Exceptions to Reality (8 page)

Those who pursued him could have put a stop to his activities by passing his curriculum vitae along to every large gaming establishment on the planet. But they would not do that, he knew. Such an incredible revelation was bound to lead to inquiries public, scientific, and commercial. Those who had especially sensitive reasons for wanting to stop him did not want inquiries—they wanted him dead. Their conundrum bought him time.

He had to convert his Brazilian reals into dollars, then find a bank that would handle the wire transfer to Zurich. That took the rest of the day. By the time evening approached his latest winnings were on their way out of the country and his fanny pack contained a newly purchased first-class ticket to Lima. There was a nice casino in the district of Miraflores, he had read. He was anxious to pay it a visit.

He had chosen a hotel on Itapuã Beach north of the city, having reserved a room for the week. It had taken only two days to find the right machine in the casino. As he exited the taxi and entered the lobby of the hotel, he located a desk clerk with some command of English and informed him that management might want to send someone to check the main transformer on the street outside. Threerivers thought he might have seen a spark, or something, he explained. Actually he had seen nothing at all, but stepping out of the cab he had smelled sage and thyme—essence of capacitor overload, as he had come to know it. He couldn’t have cared less about the transformer, or the neighborhood in which it was situated, or the hotel, but he did not want to burn up in bed before he could check out the next morning.

He had inserted the plastic key into the lock to his room when he hesitated. Something on the other side of the door was tickling his nose. He always made it a point to memorize the smell of a room whenever he checked in to a new hotel. The TV, the electrical outlets, the lamps—all had their distinctive aromas. Here, now, something smelled different. The discrepancy was slight but unmistakable. Slowly he removed the key from the lock, trying not to make any noise as he did so.

Someone pushed a hard, unyielding something into his back. “Don’t turn around. Walk down the hall, toward the beach.” Reaching out, the man behind Threerivers rapped on the door twice, then twice again. It opened to reveal a tall Amerind who slipped a small gun into his pocket as he emerged.

“He knew you were in there,” explained the man behind Threerivers. “He was starting to back away. I was afraid he might bolt.”

“How?” The other man’s face was a mix of concern and confusion as he stared not at his partner but at their stoic captive. “I didn’t make a sound.”

The other man gestured. “You wearing anything electronic?”

Shutting the door to Threerivers’s room behind him, the intruder considered the question. “Only a watch. And my cell phone is off.”

“But charged,” replied his partner. “He probably sniffed it. Same way he does the machines.” The small, hard pressure in the middle of Threerivers’s back pressed sharply inward. “Didn’t you?”

Threerivers shrugged indifferently as they started down the hall. It was late, and none of the other guests was around. Hopefully he and his new companions would encounter a maid or someone checking hotel security. The hotel’s main building had only two floors and was situated right on the sand. Right now the beach would likely be completely deserted. That was not good.

“Cell phones stink of spoiled fruit juice,” he murmured absently. “A watch hardly smells at all.”

“Freak,” snapped the man who had been concealing himself in Threerivers’s room.

Bull replied in Cheyenne, which neither of his captors understood. “There’s no need for this,” he insisted as they walked him down the hall in the direction of the dark, empty beach and the wide Atlantic beyond. “Whatever they’re paying you, I can add zeros to it.”

“Sorry, brother,” responded the one holding the pistol. “It’s all been explained to us. There is too much at stake here.”

“What? One guy’s few winnings?”

“Few millions, is how I hear it,” declared the other man. “It’s not the money, though. You know that. You know what it is. The elders told you.”

“Maybe I don’t.” Threerivers was defensive. “Why don’t you explain it to me again?”

“All those hundreds of millions pouring into reservation casinos every year,” the man with the gun told him. “The salvation of dozens of tribes. The basis for the preservation and the resurrection of the pride and culture of the Indian nations. Everybody’s content with the arrangement: the white folks who happily gamble their money away and the tribes that gladly collect it. Then you come along. An Indian who can smell out a winning jackpot. What happens if the white media get hold of a story like that?”

“I’m the only one who can do it,” Threerivers told him.

“Maybe,” admitted the hired assassin. “A lot of elders and council members sure hope so. But try and tell the white man that. If they think there’s one of us who can put the fix on slot machines, they’ll start wondering if there are others. And if they start wondering if there are others, they’re liable to stop coming to the casinos on the reservations.”

“I haven’t been on a rez since I left New York for London,” Threerivers protested. “I haven’t cost one tribe an Indian nickel in the last year and a half.”

“You’re too dangerous to have around,” the other man pointed out. “If anyone, anywhere, finds out about what you can do, the news will get back to the States. And then we have the problem. Once the wendigo is out, you can’t put him back in his hole.” He gestured downward. “Mind the stairs.”

Threerivers turned left instead of right. Before they could question his decision, they found themselves confronted by a waiter wheeling a hot room-service dinner for two toward a second-floor room. Threerivers had turned that way because he had smelled the electric food warmer approaching. He was counting on the fact that the assassin would not risk shooting the waiter and that the pistol he was holding was not equipped with a silencer. When he made his break, darting forward and around the startled server, he gave the food cart a hard shove sideways. Spicy Brazilian food went flying, the waiter yelled in surprise, someone stuck her head out a door to see what was happening, and Threerivers was sprinting for the service exit. Whenever he checked into a new hotel, one of the first things he did was mark the location of alternative exits.

They didn’t catch him. By the time his pursuers found the service exit, he had managed to flag down a passing car. Waving a fistful of bills to persuade the startled driver, he was soon speeding away from the threatening ocean.

His pursuers went straight to the airport, but they were not sanguine about encountering their quarry there. In this they were right: Threerivers was too smart, too experienced to chance taking the first plane out of town now that his presence had been detected.

When the old bus finally rattled into Recife days later, he booked a cabin on a freighter and vanished into the Atlantic. They never caught up with him again. In the course of his travels, Threerivers had learned a lot about gambling. Despite his peculiar talent, he knew when to quit. If only his pursuers could have accepted his word that he would, his last flight would have been unnecessary. Seven figures, he decided, were of more comfort to a man alive than eight to a man permanently abed deep in the earth. He never set foot in a casino again—or, for that matter, in a city that boasted a casino.

They kept searching for him, of course, not willing to take the chance that he would keep his ability permanently under wraps. They did not find him. No one thought to look on the coast of the island-nation of Sri Lanka, a hundred miles south of its sultry capital city of Colombo. There it was that a certain expatriate Amerind lived in quiet luxury amid beautiful people who were darker than himself. He married and had four children, two of whom demonstrated the most curious propensity for fixing obstreperous computers and stereos, while the perfectly beautiful little girl spoke repeatedly of her intention to one day start her own software company. Her friends chattered instead about boys and music and movies and school, and sometimes they laughed at her behind her back.

But then, none of them could feel the Net.

Rate of Exchange

I once shepherded to the Grand Canyon a very talented and opinionated software engineer who worked for Symantec back in the Mesozoic era when having four megs of RAM and a real black-on-white screen on your home computer was considered cutting-edge technology. In the course of making conversation during the two-hour-plus drive from my home up to the national park, I asked him what he might like to do if he was not deeply embedded in the software industry. I forget his reply. (How’s that for a punch line?) He then turned the question back on me. Hoping to provoke an interesting response, I avowed as how I might be a trader in international currency.

“Scum of the Earth,” he replied tautly.

Marx certainly would have thought so. An ideal example of a profession that generates income while producing nothing in the way of real goods. Now, I confess that I do not personally know any currency traders. I do have a couple of friends who deal in international commodities and futures—everything from orange juice to iron ore—and these two gentlemen happen to be quite pleasant folk. But at least their work involves trade in actual goods and not just the wily adjustment of figures inside computer programs.

Every day, vast fortunes rise and fall on the predictions, suppositions, and manipulations of currency dealers. These individuals exist in a cyberworld of their own, have their own arcane tribal lingo, and must perforce possess a confidence beside which that of the most prominent sports stars pales into bumbling uncertainty.

As you can see, obviously a subject gravid with humorous potential.

Speaking of worlds that exist in cyberspace, this story first appeared as a promotional tie-in for America Online. This is therefore its first appearance on a portion of the corpse of a remanufactured coniferous Terran life-form.

Parker-Piggott’s morning
had proven very profitable indeed, and he fully expected the afternoon’s business to go as well. While Wall Street shut down for the day and the Hang Sen went to sleep, the men and women who traded in the world’s currencies never rested. It was not true, as it was sometimes rumored, that there were certain individuals in the business who never slept. A trader needed a full night’s rest to function efficiently in an environment where millions upon tens of millions were wagered on value shifts as ephemeral as fractions of a yen—or baht or euro or rupee.

He was very good at what he did, was Geoffrey Parker-Piggott. His success had imbued him with a confidence that left others thinking him smug. Perhaps he was, a little. But not to the point where it affected his work. Never to the point where it affected his work. Smugness had been the ruin of many a previously victorious speculator. Parker-Piggott assiduously avoided stepping on that especially dangerous path.

By the time he had concluded lunch with three of his colleagues, including the beauteous but somewhat glacial Jennifer Lowen, the ruble had risen nearly 0.8 percent against the dollar. He smiled to himself as he watched the figures, like so many agitated insects, crawl across the screen. There were three such screens in his office, all connected to one another yet monitoring distinct sources. While he often wished for a third eye so he could keep a permanent watch on each one, he did an excellent job of monitoring them all nonetheless.

One monitor displayed figures, the other options, the third world news. Four tourists beaten up and robbed in the Masai Mara less than an hour ago. Instantly Parker-Piggott was working the lines, filching quotes, and changing one and a half million Kenyan shillings into those of its slightly more prosperous and stable neighbor, Tanzania. He was at little risk because the transaction was fully covered by a congruent forward position founded on solid South African rand. Thanks to his complex maneuvering, if the Kenyan shilling went down, then he would make money thanks to his forwards in South Africa. Conversely, if the Kenyan currency held firm, he would make money in Tanzania. Leaning back in the thickly padded and very expensive leather chair, he placed his hands behind his head and smiled contentedly. Life was good. Most people were not too bright, especially when it came to their money. This put Parker-Piggott, who was much brighter than most, especially when it came to other people’s money, in an enviable position.

Seeing an opportunity to place six hundred thousand for a good customer, he proceeded to purchase a trustworthy basket of Scandinavian currencies. Little volatility there, but a safe investment he could sell off in a week or so at a slight profit. The customer would be grateful, and Parker-Piggott would chalk the humble transaction up to good public relations. Next time he would be able to take a bigger risk with the man’s money. The beauty of the business was that whether the currencies traded went up or down, his commission remained the same.

Sipping a cold frappé brewed solely with rare Atiu coffee, he perused the status of the always interesting Southeast Asian exchanges. It was one of his favorite places to do business. The inherent explosive nature of the region offered potential big profits for his customers, and equivalent commissions for the company and himself. He had done particularly well in that part of the world and fully intended to do so again.

Papua New Guinea kina…no, that was holding steady. Nothing interesting happening there. What about the Malaysian ringgit? Already up 0.5 percent today…too late to jump in. The Singapore dollar he rarely played with, but the Indonesian rupee, with its wild swings, was always worth working, especially when he was in a real gambling mood. Today looked like a bad day on the Manila exchange. Possible opportunities there for him. Knowing his limits to the dollar, he whistled merrily to himself as he put in an order for 22.3 million Philippine pesos, with an eye toward unloading them by the end of the workday. The Manila bourse might be down, but his sources had been assuring him for weeks that the economy was strong and rebounding nicely from the mini-depression of two months back. If he was right, and he usually was, the swing would net the company’s investors between 1 and 2 percent. Not a huge profit, but very nice indeed for one day’s work.

He had authorized the buy and was in the process of plotting another when the middle screen declared, calmly and without emotion, “Purchase confirmed: twenty-two point three million
zwebagls
.”

He blinked. At first he thought there was a keyboarding error. Then he realized it was a joke. There was, of course, no such unit of currency as the
zwebagl
. It did sound vaguely like an issue from one of the old Eastern European communist governments, though he knew that could not be so. Geoffrey Parker-Piggott knew the names and denominations of every currency on the planet, from Peruvian inti to Israeli shekel. The
zwebagl
did not exist. Therefore, someone was pulling an elaborate gag on him.

He ran a systems check. Expensive firewall and second-line-of-defense software assured him that neither office intranet nor his personal units had been compromised. He had not been hacked, whacked, or sacked. Who had the necessary skill to break into his private network without activating security? More importantly, who had the chutzpah? Even if the initial intent was humorous and the final goal amusement, serious damage could result.

Well, no harm done. Undoubtedly he would find out at some future date who was responsible, when the joker chose to reveal himself. Or herself, he mused, allowing himself to recall the face and figure of the exotic and lovely Jennifer Lowen. Ignoring the readout he continued with his work, reentering the order for Philippine pesos. He was gratified to see it confirmed within a few minutes.

Later that afternoon the relevant screen, as it was programmed to do, blinked for attention.

“Your recent
zwebagl
purchase is up five point two percent. Do you wish to initiate a correction or a transfer of assets? There appears to be a good opening in
gyflings
.”

His software was programmed to alert him anytime a holding he had authorized rose or fell by 5 percent or more. But according to the machines, he had purchased the twenty-two million
zwebagls
less than two hours ago! The upward surge was incredible, and without knowing what was going on he had apparently made the right decision. About nothing.

Parker-Piggott licked his lower lip. A wonderful joke, yes. One so sophisticated and adept that few could enjoy its ramifications. All right—no one enjoyed a good joke more than he did. Hesitating only briefly, he entered the necessary commands to sell. Furthermore, a smile playing about his pale lips, he added additional instructions that he felt were wholly in keeping with the tone of the gag. Who said he had no sense of humor?

“Selling twenty-two million plus accumulated five point two percent profit
zwebagls
. As per request, recommend one-day forward option to purchase three hundred fifty thousand
gyflings
.”

He left it at that, finishing the day with more ups than downs, and making a game as he left the office of trying to guess who was behind the goofy hoax. Whoever it was did not give themselves away in the crowded hall.

By morning of the next day he had forgotten all about it. He was deep into trying to decide what to do with half a billion new Brazilian reals when a note popped up on one screen indicating that on his authorization the computer had purchased, in addition to his slowly but steadily appreciating
gyflings,
2.5 million worth of Posmoo
schmerkels
.

Enough was enough, he decided. But no matter how hard he tried to purge his system of the intrusion, every piece of software, including his supposedly inviolable backups, insisted that he was committed to acquiring the indicated quantity of
schmerkels
. Meanwhile, his
gyflings
continued to do well. The computer also assured him that now was the time to sell any other
zwebagls
he might be holding, and that there was a new opportunity to grab some Umutu
weesfirks
before word got out that the Umutun government was going to issue equivalent bonds at an admirable premium.

Furthermore, his commissions on all relevant transactions were substantial. The only trouble was, they were in
zwebagls
. Staring at the screen, he found himself wondering for a wild moment if he should convert his recently acquired personal profit to
schmerkels
. Then clarity returned and he wondered what the hell he was doing.

He wanted to stand up and shout,
All right—this has gone far enough!
He did not because he knew that anyone in the office within earshot of his station would look at him as if he had suddenly gone daft. For a number of good and valid reasons, he was convinced he had not. He was less certain about the sanity of his software.

Twenty minutes into negotiating a price for some Chinese yuan, screen number three, which heretofore had been acting in an entirely prudent and responsible manner, broke in with a special bulletin. War, it declared, had ceased between the Gherash Federation and the United Orb-Urbs of Frebbic, with the Gherashians conceding defeat. News would not reach the public at large for at least six minutes. If he acted quickly…

Parker-Piggott stared at the screen for a long time. An opportunity like this came to a currency trader maybe once or twice in a lifetime. If he moved fast, according to the information appearing on the screen he could make a monstrous killing in the market for Federation
norpits.
Of course, there was no such currency as the
norpit,
just as there were no countries named the Gherash Federation and the United Orb-Urbs of Frebbic. Still, the temptation to act swiftly was one that was ingrained in every currency trader.

It was not like him to enter figures in anything less than a crisp and competent manner. His excuse was that it took a couple of minutes to establish the correct exchange rate between the
norpit
and the
schmerkel.
If he had calculated the appreciation on the forward
schmerkel
contract correctly, then he would end up with a windfall in
norpits
without having to commit any real currency, like dollars or pounds. Not that he would have had to anyway. There is such a thing as carrying a joke too far.

The information provided by the screen turned out to be conservative. News of the Gherash Federation’s defeat did not appear on the third screen for almost fifteen minutes, not six. The creature that delivered the bulletin in a flat nasal tone resembled a warty salamander with a runny nose and unsteady eyes. Watching it, Parker-Piggott reflected on how wonderful it was what creative people could do these days with a few simple wire-and-frame animation programs. Then the creature did something that made his lower jaw drop and his thoughts spin. Of one thing he was abruptly convinced: what he was watching was not the product of some clever CGI specialist’s art. And if not that, then what? The possible conclusions were daunting.

Did it matter? He was beginning to wonder. Regardless, he was suddenly
norpit
-wealthy beyond the dreams of
gorplash
and decided to luxuriate in his victory. He left the office feeling absurdly triumphant, as well as slightly dizzy.

It was dawning on him that this was more than a joke. Much more. Somehow he had tapped, accidentally and unintentionally, into something important. Some
otherness
. That was cyberspace for you: full of inexplicable mathematical folds and twists not even its programmers understood. Otherworldly, elseworldly, different-dimensionally: the definitions didn’t really matter. Definitions were immaterial. What
was
important was that his skills were appreciated in that other place. Why, the resources being placed at his disposal were staggering, an ongoing vote of confidence in his innate talent. That was what mattered—not the source. He drifted through dinner in a daze, wondering how he might persuade Harrods to accept
zwebagls
.