Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  For the next week, Martin watched Billy become a total master of “House Haunted,” and then successively more advanced games until, by the beginning of the next week, the boy was absorbed in a highly complex game called “Star Lords,” which required abstract thinking in three dimensions, plus an understanding of time-distension effects in space flight at relativistic speeds. Billy demonstrated eidetic memory, imaginative strategy, and a keen perception of cause-and-effect relationships many “turns” in advance—much in the same manner that a chess master can anticipate forced moves by his opponent. Martin knew that only several of the Institute’s most skilled programmers and analysts could cope with the complexities of “Star Lords,” but little Billy Hutton absorbed the game with an almost supernatural ease.

  During the times when he was playing with the computers, Billy now seemed like a normal nine-year-old boy. His eyes were bright and quick, his cheeks filled with a healthy color, and most importantly, he smiled. Martin observed that Billy almost seemed to be drawing some kind of energy from the machines he played, so great was his enjoyment and ability to emote naturally while at the consoles. It was equally difficult to accept how radically Billy would revert back to his usual, autistic persona when he was not in therapy with the machines and computer games. In fact, Martin was forced to admit that Billy’s behavior, when away from the computers, was worse than before he had begun the new therapeutic techniques.

  But that was only the beginning.

  The following week, Martin Godell was visited by Nick Shepherd, the Institute’s Data Processing Chief. He was a thin nervous man who had an almost continuous facial tic at the left corner of his mouth.

  “Excuse me, Doctor, but we’ve run into a little problem over in the computer room, and I was wondering if I might talk to you for a minute.”

  Martin invited Shepherd to have a seat and made small talk about how he knew nothing about computers and could not imagine what he might be able to do to help.

  Shepherd fidgeted nervously in his seat as he explained his problem: the computer-games programs had been tampered with.

  “What do you mean, ‘tampered with’?” asked Martin.

  “Well, what I mean to say is that there are some new games added to the memory discs,” said Shepherd. Tic. “And none of my people claim to know anything about it. In fact, they all swear they don’t know anything and haven’t been fooling with the programs.”

  “New games?” asked Martin, sitting up suddenly in his chair. “What kind of new games?”

  Nick Shepherd laughed nervously as his mouth twitched. “That’s just it. None of us can figure them out. They’re written in some kind of weird language—not normal computer language and not really English either. Every once in a while you can recognize some mathematical symbols and some physical relationships, but not much more. Carrington’s been playing around with it and he thinks that some of it might have to do with relativity and time-space problems, but he says he’s just taking a wild guess.”

  “And you think I may know something about it?” Martin sat back in his chair, using the voice he used to interview patients.

  “Oh no,” said Shepherd defensively, trying to chuckle but failing “It’s just that I knew you had been bringing one of your kids over here to use the games programs, and I was wondering if you might have noticed anything funny.”

  Martin shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, Nick, but I haven’t seen anything unusual.” He felt the lie burning his tongue like a hot coal.

  Shepherd stood up and shook his head. “And that’s not the damnedest thing, Doc…the funniest part is that we don’t even have a record of data input for these new games.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” said Shepherd, his facial tic rapidly flashing, “and I know it’s impossible but those new games seem like they just appeared inside the computer. Like the machine just thought them up itself! Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Yes,” said Martin, “it does seem odd.”

  “Okay, well, thanks, Doc,” said Shepherd as he stood in the doorway, preparing to leave. “I just wanted to check…you never can tell, and I thought you might have seen something funny, that’s all. See you later. We’ll figure this thing out, I guess.”

  As the nervous little man disappeared down the hall, Martin kept thinking of what he had just learned. Nothing funny at all. No, it was definitely not funny, thought Martin.

  That evening, he took Billy to the Data Processing Center, and stood in the doorway, watching the boy approach the computer console. Sinking into the chair as if in a trance, Billy watched the display monitor as it blinked into life. Martin stared at the scene in disbelief, even though, by this time, he should have been expecting what he now witnessed. As soft humming sounds of the machines filled the room, Billy watched the screens, his arms folded calmly in his lap. Martin felt a lump growing in his throat, because he knew that Billy had not touched the consoles. He had not, physically, turned on the machines.

  Forcing himself to watch what followed, Martin stared at the odd tableau of the boy and his machines. Yes, they were his machines, thought Martin…more than anyone else’s in the world. He knew that now. The monitor flashed a series of symbols and letters, the lines skipping across the screen, filling it. At first, there was a slow precision, a measured rhythm to the information that flowed past the display, but as Martin watched, the process was accelerated, faster and faster, until he could not discern the letters and figures as they blurred across the monitor—flashes of color against contrasting backgrounds.

  Martin watched Billy and the machines as they conversed, for that was surely what they were doing. It was an impossible pairing of boy and machine, yet it was happening, and Martin felt that he was violating some kind of taboo, as though he were witnessing some sacred rite. What was this boy? How would one describe him? A biological experiment, a prototype, the ultimate man-machine interface? Whatever words Martin might choose, he knew that the boy could somehow psychokinetically communicate with machines.

  Even as he watched, he saw that an aura, a shimmering halo, was forming around Billy’s body, around the machines. They were commingling, joining forces to become the single entity. Martin had a brief vision, a thought of the vast information network which bound the world together electronically and mechanistically, and he was forced to look away from the boy.

  He felt he had been witness to some kind of new and very special creation. Billy was no longer a small, fragile boy, and Martin wondered what the world would try to do with him.

  Or, perhaps it was the other way around…

  One of my earliest and most profound influences was Ray Bradbury. I will never forget discovering the Ballantine and Bantam Books reprints of The October Country, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and other magical books of stories by the man from Waukegan, Illinois.

  The next story is definitely on the same evolutionary path as much of Ray’s work. When I sat down to write it, I remember having several ideas in mind, which is usually how I get a story to take shape and finally a life of its own. Namely, I think of the kinds of people I will need to act it out; then I figure out what I want to say in terms of theme or motif; and then I start writing and see where the words take me. I rarely, if ever, know ahead of time how a story’s going to end. I like to tell it to myself as I write it. I like to entertain myself. I like myself very much, you see…

  Anyway, with this one, I kept thinking of that Bradbury tale in which an old man picks up a mysterious hitchhiker on a blistering hot, summer day. I was also thinking of the wonderfully close relationship my father and my first (and at that time, only) son, Damon had developed and enjoyed. Half-consciously, I decided I’d try to capture the essence of grandfather and grandson; as well as turning my memory of the Bradbury story inside out. The title is a line from my favorite source of titles: one of the poems in A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman.1

  The story has been reprinted numerous times
but the most interesting and most recent has been in a British tome entitled The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories. I have to be honest here—as much as I like the story, I would have never picked it for a Christmas anthology…

  1 Back in the Seventies, my old pal, Roger Zelazny, hipped me to Housman’s poetry (which is some of the most lyrically brilliant stuff in the English language) as a great source of short story titles. Roger, who wrote the Introduction to my first story collection, died far too young from colon cancer, and I will always miss his mordant sense of humor, his effortlessly crafted prose, and his valued friendship.

  “Oh damn!” cried Grandma from the kitchen. “I’ve run right out of shortnin’ for this cake!”

  “Are you sure?” asked Grandpa. When his wife cussed, she usually was very sure. He eased the Dubuque newspaper down from his face and peeked at her through the kitchen door.

  “’Course I’m sure! And if you want a nice dessert for after Christmas Dinner, you’ll get into town and get me more shortnin’!”

  “What’s shortnin’?” asked Alan, ten years old and always asking serious questions at what always seemed like the wrong moment.

  “But it’s a blizzard goin’ on out there!” said Grandpa.

  “What’s shortnin’?” asked Alan.

  “Rolf, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get into that town and get me my shortnin’…” Grandma used that tone of voice that Alan had learned meant no foolishness.

  Grandpa must have noticed it too because he said “Oh, all right.”

  Alan watched him drop the newspaper and shuffle across the room to the foyer closet where he pulled out some snowboots, a beat-up corduroy hat, and a Mackinaw jacket of red and black plaid. He turned and looked wistfully at Alan, who was sitting on the rug watching the Chicago Bears play the Kansas City Chiefs on TV.

  “Want to take a ride, Alan?”

  “Into town?”

  “Yep. ’Fraid so.”

  “In the blizzard?”

  Grandpa sighed, stole a look toward the kitchen. “Yep.”

  “Okay. It sounds like fun…we don’t get snowstorms like this in L.A.!”

  “Fun?” said Grandpa, smiling. “Oh yes, it’ll be great fun. Come on, get your outerwear on, and let’s get a move on.”

  Alan ran to the closet and pulled on the heavy, rubber-coated boots, a knit watchcap, and scarf. Then he shook into the down parka his mom had ordered from the L. L. Bean mail order place. His first encounter with cold weather had been a great adventure, a great difference in his life.

  “Forty-two years with that woman and I don’t know how she—”

  “What’s shortnin’, Grandpa?”

  The gray-haired man had just closed the door to the mud porch behind them. He was muttering as he faced into the stinging slap of the December wind, the bite of the ice-hard snowflakes attacking his cheeks. There would be roof-high drifts by morning if it kept up like this.

  “What? Oh…well, shortening is butter or oleo, or even cooking oil, I think. It’s for making cakes.” Grandpa stepped down to the path shoveled toward the garage. It was already starting to fill in and would need some new digging out pretty soon.

  “Why do they call it that? Why don’t they just call it butter, or margarine?” Alan had already lost interest in the question, even as he asked it. The hypnotic effect of the snow was captivating him. “Do you get storms like this all the time, Grandpa?”

  “’Bout once a month this bad.” Grandpa reached the garage door, threw it up along its spring-loaded tracks. He shook his head and shivered from the wind-chill. “And to think that your mom and dad are cruising the Caribbean! Hard to believe, isn’t it…?”

  “I’d rather be here,” said Alan, shaking his head. He smiled, obviously immune to the shrieking cold and the missile-like flakes. “This is going to be the first real Christmas I ever had!”

  “Why? Because it’s a white one?” Grandpa chuckled as he walked to the door of the 4-wheel drive Scout and slowly climbed in.

  “Sure,” said Alan. “Haven’t you ever heard that song?”

  Grandpa smiled. “Oh, I think I’ve heard it a time or two…”

  “Well, that’s what I mean. It never seems like Christmas in L.A.—even when it is Christmas!” Alan jumped into the Scout and slammed the door. “Boy, Grandpa, it’s really coming down, now…”

  As his grandfather backed the vehicle from the garage, swung it around and churned down the long driveway toward Route 14A, Alan looked out across the flat landscape of the farm and the other farms in the distance. There was a gentle roll to the treeless land, but was lost in the wall of the storm.

  In fact, Alan could not tell where the snowy land stopped and the white of the sky began. When the Scout lurched forward out onto the main road, it looked like they were constantly driving smack into a white sheet of paper, a white nothingness.

  It was scary, thought Alan. Just as scary as driving into a pitch-black night.

  “Oh, she picked a fine time to run out of something for that danged cake! Look at it, Alan. It’s a regular white-out, is what it is.”

  Alan nodded. “Jeezoowhiz, how do you know where you’re going, Grandpa?” The first twinges of fear were getting into his mind now.

  Grandpa harrumphed. “Been on this road a million times, boy! Lived here all my life! I’m not about to get lost. But my God, it’s cold out here! Hope this heater gets going pretty soon…”

  They drove on in silence except for the skrunch of the tires on the packed snow and thunk-thunk of the wiper blades trying to move off the hard new flakes that filled the sky. The heater still pumped chilly air into the cab and Alan’s breath was almost freezing as it came out of his mouth.

  He imagined that they were explorers on a faraway planet—an alien world of ice and eternally freezing winds. It was an instantaneous, catapulting adventure of the type only possible in the minds of imaginative ten-year-olds. There were creatures out in the blizzard—great white hulking things. Pale, reptilian, evil-eyed things. Alan squinted through the windshield, ready in his gun turret if one turned on them. He would blast it with his laser cannons…

  “What in heck?” muttered Grandpa.

  Abruptly, Alan was out of his fantasy world as he stared past the flicking windshield wipers. There was a dark shape standing in the center of the white nothingness. As the Scout advanced along the invisible road, drawing closer to the contrasted object, it became clearer, more distinct.

  It was a man. He was standing by what must be the roadside, waving a gloved hand at Grandpa.

  Braking easily, Grandpa stopped the Scout and reached across to unlock the door. The blizzard rushed in ahead of the stranger, slicing through Alan’s clothes like a cold knife. “Where you headed?!” cried Grandpa over the wind. “I’m going as far as town…”

  “That’ll do,” said the stranger.

  Alan caught a quick glimpse of him as he pushed into the back seat. He was wearing a thin coat that seemed to hang on him like a scarecrow’s rags. He had a black scarf wrapped tight around his neck and a dark blue ski mask that covered his face under a floppy-brimmed old hat. Alan didn’t like that—not being able to see the stranger’s face.

  “Cold as hell out there!” said the man as he smacked his gloved hands together. He laughed to himself, then: “Now there’s a funny expression for you, ain’t it? ‘Cold as hell.’ Don’t make much sense does it? But people still say it, don’t they?”

  “I guess they do,” said Grandpa as he slipped the Scout into gear and started off again. Alan looked at the old man, who looked like an older version of his father, and thought he saw an expression of concern, if not apprehension, forming on the lined face.

  “It’s not so funny, though…” said the stranger, his voice lowering a bit. “Everybody figures hell to be this hot place, but it don’t have to be, you know?”

  “Never really thought about it much,” said Grandpa, jiggling with the heater controls. It was so cold, it just didn’t seem
to want to work.

  Alan shivered, uncertain whether or not it was from the lack of heat, or the words, the voice of the stranger.

  “Matter of fact, it makes more sense to think of hell as full of all kinds of different pain. I mean, fire is so unimaginative, don’t you think? Now, cold…something as cold as that wind out there could be just as bad, right?” The man in the back seat chuckled softly beneath the cover of the ski mask.

  Grandpa cleared his throat and faked a cough. “I don’t think I’ve really thought much about that either,” he said as he appeared to be concentrating on the snow-covered road ahead. Alan looked at his grandfather’s face and could see the unsteadiness in the old man’s eyes. It was the look of fear, slowly building.

  “Maybe you should…” said the stranger.

  “Why?” said Alan. “What do you mean?”

  “It stands to reason that a demon would be comfortable in any kind of element—as long as it’s harsh, as long as it’s cruel.”

  Alan tried to clear his throat and failed. Something was stuck down there, even when he swallowed.

  The stranger chuckled again. “’Course, I’m getting off the track…we were talking about figures of speech, weren’t we?”

  “You’re the one doing all the talking, mister,” said Grandpa.

  The stranger nodded. “Actually, a more appropriate expression would be ‘cold as the grave’…”

  “It’s not this cold under the ground,” said Alan defensively.

  “Now, how would you know?” asked the stranger slowly. “You’ve never been in the grave…not yet, anyway.”

  “That’s enough of that silly talk, mister!” said Grandpa. His voice was hard-sounding, but there was a thin layer of fear beneath his words.

  Alan looked from his grandfather to the stranger. As his eyes locked in with those behind the ski mask, Alan felt a burst of acid in his gut, an ice pick in his spine.