Zero History

4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST
With the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British
Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow.
He’d taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back
cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing
schedules, particularly when you weren’t allowed to know exactly what it was you were
taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory
form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had
explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously
sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open.
He’d pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations
of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on
the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs.
His passport lay against his chest, beneath his shirt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the
information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight’s.
Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely
in every recent U.S. passport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which
Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and
remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday
pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.
Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as
Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one
that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite
good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed
to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty
seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer
than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it
gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and
that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.
The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which
Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent, installing or deleting
applications as he saw fit. It was also prone to something Sleight called “kernel panic,”
which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been
instantly inclined to identify with.
Lately, though, Milgrim didn’t panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart
of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product
of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself.