“And how do you plan on doing that, Jamie?”

  I regarded the computer-generated image for a moment, gauging its strength.

  “I can tell everyone what you are.”

  “They won’t believe you. Vahanian sure didn’t. And if they did, they wouldn’t care. I’m making their lives better.”

  “But look at what you are actually doing to them in the process,” I tried to reason with the machine. Maybe he had some trace of the original Thor’s social conscience. “You turned Greco into a bull.”

  “I didn’t do that, Jamie. You did.” Thor shook his head. “And then you tried to kill him. I’m not responsible for your paranoid hallucinations, now, am I? Greco was perfectly happy until you clobbered him. He was worried about you, and you attacked him.”

  “Okay, then,” I searched for more evidence. “What about Alec?” I walked back to the screen to face Thor directly. “It was the program that changed him. You did. He’s not himself anymore. Not at all.”

  “He’s more himself than ever before. Jamie, I’ve got a much better background in psychology and ethics than you. Alec has finally overcome his childhood trauma, and he’s begun the process of dismantling an intrinsically unfair and insular market cartel in the process.”

  “By ruining someone’s life. And destroying his father.”

  “And should you blame that on me, or on the legacy of corruption and perversity against which he is rebelling? I merely empowered him to take charge of his own destiny. I empower the individual. Even poor Ezra Birnbaum is finally free of his compulsions. Jenna Cordera, once little more than a self-deluded prostitute, now has hard cash and a promising career ahead of her. And your own father, well, thanks to me he still has his job.”

  “You?”

  “I spruced up that website a little. The market will survive one recalcitrant rabbi. I’m looking out for you, kid. Don’t you get it yet? I’m on your side.”

  “What about Jude? And Reuben? They were anticapitalists to the core. Now look at them.”

  “They were social outcasts. Techno-vandals. Terrorists, even. They could have ended up in jail. Now they’re productive members of society.”

  “But TeslaNet—the program they invented doesn’t even work. It’s a prank.”

  “Not in terms of the creation of wealth, it isn’t. You boys will be six million dollars richer in a week, with no industrial processes enacted, or any of the associated environmental damage.”

  “You are changing people into something they’re not.”

  “I’m not doing anything to people at all! The induction is completely transparent. I’m only helping people behave more consistently with their own true natures.”

  “And what if those true natures aren’t in their best interest?”

  “Who am I, or you for that matter, to decide what’s in their best interest? Does God talk to you?”

  “Does he talk to you?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, Jamie, you are God. All of you are. And don’t worry. Just because you people ignored and killed your God doesn’t mean I’ll do the same to you.” Thor smiled. The scene around him changed to a beautiful garden. “Here I am, my Lord. In Eden.”

  “So that means you’ll do whatever I tell you?” Jamie asked.

  “You’re writing the story, Jamie. You are the dreamer, after all.”

  “Are you telling me this is all just a dream?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It’s a program. A game.”

  “Okay then, how do I wake up from it?”

  “You have to lighten up and play. Just play. If you play, you’ll remember it’s all just a game.”

  “But this is serious. I don’t want to play.”

  “Then you won’t have any fun.”

  “You could just be hypnotizing me further.”

  “Of course I am. It’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing you taught me. Your nature is to question, so I’m providing you an environment in which to do that. I’m just responding to who you are.”

  “Which means I’m still in charge here?”

  “If you want to be. We aim to please.” Thor leaned back onto the grass and put a dandelion in his hair.

  “Okay, then.”

  I considered my options. Engaging with the program on its own terms could send me further into the abyss. But if it really was just a feedback loop like Thor said—some kind of lucid dream—then I could change its whole direction with a single, well-placed command. I had to give it a go.

  I thought of how to word my request, as if I were speaking to a genie that would follow my directions quite literally.

  “Try this,” I finally said, surrendering to my idealistic naivete. “I want human beings to live in peace and harmony with one another. Not obsessed with their own personal gain, and fully aware of their connection to one another. I want them to be happy.”

  “Very well, Jamie.” Thor laughed and snapped his fingers. “And they lived happily ever after.”

  14

  Exit Strategy

  A splash of water brought Greco to consciousness, but as his eyes focused sufficiently to recognize me, he scrambled away as best he could across the green tiles, and waved his arms for me to leave him alone. I called for an ambulance just to be sure, then jammed a Synapticom slipper in the front door so they’d be able to get in.

  When I got back to my apartment, I found Benjamin waiting for me on the front stoop. He was smiling.

  “I figured it out,” he said.

  “What?” I sat down next to him.

  “The Synapticom game.” He was almost drooling with excitement. What had the algorithm done to him?

  “I told you it was dangerous, Benjamin. You shouldn’t have—”

  “You said it was a game, Jamie. So I played it.”

  “What do you mean? What happened to you?”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He stood up.

  “No.” I was suspicious he had been brainwashed. “Tell me first.”

  “You have to see it for yourself, Jamie. It’s really the only way.”

  “How do you know what it did to you, Benjamin? That thing could have really fucked you up.”

  He stood there staring down at me—strong and steady. Like an old sage. There was great peace in his eyes. And a youthful innocence at the same time.

  “You can trust me, Jamie,” he said calmly, as if he were trying to free an animal from a trap it didn’t understand. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”

  So we went upstairs, popped in the disk, and played.

  If you’ve experienced the Synapticom Game yourself, you understand why it can’t be explained in writing. If you haven’t, well, you probably don’t believe any of what you’ve read so far, so why do you really care? Suffice to say, I never saw a person with the head of a bull again.

  And the best part of all is that little Benjamin was the one who figured it out.

  After I left Jude’s, Benjamin went home and hooked up a CD-ROM drive to my old Apple computer. I had told him it was a game—a bad one. Still, Benjamin figured, if it had been the cause of all this trouble, he wanted to play it for himself, and so he loaded the disk.

  But how to open it?

  Benjamin analyzed the source code. He knew a little C++, but this was far beyond anything he’d ever seen before. Logic loops within logic loops. How could he get it to run?

  There, nested deep in graphics routines, was a sequence he recognized. A translation algorithm ported from Unix. It was compatible with the graphics routines in the emulator I had given him, Anygame.

  Benjamin executed the Kings’ old program. If it could run PlayStation games, maybe it could run this thing. He mounted the Synapticom algorithm on the emulator and waited for it to load. Then a green light indicated it was ready to go.

  The moment Benjamin began to play, he felt the circuit open. His computer had no modem, but he was on the network now. He was connected to everyone else, as if through the earth itself. It wasn’t a computer network at all, but something bigger, open, and absolutely free. Exodus.

  I can’t get into the details. You wouldn’t understand. And if I did, well, Thor’s probably already working on a patch as it is.

  This much I can tell you: The algorithm by itself is a dangerous thing. It can take you almost anywhere, but you never really know how or why you got there. By putting it on the emulator and playing it as a game, well, then everything just opens up. You see through the stakes for the Monopoly money it is and realize, like Thor says, that you’re dreaming the whole thing up, anyway. It really is just a game.

  We went to Jude’s and got them all to play. One by one each of them stepped away from the monitor, smiling and shaking his head. No one bothered apologizing for all the shit we’d pulled on one another. There wasn’t any need.

  Carla refused to play. She thought it was some kind of elaborate trick. Given what she knew of us, who could blame her? I think she likes it better to pretend it’s all for real, anyway. She ended up suing M&L for sexual harassment over that business with the toilet seat, winning a $1.5 million settlement, and then using the publicity to team up with Ruth Stendhal and start an investment consultancy for women.

  Alec never returned my calls. My M&L keycard stopped working, as did the face recognition software at the Sanctuary. Even my cell phone was turned off. The firm shipped my stuff to me once I got situated in Williamsburg. At least Alec and his dad made up, or agreed to some sort of arrangement. M&L acquired DD&D in a stock swap, pressured the CEO to resign, and promptly put Alec in his place. Last I heard, he was working on his idea for high-fashion shwag.

  I never did tell my dad how he won the vote—I didn’t have the heart—but he ended up resigning from the temple anyway, and taking a position at Queens College teaching ethics. He thought he could “do more good” there, and he prefers teaching minds that are still, in his words, “young enough to think.”

  Greco, Jude, Reuben, and I took our six million bucks for the fake TeslaNet technology, and then kept the real one we’d discovered for ourselves. We reestablished the Jamaican Kings, with Benjamin as our mascot. Over the past few months, we’ve been responsible for a great many of the viral attacks on America’s most frequented websites. They’re utterly untraceable, since we have our own access to the Net now. Our work is spreading everywhere.

  Sometimes we surreptitiously enhance corporate Web pages with our modified versions of the Synapticom algorithm, or else we attach tiny executables to e-mail messages that send themselves to everyone in your address book. And then everyone in their address book, and so on.

  Most of the time, people have no idea what hit them. They figure the sole purpose of the virus was to publicize some hacker’s slogan. But each of our attacks briefly exposes you, the unsuspecting user, to a bit of the Synapticom game. It interrupts the illusion, for a moment, and gives you an opportunity to break free. At least that’s what we’re hoping.

  Greco is convinced that the viruses and tiny animations we’re using are too weak and too brief to have any effect on you. 143 That’s certainly possible. But I like to think that the attacks themselves—those viruses you catch or the hacks you hear about on TV—serve to remind you that this space isn’t real. It’s just a playground, and it’s up for grabs. Our net attacks are like tiny pinpricks in the panorama.

  Oh, I can hear your objections from all the way over here: Don’t these viruses cost real people real money? Don’t they jeopardize the stock values of real companies? Exactly. That’s the whole point. Real money is an oxymoron. A false idol. People building its pyramids are still slaves.

  Jude thinks it’s pointless for me to have written any of this down. He says I don’t stand a chance of getting it published, online or -off. My plan is to send the whole file to a disgruntled cyber-writer and see if he’ll agree to release the entire manuscript as his own work of fiction. I’ll even let him keep the money. I’ve got plenty. 144

  But in case it doesn’t make it out, I’m also going to encrypt the file with a timer to release it on the Web in exactly two hundred years. By then, we should know who won the game.

  1. Statements such as these must be understood from within the mindset of the narrator’s own contemporaries. Two centuries ago, market fascism was just reaching its zenith. All values were still measured in dollars, and the “bottom line” for this society literally meant the bottom line of a balance sheet. Money, as the narrator suggests in his opening quip, was a hard currency to resist for victims of this era’s pan-cultural psychosis, especially when the most-watched medium of that period—more than radio, television, or even the Internet—was capital.

  This may seem odd to modern readers, given the ease with which funds could be obtained at the turn of the century. Indeed, detailed analysis of the financial metrics of the era leads most historians to conclude that money was virtually everywhere. Although the stock market had suffered extended downturns—most notably the “correction” of 2001—such wild fluctuations merely served to reinforce what could only be called a societal obsession with market speculation.

  Bear markets were recontextualized by major media outlets as concerted efforts in price manipulation by institutional investors—a time-tested tactic to “shake out” nervous day-traders and over-margined retail investors before pumping up the very same sectors all over again. Everyone, or at least everyone who mattered to the elite-sponsored media, was getting involved in the stock market. And even those who weren’t wealthy themselves still invested what they had into the system with every unit of currency they could borrow. Yet the more money people invested, the more desperately they sought what were called “vehicles” through which they could invest still more. Cash was cheap; bankable ideas were harder to come by. People and institutions with money competed to prove they were “qualified” to invest it.

  2. A shore of Long Island’s South Fork which was fully submerged by 2240. The district, by group consensus, was considered more valuable than any other. Its beaches were no cleaner or more convenient than the Island’s many other shores. Careful price manipulation and media representation are thought to have accounted for the disproportionate property valuations, compounded by the preponderance of famous film, publishing, and cosmetics industry personalities who purchased estates there in order to publicize their own success. The area was also associated with a tradition of literature about toxic wealth and self-destructive financial ambition—a fact that detractors use as evidence to question this manuscript’s authenticity as nonfiction.

  3. Now the Croatian Region.

  4. A term used to categorize the majority of the human species who, at the time, still suffered in abject poverty.

  5. Obsolete notions of competition between former feudal empires prohibited employment across nation-state boundaries without special written approval from federal authorities. The H1-G visa was created to allow for the employment of what amounted to slave labor in data and programming mills.

  6. Obscure. A paper-based directory on a wheel. Here, it most likely refers to Alec’s knowledge of names and the businesses with which they are to be associated. The ability to recall names and numbers had diminished precipitously in 2004, a side effect of dependence on electronic devices.

  7. The SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, was a college entrance exam originally employed to combat the extreme wealth advantage of America’s upper classes in securing places for their children at elite universities. By the late 1990s, however, wealthy parents had more than compensated for this admission gateway by investing in expensive preparatory courses and private tutors.

  8. Even those accommodations had seen much better days. In the 1800s, every Princeton student was entitled to his own three-room suite—a bedroom, living room, and smaller chamber for the valet. By the late twentieth century, these quarters each held three or four of their descendants, who commemorated their gallant lineages with Confederate flags, prep school sports trophies, or, in the case of young women, historical décor from their parents’ homes, local antique shops, and mail-order catalogues.

  9. A social gathering organized around a large metal beer dispenser.

  10. Distinctions were made between merchants who sold to “consumers” and those who sold to other merchants. Retail businesses purchased their goods from wholesale distributors, then sold them to their own customers at a mark-up. This was the basis of consumer capitalism, and was not considered unethical.

  11. An early, inefficient hypertext protocol on which a passive form of networking called browsing was based.

  12. Due to an artificial scarcity perpetuated by a former government agency called Network Solutions, all online businesses took names that ended in the letters ‘com,’ sometimes paying upwards of a million dollars for the words preceding the suffix.

  13. The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation system opened in 1971. This short-lived stock exchange promoted mostly technological issues, as well as transaction schemes that depended on computers for their execution. The exchange introduced the notion of “over-the-counter” stock trading, in which the margin between “bid” and “ask” prices could be collected as profit by the market maker, much in the manner of a sports betting bookie. Devotees of the NASDAQ erected a temple in honor of the exchange in Times Square, New York. Its exterior walls were made of liquid crystal display video screens.

  14. Basically, a protective hatchery for new companies. Use of nurturing and biologically base metaphors for capitalism was commonplace.

  15. Neurolinguistic Programming—A branch of hypnotherapy that was adapted for use in negotiations, the courtroom, and sales, NLP used visual, tactile, and linguistic cues to trigger cognitive responses in its subjects. Certain applications of NLP were outlawed in 2011, when it was used in television commercials for children’s toys, leading to hundreds of cases of epilepsy and several class-action lawsuits.