22
At three in the morning, the phone rings, in the dream it seems to be the siren of some cops who are chasing her. “You don’t have all the evidence,” she mumbles. Gropes for the instrument and picks up.
Sound effects on the other end suggesting an unfamiliarity with telephones, “Wow, these things are weird. Hey, now what’s it doing—is it gonna time out on me, jeez…” It seems to be Eric, who’s been up since the previous 3:00 A.M. and is about to grind and snort another fistful of Adderall.
“Maxine! You talked to Reg lately?”
“Hmm, what?”
“His e-mail, his phone, his doorbell, it’s all dangling links anymore. Can’t find him at work or on his mobile. Like everyplace I look, suddenly no Reg.”
“When were you in touch with him last?”
“Last week. Should I be starting to worry?”
“He could’ve just split for Seattle.”
Eric hums a few bars of the Darth Vader theme. “You don’t think it’s anything else.”
“Hashslingrz? They fired him, you knew that.”
“Yeah, meaning I got fired too, Reg being a class act sent me a nice severance check, but you know what, with core privileges now that let me go anywhere inside hashslingrz, lately the more of my business it ain’t, the more I can’t stay away from it. Fact, I was just about to go down there again but thought I’d better call you…”
“While I was asleep, thanks.”
“Oh shit, right, you guys sleep, hey, I’m—”
“It’s OK.” She gets out of bed and shuffles over to the computer. “You mind some company? Show me around the Deep Web, maybe? We did have a date.”
“Sure, you can come on my network, I’ll give you the passwords, walk you through it…”
“Just putting coffee on here…”
Presently they’re linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms… down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyberthugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined…
“Some nice foot-lover sites too,” Eric comments casually. Not to mention more forbidden expressions of desire, beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there.
It surprises Maxine how populated it is down here in sub-spider country. Adventurers, pilgrims, remittance folks, lovers on the run, claim jumpers, skips, fugue cases, and a high number of inquisitive entreprenerds, among them Promoman, whom Eric introduces her to. His avatar is an amiable geek in square-rim glasses wearing a pair of old-school sandwich boards that carry his name, as do those of his curvaceous co-adjutor Sandwichgrrl, her hair literally flaming, a polygon-busy GIF of a bonfire on top of a manga-style subteen face.
“Deep Web advertising, wave of the future,” Promoman greets Maxine. “Thing is to get position now, be in place, already up and running when the crawlers show up here, which’ll be any minute.”
“Wait—you’re actually seeing revenue from ads on sites down here?”
“Right now it’s weapons, drugs, sex, Knicks tickets…”
“All that real recherché shit,” puts in Sandwichgrrl.
“It’s still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonizers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There’s already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web—”
“Is that,” Maxine wonders, “like, ‘Ride the Wild Surf’?”
“Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything’ll be suburbanized faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’ Then it’ll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom’ll have to saddle up and head somewhere else.”
“If you’re looking for bargains,” advises Sandwichgrrl, “there are some nice ones around the Cold War sites, but prices may not stay reasonable for long.”
“I’ll bring this up at our next board meeting. Meantime maybe I will just go have a look.”
It isn’t a promising neighborhood. If there was a Robert Moses of the Deep Net, he’d be screaming, “Condemn it already!” Broken remnants of old military installations, commands long deactivated, as if transmission towers for ghost traffic are still poised out on promontories far away in the secular dark, corroded, untended trusswork threaded in and out with vines and leaves of faded poison green, using abandoned tactical frequencies for operations long defunded into silence… Missiles meant for shooting down Russian prop-driven bombers, never deployed, lying around in pieces, as if picked over by some desperately poor population that comes out only in the deepest watches of the night. Gigantic vacuum-tube computers with half-acre footprints, gutted, all empty sockets and strewn wiring. Littered situation rooms, high-sixties plastic detailing gone brittle and yellow, radar consoles with hooded circular screens, desks still occupied by avatars of senior officers in front of flickering sector maps, upright and weaving like hypnotized snakes, images corrupted, paralyzed, passing to dust.
Maxine notices that one of these maps is centered on eastern Long Island. The room has a familiar look, austere and unmerciful. She is visited by one of those rogue hunches. “Eric, how do we get into this one?”
A brief tapdance over the keyboard and they’re in. If it isn’t one of the underground rooms she saw out at Montauk, it’ll do. The ghosts here are more visible. Strata of tobacco smoke hang unstirred in the windowless space. Scope wizards attend radar displays. Virtual underlings pass in and out with clipboards and coffee. The officer on duty, a bird colonel, regards them as if about to ask for a password. A message box appears. “Access is limited to properly cleared individuals attached to ADC from AFOSI Region 7.”
Eric’s avatar shrugs and smiles. The soul patch pulses incandescent green. “Crypto’s all pretty old-school, give me a minute here.”
The colonel’s face fills the screen, broken up sporadically, smeared, pixelated, blown through by winds of noise and forgetfulness, failing links, lost servers. Its voice was synthesized several generations back and never updated, lip movements don’t match the words, if they ever did. What it has to say is this.
“There is a terrible prison, most informants believe it’s located here in the U.S., though we also have Russian input comparing it unfavorably to the worst parts of the gulag. With classic Russian reluctance they will not name it. Wherever it is, brutal is too kind a description. They kill you but keep you alive. Mercy is unknown.
“It’s supposed to be a kind of boot camp for military time travelers. Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don’t just climb into a machine, you have to do it from inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption—of, or from, anything.
“Given the lengthy schooling, the program prefers to recruit children by kidnapping them. Boys, typically. They are taken without consent and systematically rewired. Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative histories which will benefit the higher levels of command who have sent them out.
“They need to be prepared for the extreme rigors of the job. They are starved, beaten, sodomized, operated on without anesthetic. They will never see their families or friends again. If by accident this should ever happen, during an assignment or simply as a contingency of the day, their standing orders are immediately to kill anyone who recognizes them.