Death Dream

by Ben Bova

  "But I saw it!"

  "You thought you saw it."

  Susan said, "Dan, really! If that's what Angie saw—"

  "Listen," he said. "Once, when I was a kid in Youngstown, I was sneaking through the alleys behind the houses on our street. I forget why; maybe I was trying to get home without running into any of the tough kids on the block.

  "Anyway, there I was, going down this narrow alley. It had big tall wooden fences on both sides of it."

  Angela was looking up into his face, fascinated that her father was telling her a story about himself. Susan was watching too.

  "All of a sudden a big dog starts barking and running down the alley after me. I was scared to death! I looked over my shoulder and there was this dog! He looked as big as a lion and he had horns on his head! Like a bull! Honest, that's what I saw, big black sharp horns on his head. I can still see that dog and his horns, right now."

  "Dogs don't have horns." Angela said weakly.

  "I know. I even knew it then. But I was so scared I thought I saw horns. And when I think about that dog even today my mind still shows me that same picture, with the horns."

  "Did the dog catch you?"

  "No, honey. I ran faster than I ever had in my whole life and got to the door in the fence of our own house and went inside and locked that door tight!" He looked up at Susan. "Then I came down with an asthma attack that kept me in bed for a week, almost."

  Angela seemed to perk up after that. Dan stayed with her, telling stories and even breaking out an old jigsaw puzzle that they spent the rest of the afternoon on. Susan ignored the messages piling up on her phone machine and took care of things around the house that she had been putting off for days. The baby woke up and for almost a whole hour the four of them played together on the sun-warmed floor of the living room, almost like a family in a television commercial.

  By supper time Angela seemed to be behaving normally, her trauma forgotten. But after the children were put to bed and Dan was stretched out on the sofa watching the local weather forecaster talking gloomily about the drought affecting Florida, Susan came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel.

  "Can we talk about it now?"

  Dan swung his feet to the floor and sat upright, clicking off the TV with the remote controller. "About what?"

  "Angie."

  He made a wry face. "Those VR games can be very realistic. She just got carried away."

  "Maybe they're too realistic. For children."

  "Aw hell, honey. How many kids in that school have used the games and how many have been affected the way Angie was?"

  "I don't know."

  He blinked at her. "You mean you think other kids might have been affected too? No, that can't be. The school would've shut the games down. They'd be yelling bloody murder at us."

  "Maybe."

  "No maybe about it."

  Susan asked, "Do you think she really saw you in the game?"

  "Couldn't have," he said gruffly. "You think we paint in every kid's picture and run their own special version of the game? Get real!"

  "But she seemed so certain," Susan said. "I mean, it scared her so much she fainted!"

  Dan looked up at the ceiling, his way of signaling that he thought his wife was being ridiculous. "Okay, look. Tell you what I'll do. I'll check out the game myself. We've got all the CDs at the office, so I'll just run through that one during my lunch hour tomorrow. Okay?"

  "All the games are kept at the office?"

  "Sure. The VR booths in the school are just the output sites. We keep all the computer hardware and software at the office. They pipe the programming to the school over a dedicated phone line. A fiber optic line. Didn't you know that?"

  "No." Susan's brow furrowed slightly. "So all the games are actually run from your office, then."

  "From Vickie Bessel's office," Dan said. "Vickie's in charge of the school programs."

  CHAPTER 10

  It was full dark when Jason Lowrey finally left the ParaReality building. Other employees left by the rear entrance, through the double metal doors that bore the company's logo in stylish gold lettering. Other employees walked out into the parking lot and got into their cars and drove home.

  Not Jace. He went back through the storerooms and workshops to the loading dock, where he kept his battered old ten-speed bike leaning against the wall beneath the overhang so it would not get rained on. In spite of that the bike was blotched with ugly patches of rust; Jace laughingly called it eczema whenever someone told him he should clean it up or get a new bicycle. In the humid Florida air the gearshift had rusted, too. He had not used the gears since he had arrived in this flat land around Orlando; there was no need to.

  Jace flung one long lanky leg over the saddle seat and pushed away from the wall, coasting down the loading ramp and out onto the back driveway, heading for the little bungalow that other people called his home. Back in Dayton, Dan—always the worry-wart—had bought him a chain and padlock to protect his bike while it was parked outside the Wright-Patterson lab during the day.

  Jace had laughed his head off.

  "Who the hell would steal my eczema special?" he asked Dan. "Anybody needs a bike so bad they're willing to steal my junker, they're welcome to it."

  Jason Lowrey was the only son of a university professor of mathematics and a San Francisco socialite who had been beautiful enough to be a fashion model. Not that his mother chose to work; she regarded a job as beneath her station in life. But she did pose for photographers now and then in connection with charity drives to raise money for the homeless or other good causes. Jace's father doted on his mother but, with his teacher's income, he could not afford to show his love in any solidly visible form, such as jewelry or a fine home or even a ski condo up in the Sierras. She bought those things for herself, constantly reminding her husband that he was not enough of a man to provide for her in the manner she expected.

  As Jace grew up he began to realize that love meant pain. Not physical pain, perhaps, but constant mental and emotional torture. His mother seemed a coldly unattainable goddess: distant, haughty, demanding, often stern, occasionally brutal, never willing to give the warmth and affection he craved. Jace watched his father grovel before his beautiful, demanding mother. As he grew older he wondered why his father would behave so.

  Then Jace discovered sex and his sudden realization of the true reason behind his father's slavery stunned and disgusted him.

  When Jace was little, his father virtually ignored him. "You're not a human being until you can hold an intelligent conversation with me," Jace remembered his father telling him whenever he asked the soft-chinned man to play with him or help him in any way. Even when Jace was rushed to the hospital with acute appendicitis, his father went ahead with his trip to some conference on education. "I can't do anything to help the boy," he had said. "No reason for me to miss my conference."

  Once Jace started going to school his father became an unbending tyrant, demanding that his son be the brightest, best behaved; most honored student in his class. Jace rebelled in little ways. School was so easy that he could not help but get good grades. But he played pranks on his teachers and got into fights with the other kids. He became a discipline problem. And he learned that he could play his mother against his father, get her to blame him for his difficulties in "adjusting to his peer group" while he blamed his wife for "spoiling the child rotten."

  Jake's earliest friend was his TV set. His first memories were of cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. He laughed with childish glee whenever Bugs outslicked Yosemite Sam or the cloddish Elmer Fudd. Later he graduated to superheroes who righted wrongs and won the world's admiration while wearing wonderful costumes with masks and capes. The only effective way his parents had to discipline him was to turn off his TV. Later they had to physically remove the set from his room. By the time he was a teenager he kept his cartoon addiction a secret from the few acne-faced friends he possessed, but the Teenaged Mutant
Ninja Turtles were his companions every Saturday morning.

  By then he had discovered video games. Every nickel and dime he could lay his hands on went into video arcades. He pestered his parents for games that he could play on his home computer and even promised to behave himself in school if they would only buy him more games. They found it easier to placate their son than to fight against his insatiable thirst for more and more complex video games.

  When Jace was ready for college he looked like the stereotypical nerd: a tall, gangly, pock-faced kid with unruly hair, squinting narrow eyes, and nervous mumbling voice. He knew that love meant pain and sex meant subjugation. Yet he was not so much afraid of other people as uncertain of how to make friends—or even of the need to have friends. He was almost totally self-contained.

  But he was a genius. That became clear as he breezed his way through his first year at Berkeley, where his father taught mathematics. Airily, Jace transferred to the California Institute of Technology.

  "Do him good," Jace overheard his father say to his mother. "He thinks he's such a hotshot, wait till he gets to Cal Tech and finds that there are hundreds of other kids just as bright as he is. And even brighter. That'll take him down a peg or two." There was no one at Cal Tech brighter than Jace. At least, no one that he would admit was brighter. On a campus renowned for brilliance and a certain easiness when it came to discipline, Jace began truly to shine. Even his pranks won campus-wide admiration. He blossomed socially. He made friends, almost all of them fellow male students. He avoided most of the women on campus. Love meant pain. Sex meant subjugation. He substituted the worlds he could create inside computers. He longed to make those worlds real, alive.

  After three years his despairing faculty advisor warned, "You've got to settle down to some curriculum, Jace! You're picking classes here and there and making no progress toward a degree."

  Jace had no interest in a degree. He had no desire ever to leave Cal Tech. He loved his life there. He attended classes when he chose to, yet still passed them all with ease. He lived alone in a series of one-room apartments, always thrown out sooner or later by a landlord or landlady who could no longer stand his indifference to cleaning. One irate woman got the FBI to search his room, certain that all the electronic gadgetry Jace had accumulated could only be the tools of a high-tech terrorist or a madman.

  Cal Tech shelters its geniuses only up to a point. After six years the administration made it clear that Jace had either to buckle down to a stiffly-regulated curriculum that would lead to a degree and graduation, or they would throw him out unceremoniously forthwith. Jace might have eventually gotten his degree if it had not been for Ralph Martinez.

  Martinez was a captain then, just returned from a combat tour of the Persian Gulf and, much to his disgust, assigned to a public relations swing through the nation's leading universities. He gave his perfunctory little illustrated speech in one of the Cat Tech lecture halls, then—as ordered—"met informality with interested members of the student body."

  Barely a dozen and a half students showed up at the student lounge to talk with Martinez. One of them was Jace. Most of the students were interested in the supersonic airplanes and high-tech weaponry that Martinez had shown in his slides. Jace's only interest was in being the star of the group, and that meant he had to bait the hardedged captain unmercifully.

  "You enjoy killing Iraqis?" Jace asked, a big-toothed grin on his gaunt, angular face.

  Martinez's eyes flashed like flint struck with steel but he said nothing. They stood facing each other, the tall lean scarecrow with his hair pulled back in a ragged ponytail and the stocky, square-shouldered captain in Air Force blue.

  The other students, all male except for one buxom young woman with an overly loud voice, seemed to move back as if they were getting out of the way of a shoot-out.

  "Don't mind him," said the young woman disdainfully. "He's sub-human."

  Jake's smile widened. Without taking his eyes off Martinez he said, "I mean, does it give you a kick to drop bombs on helpless women and children?"

  "We bombed military targets," Martinez snapped.

  "Then who the hell bombed all those women and children we saw in the news?"

  The young woman stepped in front of Jace, as if trying to separate him from the captain. "What is this, Lowrey? Now you're a political agitator?"

  "I just wanna know what it's like to kill people," Jace replied. "I never met a killer before."

  Obviously seething, Martinez repeated, "We bombed military targets. Not every bomb hit its intended target, though. There was some unintended collateral damage—"

  "Like that civilian shelter," Jace said. "How many people did you kill in there? A hundred? Two hundred?"

  Martinez said, "That was a military command post. We didn't know they had brought the civilians into it."

  "I thought you were using smart bombs," Jace sneered. "They sound pretty stupid to me."

  "Then make them smarter, wiseass."

  That stung. "Me?"

  "That's right: you. Do you think we're a bunch of homicidal maniacs? Do you think we enjoy risking our butts and dropping bombs on people?"

  "Yeah, I think you do."

  "Then think again, asshole. I love to fly. Nothing in the world beats the thrill of flying a high-performance jet. But combat is something else. I've been there. I can do without it, believe me."

  Jace shook his head in distrust.

  "And if you're so fucking worried that we're killing civilians by mistake," Martinez went on, "then come and help us build smarter weapons."

  "Not me!"

  "Sure, not you. You'd rather sit back and make wisecracks about us. But you won't help us to do our jobs better. You're too fucking chicken to put your brain in gear and tackle the toughest problems you'll ever face."

  Jace gave the captain a studied grin and a one-finger salute, then left the room. Martinez had clearly won the exchange.

  Two months later Jace showed up at Martinez's new office in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Martinez had demanded. On his shoulders were the bright golden oak leaves of a brand-new major.

  "You're a hard guy to find," Jace said, standing in front of Martinez's desk like a tall shabby scarecrow. His tee-shirt proclaimed, Split Atoms, Not Logs.

  "I've just been assigned here."

  "Well, you said something about tackling the toughest problems I'll ever face. Okay, I'm willing to take a look at your problems."

  Martinez stared at him for a long silent moment. What Jace had not revealed was that he was fleeing from Cal Tech's determined effort to get him to graduate. And that he had neither forgotten Martinez's besting of him nor forgiven him for it.

  "I got to reading about what you guys are doing," Jace said. "I don't wanna work on any weapons; I'm not gonna help you kill anybody. But there was some pretty interesting stuff about cockpit simulations—building better simulators. I got some ideas about that."

  Martinez eyed Jace warily, then reached for the telephone on his desk. "I'll ask Bill Appleton to take a look at you." To himself he added, If anybody can put this kook in harness, Appleton's the one to do it.

  Before the week was out Jace was happily working in Appleton's simulations laboratory. He sent a picture postcard to his parents in California. It showed an aerial view of the city of Dayton. Jace did not put a return address on the card.

  Eventually he phoned his mother, just to hear her voice, just to tell her he was okay and doing well and maybe hear her say she was pleased that he called. Instead she told him that his father was in the hospital dying of cancer.

  "I can't do anything to help the boy," Jace said, echoing his father's remark from twenty years earlier. "No reason for me to miss my conference."

  He did not even bother to send a card when he moved to Florida; he had merely left his forwarding address with the Post Office. His mother had not written to him in the fourteen months since he had moved.

&nbs
p; Jace bicycled up to his bungalow in the yellowish light of the street lamps out on the avenue. The bungalow was tucked away behind the houses that fronted on the street.

  Ghostly blue flickers from TV screens lit most of the windows he passed. The gravel driveway was dark, but he knew every bump of it. Somebody was barbecuing ribs: burning them, from the smell of it, Jace thought.

  He leaned the bike against the bungalow wall next to the front door, then pecked out the elaborate security code on the keypad he had installed in the door jamb.

  It beeped and winked green lights at him and the door popped open with a sigh and a puff of air like the airlock of a contamination-proof biology lab or an aerospace clean room.

  The track lights he had installed along the ceiling came on automatically as Jace stepped into the room and kicked the door shut behind him. He had carefully opaqued all the windows and knocked down all the partitions, turning the bungalow into a single room that never saw sunlight. It was filled with television sets, computer boxes, display screens, keyboards, dull black remote control units scattered everywhere, green circuit boards lying on the floor, on the bed, on the long work tables that were the main item of furniture in the one room. Microchips lay everywhere like a fine high-tech dust. There was not a book, not a magazine or a journal or a report anywhere; not even a newspaper or a TV listing.

  There was one chair in the room, a jet black curved recliner that looked like an astronaut's acceleration couch. Jace stretched out on it, his booted feet hanging past its end, cranked it down almost to a prone position and reached for the TV remote controls on the floor where he had left them. He turned on three of the TV sets lined against the wall, each of them showing a different channel, each of them muted to absolute silence.

  There was no refrigerator in the house, no stove or microwave oven. Jace had removed the entire kitchen and covered the sawed-off pipes with cabinets that held videotapes. He ate at the lab and, lately, had been taking his infrequent showers there too. His own bathroom was too filthy even for him to feel comfortable in it.