No ... she either had to do it, or go back up to Room 303, flush the MemCard down the toilet, hastily repack her Vittorio suitcase, toss the HCS60 into the garbage at the bottom of the pool in passing, slink back home to Pewter Palisades and selectively confess to Kyle and the doctors.
“Show me what to do,” she prayed.
A corporate jet screeched past overhead, driving the rats up out of the pool and frantically off into their bunkers. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the revelation that had started all this. It was right there ... right on the tip of her mind, but the words wouldn’t come. Then they came.
“Everything, as it is, is perfect.”
But everything as it was was not perfect. Everything as it was was wrong. This was wrong. It felt so ... wrong. She could feel its wrongness deep in her body. It was something that had always been there ... this sense, or awareness, or whatever it was. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise, a game, or some essentially harmless fantasy (like her fantasy about the men in goat masks). They wanted her to get up and actually do this. They wanted her to actually kill her baby. Which was wrong, and bad, and sick, and evil, in some axiomatic, a priori way, which she couldn’t explain but just knew was true, and could feel in every fiber of her being.
Killing other creatures was wrong. Violence was wrong. It accomplished nothing ... and yet what else had brought about all that progress, and enabled us to crawl up out of the slime and eventually (i.e., after two thousand centuries of killing, torturing, and raping each other) establish a peaceful and prosperous society? Hadn’t violence accomplished that? Was that also wrong? No ... it wasn’t. Or yes, it was, but that was before, before we discovered Anti-Social Disease, so that didn’t count, but now it did, now that there weren’t any foreign enemies, or despotic regimes to be violently deposed, and that the last remaining threat to peace was not the Terrorists, or not per se, but rather, the Anti-Social Disease that distorted their thoughts and made them Terrorists, which was also the same Anti-Social Disease that everyone had had for thousands of years while they’d made all that revolutionary progress and defeated all those foreign enemies and ...
Valentina couldn’t keep it all straight.
Sometimes back on the dock on the pond (in another body that no longer existed, so for all intents and purposes was dead, but whose memories she had inside her brain) she had dreamed, or possibly just imagined, that she, and her mother and father inside “discussing” her mother’s latest symptoms, and the neighbors viewing their streams of Content, and the Security guards at the entrance gate, and her friends at Playhouse Community Day School, and her teachers, and doctors, and everyone else, were all just figures in an endless dream ... a dream the One Who Was Many was dreaming, and had always been dreaming, and would always be dreaming, and which had never begun, and would never end. The One Who Was Many was not the dreamer, or not like she was when she dreamed (which was more or less like watching an Immersion, because even though you were in the Immersion, part of you wasn’t, and was only watching, and knew that it was only watching, and it was like the part of you in the dream that was going to wake and remember the dream ... ), because the One Who Was Many was the dream, from which there was no one (no dreamer) to wake.
Lying out there in the stifling heat with the bugs and the flickering lights in the silence, except for the hum of the HVAC units (because you couldn’t hear anything from inside the houses, and the fountain out in the middle of the pond, which Shaniqua Goldin and Carly Gomez thought was simply a decorative feature, but was actually to keep the water moving, automatically switched off at night), this other Valentina, who no longer existed (or who only existed inside the mind of the Valentina who now existed), lying out there with her whole life ahead of her, pinned by the curvature of physical spacetime to the surface of a rock that was orbiting one of the countless suns that were out there somewhere, burning out, for no real reason, lying out there, supine, on the lounger, facing up or out at what her teacher claimed was like a giant ice cream cone that was made of time (and that’s how it looked in the pictures he showed them, like a cone, or a tube, inside of nothing), little Valentina, lying out there, waiting for her father to appear on the patio and rap on the glass with his first two knuckles, which he would do when they had finished “discussing,” Valentina, this earlier version, who had replaced a series of earlier versions who had disappeared and so were technically dead, and who was already taking 20 milligrams of Zanoflaxithorinol daily (she was probably six or seven at the time), knew, or believed, or at least suspected (not that she could have explained it back then), that what she was learning at the Playhouse Day School in an ostensibly meticulously-structured manner, and was otherwise soaking up like a sponge in the course of just being an exceptionally intelligent and inquisitive child at a formative age, and was being bombarded on a more or less moment by moment basis on her Viewer with (but not at that particular moment, because she had left it inside when she went outside to lie on the dock in the heat with the insects), was not as much knowledge, or facts, or whatever (this stuff she was learning, or was being spoon fed), as it was an attempt to extract her from, or otherwise forcibly pry her out of, the dream the One Who Was Many was dreaming (i.e., the aforementioned beginningless, endless dream) and imprison her within some other dream (which was like an almost identical copy or simulation of the aforementioned dream) where something was always wrong with something, and everyone was always scared and confused and sleep deprived and gritting their teeth (though they did their best to pretend they weren’t), as if they were somehow strangers there (in the only place there was to be), as if they weren’t all perfect parts of the one and only thing there was (which wasn’t bound or contained by anything ... especially not some endless nothing), and she didn’t understand that, not one bit.
This was how her thoughts were flowing poolside now at the Skyline Motor Lodge, memories flowing along the cognitive streams of the infinite lines of flight that were spreading like a web of hairline fractures across the seamless plane of the world they had coated her spirit, her energy, with, as if she’d been dipped in a vat of translucent liquid plastic, which had frozen and cracked ... and what she was was seeping out of it. What she was was not what she was. She wasn’t just a middle-aged Variant-Positive who colored the streaks of gray in her hair and whose breasts were starting to sag a little ... or OK, more than just a little, whose genetically-inherited medical condition was causing her to blow her unconscious terror of bearing and raising a brood of children she had never even wanted in the first place (which would claim like thirty years of her life, and most of what was left of her sanity, and would leave her fat and loose and dumb and probably depressed to the point of suicide) up into some phantasmagoria involving fictive Terrorist networks and some nebulous quasi-demiurgic force, when actually all that was happening here was that she didn’t really want to have this baby ...
No ... this was not what this was. Why was she even thinking it was? All that was just the film, or glaze, or imperceptible, immaterial membrane the child on the lounger on the dock in the dark (if Valentina had actually done that, and hadn’t just made the whole thing up) got sealed inside of and couldn’t get out ... which was all she had ever really wanted, ever.
The problem was, there was no out. The world was one. It was all one place. There were many places inside that place, but there wasn’t any place outside that place. Or anywhere to hide within that place. Anything that happened to anyone anywhere was immediately known by everyone everywhere. Everything was connected to everything. It was all one seamless inescapable network. And it wasn’t just here on what was left of the planet. There wasn’t even anywhere to go in space. They had probed, sampled, mapped, and modeled, and assigned little correlated numbers to, every last fraction of every second of every light-year of Minkowskian spacetime extending backwards in a conelike pattern to the vanishing point of that original nothing. It was like they were trying to sketch out a prison with the exact dimensions of the ph
ysical universe. Or maybe that was just how it looked through the film (or imperceptible immaterial membrane) that was stretched like a layer of skin around her (whichever one of her she was), which she needed to tear, or rupture, or puncture (her intuition, or something, told her), because possibly where she really was (i.e., the Valentina she really was, not the one who lived in her forehead and that was still, despite all the trials she had been through, trying to make sense of the circuitous logic that every Normal was conditioned to employ) was floating right there in the middle of it all (that dream she was, or was in, or was dreaming, and that knowledge she had prayed for but had never received, because maybe you didn’t receive this knowledge, because you started out with it all inside you (and also somehow inside of it), but they wrapped you up from the day you were born in so many layers of immaterial membrane that you looked out through this film (or lens) at what passed for facts and truth and the world and what was real and common sense (which actually made no sense at all, but you never had time to think about it) ... but sometimes, if let’s say you screwed up your meds, or suffered some kind of ischemic incident, you got this infinitesimal glimpse of it ... the fleetingest glimpse, which you couldn’t hold onto ... of what it was like when you knew all that, in some it went without saying wordless way, before they turned you into this unique fucking godforsaken individual who was trapped in the core of a big glass onion) ... and so maybe what she needed to do at this juncture (if she really wanted out of all this) was snake a pointy metal object up into her uterine canal and stab it into her amniotic sac with a force sufficient to rupture same.
That would probably do it, she figured. One good jab, to start the process ... then a few (or possibly several) hours of excruciating pain, and it would all be over. She tried to imagine actually doing it. The cramps. The tissue squirting out of her. The blood. The sweat was pouring off her. She was wearing the Gina Lewinsky ensemble that she’d bought last summer and that was totally ruined. The voice on the tape in her head was shouting orders at her that she couldn’t make out. The plastic straps of the lounger felt like metal blades cutting into her back. She remembered the grainy archival Content they showed you in school about the horrible past when women routinely murdered their babies, not for legitimate medical reasons (which of course that still occurred sometimes), but because their disease had rendered them void of any shred of human empathy. The Content they showed consisted of close-ups of sickening surgically dismembered fetuses, intercut with women smiling these satisfied, sociopathic smiles ... as if they’d gotten pregnant purely in order to be able to have their fetuses cut into pieces while they were still inside them, and then loudly vacuumed out their uteri and filmed for some reason that was never explained .
Valentina wasn’t that far along. Her fetus was about the size of her thumb ... the cuticle of which was a total disaster. For a half a second she was utterly convinced that she had known all along it was Hadley Security. Then it was gone. That knowledge. That thought. She would flush it down the toilet or something. Someone would. One of her would. Whoever or whatever she would be by then. Apostate. Monster. Stranger. Martyr. She couldn’t string her thoughts together. They weren’t her thoughts. She’d made a mistake. A big mistake. An enormous mistake. A series of seriously sizable mistakes. Other words that began with S. She had run out of breath mints. She had to decide. Or just lie there and wait for them to come and get her. She said her mantra. Or someone did. The One Who Was Many. The Many Who Were One. The dock. The dark. She prayed for knowledge. Sucked up into the tunnel of time. Born dead out of the asshole of nothing. The folds of her brain were crawling with words that sounded good but didn’t mean anything. Good. Bad. Right. Wrong. Sick. Healthy. Hair conditioner. Comfort soles. Truth dispenser. She could feel the skin around the skin around the skin they had pasted onto her. How many Valentinas were there? How many had there been by now? The roar of the silver metal fuselage dribbling foamy streaks of grease that ran out of its flaps and hatches. The rats that raced in circles beneath her. Swarm. River. Water. Blood. Tides. Breath. Wordless current. Everything revolving counter-clockwise. The sweat was running down into her eyes. The dead girl’s memories inside her mind. Her mother. Kyle. Hives. Cells. Cancer. Fingers up her cunt. The one she was was already dead. The sound of her voice on the tape in her head. All these thoughts she had already had uncountable times and would always have ... in this moment in time that went on forever. She had to kill ... to kill that voice. Kill the One and become the Many. Become the voices. The many voices ... speaking ... no ... no, they were singing, singing together, all at once, as they always had been, and always will be, forever, and ever, and ever ...
Listen.
No Deviations
The morning of officially 15 March, 2610, H.C.S.T., or 24 Phalguna, 2531, or 27 Sha’ban, 2049, or Day 565 in the Year of the Lemur, began, for Taylor, like any other morning, or at least like any other morning of late. It began in Room 3 at the Darkside Club, where he woke with a seething and painful tumescence. He also awoke with a throbbing headache that felt like someone had been hammering concrete nails into his eyes all night. Oh, and also with a generalized queasy-type feeling that, not immediately, but relatively soon, something terrible was going to happen to him.
He remembered dreaming that he was lost in a maze of infinite mirrors where, whichever way he turned, an infinite series of identical Taylors, or Taylor-like entities, were staring back at him, opening and closing their mouths like fish. He wasn’t sure what kind of fish, but he thought maybe grouper, or possibly sea bass, or something large and ugly like that. He slid himself off the slimy bedsheet, staggered across the room in the dark, and pissed in the sink for about two minutes. Bladder empty, his tumescence wilted. His throbbing headache, however, did not.
Sarah was gone ... which was standard procedure. So that wasn’t what was bothering Taylor as he fumbled around in the dark for the candle, which wasn’t on the shelf above the sink. What was bothering Taylor was the fact he couldn’t remember much of the night before. However, he figured, given this headache, he must have gotten drunk, and was now hungover, which a couple of beers downstairs would fix. The only problem with this theory was, he didn’t appear to be hungover ... or at least his mouth didn’t taste like hangover. It tasted like Sarah. And like he’d been snoring. And his headache wasn’t a hangover headache .
Horribly cheerful Morning Show Muzak was playing on the Public Viewer outside, which meant that it was just past 0500, and he had overslept and fuck ... fuck, he needed to get out of there and get to Cassandra’s. He raised the blind to let some light in, found his clothes, got them on, staggered out and down the hall, down the stairs that led to the basement, through this soundproof door they had there, and walked face first into a sonic wall of pounding Afro-Aztec music that made his internal organs vibrate.
The Darkside “playroom” was in full swing. Walls of contraband PlasmaTron screens were running loops of hardcore Content, repeatedly rephotographed lube-smeared reels of unidentified individuals sexually violating other individuals in every conceivable manner possible. Most of which acts were also being perpetrated live on the floor of the Darkside’s playroom, a cavernous, red-lit, hangar-like dungeon you had to walk through to get upstairs, or in Taylor’s case to get downstairs and get to the bar and get a beer.
He squeezed and pushed and pried his way through the clutches of naked and vinyl-clad lovers, ducking floggers, sidestepping dancers, steering clear of the heavier players, and finally made it across to the bar, a ragged slab of rusty metal that would slash your fingers down to the bone if you ran your hand along the razor sharp edge of it. He caught the eye of the bartender, Nilo, who was reapplying his blood red lipstick, and made the gesture for “emergency beer.” Then he went in his pocket and fished out ... uh oh ... six IZ dollars and assorted change, three of which he now owed to Nilo. So great, this day was shaping up nicely. Not only did he have this fucking headache, and had overslept, and was going to be late, which Cassandr
a was going to have his ass for, and the dream, and the fish, and the sense of dread ... on top of that now he needed money.
Cassandra was down to the last of her rations and in desperate need of TŌ Ham, Yogurt, Seaweed Chewies, Pineapple oatmeal, and those instant Chinese noodles that came in a variety of flavors in the 10-Pack boxes. She was also in somewhat less than desperate but fairly immediate and ongoing need of a particular brand of flavored potato chips, and TŌ Sardines, and pickles, naturally, and Zwizzlers, and anything containing chocolate. All of which was going to cost money .
On top of which, there was the Content Problem. The Content Problem had now gone critical. Cassandra had been watching the same ten discs, the original pirate discs he’d brought her, Normal RomComs and SecFlics mostly, over and over for the last four months, and basically, if Taylor didn’t get her some new ones, and soon, she was going to go fucking apeshit.
Taylor did the math in his head. It turned out he needed somewhere in the vicinity of IZD two hundred eighty-three fifty. Which neither he nor Cassandra had. Which meant he would have to rob somebody, or get back home to 16 Mulberry by 0600 at the very latest and borrow two hundred eighty-three fifty from Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, assuming, that is, they had any money, which they probably didn’t, it being a Thursday. In which case, maybe he could borrow it from Meyer, or Coco, or ... wait. What was he thinking? He could borrow it from Dodo, who was sitting right there in a recessed booth across the playroom sipping some neon green concoction and trying not to get spotted by Taylor.
Taylor experienced one of those moments you’ve probably seen in a lot of films where they dolly the camera away from the subject, while at the same time zooming in on the subject, so that the subject (in this case Dodo Pacheco) seems to just sit there utterly frozen, as the rest of the world goes whooshing past him ... which they do to convey the kind of experience Taylor was having at precisely that moment. Dodo, presumably sensing Taylor was having this type of cinematic experience, turned away and made this furtive move with his hand that was meant to look casual, but which ended up looking like just what it was ... a pathetic attempt to not get spotted.
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