Prologue
Colby motioned for his driver to slow down when he saw the mileage sign for how far out they were from Flagstaff. The fall dusk was casting a ghostly violet with a small flecking of stars behind the 2024 Tesla; with the cloud music player in the car blaring out some Mulata Astatke on repeat, the mellow jazzy sounds were almost putting Colby to sleep. His sachet of Xtandi had been dwindling for the past four hundred miles, so Colby was more concerned about whether attendant dizziness and diarrhea were about to get the best of him. Fatima leaned in towards the front seat and whispered into his ear, “Habibi.” Although his eyelids were drooping, he knew that if that even if the electrical grid was still intact in Nye County, getting a room at the Inn was going to require more than a working credit card. Cash was still circulated and used, but for the life of him, he couldn’t fathom why. Although TV broadcasts had grown mostly dark, people were still plugged in….That was almost a given…
No, what had Colby preoccupied was the possibility of looters, or aggressively paranoid looters prone to shoot first before plundering their victims. Colby had switched his insert off once they had left Texas; the constant disorientation from the net-virtual world and the onrush of sagebrush and tumbleweed on the side of the road were not treating him too well, especially when one mixed in the dizziness from the Xtandi. Although the pharmacy sachet didn’t explicitly list nausea as a likely side-effect, and Colby had never suffered from motion sickness when he was younger, he still couldn’t maintain equilibrium with the natural reality and the virtual world going on simultaneously. At least not with the drugs in his system.
The driver flicked on the blinker, and he fingered his jacket’s breast pocket for his pack of contraband Camels. Colby snickered, and gently placed his hands on the dash, “I know you have been hankering to light up since we passed Clovis. Really, ten minutes, give or take, won’t hurt us–“
Fatima blurted out in a hushed tone, “…But, we need to find a place to sleep for the night.”
The driver let out a slow sigh and turned off his blinker. Colby hadn’t seen another car’s lights for at least forty-five minutes. If he wasn’t so drowsy, this normally would have made him suspicious. Colby knew that ever since they left Amarillo after lunch, that the roadblocks could be viewed as a portentous foretelling. Every major metropolitan area from even before they crossed the Mississippi had been peppered with exiting and entering roadblocks. He considered their diminishing presence as mostly a lack of the National Guard’s resources, but when the last line of soldiers in Texas had five of their guys donning hazmat suits, he knew that things were different. He was ruminating on what they might mean, but he could guess what that meant after passing five cities with hardly any visible car traffic visible from the interstate. Either people were hunkering down in their bunkers, cellars, or whatever panic rooms they had fashioned, or the contagion had wiped out the more densely populated towns. Colby and his fellow traveling companions knew to wear facemasks and gloves when in the presence of others and observed this habit religiously ever since they had set out from Baltimore more than a month ago, but he hadn’t encountered a live civilian besides his team wearing anything less than full body protection since Texas. Although the soldiers in Amarillo weren’t too nosey, they eyed Colby’s car-mates with an ever growing degree of fear. They kept demanding his driver only crack their windshield a few inches. He could tell that the less they had to interact with him and his fellow passengers, the better they felt.
Colby’s driver yawned enthusiastically, and in mid-stretch, Fatima opened up her backseat Web-tray and began sliding through the touchscreen until she got back to her incoming emails.
“Colb, I just got a message from Nigel. He says that the Auto-Drive network has been hijacked by NSA operatives.” The Auto-Drive network would influence the other drivers out on the road, but this posed another issue. Would auto-inserts be next? The driver had his vehicle set on manual control since they had passed through Texas, but his need to check in with cell members periodically had been a necessity throughout their trip. So, he had to resort to his insert from time to time. Since Fatima was able to check in with her underground contacts, subversive and alternative news feeds online, they still had a way to plug in with the outside world. And, Colby needed to disconnect. But, with some roads having lost their street lights and traffic lights, the horizon now demanded their driver’s undivided attention.
“Fatima,” Colby released the words out deliberately with clenched teeth now, his thoughts obscured from the dizziness, “what do you think about all of us up here riding upfront stay offline as well? We have a very recent map, which renders the GPS system–”
“Just a sec, hon; I am getting an IM saying they have spotted my location based on my IP. Let me try some spoofing. What is the password for the VPN again?”
“Rastafarian love mojo, underscore, 420”
Fatima snickered while she activated the cloaking software. For Colby this type of personalized pinging from the NSA was disconcerting; even though it didn’t prove they had information on their physical whereabouts, if they could pinpoint the local wireless carrier switch, then they could be running out of time off-grid.
Colby reached out and clutched his driver’s shoulder immediately, and with one quick swipe turned off the insert at his temple. He was a little too late since the driver was already drooling with his eyelids drooping. Fatima shrieked as Colby attempted to take control of the wheel. He cursed himself for the idiot move: he wasn’t a driving instructor taking over the car’s guidance with his own passenger side driving wheel. He yelled out, “Rick! Ricky!! Ricky Donovan!!!”
He was praying to God that Rick’s foot would ease off of the accelerator soon. Without having any guardrails, Colby could expect the car to veer onto some tumbleweeds and sagebrush soon enough, and the terrain was mostly flat. But, he needed the vehicle to slow down. And, stop. Stop!
When news reports first started appearing out of Guinea-Bissau of the mutated strain of Ebola, no one was really paying attention, at least not those across the Atlantic. They were busy watching the tabloid reports coming in about Michael Alig’s death in Prince Harry’s château in Bordeaux. The cause of death was suspicious, so the local gendarmerie supporting the hamlets near Cognac had set up massive checkpoints in late December of 2026. Although the Sorgente group had handled the mansion’s finances with a considerable amount of financial dexterity and acumen since 2010, when Prince Harry turned 31 in 2015, he had met a windfall of an inheritance when the Duke of York, his uncle Prince Andrew, named him sole beneficiary of his interests in the Sorgente group; the escalating scandals sprouting from the sex slave allegations in early 2015 eventually brought on too much stress for Andrew’s congenital heart arrhythmia, a condition he had been oblivious to until it was too late. Since this share was a majority portion, Prince Harry saw an opportunity to diversify the family’s estate; single life had brought plenty of temptations as he aged into his late thirties, and a certain odd mix of hanger-on’s and shady characters found their way into his Soho soirees and bohemian excursions that usually lasted well into the small hours. By the early third decade, the Prince would find himself dealing with the loss of his father, after having lost out to an excruciating and debilitating case of Parkinson’s, in a myriad of self-destructive bouts of addiction to hashish and opium. After a series of unsuccessful stints in the most luxurious and expensive rehab facilities based in and around London, he finally bottomed out in the spring of 2023 and found refuge at the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, (the same resort Eric Clapton founded). Once there, he struck an unlikely friendship with another relapsing addict, Michael Alig; Alig had bounced around the club circuits throughout Europe for about ten years after his release on parole in May of 2014. He eventually found himself stranded in Algiers, much to the chagrin of his parole officer back in New York. When his newest lover agreed to help him out with an all-expense paid three weeks at Crossroads Centre, Michael gave him a long and tight embrace and lumbered onto the tarmac.
The program was an invigorating success, and he had even purged himself of his persistent cigarette habit. Funnily enough, this weaning process got him into the habit of mooching Nicorette lozenges off some of the other patients. And, he found his friendliest supplier in Prince Harry. Due to the age gap between the two men and their drastically different backgrounds, they both felt an uninhibited ease in discussing their lives. Harry had never met someone who could discuss his adventures with drugs, violence and the New York party scene in the late eighties with such detachment, and in much the same way, Alig found an endless supply of sympathy for this young man’s loss of a mother when he was so young. They both shared the indelible trauma of being celebrity’s capricious victim. Harry’s face would go flush when recounting to Alig how it would still come up, although not as often as it used to in the early aught’ s, in interviews the moment when reporters would inquire about his mother. Alig would just listen and appreciate the fact this was the burden of those blessed with the rare combination of fame and wealth: they could hardly count on one hand the number of people who could relate to their periods of isolation and contempt from the masses. Prince Harry had no more control of the actions his mother took and the destructive driving methods her driver took on the night of August 31st, 1997 than he did over his hair color or his allergy to shellfish. This relationship, safe from outside contamination, came at a crucial time in Harry’s life. And, so, after they had both finished the full course of their treatment plan at Crossroads in June of 2023, Harry took Alig back to London; and they became quite literally inseparable. Once his newfound acquaintance, who came from such noble stock as the royal house of Wales, took a liking to the party promotional notoriety Alig had achieved in the late 80’s, Alig saw an opportunity to strike up connections in even more auspicious circles than he had with the nouveau riche he had accumulated back in the states. But, this time, things would be different, things would be drug-free.
Alig did still have that nagging shadow of what had gotten him incarcerated back in the states in the late nineties: the murder of one Andre Melendez. But, surprisingly enough, Prince Harry was bound and determined to pave a way for him with every member of his coterie and all of his old army mates. It seemed that by the summer of 2024, Michael found himself hobnobbing with not only all types of patrons of the arts hailing from old blue-blooded Europe but even welcomed into the staid and tony gentlemen clubs of London and Westminster. It wasn’t uncommon for him to find himself suiting up in the finest evening wear to have cocktails with the upper crust debutantes and socialite wives of corporate board members. But, Harry made sure to maintain a low profile for Michael in all matters relating to the press: he found that Alig was best at his job when working in the shadows, moving people around almost like chess pieces at any type of charity, royal function, or some foundation fund-raising event. Seating arrangements could make the world of difference, so Alig’s grasp of any type of minuscule backbiting or gossip wars playing out amongst Harry’s passel of celebrities and posh characters was essential to keeping the right conflicts brewing whilst maintaining that delicate cold war temperature thus preventing waxing melodramas from exploding. When it came to inviting the right A-list personality, reality television star, a tabloid journalist, or even some past-prime novelist that couldn’t maintain sobriety past nine pm, Alig knew the perfect roster for an entertaining evening. Within a year, Alig was responsible for a myriad of consortiums spanning from the Land Mine Relief Agency for Africa, to the Education Foundation for Afghanistan Children, and even including the Agency for Rescuing Exploited Children in Southeast Asia. But, his duties and his handling of them didn’t belie the true extent of how seriously he took them: no, he legitimately elevated their donation streams by upwards of thirty percent in the course of a year, but he also managed to position the key spokespeople and photo-ops that focused attention on the people most in need for each cause. When it came to using pop stardom and the manipulation of the image to help finance the causes Harry felt most passionate about, as well as those his mother stressed to him before she died, Alig was no paper tiger.
Basically, all the press knew about his relationship with Prince Harry was that he helped organize parties. So, it naturally came as sort of an abrupt shock to the glitterati and paparazzi when Michael Alig was found to be the victim of the same type of foul play he had visited upon someone else thirty years prior. When the cleaning lady appeared on the morning of December 26th, she expected there to be a mess of leftovers from the Christmas festivities, but Alig had kept a rather meticulous and antiseptic care of the kitchen and living quarters he had been using within the chateau since September. What the live-in domestic noticed as odd was the Bugatti Veyron’s driver door was still ajar with euro coins and a few keys littering the cobblestone driver leading up to the front door almost like crumbs inviting her into the domicile.
Margarite Huppert shuffled from the gray morning into the foyer with no more reason to expect seeing dismembered body parts stuffed into about four boxes than she would have anticipated seeing Vishnu making an appearance at Lourdes. Being a proud and militant atheist, Margarite would most likely have no hopes of seeing either, but she felt a ghostly chill when she almost slipped on an obscured blood puddle. She was able to keep her balance and instead of fleeing like the old maid she was, she flicked on the nearest lamp she could reach. Her gaze slowly panned from right to left as her eyes adjusted to the fluorescent light. She not only recognized Michael’s Tateossian cufflinks reflecting the growing sunlight coming in from behind her back but when she caught the pair of open, forlorn eyes in the fourth box staring back at her, she knew who the body parts belonged to. For an absurd second, she intuited a blink or a wink, but she knew his sense of humor wouldn’t survive the loss of motor functions. She caught herself before instinctively mouthing the Ave Maria; she followed his gaze back to the wall behind her, and when she distinguished the dark crimson that had already started to dry, she found herself reading the letters’ message in a faltering whisper:
AVENGING ANGEL STRIKES BACK, YOU BITCH!
The nearest SKY reporters had already stationed their satellite van outside the château’s garden wall by noon; after the teletype came into the London office about a dismembered body found in the Chateau Mirambeau, no one gave it a second thought, until Trevor Edington, a middle-aged producer who once covered Buckingham palace, was carbon copied on the email chain at around three am. When he sat there, tapping the pen on his forehead for about the fiftieth second, Hugh Baines, eased up beside him and flipped on his insert, to log into the web’s archive about the Brit’s mansion. Hugh yielded to the temptation to pester his self-professed mentor as much as possible, since this journalistic veteran’s reputation, who had the Afghanistan IED shrapnel in his shin to prove his reporter’s mettle, for sharpening prose in record speed for deadlines stressed to Hugh that it would take years to match Trevor.
“What ya thinkin’, Trev?”
Edington glanced at the sheepish intern for a brief second and sighed. He was this close to realizing the mansion belonged to Prince Harry when Hugh caught the blurb from the Times Money section about the handover of majority shares to Prince Harry back in 2018. Sadly, the rumpled Trevor was not only in need of a swig of coffee, but he was always remiss in using his web insert. He used the internet through regular terminals and smartphones, but he was always leery of getting any type of elective implants put into his body, especially his face.
“Piss off, you ginger snapper! Can’t you see I’m trying to think here?! You know what that means don’t you? Or, are you busy watching porn with one eye while you scan the tele-queue for anything trashy?”
Hugh’s smirk almost changed into a grimace. How did Trevor know he could maintain split-screen monitoring of the sex-tubes with one eye while working with the other eye?
“Trev, I think I have an idea on why you are so flummoxed.” Hugh placed his hand on Trevor’s pudgy shoulder. This man should try pumping some free weights once in a bloody while. Trevor sighed and looked back at the gargantuan monitor attached to their news “war” room.
“Lay it on me, kid. What has me flummoxed?”
“The estate belongs to Prince Harry, you muppet. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Trevor threw his pen across the floor and got his phablet’s stylus on hand for some quick notes. He wheeled his rolling desk chair and raced over to the holograph board within a few inches of almost crashing into it. He remained seated while he started writing an instant message to their Executive Producer, on holiday on his boat near Greece.
“It means, you bleeding bastard son of mine that we need to dispatch a crew there as in this morning before the tube gets everyone settled into their desks up here on our floor!”
“It means you love me, don’t you, you boffin.”
“Love you? Listen here, you ponce, with this story, I will bugger you live on worldwide satellite. Boy, get on the webcam and get a conference call with anyone near the Chunnel, ASAP. I am going to get budget wired for a week’s stay there. It is easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”
While the news team piled up into the van parked outside of Folkestone, Kent, cranking up the interior heating vents furiously as Candice Watson jotted down a few more notes for her line of questioning with the local police, the teletype news feed blurted out an intriguing few sentences, an odd fragment not uncharacteristic about Africa, especially for the western countries. Almost buried within all the collage of ethnic and religious conflicts still plaguing the continent, not to mention the diseases that seemed to decimate the populations every few years, was a story about a recent outbreak of Ebola in and around the town of Bolama in the backwaters of the former Portuguese colony, Guinea-Bissau. Its recent turn of events wasn’t too remarkable since the country had been fighting isolated cases of Ebola for going on two months now. But, what was newsworthy was the fact that the Western doctors sent there to contain the epidemic had suffered such immense losses themselves that their numbers had dwindled down to five. Their rapid decline had transpired within a week, but what was most alarming was the statement issued from Gerhard Ganz, the Austrian epidemiologist working in conjunction with Partners in Health and Doctors without Borders. His team had stumbled upon a drug-resistant strain within the past couple of weeks; in fact, ZMapp seemed completely ineffective in halting the symptoms. Moreover, those patients and doctors who seemed most susceptible to infection were those who had the web-insert implanted into their right eye sockets. But, at the time any correlation between to the two was completely lost to Ganz. Likewise, the brief blurb caught nothing more than a passing glance from the major news agencies at the time.
Everyone thought the next big thing to sweep away the leading smartphone manufacturers by the Christmas shopping season of 2022 would either be from the design rooms within the Google Glass division or from some watch/smartphone creative group from Samsung. No one gave much thought to a fledgling unheard-of-company based in Colorado to come up with something organic. Most companies didn’t want to go there. But, Halcyon Industries had the foresight to appreciate how the ubiquity of smartphones had plateaued as well as the insatiable need for everyone to remain connected to all types of cyberspheres. It had all reached a technological ceiling; there was nowhere else for the devices to go except inside human tissue. With advances briskly rolling forward in optical transmission devices for the blind, there was bound to be a breakthrough, and when Salvatore Torreto came on board the design team, he had to sign the same nondisclosure agreements just like everyone else. He relocated to Aspen with his wife and kids in October of 2020, and his boys, Roberto at 9 and Antonio at 7, acclimated soon enough and were even correcting their father on his usage of everyday slang. Salvatore had studied the optical nerve, the eye, visual cortex, retinal sensors, for at least twenty years in Milan, and his research had helped Ophthalmologists throughout the world. His work had established some initial renown when he devised an electronic prosthetic that eradicated color blindness. But, what put him on the radar of Halcyon Industries inner sanctum of design and patents division was when he had announced in Zurich the ability to tether a test subject’s visual cortex and occipital lobe to a computer. When word of this caught the rumor mill and water cooler discussions, Veronica Jennings was incredulous. Since it was her job to parse through fantasy and fact as acting head of Research and Design in Patents, she usually credited her bullshit detector to be vastly superior to that of her peers. This revolutionary innovation owed its notoriety to Torreto’s demonstration on Youtube in March of 2019. She sauntered up to the trio of R & D guys she would occasionally share an e-cigarette with her during the morning in the courtyard; the biting cold had her zipping up her windbreaker as she closed the door behind her. Krishna was the first of the trio to dispense a quick good morning.
“…. I’m telling you, Buboy, this is a complete game-changer. Don’t you realize the potential for virtual connectivity?”
Buboy Rivera turned his back to the bright, crisp sun, shooting through the fresh foliage in the narrow-leaf cottonwoods sheltering the offices there at Halcyon. He looked over at Veronica, who had inveigled herself into the trio’s circle.
“Look, I don’t even dare to claim expertise in the marketing aspect, but I just know that people don’t tend to splurge on getting something like the Borg put into the bodies, especially something that has to do with their gray matter.” Since Veronica had no frame of reference for their topic of discussion, she simply kept listening. “Not to mention the immune resistance complications that are bound to arise. I took my fair share of human biology courses back in Manila. I don’t see the public being there yet.” Veronica’s attention was coiled up like a snake. What in the world is getting these two guys so excited at this hour of the morning? It isn’t soccer, and it isn’t anything going on with the stand-alone premium shows from HBO or AMC that always dominates her teams’ idle banter on every Monday morning. And, why was Guillermo Cervantes so damn quiet?! He stood there rolling his e-cig between his fingers as though he were a cardsharp. His Zen stoicism was annoying the hell out of her. She leaned in towards him almost a few inches from his ear and whispered.
“What’s up, Mo? What are they amped up about? Did they put meth in their e-cigs this time? I haven’t even gotten a full cup of coffee in me yet.”
He put his arm on her shoulder and whispered back to her as though they were spies trading cold war secrets to keep the freed world free or to bring it down. He opened up his jacket and simply pulled up the YouTube video of Torreto in Zurich. “Come with me to the shade.” He pulled her behind him to the corner of the courtyard out of the expanding sunlight. This was atypical for Guillermo to touch her or anyone for that matter. The man rarely even shook people’s hands. Veronica swore he was a complete and certified germaphobe. He flipped open his 10th generation HTC phablet and set the YouTube channel to holo mode. There on the shaded charcoal wall the picture expanded to about eight by ten inches in high definition. Once her eyes adjusted to the contrast and tint, she made out a fortyish looking man no higher than five foot six with a thin tie splattered with gauche pastels. His lab coat had mustard stains, and he had this morose look in his eyes as he held his test subject’s hand. Within five minutes of the video, it became obvious that he stood in front of about thirty or so science correspondents. Camera flashes flickered across Salvatore Torreto and his human guinea pig, who had a thin wire seemingly taped to his right temple, an inch or two above his ear.
“Buongiorno, a-ladies and a-gentlemen. Today, I want to reveal to you all the discoveries of me and my team. This has been a mix of cooperations from the Neurology a Departamento at the Cambridge as well as the great minds in a Roma. I want to turn on the display for a everybody here. Now, everyone look to here, please.” Salvatore sidestepped to the plasma monitor attached to the wall; the laboratory had a piss-yellow hue to the walls; they obviously hadn’t wasted money on the décor. For a brief second, Salvatore looked directly into the camera, and for some absurd reason, Veronica felt like he was looking directly at her. The monitor revealed a prosaic display of the Windows Explosion OS active in holo mode. He turned back to glance at the captive audience and a brief sneer flickered as he turned back to the patient whose eyes had remained closed up until Salvatore finished his preliminary remarks. “Luca, could you please a scroll over and open up the folders on the hard drive?”
Luca stared at the screen for about a full minute. A few sighs exhaled amongst the spectators as the tension agitated the most patient of journalists assembled there. You could almost sense people checking their watches or sneaking a peek at their Social Media newsfeeds as the antiquated analog clock above the monitor flicked its second hand in clinical, metronome-like accuracy. But, the whole time, Torreto never took his eyes off of the monitor. When the clock measured a full minute, he opened his mouth as though to dampen any growing doubts; as soon as he did so, the virtual mouse on the screen gently moved to the menu options. An audible gasp erupted within the group of reporters, as the mouse’s movements picked up speed and Luca had already burrowed down within the hard drive and pulled up his subfolder containing his photo spread from his summer vacation. A barrage of pictures showcasing his wife and two-year-old son started streaming across the holographic display. Sandcastles, topless women in the background sunbathing, and corpulent silver-haired men decked out in speedos lazed on towels on the Balkan beach, all flashed as he would flash captions under each photo. What made the crowd “ooh” and “ah” was the fact that these captions were typed out live in front of all to see their immediacy. His alacrity in providing a nonverbal slide show of his summer vacation sent a chill through the room. Veronica felt a bead of sweat on her brow as the video closed in at the last two minutes. An earthquake, typhoon, and forest fire all could have met up outside the offices of Halcyon Industries, and at that exact moment, she couldn’t have cared less. She had never hyperventilated in her life, but she was beginning to get the feeling she had an inkling of what the sensation felt like. This was a BCI that appeared on the surface as crude and not much more advanced than those pioneered by the likes of Nicolelis or those from the likes of Donoghue, Schwartz, and Andersen. Veronica’s old boyfriend, Victor, from her days at Florida State, was an avid dilettante in matters of neuroimaging; his interest morphed from the level of casual reader to the point where he had spent months staking out material for his thesis.
As the timer of the YouTube video of Torreto rapidly inched towards the stop point, facts flitted across her in a wash of post-coital sessions and late night discussions with Victor and his colleagues from FSU’s Neuroscience department down at Bullwinkle’s. She recalled Victor always repeating the 2004 trial of Leuthardt and Moran in St. Louis setting up a teenage boy to where he could remotely play space invaders. But, she redacted the significance of this when she recalled this test was ancillary. What Victor’s sparring partners always used as a gadfly to his fanatical devotion to the subject was that the researchers had failed to jump the hurdle of noninvasive implants. The video clip was down to the last forty-five seconds now….Veronica puffed on her e-cig as she started connecting her decade-old memories to the import of this viral video. Think, girl, think! No, this wasn’t in college, this was when they had already gone their separate ways: she had graduated and started her entry level job at Samsung in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, and Victor had wound up at MIT. Victor had forwarded a blurb from the Guardian about the University of Minnesota led by Bin He; in 2013 they had flagged the key signals triggered by motor imagination to the point where their non-invasive EEG mind to computer interface allowed a subject to fly a virtual helicopter in a three-dimensional environment. Before she could reply to his email, he had her on the phone, frantically spitting out technical and neurological jargon she would soon forget as soon as she got off the phone. Why couldn’t all of her exes simply move on and keep their postgraduate obsessions far removed from her new life? But, then it came back to her as he almost spat out the words, “Vero, this genius had a specimen guide a remote controlled helicopter through an obstacle course!”
The footage wound down to the last fifteen seconds while the mouse cursor danced back and forth across the monitor in Zurich. Before she got off the phone with Victor she couldn’t forget him almost shouting out to her, “Vero, the money is in the next generation of establishing synergy. You really need to listen to me here! Avery Biomedical and Stony Brook have been working on this since 2004. I am not pulling your leg. You remember me telling you about Ambient with the Audeo in 08? They already can translate unpronounced speech!” She looked over at Buboy and Krishna almost quarreling at a fevered pitch; Buboy was counting off his points by using his fingers, while Krishna stood there with his hands on his hips shaking his head in defiance. In her mind, she was replaying the penultimate conversation she would ever have with Victor before they soon lost complete interest in each other’s lives as the counter got down to the last eight seconds…It was though Victor was mouthing the words though Torreto as he held court with the gripped attention of the audience. “Look, Vero, I have to get back to work, but I’m telling you to keep your eyes peeled in the next five to ten years for something radical. You won’t be able to say I never warned you–“
Her call dropped during that conversation, but she couldn’t shake off the remembrance of the last email she got from Victor later in February of 2014. A company dedicated to constructing exoskeletons for paraplegics and quadriplegics started work on developing a wireless BCI…She didn’t bother calling him up that time as she was busy trying to move into a new apartment five miles outside of Ridgefield Park. In the remaining four seconds of the clip on Youtube, which had now garnered five million views, she saw Luca gently swipe the cursor over to his Explosion’s browser, open it up the HTML row and start typing in the address of google.com. The last words from Torreto’s lips were as follows:
“Ladies and a gentlemen: I am pleased to announce that this prototype is already abbandonato for a more cheap one we will install on the epidural tissue near the eye. We a-hope by a two months to make it a-palare with 802 WLAN compresi 2.4, 3.6, 4.9, 5, and 5.9 GHz bands. And, then…then we will create receptivity with GSM to LTE carriers….” Guillermo clasped his phone shut and winked at her.
“Ms. Jennings, you see what all the commotion is about this beautiful, spring morning, don’t you? While I am pleased to break the news to you, I know that your mind is racing. I mean no disrespect when I know you will be contacting our European branch on having their HR VP start making overtures to a one, Salvatore Torreto.” Veronica was already yelling over to Krishna and Buboy an indecipherable list of topics to scour online for before Close of Business that Monday.
“Guillermo, cut the bull; you know this means we will be tied up for the next five months. And, that is completely dependent on whether we can get him here. And, don’t ever call me by my last name. I’m five years younger than you.” Guillermo smiled at his boss and almost curtseyed as they made their way back inside the balmy office.
They did manage to rope in Torreto within a month; of course courting an established expert in his field didn’t come cheap. He knew that he would be in high demand, even from the likes of Apple. But, what attracted him the most to Halcyon, besides their signing bonus and stock options, was the patent clause. His lawyer successfully haggled a whopping 7.5% of all proceeds based upon the finalized product. And, within a month after he had all of the furniture situated and his wife and gotten all of her decorations put up, with their armoire, which was a wedding gift from her godparents, fully erect in their bedroom corner, he was looking at his office and basement workshop fully furnished. Ironically, as everyone else shut down operations across the country in time for the Thanksgiving holidays, Salvatore found himself sequestered with Krishna, Buboy, and Guillermo. His wife affectionately referred to them as the four musketeers, but he chafed at the idea of working with these company men.
Notwithstanding his indifference to being part of a team kowtowing to the whims of a fledgling company’s struggling design unit, he found his creative streak had hit a major roadblock. He had come up with a schematic that would no doubt create wireless connectivity with all contemporary forms of the online packet and IP-based protocols, via preexisting wireless technologies. That was no longer the problem. The issue now was how to get the computing capabilities inside the human body. He was halfway there with the plans already sketched out for the radio frequency antennae to fully cooperate with a makeshift cell site and a WiFi router setup in his basement. In fact, he had the theoretical designs already worked out before he was on his first flight to Aspen with his wife, Sofia, to look at houses in the Centennial neighborhood. They rode the wave of gentrification that was happening at the tail end of the 2010’s in and around Aspen; the term was ill-suited there since it is difficult to visualize such a term for where the one- percenters and celebrities go to get away for wintry diversions. Ultimately, if he couldn’t come up with a way to get a proficient CPU inside the human body, he would be nothing more than a relic for Halcyon by the next summer. This is where Krishna was indispensable. While Guillermo earned his keep by maintaining an ever-abiding sense of sanity within their group, Krishna was the computing ace in the pocket. He had worked within copycat companies in China and Thailand black market companies for close to 25 years and demonstrated not one iota of shame. He knew that miniaturization was essential for their success, and he had cloistered himself at their offices near Modesto, California for two weeks. He would only communicate through a few snippets of email and brief IM’s, and normally he would only communicate with Veronica. She had found that allowing a wide degree of autonomy to this cosmopolitan mix of engineers was going to have to work for the time being. She had given herself around five months to simply leave them alone to their own talents, cooperation, and ingenuity. Before she knew it, six months turned into a year.
Acquaintances
