The Masqueleros and Bash crowded into an adjacent room full of antique hardware, including decrepit plasma flatscreens and folding PDA peripheral keyboards duct-taped into usability. The trapped heat and smells of the laboring electronics reminded Bash of his student days, seemingly eons removed from the present. Several of the Masqueleros sat down in front of their machines and begin to mouse furiously away. Interior and exterior shots of Greater Boston as seen from innumerable forgotten and dusty webcams swarmed the screens in an impressionistic movie without plot or sound.
Tito Harnnoy handed Bash a can of Glialsqueeze pop and said, “Refresh yourself, pard. This could take awhile.”
Eventually Bash and Tito fell to discussing the latest spintronics developments, and their potential impact on proteopape.
“Making the circuitry smaller doesn’t change the basic proteopape paradigm,” maintained Bash. “Each sheet gets faster and boasts more capacity, but the standard functionality remains the same.”
Bash had to chew on this disturbing new scenario for a while. Gradually, he began to accept Harnnoy’s thesis, at least partially. Why hadn’t he seen such an eventuality before? Maybe Dagny had been right when she accused him of losing his edge….
“Got her!”
Bash and the others clustered around one monitor. And there shone Dagny.
She sat in a small comfy nest of cushions and fast-food packaging trash, a large sheet of proteopape in her lap.
“What camera is this feed coming from?” Bash said.
“It’s mounted at ceiling level in the mezzanine of the Paramount Theater on Washington Street, down near Chinatown.”
When Bash had been born in 1999, the Paramount Theater, one of the grand dames of twentieth-century Hollywood’s Golden Age, had already been shuttered for over two decades. Various rehabilitation plans had been tossed about for the next fifteen years, until Bash entered MIT. During that year, renovations finally began. The grand opening of the theater coincided with the churning of the economy occasioned by the release of proteopape and also with a shortlived but scarily virulent outbreak of Megapox. Faced with uncertain financing, fear of contagion in mass gatherings, and the cheapness of superior home-theater systems fashioned of proteopape, the revamped movie house had locked its doors, falling once again into genteel desuetude.
“Can you magnify the view?” Bash asked. “See what she’s looking at?”
The webcam zoomed in on the sheet of paper in Dagny’s lap.
And Bash saw that she was watching them.
In infinite regress, the monitor showed the proteopape showing the monitor showing the proteopape showing…..
Bash howled. “Someone’s got proteopape on them!”
Just then a leering Dagny looked backward over her shoulder directly at the webcam, and at the same time Bash’s chin spoke.
“It’s you, you idiot,” said Bash’s epidermis in Dagny’s stepped-down voice.
Bash ripped off the smart band-aid he had applied while shaving, and the image of the Masqueleros on Dagny’s proteopape swung crazily to track the movement.
“Dagny!” Bash yelled into the band-aid. “This has gone far enough! You’ve had your fun at my expense. Now give me your current password so I can make proteopape secure again.”
“Come and get it,” taunted Dagny. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I will!”
With that bold avowal, Bash furiously twisted the band-aid, causing the image of the Masqueleros on Dagny’s proteopape to shatter. On the monitor screen she appeared unconcerned, lolling back among her cushions like the Queen of Sheba.
Bash turned to Tito. “Lend me a phone and your Segway. I’m going to nail this troublemaker once and for all.”
“Some of us’ll go with you, pard.”
“No, you stay here. Dagny won’t react well to intimidation by a bunch of strangers. And besides, I need the Masqueleros to keep on spying on her and feed me any updates on her actions. All I can hope is that she’ll listen to me and abandon this insane vendetta. If she doesn’t — Well, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”
“No problemo, fizz.”
Someone handed Bash a phone. He downloaded his identity into it, then established an open channel to Harnnoy. After tucking the phone into the neckline of his shirt, allowing him to speak and be spoken to hands-free, Bash darted from the underground room.
7
Phantom of the Opera
Bash made it as far as Killian Court before the first of Dagny’s attacks commenced.
On all the canvases of the amateur painters, on all the individual sheets of proteopape held by the idling students, Bash’s face appeared, displacing laboriously created artworks, as well as the contents of books, magazines and videos. (Dagny had unearthed a paparazzo’s image of Bash that made him look particularly demented.) And from the massed speakers in the proteopape pages boomed this warning in a gruff male voice:
“Attention! This is a nationwide alert from Homeland Security. All citizens should immediately exert extreme vigilance for the individual depicted here. He is wanted for moral turpitude, arrogant ignorance, and retrogressive revanchism. Approach him with caution, as he may bite.”
This odd yet alarming message immediately caused general consternation to spread throughout the quadrangle. Bash turned up his shirt collar, hunched down his head and hurried toward the street. But he had not reckoned with the kites.
Homing in on his phone, the co-opted kites began to dive-bomb Bash. Several impacted the ground around him, crumpling with a noise like scrunching cellophane, but one scored a direct hit on his head, causing him to yelp. His squeal attracted the eyes of several onlookers, and someone shouted, “There he is!”
Bash ran.
He thought briefly of abandoning his phone, but decided not to. He needed to stay in touch with the Masqueleros. But more crucially, giving up his phone would achieve no invisibility.
Bash was moving through a saturated I2 environment. There was no escaping proteopape. Every smart surface — from store windows to sunglasses, from taxi rooftop displays to billboards, from employee nametags to vending machines — was a camera that would track him in his dash across town to the Paramount Theater. Illicitly tapping into all these sources, utilizing common yet sophisticated pattern recognition, sampling and extrapolative software, Dagny would never lose sight of her quarry. Bash might as well have had cameras implanted in his eyeballs.
Out on Mass Ave, Bash faced no interception from alarmed citizens. Apparently the false security warning had been broadcast only in Killian Court. But surely Dagny had further tricks up her striped sleeves.
He spoke into his dangling phone. “What’s she doing now?”
Harnnoy’s voice returned an answer. “Noodling around with her pape. She’s got her back to the camera, so we can’t see what kind of scripts she’s running.”
“Okay, thanks. I’m hitting the road now.”
Once aboard the Segway, Bash headed back toward downtown Boston.
He came to a halt obediently at the first red light, chafing at the delay. But something odd about the engine noise of the car approaching behind him made Bash look over his shoulder.
The car — a 2029 Vermoulian with proteopape windows — was not slowing down.
