Concord, Chapter 7
Soaking
The story so far: Sixteen years after escaping the ruined mainland aboard Concord, a self-sustaining floating city, Second Founder Saul Klein lives a quiet life as a teacher, haunted by the loss of his former lover, Suzanne. A chance encounter with a desperate trio of refugees, and the confession of his partner’s daughter Lila of her pregnancy, leads Saul to contemplate the unthinkable: challenging, or escaping, the increasingly repressive authority of the utopia he helped to create. But how will he decide? And who can he trust? His doctor, Lincoln Chatterjee? His housemate, who wants to know what became of the refugees’ boat? And with his steadily worsening migraine headaches, and the increasingly vivid, hallucinatory dreams he has of Suzanne, can he even trust himself?
That was a waste of time, he snarled to himself as he strode away. Underneath the anger was the sick taste of fear. The Constable, the Commodore, Dr. Jee, now the Painter: they all knew too much about his activities for comfort. Who else had his number? Who else suspected him of high treason, punishable by sunrise, exile, or death? It doesn’t matter what happens to me, he told himself. But Lila. You have to stay alive, for her.
He walked blindly for a while, almost running, up and down the familiar incurving streets past the watchful, silent houses. Concord had been born of exuberance, a free city in every respect: from old laws, old restrictions, old conceptions of sovereignty and time. And yet each house Saul walked past, he was sure, concealed its secret share of sorrow, born of the inability to entirely discard the past. Was that more or less true here than it had been back in the world? Maybe Suzanne had understood better than any of them the consequences of Marco’s dream. Maybe that was why she wasn’t here. Saul felt like he was pushing through bright tendrils of webbing—the migraine net that never truly abandoned him. By now he was used to the pain, almost welcoming it. It was the feeling of her, the seed she’d planted, the hooks of her. Even in the earliest days of their acquaintance, helplessly smitten, having for all intents and purposes lost her in advance, Saul thought he could detect her sadness; a sadness almost indistinguishable from her wit, her rage, from the beauty that seemed to withdraw from any viewer who faced her head-on. She appeared to him softly rounded, feminine, pale moon with depths of green light around the eyes. Then he would catch a glimpse of her surprisingly angular profile, the sharp edges of a face from which all its distinction glittered. When had he known that they would become lovers? Was it the first time they met, at the private sushi club Marco favored, where you could still chow down on gourmet sashimi if you could swing the six-figure membership fee? When had she realized? In memory she seemed to foresee it all: he saw it in the glint in her eye, the twist of her mouth. The way she leaned across the table to say, “Marco has told me everything about you.”
“Everything?”
“Everything he knows,” she said. Her smile was tinged with a touch of something he took for compassion, that sent a tingle of mingled pain and pleasure running through him. He looked down at his plate, feeling acutely the emptiness of the chair next to him.
“He’s my partner,” Marco said, trademark smirk in place. “A genius at execution.”
“Your Lord High Executioner?”
“More like his Lord High Everything Else,” Saul said. “Only one genius at a time, am I right?”
Marco lifted his sake cup in acknowledgment.
“You’re a lawyer,” Saul said to Suzanne. “Didn’t you try to sue us?”
“Big time,” Marco agreed. “She lost.”
She jabbed him with her elbow, eliciting a giggle. “I didn’t lose,” she told Saul. “My client decided to settle. There’s a difference.”
The court had ruled that no POS—a Personal Operating System, even one built on open source code—could have standing to testify. Suzanne was prepared to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, but on the same day her client, Harrison Moore, was indicted for crimes against intellectual property. He escaped to the Argentinian consulate, where he would spend the rest of his days recording increasingly incoherent rants against the government and prophesying civilization’s fall. Give the man a shave, Saul thought, put him in a suit, and teach him to make eye contact, and you could almost imagine it was Marco talking. Suzanne, he figured, must have a thing for men of extremes.
Now in the private dining room overlooking the main floor, guarded by shields that made them invisible to the OS’s of the hoi polloi, the three of them clinked glasses. “From my perspective,” Marco said, taking her hand, “it worked out perfectly.”
She turned to Saul. “Is he always this big of an asshole?”
“That’s the secret of his success.”
Marco went away — to the bathroom? to take a call? — and she turned to him, putting her cool hand on top of his. He felt a shock that went from the top of his head to the bottom of his balls. “What about you? What’s your secret?”
“I wish I knew.”
There was a band that night, three young women with saxophones and an old blues pianist. She held onto Saul’s hand. “Do you want to dance?”
It turned out that he did.
His walk slowed as he circled back toward town. He could hear the faint tootling of the band, saw the spire of the Conn looming like a great antenna into the sky. Feeling dizzy, he reached out to grasp the railing before him and realized he was standing on the steps of the Concord library. Solvitur ambulando, he thought. A visit to the Archive might be just what he needed. It was risky, of course. Nostalgia, like every other emotion, was closely regulated on Concord. But they’re already watching, he told himself, and you need to decide what to do. I wasn’t cut out to be a single parent, he thought sardonically. Nor any sort of parent. But he couldn’t make a decision for Lila, let alone himself, without consulting her mother first.
The interior of the library was hushed, classical. The Librarian, Mrs. Riordan, presided over an eccentric collection of salvaged books, all of which could now plausibly be considered rare editions: a complete leather-bound set of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson cheek by jowl with a dozen autographed copies of The Art of the Deal, while opposite a shelf of engineering manuals stood a glassed-in bookcase devoted to the oeuvre of Ayn Rand and her followers. A vitrine displayed the publications of those villagers who had committed acts of literature, with Marco’s autobiography Paradise Made the most prominently featured. Another display was given over to the evolutions of the Whole Earth Catalog. By Mrs. Riordan’s desk stood a brass machine capable of printing and binding virtually any book upon demand in under thirty seconds. It saw little use. The few elderly villagers who haunted the library clustered around the tables and chairs of the reading room with copies of the Concord Gazette or played endless silent hands of euchre. Some nodded in armchairs over copies of Atlas Shrugged or C.S. Lewis, others held nothing in their hands at all but merely blinked rheumily at the fireplace projectors, screening nature scenes. Saul wondered what held them back from paying their final visit to Sunrise House. Fear, hesitation? Or simply the habit of years?
The Archives were something else entirely, and Saul never descended the spiral staircase from the library level without a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. Below ground, below deck, as close to the understructure and Vital Services as an ordinary citizen was permitted to get. Lionel Riordan, the Archivist, was a compactly built light-skinned Black man in a shapeless gray sweater that he tucked into the top of his trousers, making him look a little like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. He spent his days overseeing the glassed-in hemisphere where the Archive terminals went for the most part unconsulted. He nodded to Saul as he entered. “Haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Klein. You want a terminal?”
Saul looked out at the blond wood tables on which perched monitors and terminals sculpted in late twentieth-century style. With them, those with the desire might peruse the annals of the former world. The Archives were, in essence, a cumulative snapshot of the Soak, as the collective entity that comprised both virtual and actual realities on the mainland was known, though a few old-timers still thought of it as the Internet or the web. The Soak had crashed like a tsunami, the proximate cause of Concord’s only slightly premature launch. The Archives had preserved it like a vast reflecting pool, but few cared to glimpse the images it might show them. Crackpots like Suzanne’s old client had predicted that the human future lay in the self-aware Singularity that the Soak would inevitably become, transcending at last the petty business of humanity, overcoming the too-numerous, resource-devouring bodies that were the final obstacle to an existence of pure mind. As one of the chief developers of the paraverse—the technology for connecting human nervous systems with the Soak—Marco had been one of these prophets. But when the once-quiescent governments of the faltering West had unexpectedly reasserted themselves, sending forth entangling regulatory nets, Marco had chosen the path of silence, exile, and cunning. In secret shareholders’ memos he proclaimed that Concord would be the new global village miniaturized, a floating shrine to the individual, as cut off and adrift from the world’s news as any unvisited island tribe.
The circular room was empty. “Not too much business down here,” Saul said.
“May I ask yours?”
Saul cleared his throat. “I thought I’d look up some old recipes.”
“Recipes,” the Archivist repeated flatly. “What are you going to cook?”
“That’s just it,” said Saul. “I need to look at some recipes to figure that out.”
Lionel stared at him, stone faced, then turned back to his desk. “Terminal three,” he said.
He knew his visit marked him as eccentric. Few of his fellow shareholders admitted any interest in plugging themselves back into the subtracted Soak, now that it was detached from anything tangible. It was only a window on the bad old world, window upon window of advertisements and porn and more porn and videos of kittens tumbling over balls of yarn, LOL, OMG, world without end, amen. Down in the cool antiseptic space of the Archive you could reinsert yourself at any point into digital history, searching the names of loved ones and celebrities and extinct species that would again spread their wings before your eyes. But it was declassé, gauche. He wondered who else might come down here. He wondered if Lionel would tell.
He made his way to the terminal he’d been assigned, passing an array of unused screens all depicting the same loop of a Macaque ape peering into a mirror, contemplating itself gravely before breaking into an infectious, eerie grin, again and again.
Saul dialed the terminal to the end of its reckoning, to the days just before the Soak had crashed. Why it had crashed and what had crashed it, no one knew, but the effects had been catastrophic. Aside from the immense damage to infrastructure, immediate and long-term—aside from the fried power grids, overwhelmed waste disposal units, and self-piloted aircraft gone brainless midflight, millions of people for whom the paraverse was more real than the air they breathed had been thrown abruptly upon themselves, each cast back into a no longer familiar body that betrayed each and every one of them with its ordinary thirsts. Those whose meshes had shorted, causing immediate cardiac arrest, were the lucky ones. The descent into open barbarism had been as irretrievable as it had been immediate. Marco had foreseen it all, and prepared for a chosen few his sovereign refuge on the sea.
Now that world was a memory that Saul conjured with a keystroke. It reran its course in the form of algorithmic recordings of online behavior that added up to sentient replicas, like the POSes that Harrison Moore had so quixotically sought to liberate. Saul did not of course mesh with the Archive—even if his mesh had been functional, it was forbidden to revive even a corner of the Soak by interfacing with it directly. He’d have to be content, as his ancestors had been, with a screen.
Glancing over his shoulder at Lionel’s window, holding his breath, Saul summoned into being Suzanne’s outsourced self, the residual avatar popularly known as an iMe. In the days of the paraverse people’s very selves were outsourced bit by bit, stalked by algorithms that studied their behavior as closely and precisely as any infatuated lover; the better angel of your nature, or so said the advertising copy. It took only a few keystrokes for him to conjure Suzanne’s double, that gravely beautiful face that shifted from pensive to smiling, breaking light as she registered his presence. He touched the chat icon and waited.
hey sexy
Hi.
i missed you
I missed you, too.
Surrounding the chatbox discrete advertisements for obsolete products phased in and out unobtrusively, like moons. A chyron designed to minimize anxiety presented a soothing stream of factoids about defunct celebrities. The simulated date told him that Lila was at this time about six months old. He typed:
How’s the kiddo?
exhausting
beautiful
exhaustingly beautiful
Images bubbled up: a newborn’s squint-eyed offended stare; a baby in a high chair smearing green paste on her forehead; a toddler waddling into the frame on fat legs, assisted by one finger of a disembodied masculine hand. Little Lila. In the Archive she would never become older than the nine months she’d logged to the day of the launch. He typed:
She’s all grown up.
if only then i could maybe have a drink
breastfeeding is murder
A Leche League PSA played unobtrusively in the screen’s upper right corner, while the goodnews chyron was supplanted by another streaming unending deals on car seats, onesies, educational software, Mandarin classes, insurance. An infinite present unfurling its infinite choices in a capsule of the irretrievable past. Suzanne’s avatar winked at Saul, doing something with its hands that he couldn’t quite see, out of the frame. He remembered that she, like Dr. Moody, had been fond of knitting.
How’s Marco?
i should ask you that question i never see him he’s always traveling working
planning how’s the secret project coming i should ask that will tell you how
marco is how is it
Still secret, he typed, adding idiotically: He cares about you a lot.
he cares he plans he loves
He could almost hear her saying the words. Even the halting pace at which the letters appeared helped him picture her tapping away at screen or keyboard, Lila filling her left arm, or sitting at Suzanne’s feet blowing a contemplative bubble of spit.
I wish you were here.
There was no answer for what seemed like a full minute. He pictured her in the sunroom on the fortified compound, distracted by her mesh—Marco dialing inopportunely from wherever he was, New York or Dubai or Jakarta. Something was boiling over on the stove. Or the baby demanded her attention. Maybe it was simply her eyes, passing unseeing over the cultivated grounds, wondering what role Saul played in your life. Lover? Friend of the family? Or just a man-shaped hole whose need she knew she could never fill. Pick your poison.
i’m scared
He stared at the words.
Why?
Three dots. “Typing.” They lapsed away wordlessly.
Why? Is it Marco?
Nothing. Like a fool, as if she were really there, he typed:
Everything is going to be all right.
Still nothing. But then, just as he was about to shut down the monitor and walk away, cursing himself for his sentimentality, her iMe wrote:
when i was a girl winter was winter in mass winter came sometimes early sometimes late but first there were the leaves going gold and red and yellow and wed stay off the roads crowded with leaf peepers lots of crashes when someone was overcome by a maple driving but now the trees are dead and summer is winter not that its cold its not its horridly hot but summer is like winter used to be everything dying airless no santa claus dont laugh at me saul st nick meant something to my girlhood but hell mean nothing to lila my daughter our daughter st marco doesnt care about anything but saving her saving us hes planning he doesnt ask our future our lives in a secret garden a floating village like the world of my girlhood i dont want it i dont want secrets dont want him but save us save lila saul
“Everything all right?”
It was the disembodied voice of Lionel, speaking from his office into a slender microphone. Had he been monitoring Saul’s activity, his interface? Of course he had.
“You look a little white, Saul.”
Saul realized he was sweating, his fists were clenched, and the migraine halo was back, turning the anguished face on his screen into a demonic shiver. He kicked the power switch off. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Were you hallucinating?”
“What?”
No. No, that wasn’t what the Archivist had said. “Was it hallucinating?”
“Yes,” Saul said quickly, gratefully.
“It happens,” Lionel said. “We did everything we could to ensure that whatever virus or instability that caused the Crash wasn’t part of the Archive, but we can’t prevent a certain ripple effect. Cave user, right?”
User beware. “Right.”
“Be safe out there,” said Lionel. The mic clicked off.
Saul stared at the screen through the wavering curtain of his headache. The Macaque ape studied its reflection, grinning like a dandy who approves of what he sees. Save Lila, Saul. He could almost hear her saying the words.
Save Lila. But how?
Maybe the Painter was right about Ali’s boat.
A shimmery sense of our future that is the past in this story.