by Alex Shakar
A wind blew in Fred’s mind. It sounded so much like George. As he sat there willing logic back into the world, another note appeared:
… actually, I’ve got the sneaking suspicion we’re the only two losers on it.
Fred wrote:
was george a part of this?
And didn’t move as he waited for the reply.
I’ll overlook your use of the third person. Not to mention past tense. Ouch. But, you know, the suspicion is mutual. I’m having a hard time believing in you, too. So what say we play a little game of trust?
The unease was pulsing into nausea. Fred waited.
It is foretold the Avatara must find his eternal mate before undertaking the final battle. Luckily, even angels-who-don’t-believe etc. have the power to hook two lovers up. It pretty much comes with the feathers. So, who are you fancying these days?
What was the point of this? Just to keep him up all night? Ruin him for tomorrow? Fred wrote:
come over here, angel boy, and I’ll tell you.
The reply:
Just type in her initials and picture her, and trust, for a moment, that it can happen. Take this one small step into faith, and I promise I’ll explain some things.
He didn’t have to picture her, of course. But he was so tired, and the images he’d conjured earlier were still so fresh they were already back in his head. He didn’t have to use her actual initials, but what was there to lose? He typed:
me
And waited for a crack about narcissism.
And helplessly continued picturing her, more chastely: Hands flitting about her head, pointing to brain regions. Lit by the nightlight, arms outstretched, blanket descending. In the bar from above, hands in her back pockets. Reaching up for the shade, winged by monitor glow. Her eyes wandering off, suddenly lost, when he told her she was no fucking angel. He wished he hadn’t. She seemed so firmly in command most of the time, but then there were moments like this, when it seemed, at least for a second, like the slightest stumble could shatter her.
The response popped up:
Oh man, she’s something. You’ll definitely need help with her. So all right, those fun facts I promised …
The messages started appearing line by line, the sender posing his own questions and answering them:
Q: The wings … functional or just for show?
A: We can fly. But generally not worth the effort.
Q: The halo … what’s up with that?
A: Too much light for a good night’s sleep. Not enough to read by.
Q: You got, like, a harp, or something?
A: Have yet to lay eyes on one of those torture devices. But it’s all you get on the radio.
Q: And, er, is there, um, what do you have … down there?
A: The short answer: I don’t want to know what’s there … or what’s not. Mercifully, this gown doesn’t come off.
Q: And the long answer?
A: That last summer on Earth, I’d ride around in cabs, eyes huge for camera sparks in loft windows, for headlit skirted thighs, for tongues lashing slopes of ice cream cones, for lips of bank machines spitting up green. Round I rode as the meters rose, trying to decide who were we, a race of gods or of monkeys. I knew which I felt like, so hungry for it all. Like my eyes were Hoover Deluxes, vacuuming in so much wanting, so much getting and losing and wanting again, so much not wanting to want but wanting anyway—so much life, I guess is what I’m trying to say, I could just about explode from the overload…. Well, none of that here … blank windows … empty streets … and yet Desire’s all the stronger, like the whole place is made of it, like I’m made of it, like nothing’s made of anything else. It sucks shit, here, dude.
Was it George’s tone, George’s style? Fred couldn’t quite say. And was it true, what this George impersonator was saying about George riding around in cabs last summer—around the time of the diagnosis? It might have been true, Fred supposed. But again, he didn’t really know. The lines kept coming:
Q: Desire with no object?
A: There’s one—one thing for which our every feather aches: Paradise. Promised legends ago by the golden-wingèd one, he of the champagne-effervescing halo, who descended from on high, who gave his blessing for us to build a Devaloka of our own.
Through the aeons our work progressed, some of us hopeful, others caviling that, paced thusly, it would take for-fucking-ever.
Then, from the stratosphere, down swooped another, with gunmetal wings, and an ember-glowing helm, swearing he could speed our work a thousandfold.
Shit-for-Brains, we. We signed on the dots.
His dark project unfolds. Not a Heaven, but a Hell!
Only I resist! Awaiting the Avatara’s decisive blow! And I’m starting to believe!
To believe!!! …
… that badass dude just might show.
A minute passed. Nothing else came. Fred read it over. Was it about Urth? Was it about Fred himself? He wrote:
don’t count on it, “d00d”
The reply:
Oh, I will. And oh … Mira Egghart. She’s on Seventh Street, right?
As the sun began to burn around the edges of the blackout curtains, Fred read about Kama Deva, the Hindu analog to Cupid, with his beestrung, sugarcane bow and lotus-tipped arrows. He read about Vishnu and Lakshmi, the eternal lovers residing together beyond time, beyond space, amid the coils of a thousand-headed snake on whose hoods rest all the celestial bodies of the universe. He read about them finding each other in earthly manifestations again and again down through the ages; and how Padma, Lakshmi’s incarnation destined for the hand of the tenth avatara, Kalki, would pray for blessings from a god it took Fred a while to figure out was also Shiva—the god had one thousand names, apparently, and the pseudonym used in the semi-redacted Google Books version of the Kalki Purana was misspelled at that. And how Shiva would answer both their prayers, and the two lovers would come together, and Kalki would set off to make sacrifices and prepare for the fight ahead.
It wasn’t the tiredness, the gravitational pull of the bed, that was keeping him from getting up and getting dressed for the interview. He sat for a long time leaned against the headboard, folding open and back the various tools in the Swiss Army knife. Blades, saws, files. Pliers, scissors, bottle- and can-openers. An awl. A chisel. A plastic toothpick. He stared at the little emblem, the cross within the shield.
Who were these people? He knew who they were, he told himself. If not specifically, then generally: a bored, random hit squad of listserv dweebs, out to make his life hell. He could barely even contemplate the alternative—that it was people actually trying to honor George, to avenge him in some misguided way. People who—was it really possible?—may have had his trust, even his participation. People loyal to George. More loyal than Fred.
Whoever they were, they were spying on him. Would they now involve Mira in this? Simply to humiliate him, if this was a prank? Or to blackmail him, somehow, if it wasn’t? Was she in danger? The idea seemed farfetched, but his spinning mind reeled out farther still, wondering if Mira herself were in on it, if this helmet study were nothing but an elaborate ploy to brainwash him, make him psychologically malleable, implant subconscious messages or the like and soften him up to do the conspirators’ bidding.
Then, sensing no ground beneath him and madness all around, he was scrabbling all the way back to the prank scenario, telling himself to get real, to get a grip, hurling the multitool across the room, bounding up from the bed, cursing himself for the wasted time. A one-minute shower. A shave in quick, perilous strokes. Throwing on his semblance of a suit. He was about to leave the knife behind, but thinking he might be able to get a telling reaction out of someone were he to casually produce it on the programming floor, he retrieved it. Then he was leaving the rabbit hole of his old life behind—out of the hotel room, out of the elevator, striding into the sun-dazzled parking lot, into the future, which welcomed him with a brightness perhaps too bright even for Florida. So bright that
, despite himself, he took it as a sign.
According to that iron-jawed self-expert whose book Fred had been making his way through, the CIA had perfected a set of techniques that, when unflinchingly employed by agents or their trained henchmen, could totally eradicate, replace, or otherwise modify a person’s most deeply held beliefs. Average citizens, the author claimed, could reap the benefits of this groundbreaking governmental research as well, to rid themselves of the beliefs that limited them and held them back. All one had to do to banish an unwanted belief was to associate it with a massive amount of pain.
Though Fred still had a few lingering reservations about applying CIA coercion tactics to his already beleaguered brain, as he piloted his revoltingly over-freshened minivan down 408 toward the research park, his bowels braiding, his heart pumping electricity rather than blood, he felt more or less ready to try anything. After that last cyber-volley of guilttripping harassment, he wanted his job back more badly than ever, so badly now he was racked with the terror that he’d mess up the interview somehow, come off looking angry, or desperate, or unhinged. Maybe he was all of the above. Maybe all his creativity was spent. Maybe without George, he was all but useless to begin with, destined for this or that dead-end cubicle. Maybe everyone knew it but him. One by one, as each of these non-empowering suppositions arose, he locked in on it, feeding it with his focus until it made his entire being pulsate with despair. Then he slapped himself on the head, repeatedly, with both hands.
It was amazing, oddly impressive, how many non-empowering beliefs his mind could produce in a single minute. Within the space of five, the beatings they necessitated had resulted in a not insubstantial amount of pain; his head throbbed, as if a long metal claw had begun twisting into the vertebrae below his skull. And yet, despite all this punishment, the therapy seemed to be backfiring—the more he hit himself, the more non-empowering his thoughts became, as though his mind had dug in and was now returning fire:
—broke—
smack
—living with your parents—
smack
—going gray in your thirties—
smack
—going to grovel for a job in your own company—
smack
—better suck them off while you’re at it—
He hit himself so hard he nearly ran off the road.
Nestled in tracts of surrounding suburbia, far from downtown Orlando, farther still from the no man’s land of walled-off theme parks and resort hotels, the research park—home not only to Armation, but also to NAVAIR, SAIC, the Naval War College, and dozens of other firms comprising 80 percent of the country’s military simulation industry—was a place anyone not in the know could easily drive by or even through without realizing they’d just been anywhere in particular. Unlike Los Alamos, it wasn’t a community. No residences, only isolated, fortress-like constructions, spaced a few acres apart and set back on sprawling grass plots bordered by neat rows of trees along winding roads with names like Ingenuity Drive and Challenger Parkway. Few cars drove along these roads, and in all Fred’s visits here, he’d not once seen a pedestrian.
Armation HQ was a recessing ziggurat of white stone and black glass. Maybe by decree, maybe through some less conscious process, the cars in the lot out front were hierarchized by wealth and beauty: luxury sports cars and sedans closest to the entrance, cheaper and more utilitarian models farther out. Despite a free space a few yards from the door, Fred decided not to buck the tide, and steered the minivan over next to the groundskeeper’s pickup.
Somehow, he was twenty minutes early. Awkward to drive back out at this point—for all he knew, upper management was tracking his movements through those tinted windows. He left the engine running and the AC blasting to keep his sweat level to a minimum, and ran through potential talking points, improvements to the simulation code, including the possibility of creating a playback feature (inspired by his inability to replay the appearance of that George avatar) so that military, fire, and police commanders could save and review the exercises step by step at their leisure. Checking his reflection in the rearview, he was dismayed to see a patch of stubble he’d missed under his jaw, and a bright red sunburn on his nose and cheeks. His jacket and slacks didn’t match in bright light. The checkered fabric of George’s shoes was torn at both heels.
He looked like a clown, he thought.
Like a clown-whore, even, Inner George offered, ever helpful.
By already-learned reflex, Fred slapped himself with either hand, and then set about picturing that new Fred, that future Fred, with an even tan and an actual suit, pulling up to that free space out front in a Benz convertible; passing the day in a big corner office; clocking out while the sun was still up and tooling over to the barbecue joint down the road; describing for a table full of listeners—nameless, faceless, as yet, only their sheer gift of witnessing coming through—how nervous and lost his poor former self had been sitting out in the rented minivan that long-ago day. But it was all for the best, future Fred would say. Fred heard the words so clearly, this time, he could wait no longer. He quaffed the last of the coffee, crunched a breath mint, and waded through the morass of sunlight to the entrance.
In the lobby, a heavyset security guard, assembled from equal parts fat and muscle, eyed his approach from behind a trapezoidal desk. Fred had seen him several times on his previous trips down here, but the guy at least affected not to recognize him.
“I have an appointment,” Fred said, after a few seconds of the guard not asking.
“Who with?”
It occurred to Fred that he wasn’t exactly sure who the interview was going to be with. He assumed Erskine would be there, but wasn’t certain. He’d been picturing a whole table of executives and senior project managers, a whole pack like the one he and Sam had run into in the virtual stairwell.
The guard asked for his name, then for an ID, then turned Fred’s driver’s license this way and that for half a minute while checking the appointment screen.
“Human resources,” the guard said. “Fourth floor.”
“Human resources?”
By way of an answer, the guard handed him an orange visitor’s badge on a long-snouted alligator clip bristling with sharp little teeth, and pointed him toward the elevators. Fred clipped the badge to his Barneys jacket, feeling sympathetic pain as the teeth bit in. He’d never been to human resources, and didn’t know what to make of the fact that he was being sent there. Had they decided to reinstate him without so much as an interview? But if so, on what terms? Had they settled this, too, by fiat?
The elevator arrived. He boarded with a balding engineer in a lab coat, and a programmer whose monobrow he recognized from his avatar, but who didn’t seem to recognize Fred. In the corridor on the second floor, as the engineer stepped out of the opening doors, a man in a green jumpsuit dotted with sensors walked past holding a blackvisored helmet under his arm. From the back of the helmet protruded a bundle of black wires ending in dangling, gold connectors.
“Did they paint that VR helmet? Was it always black?” Fred asked the programmer. He remembered it as bright, maybe silver, but maybe it was just getting mixed up with Mira’s God helmet in his mind. He’d watched a soldier testing the helmet out last time, jumping around with a laser tag rifle in a gray, padded room. The technology could make the Urth experience more immersive, but so far it had disagreed with the inner ear and made the soldiers throw up.
Monobrow nodded and was about to say something, but taking in Fred’s orange badge, seemed to think better of it. On earlier visits, Fred and Sam had been issued aquamarine badges. Fred didn’t understand the badge system well enough to know exactly how bad an insult orange was meant to be. The programmer got off on three, a warren of coding cubicles Fred had visited a few times before. A good many of the programmers visible through the open doors looked like Monobrow—the short hair, the polyester, short-sleeve button-downs—like they wouldn’t have been at all out of place coding late-model pun
ch-card computers for IBM in 1966. Their cubicles were either bare of any personal effects whatsoever or otherwise filled with model jet fighters and the more or less omnipresent early-model Starship Enterprises and Mr. Spock action figures. They got along uneasily with the sometimes hippified transplants from the gaming and movie animation industries, who’d been known to buy their own clothing, go to hairstylists rather than barbers, and talk to women (although, as such traits were viewed with suspicion by middle management, even the most metrosexualized of the transplants tended to downplay their fashion sense). With a pang, it occurred to Fred that the New York crew, a happy, nerd-chic medium of designer clunky glasses and retro Atari T-shirts, would probably fit in perfectly; and even as he was thinking this, in the instant before the doors slid shut, he caught sight of Conrad and Jesse stepping out into the aisle between cubicles, dopey smiles on their faces and gleaming new computer stacks in their arms; a pair of sunglasses perched in Conrad’s Afro; Jesse’s hairy toes galumphing in flip-flops. Their first day down here, and already natives. Since this morning, in the back of his mind Fred had been wondering if Conrad and Jesse might have been his cyberstalkers, his mystery messagers—secretly fighting the power and avenging George’s memory. Seeing them now, though, Fred simply couldn’t imagine it.
On the fourth floor, he found himself in a second lobby, before a second high-walled front desk. The receptionist, middle-aged, platinum-haired, told him in a Long Island accent to have a seat and pointed with a long, lacquered fingernail at an alcove sporting a low-slung black leather couch, matching chairs, and a glass coffee table stacked with issues of Jane’s Defense Weekly and The New Republic. Too fidgety to sit, he paced and gazed out the window at the company grounds, an otherwise blank grassy area in which a single paved path led to a fountain. Fountains, for some reason, were ubiquitous in the Orlando area, and everywhere it was the same design—a shallow, round pool, a single high jet of water. One could see them from the air upon takeoffs and landings, aspurt in the housing subdivisions and industrial parks that stretched to the horizon, as if global warming were already wreaking its havoc, causing the land to spring leaks as it sank into the ocean. His next thought, more a feeling than a thought—an intuition that there was no escape here, no fundamental difference between this tidy little cosmos and the one from which he’d flown—was gone the instant it appeared, beaten out, as, automatically, he whacked his head with an open hand, then brought the hand down just as quickly, before the receptionist could look up and see.