by Alex Shakar
“So … is this you celebrating your last night here?”
“Celebrating,” Sam repeated tonelessly. “Here, take a look. Celebrate away.”
He spun the laptop to face Fred. On it was a 2-D Manhattan map, over which, in slow motion, a mushroom cloud unfurled. The animation was near photorealistic, except that as Fred watched, the cloud began behaving strangely, reticulating and bifurcating into more and more crooking, branching arms.
“What the hell is that?”
“The latest little wrinkle,” Sam said. “All the object functionalities are getting mixed and randomized.”
The cloud/tree then started folding up like an umbrella. There was something fanciful, and yet at the same time, deeply malignant, about the transformations. A seasick feeling overtook Fred, along with that bleeding nightmare unreality he’d felt in the playtest, as if those instabilities might somehow leak out of the screen and into the room.
“You should see Little Baghdad,” Sam said. “Tanks flying around like Frisbees. Helicopters flopping like fish. The chaos is overwhelming the servers. Whole place is barely moving.”
Fred could barely feel the Presence anymore, he realized, as if it had withdrawn at the sight. Inwardly, he kept scanning for it, feeling abandoned. On the screen, the column of smoke and fire shortened, contracting at the bottom, then bounding up and landing a little off to the right.
“I forgot we programmed in pogo sticks,” Fred said, as the cloud hopped out of view.
“Sales force in Jakarta’s probably going ballistic right about now.” Sam rolled on his stomach. His back—orange where he’d reached, white where he hadn’t, and coated with floor dust—looked like a hoarfrosted Creamsicle. “There’ll be fireworks in the morning down at HQ. And a good old Soviet-style purge, no doubt. They’ll probably call the Feds in. And of course my demo on Monday is toast.”
The detective’s card put on weight in Fred’s pocket. “You could reschedule,” he suggested.
Sam got to his feet, wound back an unsteady leg, and kicked one of the empty cardboard boxes to the wall. Fred just then noticed that the pile of computer parts had been scattered—hurled, it appeared—from their former position, across the whole right side of the room.
“Monday was the day,” Sam said. “The perfect day. All those officials lined up. Awareness heightened up the wazoo.” He punted the second box, then walked slowly back and picked up the champagne bottle. “When I get to Florida tomorrow? I’m not even going to show my face at Armation. I’ll just put my car and condo on the market, and see if Manny can get me a job in an amusement park.”
“Come on, Sam. You can’t give up now. You can fix this.”
Sam just stared at him, with a sudden look of such hurt and helplessness Fred was stunned to silence. A moment later, veiled in indifference again, Sam’s eyes wandered down to the items still retained in Fred’s hands.
“What’s with Dad’s hardware?”
“Just … a little project.” It seemed the wrong time to explain. In any event, Sam didn’t pursue the subject.
“You bring a hammer?” he asked instead.
“I don’t think so.”
“Big screwdriver?”
“Maybe.”
Fred set his cargo down. Sam walked up, smelling of synthetic coconut, and offered him the champagne. There didn’t look to be much left.
“Was saving it for the big sale,” Sam said. “Cheers.”
Fred took the bottle, fearing if he didn’t, Sam might chuck that too across the room. Sam fished the desired screwdriver from the toolbag and pulled a penlight from his pocket, then started wending his way around the scattered parts toward the back of the room.
“I figured out those phone numbers you got,” he said. So nonchalantly Fred wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.
“What? You did?”
Standing in place, Sam began scanning the light methodically around the floor, walls, ceiling. “I was fielding emails about the video recording we were gearing up to do for the Times Square simulation. Lining up some military-grade GPS handhelds and a panoramic car-cam for the job. Then it hit me. They’re not phone numbers you got sent.” He was digging in his pocket again, pulling out a small handheld device of some kind. “They’re longitude and latitude numbers.”
“Sam.” Fred laughed. “You’re a genius. So … where?”
Sam peered into a display on the device.
“Here,” he said around the penlight, now in his teeth, as he knelt and began prying with the screwdriver at a buckled floorboard.
“Here …” Fred processed. “This office?”
“Here, where I’m fucking standing.” Spittle flew around the light. “Where his fucking desk used to be.”
Sam wrenched out the floorboard. It looked like he’d been trying to do so before Fred had arrived, with a bent metal bookend nearby.
“So … what do you think that means?” Fred asked.
“Somewhat difficult to say, without his fucking desk.”
Kneeling close, Sam shone the light into the hole. Then cursed, and flung the floorboard away.
“You think he left something here?”
“Hard drive totally wiped. Just like at his apartment,” Sam muttered, on his haunches now, face in his hands, the penlight pressed to his cheek. “I cleaned his desk out myself. It was practically empty. A few paperclips. All I can think is that there could have been something hidden somewhere in it, or marked on it.”
“So where is it now?”
“In desk heaven.”
Fred wondered if it was just the booze, if Sam wasn’t thinking clearly. “Who took the desks off our hands? Can’t we call them?”
As Fred’s voice rose, Sam’s grew faint. “They were particleboard pieces of shit, and we were pressed for time. We broke them down and left them in the trash room. The waste management company says the scraps have been incinerated by now.”
Sam was walking again, scanning the back wall. Reaching the Matrix poster, already all but peeled and hanging at a diagonal, he scanned its front, then peered behind it, at its reverse side, then at the wall, all of which Fred had the sense Sam had done before. Then Sam drew back, seemingly pensive. Then he tore the poster from the wall and ripped it to pieces, then kicked the wall, stabbed it with the screwdriver, rammed his head against it, and half slumped, half fell to the floor, where he sat absolutely still, the beam from the penlight, which had rolled off amid the bits of paper, illuminating him from the side.
“Sam.” Fred stepped toward him. “You don’t need the desk. Who knows what that wild-goose chase was about. It doesn’t matter. Just go down there and stop the sabotage. Tell them what’s happening. Just get Urth up and running again.”
Sam looked up at him, that same awful, wounded look on his face. It wasn’t even about saving his job, at this point.
“He told me to stay with the company,” Sam said.
Fred was standing over him. “George? He told you that?”
Reaching out, Sam grabbed Fred’s wrist. “Sam,” said Sam, “stay with the company. Stay with the company, Sam.” His eyes were quizzical, bright. “The last words out of his mouth.”
Sam couldn’t mean what he was saying. He hadn’t even been speaking to George toward the end. “When did this happen?”
Sam’s face hardened, fearful, determined.
“When he tried to kill himself.”
“I was here. Working late. He called and asked me to come over. When I got to his place, he showed me a bottle of sleeping pills. He just let me look at it until I understood. He told me he needed me there with him.”
They were sitting side by side against the wall, in the shadows. A creeping paralysis was taking Fred over. His mind was fuzzed with dread. The Presence had either stepped far back into the darkness or vanished altogether. He couldn’t force his mind ahead where the story was leading. It was all he could do to follow, word by word.
“Why you?”
“Think about it,” S
am said, his voice soggy with drink. “Would you have stood for it? Anyway, he didn’t want to saddle you with that.”
“So he saddled you?”
Sam stared into his fingers, as if he had too many of them to count. “No. With me, it was like a sign of trust. Before that night, I thought he didn’t trust me at all. I thought he hated me, after all the shit with the company. I still told him no, no way, but then he said he’d have to die alone otherwise. He looked so sick. What else could I do?”
Sam risked a look at Fred, just as quickly looking away.
“We had a long talk,” Sam went on. “We were sitting in his living room, on the floor, against the wall. Just like this.” His head lolled around. “That room was almost as empty as this one. Mostly it was me talking. I didn’t think I’d be able to say anything, but then I started and I couldn’t shut up. I told him my whole side of things. I told him how he’d saved me. How our company had saved me. How the company was all I had. I told him how, like, that day at the diner, when he asked me to choose between the company and him—because that’s what the choice was, we would have lost everything we’d done—how it was like he was taking a hatchet and chopping me down the middle.”
As if it were that hatchet, Sam had snatched the screwdriver from the floor. He now turned it in a dusty slice of light.
“He just kind of smiled, like he’d known we were going to have this conversation. He said he understood. That he wanted me to stay with the company. That it would be better if I was there. Then he went into the bathroom. Then he came out and handed me the pill bottle. Empty. And told me to throw it out and not tell anyone. Then he got into bed. He started getting sleepy. He told me he could handle it from here, and that I should go. And that I should stay with company.”
His grip tightened on the screwdriver.
“Why would he have told me to stay, if he was in on some plot like this? Just for revenge on me?”
He was looking at Fred again. Fred couldn’t say anything. Fred didn’t know either. A minute later, Sam continued:
“It was the middle of the night. I went home. I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t stay there at all. I packed some things and came here.”
“And I found him comatose the next morning?” Fred asked.
Sam nodded.
Fred had gone over there early. He’d had a strange premonition something was wrong.
“You and Dad both called me, and I didn’t know what to do,” Sam said. “I wanted to tell you to stop trying to save him, but I’d promised him not to say anything about the pills. Anyway, once I got there, I was sure there was no way I could change your mind.”
Sam looked to him for confirmation, and Fred had to nod. Even had he known, Fred wouldn’t have stopped trying to save George. He’d only have felt guiltier about doing so. And the last few months would have been even harder to bear.
“Maybe if I’d told the doctors about the pills,” Sam said, tears gathering, “they could have given him a different treatment and brought him back.”
Fred could see that this possibility, and Sam’s dread of Fred’s reaction to all this, had been eating at Sam all this time. Maybe it was true. Maybe they’d done all the wrong tests, given all the wrong treatments. Or maybe there was nothing that could have been done at that point anyhow.
“It doesn’t matter, Sam. They said his sodium levels were low. He might have slipped into a coma before much longer even without the pills.”
Sam closed his eyes. Just as Sam’s guilt appeared to be ebbing, Fred’s began to swell. He’d foiled George’s graceful exit. He’d fucked things up even more than he’d thought.
“It’s not your fault either, Fred,” Sam said, his eyes still closed.
There was a current, it seemed, that just kept carrying Fred down and down, one waterfall after the next. There might be no end to it, he thought. It might be time to give in, let himself be bounced and bashed from rock to rock with no further struggle. Though no sooner had he felt himself surrendering than the impossible Presence was back, catching him in its illusory, cloud-soft embrace and winging him upward, so that he felt himself falling and rising at once.
He crossed the room, grabbed an abandoned lamp from the corner, and plugged it in. Then he opened his briefcase and took out his laptop and the flat metal amplifier box with the coiled wires and solenoids.
Sam approached. “What the hell’s that?”
“Luminarium,” Fred said. He clicked open the folder he’d copied, then the consilia subfolder, then a file within:
Transcranial Complex Waveform Magnetic Stimulator
“From that study?”
The words ran above an elaborate diagram, filled with measurements, of a helmet with a dozen holes.
“They gave that thing to you?” Sam asked.
“I borrowed it.”
“You …” Sam leaned around, trying to get a better view of Fred’s face. “What for?”
“For George.”
Sam’s face just hung there.
“He’s going to see God before he dies,” Fred said. “Or a stand-in, at least.”
A slow, lopsided, incredulous smile overtook Sam. He shook his head. Then he looked from Fred to the plans on the screen.
“So you just stick those cylinders into a helmet?”
Fred nodded.
“What are you going to use for …”
Sam followed Fred’s glance, to the cantaloupe box. And laughed, sort of, a soundless little huff.
“You’re not even joking,” he said.
“Listen, Sam,” Fred said. “I don’t want to give you even more trouble. If you think they’ll blame you for this …”
“Fred, it’s not my head they’ll want on a pike.”
“He’d want that helmet to be the one, though,” Fred said. “Don’t you think?”
Sam’s mouth flattened under pressure. Like he didn’t know whether to frown or smile.
“I think you’re both fucking nuts.”
As Sam painstakingly measured out and marked points on the space helmet, Fred laid out the tools, thinking about one of the first pieces he’d read to George in the hospital, the speculative writings of a quantum physicist. How two correlated particles affecting each other at a distance might actually be just two different three-dimensional projections of the same six-dimensional particle, like two videotapes of the same fish shot from the front and side of its tank. How what you perceive as movement might just be the unfolding of patterned information in this higher dimension. How from a still higher perspective, not only all inanimate matter but all the patternings of life might be thoroughly intertwined, unfolding from it and refolding back into it continually: plants forming from seeds-sun-water-soil-air; systems marrying systems giving birth to systems; brain enfolding mind and mind in turn enfolding brain / body / the entire material universe, in a meta-system whose ultimate ground is neither mind nor matter but an actuality beyond both, a single totality, all of it and all beings changing as they are changed, enfolding one another in a creative and generative embrace.
Tightening the router bit on the end of the drill, he wondered how things might look from a higher order in which faith and doubt were reconciled, in which God and no God, even, were one in the same. In which it wouldn’t be any kind of contradiction whatsoever that the only true place for God to be was nowhere—to all outward appearances false, by all objective measurements absent, real only to the extent one could, through some arduous test, some ingenious stratagem, stretch a portal to that nowhere and see Him eye to eye. Now George would get a glimpse through that doorway before he jumped. And if in the end, Fred thought, there was no door, was not even a nowhere, then at least, for George’s sake, this flat old world would have striven to appear better than it was.
On the floor between Fred and Sam, the helmet’s white dome shone in the lamplight, the lines and the dozen spots Sam had drawn on it giving it the look of a ladybug’s shell.
“Careful about the angle,” Sam said, his
eyes a scalded red from the drink, the confession, the work on the helmet, the effort to sober up. “Stop every centimeter or so and let me check it.”
The helmet was pretty well hardened, even against Vartan’s diamondtipped bit, but once through the outer layer, the rest was easy. Working slowly, the two of them checking and double-checking, the drilling took an hour. Fred could have borrowed his father’s glue gun as well, but he didn’t want to scuff up the solenoids—he’d done his best to conceal the device’s absence, placing a thick book from Egghart’s shelf in the bubblewrap under the folders at the bottom of the locker; he thought there was a pretty good chance he could return it tomorrow night, when he met Mira again, without her or her father knowing it had been gone. Anyway, the fit was snug enough that securing them wasn’t much of a problem, even in the three holes he and Sam had made in the faceplate. Some tape and a bit of wedged toilet paper was all it took. They set the amplifier next to Fred’s laptop on the cantaloupe box, and the helmet on Sam’s folding chair. They plugged the cable from the back of the device into the laptop, and the power cord into a strip. Fred switched the power on and brought up the software.
“You want to try it?” he asked Sam.
“Fuck no,” Sam said, and staggered off to the couch.
The thing had to be tested by someone. Fred picked up the helmet, sat down, and fit it over his head. Could this be the first time? He supposed he’d had other things on his mind. Still, it seemed funny he’d never had the impulse to try it on. Indeed, he found it comfortably padded, so well fitting as to feel completely natural and familiar, like it had been made to order. His breath fogged the faceplate. He decided to try Week One. It was the least cognitively disruptive, and he wanted to be functional in the morning. He navigated to the first file in the spiritus folder: complexo. He assumed the files were in order, but to be sure, tried complexo in an online Latin-English dictionary, which returned: “encompass.” That had to be it.
Running it was easy as opening a spreadsheet.
A high-pitched sound.