Daniel slammed the car into DRIVE and turned back in the direction from which they’d come.
“That precinct’s the other way,” Bryce told him.
Daniel hooked onto Mass. Ave. and headed toward Washington Street and what was left of the old Combat Zone. “We’re going to make one more stop first.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The neon sign advertising Hot Karl’s Book and Video Depot glowed through the rain. The liquor store next door was open but didn’t appear to be doing much business at the moment. On the other side, an aging prostitute stood beneath an overhang in front of the abandoned and decaying building that had at one time been an adult club. Wet, shivering and chomping furiously on a wad of gum, she looked hopefully at Daniel’s car but didn’t approach it.
“Great neighborhood,” Bryce grumbled.
Daniel pulled to the curb and pointed at the narrow alley between Hot Karl’s and the dry cleaner. “Bedbug’s place is down there, second floor apartment above a stockroom.”
“Speaking of bugs, the hooker with no teeth’s a nice touch.”
Though Daniel found comfort in the fact that Bryce could still summon a humorous quip, rather than play along he opened his door and let in the night, the cold, the rain. “You coming or staying?”
They left the car, ignored the hooker, who tried to pitch them on a special two-for-one price she was offering, and slipped into the darkness of the alley between the buildings. The rain ran through gutters and splashed down into puddles, nearly flooding the alley floor in continual rushing streams, and but for faint light coming from the top of the stairs along the side of the building, there was no illumination whatsoever. Despite some basic disorientation, they climbed the open wooden stairs leading to the apartment on the second floor, Daniel in the lead and Bryce following close behind, glancing nervously behind them from time to time, one hand tucked into his coat.
Following the blue hue of occasional blinking lights leaking from the top of the stairs, which were reminiscent of those cast from a television onto the walls of an otherwise dark room, Daniel closed on the landing and realized the door to Bedbug’s apartment was ajar. He leaned closer but could not see into the apartment, so he knocked on the door, the slight force opening it a bit wider. After a moment he called out, identified himself and asked if anyone was inside.
When no answer came Bryce moved up alongside him, hand still beneath his coat and clutching the 9mm. “After the shit with Bartkowski,” he whispered, “how do we know Gorton isn’t in there?”
Daniel hadn’t thought of that, but knew it was a very real possibility. He nodded, slid to the side so Bryce would have as good a view as he had, then placed a hand flat against the door and slowly swung it open the rest of the way.
They stepped through together, into a short hallway. The walls were bare, the floors void of carpeting. A strange smell permeated the area, indicating the apartment hadn’t been aired out in quite a while. Beyond the short foyer was a large main room filled with various computers; the glow of numerous monitors providing the only light. Set up like a command center, the monitors formed a horseshoe design that went nearly to the ceiling around an old, worn desk, and various hard drives and other components were positioned about the room, some stacked on makeshift metal frame shelves, some on inexpensive tables and some even scattered on the floor. Everywhere one looked electronic equipment of one sort or another was found. Wires hung about the room, some collected into large, multi-colored harnesses, others single or double strands that snaked behind components or dangled between them, like the room’s skin had been cut open and peeled back to reveal a network of veins and devices still at work beneath. The two windows in the room were closed and hidden behind dark pull-shades, and while there appeared to be another room beyond this one, the darkness left the remainder of what constituted the apartment a mystery.
Bedbug sat in a rickety chair behind the main desk, eyes fixed on the sea of monitors before him. At first glance it looked as if he were part of this massive conglomeration, just another module in a massive single mechanism. “Took you long enough,” he said blandly.
“What the hell is all this?” Bryce looked around incredulously.
“This is Bryce Callahan, a friend of mine,” Daniel said, indicating him. “We need to talk to you.”
Bedbug glanced at them with disinterest. “Hey, Cochise, right on schedule just like I knew you’d be.”
A large duffel bag stuffed to capacity had been left on the floor between them. “Going somewhere?”
“Moving. I do that a lot, got to keep moving. I shut it all down, destroy it and leave the bones for the feds to pick through. Fucking freaks. Then I make camp someplace else and start over again. It’s the only way. Think I’ll blow Beantown all together.”
Daniel watched the monitors. Though some were off, the majority were on but not locked to a certain site or display. They seemed to be continually changing and shifting, and some showed only shapes or colors moving in odd patterns across the screens, while others had columns of numbers or letters running rapidly in vertical lines. “Something else has happened. A man tried to help me, a private detective named Wayne Bartkowski. He said he’d worked with you a few times in the past. He was killed just minutes ago in a fire.”
“The one over by Fenway, yeah?”
Daniel nodded even though Bedbug wasn’t looking at him. “Gorton did it. Gorton, the man I told you about. He’s here, in the city.”
Still dressed entirely in black and sporting another scarf around his head, Bedbug sighed as if bored, the reflections from the monitors flickering across his angular face. He sat back in the chair, his dangle earring catching the light. “The human beast,” he said pensively, “is one of the more physically vulnerable species in the animal kingdom, yeah? But we got this.” He pointed to his temple, the bracelets on his wrist clicking together. “And this makes us think we’re the meanest motor scooters on the block, dig? What’s worse, it makes us think we should be, like we need to be. We mistake these brains for something besides what they were intended to be—what we were intended to be—and we end up using them instead for the basest shit imaginable. We think we’re the only ones who got it, advanced brain capacity and all that. We think it gives us dominion over animals, over the planet, over lesser humans, weaker humans. Well shit-balls and little round blueberries to that, baby. Only God has dominion, and He’s not exactly the talkative type. No living thing has anything better than any other living thing in the universe. And only the human beast would be so arrogant as to think he does. Gives men the cue to, like, destroy and take advantage and to inflict suffering on those beneath them, yeah? To justify it under some cloak of fucking superiority, whether it’s moral, religious, intellectual, economic, makes no difference, man, makes no difference. The rest of nature just does its thing, does what’s necessary. But the human beast loves the fucking chaos. We’re the imperfect ones, and that’s why we’re here. We’re all equal, equally defective, man. Everything’s just got different versions of the same mind. Us, we got a human version. But a mind is a mind is a mind.” Bedbug reached into his shirt pocket, removed a joint and a Zippo. “When I was younger, I got in with some shady fucks, government types, yeah? Did the kinds of shit people think only happens in books and movies. Drug experimentation, mind control, sleep study tests, sensory deprivation tanks, and worse, a lot worse. You got no idea the things people are capable of under the right conditions, when you break them down, when you alter what they think and see and hear, when you change their reality. And it’s not instinct or reactionary shit. It’s strictly thought, man, decisive thought. It all starts here, ’cause if you can think it you can live it, yeah? But here’s the bad news, Peggy Sue, it changes you, makes you see the world in a whole different light. Shit, man, for all I know I could still be floating in one of those old deprivation tanks right now, and you, him—this whole scene—could be a big mind-fuck. Maybe I’m just a manifestation in your bad dream. Maybe you�
��re in that tank or on a table somewhere with something injected into your veins or dropped on your tongue, and all this is just you crossing from one bridge to another. Trust the Bug. You only think you know what’s real. It’s all a big fucking experiment. And we’re the rats, we’re the monkeys. Serves us right, way I see it, for thinking we had the right to fuck with those rats and monkeys in the first place. Karma, baby children, is a beautiful thing.”
Bryce looked at Daniel uncomfortably. “Are you kidding with this guy?”
“Problem is,” Bedbug said, slipping the joint between his lips, “reality goes a lot deeper than people know. And the normal folks just wandering around in the street trying to get by, going to work, taking care of their families, paying the bills, they’re too fucking tired trying to survive day-to-day to even notice what’s going on all around them and in their own heads, on the outskirts of their own minds. Then you got the so-called experts, yeah? Well the more those toads study the mind and how it all works, it just makes the water murkier. More questions than answers, yeah? Because really, what is consciousness? Autism…Down Syndrome—”
Dora Steiger’s face flashed in Daniel’s mind.
“—Manipulation and deprivation…dreams…hallucinations…Alzheimer’s—”
His mother’s terrified eyes.
“—what the hell are they? They’re different, alternate forms of consciousness, man, that’s what they are. Stay up four or five days without sleep and see what happens to you. You’re not crazy, you’re not sick. You’re just changed. You’re experiencing a different level of consciousness. Everything around you, everyone around you, is the same. Reality is the same. But your perception of it changes. Only the human species is lazy enough to confuse diversity with illness. So fucking typical, man, ain’t that a bitch? All consciousness has to be uniform or we label it sick or deformed. I’ve been to the institutions, OK? I’ve lived it. From me to you: It’s a good goddamn thing we got those places ’cause there’s some demented mo-fos in this world. But they’re not all crazy in there. Some just tell truths nobody in the sane world can handle. Now animals, on the other hand, being a different species, have the capability of seeing, knowing and experiencing things without the requisite ‘insanity’ that accompanies it in human beings. See how it works? A dude’s nuts, but a cat or a dog or a dolphin might be mystical and able to see something we can’t, dig? We think reality is little pieces, little personal individual pieces where we get to pick and choose and make those decisions, but it’s not like that. It’s a whole cloth, man, same as the universe, many realities all at play at once.”
“Look, I don’t have time for your drugged-out philosophy of life,” Daniel said squarely. “What did you find on those hard drives?”
Bedbug sparked the Zippo, drew on the joint then snapped the lighter shut. “Truth, you rude dick, that’s what I found.” Smoke curled through the air around him. “You think you’re the first or last one to come to me with your tail between your legs all weepy about freaky shit on your computer? You’re not, buddy boy.”
“This is ridiculous.” Daniel turned to leave.
“What do you know about the internet?” Bedbug inhaled again, held the smoke deep in his lungs a while then let it out in a slow stream. “You use it, right? But do you know what it is, how it works or why it works? Any clue, Nancy Drew? Like, if I was to ask you what a blender was and how it works, you could tell me, yeah? So explain the internet to me.”
Daniel and Bryce exchanged uneasy glances.
“You and the rest of the sheep just accept it. They put it in front of people and they’re so brainwashed with apathy they don’t question shit anymore. They just do what they’re told. Well I say fuck The Man. Know why? ‘Cause I’ve worked for The Man, and I’m here to tell you he’s an evil no good cow-fucker.” He took another hit. “Every now and then, in between the goofy shit I do for people to pay the bills, I run into a real job like this, one that counts and ties into what’s become my life’s work, and then it’s all worth it ’cause it brings me closer.”
“I’m glad the destruction of my life could be so useful.”
“It’s happening more and more,” Bedbug said glibly. “I think the walls are getting thinner.”
“The walls between what?”
“Us and them.”
Memories of Wesley Steiger swinging a baseball bat blinked past his mind’s eye.
“See, when something’s invented, all The Man wants to know is one thing: Does it or can it have military purpose? Meaning, can you kill people with it, can it help them kill people with it or can it help prevent the enemy—whoever the enemy may be that month—from killing them? Defensive or offensive, makes no difference. Internet started the same way. Rewind to the early 1960s, teenagers, it was originally an attempt to connect a Defense Department network with a bunch of radio and satellite networks. It grew and changed and evolved from a private forum into the free-for-all commercial party zone we all know and love and groove to today, and as some would argue, became the most important invention since the printing press. True, the potential’s there, but leave it to human beings to reduce something as amazing as the internet to a fucking sex toy, a high resolution porn whack-off machine. That and blogs. Yeah, thank God for those. Couldn’t live without knowing what Dudley-fucking-ass-cheese did at work today, what sort of mood he’s in and what CD he’s listening to. God damn it, dig the technology, motherfuckers! Who in the hell told any of these coma-inducing trolls out there anybody gives a shit?” He chuckled. “What most of you cats don’t understand, while you’re running around doing your thing online, is that internet interaction—shit, computer interaction alone—leaves behind a kind of…residue, let’s call it, a psychological but energy-based residue. A byproduct kind of like the way toxic waste’s a byproduct, you with me? We’re just starting to understand it now, just scratching the surface. People are playing with literal fire. We’re all fucking around with a technology nobody knows that much about. All one big experiment. The Man’s just standing by taking notes and waiting to see what happens.” Bedbug tilted back in his chair and waved his arms about as if signaling incoming aircraft. “Conspiracy, right? It’s a bad word, it’s a crazy word, but it’s a true word, it’s a real word. Look at Julius Caesar, biggest conspiracy of all time. It’s not so much how they did the Julie-man, or that they did do him, but that they went forward without what was probably a smarter plan on the other side. In other words they were rolling the dice by doing what they did because they didn’t really know what the eventual end result would be, yeah? Today’s conspiracies don’t have to kill anybody. They just get people to kill themselves and each other. Look at the drug companies. Here, take this pill, it’ll help you. What? Oh, we got no idea what it might do to you taken long term, the pill hasn’t been around long enough for that, kids. You could end up with a big ol’ floppy Johnson growing out your forehead but take it anyway, baby, it’s far out, trust me, I got a white coat on and went to school until I was almost thirty. Guess we’ll find out later if it was a good idea or not. All one big experiment on expendables, and the internet and the technology behind it’s no different. Bunch of cavemen fucking around with nuclear weapons.”
“Yeah,” Bryce said, “and when the radio was invented there were people who thought it was the Devil talking to them.”
Bedbug took another toke, exhaled then gave an evil grin through the thick smoke. “How do you know it wasn’t?”
Bryce turned to Daniel. “What exactly are we doing here again?”
“A man was killed tonight,” Daniel said. “I’m done playing games.”
“Is that what you think we’re doing?”
“You either have information that can help me or you don’t.” Daniel moved closer to the console. “Which is it?”
“Hey, remember what Fonzie said: School is cool.” Bedbug stabbed the joint between his lips and left it there. “Class is in session, kiddies. Listen and learn.” He righted his chair, tapped at
one of the keyboards before him and suddenly the monitors all changed to a single image: a photograph of a large skull that at first glance appeared to be made of glass. “Anybody know what that is?”
Struggling to maintain some semblance of patience, Daniel bit his lip and answered, “A skull.”
“Yahtzee!” Bedbug pointed at him. “But not just any skull, butt-plug. This skull was discovered in 1927 in the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Lubaantum in what was then Honduras and is now Belize. Say it with me now: Lumbaantum. Just one of those fun things to say, no? Kind of like Lolita Davidovitch. Lo-lee-tah-Dav-id-o-vitch. I could say that shit all day long. Anyhoo, the thing is, the way this skull was constructed is what still baffles experts today, because even with modern tools and technology this skull can’t be duplicated as perfectly as the Mayans apparently made it all those years ago with their so-called primitive tools, yeah? And guess what? There have been others found in other parts of the world too. But here’s the real kick in the nut-bag, rock stars. The skull is made of quartz crystal. Now that may mean nothing to you, but quartz crystals are and have been used in shamanism, witchcraft, Old World alchemy and magic ceremonies by numerous cultures all over the globe for centuries. They’ve been used to cure and heal and even to see the future. All the New Age dorks are always running around with crystals too, talking about how fucking trippy they are, yeah? Truth is quartz really does have some fascinating abilities. For one, it’s capable of storing information electronically. And two—oh yeah, that’s right—it’s pretty much responsible for the technological revolution. Ever heard of a little something called the silicon chip? It made things like cell phones and computers—even the internet—possible, because it allowed for the massive storage of information, and for that information to be controlled and condensed in an accurately organized way, dig? And guess where silicon chips come from? Survey says!” He sucked on the joint a moment. “Yup, quartz crystal. Now, get out your pads and pens, Wally and Beav, there’ll be a quiz later. When a small crystal of quartz is cut along particular lines, it can be vibrated at a certain frequency and that produces an electric signal. It has a kick-ass arrangement of atoms that vibrate at very stable frequencies, OK? And that’s what makes it a great receptor and emitter of electromagnetic waves. That’s why quartz is used in shit like radios, watches and pretty much every other piece of modern electronic equipment. But it gets better. This Nobel prize-winning scientist doing research for IBM made a discovery that changed history. He figured out that besides converting crystals to programmable silicon chips in a computer, they could also be programmed with thought. OK, check this. A person sitting at a computer, typing their thoughts through a keyboard is actually transferring those thoughts into the silicon chips in the computer, where they’re stored through the use of electricity, yeah? It’s an interaction of intelligence and memory, of thought, one human, one artificial. But what no one knew is that maybe you didn’t need that specific electricity. Maybe there’s something in those crystals and contained within the electricity in our own bodies beyond anything we can comprehend that allows for a bridge between it and us. Information, fed into a computer, a thinking intelligent thing—which is what a computer is—opens doors no one knew about or could even imagine. The computer and its silicon chips are just the vehicle. A bridging of realities, that’s what it is, because when you deal with a computer it’s not like a typewriter, a lifeless machine. Computers are alive in a way, and they’re using a technology we call modern but that’s really the same shit those ancient Mayans were fucking around with thousands of years ago. The Mayans believed quartz crystal not only stored information, but provided a window into the future, the past and even parallel presents. Well, come to find out they were right about the first part so why not the second? Crazy, superstitious, primitive motherfuckers, right? Wrong. They knew shit then we’re still trying to figure out, shit that got me a private suite in the madhouse for a while.”
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