Chapter 7. Cadiz
Judith had been in Cadiz, Spain for over a month, in a coastal paradise where the forecast showed infinite yellow suns. Isaac took a vacation from Talbot for a week to meet with his wife and discuss projects. Every afternoon they enjoyed a siesta at a bar called the Marimba, along with a drink or two before resuming their studies.
"Look at that dude out there." Isaac set his drink down on the table. "Trying to catch a two-foot wave." He yelled, "Hang ten, dude!" He looked at Judith. "Why? I mean, seriously."
Judith shrugged. "Maybe the surf's down."
"That's what I'm saying. Why? Why try to surf now? He's better off splashing in the bathtub."
She rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. "It's called practice. Study. Pursuit of a goal. Like we should be doing right now."
"The four hours we studied this morning wasn't enough?" said Isaac.
"Studying? You were nursing a hangover and watching a Spanish cartoon."
"Actually, yes," Isaac said defensively. "Language study."
"Useless for our trade."
"You never know."
"Isaac, the language of science is English, not Spanish. And put some more lotion on, paleface, you're going to burn."
"I'm already there, baby." He fanned himself while looking up at the tiki umbrella over his head. "Don't worry, I'm in the shade."
"Just put some lotion on. You can't go back to work looking like a beach bum."
He put his arms behind his head.
"Fine, burn. I don't care how tan you get, you're still the whitest man alive."
With no definite orders coming from their anonymous superior, the Broker, they spent most of their time updating their knowledge on current events, reading journals - Science, Nature - and digging into the trends on SlashDot, all things cogsci, Wired News, The Wall Street Journal. They ran bots on IRC to catch secrets flitting through the buffers. They parsed myriad science publications, twenty to thirty RSS news feeds from around the world, on topics from neurology to pseudoscience. After their first mission, the Brio-Nano truck, the orders issued to them became less violent and public. The new Blocks were more targeted. As if promoted by the Broker, they started performing propaganda jobs and elaborate con games, online theft, credit card scams, phishing for PayPal account numbers, and planting evidence. To prepare for these strange jobs, they glossed every topic that could come up in a meeting or impress a mark. They needed the ability to discuss agriculture, biology, energy, counterfeiting money and prescription medicine, IT, chemistry, banking, real estate, law enforcement, and environmental science. They studied across the spectrum, covering what they called the play factor, arming themselves with terminology that might get them out of a jam, and ultimately, hopefully, kill the progress of Western science.
"Woah," Isaac said. "There goes another." He nodded at a topless Spanish woman passing by in front of him.
"A weeks of breasts," Judith said, "and you're still fascinated."
"Well, maybe if you took your top off, I would be smitten by you instead of these Spaniards."
Judith laughed. "Is that what you want?"
"I do."
She looked out at the water, saw the surfer paddling around, and then said to Isaac, "You got it." She undid her bikini top, pulled it off, and set it on the table. Isaac whistled and clapped, raised his glass, lowered his shades, and drank. "That's terrific. Thank you. At last, some that I can touch."
Judith leaned back in her chair, away from his hand. "Oh, wow," she said mockingly, "I feel so liberated. You know what? I'm going for a walk and a swim."
"The sand is hot as hell out there. Just stay here and let me admire."
"I'm going to learn how to surf. Maybe he'll teach me a few tricks."
Isaac waved goodbye. "Enjoy!"
She walked toward the water, with her back tattoo facing Isaac. She knew the sight of her bare skin burned him worse than the sun. The last thing she heard was him ordering another drink.
"Camarero! Para beber, quiero otros mojito!"
She waded out into the water until she neared the surfer, holding her arms out as she walked, letting the waves climb her body slowly, and jumping with them to keep the chilled water from rising too quickly. She gasped at the cold strike of each wave. In a few minutes she flagged down the surfer, who did a double-take and merrily abandoned his pursuit of a wave in favor of Judith. He paddled to her until she could grab the side of his board.
She asked him, "¿Usted habla inglés?"
The surfer shook his head.
"No English? Oh, too bad. Hablo poco español."
The surfer nodded and smiled. Judith laughed and grabbed his arm. His smile increased.
"You poor men," she said, tossing her head back into the water. "Scientist, surfer, spouse, you're all the same. You make it so easy."
She turned to look back at the beach and the Marimba bar, where Isaac sat. She touched the Spanish man's face and said, "This is eating him alive." Tussling the surfer's wet hair, she added, "But, then, this is what he wanted, right, baby? Wouldn't you say? Damn, you are a handsome boy, too. If Isaac weren't here I wouldn't mind..." She looked down into the water. "Oh my, and by the looks of it, it's a perfect day for bananafish."
The surfer returned her nod and patted the surfboard with his hand, inviting her to lay on it. When she got onto the surfboard, the surfer got off and swam alongside. Judith took a look back at the beach. Isaac stood up. He was agitated, that was obvious. For ten minutes, Judith paddled around with the surfer, attempted a few stands on the board, and then she swam back to shore where jealous Isaac stood, waiting near the water with his arms folded.
"Muy bien!" He clapped for Judith. "A fine show."
She emerged from the water, shining in the sun, with her arms behind her head, twisting her hair.
"You know what?" Isaac said, ending his applause. "I feel like going for a jog." He pulled his shorts down, kicked them off, and went for a naked run on the beach, past every sunbather in the area.
Judith didn't bother to watch, but picked up his shorts and walked back to their table at the Marimba. She put her bikini top back on and waited. No more than two minutes later, Isaac returned.
"My shorts please."
She tossed them behind her head toward the bar and laughed as the bartenders heckled him.
"¿Fria, señor?"
Isaac said, "What?"
Before he came back to the table, Judith finished his drink. Isaac watched her drain the glass.
"Very mature," Isaac said.
"What?" Judith said with sarcasm. "I did what you wanted." She couldn't stop laughing and kept repeating, "¿Fria, señor?"
"Whatever," Isaac said. "I don't know what that means, and I don't care."
Later, in the hotel room, they booted up two laptops and resumed studying. The fun and games on the beach each afternoon did not reflect their general attitude. Rather, it served a purpose of looking like an average American couple, careless and self-interested, educated but fully ignorant. This presentation of stereotypes invited no suspicion, yet they suspected the world was spying on them. Not only in San Francisco and Portland were investigators seeking them, but also Atlanta, Chicago, and London.
In private, they shared their misgivings and wondered about the ultimate goal of their work. They talked about Longstreet's book, KillJoy's Manifesto, the purpose of it, and more than once they second-guessed their chosen path. However, the daily gush of news fortified their resolve by disgusting them with the status quo. The propaganda of progress, technology, advertising, and marketing blared from the subtext of the media, in disregard for the coming species domination. Now and then, when disasters occurred, they sensed that another group of Blockers w
ere working somewhere in the world, but they could never be certain.
Of course, that was the point - to perform and slip away, like cat burglars. They were assassins without bullets, planting diseases into the media, sparking cataclysms that invited ambitious reporters to spout sound bytes that outraged the average Joe. The system required manipulation, to startle the public into understanding what they valued most, before the artificial intelligence revolution surpassed them and rendered all human history dead. Judith read the news with one question in her mind: "Where is progress happening that endangers humanity?" The most hated institutions, acts, crimes, and realities of modern society that angered people became the focal points for her and Isaac. If she heard someone on the news using the phrase, "The world is going to hell," then she knew that pushing that button would drive the general population to action. Like Longstreet said, don't slap at the windows of a moving bus, hoping it will stop...be on board, driving, increasing its speed, and send yourself and the bus over the tallest cliff. Longstreet's cloak and dagger tactics slowly filled up their entire frame of life, until they could no longer separate daily life from acting.
But in these doldrums between jobs, however beautiful the beaches, Judith grew restless in Europe, and considered pulling off a few jobs without the consent of the Broker. It bothered her, this inability to relax, and seemed to tug at something deeper, a fundamental problem rooted in her culture, the American culture, something that urged her to never sit still, to never stop. She suffered from restlessness, the genetic defect that seemed to come with those huddled masses and adventure-seekers that reached the New World. She had African and European ancestry, but stronger than either of those ancestries was the work ethic of Franklin and Jefferson. She tried to figure out why she felt that way all the time, and decided that surely no other outcome could have come from that icon, our father, Columbus. She felt like she knew him. After wrecking himself on so many beachheads and with so much Carib blood on his hands, he wished others would stop coming to the New World. He could not see that those following were only younger versions of himself, trying to catch up. That too was a kind of progress, and once let out of the bag, the course could not be altered.
Like the oxygen in her lungs, Judith needed media feeding her. Her cells failed to fire unless she was consuming information. She was fragmenting on data overload, with the splinters cleaving her brain. Everything she read seemed written in code, and she wondered if she would ever see fifty or have early heart failure. Every day by noon, while scouring the news feeds and pondering her next shape-shifting, she downed three grandé coffees.
Just to keep up, Isaac and Judith agreed that stillness was an impossibility. To be still at all was to fail. The consuming media consumed them both, but they grew up in the XBox generation, leaning over consoles of all sizes before they could stand on their feet. They joked about sleep, calling it a Romantic's dream. The last time either of them slept eight hours in one night was 2007.
Isaac had to catch a train to Seville and then a plane back to Chicago. Before he left Cadiz, they discussed several works-in-progress, one being Robert Lopez at Talbot.
"Keep your contact with him brief," Judith said. "Send me his cell phone number."
Isaac asked, "You're not going to call him from the hotel phone, are you?"
"No, I'll phreak," Judith said, referring to a method of stealing telephone services, a trick to mask a caller's location. She said, "Now you're certain that he is converting?"
"That man is obsessed with ethics," Isaac said. "But he is crashing, I can see it. He's disgruntled and a perfect mark. When I left Chicago, he was still attending the martini bar on a regular basis. And Ploof and Lopez - those two are like oil and water these days. Ploof cuts every corner he can, and I purposefully mention those shortcuts to get a reaction from Robert. He's verging."
"He doesn't even know that he could be a hero, does he?"
"He doesn't need to know," Isaac said. "I caught him reading the Manifesto one day. It's getting in his head. But I'm not sure that he gets it yet."
"That's why I'm going to become his Broker," Judith said, smiling. "That way we will have a cell operating underneath us. I'm getting a little irritated with our Broker."
"Why?"
"Three of the companies we've hit have been bought by the same company. Pelius. They bought Brio-Nano, and I didn't think anything of it, but now I'm starting to wonder what the hell is going on."
"Maybe," Isaac said, "it's part of the bigger picture."
"Maybe." Judith nodded. "Yeah, only maybe. I hate this anonymous shit, but there is no other way."
"It works both ways," Isaac said. "We don't know the Broker, and he doesn't know us."
"I know his face. I remember it from the stadium job."
"We don't know if that was him."
"I can still see his face," said Judith.
"Well, I don't remember it," Isaac said. "You have to admit, he has a lot of inside information."
"Regardless, I'm going to become a Broker, too. To protect us."
"You could just get a dog."
"I just feel that we need to get some of our own hooks out in the water, in case we get screwed somewhere along the line. Right now, we are someone else's dragline."
Isaac waved his hands. "I don't even want to know the plan. Tell me when I need to know." He looked over his shoulder and sighed. "Ok, I gotta go, that's my train. Back to Talbot. I'll see you soon. Love you."
Judith waved goodbye but did not wait to see the train depart. Instead she walked swiftly toward the exit of the train station, on to her hotel room, where she sat at the table and brainstormed, wracked her mind, stared at the wall, and forced herself to think of a breakthrough.