Bangkok Noir

1.0

Where are you?

Queen Sirikit Center, Bangkok, Thailand

Inside one of the smaller conference rooms, the air-conditioning blasting multiple streams over the audience. In the back a youngish Thai man — just out of his teens — his hair short, as if he’d recently disrobed as a monk or left military service. But he didn’t seem like the type for either the monkhood or the army. Chinapat had the soft, nerdy look of a man-boy slumped before a computer screen as a way of life.

He sat in quiet serenity, either meditating or somewhere online inside his skull, slowly rubbing his hands, moving his fingers together as if the meat locker chill temperature had seeped deep into his body or he had lost his concentration, hand on the mouse, the cursor frozen on the screen. Dressed in a suit and tie, and cheap black shoes from the Sunday market, the kind with thick rubber soles. Such shoes allowed Chinapat, like a phantom, silently and without notice, to disappear inside a room.

Inside the frigid room was the object of Chinapat’s first professional job.

A middle-aged Japanese man in dark glasses looked him over the way a father looks over a son, part pride, part doubt and disapproval, as if his expectations had been exceeded and dashed at the same time. The Japanese man showed him a photograph of Tanaka.

“Eliminate him,” he said.

Chinapat glanced at the podium. Mr. Tanaka, a representative of an obscure but well-financed Japanese film distributor, spoke to the early morning symposium. It was Friday at 8:30 a.m. Chinapat couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake at 8:30 in the morning; no memory came back.

He watched as Mr. Tanaka began to read from his notes, looking up at a thin audience of no more than seventy-five people — a scattering of journalists, film students, some representatives from the Japanese embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a few walk-ins who had read about the event in the Bangkok Post. Most of the audience had blue lips from the cold. They’d been paid a handsome sum to wrap themselves in coats and scarves to survive the arctic blast from the ventilation system. The first two rows of hard-looking Japanese men, with thick necks sticking like redwoods from their white shirts and dark suits, sat so still they looked like sculptures. Chinapat sighed, thinking as he examined the men in the first rows that he’d signed onto a very long payroll.

Mr. Tanaka had a thin moustache and gleaming teeth that looked artificial — hard, resilient objects that would outlive the man by centuries. The speaker appeared more Chinese than Japanese with his round face and large eyes. Chinapat wondered if this was the result of a deep flaw as Tanaka lowered his glasses, looked up from his notes and nodded at one of the men in the first row. Tanaka’s unsmiling stone-like face surveyed the audience. He spoke in English, his tone reserved and serious. Chinapat wondered what it was like to actually kill a man in the real world. And, in particular, what it would feel like to kill Tanaka.

“We resist outsiders who don’t know our history,” Tanaka said, looking at the audience. “Such people do not respect or honor our way of life, our traditions. Our history, like your history in Thailand, is both noble and ancient. Outsiders would try to destroy our culture. We have terrorists like the Sea Shepherd, saying that because we hunt limited numbers of dolphins and pilot whales we are wrong. How can that be?” Tanaka shrugged his shoulders, looking out at his audience. “How can the Japanese way of life be wrong? It’s not logical. It’s not scientific.”

Chinapat thought the speech sounded like something from the lips of an old analogue way of viewing reality. He opened one eye and glanced down at his watch before he closed them again. Waiting was the worst part of his job. Listening to a speech from Tanaka was the second worst part. He quite enjoyed, though, the planning, working out the details — place, time and, most important of all, the exit from the scene once the work was done.

Mr. Tanaka hadn’t made his first job easy. In the real world there were no “cheat codes” to game the system. He had to figure out stuff one step at a time. Tanaka hadn’t stayed in any of the luxury hotels on Sukhumvit Road. Instead he had holed up, as if expecting trouble, in a compound in Thonglor — the heart of the Japanese expat community — ringed with CCTV cameras, security personnel and limited access. On screen, none of these obstacles would have taken more than a few keystrokes to blow through.

Tanaka droned on in a public speech fashion — all words, no images — with lots of very important people in the audience who actually appeared to be listening. Chinapat hated all of those words, and he hated more how the words made him captive, a passive, helpless, patient observer. Analogue boredom flowed like pain throughout the system.

The overhead lights dimmed, and behind him the film started.

The screening of The Taiji Truth ended with a slow fade to a group of fishermen sitting together with their wives and children. The villagers lived in Taiji, located in southwestern Japan. These were the same people who’d done the heavy work, the slicing and cutting, the killing in The Cove. In this film the fishermen appeared as heroes, dressed like samurai. They talked about the history of their village and its simple, honest people, who only wanted to continue the traditions of their ancestors. Self-sufficient, modest, proud and very Japanese... but no one was talking about Academy Awards. The film had been financed by members of the far right in Japan and had been taken to Asian countries to show the true story of the people of Taiji and their relationship with the annual dolphin hunt.

The camera floated across the faces, making them look like humble, salt of the earth villagers who had little in terms of material possessions. The kind of people one rarely thought about as living in Japan. Chinapat thought they looked like men, women and children from a village near the Laotian border he’d once visited just to see what such a place looked like. He was more careful about unstructured visits, as they often led to little more than dust, barking dogs, chickens scratching the ground and the smell of wood fires. Bangkok was different. So was Taiji.

No more than five minutes into the documentary, there was a jump cut. Nothing gracefully prepared the audience for what came next.

A shudder arose as the screen filled with the Taiji bay boiled up a gruesome red. Blood gushed from dozens of gutted dolphins as local Japanese villagers slaughtered as if on a battleground, hacking and stabbing and cutting through the flesh. Tanaka started shouting in Japanese. A couple of the men in the first row ran to the front, using their sizeable bodies to block the screen. Other Japanese men from the second row ran to the projection room in the back. Chinapat heard them cursing in Japanese.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have had someone sabotage our film. Those who hate Japan stop at nothing to hurt us. What you are seeing is an example of the history of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. They seek to interfere and bring down our traditions. We will stand together against such people.”

The Japanese in the audience applauded. After a few seconds they were on their feet giving Tanaka a standing ovation. It was Tanaka’s moment of glory. He actually smiled and bowed to the audience. The men outside the projection room were having difficulty getting in. The projectionist had locked the door from the inside.

“In Japan we follow the principle of sustainable use. Dolphins are a renewable resource.”

Chinapat kept his eye on the stage, watching the sea of dead and dying dolphins dancing over the faces and chests of the Japanese men from the audience who stood shoulder to shoulder, as if they’d practiced this formation. The shallow inland bay reminded him of Fanta strawberry red, one of Chinapat’s favorite drinks as a boy. The rest of the audience reacted with confusion and anger. Watching the men from the first five minutes gleefully slaughtering the dolphins horrified the women in the audience. They registered a common emotion, which exploded like a flock of birds that had spotted an eagle circling. The roaring sound of stale breath sucked deep back into the lungs, a rising tone of disgust salted with despair.

Finally the film stopped, and the men who’d been blocking the screen filed back and took their seats. Three other men came out of the project in booth, leaving a comrade inside to keep an eye on the projectionist.

As Tanaka resumed his speech, apologizing for the interruption and promising to file a complaint, he said, “What you’ve just seen is the work of terrorists.”

More applause burst from a sizeable section of the audience. Chinapat observed that a number of those applauding were missing little fingers. The absent appendage didn’t muffle or reduce the sound of the clapping. Then an attractive young Thai woman with red streaks in her long black hair entered from one of the side doors — she looked no more than seventeen or eighteen. She wore a tight, short black miniskirt and a crisp white cotton blouse with shiny buttons that looked like military decorations. She walked straight to his row and sat in the seat next to him. “I know who you are,” she said. “And I have a message for you.”

He didn’t recognize her at first. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else, younger sister,” he said.

“It’s a trap,” she said, looking straight ahead at the stage. “We’ve been set up.”

“That’s not my reading,” he said.

Her name was Seven and she’d expected an argument. “That’s because your calculations are off point four,” she said.

He ran through the sequence from top to bottom. “Fuck, you’re right,” he said, his mouth ajar. “How did that happen?”

She leaned over and whispered, “You were in a hurry. Now we don’t have much time. But I have a backup plan.”

One of the things Chinapat loved most about Seven was that she always came with a fully developed contingency program.

She firmly grabbed his hand, and together they moved down the row to the exit door and out into the main lobby. Seven handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the men’s restroom. A couple of minutes later, Chinapat emerged wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with a small dolphin icon above the heart.

2.0

Where are you?

Nana Entertainment Plaza

In a small, overcrowded back room of a bar converted into an office, a couple of tables, chairs, bookcases, a filing cabinet and two enormous safes occupied the area behind a locked set of teak doors.

Sitting amid gray smoke, a heavy-set Middle-Eastern man named Jaul slumped in front of a computer screen. His enormous stomach rose above the edge of the table as his right hand moved the mouse and his left hand fed a large, freshly fried chicken drumstick into his mouth. Jaul was online, working through a pirated version of an early program of an archeological dig outside Baghdad. He was the owner of the Smoke but No Fire Bar.

The bar, once a travel agency, was discreetly set back from the staircase on the second floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza. It was early morning, and the plaza was deserted. A few delivery trucks downstairs. Otherwise only a stray cat and a couple of resident dogs occupied the narrow corridors. Jaul loved the early morning, when he was left alone to count his money. His was a popular bar, and his women tall and young and beautiful. Money, piles of cash, accumulated every night like clockwork. He had counted his money twice and made notes in a ledger. Behind the chair where he sat, the safe door was ajar. Through the door appeared rows of stacked Thai thousand and five hundred baht notes.

One of Seven’s cyber friends had struck up a friendship with Pepsi, who worked at Jaul’s Smoke but No Fire Bar in Nana. Pepsi was a dancer and she took drugs. She paid cash for some cyber work involving several foreign customers, and Seven had been a subcontractor in refining Pepsi’s network of clients. Like most addicts Pepsi had a keen awareness of where lots of money was hidden and loved to gossip. She traded information about Jaul’s safe after Seven promised a full system upgrade and payment security that her bookie couldn’t hack.

Chinapat stepped into Jaul’s office, finding crude, out-of-date furniture and equipment. The primitive quality of Jaul’s software made his computer system no better than a toy. A porn site with several naked actors on a sofa flickered on the computer screen.

“What do you want?” Jaul asked, looking at Chinapat and then at Seven. “A job?”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he mentally undressed Seven.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

Jaul understood exactly what she meant. “Pray tell me your wish.”

“The money,” Seven said. He followed her eyes to the open safe door. Pimping clearly was more lucrative than murder.

As Jaul swung around to close the safe, Chinapat caught him along the side of the head with a 9mm Glock. There was nothing like hardened plastic to send a man to dreamland. A gush of blood dribbled down Jaul’s cheek. His attempt to fall back over his keyboard was interrupted by the bulge of his stomach, leaving him in the no-man’s land of being half-suspended in space. “Someone named Jaul should make better choices,” said Chinapat.

Seven rolled her eyes, knowing that Chinapat had accessed the Arabic dictionary as he stuffed the 9mm into the waistband of his jeans.

They cleaned out the safe, stuffing Seven’s suitcase with over a million baht. Jaul remained unconscious as Chinapat left first, carrying the suitcase. A moment later Seven followed.

At the Nana and Sukhumvit Road intersection, beside the police traffic control box on the corner, they met and climbed into a taxi. “How do you know this isn’t another trap?” Chinapat asked.

Seven held the suitcase on her lap. “Soon the Japanese will be looking for you.”

He knew there was no going back to Queen Sirikit Center. “Do we have enough money?”

Seven nodded her head. “For the startup, yes. Then we’ll need financing. Worry about that later.”

Not only had she saved Chinapat from falling into a trap laid by the Japanese, but she had the most calming effect when it came to assigning worry to a future to-do list. He could love a woman like that.

3.0

Where are you?

Bangkok Port

Located at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok Port — people also called it the Port of Klong Toey — had been a trading hub since the ninth century. A lot of sailors, pirates, traders, merchants and adventurers had walked the docks. As the taxi pulled to a stop, the sky was dotted with large cranes like columns of dinosaur skeletons erected up and down the shoreline of the Chao Phraya. Beyond the cranes were cargo ships, rice barges and fishing ships at anchor. Waiting.

Wires from Seven’s cell phone ended inside her ears. She talked as they walked down the road. Chinapat shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other. Real cash had a certain heft; the weight of money, though, never seemed heavy. They walked for fifteen minutes, and the sun was overhead and hot. Sweat rolled down Chinapat’s face, but Seven’s skin was cool and untouched by a single drop of perspiration. That’s when they saw a skinny white-haired farang man with a broad smile, waving, in the distance. As they came closer, the man could have passed for late forties to early seventies. He introduced himself as Mr. Shockley and led them up the gangplank of the ship with “DOLPHIN SHEPHERD” stenciled on the bow.

“Welcome, partners,” Shockley said. “Let me show you around.”

First stop, and his point of pride, was a crane equipped with a large metal claw — a giant version of the fairground arcade game. Chinapat exchanged a look with Seven.

“Are you the owner?” asked Chinapat, frowning under his baseball cap.

“I am authorized to act on behalf of the owners,” he said. “As chunks of ice shelves calf into the Antarctic, we bring the ship alongside and harvest the purest drinking water on the planet. Australia is running out of fresh, pure water. So is Japan. The future of water is locked in icebergs.”

“How do you drink an iceberg?” asked Chinapat.

“You bottle it,” Shockley said.

Seven took the suitcase from Chinapat and handed Jaul’s pimping money over to Shockley. “Aren’t you going to count it?” she asked.

“No need,” he said.

“Now that we are partners, shouldn’t we know who our partners are?” Seven asked, wondering if this was the first time that brothel money had been laundered through an iceberg business.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Chinapat. “Partners shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”

Shockley had hoped they would have taken more interest in the machinery, the engineering work that had gone into the crane, and shown some curiosity about where the ice was stored on board and how it was transferred to the bottling plants. He loved telling others stories of the early days of trial and error, testing, equipment breakdowns and violent storms at sea, where it was like riding an eighteen-story building struggling sideways over forty-foot waves. He led them to a stateroom and sat them at a conference table. There was a huge computer screen, and Shockley clicked the mouse to fill the screen with what looked familiar to Chinapat. A fishing village in a small bay.

“That’s a village in Japan. It’s Taiji,” said Chinapat.

“Our new bottling plant will be located here,” he said, directing a cursor to a point near the village center. “We will employ most of the able-bodied men in the village.”

“Who is ‘we’?” asked Seven.

The problem with the word “we,” she thought, is that the edges break off when it comes to describing the merger of intelligences that include human interfaces. Unscrambling the nodes and networks is a messy business.

Shockley scratched his chin and smiled. “The original settlers of the Antarctic,” he said, looking at the two new partners and trying to read their reaction. “Those who know the icebergs better than anyone.”

“Dolphins,” said Chinapat. “We’re back to dolphins again.”

“We are returning to the sea,” said Seven with a smile.

“The water inside icebergs is thousands of years old. Some icebergs have drinking water older than man,” said Shockley. “There is no manmade tradition older than iceberg water. We have approached the Taiji people, who have agreed to give up killing dolphins for harvesting pure water. The new harvest carries the dignity of the past, and it is the past they worship.”

As the Dolphin Shepherd sailed from Bangkok Port, Chinapat caught a glimpse of the two rows of Japanese men with long swords and megaphones shouting slogans as they ran along the docks, waving and shouting, and Jaul waddled behind, trying to keep up. He looked like an old walrus, shaking his ham-sized flipper and barking. Bringing up the rear were hundreds of Nana Plaza bar girls. As they set sail, Chinapat grasped the railing with both hands. Seven stood beside him. They watched as the women gutted and slaughtered the black-suited men, turning the Chao Phraya River red. The swords dissolved in the hands of the Japanese. The megaphones fell silent. By the time they reached the sea, the water was again clean and pure.

Bangkok Port soon was a tiny rim on the horizon. Shockley produced a device the size of a cell phone, running his fingers across a small screen until it lit up. He offered the device to Seven. “It’s the owners. They want to communicate directly.”

She held the device close to her ear and smiled. Then she handed it to Chinapat, who pressed it against his ear, a big smile crossing his face. It was somewhere between the rush of the sound from a large seashell, running water and music coming from a thousand crystal glasses, each filled with different levels of water. The background songs registered from deep inside the electromagnetic spectrum.

4.0

Where are you?

Chinapat: Still at Dolphin Shepherd, Simulation 28478, GENESIS 32 Vector

Where are you?

Seven: Meet you at Login node loading hydrogen atoms to emit microwaves at the frequency “21-centimetre line” sequencing EXODUS 4:24–26 router

4.1

Where are you?

Queen Sirikit Center, Bangkok, Thailand

Inside one of the smaller conference rooms, the air-conditioning blasting multiple streams over the audience. In the back sat a youngish Asian woman — still in her teens, her hair long and dyed red in streaks. The young woman was dressed in the white pressed cotton blouse and black short skirt of a university student. The too tight skirt just fit inside the outer perimeters for a certified conservative sexual university outfit found in Bangkok. The Gucci handbag also fit. The .38 Smith and Wesson inside the handbag was non-standard university issue. Seven had the confident and alert look of a woman-girl whose attention floated across the room, perching, sensing, flying off to another perch, constantly on the move.

Seven could never sit in quiet serenity like Chinapat. That was his problem. All that meditating had over-focused his attention on one thing. For example, she thought he’d complain of the tropical heat inside the room. The temperature was like a sauna. Many in the audience had wilted like unwatered flowers.

Inside the hotbed was the object of Seven’s first professional job.

A middle-aged Japanese woman in dark glasses, old enough to be her mother, had sat with her in the back of a BMW. Looking her over the way a mother looks over a daughter before a first date — part pride, part doubt and disapproval, as if her expectations had been exceeded and dashed at the same time — the Japanese woman had showed her a photograph of a woman named Tanaka. She was an activist filmmaker, and she had drawn an audience of activists, artists, journalists and NGOs to hear her speak about her dolphin film documentary, showing a terrible, cruel slaughter.

In the parking lot a couple of dozen Japanese men in dark suits used threats to stop people from going inside. Only a few people were intimidated enough to leave. The others filed past the Japanese men with tattooed necks and missing small fingers.

“Eliminate Tanaka,” the Japanese woman in the car had said.

Even though Seven hadn’t asked why the activist was scheduled for removal, the middle-aged Japanese woman felt obligated to give a reason. “She’s a troublemaker.”

Chinapat slipped into the seat next to Seven and whispered, “It’s a trap.”

Seven smiled, glancing over at him, squeezing his knee. “I have the cheat code.”

He frowned, pretending to be above easy shortcuts. Chinapat had a cheat code to get out of virtual prison, but only if nothing else in his source code kit worked. Cheaters ran up the white flag of surrender before experiencing any real degree of panic or desperation or being black-boxed and cut into pixels. He never thought of Seven as a cheater. Before he could object, the large screen behind Tanaka filled with a video of dolphins churning in blood red waters. The volume of their high-pitched squeals rolled through the room, echoing off the walls, ceiling and floor.

Seven leaned down and rummaged inside her handbag until her hand emerged gripping a .38 Smith and Wesson. She rested it on her lap, looking straight ahead. As she began to rise from her seat, two men from the row of seats behind her grabbed her arms. The gun dropped on the floor. The sonar whelp of the dolphins murdered on screen masked the sound of the gun hitting the floor.

4.2

Where are you?

Below deck, Dolphin Shepherd

As far as Seven could see, she was surrounded by mountains of shaved ice. From the port side, she wiped icy fog from the window pane and looked out at the calm blue sea. A ridge of white foam passed beside the ship. She shivered, moving from side to side, but nothing seemed to bring warmth. The ice had gone straight into her blood, lungs and brain. She sat in a corner, arms folded around her chest. She’d never seen so much ice in a room.

The bulkhead door opened and Shockley stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He wore a hat, mufflers and a heavy coat. Unwrapping the scarf from around his neck took several minutes. When he finished, he handed it to Seven, who looked up with a smile.

“Using an old cheat code to game the system,” he said, slowly shaking head.

Seven took the scarf and cocooned herself like a larva. “How long do I have to stay here?” she said, sighing.

“Until you earn their trust,” said Shockley. “And that won’t be easy, given your last jump. But they have all the time in the world.”

“Chinapat?” she whimpered.

“He’s harvesting pure water from our iceberg factory. The dolphins trust your friend,” said Shockley.

“Can’t you release me to Chinapat?”

Shockley smiled. “No one is stopping him from coming for you.”

Seven blinked, only her wet eyes visible through a slit in the scarf. Hot tears froze halfway down her cheek as she wondered if Chinapat had left her behind, jumping to the next router. She hung her head. On all sides heaps of pure ice thousands of years old seemed to grow, crowding her into a small corner. Her arms wrapped around her raised knees, she rocked back and forth. “When will he come?”

4.3

Where are you?

The Cove, Taiji, Japan

Chinapat sat alone on the long sandy beach, facing the sea and the Dolphin Shepherd, anchored in the harbor. Small skiffs ferried ice from the ship to the shore. The cranes on the ship loaded ice onto skiffs. The clear sea surrounding the ship boiled with dolphins, jumping and diving, swimming alongside the skiffs and guiding them to docks that dotted the shore.

Seven started to run as she saw him in the distance. His large head and broad shoulders were unmistakable against an almond sky. She sprinted the last thirty meters, feeling the warm sand between her toes. Shockley’s scarf trailed behind her until at last it fell from her, leaving a long silk wound in the sand. Reaching Chinapat, she fell on her knees next to him.

He took her hand, not taking his eyes off the Dolphin Shepherd and the skiffs.

“I told you it was a trap,” he said.

“The Sim felt so real,” she said. “The ice, the cold. Shockley. The scarf.”

He turned his head, looking at her eyes for a moment and then behind her. “But it was real.” The scarf had turned into a scarlet red river in the sand, gurgling as it flowed toward the sea. Baby dolphins dropped one by one, as if from an assembly line, into the sea. They both watched as the cove teamed with dolphins.

“The scarf was from you,” she said. “You trusted me.”

He shrugged. Chinapat had never thought of giving another person a cheat code for release from virtual prison reality. He had only one. Once it had been used, that was the end of it. There was no second code. If things went wrong now, he’d remain in a limbo with no hope of escape. It wasn’t necessary to tell Seven the obvious consequences of his decision to help her.

“We are going back home?” she asked. Chinapat smiled, knowing that her idea of home was far away from the dolphin world.

He nodded his head. “We’re not finished. Tonight we sail for Bangkok on the Dolphin Shepherd. This time we can’t make any stupid mistakes. We play by the rules.”

“But I played by the noir subset of rules,” she said, a tone of anger creeping into her voice. “It is permissible.”

Seven was a literalist. And she believed in free will. Bangkok, the epicenter of noir, had enticed her to take any contract and take any risk. She’d ignored that the underlying source code for intelligence and purity perimeter violations established a deterministic but chaotic system not bound by entropy. But the old assumptions died hard. Bottom line was that no free will patches could be deployed to destroy predetermined outcomes. Emerging intelligent systems and water source purity were jointly linked and encoded with a level-eight firewall, which even the best cheat codes couldn’t breach. They returned to Bangkok, not as observers, but as partisans taking their place inside a deterministic noir world where their mission had already been predetermined.

Once Seven reviewed and uploaded the operative conditions, she’d understand that her feelings of pain, pleasure and emotions were real. Her problem arose from the perception of freedom and liberty, which felt also overwhelmingly real. In fact they were illusions in the system where the fundamental unreality was hidden at the quantum level. These mental conditions were bought and sold through administrator level cheat codes. Seven believed freedom and liberty were a natural right. It was a common mistake.

The question in Chinapat’s mind was whether she’d learnt her lesson.

Chinapat would find out the answer in Bangkok on a stormy night when the Japanese mafia came to greet the arrival of the Dolphin Shepherd at the Port of Klong Toey. They stood under umbrellas in the rain waiting for the ship. Armed men with swords and guns would take a stand, one consistent with their huge appetite for dolphin meat. Icebergs, no matter how pure, were no substitute for that sensation of pleasure.

“What do they expect?” Seven asked as the Dolphin Shepherd left the cove.

“They will offer you another contract,” said Chinapat.

“Am I free to accept their offer?” she asked.

Shockley joined them on the foredeck. He handed Seven a glass of pure iceberg water. “Ten thousand years ago, this water froze into ice. Today it is water again. When was it free? As ice? As water?”

“Water just is. How can water or ice be free?” She looked troubled. “Am I free to upload to home base?”

Shockley turned to Chinapat. “She is free to drink the iceberg water. Ten thousand years a sip. Once you’ve swallowed and digested the water time, you can phase back. Meanwhile, you’ll have another offer to consider.”

5.0

Where are you?

Chinapat: Cross-check Highway, Chon Buri Province 28480, ALPHA 16 Vector

Where are you?

Seven: Meet you at Login node loading hydrogen atoms to emit microwaves at the frequency “091-centimetre line” sequencing OMEGA 7:33–39 router

5.1

Where are you?

Highway No. 41 between Kms 6 and 7, Muang District

Several hours had passed since the Dolphin Shepherd had docked at the Port of Klong Toey, and Chinapat guided Seven through a scrub of Japanese gangsters in their black suits and ties. The gangsters blocked their path, wielding swords and guns, threatening and shouting, demanding and gesturing. Shockley watched as Chinapat found the keys for the Honda 500 motorcycle. Seven sat on the back and Chinapat slowly found a path through the gangsters. Twenty minutes later, Chinapat pulled behind a gray-bronze van. They were on the way to Chon Buri.

“That’s the van,” said Seven.

Chinapat followed behind at a safe distance and at Kilometer 6 pulled ahead and cut in front of the van. The driver honked angrily and tried to pass him. As Chinapat pulled alongside, Seven had extended her arms, both hands clutched together, pointing a .38 Smith and Wesson at the driver. She waved for him to pull to the curb. The driver said something to the passenger in the seat next to him and, before Kilometer 7 was reached, pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.

Seven kept the gun pointed at the men in the van.

“Get out of the van. Hands up,” said Chinapat.

“Do you know who our patron is?” asked the van driver.

“Shut up and open the back,” said Chinapat.

The driver clutched his fists and stepped forward, arm cocked and ready to swing.

Seven fired a round over his head. “He said open the fucking van.”

When the door opened, inside the modified van were three large dolphins.

Just as Shockley had said, in the back two female Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins and one male lay under a green plastic sheet. Chinapat pulled the sheet away, exposing the pregnant female on a rubber mattress. The dolphins from the cove at Taiji had passed along the kidnapping alert minutes after the gang caught the dolphins in the sea near Trang. The kidnappers were on their way to deliver the dolphins to a powerful person in Chon Buri province.

The police arrived minutes after Seven phoned. They looked at the dolphins as the men in the van watched.

“Do you know who our patron is?” the driver asked one of the cops.

“You’re under arrest,” said the head policeman. He turned to Seven. “You’ve been a great help. We will handle it from here.”

“What will you do?” asked Chinapat.

“Of course, in time, we will return the dolphins to the sea,” the policeman said.

Seven, at last, could understand the dolphins communicating in the van. They were saying that they hadn’t much time remaining, and soon it would be too late.

“There isn’t much time,” Seven said to the cop.

The gangsters, who’d been silent, looked at each other and then at Chinapat and Seven. “You have no choice but to let us go,” said the leader. “You will regret this. Hey, what are you doing?”

Chinapat had climbed into the van and Seven joined him. He rolled down the window. “We will release them.” He didn’t wait for an answer. The police and gangsters stood on the road, watching as Chinapat squealed the tires, kicking up gravel, as he drove the van back onto the highway.

5.2

Where are you?

Beach, Muang District, Chon Buri

Chinapat pushed the accelerator to the floor as the van sped toward the sea. He cut off the highway, and the van bumped along a gravel road. They could both smell the sea. The dolphins, despite their weakened condition, had continued to sing during the entire journey. The rescue revived their spirits. When the van reached the end of a dirt road, Seven got out of the van and guided Chinapat as he backed onto the beach, the surf lapping at the rear wheels.

Seven spotted the Dolphin Shepherd a couple of hundred meters offshore. Shockley and four men worked the oars on the rowboat. Landing the boat, Shockley and his men ran up the beach, and within minutes they had carried the first female out of the van and laid her on the sand. Not long afterward, the other two dolphins were lined up on the beach, too. Shockley’s men removed two cases of iceberg water from the rowboat. Shockley opened several bottles and poured the cool water over the three dolphins. One by one, the dolphins slipped away.

Police sirens wailed in the distance as Shockley and his men climbed back into the rowboat. “That will be the police. You’d better come with us,” he said.

Seven shook her head. She squeezed Chinapat’s hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Shockley.”

He smiled and nodded. “The rescue was worth 10,000 points. You are almost over the finish line. Why stop now?”

Seven knew that was a con. Simulations never had a finish line, only a continuous loop, with points stacking up to reach the moon but never quite reaching the stars.

5.3

Where are you?

Friendship Hotel, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok

Like ice into water and water into steam... Seven continued to fix her gaze at the crate of iceberg water bottles Shockley had left behind. She had never felt more alone and sad. Anger welled up inside as she picked up one of the bottles by the neck and flung it as hard as she could at the sea. It exploded in a star cluster of light, turning the shoreline a silvery glowing white.

As she leaned down for a second bottle of water, she looked to her right. Chinapat was next to her in bed in their Bangkok hotel room. They’d been drinking Mekong whiskey, and the bottles were strewn on the floor. She held an empty bottle in her hand, and as she rolled over she asked Chinapat if he was awake. He’d unhooked a red and blue wire from the insert plates at the base of his skull cables. The first two rows on the consort unit beside the bed flashed a hot white.

“Why does the dolphin simulation always upset you?” he asked. It was like asking an addict why she couldn’t go cold turkey.

He gently removed the cables from Seven and let them drop to the side.

She twisted the wires between her thumb and forefinger, and looked up at Chinapat. He was waiting for her answer.

“We’re out of the router, right?”

He nodded.

“We’re off the grid, right?” she asked.

“Right.” That seemed obvious, and he wondered why she asked.

She shook her head. “It’s not right. I’m logged at 5.2? And where are you, if you’re not at 5.2?”

Chinapat rolled over and grinned into his pillow. She’d confused the “where are you” with the “who are you” matrix.

“Listen,” he said, “and they’ll tell you themselves.”

He cranked up the volume on the black console no bigger than a shoebox. Dolphin voices echoed across the room, liming the ceiling with a blanket of white ice crystals. The hotel window overlooking Sukhumvit Road was caked with a half-inch thick sheet of frost. The rising and falling singsong notes, like musical instruments, formed patterns in the ice.

When Shockley opened the door, it was no longer the hotel. They were aboard ship, in the holding tank. As he stepped inside, Shockley handed her a glass filled to the top with pure iceberg water.

“Take another sip and relax. Another ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye.”

Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award-winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy.

In his former life, he studied at Oxford University and taught law at the University of British Columbia. He wrote radio plays for the CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985, when he promptly left his tenured academic job for an uncertain writing career, leaving his colleagues thinking he was not quite right in the head.

His journey from Canada to Thailand, his adopted home, included some time in Japan in the early 1980s and four years in New York in the late 1980s. In 1988, he came to Thailand to harvest materials to write a book. The visit was meant to be temporary. Two decades and 22 novels later, he is still in Bangkok and far from having exhausted the rich Southeast Asian literary materials. His novels have so far appeared in a dozen languages.

For more information about the author and his books, visit his website: www.cgmoore.com. He also blogs weekly at International Crime Authors: Reality Check: www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.