Cronix

by James Hider

  "Umm ... I dunno, I guess, about, what ... four thousand years ago?"

  "Not bad. Almost three thousand years ago."

  Glenn nodded.

  "You know how many generations between us and him?"

  He shook his head.

  "Hundred and twenty. One hundred and twenty people between us and him. That's all. Yet almost everything that's happened in human history stands between us and him. The Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, the conquest of America, Newton, Voltaire, Washington, Hitler, the Bomb, the Cold War, those crazy Muslims, everything. All in 120 lives. And that's allowing for the extremely short life expectancy of pre-modern peoples."

  "Huh," said Glenn, nodding but totally confused. "Doesn't seem like much, really. When you put it like that."

  "It's not. But where are they all?"

  Glenn pursed his lips, weighing the strong possibility that this was a trick question.

  "Dead?"

  "Yeah. Dead. Very good.” She raised her eyebrows as though in appreciation of her pupil’s great strides forwards. “Dead. All of them, every last one of them. Billions of people, trillions of thoughts, emotions, aspirations, experiences. All gone. Kind of a waste, don't you think?"

  He ducked his head, yes.

  "It's just lucky that we humans have pretty much the same water content as a cucumber, otherwise the world would be one big cemetery. But all those people have gone."

  "Uh-huh."

  "So, tell me. Where are they?"

  "Who?"

  "The dead people, Glenn."

  Glenn screwed up his eyes. The woman was way weird. But then that was all she'd promised, what he must have come here for, though he wasn't too sure any more.

  "Er … heaven?"

  She smiled, jutted her head forward as though she expected him to go on.

  "Hell?"

  Her smile widened, disconcertingly. She licked whisky off her lips.

  "Do you believe in God, Glenn?"

  "I think so, yeah" he muttered, in his usual non-committal way when asked a spiritual question. He was about to launch into qualifications, based on his extra-curricular readings about Buddhism and Hinduism while at university, but she cut him off.

  "I didn't ask you if you think there may or may not be the possibility of the existence of some mystical deity. I asked you if you believe God exists."

  Glenn thought for a moment, tried to focus on exactly what he did think. It felt like exercising some long neglected muscle, whose balance and holding-capacity were untested, but which was unexpectedly called upon to function.

  "Er, yeah. I guess ... I mean, I think I believe in God."

  She stared at him, shook her head. "No. I'm sorry to tell you, Glenn Rose, you don't have a God. What you have is a vague and unfounded hope that you're not all alone in the universe now that your mommy finds watching TV more satisfying than catering to your every whim. What you have is a lame, largely unserviceable stand-by for emergency situations, something beyond blind chance to cry out to when your finger gets caught in a drinks machine some dark night in the middle of nowhere in the height of a snowstorm. What you do not have, however, is a God."

  Glenn gawped. "Well... do I need one?"

  "You may find out pretty soon. Now, drop your pants."

  "What?"

  "I said drop your pants. And your underpants too, if they're not the same thing in dear old Blighty."

  He laughed nervously. "Hey listen, you've got to be joking. I mean, I can't just drop my trousers in your kitchen..."

  She smiled, almost laughing with him. She nodded with mock vigor. "Yes you can. Try it and you can do it. You'll see."

  She carried the whiskey bottle over to the sink, put the bottle back in its box. She pulled open a drawer under the sink. When her hand emerged, it was holding a pistol.

  "Oh no, not that again." He tried to laugh, but couldn't. Their tenuous rapport had evaporated in an instant. "You're not gonna shoot me 'cos I didn't drop my trousers, are you?"

  "No, because you're going to drop you're trousers so I won't have to shoot you. Now do it."

  "Hey, listen ..." he said, but she raised the pistol, pulled back the slide and pointed it straight at his chest.

  "Do it."

  "Okay, okay. Okay, for fuck's sake," Glenn said, half ducking and unbuckling his belt. His bandaged hands fumbled with the zipper, then he pulled his jeans down round his knees.

  "And the boxers."

  "Oh Christ, what the fuck..."

  She fired. The report of the shot was unbelievably loud in the confined space, like the crash of a cannon. A stand of wine glasses exploded some place behind Glenn’s head and he dropped to the floor.

  "Get up and pull down your boxers," she barked.

  Glenn pulled himself awkwardly from the floor, brushing shards of glass off his bare white knees. Hairline scratches welled red. He fumbled for a second under his pullover and shirt, then pulled his boxers down. His shirt tails hid his crotch from view, he noticed gratefully as he straightened up.

  They stood in silence for a second. She had lowered the gun to her side, was staring at him. He felt foolish but also, to his great surprise, the vague stirrings of sexual arousal. He stood stock still, suddenly hoping he wouldn’t get a semi hard-on.

  "Now jerk off," she said.

  He let out a strangled laugh. "But I can't, I ...I'm not at all..."

  She gave a tiny shake of her head. "I don't give a shit. Just do it." She raised the gun again.

  "Fuck," said Glenn as he reached under his shirt tails to grab his mercifully still flaccid cock with his bandaged hand. Staring hard at the floor, he started pulling at it, though it felt like a useless piece of cold, wet pasta in his hand. To his horror, he felt that pulse of sexual arousal again. She stood pointing the gun at him. A thought flashed through his mind, that the last moment of life would bring not enlightenment but the revelation of a hitherto unacknowledged Dominatrix fetish.

  The phone rang, its sudden trilling like a transmission from another planet.

  He stopped his frantic tugging and hid his dick under his shirt again as she moved over to the phone, the gun still pointing at him.

  "Hello?" she said as she picked up. "Doug?"

  A moment's silence. "It worked? No way. No fucking way. It really worked? Oh dear God, thank you, Lord."

  She held the phone to her ear for a moment more, though from her silence Glenn guessed the line had already gone dead. Tears welled briefly in her eyes, before she sniffed and let the pistol drop to her side. She rubbed her tired face and smiled, the gun dangling in her other hand, as menacing now as an oven glove.

  "Congratulations," she said. "You've got the job. Now pull your pants up and finish your drink."

  ***

  Little man

  Oriente looked up from his book, startled. Lola, who'd filched some of his drugs from the pharmacy and taken them herself, was sitting in a semi-trance in the chair next to his bed.

  “What did you say?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, eyes unfocused.

  “What?” she mumbled. “Didn't say anything.” She frowned slightly in concentration. “Did I?”

  Oriente peered around the room, scouting for one of Wexler's visitors.

  “Someone just said something,” he said.

  “What did they say?” she slurred.

  “'Little man,'” he said. “That was it.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I don't think you're little. I think you're hot.” She grinned, without opening her eyes. He smiled back at her, the shock of the strange voice receding.

  “And you, my dear, are off your tits,” he said.

  “And what great tits they are,” she mumbled. “Best in history.” And she started snoring gently, leaving Oriente only slightly reassured that he wasn't cracking up.

  ***

  The woman led Glenn up to a bed room, his whiskey glass still clutched in a shaking hand.

&nb
sp; "This is where you'll sleep. Don't get any ideas just because of what happened down in the kitchen. I don't want any sexual favors from you, I just wanted to make a point: you do what I say, when I say it, no matter how crazy it seems."

  He nodded, face red at the memory. “And no, I didn’t see your junk, so don’t worry,’ she said.

  He smirked nervously, never sure when this woman was serious or joking. He was still trembling from the experience in the kitchen, and here she was, acting like a landlady renting out rooms.

  "Keep your stuff in the wardrobe, don't spread it around. No one must know that you're here for now, until my colleagues come back. They’ll have to vet you.” She caught the alarm on his face. “Don’t worry, they won’t look too deep into your past. This place is like the Foreign Legion. You check your shit at reception.’

  The last remark clearly did little to calm her guest. "It'll be okay. They do occasional checks, but I'm senior enough that it's only cursory."

  "Who's 'they'?" asked Glenn

  "Site security," she said, vaguely.

  "Who owns the site?"

  "Mostly private businesses, but there’s some government interest too," she said. "Not the sort of people who need to know you're here right now."

  "So what do I have to do while I'm hiding out here?" he asked, looking round the Spartan room.

  "Just press a few buttons every day," she said.

  "That's it?" he said, slightly disappointed. "But who's dead?"

  "What do mean, who's dead? No one's dead."

  "Well, I mean, if I'm a mortician's mute, that implies someone is dead."

  "Just a turn of phrase. Lab humor."

  "Well, it's a relief to hear you have a sense of humor, seeing as you keep waving that gun at me." He attempted a smile: she barely reciprocated.

  "You just keep yours, and we'll get through this fine," she said.

  “You’re not soil researchers, are you?”

  “No,” she said. “Now look, I have to go out now. I wasn’t expecting you, and I have to meet someone on Holsten City. I'll be back late. Put your car round the back, then wait in the house till I come back. Don't touch anything and don't go snooping around, 'cos I'll know if you do. Do you believe me when I say that?"

  He nodded. She turned to go, but he called after her.

  "Hey, you haven't even told me your name," he said.

  She stopped in the doorway, smiled like someone just remembering what social intercourse was.

  "Oh yeah. Sorry. I’m Laura." And she headed off down the stairs.

  ***

  Fitch and Stiney were too busy to celebrate. They worked with the feverish excitement of sports fishermen landing a great marlin on a slippery deck, far out at sea, the thrill of triumph concentrated into the long series of tasks involved in securing their prize.

  When they had finally run all the assessments of the data reaped from the executed genocidaire, Fitch put on what Stiney had, with typical facetiousness, dubbed the 'space hat' and allowed his younger colleague to administer a dose of the same drug that had set the killer Patrice's mind free of its conscious self earlier in the day.

  "To boldly go where no man has gone before," snickered Stiney as he plunged the syringe into the stringy muscle of the older man's forearm. Fitch scowled and lay back on the padded bench. Stiney adjusted the electrodes over Fitch's carefully cropped grey hair.

  "Cut the crap, Frank," Fitch growled, though he knew Stiney was as nervous as he was. "Remember, seven minutes and 33 seconds after I hit the void. Any longer and he'll wreck the computer and do God knows what to my head."

  "Sure, sure, I got my egg-timer, Doug, don't you worry," Stiney said, gently pushing Fitch back on the bench. Then he went and stared at his console, watching the indices of Fitch's consciousness flicker.

  Fitch lay on the board, trying to relax his stiff muscles, like a novice diver trying to regulate his breathing. He trusted Stiney, but this was seat-of-the-pants science, Marie Curie playing around with glowing radium. He tried to avoid gritting his teeth as he heard Stiney count down the minutes to void. Within less than half a minute, however, he lost consciousness and the worries evaporated in an instant. His mind soared down a green river valley, skimming the treetops of a vast forest. He knew everything would be more than alright, it was perfection itself. A tiny part of his mind, the last remnant of consciousness still loosely steering his mind, registered the exhilarating effect of the drug.

  Stiney's voice announced "Void" somewhere out there, but the relevant nerve endings failed to relay the message from Fitch's ear drums to his brain.

  Instead he was overwhelmed by the urge to have an enormous shit.

  His body contracted, he knew he was going to crap himself, but the feeling vanished as soon as it had come upon him. It wasn't a physical urge at all: he would later regale Stiney with the glorious fact that the first inherited memory in the history of mind-uploading was a dead mass murderer's recollection of taking a great dump.

  He was drifting now along a street in a run-down African city, past teeming shops and market stalls stacked with the cheap, ubiquitous trash that proliferates in the Third World like cellophane fungus. Then he was chasing a scrawny chicken across a village street, past squat, clean houses: his limbs were open and full of vitality, the glorious unencumbered feeling of childhood. Fitch felt cleansed, his aching joints a bad memory of a barely imagined life. In his mind's eye, he pursued the stringy bird through a yard and into a ramshackle hen house. A protective rooster stared out from the dark interior: then without warning he was watching a film, scratchy in quality, in a sweltering cinema, a young girl beside him and feeling lust rising in his belly: now he was in a dark field with lights swirling around him. He didn't know what the lights were at first, they jumped in the dark, surrounded by the nocturnal clatter of insects. Then he realized they were fires and a voice off somewhere behind him was shouting, "It's started, come on over here, they said it’s started."

  Another voice drifted across his mind.

  "Doug? Doug? You still in there?"

  Fitch opened his eyes to see Stiney leaning over him. He lay silent for a few seconds, trying to weed out what he had just seen from what he knew he was, the mental equivalent of checking for broken bones after a parachute jump in the dark.

  "I'm okay," he said. "I'm ... still here." He sat up. "Was that it? Seven minutes?"

  "I took you out after five thirty. Got a blip on the reading that kinda freaked me out for a second."

  "What was it?"

  "Nothing, I guess, just some subliminal burst of neural activity, an endocrinal storm in a teacup. There was no real risk, I just didn't want to fuck it up on the first run."

  "Yeah, okay," said Fitch, still dazed. He looked at Stiney. "Hey, it worked."

  "Did you see the genocide?" Stiney asked.

  "I don't know, there was something, fires burning, trees ..." He felt like a medium returning from the spirit world, not sure of what exactly he'd witnessed on the other side.

  "Hey, maybe he was innocent after all," said Stiney. "I wouldn’t trust these UN courts."

  "It was all very random. I knew it would be. I remember chasing a chicken, I was a kid, it was wonderful, so clear ..." he stopped, trying to unglue the memory he'd grown attached to so quickly, knowing it wasn't his. The inherent danger of mind piracy.

  Stiney was grinning so hard that Fitch had to start smiling himself.

  "Come on Doug, you gotta make a speech. You're Neil Armstrong on the moon, man, you're Christopher Columbus on the beach at Hispaniola. Tell me more, for crying out loud."

  "You know what? I thought I'd shat myself for a minute in there."

  They both burst into hysterical laughter, the noise of their merriment drifting out of the window to mix with the chirp of cicadas around the holding pens, where sullen men accused of hacking their neighbors to pieces heard it but registered no feeling on their blank, sweating faces. Hours later, those that were still awake in the purple da
wn would have seen the crop-headed Fitch and his gangling assistant hurrying back to their accommodation, wild expressions on their exhausted faces.

  ***

  Glenn could hear upbeat gospel music blaring from Laura's car as she drove off. She appeared to be in good spirits. Despite her hostility, his arrival had definitely pleased her, though he couldn't fathom why. He watched through the bedroom window as the car bumped down the track, then walked back downstairs to the kitchen, where he helped himself to another generous whiskey.

  He checked in the gun drawer. No pistol. He felt an electric excitement run through him. Perhaps she was right: maybe he was some late-blooming thrill-seeker who was only just finding his vocation. He hadn't felt so alive for months, not since he'd been mining Rick’s bank accounts. He walked through the house looking for any telltale signs that could betray the true nature of his new employer.

  There was little enough: she might have moved in last week, for all the imprint she’d made. The fridge was nearly empty save for a half-drunk bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a dozen oven-ready meals. He went upstairs, tried the door to what must be her bedroom, but it was locked. The bathroom was clean and austere, with an enamel tub and a showerhead like a metallic sunflower. He took a shower, wrapping his bandaged hands in plastic bags. He carefully rifled her bathroom cabinets, once more drawing a blank: make-up, face creams, tampons, q-tips and an exfoliant.

  Downstairs in the living-dining room a huge TV stood in front of a deep buffalo-hide sofa, mounted in a cabinet that had a stack of home movies locked behind a glass case. Glenn wondered if they were perhaps films of Laura getting jiggy with his predecessors: the thought provoked a twinge of anticipation. He flicked on the television, and was surprised to find that so soon after being confronted by a gun-wielding mad woman who had forced him to jerk off in her kitchen, he should be idly watching MTV. Rappers danced in synched studio line-ups, doe-eyed girls with bunched hair and tight midriffs lilted across beaches, teenage Goths in black clothing scowled as they rocked on the trimmed lawns of Middle America.

  And Glenn Rose, newly appointed and slightly drunk mortician's mute, sat wondering what the hell he was doing here.