Harry’s New Pants

by Jeff Pepper

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

“Get this damn thing out of my head!” I shouted to Dr. Mendez.

She sat impassively behind her desk, her hand under the desk near, I imagined, a panic button that would summon the company’s security guards.

“Harry,” she said smoothly, “I don’t understand why you’re angry. You wanted the shoes, and now you have them. You wanted peace of mind, and you have it or, at least, you did before you overreacted to the dream encounter, which ended up with you getting the shoes you wanted anyway. What’s your problem?”

“My problem,” I hissed, “is that you have made me into a consumption zombie.”

“No, I have helped you to adjust to the world you live in. You’re much happier than you were before, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to be happy if it’s induced by wires in my brain. I want to be happy on my own. Now take this thing out.”

She took a long breath. “Harry, of course I can do that. But you may recall that our agreement contains a paragraph covering patient-initiated removal of the device. It was on page 24, I believe. There is a fee involved.”

I slumped in the chair and looked at her. “How much?”

“Thirty thousand dollars.”

“I don’t have thirty thousand dollars. I work in food service, remember?”

“Well then, Harry, I guess you will have to be satisfied with being happy.”

* * *

I left work early. I was trapped in a life of work and consumption. There was no way out.

Then I remembered the little paper slip, “Set yourself free,” and the QR code that didn’t seem to work. Was this a way out? I had no idea, but I was desperate. I had to see Marcus.

Marcus, an old friend from college, was a black-hat hacker. Fired from his job with a major bank, he worked out of various rented apartments and hotels, breaking into websites and servers and doing whatever was necessary to profit from the effort. I didn’t want to know the details of what he did, but I knew he had the skills, if anyone did, to access this elusive website.

He could have been in any of a dozen secret locations but, fortunately for me, he was at his mom’s house, having dinner. I knocked on the door. He opened it, long dreadlocks tied back with a red bandanna, grimy t-shirt over sweat pants. Hard to believe he ever worked at a bank.

After he excused himself from the dinner table and we headed to the basement, I told him about the Inner Peace device and what it was doing to me. He listened intently, nodding his head and twitching his fingers, as if he couldn’t wait to get to a keyboard.

When I’d finished, he said, “Well, my friend, I have no idea what this awful thing is in your head. That’s the bad news. The good news is, I can certainly get you to that website.”

“How?”

“It looks like all the major browsers have been enlisted in a coordinated effort to prevent you from accessing this website. God knows why. But, fortunately for you, there’s a workaround. Have you ever heard of a ghost browser?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a hand-crafted web browser that operates completely independently from the rest of the internet, so it can’t be corrupted like mainstream browsers. When an update is needed, the author puts it on a thumb drive and it’s passed from one trusted individual to another. It’s completely silent; no crash reports, no analytics, no customer support, nothing to identify the user or the creator.”

I was intrigued. “And would you happen to have one of these ghost browsers?”

He grinned. “How did you guess?” He rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a nondescript black thumb drive. On one surface was a crudely drawn picture of a Pac-Man style ghost. Handing it to me, he said, “Be careful. Don’t use this at home or any place where you can be traced. Use a public computer. And get the thumb drive back to me when you’re finished. It’s my only copy.”

“Can’t you just make more copies?”

Marcus looked at me, obviously disappointed. “Come on, Harry. If you tried, I’m sure you could come up with a dozen ways the creators could prevent that.”

I thanked him, slipped the thumb drive into my pocket and headed to the New York Public Library.

* * *

Fortunately the library computers were old enough to have USB slots. They also had software to prevent anyone from installing new code, but the ghost browser slapped that aside and self-installed. A little ghostie icon appeared on the desktop. I double-clicked it.

A full-screen window opened up, plain white. At the top, “BROWSER” appeared in black, Courier fixed-width font. Below it was a little green “>” symbol, looking for all the world like a 1980’s DOS prompt. It flashed slowly.

I carefully typed in the web address I’d saved on my phone and hit the return key. A few seconds later, another browser window opened on top of the first. It displayed an address in Harlem and an apartment number. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper, which was fortunate, because soon the letters faded, the browser window closed, and I could not access it again. The ghost browser had deleted itself from the library’s PC. Satisfied, I removed the flash drive and walked out of the library.

* * *

It was getting late, so I got some dinner and went home. I really did not want to meet uber-Harry again, so I drank a half-bottle of Scotch and fell into a drunken stupor, which lasted till morning, when I woke up with a splitting headache. If I’d had any dreams, I could not remember, and when I checked my email inbox, I found I hadn’t purchased anything overnight. So far, so good.

I popped a couple of Advils, stopped at Starbucks to pick up a mocha frappe, then I took the subway up to Harlem. My destination turned out to be an ordinary, six-story apartment building, old red brick with rusting fire escape ladders mounted on the front. The building had seen better days but seemed to be well-maintained.

The apartment number was 5F. There was no elevator, so I had to climb to the fifth floor. I found the apartment door and knocked.

A middle-aged woman answered the door. She was wearing large sunglasses and a hat, which seemed odd. She didn’t speak but just motioned for me to enter. I stepped into the apartment.

I just had time to notice the apartment was completely bare when I was grabbed from behind. My attacker, who was much stronger than me, draped a hood over my head and held me tight. Someone else pushed a metallic helmet onto my head. A couple of seconds later I felt an electric jolt, like someone had put my head into a power outlet. I screamed and dropped to the floor, twitching like a fish on the deck of a boat.

The woman knelt over me and carefully removed the helmet and the hood. I looked up and saw her and two men. One of them was the pretzel vendor who’d given me the slip of paper with the QR code. “What the hell?” I mumbled.

“Sorry about that,” said the pretzel vendor. “We had to neutralize the Inner Peace thing in your brain. It’s done now. You’re free. No more consumer dreams, no more manipulation of your desires and, fortunately for us, no more surveillance. Now we have to get going, and I mean now. Get up.”

I could barely stand. “Why?” I said, obviously not thinking this through.

“Everything you saw and heard, up until a minute ago, was processed by the thing inside your brain and transmitted to the Inner Peace servers. That would have included us, which would have been very bad. For us, and for you.”

“But they know where you live,” I protested.

“Oh, this place?” he said, looking around. “Nah. This apartment is unoccupied. We’re just using it for this job. Squatting, you might say. Once we leave, the Inner Peace people will have no idea who we are or where we went.”

I thought about Marcus.

I started to speak, but he held up his hand. “No more questions for now. We gotta go.”

* * *

The pretzel vendor, whose name was Pablo, sat next to me on a deserted subway car as it rattled along the Lexington Avenue Line south towards Spanish Harlem. His two accomplices had stayed on the subway station, cheerfully waving as our train pulled away.

“I have questions,” I said.

“Sure, fire away,” replied Pablo as he pulled two cheese-stuffed pretzels from his satchel and offered one to me. I took a bite. It was delicious: crispy and salty on the outside, warm and gooey inside.

“It’s hard to know where to start,” I said. “First let’s go with the easy stuff. What exactly was that thing in my head?”

“A combination neural computer and telecommunications device.”

“Huh? How can something the size of a fly communicate with the outside world?”

“Have you ever heard of a molecular antenna?” he asked. I shook my head.

Pablo took another bite of his pretzel and chewed for a bit. “Turns out if you string together a few thousand identical DNA base pairs, it functions like an antenna. Some people think that’s how telepathy works, I don’t know. Anyway, you can use it to communicate over a modest distance. That’s how they inserted commands into your brain and how you were tracked and controlled.”

I was stunned. “So, you broke the antenna?” I asked.

“Nope, the antenna’s made of DNA and is quite robust. But we fried the tiny computer it was attached to. So you’re safe.”

Saying I was safe seemed like quite a stretch, given what had happened to me in the last couple of hours. “OK,” I said, “enough of that. Who’s behind all this?”

“There is a secret alliance of the world’s most powerful corporations, mainly in software, e-commerce, media and consumer goods. It has no name we know of. It might not even have a name at all. We just call it the Group.

“Each member organization has a small black ops department that’s kept secret from shareholders, regulators, employees and, of course, the public. They pool their funds and collaborate to develop advanced tech like the Inner Peace device, which they use to analyze consumer behavior and create targeted ads. Lately, they’ve been going further and inducing people to buy stuff, as you have already seen. Believe me, it’s quite profitable.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” I said.

He nodded and took another bite. “I used to work for them.”

That made sense. “And I suppose when you left, you took a few, umm, technical items with you?”

He grinned. “Yup. And I had to disappear. The Group does not look kindly on people who leave and even less so on those who steal their tech.”

Now I knew how he recognized me as an Inner Peace user the first time I’d met him.

“Is the government involved?” I asked.

“At this point, probably not. Definitely not the local governments, so we don’t have to worry about cops, traffic cameras, or anything like that. But the federal level is a different story. We’re pretty sure the Group’s AIs are working to manipulate elections and install their own people in Congress and the White House. It won’t happen overnight; it might take two or three election cycles. But once that happens, it’s game over. So we have to move quickly.”

“So, what do I do now?” I asked.

“Well, that’s up to you. Clearly you can’t go back to your old job or your old life, because they know everything that happened to you up to the moment we fried the device. If you show up at the office, I don’t know what will happen, but it will certainly be very bad for you.

“Alternatively, you could go off grid and live in a cabin in the woods somewhere, though it’s hard to imagine you chopping firewood and eating squirrels. I suppose you could try buying a new identity, though these days it’s harder than people think.”

This conversation, with its menu of unattractive choices, was starting to remind me of my chat with Dr. Mendez. “I don’t like any of those,” I said.

“Well,” said Pablo, and he gave a sly grin, “you could always join us.”

I sat for a while, gazing at the subway tunnel walls as they flashed past the windows. What were my options? As Pablo had so helpfully pointed out, I couldn’t return to my old life, which hadn’t been much fun anyway. I had no survival skills, so heading to the wilderness was out of the question.

And I was starting to feel a little bit pissed off. Who were these Group people anyway, and what gave them the right to screw with peoples’ lives? Maybe it was time for me to be less like a consumer and more like a real human, a fighter like Pablo and his friends. Maybe it was time to stand up for something.

“OK, I’m in,” I said. “Sign me up.” And that is when things started to get weird.

“Great!” said Pablo. “Here, have another pretzel. This one is salted, you’ll love it.” He handed me a steaming hot pretzel wrapped in a napkin.

I took a bite. This was even better than the last one. The crispy crust was dusted with sea salt crystals and enclosed a soft, piping-hot interior. I closed my eyes and savored it. Possibly the best pretzel I’d ever had.

But we’d been riding in this subway car for a while. How could the pretzel still be so warm?

“Thirsty?” asked Pablo. I nodded.

He turned and looked back towards the subway car door behind him. It slid open to reveal my Starbucks dream girl. She walked into the car, holding two mugs of steaming hot Pumpkin Spice Latte, one in each hand, completely unaffected by the rocking and swaying of the moving car. Smiling, she handed me one of the drinks.

I was totally confused and more than a little freaked out. “What’s going on?” I asked Pablo.

“What do you think is going on?”

“I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming,” I said. But I had a sinking suspicion it was the latter.

Pablo munched on his pretzel. “It’s decision time,” he said.

My dream girl leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Don’t forget to wiggle your big toe.”

I just stared at her. And I realized I didn’t even know her name.

Before I could think of how to respond, the subway door slid open again and my old nemesis, Handsome Harry from the billboards, strolled in. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and white slacks. He grinned at me, showing his perfect teeth.

“Well,” he said, “that was fun, wasn’t it? We thought you could use a little adventure to spice up your life. I see it worked. How do you feel?”

“Is this all a dream?” I asked him, dreading the answer.

He waved his hand dismissively. “Dreaming, waking, what’s the difference?”

I looked at Pablo, to the girl, to uber-Harry. Who were these people? Was this a dream, a hallucination, some kind of simulation?

I was desperate. Remembering the girl’s advice, I wiggled my big toe.

Immediately, something shifted in my mind. I was still in the subway car, but it felt different. I was dreaming, but I was also awake. I could feel the cool metal of the subway seat on my butt, but I could also sense the pressure of a bedsheet against my toe. I was in two worlds at once.

And I felt different. More in control. And seriously pissed off.

Uber-Harry saw the change in my expression. His smile faded. “Harry, don’t,” he warned.

Too late. I was in charge now. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a magic wand. It was obsidian, shiny black and glowed with a faint blue light. I pointed it at him and shouted, “Pixelus Evaporatum!” The wand flashed. Uber-Harry flickered, pixelated and dissolved into a sparkling cloud.

Slowly, I shifted my eyes and the wand, towards Pablo. He put up his hands. “Harry, don’t. We’re your friends, remember?”

I thought about it for a moment, then said, “Don’t worry, Pablo, I won’t zap you.” I put away the wand. Pablo visibly relaxed. I continued, “But I’m done being a product. I need to figure out how to fight this Group thing. Is it real?”

“As real as you or me,” replied Pablo. His image flickered a bit as he said it.

“Well, that’s as good an answer as I’m going to get from you, I guess.”

The three of us sat in comfortable silence for a while, enjoying the subway car as it rattled along the track. After a minute, I turned to the girl. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She gave me that wicked grin that I’d seen so often in the Starbucks: “Call me Hermione.”

I looked up and noticed a row of ad cards on the far wall of the subway car. One of them read: Harry — it’s time to wake up.

For the first time in years, I smiled.