“All right, so let’s have it, when are you due?”
“Hmm? ‘What do I do’? You mean like all day or . . . Oh. Oh, Maxi the Taxi, you tumbled already? I only told Avi last night.”
“Sisterhood is extrasensory, watch more horror movies, you’ll get educated. How is Avi with this?”
“Awesome?”
Not quite how Avi would put it. He’s now making a weekly practice of slipping in the delivery gate around the corner and past Daytona’s headshaking scrutiny to tell Maxine his sad hashslingrz stories, as if she has an arsenal of superpowers to call on.
His workplace has become a rat’s nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft. What Avi once imagined as simple paranoia about the competition is in fact systemic by now, with more enemies inside than out. He finds himself actually using the word “tribal.” Also,
“Mind if I use your toilet a minute?”
Which with Avi has become a Frequently Asked Question. Plus the red eyes with the half-closed eyelids, runny nose, dopey and scattered conversation, buzzers do begin to sound. One day Maxine gives him a short lead, then follows him out down the hall and into the toilet, where she finds her brother-in-law with a computer-duster nozzle up his nose, committing propellant abuse.
“Avi, really.”
“It’s air in a can, harmless.”
“Read the label. Some planet where the atmosphere is fluoroethane gas, ‘air,’ maybe. Meanwhile, back on earth, you should remember you’ll be a patafamiliarass before you know it here.”
“Thanks. I should be totally euphoric, right? Guess what, I’m not, I’m anxious, I know I need to find another job, Ice has me by the balls, how do I pay off a mortgage, support a family, without a paycheck?”
“All Ice cares about,” there-there as usual, “is the lunchhooks of others in the company tambourine, with nondisclosure a distant second. If you can convince him you’re no threat in either area, he’ll go out and headhunt you the perfect dream job himself.”
• • •
BUT SHE CAN’T stay out of DeepArcher. Since it went open source and welcomed in half the planet, none of them who they say they are, acquiring a set of option menus the size of the Internal Revenue Code, anybody is likely to be wandering around the site, herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, the end of life below the spiders as we’ve known it, ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually unwriting and overwriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining an ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape . . . the word is out, and it seems they’ve been waiting years, such is the what’s called pent-up demand. Maxine is able to settle in among the throngs, invisible and at ease. Not addicted exactly, though one day she happens to be back out in meatspace for a second, looks at the clock on the wall, does the math, figures three and a half hours she can’t account for. Luckily there’s nobody but herself to ask what she’s down there looking for, because the answer’s so pathetically obvious.
Yes, she’s aware DeepArcher doesn’t do resurrections, thanks for pointing it out. But something odd has been going on with Windust’s dossier, the one she copied onto her computer shortly after Marvin brought the thumb drive it was on. She’s been sneaking moments away to look at it, not, lately, without twinges of colonorectal fear, because each time she consults it now, there’s been new material added. As if—a breeze given her generations-old firewalls—somebody has been hacking in whenever they feel like it.
“Consider the recently advanced theory,” for example, “that subject, while not a double agent in the classic sense, may have been pursuing a well-defined personal agenda. According to recently downgraded files, this may have begun as early as 1983, when subject allegedly expedited the escape of a Guatemalan national, of interest to the Archivo as an insurgent element and to whom subject was married at the time.” And similar updates, all strangely nonnegative when not outright eulogy material. For whose eyes would stuff like this be intended? For Maxine’s Only? who would benefit from knowing that twenty years ago Windust was still capable of a good deed, in saving his then-wife Xiomara from the fascist murderers he was technically working for?
The first author to suspect here would be Windust himself, trying to look good, except this is insane because Windust is dead. Either it’s Beltway tricksters out on maneuvers or the Internet has become a medium of communication between the worlds. Maxine begins to catch sight of screen presences she knows she ought to be able to name, dim, ephemeral, each receding away into a single anonymous pixel. Maybe not. Much more likely that Windust remains unlit, terribly elsewhere.
Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations—so when she runs unexpectedly into Lester Traipse, instead of assuming it’s a Lester impersonator with an agenda, or a bot preprogrammed with dialogue for all occasions, she sees no harm in treating him as a departed soul.
Just to get it out of the way, “So! Lester. Who did the deed?”
“Interesting. First thing most people want to know is what’s it like being dead.”
“OK, what’s it—”
“Ha, ha, trick question, I’m not dead, I’m a refugee from my life. As for whodunit, I’m supposed to know? I arranged over the phone to drop a shrink-wrapped cube of cash as a first installment for Ice underneath The Deseret pool at midnight, next thing I know, I’m here wandering around with my spectral thumb in my metaphysical ass.”
“Igor Dashkov said you talked about trying to seek some kind of asylum in DeepArcher. Is this who I’m really talking to now, Igor? Misha, Grisha?”
“Don’t think so, I say ‘the’ too much.”
“All right, all right. Assuming there’s still an edge somewhere. And beyond it a void. If you’ve been out there—”
“Sorry. Just a mail-room scrambler here, remember? You want prophecy, sure, I can do that, but it’ll all be bullshit.”
“How about at least letting me bring you back up. Whoever you are.”
“What. Up to the surface?”
“Closer anyway.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She doesn’t. “If it’s really you, Lester, I hate to think of you being lost down here.”
“Lost down here is the whole point. Take a good look at the surface Web sometime, tell me it isn’t a sorry picture. Big favor you’d be doing me, Maxine.”
• • •
MIGHT AS WELL BE HOMECOMING weekend down here. Next thing she knows, here’s who but her very own Ziggy and Otis. With a whole expanding universe to choose from, among the global torrents somehow the boys have located graphics files for a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001, before Ms. Cheung’s bleak announcement about real and make-believe, reformatted now as the personal city of Zigotisopolis, rendered in a benevolently lighted palette taken from old-school color processes like the ones you find on picture postcards of another day. Somebody somewhere in the world, enjoying that mysterious exemption from time which produces most Internet content, has been patiently coding together these vehicles and streets, this city that can never be. The old Hayden Planetarium, the pre-Trump Commodore Hotel, upper-Broadway cafeterias that have not existed for years, smorgasbords and bars offering free lunches, where regulars hang around the door to the kitchen so they can get first shot at whatever’s being carried in, city-summertime movie theaters with signs in blue display type bordered by frost and icicles promising IT’S COOL INSIDE, Madison Square Garden still at Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue and Jack Dempsey’s still across the street, and in the old Times Square, before the hookers, before the drugs, arcades like Fascination, pinball machines so classic now that only overly compensated yups can afford to buy them, and recording booths where half a dozen of you can jam inside and cover the latest Eddie Fisher single on acetate. The retro machinery in the streets, though undefined as to makes and years, is plentiful and ever on the move. Ernie and Elaine, as probable sources for all this, would be screaming with recognition.
