The Word Exchange Read online

  I was scared, but I was still being carried by the sinuous energy I’d once depended on to compete and throw opponents bigger than me. A feeling that had largely lain dormant in my adult life, partly because when it did appear—as in especially fierce fights with Max—it had earned enmity, not match points. But it was a feeling I’d missed, and I held it, exhaled, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. After a moment I knocked harder. But still nothing happened, so I tried the knob. And to my surprise, it turned.

  Almost instantly I wished it hadn’t. Because the door swung in, shifting a towel lining its bottom edge, and what I saw on the other side was very strange and unsettling. Twenty or more workers, all in identical dark blue jumpsuits, were locked in a fast, agile dance. Several sets of eyes darted toward mine, then quickly glanced off, the people they belonged to hurriedly turning back to their tasks.

  I didn’t know, of course, that the man who’d been stationed outside—the one they must have expected to see when the door opened, and to whom they might have reacted differently—had gone out for a few hours. Compared to him, I doubt I seemed very frightening. And yet even though I was careful to move with purpose as I stepped inside, I was surprised that no one spoke to me, or tried to keep me back, or even stopped what they were doing. Someone hurried past me to shut the door—that was all.

  Even now, more than two months later, I find it hard to believe I wasn’t turned away immediately. I can only speculate that the workers didn’t know the guard had left his post. They must have assumed he’d let me in. And maybe my feigned authority also worked; they were willing to believe I might belong. But I think there’s another, more relevant reason: that whatever threat hovered over not finishing their night’s work was far more menacing than me. (A person running from a pack of wild dogs might not worry if a bird suddenly appeared and started circling.) There’s also a final possibility, the one I find most troubling: that many of the workers were already too sick or stunned to notice me.

  Once I was inside the room, I was mesmerized. It was very large—four or five times the size of my art studio—but it felt cramped and chaotic. Thick concrete support pillars made the space feel crowded, smaller; the pneumatic tubes and exposed pipes brought the high ceiling down, and I felt again like Alice, suddenly taller—and as if I’d stepped into a dark, elaborate dream, one littered with large orange trash barrels and white-tiled walls streaked with dirt, the reverberant clang of pipes and pounding feet. And one in which the light, which jangled down from bare bulbs high on the walls, was filtered through a gray spume of smoke. Because the most vivid sign that something was very wrong, that made me wonder if anyone upstairs knew what was happening in that room, was that it was sweltering, the air thick and acrid.

  I unzipped my coat and coughed into the liner, and right away I was jostled by a man hefting boxes from a massive, messy cairn of them stacked on pallets near the door I’d just walked through, and piled high above my head, almost up to the tubes. With a low grunt, the man heaved a box and carefully swung it to the worker next to him. A line of men in dark blue suits undulated along the left wall as they passed boxes hand to hand. I couldn’t see where the row of them ended; it vanished into a cove around the corner.

  The man at the head of the line nodded that I should move—I nodded curtly back—and as I stepped away from him, I tugged the neck of my shirt over my nose. It was hard to breathe through the smoke and heat, almost hard to see. My eyes burned, and I blinked back tears as I tried to interpret the shadowy movements around me.

  I could make things out well enough to tell that in contrast to the thronging motion along the wall nearest me, just one man was standing on the room’s opposite side, next to what must have been the message-routing station: the pneumatic tubes curving along the ceiling came together in a confluence of dull brass gills resembling a large church organ. Each tube had a small placard that I couldn’t read from where I stood—their origins and destinations, I guessed—and they all emptied into a long sorting trough. A few empty metal stools were dispersed along its length, but the lone man stationed beside it stood. He had his back to me and seemed absorbed in his Meme, which glowed with a rabid, colored pulse. From my position, half hidden behind one of the support pillars, I watched him intently for several long moments, but I saw him glance over his shoulder just once, at a long table in the center of the room that separated him from the men moving boxes, who were nearer to me.

  Of all the room’s activity, it was the unfathomable work taking place at that cluttered table that most confounded me. About a dozen laborers sat staggered around it. I couldn’t see them all—where I stood, pillars blocked some from view—but each seemed bent at the same crimped angle, tipped into the indigo glow of monitor screens, heads floating like tired ghosts over awkwardly perched bodies. Several had white masks over their noses and mouths, which made their faces hard to read. But I thought I saw something disquieting: the dead-eyed expressions of people dulled by mindless computation, or hallucinating. Or maybe that’s what I see only now, with the eyes of memory. But then I was distracted by an even more distinctive trait they all shared: affixed to each of their foreheads was what looked like a coin, a little larger and thicker than a silver dollar. (Or so I’m told—I’ve never seen one of those.) When I got closer, I saw it was emblazoned with a coil intermittently glowing different colors: red, white, blue, gold, green. I was transfixed.

  Cautiously, first studying the man watching his Meme near the tubes’ terminus—from his solitude and idleness, I deduced authority—I walked over to the table. The girl sitting closest to me was tiny and silent and must have been ferociously focused; she didn’t seem to notice me standing just a few feet away. Two enormous open books were balanced on her delicate knees, one nested inside the other. She looked down at each of them in turn and at another volume open on the table. Then she peered up at her monitor.1 The screen was filled with populated fields laid over dishwater gray. And it looked a lot, actually, like the corpus of our Dictionary.

  While I watched over her shoulder, a field on her screen turned a pale, pretty green. Then a word—I think it was “paradox,” but I couldn’t quite see—disappeared. And in its place strange characters emerged: b-a-y-ᴨ-O-κ-c. Then the blocks of text below—its senses and textual examples—also vanished. Replaced by the single phrase “that which is true.”

  I learned only later what I’d seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme—those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating—terms like this one would replace “obscure” words—“cynical,” “morbid,” “integrity”—that those of us who’d grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this “word” had just been fabricated.

  The new, alien string of letters had no illustration. No etymology. No pronunciation guide, even. It was just a hard-hearted, ungenerous little word whose whole use was in its uselessness, cut off from human thought and history. A sad, sterile birth, prefigured by the death of paradox. It was ouroboros made manifest. The snake eating its tail. Facta non verba. My father’s worst fears come to life, in other words. But at the time I just watched, silently entranced, as the next field on the girl’s screen flooded green.

  I looked at her again. Saw the silver coil on her forehead morph from blue to purple back to blue as she stooped to peer at the thick book resting more on her left knee, glance up at the screen, look at the one on her right knee, peer up again. Then she bent to mark a check with a pen next to one of the columns of text in the book open on the table, which had been annotated heavily in what I thought might be Chinese.

  I leaned in to get a better look, and the girl, finally seeing me, gave a start.

  I tugged my shirt from my face. “What are you doing?” I asked quietly, trying to sound curious instead of accusatory, not sure, but not unsure, that she’d
understand me.

  She was silent, replying only by blinking her eyes. Her coil began to glow red.

  Without asking, I picked up the defaced book and flopped it closed. Hauled it over to inspect the gold letters on its spine and saw what I’d already suspected: it was volume P of the third edition of the North American Dictionary of the English Language. I more closely examined the girl’s screen. It was our corpus. “Paradox” was gone. I felt dizzy.

  “Wh-what’s going on here?” I asked, shaking the heavy volume, then gesturing at her screen. My voice had gotten louder and harder than I’d meant it to, but my pulse was surging, my face getting hot. And when she tensed but still didn’t speak, just kept blinking under the ember glow of her device, I nearly yelled, “Do you understand?”

  But it was clear she didn’t. Terrified, she flinched, and one of the books fell from her lap. It hit the floor with a loud report, and we both recoiled, me partly out of guilt and shame for the way I was treating her. I was also still vibrating with confused agitation, but that was no excuse.

  Shaking, I bent to recover the volume. Before I could, though, the woman next to her dove for it, and as she leaned forward, the coil on her own forehead came off, maybe loosened by sweat—my face was dripping—fell to the floor, and rolled a few inches toward me before spinning to a stop.

  I reached to pick it up. And on impulse I turned my back to the women and took a few steps away. I rubbed the device on my jeans, swiped my arm across my forehead, and pressed the disk to my skin. The side not raised into a coil seemed almost adhesive, like an electrode sticker—or more like the feet of a fly, I thought later; there wasn’t any tape or glue. That’s how I came to test the latest model of the Meme, the Nautilus. Not yet released.

  I don’t know what I expected. If I thought I’d experience anything—in the tiny shell of an instant I may have considered it—perhaps I half imagined I’d see a replica in miniature of what had appeared on the girl’s monitor. But I think I assumed I’d feel nothing. What I did feel, though, right away, was a tingling, almost needlelike stinging on my forehead and an incredible warmth that quickly spread through my head and face.

  But that wasn’t the most remarkable effect. As I watched, it seemed that several glowing, golden columns of calligraphic characters faded from before my eyes like lovely, dispersing sun phantoms. It was as if I’d seen them projected on some sort of screen, the impression so strong that I patted my face to feel for something—lenses. But of course there was nothing there. And stranger still, as the characters faded, I felt a residue of indignation and fear, as if induced by whatever had been written there.

  It’s possible, of course, that this memory is false; I now know the Nautilus has an extraordinary power to distort—to flatten and rewrite experience and thought. And although the older woman quickly snatched the device back, scratching my face a little as she did, I later spent several hours lost in the fog of a different Nautilus, which also might have augmented my impressions of that night.

  Before she removed it, I do remember being suffused with calm. An elating, almost paralytic sense of destiny and becoming—absurd (and dangerous) as that now sounds. Then I saw the angry face of the woman whose Nautilus I’d taken right in front of mine, and in an instant I felt a painful ripping and perceived noise and blinking light. She gripped the device in one hand, and in the other, a silver case, which she quickly opened. It seemed to be full of liquid. Carefully she placed the device inside, closed the lid, and violently shook it from side to side.

  She was speaking loudly and quickly in Chinese. Everyone had stopped to stare at us.

  “Listen,” I said, shivering, still a little anesthetized. “You can’t do this.” I stepped back over to the girl, and I pointed at her monitor, shaking my head. Continuing to speak English to them seemed not only useless but antagonistic—patronizing. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “I don’t know how you got the passwords,” I babbled on. “And I’m sure this is all saved somewhere”—I had the unsettling feeling that I was reassuring myself—“but this is bad. Very bad. You have to stop.” Again I pointed at the screen and shook my head, embarrassed by my condescension. But also upset, and overwhelmed.

  What was happening? These weren’t building employees, that much seemed clear. So how did they get in? How long had they been there? Hours? Days? And what were they doing? On whose orders? Even if their intention wasn’t to destroy the NADEL—and how could it be? It was an insane thought—accidental deletions would also be devastating. Each term represented untold hours of painstaking labor. Nearly three decades of Doug’s work. And Bart’s and mine. And dozens of others’.

  And insane or not, nothing about what was happening looked accidental.

  If many words were tampered with or erased—my mind went blank. The scale of the damage could be tremendous. Especially, I thought, my stomach getting tight, if the backups had also been harmed. The server room was down the hall. The Dictionary offices, with all the files of our digital archive, were just upstairs. The third edition was supposed to launch in less than a week. The first copies had been printed. But after that? How would we restore the missing terms? Every scenario I imagined, even the best ones, would require months or more of monumental effort to replace what had been lost. Time we didn’t have—our funding was already almost gone. I wasn’t sure any of us besides Doug would even know where to start.

  As I thought of Doug, I felt my breath evaporate. I coughed again, violently, eyes watering. A sob lurking near the surface. “Dad, where are you?” I whispered to myself, wiping my eyes. Looking down the table at the line of laborers who’d gone back to inking up volumes, I finally let myself believe the worst. I found myself gripping the table edge, not sure I could stand. Staring into the frightened face of the girl I’d interrogated, who was still blinking. Now blinking back tears.

  But it was at about this time that the man who’d been standing near the pneumatic tubes hurried over, shouting at the workers as he approached the table. I couldn’t make out most of what he said—he was speaking something incomprehensible to me—but I thought I heard the English words “How? Who let her?” as he jabbed his hand through the air at me, a few white dots of spit jumping from his lips as he looked toward the door a little frantically. Then, with a final flurry, he motioned with both hands that they should get back to work. And he stalked toward me, anxiously glancing once more at the door.

  I steeled myself. Wood and glue, I thought. It’s what Doug would have said to me.2 You don’t know anything, I reminded myself. Never let uncertainty get to you. I swallowed hard and stared at the man’s eyes. Unlike most of the other workers, he looked Slavic, with a strong nose and cleft chin. And he was short—about my height—but very solidly built. “Everything is all right,” he said gruffly. “Naypek problems here. Yes?”

  I still had a hand on the edge of the table, and he put his next to mine, setting something down: a silver case like the one in which the older woman had just forcefully cleaned her device. In the other hand he was holding his Meme, with whatever he’d been watching on mute, but when he noticed that I’d noticed it, he put it in his pocket.

  “Look,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. I found myself peering at the silver case. Wondering for a moment why he wasn’t using the coil inside it. “I work here, upstairs. My father is Douglas Johnson, Chief Editor of the North American Dictionary.” As I said it, my voice crumbled a little, like a dune, a warm sluice of pride spreading through my chest. (Wood and glue, I repeated to myself.) “Can you tell me—what is all this?” I stared at him. “It looks like they’re in our corpus. And as I’m sure you know—”

  “Nothing,” he said, cleanly scything my line of inquiry. “Myno is happening.” The specter of a smile played on his lips. He looked again at the door, and the smile slipped away.

  Exasperated, I shook my head. “I don’t mean to contradict you—” I started to reply. But he placed a hand firmly on my shoulder. A shiver flickered down my spine.
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  “Everything is okay,” he said, a bit more brusquely. “You don’t see what you think you see. Time tyaz for you to leave.” But then he grimaced strangely; letting go of me for a moment, he gripped his head in both hands. Very quickly, though, before I could process what was happening, the odd fit subsided. He reached across my body and roughly turned me toward the door.

  And that unexpected shove ruptured some psychic membrane that had been convincing me I was safe; it made me freshly aware of where I was: two floors underground on a Saturday night. No one in the outside world knew I was there.

  But I didn’t move any closer to the door. I held my ground, tensing slightly but nodding. Looking over my shoulder at the foreman, I said, “I’m sorry,” relieved to hear that I sounded calm. “I just need to know what’s going on.”

  He studied me, eyes sparkling. He’d stopped pressing my back. But his hand lingered there lightly, as if on a horse’s flank. The heat in the room was amazing. I felt shaky. Turning again to face the door, I tugged the neck of my shirt back over my nose for a few breaths. Sweat tickled my temples and the back of my neck, and I watched the men toss boxes in an inky curve through the shifting scrim of smoke. Stuck here and there to the concrete floor were boot-smudged pieces of paper. Pages from books. I watched the weak light dance in a few shallow puddles, and I tried to will the man’s hand off me. I found myself wondering if I could use a judo throw to take him over my shoulder if it came to that. I’d thrown men larger than me, but not in a very long time. And if I did, what then?

  I didn’t have to, though. Finally he lifted his hand. “I think it’s better we don’t call Dmitri. You agree?” I twisted again to face him. “He’s coming back yankor. He doesn’t like when we call.” Then he lightly patted the baggy pocket that held his Meme—or something else. And that implied threat, together with the mention of another man, finally, fully pierced my armor. Maybe he was bluffing, maybe not. But he seemed very agitated, and insistent that I should leave—worried, I imagined, that he’d have to account for me to the other man: Dmitri. And frightened people can do very frightening things.