dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “The Yank. From school. What are you doing here?” Lennie almost sounded pleased to see him.

  “I was walking down this road a while ago,” Joe lied, effortlessly, “and saw you going into this house. I had some errands to do, but thought I’d stop by on my way back. And here I am. This is Ani, by the way. She’s my … girlfriend.”

  Ani smiled at Lennie, not missing a beat, and placed a hand on Joe’s shoulder. A small, but proprietary gesture that backed up the lie.

  Lennie looked at her, and the blankness returned. The look turned to a stare and he held it for thirty seconds, utterly still, until it got really uncomfortable and Joe felt he needed to intervene.

  “Are you okay, Lennie?” he asked. “I mean, you seem a little … off today.”

  Lennie snapped out of it, and looked back at Joe.“I’m just tired,” he said. “Well, isn’t this a trip? Joe Dyson.”

  Then Lennie pulled back, straightened up his loose-hanging frame, and a suspicious—almost wounded—look turned his face hard.

  “Didn’t you go off and join the police or something?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “I lasted a week.” Joe was manufacturing trust pheromones in industrial quantities. “You know me, Lennie. Not particularly good at following rules. Hey, remember when that history teacher—what was his name? Mr. Norris? Mr. Morris?”

  “Wallace.”

  “That’s the one. Mr. Wallace. When he demanded that I read my essay to the class, the one on Lenin …”

  “And you refused,” Lennie said, nodding. “The essay was perfect, man, I mean absolutely perfect, but you didn’t like him putting you on the spot like that and you told him that you wouldn’t read it out loud. I remember you said ‘It’s an essay, not a presentation.’”

  “And he threatened me with detentions, and letters home, and giving me an F …”

  “And you compared him to Stalin, even came up with evidence from that book by Bullock on Stalin and Hitler to back up the claims. Man, that was legend.”

  “Yeah, well, imagine that kind of being put on the spot and multiply it by a hundred and you’ve got my reason for not making it into a second week.”

  “So what are you doing now?” The suspicion was still there, just lessened, but Joe knew that he was treading a very thin line here and needed to be very careful how he proceeded. He cranked up the pheromone factory and served up some trust.

  “Joe’s writing a novel,” Ani piped up, and he felt his one opportunity to engage Lennie slipping away. Still, he hadn’t come up with a quicker lie, so he couldn’t blame her for filling a potentially awkward silence. Then she continued, “But it’s really an indictment of modern values, the military industrial complex, religious hypocrisy, our suicidal push toward the end of the world. It’s about teens fighting back against the whole corrupt system.”

  The more Joe thought about it, the more he realized he’d have been hard-pressed to come up with something better. An author was believable. He’d been pretty good at essay writing—good enough to ghostwrite for a few classmates when they were falling behind. And the stuff Ani had strung on to the end about fighting against a corrupt system seemed to agree with the philosophies of the three X-Core fans he’d met before the Warhouse gig.

  “Wow, that’s really cool,” Lennie said, and it looked like his suspicions were calmed for now. But there was still something distant and guarded about him that made Joe angry. The Lennie that he knew was no longer here. Or, if he was, he had gone so far into hiding that Joe thought it made little difference.

  Do you have one of those … things inside you, Lennie? he thought, and the idea made him break out in goose bumps. Are you like Professor Klein, hiding something else beneath a human layer? Something impossible? Something alien?

  Instead, he tried the trivial.

  “So what are you up to these days?” he asked brightly.

  Lennie looked shocked that the conversation was still continuing, and kept turning his body toward the hallway to leave as soon as it was politely possible. “This and that.”

  It was frustrating, to say the least. If Lennie had been an arms dealer, or a thief, or a potential terrorist, then Joe had been trained to handle the conversations that would have resulted. He knew the switches and levers and buttons to push. He could work his way into all manner of tricky situations with some practiced patter and the ability to adjust that patter on the fly.

  But if what he was dealing with was a cult, Joe was at a loss as to how to proceed. If Lennie was harboring an alien life-form that had infected him via a .wav file from outer space, then no amount of training in the world was going to prepare Joe for breaking through its defenses.

  “Joe talks about you a lot,” Ani said, interrupting an edgy silence that had sprung up. “He told me that you were a true friend when he really needed one, and it meant a whole lot to him.”

  Lennie looked at her, hollow eyed and … and something else.

  Was that an actual emotion? Had Ani’s words managed to break through to him, to the real Lennie, to the nice guy that Joe knew he had once been? Joe wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw that Ani’s words had penetrated the outer shell of Lennie’s caution.

  He thought maybe it was time to bring on some real empathy with a little hit of the pheromones regret and remember.

  Neither of them was a precise weapon to use: regret was too broad and often caused introspection and remember was vague and rarely worked, and even when it did, it often caused the wrong kind of reminiscences. Still, beggars really couldn’t be choosers in this situation. He needed to try, at least, to capitalize on any chink in Lennie’s armor if he was going to keep him talking.

  “Joe?” Abernathy said into the chipset. It sounded like he was turned up to 11, echoing inside Joe’s head. “This link should be up and running, but I’m using a poor version of burst transmissions and it’s crude, so I apologize if I haven’t got the calibrations right. I probably either sound like I’m shouting or whispering. Anyway, I’m sending someone to collect young Mr. Palgrave. My personnel’s limited right now, what with all the adventure of last night, but I think it’s high time that I started working with the resources I have. And I’ve been meaning to test Dr. Ghoti in the field for a while. She assures me that she has a chemical spray with her that should make Lennie very compliant—if compliant is a synonym for unconscious—but I digress. Make sure Lennie doesn’t leave the house. If he does, tail him. Don’t let him out of your sight. And now, as you were.”

  Joe wished that it was a telepathic link rather than one that required him to speak, because they were at an important point in the conversation, and Joe couldn’t think of something to say that would show he’d received Abernathy’s message and also keep Lennie onboard.

  So he just went in for the kill on Lennie:

  “I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I really don’t.” For once the words he used to manipulate his subject were entirely true.

  Lennie looked torn, divided, like the gratitude Joe and Ani were offering him was both welcome and unwelcome. Like he was fighting a mental battle between his better nature and whatever it was that X-Core had filled him up with; and it was by no means certain which one was going to win.

  Lennie started to sway, big arcs from left to right and back again, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

  Joe remembered Klein’s eyes doing the same thing and looked desperately at Ani, but she was just looking at Lennie with a horrified expression.

  Guess she’s thinking what I’m thinking.

  Lennie’s body was shaking now, as if he was having a seizure. Or, more accurately, a whole bunch of miniseizures. His arms started to flail, his head ticced and tossed, and then he fell over backward.

  It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that it took a couple of seconds for either of them to react. Then Joe stepped over Lennie and into the house, dragging him into a hall that looked straight out of Hoarders. When Lennie’s feet had crossed the th
reshold Ani came in, too, and closed the door behind them.

  There was a nasty smell in the air like rotting food, and the carpet that Lennie was lying on was filthy and spongy. His head lolled to one side and foam had started drooling from his mouth and nose.

  “Is he choking?” Ani asked, but Joe didn’t know the answer.

  Or if he did, he didn’t want to accept it.

  He feared that Lennie was about to become one of those … things, and he didn’t know what he was going to do if it happened.

  But Lennie resolutely refused to change into anything. He just lay there spilling foam from his open mouth. Joe could see it being sucked into the carpet. It made him feel queasy.

  “What do we do?” Ani asked.

  Joe didn’t have a clue.

  Ani saw that Joe had pretty much frozen, and she stepped forward, removed the tablet from her pocket, took off her jacket, balled it up, and put it behind Lennie’s head.

  “Get some water,” she said sharply, putting the tablet on the floor next to Lennie. Joe seemed glad to have an actual goal to accomplish and set off into the house to find some. Lennie’s brow was hot, and the beads of sweat seemed inadequate to deal with the heat that was raging inside him.

  He’s burning up, she thought grimly. He’s fighting something, and it’s burning him up inside.

  She made soothing sounds and stroked his brow and, for an instant, it looked like Lennie was returning to normal. A look of pain danced across his face and then was gone, and Ani thought that maybe they had seen the worst of it.

  Half full glasses are also half empty.

  There was a sudden brightness like a thousand flashbulbs going off at once that seemed to emanate from all over Lennie’s body, a sudden halo of intense, blinding, white light. She felt it buzz through her fingertips where they were touching Lennie’s brow and she was thrown back by the sudden electrical discharge. Landing heavily on the base of her spine, the pain, paired with the fact that she’d just had all of her breath forced out of her by the sudden impact, meant she just stayed there, crunched up against the wall of the hall, staring at the blazing white halo surrounding Joe’s friend.

  She saw what looked like soundforms moving across the skin of the electrical field surrounding him, but these were far different from the ones she had seen at Pabody/Reich. Sodium white, cruelly jagged, less wormlike, like blasts of electrical shocks rendered into a form that almost seemed cartoonish, like one saw in a comic book to depict electricity. All that was missing was one of those awful sound cues, bzzzzzztttt!

  There was something almost contrived about the way the nastiness of the soundforms she’d seen before had been made more comprehensible to the human eye. It seemed to her that she was no longer looking at something that her mind couldn’t understand and just chose the closest it could come to it. Now it was something that was just as it appeared.

  Electrical fields.

  Discharging power.

  Voltaic forces.

  Joe was back with a dirty glass filled with water, and he stood motionless in the nearby doorway. The look on his face said that he thought water probably wasn’t going to bring Lennie out of it.

  Whatever it might be.

  Ani heard Joe speaking, obviously to Abernathy: “How close is Dr. Ghoti?”

  However close she is, it’s not close enough.

  Because the battle Lennie was fighting—and having felt soundforms invading her own mind, she had a pretty good idea what that battle felt like—was not going well. Lennie’s mouth, which had been hanging open slackly as it foamed onto the carpet, was now stretching wide in what could only be an expression of terror and agony. His hands were steel-sprung traps snatched tight over his palms, and she could see his fingernails biting into the meat. And the jagged spikes of the aura that surrounded him were growing larger, stronger, sharper, and more jagged.

  She spotted a colored flicker out of the corner of her eye and thought that it was another manifestation of this horrible phenomenon, but when she turned her head she saw the screen of the tablet flashing. She moved closer. The screen was filled with a graphical representation of the thing that was enveloping Lennie, a kind of digital reflection plucked out of the air. But the tablet image was turned ninety degrees, showing a portrait view. From a different angle, Ani recognized its shape.

  Back in Cambridge, what seemed like an age ago, when this was all just starting, Uncle Alex had opened the .wav file in some software that had showed what the sound looked like—a series of peaks and troughs, jagged spikes along the timeline of the player software—and that was what she was seeing on the screen.

  The spiky aura that surrounded Lennie Palgrave was a graphical representation of the sound itself.

  She knew that it was an important piece of evidence—it might be useful to have a graphic representation of the sound for later reference. She had to fight through a flood of fear, helplessness, and self-doubt, but it was an opportunity too important to miss. She shoved her personal feelings aside, grabbed the tablet, and took a screenshot, then spent a few moments trying to clear the digital echo from the screen. It took a reboot, but the tablet was so fast that hardly mattered. She downloaded some sound editing software—again, lightning fast—displayed the graphical representation of the .wav file, took a screenshot, then opened both files and lined them up side by side.

  Triumph and fear combined into a new, composite emotion as the stray pieces of the puzzle that had been floating around inside her head suddenly meshed together.

  The more she thought about it, the more the thought gained weight and clarity.

  She had a few things to check, a meeting to keep, and a favor to ask of Uncle Alex, but she thought she had a lot of this mess figured out now.

  She only hoped she was wrong.

  Joe saw Ani reach for the tablet, and the purposeful expression on her face told him she was onto something. He left her to it and bent over to attend to Lennie.

  Joe knew better than to touch him. He’d learned that at an early age: you don’t stick your hand into something containing electrical sparks. But he’d also learned that sometimes hard-and-fast rules weren’t always without exceptions.

  To even begin to understand this phenomenon, Joe knew that he was going to have to risk it.

  He extended his hand, then stopped just short. He could already feel the immense power crackling through his hand, but he didn’t feel pain, exactly. It was more like the odd tingle of static electricity.

  He took a deep breath, reached out farther, and touched the jagged shell with his fingers splayed.

  Joe heard the current rather than felt it, a collection of jumbled sounds in his head, different from the experience at the Warhouse. The sounds didn’t seem to be trying to work their way into his brain. He was overhearing them, not being attacked. The phenomenon was focused on Lennie, and Joe was afforded a rare opportunity to listen in without it sensing him as something that needed to be attacked.

  The jagged shell expanded—grew even spikier—and the sound got a whole lot louder. Its melodies rang and echoed through Joe’s skull: high sounds that hurt; bass sounds that vibrated through his bones. But it was the mid-range sounds that gave him pause.

  They didn’t seem quite connected to the others. They stuck out. And it took Joe a few seconds to work out why. It was like they were coming from a different set of instruments, which was sort of true, but not entirely the answer. He concentrated harder, and it came to him. Where the treble and bass sounds were otherworldly, alien, phrased and arranged in structures that seemed unique and strange, the mid-range notes seemed recognizable, or at least understandable. The treble/bass followed no musical patterns that Joe could recall, clicking and buzzing and falling away in chaotic patterns. The mid-parts seemed more organized, more … human.

  Joe pressed his hand harder against the shell of sparks. The surface tension would not allow his hand to pass through to Lennie inside. The more forceful contact seemed to fight against him, the so
unds growing louder inside Joe’s head, and his entire body felt like it was resonating along with the sound, as if he had become a tuning fork through which the vibrations passed.

  The incomprehensible madness of the alien sounds became unbearable. If he listened to them this loud for too long he thought they might just drive him out of his mind. The other sounds provided him an anchor—something to hold on to to keep him from going adrift in the voidsounds that surrounded them.

  Alien sounds, he thought, but they have a terrestrial middle.

  Joe tried to focus on the mid-range sounds, and for a moment he thought that he was on the verge of something: understanding? Recognition?

  Then the shell collapsed beneath his hand and he was touching Lennie’s arm.

  The sounds died down.

  Lennie lay there unconscious.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Emari Ghoti was standing outside looking tense but supremely capable. In one hand she held a set of car keys, in the other a plain, unlabeled aerosol can.

  Tall and slim, with dark butterscotch skin, Dr. Ghoti was a rising star medic who had tired of the National Health Service and the lack of funding for research that didn’t have an immediate cash value application. She’d traded her old life for an unlimited research budget at YETI.

  Once, she had joked to Joe that her name could be pronounced fish, if you used the “gh” as it was pronounced in the word enough, the “o” from women; and the “ti” from nation.

  “You have a patient for me?” she said, stepping through the door, wrinkling her nose at the state of the hall, then frowning at Lennie’s body spread out on the floor. “Started without me, huh?”

  “We just left him where he fell,” Joe said. “We need to get him back to Gretchen’s and find out what’s wrong with him.”

  “What are the symptoms?” Dr. Ghoti bent down and made a give me space gesture to Joe and Ani.

  “He had a kind of seizure,” Ani said. “Sudden fever. Oh yeah, and then he got swallowed up by alien electricity and started throwing out sparks. Sparks that mimicked the shape of the sound waveform that got him into this state in the first place.”