The Media Candidate Read online

  “Okay.”

  “But do not contact him.”

  Sherwood reached for a button, and the holograms at each end of the conference evaporated.

  PART TWO

  Sherwood

  —the past—

  “But lo, men have become the tools of their tools.”

  — Henry David Thoreau

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Singular Lesson

  Fifteen-year-old Sherwood sat on his front porch one Saturday awaiting his monthly issue of Double Agent. It was two days late, and he fantasized the mailman taking it home. “If he does not bring it today,” he mumbled, “I am going to tail him and find out what he did with it.”

  He relived last month’s “true life” spy adventure. Saber Tomb was last seen setting up an inflatable M-53 antenna on the balcony of X-Dog’s apartment to transmit ocean-test data on the latest Q-Line North Korean nuclear submarine. The story was continued just as the North Korean RF source locator had locked on to a side lobe of the transmitter signal and pinpointed the source. Tomb is smart, he thought, but how would he get away?

  Suddenly the robotic mail tricycle cart appeared rolling down the sidewalk. Then the mailman appeared, head bowed to the packet of mail in his hands.

  Sherwood fixed his eyes on that packet, looking for the international orange cover. When it appeared, he sighed with relief. Yes! Come to me Saber Tomb, he thought. Now we will see how you deal with those North Korean devils!

  These heroes had been his real family. The secret codes of a dozen spies crowded his mind like baseball statistics do most boys. He knew each agent’s tricks. He applauded their ingenuity, celebrated their bravery, and imitated their treachery.

  He bought kits for a laser-bounce listening gun and an infrared snooper-scope from the Double Agent classifieds. His financial resources might include the change he forget to give his mother or the few dollars that would disappear from her dresser. She encouraged his enthusiastic purchases of rare stamps, so he solicited cash for those special stamps, then bought some cheap surrogates to satisfy her alacrity. Sometimes she wrote him a check to the stamp company. He preferred cash.

  His parabolic listening device introduced him to the “natural state” of girls. He found that some girls thought about sex as much as he did, which repulsed him and his Victorian model of females.

  He planted an FM wireless microphone under a library table where a group of girls sat, and what he overheard nourished his plan for his first sexual encounter with a girl. He built an audiotape mixer in his basement electronics shop. He taped some erotic music and electronically mixed it with a spoken message of his own that subliminally suggested that the girl was getting very excited and should take her clothes off. His plan, however, assumed he would be able to get a girl to listen to the tape with him. It was never field-tested.

  He bought an ultra-miniature TV camera, which he installed in the ceiling of the girls shower room from the crawl space above it. This became his new window to sex. The sting of his subliminal tape defeat made him aware of a basic shortcoming in that earlier strategy. He’d failed to use the resources available to him, information privy to him alone that could make the difference between victory and defeat. His arrogance propelled him toward spying like oxygen draws a whale to the ocean’s surface.

  He listened again to a conversation he’d recorded with his library bug.

  First Girl: “Gary thinks he’s perfect cool in bed, but he’s, like, really flapping me lately. I just don’t know anymore about him … or any poke.”

  Second Girl: “You still like me, don’t you? You know, I never, like, had anybody like you. You are so major gris.”

  First Girl: “That’s what’s so, like, ripping. I’d rather rip with you than any poke. I think about the other night, like, all the time. I want us to rip again so bad, and I don’t give a damn if I, like, ever see another boy again. Especially that Gary drub.”

  Second Girl: “Why don’t you, like, meet me at my sister’s place tonight? She’s total cool.”

  First Girl: “Okay, but we have to be, like, total prude. I told you what my brother or my father might do to me if they found out I was dishonoring the family.”

  Second Girl: “But you know I'm not religious. ”

  First Girl: “That's even worse. It would be better even if you were, like, Christian. They hate Infidels plenty, but if you're, like, atheist, that's even worse. I told you what they can do to girls that dishonor their family. ”

  Second Girl: “But there are, like, laws, you know. They can't just, you know, totally kill you. Or whatever. ”

  First Girl: “Ha. You just don't get it. My brother says the cops are afraid of us now. You've seen all those riots and stuff on TV. My brother says the president, or somebody, makes them say, like, they're sorry or something if they butt into anything religious. He says there's this law that says nobody can say, like, anything bad about any religion. So he can frag the cops and do anything he wants, as long as it's for our religion. Because nobody, like, dares to say anything against him. ”

  Second Girl: “Well, don’t worry about my sister. She's, like, totally prude for me. She'd never say anything”

  Sherwood played that part over repeatedly and propped up color printouts of Fatima and her lover from his shower collection. The pictures motivated his greatest espionage adventure yet.

  The next day he implemented the plan. His mother would be gone that evening, so the opportunity window was open. It wasn’t easy because he so rarely talked to girls, least of all like Fatima. But as he approached her to a safe distance, something else took charge. Fear retreated. It was replaced by hunter instinct.

  Fatima stood under a tree while Sherwood watched for the right moment. Her dark hair teased an amber neck. A single earring dangled from her left ear. She talked to another girl whose animated gestures didn’t detract his attention from his prey. The two girls laughed, their notes radiating in unison; but he was tuned to just one. Then the second girl began to back away from Fatima, talking then listening, then talking again. Laughter rang once more. The second girl walked away.

  He approached Fatima with eyes fixed. Short, regular steps brought him efficiently and discreetly to engagement range. He’d always found it easier to talk to someone if he imagined himself on an espionage mission. At last, he didn’t have to pretend.

  “Hello, Fatima.”

  A smile spread over her face as she turned around. As the inertia of the dark strands carried them beyond her turn, she reached up to sweep them aside, and saw it was Sherwood. The smile immediately evaporated. Registering a look of disappointment, contrived grace appeared and triumphed. “Hi.”

  “How are your soirees with Sara at her sister’s place?”

  Fatima’s jaw dropped, and she could do nothing more than simply stare at Sherwood. Then her legs automatically retreated a step, and a swallow went down hard as the amber quality of her skin turned chalky.

  “Is she still better than Gary?”

  “What … Where did you—?” Fatima stammered, retreating another step.

  “Is she still major gris?”

  Breathing stopped as her eyes glazed over. Then she willed air back into her lungs. Her next breath was labored and raucous. “What do you want?”

  “Do not be alarmed, Fatima, I can keep secrets.” A grin just began to unfold.

  She turned her head sideways, biting her lips. “How’d you find out?”

  “Suppose you come over to my house this evening, and we can discuss it.”

  “Why should …” She stopped and turned back toward him. The same fragment of a grin greeted her again. “You want me to—”

  His mouth curved slightly upward as his eyes wandered toward the canopy of leaves above them. With the snap of a whip, they rotated back to hers, the incipient grin still pursuing. “Then we can discuss this in a more civilized, and intimate, setting.”

  That evening, Fatima responded to Sherwood’s invitation. This was not
hing like his fantasy with the subliminal tape. This was real flesh. This wasn’t plotting and subterfuge and watching. This was the payoff. This was where the juices of his dreams filled in the gaps of his life. The bottom line, he thought as he collapsed on top of Fatima. Yes, this is the bottom line.

  Sherwood found that sex was the most challenging adventure yet and well worth the effort. And Fatima and Sara were qualified instructors. After his first few encounters, he anticipated wallowing in this sea of soft flesh and liquid touches forever. The intensity was beyond what he could’ve imagined, especially when all three of them mingled purely for his electricity.

  But anxiety swelled in him as their encounters continued. Whether he was unable to relate to others, even on his terms, or he couldn’t submit to any form of control, even to achieve his own agenda, was never resolved. All he knew for sure was that he couldn’t enjoy long-term anything with anyone but himself.

  Their encounters became less frequent and finally stopped. His subterfuge world held the real pleasures that could be delivered day after day, without a price.

  But as many questions as this adventure raised and as intense as his gratification had first been, what he remembered most was a single lesson. For years, he’d followed the exploits of fabled spies and emulated their conquests. Now he understood why such attention is given to this game he’d once played just for fun. He now understood that dealing from a position of superior knowledge made a vast difference in the outcome of the game. This was why spies plied the earth. It wasn’t just for fun.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Dagger for Dorsal Fin

  Jenner was a software engineer in the Dorsal Fin Program in the GX Operations Department of COPE. She worked on the Dorsal Fin team for several years and was the most respected and reclusive software geek there. She had developed control software and firmware for various stages of robotic demonstration and prototype components. The Dorsal Fin program manager was grateful to her for solving a couple of knotty control problems that had threatened the very existence of the program.

  At a routine Monday morning technical review in 2045, Jenner commented, “I just can’t make any progress using those jerks in Engineering, and I don’t have time to do the feedback-loop optimization myself. I’ve got all I can do keeping three programmers and an analyst busy. We’re falling behind in the hardware, and we just aren’t going to get there using Engineering support like we’re supposed to.”

  “Jesus, Jenner!” her boss said, shaking his head. “You know how the Engineering AD gets on my boss’s ass every time he finds out we’re going around Engineering for support. And you know Jerry believes in the gravitational theory of management—and so do I!”

  “Yeah, I know. Shit roles downhill.”

  “Right! And you’re in the valley.”

  “Okay,” Jenner said, “Bottom line is I’ve got to use Engineering because you don’t want to piss off your boss. But if I don’t get somebody good and dedicated, you’re going to see a lot more schedule flags.”

  “Look. Three times I’ve gotten you dedicated help from Engineering.”

  “Yeah, the first guy was dedicated to retirement. The most work I got out of him was a nice design for his cabin up at Tahoe. Then there was that broad that really liked me. She dedicated a poem to me. And then there was that Mormon creep that kept talking to me about endowments. I think he was dedicating a new synagogue or something. I’ve had enough COPE dedication.”

  Her boss sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I talked to Jerry on Friday because I figured you might hit me with this. Here’s the deal, and don’t yell at me until I finish. E-4 has this hotshot controls guy. He’s been working on some sandbox stuff that hasn’t been going anywhere, you know, Jimmy’s group? But this guy, Sherwood, is really a top nerd, and we can have him.”

  “Oh, right! And the only problem is he carries a chain saw in a holster.”

  “No, listen. He’s not that bad. Jimmy says he’s a little weird. He’s got a couple of women over there that complain about this guy being kind of creepy. The word is, Jimmy’s sleeping with one of the gals, and she laid the law down about getting rid of this guy, so Jimmy’s smart enough to know what that means. So we can have him.”

  “Since when is it against the law for an engineer to be weird? Hell, we ought to all be in the bumper room. So when can I interview this guy?”

  Jenner’s boss grinned. “They’re moving his stuff over here this morning. He’s going in Jacob’s old office, you know, next to—”

  “I know where it is! But don’t I get anything to say about it? After all, he’s going to be working for me. Besides, if Jimmy hired him, he probably can’t even zip his own fly. How we ever let some retired colonel have a position of authority around here I’ll never figure out.”

  “But Jimmy didn’t hire him,” her boss said. “He came in through the FBI window when we moved.”

  “You mean we’re getting an FBI retread? I don’t like this!”

  The other task managers had been silent throughout this exchange. The mechanical engineer then spoke up. “We’ve been after you for a month for the bandwidth requirements of each leg joint, and you don’t even have time for that. That affects stiffness, damping coefficient, moment, everything. I think you need this guy, and you ought to just go ahead and do it, and worry about his bad personal habits later.”

  Thus, Sherwood had become a member of the Dorsal Fin team. All he knew about Dorsal Fin was that it was developing the world’s most advanced robots for COPE and that they had something to do with spying and espionage.

  Working for Jenner was a new kind of experience. Here, at last, was a human who thought like the machines she attempted to master. She integrated herself into the very controls she cultivated. It was as if her ancestors had pulled themselves up, not from the sea, but from a cauldron of integrated circuits, memory chips, and transimpedence amplifiers. Sherwood was awed by a human being for the first time in his life.

  Sherwood lived up to everything Jenner’s boss had said about him. He felt more intimacy with machines than he could with mere humans. They were superior to humans, but inferior to him, of course. His intuitive notion of how a robot acts was a perfect complement to Jenner’s sensitivity to its thought process.

  The Dorsal Fin staff had soon discovered his other side, too. He was at least as weird as they’d been led to believe, living some existence to which they were excluded. His arrogance broadcast from him like a drop of gasoline blankets a water puddle, yet stays separate from the water.

  He and Jenner worked together on many robot, control-system problems. He had addressed elements of these problems in school and in the Engineering sandbox; but now these problems awaited real, not academic, solutions. It ignited a passion in him like his treachery in high school. He looked at it as one of the great spy-technology sagas of history.

  An early problem was to analyze the electronic feedback from the exoskeletal sensors of a robot leg so that it would apply exactly the right amount of current to each internal actuator to affect the desired mechanical response. This evolved into optimizing the shape each leg made and its rotational inertia while walking to maximize its strength and accuracy and minimize its power consumption. All the while he envisioned the robot’s ultimate function, or at least his fantasy of it.

  After finally receiving the required security clearances, tickets as they called them, Sherwood had been “read in” to the Dorsal Fin program; that is, he was given access to whatever classified information he needed. With these tickets, he learned much more about COPE applications such as reconnaissance, intimidation, and burglary. But he knew there was more. He and Jenner were principal members of the small team that took the most advanced robots from contractors in Silicon Valley and developed the first fully independent COPE espionage spider. They had worked together for several years refining these operational soulless agents without being certain exactly what the objective of the robot was.

  * * *
/>   One day, the AD for Special Projects, the Asp as he was known informally, called Sherwood and Jenner into his office. The office was a many-walled setting comforted by windows on two sides. The view was bucolic with grass, trees, and flowers gracing some unseen summit. Potted plants abounded within, each seeking a freedom it could sense only through glass. The decor was upbeat with oils and watercolors.

  The Asp was silvered by a subtle wave ascending from his forehead. He spoke articulately, but not pedantically. His successful career had placed him in a position of extreme importance, in fact, one of higher authority in some respects, than his boss, the Director of COPE, and even her boss, the Secretary of the Electorate. He was just shy of tall and dressed classic, but comfortable. A dimple in his chin competed with formal ebony eyes.

  He remained standing after seeing his guests seated, then walked to the window behind his desk where he stood with his hands behind his back. Shortly, he turned to face them. “As you can see, I’m sidestepping the chain of command, but I need this flexibility to cut through the bureaucracy when national interests dictate. I’ve been tasked by a high authority to discretely solve a problem that could affect the hard-won order of our society.” The brightness of the window behind him washed out his features, creating an almost ghost-like figure. Jenner squinted and turned her head slightly to adjust to the scene. Sherwood watched squarely, eyes wide open, allowing his pupils to adjust for him.

  “I try to keep track of the efforts of my staff, especially in such critical areas as Dorsal Fin. Frankly, I’ve been more than a little dazzled by the work you two have done. I think you’re a team—and a damned impressive one. I’ve called you two here to invoke your help for the final step in the robot development—to put teeth into the program, so to speak. What we need to do now can’t be done by contractors because of its sensitive nature, and the two of you together, I believe, can make it happen.”