Shel Chen had many names. Shel Chen, OneEyedRoyal, McCreight, and M. But McCreight was the one he told Lyle to call him. McCreight was the one who had built the tools of revelation that both succeeded and failed too much. He was the one Lyle decided to trust because he was who was worth a story.
Over recent weeks, as he’d continued to narrate, deeper and flatter was the way McCreight’s voice had gone. Lyle could hear the way the years had pulled him down, just like anyone else, and it made it easier for him to put the hack behind them.
They were both disappointed men.
But there was a sharpness too, he recognized in the audio recording, that blade running beneath. He knew he must be careful. That blade—it pointed at Lyle.
You ought to look at data and say, there is an editorial unit here, a unit being the shape life doesn’t have. But I look at you, and you are too hungry to tell data, Michaels.
Lyle had tried to compliment McCreight into returning to the subject of Glen Close. He’d talked about vision, scope. Sometimes what looks like misanthropy is for the potential utopia of the whole world.
You want me to say I did it for heroic reasons, Michaels. You want me to be your protagonist, and I’m not. I wasn’t after good. I was after the top.
Lyle said they were not so different. They were both data analysts of sorts.
I buried everyone I was to be who I wanted to be, Michaels, McCreight said in the recording. Don’t do the same. If you don’t stop now, you’ll become your profile: set, finite. Wait too long, you’ll never spread out again. You’ll wake up who you wanted to be with nothing you want. Change the theorem.
In the recording, there was a silence before his own voice. What do you want? Lyle had asked. And he remembered how McCreight had leaned over the table, quick as a slammed door.
For you to be someone worth trusting, McCreight said.
The computer spoke again in Lyle’s voice. It said that they were not talking about Lyle but Sean.
You aren’t the one who will be punished. Comes to a point, I will never be alone of witness again.
Lyle coughed, asked who was witness.
They are.
Lyle again asked who.
Let’s imagine they were waiting for someone like me. Let’s imagine they’ve been following me since Nevada. Maybe there never was a RabbidUnicorn, Michaels. Maybe RabbidUnicorn was many shadow operatives. They wanted a loner. I was a body no one would claim, so ripe for them, controvertible. From work to cocktails— you can wear him so many ways!
A guttural sound. A quick four beats of flesh on table.
Of course, Alexandra thinks it couldn’t possibly be. Everything ugly is always somewhere over the rainbow. And if it isn’t, she’ll send it there first class.
Alexandra isn’t here, Lyle said. Let’s focus on the story.
Crazy would rather think, her own brother crazy she’d rather think than that her government is.
Lyle heard the record of his voice glom on to RabbidUnicorn. Then there was a drawn-out silence, a thinking one.
In retrospect, maybe the whole group was run by them, McCreight said finally. A quiet game of make-pretend geek revolutionaries. They groomed me like pedophiles. You think there are two sides, that the discontents are disrupting the rodeo, but they’ve filled in every side. Modus operandi: you teach them to code, wait for something useful. Or you embed in hacker collectives, disrupt service. Then you make the arrests, turn anarchists to work for the government. Who are they? They are Mr. Potato Head with all his mustaches.
You feel tricked?
The worst way to be was duped, I used to think. But that was because I’d never really been scared.
What is the fear?
One day you are us. The next you’re recategorized. Guy I worked with on terrorist finance tracking applications: dead. Three bullet holes. He was thinking of getting out. He was investing in properties. Over fast as three bends of a finger.
“And you believe him,” Bri Freeman said on the phone when he called her.
“He’s emotional when he speaks. It’s not practiced. You can hear that he feels he’s being followed.”
“Sounds like Gülen,” Bri said.
“The cleric.”
“He will cry as he lectures about interfaith dialogue, the West. But meanwhile, he prays in the Poconos, the beneficiary of the CIA’s hospitality.”
Lyle looked at the ceiling. He couldn’t see the full figure of McCreight, summarize him. Just as Lyle caught a trace, Sean dropped off. “The entire story will crumble if he’s a fraud or a crazy.”
“You think he might be.”
“And you think?”
A pause. “I think it’s hard to tell a true story,” she said. “Even for Lyle Michaels. Maybe you need a wider sample.”
“Meaning?”
“Who can you talk to who knows the guy?”