Fade to Blue

by Sean Beaudoin

  The tip of the knife clipped my knuckle.

  Pop pop pop.

  I stuck my finger in my mouth and tried not to yell, tasting blood.

  Pop pop pop.

  The knife tore my skirt, making a different sound than the mattress.

  “You in here, fatty?” Goethe called, kicking a chair. I heard him clomp back up the steps. When I was sure it wasn’t a trick, I opened my eyes. It was tempting not to move. But the smell had gotten worse, and there was something sweaty and plastic pressed against my face. I twisted halfway out. It was a comic. In a plastic sleeve. A robot with a big steel jaw was staring back at me. Destruktor-Bot. I wrenched myself the rest of the way from the bed and slipped it down the front of my shirt.

  Goethe was back on the sofa next to Trish.

  “I missed you,” he said, finishing her wine.

  “Cut the crap,” she said, grabbing her glass back.

  “Maybe you better come with me,” Goethe said.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “You been somewhere with me,” he said, grinning his watermark grin. I tried not to gag. He pulled out a chrome briefcase and spun the lock. Inside was a needle.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Trish said.

  Goethe laughed and pulled up his sleeve. “This isn’t from the lab. Private stock. I thought you and me could party.”

  “You always know just what to bring,” she said. “Flowers? Wine? Nothing so crude for a gentleman like you.”

  “Just the kind of gentleman you like,” he said. When he turned to pick up the case, I ducked back through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SOPHIE BLUE

  WILL THE CONTESTANT STEP RIGHT THIS WAY?

  I slipped along the side of the house and ran up the driveway to Officer Goethe’s sedan. There was no way he would have been dumb enough to leave the keys in the ignition. Not a chance.

  Except there they were, dangly and shiny and gorgeous. I almost laughed out loud. Until I heard the front door open. Larry stood in the doorway, and he was the one doing the laughing.

  “Honeypot!” he said. “You’re home!”

  I gave him the finger, and he stopped smiling.

  “You’re a dick, Larry,” I said. “Fake janitor!”

  He ran at me, taking the steps two at a time. I yanked the handle, getting the door open, getting my shirt caught on it, wedging myself into the front seat. Larry kept coming, his huge boots making divots in the lawn. I turned the key and closed the door just as his shoulder crumpled into the side, leaving a massive dent. He pounded the window, first with the flat of his hand, then with his fist. I put the car in gear, reversing quickly to the left. The fender sank into his belly and tossed him like a sock full of pudding. I floored it backward, out of the driveway, Toot toot, beep beep, talking ’bout bad girls.

  Two streets over, I slowed next to the group of police cruisers. They were still parked, sirens flashing and reflecting off Coach Dhushbak’s convertible. I gave the officers a friendly wave and rolled down my window.

  “There’s a man back there trying to break into that house.”

  “Excuse me?” the officer said.

  “Right back there. A big apey guy with a suitcase full of drugs. Lying on the lawn.”

  One policeman looked back at the others, and they began to jog across the street, holding their batons against the side of their legs.

  “Stay right here,” the first one called.

  “You bet,” I said.

  In the parking lot outside the lab was a security booth. I knocked on the window. It was empty. On a hook over a monitor hung a key ring. I grabbed it and slid one of the two keys into the lab’s elaborate lock. It fit perfectly. The door wheezed, rusty hinges making tiny little protests.

  Inside was a small anteroom of greenish concrete. There was a wrought-iron bench and a dead plant and some papers on the floor. Against the far wall was another smaller door, with a sign that read EXTREME CAUTION. VERBOTEN.

  The second key also fit perfectly. I inched the smaller door ajar. Inside, the laboratory was dark and wet. It was filled with offices that looked looted. Walls of computers were smashed. Exposed wires hung from the ceiling and from inside broken components. Random lights blinked, in last-ditch attempts to function. Water vats were cracked or overturned, spilling their contents across the floor. Papers were everywhere, graphs, stacks of numbers, rolls and rolls and rolls of printed code, floating in puddles and impaled on shards of glass.

  “Hello?”

  There was no answer, but I could see someone seated behind a rusty steel desk. That someone was wearing a dirty nurse’s uniform.

  “Took you long enough,” Rose Fade croaked.

  She’d aged thirty years. Or fifty. Her face was lined and her fingers were bent. She was barely able to hold the cane that sat across her lap.

  “Have you brought what I asked for?”

  I slid The Adventures of Destruktor-Bot and Manny Solo, Boy Mentor from my shirt. She reached out, but I pulled the comic back. She almost fell over, steadying herself angrily.

  “First, tell me why you want it.”

  Rose Fade poured herself a glass of water and took a tiny sip, her hand shaking. “I want it, my dear, because it’s the only physical item to be taken out of the Virtuality. So far.”

  “It’s just a comic book,” I said. “My father gave it to Kenny.”

  “Your father gave it to Kenny,” Rose agreed. “After you brought it out yourself. A year ago today. In this very office.”

  The memory of that day trickled into me like rusty water. The pain. Her fingers gripping my arm, Goethe holding me down. My father watching from the shadows.

  “I remember the needle,” I said, starting to shake. “I remember having a dream.”

  “That’s right,” Rose said soothingly. “Let it all come back.”

  I held the comic up, staring at the cover. Flashes of being in a soccer uniform, of the injection, of going to the vacuum store and spinning the wheel settled through me. I had a flash of being in an apartment. There was a child in a crib. My husband (husband?) lay on the couch, watching a football game. I sat at an easel, drawing. I was older. An adult. My clothes were spotted with ink. My hair was long, in a ponytail. A large piece of paper was spread before me, broken into panels. I was inking a picture, with careful shading and cross-hatching. My son cried. My son. I turned, spilling the ink bottle, a black puddle oozing over drawings of a robot. “Hey,” my husband said, kissing my neck. “Careful. There goes this month’s rent!”

  I was the one who drew The Adventures of Destruktor-Bot.

  I was trying to tell myself something.

  “But that was a dream,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to hold on to the memory. It slowly seeped away. I wanted another glimpse of my husband. I wanted another glimpse of my freckled child, but it was gone.

  “Haven’t you read your own work?” Rose asked. “Ben Fade knew exactly what he was doing. Tangible things can be brought from the Virtuality.”

  I stared at the drawings. My drawings. The Nurse and the robot. And Manny Solo. Like a skinny Kenny. Like my brother before Dad left, but grown-up and sarcastic and heroic. I wanted to hold on to it. And I knew wanting it was dangerous. I needed not to care about anything to do with Rose Fade.

  “Maybe I should just tear it up.”

  “No,” she said, rasping. “It’s my property. Your father stole it from me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, thinking about the last time I’d seen him, rummaging in the basement, frantic. I thought about how I’d just been repeating his steps.

  Rose held her arm toward the door. “Fine. So there’s the exit. You found your way in, you can find your way out. Don’t forget to have the guard validate your parking ticket.”

  She was right. I had no leverage. What was I going to do? Go back home? Let it start all over again?

  “Your father tried to sell our litt
le program on the open market,” Rose said softly, “but even multinationals have limits. Internal safeguards, blah. Ethics committees, blah. They weren’t interested in buying after the first… failures. But they will definitely be buying now.”

  “Why now?”

  “You’re holding it. Proof trumps ethics every time.”

  I stared at her.

  “But why believe what I say? Come with me, and you can ask your father yourself.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ROSE FADE

  THE ROSETTA STONED

  Rose stood and hobbled through a series of dark offices, not looking back to see if I was following. We came to a long metal staircase that wound down the side of a hangarlike room. At the bottom of the staircase was another, smaller lab, this one intact and spotless. It was lit by a series of blue fluorescent tubes highlighting a circle of glass vats. Inside each vat was a dog, floating in some kind of yellowish gel, hooked up to tubes. A sign read Canis Control Group One.

  “The first generation,” Rose said.

  “Twinkle!” I whispered.

  “A noble sacrifice,” Rose said, pretending to wipe a tear from her eye.

  I glared at her, but she just shrugged like, What can you do?

  Behind the dogs was another room filled with machinery, and in the center of the machinery was a rectangular pool. Exactly like the town pool. It was a model replica, with a fence and a snack bar. I was about to ask why, when Rose said, “A comfortable and familiar environment means productive workers.”

  There were people floating, connected to dozens of tubes, on their backs, eyes closed. Just their heads stuck out from the surface. Except it didn’t look like water. It was thicker, more viscous.

  “Conducting fluid,” Rose said. “Also, a secondary nutrition source.”

  Some of the people had the fluid in their mouths. A couple seemed to be mechanically swallowing.

  “No way,” I said.

  Rose smiled. “Sour White concentrate.”

  I held a hand over my mouth.

  “Pure protein.”

  I made myself focus on the cords that ran along the floor, from the people’s elbows and out of the pool, across the room, where they were hooked into a wall of computers, just like the robot had been. Just like I’d drawn.

  “It’s all the original test group,” I whispered. “From the newspaper article.”

  “Oh, no,” Rose said. “This is Bio-Rite II and III. You were Bio-Rite IV.”

  “Where’s Bio-Rite I?”

  Rose shook her head with mock sadness. “Zero percent viability. Poor quality test-stock. Your local transients and runaways, mostly. That’s what happens when you cut corners and go with lower-grade material.”

  A guy in the corner of the pool started to jerk, like a dog in the middle of a dream.

  “They’re having afterlives, aren’t they?”

  “Exactly,” Rose said proudly. “They’re busy being rock stars and billionaires and athletes and stewardess-gropers.”

  It was tempting to hand over the comic and lie on the floor and have the nervous breakdown that’d been knocking on my door for a year.

  “So Mr. Puglisi lied. There’s no vacuum store, no one died. They’ve all been here all along.”

  “He didn’t lie.” Rose laughed. “He’s software. He did what he was programmed to do.”

  I thought about all the kids at school. Zac, Dayna, the six dozen Kirstys. I thought about the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, who they picked on, who they were nice to.

  “Don’t we all just do what we’re programmed to do?”

  “That’s very deep, Ayn Rand,” Rose said. “But the answer is no. We’re all in control of our own decisions. Free will is the only will. Like, for instance, how I freely decided to get rich. And how I’m about to.”

  I pointed to the people in the pool. “They’re not in control of their decisions.”

  “They made a choice,” Rose said. “They volunteered.”

  “For this?”

  “For a fantasy. Which is exactly what they got. Of course, they probably didn’t read the fine print. Five minutes of being a rock star, and then the real show starts. You want some advice? Always read the fine print.”

  “What real show?”

  “The assembly-line show. They’re dreaming of factory workers. Building product. High-end televisions, designer shoes. Laptops. Scooters. Maybe in year two we can move to food. Steaks, lobster, Chilean sea bass.”

  “Why? What good does it do you?”

  “None at all,” Rose said. “Until someone with perseverance, smarts, and loads of business acumen figured out a way to reopen the Conduit.”

  “God, do you suck,” I said.

  “Don’t act so superior. After all, if your father had sold the program to, say, the Chinese military, who knows what they’d be bringing out? Ray guns? An army of minotaurs? Mao’s long-lost brother Fred Tse-tung?”

  “So why tell me?” I asked. “Why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with.”

  “Oh, I would never shoot you, honeypot,” Rose said. “The code we injected in you has finally gestated, which happens to take—”

  “—exactly one year?”

  “Have I said happy birthday yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re special, Sophie.” Rose sighed, putting her hand on my shoulder. “You’re the only test subject to ever succeed. You’re like Amelia Earhart. Or Wilma Rudolf. You’ve gone where no one else ever has. Your potential is limitless.”

  I tried not to blush. It was mortifying, but even coming from her, I liked it. It felt good to be touched. I hated myself for being so weak.

  “The code inside you is a Trojan horse,” Rose said. “Once you jack in directly, it’ll force the Conduit open. This time we’ll keep it open. It’ll be like we’re partners.”

  “What about my father?” I whispered, forcing myself to push her hand away.

  Rose shuffled to a desk in the corner. In the center was a tiny white hard drive. It hummed loudly, pulsing with little waves of light. There were no wires coming from it except a single orange extension cord that ran along the floor, snaking all the way to the far wall, where it was plugged in to a transformer.

  “After his theft was discovered, I gave Albert a few choices. Having a private talk in a windswept field with our Russian investors was one. Volunteering to be a petrie dish was another. Your father is… permanently connected.”

  I started to back away. Her eyes were suddenly huge and black.

  “But don’t worry, sweetie, Popsicle Man 3.0 has a very important purpose. Your father and his little truck haul goods from the Conduit to the physical warehouse.”

  I turned to run, but Rose’s arm lashed out like a buzzard’s claw and grabbed me by the wrist, just as she’d done a year ago.

  “Hey!”

  Rose dug her long nails into my arm, chunking beneath the surface. She yanked, tearing the skin at my elbow backward. I screamed but couldn’t wrestle away. She tore in even farther, ripping up a flap the size of a tennis ball. My legs wavered. Nausea rushed through me. Blood leaked from the jagged wound, but not as much as there should have been.

  “That’s your hookup,” Rose said, letting go. “It’s been growing all year. Now it’s fully formed.” She held out a gold-tipped stereo plug attached to a thick rubber cord, which coiled from the hard drive. “Jack on in and you can ask your father all about it.”

  I stared at my arm. Below the torn flap of skin, between bone and ligament and vein, was a fleshy cylindrical tube, like the tip of a hollow straw. It quivered pinkly as if it were anticipating accepting the plug. Rose held her cord. In the crook of her arm was a withered nub. “C’mon, we’ll jack in together.”

  I took the cord, turning it over in my hand. I wanted to fling it like a snake, but part of me wanted to hold it even more. My jack continued to quiver, like someone was twanging a string, a thrumming bass-line. It was sensitive and itchy and raw. It also
felt relieved, as if it were finally allowed to breathe.

  “You feel it, I know you do,” Rose said.

  The jack began to ache, desperate for the plug to enter it. For the circle to be complete. For the numbers to come into me, ones and zeros, but not in dreams anymore.

  “Plug it in,” Rose whispered huskily. “It’ll make the injection seem like a baby toy. This is pure feed. Top of the line.”

  I could almost hear the numbers daring me with tiny laughing whispers. Do it do it do it do it.

  “Plug it in,” Rose said again, already connected. Her face went slack as it took effect. “It feels like a thousand exploding suns.”

  I held the plug an inch from the opening. My hand shook. There was still time to run. She couldn’t stop me. I could take the drawings and go back out to the car and drive to… to…

  “Your brother is going to be Bio-Rite V, you know,” Rose slurred. “You’re paving the way for the next generation.”

  Kenny. I had to go find him. But I was suddenly utterly exhausted, resistance bleeding away with each pulse of my elbow. I wanted that jack inside me. I wanted to know the rest of what was going on. Everything. No more lies.

  Do it do it do it do it.

  Find Kenny. Stop this. Resist.

  Do it do it do it do it.

  Run. Upstairs. Now.

  Do it do it do it do it.

  I handed Rose The Adventures of Destruktor-Bot and Manny Solo, Boy Mentor. She cradled it, a smile on her face like the Grinch teetering above Whoville.

  “Screw it,” I said, completely letting go.

  “That’s right,” Rose hissed. “Screw it in. Righty-tighty.”

  I clenched my teeth and shoved the plug, savagely, jamming it as deep and as hard as it would go.