Those That Wake

THE COOPERATIVE

REMAK AND MIKE, their faces grim, were waiting for Mal and Laura among the crowds in the movie theater.

“I assume,” Remak said when they reached him, “you’ve discovered that Laura’s problem now extends to all of us.”

“You, too?” Laura said, her eyes like those of a drowning woman who’s just had a potential savior push her head deeper underwater.

Mike looked beaten by it, worn down to a husk. Only Remak seemed beyond pain. He nodded and rubbed the back of his head, recalculating his equation with the new numbers.

She wondered about Remak: Who had forgotten him? Where did he no longer belong? Maybe, Laura considered, that wasn’t as important as his reaction. This was all starting to seem like a science experiment to him.

“Are you okay, Jon?” She asked him for her and Mal’s sakes as well as his. They were looking to him for their next move.

“I’m frustrated, naturally,” he said. “Without the cooperative, our choices are very limited.”

“I meant, how are you dealing with it? Where’s your head at?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he said, and before she could press him further, he nodded out the door. “Let’s get going.”

He walked out with purpose, and they, of course, had no choice but to follow.

Where he led them was to a parking lot rising seven stories from Forty-Fourth Street up toward the soggy gray sky. He spoke to the attendant, and they exchanged information and items. The four of them got onto the elevator and went to the top floor, where the cars were scattered intermittently, several with a rental car logo swooshing across their sides.

Remak took a quick inventory of their choices and went straight to one of them and pulled a keycard from his pocket that opened the doors. They climbed in, Laura getting the front passenger seat by default, though she’d have far preferred sitting next to Mal in back.

Remak, in the driver’s seat, scanned the area through the windshield and then took the gun from the small of his back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Laura’s eyes went wide, and she felt a shifting in the back seat.

Remak reversed his grip on the weapon and began hammering at the GPS panel in the dashboard with the butt of the automatic. Laura pulled herself away as metal and plastic shrapnel sprang out onto the seats.

“A GPS works both ways,” Remak informed her. “A car with a GPS could be tracked as easily as a person with a cell.” His arm worked back and forth, but the expression on his face didn’t change.

Once he had turned the thing into a jagged cavity, he leaned over, peered inside, and jammed his hand into it. He tugged hard and came out with a small chip, trailing wires. This he tossed out through an open window, and then, as though strapping in for a ride through the country, he buckled up.

“Where are we going?” Mal said.

“That’s complicated,” Remak said, starting the engine.


They drove. Mike wasn’t heeding the other human beings around him anymore. He looked out the window at the trees and fields that flashed by along the side of the highway. The sun, which had appeared after the city was long behind them, was just starting to duck below the horizon, and a bright point of reflection flickered in his eyes as the trees opened here and there to let it shine through.

“I work for a cooperative,” Remak said through the hum of the car, “whose efforts are concerned with cataloging the social flow in the world. There are certain details of human life that serve as red flags, warnings of upcoming events. Like when you hear thunder and you know rain is coming. It’s a matter of discerning our collective social unconscious and watching it closely. This is a phenomenon we call the Global Dynamic.”

He glanced over at Laura in the passenger seat, who nodded back at him, before he continued.

“There are things you might never think to associate with one another, things you’d never even think to compare, that are tied together as tightly as our conscious and unconscious minds. In Middle Eastern nations, the consumption of chickpeas, a mainstay of the Middle Eastern diet, drops sharply before a shakeup in governance occurs, a coup, for example. Western Europeans and Middle Americans tend to let the upkeep of their lawns and gardens slip shortly before financial recessions. In the United States, sales of action figures skyrocket before our country engages in military actions.”

“Action figures?” Laura said.

“Yes. The little dolls that children, mainly boys, play with. Their sales are an indicator of when this country’s aggression is on the rise. There may not be anything in the papers about foreign trouble; the issues may not have even come to a boil at the highest levels of government; yet the sales of action figures boom. Our attitudes are bound together not merely on the level of individual contact but like a giant body of water that ripples all over even when a tiny pebble is thrown in at one small corner. Few people know the aggression even exists yet, but we feel it. All of us feel it. And some of us act on it. We buy action figures. These feelings, these indicators, are called the Global Dynamic.”

Laura glanced behind her: Mal listening intently, Mike in a dead stare locked on nothing. She wanted to prod him, let him know something important was happening, but Mike looked as if his mind had taken him so far away that he wasn’t really here anymore, just a man digitally inserted into an environment he wasn’t a part of.

Behind them, the dome, glimpsed between buildings, edging over roofs, receded as they left the city behind. It had become such a part of what the city was that Laura couldn’t even imagine the city anymore without the image of it being slowly swallowed by the thing.

“So we catalog these indicators,” Remak said, “and we watch them, and when there’s an obvious anomaly, either an aberration from previous statistics or indicators suddenly pointing toward something significant, we investigate.”

“And that’s what you were investigating this time?” Laura asked.

“Yes.” Remak nodded slowly. “The occurrence of desolated response—that is, behavior indicative of apathy or desperation on a large scale such as street crime, domestic violence, and suicide. The occurrence of desolated response experienced a massive spike in the neighborhood of Mike’s school.” Mike looked up absently, having heard his name, then looked away again just as quickly. “A certain level of desolated response is standard in low-income, high-need neighborhoods, and while the sudden rise was astonishing, it wasn’t the only notable element.

“Out of fourteen acts of random violence, five of them had been committed by people of widely varying demographics simply passing through the neighborhood. A teenage girl who had just disembarked from a bus, for instance, attacked her mother. The family, who owned a chain of Laundromats, were quite well to do. Of thirty-one reported domestic disturbances, eight were likewise committed by people who just happened to be in the neighborhood. A stockbroker began beating his wife as they passed through the neighborhood on the way to a restaurant. The traffic accidents actually reflected a higher number of perpetrators among those driving through, especially taxi drivers. Even among the shocking twelve suicide attempts, four of them had been by visitors: two cheerleaders, for instance, from out of town and separated from their group, were waiting for a train and threw themselves in front of it.

“Of course, we know the cause now,” Remak concluded. “To some degree.”

“The doorway,” Mal said hollowly.

“Yes. The building you were in contained some sort of psychic virus. But when the door was left inadvertently open, it escaped through Mike’s school and into the outlying neighborhood, affecting everyone who lived there, or was just passing through.”

Laura could see Mal’s face without turning to look, could see the guilt twisting deeper into his eyes.

“What do you mean, ‘psychic virus’?” Laura said, thinking of the darkness crawling into the Starbucks, how it seemed to actually infect the people within.

“It’s a hypothesis,” he said. “A convenient name for a pathogen that thrives in the environment of human synaptic transmissions. Its form is unknown, but it has the capacity to alter human perception and information storage. It could even, conceivably, control its host’s actions.”

“That’s exactly what this is!” Laura said with more vehemence than she was expecting.

“Possibly.” Remak glanced at her with interest. “Much of the Global Dynamic is founded on similar thinking, that ideas multiply and transmit in a viral fashion, though documented proof is difficult to come by. I had been hoping to bring the information we had to my superiors, but when I tried this morning, well, you can imagine what happened. I’m lucky to be here and not in some basement interrogation room.”

“What is this cooperative you work for?” Laura said. “A cooperative between who?”

“The cooperative is all funded by anonymous individuals and entities, collaborating interests outside the standard sociopolitical superstructure. We don’t take a cent from government or industry; it’s in our mandate. But we do recruit from government and industry, for our analysts, investigators, and theorists. Any field operative may be required to analyze, interpret, and act on any intelligence gathered. Multiple areas of expertise are required even before recruitment: economics, advanced mathematics, logic, strategic systems, game theory. Then the training: tactics, close-quarters combat, firearms, counter-insurgency, de molitions.”

“You?” Mal asked.

Remak nodded.

“I used to work for the IRS.”

“Sorry.” Mal leaned forward. “The IRS?”

“They’re not all accountants, Mal.” Remak smiled only a little. “Some of their operations require more field know-how than military operations.”

Mal nodded and sat back, trying to decide whether or not that could possibly be true.

“The cooperative was created to pursue avenues opened by the Global Dynamic, a theory developed by one man, culled from years of research in the corporate field. You see, after 9/11 there was an upsurge in government interest in the Global Dynamic. My cooperative predicted something like Big Black months ahead of time.” Remak let out a long breath. “But governments work from a philosophy of definite, provable necessity: does this need to be done for things to keep working? Corporations, on the other hand, work from a philosophy of investment: will attention now profit us later?

“The kind of thinking—about social structures and interactions—that led to the Global Dynamic existed long before 9/11 and Big Black, and corporations saw its efficacy long before the government did. Corporations were collecting numbers on such social interactions decades ago for marketing purposes.”

“So this one man,” Laura said, “the one who developed the Global Dynamic, he worked for a corporation. Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name. No one does. He’s kept it well hidden. Even my superiors never knew it, though he was our primary consultant for many years and, I believe, a major benefactor of the cooperative. He was once a lower-echelon administrator, a corporate librarian for a company based in California called Intellitech. They collected raw data on human interactions and responses to a vast array of stimulation and input the world over. The company was founded by two graduate students with degrees in the field, and consequently, Intellitech’s efforts in this area were far in advance of its competitors. Various departments accumulated the data, but this librarian was the first to collate it all.

“He saw ramifications, and he created the Global Dynamic rubric. It was a predictor of human behavior that was to be a great boon to human knowledge and understanding. But Intellitech saw other possibilities for it, far more … profit oriented. Any corporation would.

“They weren’t just interested in how to read the Global Dynamic, but in how to push it one way or another. In essence, how to make people think and feel according to the corporate agenda. Corporations were interested in how to get an entire city or state or nation to move in a desired way by faking this Global Dynamic, by creating the symptom and, in effect, having the symptom create the disease.”

“Like launching a massive increase in action-figure marketing,” Laura tested, “and causing the military action to follow in its path.”

“Exactly.” Remak nodded. “Reverse-engineering the Global Dynamic. Imagine what an arms manufacturer could do with the ability to manipulate a nation’s aggression by, say, contracting a toy manufacturer to launch a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign for a particularly militaristic new line of action figures. There’s no more producing the goods and waiting for the demand. With this kind of control, you can manufacture the demand as easily as the product itself.”

Heavy silence fell on the car.

“In any event,” Remak continued eventually, “the Librarian broke off from Intellitech, began using the Global Dynamic to serve other causes. As I said, he was once a great help to our cooperative. He was like an information dynamo, a living computer. He had always been private, though. His name was never disclosed. And, a few years ago, he cut himself off completely, with no warning, no explanation. He went away, wouldn’t consult or advise; he just kept taking reports, collecting information. He still does. Reams of data go in; nothing comes out.”

“What happened?” Laura asked.

Remak gave a small shrug and touched his glasses.

“We think he figured something out, saw something coming that none of the rest of us could, and it was so terrible, he removed himself.”

“What do you think?” Laura persisted.

“I think,” Remak said, “I’m going to ask him myself.”