Cronix

by James Hider

  “What did Poincaffrey say?”

  “He's beside himself. He contacted that man from the DPP, but he was too busy to do anything.”

  Swaincroft could think of nothing to say or do to comfort this woman who was almost certainly betraying him. On an impulse, he took her in his arms and held her. “I'm sorry,” he said.

  She smiled, wiped a tear from her eye. She knew that he knew. She pressed something metallic into his hand.

  “What's this?”

  “Oriente left it,” she said. “Said if anything ever happened to him, I should give it to you.”

  Swaincroft eyed at the device in his hand. It was a recorder. His heart leapt. The Missing Link's last testament? He checked himself, not wanting to look too pleased. He suddenly wished he was alone, could lock himself in his room and see what treasure the hunter had bestowed upon him to assuage the guilt of stealing his girl.

  “You think...something has happened to him?” he said.

  She shook her head, sniffed, and her long hair fell across her eyes.

  “I don't know. He's gone, as abruptly as he showed up. And London is in panic. So...”

  She saw him sneaking a peek at the recording device. She smiled slightly. “I have to go now,” she said. “Hospital's busy and most of the staff are refusing to go outside.”

  He started to say something, but realized it was too late. He just nodded. “Be careful.”

  She put a hand in her coat pocket, pulled out a powerful-looking pistol. “Don't worry about me,” she said. “But you stay inside now, you unchipped prole.”

  ***

  Swaincroft barely noticed London collapsing outside of his offices. What did he care about the reports of rampaging Cronix, the rumors that a tank had mysteriously exploded while attacking a substation in Brixton? The Eternals would sort it out, they always did. All-knowing, all-seeing, it was inconceivable the crisis would last more than a few days. Nothing ever really happened these days. That's why history was so alluring.

  And he, Quintus Swaincroft, was a dedicated historian with pure gold in his hands.

  Oriente's bequeathed gift was even more intriguing than he had hoped. The fact that the Missing Link now appeared to have ducked out of history once again only added to the importance of the material.

  He watched, rapt, as the hunter described his exile from the house on the plains: the months of wandering after Laura dropped him in Holsten City; how he had set up his own illicit clinic in Mexico City with the help of a drugs lord who needed to swap bodies to escape the law; how he himself had parasited the body of a young refugee from the Cuban war to hide any traces, just in case Colonel should think better of bowing to Laura's act of charity.

  Once Fitch's historic invention had gone public, Oriente's exclusive “moonshine soul still,” as he described it, went bust and the Missing Link made his way to New York, where he bribed his way into a job at DKarn, the afterlife corporation that had taken over the Empire State to allow its clients to shuffle off the mortal coil in style.

  The recorder not only delivered Oriente's voice, but an image of him as he talked into the device. Adjusting it for size, Swaincroft had a miniature Oriente sitting on his desk, recalling his time at the Empire State Building, branded by Dkarn as 'the Ellis Island of the afterlife.'

  “On my first day on the job,” Oriente recalled in his conversational tone, “they gave me a plastic badge that read “Luis: trainee.”

  Oriente pinned the name badge to his orange jumpsuit. Two other employees started at the Empire State the same day, a heavy-set middle aged man and a skeletal teenager, his expression as vacant as an up-turned bucket. The new recruits were given a staff orientation tour of the DKarn premises, guided by a dour woman whose badge declared her to be “Doreen: trainee supervisor” and whose rotund figure was likewise squeezed into a snug set of coveralls. She carried a clipboard from which she ticked off the vital talking points, fielding questions with a glance at the crib sheet. Oriente’s fellow recruits were wide-eyed at the vast operation underway around them, and posed few queries. He decided to listen and kept his own counsel.

  It was only 9.30 in the morning, but as they stepped outside they could see a long line of people already snaking out the entrance and along Fifth Avenue, a metal canopy sheltering them from the elements and the splattered gore of those who went before them: two blocks down, the boulevard had been closed to traffic, and the impact area, where the leapers crashed into street, had been screened off by blue tarps. The far side of the street was crowded with soul pole receivers to catch the freshly departed and transmit them safely to their new reality.

  There was a fairground buzz to the crowd: a delicious, delirious mingling of fear and elation, the anticipation of escape. The screams from above were accompanied by cheers from below. Despite the early hour, many in the crowd were already drunk, buying bottles from vendors who pushed street carts down the line, making a killing from people who had already renounced all worldly possessions. Oriente could see a young couple fucking in a doorway, to cheers and wolf whistles from the crowd. Private security guards patrolled the line to make sure none of the more spaced-out clients took it into their heads to try and exit the world a little early: many of them had already had themselves chipped by other companies, but had been attracted by DKarn’s spectacular exit route.

  Other companies advertised on the walls of the covered walkway, posters luring punters to subscribe to a variety of after-world packages.

  “Jesus wants YOU for his Rapture NOW!” clamored one billboard featuring a bearded, winking Messiah atop a nearby skyscraper. “Be one of the Chosen on Judgment Day. Take the Chrysler Building Leap of Faith!”

  Another ad featured a squat mountain in the desert: Lieberman’s travel company offered Jews a one-way package tour to Masada.

  Doreen explained that the clients had a choice of using DKarn’s own afterworlds, or those of other companies. “If you look at this poster here, for example” she said, pointing to Lieberman’s End of Days desert tours, “the client can use our facility to exit this world, but will wake up in a reconstructed ancient Jerusalem, just outside the holy Temple that was destroyed by the Romans 2,000 years ago.”

  Her monotone corporate recital was drowned out every few minutes by the screams of terror that filled the wide street, as body after body streaked past cliffs of glass and granite, limbs flailing as they dived into the huge metal skip in front of the Empire State. Then, unflustered, Doreen would resume with her rote lecture.

  “So DKarn came up with this great idea, to make things easier for the newly decarnate, of creating an exact same replica of this street when they wake up. So they jump off the Empire State gallery, fall eighty-six stories to street level, and when they open their eyes, here they are, as if nothing had happened. Except they are in the DKarn afterworld. Or the afterworld of their choice, if they have opted to subscribe to a separate package.” Her voice, bland as her face, was drowned out by another unearthly holler from above, followed by a metallic clang from the receptacle.

  She led them into the thronging lobby, where exuberant leapers registered at reception desks before riding the elevator to the 20th floor. There, in the presence of DKarn’s legal and administrative teams, they signed service contracts, disclaimers and final testimonials before proceeding again to the 60th and 61st floors, which had been converted into a vast workshop to scan profiles, implant chips and process avatars. Those already chipped passed through quickly: those needing implants had to wait longer.

  The last stop was the 62nd floor, where Doreen showed her clutch of newcomers how the professional counselors talked their clients through the often disorienting effects of the initial decarnate stage. They were told what to expect upon their arrival in the next world, where they would be met by counselors who had already taken the plunge, and were known in company jargon as “soul mates.”

  On the screens around them, their predecessors offered their own breathless recollections of the leap,
the wonder of waking up again after the fatal plunge.

  A young man was staring into the camera. “I can’t quite believe it still. I keep on patting myself down to see it’s real, and…well, it is. I was 67 years old when I took the plunge, my knees ached, I had arthritis in my elbows and sciatica. Now…” he ran his hands over his body, apparently unsure whether to laugh or cry. “You know, I knew I was still in there, despite the sagging face and the aches and pains. I knew the man I was once was still there. And here I am. Here I am.”

  “Is there anything you want to change about your appearance, now you can be whatever you want to be?” asked the counselor. The man shook his head. “No, I think given the huge change I’ve just been through, I’ll stick with my appearance for now. Younger, obviously, to reflect the age I really feel. Okay, a few other little improvements maybe,” he said, laughing. “Shave a bit off the old schnozz. But maybe later, when I’ve got used to it…”

  Oriente nodded at the screen. “I thought everyone wanted to look like James Dean and Marilyn once they were on the other side?”

  Doreen shrugged. “Some do. But most want the reassurance of still looking like themselves, so they are sure of who they are, at the beginning at least. It’s called the continuity phase. Later, they can get improvements to their physical appearance, which often leads to major character improvements too. Afterlifers are happier, better people.”

  “Wait,” said Oriente, forgetting his decision to be as unobtrusive as possible. “If a person kills himself here on Earth, and then in the afterworld he changes his appearance, and even his character, to become a ‘happier, better’ person… doesn’t that mean that the poor original person he once was is effectively dead?”

  Doreen puffed her cheeks out, shot him a suspicious look and scanned her clipboard. Clearly the word “dead” was a company taboo. Something on her clipboard notes appeared to remind her of a lesson from her training, and she stared back triumphantly. “Is a caterpillar dead when it emerges from its chrysalis as a butterfly?” she said, cocking her head defiantly.

  It was a good comeback, Oriente had to admit. Clearly not Doreen’s own confection: no doubt dreamt up by some smart-ass young exec in the advertising department with a big paycheck.

  The lank-haired teenage trainee next to Oriente squinted at Doreen. “What’s a chrysa..?”

  “It’s like a…a sort of pod thing,” Doreen said, describing a large, elliptical shape with her hands. “For caterpillars to become butterflies.” She led her charges back into the corridor where a bank of elevators took them to the observation gallery on the eighty-sixth floor. They rode up with a group of newly processed leapers, the noise of their excited, terrified chatter almost deafening in the enclosed space. As the doors opened, the wind hit the new arrivals like an express train: the gallery windows had been removed to facilitate the building’s new purpose as an exit point for flying bodies.

  A few yards from the elevator doors was a thick red line, and painted on the floor beyond it: “POINT OF NO RETURN.”

  “Now, this is where you’ll be working, Luis,” shouted Doreen against the wind. She walked over to the open space where the gallery windows had once been. “You’ll be on the Exit Teams.” The other two recruits gazed enviously at him: the skinny teen had already been assigned to the clean-up squad down at street level, removing pulped carcasses from the receiving tray when the procession of leapers was paused every hour, then sluicing the space out with hoses. The chubby man was going to be working as an usher on the elevators.

  Oriente’s job was at the more glamorous end of the operation, something he had ensured by slipping the human resources guy an extra five hundred bucks on top of the grand he’d given Doctor Wilson to let him pass without a chip. Now, as the wind whipped around them, he knew it was the right choice.

  The Exit Teams worked in pairs, attached by a harness to an overhead metal scaffold, just in case a panicked leaper dragged them over the edge. They guided clients to the edge of the precipice, holding the hands of nervous children, giving a helpful shove to the reluctant, an encouraging cheer to the exuberant. When the leapers had gone over, the team would wait a minute until a green light above their station came on and a buzzer sounded, then the next group would move forwards, warned by ushers that once they had passed the Point of No Return they would have to go over the edge in order not to cause delays.

  “We officially refer to the clients at this stage as leapers,” bellowed Doreen over the wind. “Just in case you’re interested, it was the name given to stockbrokers who leapt from skyscrapers after losing all their money in the 1929 Wall Street Crash.” She looked up from her notes, which clearly included the instruction ‘smile,’ which she duly did. Then she added, in a fake-conspiratorial whisper that in fact turned into a shout over the whipping of the wind, “And in the company, the Exit Teams are known as ‘gargoyles,’” because they are perched up so high on the ledges of the building.

  Oriente watched as the nearest ‘gargoyle’ came up to meet a pair of jittery women in their twenties.

  “Nervous? Naw, don’t be, you’ll love it,” the man shouted. “You’ll soon be up there on the screen, giving the thumbs up to all these people here. Who you signed up with? Headspace? Great company, lots of people go with them…” by which time the women were already standing on the lip of eternity, their nervous giggles vanishing at the prospect of the drop.

  Further along the precipice, another gargoyle was studiously ignoring the fact that the young man he was guiding to the lip of the building had pissed his pants. In the pulp pit below, no one was going to notice.

  “Go on then, it’s all out there, just waiting for you,” the first gargoyle shouted to the women, then gave them a little shove, discreetly so as not to alarm the next clients already being escorted from the elevators: a man dressed in a flea-bitten King Kong outfit, his girlfriend in a flimsy Fay Ray dress that caught the wind and showed off her shapely, soon-to-mangled figure. The man in the gorilla suit waved cheerily to the foreign tourists clustered on the rooftops below, showing off for the long-lens Japanese cameras. Gorilla man had a quick stab at an improvised Charleston with a bravado that probably came from the booze vendors working the crowds of pilgrims down on Fifth.

  There were plenty of costumes, Oriente saw – skeleton suits, Grim Reapers, angels and Supermen in red capes who would soar for only the briefest of moments. The corporation had dubbed the whole metamorphosis extravaganza the “Karnival of the Millennium.”

  Oriente and his fellow trainees stared in wonder at the well-oiled operation, while Doreen shivered in the wind, waiting for the shift supervisor to whistle the order for a break: when he eventually did so, the ground crews rushed in to clear away the mangled corpses before the pile started to show over the tarps lining the streets below.

  “This is Leon,” Doreen said as the squat supervisor barreled up, his brow etched into a permanent furrow. “Leon, this is Luis, he’ll be working with your teams from tomorrow.”

  Leon nodded without extending his hand. Oriente smiled and shouted over the wind: “After all the millennia of prophecies of impending doom, who’d have thought the Apocalypse would be voluntary, eh?” Leon’s frown only deepened.

  “Whatever,” he shrugged. “Just make sure they don’t drag you over, coz’ it takes a good ten minutes to haul your ass back up here. And that really snarls the system.”

  ***

  The work of DKarn never stopped. The gargoyles toiled in shifts to accommodate the round-the-clock traffic. Oriente saw the adverts in the street as he commuted through the fast-emptying city.

  “Bad day at work? Love life not satisfying? Why not kill yourself?”

  Another had a picture of Marilyn Monroe. “Live fast, die young, have a beautiful avatar,” it said.

  He started on the morning shift, showing up at six every day and hurling people to their deaths for a solid nine hours, lunch and tea breaks included.

  The screams echoed in his ears all day
. Suicide songs, the gargoyles called them. They said some leapers screamed all the way down and woke up on the other side still howling like new-borns. The sound tormented Oriente, and for the first two weeks he could hear the screams whenever he closed his eyes to sleep at night. Then he got used to it, and slept more easily.

  There was nowhere to go in his brief lunch breaks except the staff canteen: getting out of the vast, overcrowded building took far too long. So he would chew his sandwich in the DKarn eatery, flicking through the tabloids left behind by other diners. He was always amused by the headlines, by the sheer havoc that his invention had wrought on the world while he sat here, anonymously, among the minimum-wage drones and with their burgers and fries.

  “Fuckin’ tree huggers,” said his shift partner, Lincoln. He slapped his copy of the New York Post.

  On the front page was a photo of a middle-aged woman standing before an enormous white bear that had raised its fore paw, ready for the kill. The story told of how an environmentalist group was organizing expeditions to go and help the polar bears, whose populations were dwindling fast on the melting ice floes. Whenever they spotted a starving bear, one of the chipped volunteers would shed their expensive Arctic parka and walk up to the starving creature, offering themselves up as handy meal. A spokesman for the group admitted it was a long haul across the ice, and physically demanding for many of the older members of the group, but that volunteers contacted from the afterworld reported the actual death was much less painful than they had expected: the bears tended to break their victim’s neck with a swift blow to the head.

  “What a waste of time,” said Lincoln, who was perhaps one of the most non-descript humans Oriente had yet come across.

  Oriente had been reading a copy of the Times: while he enjoyed the sensationalist Post, he liked to get a strategic overview of the world's dwindling populations. He scanned the headlines: England had banned the so-called lemming festivals -- rock concerts held on its southern cliffs where the audience was encouraged to throw themselves over to the beat of thrash metal – after several unchipped concert goers had been dragged over in the frenzy of a recent gig, in which even the band had taken the leap.