Borky's Beach

Chapter One - Alphabet City

Chapter One - Alphabet City

Dane considered the futility of human memory with resignation. The catastrophe that changed the 21st Century was not so dramatically initiated as those that defined the 20th. There was no royal assassination, daylight air raid, atomic explosion or collapsing of skyscrapers to mark the turning point of history. In many ways it was a continuing disaster that seemed to come from all directions at once instead starting from a single point. The world descended into madness gradually and as the millions perished and disappeared all over the planet, there was no one to blame but God. In the Western world, where God appeared to be on hiatus, people blamed governments and so governments crumbled, fell and turned over. Globally.

It was a plague of biblical proportions. More than any other soundbite, ‘biblical proportions’ lead all the news stories until the real panic set in and viewers discovered that their cable boxes no longer had news stations. When there was no longer electricity for the cable boxes, when the Internet went dark, when people roamed the streets looking for their relatives. When the world went silent, when 7.5 billion became 5 billion it was the death felt around the world. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew how. It was a slow thunderbolt of indifference from the biology of the world itself.

Collapse comes quickly and slowly at the same time. Nobody is prepared for it because they’ve survived all the near misses, but everybody sees it coming. Everybody gets used to being frightened for a time, bleating all of their emotions out to everyone for two or three weeks and being sensitive for a year. Finally, nobody in your family gets H1N1. Nobody in your town suffers a school shooting. You move on ready to be outraged at the next outrage, sure you know which political partisans, ethnic minorities or religious fundamentalists were behind the conspiracy. All near misses are like two semi trucks speeding in opposite directions on a dark desert highway in the middle of the night. They allow you to survive and curse the idiot on the other side. You tell the story of rage in the next roadside rest. People give you comfort. Disaster is just matter of inches this way or that. Nobody survives the head on collision and nobody knows to look until the next day. Collapse is when everybody dies on the highway between towns, and then the towns go dark. Sometimes a stranger happens to cross an intersection full of bones, blood and twisted metal. He picks through the wreckage to find out what happened. Sometimes the stranger just escaped another wreck and keeps on stumbling forward without a second glance. After the plague and collapse of 2037 it took years to sift through the carnage of humanity. People who lost everyone and everything tried to keep walking forward, but they always looked backward over their shoulder.

Sitting in a cafe 18 years later, Dane Charles Vincent II tried to remember. But he couldn’t remember the precise moment the disaster happening all around him became that relentless beast that chased him into his own lonely oblivion. Like everyone who listened to the news from London and Dubai and Atlanta, he figured it was airports. He was 17 years old and had never flown on a plane, but his father was a traveling consultant. As he watched the videos of people in the streets outside of hospitals puking up blood, he felt a tightening in his stomach alone in his father’s Brooklyn condominium. School had been out for a week and his mother didn’t dare walk the streets to come fetch him. His phone had no bars. Only this old cable flat screen worked as Dane worked his way through the frozen food in the fridge. It was Thursday afternoon when they announced that JFK was closing. Dad was still in Toronto. Perhaps he would drive back early. Drive back, Dad. Drive back.

His father did not drive back. His mother did not come or call. For three weeks Dane and millions of others wept, sheltered in place, orphaned by anonymous death, watching television for the news. Searching the web for a connection. Waiting for the National Guard to move them out. Wondering where everybody was. Everyone in civilization was abandoned. Civilization didn’t have a cure, worse still, civilization did not have a reason. Civilization did not have an excuse. Humanity, on the other hand, was much older than civilization, and so humanity had hope, but first humanity had to suffer.

The cafe on Houston and Avenue A allowed Dane to observe like a New Yorker observes, with casual disdain. Anywhere else such a look of contempt would be considered anti-social in the new normal. Dane needed New York City. He needed its crowds and its anonymity. The posture of being able to do without people was a necessity Dane associated with civilization. Everywhere else that had been depopulated, people were too clingy and personal. He calculated that the average handshake, which became the classic hug, had already morphed into something unduly familiar. It’s as if nobody who survived the plague wanted personal space any longer. Dane speculated about how humanity would be transformed. Everybody did. Everyone wanted a new beginning. He wanted an old beginning, the same old beginning. He didn’t think the planet needed a reboot and a scrub. It just needed more people, especially old people. And so it was in that moment of reflection, like so many others, that his mind drifted back to find a particular moment of change. Once again, he had that gnawing feeling that he couldn’t know for sure.

His reveries were interrupted by Max, his paymaster. Max who understood the underside of things. Max who understood where to look was a perfect employer for Dane who knew how to look. In this moment Dane was looking for a pattern in the street that would help him give the word to Max whose voice and icon were now displayed on Dane’s tablet. The time was 11:42AM and the weather was still brisk. Dane indicated that nothing had changed. He poked the button labeled ’negatory’. When he looked up from his tablet, Dane could watch the people beginning to fill the sidewalks for early lunch. He watched the construction workers in their luminescence ripping and patching the macadam. He could see the police SUV with its blacked out windows and drone carrier perched on the roof rack. The hex drone was up. Dane switched his tablet to hack and steal the hex drone’s perspective, a simple birds-eye without the overlays. Then he switched to the security cameras of the police van itself, that also a simple hack.

He took another sip of tea and scanned the news alerts from his subscriptions chirping in at the low setting. He decided to drop in a couple overlays. He turned on the beacon overlay. Because of his relationship with Max Moreno, Dane had access to certain data facilities the ordinary Joe could never get and hardly even imagine. But this time, just looking at beacons would tell him enough. Now on his tablet every individual passerby showed up as an amber dot in the drone view. Dane had gotten pretty good at recognizing if the dots on the map matched the people he could eyeball in the street. Still, like any other human, his eyes were drawn to those events his brain processed instinctively. Flashes of light, a swift movement, a single different color in contrast with a background. Now his attention was drawn to a man in an overcoat running across Houston, but there was no corresponding beacon on his table. Shit, this was too easy.

There was a good chance the man was a billy, short for hillbilly. Someone who decided to not be tracked by his neighbors in the new normal, post-apocalyptic present where everybody wants to be intimate. Dane estimated the spot where he crossed out of his view, poked his finger on the map and commanded the network to track his heat signature where there were no beacons currently pointcasting. He pinged Max and assigned a jade rabbit icon to the man in the overcoat. Billies are easy suspects and generally regarded as the homeless people they are, given even more enmity for surviving the Plague without the decency to take all of the new benefits, but Dane hadn’t given all of that much thought. Here was easy money. The man turned into a shoe repair shop on Avenue A. Dane only had to turn 90 degrees to his right to see his actions clearly. He pushed his spoon off the table. As it clattered to the concrete floor, he mumbled a faked curse, stood and moved his tea to the seat facing the shoe store, then unwrapping the service in that seat put a clean spoon into his demitasse. Seated in the new position he began pulling up information about Avenue A Cobblers.

Dane was a forensic data scientist, if there was a such thing. In the post-plague world, it was an arcane science due to a combination of advances in artificial intelligence and simple disinterest. Dane often thought himself as a stone mason in a world of glass office buildings. Only called upon by academic historians and wealthy eccentrics. Dane inherited his father’s clients. Of those who survived and actually paid, Max was the most mysterious. This was his third year taking contracts, mostly in New York, but sometimes DC and elsewhere. Tracking a billy in gridspace wasn’t his favorite kind of gig, but this should be over quickly. Wait. There was no realtime video feed available inside the shoe shop. Not a good sign.

There were usually two officers who crewed the powerful SUVs typical of patrol work these days. The senior officer could be armed but the junior partner would stay unarmed in the bulletproof van and work the drone. More than just about everyone except celebrities, police officers were the most highly scrutinized people in society. Most resented it, but they were the old school. New younger cops did the job, which was never less dangerous, as lightweight movie stars. They enjoyed the spotlight, especially female cops doing interventions. It was because of the success of panoptic surveillance that the popularity of police reversed from the bad old days of ‘Dead Cops Don’t Matter’. Now that police work was the new realtime interactive reality TV, and everybody got to be their own 911 dispatcher, it was a whole new ballgame. Some genius figured out that if policing could be turned into a reality game show where the audience got to choose if the perpetrator got a warning or a beatdown it would save a lot of cities a lot of money in brutality lawsuits. It turned out that after a few years, Americans got accustomed to their bloodlust and bleeding hearts. Especially when it came to female ‘bunny cops’. It took a lot of rethinking of police tactics to get to this point, but people dropping like flies all over the world turns out to be a good catalyst for new thinking. The simple idea that the public would almost always side with female police officers if they could see criminals or mobs fighting against them turned out to be revolutionary. Once upon a time, Dirty Harry, was the archetype. Now it was ‘Mum’.

‘Mum’ was the nickname of a London constable out on patrol assaulted by a gang of roughnecks in the process of robbing a convenience store. She, a middle aged lumpy woman with sad eyes and rubbish blonde hair was having a coffee break at the local charging station. The punks came in and in the middle of harassing the man behind the cashier, Mum started correcting them like they were her own bratty kids. Abashed, they started to back off, until one of them told her ‘Piss off cunt, you’re not me mum’, and walloped her with a baseball bat. Then all four jumped her, yanked off her shoes and pants and proceeded in the most cruel way imaginable to violate her with their boots and bats. The cameras were on, the neighbors came out, and revenge was had. It made worldwide news that so shortly after a world crisis that such barbarity could persist. Londoners were scandalized, for the woman had lost all of her children during the dark pestilence. She wanted nothing more than to be a care taking mother once again. Shortly after her recovery she became the world’s Mum. The short cutting of the Justice System was not forgotten, nor was the power of realtime camera surveillance. While the UK took some time to implement a new system, the idea caught on rabidly in the States. Except in the US, there was a twist.

There was no bunny cop this morning on Houston. But like most nosy neighbors watching realtime in Alphabet City, Dane watched the cop, the streets and the hex drone cameras, swiping through the angles like a movie director. Dane wasn’t a part of the local Eyeballer Network of Alphabet City and therefore not authorized to use the municipal camera system. But for him, it was an easy hack. Unfortunately for the non-bunny cop, he was unarmed and one of the first to hit the pavement when the bullets started to fly.

Most people have no idea how loud big caliber pistols can be. Not even the most expensive home theater systems available capture the dynamic range of their deafening crack. When the cacophony erupts in a public place, the effect is immediate. People first freeze in place, spin wildly around to see where the noise is coming from, then scramble madly in the opposite direction. In the brick and mortar canyons of Houston and Avenue A, opposite was not a direction easily identified. Two shots rang out. Pedestrians scattered like ants blown upon, not even stopping to look where others were running, slamming into each other, dropping parcels and packages, ducking and dodging. Dane immediately hopped behind the bar and wedged himself behind the ice box with his back to the street. His fingers flew over the tablet arranging several video windows into a 3D view of the street. He readied his software agents to triangulate the location of the shots. 2 meters inside the front door, bullets traveling west. The plate glass windows of the shoe shop exploded with a booming crash. Shotgun. The billy stumbled out backwards into the street clutching his groin with his left hand, pistol in his right. Dane could identify with a quick analysis that there was something weighty in his coat pocket the way it swung with its own pendulous momentum despite his jaggy steps. The outside cop at this point started running towards the shop ordering the billy to drop his weapon. The billy turned his weapon briefly towards the cop and then back towards the shop and fired three more shots into its dark interior. The cop slowed up, crossing Houston through the same crosswalk the billy had earlier only to take cover behind a large metal public trashcan. An elderly man, Asian looking came out of the shop, mortally wounded. He squeezed off one more boom of the shotgun that went wide of the billy peppering parked cars in front of the cafe as the billy hobbled northward, angling across the Avenue towards the sidewalk on the cafe side. A young woman came out of the shoe shop, and the cop, peering around the corner to see the toppled over man moved up with more confidence. She picked up the shotgun from the bloody sidewalk and stepped off the green zone curb in front of the shop scanning up and down Avenue A for the billy who was now groaning loudly behind a parked car. She yelled something unintelligible and racked the shotgun. Immediately the billy popped up his shooting arm and fired blind. Four shots. Now the cop froze and hastened back to cover.

Dane was able to take all this in rapidly from his position of relative safety within the cafe. The bartender had been crawling on his hands and knees across the rubber matted floor freezing in place at the sound of every explosive shot. He finally reached the far end of the bar and slammed a button at eye level. The building’s metal security shutters now began rolling down. Dane could hear Max in his ear-set, and for the first time recognized the captioned words below his tablet icon. “Get the package!”

Shit. Shit. Shit. As Dane recognized the import of that statement, he realized he had to get outside of the cafe before the shutters reached the ground. He checked his tablet, ran out the door on Houston and over towards the police van. As long as there were bullets and shot flying, behind the van would be the safest place out of doors. He wasn’t the only one with that idea. Several pedestrians were there already, one woman in a blue skirt banging on the black tinted windows of the van for the drone pilot to let her in, dammit. The whoop of a distant siren could be heard; Dane could see a couple of red beacons coming up from the south, and the drone pilot had just now put tags on the shooters. Rookie, Dane thought.

Everybody in Alphabet City is going to be eyeballing this deadly drama, and clearly the billy is going to be lynched. There was no way Dane thought he could get to that dying man after the time he runs out of ammo, and before more cops arrived. These were not going to be bunny cops, these were going to be the robocops, namely the NYPD Interdiction Squad. This was the American twist. Along with Mum were the uncles from hell. The Eyeball Network had already made up its mind, they were calling in the big guns. A quick look at his tablet verified that 87% of the residents have already approved unlimited lethal force. Time was short.

Another shotgun blast made the crowd behind the police SUV jump. The woman in blue screamed. She pulled a large inhaler out of her purse, turned a couple dials on the bottom of its canister and snorted a blast. She then shook her head, sneezed and then stormed off in a rage, cursing. “Damn”, somebody said “I wish I had me some 88. I’d take the bastards down myself.” Nervous titters, and then another two rapid pistol shots. This time the silence was eerie. Dane could see from a quick replay that the billy had waited for the young woman with the shotgun, and then ambushed her. Something about the quickness of the pistol shots told Dane that this billy had training. He could hear the clatter of the shotgun falling from her arms and the melon smack of her head on the pavement.

Dane felt futility crawling down his spine in a cold sweat that dampened his shorts. This was not going well at all. He had never been this close to a firefight. He wasn’t in a panic but he was breathing like he was. He glanced down at the tablet one last time. The Interdiction Squad was 2 minutes away. The outside cop was still peering from his safe space behind the recycle bin. The Rookie was reporting to the incoming responders. The billy was dragging his bloody ass up Avenue A and preparing to meet his maker. Whatever the package was swaying in the billy’s coat pocket, it was going to be confiscated. That means the billy is going to have to communicate its whereabouts or stash it somewhere. It was worth killing and ultimately dying for. Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Max! You haven’t told me enough. I found your rabbit, where did you expect me to follow him?”

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know. The contact is already spooked. It would have been the second stop. I don’t know if it’s here in the city or Timbucktoo. “

“Well what’s the billy’s name?”. It was a desperate question. Billies are often used as drug couriers or cutouts in gridspace precisely because they have no ID. One as coherent and deadly as this one is no joke. “Did you even expect this to go lethal? You didn’t tell me anything about that.”

“Calm down Dane. Calm down. I need you to get that package and I’m willing to take a chance on you. But you’re going to have to trust me. “

“Yes?” Dane said it slowly as if he knew he shouldn’t have answered so quickly in the affirmative. But in his gut, he trusted Max Moreno. The problem was that saying ‘yes’ to Max Moreno was like saying yes to William Tell. You were putting an apple on your head. Today it felt like Max was saying “Hold my beer”, but the beer was a hand grenade. Dane felt like he couldn’t simply say OK, to something like this. There had to be some proviso. He thought of an old action movie. “Yes.” He said more decisively, “but I want triple my fee.”

 

Chapter Two - Go West

### Max Calls

Three days later, Dane lazed in the clawfoot bathtub of his Brooklyn apartment snoozing lightly through the bubbles when his brick rang. The tinkling bell startled him slightly. He let it repeat, remembering that it was not just a happy coincidence playing in his random mix, but was actually a ringtone he had assigned to Iris. Why would she not just speak up? A cascade of signals flowed down his redirect path from the handset in his bedroom through his tablet in the kitchen maybe, to his workstation in his office, to his big screen in the living room and now the medicine cabinet mirror a few feet above his annoyed yet still relaxing head. The letters of a message flashed in an insistent amber and then faded from view. He didn’t really want to hear from anyone right now and felt glad that for the most part, he was anonymous and protected - a privilege that only a few could afford or, in Dane’s case, hack into existence. He grinned and hung his left arm out of the tub, watching suds and greenish water run down his hairy forearm, over his chrono and onto the white tiles pooling up against a short glass of bourbon.  He took another sip and then closed his eyes, tapping more hot water in with his right foot. He had probably told Iris to remind him of something trivial, but now furrowed his brow actually trying to remember what and couldn’t. Good. No sense wasting good brain cells for that. But he couldn’t let it go.

“Louder”, he shouted, alarming himself at the sound of his voice echoing off the tile, but the stereo complied pumping more volume from Beethoven’s 9th through the flat. Sinking back into the suds he listened for the tympani to sound through the water. Instead it was Iris again. Ahh crap. The stereo dampened the symphony.

“Yeah what is it?”, he called, again louder than he had to.

“I need you to go to LA” It wasn’t Iris at all, but the starched bass of Max Moreno.

“Already?” "When" was the only appropriate answer to a request from Max Moreno, but Dane was feeling a bit cocky after recovering the Alphabet City package.. He blew the bubbles out of his goatee and stood up dripping, expecting that the answer would be yesterday, grabbed a towel and stepped out and over the bourbon. The data was showing up on the mirror, the itinerary was already booked and Max had already clicked off. Dane adjusted his focus back and forth between his own reflection and the amber font on the glass, the former showing more resignation the more he read the text of the latter.  He had one day to prepare. There was no return flight.

Dane dried himself with another towel, dropping the first on the floor. He picked up the bourbon and downed it. It was 6pm and the bath had done him good. He started to move. The volume of Beethoven was still low, suggesting that Max might still be on on the circuit, or Iris. He stared at his large middle aged frame in the now clear window. He was a chunky six footer with more hair on his chest and back than was fashionable. His cheerful brown eyes and pleasant disposition hid his mild disgust with himself, but at least his skin was perfect. Well, it was 2060. Everybody's skin was perfect.

"What?", he called out from the bathroom, as if addressing a person hidden somewhere else in his apartment. It wasn’t like Max to be less than direct or have second thoughts, so why was his connection still open?

“It’s just me.” Iris’ familiar voice came through. “I’m not sure how he got through the filter you setup for this week, but Max is quite resourceful.”

“You think?”, Dane replied. Dane played a game of hide and seek with Max, trying his best to hide his cyber presence in a way that he challenged Max to discover. He had never succeeded in remaining hidden for more than a week, then again Dane didn’t really want to stay hidden from the best employer he ever had.

“All I can say is that he got through a crack. The old VPN tunnel we made do callbacks. I’ve isolated it per the profile. It limits my ability to speak..”

“Whatever.” Dane interrupted. “What’s in the suitcase?” Max would always leave a digital suitcase which contained the stuff he would need to know. Most of the time there would be zippers and timed locks and geographic triggers that would open suitcases within suitcases. Max could be awfully cryptic, but he did have an excellent sense of knowing when to tell people what they needed to know. Perhaps that was what kept Dane coming back for more. Damn his curiosity. Max always had a payoff at the end of the rainbow. It was enough for Dane to lose his scruples. It was a good thing that Max Moreno was one of the good guys, so far as Dane could tell. What was most important in Dane’s mind was where he was going to stay. If he had to go to Los Angeles, as much as he despised Los Angeles, at least he could get good food there, and there were decent places to stay.

“The usual. An address, a car, an account and a dictionary and.. “ Iris stopped short, thinking. “A digital sub package. It’s large and I don’t recognize what it is. It’s random enough to be encrypted, and there’s a GPS location lock on it. “

“Where’s the address? Does it have a pool?”

“The location of GPS lock on the package, or the location of where we are going to stay? You’re using too many pronouns.”

Dane got annoyed, but Iris was correct. “The general rule is to take the first parameter of the disjunct..” He paused realizing with embarrassment that the rule he was spontaneously crafting for Iris didn’t actually apply in this case. “I’m talking about where we’re staying, why would I care about a pool on a GPS lock?”

“Why would you care about anything you care about?”

Touche. Good snarky response for an AI. Dane tried to remember when he plugged in that semi-random response. He merely grumbled in a particular way that let Iris know that she should continue with no further verbal prompting.

Iris added an additional level of snark, adopting the accent of Mary Poppins for her verbose continuation. “The address of the domicile from which we will be conducting business will be in the Manhattan Beach designated area of the Los Angeles County Coastal Quarantine Zone, under the provisional authority of the Army Corps of Engineers and the County Sheriffs. There is no pool. The location of the GPS lock for the encrypted suitcase is Spring Valley Lake. ”

“Manhattan Beach? Wonderful.” Working for Max was always interesting, pretty rewarding, and satisfying for the most part. But it had never been so dangerous. Dane began to think that now he was on the hook for more than a little adventure. Manhattan Beach, shit. “Are you sure?”

Iris sucked her virtual teeth. Good gesture, really good gesture. He could even sense her rolling her eyes, if she had eyes. Well, she did have eyes, brown eyes in the video games he played co-op mode with her avatar. Even though he hated the assurance that it signified that he would definitely be going to Manhattan Beach, he was proud of the way Iris had adapted to the new rulesets he had given her to make her responses more… feminine.

“Ah. There is an addendum. Mr. Moreno says that the Manhattan Beach location is for your enjoyment and two week vacation, after which you may proceed with the assignment to be revealed to you at Spring Valley Lake.”

Dane went to his office. For all of his single life, he had rented two bedroom apartments, often to the confused consternation of landlords and their flunkies sent to collect late rent. They would come in sniffing and looking for contraband or bound teenaged girls in the closets. It wasn’t like a man of Dane’s description to have enough scratch for the kinds of flats he maintained. Inevitably they would come into the office and be met with amazement with the array of electronic equipment. Dane had an equally broad set of snappy answers for the stupid questions, but since he put up the large fake framed cert from the Federal Association upon his wall, “I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you” was the standby. What landlords didn’t know was that half of the impressive electronic stuff didn’t work, but that didn’t stop Dane from treasuring the knobs, lights and dials in their 19 inch racks. Most of the work got done on his main workstation and then most of that basically his programming interface for adding information and rulesets to Iris.

He would have to put together a travel package, something he hadn’t had to do in over 18 months. His last contracts with Max had been mostly local stuff and things he could do from home. Dane was used to field work, but it would mean being away from the stable relationship he was trying to establish. He pushed the thought out of his mind, slowly staring at the credenza and its store of odds and ends. Speaking of relationships, he was going to need his gun.

Dane had always wondered when he might need to carry a gun. Maybe he was getting precisely that old. The thought of going to Manhattan Beach worried him. No, it frightened him. No particular source of news was to be considered reliable until it had been parsed but in the periphery of his mind he knew that there was something especially creepy and dangerous about ground zero of the Coastal Quarantine Zone. Aside from the fact that the city had been abandoned and then gangs had moved in, there were rumors of zombies - real mutant survivors of a biological catastrophe outside of the plague itself.

Dane had to admit to himself that he had an irrational fear of Zombies. It wasn’t Zombies directly but it was about them in theory. It was about the fact that something could bite you and give you a disease, this is what unnerved him. Even the thought of such a thing was ridiculous, but since the war with Mexico it was a real possibility that armed gangs were holed up in there. That was the rumor anyway. CNNBC ran the story twice last year. Dane didn’t like the idea that there was this hole in his chain of facts into which semi-rational fears had taken hold. His life had been a series of emotional mishaps that all started from being fearful of the unknown, or what he considered to be the unknowable starting with the mind and intentions of women. But even women can be figured out. That’s semi-rational hope. What about zombie women? Ugh. He shivered. If there are zombies, then there must be zombie women. He decided to put the notion out of his mind by calculating the possibilities. Let’s say that there’s a possibility that there are zombies or some sort of dangerous human mutant in Los Angeles. Let’s say that in the affected area there has only been two sightings. What are the chances that the news networks don’t broadcast that fact? Well, it would have to be the news networks because if an individual saw it, it would be on the net. So. No chance. There.

Manhattan Beach, probability 99.5% Armed gangs, 62% says Iris. Zombies? Whatever. He was going because Max said so, and Dane owed Max. A lot.

 

### Airport Security

Dane wore a baseball cap with NY on it low over his forehead as he approached airport security at JFK. He didn’t really need to attract any attention and worried for a moment if he was too conspicuously inconspicuous. He didn’t feel like changing his walk or stopping to look confused as he strode towards the lines. It didn’t really matter so much, now that he thought about it. LastID had pretty much made the job of the screeners superfluous and their own attitude changed enough so that people were actually being nice. Some clever marketer had figured out that there was a certain kind of profile of person people liked in security matters, generally young, generally female, and generally attractive. Men, who were 74.3% of frequent travelers were always tending to second-guess themselves when crossing the tastes of young beautiful women. When they wore black leotard-like uniforms with severely pulled back hairdos and headsets, the effect was increased 22%. That was for the frontline troops. When matters of security escalated, there were two types that ended all self-confident speculation in passengers with nerve enough to second guess national security law. The first was the drill sergeant, the second, rather unsurprisingly to Dane was the matron. She was some combination of ball busting bitch archetypes with a perpetually grim look. Here at JFK, the bitch in command had a hairy mole on her right cheek about the size and color of a caper. He thought a moment to himself as he peered through the plextic barriers to the throne on the clean side of the security barrier, that she reminded him of no character so much as the Red Queen from Wonderland. Their eyes met for a moment, something he would ordinarily not care to do, but this time he didn’t care. He was going to California on Max’ command. Better get used to staring danger in the eye.

There was no reason for anyone, least of all in NYC, to be cursed with an unsightly hairy mole. The Red Queen’s was surely grown there for effect. She would probably have pointy teeth as well, but there was not a hint of cheek muscle contraction that would show such dentition as her eyes left his, nonchalantly and then slowly scanned from station to station. Dane passed through security without incident and tried to put the Red Queen out of his mind. But the fact that people were so casual about re-engineering their appearance and body chemistry these days reminded him how out of touch he was with the state of things in 2060 America. Her microbial balance was probably a Double Edge all of her personally boosted into the of hostility and disgust. Dane wondered why would anybody do that on purpose?

Dane was a throwback to the digital age long after it had been fashionable to be one. He liked to think he was part of a throwback era of gentleman. It was only his connection to Max Moreno’s power that gave him any inkling that it was more real than fantasy. Max was polite, direct, powerful and wise. Most important Max had purpose, the kind of purpose that made you relax your own ambition. It forced Dane to see himself as small and that his only contribution to anything would be his rationality, and this rationality made hime different. He seemed always to be explaining it to himself, rationalizing what most people could not be rational about, because more than anything Dane was merely himself. That he was portly was not for some designed effect. That he was partly balding and wore a goatee was not a style calculated to cater to some particularly data mined segment of the single female population. He had no purpose for the way he looked and did little more than wear clothes for whatever occasion or mood managed to prepare for. “I don’t get it.”, was the typical response. There was nothing to get. It wasn’t as if he didn’t care. He simply hadn’t decided to do anything about it, not out of fear so much as a lack of motivation. He was that odd kind of late 30s single man, on the verge of determining that no woman is worth the effort, in anticipation that in fact no woman would find him worth the effort. Also there was no purpose in settling down for any particular kind of domestic stability and company. For that he already had Iris, and Iris didn’t much care about his appearance.

At this point in Dane’s moments of self-reflection, shuffling through airport security in something of a meditative trance, he generally decided that he had thought quite enough about the subject of himself and of himself and women. The matter of Iris seemed to foreclose the possibility of any need for further thought. But Dane couldn’t fool himself into believing that was the end of the matter. He decided therefore, because this trip appeared to be one whose success could take him to the next level, that he might chance more and deeper introspection. Iris is not a woman. Iris was an artificial intelligence. Iris satisfied his need for company generally, women generally did not. When Iris displeased him, she could be adjusted at his suggestion. When women displeased him he was seen as the object of adjustment, to which he generally took offense similar to the offense he had been assured that he had given women. So who was right and who was wrong? Iris was right. Then again, she would be, as Dane had done much to adjust her over the past 10 years. What Dane therefore lacked was not company, nor sympathy, nor self-esteem nor much of anything else a woman might provide. He had a helpmate, and that was Iris. QED. It was not introspection so much as it was a logical syllogism which was the equivalent of an a priori given. A matter of faith as well as an axiomatic truth. A truth that nonetheless gave him no comfort.

Was it sex? Was it intimacy? Was it some giddy unselfconscious human instinct that required the fuel of an ineffable female? Meh. It was sex. And for that he had not lacked prior to his latest debacle with Sandra. The thought of his own mind saying her name to himself was quite enough to make him realize how his arms and back were sagging under the weight of the baggage he was now schlepping through the airport. End of reverie. Stop. Terminate. Do not think. Do not pass go. Self distract. Read signs in the real world. “Do you have a package to declare?”

Dane did have a package to declare to the Purser. He adjusted his right hand grip on his roller bag and pulled it in closer to his body as he lurched over to the left just near the end of the security area. United American was a year or two ahead of the competition for customizing flights, and among the selections Dane made for his flight, he paid the extra coin for his Class X package. He sent it in the day before and confirmed that it had been received. A simple X was generally a firearm and class X was the minimum security search. They would open the package, inspect the weapon and insure that it was appropriately disarmed for transport in a standard weapons container. The Purser would eyeball the individual owner and validate.

A Purser of any sort was the only class of security Dane found actually useful. They were genuinely psych balanced and engaged you in multiple dimensions rapidly. Along with the usual barrage of quant stats taken with LastID and the DNA sample, they asked you questions, followed your movements, sometimes pre-studied you, and they gripped. Dane was always happy to grip one of the Pursers. The way he saw it, the grip was one of the last genuinely human interactions left. More than a handshake and something less than a full embrace, the grip was a final kind of psychological screening left to the government or anyone not in contravention of the Dunbar Convention. So many people depended on LastID profiles that the only touching that went on between people was full bang intimacy. All the other indicators were done through people’s bricks.

He passed through the regular scanner which sniffed his microbes, confirmed his DNA and incremented his travel credits, and then moved over to the Purser line. Most people thought that it was quaint that the airlines still depended on this older redundant tech. But Dane understood that in certain matters, you can never be too redundant. Ahead of him was an unusually short man to be dressed so well. Dane noticed immediately. He had chosen the forehead grip, which was unusual for North Americans but much more popular in Africa. The Purser, approached him from his podium, and leaned forward bending to a perceptively uncomfortable angle. They appeared as though they were about to embrace for a kiss, but stopped short of a full hug, placing right palms behind the other’s head and pressed their foreheads together. Their left hands crossed in front of them for a traditional, if backwards handshake. They stood staring eye to eye for several seconds longer than a normal greeting of friends in this awkward seeming position. There couldn’t be any way that this kind of grip could be misunderstood, there couldn’t possibly be any mistake of the identity of the short man. It struck Dane as a bit much, almost intrusive, and yet reassuring. It was purposeful human contact, a social transaction with structure and meaning.

The short man proceeded towards the gates and the Purser raised his glance over to Dane who suppressed a look of distaste and shuffled more quickly to the yellow line.

“Springfield Armory 1911, ACP .45”, said the Purser in a voice that betrayed any indication that the previous grip was anything out of the ordinary. “That makes you a traditionalist, neh?”

“I guess you could call me Old School, but I actually know where I can get spare parts for this one”, Dan replied and extended his right hand for the traditional grip. The Purser hesitated, blinking as if he recognized Dane already but couldn’t place the face. It was completely unexpected as he had of course had Dane’s public record on his podium - more than usual because of the firearm. The hesitation threw Dane for a moment and he cocked his head slightly to the left and furrowed his brow. As he did so, he realized that this was exactly the reaction that the Purser had wished to evoke. The Purser smiled as he recognized that Dane had realized he’d been quantified and then extended the friendly grip.

“Welcome to United American. Enjoy your trip sir”.

“I’ll try not to shoot anything when I get there.” Dane snarled ironically, and hustled down the sparkling corridor into the clean throngs headed for the gates.

### Window Seat

As he sat, Dane raised the shade on the window to his right to look out over the airfield at JFK’s foggy morning. He always ordered a window seat just slightly behind the wing. He enjoyed watching the blur of the exhaust of the jet engines and the articulations of the flaps, slats, vanes, ailerons, spoilers and wingtips. As a class X flier on United American he got special access to the in-flight telemetry, but he also had a hacked code that allowed him to monitor the actual command sets emanating from the cockpit. As he brought up his touch display, he activated the antenna in his brick that intercepted the flight data stream which these days were broadcast in real-time to the constellation of Blackbox satellites. That meant he had the option of listening not only the communications between the jetliner and air traffic control but also that between the pilot and co-pilot. Most of the time that was boring. What was more interesting to Dane was monitoring the way the engines gobbled up fuel and how the pilots would rebalance it in the various wing tanks as the flight proceeded. As usual when he flew, he went over a mental checklist of everything he had packed and everything he would need to buy or requisition at his destination. He felt the fresh confident exhilaration of being on a new assignment. The nice thing about being a traveling consultant, was the expense account. Max was a good handler, the best actually, and Dane was on his way to being Max’s go to guy.

Dane was a digital consultant, certified and licensed via the Meritocracy’s International Standards Organization, which pretty much certified everything that could be measured. His specialty was applied forensics which was mostly, Dane like to think, urban anthropology with digital spy tools. Dane used a combination of technologies in his craft that were unusual because of two particular features. In the first place he was very old school in that he often used a keyboard. He liked writing his own routines out in syntactical language rather than just manipulating the newfangled visual objects most programmers used these days. For that kind of manipulation he had Iris. Iris was his secret weapon, his sidekick and daily reminder of his mortality. Many people in Dane’s profession had AIs but very few people programmed their own or had one as long as Dane had Iris. If it weren’t for Iris, Dane figured that he wouldn’t have a livelihood. She energized him and aggravated him - he spent all of his spare time, figuring out what to put into her next, and then the rest trying to figure out if he were just talking to himself.

Iris was like his great unpublished manuscript, his unfinished hot rod, his incomplete garden, the never ending math equation on the blackboard of his life. He loved her in the way a man past caring loves his masturbation time. He hated her in the way a man hates the mother he can never please. He needed her like a legally blind man needed his implants. Dane had a world of feeling and thinking for Iris for she was his life’s great work. Yes, a masterpiece. It was this way Dane preferred to see himself and Iris, and he chided himself for his earlier insecurity. She carried everything he knew, she was pregnant with all of his human associations. As such he couldn’t express all she meant to him as he equally couldn’t describe the meaning of his own life. But he did know two things. She was his creation and she was the only source he could fully trust, because Isis was also himself - his mind perfected, his memories, his experiences, his solipsism, his Weltanshuuang.

He tried once again not to dwell on the ultimate sad tragedy of all that, because after all, she made all things possible and since he made her, then he was God and in that way master of his own fate and accountable to no one. He made her Other, so that she could be appreciated in a way that seemed like caring. He gave her a voice so that she could ask for what he might provide. He made her ask dumb questions and come up with remarkable insights, so that he could provoke himself into a better self. She made Dane into a man above men because she provoked in him what was missing in most of the people around him, and that was discipline and curiosity. Iris, in a way more familiar to him than the very spirit of God, reminded Dane of his fallibility. She reminded him of the vastness of mankind’s information universe and the small little bits of it which he decoded to make a living.

It wasn’t as if humans had lost their curiosity altogether, rather that they had reshaped it away from the world of things Dane had become so useful at investigating, the digital realm. It was that lacuna that made the miracle of his value to men like Max. And so to Dane, with such a world for he and Iris to explore, most people seemed remarkably incurious. He knew that in some way it was because the digital realm had become so reliable and perfect, like the small motors in refrigerators, like the pumps at oil refineries. Everyone liked a cold drink, but almost nobody cared to marvel over how refrigeration worked. Over the years, in Dane’s life, so much of the digital world had been perfected, like refrigeration. Like electrification. Well, to hear ordinary people talk about it, such things like compute engines and air conditioners were equally ubiquitous and uninteresting. For most of the classes of mankind, computers, networks, software and such were all just another kind of plumbing. The digital world had achieved its perfection in the same way the New York skyline represented all the skyline anybody ever cared to build in America any longer. The golden age of open software and open information was over. Now it was all janitorial work. The upside was that Dane, like all janitors, could go just about anywhere without being noticed.

In the world of today, the vast complex edifice of banking, insurance, payroll, investment, shopping, marketing, the entirety of the services sector of modern life had been simplified into a comprehensive system, LastID. It was the single system encroaching upon every decision anyone cared to commit to record. Everybody and everything was now on the grid and the grid made things easy. People trusted it partially because it worked like plumbing and partially because the alternative was too smelly to contemplate. And just as people lost interest in doing long division, raising chickens and changing the spark plugs in their autos, such skills with the grid became the province of specialists like Dane. He was a tradesman. But he thought of himself as an artisan.

Aside from his complex dependence and pride in Iris, Dane thought of himself as an ordinary hacker, a professional whose own peculiarities worked out as a matter of good fortune. He found ironic sadness in his good fortune. Dane’s father had been a programmer who taught him the basics. In those days programmers were well respected and made good money, some made fabulous fortunes. But the best and the brightest of Americans, at least, were no longer interested in bits and bytes. These days most programmers were legacies like the TV repairmen of the Twentieth Century, those who inherited some lease on compute space or an old network passed down. For unlike most people in the post-Plague world, Dane hadn’t shifted his curiosity back to the personal, the private and the primitive. He didn’t swoon over the human touch in that odd way that made ordinary people forget to care about their digital lives. When his display said 3+3 = 6, and then the next second it said 3*3 = 9, he didn’t take that as a clue to tell a sexual partner their next position. Dane cared about how and why the digital world began its degenerate panoptics, and Max Moreno paid him to find out project by project.

If Iris was frighteningly intimate and self-assuring, Max Moreno was everything opposite. Where Iris was the sparring partner you could ask not to punch too hard, Max was the cage match you dreaded but could not resist. He represented to Dane everything the world did not want to know, half because the world loved bliss and half because the world actually feared real capability. Max seemed to know all the answers - and you wanted him to like you, sorta. But you also didn’t want him too close. Max was irritatingly powerful and connected. He was cryptic and businesslike. When Dane thought something impossible had occurred after thinking his way into an interesting observation about the world, sometimes he thought he was crazy. On those occasions he got the urge to ask Max. When he did, Max could resolve a month’s worth of contemplation in a few moments’ time. He could deliver reassuring comfort or a blistering rebuke. One thought very carefully about asking questions of Max. Sometimes you just didn’t want to know. You wanted his attention, but not too much.

Dane always considered the prospect of meeting Max face to face. He played the scenario out in his mind. Perhaps it was an expensive restaurant and Max would be in the booth in the back in the corner in the dark behind red velvet curtains. He would be there seated in dark suit with a large brimmed fedora pulled over his face, quiet beneath a halogen spotlight the drew dramatic shadows. Dane would enter and be commanded to sit in uncomfortable silence. Max would raise his head and say nothing, but the reflected light off the red velvet curtains would give a haunting glow to eyes set deep in a darkling face. Max would stare, unblinking, with bug squishing curiosity, saying nothing until Dane would blurt out, “You want to kill me, right?” and Max would say in a deep soothing voice “No”, far too soon as if he had already anticipated the question.

Dane had not met Max except by electronic messages and a voice which was surely synthesized. Whether voice or text, always through a singularly secure channel that he and Max established through the instantiation of a secure hardware facility attached to Iris’ primary location. The channel would appear, the message would post, or the short conversation take place, and then the channel would disappear. The port drivers would be replaced and their normal function restored. Max Moreno never gave the impression of being affected at all by what he knew. He was like the prow of a freshly painted battleship. Incapable of betraying the burdens and hardships of decades of combat. Max never creaked. Never hesitated.

How many other people did Max command? It was a mystery to Dane. He reflected on the escaping the billy from last weeks’ shootout. He was sure that there was no way out of the situation, that in chasing down the Billy, Dane was likely to get shot or apprehended by the Interdiction Squad. But Max worked a miracle. He managed to short circuit the entire Eyeball Network of Alphabet City. The billy lied there dying in an alley off Avenue A. The Interdiction Squad suddenly got called away. Dane simply picked the pocket of the dying man, retrieved a bloody brick from his coat pocket and walked away unseen. Dane now had time to think about how Max actually pulled it off and drifted off to sleep dreaming of interrupts and algorithms.