This scumbag Renshaw says we're lucky she can still breathe and do her body functions.”

It's hard to believe I'm right here looking at Jenna Bush. But she's not looking at me. There's nobody home. George hops to his feet and returns with two towering burgers.

“Burger, Jenna?” he says softly.

Jenna's lips move, and she says, “OK.”

George sets the plates in front of Jenna and me; we begin eating.

“All Jenna does is say OK anymore,” says George. “It happened last month. Jenna and Noelle were supposed to attend some big-ass dress show over in, over there.”

Facts are jumping around in my head. I like collecting info and looking for patterns. Noelle was busted for a fake drug scrip the week after the Versace show in London. The scrip was for Xanax, and why would anyone bother getting arrested for a mild antidepressant? Well, Xanax's street use is as a comedown drug from ecstasy—or crack. The media didn't report that Noelle and Jenna were in England at that fashion show. In fact, it was the previous first daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who was hanging out with Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow in front of the Versace runway.

“Versace?” I say, just to be sure.

George nods at me, then glares over his shoulder at Renshaw, who's craning in under the willow tree as well. “See how Wag's little noggin's straining to piece together the puzzle?” he says. “Too bad I didn't have him here to second-guess you turds before you did your thing.” And then he fixes his eyes back on mine, “OK, Wag. Of course all this is hush hush, this is Homeland Security Code Orange, but here's how the story began. Supposedly Noelle had some kind of goddamn pill she wanted to slip Chelsea Clinton, some kind of Mickey Finn. This was Jeb's idea, he got the drug from the Clik. Clik? It's the conspiracy elite, the secret government that never goes away. The ordnance labs, the spooks,
the Cuban freedom fighters, the Fair Play for House of Saud committee—it's all Clik. The same crowd that took down JFK, same ones who threw the election my way, same ones who got in so goddamn tight with Osama. We Elephants never shoulda gotten in this deep with the Clik, but it's too late to back out now. I don't condone any of this, you understand, Wag. I'm not really that powerful of a man, I'd just as soon be back running the Rangers, watchin' the games with my two girls.” He pats Jenna's hand, then wipes the drool off her chin. Her eyes are watching us as we talk, glittering with primitive, reptilian intelligence.

“Anyway, the Clik sold Jeb and me this crock of shit that they wanted to use Jenna as a delivery system,” continues George. “Laura and I had just planned the trip as a spring fling. But Jeb's Clik handlers, they said Jenna, she's fun, more attractive, more likely to get close to Chelsea and hand off that goddamn pill. Chelsea's not likely to talk to Noelle. Jenna's supposed to tell Chelsea it's some kind of goddamn party drug, not that I'd call that a party, making yourself sick with a pill. Some new crap the Clik came up with, they call it Justfolx. Supposedly the pill is gonna, the pill somehow makes Chelsea into a real American, so she'll fight with Hilary, which is good for the Elephant Party, and what's good for the Elephants is good for the Clik, it's a win-win. But during the flight Jenna has a few drinks, she's like I used to be, just high spirits, she gets in a spat with Noelle. Noelle's always been one to needle her cousins, and Jenna's easy enough to fly off the handle when she—what was it Jenna said, Mike? Tell Wag the course of events. You were there, not exactly doing your job a hundred percent, I'd say. To frank the truth I wonder why I can't get them to fire you.”

The Boss_tx and Doctor Renshaw have both sidled under the willow tree with us. “I told you I'm sorry, Mr. President,”
says the Man in Black. “I'm sure the Clik, I mean the Fair Play for House of Saud committee, they'll dock my pay, if it's called for, not that I feel they should. I was guarding the young women in close proximity, across the plane aisle. A fast-breaking chaotic situation developed. An argument. It seemed the young women were planning to split up when we disembarked. Fine, but then Noelle took out her Justfolx medication delivery system—the capsule. The plan was, as the president told you, Wag, for Noelle to hand the pill off to Jenna to give to Chelsea. And since the young women were seemingly going to split up, it seemed reasonable to me for Noelle to make the transfer at this time. Holding up the translucent red, football-shaped Justfolx capsule, Noelle stated, ‘Can you remember to give Chelsea this, you drunk redneck?' To which Jenna replied, ‘You dumb-ass pill-popping cracker, I'll show you how to party,' and thereupon swallowed the Justfolx pill. I executed a poison-control maneuver, induced vomiting. But the pill had dissolved. Jenna showed an extreme reaction. The plane landed in London, but we didn't get off the plane, much less did we alert the press. We cleaned the plane up, refueled, and flew back to Texas.”

“The Justfolx pill is supposed to make you an Elephant?” I ask.

“Well it's not like a pill knows math, is it?” says George. “I understand the treatment was to reduce the . . . take away the know-it-all Rhodes scholar and so on, the high-horse attitude you'd see with a Hilary or a Chelsea Clinton.”

In sounded like the dosage was designed to make Chelsea stupid enough to be an Elephant. And if you gave it to someone low down enough on the scale to already
be
an Elephant, well, it would make them into—a vegetable. So Jenna got erased.

Jenna makes a little noise then, kind of like a newborn kitten. “
Mew
?”

Awww.