The Hungarian Incident
by Mickey Fisher
Morgan Vanatta parked his Typhoon at the base of Bonnie Brae and hiked the steep quarter mile up to Chateau De Magie. A steady stream of driverless cabs and luxury EV’s rolled past the guy in the sport coat with no umbrella plodding along in the rain.
Samu told him to leave his car with the valets at the top but there was no way he was going to trust them to drive something fully manual. It was becoming a lost art, especially among the younger guys who grew up in the early days of the auto-pilot.
He checked in with the hostess, a woman with an LED tattoo on her upper chest that was entirely imperceptible until her pale skin dissolved to a living replica of the organs underneath, then to an empty space that made it appear as if you were looking directly through her to the curtain on the other side.
The Chateau was filled with illusions, some of them old school mechanical and others like this one, made possible by cutting edge tech. It was an exclusive club and it wasn’t cheap, but it provided the kind of wonder and awe that was hard to come by these days. With the known universe clamoring for your attention from the rectangle in your pocket, this was a place where you could cut the umbilical for a couple of hours, safe in the knowledge that nothing on your screen would compare or compete with what was happening on the stage in front of you.
The hostess led him through a winding stone corridor lined with paintings that talked to you as you passed by and statues that were in a constant slow motion evolution. One sculpture was a cauldron of black tar that rippled outward from the wall, forming a human hand that would grab your arm if you stood still for too long. When they got to The Ricky Jay Room in the basement, Morgan ordered a drink from the bartender, a pair of mechanical hands that reached up from below the other side of the bar and made the perfect Mai Tai in less than fifteen-seconds. He took his drink inside and stood at the back of the fifty seat theater, watching Samu Sanda, aka Karlock The Great, amaze and astound his audience.
Samu was in his 40’s and the kind of handsome that Morgan recognized from the models in the digital underwear ads at bus stops and billboards.
Samu handed a deck of cards to a woman in the first row, asked her to shuffle them and then fan them out to show the audience that it was a genuine deck. Then, he asked her to take a card and pass the rest around. “When I first started doing this trick, someone accused me of using a plant. So, in order to insure that there is absolutely, positively no way I can be working with a plant, I want each person to take a card. There are fifty of you, that means there will be two cards left over. There you go, take one and pass it around. There’s no rush, I get paid by the hour.” When the deck got to him, Morgan took a card, four of spades, and passed it on.
After the entire deck had been distributed, Samu said, “Unless you think every single person in this audience is a co-conspirator, including yourself, this should be pretty interesting. Now, I want you to memorize your card, and when I tell you to, I want you to picture it in your mind’s eye and I want you to imagine you’re transmitting that image to me all the way up here. Information is all around us in the air. Your phones are picking up messages and receiving them, ones and zeroes, swirling in the air all around us. That’s all your thoughts are, information, transmitted via electricity through your brain. You’re going to send that information and I’m going to receive it. Are you ready? Here we go. And, send.”
He closed his eyes and held out his right hand, extending his fingers like a telescoping antennae. With his left hand, he pressed his fingers to his temple and grimaced, signaling that his brain was being overloaded by a torrent of transmitted messages. He squeezed his eyes shut even harder and gritted his teeth, really going for a convincing performance. To Morgan’s eye it looked like he was genuinely in pain.
Finally, he opened his eyes and breathed heavy, recovering. He grinned, pointed at a lady in the front row and said, “When I guess your card, please hold it up for the audience to see if I got it right. Ten of hearts.” The woman held up the card, ten of hearts. He pointed to the man next to her, “Jack of clubs” One by one, he went through the entire audience, telling them the name of their card. The reaction was an oscillating wave of disbelief turning to delight and then joy. The longer he went and the more cards he got right, the more the applause would build. By the end of it, fifty cards in all, the audience was cheering his impossible feat.
Morgan looked down at the card in his hand. Was there some kind of holographic inlay that was only visible to an ocular lens that Samu was wearing? He could hear the crowd on their way out chattering their own theories and thought about the fact that half the entertainment of a magic show was the conversation that happened on the way home.
***
Back in his dressing room, Samu took off the black waist wrap he was wearing to keep his stomach in underneath his tuxedo shirt and poured Morgan a drink. Tequila, neat, for both of them. Samu said, “What did you think?”
“I think you’re playing too small a house.”
“I like the intimacy here. And, the history. Do you see that?” He pointed to the dingy grey smudges on the once-white border between the wallpaper and the ceiling. “That’s Harry Blackstone’s cigarette smoke. You can’t get that in a dressing room at The Anubis in Vegas.” Morgan appreciated anybody with a respect and appreciation for the past.
Samu said, “Do you want to know how it’s done?”
“Isn’t there some kind of code about that?”
“The trick is the reason you’re here. I figured Ollie would have told you by now. I need his help from time to time with the updates.”
So, there was a piece of tech involved.
Samu shoved a glass bowl of M&M’s across the makeup table to Morgan. Morgan said, “No, thanks.”
“Reach in and take a handful. Don’t look at them, just close your fist around them.”
Morgan did as he was told.
Samu said, “Two brown. Two red. One orange, one yellow.”
He nodded to Morgan and Morgan opened his hand. Two brown, two red, one orange, one yellow.
Morgan said, “Well, it’s definitely not a mind reading trick because I didn’t even know what I was holding. So. How’d you do it?”
Samu said, “I simply looked forward in time to the moment you opened your hand.”
“Simply? You simply saw the future and looked at the cards they were holding up?”
“The hardest part is the memorizing. That, I won’t tell you about.”
Samu explained that his father Gabor was like Ollie, a theoretical physicist working to understand the deep structure of the universe. Years before Ollie made his discovery in the “space” component, Gabor and his partner, Zofia, made a breakthrough in the understanding of time in a lab in Budapest. “They started with the idea that the world around us — earth, light, air — is made up of fields that form the weave of our physical reality. One of these fields is gravitational. In turn, it forms spacetime, the fabric on which the rest of the world is painted.”
Together, they developed an ocular implant that connected to the DNI and allowed a person to “see” the fuller picture painted on that fabric. They called this new tech “Belatas,” the Hungarian word for “insight.”
“The view is still somewhat limited, roughly four hours at the most, and only in the immediate vicinity of the device. And, you can’t interact with the physical world. You can only observe it.”
“But you can change it afterward.”
“Actions in the present can rewrite the observable future, yes.”
Morgan kicked back the rest of the tequila and sat back in his chair, trying to get his mind around the idea. Just when the world was starting to make sense again something else would come along and shake it all up again, rendering his previous understanding obsolete.
Morgan said, “How many people know about this?”
“Currently? You’re the sixth.”
Morgan said, “This would put your father and Zofia in the history books next to Einstein and you’re telling me nobody else knows about it?”
“What would you do if you could see four hours into the future?”
“Buy a lottery ticket.”
“That’s exactly what ninety-nine per cent of people would do. Having access to Belatas is a twenty-four-a-day test of a person’s character. My father knew we weren’t ready to wield that kind of responsibility yet so he kept it secret. What he didn’t know was that one of his research assistants was a member of a group called Blood and Honor.”
Morgan recognized the name. A million people had fled the drought-stricken deserts in the Middle East and filtered into Eastern Europe. Blood and Honor was a group of far right, ethno-purists who were pushing back on what they had labeled an “invasion.”
“They saw it as a way to build a base of money and power,” Samu said. “They wanted to do what everybody does at this stage of a new technology.”
“Find a way to turn it into a weapon.”
“My father entrusted it to me when I moved to America. After I left, Blood and Honor murdered him and Zofia, trying to force them to confess where it was hidden.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Now you know why I can’t have my face plastered on billboards all over Las Vegas. I was keeping a low profile here. Then… I got a little homesick.”
***
Samu explained that he went to a joint called The Danube in West Hollywood looking for Paprikas’. Halfway through his meal, he noticed the place was filling up with Eastern European ex-pats, mostly guys in suits with skinny black ties who were plowing their way through plates of Khinkali. He noticed a woman near the door, glancing outside every few seconds, anxious, like she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Samu had a gut feeling something bad was about to go down, so he used Belatas to look ahead. In his vision, he heard muffled gunshots and screaming. Then he saw a body laid out on the floor.
One of the men with the skinny black ties was bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the chest.
Samu didn’t want to risk getting involved but he couldn’t just let him die. So, he wrote a note on a cocktail napkin saying it wasn’t safe for the man there, that he needed to get out and fast. Samu tried to leave, but just as he got to his car in the parking lot, the future victim grabbed him and pinned him to the side of the car. He put a gun to Samu’s stomach and said, “Who the fuck are you?” He was a fellow Hungarian, judging by the accent.
Samu told him he was just a guy who was there to have dinner, that he was getting a bad vibe from the woman near the door. That’s when they both heard gunshots and screaming coming from inside the restaurant. The future victim turned and ran back to the restaurant where his friends were trapped inside, and Samu took the opportunity to get the fuck out of there.
It wasn’t until he got home that he realized the guy had pickpocketed his wallet.
The man tracked down Samu’s cell number by the next morning. He’d done his homework overnight. He knew Samu’s real identity, who his father was, he even drew the connection between what happened in the restaurant and the long-rumored Belatas technology.
Over the phone he said, “You saw me die. In the future.”
Samu didn’t confirm his theory.
The man said, “Where did I get shot?”
“In the chest.”
After a beat, the Hungarian said, “I always thought it would be the head.”
He made Samu a proposition which was really an ultimatum. Whoever shot up The Danube was likely gunning for him, but there’s no way to be sure because they got away. “You’re going to help me figure out who it was. With your gadget.”
Samu said, “I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do that.”
“You’ll figure something out.”
When Samu tried to refuse again, the Hungarian made it clear. “You know there are people still looking for you.”
The threat was implicit. If he didn’t do it The Hungarian would sell him out.
***
Miklos Nagy came to America a decade or so ago as a member of the Circle of Eight, a loosely organized Vory-style crime syndicate. Recently, he committed one of the cardinal sins of a thief-in-law, overextending himself on a gambling debt, and to more than one bookie. Miklos owed tens of thousands of dollars, but he was still living the high life in a penthouse apartment in Mid-Wilshire, across from the Cyclosphere, driving a fully automated Mercedes EV, and sucking down valve after valve of high end Stratus.
Samu figured he didn’t have a choice and besides, helping the guy figure out who was trying to kill him wasn’t the worst use of the tech. The best plan he could come up with was a makeshift sting. Miklos would call the people he owed money to and arrange a late night meeting at a hotel or some other neutral space to pay them off. Samu would use Belatas to see who showed up and whether or not they tried to kill him.
Miklos picked him up in the black Mercedes SUV, adjustable tint on full occlusion so that it felt like riding in a black box. He was bumping Hungarian hip hop at an earsplitting volume and surfing a Stratus high, judging from the empty valves in the console. Samu noticed he was armed with a couple of hand cannons and a combination kubotan and taser that was charging up on the dash. Miklos saw him staring and said, “I got more in the trunk, if we need it.” That didn’t make Samu feel any safer.
The Stellar Surf Motor Lodge in Malibu sold itself as “retro-aesthetic, modern comfort,” which meant the decor was neon kitsch but you could pretty much have whatever you wanted at the touch of a button. Each room had a floor to ceiling window that looked out on the ocean but if you got tired of looking at that you could tell the room to switch over to hundreds of other choices. Since he had a few minutes to kill, Samu chose the view from Sacre Couer in Paris, one of his favorite places. He’d been there when it was still a cathedral, back before they turned it into a Heaven and Hell themed nightclub called Ascension.
After Miklos got confirmation from his collectors he headed back out to the car to watch the door and Samu got to work. He sat at the foot of the bed and blinked the sequence of commands that opened up the Belatas landing page in a screen projected on his ocular lens. He set the precise time, activated the program, and watched as a series of flickering lights commandeered his field of vision, connecting him to the images it was picking up and transmitting from shortly in the future. The room began to spin around him, edges blurring. It was a bit like being on a Gravitron in one of those retro amusement parks.
As it settled, Samu saw that the door to the hotel room had been busted off its hinges. The floor to ceiling window had been shattered. There were fat holes in the walls. Gunshots. Outside, flashing red and blue lights indicated the presence of the police.
As he scanned the room, Samu’s eyes landed on the wall beside him and spray painted in big letters were the words, “RUN NOW!” It took him a second before he figured it out. Something terrible was about to go down, not in the future, but in his present.
His future self had given him a warning.
He started to run before the Belatas fully closed out. The room morphed back to its former state as he reached the door and yelled at Miklos to start the car but it was too late.
Four vintage BMW i8’s came screeching through the turn into the Stellar Surf’s parking lot, cutting off the exit route. Miklos grabbed the hand cannons in his console and took cover near the trunk of the Mercedes where he had a full stash of ammo waiting.
The passenger in the lead i8 leaned out of the window and fired a volley of shots at the Mercedes, sending bullets ricocheting off the seemingly impenetrable surface. They smashed into windows and neon signs, raining down curtains of multi-colored glass over the parking lot.
Samu was cut off from joining Miklos behind the Mercedes and besides, what was he going to do? He’d never fired a gun in his life. The only thing he could think to do was run so that’s what he did. He hugged the motel’s outer wall and traced it around to the back, through the pool area, and scrambled down a cliffside that led to the beach. From there, he ran south, toward the hundred foot tall projection mapped Marilyn Monroe doing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in the finale of the nightly show on the Santa Monica Pier.
He would have to double back soon and find a way to leave that message for himself.
***
Samu thought, and if he was honest with himself, hoped, that his problem with Miklos had taken care of itself. But the next morning, his cell rang and the Hungarian accented voice on the other said, “Crazy night last night, bro.”
Samu thought Miklos might be pissed at him for running, but when he tried to apologize, Miklos said, “You did what I asked. And, it worked.”
He insisted that Samu take a ride with him out to Topanga, he had something he wanted to show him. They pulled up to a gate tucked way back in the canyon and Miklos scanned his way through using a bio-authenticator. A hundred yards back there was a small bungalow that Miklos was using as a grow house. The entire place was covered in marijuana plants. Makeshift ductwork ran overhead, plastic tarps covered the windows and anything unrelated to the plants.
Miklos said, “This way.”
He led Samu down a hallway and used an old fashioned key to open one of the bedrooms. The inside was empty except for three things: a black plastic tarp covering the floor, a man in a track suit handcuffed to a folding chair, a bullet hole in his forehead, and a massive Rottweiler on a chain watching over him. The man’s skin was covered in iridescent tattoos that glistened in the dark.
Samu felt sick. He put his hand on the wall to steady himself.
Miklos said, “I caught one of them. Made him talk.”
“Who were they?”
“NexGen. They’re working for a friend. Or used to be a friend. I guess not anymore.”
Miklos suggested they have a drink out back, and poured them both a water glass filled to the top with vodka, even though it wasn’t quite eleven in the morning. Miklos raised his glass to Samu and said, “I owe you for saving my life.”
Samu waved him away. He said, “You don’t owe me. I’m just glad you made it out.”
After a couple of large gulps, Miklos said, “I’m going to repay you with an opportunity.”
He explained that he and Samu were going to be partners. “The man I work for, Mr. Kipiani, has a safe in his office. It’s in the back of a banquet hall called Touch of Class, where he keeps an office. There’s two million dollars in there right now, waiting to be converted so he can pay up overseas.”
“I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”
“You’re going to help me steal it.”
Miklos had the whole thing worked out. He would bring Samu into the club as a guest during the weekly dropoff. Samu would use Belatas to look ahead to the time when Mr. Kipiani deposited the money in his safe and memorize the combination.
Samu said, “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t —“
Miklos held up a hand to stop him and said, “It’s done.”
***
Morgan took the last sip of his tequila and said, “That won’t be the last one.”
“Which is why I called Ollie. If we manage to pull it off, which I don’t think we will, he’ll come back for more the moment he gets in trouble again. And, if we don’t pull it off? If he gets caught, he won’t hesitate to sell me out in order to save himself.”
“You’d be signing your death warrant with the Circle of Eight.”
“I can’t go to the cops. I can’t kill him. But, I do have to get rid of him.”
After a moment, Morgan said, “I can help you with that.”
***
The night before Miklos wanted to bring him into the club, Samu suggested they do a trial run outside the banquet hall to make sure there weren’t any troublesome electromagnetic fields that would wreak havoc with the Belatas tech. He told Miklos, “We may only get one shot at this, the conditions have to be perfect.” So now they were sitting across the street in Miklos’s Mercedes, windows on half-tint.
Samu had spent enough time with Miklos to know that he burned through at least two Stratus valves an hour. He just had to keep him in the car long enough to cycle through one hit. While they were waiting for the right time to do the test run, Samu picked up the valve Miklos had on deck on the console and inspected it. He said, “Do you make your own?”
Miklos shook his head, said, “Too much work. And the fumes are dangerous.”
Samu nodded, then pointed through the windshield. “Which one is the office?”
As Miklos explained, Samu deftly palmed the valve from the console and swapped it out with the one he brought. It was an exact replica, filled with a highly concentrated, aerosol-based tranquilizer. Now he just had to wait for Miklos to suck it down, after which he should be out like a light for the next six hours, plenty of time to make the transference to the other side.
It sounded pretty simple.
Then the vintage i8 rolled past and stopped at the light just ahead.
Miklos saw it a split second after Samu did. He drew one of the hand cannons from a side panel and bumped the occlusion on the windows another twenty per cent. They watched as the i8 made a u-turn and rolled by again, slowing down for a brief second before it gunned the engine and took off.
Samu breathed a sigh of relief.
Then Miklos turned the gun on him, aiming it right at his heart. Samu put his hands up on instinct, in defense.
Miklos said, “How much are they paying you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nexgen. How much did they pay you to set me up?”
Samu was starting to panic now. Morgan was waiting down the street but he wouldn’t be able to see what was happening through the tint. He said, “Nobody’s setting you up.”
“You tell me you need a test run, tell me where to park, how long to wait. Now, I see these guys.”
“You’re paranoid.”
Miklos flicked the safety off. “I’m going to give you one more chance. Who got to you and how much are they paying you? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?”
“Miklos, use your head. You told me this score is worth two million dollars. You think I’m going to sell you out for a fraction of that? Does that make any fucking sense to you?”
That seemed to work. After a moment Miklos said, “Put your hands down.”
In the excitement, Samu forgot about the Stratus valve he’d palmed earlier. When he put his hands down, it came tumbling out of his sleeve, across his lap, and rolled onto the floor.
Now Miklos was sure his paranoia was well-founded.
“Motherfuck —“
He raised the gun to fire but Samu lunged for his arm and shoved it away. Miklos managed to get off a shot, the bullet ricocheting off the windshield and pinging around the car until it grazed Samu’s shoulder with a surge of white heat.
With one hand on Miklos’s wrist and another on his elbow, Samu drove Miklos’s arm into the steering wheel, snapping his radius and forcing him to drop the gun. With his good arm, Miklos grabbed Samu by the throat and began smashing his head against the passenger window, the skull bouncing off with a heavy thud each time.
Samu was flailing now, trying to throw Miklos off or land a punch that would loosen his grip, but it was no use. If it kept going like this, he’d be dead in twenty-seconds.
Then he saw the kubotan charging on the dash. He reached for it, fingers grasping, and yanked it off the charger. He jammed into it into Miklos’s side and the surge of electricity caused an instant muscular override. Miklos went slack in the driver’s seat, gasping for air.
Fighting through the pain and blurred vision, Samu grabbed the replica Stratus valve, jammed it into Miklos’s mouth and held his nose so that Miklos had no choice but to suck in the aerosol tranquilizer. Ten-seconds later he was unconscious and Samu sat back in the passenger seat to catch his breath before flashing the headlights to give Morgan the signal.
Morgan slipped out of a nondescript sedan, carrying the confluence kit. He’d stashed his own car at the transference point earlier. The plan was to drive Miklos’s car out there together and leave it in the desert for looters and scavengers to pick over.
When Morgan opened the driver’s side door he saw the wound in Samu’s shoulder and said, “What the hell happened?”
“Tell you on the way, we gotta hurry.”
Together, they hauled Miklos’s body over the console, through the center divide between the passenger and driver’s seats, then Samu got out to finish pulling him into the back seat. Morgan slid into the driver’s seat and started the car.
That’s when Samu heard the familiar sound of the i8 engines, roaring up the street again.
He thought the first one might have been an unfortunate coincidence. It never occurred to him that they would be casing the place looking for Miklos. He looked back through the window saw three of them screaming up fast from behind.
He said, “GO! NOW!”
And Morgan jammed down the gas, peeling off into traffic at full speed.
Morgan said, “Who are they?”
“NextGens, from the hotel.”
The Mercedes was fast but it wasn’t going to be any match for the i8’s, so Morgan jerked a hard left onto 6th and gunned it for the freeway. He thought once they were on the 5 he could find cover, but aside from a steady of stream of delivery cubes, traffic was pretty light.
The i8’s were fanning out behind them, looking to make their move and box them in or get a clear line of fire.
Samu had an idea. If he set the counter on the Belatas at five seconds ahead he could give Morgan an advantage by telling him which turns to take to would avoid obstacles, or put those obstacles in the path of the crew behind them.
He activated the device and watched as the Gravitron sped up again in his field of vision. When it settled, he was looking at the superimposed future of the freeway unfolding right in front of him. He spotted a driverless semi in the center lane and a group of sport bikers riding matte black Interceptors in the far left.
“Get behind this truck.”
“What tr—“ Then Morgan saw it coming. He swerved in behind it.
“Move right in three-two-one-“
“There’s a car —“
“Go!”
Morgan jerked the wheel, miraculously the car had switched to the exit lane.
“Back to center, then all the way hard left.”
Morgan did as he said and watched as the convoy of i8’s struggled to avoid the cars in front of them.”
Samu saw something long and thin materializing to his right. A train, stretching out behind him.
“There’s a train coming, if we can get across.”
“What about this exit coming up?”
“Take it.”
“Am I clear?”
The vision in Samu’s ocular lens went blurry for a second. He couldn’t tell if it was the lens itself or the DNI’s connection with his brain. Something must have shaken loose when Miklos was bouncing his head off the window like a baseketball.
The image cleared again. He said, “You’re barely gonna make it, don’t let up!”
Morgan kept his foot on the gas as he hit the exit lane, got to the bottom and skidded hard around the right turn, just in time for a car coming up fast behind him to screech to a halt, blocking the SUVs from turning.
Samu looked ahead, the barriers were already blocking the track, the lights were flashing. He said, “I think you’ve got time.”
“You think or you know?”
The truth was he couldn’t tell, the image was going blurry again.
“Samu, do we make it?”
Samu was staring straight ahead, eyes searching.
The train was two hundred yards away and closing in fast.
Morgan yelled again, “Did we make it?”
Samu squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, trying to clear the cobwebs, looking for that moment in the immediate future when they would be safely across or wiped out by the train.
At the last second, he got it.
“We’re clear.”
Morgan weaved around the barriers and rumbled over the tracks. He could see the train barreling down on them from less than a hundred yards away. The lights were blinding, he could barely see through the windshield but he trusted Samu’s vision.
Fifty yards.
Forty.
He heard the horn blare and then just like that it was passing behind them and getting quieter in the distance.
The i8’s were stuck on the other side of the tracks.
***
The rest of the night went off without a hitch. They made it to the transference point and sent Miklos over. Samu felt a little guilty but he comforted himself by thinking he may have saved the man’s life for a third time.
Morgan used a first aid kit from the Typhoon to stop the bleeding on Samu’s shoulder and busted out an emergency flask of white rum to take the edge off. On the drive back, they listened to a mix of French Beat and Ye-Ye, neither of which Samu had ever heard before.
When he told Morgan about what had happened in the car, Morgan said, “You get out of spot like that, maybe you should change your name to Houdini.”
“Houdini was Hungarian, you know.”
“He was?”
“Born in Budapest. A woman at the Chateau does a seance act where she calls on his spirit. You should come check it out. As a fellow magician I think you’d appreciate it.”
Morgan grinned and pointed the Typhoon West. It was really late, or really early, depending on how you looked at it, and the sun would be coming up behind them soon.
