She looked as though some junior magazine editor had accidentally sent the featured model for Gentlemen’s Nubile Review to the cover shoot for Mercenaries Weekly.
She straightened up and spit out a bullet. It rolled across the workshop floor.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, dropping the weapons and grimly removing a final taser prong from her shoulder.
“We have to get out of here now. It isn’t safe.”
Chapter 29
Isaac’s desk was littered with papers.
“Littered” is the key word. On most days, Isaac’s desk was so scrupulously tidy that any passing neo-Freudians would have instantly diagnosed its owner with a rich stew of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anal retention, tax-accountant-ism, and hints of latent germanity. It was a neat desk. It was an organized desk. It was the sort of desk that any tree would gladly die to be made into.
That’s how it usually looked, at least. Right now it was downright messy. It had been that way for days, ever since Isaac had secretly stopped taking the little blue pills. Now, instead of a smartly stacked datalink and notepad, or a series of pens aligned in perfect military formation, the desk was piled high with crumpled wads of paper, the cast-off remnants of at least five dissected pens, a tattered notebook covered in doodles, a dozen or so tortured paper clips, four ink-splotched napkins, and two half-drunk mugs of room-temperature coffee.
And because it is a matter of literary convention that every desk, like every office, reflects its owner’s soul, it stands to reason that something similar had happened in Isaac’s brain.
While he’d been taking his blue pills, Isaac had seen the world in tidy rows of alphanumeric characters and mathematical symbols: neat equations that, when lined up just so, helped him see the Way Things Were. Since he’d stop taking the pills — the pills that blocked ambition — Isaac had stopped seeing the world that way. Instead of a series of rank-ordered, marching regiments of mathematical figures, Isaac’s world had become a swirling, tie-dyed mess of abstract thoughts — thoughts that congealed into the fundamentally profound sort of questions that only preschoolers dare ask.
Last week, while he had still been taking the pills, Isaac had written a mildly pedantic but insightful theoretical treatise on the interplay of interstellar forces. Today, without the pills, he wondered about the smell of blue, the weight of dignity, and the colour of grammar. He’d just finished sketching an engine that could propel a rocketship at the speed of dark. He’d written the world’s funniest joke.47 He’d divided by zero. He’d seen the point of haiku. He had followed the yellow brick road and swum in seas of irrationality. He’d seen the double rainbow, squared the circle, and rhymed with orange. He’d tasted the pure, fiery moonshine of unconstrained creative thought.
It tasted alive.
The changes taking place inside Isaac’s brain had given rise to practical changes, too. Before Isaac had freed his mind, before he’d stopped taking the pills that reined in thought by stopping Isaac from aspiring to greater things, it had been Isaac’s settled practice to write his notes in a consistent, plodding format. They’d begin with a hypothesis, proceed with a proposed method of testing that hypothesis, and compare the results of tests and observations with his predictions.
This was rational. It had worked.
It had worked beautifully, in fact. By sticking resolutely to this method, Isaac had invented IPTs, conceived of flexion filing, designed boson whips, and formulated calorie-free ice cream that tasted better than the real thing. He’d married quantum mechanics and relativity, solved the energy crisis, eliminated halitosis, and determined how to stop telemarketers from calling during dinner. All of this he’d done by following his mantra: hypothesize, test, observe, conclude. It’s how he’d structured all of his scientific work. It’s how Isaac’s brain was wired.
The notes that littered Isaac’s desk didn’t follow the usual pattern. They didn’t start with the word “hypothesis,” for one thing. They started with a different word.
They started with Imagine.
Imagine if we could bend time, began the first, quickly trailing off into a dizzying series of equations. Imagine if we could see the ancient past, began another, accompanied by a sketch that looked like a nuclear-powered monocle. Imagine stepping between quantum realities to see what life would be like had you made different choices. This one finished with an inkblot from an exploded blue pen.
Imagine an end to violence, hunger, and struggle, read another. Imagine there’s no Detroit, no Abe, no City Solicitor. It’s not difficult if you expend an appropriate quantum of effort in the attempt.48
One of his notes stood out from the others. Where the rest of his scribblings were brief, incomplete, crumpled, and cast aside at whichever point Isaac’s newly ignited ambition had driven him off in a new direction, this particular memorandum carried on for several pages. It started out like this:
Imagine that the beforelife is real.
The thought had occupied Isaac’s mind for most of the previous night. It had kept him awake for hours and had woven its way into fitful dreams. The note carried on with a series of unanswered questions and conjectures:
Imagine a beforelife — a limited, bounded life in which human beings are mortal in the way of lesser creatures. Would inhabitants of the beforelife know of Detroit? Would they doubt our existence, as we doubt theirs? Would their vision of Detroit be accurate? Would they look forward to coming here — to their “afterlife,” so to speak? Would they remember their beforelife when they arrived?
Can one prove that the beforelife doesn’t exist? Is the evidence we perceive more consistent with a beforelife, or with the currently held (and hitherto unquestioned) belief that human life originates in the Styx?
This was followed by the sorts of doodles you might make while talking absent-mindedly on the phone, provided only that you have a deep understanding of quantum mechanics and biochemistry.
Page three of the same note featured a block of text that had been circled and highlighted in yellow marker:
Imagine that the Omega Missive is true. Why does it have two ages? From whence does it come? Might it be a truthful account of someone’s memory of the beforelife? What of its references to “manifesting one’s wishes”? Might the beforelife be a place where one can manifest one’s wishes by merely “envisioning one’s desires”? Can the reality of the beforelife truly bend through an act of will?
The note was unfinished.
Isaac paced the length of his alcove in the City Solicitor’s office, obsessing about the Omega Missive and its possible connection to the beforelife. He was sure that the connection was important. He was sure that it had something to do with the “end times” predictions — the ones associated with “The One Foretold” — that so troubled the City Solicitor. And he was fairly sure that all would become clear if he could penetrate the secrets of the OM.
Whistling, parroty snores issued from Cyril’s cage as Isaac paced back and forth across the room. Apart from the bird and his own tortured thoughts of the OM, he was alone.
He’d made some progress in the last twenty-four hours. He’d completed his analysis of the DNA traces he’d recovered from the Missive. At least a dozen different people had touched its pages.
One was Oan.
Why would Detroit Mercy’s resident “caring nurturer” have access to a book that carried secrets of the beforelife? Wasn’t it Oan’s job to help her patients free themselves from beforelife delusions? Wasn’t she in the business of denying death-before-life? Surely she didn’t believe in the beforelife.
On the other hand, she did write that “Sharing Room curriculum,” a curriculum that, Isaac reflected, shared a good deal of language in common with the OM. All of those references to Vision Boards and manifesting wishes, all of the notes about the power of visualization, and the so-called Laws of Attraction — it all appeared in both sou
rces. Isaac had written it off as gibberish while he had still been taking his pills. But now . . . who could say?
Oan might be important, Isaac decided. He’d have to have Socrates pay her a visit.
Isaac continued pacing the room. Who created the OM? Did other copies exist? Did its authors recall the beforelife, or — now here was an interesting thought — could they see into it? Was communication with the beforelife possible? Could the boundary between before- and afterlife be penetrated in both directions? This would call for further reflection.
Isaac did an about-face and headed back toward his desk, working his brain around the general shape of equations that could account for death-before-life.
One by one they started shimmering into view. Figures danced behind Isaac’s eyes. He could almost make them out, see their contours, shape, and structure. Another moment of concentration and he’d have them. Just another moment and —
“Your monitor is flashing,” said a voice. It was a familiar voice. An icy, spine-tingling, goosebump-summoning sort of voice. It was a voice that would have been comfortable using the word “exquisite” next to the word “agony.”
Isaac managed a three-foot high jump, which is hard to do from a stationary start. A mighty edifice of equations crashed on the marble floor and shattered.
The City Solicitor was standing in the doorway, hands clasped tightly behind his back. He didn’t look angry. He never did. He didn’t even look concerned. He had a slightly crooked smile that suggested he was toying with an idea he found amusing. But something around his eyes hinted that, while he might find it amusing, the person on the receiving end of whatever he had imagined probably wouldn’t.
“My . . . my apologies, Your Grace,” stammered Isaac, sweat mounting his brow. “I was . . . I was collating data on the probable outcome of future contact between Socrates and Choudhury, accounting for penetrable wavefronts on the order of —”
“Your monitor is still flashing,” said the City Solicitor. He would have hissed it, but it didn’t have enough esses.
Isaac’s Adam’s apple leapt into his head, ricocheted around the interior of his skull, and returned to Position One. “Right, right, yes, of course,” said Isaac, disentangling his uvula from his tongue. “The monitors. Yes.”
There were, in fact, three monitors mounted on the wall directly across from Isaac’s desk, each one streaming strings of alphanumeric characters that blurred across the screen with eye-watering speed. One had to assume that the figures meant something to Isaac, which they did. They carried data about the Detroit Police Department’s search for Tonto, Ian, Rhinnick, Zeus, and Nappy.
Isaac had been multitasking. He’d been monitoring the screens while working on the beforelife problem. During the last two hours, though, as his obsession with the beforelife and the OM had rolled up its sleeves and really gotten down to business, the task of monitoring his screens had slipped his mind. That was an utterly new experience. Isaac’s mind was not a slippery place.
He refocused his attention. He looked at monitor three. Like monitors one and two it was displaying a constant stream of encrypted data. Unlike monitors one and two, though, monitor three’s digital border was flashing a seizure-prompting pattern of alternating blue and white.
It ought to have been impossible to miss.
The City Solicitor fixed Isaac with a serpentine gaze, which sent Isaac scurrying to a control console located beneath the screens.
He donned a headset and stared at monitor three. Figures streamed across the screen. Isaac’s eyes darted over them, absorbing data at a pace that would have made most computer processors throw in the towel and start updating their CVs.
“Abe’s drawers!” gasped Isaac. “They’ve found her!”
He flipped a pair of switches on the console.
The City Solicitor clasped his hands behind his back, rocked on his heels, and placidly watched the unfolding spectacle. He looked for all the world like a man with no more than a vague, passing interest in whatever it was that Isaac might be doing. No one peeking into the office could have guessed what he was thinking. They almost certainly wouldn’t have guessed that he was surprised. And even if they had, through some miracle of astute observation, managed to notice any subtle signs of surprise, they couldn’t possibly have guessed what it was the City Solicitor found surprising.
They might have guessed that he was surprised at the current state of Isaac’s desk. They might have guessed that he was surprised that Isaac had missed the flashing border of monitor three. They certainly wouldn’t have guessed the truth.
What really surprised the City Solicitor was this: after only three days of the Solicitor secretly palming Isaac’s pills and replacing them with useless, blue placebos, Isaac had stopped taking the pills altogether. The City Solicitor had expected that to take at least a week. And after only a few more days without the pills, Isaac had already extended himself in the direction that the Solicitor planned. He would penetrate the secrets of the OM. He would make the mental leaps required to reveal the hidden truths.
Our increasingly hypothetical observer might have noticed the crooked smile. And had the observer been looking very, very closely, he might have noticed the City Solicitor glancing down at the notes that littered Isaac’s desk.
Isaac certainly didn’t notice. He was too busy activating his voicelink while monitoring the characters that danced across his screen.
“Mobile 1,” said Isaac, into his headset. “This is Command. DPD units have converged on target alpha. The anomaly has engaged them. Uploading co-ordinates now. Initiate order P47. Commence retrieval operations. Acquire target alpha with memory intact. Wipe companions.”
He flipped a series of switches on the console. Monitor three now displayed an exterior view of Vera’s shop.
“Very good,” said the Solicitor. “Very good indeed. I shall expect your full report by nightfall.”
He turned on his heel and stalked swiftly out of the room. This was shaping up to be an excellent week.
* * *
47The punchline to which was “Fine, but what am I supposed to do with a rooster?”
48Isaac had never been good with lyrics.
Chapter 30
“What I mean to say,” said Rhinnick, waggling an accusatory finger in the region of Vera’s nose, “is that I fail to see how you didn’t see this coming. That is to say, in the ordinary course one cuts a medium a certain amount of slack. Didn’t win the monthly lottery, one might ask in tolerant tone, think nothing of it. I’m sure your mind was occupied with matters of greater import. Didn’t foresee the hole you fell in? Perfectly understandable, one says, with an air of generous understanding. These things happen. But when dealing with events of pressing cosmological moment, as I believe the expression is — let us say, by way of example, the siege of one’s own shop by an absolute legion of Detroit’s official constabulary — one takes a different view. One expects a bit of foresight. Give trivial matters a miss, I mean to say, but try to see the Big Ones coming.”
“Don’t start with me,” said Vera.
“But my dear Medium,” said Rhinnick, “laying aside your Plum error, and understanding that your television needn’t carry details of what I’ll be having for lunch next Thursday, one can still insist on a bit of —”
“Enough,” said Vera, exasperated. “I already told you that I can’t just —”
“Less talk, more sorting,” said Tonto, who’d apparently been elected Party Leader. She was sorting through a heap of mechanical debris and extracting anything that she thought might come in handy. Ian, Zeus, and Nappy were doing much the same thing, scouring shelves around the shop with a view to filling Tonto’s requests.
“Pick up the pace,” she called over her shoulder. “Grab radios, walkie-talkies, voicelink receivers — anything that we can use to speak to each other or pick up police transmissions
.”
“Right ho,” said Rhinnick, heading toward the shelves.
“Nappy, Zeus: you’re on weapons detail. Pack up the guns I took and see if you can find anything else that might be useful. Look for ammo. Other weapons. Anything that looks like it could hurt somebody. Got it?”
“D’accord!” said Nappy, saluting smartly and diving into another pile.
“Take whatever you need,” said Vera, standing at Tonto’s rear. “This is important. Really important. Whatever happens, you have to get Ian away from here.”
“You think?” said Tonto, who might have rolled her eyes but for the fact that she was presently sighting down a Newton 3F anti-personnel system,49 which was essentially a fully automatic pistol that fired miniaturized, high-impact implosives.50 “Where’d you pick this up?” she asked.
“Listen,” said Vera, waving off the question. “We’re dealing with more than just the police. It’s something I saw earlier — something I didn’t understand until now. I think . . . I think that Socrates is coming. He’s on his way. I think he knows you’re here.”
There would have been a stunned silence, but Tonto wasn’t in the mood. She rounded on Vera.
“And you’re bringing this up now?” she said. “Do you have any idea how dangerous he is? Do you know what happened last time I met him?” She turned to shout at the room at large. “Pick up the pace, people! Things just got a lot more dangerous.”
Given the right set of circumstances, even the nicest people can slip into standard-issue action movie vernacular.
“I’m sorry,” said Vera. “I mean, all I saw was an image of a man in black coming into the shop. I saw it weeks ago. But I thought it was far into the future. I didn’t think it had anything to do with Ian. The shop looked older. Beaten up. Like it needed a lot of repair. But now —” she trailed off and gestured toward the cracked, broken, and bullet-shredded walls.
Beforelife Page 32