The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  **Kindle edition**

  The Pedestal

  Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Wimberley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Design Vault, LLC

  www.designvault.net

  First Edition: February 2014

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wimberley, Daniel.

  The Pedestal / by Daniel Wimberley. – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Life on other planets – Fiction. 2. Bioengineering – Fiction.

  3. Apocalyptic fantasies – Fiction.

  Book design by Giovanni Auriemma.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For my son, Luke.

  It starts with an upset stomach. Bearable at first, soon uncomfortable enough to send the man dashing home from a poker game on a perfectly gorgeous Friday night, forfeiting twenty credits to a twitchy, red-eyed apothecarist along the way. Shuffling through his front door, the man chews a fat antacid tablet, bemoaning the unconscionable price of such bitter, antiquated medicine to his empty condominium. Later, still suffering, he downs two more to no avail. The discomfort worsens with each passing minute until it can no longer be written off as just another of middle-age’s petty tolls.

  Something is undeniably wrong.

  A man of proud stock, he’s powerfully resentful of his implant—technology better suited for the hopeless youth, in his opinion, who brandish their lazy constitutions like the engorged bellies of ticks—but when the heat in his gut becomes unbearable, his lifelong posturing over such things loses focus; he calls upon his NanoPrint like a prodigal son, and he’s far too despondent to feel any shame.

  The implant tingles in a short burst, flooding him with merciful relief in milliseconds and drawing from him a scoff of grudging amazement. He’ll wrestle with guilt in the morning, no doubt, but for now he feels like a new man.

  Minutes later, sitting in his favorite chair, he draws a glass of chilled Chablis to his lips, smiling even as he drinks. Maybe he’s misjudged the value of his implant after all.

  Beneath the skin of his wrist, the tiny body of his implant begins to oscillate in steady spurts. At once, the burn of reflux resumes, this time with maddening intensity. The Chablis smolders like hot coals in his stomach. Simultaneously, the room seems to yaw, spinning around him like a broken carnival ride; he worries that he should sit down before he falls, but—of course—he’s already sitting. Sweat seeps from his pores, yet his body shivers.

  What’s happening to me?

  In answer, the contents of his stomach spew from his mouth like rodents fleeing a flooding burrow, toppling him off his chair and sending his drink sailing. Prostrate on the floor now, the man groans. The floor tilts in and out of kilter, gathering speed. His chest seems to compress as if a fat man is climbing aboard. It’s becoming maddeningly difficult to breathe with his lungs heaving in sporadic gulps—and for a few terrifying seconds at a time, not at all. His NanoPrint is still now, but he suspects the damage is done.

  I’m dying.

  There’s no one to help, no friendly neighbor to run to his aid, no automaid resting on its charger, waiting patiently for a command. Hardly the time to entertain loneliness, yet it creeps in nevertheless. For many years, he’s lived in the shadow of death—alone, separated from the woman he loves; now, as the end is upon him, the wastefulness of fear is made plain. He wants to cry out, to scream for justice, if not for help. Even if he could summon the energy to bother, his voice would scarcely penetrate the soundproofed walls of his condo.

  In desperation, he submits an emergency ticket on his NanoPrint. But he’s a pragmatic man; help will arrive too late, and he knows it.

  As if to vindicate this bit of black cynicism, the emergency submission hiccups and then fails; it slips quietly into a background queue where he hopes it will idle only briefly before reprocessing. Gliding across his retinas, though, a connection error dispels even that feeble hope.

  ...Fatal error encountered.

  ...Connection failed.

  ...The nexus is not accessible with your current NanoPrint configuration. Please seek the immediate assistance of a nexus administrator.

  Tears cloud his vision. He’s been cut off from the nexus, and thereby from everything on the planet, living or otherwise; however lonely he felt only a moment ago, he’s truly never been as alone as he is now. And still, the room spins and spins.

  Oh God, why won’t it stop?

  In a last-ditch effort, the man attempts to launch his MentalNotes—to document these final seconds, for whatever they’re worth—but nothing happens. A sob forms in his throat, yet he can’t catch a decent breath to send it on its way. His implant whirs to life again, and for a scant millisecond his hopes rise.

  Perhaps there’s still a cha—

  Crawling to his knees, the man suddenly buckles as an immense pain seizes him, goring through his chest like a giant, dull knife. Beneath the chaos, despite the pain, his thoughts race with detached clarity. His NanoPrint isn’t arbitrarily failing him, he realizes—it’s attacking him. The unthinkable—the stuff of conspiracy tales—has come to pass. He’s known for some time that his end is near; he’s spent many sleepless nights worrying over the how and when, but he never imagined that his own NanoPrint would be weaponized against him. He’s terribly afraid now. Of dying, naturally, but equally for those he’s leaving behind, the few who have made life worth living.

  It’s now or never, he realizes. Everything he’s worked for—all that he’s endured to protect his loved ones—it all boils down to this moment. The realization gives him an ounce of bitter courage, and he digs into his NanoPrint process queue. Sequences cycle there at dizzying
speeds, resolving too quickly to interpret in the best of circumstances, but that doesn’t matter. As the dying man issues his final command, a victorious smile rises above the agony of death.

  _execute file pedestal.exe;

  His implant responds instantly.

  ... Fatal error encountered.

  ... Connection failed.

  The smile flickers off like a popped filament. Just like that, it’s over. He has failed. Nothing remains but to die.

  Abruptly, as if cast away by a great wind, the bondage of his implant leaves him; the persistent signage, the gentle chemical prompts he’s endured every moment of his life—they’re quiet for the first time, and in their absence, the silence is sweet bliss.

  Blackness engulfs him, and though he longs for the plush nothingness of that soft abyss, a lone thought gives him pause on the very precipice of death.

  There’s only one hope now—but who will protect the boy?

  August 21, 2105

  There’s an expression: once you’ve bedded down with death, she’ll never leave your side. Some guy said that over a hundred years ago. It must be very profound, because people continue to parrot this bit of nonsense as if it truly explains everything. I don’t really get it—the image that comes to my mind is a pretty morbid one. I’m hardly an intellectual, though—a little on the lowQ side, in fact, if my genomap is to be believed—so what do I know?

  Not much, as you will undoubtedly come to understand.

  Until early this morning—so early, in fact, that it still felt like yesterday—I really thought I was at peace with my mortality; death and I had an understanding, you see—and no bedding down was required.

  She doesn’t come looking for me; I don’t tempt her by wandering into oncoming traffic.

  It’s frightening how quickly things can change—like a worn-out toggle switch, completing a circuit at the slightest touch when one would rather wade through transition gradually, as if into cold water.

  Just like that, death has plumed around me like a thick, clinging mist; I feel it condense on me like morning dew, and I wonder if I’ll ever be clean of it again. Certainly, I’ll never take death slightly again.

  >>Silly, Wilson ... you’re awfully sexy, but did you mean to say ‘never take death lightly’?

  Oh, uh, please excuse my nexus interface—Marilyn has a tendency to interrupt. To her credit, she’s considerably more pleasant than the other available interfaces. And I don’t suppose it hurts that she’s modeled after a wonderfully voluptuous pin-up model. Actually, I sometimes look forward to Marilyn’s corrections. Who am I kidding? I goad them when I get a little bored.

  It should come as no shock to you that I am single.

  Anyway, I stand corrected: take death lightly. The point is, I should’ve slept right through the waking hours. If I’d been granted even a tiny inkling of what was to come, surely I’d have covered my head with a pillow and smothered today from my future.

  Speaking of sleep: though I crave it deep in my bones, rest is completely out of the question. I stayed up much later than was responsible last night, playing the odds that I’d manage to squeeze in a little break-room catnap during lunch today—it seemed like a good bet last night when I was riding an unnaturally hot streak at the poker table. A hectic morning at the ER wasn’t even on my radar.

  And so here I am, headed to my office aboard a crowded tram with scarcely a few grudging ounces of gray matter left awake to man the helm. I know it’s hardly the appropriate time to notice, but the sun is kissing the clouds through the window in stunning pastels, and the air is crisp with autumn beginnings. Everything’s so beautiful, so disproportionately alive. It’s a slap in the face to cliché, whose script calls for a Gaussian haze of cold drizzle. Still, it’s an exceptional morning; I wish I could pause it in midstride to revive it on a day when I’m in better form to appreciate it.

  What can you do?

  I smile mechanically at a lady seated opposite me on the tram—not because I hope to engage her in conversation, but because she’s pretty, and society deems this worthy of a respectful, if not admiring, smile. She nods politely—not because I’m reciprocally handsome, but because it’s considered socially responsible to humor the plain among us—and looks promptly away with a subtle cringe. She doesn’t dare look again. The man next to me sniggers under his breath.

  Yup, that’s me: chick magnet.

  It’s okay, I’m used to it. Actually, while it often depresses me, I’m completely unfazed this morning. I’m far more dismayed—and likewise distracted—by the incessant nagging in my stomach. It isn’t some trivial, back-of-my-mind did I leave the milk out again? sort of nagging, either. You can ignore those, with enough practice—trust me on that; I’m an expert in the art. This one lingers at the forefront of my awareness, casting my thoughts in balmy shadow.

  I’ve been hanging on a single strand of hope, and it can only stretch so far. As much as I long for some invisible force to save the day, I know logic doesn’t mesh with such mysticism—and disregarding logic certainly won’t do me any good.

  I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and I’m in dire need of sleep or caffeine—or both. Since leaving the hospital this morning, my thoughts have continually returned to just how surreal the world has become; I feel strangely betrayed that life and commerce continue to bustle with such energy, irrespective of my plight. It makes me want to make others as miserable as me.

  I didn’t see any of this coming. If there were signs along the way, I somehow missed them. Yesterday, Arthur—my longtime friend and mentor—treated me to Gizi’s Trattoria for my thirtieth birthday. Today, he’s in a hospital bed with a heart that’s only twitching at all by the magic of some determined machine. I can’t fight off the primal need to scramble, to generate some kind of last-minute salvation by the sheer tenacity of my willingness to try.

  But what can anyone really do for anyone when his number’s up?

  If you knew Arthur at all, you’d assume someone of his intellectual means—a man knee-deep in the tides of progress, nose buried deeper in the nexus than just about anyone—was surely first in line to opt in for medical monitoring on his NanoPrint. And you’d be wrong. Mrs. Grace, my elderly next-door neighbor, is convinced her implant will catch fire and cook her from the inside—like that’s happened at all in the last fifteen years—yet even she had the common sense to opt in; there’s just no downside.

  But not old Art.

  He’s a paradox: he spends his days developing technology that few among us can fathom, and he’s almost vehemently opposed to enjoying it. To be fair, it isn’t the technology itself he takes issue with; it’s our eager, worldwide reliance on it—the nexus, specifically. It’s our global crutch. “One day,” he’s fond of ranting, usually over—or perhaps under the influence of—a tall glass of Cabernet, “the pedestal of this arrogant civilization is going to collapse. It’s a historical inevitability. We’ve lost our animal instinct.”

  He’s a good friend—the best, actually—but at the moment, I want to give him a good kick in the nay-saying rear. If his aversion to all things normal wasn’t so freaking acute, his health problems would’ve been detected long before they could fester.

  But then, I guess he wouldn’t be Arthur.

  Passing swiftly into the lobby of my office building, I grab my usual extra-large coffee from an automated kiosk. Please don’t judge me for my addiction to manual caffeine infusion—there are far worse things to be addicted to, after all. I make a careful run to the elevator, where Keith Billings, my recently transgendered boss, is already onboard. We slingshot to the seventh floor. I expect her—er, him—to offer some tacky, preemptive condolence as if Arthur has already passed—because Keith’s just the sort of socially retarded person who would do something like that—but he doesn’t say a word.

  At least, not right away.

  He waits until we’ve already walked into the office to open his mouth, and when he does, his androgynous voice pitches
to a level of condescension one might normally reserve for a six-year-old—I mean, if there’s a mother out there with so little regard for her maternal responsibilities that she’d even allow a weirdo like Keith near her kid.

  “Hey, Wilson. Didn’t see you there,” he says. “How’s it going?” Sheesh, he might as well drop to one knee and put a hand on my shoulder—What do you wanna be when you grow up, little guy?

  For a split second, I imagine my coffee soaking his face, washing away that stupid smile and a pound of blush.

  Seriously? Like we didn’t just ride the elevator up here together?

  Like I didn’t just hold the door for you two seconds ago?

  Like you don’t already know that I’ve been sitting in a hospital room for the last four hours?

  This is exactly the sort of thing that drives me crazy about Keith. I used to be more tolerant of his disregard for social mores, perhaps because I thought I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately for us all, his little, uh—procedure didn’t resolve his extreme eccentricities. Worse than ever, his weirdness routinely breaks free from the good old parentheses of gender confusion and bleeds into everyday interaction, where it manages to make even the most innocuous of social situations utterly unbearable. So pardon me if I’m a little intolerant. I think I’ve earned it. This particular incident is pretty mild, I suppose, but recognizing that doesn’t make me want to backhand him upside his fat head any less. So I dig deep, clench my fists and—

  A wave of chemical calm ebbs through me, and for a split second, I nearly forget why I’m upset at all.

  “Doing fine, Keith,” I say in a voice that seems far away.

  That’ll show him. Okay, weirdness aside, he’s still my boss.

  “Too bad about Arthur, huh?” he says. With my irritation re-enflaming, I don’t respond in word; rather, I look at him like he’s a crank wearing mascara because—well, in part because he actually is, but moreso because he doesn’t get to chum up with me by the watercooler of my dying best friend—and frankly, I can get away with a nasty look when nasty words might just get me the boot.