• • •
THAT EVENING UNACCUSTOMED LAUGHTER from the bedroom. Horst is horizontal front of the tube, helplessly, for Horst, amused. For some reason he’s watching NBC instead of the BioPiX channel. A diffident long-haired person in amber sunglasses is doing stand-up on some late-night show.
A month after the worst tragedy in everybody’s lifetime and Horst is laughing his ass off. “What is it Horst, delayed reaction you’re alive?”
“I’m happy to be alive, but this Mitch Hedberg guy is funny, too.”
Not a hell of a lot of occasions she’s seen Horst really laugh. Last time must’ve been Keenan and Kel’s “I dropped the screw in the tuna” episode four or five years ago. Sometimes he’ll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody’s laughing at something and he isn’t, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. “For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.” So what’s he still doing in town, by the way?
• • •
GOING IN TO WORK one morning, she runs into Justin. It seems accidental, but there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else. “Mind if we talk?”
“Come on up.”
Justin slouches into a chair in Maxine’s office. “It’s about DeepArcher? Remember back just before the attack on the Trade Center, Vyrva must’ve told you, everything got a little weird with the random numbers we were using?”
“Dimly, dimly. Did that ever get back to normal?”
“Did anything?”
“Horst says the stock market went crazy too. Just before.”
“You heard of the Global Consciousness Project?”
“Some . . . California thing.”
“Princeton, as a matter of fact. These folks maintain a network of thirty to forty random-event generators all around the world, whose outputs all flow into the Princeton site 24/7 and get mixed together to produce this random-number string. First-rate source, exceptional purity. On the theory that if our minds really are all linked together somehow, any major global event, disaster, whatever, will show up in the numbers.”
“You mean, somehow, make them less random.”
“Right. Meantime, for DeepArcher to be untraceable, we happen to need a high-quality supply of random numbers. What we’ve done is create globally a set of virtual nodes on volunteer computers. Each node only exists long enough to receive and resend, and then it’s gone—we use the random numbers to set up a switching pattern among the nodes. Soon as we found out about this Princeton source, Lucas and I were into the site, bootlegging the product. All goes well till the night of September 10th, when suddenly these numbers coming out of Princeton began to depart from randomness, I mean really abruptly, drastically, no explanation. You can look it up, the graphs are posted on their Web site for anybody to see, it’s . . . I’d say scary if I knew what any of it meant. It kept on that way through the 11th and a few days after. Then just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again.”
“So . . .” and like why is he telling her this exactly, “whatever it was, it’s gone away?”
“Except that for those couple of days, DeepArcher was vulnerable. We did our best with serial numbers off dollar bills, which do pretty good as seeds for a low-tech pseudorandom-number generator, but still, DeepArcher’s defenses began to disintegrate, everything was more visible, easier to access. It’s possible some people may have found their way in then who shouldn’t have. Soon as the GCP numbers got random again, the way back out would’ve become invisible to any intruders. They’d be caught inside the program. They could still be there.”
“They can’t just click on ‘Quit’?”
“Not if they’re busy trying to reverse-engineer their way to our source code. Which is impossible, but still they can compromise a lot of what’s in there.”
“Sounds like another reason to go open source.”
“Lucas says the same thing. I wish I could just . . .” He looks so perplexed that Maxine against her better judgment sez, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Guy’s walking around holding a blazing-hot coal . . .”
• • •
THAT EVENING, first thing in the door, she notices something sure smells good. Horst is cooking supper. Seems to be coquilles Saint-Jacques and daube de boeuf provençal. Again. Of course, the Guilt Special. By a strange invariance in the parameters of wedlock, Horst lately has been turning, all but insufferably, into a homebody. The other night she came in late, all the lights were off, wham, she’s suddenly assaulted at ankle level by a mechanical device, which turns out to be a robot vacuum cleaner. “Trying to kill me here!”
“Thought you’d be pleased,” sez Horst, “it’s the Roomba Pro Elite, brand-new from the factory.”
“With the spousal-attack feature.”
“Actually, it won’t be released till fall, got this one at an early-adopters preview sale. Wave of the future, honeybunch.”
Irony-free. Unthinkable a year or two ago. Meantime it’s Maxine’s turn now to have these, hmm, undomestic urges. Which, for those to whom balanced books appeal, seems fair. Guilt? What’s that?
Eric and Driscoll are in and out of the house together and separately and unpredictably, though they do respect school nights and an informal curfew of 11:00 P.M. Out any later than that and they make other sleeping arrangements, which everybody is cool with, besides relieving Maxine of some worry. The boys, in any case, like their father, continue to sleep so unperturbed that next to them the average sawmill inventory is insomniac.
One day Maxine finds Eric in the spare room with a 27-ounce spray bottle of Febreze, spritzing his dirty laundry, item by item. “There’s a laundry room in the basement, Eric. We can lend you detergent.”
He drops the T-shirt he’s holding on to a pile of already-Febrezed laundry and remains pointing the bottle at his ear, as if about to shoot himself with it. “Does it come with Downy April Fresh Scent?” Diminishing returns. But he also has a worried look.
Angling an antenna, “Something else, Eric?”
“I was up all night with this again. Fuckin hashslingrz. Can’t let it go.”
“You want some coffee? I’m going to make some coffee.”
Following her into the kitchen, “That hashslingerz money pipeline to the Emirates, remember? banks in Dubai and shit, I couldn’t stop going back, over and over it, what if that was helping finance the attack on the Trade Center? then Ice isn’t only just another dotcom douchebag, he’s a traitor to his country.”
“Somebody in Washington agrees with you.” She gives Eric a quick recap of the dossier that Windust handed her, with his punk-rock cologne all over it.
“Yeah, how about this ‘Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship,’ they happen to mention them?”
“They think it’s some kind of front for moving money into jihadist operating accounts.”
“Even cuter than that. It’s a front, all right, but it’s really the CIA, pretending to be jihadist.”
“Get outta here.”
“Maybe it was the Ambien, maybe it was always there right in front of me and I just didn’t see it, but somehow this time all the veils go droppin one by one, and there’s Mata Hari herself. It’s all been a way to get funds out to different anti-Islamic undergrounds in the region. In return Ice gets to keep a commission on everything moving through, plus some heavy-ass consultancy fees.”
“Why, the man’s a patriot.”
“He’s a greedy little shit,” Eric’s head now in a halo of Daffy Duck froth droplets, “eternity in a motel lounge in Houston Texas with a Andrew Lloyd Webber mix repeating forever on the stereo is too good for his sorry ass. Just totally trust me on one thing, Maxine. I’m gonna fuck him up.”