“I didn’t mean to pass this ability on to her. In fact, all I did was drop a drunken clue and she ran with it.”
“Our Dag is one clever girl, that’s for sure.”
Bash looked nervously around the dim narrow hallway full of antiques and was relieved to discover only dumb wallcoverings and not a scrap of proteopape in sight. “We should make sure to exclude any proteopape from our meeting with your friends. Otherwise Dagny will surely monitor our discussions.”
Following his own advice, Bash took out his phone and placed it on an end table.
“Wait here. I’ll run ahead and tell everyone to de-paperize themselves.”
Cricket returned after only a minute. “Okay, let’s go.”
Walking down the long hall, Bash asked, “How did you guys ever end up in a building like this? I pictured your clubhouse as some kind of xinggan Koolhaus.”
“Well, most of us Dubsters are just amateurs with day jobs, you know. We can’t afford to commission special architecture by anyone really catalyzing. But our one rich member is Lester Schill. You met him the other night, right? The Schills have been Brahmins since way back to the 1950s! Big investments in the Worcester bioaxis, Djerassi and that crowd. But Lester’s the last of the Schill line, and he owns more properties than he can use. So he leases us this building for our HQ for a dollar a year.”
“Isn’t he concerned about what’ll happen to the family fortune after his death?” This very issue had often plagued the childless Bash himself.
Cricket snickered. “Lester’s not a breeder. And believe me, you really don’t want to know the details of his special foldings. But I expect he’s made provisions.”
Their steps had brought them to a closed door. Cricket ushered Bash into a large room whose walls featured built-in shelves full of dumb books. Bash experienced a small shock, having actually forgotten that such antique private libraries still existed.
Close to a dozen Dubsters assembled around a boardroom-sized table greeted Bash with quiet hellos or silent nods. Bash recognized Flanders, Mexicorn, Diddums and the enigmatic Schill himself, but the others were strangers to him.
Cricket conducted Bash to the empty chair at the head of the table and he sat, unsure of what he needed to say to enlist the help of these people. No one offered him any prompting, but he finally came up with a concise introduction to his presence.
“One of your West Coast associates, Dagny Winsome, has stolen something from me. The knowledge of a trapdoor in the operating system of proteopape. She’s already begun screwing around with various sheets of my personal protean paper, and if she continues on in this manner, she’ll inspire widespread absolute distrust of this medium. That would spell the end of our I2 infrastructure, impacting your own artistic activities significantly. So I’m hoping that as her friends, you folks will have some insight into where Dagny might be hiding, and also be motivated to help me reach her and convince her to stop.”
A blonde fellow whose face and hands were entirely covered in horrific-looking scarlet welts and blisters, which apparently pained him not a whit, said, “You’re the brainster, why don’t you just lock her out?”
Bash vented a frustrated sigh. “Don’t you think that was the very first thing I tried? But she’s beaten me to it, changed all my old access codes. She’s got the only key to the trapdoor now. But if I could only get in, I could make proteopape safe forever by closing the trapdoor for good. But I need to find Dagny first.”
Cricket spoke up. “Roger, tell Bash what you know about Dagny’s departure.”
The jaundiced ephebe said, “I drove her to the airport a day ago. She said she was heading back to LA.”
“Did you actually see her board her flight?” asked Bash.
“No….”
“Well, I think she’s still in the Greater Boston Metropolitan region. The time lag between coasts is negligible for most communications. Even international calls ricochet off the GlobeSpeak relays practically instantaneously.” Bash was referring to the fleet of thousands of high-flying drone planes — laden with comm gear and perennially refueled in midair — which encircled the planet, providing long-distance links faster than satellites ever could. “But she wouldn’t want to risk even millisecond delays if she was trying to pull off certain realtime pranks. Plus, I figure she’ll want to finally pop out of hiding to lord it over me in person, once she’s finished humiliating me.”
The toothy Indicia Diddums spoke. “That raishes a good point. This looksh like a purely pershonal feud between you two. You’re the richesht plug in the world, Applebrook. Why don’t you just hire some private muschle to nail her assh?”
“I don’t want word of this snafu to spread any further than absolutely necessary. I spent a long time vacillating before I even decided to tell you guys.”
Lester Schill stroked his long beard meditatively before speaking. “What’s in this for us? Just a continuation of the status quo? Where’s our profit?”
Bash saw red. He got to his feet, nearly upsetting his chair.
“Profit? What kind of motive for saving the world is that? Was I thinking of profit when I first created proteopape? No! Sure, I’m richer than God now, but that’s not why I did it. Money is useless after a certain point. I can’t even spend a fraction of one percent of my fortune, it grows so fast. And you, Schill, damn it, are probably in the same position, even if your wealth is several orders of magnitude less than mine. Money is not at the root of this! Proteopape means freedom of information, and the equitable distribution of computing power! Don’t any of you remember what life was like before proteopape? Huge electricity-gobbling server farms? Cell-phone towers blighting the landscape? Miles of fiber optics cluttering the sewers and the seas and the streets? Endless upgrades of hardware rendered almost instantly obsolescent? Big government databases versus individual privacy? Proteopape did away with all that! Now the server farms are in your pockets and on cereal boxes, in the trash in your wastebasket and signage all around. Now the individual can go head-to-head with any corporation or governmental agency. And I won’t just stand helplessly by and let some dingbat artist with a grudge ruin it all! If you people won’t help me without bribery, then I’ll just solve this problem on my own!”
Nostrils flaring, face flushed, Bash glared at the stubborn Dubsters, who remained unimpressed by his fevered speech.
The stalemate was broken when a segment of the bookshelves seemingly detached itself and stepped forward.
The moving portion of the bookcases possessed a human silhouette. In the next second the silhouette went white, revealing a head-to-toe suit of proteopape. This suit, Bash realized, must represent one of the newest third-generation Parametrics camo outfits. The myriad moletronic cameras in the rear of the suit captured the exact textures and lighting of the background against which the wearer stood, and projected the mappings onto the front of the clothing. The wearer received his visual inputs on the interior of the hood from the forward array of cameras. Gauzy portions of the hood allowed easy breathing, at the spotty sacrifice of some of the disguise’s hi-res.
A hand came up to sweep the headgear backward, where it draped like a loose cowl on the individual’s back. The face thus revealed belonged to a young Hispanic man with a thin mustache.
“My name is Tito Harnnoy, and I represent the Masqueleros. We will help you, hombre!”
6
The Manchurian Candidate
Tito Harnnoy drove his battered industrial-model two-person Segway down Mass Ave toward Cambridge. Riding behind Harnnoy, Bash experienced a creeping nostalgia, not altogether pleasant, that grew stronger the closer they approached his old alma mater, MIT.