Complete Stories (94 page)

“Bastards,” snapped Dubya. “Pricks.” Now I get why he has it in for Renshaw.

“Pause,” is the only thing I can think of saying. I look toward the last bit of light on the horizon. My blood pulses, I see ragged checkerboards in my eyes, patterns driven by the rays of the fading Texas sun. “Ready,” I add after a bit. “Tell me more about beaming in the data.”

“The Justfolx medication has the side effect of putting the subject’s cortex into a state of electromagnetic sensitivity,” says Renshaw. “That’s the key clinical action. The aphasia is merely a side effect. The pro forma plan was that we planned to beam Rush Limbaugh shows into Chelsea Clinton after giving her the drug. But the true plan is much richer. Your mission. Find Jenna’s conversations, clean them up, make them contagious, and then we’ll use a 5.4 gigahertz transmitter to beam the info into Jenna’s brain. She’ll be good as new. Better.”

“Bullshit,” mutters the president. He’s deeply pissed at having his daughter be the Clik’s guinea pig.

Renshaw smiles ingratiatingly at George. “Really she’ll be fine, Mr. President. And with the personality cleanup, we can put an end to the kinds of stories Wag posts on his Web site. We can bring to a close this regrettable stage of Jenna’s development.”

Me, I’ve got goose bumps from the mention of 5.4 gigahertz. That’s the frequency that the FCC allows anyone to transmit wireless Internet on. That’s also the frequency used in the lamppost repeater boxes that the peer-to-peer cell phone company Ricochet put up before they went down the tubes. Most people think the repeaters are turned off now, but they’re not. The tweakers know.

The potentialities of the hack expand in my mind like a supernova. The Justfolx drug can be dosed into people’s drinking water, they’ll all turn Elephant or vegetable, but that’s not the real point. The point is that once everyone’s sensitized, AOL and the Clik and the Elephants and the Men in Black can start transmitting spam and telemarketing and political advertising right into our brains.

I turn the idea the other way around. A grave danger, but a wonderful opportunity. What if we broke free of the client/server model and went fully peer-to-peer? Let people send thoughts right at each other, with nothing in between. With Ben’s help, maybe I could fix it so people could have direct electronic brain-to-brain contact. Peace, love, and radiotelepathy.

I take a deep yoga breath, broaden my shoulders, and relax. One Nation under a Groove. This is truly a project worthy of my time.

They give me a room at the ranch, me and the Dogyears machine and my laptop and, since I ask for it, a thermos jug of coffee—though it tastes like it’s from a Texas McDonald’s. There’s a big couch upholstered in calfskin with the hair still on it. Black-and-white spots like a Dell computer shipping carton. I’m supposed to get right to work, but for a few minutes I’m just trying to get down enough of their watery, scalding hot coffee to bring my cycles up. Standing at the window looking out at the strange Texas sky.

I’m still mind-boggled that the FoneFoon worm has zipped six hours of Jenna’s phone conversations into my server, and that I could have been listening to her all along.

I start thinking about reprogramming Jenna’s mind, about downloading her edited personality back onto her, having used her cell phone conversations as the source code. It’s like I’m supposed to make the talk tape for a Mattel Barbie doll, with all the curse words snipped out.

The Clik—you had to hand it to them. Jenna had scarfed Noelle’s Justfolx pill like Ms. Pac-Man gobbling a power pellet. Give Jenna a few drinks, show her a pill,
uncha-yuncha-unch
! I start goofing on that, imagining that when Jenna ate the Justfolx pill, she heard the Ms. Pac-Man power-up sound, that happy
doodley-doodley-doo
music. And then she turned into an 5.4-gigahertz-receptive Elephant vegetable.

There’s still some pieces I don’t understand. If the Clik knew all along they were going to reprogram Jenna, then they would have had to be sure that her cell phone conversations were being saved. The FoneFoon worm played perfectly into their plans. The Clik got Jenna’s talk without actually tapping her. The thing is, I’ve thought all along that Ben Blank wrote the FoneFoon worm—not that I’ve asked him, which would be bad form. Could Ben be working for the Clik? And what about the UFO I saw from the plane? And what’s the deal with the brick of meth the SS threw down for the tweakers? How does that fit in? Have I mentioned that I drink way too much coffee?

I go back to wondering about Jenna. Where in this rambling ranch house might she be stored?
Mew?
I go so far as to peek out of my room’s door. The Muscle_tx is right there, not looking any too friendly. And when I lean out of my room’s window, I see Brad in a lawn chair. He points at me, like, “Gotcha covered.”

So finally I get to work. I connect my laptop to the Dogyears server box they brought along. Mining the conversations out of the data doesn’t take all that long. I have a clip or two of Jenna’s voice on the Prexy Twins site, and I’m able to write a Perl script to grep my terabytes of FoneFoon for her phoneme patterns. Right as I’m playing some of the files, kind of laughing at the things she says, my own cell phone rings. It’s Hella.

“Wag, you’re in Texas?”

“I’m at the president’s ranch.” I’ve got Jenna’s voice playing in the background. She’s ordering a pizza, hanging up, calling a friend about a picnic, talking to a boy, on and on.

“No way. Who’s that talking, Wag? I hear a girl.”

“It’s Jenna. I—”

My phone goes dead. The Men in Black have cut me off. Great. Now Hella’s heard just enough to think the worst. I open the door and ask the Muscle_tx for (a) a chance to call Hella back and (b) more coffee. He passes the requests along. All I get is the coffee.

My next task turns out to be harder, not technically so much as conceptually. Renshaw asked me to take the cursing, sex, alcohol, and drugs out of the conversations, so that the reprogrammed Jenna won’t be a hell raiser. But exactly why would I actually do things the Clik’s way? They’re too stupid and/or lazy to watch what I’m doing in here, so I’ll do what I please. It’s amazing, when you get right up face-to-face with them, how incredibly lame our lords and masters are. They’re actually relying on my supposed patriotic rah-rah team spirit. It’s like the Clik can’t begin to imagine how much we despise them.

I toy with the idea of editing the conversations in exactly the opposite way they asked me to, leaving nothing but the juicy stuff. But there isn’t really all that much juice, I realize, listening to the tapes. Jenna’s pretty much a regular girl, doing normal things with her friends. I play the conversations speeded up so I can get a fast overview of them. Jenna’s chirping at me like a bird. I start to feel a little sleazy to be listening to her, a little scuzzy for being the guy who runs the Prexy Twins Web site to help people gossip about her. I’m a filthy dog who rolls in garbage and licks his balls.

In the end I decide not to edit the conversations at all. I’ll just try and help Jenna get back to square one.

I get more coffee and start on step three: making the data files contagiously reactive. I use some artificial life hacks, fold it in with some self-modifying code, assemble it onto one of the universal replicator structures that Ben uses to make his viruses, and by the time the night ends, I’ve got some Jenna-based artificial life cooking away in the bowels of my Dogyears server box. Little knots of language and logic, evolving to become more and more contagious. I think of them as Jennions.

The sun is creeping up on the horizon. The massive caffeine intake and the lack of carbohydrates has made me a bit shaky. I lie down on the Texas-sized calf-skin couch.

-----

The next thing I know Brad is poking me awake from a puddle of drool. The sun’s coming in at my eyes at a low angle. I’ve only slept about twenty minutes. My head is pounding and I feel ready to choke someone.

“Is it ready?” asks Brad. “You were asleep.”

I look at my laptop screen. It’s using a graphic display to represent the state of the Jennions. The images right now look kind of like live paisley with ants crawling around in it. Good. When I went to sleep the images just looked like dots and circles.

“It’s ready,” I tell Brad. I punch a few keys to copy the Jennions out of the big server box and into my laptop’s hard drive. And then Brad takes me out to the picnic table in the backyard. Jenna’s sitting there again, still drooling, wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans today.

The Muscle_tx follows me and Brad, as if there were any place I could run to here in the middle of Texas. Renshaw and the Boss_tx are drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while Jenna watches the food-to-mouth movements of the men. I miss my mutt, Larva.

“You’ve extracted the language elements?” asks Renshaw. He sips his coffee and nibbles his doughnut. There aren’t any circular carbohydrates on the table for me. Shit.

“Yep, all ready to beam her down,” I say.

Renshaw chuckles and makes the Star Trek hand sign at me, with his fingers spread to make a V. It occurs to me that, being a Clik scientist, this guy probably doesn’t know squat about computer hacking. I hate him. I hate everyone.

The Boss_tx has finished his coffee and his doughnut. He motions to a sandpit next to the Willow tree and says, “Let’s get this rolling and maybe Jenna will want try out the new volleyball court with you, Wag. That’ll be a treat , huh? We know how fascinated with her you are.”

“I hate volleyball. Give me some fucking coffee. And if you think that—” I stop the beginning of a rant and assess the situation: I’m losing it. I’ve slept twenty minutes, Hella thinks I’m boning Jenna, Larva has probably shat all over my room, I have no idea if Jenna can be fixed, and Dogyears is down the tubes. “Coffee,” I repeat.

The Boss_tx catches my gaze and says, “Relax, Wag.”

“Relaxing makes me tense!” I scream. This is a running joke I have with my sister. The SS totally don’t realize I’m being funny.

On some sort of silent cue from the Boss_tx, the Muscle_tx grabs my thumbs, pulls them behind my back, and mutters, “Welcome to Texas,” in my ear.

At this moment, George Dubya walks out of the ranch house in a jogging suit, carrying a tray with more breakfast supplies. I feel a wave of affection for the man.

“Pleased to see y’all up and at ‘em,” says George. “We gonna fix my girl?” His we’re-all-working-together attitude calms the tense situation I’ve created. The Muscle_tx lets up

And now finally I get my breakfast. “I’ve got the agents organized and ready to go,” I say, mouth full. “Right here in my laptop. The Jennions.”

Renshaw lifts a box up from under the table. It’s one of those Ricochet cell phone repeater antennas like you see on lampposts all over San Francisco! “This is the kind transmitter we’re particularly interested in learning to use,” he says. It’s like this whole thing’s been set up as a science experiment for the Clik. Poor Jenna.

Now Brad weighs in . “I saw some druggie San Francisco–type colored patterns on Wag’s laptop in the house. I’m not sure he’s really made the program sufficiently Elephant-oriented.” What an ass kisser.

“There’s nothing in there but Jenna,” I say. “And, if you want to know, I didn’t edit her words at all. If it works right, she’ll be the same as she used to be. Take it or leave it.”

George’s face gets that inspirational, leader-of-the-nation glow. “That’s the way it should be. She’s fine the way she was.” He pats Jenna’s shoulder. “Would you like a doughnut, dear?”

“OK.” She gobbles it in two bites.

Meanwhile Renshaw jacks a special wireless card into my laptop and turns a switch on the repeater box. On my laptop screen, I drag the Jennion icon to the fresh icon for the wireless card, and now the repeater is beaming out Jennion code at 5.4 gigahertz. The microwaves go right through George, Renshaw, the SS guys, and me, but it’s digging into Jenna’s Justfolx-sensitized brain.

Jenna freezes real still for about twenty seconds. Like a startled deer. And suddenly her face lights up, chubby and friendly, she’s like a regular person, yes, I’m meeting Jenna Bush at last.

But then, crap, she opens her mouth and starts making a noise like fax machine or a 560 modem. She jumps up and runs over to the TV satellite dish on the lawn, spewing out that noise all the while. She stops by the antenna and rocks back and forth until her mouth is in the direct focus of the parabolic dish.

“Is this part of the process?” asks Brad. Good show of out-of-the-box thinking, Brad!

“She’s transmitting, dude.” I say. Jenna’s sending some kind of signal into the antenna and up into the satellites in the sky. The SS operatives look at me like they’re ready for the Vulcan nerve-pinch session again. “But, hey, don’t blame me!”

Jenna finishes doing her thing, shuts her mouth, and walks back to the table.

“Thanks, Wag,” she says . “You fixed me good.”

“Jenna dear, is that you?” asks the president.

“Yeah, Dad. I’m back. But now there’s a whole ‘nother consciousness in me as well. Call her NuJenna. She’s from the stars.”

Jenna’s expression changes. She’s looking at us with incredible wisdom in her eyes. Like the picture of Mahatma Gandhi I saw on an Apple billboard near my server hotel. “You and the Clik have done well, Renshaw,” she says in a high-pitched, mellow tone. “It was we who posted the Justfolx recipe.”

George’s cell phone rings and he picks it up for a brief conversation. His end goes like this.

“They did?”

“I see.”

“We can fix that.”

“We can’t fix that?”

“I see.”

“They will?”

“We can’t fix that?”

“I see.”

He hangs up and runs his hands across his face.

“Back to baseball for me,” he says with a crooked smile.

“The Clik needs a period of chaos, Daddy,” says Jenna’s sweet voice. For the moment she’s the chubby college kid again. “Until the new order settles in. So NuJenna and I told everyone the truth about your administration, about the rigged election, about Cheney’s crimes, about Osama and the Fair Play for House of Saud committee. I like being so smart with NuJenna in me.” Jenna blushes when she says she likes being smart. And I get the feeling that shutting down the Elephant administration has made her feel just a little bit sorry for Dad.