Virtually True (29 page)

He stares at the first letter,
p
. True is out of step. Things aren’t what they seem.
P
. Step. True looks at the letters on his qwerty touchpad, the steps around the symbol: The letter
O
is immediately to the left. Diagonally up to the left is
0
. Clockwise shows a hyphen or a dash, to the immediate right a bracket. Then quote marks, a colon or semi-colon, the letter
L
.

He thinks through the issues that dog him: Tokyo, the earthquake, Reiner, Bong Bong, Rush, Aslam, land transactions, capital and capitol, psychotropia patterns, Dr. Powter. But
Pee zero why eye double-you kay
seems a world away. He counts up the number of symbols: six. True is out of step. Trust your intuition. Six symbols. Six letters.

Tokyo, earthquake, Bong Bong, Rush, Aslam, none are constructed from six letters, although Reiner is. So’s Powter. True tries to formulate a cryptogram to solve the puzzle, but no matter what, no matter how many spaces there are or in what order he places the letters, neither Reiner nor Powter equals
p0yiwk
.

A step away. He stares at the pattern, starts words beginning with letters surrounding the
p
key. After minutes, maybe hours, True solves it.

“
p0yiwk
.” When True takes each letter down diagonally to the left, the message spells “logjam.”
LOGJAM
.

Logjam? He thought about it in his virtual trip, also during imagined sessions with Dr. Powter. It’s more, much more, than too much data piped into too small a space. It means he suffers from mnemonia. He runs a trace on the word, pulls up a number of entries from past newscasts, looks at the name of the reporter who filed them: True Ailey. He watches footage from a year ago, of himself: healthy, capable, not diluted as now. True watches, fascinated, as he breaks a story that ended up breaking him.

“Shirley Logjam’s nightmare began long before she knew she was living a nightmare,” True begins in his report. “With echoes of Nazi atrocities in last century’s Second World War, Logjam was a human guinea pig. Her company, International Soft Where?, a developer of complex virtual reality systems including the popular
Street Ninja
, tested its most experimental and dangerous virtual reality systems on her.

“Now Shirley Logjam is dead, her mind and body destroyed by her devotion to her work—a devotion not even she knew she had.”

True has no recollection of this report, yet there he is, providing footage and narrating a grisly tale of electric intrigue. He gets to relive a lost part of his life, like finding a dusty journal.

Shirley Logjam died of liver failure. The autopsy showed she’d been abusing FREEze, a meta-amphetamine commonly used in tandem with virtual reality games, enabling the abuser to be fully absorbed by mirror universes. “At first glance, it’s a typical story of FREEze abuse. Except one major difference: Shirley Logjam was no drug addict. She was murdered.”

True accesses all the broadcasts, background notes, edited-out portions, footage never aired. What he finds possesses an eerily familiar quality. Three days after the death of Shirley Logjam, her husband turned up at True’s door claiming his wife was murdered. After investigating, True discovered her company had been testing its virtual reality products on unsuspecting employees, drugging them and detailing their responses.

His report numbed a public already numbed by technology. The trial, in which the American Defense Corporation, among others, stood accused, was an offshoot of True’s report. In his notes, he discovers that International Soft Where? is an ADC affiliate. True searches for a connection to Sato, but there isn’t any apparent one; ADC and Sato Corporation are direct competitors. Enemies.

True checks the dates: days before he fell into virtual voids. Even his notes from the period are a haze, and the closer to his hospitalization, the hazier they get. He watches, transfixed, as he floats into a court room, watches as the CEOs of the defendant corporations refuse to cooperate, threatening to move their operations abroad, and the American people pressure their representatives to force the special prosecutor to drop the charges. Remembers de Bris told him the charges were dropped.

He compiles a lengthy list of corporations, including ADC and MedTekton, the plastics company. True asked de Bris whether MedTekton was one of the companies on trial. They weren’t, this is true; but bank data shows ADC and MedTekton have megs of money zapping around one another’s accounts.

The question sticks. If ADC is behind his latest electronic escapades, what makes True certain Sato’s the key? Why’d his latest elect-trek take him to Japan, to Reiner, Eden, accessing Sato’s chip? He’s about to over-and-out when he hears a familiar voice: “True. It took you long enough.”

The wrist-top. Aslam, grimy in camouflage. Behind him, barracks for rebel forces on the move. He’s chewing on a straw. “One of the hardest things to manufacture is this drinking straw. It requires near-perfect quality control, which you don’t find in fucked-up places like this.” Aslam in the virtual flesh, talking into a wrist-top, WWTV-issue, pans his jungle locale. Scorched trees and earth, stationed near a cave with an assemblage of bunkers, collapsible aluminum nut-and-bolted together. Aslam knots the straw, holds it to the lens. “This is the last straw, True. The last straw.” He snickers soundlessly. “I told you that computer model was something.” Aslam pops the straw knot in his mouth, chews on it. “So I’m dead, you’re listening to me, and you’re on your way to figuring things out. Least, I hope so. It’s been a hard road, my friend, and for that I’m sorry. If I hadn’t had to include you in this shit, I wouldn’t have. But there was no other way.”

From fifteen days ago.

“Besides, you owe me. You know you do. Pay-back time. Brother-to-brother. It’s cast a shadow over our friendship ever since it happened. We never talked about it, though I wish we had. But at least I won’t have to listen to you fuck things up, apologize or something, like that’s what I want, which is total bullshit. You know what I’m talking about. Pakistan, India, the war.” Like Aslam’s right there, bedside; only in memory, really. “A trade. You for Anjou and Imran. Only at the time I don’t know it’s a trade. Just trying to do the right thing, you know? You’re in jail, Anjou and the kid are with her family in Lahore, and I get electric fever: I’ll spring True from jail, have the wife and kid meet me at the border, where you and I’ll be waiting, and we’ll all flee ever happily into Free Tibet. A good scheme for escaping nuclear war, which was just hours away.”

Guilt claws at True. He knows the story already. Lets Aslam finish his purge. “But they don’t make it. Rumors of nuclear war were driving people to panic. A lot of traffic accidents. I guess that’s what happened. Maybe she was killed by bandits feasting on the anarchy. All I know is they would have made it if I’d been with them.” Aslam’s complexion turning strawberry rash under his jungle tan. “Except I was with you. And you made it. No offense, True, but it was a bum deal for me. When Anjou and Imran were dissolved into radioactive dust, some of me died with them. Faith is all I got now, True. Which is why I need you.”

True flashes to this time, the angry mood, the border’s desolation spiraling up to the Himalaya’s breathless peaks, waiting, waiting, waiting for Anjou and Imran. Launch time all keyed in. Ready. 10-9-8-7-. Have to escape, far away from this nuclear MADness. But Anjou and Imran don’t show, and when True and Aslam can’t afford one sec more, True has to coax his wasted friend over the border, away from the war and the ashes of his family.

Aslam keeps on. “I don’t know how much I will have told you. Some military corp contacted me after my platoon was smoked by a weapon that nullifies everything you do. I can’t explain it, but we were powerless against it. They offered major bucks if I tracked it down. Lots of perks, money. Figured I’d use the corp’s resources to get you to track down the design codes, then take them for myself. I know I can biz with you. You didn’t really believe I’d leave the insurgency? I wanted to smoke those fucking ethnics with a taste of their own. I also needed to take care of biz, in case, you know, I got smoked. So here I am. TCBing. I don’t know who the defense contractor who hired me is. Could be Boeing-Mitsubishi, American Defense, maybe GEC. I didn’t get to pose too many qs.”

True begins to sift fact from virtual fact. Too much coincidence in all this. Are there things to be learned from his intuition?

Aslam looks to night’s sky, stars hazed by artillery smoke. Peers into the camera, at True, grins. “Did you catch any of those promos your shitty-assed anchor Rush Gallstone ran?” Aslam mocks Rush’s inflectionless promo voice. “‘Coming next week: I risk my life bringing you a rare live interview with the blood-thirsty leader of the Muslim Insurgency, Aslam Q. Aziz. A WWTV exclusive brought to you by Rush No Balls.’ What a glitch-master. Just to piss him off, I’m not doing the interview. I got what I needed. Which is to leave you this message; a heartfelt request, actually. Find out what this corp technology is all about and share the wealth. A Japanese corporation’s got it. The Sato Corporation. I don’t know how they got it. Maybe it’s in WWTV’s video archives. But you’d have checked that already since you’re here with me now.

“That’s all I know. The rest is in your scoop-worthy hands. Your mission, which you have no choice but to take, is to restore the corporate balance of technology. I know, I know. If I had the technology, no way I’d pass it on. But I’m dead, so tech-transfer is the next best. Do it and we’re even. The cosmos is clear. But don’t let me down.”

Muffled commotion, insurgents scrambling to face Mecca. Aslam’s flat, moody expression. “Prayer time. Goodbye, handsome best friend. Too bad things always get worse before they get better. The story of our lives.”

After saving a copy for himself, True erases Aslam’s video note from WWTV’s archives. Then sets to retiring his debt.

*        *        *

After daybreak True’s still energized. He doesn’t want to sleep because with sleep come nightmares and he’s had enough of those, so he accesses his wrist-top’s jazz program.

Drums beating.

               Insistent.

                     Incessant.

                           Wood striking skin.

                                  Splashes of cymbal

                                       circling vultures of sound.

                                            Tribal sounds from the jungle. And True focuses on the rich tones of the bass. The music’s foundation. Chords pound on a piano, hands splayed; clusters of tones weave throughout, threads of a magic carpet.

Sheets of sound.

              Coltrane’s shrieks of sound.

                    Pleading for understanding.

                          And healing.

                                Peace.

                                      Knowledge.

                                             Above all knowledge.

In defiant stillness True listens to “Resolution” from
A Love Supreme
, John Coltrane’s ode to God. Lost in the music, surfing on the waves and pulses of notes, his mind reeling from the power of the tenorman’s passion, his search for truth winding strand for strand with True’s.

Reedy gasps, squeals, squalls. Oblong cycles of notes. Pentatonic scales. Brush fires of sixteenth-note runs spiderweb with Elvin Jones’s percussive fabric, the skimming of drumsticks on cymbals. Tones of terror intertwine with McCoy Tyner’s cascading chords and rhythmic thunder. Over grave bass tones and tomes, a dark, plaintive cry is issued. More shimmering cymbals and gravel bass notes, contained within the confines of Trane’s vision—his
jazz-schauung
—the elixir of life, the fountain of art, the driving force of his music. And his life.

“Resolution” ends. “Pursuance” begins. The melody, a jagged line, brings to True’s mind a mountain range’s peaks, connected by Trane’s magical sense of lyricism. And the mountains urge True on.

The Pursuance of Aslam’s murderer.

              The idea will not fade.

                    Trane pursued the ultimate truth.

                         True will pursue the truth.

Elvin Jones locks into a triplet fill, sparring with Trane’s throaty cries and McCoy Tyner’s chordal ripostes. Jimmy Garrison strums taut strings: buzzing Tibetan monk chants in double-note harmony, reminiscent of exotic far-east vocal boxes. And there are the mountains again. True feels those towering hills. Remembering the cold cell in those mountains that once held him, one tiny window funneling in a string of light. True slept on a dirt floor. Scant food, shit on the floor—his shit—ankles gripped by shackles. True lost hope, his spirits sank lower with each hour. It was then Aslam walked into his cell and back into his life.