It was not. The metal and glass storefront door swung out, instantly colliding with a large cowbell which hung on a rope above the door, announcing his arrival loudly. Elias was immediately struck with the powerful organic smells of a greenhouse. His hand instinctively sliding into his pocket, where he again carried the 9mm, he momentarily regretted his earlier decision to leave behind the assault rifle given to him by Sweezea.
Taking a step forward, he allowed the door to swing shut behind him, triggering another metallic clatter from the bell. There was a path in front of him, albeit a narrow one, penetrating the dense vegetation, and Elias slowly moved forward, leaving his sidearm in his pocket. So thick was the foliage that it took no more than fifteen paces for the door he had entered to become obscured completely, as was the entire perimeter wall around this jungle. The growth was so tall that he could not see the sky above, only indirect sunlight as it filtered through the stalks and leaves of the canopy above his head.
It had been many years since Elias had trekked through a real jungle, but he still recalled the various sounds caused by the sudden darting of animals through the underbrush, the whoops and cries of birds, monkeys, and other creatures. That discordant symphony was absent here. Instead, his ears were filled with the sound of the whipping wind, high overhead, as it twisted and twirled its way down into the open area. The effect of the unceasing turbulence was to set all of the plants in motion. Elias was surrounded by undulating branches and fronds, dragging and crashing against each other, generating a low-frequency din which nearly drowned out the voice.
"Stop where you are!"
Elias halted.
"Take that right hand out of your pocket."
Complying, Elias pulled out his hand, empty, and let it hang loosely by his side.
"Where are you from?" the voice demanded firmly.
"Phoenix," Elias lied.
"That's not what I mean. You don't look like a ZooCity habitant. Are you from Madison or those mush-heads at Walden?"
The voice was coming from Elias' right, but he could see no trace of the man hidden in the dense, green wall.
Elias manufactured a touch of derision in his voice. "No way! I've met them both."
The stranger paused briefly before asking, "What do you want?" His tone was a little less hostile.
"I just got here," Elias explained. "I am trying to figure out where I want to plant myself."
Above the sounds of the wind, Elias heard a chuckle. "You think I'm that stupid?"
"What do you mean?"
"You come into a park that's been taken over by someone obviously obsessed with greenery, and you think that if you employ subtle comments about wanting to ‘plant' yourself, I'm simply going to like you?"
Elias grinned. "It was worth a try."
The stranger coming to a decision, the thick leaves of a philodendron to the right side parted, and an older man, probably in his early seventies, emerged, carrying a shotgun, which was not pointed at Elias.
"Aw, rats. I wouldn't mind a little chat, I guess."
The man extended his hand and introduced himself. "I'm Wilson."
"Elias Charon."
They shook hands.
"Let's go sit down. My knees hurt from crouching."
Wilson pointed down the path with the barrel of the 12 gauge and indicated, "That way."
Elias' smile broadened. "I see you're also not so stupid that you let me walk behind you."
"You got that right," Wilson responded with a wink. "Now follow the path. There's a shack dead-ahead."
Surprised, Elias asked, "You built a shack here?"
"Uh-huh."
Intrigued, Elias turned and followed the path. Within forty yards he found an obviously handmade structure, cobbled together from an assortment of salvaged building materials from the inside of Aegis. He noticed that there was even a porch with two chairs, incongruous in these surroundings as they appeared to have been pilfered from a conference room.
Elias stepped up onto the porch, followed by Wilson, who leaned the shotgun against the wall of the shack and said, "You probably want a beer. Well, I don't have any. How about some tea?"
"Sounds good."
"Take a seat, Mr. Death. I'll be right back."
"Mr. Death?"
Wilson, who was already halfway through the front door, looked back and remarked, "You really do think I'm a dolt, don't you?"
He turned without waiting for a response and went inside, leaving the door open. Elias noted that Wilson had left the shotgun on the porch.
Sitting back in the vinyl chair, Elias stared in wonder at the dense foliage all around him. Not an expert in horticulture, he was certain that many of the species were indigenous or adaptable to the dry Arizona climate, but it seemed as if he were sitting on a cabin porch in the Ozarks rather than the Sonoran desert. Over the wrawl of the wind, he could hear the occasional clatter made by Wilson preparing the tea.
The setting of the shack, and the leafy palisade surrounding it, had a calming effect on Elias, despite the wind, and he could understand why this strange man had created and protected this environment.
"Do you want milk or sugar?" Wilson yelled from inside.
"Sugar, please," Elias replied, raising his voice to be heard.
"I'd better put it in before I come out, or that wind will blow it away. How many spoons?"
"One."
Within a minute, he returned with two mugs, handing one to Elias, who noticed that his mug had the phrase "Don't tread on me" above the familiar image of the coiled snake. Glancing over, he saw that glazed on the stranger's mug was the American flag.
"So what brings you to hell?"
Taken slightly aback, Elias asked, "Hell?"
Wilson chuckled. "Hell, purgatory – what would you call it?"
"Aegis?"
Snorting with derision, Wilson came back, "Because you and everybody else call a pig a rose doesn't mean I have to go along. Ever since man quit cowering in his cave, he's been trying to usurp the natural way of things. All the science, all the technology, inventions, you name it…it's all been nothing but an effort to say ‘I can do anything you can do better.' That's all this is. That idiot Walker building this place because he was so broken up about his daughter – it was plainly meddling with yet another thing that was already tried and true."
"What's that?"
"Killing yourself!" Wilson exclaimed as though Elias was a dunce for asking. "All the stuff we do has a reason. It's all been fiddled with and tested and the bugs worked out of it for centuries, no, millennia. That's the reason it's all still around. It works! But we can't stop ourselves from tampering with it."
Elias could not help but be amused at the comments. "You're serious?"
"You bet I am. You want some examples?"
"Sure."
"Names!"
"Names?"
"Yeah, names. For hundreds, maybe thousands of generations, when people got married, they took the husband's name. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes, some poor woman with a perfectly fine name like Mary Jones married some guy stuck with a last name of....As my guest, maybe you could suggest what might be a suitably embarrassing name."
"Boner!" Elias chuckled.
"What?"
"You heard me. It's a common name."
Wilson's face twisted in a grimace. "Very well. But I am using it in the classical sense of ‘blunder,' as in the dictionary."
"As you wish," Elias consented, smirking at the old man's discomfort.
Wilson glared at Elias.
"Anyway, as I was saying, she married him, and became Mary Boner. I'm sure she wouldn't be happy about that, and I'll bet their kids would all wish that they were little Joneses instead of little…you know what I mean. But that was what society had figured out, and it worked. Yeah, I know it was male-oriented, but don't get me started on that. Anyway, all of a sudden this generation, for the first time in the history of the whole world, decided to change things – only because they cared abou
t themselves and didn't give a hoot about the rest. Self-centered little cusses!
"Now, they hyphenate. So now, Mary Jones gets married and becomes Mary Jones-Boner!"
"That's true. What's the problem with that?" Elias asked, playing along.
"The problem?" Wilson almost barked at Elias. "What do the kids get to call themselves? Are they Johnnie and Susie Boner…or are they Johnnie and Susie Jones-Boner?"
Enjoying the process of following Wilson's train of thought, Elias said, "I think the norm is that they would be Jones-Boner."
"You think! See, that's the problem. Suddenly we don't know. As long as civilization has been around, we would have known exactly what little Johnnie and Susie would be called. There wouldn't be any thought, any decision required. It was all worked out long before they were born, and if somebody didn't like it, there wasn't anybody to get mad at; that was simply the way it was. But now, they pick. And, initially, the parents decide; they're required to put something on the birth certificate. So they pick Jones-Boner, and Susie grows up and decides she doesn't like Jones-Boner – she just likes Jones – and then she's mad at her parents for the choice they made. But forget about that part for a minute."
"Okay," Elias said, grinning.
"Let's say that both of the little brats grow up and love the name exactly the way it is."
"Got it."
"What happens when Johnnie Jones-Boner falls in love and gets married to Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt?" Wilson's voice was louder now and more animated as he reached the point of his soliloquy. "Why, I guess they have to become Johnnie and Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt-Jones-Boner."
Elias burst out laughing.
"But wait, making one little change to how things have always been done makes it even more complicated than that. There isn't any custom dictating which of the surnames goes first. So maybe they are Johnnie and Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt-Jones-Boner, or maybe they are Johnnie and Wendy Jones-Boner-Kalinsky-Pratt! So they get to decide, which is only right since it is all about them, right?"
"I guess."
"Now, and I want you to think about this, whichever way they choose is going to either hurt or anger one set of parents."
"Because," Elias added, "both sets of parents will want their name to have the better placement."
"Exactly! So somebody's parents lose and somebody's win. Not only that, but either Johnnie or Wendy is a winner – or loser – as well."
"That's true. They can't both get their way. One does, and the other gives in."
"Right! So now this young couple, just starting out, has a resentment brewing and one set of ticked-off in-laws."
Laughing, Elias agreed, "Makes sense."
"Darn right it does. And then, what about the next generation?"
Elias held up his hands in surrender. "I get the picture."
"Do you? I mean, do you really see what I'm driving at here? We took a system, a custom, which had been worked out long before we were born and had functioned perfectly for countless generations, and we ruined it. Part of the beauty of the custom was that it worked without cluttering up people's lives with details and extra names. The other important part of it was that it recognized the inherent tendency of certain acts or decisions within a society to cause pain and hurt feelings – like picking a name – and it removed that decision and made it a given…made it a custom dictated by people long dead. So there wasn't anyone around to blame or get mad at. But if it becomes a decision made by a living, breathing person, then everyone involved in the situation is watching to see which way he or she will choose. Winners and losers!"
"I never thought about it that way. But what does that have to do with Aegis?"
Wilson paused and took a sip from his mug of tea. "Well, obviously it's a little different from the name thing, but society had sorted out the whole suicide thing, too. Suicide is, or was, what it's supposed to be."
"What's that?"
"Death," Wilson exclaimed. "It's supposed to be death, not this namby-pamby institution."
Although Elias agreed with Wilson, he wanted to hear what the man had to say. "You don't think this was a good idea?"
"Nope. I don't. Let's talk about people who might consider suicide. Before, if people screwed up their lives, they always knew they had the option of suicide. It was an unpleasant thought and a scary one, but people always knew that no matter how bad things got, there was always that back door they could slip out through.
"You know, Mr. Death, I bet you that if you could somehow remove the option of suicide from the minds of people, the whole civilization would grind to a halt."
"Why is that?"
"People would be afraid to do anything…try anything risky. Suicide is the net under them while they go on the high wire. Remove the net, and who would be stupid enough to go up there and learn those tricks?"
"Makes sense," Elias concurred.
"Darn right it does. But the deal is, for the whole program to work, suicide has to be tough; it needs to be scary and final. And what's more scary to people than the unknown? So they all need to be scared to death, no pun intended…."
"None taken," Elias commented sarcastically.
"They all need to be scared to death to take that step. You know, what if they do go to hell when they die? What if, after they die, there is just nothing? All that stuff. And what if killing themselves would hurt like blazes?
"In other words, if that option of suicide is truly too horrible to fathom, people have to try harder to get things right, to find a better solution. What I'm saying is that there needs to be a real deterrent, or people would take the option if they stubbed their toes."
"That's what is happening out there now."
"I know," Wilson sighed. "I've been in here watching. Most of the people coming in aren't doing it for the old reasons, not that all of the old ones were good ones. They're doing it for some of the most ridiculous reasons I've ever heard. There was even a young girl who came here because her favorite actor checked in."
"I heard about that."
"Yeah? Well, would she have done that if she knew he was dead?"
"No. Probably not. Maybe it happened, but I can't remember anyone committing suicide because his or her favorite actor or singer did it."
"Me neither. But that's not what I meant."
"What…?"
"He was dead! Within minutes of walking through those spinning doors, they killed him."
"Who killed him?"
"Those punks. They did it for the fun of it. They were so happy to have this spoiled, privileged kid just so they could beat the insides out of him. And then when she arrived, looking for her heartthrob, well, I'm not even going to tell you what those animals did to her."
Elias shook his head. "Unbelievable."
"But, see, if we still did things the old way, she wouldn't have come and it wouldn't have happened. She thought she was checking in at a hotel and was going to be able to make google-eyes at the star. She probably thought she could move into one of the apartments here with him and they could live happily ever after. If he had O.D.'d on sleeping pills, she would have felt bad. Might have even thought about doing it herself, but she wouldn't have had any illusions about living in the hereafter with him!"
"I see what you mean."
"Of course you do. You're not an idiot. The point is, we've cheapened everything, even death."
"What do you mean ‘cheapened'?"
Wilson took another long sip on his tea as he collected his thoughts for another tirade. "You look old enough to me to remember something pretty special."
"What's that?"
"Tearing open the plastic wrapper on an album."
"A record album?"
"Yes, a record album. I remember wanting to get a copy of ‘Peggy Sue' by Buddy Holly."
Elias nodded, encouraging him to continue.
"I took my allowance money from doing chores around the house and went to the Kresge on the corner. That was before K-Mart. It was 1958, and I bought Buddy Holly
's latest album, which had the song on it. I cradled that album all the way home on my bike, ran inside the house, and sat down on the floor in front of my record player. Then came the best part."
The old man grinned as his eyes conveyed the joy of this past memory. "I broke the plastic wrapper with my fingernail, right at the opening of the jacket. Then I slid my finger to carefully slice that wrapper open. Didn't want to tear it, you know."
Elias nodded.
"Darned if I didn't get a paper cut under my fingernail from the cardboard edge inside."
"Ouch!"
Wilson chuckled. "But it didn't matter. Careful not to get any blood on the inside liner – you know, that paper sleeve inside – I pulled out the record, with the sleeve still on it. Then I set down the album cover, gently took the record out of the sleeve, and put it on the turntable."
He looked piercingly at Elias. "You remember that smell? The smell of a new record?"
"Oh, yeah," Elias answered.
"Well, then I played it. And I played it and played it and played it. Boy, did I love that album. But the point is the experience. The process. The ritual. We all had record collections, and you could tell a lot about a fella by his records. Or a girl, for that matter."
"That's true."
"Do you think that all of the younger people around today prize any individual song that they have crammed on their iPods, with the eight thousand other songs they've downloaded, as much as I prized that album? I don't.
"Before I came to this place, I was sitting at a coffee shop and listening to a couple of younger guys talking. From what I heard, they had downloaded, between the two of them, about three hundred songs the night before. Three hundred! And most of them were downloaded onto their cell phones! I'll bet there are some songs they have gotten that they'll never even listen to the rest of their lives, much less care about the way I did that one album."
"You're probably right."
The man leaned forward, closing the gap between himself and Elias. "And it isn't just songs, either. Look at pictures! With digital cameras, people come back from lunch with as many pictures as a man and his wife used to take during an entire vacation. And books, too, with those cursed e-books."
The Aegis Solution Page 11