Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  I nodded, knowing she was right.

  "There's evidently something going on in Ethan's universe, and it's good that I know about it. You did the right thing coming in to tell me about it."

  "I hope so," I said, anxious now to lighten the mood. "Ethan said last night that's it was okay to tell me about it, but teachers couldn't know. Otherwise, Arthur would, you know."

  Ms. Reynolds smiled, and rolled her eyes, as she started to lead me toward the door. "The stuff that goes on in their heads," she said, with just the right amount of irony, and affection.

  I realized that I'd started to like Ms. Reynolds, and respect her, and that perhaps I'd start to take a more active role in Ethan's schooling, and that would be good.

  She walked with me out of the doors and to the waiting area outside. I had an hour to kill, and had decided to go find a coffee somewhere. To think through what had been said, to find a way of accessing a calm which must still exist somewhere inside me. To lighten up. To remember how to be strong, and kind.

  "You did the right thing," she said, once more.

  As we shook hands again, there was the sound of glass breaking, somewhere high above. We looked up and saw the third floor, and the broken window there.

  Saw the small, boy-shaped figure that came out of it, and started to fall.

  «-ô-»

  REMtemps

  By Michael Marshall Smith

  I got into it the same way as most people, I guess. By accident. I was staying the night in Jacksonville, much as anything because I basically didn't have anywhere else to be. I arrived in town late and tired, pissed at winding up there yet again. It seemed like whenever I couldn't find a road to take me anyplace new, I wound up back in that city, like a yo-yo bouncing back to the hand that had thrown it away in the first place.

  I was planning on getting out of state early the next day, and after my ride set me down I headed for the blocks round the bus station, where everything is cheaper. Last time I'd worked had been over a week ago, at a bar down near St Augustine. They didn't like the way I talked to the customers. I hadn't cared for their attitude towards pay and working conditions. It had been a short and unproductive relationship.

  I walked through the neon and cars, crawling curb, until I found a place in my exalted price range. It went under the inspiring and evocative name of "Pete's Rooms," and the guy behind the desk was wearing one of the worst shirts I've ever seen. I didn't ask him if he was Pete, but it seemed a fair assumption. The shirt looked like a painting of a road accident done by someone who had no talent, but an awful lot of paint to use up. A sign above the desk said the rate was twenty dollars a night, with superbroad web access in every room.

  Very reasonable. Extremely so, in fact – yet the shirt, unappealing though it was, looked like it had been made on purpose. Maybe I should have thought about that, but it was late and I couldn't be bothered.

  The room was on the fourth floor and small. It wasn't as horrible as it could have been, but the air smelt like it had been there since before I was born. I pulled something to drink from my bag, and dragged the room's one tatty chair over to the window. Outside was a fire escape the rats were probably afraid of using, and below that just yellow lights and noise.

  I leant out into humid night and watched people walking up and down the street, all looking for action of some kind. You see them in every city, mangy dogs trying to find the trail their instincts tell them must start around here someplace. I wished them well, but not with much hope or enthusiasm on their behalf. I've tried most types of action, and they don't get you very far. Stealing physical possessions isn't as easy as it sounds, and they're always disappointingly heavy and difficult to sell. Drugs are either too dangerous or too organized, or both. Ripping credit card numbers or running hacker scams can make money, but not much, and not for long. The Feds have the cash and reach to ensure that the net runners they hire are better than or at least equal to those on the street, so sooner rather than later someone's going to drop you in it. It's my opinion you're probably actually better off looking for regular work, but I've just never been very good at keeping it.

  I stared out the window until the bottle was done, wondering where I was going next. It felt like everything had ground to a halt, as if I needed something pretty major to get my life started up again. It's felt that way before, but not quite so bleakly. I was thirty-five, with no money, no family, and all the prospects of a sand castle. It was the kind of situation that could get you down, if you studied on it too long.

  So I lay on the bed and went to asleep.

  * * * * *

  I woke up early the next morning, feeling strange. Tired. Spacey. Hollow-stomached, and as if someone had put little warm balls of crumpled paper inside my eyes.

  My watch said it was seven o'clock, which didn't make sense. Only time I see seven is when I've been awake straight through the night. Waking voluntarily at that time is unheard of.

  Then I realised an alarm was going off, and turned my head slowly and carefully to see the console in the bedside table was flashing.

  "Message," it said.

  I screwed my eyes up tight and looked at it again. It still said I had a message. I rolled over to reach the keyboard and hit the RECEIVE button.

  The screen went blank for a moment, and then fed up some text. "You could have earned $367.77 last night," it read. "If you're interested in learning more, come by 135 Highwater today. Quote reference PR43."

  I sat up, reached for a cigarette, squinting at the message. I'd never seen one like it before, and I've slept in a lot of different rooms, in hotels and motels and even less salubrious by-the-night accommodations all over the country. The amount mentioned was very specific, and it didn't take me long to remember that my room number was 43. Chances were the "PR" stood for "Pete's Rooms." Rather than just saying "Earn $$$ fast," it seemed to be targeted directly at me.

  Intriguing.

  $367.77 is a lot of nights' bar work. I changed my shirt and left the hotel.

  * * * * *

  By the time I was nearing the address I was already losing interest. It was likely a scam of some kind, just better-pitched than usual, and I'd done my time in the minor crime mines and I was still waiting for my Gold Card invitation. My head felt fuzzy and worn, as if I'd spent all night doing math in my sleep. A big part of me just wanted to score a carb and protein-intensive breakfast somewhere and then go sit on a bus, watch the sun hazing across window panels until I was somewhere else.

  But I didn't. I have a kind of shambling momentum and sticky focus, once I'm started. I followed the streets on the map, surprised to find myself getting closer to the business district. The kind of people who spam consoles in cheap hotels generally work out of virtual holes in the wall, non-places lodged in foreign corners of the net. Highwater was very much a real place, a long road with a lot of big, butch-looking office buildings preening on either side, and when I found 135 I stood on the pavement for a moment, finishing the cigarette they wouldn't let me have inside.

  135 was a mountain of black plate glass with a revolving door at the bottom. Unlike many of the other buildings I'd passed, it didn't have videowall panels displaying with tiresome thoroughness the business and success of the people who toiled within. It just sat there, not giving anything away. The lobby, when I went inside, was similarly uncommunicative, and likewise decked out all in black. It was like they'd acquired a job lot of the colour from somewhere and were eager to use it up.

  I walked across the marble floor to a desk at the far end, my heels tapping in the cool silence. A woman sat there in a pool of yellow light, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

  "Can I help you?" she asked, her tone making it clear she thought it was very unlikely.

  "I don't know. I was told to come here and quote a reference."

  Her face
didn't light up, but she did reach to tap a button on her keyboard and turn her eyes toward the screen. "And that is?"

  "PR43."

  She scrolled down through some list for a while. "Okay," she said, eventually. "Here's how it is. Your potential earnings for last night were $367.77, which is quite impressive."

  "Thank you. I think."

  "You have two options. The first is I give you $171.39, and you go away with no further obligation. The second is that you take the elevator on the right and go up to the 34th floor, where Mr. Rabutni will meet with you presently."

  "And you arrive at the $171.39 how, exactly?"

  "Your potential earnings less a twenty five dollar handling fee, divided by two and rounded up to the nearest cent."

  "How come I only get half the money?"

  "Because you're not on contract. You go up and meet Mr. Rabutni, maybe that will change."

  "And in that case I get the full $367?"

  She raised an eyebrow again. "You're kind of smart, aren't you?"

  The elevator was very pleasant. Tinted mirrors, quiet, leisurely upward progress. It spoke of money, and lots of it. Not much happened during the journey.

  When the doors opened I found myself faced with a corridor done out in – you guessed it – black. Maybe the architect had been blind or something, hired on some positive discrimination deal. A large chrome sign on the wall said "REMtemps." I walked the way the sign pointed and fetched up at another reception desk. The girl there told me in turn to take a seat. I walked a couple paces from the desk, but didn't sit down. I hate sitting in receptions. I read somewhere it puts you in a subordinate position right off the bat, and I figure I'm starting from a low enough point that there's sense in making it worse. (I'm great at the pre-hiring tactics, you see – it's just a shame it goes to pieces soon afterwards).

  "Mr. Stone, good morning."

  I turned to see a man in a sober suit standing behind me, hand held out.

  I stared at it for a moment, then shook it. "Mr. Rabutni, I assume. How'd you know my name?"

  The man smiled. He looked just like anybody else, simply more polished: as if he was a release-standard human instead of the beta versions you normally see lumbering around. His handshake was firm and dry.

  "We ran a check on you. We need to know who we're dealing with before we hire them."

  "How? I paid cash at the hotel."

  Rabutni just smiled again. I guessed it didn't matter how they'd done it. They evidently had their methods.

  I was shown into a small room off the main corridor. Mr. Rabutni sat behind a desk, and I lounged back in the other available chair.

  "So what's the deal?" I asked, trying to sound relaxed, and perhaps even insouciant. I'm not absolutely sure what the latter is, but I gather it's something that could be good to be in this kind of situation. There was something about the guy opposite which put me on edge, however. He was charming, suave and obviously very rich. But behind the ever-present smile it was also crystal clear that he wasn't someone to fuck with. Plus there was the matter of how he'd been able to run a make on me without any credit card information. Maybe there'd been a video camera hidden in the elevator, and they'd used a frame-grab of my face. That implied he was wiring to some very good information systems.

  I don't like people like that. They give people like me The Fear. We don't want to be known about. We don't want to be pulled into the big picture. We just want to be left alone to scratch out our little lives in peace.

  "Dreams," he said.

  "What about them?"

  He leant forward and turned the console on the desk to face me. "See if there's anything you recognize," he said, and pressed a switch.

  The console chittered and whirred for a moment, and flashed up "PR43 @ 18/5/2025." The screen bled to black, and then faded up again to show a corridor.

  The camera – if that's what it was – walked forward along it a little way. Drab green walls trailed off into the distance. On the left hand side was another corridor. The point of view turned – and showed that it was exactly the same. Going a little quicker now, it tramped that way for a while, before making another turn into yet another identical corridor. There didn't seem to be any shortage of corridors, or of new turnings to make. The floor went on for ever. The walls were featureless, and looked like they were made out of metal. Occasional chips in the paint relieved the monotonous olive, but other than that it just went on and on and on.

  I looked up after five minutes, to see Rabutni watching me.

  "Ring any bells?" he said.

  I shook my head. Rabutni made a note, and then typed something rapidly on the console's keyboard.

  "The imagery wasn't distinctive," he said. "I don't think the owner was very imaginative. And you lose a lot, naturally, just getting the visual without any of the emotional content. Try this one instead."

  The image on the screen changed, and showed a pair of hands holding a piece of water. I know "piece of water" doesn't make much sense, but that's what it looked like. The hands were nervously fondling the liquid, and a quiet male voice was relayed from the console's speaker.

  "Oh, I don't know," it said, doubtfully. "About five? Six and a half, maybe?"

  The hands put the water down on a shelf, and picked up another bit. This water was a little smaller.

  The voice paused for a moment, then spoke more confidently. "Definitely a two. Two and a third at most."

  The hands placed this second piece down on top of the first. The two bits of water didn't meld, but stayed separate. One hand moved out of sight and there was a different sound then, a soft metallic scraping.

  That's when I got my first twitch of recall.

  Rabutni noticed. "Getting warmer?"

  "Maybe," I said, leaning to get a closer look at the console.

  The point of view had swiveled slightly, to show a battered filing cabinet. One of the drawers was open, and the hands were carefully picking up pieces of water – which I now saw were arrayed all around, in piles of differing sizes – and putting them one by one into drop files. Every now and then the voice would swear to itself, take out one of the pieces of water and return it to a pile – not necessarily the one it had originally come from.

  The hands started moving more and more quickly, putting water in, taking water out, and all the time there was this low background noise of the voice reciting different numbers. I stared at the screen, gradually losing awareness of the office around me, and becoming absorbed. I forgot that Rabutni was even there, and it was largely to myself that I eventually spoke.

  "Each of the pieces of water has a different value. Somewhere between one and twenty seven. Each drawer in the filing cabinet has to be filled with the same value of water, but no one told him how to work out how much each piece is worth, or what the total for the drawer has to be."

  The screen went blank, and I turned my head to see Rabutni grinning at me.

  "You remember," he said.

  "That was the one just before I woke up. What the fuck's going on?" I reached unthinkingly into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

  Instead of shouting at me, Rabutni simply opened a drawer and pulled out an ashtray. "We took a liberty last night," he said. "The proprietor of the hotel has an arrangement with us. We subsidize the cost of his rooms and web access, and provide the consoles."

  "Why?"

  "We always need new people. This is the best way of finding them. I'd like to offer you a job as a REMtemp."

  "You're going to have to unpack that for me."

  He did.

  He unpacked at some length, in fact. This is the gist.

  Five years previously, as I knew, someone had found a way of taking dreams out of people's heads in real time. The government wasn
't keen on the idea, and it's still not strictly legal, but a covert industry was born overnight. A device placed near the head of a sufficiently well-off client could keep an eye out for dreams of particular types (alerted by distinctive spikes in alpha and theta waves), and – when they came – divert them out of the dreamer's unconscious mind and into an erasing device.

  At first the main trade was in nightmares, naturally. After a while this changed, however, for two reasons. Nightmares usually don't happen very often, and clients balked at buying systems which would only help them out once every two or three months. They would only pay piece rate on a dream-by-dream basis, and the people who'd patented the technology wanted more return on their investment. Also, nightmares are generally handing you useful information. They're giving you news. If you're scared crapless about something, there's a good reason for it – and you'd be better off paying it some mind, rather than just ignoring it all the time.

  So instead of nightmares, the market shifted to anxiety dreams. Kind of like nightmares, but not usually as frightening, these are the dreams you get when you're stressed, or tired, or fretting about something. Often they consist of minute and complex tasks which the dreamer has to endlessly go through, often with really understanding what they're doing, and thus constantly having to start again. Then just when you're starting to get a grip on what's going on, you get flipped into something else entirely, and the whole cycle starts again. These kind of dreams usually either cut in just after you've gone to sleep – in which case they'll fuck up your whole night – or in the couple of hours before waking. In either case you get up feeling tired and worn out, in no state to start a working day when it feels like you've already just been through one.

  Anxiety dreams are far more frequent than nightmares, and tend to affect precisely the kind of middle and high management executives who were the primary market for dream disposal. The guys who owned the technology changed their pitch, reprinted their brochures, and started making some serious money.