“I wish I had his confidence,” Marilyn says.
“He’s a cocky sonofabitch,” Elvis says, “but he’s sure enough got a voice.” She’s about to reply, but something comes in. He almost clears it, but he realizes it’s closer than it should be. He’s been careless. “Hold that thought, honey,” he says. “I’ll be back.”
#
The moment they catch sight of him, panic strikes. Bullets rip snarling holes through the air, punching through his body and out the other side without slowing. He lets them shoot, studying them the while. At least a dozen. They have the look of desert scavengers in old-school military camouflage decked out with goggles and improvised headwraps to keep the heat and the dust at bay. Their weapons are mismatched. Their discipline is poor and their fire control worse. He watches and waits.
The gunfire turns sporadic as some take cover, some try to change magazines, and some maybe realize at last things aren’t what they seem. One of them holds up a fist, and the last shooters stop.
He looks more carefully at the one with the fist. It isn’t easy to distinguish much out here. He’s restricted to visible light and a bit of the infrared spectrum, so about all he can tell is that the leader is a man, maybe a little older than most of the others. They’re all thin. Their clothes hang loosely over angular limbs.
“Where are you from?” he asks at last.
It’s enough to startle the men.
“A ghost!” someone shouts. “Like Stein said! We shouldn’t be here, man.”
The leader holds up that fist again, opens his hand, palm flat. “No ghosts here, Davis,” he says. “That’s some kind of 3D projection.” The goggles glint in the sunlight as he tilts his head this way and that.
Finally, the leader shuffles close. He strips off a glove and extends a hand, then yanks it back. “Water,” he calls. “There’s a mist sprayer here. They’re using lasers, shining them into the super-fine spray. Old technology.”
Smart, then.
The leader moves his wet hand towards his mouth. Elvis shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do that,” he says.
The leader stops, and pushes his goggles up his forehead. He waits on Elvis.
“They never fixed up Hoover Dam rightwise after the Trumpists tried to blow it. Lake Mead’s not much anymore. We don’t get snowpack on the mountains like we used to, either. Water from the mister ain’t meant for drinking. Not sure it ever was, to be truthful. They put ’em up to cool the streets for the gamblers and tourists.”
The leader shakes his head, and the men mutter. The local pickups aren’t good enough for him to get everything they’re saying, but they seem shocked at the idea of spraying fresh water just to cool people.
“You got a name?” the leader asks.
“Not for you,” he says. “You and yours—you’re leaving. This ain’t your turf.”
The leader studies him. “You look like that old time singer. I’ve seen video. Elvis. I’m going to call you that. I’m Desmond Garnett, Elvis. Colonel Desmond Garnett. ESA Special Forces.”
“Eastern States of America,” Elvis says.
“You’ve heard of us?” Garnett pushes his goggles up his forehead and peers at Elvis.
“It’s an easy jump to make. I’ll give you a few more, for free.” Elvis gestures at the ragtag group. “I was in the army for a spell. I can see your guns don’t match. Your uniforms are trash. Your training is slipshod. If you’re Special Forces, I’m a bluetick hound.”
Garnett gives him a tight, wintry smile. “I’ll allow as I’ve had to recruit from outside my usual pool of talent. This here’s a low-key, fully deniable mission. There’s a degree of uncertainty regarding the border between the ESA and the Republic of the Pacific Coast, and my superiors would rather not raise that issue at the present time. But let me assure you, son...” He lifts his chin, and throws out his chest. “I have the full backing of the duly constituted government of the ESA, and if and when I send the call for backup, there will be a ruckus of the sort that will make you wish you’d never crossed paths with me. So why don’t you just walk back that nonsense about ‘my turf’, and maybe we can talk like civilized men?”
Elvis thinks about smiling in return, but really, what’s the point? “One warning only, Colonel Garnett. Turn yourself around. You got ’til sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the projection, effectively vanishing. The look on Garnett’s face is surprisingly gratifying.
#
“You’re back,” Marilyn says, and offers him a stemmed glass. Elvis takes it automatically, though it’s empty, just like hers. She’s wearing a little black number now, every inch the living vision that seduced a nation, and her smile is a thing exquisite.
“How’d you know?” he says.
She shrugs. “I always know.”
“The others don’t.” He gestures with his glass, taking in the whole crowd of them jittering and jiving as Glenn leads the band through Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand, all sweet-sharp brass and mellow clarinets. “You’re the only one.”
Marilyn touches his hand, just for an instant. They’re sitting in a quiet booth off to one side of the dance floor, out of the treacherous currents and swirling tides of the cocktail party. Nobody’s paying them any mind, and for just a moment, he lets his hand press hers in return.
She blushes, and looks away. “I don’t know how I know,” she says. “You’re still…you. But it’s like something is missing. I think sometimes, maybe—I think you have important things you have to do. Not this stuff.”
“This is important,” Elvis says. It’s more important than he can ever hope to explain.
“This?” She looks around the room. “It’s a party. Happens every night.”
“It’s an after-show party. It’s what we do.”
“Work hard, play hard.” She tips up her glass. “Chin-chin.”
He murmurs an apology and gets up to do the rounds. Press the flesh. His mind isn’t really on it, though. Big John Wayne is arm wrestling Lee Marvin at one of the tables, and Frank’s taking bets. There’s a small crowd around them cheering and catcalling, but Elvis is watching the faded, broken, night city outside through the nanolensed eyes of a drone-swarm. Short-lived, semi biological, they crawl and leap and fly amongst the blown sand, the wreckage and detritus, seeking out Garnett and his men.
He sets them to watch, marking certain action parameters, and lets them go. They’ll call if something important happens. Meanwhile, he has other duties.
Jimi and Janis, smashed as usual, howl their way through All Along the Watchtower to tumultuous applause. Bob watches from the sidelines, a rueful grin on his sharp face.
“Sure. I wrote it,” he tells Elvis, “but I never could make it sound like that.”
“It’s okay,” Elvis says, putting a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “It’s what they do. It’s why they’re here.”
“Yeah, man.” Bob can’t take his eyes off the performance as Jimi makes the old Fender do impossible things, wailing through oneiric octaves in an unknown key but it’s right, so right, and Janis stays right there with him, that diamond-gravel voice belting out the words like an anthem to a lost world. “Beautiful,” says Bob with a half-checked sob. “So fuckin’ beautiful.”
And the night rolls on. Fred and Ginger improvise a sparkling routine to something George bangs out on the Steinway grand, leaping and spinning across tabletops in perfect time until Gene steps up with a grin and a tap that sounds like a fusillade, his feet a blur. Ginger spins across to pair with him and they whirl like flames until Fred returns with a hatstand as his partner, mimicking every move Gene makes. On some invisible cue, like magic, Gene twirls Ginger away and Fred spins the hatstand across, and now it’s Gene and the hatstand chasing Fred—and Ginger, as always, making the boys look even better than they are, always in the exact right spot, dancing backwards in heels with a perfect smile and never a hair out of place.
Then it’s Ella and Billie in a searing slow duet while Satchmo leads the band and Miles counterpo
ints, cool, so very cool. Groucho follows with a routine that pillories Bogey who stands by, laughing helplessly while Harpo honks and mugs and steals his fedora.
Sooner—or maybe later, it’s hard to tell—John and Paul catch up with Elvis and push the big old Gibson flatback into his hands and things get quiet. The lights go down a little, and he catches Marilyn’s eye as he sings Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Love Me Tender, but just as he’s about to give them Heartbreak Hotel to finish for the night the drone swarm signals and he cuts away—
#
—through a security camera with limited night vision, he watches as Garnett sets up a piece of equipment in the middle of the dusty street corner parking lot where the men have made their camp. It’s nothing like the mismatched guns and worn-out camo, this thing. It’s modern, or maybe postmodern if you factor in the Breakdown and the general halt in research and production around the world.
Garnett unfolds it from a heavy, insulated box lined with dense foam that supports every piece of the construct for transport. It’s a spindly thing, but sturdy enough, rising about man height on a tripod that reflects in the spectrum for titanium, mostly. Lightweight, but rigid. Then the colonel mounts some kind of a black-box unit on top, orienting it with tremendous care.
Elvis runs the silhouette of the device past a range of databases, but nothing matches up precisely enough to make him happy. He moves the drone swarm subtly, getting as many angles as he can. He’ll collate the images and refine them, and share them next time Indira’s got a satellite overhead. Even if she doesn’t recognize it, Indira will want to know.
It’s not until Garnett fans out a tiny, delicate dish of spider-web thin wires that Elvis realizes what he’s looking at. It’s some kind of highly directional transmitter. He checks the satellite database, but no, there’s nothing significant overhead at the moment. A high-altitude drone, maybe? He reorients half a dozen peripheral cameras around the city, but there’s nothing.
He shifts the drone swarm again, measuring the parallax, establishing the angle on Garnett’s transmitter dish. It’s aimed northeast, about thirty-six degrees from horizontal. And there’s still nothing to be seen.
Enough.
As Garnett plugs a portable drive into the unit, Elvis powers up a flatscreen advertisement across the street. The old sound membranes are unreliable with all the dust and blown sand, but the OLED matrix is as bright and clear as ever. Elvis makes a throat-clearing noise, and Garnett looks up. His eyes pop, and he scrabbles for his sidearm, but Elvis shakes his head.
“Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good,” he says.
Slowly, Garnett straightens. “Good trick. You about scared me stupid.”
The straight line is irresistible. “Short trip, I reckon,” Elvis says, and twitches a wry smile onto his image.
Garnett grins. “You might think that. And I guess if I’m right, you might have cause.”
“Right about what?”
Garnett folds his arms across his broad chest and peers at the image, twice lifesize, on the wall across the street. “Could be an animated avatar,” he says. “Could be there’s a man behind, somewhere, using that old face. But I think you’re something more.”
“Do tell,” says Elvis, but he’s got a bad feeling he knows where this is going. The feeling gets stronger as he watches Garnett pull a silvery bag from a pocket and enshroud the transmitter with it. “Faraday cage. You must think me all kinds of sneaky.”
“I surely do,” says Garnett. “That’s why I’m using this here ultra tight-beam, frequency-agile comms unit to talk to a stealthed aerostat way back over yonder. Now, I guess you can figure out the direction. You can probably even guess the range pretty close, knowing what I’ve got for power and seeing the angle of the transmitter dish. But not even you can suborn my communications if you can’t nail the frequency and the signal strength and a few other things I’m not inclined to discuss. So unless you’ve got something interesting to tell me, you might as well sit back and watch me send off a report that says I’m closing in on you, right now.”
“You think that?” says Elvis. “Closing in? That’s amusing, sir. Very amusing.”
“I don’t see you laughing.” Garnett slips his hands under the silvery bag, fingers moving.
Elvis has no really useful assets on hand. The drone swarm is already dying. Another couple hours and they’ll be nothing but decaying components, near indistinguishable from ordinary dead bugs. His heavy units are fixed, providing security for the Hotel structure itself. Of course he’s long ago infiltrated and suborned other security fixtures around the remnants of the city, but by good luck or worse, good planning, Garnett has set himself up out of range of all of them. It’s going to take at least another minute before one of the armed drones makes the distance. Time to stall.
“Those losers you got with you,” he says, pushing the membranes to raise the volume even though it makes his voice come out weird, tinny, kind of robotic. “They won’t get you in. You ain’t got nearly what it takes.”
“That’s okay,” says Garnett, not looking up. “They don’t have to. We just have to find your place, that’s all. Then I call in the professionals and these fine young men collect their promised and well-earned rewards before going back home to a hero’s welcome.” Garnett’s raising his voice too, and Elvis can see several of his men following the conversation with interest.
Change of tactic. “What’d he promise you? Money? I got money. Real money. Old style USA money if you want it. Gold and silver too.” Elvis shifts his image to look at the men with Garnett, throwing in a few superfast subliminal images as well—naked women, gleaming sports cars, gold coins. It can’t hurt.
One of the men—a youngster with a spray of pimples under the desert sunburn—moves uneasily, but Garnett cuts in first. “Family,” he says. “Back east, where you can’t get at them. These gentlemen do their jobs, and not only do they get the promised reward, but certain things happen in favor of their families. Important things. Things they can’t get in any other way. There’s no raccoon up that tree for you.” He frowns, and glances across at Elvis’s image. “What’s that godawful racket you’re making, boy?”
The old membranes are growling and whining now, distorting Elvis’s voice. “Old installation,” he says. “The maintenance staff ain’t what they used to be, you know?” The fact that the noise itself conveniently conceals the whine of a drone engine is another matter.
Garnett chuckles. “You can say that again.” He turns his attention back to the transmitter unit just as the AP drone pops over the top of the 7-11 building on the corner and puts two heavy rubber rounds through the delicate transmitter aerial, blasting it into uselessness.
As the men scatter and dive for their weapons, Elvis puts two more rounds into the transmitter unit itself, then sprays the campsite, the bullets bouncing and whining and kicking up dust. The drone is empty in less than a second, and he dispatches it back to base before Garnett’s men can return fire.
The colonel hasn’t moved a muscle, still there with his hands tucked under the Faraday bag though the transmitter has been smashed. “Good shooting,” he says, finally. “Non-lethal rounds. That’s an old police drone you’re using?”
“I got others,” Elvis says. “Not all of ’em play nice. Why don’t y’all just turn y’selves around and get out before I have to be downright unpleasant?”
Garnett sets himself down on a folding stool. He rummages about in his jacket, comes up with a worn, silver Zippo and a thin black cigar that he clenches in his teeth. He puffs out a cloud of smoke. “We could do that,” he says. Then he gestures at the wreckage of the transmitter. “But I’ve got backup units too. Maybe we could try talking instead. You never know. Could be we can come to some kind mutually beneficial arrangement?”
“You’ll be ice fishing in Hell first,” says Elvis. “Sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the flatscreen.
#
The party winds down in the small hours. Sleep is
a thing, after all. Or they call it sleep, anyhow. It’s a period of inactivity in which their systems can repair and recharge. They may not be using beds, but what else could you call it?
Elvis doesn’t sleep quite the same as the others. In his own way, he’s more like the dolphins, which sleep half their brains at a time so as they don’t drown. He can shift his awareness around his matrix, letting some elements undertake rejuve cycles while others arise from dormancy to take the load. It’s a dangerous world. Somebody’s got to be awake, keeping an eye on things, but there are times he wishes he could just let go, surrender to the dark for a while, and return when things were on the up-and-up again, ready to go.
He checks on Marilyn, motionless in her niche. She’s been odd lately. The subminds that maintain Elvis while he’s elsewhere are—should be—perfect. She shouldn’t be able to tell when his primary mind is otherwise engaged. Is there some kind of bleed-over? Has she retained elements of the primary awareness after a period of asset-loading?
Or is it him?
He considers that possibility while he watches her. In her version of sleep, she’s cold and immobile. The stark glow of the LED readouts above her steals even the color from her skin, making it too perfect, too even. All the animation, all the joy, everything that makes her a person vanishes. Sleeping, she’s just hardware. Unliving.
Humans dream. Their bodies keep up the processes of being while their brains do strange, uncanny things. Marilyn doesn’t dream.
Or does she? Maybe the maintenance routines…they touch all of the sleepers, every night during the downphase. Could there be something shared? Something he doesn’t know about because of the different way he sleeps? Or is that simply wishful thinking? Perhaps this is what loneliness is.
What would it be like to have someone else like him in the Hotel?
#
Garnett is talking to a travel advertisement on the wall of the old US Postal Service offices on the Boulevard. He’s very serious about it, and it’s pretty damned funny. After a minute or so, Elvis decides to cut him and his men in on the joke. He lights up a nearby public information screen, and calls out.
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