Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  Fred yanked his laptop from the backpack. He brought up an Urth window, and logged in. He appeared in his last location, more or less, not falling or frozen, but just standing on 34th Street, the reconstituted Empire State Building to one side, the flattened studio-set façade of storefronts to the other, the 2D map stretching out east and west. He was still wearing a fire helmet, still too small for his cartoon head. He scrolled around Little Fred and saw he was also still wearing the air mask. It looked uncomfortable, so he took it off, hearing the moment he did the sound—all-too-familiar from all those wargaming man-hours—of a grenade pin being pulled. Remembering the sabotage going on, Fred managed to chuck it away before it exploded, though when it did, it merely splashed, like pool water around some porcine bellyflopper. He brought up the navigation panel, took out his cell phone, typed the CALL GEORGE numbers into the longitude and latitude entry boxes, and teleported downtown. Nothing here. Just the 2D plane, the Empire State Building off in the distance. He was about to give up and close the program when he noticed a sparkling dot on the ground about thirty feet off. As he approached, it grew a few pixels, but no more, until he was practically standing atop it. Only then did its shape become clear: a key.

  When Fred picked it up, around him, the street outside his office suddenly appeared. It was crudely rendered, not up to Urth’s current standards—part photographic backdrop, part quick-and-dirty animation. Unlike the actual street, several of the buildings here were not quite complete, presenting exposed girders, half-laid brickwork, open holes awaiting windows, through which bare studs could be glimpsed. At work inside, wielding hammers, out on the scaffolding with trowels, and up on the beams with rivet guns were a score of angels, wings protruding from flannel shirts, yellow hard hats atop golden haloes. As Fred watched, a special-effects ripple spread overhead, and as it passed, the workers’ tools transformed, a jackhammer blasting one angel off like a rocket, a paintbrush in another angel’s hand erasing rather than coloring a wall. Fred slowly turned in place. Another wave passed, and another, turning arc welders to bubble blowers, tape measures to jump ropes, sending a streetlight sack-racing off to freedom. The waves passed every thirty seconds, and seemed to emanate from an upper floor of his office building.

  He passed through the front door into a rough facsimile of his lobby, the dimensions and colors more or less right. An elevator opened as he approached. He walked in, experiencing a phantom downward pull as the lighted numbers rose, his anticipation and apprehension rising with them. In the hallway, there were no doors other than the one to his former company. He clicked it open.

  He could barely make out an office in the chaos that confronted him. Neon-blue waves rolled across the ceiling, bursting into froth as they hit the wall. Out of this same wall, strange, inverted trees, with leaves suckering to the walls like roots, and roots spreading out like branches grew sideways into the air. As he cleared the maze of foliage, Fred saw that the area where his station should have been was empty, save for cobwebs, mold, and dust. Sam’s alcove housed only a tumbleweed, tumbling around in some micro-weather breeze. The window wasn’t papered over, and afforded a view Fred had almost forgotten, a view Sam had only wanted to forget, of sunlit buildings to the south and west. The only difference was that where first there had been the towers, and then just the empty air, two new towers stood. They weren’t as high, and weren’t quite identical, though both were darkish and malevolent looking, and bristling with spires. Orthanc and Barad-dûr, he recognized, from The Lord of the Rings. These, too, were still under construction, minute, wingèd forms hammering at the flanks.

  He turned and wended his way through a curving passage of gravitydefying desks and chairs and other floating objects—the red couch, the microwave and mini-fridge, the Lego Death Star. The backs of a dozen crammed-together monitors of varying sizes blocked from view George’s little area in the back corner. It wasn’t until Fred was practically inside it that Angel-George himself was revealed, his back to Fred, cross-legged on a meditation cushion afloat in midair, wings draping to the floor. Above the oxygen tank that was strapped between the avatar’s wings could be seen the back of a too-thin neck, and a grayish, hairless little head. An inch above that floated a halo, and atop that a very tall, very strange-looking top hat, of burnished silver, opaquely reflective, with round brims at both bottom and top.

  “My Precious! You made it!” George’s voice erupted from the speakers of Fred’s computer, causing Fred’s heart to lurch, and a nurse, passing with a tray heaped with scramble eggs, to turn and stare. As Fred dug through his briefcase for his headphones, the floating cushion spun George about. His eyes were huge now, and his face around them had shrunk, skin withered and drawn, the oxygen line cutting deep below the ridgelines of his cheekbones. Fred managed to get the headphones plugged in before George spoke again.

  “I’m betting you’ve got some questions. Ask away.”

  George’s voice was full of cheer. His avatar’s thin lips moved, mimicking speech, then widened into a snaggletoothed smile. At the bottom of the screen, a line of text appeared. Fred’s first, pre-scripted question, he gathered:

  --So is that thing on your head your secret weapon? Or are you just happy to see me?

  Fred clicked the line, wondering how much of this was automated, and who, if anyone, was here with him, watching it unfold.

  “On Earth it’s your hair and nails that keep growing,” George said. “Here it’s your formal wear.” He doffed the enormous hat. “I call it the Discombobjectulator.”

  Little George mimicked laughter, his bony shoulders hitching. George’s recorded delivery was drier, his voice raspy, as it had been toward the end. Fred imagined him in that nearly empty apartment, hunched over his computer, speaking the lines into a headset mic. The clarity with which Fred could see this only thickened the surrounding fog of his incomprehension. Another question, this one more pertinent, appeared for him to ask:

  --Who’s working with you? What do they want?

  “No one, Fred,” George said, when Fred clicked the line. “Kghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrk. It’s all me.”

  From George’s hat, one of those rippling waves emanated in all directions—this seemed to be the source. As it passed through the desk, the dozen screens, encased in a webwork of creeping ivy, flashed like lightning. The desk, Fred now noticed, was covered with George’s sickroom supplies, his tissue boxes and balms and lotions and lozenges, and a hoard of translucent-orange prescription bottles, all full of pills, except for one, which lay empty, the cap off, tipped on its side.

  Fred’s inevitable follow-up question had appeared:

  --But … how is that possible?

  “Do I really need to spell it all out?” George snapped, when Fred clicked the line. “Figure it out yourself. Go ahead. I’ll give you some time.”

  Little George’s eyes closed, and an undulant stream of zs began issuing from his mouth.

  It wasn’t a complete surprise to Fred. He’d been thinking about all the ways George might have done at least most of this on his own. The emails, the instant messages—with some rented server space and a little coding, he could have programmed them to be sent to Fred at prearranged times. Starting with six months from the day George had taken those pills, expecting to die. For the conversations themselves, he could have constructed a database covering a range of Fred’s probable responses—which, if anyone could have predicted, it was George. As for the playtest haunting, this, too, could have been programmed in advance; George could have set his avatar up to appear somewhere near Fred’s, a half-hour into Fred’s next Urth login, following one of those messages—its motions had seemed somewhat random. With a little doing, George even could have preprogrammed an online order for the Swiss Army knife, probably with some failsafe options from backup stores in case the first choice no longer panned out. Using a robocaller program to send the text messages would have been simplicity itself.

  So yes, maybe George could have done all this himself. Would he
have?

  That one, Fred knew. Of course he would have.

  But what about the ongoing sabotage of Urth? And what about Mira? How could his brother possibly have predicted that? Had George known her? Could they have met in the hospital at some point? But that night at her apartment, Mira hadn’t even believed in George’s existence. Had she been lying?

  Getting overwhelmed, Fred clicked Little George, rousing him from sleep.

  “So tell me, Precious,” George said. “The woman’s initials you gave me. Did I get her name and address right?”

  Two possible responses appeared:

  --You … you did!

  --Not even close, Houdini.

  Fred hesitated, then clicked the first, sensing what he was in for.

  “Ha! Beautiful!”

  George laughed for half a minute.

  “I wish I could have seen the look on your face! Never mind! I can picture it!” He laughed again, until he was coughing uncontrollably. More than any time since George’s coma began, Fred felt haunted, as if his brother were sitting right across from him, so clearly had George pictured this moment to himself, so fully had he delighted in its possibility.

  “I was keystroking you, dude. I planted a keystroke monitor in your laptop, specially focused on Internet searches. I made a little program to sift through your two-word entries, pick out the ones most likely to be names, and cross-check them in various directories. Serves you right for researching all the mystery out of your crushes!”

  George laughed again. Dazed, Fred was soon laughing too. George started wheezing.

  “So tell me this,” George said. “Did it work? Did you get the girl?”

  Three responses appeared:

  --Girl got.

  --Girl not got.

  --It’s complicated.

  Fred sighed, and clicked the last. George sighed as well.

  “Yeah. I guess it usually is.”

  Another wave pulsed from his giant hat. Fred’s fire helmet, along with a nearby stapler, flapped off like a pair of bats. George had really been trying to help him, Fred was thinking. He’d really wanted him to get the girl. He’d spent his last weeks setting up all those interventions in Fred’s life, as a joke, yes, but not a cruel one. He’d wanted to keep Fred company. He’d wanted to be Fred’s guardian angel. Fred wanted to jump up and pull the coffee-cup woman and the old man and the doctors and nurses to their feet and dance. But then he saw his next question waiting on the screen:

  --So why have you brought me here?

  When he clicked it, Little George’s face morphed, his lips twisting into a feral curl, his nose and brow crumpling around a point between those giant eyes, which narrowed to dagger tips, bright and malign.

  “For our revenge,” he said.

  The hat coiled, then the top of it sprung up in an arc, Slinky-like, the upper rim landing on Little Fred’s head. Fred’s avatar suddenly hunched, as if under the weight. Fred noticed his neck looked thinner, his ears bigger. Wheeling the view around to observe his face, he found it much like Little George’s now. Another Gollum.

  Meanwhile, the screens by George’s desk flashed, a single phrase lit large over all of them:

  OPERATION AVENGING ANGEL

  And beneath, a countdown: 2:00. 1:59. 1:58.

  “It will take both of us standing here to complete the op,” George said. “If you leave, the program will abort. But then you won’t get to hear my dying words to you.”

  Fred could barely breathe. If this was George’s revenge, he thought, on him as well as on everyone else, he couldn’t imagine a more perfect form.

  George’s cushion descended a bit, turned, and slotted itself and his pretzeled legs under his desk. He began making typing motions at the keyboard.

  “So,” he said. “Any last questions?”

  Fred’s only option appeared:

  --I thought this was supposed to be the Kalki Purana. Why is it all of a sudden Lord of the fucking Rings?

  Yes, Fred thought. What the hell. Wasn’t he at least supposed to be the demon-slaying avatara in all this? He clicked it. George proceeded to ignore it anyway.

  “I’ve been preparing my weapon of mass discombobjectulation for millennia.”

  Behind George on the wall, the arms of a clock sped to a blur.

  “For years, dude,” he said, in a flatter tone, almost an aside, before sliding easily back into character. “Ever since we signed the pact with the Demon Lord.”

  Another wave shot out of the hat. The screens blinked. Beneath the ivy, lines of code began to stream.

  “At first I didn’t really know why,” George went on. “Maybe as a joke. Maybe as a bargaining chip. An insurance policy. You know, a way to retain some control over the place. At some point, I realized I could do more than just cause some headaches. I could really bring it all down if I wanted. Not just temporarily either.”

  Little George was smiling again. He sounded not so much amused as amazed.

  “Not long after I made this discovery, I embarked on a journey. To the Evil One’s lofty lair. I wanted to strike a deal. They could go on building Hell, for all I cared. All I wanted was to spin off a little piece, for Heaven.”

  One minute left. The crazy, double-bottomed hat above them began to glow and fizz with particle effects.

  “I thought my secret weapon would make me feel more powerful,” George said. “Like a bonafide god. Not just some code monkey. Like if things weren’t going my way I could just set it off. Like then they would talk to me.” He sighed. The sigh turned into a cough. The sound cut out for a moment. Then his voice resumed, his tone as even as before. “But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. Ideals or cowardice, I don’t know. I went around begging for a while. Then I just left.”

  Another ripple. The clock flipped and flopped in the air, like a pancake off a griddle, landing on the wall again.

  “Later that night,” George said, “I ascended a second summit, and sat under the Pretaloka moonlight. I don’t know what I was thinking while I was climbing up there. Let’s say I was thinking about the Demon Lord. His dark armor. His jet-steel wings. And about the Angel Inceptor, with his champagne halo of lore. Let’s say that’s what I was thinking, why not. I was pretty drunk, to be honest. But I’ll never forget what I saw when I got to the top.”

  The counter hit 0:30. Fred was given a chance to speak.

  --Let me guess. A moonlit stream of your own vomit?

  Snidely. Not at all the way he wanted to speak. He didn’t want to be George’s antagonist, or George to be his. He didn’t want to be written into this kind of story at all.

  “I saw everything,” George said quietly. “The whole crazy design. All the way down, all the way up. Fire worlds full of angels believing they’re tortured, roasting souls. Cloud worlds full of angels dumb and dangerous enough to believe they’re angels.”

  0:10. Fred thought of Sam, Sam’s upcoming demo, his condo and car and dates with suntanned believers. Fred told himself he’d jump away at the last second. George was speaking again, his voice contemplative, almost a whisper.

  “But they’re all Pretalokas, every last one of them. Limbos are all we ever build. So tell me, Precious, what’s there even for a hero to do?”

  Fred wanted his avatar to move. He wanted himself to make it move. But he couldn’t move a finger.

  “Sometimes,” George was saying, “I think that’s all this world ever wanted to say to me….”

  0:00. The screens began to strobe.

  “… Hey, hero. The cancer is you.”

  Does Fred know he’s dreaming? Does he know something here isn’t quite possible? Part of him might, but the rest is too happy to care. Because they’re heading in again, Fred and George and Sam, just like the first time all those years ago: across the sunlit plaza, around the fountain and its segmented bronze sphere, through the revolving door, and into the mezzanine, with its circling balcony and floor-through, minaretted windows. Then down the escalator to the elevator banks, a
nd up, and up, and up. Every bit as nervous and excited as the first time, they’re ushered into the conference room where they first raised money for Urth. The same view: the other tower to the northwest, and to the north and east, almost the whole city, including, not too far off, the little brown building that houses their office. Facing them at the table sits their angel investor, with his ruddy, cherub smile, flanked by his angel attendants. No wings, no haloes, just suits and skirtsuits. But angels nonetheless, watches and earrings and glasses dancing with unearthly light.

  The brothers are back here with a pitch for another company, a new serious game they think can seriously save the world, something about players racing to update the operating systems, of themselves, of the world, before both crash forever. Sam mans the projector, in a white tuxedo and white top hat. Fred and George are in their tuxes, too. And Fred is in the sparkly gold motorcycle helmet. And George is in the big, bulbous space helmet. And in their hands are laser pointers. And on the projection screen float twin diagrams of glistening clusters and strands warped into whorls. Identical to the last detail. The first labeled “me.” The second: “ME.”

  “The mind,” Fred says, pointing to the first.

  “The MEC,” George says, pointing to the second.

  They butt helmets, to the angels’ guffaws.

  Fred woke up with his head on the cafeteria table, the sleeping laptop before him. With George’s parting words, Urth had scrambled into a soup of color, then vanished, interface and all, only the desktop remaining. Fred’s attempts to log back on had been fruitless. He tried again—still blocked. When Armation started tracking down the people online at the time of the metaverse’s collapse, they’d find Fred’s username. It was not unlikely, he thought, given his history with them, that they’d blame the entire assault on him. Who would believe the true culprit had been a man in a coma for the last seven months? And how would Fred explain to them, and worse, to Sam, that he’d had the chance to stop it? George, no doubt, had foreseen all this. George’s secret coconspirator was none other than Fred.