Cronix

by James Hider

  Lola pushed the agent aside and sat down on the floor beside Oriente.

  “What is sweetheart?” she said.” What the hell happened?”

  He looked at her wildly. “Voices. In my head. I keep hearing the voices.”

  She wrapped her arms round her. “It's probably some problem with the chip they implanted.” She threw an accusatory glance at the DPP agent, who was holstering the weapon he had pulled out.

  “No,” Oriente whimpered. “I don't think so. I think I'm falling apart.”

  She pulled him close and kissed on the top of the head, ignoring the agent. “Naah,” she cooed. “You're fine.”

  “There's something you don't know,” Oriente said. “Something I haven't told them yet.”

  “What's that?” said Lola.

  Oriente rubbed his face, took a deep breath. “I'm … I'm not quite real. Not quite human. I never was.”

  Lola sighed. “None of us are anymore, honey. Welcome to the club. Come on, let's get you back to bed now.”

  She stroked his sweaty forehead and smiled. He smiled back, the panic receding. She held him in her arms, in the corridor, until the dawn light came through the window and his shivering subsided.

  ***

  “Is this going to be like the helmet?”

  There was a distinct tremor in Glenn’s voice. He was lying on his back, and had to raise his head to see Fitch and Stiney as they prepared what they called his “first session.” Laura was there too, frowning as she tapped away at a computer attached to the MRI machine.

  “A bit,” said Fitch, strapping Glenn's wrists to the flat bed of the MRI machine. “Now, it's very important you don't move at all.”

  Stiney came up and stood next to his feet.

  “Don’t worry, you’re going to have a great time. You’re not going to be meeting any Haitian share-croppers in here, my friend. This is the big daddy of the lab. This is Laura’s brother, Lyle.”

  “But I though he wasn’t dead?” Glenn looked at Laura, hoping for reassurance.

  “He’s not, and with your help he’ll stay that way,” said Laura. “We have been reaping Lyle’s memory banks for two years now. And we are still getting a steady stream from an implant in his brain. What we need you to do is go in there and make sure that we are getting the real thing. You’ll under be under for ten minutes. Then you wake up and tell us what you saw. That’s all.”

  Stiney was fiddling with a plastic jar with a child-proof lid. He pulled out a pill that looked big enough to tranquilize a horse.

  “You’ll need to take this,” he said. “It knocks you out, isolates your conscious mind, so you don’t interact with Lyle’s memories. We don’t want to taint the process.”

  Glenn took the horse pill and examined it nervously. Stiney proffered a water bottle to wash it down. “We’ve found the pill is better than an injection. Once you’ve taken it, the effect will kick in within seconds. You’ll love, judging by the results of your blood tests. Oh come on, you thought we wouldn’t know? We’re all adults here, Glenn, don’t worry. We all enjoy a puff or a snort now and then. Now, lie down as soon as you swallow, then we can begin.”

  Glenn put the tablet in his mouth, wincing at the chemical blandness. He swigged water, gagged slightly as the pill muscled its way through his gullet. He lay back on the padded bed, head in the molded receptacle.

  The world shut down, just for a moment. Glenn’s mind took an awkward twitch-step into deep sleep.

  Abruptly, he was someone else, in another realm. If the drug brought him relief from the constraints of this life, the new person he found himself to be freed him entirely from his old self. He wanted to say something, to utter words that would take possession of this new persona, but before he could find the right ones he had forgotten that he was ever anyone but Laura's little brother Lyle.

  Ten minutes later, his body was smoothly ejected from the machine. He found himself abruptly awake, bereft as a ghost at a séance. What disappointment to be summoned back to this drab old self, to once again be the same old Glenn Rose, beset by the disappointments and failures of a squandered life. Yet he could not stop smiling as Fitch, Laura and Stiney gathered round, faces intent. Laura in particular was scrutinizing him for news of his voyage of discovery. Glenn grinned at them.

  “Can I do it again?”

  Fitch started clapping, Stiney rabbit-punched the air and Laura’s face crumpled as the tension evaporated. Fitch handed Glenn a cup of hot, sweet tea and urged him to recall what he had seen, though it was far from easy: a fleeting kaleidoscope of memories and sensations swirled before him and he simply stared into his mug for a while. With a smile, he looked at Laura.

  “It’s strange to say it, but I know what your grandmother’s house smelled like.” She locked her eyes on to his. “But it’s difficult to put into words now. It was a kind of mix of some cake flavoring, vanilla essence and lemon…I don’t know, a particular flowery perfume, something I can’t quite pin down. Jasmine, maybe.”

  “Olfactory sensations are notoriously difficult to categorize,” said Fitch, without looking up from the notebook he was scribbling in. “Try a visual memory if you can.”

  Laura glanced angrily Fitch, as though he had robbed her of something precious.

  “Okay. There was this street where I…sorry, where Lyle and you used to live,” Glenn said, looking straight at her. “It was on a slight rise, with really big terraced houses with stoops and trees lining the sidewalks. I was riding my bike there, it was one of those 1970s choppers with a gear stick on the cross bar. Blue with yellow go-faster stripes. You and some of your girlfriends were playing in the street, hopscotch. You were wearing flared purple corduroys…”

  He stopped, because Laura was crying. Not loudly, but her cheeks were wet and she turned away. Fitch, either unseeing or uncaring, urged him to go on.

  “Anything else?”

  Glenn scratched his head, still relishing the childhood memory, the softness of a warm spring evening, full of sap and promise.

  “Yeah, there was a school, a huge concrete building. A gang of teenage boys pushing along the corridors and a school teacher shouting at them, telling them to slow down. There was that strong smell of board markers, a sweet, chemically banana smell like nail polish. And …oh yeah.”

  A broad smile spread across his face.

  “What? You get laid or something?” grinned Stiney. “I saw some major activity on the chart that indicated sexual arousal.”

  Glenn nodded slowly, feeling very pleased with himself.

  “What? At school? Who was it?” cut in Laura, the big sister suddenly emerging.

  “Cindy Jappe,” said Glenn, nodding with pleasure. “In the bathroom cubicle. She was wearing a red-pleated mini. We did after we cut geography class. “

  “That slut!” said Laura. “I remember her. She’d slept with just about the whole school by tenth grade.” But Laura was smiling now, despite the evident scorn for her brother’s cheap teenage conquest. Here was proof that her beloved sibling was salvageable. “Well,” she said, “Lyle was quite the lad about town. I think you’re going to have an interesting few weeks here.”

  “When can we do it again?” repeated Glenn.

  Fitch raised an eyebrow at him. “Not more than once every three days at the beginning, I’m afraid. You’ll have to let the memories settle, or they could overtake your own. We’ll schedule the next session for Wednesday. By the way, you may want to change your underwear. These dreams can be extremely realistic.”

  To his enormous embarrassment, Glenn could feel the warm, sticky sensation in his boxers. He flushed a deep crimson and stuttered in front of the scientists.

  “It’s alright” said Stiney in his barely suppressed giggle. “You know, if it makes you feel any better, Doug here shat himself the first time he tried it out.”

  “I did not,” snapped Fitch, affronted. “I told you I almost did.”

  “Well that ain’t the way it’s going down when the Smithsoni
an asks me for my version,” tittered Stiney, high-fiving Laura as Fitch pursed his lips and did his best to ignore them.

  ***

  The dreaming lasted for weeks. As Glenn got used to the drugs, Fitch allowed the sessions more frequently. Sometimes Glenn would emerge traumatized and breathing heavily, needing to talk his way back to his old self: at other times, he came out grinning at some escapade that Laura’s ne’er-do-well brother had got up to. Lyle had lived a less than ordinary life and when he was inside the machine, it was almost as if the stronger memories were tugging at Glenn, trying to grab his attention, telling him, This is who I am.

  After each session came an extensive debriefing. Fitch took notes while Stiney recorded all the details on camera. Laura was always on hand, and Doug took her off afterwards to confirm that the sights Glenn was relaying were actual episodes from Lyle’s memory, not some strange hallucination induced by the drugs. But mainly Laura wanted to be there to know her brother was somehow safe, although no one had yet explained to Glenn what the looming threat to his life might be.

  Clearly Lyle had lived a dangerous life. One day, early on in the sessions, Glenn found his mind drifting through a scene in a desert, a soldier surrounded by other soldiers. He saw a dusty, desiccated hand sticking out the ground. Over there a boot. A head, half submerged, as though the man had drowned in these dunes.

  Glenn was sweating as he related the episode to the assembled scientists. They raised their eyebrows knowingly at each other, as though they had been waiting for this very image to emerge. Glenn could not resist asking them what the ghoulish scene was that they appeared to recognize so readily.

  “All in good time, Glenn,” Fitch said. “We can’t let you know too much at this stage, otherwise you might build up an affinity with the subject that could interfere with the test results. There can absolutely no conscious interaction between your mind and…the subject,” he said, avoiding Laura’s gaze.

  And so it went on. Fleeting images of restaurants, people, houses and hotels, desert highways and refugee-clogged jungle tracks, run-down cities in countries Glenn could not even pinpoint afterwards. Lying in his room at night, he went over the strange memories again and again, events he had never experienced, something he found both deeply disconcerting and tremendously exciting. On days when he had no sessions scheduled, he paced around the house impatiently, hungry for more of the vicarious experiences of a life lived so much more fully than his own.

  Yet part of him was also afraid, worried these new memories might fade, when they already felt so much a part of him. He wondered if, after all this was over, he’d need therapy, but how he could ever begin to explain to a shrink what had gone down inside his head?

  Occasionally, when the adrenaline got much and his racing pulse worried the scientists, Fitch would pull the plug. One night, Glenn awoke from a memory-dream with a bellow, and was surprised to see Laura pad in quietly in her pajamas to soothe him.

  “It’s okay, honey, It’s going to be alright now,” she said, and offered him a glass of water and a Valium. “Shush now.”

  She ran a soft hand over his brow, plastering back the damp hair from his forehead. Glenn was inordinately grateful, but also puzzled. It was difficult to equate this mother-hen with the gun-toting psycho he had encountered a few months earlier at the snowbound gas station. The sedative dulled his mind, lulled him back to sleep. But as he drifted off, a disturbing idea wandered into his drugged mind.

  Was Laura talking so sweetly to Glenn, or to her brother?

  Mercifully, he fell asleep before he could dwell too long over the question.

  ***

  Lupo had coveted the mayor's job long before he returned to Earth. Way back before the Exodus, he had twice held the mayoral office in his small hometown in Ukraine, and had always enjoyed the jostle of local politics, the wrangling and horse-trading, as well as the attention and occasional fawning that it afforded him. When the position in London had come up, he had jumped at the opportunity.

  Sitting now in his office, Lupo was having second thoughts about the joys of office. He stared at the blank screen before him, smoke from his cigarette coiling into his eyes. He was supposed to be composing a report to the authorities airside, but wasn’t sure where to even begin. As someone who saw himself as a benevolent guardian of the Sapien community, he had been shaken by Dawes’ confession that so many saw the good-natured Lupo and his fellow Eternals as mere phantoms, unwelcome strangers in their old home.

  There had always been some support among younger Sapiens for the Santa Muerte, a bunch of terrorists spawned long ago when Mexico's drugs gangs had fought the construction of the Zone in their home country. The militant luddites had fused, through late-stage globalization, with a new strain of radical Buddhists in southeast Asia to create a shaky ideology opposed to immortality. But for whole communities to suddenly start backing their crazy pseudo-philosophy? Lupo had never come across such a thing before. Put that together with the unprecedented attack on the Rangers, and Lupo felt like he had an undigested rock sitting in his stomach.

  His screen flashed with an incoming message. It was Harrell, his police chief, looking the very picture of discomposure. The knot in Lupo’s guts tightened.

  “What is it now, Harrell? I’m very busy.”

  “Mr Mayor?” the police chief said. “Listen we have a serious situation down here. You’re going to have come on over. Now.”

  ***

  And then, abruptly, the dreaming was over.

  After months of haunting Lyle’s memories, Glenn was told by Fitch that this particular phase of the experiment had proven a success. They were ready to move on to the next level.

  Glenn had known the day must be coming. He had been in the house for almost all of the six month’s stipulated in his strange contract. Still, the news was a shock. He had come to love his sojourns in the other man’s head. Aside from the drugs and the excitement of the whole undertaking, there was the sheer buzz of being Lyle, a pulse that had been totally lacking in his own humdrum life until the last year, when he taken that unprecedented decision not to report Rick's death. That was the point of connection, Glenn knew, the cross-over moment when the grey life of the failed artist Glenn Rose had come close to matching the adventurous existence of Lyle McLure. They had become, in Glenn’s own mind, kindred spirits, their stories inextricably interwoven by fate.

  “So what happens now?” It was late afternoon, and outside, the sky was clouding to deep ink. The first star winked over the plains. Glenn would miss this place, filled with it lonely beauty and strange phenomena.

  Fitch had already started to pack up his laptop and bundle his papers into the small backpack he always toted around. He did not even pause in his packing as he answered.

  “We are going to Texas tonight, Glenn. We have to prepare for Lyle’s execution,” he said. He had scarcely uttered the word when Laura walked past the door. She didn’t say anything, just dropped her own traveling case next to Fitch’s in the hallway. Kevin the bodyguard came in and hefted the baggage out to the car.

  “Lyle’s going to be executed?” said Glenn. “For what?”

  “Officially, he’s going to be executed,” said Fitch, clearly trying to reassure Laura, hovering by the door. “But thanks to our work here, and due to your own excellent contributions, we are confident that while a lethal injection will be administered a week from now, we will actually be able to save Lyle. His mind is here with us already.”

  Stiney burst in, looking flustered. “Anyone seen my keys? I can’t find them?”

  Laura glared at him. “No, I haven’t seen them. You’re always leaving them lying around somewhere. They’re probably in all that clutter you call your desk.”

  Stiney was rooting among the pot plants on the window sill, slamming draws and up-ending jars full of pens. “No, I definitely left them down here somewhere,” he muttered. “Got my swipe card on them too.”

  “Well, you won’t need them in Texas,” said Fit
ch. “And Kevin’ll be here the whole time, so it hardly matters. Now, if you could just give us a minute…”

  Stiney stomped out again. Laura seemed to have lost her usual focus for a moment, before coming back to herself.

  “I guess you’ve earned an explanation,” she said. “Come with me.”

  For the last time, she led him through the house and into the warm kitchen. The place felt deserted already, a chapter closing in Glenn's life, almost certainly the most exciting one he would ever know. Laura poured him a final shot of whiskey, even though it was still only mid-morning.

  “One for the road,” she said. “Listen, you’ve been living in Lyle’s head all these months now, I think you’ve probably got quite a feel for the type of person he was. Is” she corrected herself. “Lyle’s no saint, but he’s a good person, deep down. He had some tough breaks, but he never gave up struggling to make a better life for himself. I think now that you won’t be surfing his memories any more, it’s safe for me to tell you what happened. The plane leaves in four hours, so I’m afraid it’ll have to be a fairly potted history.”

  It was a perfunctory account, and seemed to Glenn woefully lacking in depth after the strange visions he'd experienced. Laura was clearly trying to control her emotions – she didn’t know, after all, if her brother was about to die or be saved by her and her colleagues’ handiwork. But Glenn still felt somehow cheated, as though his moment of catharsis was merely an item on her check-list of chores.

  It was no surprise to hear that Lyle had gotten into trouble as a teenager. Drugs, insubordination, screwing around. Petty crime. By sixteen, he'd served time in a juvenile facility. Bored and on the look-out for cheap thrills, he easily found them. When he was eighteen, he bumped into an army recruiting sergeant scouring the streets, looking for lost souls like Lyle, people searching for a way out of their cramped lives. Lyle signed up, and was part of the vast American army shipped off to liberate Kuwait in 1990.