Dreambox Junkies

by Richard Laymon

  For sixteen years Janko Brauch had lived in the knowledge that living was something he didn't deserve. Not only that, but the whole neat Elvis/JFK/Lennon/Luther King/Janis J/Princess Di/Marc B/Marilyn M/Sherry Frean/Jimmy Dean/Kurt C/Jimi H/Jesus Christ trip, he had always envied that riff, liked the idea of joining that company. Who wouldn't want some of that outpourgasm action? Love like that. Love for him, for Janko Brauch. Love like you only ever got when it was too late. Who could have imagined things would turn out just the opposite: that he would go down as a killer of innocents, and the kids, the frucked-up kids, would see that as a cool enough deal?

  Janko Brauch didn't see it as cool, being the cause of a crash in which he himself, and not that married couple, should have died. A matter of conscience, yeah? You know it should have been you.

  But when finally he'd got the chance to go back in time and stop it ever happening, and had saved his victims’ lives without them ever knowing, Janko had found that he hadn't wanted to switch fates, after all. When it came to the death of Janko Brauch he'd wanted something more individual. So he'd come up with something better, a death more memorable.

  So picture it, man: you're live on stage, yeah—sixteen years ago, this is; the night before what would have been the crash—and you've just done your set, and they're screaming, and this beautiful, frucking BEAUTIFUL girl scrambles up on the stage, and, right there in front of them all—in front of everybody there, and all the millions watching all over the world—right in big, big, big, big close-up, this frucking lovely gorgeous beautiful girl whips out this bowie knife and slits your throat.

  It's just her way of loving you.

  And down you go on your knees, and this chick stands there holding you up by your hair, and holding the knife, and holding your head back, with your throat gaping open, and the cameras zoom in close, big, big, big, big, and just as you're dying, just in the second before you cash in, you give this girl a little look that says you understand, and you forgive her.

  Cool, no?

  So then you die, you leave your body, float, and witness. And what a frucking Grade A trip. All the shit he'd ever done, the chemmies, sex, came nowhere close, man, feeling them mourn you, drinking in that EMOTION.

  * * * *

  He floated down into a girl's private bedroom. A pretty little, shy little fox of a thing stuck out in some godforsaken town in fruck knows what part of the world, with smartpape posters all over her walls. A living, moving poster of Janko Brauch, singing, stomping, wanking his Fender. And next to it another shot, Janko Brauch and his killer. A still photo, this one, stark and frozen, in grainy, superstyley black-and-white. The Notorious Photo Taken Just Before The Act. You could see the knife very clearly. And his killer's luscious big black mad girly eyes.

  Sixteen years ago.

  Before this other chick, the girl in this bedroom into which he had floated, had even been born. He was as old as her old man. Or he would have been, had he lived. This lonely secret little girl with all the posters of Janko Brauch was sitting cross-legged on her bed looking at the posters and mouthing along as he sang Lisa Sleaze—and sobbing and smudging her kohl and letting her hair hang down all in rats’ tails and feeling this deep, deep, deep, deep love for the dead Janko Brauch.

  Janko drank it in.

  The chick was what, fifteen? Same age his killer had been. Wouldn't it be a gas if he materialized, came back to life in her bedroom, just for her, as if her love had been so strong it brought him back? Janko wanted to hold her, hug her in his arms, so eat-me sweet she was, so cute and soft and perfect-faced. He wanted to cradle her. But it wouldn't be fair on her head to do that. He was floating in the bedroom of this sobbing little fan of fifteen. D-e-n-y-s-e, her name was, she had on this metal necklace in the shape of her name, like the nameplate on a chromy old car. Janko was floating around pretty Denyse when his timer fetched him out, sucked him gently back down into Groundworld. Being a neat Bengt & Anderssen, his box had the gentlest fetch on the market, a tender tongue-tip caress of a fetch. And it was known to be one of the best at keeping at bay any bad shit picked up when your boxworld was being put together, stuff like erotoroutines and spooks, even the archspook, Sick Nick.

  To start with, Janko had used the box with gamecards, conquering universes, shooting and shagging like millions of others. But when, just the other day, he'd found out you could wildcard your box and do whatever you wanted with its copy of the world, well, then there'd been no stopping Janko Brauch. He had gone back in his boxworld sixteen years and changed the past.

  Janko lay there while the real world came into focus. His veins were fiery, still, his heart and his head hypercharged.

  And then the process began.

  You pathetic old titsphincter.

  He lay there with his Dreambox in this cheap cockroachy hotel room where no one would find him or disturb him and he told himself, You think it's love for YOU, man, but it's not.

  You did your dethan shit, half a hair pill and the Vitamin C, and still you ripped into yourself as soon as you got back in the Real. It was the price you paid for having such a frucked-up shit-filled head, the selfsame shit that made you a Sensitive Artist, an authentic human person who faced up to yourself, so maybe this was right and cool and proper, that straight away you should start ripping into yourself, killing the bliss of coming back. Now and here, in Groundworld, Janko ripped into himself by reminding himself that it wasn't love for him they were feeling, all these kids, sixteen years on and still torn up and pining. It wasn't a him thing, it was a self thing, all their little separate selves they were feeling for. Ten million private Janko Brauches, no more real, no more him than the computer ghosts the moviemakers used.

  You sad old gusset-sucker, Janko Brauch.

  There was no going back, no undoing the crash in this real world. Those two people had died. He had run them down and killed them. End of story. It might have turned out differently, but it hadn't, so tough frucking titty. He could dream up any shit he desired, but the REAL TRUTH was written in stone. In his boxworld, Janko Brauch was a slaughtered lamb legend. Here in Groundworld, he was what he had always been these last sixteen years: a ruined soul, a taker of lives, a grey-haired once-was, turned forty-six, with blood on his hands. The blood of those two newlyweds, robbed by him of the rest of their lives.

  What kind of lives? Janko had wondered, and he had thought that maybe seeing them happy would make him feel better about himself. To start with, he had left them well alone in his boxworld. But then all of a sudden this impulse—why not pay a visit, make sure that things were okay, fine and good? If things weren't, then that wouldn't be his fault, not in his boxworld, a world where he hadn't gone off the road and hit them sixteen years ago. But he hoped life was good for them. All he had to do was wish to see them, and his little magic box would do the rest.

  And so, two boxtrips ago, the bliss belly had shat him out over a city. Southern Spain. Seville. He knew it, he'd played there. He'd floated down toward a house with a big glass sun dome. He'd floated down through the dome, down into the open garden court the house was built around.

  And there she was, the woman, older now, but still a looker. She was standing alone, and just as he'd floated down toward her she'd raised her face and stared right up at him, right at him, as if she could see him there, even though he was invisible to her and to all of them, every one of his humiliants. And then she had collapsed, knocking over a plant in a pot, and had thrashed about on the floor and let out a weird, weird moan.

  Like she'd seen him there, looking down on her.

  Janko had checked to make sure he was invisible. He was; he could see nothing of himself.

  Some Spanishy dude had come rushing in and picked the woman up and shot her with a hypo.

  “Paul!” the woman had called.

  The name had put a knife through Janko Brauch's invisible guts.

  The woman, Frances Rayle, had started crying, the young Spanish guy in the white shirt trying to soothe her.


  And then, somebody else had appeared, and Janko had recognized Paul Rayle. Sixteen years on, he wasn't looking well, he wasn't looking too healthy.

  But there they were, though, both still alive, the married couple he'd killed.

  And married, still?

  No.

  All Janko had to do was ask a question and his boxworld supplied the answer in the form of an intuition. That was one of his wished-for supernatural powers—instant knowledge, along with weightlessness and utter invisibility. He'd ripped off the idea from DR SPEKKTRO, a comic he had read as a kid. The extra bit he'd added on by himself, a unique Janko Brauch invention, was the ability to drink in people's feelings for him. Like with that other chick who had been there in Seville, the chick with the Louise Brooks hair. Janko had detected quite a little lovesource there. But she was old. Thirty, if a day. Back when she was a teenager, maybe—

  Seeing them both there in that house, his two once-victims, Paul and Frances Rayle, Janko had been troubled to find the woman having such a tough time of it, even though he knew that she was rolling-in-it rich. But more than that, something scared him about what was going down. In bewilderment, and with very deep unease, he had floated there and watched as Frances Rayle freed herself from the young guy and, unsteadily, stood up and looked straight up at him, Janko Brauch, once again, just like before, staring straight up at him and giving him the shits. You weren't meant to get the shits in your own boxworld. Not unless you hadn't dethanned. Had he boxed up without any dethan, gone in uncushioned? Was that why what was happening was happening?

  “Paul ... Paul it's not your world, it's not Processia's, nor mine, it's..."

  And then she'd she'd pointed up at him, at the invisible Janko Brauch—just as if she could see him there.

  “TELL THEM THE TRUTH!"

  The words, screamed up at him by Frances Rayle, had caused Janko Brauch such severe shock that the traumafetch, a brand-new safety feature exclusive to Bengt & Anderssen, had yanked him out through the bliss belly as if by Caesarian, and dumped him home in Groundworld, for him to wake to the discovery that he'd used his pants as a toilet. From now on, Janko had vowed, he would keep well clear of Paul and Frances Rayle. He had put things straight, in his boxworld if not in real life, by undoing the crash that had killed them, by not even driving along that road that night sixteen years ago. He had settled the debt, and could hardly be held responsible for any other shit their little lives happened to drop them in subsequently. He would be leaving them to themselves, from this point onward. After all, they were only frucking humiliants, electronic pretend people, just like all those billions of other little ghosts in the private, secret boxworld of Janko Brauch. That was why it did your head in, doing Dreamboxes. You started thinking of your boxworld as real, when it wasn't real. You started thinking you'd put things right, healed the past, when you hadn't, man, not at all. That was why, when your brain mellowed out and you saw things straight and got your head round the real state of play, you started ripping into yourself. And the more of a Sensitive Artist you were, the more you beat yourself up, the higher the price you paid; it went with the territory.

  Janko got up from the bed. He felt like ratshit. He had three immediate needs: a slash and a spliff and a shot of Jack Daniels. Too late, he realized he was still wearing the trodes. The Dreambox, yanked off the bed like a dog on a leash, smacked into the bedside table and thumped down and bounced on the thin-pile carpet.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 24

  It was as though a gaggle of electronic geese had been let loose in Frances's house. One of the birds could talk. It kept squawking: “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!"

  Xabier instantly appeared, wielding a snubnosed buzzpistol. Felipe emerged from somewhere else, similarly armed. Sesha Roffey and Ruth were looking down over the balustrade, brought out from their rooms by the raucous alarm.

  Frances just stood there as though in a trance. Xabier grabbed her and hustled her into an alcove, body-shielding her. Felipe did the same with Paulie as, onto the patio, strode a tall, muscular man in a bottle-green boilersuit and a Viking helmet. He was carrying not a firearm but a toolbox. Steadying his buzzgun with both hands, Felipe addressed the trespasser in Spanish, his voice taut and threatening. The Viking said a word, Paulie didn't catch it, and Felipe froze in his shooting stance like a waxwork exhibit. Xabier was likewise rendered inert.

  The Viking said, “You are Paul and Frances Rayle, yes?” His accent was so gelatinous as to court amusement.

  What am I dreaming up now? Paulie wondered, trembling.

  “Paul and Frances Rayle,” the Viking spoke gravely, formally, “I regret to inform you that this Bengt & Anderssen BeaBox Ninety has suffered a physical shock of a magnitude sufficient to necessitate a complete reversion to initial worldcopy mode. All user amendments are forthwith rescinded. Sadly, this reconfigurative measure involves withdrawal of epicentral humiliant status from the aforementioned pseudopersons: namely, yourselves."

  Chilled to the bone, yet at the same time grimly gratified by this broad confirmation of his ontological suspicions, Paulie asked of their visitor, “Are you the Viking from the Bengt & Anderssen ads?"

  “I am indeed that personage, yes."

  “Is this one of those new holo ads?” Sesha Roffey, more than a trifle perplexed, was standing at the bottom of the steps. “They beat Sick Nick,” she marvelled. “No one ever beats Sick Nick. You should have seen it. So you're a holo ad, right?"

  “I am a boxworld janitory program manifesting itself anthropomorphically.” The Viking put down his toolbox. “And you would be ... Miss Processia Roffey? Miss Roffey, your own situation is somewhat more sanguine than that of Mr. and Ms Rayle, since the Ground-original self to which, directly, you shall be reverting is alive and well. These events may even be preserved in your memory at an oneiric level."

  “So some of us aren't alive and well in Groundworld?” Paulie was aghast. “Whose boxworld is this?"

  The Viking pondered. “I see no reason not to divulge the requested information, since the coming reversion will...” He broke off, as if not to belabour harsh truths. “The user's name is Janko Brauch."

  “Janko Brauch?” Sesha Roffey shook her head. “Janko Brauch died ages ago. That girl killed him onstage. Slit his throat with a bowie knife. Everyone knows that. What am I doing, arguing with a holo ad? And what's wrong with Xabier and the other guy? Am I sleepwalking or what?"

  She's right, Paulie thought. It's common knowledge that Janko Brauch was murdered, elevated by a mad fan to the pantheon of showbusiness subchrists.

  The Viking turned to Frances. His politeness, the care he took not to have her feel excluded from the conversation, was commendable. “Ms Rayle, there is no pleasant way of putting this, but, in Groundworld..."

  “...I do not exist?” Frances still showed no fear; in fact, she alone seemed to understand what was taking place.

  “You do not exist,” the Viking confirmed. “Or to be more precise, you are no longer animate. And neither are you, Mr Rayle, I'm afraid."

  Paulie almost collapsed. Dry-mouthed, he inquired, “Why is that? How can that be?"

  “You were killed in a traffic accident by a driver who was, regretfully, in no fit state to be in command of a vehicle. That driver was Janko Brauch. The accident happened some sixteen years ago."

  “But Janko Brauch is dead,” Sesha Roffey pointed out. “Janko Brauch died sixteen years ago. You're talking crap. He never killed anyone. I never heard of him killing anybody."

  “That much is true in this boxworld only,” the Viking corrected. “As to Mr. Brauch's motives for resurrecting Mr. and Ms. Rayle and doing away with himself, I am sorry to say that I can furnish you with no further insight. The Bengt & Anderssen BeaBox Ninety creates for its user a psychoplastic Berkeley Effect worldcopy without in any way understanding, in a human sense, what it is doing. Any appearance of comprehension on my part is merely clever programming
."

  Paulie asked, “Why is it necessary, the reversion? Just run it by me again."

  “Physical trauma. The BeaBox Ninety received a shock of such intensity as to render the Berkeley Effect susceptible to exponential aberration. Henceforth, the user will progressively lose control of his boxworld. Reversion resets and restarts quantum compliance ... the aforementioned Berkeley Effect."

  “Then why not just automatically revert?” Paulie's own Dreambox boasted a similar safeguard; he now recalled skimming over that section in the instruction manual. “Don't you think it would have been kinder not to have notified us?"

  “Undoubtedly. But I have my programming."

  “What are they, these programmers ... a bunch of fucking sadists?"

  “Quite possibly. Programmers are human, with human faults and foibles. Given the choice, I should not have discharged my duties in this somewhat cruel, theatrical manner. But that is academic,” the Viking smiled mirthlessly, “since every facet of my apparent ‘character’ derives from a subroutine incorporated for the express purpose of further advertising the subtle artistry and zany eclat of my creators ... although it could perhaps be that my hinted antipathy toward them reflects a measure of self-reproach on their part. But I digress."