Dreambox Junkies

by Richard Laymon

  He said glumly, “There could be something in it, I suppose, if I heard it from that Viking character, and now you're giving me the same story.” His true, original Groundworld self had died in a car crash some sixteen years previously. Frances too. There was no Institute of Psychotrichology. “And Sesha Roffey ... there's really no such person? That was just your ... what was that term you used? ... your ‘Displacement Persona,’ right?” Ruth had told him all about the PhantAssist, had even showed him the implantation scar, hidden under her hair. He thought, Poor Sesha. The creation of a brain chip. And here am I, feeling sorry for myself. He said, “So that's the harsh truth of it?"

  “Perhaps everything's true.” Gently, Ruth kissed Kali's ear. “Perhaps everything exists, and ontological status is just..."

  “...another Kantian category, a way of carving up the manifold?"

  She said, “I bet you must have felt really lonely?"

  “Lonely?"

  “Being unable to discuss, properly discuss with me, so many things."

  “I could always discuss anything with you."

  “Kantian categories?” Her smile was more Frances than Ruth. “Tell me, Paulie, what did you see in me, hmm?"

  He thought, Whatever you wanted me to see, if this is your boxworld. Or, if it's mine, then whatever I wanted to see.

  He said, “Maybe you had a better idea than me of what's important. I mean, who's to say metaphysical speculation isn't just a kind of mental illness? But look, this isn't fair,” he pointed out. “You've become more like me without my becoming more like you. I'm still, so far as I can tell, worse than useless at a practical level. A dreamer who relies on you as much as Kali does. So, can you blame me for being pretty convinced that this is my own boxworld we're in?"

  “That's not quite how it appears from where I'm sitting."

  Kali had finished her feed. Ruth held the baby out to him. Paulie took his daughter and winded her over his shoulder, tears clouding his eyes as, gently, he patted her little back.

  How he loved her.

  How he loved the both of them.

  Ruth sat there with her breast bared, still, the nipple all swollen and glistening, the areola large and dark, and with a couple of hairs, familiar hairs, caught by the light as she drew in a breath. A sight mundane yet magical. She tugged her sweater back down over herself. When was the last time they had made love? How he ached for her.

  Ruth murmured something he didn't quite catch. She spoke again, this time slowly, deliberately. “Universal Male Sterility."

  It was one of those dire ecopredictions, grim warnings trundled out by the media with numbing regularity. You heard them so often that they came to resemble ad slogans, in one ear and out the other. Overpopulation. Ozone Depletion. Agricatastrophe. Universal Male Sterility. How ironic it was that the most immediate danger facing any given member of the human race had turned out to be none of these, no form of ecoperil at all but, instead, a bizarre and evidently unforeseen side-effect of consumer electronics technology. Ontodemotion, the danger of discovering yourself to be nothing more than a copy inhabiting some disintegrating boxworld, a humiliant at the mercy of the Dreambox user.

  “Paulie?"

  He looked at her.

  She asked him, “Has UMS become a reality?"

  “Not to the best of my knowledge, no.” He cuddled the baby. “Why?” Ruth's question, something about it, had launched another wave of nausea. He gritted his teeth against it.

  “In my world it has,” Ruth said simply, chillingly. “So tell me, if this is your boxworld, why you should be dreaming of a world in which that's the case, in which all men are sterile?"

  “I don't know,” he conceded. “Unless..."

  “Unless it's some deeply-buried fear coming out?” Ruth didn't sound very convinced by this hypothesis.

  Paulie's heart was pounding. “So you had Kali by artificial insemination? All men are sterile, and parthenogenesis hasn't yet been perfected, but years and years ago I'd donated sperm for this charity ... which is true, I do remember donating it. It was Frances who encouraged me to, as a matter of fact. So you didn't want to go the cloning route, and mine was the only sperm available; the rest had been distributed by lottery?” The more he thought about it, the more the whole scenario amused him. “Come on, honestly ... have you ever heard of such a conceited little fantasy? It's really embarrassing, to be dreaming up something like that. Shame on you, Paulie Rayle."

  He heaved a sigh. “I suppose that's just my good old reproductive drive, wishing for a world in which I end up fathering kids by all those thousands of women."

  Ruth looked troubled, and Paulie felt guilty.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “But isn't that a fair interpretation? Okay, so my memory may be fucked, but as I recall, in my Groundworld UMS is just one of a bunch of standard ecothreats. So you're saying in this world it's a reality?"

  “This world? I don't know. All I know is..."

  “...that I'm dead, and you got Janko Brauch to bring me back to life? Don't you think it would have been better not to have told me I was dead? I mean, thanks for your frankness but, you know, it can really screw you up, finding out you're a ghost.” Wryly, he thought to himself, The ghost in the machine. One of billions in millions of machines.

  “You're not dead,” Ruth assured him. “Not so long as I'm alive.” She got up, held out her arms. “Look at Kali ... she's yawning. It's time she went to bed."

  Paulie kissed the baby again and then handed her over.

  * * * *

  Lying naked together, intertwined, they held each other. He took enjoyment in the feel, so deliciously intimate, of his seed spilling out of her onto his thigh. Ruth kissed him fiercely, then pushed him gently back, separating from him so as to see him. Under her gaze, and then in her grasp, his penis stirred, stiffened again. Clutching him, kissing him once more, she smiled at him, as if to say, All for this. Strange, life, isn't it?

  Again, they embraced. He ran his fingertips down the centre of her back, down, down and, with her worldless assent, found her hot secret stickiness. She clenched her thighs tight around him and their tongues sparred playfully, then savagely, each in turn surrendering and, for a time, real or not, Paulie was free, lost, safe, home and happy.

  * * * *

  As Ruth slept in his arms, he thought of the Goddess of whom she had spoken.

  SAGRADA.

  The Goddess whose name was the name of Ruth's mother.

  But how could all of this be? According to Ruth, no less a figure than Erland Zeller himself was leading a team whose aim was to supplant this world with one in which ontotechnology was a reality. Yet so far as he, Paulie Rayle, was concerned, the very concept of ontotechnology was nothing more than a figment of his own imagination. So what was going on? Were all of these things part and parcel of the labyrinthine workings-out of the Berkeley Effect? Was it all just one big intricate boxdream being dreamt by Paulie Rayle?

  Or was Ruth at the centre of it all?

  Was he hers, mind and body, an imaginary resurrectee endowed with pseudolife by her psyche, totally dependent upon the Goddess for his quasexistence? Ruth's Goddess? For he was aware of what Frances had done. In fact it was the very last thing he could remember prior to his waking up in the bedroom. Frances had—how could you describe it?—entered into him, filled his empty shell, imbued him with herself, and delivered him from all fear. He had not mentioned this to Ruth, that he could remember. He wished almost that he had no recollection. Although he could make little sense of the act, it weighed upon his mind as somehow alien to his imagination. But he lacked the energy to worry at it, to gnaw at it, to attempt to draw out, like blood from a stone, some disarming rationale. He felt so weary, so sick of speculation. In the end, you just came down with conjecture fatigue. Your head packed up on you, your brain just couldn't—

  A deafening CRUNCH of splintering wood.

  A blast of freezing cold air.

  “You frucking move you DIE!"

>   Held rock-steady in the hands of the black-clad, pulverbooted goon who had kicked down the door and issued the injunction was a compact silenced spewgun.

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  * * *

  Chapter 28

  They lay there shivering in their own urine, the terror having gone straight to their bladders, while the shortest of the goons—there were three of them in all—sought to entertain the others with a touch of slapstick, carefully closing what was left of the splintered cottage door, reducing the onslaught of bitter night air to a fierce icy draught. In the other room, Kali was making it known that the commotion had caused her deep distress.

  Fury, the most intense, burning fury, rose up within Paulie Rayle.

  “Let me go to my baby,” Ruth implored. She sounded distanced, numb, and yet, beneath it all, immensely strong.

  Ignoring her, the first goon, lean and rodenty and obviously the leader, indicated Kali's door. The short goon kicked it down. Ratface and the third goon, distinguished by a trendily tattooed nose, stood brandishing their spewguns, richly amused by Paulie's impotent rage.

  The short goon re-emerged, Kali crying in his arms.

  Paulie moved, and Ruth was even quicker; she was up off the bed like a shot. But Ratface, more swift than either of them, backhanded Ruth hard across the face, sending her crashing back down on top of Paulie, knocking the wind from his lungs and leaving him agonized, gasping for breath and dully reflecting that a dethanatized, unmasochistic boxdreamer would almost certainly have been spared such an ordeal.

  So that settles it, he thought. This is Ruth's world, not mine.

  Or, God forbid, it was Groundworld.

  He knew that Ruth hooked up without dethan, didn't protect herself; she'd told him as much. But why the fuck would her psyche go and do this to her?

  They hauled Ruth up off him. Ratface had hold of her hair and was dragging her up, pushing her away against the wall, while Nose-Tattoo kept Paulie in the sights of his spewgun, mutely challenging him to make another move.

  The short goon plainly knew about babies, perhaps had children of his own, for he had worked some kind of magic and quietened Kali down. She gazed around with big curious eyes.

  “Give me Laurel,” Ratface snapped, bringing his wrist up near his face as though testing scent.

  “I'm real sorry, hon, but this is an airjam zone,” the goon's wrist mobe purred in a vocpat Paulie guessed to be Jailbait Ear Candy.

  Ratface hawked and spat and swore.

  Laurel? Paulie struggled to make sense of it. Bertrand Laurel? So in this world Bertrand Laurel hadn't been murdered by Sick Nick? Not that the deduction made things any clearer.

  Ruth threatened icily, “Don't you hurt my baby."

  Ratface poked out his studded tongue.

  Had he been within reach of a firearm, Paulie could quite cheerfully have cut the goons down like mad dogs. Yet, all his instincts urged him not to antagonize them. The spewguns were as real as anything else in this world and, to all intents and purposes, lethal.

  Ratface held out his hand, snapping his fingers with impatience. From a bag, Nose-Tattoo produced, of all things, a Dreambox. Ratface snatched it and held it up. “You,” he told Ruth, “are going to dream us a nice little dream."

  Ruth stared stonily.

  Ratface said, “You know the deal ... you don't co-operate, we do things to your partner in piss here. You still don't give suck, we start on the kid."

  “I'll kill you first,” Paulie told him.

  All three smirked at the bold counterthreat, and Paulie wondered why psychos like these were not themselves box junkies, gleefully making pseudolife hell for their humiliants.

  Unless, he thought, this is Ratface's boxworld?

  “I'm doing nothing unless you give the baby,” Ruth indicated Paulie, “to him."

  Ratface considered, then gestured to the short goon, who stepped forward and, not without reluctance, handed Kali over to Paulie. She started crying again. Ruth looked to Ratface, contemptuously awaiting instruction.

  “Dream that the Dreambox was never invented,” Ratface commanded. “But leave everything the same apart from that."

  If not for the anger and the fear and the pain, Paulie could have laughed in the goon's ugly face. The plan was obviously a product of extreme desperation. How could Laurel, presumably the mastermind behind all this, have possibly imagined that Ruth would play along? What was to prevent her from dreaming that Laurel had never been born? Provided, of course she knew who Bertrand Laurel was. And were Laurel's goons also holding the whole ONTOTECH team at gunpoint, making the same demand? Or had they singled out Ruth, Zeller's onetime star imagineer, as their best hope? Over and above all that, though, surely the goons realized that fulfilment of Laurel's demand would have ramifications with regard to themselves?

  Ratface's thin lips twitched in mirth. “I know exactly what you're thinking: if the dream works and the world changes, we'll never get our money, us three. We could end up anywhere. You're thinking we must be thick as shit, not thinking it through.” He glanced at his companions, likewise smug. “Well, you see the thing is, nanoprick, the three of us were chosen for this mission on account of us all having had people close to us suffer Dreambox-related deaths ... in my case a twin brother. We're all of us unbalanced by grief, united in our hatred of these disgusting devices ... so I shouldn't bother playing the rationality card."

  Ruth's eyes let Paulie know that she too was wondering whose imagination it was, her own or his, that was smoothing over the lacunae, painstakingly patching up logical flaws. And yet, like him, she was also bearing in mind the grim possibility that this was the true and actual Groundworld.

  Ratface tilted his spewgun toward their own Dreambox, still there on the bedside table. “A philosophical question: are millies really alive? Humiliants ... can they really,” he fired the spewgun, “be murdered, a whole worldful at a time?” The Dreambox leapt, splintering fragments, and landed in front of Nose-Tattoo, who finished the job with the heel of his pulverboot.

  Paulie thought, You sick bastards.

  Kali was crying again. He did what he could to comfort her.

  Ratface thrust the other Dreambox into Ruth's hands and shoved her down onto the wet mattress beside Paulie. “WELL, FRUCKING MOVE IT ... WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?"

  Ruth fumbled on the trodes, sank back onto the pillow and, after a brief glance at Paulie, closed her eyes and hoarsely whispered the speakstart command.

  The box hummed into action.

  Ruth gasped orgasmically as the bliss belly ingested her.

  Nose-Tattoo guffawed.

  “Just tell me something.” Ratface turned to Paulie with a grimace of revulsion. “How can you fruck something with all that unsightly underarm fuzz?” Pointing his spewgun at Paulie's head, he broke into a big, manic Cheshire Cat smile. “Bit of a run of bad luck on your part, wouldn't you say, what with me being deranged, given to acts of senseless violence straight out of your worst nightmares, and now looking for one last little bit of fun before the big change.” He adjusted his aim. The weapon was now pointing at Kali. “You know what I always say? If you feel an evil impulse coming on, well, what the fruck, why not give in to it? After all, you only live once."

  He squeezed the trigger.

  “No!” Paulie heard himself screaming as he whirled, twisted, tried to shield his daughter from the bullets. “NO!"

  LIGHT. BLINDING LIGHT. AND THEN SILENCE.

  “Here, let me help you."

  The voice was both familiar and unfamiliar. The blurry image sharpened into a face, a face Paulie both did and didn't recognize. The sun was blazing outside. It no longer felt cold. One moment darkness and ice—the next, daylight and warmth.

  “Here."

  Something was being offered to him. A coat, his own coat from the back of the door. A coat to cover his nakedness as he stood there shivering, his baby daughter still warm, living, breathing, in his arms.

  “Here."


  The coat was slipped on over his shoulders. The change in the weather had rendered such an item of apparel highly inappropriate, but something said it would be wrong to reject the tiny gesture of atonement from this person who, scarcely more than an instant ago, had been a vicious ratfaced goon.

  “I can't believe it."

  Ratface sank to his knees. In fact it was no longer fair to call him Ratface, for he now looked altogether ungoonlike. “I can't believe how I was, the way I behaved, the life I led.” He stared at the five transplosive spewshells hanging frozen, in stark defiance of omniversal laws, a mere arm's length from Kali's head, from Paulie's chest. One by one they dropped, bounced, clattered to the floor. “I just can't believe it.” He looked all at once bewildered and embarrassed and appalled to be in possession of the spewgun. Reversing the weapon, he offered it to Paulie.

  Oddly enough, Paulie felt no suspicion, no urge to unleash pent-up anger. For there was no anger, none at all. He took the gun and, for want of a better means of disposal, dropped it into his coat's capacious pocket. Respiration, the complaints he was receiving from his ribs, left him in no doubt at all that certain elements of the former state of things remained distinctly untranscended. Pain still had a part to play, even in this strange, sun-drenched place.

  “Paulie?"

  Ruth was sitting up in the bed, hugging the quilt up around herself. Her jaw was bruised, her smile wan but reassuring.

  Their three erstwhile assailants were weeping profusely.

  “I know it's not enough to say I'm sorry,” sobbed the man who was no longer Ratface, gazing down at the shattered, spewshell-ridden Dreambox. “Nowhere near enough. But I guess the best thing we can do for you people right now is get out of your sight."

  Much as he appreciated the goons’ miraculous transformation into civilized beings, Paulie thought the idea a splendid one.