Reap3r Read online

  Reap3r

  © 2021 Eliot Peper. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.

  book design by Kevin Barrett Kane

  REAP3R

  Eliot Peper

  People seeking the meaning of life get it backward.

  You don’t ask life for an answer.

  Life asks you.

  Prologue

  The target ended the call, slipped the phone into her pocket, and looked out over the shimmering infinity pool. Walter Klein followed her gaze through the binoculars, but beyond the cliff’s edge, there was nothing but the Pacific Ocean stretching away into blue-gray haze.

  What would a person like Dr. Alice Tufekci be thinking about as she stared into the distance? What memories haunted her? What anxieties plagued her? The CZ 75 dug into his ribs. Walter shimmied up a few inches so the gnarled trunk of the Torrey Pine didn’t rub against his shoulder holster. It was always tempting to imagine that targets were thinking profound thoughts, that they had some intuitive premonition of what was coming and used what little time they had left to consider the path their lives had taken, the moral quandaries they’d navigated, the fears they’d fled from or overcome. But Walter knew he was projecting. Alice was probably just mentally reviewing the latest experimental results or wondering whether she had time to take a shit before heading to the lab. Movies used music to build tension before major twists, but real life didn’t have a soundtrack to clue you in to the fact that everything was about to change. Everything was just normal until it wasn’t. Sometimes Walter wanted to scream at them: Can’t you feel the crosshairs on the back of your neck? Stop being an idiot and appreciate the gift of existence before I snuff it out. The end is nigh, asshole. But of course he never did, because he was a professional, and professionals shut up and did the work. Nobody wanted a dentist who decided to improvise in the middle of a root canal. So whether or not ignorance was in fact bliss, targets went to their graves without ever knowing the jig was up.

  Alice spun and walked through the French doors into the house. Walter checked the time. If she stuck to the routine—and she always stuck to the routine—she’d be flying out to the lab in five minutes.

  It was strange how well he got to know targets. Alice loved the perrones at Tacos El Yaqui in Rosarito, an hour’s drive down the coast from San Diego. When she was working on a particularly tough technical problem, she listened to the Taylor Swift song marjorie on infinite repeat. Habitually celibate, every once in a while Alice would pick up a Marine in an Oceanside dive bar, hustle him off to a boutique hotel in Rancho Santa Fe, and fuck his brains out for a weekend before returning to her default life as if nothing had happened. Last night, Walter had woken up with an erection from a dream that conjured one of these irregular bacchanals in graphic detail. He sighed. There was a peculiar kind of ache accompanying this one-way intimacy. He knew so much about her, and she knew nothing about him. But he was here to fulfill a contract, not the possibility of human connection.

  The target came out of the front door at the five-minute mark—probably not enough time for a shit—and boarded the chopper. Through the binoculars, Walter could see her checking diagnostics. The rotor began to spin, kicking up dust in the native-plant garden that surrounded the helipad.

  Walter admired Alice. She’d been on the legendary team that headed straight for the epicenter of the original Bakunawa outbreak. It was during her time in the Philippines when, as the pandemic raged across the globe, she’d been helivaced out of a quarantine site under attack from a local militia. After Geoff Rossi, Alice, and their colleagues had managed to defeat the virus, she’d used some of her share of the proceeds from the vaccine to buy a helicopter and learn to pilot it. Now, she flew back and forth from the lab every day. Walter could appreciate what it might mean to feel like you always had a means of escape, and how such feelings could ultimately betray you.

  Individual blades faded into collective blur.

  Walter unlocked his tablet and ran the script.

  The chopper rose smoothly off the ground and hovered in place for a long moment.

  His mouth was dry and he was sweating under his denim jacket. Not even people who had saved the world were safe from people like him. There were sheep, and there were wolves, and neither lived forever. You could survive a lot of things, but you couldn’t survive life.

  And then Alice dipped the nose of the chopper and swung it out to sea and the drones Walter had kept carefully hidden beneath the cliff’s edge swarmed up around it and dive-bombed into her rotor mast and air intakes. The helicopter listed to one side as the target desperately tried to regain control—the slate of Alice’s mind wiped clean by existential dread—and then flames shot out the back of the engine and the tail swung around fast, carving a chunk of sandstone out of the cliff before the failing machine plunged out of view. The ground under Walter shook when it hit the beach, and then again when it exploded.

  Time to move.

  He pushed himself to his feet, stowed the tablet in the backpack stuffed with ephemera carefully curated to simulate a generic grad student, wiped his hands on his jeans, double checked that his jacket was covering the CZ 75 in its holster, ran a hand through his ginger hair, and slipped away from the grove of wind-sculpted trees.

  Despite his racing heart, Walter forced himself to stroll past the opulent La Jolla Farms estates. Incoming sirens wailed as he crossed the main road onto UC San Diego’s campus. He allowed himself one glance over his shoulder as he followed a pedestrian path past the undergraduate dorms. Oily black smoke billowed up over the bluff, darkening the baby blue sky.

  Down the rabbit hole, Alice.

  Walter’s phone buzzed.

  Reap3r notification: Payment received.

  Walter wondered what Alice had done to earn the enmity of whoever had posted the gig, but clients were anonymized behind layer upon layer of encryption, the transaction facilitated by smart contract instead of fixer. Was there a spurned lover? A conspiracy-addled anti-vaxxer terrorist cell? A secret beyond the scope of the dossier he’d collated? Walter would never know and frankly, it was easier that way.

  A target was a target.

  A job was a job.

  Anyone who claimed life was priceless wasn’t paying attention.

  Three years later…

  1

  Sansome Haverford forced himself to let out a long-held breath, set his shoulders, and strode onto the stage.

  Lights blazed. Applause swelled.

  TED.

  He had worked so hard to get here. He wished he were anywhere but here.

  Sansome smiled with his eyes just like Esteban had coached him. He didn’t need to look at the slides or the prompter. He didn’t need to look at the clock. He needed to look out at the audience—meet all those other eyes behind the glare.

  Some people loved being the center of attention. There was a hunger in them that could only be sated by sating the hunger of an audience. Sansome was not such a person. The hunger of an audience made him feel like a meal. Far better to be a center of influence, to direct events from the sidelines, to move the world with the gentlest of touches.

  Speak.

  Speak.

  Speak.

  Self-flagellation roused Esteban’s training and Sansome spoke. Stories took shape and interlocked, loaded with carefully calibrated logos and pathos, each successive piece revealing the puzzle’s overall design to be stranger, grander, more counterintuitive.

  Sansome
resented his fear of public speaking in no small part because it was so cliché. The butterflies. The burgeoning nausea. The dreams shot through with anxiety. To feel crippled by such a common phobia was humiliating, and knowing such a sentiment was unworthy made it that much worse. He fought back the rising tide of stage fright by focusing on the rhythm of the words.

  Remember why you’re here.

  He’d give anything to be holed up in his study with a biography of Florence Nightingale or Genghis Khan right now, and whatever narcissism smoldered in Sansome’s heart wasn’t stoked by adulation. No. He was here to be of service, not to the beau monde gazing up at him with bated breath, not to the faceless millions streaming this talk online, but to his portfolio, his people, his family.

  Nobody liked raising capital, least of all those whose profession was to manage it. But by corralling money from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and billionaires, Sansome could guarantee that a lack of cash would never stand between those under his wing and the futures they sought to realize. And the staid shepherds of the wealth Sansome wanted to deploy liked to think of themselves not as fungible cogs in a machine to turn money into more money, but as strategists of insight and initiative who chose to put their weight behind the kinds of people with ideas worth sharing, the kind of people who earned standing ovations at places like TED. So Sansome would do this little dance for them, to spare his own investees the trouble. And who knew? The next Florence, or the next Genghis, might watch this talk and see in Sansome a potential ally.

  So he told them about Human Capital’s humans. Geoff, who had saved billions of lives with his vaccine. Safaa, who was the highest grossing professional athlete of her generation. Farzona, whose databank had rewired the information architecture of the entire internet. Lauren, who had singlehandedly revitalized Star Wars for Disney. Samuel, who had built a new nation from the remains of what had once been Venezuela. Molly, whose pioneering work in genetic engineering was poised to revolutionize biotech. On and on and on. For every example he mentioned, Sansome glossed over many more whose positions or projects were sensitive. And of course, he couldn’t mention Luki’s top secret advances in quantum computing, much less Reap3r.

  Sansome walked back and forth across the stage, hoping movement would quiet his nerves. He explained that in ancient Rome wealthy patrons had financially supported writers and artists, providing them with room, board, gifts, stipends, and social access. In return, these artists served as anteambulos, literally clearing a path for their patrons as they walked the bustling streets, and metaphorically clearing a path for their patrons by ferrying messages, offering favors, and generally nudging life in the right direction.

  And here was the lovely reversal Esteban had suggested: the audience expected the anecdote to resolve with Sansome as patron—investing as he did in artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. But Human Capital’s real work was that of anteambulo: clearing a path for their portfolio to make the greatest impact they possibly could. It was the kind of narrative sleight of hand that might show up in podcasts like Akimbo or Rabbit Hole.

  Sansome stopped, faced the audience, and sank into the moment, reaching for the kind of inspired spontaneity only achieved via relentless practice. “At Human Capital, we don’t bet on technology. We don’t even bet on companies. We bet on people.”

  Repressing the pain it caused him not to fill it, he let silence expand into the room for a long beat—that was the bit Esteban had drilled him on hardest: holding space for silence.

  “It’s tempting to look at the world and see governments and businesses and schools and hospitals and institutions, but that’s all a convenient fiction. The truth is that organizations are just a bunch of people trying to move in the same direction, and technology is just the way that people do things. Special relativity didn’t change the world. Einstein did. So we dispense with the theses that guide so many investors, and think of ourselves as a special breed of New Yorker profile writer who just happens to invest in the subject of the story. We find the best people in the world, figure out what makes them tick, write them checks, and give them free rein to do what only they can do.”

  He opened his palms as if revealing a present. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the Human Capital formula. Only people can change the world.”

  Silence.

  Blind panic: Had he misread the room? Had he fumbled this crucial opportunity to reach the right people with the right message? Had he failed himself and those who depended on him?

  The crowd rose to their feet.

  Sansome might not relish public attention, but there was no denying that the roar was electrifying. The wave crested and broke. He feigned embarrassment, letting it wash over him. Against all odds and in violation of weeks’ worth of stress fantasies, he hadn’t fucked it up.

  He bowed. Waved. Bowed again.

  And then he was backstage and out of the hot glare of the lights and checking his phone and—yes—Esteban. This time, Sansome’s smile didn’t require media training.

  “I fucking killed it, thanks to you,” said Sansome. “LPs will slit each other’s throats for a seat on the bus.”

  “It’s Geoff,” said Esteban, his urgent tone wiping the shit-eating grin off Sansome’s face. He didn’t want to deal with this right now. He wanted to sit back with a well-deserved whiskey and reread Devon’s grant application. “I’m forwarding you the feed.”

  “Nightmare?” asked Sansome.

  “Harrowing,” confirmed Esteban.

  That was the problem with investing in people.

  Numbers were clean.

  People were messy.

  2

  The phone call ruined an otherwise perfect lunch at Saul’s.

  Geoff Rossi wasn’t on planet Earth. At least, not quite. While he was technically sitting in a booth at the best deli to have ever graced his palate, he was also—thanks to Terry Pratchett’s indefatigable imagination—sneaking through the fetid alleys of Discworld’s infamous, conspiracy-ridden, fantastical city of Ankh-Morpork. After another bout of night terrors, Geoff had needed an escape.

  He reluctantly lay the novel down on top of the stack of dissertations he was supposed to be reviewing. He remembered how full of vim and vigor he’d been in graduate school, how eager to advance the cause of science, to unlock the secrets of life. Now when he wasn’t busy steadfastly refusing the never-ending flood of offers to commercialize his patents—this being the best lever Geoff had to head off the existential dangers his discoveries heralded—he struggled to summon the energy to coach the brilliant students so eager to work in his lab at UC Berkeley. He knew what the tools they developed might be used for. Japan had outlawed guns for three centuries. Italy had outlawed silk spinning for two centuries. France had outlawed printing for two decades. Technological prohibitions could work, if only for a little while. Geoff’s only hope was to buy some time for people to think through the implications of his invention before remaking the world with it. While he took every opportunity his celebrity afforded him to champion the Protocol for Ethics in Synthetic Biology, he shuddered at the fact that he’d been the one to write it. What would people do if they found out the truth? Nothing made Geoff’s skin crawl like admiration, which was why their complete indifference to his Reputation was the greatest gift Saul’s staff could offer him.

  Their second greatest gift was the Pastrami Ruskie—from which he took an enormous bite while pretending to ignore the phone buzzing in his pocket. Fatty and mouthwatering, the owners sourced the grass-fed beef from Bill Niman’s ranch in Marin County, brined it for days, rubbed it with spices, long-smoked it, steamed it and served it on warm, handmade, fermented rye. Then there was the Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, coleslaw, and pickled vegetables. In other words, perfection. Geoff would award the sandwich one of his godforsaken Nobels if he could.

  But the food wasn’t the best thing about Saul’s.
The best thing about Saul’s was that it wasn’t trying to be a New York Jewish Deli. The only thing Saul’s was trying to be was itself—a luxury unimaginable to Geoff. He sometimes resented having outlived Alice and Frank, his closest collaborators on the Bakunawa vaccine.

  Wishing he could shut the damn thing up through pure force of will, he snatched the vibrating phone from his pocket.

  His jaw froze mid-chew as he stared down at the screen.

  This was the one number Geoff never, ever wanted to hear from.

  He had almost managed to convince himself that the caller didn’t really exist, was just yet another hungry ghost in the faceless 220-million-strong pantheon that haunted his dreams.

  Geoff forced down the masticated lump of sandwich.

  He’d known this was coming.

  It came every year, without fail.

  Island hopping through the Aegean.

  Shooting the Northwest Passage.

  Rounding Cape Horn.

  The lap of waves against hull.

  Unfamiliar pelagic birds circling overhead.

  Air thick with ocean-tang.

  And people. People Geoff didn’t care to know. People he couldn’t avoid thanks to a promise he’d lived to regret.

  He wanted to decline the call. He wanted to drop the phone on the floor, crush it under the heel of his Birkenstock, and get a fresh number from a new carrier. He wanted to escape back into Discworld.

  Geoff accepted the call, if not the fate he knew he more than deserved.

  “Sansome?” the tremor in his voice calcified Geoff’s self-hatred.

  “Geoff, my man. I come bearing the invitation of a lifetime.”

  3

  Luki Zubiri walked the path that ran along the edge of the bluff.