by PJ Manney
Soot-and-blood-smeared eyes closed, Carter listened to Tom’s accusations of diversion and perversion, but he colored the lyrics, assuring Carter it wasn’t a perversion of sexuality or even morality. These were malleable and subject to cultural conventions. It was a perversion of something more fundamental: his soul. Carter’s oxygen-deprived brain accepted the judgment. There was no energy left to argue against truth. Confusion set in, and the dying man’s mind free-floated in a subconscious dream state of past and present, which Tom meandered through with him.
Drifting to the top for a moment, Carter begged, Please, Pete.
Tom took one last breath of lung-singeing air and held it as the world burned around them. The heat was unbearable. He shut down his skin’s nerve receptors to ignore the pain. Carter couldn’t, and Tom felt his agony of skin bubbling and burning.
I forgive you, Carter. Tom hoped he could forgive himself. Before the end.
With the song finished, and forgiveness granted, Carter’s mind quieted. Tom felt the moment Carter fell unconscious, like his mind’s mute button clicked. There was still peripheral activity, but no one there to care. Tom cradled his old friend in his arms and kissed his bloody lips. He was no longer the beautiful man admired, respected, envied, and desired by all. He was a mutilated mess, with only a little seed of humanity remaining in his diminishing brain. And soon, that would be gone, a lump of useless flesh devoured by flames. And what would be left of Carter Potsdam, the Sun King?
Or Thomas Paine? Peter Bernhardt was irrelevant to him. Another species, he had been consigned to watery oblivion a lifetime ago.
Life flickered in Carter’s mind, stretching out into the darkness of the universe with Tom there to catch him. Suddenly, in a burst of pure energy, everything that was ever Carter Potsdam exploded outward, a psychic atomic blast, beyond heat, beyond light, beyond power. The wave reverberated through Tom, and he shuddered in shock as it rolled past.
The fleshy shell he clutched to his chest was no longer just limp. It was empty. He gently laid the body on the floor. Was this what death was for everyone? Or only for those who had been nano-enhanced? He hadn’t felt the shockwave when Josiah or the soldiers died. Was it because he was inside his friend’s mind? Or that he simply cared?
The contents of Carter’s mind clung to his, like hurricane debris stuck to a vast chain-link fence. He scanned the jetsam and was surprised by its completeness: It suffused his own thoughts, having absorbed Carter’s essence. It coexisted with pieces of Anthony Dulles, Bruce Lobo, Josiah Brant, and his own multiple selves. It was crowded in there . . . and yet not. He heard music . . .
The song told him the answer: To forgive himself, he had to forgive the human urge for power and status, which Peter himself once craved, and Tom had used as a weapon. He had to forgive humanity and embrace the universal consciousness.
Only the practicalities remained. He could hold his breath longer than it would take the fire to consume him. Might as well just hyperventilate and let the carbon monoxide do its job, in spite of the respirocyte’s efficiency. It wouldn’t be bad. It would be like drowning, and he had practice in that, too. Better than watching himself burn to death. Or maybe just a bullet to the head, like Josiah and Chang . . .
“Want some cheese with that whine? Get your ass outta here!” His father stood astride the flames, arms akimbo before him.
“But . . . Pop . . .” he sputtered.
“Am I talkin’ to the wall?” complained the old man to no one. “I am! I’m talkin’ to the Goddamned wall!”
“Pop, I’m dying here, all right? What? You gonna nag me till I’m dead? I still don’t even know if you’re some fucking hallucination.”
“Watch that mouth!”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Or an honest-to-God ghost, but whatever the hell you are, it’s too late. Have you taken a look around me?”
Faintly, he heard something beyond his father’s carping. The flames’ roar was loud, but Tom’s sensitive auditory cortex picked up the thin sound.
“Tom? Tom, are you down there? Answer me . . . please, God . . . Tom!”
Talia? Was this part of the hallucination? He wished he could see her, like he saw his father.
The screaming continued. But it wasn’t in his head. He felt the external, electrical source near the door. The intercom. Even though the blast should have demolished it, there was her voice. He was sure of it. He had shut down so much of himself preparing to die, he couldn’t hear her. He opened up his senses and let layers of the world flood in. Talia stood in the foyer between the blast and security doors. She would have them opened in a minute because he had disabled the security systems, putting her in terrible danger. Could it be possible she still loved him? That she might want to save his sorry ass so they could be together?
“Got the smartest Goddamned boy on the planet, and he still don’t know shit. Go get her, idiot!” ordered the old man.
Sheepishly, he rose, muttering, “Yes, Pop . . .” Carter-thoughts said, Take the shirt, so he stripped the bloody cotton shirt from his friend’s body and wrapped it around his waist. Staggering through the flames to the door, Josiah-thoughts said, Take the jacket. Tucked in the corner, it had escaped the flames, so he pulled off the bomber jacket and tied it around his waist, too. His skin’s pain was intense. Bruce-thoughts said, Shut it down, so he dampened the agony, except for his fingertips, each stinging like a lit candle.
Emergency stairways were engulfed and impassable. He ran to the elevator. There was no electrical power, but it wasn’t too hot to touch. He forced his fingers into the crevice and pried open the doors. Inside the dark car, he jumped and pushed open the emergency trapdoor overhead, disguised as a light panel. Hoisting himself through the hole, he crawled onto the ceiling of the car. It was very dark, except for the faint light of fires seeping through the minute gaps of the doors. Being a modern shaft, there was no emergency ladder on the wall, only metal tracks to guide the car up and down. Ever the engineer, Chang-thoughts imagined the government architect’s incredulity: What could possibly go wrong in a modern elevator to need a shaft ladder?
It was eight floors straight up with only large steel crossbars every four feet. Grabbing a crossbar at the bottom of the eighth level, he hoisted himself up each section, one at a time. Although the distance between rungs wasn’t hard, the bottoms of his boots were caked with grease, making feet as slippery as hands. A good grip was impossible.
One mind-track concentrated on not falling, while the other tried to make contact outside the building. But he was in too deep for an outside line.
Hands slid away from metal . . . He quickly bear-hugged a guide rail. Left arm hooked around steel, he carefully untied Carter’s shirt with his right hand and wrapped the shirt around each rail as a harness, releasing it only to tie it around the next rail and pull himself up.
BOOM!
An armory explosion on the second floor rocked the structure. Steel elevator doors plummeted down the shaft. Tom braced himself, head tucked to his chest, grabbing the guide beam with both arms, but a hunk of steel hit his shoulder like a speeding bus. His feet slid out and he dangled by Carter’s five-hundred-dollar Egyptian-cotton button-down five floors from the bottom, grateful for the well-made seams. Scrambling for a greasy foothold, he climbed the remaining three floors, passing the blasted opening, the hallway nothing but flame.
Tottering on the first level’s two-inch-deep ledge, he touched the doors. They were hot. Apologizing to his volunteer fireman father for all the broken safety rules, he pried at the doors, gripping the edges as hard as possible to prevent falling backward down the shaft from the heat wave’s force. He pitched forward, throwing Josiah’s jacket over his head, and stumbled into the fiery hallway that led out of the mines.
Talia had opened the inner security doors, but held back by a tunnel of flames, stood there uncertain. Dozens of weapons’ discharge rang out in the distance behind her.
Dulles-thoughts urged him, Faster, faster, save h
er! Thirty feet away and closing the gap, he screamed, “Stay away from everyone! Away from me!”
“Tom!”
“Talia! Get everyone away. We’re all infected!”
“Ruth protected us! We’re here for you . . .”
Ruth, his darling, brilliant Ruth, had figured out what he’d done in her absence, using his protective bot vaccine on them. Surprise piled on top of surprise, none of which were in his future script.
Wishing beyond hope they were home free, Tom yelled, “You are my guardian angel!”
R-R-R-RUMBLERUMBLEBOOM!
Erupting from the belly of the mine, the explosion poured out the only vent: The blast doors. Even with superhumanly fast reactions, there was no way to escape the fireball.
“Run!” he screamed as the first flames engulfed him.
Fire flowed over, under, around him like water, consuming cloth, hair, skin. He was thrown to his knees, then face. There was intense pain, and then none. The continued cooking of flesh and bone wasn’t so awful. He cut off his pain receptors, but even so, there was a place past pain, where pain wasn’t a word anymore, it so overwhelmed the brain and made flesh immaterial.
When the tide of fire retreated down the shaft, he heard Talia and a rescue team dash in, extinguishing what blaze they could to carry his body out.
He only heard them because he was blind.
The bang of rifle shots grew closer, then exploded around him, but because he couldn’t see, his brain filled in the missing perceptions, creating a kaleidoscope of color and sound in his head. He checked his internal connections. Even after the holocaust, they worked. He frantically searched for a wireless network that would allow him to see. A camp security line let him log into cameras, which he swung around until he could find himself in the action. A front and rear detail of armed men surrounded a stretcher bearing a black-and-red mass that only vaguely resembled a human in size and shape. They picked off the few remaining security guards who threatened them.
“Ru . . . sssss . . .” he whispered to Talia, who was near him. “Ruthsssssssss?” He could feel the ultraviolet panic in her vibration; taste her hot chocolate effort to stop her tears.
“She thought you wanted to kill yourself, so we came back, shot ourselves full of stuff, and . . . we’re here. She’s on the Pequod.”
That’s all he needed to know. He sent Ruth a message only she would understand. When she responded in seconds, he sent two streams of data to download and process.
One was the digital recording of everything Peter Bernhardt and Thomas Paine knew or had experienced about the Phoenix Club.
The second was his lifeline.
Talia was on one of her infinite cell phones. “Yes!” she screamed above the roar of the rotors. “But, Steve, he’s . . . ! Yes . . . ! At the pad!” She ordered the copter pilot directly to the roof of Sacramento General.
After heli-medics wrapped Tom in blankets to put out his smoldering body, hooked him to an IV, and stuck a breathing tube down his trachea, he finally relaxed. Knowing he would finally die was oddly freeing, and he accepted the karmic irony of his fate with calm. There was nothing for him to do until he saw Ruth again, except continue transmitting. And not die. Not quite yet.
Assuming he was unconscious, Talia released her tears as she huddled next to his still body. “Is this what you wanted? Did you think your . . . revolution . . .” she spat, “would succeed?”
Yes, thought all the people contained within him. And we’ll know for sure soon enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Hooked up to life support; both kidneys on dialysis; crosswired sense organs either destroyed or turned off for comfort; burns over eighty percent of his body; mummy-wrapped in artificial skin to keep bodily fluids from leaking out and dehydrating him to death. All this existed in one reality, but the only reality that mattered anymore was the one contained in his group-mind’s memory. As the entity still known as Tom lay waiting, he couldn’t help but compare his own end to Pop’s. Whereas his father, through forgetting, had made peace with the vacuity of time and space and past and future, he clung to his memories, because it was all he had left. If his father had gained just enough recollection to kill him, Tom had too much to die. Had he learned nothing from Pop? And what further lessons would Pop convey before the end? He hoped for one more visit.
As he waited for something to happen, he played “Yesterday” in his head and decided he agreed with Pop on at least one thing. It was a very good song. A very good song, indeed.
The second track of his brain plucked out a verbal bass line: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can . . .” He could only quit his marathon at the finish line, but it was a race he ran alone, a mind floating in a virtual world of his own making. When they put him on morphine, it was even worse. At first, he didn’t care about anything. Then, as they upped it to a palliative dose, the combination of drugs and wiring made for deeply disturbing dreams, and the lack of outside stimulation made them more than real. His brain created a phantom body and sent it through the flames . . . Tony lay in the yacht’s dining room, his skull splayed open . . . Amanda ran from Tom to the plane . . . Josiah tormented by Davy Brant . . . Carter dying, held by Tom . . . Bruce burned alive . . . Talia leaving Tom . . . These new memoryscapes were too real. Was he fated to relive only nightmarish pasts and not the moments he cherished?
After two hours and eighteen minutes, he heard his door open and people push something large on wheels into his room. One voice stood out.
“Got in himmel . . .” she gasped. Her GO buzzed. She had been ordered by Tom to keep it on, regardless of hospital policy. She read her message and quickly typed back.
“He w-w-w-wants I should set it up. Right n-n-now,” said Ruth, spastically tapping a fingernail on a metal case. He felt bad he was causing her such distress, but she agreed it had to be done. Heavy metal cases were shuffled and scraped across linoleum.
“Thank God I got the board to agree to this,” said Steve.
“For a new wing? Manna from heaven,” replied Ruth.
“Considering Thomas Paine doesn’t even exist officially, I guess it is. I just hope he doesn’t set fire to this one.”
The fourth person in the room didn’t speak. He supposed Talia had nothing to say. But he was very glad she was here. He wasn’t sure he could do this without her, even though he regretted surprising her. It wasn’t fair, but if she had been made privy to all his plans, if anyone but Ruth had known what he was developing, she might have stopped him. And he had come so far, suffered so greatly to achieve so much, it would have been a great waste not to at least try.
After never feeling so alive as he did fully functional, plugged in, and switched on, the absence of any connection, be it to flesh or silicon, made his loss more acute. He ached to reach them. If Ruth was successful, he would be able to.
Linked to Ruth’s GO, he scanned the media feeds as he waited. BBC World had the best update on the explosion outside Yosemite. A male reporter wearing a hazmat suit pointed to a huge hole in the ground surrounded by dead soldiers, intercut with club members’ interviews, emergency personnel tending to the living, and a diagram of the blast. As of now, Carter and Josiah were missing, but no one dared presume them dead. Would they ever excavate far enough to find their final resting place? Given the intensity of the fire, they’d be ash. He could see the club’s hand in the downplayed spin, which raised more questions than it answered.
None of it mattered. The world would know the truth soon. He would make sure of it.
After one hour, seven minutes, and forty-three seconds passed (he didn’t need to track it anymore, but his wiring couldn’t help it), Steve asked, “What next?”
“Did you prepare the site?” asked Ruth.
“Yeah, but isn’t he wireless?”
“F-f-f-faster this way. Plug in.”
When Tom arrived by helivac, Steve opened the receiver in his leg and attached a special plug per Ruth’s orders. Rubber-gloved fingers
fumbled groin bandages as Steve plugged in a special broadband nanocable.
There was a delicious surge of mental energy from the electrical connection at boot-up. At last, a reason to be . . . Software programs entered like thoughts. He wasn’t alone anymore; he had a direction, a goal, even if it was only an electronic one. Soon the link would be more than that; it would be the human connection of communication. He had quashed his emotions so long and so hard that now they overflowed, unhindered by the need to survive.
Reaching out his thoughts to Ruth’s computers, he could “feel” them, “smell” them, “taste” them, even though none of these were the right word. Language had failed him throughout his transformative process and even more so now. He decided his lighthearted choice for the name of their computer program—Major Tom, the hero of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”—was sadly predictive.
Ruth spoke into a microphone jacked into his wiring so it was easier for Tom to hear. “R-r-ready?” Her voice was as intimate as could be, having come from inside his brain, as if she had crawled in, twitching, to join him.
Tom took a deep breath off his inhalation tube and spoke with his mind: “This is Major Tom to Ruth. I’m outputting through the audio.” The voice sampling they painstakingly took months ago worked, coming through Ruth’s speakers loud and clear, sounding spookily like his bourbon-and-smokes tone.
There was a gasp from across the room. It was Talia.
“Commencing download. Servers on,” replied Ruth.
“You do have a sense of humor!” said Steve.
“What humor?” she scolded back.
The same wires that had moved information into his brain were now moving it out as the nanopipeline simultaneously recorded the hundreds of thousands of neurons his intravascular nanowires touched, and the impulses traveled along synapses to the thousands of neurons they contacted.