by Alex Shakar
On Fred’s laptop screen, trees popped into being on a grassy hill, accompanied by flashes of light and ascending runs of chimes.
“What’s that sound?” Sam asked.
“The Creation video,” Fred said. “On the Christworld website.”
More silence on Sam’s end. On Fred’s screen, to the sound of a gong, a blazing sun blossomed, shimmering from nothing in the middle of the sky. Then night wheeled around, and to the accompaniment of synthesized harp strings, a moon and stars were painted onto the darkness. The laptop cast the hotel room’s only light; Fred had been pointing and clicking around the Christworld site since before nightfall. He’d watched a lock-jawed but otherwise friendly-seeming pastor give a sermon on a theme he called “simplexity,” the art of staying true to a seemingly fantastical two-thousand-year-old story in an increasingly complex modern-day world. He’d taken a virtual tour of the church grounds, seen the smoothie bar of legend; and a day care center with a plastic slide and biblical scenes painted on the walls; and a massive multimedia auditorium, the stage crowned by a giant projection screen.
“Where would you rather live, Sam?” he asked. “In a universe where everything has been created just for you? Or in one where you’re completely accidental, just a side effect of some larger system that has nothing to do with you, where you’re struggling just to hang on?”
After a pause, Sam apparently decided it most expedient to play along. “The former,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely. With you one hundred percent.”
“Um. OK.” Sam sounded impatient.
“But what if you could live in a universe that somehow balanced the planned and the unplanned, the intended and accidental? You never know quite how everything fits together, but somehow, it does. You never know quite whether you belong, or where you fit into it all, but somehow, you do.”
A close-miked gust from Sam’s nose. “Sounds like a better game, I suppose.”
“What if that’s New York, Sam?”
Fred was mainly playing devil’s advocate at this point. He hadn’t felt either like things fit together or like he had a place in that town for a long time. On the screen, a lightning bolt zapped a man into existence, Caucasian and clean-shaven, his genitals obscured by the branch of a tree. The naked actor looked around, confused, excited. Then looked up in gratitude. Then down at his ribcage, amazed, and tracked with his eyes a shimmering mist expanding from it into the air beside him.
“There’s something to be said for planning, though,” Fred conceded. “After we checked out your condo, your realtor showed me a little place I might rent.”
A top-floor one-bedroom, with a fresh coat of paint and a sunny terrace. It had a rotted plank or two—the sight, in the immaculate surroundings, had brought on a brief surge of unease—but Phil the realtor had assured him that the wood would be replaced. The apartment was right downtown, just down the block from Phil’s office. Fred could stroll past it every day, he thought, and wave to the gorgeous Christine on his way to that diner by the lake. He and her father had talked numbers for a bit, after which, in the sporadically reappearing mysterious brightness, Fred had powered open the sunroof of his minivan and spent the day driving, back through the strip malls of Kissimmee and the low-rent carnivals; up and down the streets of downtown Orlando, bristling with construction cranes and buildings so new and sparkly they seemed clad in shrinkwrap; down to Ave Maria, the spanking-new Catholic-themed town founded by the Dominos Pizza baron; through a few of the area’s other master-planned communities, rainbow-hued Main Streets and neon-green parks sweeping by. With the exception of Cassadaga, the Spiritualist Church-owned swamp town of mediums and psychics (where the theme itself seemed to forgive the dilapidation), there was not a pothole or flaking paint job to be seen in any of them. Finally getting back to the hotel, he’d sprawled out on the bed, propped himself on a few overstuffed pillows, and continued his self-guided tour online.
“We’d be just a two-minute trolley ride from each other,” he added, as, on his screen, the mist coalesced into a cream-skinned Eve, exchanging chaste, eye-level greetings with her man from behind two well-placed branches.
“Yeah,” Sam said, his voice flat, barely audible. “The agent told me.”
“What’s wrong? Worried I’ll lower the property values?”
“No. No.” Sam’s voice trailed off. Fred wondered if he was multitasking. “I’m just … surprised you took to the town so quickly.”
“Me too. There’s some kind of soporific allergen in the air. Maybe it’s muddying my thinking.”
Sam said nothing.
“And the receptionist was pretty hot,” Fred admitted. “That might have factored in.”
Though that bright, weightless instant when Phil had put his arm around Christine might have factored in more. Thinking back on them now, the two scenes didn’t really seem so uncannily similar: a father and daughter, a hand cupping a shoulder. That was the extent of the synchronicity; in a thousand other ways, they were two different events entirely. But standing there in that office, in that gleam that might have just been his screwed-up brain or the ramped up sun of the Sunshine State, but might too have been something more, the image had seemed momentous, a sign he’d be crazy to ignore: Two father-daughter teams intent on transforming his life. One with a bizarre contraption in a cramped little room, in a doomed-and-not-even-knowing-it metropolis, offering a complicated, possibly untenable accord between doubt and faith; the other with a sunny apartment on a powerwashed street, in a brand-new town, offering a straightforward new life fresh out of the box.
It was strange, from his desk in Tribeca, apart from George’s cancer, the Military-Entertainment Complex had been starting to seem like the biggest, most out-of-control proliferation in Fred’s life. George’s dim view of the new Urth had been seeping into Fred like a neurotoxin, locking up his mind and body alike, so that he could barely even stay at his desk without feeling he was dying. But either George needed more time and medical care to recover, in which case Fred needed this job, or he wasn’t going to recover, in which case, maybe Fred wanted it. Maybe he wanted it either way. From a rectilinear office in a well-groomed industrial park, from the sun-dappled bosom of the Military-Entertainment Complex Accommodation Area, some new Fred, thought Fred, might look out the window and never see anything but simplexity itself.
“Anyway,” Fred said. “I just called to make sure you got my message about the condo.”
“Yeah. Lawyer’s closing tomorrow. Thanks for checking it out.”
“Forget it, Sam.” Fred stopped the Creation movie and started another, this one starting with a crane shot of a cheering crowd sitting in stands by the shore of a lake, to the accompaniment of an instrumental rock ballad. “Listen, thanks for getting me this interview. I know I haven’t been easy to deal with.”
Fred ran a hand around the smooth skin of his neck, front and back. He’d stopped at a mini-mall barbershop, and had gotten the old barber to give him a shave along with the haircut, with a hot, wet towel and a lather brush, no less.
“You know,” he went on, “maybe Mom and Dad really could come here one day.”
After a crowd shot came a view from the shore into the lake, waist deep in the shallows of which stood three figures: two young men, and between them, a middle-aged woman in a sleeveless, Harley Davidson T-shirt. Her sun-dried face looked a little fearful, a little excited. She looked like a person who’d seen some hard times.
“Fred,” Sam said.
“Yeah?”
“Why did the realtor keep calling you Freddo?”
The two men leaned the woman backward. The lake drank her in a gulp.
After hanging up, Fred found a porn site and fondled himself, luxuriantly, for the first time in months not having to worry about his parents in the other room. The image of the Foley catheter splaying his brother’s glans, which had made him impotent with Mel for months and could still sometimes stop him dead, only gave him a twinge
for a second or two. Images of Mel disrobing, silhouetted by the cityscape in their old bedroom—before her human interest segments took on a worldhistorical significance (canine 9/11 rescue workers, post-9/11 asthmatic cats) and that cable job and giant, wall-mounted flatscreen TV took over their bedroom—only saddened him a few seconds more. As the bouncing fake breasts on the video download looked about as soft and inviting as two frozen water balloons, he rolled away, trying to imagine the pants and moans to be those of the real estate secretary, stripped of all but her black pumps and that little gold cross. Before long, though, the clip had ended, the real estate secretary had dissolved as well, and it was Mira he was seeing. Riding him in the helmet chair. Smelling of apples and sweat and smoke machine mist. Their chests sticky with electroconductive gel. Her lips at his ear, whispering, between gasps, some scientific explanation involving pheromones and vascular engorgement.
He’d planned, when this was through, to sleep, and make sure he was fully rested for the interview. But it wasn’t even nine o’clock, and as drowsy as he’d been earlier, he wasn’t at all tired. He killed some more time websurfing. Link by link, he navigated away from Christworld, until he was reading about the French Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, a planet-wide sentience evolving from the Earth’s biological and technological networks into a single, unified mind, heart, and soul.
And from there, to postings on futurist discussion boards about the Singularity—the point at which a computer network would become self-aware and proceed to evolve itself at lightning speed into an entity capable of mental and technological feats that humans couldn’t even conceive.
And from there, to a thread about the Omega Point theory, how humanity would die out but its machine-superbeing offspring, no longer bound by atmospheres or even planets, would gain control over physical forces and reengineer the universe into a self-catalyzing complex system—a biosphere or a giant, living computer, the difference being, at such a stage, purely semantic. One posting suggested that this future superbeing might crack the code of time and come back to upload the minds of every living being, perhaps at the moments of their deaths, thereby preserving them.
The idea was roundly dismissed by a dozen respondents, who agreed in subsequent threads among themselves that the future superbeing would simply expand into the phase space of all possible worlds, and then, like some deified obsessive-compulsive disorder, resimulate every possible “you” after the fact, like so many arrangements of a carbon molecule.
Half wishing he’d stuck with simplexity, Fred pushed the laptop aside and pressed a pillow over his eyes. He still wasn’t tired. He thought about reviewing his notes for the meeting tomorrow one last time, but they were already so clear in his mind that he felt any further attention would only confuse things. He thought about listening to Mira’s Week Three CD, but he was annoyed enough at himself for fantasizing about her. He didn’t want to think about her or anything to do with the city, anything within a thousand miles of George, lying abandoned in that dark, empty room.
Trapped, like a man in a hard plaster cast.
Bah, motion is overrated, he made Inner George say.
Breathing through a tube.
Get the job, he made him say. Live your life.
What if a fly landed in it?
His pulse starting to hammer, Fred grabbed his phone, about to dial the hospital to see if someone could check on George. He tossed the phone away. He put the pillow back over his head, took a deep breath, and set his mind to work picturing that less bloodless, if less likely, version of the God of the Geeks—the one that might come back in time to save them all:
A swarm of 1s and 0s, in the shape of a man.
In a cape (why not?).
With a serpentine S on its barrel chest.
Stepping back through some vaporous portal to relive the history of its own creation.
Falling in love with humanity, those little, meme-shuffling aphids who’d given it birth, and vowing to become for them the God they’d always wanted.
Witnessing, cherishing, preserving in its infinite data banks their every trial and triumph.
Uploading them, in their final moment, through a simulated tunnel and into a simulated realm of brightness, to play for them their life review, in multi-textured, quaternion-compressed truecolor, with surround sound, and an overlay of pixel-shaded meters showing them how much love/hate, joy/suffering, good/evil they’d contributed to the world. Were those needles in the black, it would bask them in its praise. In the red, forgiveness. And they would live on, immortal subroutines in the heaven of its vast, self-generating code….
He was finally drifting off when his email pinged:
Subject: be my friend!
From: G30rg3 8r0un1an
Hi! I’m inviting you to be my friend on originalfacebook.com, the coolest social networking site in history! Just click here to get going! Thanks!
Fred shut his eyes. Did he really want to do this again?
He clicked. A basic template Web page. ORIGINALFACEBOOK at the top. A faint wallpaper of hip, smiling youth in skullcaps and printed T-shirts. A login request, Fred’s name already filled in. A blinking cursor in the password box. And, in blue text beneath:
forgot your password?
Seeing no other options, Fred clicked it.
Hint: How do you wrap an AVATARA up into a little ol’ AWDBS/HAA?
He was supposed to sit here guessing? He typed:
try shoving it up your ass
Incorrect password
How should he know? Something about taking away its belief in itself? He typed:
doubt
Incorrect password. WARNING: THREE MORE ATTEMPTS PERMITTED BEFORE ACCOUNT DEACTIVATION.
He told himself to turn the computer off, told himself he needed to sleep and wake up rested for the interview.
Around 2:30 AM, he tried “Armation.” Incorrect.
By 3:00, having looked over last week’s instant-message exchange, he’d convinced himself the answer had to be “shaft,” the word used in those instant messages last week to describe Armation’s treatment of him. Wrong.
He slammed the laptop shut, took it into the bathroom, and left it on the sink, so he’d be less tempted to reach for it from bed if another answer came to him.
He lay in the dark, prayed for sleep.
3:07. He hit upon the idea that AVATARA and AWDBS/HAA might be a kind of code.
3:24. Converted all the letters to binary: 01000001 01010110 01000001 01010100 01000001 01010010 01000001 …
3:59. Ran the words through every key of the Caesar cipher: ZUZSZQZ, YTYRYPY, XSXQXOX, WRWPWNW …
4:31. Used the words as keys for each other in an online keyword cipher: AWAUATA, AWGEUKAA …
5:03. It struck him that if one counted S/H as a single letter, the words had the same number of letters. He wrote them out on a scratch pad:
A V A T A R A
A W D B S/H A A
Wrapped up. What kind of operation was that?
He counted forward from each letter of first to the corresponding letter of the second, wrapping around from Z to A when necessary: 0, 1, 3, 8.
S/H. He divided them, 19 by 8, rounded down: 2. Converted it back to a B. From A to B, then: 1. And the last two digits: 9, 0.
0 1 3 8 1 9 0
And converted back to letters:
ACHAI
Gibberish. He balled the paper, crushed it into a nugget.
He turned off the light. Listened to a garbage truck shake down a dumpster.
Just to be sure, he retrieved his laptop, opened a search engine, and entered the letters. It was a male first name, according to a baby name dictionary. American Indian in origin. Meaning: brother.
His bones went cold. Fighting the feeling he wasn’t alone in the room, Fred entered the password, and a new page appeared. A picture of Fred’s own smiling cartoon avatar in the upper left corner. Beside it, his name, his age, a couple listed interests: “computers,”
“angels.” He appeared to have a single friend: G30rg3, a picture of that bald, nose-tubed chemotherapy angel above the name. Instead of an axe, the George angel was now holding a bow, greenish in tint, and an arrow tipped with a large pink flower.
Scrolling down, Fred found Angel-George’s picture again. He’d left Fred a message:
DOOd! Thanks for friending me! I’ll be believing in myself in no time!
Fred cursored around, swearing. There didn’t seem to be a way to unfriend whoever it was. The only bit of functionality in sight was the George angel’s clickable photo, which took Fred to G30rg3’s page, as plain as his own, the only differences being the name, the image, the interests: “computers,” “humans.” Angel-George’s picture was larger on this page. The bow was strung with what appeared to be a chain of bees, joined front to back. G30rg3 had one friend—Fred—and no messages. Fred sent him one:
4Q mofo
Then waited, as riled as he was spooked, the irritation compounding with every new minute of lost sleep. Ten had gone by when a reply message popped up on his page:
You didn’t just spend all night on that puzzle, did you? Thought you must have given up for the night.
Fred took a breath.
what is this about
Another minute passed. The reply appeared:
You sound pissed. Sorry for the cloak and dagger stuff. The Pretaloka’s in lockdown. Miracle I could punch a way through to you at all. Did you get Shiva’s first gift, the Blade of Many Powers?
Fred eyed the Swiss Army knife, sitting on the night table next to another self-help book he’d picked off his mother’s shelf—Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins. The author grinned from the cover, his giant jaw and massive, gleaming teeth poised for battle like some medieval engine of war. Fred had tossed the knife and the book there when he’d unpacked, and hadn’t so much as glanced at either since.
He turned back to the screen, typed:
what do you want from me
Waited.
Oh, and apologies for this site sucking like it does. They said it was the original. I assumed that would count for something.