Blake shook her head. “I just know I want to get the fuck out of here. Anything is better than this.”
Chan looked at her and shook his head. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s out there.”
“What’s out there isn’t perfect. But at least you would know the truth.”
Chan ran a hand over his bald head. He paced back and forth on the terrace. Then he made a fist and lightly punched the palm of his hand. Clayton pulled away from the binoculars. “Amazing,” he said.
“Why did you come here?” Chan said.
Parker thought of a million different lies he could tell Chan. In the waistband of his pants, he felt the pistol with the silver bullets. He could pull it out and end this now. Wake Chan up. But he needed Chan to cooperate, to want to leave the system. To want to help. And if they were to wake him up, the programmer would find out the truth anyway.
“I’m here because I need your help.”
“Help with what?”
“Exactly what you’ve been doing here. Figuring things out. Getting into other systems.”
“In all my time here,” Chan said, “I still haven’t found out what these places are. What they were made for. Who we are. Why we’re here.”
“I can give you those answers.”
Blake stepped forward. “No matter what he says, I can go with you, right?”
Chan went to the railing of the terrace and looked out across the city. A thin trail of smoke rose from one of the buildings in Midtown, giving the sky a greasy film. Gunshots rattled off in the distance. From somewhere in the building below moaned a revenant. This was a dying city. Trapped for eternity inside a never-ending loop of despair and violence. Chan had to see that.
“I’ll go,” Chan said. “What do I have to do?”
Parker turned to Blake. “You too?”
“Shit, yeah, I’m not hanging around this dump anymore.”
Parker nodded, for he had already decided how he was going to do it. The explanation only scared people. Gave them second thoughts.
“Both of you, just look over the edge down to Park Avenue. You should see a bright light.”
Curious, Blake joined Chan at the railing of the terrace. They both leaned over, looking forty-something stories to the street below. With their backs turned, Parker pulled the pistol from his waistband, walked up behind Chan, and shot him in the back of the head.
Blake spun around at the noise, her eyes wide.
“Jesus, what hap—” she uttered, before Parker shot her too.
Parker reentered a state of consciousness like a satellite crashing through the Earth’s atmosphere. There was utter blackness, then light burned at the edges of his brain. He could feel himself erupting back into wakefulness. And he prepared himself for the memory gap. But there was none. He could remember everything that had happened while inside the system. For this first time, he knew where he had been. What he had done. Because this time, he wasn’t working for anyone. There was no memory erase.
Slowly he opened his eyes. The usual slow burn of a headache wasn’t present. There was always the mild hangover caused by the memory wash, and Parker lay on his back, enjoying the absence of pain. He turned his head to inspect his surroundings. He lay on a military-style cot in what appeared to be one of the old rooms of the asylum. Through the window, he could see the East River passing slowly by, the skyline of Manhattan glittering in the early morning sunlight.
He swung his feet out over the side and sat up. Near him was Clayton’s cot, and Selberg and Charlotte’s work station. Both were empty. The room had green tiled floors with whitewashed walls marked by graffiti. Behind him, a door banged open. Blake strode in. The real Blake. She wore cargo pants two sizes too big and a men’s button-down shirt that hung down to her knees. She walked up to Parker and pushed him hard.
“Jesus Christ, you asshole, you couldn’t have told me you were going to do that?” Blake said, her mouth twisted with outrage.
“Do what?”
“Shoot me in the fucking head, man! I mean, what the hell was that?”
“Oh . . .” Parker sighed, stood up, and stretched. “The first time it’s easier not to know it’s coming. The anticipation is the worst part.”
“Well next time, let me know first.”
“Next time? Whoa, wait, there is no next time,” Parker said. “That’s it. You helped me, so I got you out. Congratulations. Go live your life.”
“No, it’s not that simple. I need to know things.”
“What things?”
“Like my whole life? Every memory I have is a lie. Some make-believe bullshit that some computer nerd made up for me. I want to know who I am. Jesus Christ, I was in prison. I don’t even know what I did.”
Parker studied her. He had never actually met anyone in person that he had brought out of the system. All the people he kill-waked came alive in some distant Sleep machine somewhere. But then he realized, maybe he had met someone from the inside before? He wouldn’t have remembered. But somehow he felt like this was the first time. And to see her standing before him in this totally new environment was a little surreal. Like dreaming of a person, then waking to find her standing before you.
“I appreciate what happened to you, I really do. But I don’t take tourists. I go back for a reason, and there’s no room for extras.”
“I can help you,” she said.
Parker walked past her and into the hallway beyond. In daylight, the hospital wasn’t anywhere near as gloomy as it had been the night before. Except for the occasional rusted beer can or smashed bit of glass, the halls were fairly clean.
Blake followed him. “I can fight. I’m tough. I survived years in that hellhole. Every single day there was a battle.”
Parker found himself in the old cafeteria, the Sleep machines still spread out across the floor, hundreds of prisoners in their suspended states. Blake stopped and stared.
“This is it?” she said. “This is where I spent the last few years? Strapped into one of these machines?”
“Yup,” Parker said. “You and every single person in that system with you. The machine keeps you in a sleep state, and puts your consciousness into the system. You then share that world with everyone else. The machine feeds you, keeps your muscles from atrophying.”
“But why?” she said. “Why do they put you into this weird, terrible world? Why not just put everyone to sleep for ten years then wake you up.”
“Well, the whole point of it is to rehabilitate people. In most of these systems, there are supposed to be mandatory classes. So you learn a skill. Learn how to get along with people. Manage anger. That sort of thing. Like a cross between getting a prison GED and some serious psychological smoothing over. You learn how to live in the regular.”
“So in order to find out how to become human, we need to go into a computer program,” she said. “So what was I supposed to be learning in my world? If you kill someone, you better chop their head off or else they’ll come back to life as some zombie undead creature?”
“Well . . .”
“Or, no wait, never let anyone take you alive, because they’ll throw you in a cage and rape you seventeen times per day and torture you whenever you’re bored. What the fuck am I supposed to learn from that? How much the world sucks and how shitty people are to one another when things go bad? Do you have any idea how fucked in the head I am right now from the last couple of years? And you just want me to live my life?”
“Your world was different. A mistake. I’ve never seen anything like it before. They shut the system down, but they forgot you inside. Or maybe they left you deliberately. I don’t know. But it wasn’t supposed to be like that.”
“Oh, well, that’s great. Me and Chan are the lucky ones.”
“Speaking of your friend, where is he?”
“He’s not my friend.”
“You seemed like you two knew each other in there.”
“Everybody knows everybody in there. You don’t really h
ave time for friends. You have allies and enemies. People who want to kill you and people who don’t.”
“Which was he?”
“He didn’t want to kill me.”
“Well, that’s a start.”
“I guess,” Blake said. “He’s in the back with the others.”
Along the back of the asylum stretched an old wooden porch, half-rotted, but still standing. The view was impressive: out across a short stretch of grass, then toward the water and the city beyond. Parker imagined a time when patients must have been brought out here in wheelchairs or in their beds by nurses in starched white uniforms with high-peaked hats and white shoes. Tortured minds looking out across the water at a normal world off limits to them.
It was a beautiful morning. The air was still cool, a thin layer of dew covered everything, sparkling in the sun like minerals in sand. Several old rocking chairs faced the water, and seated in them, engaged in a heated discussion, were Selberg, Charlotte, and Chan. Unlike Blake, who looked pretty much the same on the outside as she had on the inside, Chan was much skinnier than he had been in the system. His elbows formed sharp points that jutted out from the dirty T-shirt he wore. His fingers were long and bony, his neck so thin it barely seemed able to support his head. And his face wasn’t quite as handsome as it had been on the inside either.
He must have found a way to modify his appearance virtually. To actually change the coding for his projection in there to make him look better. Fill him out with muscle. Make him more handsome.
A guy who could do that was exactly the kind of guy Parker needed. Clayton stood on the porch, looking out across the water. He nodded to Parker. “How you doing, buddy?”
“All right. Made it out alive. Congratulations on your first trip. How’s it feel?”
“Strange. Like I just woke up from a dream.”
“You did.”
“But it feels like it actually happened. Feels so real. I can still remember everything.”
Parker nodded. “Enjoy that part. Most of what we do, you’ll never remember. Never even know about.”
Parker joined the small circle of Selberg, Chan, and Charlotte. Chan nodded at him. “I knew it, man. Everything they’ve been telling me. I knew it. I knew there had to be more out there.”
“They told you about the supermax system?”
“Yeah, yeah . . .” Chan leaned back in the rocking chair and interlaced his fingers. “Selberg and Charlotte were just bringing me up to speed. You can’t know you’re going into a prison. You have to trick the system.”
“Is that something you think you can handle?”
“Of course I can handle it. I have to handle it,” Chan said. “I have to go back into the system. My memories are out there somewhere.”
“Exactly,” Blake said.
“What do you mean?” Parker said.
“They took away my memory of who I was before I went to prison. I get it, Selberg’s been filling me in. I was some bigtime hacker. Convicted, sent to prison. Whatever. But I can’t remember any of that. I can’t remember anything before my life in the system. But they don’t destroy your memory. I have this theory they just download it from your brain and sort of store it somewhere. Like in a systems version of an off-site server. So my memory is out there somewhere. And I need to find it,” Chan said. “So yeah, I’ll get you in. Just tell me about this system.”
Selberg cleared his throat. “Well, I think it’s like this. There’s no way we can get into the supermax system from the outside. It’s impossible.”
“Why?” Parker asked.
“Because the system is completely shut off from the outside. Nobody in or out.”
“What about guards?” Clayton asked.
“Sure, plenty of them. But they all signed on for long-term contracts. Those guys are in for years at a time. We can’t get to any of them.”
“What about new prisoners?”
“None. No new prisoners. And no prisoner is scheduled for release for another ten years. I’m telling you, this place is vacuum sealed.”
“So what do you do, like, whatever it is you normally do?” Blake said.
Parker shot her a “why are you talking” look. She stared right back at him. Selberg ignored both of them and rocked back in his chair. “Well, as Chan mentioned, there are plenty of backdoors in the older systems. We’ve been able to exploit that to circumvent the security. Think of it like a firewall on your computer. So a firewall acts as a barrier between a trusted world and something that may or may not be trusted. So the prison system, the island of Manhattan, is considered trusted. And whatever is coming onto the island is considered a possible threat. Once you get past the firewall, the only security within the system itself were the guards and other prisoners who might decide to turn you in. But once you had boots on the ground inside the prison world, it was just a matter of staying disguised and not bringing attention to yourself.”
“So what changed?” Clayton said.
“Well now, security added a new layer. Sort of like a holding stage. Where everything that comes into the prison is memory-monitored to determine reality awareness.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, if you’re aware of the truth, if you’re aware that you’re actually entering a prison, the system won’t let you in. But the problem is, if you’re not aware that you’re going into a prison, if you think the world you’re entering is real . . .”
“You can get lost in there,” Parker said.
“Exactly. Forget the mission. You’ll just start living a new life. And the system now has one more prisoner.”
“So we need to get someone past security,” Chan said. “And once we’re inside, we need to somehow have them be able to retrieve their memory?”
“That’s exactly right,” Selberg said.
“Well, that’s exactly what my theory was,” Chan said. “They download the memory to a facility and store it. Then when they release you, they give your memory back. So if we can download the memory of the person going in and somehow store it inside the system where he can find it, then we’re good.”
A sailboat made its way down the East River. Already the sun had risen above the horizon, dull orange giving way to brilliant blue. The day was fast approaching.
“We don’t have much time here,” Parker said. “These theories. Will they work?”
“I’m really not sure,” Selberg admitted.
“Well, what’s the worst case scenario?”
“Worst case is we strip your memory completely, we get you inside, into the memory storage facility, then we can never connect you again with your memory. So you go on living as a prisoner forever. We can never get you out.”
“That’s bad.” Parker had spent enough time in these machines. He wasn’t going to die in one.
“Yeah. And you haven’t even heard what the second-worst scenario is,” Chan said. “Because I think it might actually be a little worse than first worst scenario.”
“Okay, so what’s second-worst?”
“Second-worst is that something goes wrong and somehow the security system catches you and kills you.”
“So that’s not too bad. I just wake up.”
“No, you don’t just wake up. The security system is designed to follow your connection out to the real world, track down your Sleep machine, and shut off your breathing apparatus. If security kills you on the inside, your real body will die.”
Parker had never heard of that happening. He had no idea there was a security that was able to leave the system and affect outcomes in the real world. Frightening.
“Enough with the negative, man, what’s the best-case scenario?” Parker said.
“Well, of course, best-case scenario. We strip your memory, we somehow get you into the system without you having any idea you’re really entering a prison. Then we give you a series of clues . . .”
“In the form of Easter eggs,” Chan said. “Hidden messages for you.”
“A seri
es of clues that somehow lead you to a spot where we’ve hidden your memory of what’s real.”
Parked pressed his fingertips together. “Okay, then what?”
“Then, when you have your memories in place, you actually remember what your mission is. You seek out the target and you kill him. Kill yourself. Wake up, and everyone gets paid.”
“What’s the chance of all that happening?”
Selberg exhaled. “I really can’t predict that. And you know I love to lay a bet. But this one, no bookie in the world would touch.”
“Worse than fifty-fifty?”
“Probably. I don’t know. Depends on how well Chan and I can do our jobs. And how well you can do yours on the inside. Even if we’re able to smuggle your memory inside, you still have no idea how to find the mark. And if you stand out in any way, the prison guards are going to be all over you. I mean really, this mission would be like if Fort Knox was put inside the Pentagon, which was then placed on the moon and we were told we had to find a way in.”
“So yeah, I guess you’d say that’s a long shot,” Chan said. “Jesus, thanks for the motivational speech.”
“He should know the truth of it.”
Parker turned away from them and walked the length of the porch. To the south, the Queensborough Bridge stretched across the river. He stared at the expanse, deep in thought. This mission wasn’t about money. Wasn’t about getting paid. This one was about finding his wife. He didn’t care what happened to their client. Some rich kid who had a daddy trying to get him off the hook. If Parker got him out, fine. If he didn’t, fine. What really mattered was finding her.
“So every system shares the island of Manhattan in common,” Selberg said. “I think Chan’s theory on backdoors is accurate. I think each system has a series of backdoors somewhere inside. So my idea is this: If we can get you into the memory storage facility, then you can use a backdoor to get into the supermax system.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’ve got these prisoners going into the system, but they have to download their memories and store them somewhere. So they made this memory storage facility. They put the memories of the prisoners into the facility before they go into the system. Then, when they get released, the memories are uploaded back to individual prisoners.
The Memory Agent Page 27