by Paul Anlee
The walk from the lab back to Darian’s apartment had been fruitless; there was no sign he’d passed by. They’d convinced his building manager to check his suite in case he was inside, lying unconscious and in need of help. It was eerily quiet but nothing looked out of place; there was no sign of a struggle or that he’d left for a trip. The local hospitals had no record of recent admissions resembling Darian or Larry, for that matter. It was as if the two had disappeared from the face of the earth, along with the RAF generator.
Working offline felt slow and clumsy, but it was a necessary precaution. Darian’s data stream was waiting for their lattices to reopen. It was lurking in networked computers of cars, phones, appliances, lab equipment, anything connected to the internet of things.
They had enough to deal with already. Their brains didn’t know what to do with all the little bits of Darian that had leaked in during the initial barrage—flashes of everything he ever knew, experienced, or thought. They could barely distinguish their own memories, ideas, and feelings from his.
They heard the voices of his parents, teachers, and former associates playing out old conversations and arguments, and delivering wisdom as if they’d been there at the time. Fragments of books and articles pertaining to fields they’d never worked in settled uneasily into their own memories: virus engineering, dendy semiconductor design, lattice theory. They remembered people they’d never met and places they’d never been, all in one crazy, confused jumble.
The couple floundered and strained to make sense of the foreign thoughts, to tie details to what they knew, and to preserve themselves within the chaos.
When they cautiously reconnected their lattices with the external world, a fresh inundation of thoughts and memories poured in, and raced to reconnect with the excised fragments cluttering their lattices.
They staggered into work around 7:30 Monday morning. They wandered back and forth between the office and the lab, hoping their coworkers would miraculously appear with the RAF generator. C’mon, guys, where are you? Let’s all have a good laugh over this craziness, and get on with our work—Greg silently pleaded.
By 8:15 a.m., they accepted that neither Darian nor Larry was going to show up, and that nobody was trying to reach them to make demands or shed light on the situation. It was time to make an official report.
They arrived at Dr. Wong’s office, and asked if he might know where Darian was, or Larry. He didn’t.
Greg relayed the little information they had. “I know it sounds thin but it’s been twenty-four hours now, and we’d like to make an official report. We came to you first because we were afraid the police wouldn’t take us seriously. To be honest, if it had been only Larry, we’d probably give it another day, maybe even two. We came to you because you know Darian. You know what a workaholic he is; the man practically lives in the lab. And you know how important his work is to him. He was so excited when he called us about a new development.”
“Greg’s right, this isn’t like Darian at all,” Kathy added. “He would’ve been there in the lab waiting for us. Something is wrong. What if that psycho shooter at the Philosopher’s Cafe wasn’t acting alone after all? Darian could be in real trouble.”
Dr. Wong read the worry on the two scientists’ faces. He dialed Campus Security and identified himself. “We’re concerned we have a missing faculty member; possibly one of his associates, as well, and some missing lab equipment with sensitive material on it. It’s probably nothing, but we’d really appreciate it if you could check it out for us.”
The officer took down the names and lab information, gave the Chair a file reference number, and promised to send someone right over to get the full information. “Can you meet us at Dr. Leigh’s lab?”
When Dr. Wong, Kathy, and Greg arrived at the lab, two officers were waiting for them. They entered together. Kathy and Greg repeated what they knew, and the officers looked around. Without much to tell, the visit was short. “Give us a few hours to see what we can find out,” the lead officer said, and closed his tablet. “We’ll contact you with any updates. It would be helpful if someone could stay at the lab today in case one of them arrives.”
“Yes, of course,” Kathy replied. The lead officer was on his phone with the Human Resources liaison before he crossed the threshold, and the pair disappeared down the hallway.
Dr. Wong glanced at his cell phone. “Okay, I’ve got a meeting across campus in about...five minutes ago. I have to run, but keep me informed. I’ll leave my cell on, and I’ll call you if there are any updates. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll turn up, and we’ll all feel silly about this by noon.”
Kathy and Greg went through the motions of work for the next few hours. When the lab phone rang at 11:00, they raced to pick it up, but it was only Dr. Wong, checking in. “Campus Security visited Darian’s suite and spoke with the manager. No leads there.”
We already knew that—Greg thought, but held his tongue.
“And Kenna, our Human Resources liaison, managed to reach both Larry’s mom and Darian’s aunt, neither of whom knew anything about the young scientists’ whereabouts, but are now equally concerned.”
“Thanks for the update, Dr. Wong. Nothing new here,” Greg replied.
At noon, he and Kathy locked up and went to the cafeteria for lunch or, more accurately, to kill time and silently pick at their Cobb salads. They pitched the unfinished salads after ten minutes and headed back to the lab.
“This waiting around is driving me crazy. There’s little or no help we can offer the police,” he said. “But we can carry on the work. We can do that much for Darian.”
Kathy looked at her partner. She felt his frustration. He’s right. We have to do something. “I can build a new RAF generator within the month,” Kathy suggested, as if it were a perfectly normal response, on a perfectly normal day. “That will give us a chance to independently test the theory. In the meantime, maybe we can find a gentler way to accept the rest of Darian’s download. Maybe there’s something in there.”
Greg picked up on her hopeful tone. “Yeah, our lattices can keep working in the background on the first bit of data he sent us. They can organize and integrate it and, hopefully, find a way to partition it from our own minds. Then we can start pulling in the rest of his data dump and locate his most recent memories. Maybe we’ll even be able to see what he did to get the RAF working.”
“Yeah.” Kathy’s face grew somber. “Maybe we’ll learn what it was he figured out before he disappeared.”
3
Darian Leigh, the lattice-enhanced boy wonder, the inventor of the Reality Assertion Field, the most brilliant mind ever to walk the face of the Earth, the “man who would be God”—according to the more disparaging reports—was missing.
That the RAF generator and Larry were also gone without a trace was less prominent in the reporting.
The controversy that accompanied Darian and his work escalated when word of his unexplained disappearance surfaced. Chatter and speculation began within hours of police involvement and refused to die down, even weeks later. Greg and Kathy did their best to ignore the ugly rumors and focus on building a second RAF generator. Their lab notes were gone, but Kathy had the schematics in her head, thanks to her lattice.
Pulling them out was a lot harder than it had been before Darian’s “sharing” of himself. Where her hands once moved deftly across printed-circuit boards and keyboards, they now hesitated. She struggled to access her memories of the design and ignore everything not directly related to the RAF generator.
“They’re driving me crazy, all these little bits and pieces of Darian’s thoughts on new RAF theory directions, dendy virus designs, random equations drifting into sight from out of nowhere and demanding I follow them. As soon as I give in and pay the least attention to the intrusions, they change or dissolve away. I don’t know what to do with this. I’m losing my mind,” she complained to Greg, knowing he couldn’t help her.
While Kathy painstakingly retrieved the
generator schematics and assembled the hardware, Greg tackled his own scrambled lattice memories. If I can recreate the data that was stored on the stolen laptop, maybe we can find some clue as to what happened to Darian and Larry.
Like Kathy, he found the process maddening. One second he’d be dumping their most recent version of the Feynman diagrams for virtual quarks into the server, and the next second he’d be reminiscing about Darian’s childhood years in Boston.
Whenever they tried to access the internet, their conceptual integrity was overwhelmed by a fresh surge of fragments from Darian’s mind, along with the disjointed associations that each of those pieces triggered.
They spent their days and nights in fear of letting down their guard and introducing further madness into their psyches. They knew they needed a long, isolated vacation to rest and to apply some order to the scattered bits of their mentor's thoughts, but there was no time for that now. They pushed on resolutely and slept when they could.
The worst onslaught hit after a particularly long and exhausting day. Worn out, Greg fell into bed and slipped into one of the deepest sleeps he'd had in weeks.
The next thing he knew, Kathy was shaking him awake from a horrific nightmare. He fought his way to consciousness, writhing, soaked in sweat, and choking on a scream.
He bolted upright. Chills swept up and down his spine. His eyes scanned the room, searching for danger. Finally accepting that he was at home, safe in his own bed, he relaxed.
Kathy switched on the bedside lamp. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Oh, wow, that was a doozy,” he replied, still trying to catch his breath. He stuffed his pillow behind him and flopped back against it. His breath whooshed out along with the air in the polyester stuffing.
“It was so real, so detailed. I was working at my lab bench on some new project, something to do with genetic engineering. It was like I was right there. I could feel the pipettor in my hands; I could smell the chemicals. I looked up and there was a big spider watching me. No big deal. I grabbed my lab book and smacked it.
“Then I noticed another one eyeing me from behind the containers of buffers on the shelf above the bench, and a third one sitting beside the vacuum inlet near the bench sink.
“I was creeped out but curious, too. I remember thinking, ‘That’s weird. How’d they get in here?’ and wondering what to do about them. Then there was a kind of skittering sound behind me.”
Greg cocked his head as if still trying to identify it, and shivered. “I turned around and there were dozens of them. Hundreds of them. They covered the bench top.
“I freaked out. I just froze, and they stopped moving, too. They didn’t budge, not one of them. It was like they were waiting for me to make the first move. I stood there staring at them like an idiot. I could see my silhouette reflecting back at me from hundreds of beady little eyes. It was so strange. I couldn’t look away.
“And they had these really long, spiny, front legs. They started rubbing them together and—I swear, Kath—I could hear the sound they made. I could hear them. It was like some kind of music, some kind of communication or something.
“I was thinking, ‘That's not normal spider behavior. Spiders don't make sounds by rubbing their legs together.’ I was confused, but I wasn’t going to stick around and puzzle it out. I edged toward the exit, real slow and quiet so I wouldn’t spook them, but it didn’t work.
“Spiders started pouring off the shelves and benches. I could hear their bodies hitting the floor. It sounded like rain.
“They came after me, and I ran into the hallway and slammed the door behind me. By the time I caught my breath, spiders were already trying to get through the space under the door. It was awful. They kept coming, like some kind of scrabbling, black tide.
“I jumped back and ran down the hall, but they were so fast. They were definitely after me; there was no doubt.
“I ducked inside the first open room I found, grabbed handfuls of paper towel from the dispenser, and started jamming them under the door as fast as I could.”
“That’s awful! No wonder you woke up screaming,” Kathy said.
“That’s not the worst of it. I was stuffing paper like crazy and then, clear as a bell, someone said, ‘What are you doing with that?’ I almost had a heart attack right there, but when I turned around, it was Larry. I’ve never been so glad to see him in all my life.
“I started yelling. ‘Get over here and help me with this. You won't believe what's out there!’ And I kept stuffing paper towels in the gap.
“But his voice stopped me cold, Kath. It was eerie and calm, and just as scary as the spiders. ‘I have a better idea,’ he said, and that’s when the nightmare got really bizarre.”
Kathy grimaced. “What could be more bizarre than an army of spiders?”
“A huge gray bubble appeared all around me, and trapped me inside. No matter how hard I pushed and kicked, it wouldn't break or budge. It started shrinking and I had to crouch down, smaller and smaller, until I was squished into a fetal position.
“And suddenly, Lucius Pratt, Reverend LaMontagne, and President Sakira were all standing outside the bubble with Larry, and they started laughing and pointing at me.”
“Well, I can tell you what a therapist would say about that,” Kathy joked. Her attempt to lighten the mood barely registered with Greg. “Sorry, hon. I couldn’t resist. Continue; I’m listening.”
“The laughter got louder, and some other people were there. I’ve never met them in real life, but I knew who they were, all partners in the company that Darian’s mom started: Nick Franti, David Arnell, and Sharon Leigh, herself. They were all laughing, except Sharon. She looked horrified, like she was in pure agony, and that’s when I realized—She’s not watching me die; she’s watching her son, Darian, die. In the dream, I was Darian.
“The bubble kept shrinking and nobody was trying to do anything to stop it. I kept shouting at them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and all they did was laugh. I pushed, and kicked, and pleaded, but the sphere kept shrinking until it was crushing me. I couldn't move or breathe, and the next thing I knew, you were shaking me and I was screaming myself awake. I know it was just a dream but it was so real. And so strange. Some of the things I saw were from my memories, and some were from Darian’s. I couldn’t tell them apart; it was all just me.”
Greg flipped back the damp, tangled sheet and staggered into the bathroom. He could feel Kathy’s worried eyes tracking him. He shut the door and leaned over the sink. His heart was still pounding. He placed his hands on the counter for support and let the moonlight streaming in through the narrow window wash over him.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out. He looked in the mirror. Darian’s pained features, distressed and haggard, looked back.
“Agh!” Greg snapped on the bathroom light. The face in the mirror was his again but Darian’s features lingered like a distressing apparition.
It’s okay; you’re still half asleep—he told himself. He knew otherwise.. Me and Darian, one and the same? He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated.
It’s okay. I am me. I am me. I am me, and everything’s going to be okay. He wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince: himself, his dendy lattice, or Darian, who lurked even now, at the edges of his consciousness.
“Honey, are you okay?” Kathy’s voice drifted in.
Greg opened his eyes. His own worried face looked back in the mirror. A trembling laugh escaped his lips. I am me.
He sensed how thin and tenuous the line separating normal from insane could be, and how easy it was to cross when dreams invaded reality. He took a deep, shaky breath, looked once more into the sink, and tentatively raised his eyes to verify his identity. Okay, we’re good. Still me.
“Uhh…yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Be right out.”
He splashed a little cold water on his face, patted dry with the soft hand towel, and padded back to bed. The fright left him more resolved than ever to keep up his guard against the onslaught from Dar
ian—what used to be Darian—until he and his lattice could better adapt and accommodate, or at least, to partition him off.
Welcome to the next level—he said to himself. He and Kathy had been creating harmless mental games and viruses to develop their skills and to practice sparring with one another’s lattices ever since they took the dendy virus.
This, whatever it was they were receiving from Darian, was a huge leap beyond anything they’d ever created. This was more in the realm of the “what-if-you-could” games of wild speculation they toyed with over a few beers. Nothing had prepared him for this.
If tonight was any indication, there was good cause to be concerned about what was in store for their mental health over the coming weeks.
* * *
Two weeks later, Kathy and Greg had the new hardware up and running. They would continue the programming from home. With any luck, getting away from the many cues around the lab and campus that sparked Darian’s old memories would give them a bit of a reprieve.
“It’ll be a nice change to work out of the apartment or one of the neighborhood cafes,” Kathy said. “The view is much better.”
Greg agreed. It would feel good to get away from the lab, the office, and the campus, away from all the reminders of Darian. Even a few days away would be a welcome relief.
They got set up at home and settled into a new routine. Kathy entered most of the code into the system, and Greg took Larry’s place as chief tester and cappuccino fetcher.
Ten days later, a call from Campus Security burst any illusions they might have harbored about resuming a normal life.
4
Greg watched through the expansive viewing window into the lab as the Vancouver PD forensics team went about its business. Dave, the night guard, lay dead a few meters inside the door. That’s too bad. I liked Dave.
Mesmerized by the pool of blood and the rivulet that had snaked its way to the floor drain, Greg hardly noticed the coroner's assistant draping the body with a sterile cover.
It wasn't clear what had happened. Greg was pretty sure it had something to do with the one-inch gray sphere hovering chest-height near the door. Someone had cordoned off a generous space around it with a half dozen orange safety-cones and some bright yellow “CAUTION” tape. The technicians and detectives going in and out of the lab all stayed well clear of the buffer zone.