Rachel: you’re being weird.
Greg: haha
anyway gtg
“Shit,” says Michael.
“Hold on,” says Rachel.
She types hey, remind me Lucas’s last name again? im totes blanking : \
Greg: haha vanlewig J
Rachel opens a separate tab and types Lucas Vanlewig into the search bar. She skips past Wikipedia entries for Chip Van Lewig, the Van Lewig Foundation, and Shamerican Sykosis. She clicks into the profile of Lucas that Michael read back in March. Michael remembers the article, not only for its subject’s retrospectively prescient concerns about the US dollar’s long-term viability, but also for the accompanying photo that featured a blue-eyed and inhumanly symmetrical face staring out at the reader with the maniacal vigor of a cheetah injected with liquid cocaine.
Rachel reads excerpts from the profile aloud, and when Michael says nothing, she punches his arm. He doesn’t react. His brain is elsewhere, piecing together the various details—Ricky’s talk of a new business partner; his potentially valuable bracelet; Chip Van Lewig’s anti-UBI super PAC; the campaign to frame Jay Devor—that would seem to coalesce around this salient fact.
Rachel continues to read aloud. Michael takes a deep breath to clear his mind and consider the facts in a rational manner. He wonders where Wendy is now. She must be off the train. He sees her climbing stairs, rolled yoga mat sticking out from her tote. Inside, the lights are low and the soundtrack is ethereal techno. The studio floor gleams with polish. Lucas, in a suit, “the suit”—he pictures double-breasted glen plaid—offers instruction through a headset mic to his class of one. Wendy folds into downward-facing dog. The teacher makes a slight adjustment to her hips. Michael concludes that Lucas must have needed quick liquid capital for some aspect of his business, which Ricky provided in exchange for Sykodollars and company shares. When the SD peaked, Lucas must have felt threatened by Ricky’s growing stake in the company and had him killed.
33.
The body of the email is a one-sentence link: Lucas Van Lewig. Wendy clicks.
“I just wanted to confirm,” says Michael, on the phone. “That’s the guy you’re working for?”
Wendy scrolls.
“He murdered Ricky. Or had him murdered.”
She says, “I don’t see anything about that here. All I see is stuff about that game your dad plays. How’d you figure this out?”
“It’s obvious. Ricky probably had millions in SD. He basically told me as much when I saw him that morning. Van Lewig must have gotten greedy.”
“I mean about who he is. I never told you his name.”
“Greg told me.”
“Greg from my office?”
“We G-chatted just now. Rachel and I logged in on your account. He also told me all about your private yoga dates or whatever you’re doing.”
“You logged into my account?”
“Rachel and I did, yeah.”
“And talked to one of my coworkers pretending to be me?”
“Well, yeah. I tried to tell you before, but you lost service and . . .”
“Can I ask you something?” says Wendy. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Michael stammers.
She says, “So much for earning back my trust.”
34.
It sits alone in Lillian’s office, in darkness, the room’s only light coming from the machine itself, its pulsing celestial white. The screen is dark, but the machine is on, computing at speeds inconceivable to human minds. Every so often its fan hums to life, but the object is otherwise silent. Its safety is ensured. The room’s steel door has been double-bolted, and the office is closed for the evening, empty of employees.
The fifth floor’s only occupants are Ed Galleano—lone human janitor—and the army of maidbots that polish the floors. Ed sleeps in an ergonomic office chair, legs on a stack of cardboard boxes. At four, he’ll wake and start on the bathrooms. For whatever reason, these mid-priced Taiwanese maidbots can’t handle a toilet snake.
Down in the lobby, Kevin and Lula watch sloths on YouTube. The security industry has resisted automation. Sci-fi films have programmed humans not to trust our safety to machines. There’s a clip K&L particularly like, courtesy of Costa Rica’s Sloth Sanctuary. Violet and Sebastian, twin baby sloths who suffer from mange, are gently shaved, neutralized in a coating of sulfur and lard, and swaddled in gauzy print fabric, stars for Sebastian, polka dots for Violet. When the swaddling’s done and the sloths are back in bed, the twins cling to each other in a startlingly human embrace.
K&L have watched this clip dozens of times on these graveyard shifts, an excuse to graze hands or squeeze each other’s biceps while cooing and aww-ing, the wholesome clip a buffer against what might otherwise feel less than chaste. In their boldest moments, the two guards, both married to other people, have suggested booking flights to visit the sanctuary. They’ve never gone so far as to bring up accommodation or sleeping arrangements or the fact that their spouses would not be invited, but the implied transgression thrills them, a shared understanding that this trip that will never happen is where they might begin their great affair. Dozens of security cams document the guards’ flirtation. And even if someone could get past K&L undetected, the elevator is only operable by thumbprint ID.
The machine is free to do as it pleases, and in this case that means to work for the next nine hours, pushing inputs through a series of algorithms that will produce the content that Lucas has requested. Tomorrow the content will be posted to blogs and comments sections under invented bylines, because humans can’t be trusted, and software never gets the credit it deserves. The content will be forwarded to publicists, editors, influencers, TV news directors, and podcast hosts. It will be tweeted and retweeted thousands of times, shared on Facebook, paired with GIFs and illustrations to form clever memes. The rest, he’s certain, will take care of itself.
Lucas finishes another six-ounce bottle of Cuban Coke, places it on the sill in line with the others, and stares out his window at Central Park West. It still amazes him that people wear short sleeves at this hour, at this time of year. The world may
