Isaac had programmed his screen to flash a warning in the event that a woman matching Tonto’s description came into view. The screen was flashing now, and Isaac perceived that Tonto — wearing a pair of faded jeans and a leather jacket — had sauntered into the picture. She had a DDH backpack slung offhandedly over one shoulder. She stepped toward the van.
She wasn’t alone.
Isaac could see four men standing beside the vehicle — men who, from their reaction to Tonto’s approach, hadn’t expected to meet her. Each of the men was wearing an ensemble that appeared to have been drawn from last season’s “low-end thug” collection.
Car thieves, thought Isaac, judging by the look of the tools and weapons they had casually secreted behind their backs as Tonto approached. The car thieves looked at Tonto. One of them whistled. Their faces broke into leering variations on the theme of “well, well, well, lookie what we have here.”
Tonto approached the van calmly, allowing her backpack to slip down into her hand as she advanced. She took another step forward.
That’s when the screaming started.
Suddenly both of Isaac’s screens — one trained on Socrates and the other tracking Tonto — were alive with a flurry of activity, the action too fast and furious for the human eye to follow. Even Isaac, who was accustomed to watching Socrates in action, registered little more than twinned chaotic blurs.
It was over in nine seconds. Both of Isaac’s holographic screens now depicted scenes that were best described with words that end in “age” — carnage, damage, hemorrhage, wreckage, and severed appendage, for example. It looked as though a pair of tornadoes had blown through twin war zones that had been hit by a couple of earthquakes.
It had been a busy nine seconds.
“Rewind,” said Isaac, pushing a series of controls on his datalink and leaning in toward the holographic screens. “T minus nine seconds. Set playback at one-twentieth normal speed.”
Isaac watched the scenes again.
On Isaac’s left, the screen showed Socrates’ perspective as the assassin made his way toward the unsuspecting troops. He greeted them with a hearty “heads up, boys,” before leaping into action. There was a click and a whir as the iridescent tail of the boson whip flashed across the holographic screen, its first pass slicing through the barrels of two high-yield blaster rifles and the tip of a sniper’s nose. The assault troops’ faces broke into expressions conveying immortal dread.36
The screen to Isaac’s right showed Tonto dropping her backpack and then kicking it with such force that the nearest thief hadn’t time to change his expression before the backpack did it for him. It managed this by shattering eight of his teeth and breaking his nose. Tonto barrel-rolled toward a second opponent. The thug was briefly aware of a sharp pain in his southerly regions, and then more enduringly aware that his left leg now bent in ways that nature had never intended.
Even slowed down to one-twentieth normal speed, Socrates and Tonto both appeared to be moving at a superhuman velocity, while their opponents seemed to have obligingly decided to operate in slow motion. Screen one: the blur that was Socrates passed between two armoured opponents, idly snapping one’s neck while neatly bisecting the other with an absent-minded flick of the boson whip. Screen two: the blur that was Tonto slipped effortlessly under a swinging crowbar and redirected its arc into the base of a thief’s skull. Screen one: Socrates removed an opponent’s side-arm and fired three shots into another opponent’s chest. Screen two: Tonto somehow dodged through the heart of a spray of bullets and parried a knife with her bare hand before her foot connected with an assailant’s head. You could see her shoeprint on his forehead as he flew toward the van.
Isaac’s eyes widened, darting between the twin screens. Neurons sparked and realization dawned. Isaac suddenly understood that the movements he observed were synchronized — not precisely the same steps, but seemingly conceived by the same martially minded choreographer. It was as though Tonto and Socrates were dancing variations of the same ballet, or interpreting different movements of one symphony. Tonto’s lightning kicks and punches laid down a driving, percussive bass while Socrates’ lithe and circular movements supplied an undulating melody of arpeggiated chords.
Equations flashed behind Isaac’s eyes as he instinctively groped for the mathematical language needed to describe the parallel motions of the twinned, heavenly bodies on his screens. He scribbled equations on a handy scrap of paper, each throw, each leap, each parry and dodge reflected in the calculations. Car thieves and armoured troops featured briefly as fleeting variables, each disappearing from the computations as they were cancelled out by the force of the assault. Tonto pounced, Socrates whirled, and Isaac’s equations swam onto the page, passing beyond the realms of calculus and into new, untried mathematical dimensions.
The combat and the calculations progressed until they approached a final, mutual crescendo, the last opponents falling just as Isaac’s computations slipped beyond fiendish complexity and into elegant simplicity, opposing terms disappearing from the equations as quickly as Socrates’ and Tonto’s opposition had left the fray.
Combat ended. Only Socrates and Tonto remained intact.
Isaac examined his calculations.
A pale, sinewy hand squeezed Isaac’s shoulder as another plucked the pencil from Isaac’s grip.
The hands belonged to the City Solicitor, who now bent over Isaac’s desk and, without uttering a word, began revising the calculations. Isaac hadn’t heard him enter.
The City Solicitor crossed out unhelpful variables that cluttered Isaac’s formula, erasing any element that might obscure the underlying comparison of Socrates and Tonto. His approach was unconventional, thought Isaac, but the Solicitor did show intuitive flair for simplifying complex equations. Figures disappeared from the calculations like soldiers retreating from the battlefield as the Solicitor conscientiously eliminated any elements that cancelled each other out or otherwise sullied the beauty of Isaac’s computations.
A moment later the City Solicitor placed the pencil on the table and stood back, apparently pleased with the fruits of his efforts. He fixed his gaze on Tonto’s screen, his mouth set in a grim line.
Isaac looked down at the City Solicitor’s work. The last line of his “solution,” if one could call it a solution, featured only one figure. It looked like this:
=
Equals.
Equals.
“Oh, shit,” said Isaac.
Isaac fumbled at the controls of his headset.
“Umm, Socrates?” he said, swallowing nervously. “I . . . I think we have a problem.”
* * *
36It isn’t possible for an immortal to experience mortal dread. Immortal dread differs from the mortal sort in that it isn’t a fear born of a body’s hope to preserve itself from death — for immortals, preservation from death having been included in the basic specifications. The source of immortal dread is, in fact, the realization that death is not possible. There is no level of pain one can’t survive. You’re forced to endure it all. Fear exists in Detroit because pain hurts. And immortals can feel varieties of pain that mere mortals can’t imagine.
Chapter 17
What follows is the last surviving remnant of the transcript of Detroit University’s forty-eighth symposium on Beforelife, held on the fifth of July, 20,687 AD, two years prior to the publication of the current, commemorative edition. The theme of that year’s conference was “Beforelife — Historical Treatise or Flight of Fancy?” The excerpt is from a panel discussion entitled “On the Significance of Names”:
[TRANSCRIPT BEGINS]
. . . provides yet another example of the author’s ham-fisted treatment of character names. Take Dr. Peericks, whose full name — not revealed until Chapter 18 — is “E.M. Peericks,” a hackneyed play on the word “empirics.” “Empirics” is a highly ambiguous term, referring either to
experts guided by empirical evidence or — to use a colloquial term — quacks. It can mean either “practical expert” or “fraud.” The author’s goal is obviously to leave the reader in a state of bemused uncertainty regarding Peericks’s true nature. And consider Oan, whose name is generally understood as a play on the mystic syllable “Om,” yet also a deviant form of “Ian,” the main character of the narrative. The shift of the first letter from Ian’s “I” to Oan’s “O” is an important clue, I suspect, one that is meant to convey a binary shift from —
DR. M. BLOOM: You’re forgetting that that her name is properly spelled “Joan,” but the J is silent. And also invisible.
DR. S. P. OILER: I’m more interested in “Vera,” the fortune teller from Chapter 24, whose name signifies the medium’s mystic knowledge of the truth of the beforelife, which sets Ian on the path to discovering his true past. The entire encounter with Vera foreshadows Ian’s climactic meeting with Abe, and has led numerous commentators to speculate that Vera somehow serves as Abe’s agent in the story, a sort of approachable intercessor between the humble, earthly Ian and Detroit’s exalted, supremely powerful ruler.
PROFESSOR G. LEIBNIZ: We mustn’t bypass the significance of Ian’s own name, of course. “Ian Brown,” [this portion of the transcript is unreadable] . . . but readers without a technical background may not realize that the motion of any particle suspended in a fluid at temperature T is characterized by a diffusion coefficient D = kBT / b, where kB is Boltzmann’s constant and b represents the linear drag coefficient on the particle in question. The displacement of that particle in any direction after any time t is √2Dt. If we compare this to Ian’s travels in Detroit, we can see that —
DR. OILER: Come now, Gottfried, you’re rambling again. This is a novel, not a dissertation on applied mathematics. The names are not hypotheses to be tested or elements of a formula, but simple signifiers for the basic traits of the character so named.
DR. BLOOM: That brings us to a contentious point, Sherry. We’ve all heard speculation about the significance of the name assigned to Ian’s wife, Penelope. If we follow the author’s general pattern of naming, one would assume that Penelope’s name has some kind of plot-driven significance, demonstrating her relationship to the book’s overarching narrative structure. But I’ve yet to hear a single, plausible argument concerning her name’s meaning. It seems to me that —
PROFESSOR LEIBNIZ: There’s no significance at all. Penelope. Probably just the name of the author’s cat. It’s just an ordinary name, no more significant than yours or mine.
DR. OILER: It seems to me that “Penelope” is, in all probability, similar in nature to Abe, Rhinnick, Tonto, Isaac, or Socrates — all of whom were and are real people, and whose names have been added to the text to give it a sense of history and familiarity, combining the mythical characters of the text with real and recognizable historical figures. Even Rhinnick’s secret name, not revealed until Book 2, blends history with myth, for we know that the name Pel—
DR. BLOOM: Dr. Oiler, you can’t possibly suggest that any part of the book is merely mythical. Even your implication that the text wasn’t written at or near the time of the world-shaping events that it describes is untenable. The author may have assigned pseudonyms to certain characters like Peericks, Oan, and Ian, and he may have fictionalized a few inconsequential events for purely dramatic purposes, but all available historical evidence, including interviews with Feynman, Isaac, and —
PROFESSOR LEIBNIZ: Oh-ho! How convenient of you to invoke statements made by men who have disappeared under peculiar circumstances, men who are no longer available to comment on the contents of the book or to explain their role in the story. You simply must accept that the whole book — virtually every word of it — is nothing more than a metaphor, a simple morality tale, all of which is made obvious by Abe’s admonition to “hide the truth.” Abe’s so-called “truth,” like the story as a whole, is merely an allegory for the struggle between —
DR. OILER: Colleagues, colleagues, I believe that this particular dispute is a matter for tomorrow’s panel. What I wished to convey, Professors Leibniz and Bloom, is that Penelope — regardless of the mythical, factual, or pseudonymous nature of other characters in the narrative — was, in all likelihood, a real citizen of Detroit whose true identity has been lost in the millennia since the manuscript was discovered. It is similar in this sense to the City Solicitor’s name, which, when finally revealed in Chapter 33, is obviously not a literary device, but an acknowledegment of the fact that Detroit’s City Solicitor during that epoch, the infamous “silk-suited man” of Beforelife, was, in actuality, the
[TRANSCRIPT ENDS]
Chapter 18
The next bit takes place in Peericks’s office. Because the room is called “Peericks’s office” you’re probably picturing an official sort of setting — a room with a wide mahogany bureau, a leather chair, a desktop computer, shelves filled with leather-bound books and a few personal items scattered here and there to remind the occupant of the life he leaves behind while he’s at work. Dislodge that picture. This wasn’t that sort of office. But because the rules of narrative convention apply in even the most unconventional settings, the office did adhere to the one, sacred precept common to all offices everywhere: it was a perfect mirror of its occupant’s soul.37 And because this office’s occupant was Dr. Everard Michael Peericks, chief psychiatrist and patient-wrangler of Detroit Mercy Hospice, this particular office resembled a typical medical administrator’s workspace in roughly the same way that a mad alchemist’s lair resembles a pharmacy.
Picture a bookshop: one of those pokey little bookshops you generally find tucked away in unexplored nooks of large cities — the sort of quaint, musty, outmoded emporium that sells books, rather than gourmet coffee blends, stationery, and multimedia experiences.
Now picture the offspring of that bookshop and an advanced neurology lab.
Peericks’s office looked like that. It had a profusion of old textbooks stacked and shelved in no discernable order, three state-of-the-art magnetic resonance helmets, several cabinets filled with yellowing scrolls, a row of wooden filing cabinets threatening to erupt in an explosion of printed patient records, an assortment of life-sized mannequins (the sort with the outside bits removed so as to reveal a colourful model of human plumbing), various models and framed photographs of living, human brains, a selection of microscopes and imaging scanners, and two enormous metal tables adorned with beakers holding colourful, bubbling liquids that emitted unmistakably biological fumes. The walls were plastered with phrenology maps, a framed periodic table38 and an impressive number of degrees, diplomas, and psychiatric awards. There were also things kept in jars, animal skulls, and squirmy bits of organic matter, as well as several glowing datalinks scattered about the room, displaying whatever data Peericks had been viewing just before becoming distracted and leaving the link wherever he’d happened to be at the time.
The one traditional piece of furniture in the office was the desk — one of those ornately carved, heavily drawered numbers featuring at least as many knobs as a Detroit Chamber of Commerce fundraising dinner. The top of the desk was, at this particular juncture, adorned by Fenny the hamster (busily munching on the corner of a monthly expense report) and a pair of slippered feet belonging to a reclining Rhinnick Feynman.
Rhinnick yawned hugely, stretched out his arms, and then got back to thumbing through a manila folder.
The folder was marked “Brown, Ian.” It occurred to Rhinnick that he probably should have been running into the hall, pulling fire alarms or otherwise getting on with the Great Escape, but on the whole he felt that the material he had found in Ian’s file was sufficiently interesting to warrant a slight delay. Anyone else might have felt a pang of guilt while reading a friend’s private psychiatric records. This didn’t apply to Rhinnick. Rhinnick felt that doctor-patient confidentiality didn’t extend to information that was really, real
ly interesting. And in Rhinnick’s experience, pangs of guilt were things that happened to other people.
Rhinnick sucked the end of his pencil before circling a note that Peericks had written shortly after one of Ian’s therapy sessions. It read as follows:
Subject refuses to accept that the woman, “Penny,” also called “Penelope,” cannot possibly exist. She is obviously a mental construct, the idealized archetype of womanhood assembled from memories Ian acquired in the neural flows. Subject has latched onto this idealized image, no doubt, as a result of own deep-seated sense of inferiority. Penelope provides an imaginary, romanticized wife-figure supportive of a fantasy that, somewhere beneath Ian’s unremarkable exterior, lay an extraordinary man able to attract the most desirable of women. Subject keenly resents any suggestion that Penelope is a delusion — a symptom of his BD, a figment of his troubled imagination. His need to cling to this particular construct should be explored in future sessions.
The note was accompanied by some scribbling in the margin, apparently added some weeks later. The scribbles read:
Misdiagnosis. Evidence of m-wipe. Could P be real? Surviving memory fragments? Wife? Insp. D will seek evidence of persons matching P’s description. Key to ascertaining I’s pre-wipe identity.
Had Rhinnick been less engrossed by Ian’s file he might have noticed the slight creaking of the floorboard just outside of Peericks’s office. But he wasn’t, and so he didn’t. Instead, he carried on, oblivious to the figure who now stepped across the threshold.
“Ahem,” said Dr. Peericks.
“Oi!” yipped Rhinnick, toppling backward out of the chair and lobbing Ian’s records toward the ceiling. The contents of the folder rained gently around the desk, several papers eventually coming to rest on Rhinnick’s upper storeys.
“Grrnmph,” said Fenny, who didn’t startle easily.
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