and gestured for me to go in. “Oh, hell, yeah. I could buy Paris Hilton and sell her body to medical science while she was still alive if I wanted to. And, believe me, there are times I’ve considered it. In here.”
The door led only to a small gray cell with another door, much heavier, on the opposite wall. This one had a keypad lock. Zack made a sheepish face as he shielded the keypad with his body to input the number code that popped the door. And pop it did, with a hiss: hermetically sealed.
It opened on what I can only describe as Nerd Mission Control. Rows of desks with flat computer screens and keyboards, racks of machinery on the walls, cables carpeting the floor like a mass of snakes. Three guys and two girls who all looked like they popped out of the same pod as Zack, uniform in bad T-shirts and baggy jeans, sat among the screens, moving from desk to desk, tapping or mouse-clicking the occasional command.
“This,” said Zack with pride, “is what I’m talking about.”
“Looks like you could launch a space rocket from here.”
“Ha!” Zack liked that. “Elon Musk only wishes he had a setup this sweet.”
“Who?”
“The guy who sold PayPal to eBay for one point five billion. He used the money to create his own space-launch company.”
“A guy from the Internet has his own space rockets now?”
“Yeah, welcome to the late twentieth century there, Mike.”
“Funny. So if you’re not launching the next probe to Mars in here…”
Zack sat down at one of the workstations, calling up a window with a sweep of its mouse, peering intently at the string of numbers it coughed up for him. “Do you even know why people want to go to Mars? I don’t get it. There’s nothing there except probably some bacteria, if we go up to look at the bacteria then the bacteria we carry will kill it and therefore we’ve made life on Mars extinct, we can’t learn shit from the geology because the gravity isn’t the same and gravity commands geology and—”
“Zack.”
“—yeah. I know. I do that sometimes. No. Not sending a probe to Mars. Though if I did it would rock and would almost certainly drop a base on the moon on its way. But no. What I’m doing in here is changing the nature of democracy. Did you ever read science fiction novels?”
“Not really.”
He gave me a sour look out of the corner of his eye. “No kidding. Well, see, this seriously cool guy called Alfred Bester wrote a novel in the 1950s and I’m not going to get into it way deep except for there’s this bit at the end where the guy in the novel has gotten hold of this stuff called PyrE, which I guess could be pronounced pyr-ee because the e is like a capital letter? And this stuff is thermonuclear explosive that can be detonated by thought alone. Like you could stash it someplace and then just think at it and it’d go off. And what he does is, instead of keeping it for himself, he scatters it among the people of the world. Which is an awesome thing. Because not only does it put the ability to fight power in ultimate weapon-of-mass-destruction mutually-assured-destruction kinda terms, but it also means that the ability to destroy the world is in the hands of people rather than governments. You got a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it the kind with the camera in?”
“Yeah.”
“Take it out.”
I fished my phone out of my pocket and showed it to him. Zack pointed at it. “PyrE.”
“No no no. Phone. Fff oh nnnn.”
He laughed and snatched it out of my hand. “Don’t be giving me that shit. You’re like a century out of date. You’re a technological Neanderthal. You make fire with sticks. And fuck chimps out on the savannah. Or maybe dinosaurs.”
My gag reflex convulsed.
Zack pulled out his own phone, something small and freaky-looking, and began ambidextrously operating both devices at once. “See, what these things do is put the ability to fight power in the hands of the people. And what denotes power, right now?”
“WMDs? Terrorist strikes? Shock and awe?”
“Old thinking, my brother. What’s the one thing Osama bin Laden does that touches everyone on the planet?”
“Kills three thousand people in my fucking city?”
“Dude. He makes a video. He’s made more videos than he’s committed acts of terrorism. He controls the message, he controls the media outlets who fall all over themselves to give airtime to