The problem wasn’t us.
It was those Glass Eyes.
Just when did they start appearing, anyway?
At first there were only those little tiny ones. You’d say “Huh, that’s interesting,” and that’d be that. Yve, being Yve, wasn’t that interested in them either. I’m really partly to blame for getting her started. I was drunk one night—not that there were any nights I wasn’t drunk, but putting that aside for now—and I swiped this Eye that René was proudly showing off at the bar. Took it home with me. I didn’t feel bad—the old fart had just found it on the beach or something. It was a little treat for her …
The dust, which was in fact minuscule Spiders, remained unnoticed by Felix. The soundless, odorless powder of Spiders gradually began attaching itself to his surface. The Spiders had tiny hook-shaped needles at the tips of their abdomens which caught lightly on Felix’s skin and clothing. Next, microscopic motors in the hooks began to turn, unraveling Felix’s surfaces into a thread-like substance which the Spiders caught, rolled up, and eliminated with their hunger. There was not the slightest pain, and in his drunken state Felix noticed nothing. He simply kept on walking down the long, long, long corridor on his uncertain legs.
… I should never have given her that Eye. Even she didn’t want it at first. What a fool I was to force her to look through it, telling her that people said it even helped the blind see.
The look in her eyes changed then, oh yes. “Oh, Felix, this is amazing,” she said. “I can see, I can see.” Frozen in place like someone’d tied her up. Well, and fair enough. She must’ve been happy. I was happy too. But, you know, I still haven’t forgotten her face when she turned toward me. That sharp intake of breath, the tiny gasp. I heard it. Paranoia? I think not. I think she saw my face, saw how I looked, and it genuinely shocked her. For the first time, she really understood how ugly her husband was. I was roaring drunk, my hair was a mess, my clothes were worn out, my nose was bright red, I was missing some buttons… Not a fit sight for anyone. But that gasp, that was over the line, right? She acted like nothing’d happened afterward, but it was too late. Every time I saw her round face, I heard that sound in my ears again.
Anyway, forget about that. Point is, from the next morning on, Yve didn’t have time for anything but Eyes. She’d be staring into one and muttering something every free moment she had, morning till night. Didn’t matter what I said to her—she just ignored me. Possessed, you might call it? It actually scared me. I knew by the end of that first day that she’d never look at me seriously again. Does that strike you as normal? The man who stayed with her all those years, and she stops looking his way the moment she gets her sight back …
The Spiders moved untiringly. Felix’s clothing and the scissors in his apron dissolved into thread to be wound up. His red corn-silk hair vanished, leaving him bald. His ears came off. Most of his skin was gone now, revealing the programs inside him. His movements had become a little stiff, but he kept on walking. Yes: once Felix got started thinking about his time with that beloved wife of his, his head got so full that he could see nothing else (of course, this time his eyeballs had already been unraveled and wound up). A touching sight, no? That’s right, Felix. Keep walking. There’s a thousand miles in this corridor—I managed to squeeze it in, compressing it into the width of a single step. We won’t be disturbed in here by the gaze of the Glass Eyes or surveillance by the TrapNet. You can walk as much as you like.
Walk, Felix, walk. Until every last scrap of your body and mind are rolled up.
Langoni’s saliva had the sickly odor of cigars. Maria liked that too. She stretched languorously in the sheets. They had come together so many times now she had long since lost count. Her body felt charged with pleasure like a buildup of static electricity. Wherever his hands touch her, crackling sparks flew.
“Maria.”
“What is it?”
“I need a favor.”
“So, what is it?”
“Could you open up—just like this?”
Maria cackled. Her eyes, once sharp as a poet’s, were now lazy and soft. “Nuh-uh,” she said.
“Come on, don’t be like that.”
Langoni sank his member inside Maria. Partway through her face darkened. She frowned in apparent discomfort, and then, with a final short, wordless cry, Maria expired. “Expired” was not quite accurate, of course, since Maria had never lived or breathed to begin with. To put it another way, Langoni rendered Maria inert and then took over the Eye functionality that her image, symbol of Femme Fatale, had been granted. He went through Maria to hit the Eye’s most essential part and bring it entirely under his control. And through Femme Fatale he also, quite literally, jacked into the TrapNet.
Langoni checked on how his other selves were doing in the Realm of Summer. There was the boy Langoni speaking to José, there the invisible Langoni unraveling a man in a corridor. Soon the giant Langoni would arrive too.
His true form was not in this Realm at all. Multiple individuals were being projected into the Realm of Summer from elsewhere.
The conversation with José was going absolutely wonderfully. José! Healthy and capable, a man of deep feeling and intelligence. A more suitable candidate Langoni could not imagine. He truly was fit to become the greatest jewel in the crown.
Excellent. All proceeding as planned. Langoni the necrophile chuckled as he slowly moved his hips. Perhaps he would take a stroll through the hotel too. Writhing at the overwhelming pleasure, he began to scan the TrapNet.
The bathroom was in a wretched state.
The toilet had broken in two, the tiles were cracked and coming loose, and the wallpaper had become as brittle as ash. The white Glue that had been Stella was now a small pile that looked like kneaded, half-dried barium. Spider legs protruded from the pile here and there, still twitching.
René the shipwright had come with several others about his age. They removed the door that hung from its hinges and entered the stall, covering their noses against the stench. They had been tasked with retrieving and examining captured Spiders. This Spider was supposed to have been rendered powerless, but they could not afford to be careless, so the plan was to wrap it in a net of webbing and drag it out that way.
Someone behind René handed the net forward to him. He tossed it over the mound of Glue. One of the men with him used a pitchfork to turn the mound over.
“This stink’s gonna tear my damn nose off,” grimaced René, pulling the net tight. “Okay, that’ll do it. Time to pull ’er out.”
The men backed out of the stall, pulling the net behind them. One prodded the mass of Glue from the side to make sure it didn’t catch on the doorframe. Even so, they had trouble getting it out.
“Maybe the net’s caught on the door handle?”
“Let me take a look,” said René. Back inside the stall, the stench had gotten thicker. The odor was indescribable, although something like semen. Did the Glue really smell like this? As he circled the hill of Glue suspiciously, René saw something emerge from it: a man’s hand.
René was startled. Had someone gotten caught up in the Stella trap? He reached for the hand, only to see it extend toward him of its own accord, followed by the upper body of its owner. Langoni. René’s jaw dropped.
“Maria’s connected to this place, too, then,” Langoni muttered to himself. Then he noticed René. “Hey there,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Hello,” René replied, feeling reality collapse soundlessly around him. “You all right?”
“‘All right’! Do I look all right?” Langoni said, as if his car had fallen into a ditch by the side of the road. “This sticky stuff—what on Earth is it?”
“That’s Glue,” said René. It seemed to him a very bad idea to talk to whoever this was, but the words came out of his mouth anyway. The man gave the impression that nothing could be hidden from him. “Manifestation of
an Eye function.”
“Ah,” said Langoni. “An amalgam of Glue and the Femme Fatale? So you’ve been blending Eye functions, then? Useful to know. Must be off, then.”
Langoni waved goodbye and disappeared back into the Glue.
Feeling as if he might weep from fear, René waved back. He knew, somehow, that if he were to dig through the pile of Glue now, he would find no trace of the intruder.
He had to tell the others.
René stumbled out of the stall, then froze.
The door to the corridor was so far away that he could not even make it out in the distance. Thousands—tens of thousands—of stall doors lined the bathroom on both sides. A perfectly executed perspective view.
He heard chewing behind him. Then a swallowing sound.
It seemed the Spider had come back to life and begun eating the Glue. Was that crack the sound of the pitchfork’s handle breaking? He heard a regular crunching. What could the Spider be gnawing on?
He could not look behind him. He felt as if time had stopped.
In infinitely drawn-out time, in infinitely drawn-out space, with a sound like dry leaves, the helpless old man finally began to laugh.
Why? Why?
Reduced now to the barest outlines, Felix muttered the word to himself over and over in time to the hopping rhythm of his stride. His memories and thoughts had all been wound off him, but his feeling of grievance continued to grumble and walk along. How fitting, Felix, that your last words should be an imbecilic waste of breath.
So galling, wasn’t it? You must have been infuriated. To love your wife so much, and yet have been so narrow-minded that you could not support her when she felt new possibilities open before her. That incorrigible insensitivity of yours made you see the Eye manipulation techniques she pioneered as an idle hobby instead of a triumph born of her indomitable will and high intelligence. You are the earth from which your misfortune blooms. That’s exactly why you were never able to escape.
Why? Why?
Oh, Felix, you really are the limit. The Spiders have borne away all but the last wisps of your body, and yet your resentment stumps on like a ghost. Ridiculous. Truly wonderful. Very well. I shall accept that resentment too. It will, I am sure, prove a fine adornment to what I intend to make of the Mineral Springs Hotel.
Even after Langoni had taken away the last of Felix, the closed space in the corridor continued to pulse with the stumping rhythm for quite some time.
A little before the fighting at the entrance began …
In the manager’s office of the Mineral Springs Hotel, Denis rubbed his light bulb of a head. Despite his tense anticipation of the coming battle, his office was quiet and still. He was alone in the room. Even the ceiling lights were not turned on. There was only the pool of light cast by the lamp on his broad desk.
In that light he had piled dozens of large, leather-bound ledgers. In the surrounding darkness stood even more piles of ledgers.
Denis’s face, always so affable, was cold and subdued. He took great pains to maintain the image of the affable, easygoing Denis for the sake of the others, but when he was alone he let the mask drop. Doing so did not bring him relief. In fact, the opposite was true. Particularly when he was gazing at these ledgers.
Their covers bore only numbers, embossed in small gold letters. A classic, beautiful typeface, the same as the lettering on signs and room number plates throughout the hotel. Each of the hundred or more ledgers had its own sequential number. Denis had one of them open now. The faint cream-colored page was covered in tiny, neatly arranged writing in blue-black ink.
These were Denis’s daily records.
The one he had open now was from when “this summer” had first opened for business.
In the pantomime world of the Costa del Número, the AIs were both characters and stagehands. They performed many tasks behind the scenes, like a small theater troupe whose players also handled finances and advertising. Denis Prejean played several roles related to his employment. He was the evaluation function used to optimize the hotel’s service index and the HR system that kept his employees working smoothly. He also kept these ledgers. The ledgers were a database scrupulously recording each guest’s behavior in their room, and Denis was the only program capable of accessing that database. And, of course, Denis was the sum of all these programs clad in the skin of an AI.
It was Denis’s job to record who the guests brought into this members-only service domain, whether those companions were other guests or AIs, what tastes the guests had, and how they enjoyed spending their time. He was also expected to ensure that the hotel’s service reflected these things on subsequent visits, and protect the guests’ privacy by strictly controlling access to the ledgers.
Even putting it mildly, his days were hellish. Denis’s affable, decent personality was entirely unsuited for these tasks.
Denis well knew the depths of dissipation and cruelty to which guests sank at the Mineral Springs Hotel. He knew how monstrously they treated the AIs they brought in with them from town, and of course about their abominable behavior in the town itself.
Of course, all of this was legal, and no one could criticize it. If what the guests did was sordid, then the very creation of the Realm of Summer had been an atrocity, and the accumulation of all that was recorded here.
Even after the Great Down had put a sudden end to the arrival of guests, Denis had been unable to dispose of the ledgers. They did not know when the Realm might open for business again, and even if it had been closed down, the ledgers contained personal information of an unusually sensitive nature. His duty to strictly control access to them was unchanged. He stored them in a safe inside a sturdy oak cabinet, the hiding place the designers had provided to protect the ledgers from hackers, and kept the key to the safe on his person at all times.
But now it looked like Denis could finally put an end to those days.
He placed a dagger from Catsilver on his desk. In the pool of light, it gleamed as coldly as a paper knife.
He was about to burn all the ledgers.
Denis was pessimistic about the Mineral Springs Hotel’s chances against the Spiders, but he did not think that an entirely bad thing. One thousand years was simply too long to spend on summer vacation. It was a mystery how the AIs’ identities had lasted this long. Part of him wondered if it wouldn’t be best to take the opportunity to wind things down. Perhaps it was finally time for the Realm of Summer to be deleted, and the Spiders were simply here to tidy up. If so, Denis was half-ready to accept that.
Either way, however, Denis’s duty when unauthorized access to the database was anticipated was clear—the ledgers must be destroyed.
It was unlikely that the Spiders were here to steal these records, but not impossible. If there was a chance that what the Spiders ate was sent outside the Realm, then disposal became even more crucial.
Denis, although he knew it to be inappropriate, was aware that part of him was slightly excited by the prospect.
To put it very simply, everything about Denis was the way it was for the sake of these ledgers. Now he would burn them himself until nothing remained. Denis produced and cut one of the cigars he seldom smoked, then lit it with a match.
He heard the sound of impact from the entrance. The battle with the Spiders was here at last, then. Would Jules’s net work as expected? No doubt Bastin was leading from the front.
Denis touched the dagger’s tip to the first dated page in the ledger, then cautiously summoned the power of the Father of Flame. The paper burst into flames and the ledger disappeared neatly from the desk, without even the smell of burning leather. It didn’t even scorch his desk mat. The truly surprising thing, though, was that Denis became unable to remember anything that had been written in the ledger. It made sense if you thought about it, but he had not considered that he would be incinerating his own recollections.
&n
bsp; Denis burned ledger after ledger, annihilating loathsome memories for good. As he worked, he suddenly recalled Julie Printemps’s smile. Back in the days when guests still came to the Realm, he had been working on the ledgers late one night when he had heard a rapping on the window of the manager’s office. Julie had been standing outside, waggling a bottle of wine. Silently, she had mouthed, Spe-cial de-li-ve-ry! Denis had opened the window and she had come in, all smiles, and asked, “Is it okay if I watch you work?”
Nothing sexual happened that night. Julie had simply poured some wine into Denis’s coffee cup and, enjoying her own glass, watched him writing in the ledger, smiling and being careful not to get in the way.
Denis hated people watching over his shoulder as he worked, but he had found that night relaxing and the work no burden at all. When Julie eventually decided it was time to go, said her goodbyes, and slipped out the window again, Denis had remained in a good mood. The wriggling of her backside as she went out the window had reminded him of that of a child, and he had been unable to stop himself from smiling. The evening’s work had eventually stretched into an all-nighter, but he had met the dawn without feeling exhaustion.
With a start, Denis realized that he had finished burning the ledgers. The process had been anticlimactically quick.
Denis left the manager’s office, dagger in hand. He was ready to join the battle at the entrance now.
All the lights at the front desk and lobby had been turned off for the night, leaving them sunk in gloom. In the corridor that led to the dining hall, though, the lights were still on. The walls were covered in framed photos of events and celebrations held at the hotel in days past. Denis had the sudden urge to examine them as he passed.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 16