Strange Flesh: A Novel - Softcover

Olson, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451627580 ISBN 13: 9781451627589

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2013

Synopsis

In this “complex, cutting-edge debut” for fans of Neal Stephenson and The Millennium Trilogy, a troubled hacker goes undercover to locate a vanished tech prodigy and finds himself at the center of a tantalizing, high-stakes revolution in virtual reality (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

IN THIS DEBUT THRILLER FOR FANS OF NEAL STEPHENSON AND THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY, A TROUBLED HACKER FINDS HIMSELF AT THE CENTER OF A HIGH-STAKES REVOLUTION IN VIRTUAL REALITY.

James Pryce, a hacker at Red Rook Security in Manhattan, has just received his most personal assignment yet. Blythe Randall, the woman who broke his heart in college, has hired him to locate her missing brother, Billy, whose increasingly violent stunts threaten to bring down their family’s billion-dollar media empire. To do so, James must infiltrate Billy’s last known whereabouts: GAME, a programming collective where a group of designers are at work on a top-secret invention that promises a revolutionary advance in sexual technology. James has to find Billy before his final plan is set in motion, but when the GAMErs invite him to their inner circle, his investigation takes a tantalizing—and much more dangerous—turn.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Olson graduated from Harvard and worked in investment banking and software engineering before earning a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, where he designed a locomotion interface for virtual environments.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Strange Flesh 2

For a school perceived to host a driven and introverted population, the number of social clubs one can join at Harvard is surprising. They run the gamut from coed cocktail societies like the Hasty Pudding to artistic clans such as the Signet and the Lampoon.

In the fall of 2000, I’d accepted membership to the Bat, one of the college’s Final Clubs, our slightly refined version of fraternities. After the holidays, I began my pre-initiation “neophyte” period, wherein you serve as a party Sherpa to the senior members. On a bitter Tuesday evening, I was ordered to report to the club for my mandatory shift in the Texas Hold ’Em game we’d run continuously during the entire two-week reading period before exams.

Late that night, I found myself seated in our book-lined card room drinking neat bourbon and inhaling an atmosphere saturated with exotic smoke. I watched with wonder the massive pile of chips growing in front of me.

The state of my finances had been much on my mind. Like many of my classmates, my father had a blue-chip doctorate; in his case, aeronautical engineering from Stanford. I grew up within miles of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Unfortunately, his commitment to the nation’s space program was supplanted just after my mother’s death, when I was too young to have formed memories of her, by a far more zealous embrace of Jim Beam. By the time I received my heavy envelope from Harvard, he was going to work in a begrimed jumpsuit, and I was left with a complex financial aid package, now proving itself hopelessly inadequate. Despite a grueling work-study job in my house’s cafeteria and moonlighting at Ravelin, a nearby network security start-up, I would likely be forced to take the next semester off to work full-time in order to pay off swelling credit card balances. As I turned over a Big Slick, I contemplated the fact that while poker may contribute to my academic undoing, it would provide a respite from the debt collectors, at least until next month.

The only other player at the table with any kind of stack was a senior named William Baldwin Coles III. The son of a notorious currency trader, he was the club’s vice president (in the Bat, this is the highest office) and had been playing in the game for almost four days without cease. Just as I began the theatrics to set up a devious double bluff, he looked down at his cell and grinned.

“Gentlemen, things are about to get a lot more interesting.”

—   —   —

A couple minutes later, three new players arrived, led by the Bat’s reigning carnal Achilles, Raffi Consuelo. The second was Matt Weeks, the president of the Spee Club, who spent more time at his family’s Las Vegas casino than he did on campus. And finally, Blake Randall stepped inside.

Blake resembled one of the better-looking busts of a young Julius Caesar. He had the same strong nose and penetrating eyes, and his pale skin was the white of new marble. He stood a couple inches taller than my six-two and had a full head of blond hair. His chiseled physique came from hours logged on the Charles River as captain of our heavyweight crew.

Though he was a notable presence in his own right, when I looked at Blake, all I could see was his twin sister, Blythe, the legendary beauty of her class. She was also intimidatingly tall and had the same snowy complexion as her brother, which prompted her inevitable female detractors to call her “that starving vampire bitch.” Of course, her rich-girl celebrity status and willowy elegance ensured all sorts of male admirers flocking to her banner.

I was utterly bewitched the first time I laid eyes on her.

The twins’ glamour alone would have been enough to stimulate gossip at school, but combined with their alien mirrored beauty, we really couldn’t keep ourselves from trotting out sensational fantasies, often making use of the delicious term “twincest.” Further inflaming such rumors were their matching crooked ring fingers. A congenital abnormality? Had a ten-year-old Blake broken his while skiing, causing Blythe to snap her own in sympathy? Or maybe it was ritual mutilation: no wedding ring would ever pass over either finger to vitiate their perfect love.

As if to demonstrate contempt for our trifling opinions, Blythe and Blake did nothing to discourage such chatter. In a cocktail circle, her hand would seek his arm. They would clutch and whisper when they met. On formal occasions, they danced together splendidly.

—   —   —

Seeing these three arrive, a couple of the current players began packing up their chips. I followed suit, but Coles put his hand on my shoulder and said, “A little early for the money leader to cash in, don’t you think?”

The newcomers sat down as the others hustled out like the roof was on fire. I started counting out chips.

Blake smiled benignly at me. “Evening, James. What do you say we raise the stakes?”

I found it strange that Blake would want to disrupt the game right away—and even stranger that he knew my name. I looked to Coles for guidance.

My stomach turned over when the group agreed to increase the blinds by an order of magnitude. There was simply no way I could come up with a four-figure buy-in. But the words “I can’t play” wouldn’t quite come out of my mouth. I stacked plastic slowly as I imagined how I might get myself out of this situation.

Coles leaned over to grab the Wild Turkey bottle and whispered, “Just deal, man. I’ll cover you.”

A wispy rumor tickled my bourbon-fogged brain. Coles was dating Blythe Randall. Blake supposedly didn’t care for the match and did a poor job of concealing his feelings. I wanted to explain that there was no way I’d be able to pay him back. That I’d never played for that much. That it was impossible, because I’d have to drop out of school and live on the streets if I lost. But I didn’t say any of that.

I dealt.

—   —   —

I dealt myself seven hours’ worth of pocket pairs, flopped sets, and nut flush rivers. I was playing like a field mouse surrounded by hawks, and yet a mountain of valuable chips steadily accumulated under my chin.

But Blake held the chip lead all night with his unfailing instinct for the jugular. Having folded a huge pot, Raffi got up in disgust after watching him flip over a garbage hand of two-seven unsuited. Matt passed out after writing his third five-digit chit to the bank.

“And then there were three,” said Coles.

My next cards were a pair of jacks, spades and clubs. I almost had to fold them in the maelstrom of pre-flop raising that went on between Blake and Coles. But with only three players, my jacks couldn’t be that bad.

True to form, I flopped myself a set. The center cards were:



The pot rocketed over two grand before it got to me. It was weak, but I just called.

Coles said, “Shit!” and folded his cards. That worried me. Something about the hand scared him off. I glanced over at Blake for any sign of what Coles had seen, but he was a mannequin. He made a courteous gesture for me to deal another card.

I did, and up turned the jack of hearts. Giving me four of a kind for the first time in my life.

Silently screaming at myself to stay cool, I kept staring at the card until I had it together and then slowly raised my head to meet Blake’s eye.

He betrayed nothing. “Thirty-five hundred.” His bet said a full house, probably kings.

“Up five,” I said, trying to lure him in.

Blake smiled cruelly. “Table,” he said, indicating that he bet everything I had in front of me. At the bottom of my innocent columns of colored discs, I had three obsidian placards. These were ten-thousand-dollar markers. He raised me confidently enough that I took a second to reexamine the board and realized he could be holding cards that already beat even my fantastic hand. The ace of diamonds and queen of diamonds made a straight flush that would impoverish me utterly. I studied him, trying to evaluate whether the universe could be so unjust.

Blake had politely averted his gaze from someone wrestling with base monetary calculations. I started figuring odds but was interrupted by a voice inside me.

If you let this rich bastard muscle you off four of a kind, you might as well cash in your chips and prepare for a life of absolute mediocrity.

The black rectangles emerged. “It’s thirty-seven thousand five hundred. And I call.”

If Blake was surprised by the amount, he didn’t show it. Maybe he became slightly more still, but my hand was the one shaking as I flipped over the last card, cultivating nightmare visions of him pulling a miracle winner.

The last card was the Queen of Hearts.

He turned over his caballeros and shrugged. Fortune is a cruel mistress.

I had to give him credit, though. He didn’t bat an eyelash when he saw my jacks. He just took them in for a second and then murmured something I almost didn’t catch.

“Knaves. How apt.”

My brain was about to start leaking out my eyes as Blake casually counted off four black placards from his stack and tossed them over to me, making me wealthier than I’d ever been. Allowing me to quit my humiliating job in the cafeteria. Changing everything about my time in college. I was expecting him to insist that we keep playing for another two days, and I planned for a protracted period of trench warfare to protect my newfound riches.

But Blake said, “Well, I doubt we’ll do better than that this morning. What do you say we wrap it up?”

Ten minutes later, he slipped out the door into the cold Cambridge dawn. Coles gave my shoulder a painfully hard squeeze and said, with a certain lilt of passion in his voice, “Thank you.”

I lifted my glass and began an epic bender that still makes my toes curl to think of.

—   —   —

At the time, I was too beside myself with joy to think much about Blake’s parting shot. It was only later, while researching a paper about the iconography of playing cards, that I realized what he meant. I always believed that the jack was the prince of the deck, the heir to the king and queen. But he’s not. He’s the servant. Another word for which is “knave.” My jacks beating his kings was “apt” because the ranks of our cards matched the players. Blake the aristocrat was defeated by the scullery boy.

Once I understood this, I told myself that I’d gladly suffer far greater insult for that much money. That I would try to remember him only with gratitude.

By and large Harvard is a resolute meritocracy, free of the old overt classism. But I guess among any group of relentlessly ambitious people, weird hierarchies and castes develop. When we spoke of our aspirations, you’d occasionally hear someone disparage those choosing even such lucrative professions as the law or investment banking as “mere wage slaves,” the unspoken idea being that the real elite operated on the “principal side.” In business, this meant you owned the enterprise; if you didn’t have one to inherit, you started one. In other fields, you’d hear similar language about acting “on your own portfolio.” Being an artist, not a gallerist. Being a politician, not a consultant. Being the talent, not the handler. The subtext was that there were two classes of people: masters and servants.

Blake had called me a knave. I didn’t let it bother me at the time.

—   —   —

But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me now.

The prospect of seeing his sister is more bothersome still. I find it eerie, now that I’m once again drowning in emotional quicksand—and courting the consequent physical danger—that I’m receiving this visitation from Blythe, my original will-o’-the-wisp.

I’m supposed to go and drink their fine whiskey, pretending to be old friends, while the Randall twins interview me for a job. Though it may well demand my brand of skills, there are others they could have called.

At the end of our meeting Mercer says, “Dear boy, you know who these people are. I’m sure I needn’t emphasize that you’re to do everything in your power to accommodate their wishes.”

I say, “Of course.”

But I think, Why me? Why now?|Strange Flesh 1

The Norn seeks you.

Eeyore, one of my friends at work, has marked the message “Urgent.”

What could she want?

The project I’ve toiled on for the past month remains far from finished. It should be weeks before I’m due an accounting with her.

I stumble into the bathroom to get functional, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. Not yet anyway. I take a deep breath and turn the shower on hot.

The Norn is my boss, Susan Mercer, one of the managing partners of Red Rook, a global network security company based in DC. She’s called the Norn—after the Norse pantheon’s Weavers of Fate—due to the degree of her control over the destinies of the firm’s employees. The name is made especially fitting by her habit of embroidering circuit schematics for signals intelligence equipment from the NSA’s Cold War glory days. She is not someone you keep waiting.

—   —   —

The elevator opens onto Mercer’s dimly lit corner suite at our New York office. She sits at an antique desk in her Shaker rocking chair. A bright lamp casts a circle of light on her hands, which move with preternatural authority over an ivory hoop. Her eyes are focused on me.

“James, good of you to come,” she says in a Brahmin drawl.

“No problem.” I take a small glass box out of my bag and set it on her desk. It contains a rare “Bohemian Garnet” Venus flytrap for her terrarium. Mercer adores carnivorous plants, and she tolerates my gifts as sincere expressions of filial devotion. I know little about her domestic situation, but it’s hard to imagine a husband, and I like the idea that at least somebody gives her something. “I hope you don’t kill this one quite so quickly,” I say.

“This plant’s predecessor was a decadent vegetarian. No aptitude for hunting.”

“You probably froze it.”

“My office isn’t a South Carolina swamp. If a thing can’t adapt—”

Her look of delight fades into one of concern as she sees the scrapes on my wrist and then clocks my totally uncharacteristic turtleneck. The morning’s cleanup had required some improvisation. I was robbed last night. That’s how I’ve chosen to characterize it. Just the innocent victim of a simple theft. Happens every day.

“James . . . ?”

She lets the question hang there, but I just smile at her. Mercer is way too old-school to pry into an employee’s personal life, in conversation at least. She watches me for a while but only asks, “Can I offer you some tea?”

“No thanks.” I perch on one of the unstable chairs in front of her desk.

She sets down her project, the blueprint for some ancient mechanical encoding machine; pours herself a cup; and spends a moment regarding the steam as it spirals up into the shadows.

I notice her tea service rests on a set of black lace doilies that have Red Rook’s logo stitched into them. A logo that says a lot about our operation. Its black...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1451627580
• ISBN 13: 9781451627589
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416