Socrates stepped away from Vera’s workbench and into a shadowed corner. He hitched his chameleon cloak around his shoulders, pressed a button under a panel on his wristguard, and instantly shadowstepped into a darkened corner of Vera’s attic.
It was one thing to let your target hear you coming. It was quite another to arrive without a certain amount of flair. It is an important and popular fact that the universe gives out points for style.
Socrates slid invisibly out of the shadows and took a few silent moments to assess his prey. Vera was sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing away from him, rocking gently on her backside. She was surrounded by the scattered detritus of her disassembled IPT, its control board covered in scorch marks and a tangle of burnt wires.
There was a vacant hamster wheel by her right foot.
She sat staring toward the attic window, muttering to herself in almost-silent whispers. A sunbeam shone through the window, bathing Vera in warmth and light.
Never having been face-to-face (or, for that matter, face-to-rear) with a medium, Socrates was unfamiliar with the symptoms of television-in-progress. As a result, he couldn’t have known that Vera’s vacant stare, her silent muttering, her apparent lack of worry about the assassin in her shop were all indications that Vera was otherwise occupied — in an italicized and otherworldy sense. He couldn’t have known her mind was elsewhere.
Had Socrates been able to take a peek into Vera’s brain, he’d have learned that she’d been absorbed by her TV for the last ten minutes. And he’d have seen that in that time, her TV had finally lived up to its full potential.
It had, at long last, shown Vera the truth. The whole truth. It hadn’t fed her vague impressions, random images, or misleading half-revelations.
It had become, in a manner of speaking, Reality TV.
It’s probably best that Socrates didn’t know this, because it turns out that today’s TV listings had featured a miniseries on Socrates’ True Nature, and Vera had seen it all. And so she understood the assassin far more thoroughly than he understood himself.
As a philosophically minded man, Socrates would have taken this hard.
But as has already been pointed out, Socrates knew none of this. The principal fact on Socrates’ mind was that Vera — in her current, trance-like state — presented an easy target. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Socrates let his guard down at this juncture, because Socrates never did. But it would be fair to say that the tightly coiled spring that was the Socratic nervous system eased marginally to the left on whatever cosmic scale measures the readiness of assassins, and that the active assessment of vulnerable points on available targets and potential sources of danger migrated from the forefront of Socrates’ mind into the background of his not-quite-subconscious, where such thoughts generally resided.
Socrates shimmered in wraith-like silence toward Vera.
He withdrew a syringe from his bandolier. He examined it critically.
He carefully inserted its business end into Vera’s arm.
She didn’t flinch.
Had Khuufru — author of scores of books including Khuufru’s Eternal Almanac, Khuufru’s Big Book of Modern Philosophy, and Khuufru’s Guide to Natural Spectacles and Wilderness Entertainments (875th edition) — been present to record this interaction, he would have noted it as history’s quietest and least exasperating example of the Socratic Method.
Socrates withdrew the syringe and repositioned himself to face Vera. He switched off his chameleon cloak and shimmered into view.
Still no reaction from the medium.
Socrates frowned. In his experience, people generally showed a healthy amount of negativity when stabbed unexpectedly with a needle.
Vera bore it philosophically, as it were.
She continued rocking back and forth, staring vacantly out the window for the space of several heartbeats, before shaking her head, crinkling her brow, and looking down at the droplet of blood forming where the needle had pricked her.
When she finally spoke, she said, “Oh.”
After a moment’s reflection, she added a surprisingly detached “Shit,” for good measure.52
“It’s all right,” said Socrates, pleasantly, “it won’t be long.” All things being equal, his voice probably would have been a good deal more comforting had it not come from a hooded, armed man clad in black body armour and equipped with a portable arsenal of unfriendly-looking devices.
A silvery tear was tracing a path down Vera’s cheek.
“Surely you saw this coming,” said Socrates, tilting his head to one side.
“Of course I did,” said Vera, who sniffled and drew a deep, quavering breath. “It’s just bad timing. I . . . I’ve seen so much. Just now, actually. And it all finally makes sense. Abe, Detroit, Ian . . . it’s all . . . so clear. I never realized . . . And now . . .” She straightened her shoulders and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. “What’s done is done,” she added, in a louder, steadier voice. “It’s a piss-off, though. I really like this personality. I was getting attached to it.”
Socrates stood back and waited for his Stygian toxin to take effect. Right about now, Socrates knew, Vera’s memories would begin to dissolve, crumbling at the edges first, and then curling in on themselves like smouldering paper. It wouldn’t be long until entire pages of Vera’s mental scrapbook crumbled to ash.
Vera looked up at Socrates, her brow a concertina of concentration. She bit her lip. “There’s . . . there’s something I was supposed to do,” she said. “When I saw you. I . . . something . . . important.”
Vera ran a hand through her hair. “I was supposed to do something,” she repeated.
“Not to worry,” said Socrates, squatting down and smiling companionably. “It was a small dose. I’d say you have, oh, two or three minutes before the end. Plenty of time for us to chat. Incidentally,” he added brightly, “what happened to your friends?”
It is a little-known fact — so little-known, in fact, that only Socrates, Isaac, and the City Solicitor know it — that one potentially useful side effect of Socrates’ Stygian toxin is that, when administered in carefully calibrated doses, it can make its victims babble. Rather than wiping the victim’s mind in the wink of an eye, as the toxin generally did when administered at full strength or through one of Socrates’ “extra special” bullets, small doses of Stygian toxin ate away at the subject’s memory gradually. This caused babbling: a rambling recitation of assorted thoughts and feelings as the victim struggled to hold on to the last few strands of self that made up — for lack of a better phrase — the victim’s soul. For reasons that he’d long ago forgotten, Socrates called these pre-wipe ramblings Apologia. And he knew that Apologia could be useful. Ask the victim the right questions, pose them in the right order, and the victim could be led to recount specific memories — even memories that the victim would have preferred to keep to herself.
And Socrates, as you might have guessed, was very good at asking questions.
“Tell me,” he said, getting straight to the point, “where did Ian and Tonto go?”
Vera mumbled a barely audible reply.
“Please speak up,” said Socrates. “This is important.”
“I . . . I stayed behind,” she said.
“Very noble of you,” said Socrates. “But where did the others —”
“I waited . . . I . . . I knew you were coming, but I waited . . . you were coming for me . . . I . . . I . . . for Ian . . . I stayed behind. I knew what was coming, but I waited.”
She shook her head sharply, and — because the mind can slip into parallel dimensions and make surprising connections in the moments just before it waves goodbye — she muttered something Socrates heard as “guest enemy.”
“Pardon me?” said Socrates, who pre-dated that particular reference.
Vera frowned and waved off the interruption.
“We . . . we built . . . something,” she said. “I knew you were coming, so we built it. And I waited.”
Socrates’ gaze took in the debris lying scattered around the attic. “Very creditable,” he said. “You built an IPT. Not easily done. And your friends used it to leave. But tell me, Vera, were did it send them?”
“N-no,” said Vera, screwing up her face with the effort of holding on to her last, fleeting moments as herself. “No . . . not the IPT. We built a bomb.”
Ah. That.
“Yes, I noticed,” said Socrates. “But getting back to your friends —”
“Ian helped me.”
“Very kind of him. But it’s deactivated, now. Where did Ian go after he helped you build the bomb?”
Vera waved him off again, as though shooing away a gadfly. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, her brow writhing in concentration. “Ian helped me with the bomb. He . . . he didn’t know what he was doing, but he helped me. Passed . . . passed me tools. Held some wires. He helped me.”
“And then he went away,” said Socrates, who’d never let a dead horse escape a beating. “Let’s talk about where he went.”
“She was with him.”
“Yes, yes, Tonto was with him. And they’re still together now. But where have they gone?”
Vera coughed and wiped a fleck of saliva from her lip. She did a few repetitions of the squinting, staring, eye-bulging exercise that people generally do in front of a mirror when they’re preparing to fake sobriety.
It seemed to help. “You haven’t figured it out,” said Vera, in a slightly stronger voice. “You still don’t get it.”
Socrates sighed. This wasn’t going as well as planned.
“I am merely a humble public servant,” he said, slipping into a pattern of dialogue that he’d always found comforting. “I am sure that I know nothing of the sophisticated ways of seers and appliance repairpersons. Pray, illuminate me. What is it that I fail to understand?”
“She was with him,” said Vera. “When we built it . . . built the bomb. Watching over him. Making sure that everything . . . worked. She changed The Rules. Like Abe. You can’t . . . you can’t deactivate —”
“Excuse me?” said Socrates.
It was at this point that Vera probably should have said something along the lines of “See you in hell,” “Eat this,” or “Hasta la vista, baby.” She didn’t, of course. People in Detroit have no conception of hell, and immortality tends to soften the market for action heroes and their unique brand of dialogue. As a result, Vera simply slipped her hand into a pocket and withdrew a detonator.
Someone cursed.
There was a brief sensation of speed.
Memories disappeared like frost from a windshield. Decades vanished in the space between tick and tock.
Going . . . gone.
There was sight, sound, and smell. There was touch. They were . . . new.
The woman who had once thought of herself as Vera wondered where she was, and why the place was such a mess. But most of all she wondered who she was, and why she was holding a small object that featured a big red button.
Someone had gone to the trouble of writing Press me on it.
The woman who had once thought of herself as Vera wondered, rather briefly, where she’d learned how to read. Then she pressed the big red button.
It was at this moment that property values in the neighbourhood dropped sharply, which is slightly ironic because so much of that property was rising. On a massive, expanding fireball. And raining down on neighbouring districts.
The fireball accomplished in three minutes what the Committee for Urban Renewal and Gentrification had been working toward for decades — the relocation of two city blocks’ worth of Undesirable Elements from the downtown core to less centralized regions. The aforementioned Undesirable Elements comprised the sort of poorly regarded citizenry one might label “denizens,” or possibly “huddled masses,” together with their various homes, shops, vehicles, and other worldly (or, given the context, otherworldly) possessions. Their relocation was achieved in what you’d call a socialist fashion: they were now spread out evenly across much of Central Detroit in the form of a thin, particulate film.
This resulted in exactly zero casualties. This was Detroit, after all, and the act of being blown into a particle-thin paste cannot stand in the way of a universal law like immortality. But as Vera had predicted — back when she had still thought of herself as Vera — regeneration would take ages. She had known that Ian needed only a few short hours to finish his quest — to learn The Rules, to discover The Truth, and to find Penelope.
In a few hours, it would be over.
The explosion wouldn’t stop Socrates forever. Nothing could. But it would keep him away from Ian.
It really would.
It probably would.
Vera — back when she’d still thought of herself as Vera — had budgeted for the fact that, according to what she’d learned through her TV, Socrates could regenerate far more rapidly than any being she’d ever encountered. Even so, she had been certain that even Socrates couldn’t recover from an explosion of this magnitude quickly enough to interfere with Ian’s quest.
Reasonably certain, at least.
Call it “fairly certain.”
Somewhat certain, anyway.
But at least she’d never know if she’d been wrong.
* * *
51Or, more optimistically, the readers’.
52For those listening to the audio version, the word “shit” was in quotation marks, indicating that it was a word said by Vera. These things can be important.
Chapter 32
It is a matter of narrative convention that any jovial, swarthy, bearded man of generous waistline and appetite will belch hugely after downing a pint of beer. As the fellow who’d practically codified the idea of conventions, Hammurabi wasn’t one to buck tradition.
He downed his pint and belched hugely. He dribbled beer foam into his beard, in deference to ancient stereotypes.
Abe passed him another pint.
The two were reclining comfortably on a pair of wooden deck chairs that were pointed Due Beach, separated by a foldable wooden table topped with seven empty beer cans and a sun-warmed puddle of spillage. There was a red plastic cooler beside Abe’s chair, concealing upwards of a dozen thoroughly chilled reinforcements.
This was the beach to end all beaches. It featured miles of pristine sand, a seemingly endless white-capped sea, and a cloudless blue sky. It had palm trees. It had coconuts and pineapples in abundance. It was populated by a few, scattered seabirds — the sort polite enough to add a bit of atmosphere to the scene while keeping all evidence of their digestive processes to themselves.
This was the sort of beach that instantly evoked ukuleles, hula dancers, luaus, spherical men wearing polyester floral shirts, and heavily sweetened drinks featuring pink paper umbrellas. Unless you happen to be an insurance broker, in which case the scene would have brought to mind shark bites, tsunamis, personal watercraft collisions, volcanic eruptions, and the annual outbreak of gonorrhea commonly known as “spring break.”
Abe came here often. It helped him think.
Ham emptied a beer can into a big, quaffy stein before taking what only a frat boy or a Viking might call a sip.
It is a well-known and frequently cited fact that one of the keys to Abe’s popularity was that, in addition to being a kind, munificent, powerful, and level-headed ruler, Abe had invented beer. And while this isn’t the origin myth you’ll read in popular histories, this is because the popular histories you’ve been reading were published in the beforelife, and therefore highly unreliable when it comes to anything tracing its true origin to Detroit.
Abe invented beer in the year 8,523. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a byproduct of an early attempt to make a nouris
hing barley soup. Abe had known exactly what he’d set out to invent, and it had worked. Perfectly.
Abe created beer. Fiat Lager. And Abe saw that it was good.53
Abe had even called it “beer.” And because the boundary between Detroit and the beforelife is, in certain circumstances, more permeable than even Abe imagines, Abe’s invention had leaked into the beforelife thousands of years ago — possibly through a haunting gone awry or an unusual reincarnation. This was a boon to the beforelife. It gave Germans something fun to do in October, and it helped even the unlikeliest people find mates.
Hammurabi belched again.
“What I can’t figure out,” said Abe, thumbing his way through a dog-eared copy of the Omega Missive, “is who actually wrote this.” He flipped through a few more pages. “Some of your monks say it was a god.”
That had come as a surprise. The people of Detroit weren’t big on religion. They hadn’t taken to the idea of any deity who might listen to their nightly mumbling, or maybe enjoy being sung at once a week, or possibly help the right sports team win important matches. The difficulty was that people in Detroit were immortal. This not only dampened the market for divine intervention, but also meant that people in Detroit had no afterlife — which, when you think about it, is the only really reliable place to hide your god.
“Bah!” said Hammurabi. “There’s nothing special about this book, O Keeper of Kegs. It’s merely a book. Pop psychology. Inane and sanctimonious drivel. Nothing sinister at all, O Pustulant Secretion,” he concluded, in that charming way of his.
“There’s a lot in here about wish fulfillment and manifesting your desires,” said Abe, sliding his index finger down a particularly troubling column of text. It had references to Vision Boards and “empowered visualization.”
“And page ninety-two contains advice on . . . shall we say . . . bedroom matters,” said Ham, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.
“Do not worry yourself, O Fretful One,” Ham added, shaking the ice from a can of Abe’s Extra Strong. “They are just words. How harmful can this book be? It is inoffensive tripe, I tell you. Worthless drivel that has caught the imagination of a few impressionable acolytes. They’ll have forgotten it next month — or whenever the next passing fancy presents itself. Just leave them to me, Old One. I’ll have them cured of it in no time.”
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