by Guy Garcia
When Tom approached their special spot, he immediately knew something was amiss. A steady rain was falling, and the flowers were drooping dejectedly. He couldn’t be sure, but the drops streaming down Lucy’s face looked like diamond tears. Tom raised his staff and scanned the area for troublemakers.
Lucy, what happened?
Nothing. I mean, there’s nobody here but us.
So then why the bad weather?
I’m starting to get a little freaked out. I don’t even know who you are.
I told you already that it’s for our own safety.
Yours or mine?
Both.
Yeah, I know, you keep saying that, but somehow it doesn’t make me feel any safer. If you really love me, then why don’t you trust me?
Tom made a flower appear and held it out to her.
That won’t work anymore.
The flower dissolved into a yellow puddle on the forest floor.
The make-believe dimension of their relationship had started out as a playful tease, a way to get to know each other with no strings or limbs attached. At first, the strangeness of dating a mysterious cyber legend in an artificial paradise had appealed to Lucy’s imagination. They could talk about anything, do anything, be anything. They could fly over the hills or swim with weird fishes in the crystalline river. Once they had even made friends with a lute player and a unicorn and joined them for ersatz tea in a treehouse made of feathers on the shores of a purple lake. But Lucy’s emotions were becoming stronger, and she was growing tired of the charade.
I thought we agreed that it’s perfect like this. Why mess it up?
It’s not perfect, Mr. Aws, or Swarm, or whoever the hell you actually are.
You promised …
I know, I’m not supposed to use that word. An enchanted chipmunk might overhear us and call the FBI. How do I know that’s not bullshit too?
Lucy, please don’t
Don’t what? Type my actual feelings? Sometimes I think you just love me for my name. Not the real one, of course. I mean the fake one.
They had been virtually seeing each other for about a month when Tom asked what had led her to choose lucyinthesky as her online moniker. She told him the inspiration had come from an anthropology class where she learned about the paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson, who in 1974 discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia. The scientific name for the missing link was Australopithecus afarensis, but Johanson had decided to name her after the title character in the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Intrigued, Tom decided to do some online research on Johanson’s Lucy. It turned out that a cassette recorder in the camp had been playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while they were celebrating their historic find. A woman Johanson was dating at the time had suggested that he call the fossil Lucy. Afterward, Johanson’s students started asking him when they were going back to the Lucy site. Decades later, he told a reporter, “Initially I was opposed to giving her a cute little name, but that name stuck.”
The Lucy discovery catapulted Johanson into one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists, but that wasn’t why Tom was thunderstruck by the scientist’s story. The connection between Lucyinthesky of Austin, a ravishing soldier in the flash mob rebellion, and Lucy of Ethiopia, a female fossil that proved protohumans once walked the earth, was more than just an interesting tidbit of kismet in the history of their relationship. The alignment of collective action with an unexpected acceleration in the calendar of human evolution was too significant to be random or inconsequential. It touched directly on theories that Tom had been kicking around in relation to Swarm, a growing conviction that quantum social change was coming, that the species was about to take another leap, like when the first prehumans left the forest and set out together on the savannas, their enlarged brains conjoining through touch and sounds and a germinating recognition of shared destiny. Tom couldn’t foresee the next level of human evolution, but he sensed that Lucy and Swarm were interlocking pieces of a bigger puzzle, two enigmas conjoined into the contours of an answer, like fragments of bone dug up in a dusty ravine suddenly fitting together.
I want to hear your voice. I want to see your body. Flesh and blood. I’ve got to know that you’re not a creep or a bot, or some algorithm in a box running an auto-seduction program.
The rain stopped, replaced by a fine mist that made the atmosphere murky and drained the color from the plants. A veil fell between them, and Tom was suddenly worried that Lucy might disappear altogether.
Okay, we can Skype, but no faces.
The fog lifted, and the flowers regained their brilliance.
When?
Next week.
I don’t suppose you’re going to give me your Skype name.
I’ll come to you Wednesday, 9 p.m.
How will I know it’s you?
That’s a silly question.
I’m worried.
I promise you it’ll be different.
No, not about us.
Then what?
The animals have been acting even stranger than usual, and the witches in the netheregion are babbling about omens.
What sorts of omens?
They say a great darkness is coming, that all the flowers and trees will be pulled up from their roots. They say the Great Eraser will reclaim his domain and the dead will rise from their catacombs to suck out the souls of the living, and the alt-world as we know it will end.
Do you believe that?
Of course not, but it’s still creepy. Everybody is on edge, and you don’t hear as much laughter as you used to.
Nothing will happen as long as I’m here to protect you.
But what if you’re not? Can I trust you?
There will be time for you and time for me.
Then prove it.
The wizard of Aws took Lucy’s hand and kissed it. She moved closer, but before she could embrace the man of her dreams, he disappeared in a puff of blue smoke.
9
The house where Marty Fisk lived was located on a leafy suburban street in Millwood, just a short drive east of downtown Spokane. Duggan had rented a car and a room in a hotel with a gilded Wild West decor that evoked the town’s nineteenth-century-roots as a hub for miners, loggers, and farmers. Perched on the eastern edge of Washington State, between the Pacific range and the stern expanse of the central plains, Spokane retained a scrappy outpost aura that even the shiny new malls and snazzified saloons on Main Street couldn’t gentrify or tame. It was a good place for a man to hole up and hide.
Duggan walked up to the plain stucco facade and knocked on the door long enough to get the small dog inside barking. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. When there was still no response, he slid his card under the door. A moment later, a comely young woman warily opened the door and asked him what he wanted.
“Hi. I’m looking for Laura Fisk.” The woman didn’t respond. “My name is Jake Duggan, and I’m an agent with the Department of Homeland Security. I’m investigating an incident that your husband was involved in before he was discharged. I’d like to have a word with him.”
The woman’s tight smile hardened. “He isn’t here.”
“I see—then could you please tell me where I can find him?”
“See those mountains over there?” She tipped her head to the end of the street where the city succumbed to grassy green fields and, beyond that, a snow-streaked range of jagged peaks. “He goes fishing every other weekend. He always goes alone, just him and the trees and the fish. There are a thousand miles of river in those mountains. He probably stands a better chance of finding trout than you do of finding him. He’s usually back in a week or two.”
“I can’t wait that long,” Duggan said.
When she saw that he wasn’t going to budge, Laura Fisk
added, “Maybe you should talk to his shrink.”
“His psychiatrist?”
Laura Fisk nodded. “Peter Palladino. His office is downtown on Sprague. You should have gone there first.”
Palladino’s assistant seemed annoyed that Duggan had shown up without an appointment, but when Duggan identified himself, she grudgingly ushered him into a reception area furnished with two Shaker-style armchairs and a large leather sofa. Duggan lowered himself into one of the chairs and regarded a framed reproduction of miners panning for gold in a mountain stream. Duggan felt himself being scrutinized by a trim, youngish man with piercing blue eyes and long dark hair tied back into a knotted stump.
“They didn’t tell me that anyone from Homeland Security was coming,” Palladino said. He held out his hand, and Duggan shook it.
“They?”
“The people at the Fairchild Air Force Base Hospital. Almost all my referrals come from there. But it’s unusual to get a visit from Washington, even in a case like this.”
“What kind of case would that be?”
“Would you mind,” Palladino asked, “telling me why you’re here?”
“I got your name from Martin Fisk’s wife.”
Palladino blinked. “You know Marty?”
“No,” Duggan admitted. “But I’d like to ask him some questions about his drone pilot, Donald Westlake. I thought maybe you could give me some insight into their relationship.”
Palladino’s eyes flickered toward his receptionist. “Let’s go into my office.”
Duggan followed him into a small, spotless chamber decorated with framed awards from various psychiatric associations and a PhD certificate of philosophy from Gonzaga University. Palladino waved Duggan to a chair, and there was a prolonged silence as the young doctor studied his uninvited guest, his limpid eyes probing, evaluating.
Still standing, Palladino said, “I really don’t mean to be rude or uncooperative, Agent Duggan, but there are certain privacy issues at stake, not to mention doctor-patient confidentiality. I mean, is this an official investigation?”
Duggan made a quick decision. There was only one way to get Fisk’s psychiatrist to talk, and that was by telling him the truth. It was risky but unavoidable. As Duggan spoke, Palladino became visibly tense. Duggan had wagered correctly; the doctor was smart enough to know that he could never repeat what he had just heard without getting Fisk and himself into trouble.
Palladino sat down behind his desk and looked at Duggan. “You think the government is hiding something? Something about Marty?”
“I don’t know—maybe. Not Marty, though. Westlake, his drone pilot. A few weeks ago, in Afghanistan, he—”
“Yes, I know. A psychotic episode ending in bloodshed, caused by battle fatigue. Plus the additional stress of being in the kill zone.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’m sure you know most drone pilots almost never leave the United States. Marty and Donald were actually in Afghanistan, which is unusual.” He looked at Duggan for confirmation.
“Go on, Doctor.”
“Well, I treat a lot of F-16 fighter pilots. They look down on the drone operators.”
“Why’s that?”
“The main reason is that they’re generally perceived as not being in any physical danger,” Palladino explained. “The airmen who fly jets in battle zones think the drone pilots don’t deserve their respect. They call them ‘Nintendo fliers.’”
“But Fisk and Westlake were near the front lines in Afghanistan,” Duggan observed, “so they were in harm’s way.”
“Yes, of course.” Palladino was nodding. “That makes sense. It explains a lot.”
“It explains what?”
“In my practice, the men I treat are all suffering from different degrees of PTSD. The symptoms include nightmares, depression, withdrawal, antisocial behavior, and, in the worst cases, self-destructive tendencies.”
“Suicide?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you saying that Marty Fisk is a danger to himself?”
“No, no, I don’t think so.” Palladino crossed his arms. “The fact is that Marty is a very special case.”
“How so?”
“You see, there are a number of treatments for PTSD. One is called CPT, for cognitive processing therapy. You take the patient through the story; you get him to talk about the event that caused the trauma in detail so it can be neutralized. You knew that Fisk was the one who shot Westlake, right?”
Duggan grimaced. “No, I didn’t.”
Palladino was on his feet again, pacing as he spoke. “The thing is, when I had him reenact that moment, which would have been highly emotional for anybody … I mean, imagine putting a bullet through your best friend’s head. Anyway, his neural indicators barely moved. I thought it must be blockage, yet he had no trouble talking about it. And that’s not all of it. Another type of treatment is EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. In this approach, the patient talks about the trauma while we expose him to visual and audio stimuli. The idea is to use flashing lights and sounds to jog or detach the trauma from the memory at the root of the problem. I thought maybe he was being haunted by the guilt of killing people by remote control—bad guys and good guys all look the same on a video monitor, right? We get a lot of this type of thing from drone operators, particularly the sensors, who pick out the targets. But that didn’t seem to be the problem with Marty.”
“So in Marty’s case, you’re saying none of the standard PTSD therapies worked.”
“I’ve been giving him Prozosin, an alpha blocker, to stop the nightmares so he can sleep at night. That certainly helps. But here’s the weird part: when we do the EMDR, like I told you, we use flashing colored lights and different sounds through headphones. The theory is that artificially inducing an emotionally aroused state uncouples the traumatic memory from the person’s emotional response. Anyway, when we put the headphones on Marty and turned up the volume, he totally lost it. He had a very violent reaction …”
“Wait,” Duggan said, “did you say Fisk freaked out when you made him wear headphones?”
“Yes,” Palladino said. “We had to discontinue the therapy.”
“What kinds of sounds do you play when you do EMDR therapy?”
“We use all kinds of sounds—loud tones, raucous music.”
“You treat patients by playing loud music,” Duggan said, “through headphones.”
“Sometimes. Yes.”
“What about words?”
“No, that’s not my technique. But maybe some other psychologists do that. You’d have to ask them.”
“You said a drug is helping Marty Fisk.”
“Prozosin.”
“But Prozosin only treats the symptoms, just the nightmares, right?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s been helping. There’s a cabin in the woods where Marty goes to get away …”
“To fish?”
“To hunt demons,” Palladino corrected. “Look, considering what these soldiers go through, I’m surprised more of them don’t crack. Marty’s a strong guy. I helped him get a job in the athletic department at Gonzaga. I’m pretty sure he’s going to get through this.”
“This cabin where Fisk goes—do you know where it is?”
Palladino shook his head. “Did you ask Laura?”
Duggan exhaled. “Maybe I should ask her again.”
Palladino’s gaze hardened. “Maybe you should leave Marty alone.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Listen, Agent Duggan, veteran suicide is an epidemic—twenty vets kill themselves every single day. A few, like Westlake, become a danger to society. But the vast majority of these guys find a way back from the edge, and eventually they adjust. They can take care of their families, hold down jobs, and watch sports on Sunday aftern
oon. With proper therapy, most of these broken soldiers can be repaired. The thing is, one way or another, we just keep making more of them.”
Tom looked at himself in the mirror and used his hands to push the wrinkles out of his favorite T-shirt, black with a single white lightning bolt on the front. Tonight was his Skype date with Lucy, and he wanted to look good, at least from the neck down. He had run the options in his head a hundred times, but showing his face to her was out of the question. Too dangerous for both of them.
Tom went back to his workstation and found an e-mail from toke:
meta militia wants to meet u. log on to 4chan/mm/. click on green hair, passwd: silky. 9 p.m.
The first thing that got Tom’s attention was that he was being summoned to a meeting on a 4chan IRC channel for an unspecified reason, which was unusual. The second thing was that there was no /mm/ section at 4chan.org, at least not officially. He had browsed a few backdoor IRCs, but this was different: a password-protected channel created specifically for a private chat between Swarm and Meta Militia, whatever that was. As Tom expected, 4chan.org/mm/ led to a 404 File Not Found message decorated with an anime image of a girl with green hair. He clicked on the hair and entered the password. Two people were waiting to chat, toke and mm629.
toke: hi swarm thx for coming
swarm2020: no prob what’s up
toke: my friend mm629 has a gift for you
swarm3711: really? what’s that?
Tom’s screen refreshed, and a new user name replaced toke’s.
mm629: hi swarm. I’m a fan of yr stuff, and the boys on 4chan say you’re ok. I have something very special, something that could be very powerful in the right hands … in yr hands
swarm2979: really?
mm629: it’s potentially very dangerous, too dangerous to be kept secret. Do u understand?