* * *
When I used to dream, I used to have the same dream over and over again, almost every night. I say almost because, on the nights that I wouldn’t have the same dream, I wouldn’t dream at all. But more to the point, I’ve been having the same dream for nearly thirty years, which I’m sure that if I could find a psychologist—or is it a psychiatrist? Or whichever of the two that would be most qualified to interpret dreams—if I could find one of those people who could explain what it meant, then I’m sure it wouldn’t be a very positive or healthy explanation.
The dream goes like this: I’m standing on top of the tallest structure in the world. I’m standing there naked, holding my arms out and letting the wind have its way with me, pushing me back and forth, swaying over the edge. Below the building there are thousands of people, maybe millions staring up at me, eying me, making me feel as if I’m the center of the universe. They look as if they’re praying to me or to the heavens or to something else completely different. I was never a very religious guy so I couldn’t tell you, but they’re praying to something. And I couldn’t care less, I’m just there, arms outstretched and I feel the heat of the sun on my body.
I finally lose my balance and fall. But it’s a graceful fall; it’s like a great, big elegant swan dive into the sea of people, giant people now, as everything comes rushing up, distorted and off perspective. I crash into them and blood and bone and fragments of their bodies collide with my own and I’m drowning in them. But I don’t care—I’m smiling. I’m at peace with myself, with this outcome, the falling, the nakedness, at peace with everything.
I know; it’s completely fucked up.
* * *
I wake up in a small puddle of foul-smelling drool. Ah, the glamorous life of a multi-billion dollar internet mogul; there’s no huffing handfuls of cocaine off of high-priced hooker ass for me. Nope, just stagnant morning breath mixed with the acid from last night’s coffee and a weird metallic taste in my mouth that I attribute to the desktop. My neck feels like it’s been in a vice all night and I move my hand over the screen to see what time it is. My stomach growls and I begin to freak out when I see that it’s nearly noon.
Carol, my secretary, should be at her desk outside the main office by now. I call out and ask her to patch me through to the kitchen in the cafeteria downstairs.
I order breakfast and then get up to make some more coffee. But I’m really late in getting some very important things accomplished, so I skip all the formalities and microwave whatever coffee was left over from the night before. I’m going to see my father today.
Carol wheels in the breakfast shortly after I get out of the shower. I’m still soaking wet when I come down out of the bathroom. She’s used to me being less than discreet in front of her. I mean, it’s not like I’m naked or anything, but it’s not like I’m modest, either. And I know what you’re thinking and let me say that, no, I never cheated on my now ex-wife with Carol.
Though, now that she’s my ex-wife, I might have sex with Carol just because. I think about it for a few seconds and then realize I probably won’t have time to suggest anything like that. I’m being frozen in less than 48 hours. Besides, I can bang one out tonight by myself if I really need to.
I eat in what feels like seconds, inhaling the French toast and hash browns. I move back to getting ready. Along with my leftover coffee and breakfast, I have to take a rather substantial regimen of vitamins and pills that will help in the freezing process. After dinner tonight I won’t be able to eat anything solid ever again. I need to have a completely free digestive tract for the freezing process; you can imagine what it would be like if you were frozen with a stomach full of heavy foods for who knows how long. I’ve also been assured that it would not be a pretty picture when or if I thaw out.
I skip shaving, combing my hair and anything else other than putting on clothing to expedite the process. Halfway through pulling on my undershirt I start in on a coughing fit. I’ve been having these since before I found out that I had cancer. In fact, the coughing is left over from a nasty chest cold that I had about six months ago and is actually what sparked my regular doctor to test for cancer.
Chunks of lung come gurgling up the back of my throat and I spit out a thick, semi-greenish-black paste into the toilet. I check the toilet to find that there’s now little flecks of rust on the hunks coming out.
“That’s new,” I say into the toilet bowl. As I’m flushing I hear the sounds of footsteps in my office.
“Jesus, Carol, I told you: I have important things to do today,” I say as I move back towards the main part of my office. I take a few steps towards the figures then stop in my tracks as the outline of his face comes into focus and swallow hard.
“Hello, Jeff,” says the head of the Department of Homeland Security. I instantly regret holding my little press conference yesterday. There are some people that even money cannot impress or buy. The head of The Department of Homeland Security is one of them. I’ve tried.
5.
“Robert, what a pleasant surprise,” I manage to say without sounding like I’ve just made the front of my pants dark. I look over at the two very, very large pieces of genetically modified gorilla meat in suits—most likely carrying large amounts of weaponry—that are flanking Robert McMillan, Head and Secretary of The Department of Homeland Security; an entity, until recently, that we had been working with developing all sorts of…well, you got the details at the press conference.
He moves like a man shouldn’t. Like a shadow on the wall. Like something that doesn’t quite exist in this sphere of reality: silent, hulking and powerful. He moves towards one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and rests his hand on it. He looks back and starts to make polite conversation.
“Looks like you’ve made a lot of progress with these solar membranes,” he begins to ramble, but I cut him off midway through.
“Look, Rob,” I try to emphasize the fact that I can call him Rob and that I know he hates it. “I really don’t have time for this, so if you’re going to kill me then get it over with, but please just have one of your Neanderthals shoot me in the fucking head. I don’t want to sit here and be bored to death by formalities.”
He looks back out the widow, still seemingly enthralled by the progress on the solar membranes, not even bothering to acknowledge he’s in my office, in my building, in my city.
“You know what your problem is, Jeff?” he asks. Though I know where this is all leading, I humor him as I finish putting on the rest of my clothes.
“Um, the three of you standing in my office, breathing my nice colloidal silver-purified air?” I say back to him as I finish buttoning up my overshirt. I’m visiting my father today so I figured that I would get dressed up. Give the old man one last middle finger before I go completely rigid.
“You’ve always been barely tolerable, Jeff. Now that you’re dying, you’re even less than that,” he says before turning back to look at me with the two evil, grey, soul sucking voids he calls eyes. We kind of have a history.
I reach for my coat, which I had thrown over one of the chairs in the little seating area that is stationed just off the side of the main room from my desk command center. I barely have time to finish pulling on my left sleeve when I feel his hand come across my throat and grip down. For a man in his fifties, he’s incredibly fast—probably some form of enhancement that we made for the Department which he injected into himself. I feel the air rush out of my throat and my lungs begin to fill with fire and pain from lack of breathable oxygen.
“You little shit,” he snarls into my ear as he pulls my face closer to his.
“You wrecked Project Mobile yesterday with your little fucking truth hiccup. Do you know how hard it’s been on the Department’s PR staff to try and cover up what you leaked? Do you?”
I can’t do anything except look like a sissy pulling at the augmented strength in the vise-grips he calls a hand around my throat. I don’t even try to breathe. Just keep it cool, keep me alive.
“Do you even remember who lent you your first hundred million? It was my agency; we made your little power trip possible.” His eyes are mad, fireballs of anger. He’s squeezing harder and harder, my eyes bulge out and I try to look around the room but all I see are wisps of purple and streaks of silver fireworks.
“I should do the world a favor and just end your piece of shit life here and now.” He releases the claw from around my throat and I slump to the floor, taking one of the chairs with me, toppling it over on its side. I begin to suck in great gasps of air, my chest and heart and head all throb like one large, swollen organ. He looks down at me and smiles, fixing his stupid, ugly, cheap tie.
“But I’m not. I’m going to let your spoiled ass do whatever it is that you want to do because after tomorrow, you’ll be frozen. And what more can you really do then?”
“Ever the compassionate conservative, huh, Rob? How’s that third presidential bid going for you?” I ask trying to massage the words from out of my neck, and then it hits me.
I look up over at him and he knows I just got it, too. His mouth is a crooked jack-o'-lantern grin.
“How did you know it was tomorrow?” I ask him, though I already know the answer, so it was more of a rhetorically stunned, stupid thing to say. I try to push myself back up using the overturned chair, and then I decide that maybe the room shouldn’t spin and that I should remain on the floor.
“Don’t play stupid, Jeff. I know you’re not,” he says walking towards my door. The two things that parade as human beings flank him.
“Just know that you’ll be frozen, and I won’t be. Good luck, son, and say high to your father for me,” he says. Then I hear him knock on the door. It swings open a second or two later, and I see that my own security detail is seated, along with Carol, on the couch out in the main waiting room.
There are two more thugs pointing big, black plastic-looking guns at their faces. Carol gives me a look to say she’s sorry. I nod back to her and explain that I get it.
I wait a few more minutes on the floor and then I need a cigarette, so I slide back up the chair. The room doesn’t do the whole merry-go-round thing and I walk towards my desk and grab my pack. I wave my hand over the screens and start typing out code.
6.
I look at the hieroglyphic strings of code covering the screens and make sure to save it three times: once to the onsite servers, once to all three of the five-terabyte portable hard drives that are strapped under the desk, and once to the offsite backup server centers. My throat has neat little bruises in the shape of Robert’s fingers and thumb on it and I’m finally able to swallow without making a sickening cracking sound. I look at the time, it’s nearly four and I still have to see my father. I run a quick check on the code again and then minimize the editor on the screen and wave my hands to send them to sleep. I can finalize this little last “fuck you” later. I have things to do.
I call out to see if Carol and the security detail are still here. One of the meat puppets answers, “Yes, sir. What can we do for you?”
I hesitate for a few seconds before asking the nameless voice to have someone bring my car around so I can visit my father. I’m going to do this myself. No large security details, no lawyers; I want this to be a private viewing only. It’s the last time I am going to see him ever, so I want it to be memorable, without the benefit of having hairless apes standing around whispering to each other about their quadrant being “all clear” and if they’ve seen the latest this or that. I make sure he understands and to tell everyone that I won’t be gone for longer than an hour or so and that in the event that I don’t come back, not to worry. Checks are going to be deposited anyway.
“Very good, sir. I’ll have someone bring around your car; ETA on that will be fifteen minutes.”
I say, “Thanks,” and click off the phone, wave my hand in front of my screens again, and type a few commands that bring up video feeds of the white-suited scientists putting the finishing touches on the freeze chamber.
No matter how certain you are about something, a plan of action, decision, or what have you, there’s always room for doubt. Like when I started building my app. I knew, in the back of my mind, that it would do everything it needed to do. I knew that it was my ticket off the whole shitty job after shitty job ride. I knew that marrying Janet was the wrong decision but that it would be a larger gain in the long run. I knew that staying in Cleveland would change it for the better.
But even in all of those decisions there were moments of doubt like the one I’m having right now. Nagging suspicions, the sickening realization that you could be wrong, that all of these choices were going to backfire. Janet’s dad could have said no, the app could have been a failure, staying in Cleveland could have killed my company’s future. As I watch the last diagnostic tests being run, I know full well that this could wind up being a huge waste of time and money.
The cancer could go on eating at the inside of my body, hollowing me out, leaving a sunken husk. Or I could simply not survive the freezing process.
But, given the situation, dying wouldn’t be all that bad. I would just be dead. At least I wouldn’t have to deal with cancer, or quarterly earning reports, or Janet popping up in every tabloid imaginable hanging on the arm of whatever flavor of the month she would inevitably be banging to try and get back at me for divorcing her.
I said I was never unfaithful, I never said that she wasn’t. But all of that doesn’t matter if you’re dead. And technically speaking, even if the freezing process doesn’t kill me, I’m already on my way to being dead. My phone cracks to life snapping my head back to look at it like it was something foreign. The voice on the other side says, “Mr. Sorbenstein, your car is ready in the garage. Do you need an escort down?”
I shake my head as if he can see me, and then say, “No.” I get up and grab my jacket and then head to the bar to grab a bottle of something really expensive. It’s time to see dear old dad.
I open the doors and the security guards that looked so impotent sitting on the couch with Carol have gotten back some of their dignity and stand up to walk me to the elevator doors. I turn around and tell them to get something to eat—whatever they want from the cafeteria, on me—and push the door closed button and head down to the parking deck below the building.
It takes all of three seconds until the saccharine-sweet female computerized voice says, “Garage. Thank you,” and I exit and stare at my beautiful car.
For someone with enough money to buy a whole country’s debt off, when I do drive, I try to drive as inconspicuous a car as possible.
I have a 2003 Ford Focus, which I know sounds ridiculous for one of the world’s richest men to be driving a Ford Focus, but then again, you’ve never driven my Ford Focus. I had the body reinforced and bulletproof glass installed. I swapped out the shitty four-cylinder and upgraded it to a zippy little dual-eight. The wheels are all steel reinforced, 500 mile run-flats. I have enough cans of fix-a-flat to get me another 500 miles in the hatchback. The interior controls have all been upgraded as well.
The thing is literally a rolling version of my office: motion sensing heads-up displays with picture-in-picture capable touch sensitivity, connected 5G support, more of the solar membranes that I manufacture are installed over the rear and side windows, carbon fiber and Kevlar grey paint. And a nice little seven-shot 40 mm Glock tucked away in the glove compartment, just in case. Seriously, if I had a cannon installed it would be a fucking tank and, yes, I have thought about having a cannon installed.
I get in and push the ignition button and the little metal and technology-filled rhino purrs to life. I sync my tablet up to the GPS and throw it in drive leaving the city lights, the staggering drunks in the warehouse district along with the leftover remnants of homeless people, the Terminal Tower, Public Square and the rest of the godforsaken city behind in my rearview mirror.
* * *
The drive out to see my dad is a pretty long affair; he’s in a far-lying subur
b. It’s technically not part of Cuyahoga County but it’s also close enough that you could call it a suburb of Cleveland. Especially since Cleveland has begun to spread its wings further and further out, assimilating the immediate and even some of the furthest-lying suburbs. Like I said before, everyone wants to be here now. Even Ohio State has a huge new satellite campus here. It’s nearly as big as the actual one in Columbus, and there’s been talk that the school might have to split itself into two main branches in the very near future.
I went to Cuyahoga Community College but dropped out right after I started making history books and magazine covers. Eventually they decided to give me an honorary associate’s degree in computer science. Not that I went there for it, nor did I have any interest in computer science when I was there, but it was still nice enough of them to hand me the shiny piece of scrap paper. It also doesn’t hurt to donate enough money for the college to build a brand new building. After that, well, you can pretty much guarantee that I was going to get something other than a tax write-off for the gesture.
I pull through the gates and the security guard smiles and waves at me. I arranged for this ahead of time and I’m the only one here right now. I made sure that they not let anyone else in until I’m gone. I also donated enough money to have a new front gate built here, as well.
I don’t come out to see my dad all that often, and it’s kind of weird when I do. I visit my mom nearly every week, but I guess me and the old man have some unfinished business or something. Though, really, I just fucking hate him.
I park the car and walk up the grassy incline to where he’s at. On the way I pull out the bottle of Laphroaig 1998 ten-year from my jacket. It’s not the top of my collection, and my dad was more of a Dewar’s White Label kind of guy, but fuck him for not having money or taste. This is about what I like. And also shoving the fact that I can afford to have taste down his throat will, at the very least, make me feel better.
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