Noir (55 page)

“You don’t—” Harrisch gasped for breath. “You don’t even know—”

“Know what?” McNihil lifted the exec up onto tiptoe, then back down a couple of inches, relaxing the pressure against Harrisch’s windpipe. “What is it you think I don’t know? Because by now, believe me, I know a lot of things.”

“You idiot.” Chin thrust back by the asp-head’s knuckles, Harrisch still managed to get a sneer up and running on his own face. “You don’t know just how badly you’ve been connected over. By me. You were connected even before you took the job.”

“What’s he talking about?” November came up beside McNihil, maneuvering her way across the bucking rooftop. The moans and shuddering low-octave noises from the street level grew in volume and intensity, like a real ocean scudding into white-topped waves, as she peered at Harrisch. “He told me the same stuff, about you and this job, back at the hospital.”

“It’s TOAW.” McNihil didn’t look over at her as he spelled out the acronym. “That’s what it’s been all along. That’s what the job was about all along.” He let go of Harrisch, shoving him a step backward. “His big secret, that he didn’t think I’d be able to figure out.”

“What if you did?” Rubbing his bruised throat, Harrisch glared venomously at McNihil. “Even if you did find out,
there’s nothing you can do about it
. Not now.” A wild sense of triumph seemed to surge up inside Harrisch’s chest. “It’s too late. And you made it happen that way, just the way I wanted it to. Just by your being here—that was all you had to do.”

“‘TOAW’?” That puzzled November. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“His big secret,” said McNihil disgustedly. “And his little joke. It’s the kind of thing that these high-level corporate minds think is funny. It’s connecting hilarious, all right.” He nodded toward Harrisch. “You want to tell her what it stands for? Or should I?”

“Be my guest.” Harrisch left his own hand at his throat. “Why should I care?”

“It’s what came after DynaZauber’s TIAC project,” said McNihil. “You know that one?”

November nodded. “Heard something about it.”

“They got this fixation at DZ. Schoolyard humor.” McNihil shook his head. “TIAC stood for ‘turd in a can.’ It was DZ’s notion—at least back then—of their ultimate consumer strategy. A general principle, to just make sure that the customers get the least amount of goods or services for their money. Max out the packaging and you can forget about the actual contents. But it wasn’t enough.” He’d glanced over at November beside him, then turned his gaze back to Harrisch. “Was it? There’s always room for improvement; their kind of ‘improvement,’ at any rate. Thus, we go from TIAC to TOAW. The
T
stands for the same thing—you guys down at DZ must’ve thought all that was hilarious, huh?”

Harrisch shrugged. “Anything that gets the point across is good communication. Short and sweet.”

“Short, maybe; sweet, I’m not so sure about. Since the whole thing stands for ‘turd on a wire.’” McNihil gave a tilt of the head toward November. “Maybe a little poetic reference there as well; these aren’t totally uncultured people, you know—”

Suddenly, the whole building seemed to turn onto a pitched angle. Catching herself against the asp-head’s shoulder, November saw Harrisch being thrown onto one side, sliding across the roof’s crumbling sheets of tar paper; the exec managed to dig his fingers in, stopping himself just short of one of the broken gaps, as the echoes of the wave that had slapped the building rumbled away.

“Maybe,” said November, “we should talk about all this at some other time. And place.”

“Call the jet—” Harrisch pushed himself into a sitting position at the gap’s edge. “You’ve got the phone. The number’s already punched in, just do it—” He sounded as though he was verging on hysteria. “This thing’s going to go any minute—”

“Oh, I think we’ve got time.” McNihil pushed November away from himself. “There’s always time for the important things. And this won’t take long, anyway. It’s really pretty simple.”

“We’ll all be dead before you finish talking.”

“Maybe.” McNihil reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fistful of weighty black metal. “But let’s see if I can hold your attention, anyway.” He aimed the tannhäuser at Harrisch’s forehead.

“You
are
nuts.” Harrisch gaped at the weapon extended toward him. “You really are.”

“No …” McNihil shook his head. “Maybe just overly given to classicism. This is the way my old friend Turbiner would’ve done it in one of his books. Having long conversations at gunpoint is such a perfect
noir
thing.”

“You connecting idiot—”

McNihil ignored his last comment. “The good folks at DynaZauber had a great idea, you see.” The asp-head spoke calmly, despite the sounds coming up from the street level and the ongoing collapse of the End Zone Hotel. “It’s not enough—it doesn’t achieve
ultimate profits
—to sell people shit in a shiny can. Metaphorically speaking; shit being all those products that get sold in the cheap-’n’-nastiverse. Because even shit costs something to produce, and the can—the advertising and all the rest of the pretty package—that doesn’t come free. If DynaZauber’s going to achieve the perfect ratio between price and product—which, of course, is one hundred percent to nothing—they needed to come up with something even more of a scam-job than their previous TIAC program.”

“Hey.” That seemed to piss Harrisch off, enough to cut through the panic enveloping him.
Smart-ass sonuvabitch
, he thought. “It’s a competitive business environment we live in, pal. You can’t stay still and just hope to survive.”

“Survival’s another issue,” said McNihil sourly. “We’ll get to that.” McNihil glanced over at November. “So when our friend here, and the
others like him at DynaZauber, put together the next level, when they created TOAW, they went to the best business model they could think of. Which, of course, was pushing addictive drugs, licit and illicit.”

“How’s that an improvement?” November frowned. “For them, I mean. Drugs cost, just like any other consumer product. Believe me, I’d know.” For the moment, she let her earlier concern, about the building collapsing underneath them, fade to the background. “And not just for the end user,” she said. “The manufacturer and the distributor have to shell out
something
. You never get down to absolute zero.”

“You do, if you’re DynaZauber. And you’ve got smart people like this one running the show.” McNihil gestured toward the exec still sitting on the rooftop. “Or at least that’s what you can shoot for. A lot of the research that went into the TOAW project goes back to before the turn of the century. DynaZauber bought it out and has been working on it for years.”

“If we hadn’t,” said Harrisch stiffly, “one of our competitors would’ve.”

“What research?” November’s impatience manifested itself. “What’re you talking about?”

“I can just about cite you chapter and verse.” Legs braced against the hotel’s motion, McNihil looked down at Harrisch. “The mesolimbic dopamine system, right? That’s where the action is. That’s where TOAW gets rolling, isn’t it?”

Harrisch stared in amazement at McNihil. “Where did you …”

“It’s all connected,” continued McNihil. “From the specialized structures in the human orbital frontal cortex, up near the top, to the amygdala, that little almond-shaped bit in the center. And further, to the nucleus accumbens—that’s one so small, it doesn’t even show up in positron-emission tomography scans, does it?”

“No …” The words produced a deep fascination in Harrisch. “That’s what the old researchers used a long time ago. But we’ve got better methods now …”

“I bet you do.” McNihil gave a disgusted shake of the head. “Who says mankind doesn’t progress? Every day brings us whole new methods of connecting people over.”

“Wait a minute,” said November. “What’s all this brain stuff got to do with anything?”

“And the ventral tegmental area …” Harrisch spoke with a woozy dreaminess. “Don’t forget that. That’s the most important part.…”

“He’s right about that,” McNihil said to her. “This is all deep-level addiction research. Like I said, it goes back a long way before DZ ever got hold of it. But those silly-ass scientists back then, they didn’t know what they had. They thought they might find some deep biochemical
cure
for addiction. And where’s the money in that? You want to go for the long-term profits, the ultimate merchandise—the turd on the wire—you want to see about
enhancing
addiction. Making it perfect, a thing in itself, completely separate from any substance, any production or distribution cost.”

Just from hearing the asp-head talk about it, a radiant joy seemed to burst inside Harrisch’s heart; his face suffused with sudden rapture. “And that’s what we did. We found it. The final product.” The waves of the gelatinous sex-ocean below sang along, a heavenly chorus fallen out of the skies. “All profit and no cost, not to us, at any rate. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“They found the neural engine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded flat and emotionless. “That drives addiction. That chemicals—pharmaceuticals, white powders, whatever—are just crude hammers to evoke. Like banging on the rear bumper of a car with a fifty-pound sledge, to get it to move. How much more efficient, when you think about it, to find the key to the car’s ignition—the key to the brain—and get in and switch it on, and just drive it down the highway until the wheels fall off. Or until the money’s all gone.”

“The wire.” Harrisch appeared to be musing from blissful memory. “That’s the axon from the ventral tegmental area neuron to the nucleus accumbens neuron. A wire or a highway—it’s all the same. A little passage for information, billions of little passageways. Stuffed with neuro-filaments like pavement, the dopamine path. Which can be made wider or narrower—if you know how. That’s really where the action is; that’s the ultimate valve of commerce. You get inside people’s heads, squeeze those axons down or shut them off completely, a state of absolute dopamine deprivation …” A shudder ran through Harrisch’s frame, the effects of his rhapsody as strong as the forces battering the End Zone Hotel. “Then you’ve got ’em. That’s when you’ve got your customers right where you want them. And no production or distribution costs at all. You’re right—it’s perfect.”

“That’s what the DZ labs found. What they’d been looking for.” McNihil turned his face toward November. “The way to separate the dopamine flow down the axons from any physical source. A technology of regulation; the hand on the valve, the key in the ignition. So that all DynaZauber would have to do would be send out the right signals, on whatever wavelength they chose, and the customers would respond. Turn the valve one way—send the shutoff signal—and the axons between the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens start to narrow, constrict the dopamine flow from one neuron to the next, even close down completely. The result being the classic symptoms of drug-addicted systemic collapse, the crash of the individual neurosystem below normal operating levels. And the resultant urge, the overwhelming drive to reestablish homeostasis, to pay any price just to feel back to normal again.”

November gave a slow nod; enlightenment was beginning to come. “Been there,” she said. “Done that.”
Threw up on my shoes
—

“Everybody has. It’s the basic algebra of need.” With his thumb, McNihil pointed to Harrisch. “But what he and his bunch found was a way of reducing their side of the equation—what they’d have to supply—down to zero, and still having their customers’ numbers crunch out the same. They tried it before, with the whole push to get people on the telecommunications wire, have them value bits of information as much or more than the atoms of the real world, have them pay to be mesmerized by the pretty colored lights on their computer screens. That would’ve taken the suppliers’ costs down to zero as well. Only that equation didn’t work out; eventually, the boredom factor sets in with the customers, and their interest in the colored lights drifts down to zero as well. What DynaZauber finally put together was TOAW, the perfect equation.”

“You have to admit—it’s a cool thing.” Harrisch drew his legs up, resting his folded arms on his knees. Watching him, November figured that back at the boardroom, and in the DZ executive lunchroom, he and the rest of his bunch must’ve been fascinated by discussing the philosophical fine points of this TOAW project. “It’s really the refutation through economics of established physics principles. The laws of thermodynamics, all that stuff, they no longer apply. We’ve transcended reality—
we’ve found a way of generating something from nothing
. TOAW is not just a new stage in human evolution, it’s a transformation of the
universe itself. It’s what the wired-up telecommunication theorists were trying to achieve, but could never pull off. Well, we did it.” Harrisch raised his chin defiantly. “And proud of it.”

“I don’t get it,” said November. “How’s it supposed to work?”

“It’s a replicating system.” McNihil continued his flat recitation of the facts. “Operates on basic viral-contagion lines. Plus some more brain-research material that DynaZauber bought up. More stuff before the turn of the century: the way people think can produce actual physiological changes in the structures of the brain. In this case, one of them is the orbital frontal cortex.” McNihil tapped the side of his head with a finger. “It’s right over the rear of the eye socket; it basically functions as the error-detection circuit for the rest of the brain. I already knew about it, because it’s part of what was changed inside my own head, so the way I wanted to see the world wouldn’t get automatically rejected by the rest of my mental processes. But what TOAW does is hook that up to things way inside the human brain, the caudate nucleus and the cingulate gyrus structures. Those are a couple of your basic fear and anxiety circuits. TOAW sets up a feedback loop among those brain structures, which gets stronger every time the brain takes in and processes information.”

“Until it’s unbreakable.” Listening to the asp-head, Harrisch couldn’t refrain from boasting. “That’s the beauty of it. Or part of the beauty, at least.”