The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

  “Okay, Charlie,” she’d said, “that’s enough theory. The point is just to let you know we’re in VR but there’s no way you can be sure of that unless something impossible happens.”

  “If you shot me with a VR bullet, would I die?”

  “I could make you think you had.”

  He remembered when he thought he’d been going to drown, and believed her.

  “The way you’re going to escape from captivity, Charlie,” she continued, “isn’t through me slipping a mickey into the guards’ coffee. For one thing, that would prove that you and I were working together, which isn’t what I want them to think—at least not so quickly. So what I’Ve done is knock out the receiver in your chest. I’ve been trying for a while, using that big scanner, but only managed it yesterday. That means you can’t be zapped anymore. I’ve zapped you several times in the last twenty-four hours, and you haven’t even noticed.”

  Charlie felt his heart beat faster. That, he knew, was no virtual reaction; that was for real, and forget all the fancy definitions of “real” she’d been giving him.

  “Easy,” she said, “don’t get excited. I’m reading your responses and they’re going off the graph. Everything I say to you now is on the assumption that you’re going to keep your promise to help me if I get you out of here. One thing I still can’t do, Charlie, despite all this technology, is read your mind. My only knowledge of what you think comes from what you choose to tell me. Whether I hear it from your lips or read it from your brain activity makes no difference. Maybe we’ll get beyond that soon, but so far we haven’t.”

  “Trust me.”

  “I do, Charlie. Hadn’t you noticed?“

  He looked at her, standing just a few feet from him in that wholly convincing and yet unreal lunar landscape, and wondered whether the pensive smile he saw on her face meant anything. Was it just a computer-generated appropriate response? Or was it in some way wired into her real feelings? Was anything real going on between the two of them, or were they just lobbing words at each other from behind their electronic masks? And anyway, what was the difference between an electronic-mask and one made of flesh and bone?

  “Now,” she said, suddenly businesslike, “let’s get down to details….”

  The transition was seamless, but still took his breath away. From standing on the Moon with a distant and spectacular view of planet Earth, he found himself on a rocky hillside beneath a blue-and-white sky, overlooking a forest of aspen and pine trees and a lake.

  “This is a simulation from memory and guesswork. I don’t have access to maps or photography, so this is computer-enhanced recall. It looks real, but it’s not a hundred percent accurate. However, it’ll give you all the key reference points to look out for.”

  They began walking downhill, Susan pointing out various landmarks to help him get his bearings. “I’ve only seen all this from the air when I’ve flown in,” she said, “but there’s a highway down there to the south—let’s take a look.”

  The world around them dissolved and re-formed into a six-lane highway. They were standing on the central divide with vehicles moving past them in both directions. Charlie reacted instinctively, grabbing her in preparation for a leap to safety. “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said, “we’re not here to play with the traffic. This is what we’re here for. Hold on to your stomach.”

  He couldn’t be sure whether the ground was lowered or they were lifted. All he knew was that his perspective changed with startling speed to a dizzying bird’s-eye view of the highway and its surrounding tree-covered, mountainous terrain. He gulped, and even though he knew that in reality he hadn’t moved, he felt his stomach turn.

  “Sorry if that was a little fast,” Susan said as she floated beside him in the air, “but you need to get the layout of the place. This is how I see it when I fly in.”

  They began traveling at the speed of an aircraft preparing to land, except there was no aircraft, no window to peer out of, just empty space beneath them as they flew like Peter Pan and Wendy suspended from invisible wires.

  “There’s the ranch,” she said, pointing ahead to a sprawl of buildings. “We’ll stop a moment for you to get your bearings.”

  They froze in midair, then revolved slowly, Susan pointing out the things he needed to be aware of. There was an exit ramp from the highway that wound up through the trees, emerging not far from one part of the ranch’s boundary fence.

  “As far as I know,” she said, “that’s the only paved road that goes up there. But there are a couple of tracks I’ve spotted from the air.”

  They moved around—or, rather, the world beneath them shifted. There was only one track that looked as though it could take a vehicle. It emerged from a thick cluster of trees along another side of the boundary fence, then descended sharply until it reached a minor road that eventually joined the main highway.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing in another direction, “you can see the landing strip.”

  He looked. At one end of it an executive jet was parked like a toy plane. Not far from it was an equally toylike helicopter. After that they drifted to a point right above the main buildings, with the pool, the tennis court, the barns, and stables off to one side.

  “Okay,” she said when he’d absorbed everything he could from that angle, “now let’s go down and take a walk around.”

  Once again the world around them dissolved and re-formed into a new perspective. Charlie was getting used to these strange jump cuts through time and space: It was like being inside a film instead of simply watching one. They found themselves outside a long two-story building with a verandah running around two sides. “These are the main living quarters,” Susan told him. “We’ll make it a quick tour, because you probably won’t need to know too much of this.”

  They moved through the rooms not at walking pace but like a video on medium fast-forward. At these speeds Charlie had no sense of being there; he was a disembodied observer passing through. But on the two or three occasions when they stopped to check some detail, things returned to normal.

  Normal. He laughed inwardly when he thought about the word. Then he laughed again when he wondered what he meant by inwardly. Where exactly was that? Could you travel in- wardly forever? Could you implode? Were we black holes, was that it? Or was he the only one who felt like that—the mutant?

  His thoughts were interrupted by her voice—or, he corrected himself, the thought of her voice. “I want to show you Christopher,” she said, “so you’ll know what he looks like.”

  They whizzed forward a few yards and came to a stop on the porch of the main building, looking out over an empty patch of ground. Suddenly a child riding a horse materialized out of nowhere about fifty yards away. A young man seemed to be giving him instruction, then helped him down as though the lesson was over. The child started running toward them, arms outstretched, excited to see them. It was a strange feeling for Charlie to have this unknown child running toward him, as though he, Charlie, were a parent or beloved friend. He felt a surge of unease, wondering how to react if the child leaped into his arms as he seemed about to do; but at the last second the image froze.

  “It’s not a perfect likeness,” Susan said. “I had to morph him from a photograph. But that’s Christopher.”

  Charlie gazed at him a moment, fixing the delicate small features in his memory.

  “And then of course there’s my father,” she said. “You’ll need to know what he looks like, too.”

  There was the sound of a door opening behind him. Charlie turned, and felt as though the breath had been kicked out of him. The tall silver-haired man who stood framed against a dark interior, a faint smile on his lips and his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Charlie’s, was Control.

  “This is my father. His name’s Amery Hyde,” Susan was saying. “I’ve morphed him from an old picture I had in my purse. That’s why he looks a little like a waxwork. But at least you’ll know him when you see him again—okay, Charlie?”

/>   She looked at him, waiting for some response. But Charlie felt paralyzed, barely able to breathe. For an insane moment he thought he was going to pass out, or even die right there, expire within this electronic universe and become vaporized into some abstract host of random impulses.

  “Charlie?” he heard Susan say. There seemed to be an edge of concern in her voice, though whether this was real or just some other part of the simulated universe that he was in, or even just the product of his own imagination, he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say anything at the moment. He wasn’t even sure that he could think. Not only words failed him but thoughts, too.

  “Charlie, are you all right? I’m registering a very odd response in you.”

  With an effort he tore his gaze from the frozen image of Control and focused on the animated one of Susan.

  “What is it, Charlie? What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” he repeated incredulously. His voice seemed to undulate through different levels, as though his head had become an echo chamber. “Don’t you know who this is?”

  “I told you—he’s my father.”

  Charlie looked again at the tall patrician figure in the doorway. “Is this some kind of test?” he asked.

  “It’s no test. Why?”

  He didn’t answer. Without looking at her he could feel the intensity of her scrutiny.

  “Charlie?”

  Still he didn’t respond. His mind was racing.

  “Charlie,” she repeated, more insistently, “tell me what’s going on in your head. I need to know what this is about.”

  “This is the man I call Control,” he said.

  It was she who fell silent now. He turned to regard the image next to him. She was motionless, her face without expression. Yet there was something stricken in her stillness. Either that or he was reading the emotion directly from her brain through their link-up in the lab.

  “You’re mistaken,” she said eventually, and there was a strange tone to her voice, her electronic, artificial voice, that he hadn’t heard before and was unsure how to interpret. “You must be mistaken.”

  “I don’t believe I am.”

  Chapter 48

  THEY WERE BACK in the lab almost at once. Their time was up, the program at its end. The guards were in their usual corner and Susan was removing Charlie’s headset, which she put down alongside the one she had just taken off herself. She was tense. He could see it in her face and feel it between them.

  “All right, Charlie,” she said, “how much of what just happened do you remember?”

  He remembered everything, of course, as she well knew. This question, and the answer they’d rehearsed, was for the benefit of the recording devices around them. She wanted everyone to think that the experiments she was performing on him were beginning to work. She had told them she was perfecting a method of planting and deleting memories at will; ultimately, she said, she was going to be able to program his brain as easily as a computer.

  Charlie frowned, sticking to the scenario they’d agreed on. “Not much,” he said. “In fact, now that you ask, I don’t remember anything. Have I been asleep?”

  She didn’t reply directly, just as she’d told him she wouldn’t.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked. “Do you remember who I am?”

  He pretended to study her face, as though surprised by the question. “No,” he said. “Am I supposed to? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

  She nodded briefly as though it was the answer she wanted. “You can take him back now,” she said, and the guards got to their feet and motioned Charlie to do the same.

  His eyes held hers for a moment longer, and each knew what the other was thinking. Was he lying, or just plain wrong? Or was she genuinely unaware of who this man she called her father really was?

  The senior of the two guards ordered Charlie to get moving. On the walk back to his cell he was sorely tempted to test her claim that she’d neutralized that implant in his chest. The urge to give these two goons the surprise of their lives was almost overwhelming. He could have busted out of the place right there and then—if what she’d told him was the truth. Either way, there was little to lose and everything to gain. If she’d lied and the implant wasn’t neutralized, the worst that could happen was he’d be unconscious for a while; if she’d told the truth, he’d be free.

  All the same, he decided to play a long game, longer at any rate than taking those two guys apart for the fun of it. He remembered how Susan had warned him against violence, and she was right. When all this was over, he wanted people to regard him as more than just a mindless killing machine. He had killed—often—but it had never afforded him any special satisfaction. It was just what he had been trained for. What he had been created for.

  It was strange to think that all those powerful forces that had made him what he was—the painful childhood, the beatings, and the anger—had turned out to be mere illusions. But why did he say “mere”? That was something else Susan had said: In the end you have to drop the virtual off reality, because it doesn’t make any difference.

  Knowing he was a mutant, though—neither wholly chimpanzee nor wholly man—that made a difference. Strangely enough, he felt if anything less alienated from humanity than before. Now he knew that the world he lived in was his alone; it could not be shared with others of his kind because there were none. Realizing this had changed the way he felt about humanity. He felt less superior now, less special. Just different.

  Where, he wondered, would that lead him?

  Susan slept little that night. She needed desperately to get up and pace, pour a drink, take up smoking—anything to soothe the din of doubt and questions in her mind. But she was afraid of the invisible cameras and listening devices that she felt sure were planted everywhere. She couldn’t afford to give away her anxiety so obviously.

  Was Charlie playing mind games with her? Was it some kind of revenge? That was at least as likely as the idea that her father was who Charlie claimed he was. That, surely, was the only impossibility.

  Wasn’t it?

  Lying in the dark, she thought back over her life and her father’s role in it. He had been a dominant influence, although sometimes a distant one. His needs had always taken precedence in their family, and the direction their lives had gone in had always been, if not dictated, at least decided by him. But they had been a happy family. Her early memories of him were vague compared with those of her mother. She later understood that he had been working very hard in those days, building a career that had risen fast through the State Department, then on to a string of government appointments, consultancies, and visiting professorships. But he had always had time for her when she needed him, and had encouraged her from childhood to ask questions and think for herself. When she’d begun to show intellectual promise and talked about becoming a doctor, he had again encouraged her. She hadn’t needed his help to get into the best schools; her own abilities had been enough. But when it came to getting grants and making contacts, it hadn’t hurt to have a father so influentially placed as Amery Hyde. Her father, it had always struck her, seemed not so much to know everybody as to know someone who knew them.

  She remembered with a brief moment of discomfort that he’d checked out the people behind the Pilgrim Foundation for her—and pronounced them decent philanthropic individuals in whom she could safely place her trust. It would have been easy for him to lie to her, knowing that she would accept whatever he said. Just as quickly she reproached herself for the unworthiness of such a thought and the suspicion it conceded. Some part of her was judging her father guilty before she’d even heard the evidence. What was wrong with her?

  It was true that there had always been a sense of distance about him; he was an intensely private man. But his opinions, when he’d voiced them, had been sensible and moderate. He was no extremist. She had always understood there were things he could not talk about, secrets he had to keep; she had taken that for granted. But could these secrets
have been of the kind implied by Charlie’s claim? Could her father be capable of that kind of deception, let alone the ruthlessness that made it necessary?

  Her mind lurched away, like a force repelled by its opposite, from the contemplation of such thoughts. But they wouldn’t go away.

  She thought back on how, after Charlie’s claim that her father was Control, her first instinct had been to call off the whole escape plan. The idea had thrown a wrench in the works, and she didn’t know how to deal with it. She felt off balance, her resolution fatally undermined.

  It was Charlie who’d said no, this was his decision now. It was Charlie who wanted answers.

  She could stop him, of course; but she could do it only by making a confession to West of what she’d been planning. As Charlie had told her, he didn’t think she would do that.

  He was right, of course.

  Chapter 49

  THE WEEKEND began for Susan on the following afternoon, which was Friday. She was flown up to the ranch in the executive jet, arriving in time for supper with Christopher, after which they played a few games and then watched television.

  Her father was due to arrive in the morning, taking a scheduled flight from Washington, where he’d been on business for the last few days. The increasing ease with which he seemed to have returned to normal life was just another factor in the gnawing and terrible suspicion she found herself harboring about him. To get away from it she forced her mind to other things, especially the plan on which she and Charlie had agreed, and which now more than ever she could not afford to give any hint of to her father.

  On Saturday she rose early after a second sleepless night. She looked out her window onto a crisp fall morning. It struck her that the main difference between the simulation she’d run for Charlie and the real thing was the color of the leaves; she’d forgotten how fast the seasons turned. But that, she told herself, wouldn’t cause him any problems—always supposing he got this far. Of course, it was still possible that he would reconsider his position and just walk away. If that happened, she might never know the truth about her father, and maybe that would be a blessing.