Then Again

by Rick Boling

  I finished my performance that night floating on cloud nine. After a six-song set, with the best band anyone could hope for backing me, the crowd wouldn’t stop screaming for more. So I obliged them with a solo rendition of Robin’s Song, walking off the stage with a feeling reminiscent of the first time I’d experienced applause that day at William’s Park when Carol Henderson had given a seven-year-old his first taste of stardom. My elation, however, was short-lived.

  I walked off stage to another, smaller round of applause, plus high-fives and back slaps from crew members, roadies, and a dozen or so of the most famous rock artists on the planet. But that adulation did nothing to ease the pain and loneliness that rose in my chest as I stumbled through the gauntlet of well-wishers. Although I’d learned to exert a kind of makeshift, temporary control over the mind-shattering shocks of grief that struck me whenever I thought of Aurélie, searching the far walls backstage and not seeing her apparition was devastating. Behind me, chants of “More” and “Encore” were rising, but my knees had turned to rubber. And when Ellie reached out to hug me, I collapsed into her arms, knocking her to the floor.

  “Take it easy, Dad,” she said, as I buried my head in her lap. “You did great. Just listen to that crowd.”

  Yes you did, Rix. You were wonderful.

  The sound of Aurélie’s voice was, I knew, a figment of my deranged imagination, assembled from my memory banks as a defense mechanism against the thunderclap of grief. Still, my knee-jerk reaction was to look up and search the cluster of concerned faces staring down at me. Squinting through a swirl of spots that warned of impending unconsciousness, I thought I saw Aurie and Heyoka at the edge of that cluster. But Heyoka looked too young and Aurie’s hairdo was all wrong. And when I realized I was looking at H2 and Robin, the room began to spin out of control.

  I awoke in a hospital bed, thinking that somehow I’d traveled back in time to the day I’d had the heart attack at Heyoka’s villa. But, unlike that awakening, there was no log in my throat or dried goo holding my eyes closed. To further confirm that I was still in my second life, Ellie and Jackson were at my bedside.

  An IV tube dangled above one of my arms, and a blood pressure cuff was wrapped around the other. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a monitor and that flickering green light I remembered from my first visit to death’s doorway. When I tried to speak, my throat was so dry all I could manage was a weak grunt.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Ellie said. “Don’t panic. You had what they’re calling a blood-pressure incident, not a stroke or heart attack or anything. Apparently you haven’t been taking your BP meds, and that, plus all the stress pushed your pressure way up. It was around 300 over 200 when we checked you in, which they said meant you were a walking dead man. But they’ve got it back under control. All they need to do now is come up with an oral drug regimen that will keep it that way without your having to be hooked up to an IV for the rest of your life.”

  It took them a couple of weeks to get me off the IV, during which time I fell deeper and deeper into depression. It had been almost three months since Aurie’s last transmission, and other than a few sporadic bursts of unintelligible data, there were no further messages or meaningful communications from their dimension. I tried to hang on to tiny bits of hope I thought I’d found in the now-dog-eared copy of her last message—the “might’s” and “if’s” and other equivocations that suggested they had not yet given up. But that, I knew, was only wishful thinking.

  I left the hospital with six bottles of pills and orders to take various combinations of them three times a day to keep my blood pressure in check. One of the prescriptions was for an antidepressant, and between that and the side effects of the other drugs, my motor skills and brain function had deteriorated to the point of making me feel like a drunk on LSD wandering through a side-show House of Mirrors. Not only was I unsteady on my feet, there seemed to be a short circuit in the connection between my brain and my mouth that sometimes caused an embarrassing delay in verbalizing even the simplest of thoughts. The doctors assured me these side effects would ease and eventually disappear, though they said it would likely take several weeks for my system to fully adapt to the new chemical onslaught.

  Back at the cabin, with a day nurse to monitor me and make sure I took my meds, I was subjected to a steady stream of visitors, whose efforts to cheer me failed miserably. Most of the foundation’s operations had been moved to the Georgia site, so everyone was nearby. To make matters worse, Mom and Dad flew in from overseas for the sole purpose, it seemed, to berate me for not sticking to the drug regimen Dad had put me on earlier. Though happy to see them, I was not terribly disappointed when they left after a couple of days to travel to St. Pete and visit with friends before flying back to Italy.

  The only positive thing about all this visitation was that I finally got to spend some time with H2. In spite of his busy schedule, he managed to drop by occasionally, and his presence was comforting because he reminded me so much of his older self. On his first visit, he seemed dismayed that I had not been told of the grave situation Heyoka and Aurélie had faced before we lost contact with them. They had kept everyone else in our small circle abreast of what was happening, but I had been excluded on the premise that my emotional state and mental attitude had to remain upbeat, at least until after the concert.

  Although I was aware of their world’s steady march toward Armageddon, at times Aurélie had assured me they were handling things and were still relatively safe. What she failed to mention was the extent to which their underground sanctuary was being increasingly threatened by marauding hoards of anarchists who were taking advantage of instability in the surrounding bedrock that had been caused years before by commercial mining of the area’s natural gas reserves.

  “You may recall a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,” H2 said during our first meeting. “The technique was relatively new when you left their dimension, and the scientific community was only beginning to understand the dangers it presented. There was a strong grass-roots movement to stop it, but that effort didn’t stand a chance against the money and influence of huge multinational energy producers and their billionaire supporters. And, like many other ecologically unsound practices championed by corrupt politicians and greedy corporations, fracking operations flourished in the years that followed, creating devastating pockets of earthquake activity around the globe. One of those pockets was near Saint-Genis-Pouilly, and the resulting destabilization lingered, eventually weakening the defense system they’d built to protect the lab complex from invaders.”

  Over the years, he said, they had constructed several reinforced barriers, like nested shells, around the underground lab. These fortifications had been damaged by residual earthquake activity, and as the economic and social framework of society crumbled, access to outside labor and the materials needed to maintain their structural integrity was cut off. This forced them to retreat into isolation along with a core group of researchers. From then on, much of their energy and time was spent protecting the complex from savage gangs of mutant refugees who constantly attempted to break in and help themselves to the extensive, renewable supplies of food, clean water, breathable air, and medicine.

  Of course, having regressed to a near stone-age existence, these marauders would have had no idea how to operate or maintain the sophisticated generation and conversion systems. But that ignorance had never stopped them before, nor would it stop them once they discovered the world’s last remaining treasure trove of life-sustaining resources.

  Damage was done and repaired; fissures were sealed only to be broken open again by improvised explosive devices. Force fields and chemical barriers, reinforced by googolplexians of microscopic nanowarriers, were deployed for protection. The battle soon became a war of attrition, as the gangs—once-hostile to each other but now frustrated—agreed to join forces.

  In the midst of all this chaos, Heyoka, Aurélie, and their small group of dedicated colleagues worked fra
ntically to help establish the foundation and complete development of the most sophisticated 3D printing operation ever conceived—a technology not only capable of printing complex living organisms, but of doing so interdimensionally. Because there was little hope for the future of their planet, the goal was to perfect the technology in time to send instructions to our dimension for printing copies of the lab’s human personnel. Sam had said that higher life forms were coming through with blank minds, but H2 assured me they were close to remedying that problem when they apparently had to shut things down.

  “That was true of the first few attempts,” he said. “However, you are forgetting one of their monumental scientific achievements, an achievement validated by your participation in their first full-scale experiment.”

  I waited for my drugged brain to process this, but nothing came to mind. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m not thinking too clearly since I’ve been on all these meds.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said with a nod. “Well, let’s look at the situation a little more closely. Here we have, say, one Rix Vaughn, whose body has been copied and printed in another dimension. And we have the ability to animate that body so that it comes to life in the other dimension, but with no memories or personality. If we wanted to turn that body into a complete copy of Rix Vaughn, personality and all, how, then, could we do that?”

  And suddenly I got it. “The same way they transferred my mind into my younger self.”

  “Correct!” he said. “And that’s where the technology stood when we lost contact with them. In fact, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that they would be able to accomplish this, but only if the accelerator remained functional. Unfortunately, the accelerator and its ancillary components were what allowed them to communicate with us, and that communication has obviously ceased. This could be due to a number of factors, the worst being damage to the accelerator that rendered it permanently inoperable. However, it could also be that we are looking at something less severe, such as a temporary interruption in their efforts due to the ongoing battle to protect the lab.”

  “So …” I stopped to allow my mouth to catch up with my brain. “So, are you saying there might still be hope?”

  “There’s no way to know. However, the sporadic, unintelligible transmissions we’ve been receiving could indicate efforts to resume communications. Unfortunately, they could also be due to other factors, such as leftover static interference in the space-time continuum, or something else beyond our capability to understand at this time. The fact that we don’t know what’s happening leaves room for hope, but we can’t expend a lot of mental energy speculating on what might or might not happen. Our primary mandate is to complete the development of Millennium Park and continue to deal with the looming prospect of worldwide disaster. And that’s going to require all the time and intellectual resources we have.”

  A Star Is Born

  In the spaced-out aftermath of my collapse, I hadn’t thought much about the concert or its impact on my future. And no one had mentioned record sales or chart positions, probably because they’d been ordered not to do anything that might aggravate my condition. But when the doctors said they were satisfied with the stabilization of my blood pressure, and that excitement was no longer a risk factor, David Geffen came by to fill me in. It had been six weeks since the album’s release and already three singles had cracked the top ten on Billboard, with Robin’s Song topping the list now for twenty-seven days and the other two on the rise. Meanwhile, the album was well on its way to going double platinum, with no end in sight.

  “We’ve purposely held back a little on distribution in order to create a false impression of shortages due to unexpected sales volume,” said Geffen. “Interestingly, the rumor—purposely spread by our publicists—that you have gone into hiding, is adding an aura of mystery to your sudden popularity, and people are clamoring for any tidbit of news about your disappearance. The gossip weeklies are eating the story up, as are the celebrity rags and tabloids. Speculation has run from an alien abduction to a drug overdose, and everything in between. You’re hot, my friend. Especially for an invisible man.”

  If he’d expected an exuberant response, I’m sure he was disappointed; I could barely muster a smile, let alone any overt display of happiness. My lack of enthusiasm was due in part to the fact that I—with some conceit—was not really surprised the album was doing so well. But the main reason was my ever-deepening depression over losing Aurélie. The antidepressant had not helped; on the contrary, its stupefying effects had made things worse, so I’d quit taking it after a couple of weeks. Fortunately, the original marketing plan had called for me to remain out of the public eye until they were ready to release my second album. Of course, I would have to finish writing the songs before we could even start recording the album, and that now seemed like it might take years.

  Because of my supposedly delicate emotional status, no one was bugging me to complete the album, so I didn’t have to worry about writing for a while. What I did worry about was finding some kind of motivation. I had never been convinced that my role in the Grand Plan was all that important, so there was little incentive on that score. I tried my best to recapture the thrill I’d experienced on stage at the concert, but that feeling had been so brief I could barely remember it, let alone use it as a creative stimulant. Fortune and fame, as James Taylor once wrote, is a curious game; it takes a strong desire and a considerable amount of energy to manage, and I had neither.

  Ellie had been surprisingly undemanding and sympathetic. When she came by—which was more often I than would have expected given her workload—instead of berating me for my seeming laziness, she would read to me from the fan magazines and entertainment trades in the hope of raising my spirits. I was grateful for her show of tolerance, but she wouldn’t have known, because I continued to act like a spoiled child, often refusing to get out of bed or eat, and never touching my guitar.

  Periodic examinations by several medical specialists revealed no lingering physical problems. And even though I knew I was in a psychological tailspin, when Ellie finally got up the nerve to suggest I see a shrink, I flatly refused. Then, just as I was about to hit rock bottom, fate stepped in and threw me a lifeline.

  Special Delivery

  Sunrise shot silver splinters of light through the cabin’s ice-crusted windows as I huddled under a pile of blankets on that cold winter morning. The baseboard heating was struggling—and failing—to warm the house, when the phone jerked me out of a shivering half-sleep. Knowing Ellie was the only person who would call this early, I tried to ignore the brain-rattling clamor. But after the sixth ring, I knew it wouldn’t stop until I answered, so I snaked an arm out and grabbed the receiver. Sure enough, it was Ellie, calling to warn me that she would be over in a few minutes with a surprise. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I crawled out of bed to turn on the coffeepot and light a fire, then climbed back under the covers to await another tedious visit from my daughter.

  Ellie’s surprises usually involved some news about the album, or maybe a delicacy from the bakery they’d recently opened at Millennium Park, so when she walked in carrying a puppy I was caught off-guard. I knew the bit about therapeutic pets, and I wasn’t about to go for that. But the tiny chocolate lab was so feisty and cute, I decided not to say anything until she had a chance to explain herself.

  “Meet Chance,” she said, as the energetic ball of fur leaped from her arms and landed, legs akimbo, on the slick wooden floor. Together we watched it race around the room, slipping and sliding into walls and chairs before skidding to an awkward stop in front of the fire. Cautiously backing away, it resumed its frantic investigation of the cabin, and when it made several unsuccessful attempts to jump on my bed, I reached down to lend a hand.

  Ellie remained silent while the puppy snuggled up to my chin and licked my face, then slid off my chest to attack a pillow, snarling and tearing at the pillowcase as if protecting me from a vicious animal.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Elli
e said. “Seems like a normal puppy, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, so?” I grumbled.

  “So … it’s a copy—She, I should say—She’s a print.”

  I didn’t catch on right away, but once my sluggish brain managed to put two-and-two together the implications became clear. Ellie, meanwhile, cautioned me against getting my hopes up.

  “There was no message from Aurie,” she said. “No status report or anything. It was a single unannounced transmission—a set of instructions sent directly to the printer. But, if you think about it, this actually says some things in and of itself. For one, it tells us the lab is still functional, though obviously with some limitations. For another, it tells us that they—at least some of them—might still be alive.”

  “What do you mean, might?” I said. “This obviously proves—”

  “No it doesn’t, Dad. H2 says the transmission could have been archived earlier and programmed to start automatically whenever the interdimensional link was reestablished. And the link could have opened up again due to something other than human intervention. The fact that there was no accompanying message suggests that might be the case.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “At least it’s … Hey, wait a minute. She seems normal. Which means they must have solved the problem of transferring animals with their minds intact.”