by John Zakour
“Only if you say the words, Chico.”
As fate would have it, I was already down on one knee, thanks to the fierceness of the telekinetic wind around us. So at least there was one traditional element to the proposal.
“Electra!” I shouted above the din, “will you marry me?”
Electra leaned harder into my back and wrapped her left hand around me. I felt her lips, soft and moist, against the back of my neck and smelled the sweetness of her hair on the violent breeze.
“Does this answer your question?”
I looked down at her left hand on my chest and saw the ring on her finger.
“Great!” HARA said, a little coldly. “Let’s plan a June wedding. Or a November funeral, whichever is more appropriate!”
I looked up at Carol, still standing, arms spread wide, at the center of the storm. I felt Electra’s arms around me and HARA’s presence in my head. I put my head down and took two more giant steps forward.
“No one’s dying today,” I said through gritted teeth. “No one.”
I pushed on, inexorably, step after step. The winds eased ever so slightly the closer we got to Carol. She was only a few meters away now but the walls of the arena were starting to tear at the seams. I knew we were fast running out of time.
I put my head down and lurched forward once more and suddenly felt the winds ease dramatically. Without the resistance, I tumbled forward and fell to the stage floor. I looked back and saw Electra, still clinging to the cable and fighting the winds.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We’re at the eye of the storm,” HARA replied, her hologram appearing beside me.
I grabbed onto the cable and reached my hand out to Electra, who was still struggling.
“Grab my hand, honey.”
Putting my hand into the telekinetic wind nearly ripped me off my feet. If it hadn’t been for the cable, I would have been spun into the air like straw in a funnel cloud. I held tighter to the cable and went to reach back toward Electra again but she waved me off.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Save Carol.”
“Electra!”
“I’m fine,” she said, wrapping the cable around her midsection. “I’ll be there in a nano. Just go.”
We shared a long, wordless look and then she waved me away. Slowly I got to my feet and took a step toward Carol. She didn’t seem to notice me.
“Carol!”
There was no response.
“Carol, it’s me, Zach!”
She turned and I felt the winds in the arena shift with her movements. A huge portion of the arena’s southern wall ripped free with a thunderous shriek and simply blew away. Through the hole that it left, I could see that the winds had expanded outside of the arena. Carol’s storm was growing.
“Listen, Chica,” I said. “I know you don’t want to destroy anyone, or everyone, as the case may be. So I’m going to need you to power down. Okay? Can you do that?”
Her face was serene with the slightest trace of a smile on her lips. Her gaze was distant, as though she were looking through me. And my words seemed to have no effect.
Being this close to her made my head hurt from the psionic power that she was putting out. I could feel her inside my mind, fighting through the psi-blocker, and unfortunately, I knew that I didn’t have much time left.
“You know,” I said, “you’re officially my employee right now, so I’m going to be liable for the damage you’re doing. I’m going to have to take it out of your pay.”
Her eyes shifted subtly in her head as though they were focusing on me.
“Do you have any idea how much an arena like this costs?”
Her body remained completely motionless. But her eyes moved again, as though she was calling my attention to them.
“You can hear me, can’t you, Carol?” I shouted.
She nodded almost imperceptibly.
And then she blinked her right eye three times quickly.
“She blinked her right eye,” I said to HARA. “Did you see that?”
“I saw it.”
“That’s our code for trouble. It means she’s still in there. She still remembers who she is.”
“Whatever you’re going to do, Zach,” HARA said. “You better do it quickly.”
“You can do it, Carol,” I said. “You can control this, I know you can. How can I help you?”
She blinked her right eye again, three times fast.
And then a fourth time.
“Four blinks?” I said. “What does four blinks mean?”
“It means ‘please shoot me in the head,’“ HARA said. “Remember?”
A pit opened in my stomach as my memory confirmed HARA’s words.
“Carol,” I said, pleadingly.
Her right eye blinked four times again, more persistently, and it was as though someone had reached into my chest and pulled out my heart. I could hear the arena walls ripping apart around me and the cheers of the audience who were too stupid to know what was happening. I knew what Carol was telling me, but I didn’t think I was strong enough to do it.
I flicked my wrist and popped my gun into my hand.
“Are you sure about this, Carol?”
I stared at her face hard, through the tears that were forming in my eyes. I stared long and hard, searching desperately for the smallest sign of a negative response. I found nothing. Instead she very clearly nodded her head.
I stood back and wiped my tears with my sleeve. Then I raised the gun and pointed it at her.
“Zach, what are you doing?” Electra shouted.
I swallowed away a lump in my throat the size of a golfball and when I spoke, it was barely more than a whimper.
“Gates help me.”
46
“Zach, no!”
HARA’s solid light hand ripped the gun from my grip.
“HARA, give me the gun.”
“It won’t work,” HARA shouted.
“Don’t make this any harder for me. You saw what she did.”
“She’s way too powerful to be killed by your gun, Zach.” HARA said.
“I’m going to trust Carol on this,” I shouted. “Now give me the gun.”
HARA backed her hologram away from me and held onto the gun tightly. Her hands were a little unsteady. It might have been because the effort of holding the gun was taxing her capabilities, or it may have been the effort of what she knew was to come. Because, much to my surprise, she raised the gun and pointed it at me.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s the only way, big guy.”
The arena was giving way in the storm. People in the rear seats were beginning to be thrown into the air from the force. The arena itself was ready to collapse. Carol had to be stopped.
“HARA,” I said, “give me the gun. That’s a direct command. Give me my gun!”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I can’t.”
And there it was. Everything that Randy had warned me about had come to pass. HARA had refused a direct command. With thousands, perhaps millions of lives hanging in the balance, she had abandoned me. And as she stood there with my own gun trained on me, she had the femme fatale glare of a woman scorned. It was the end of every pulp novel ever written. But I couldn’t let her do it.
Slowly, sadly, I reached my hand toward my wrist interface and gently placed a finger on the button to download the virus that would erase HARV. My hand was shaking but I was running out of time, and I had no options left.
Then she stopped me with two words.
“Trust me.”
HARV had saved my life more times than I could count. I trusted him implicitly to do the right thing. He was my partner, my friend. He had my back. But as Randy had said, this wasn’t HARV anymore. It was HARA. The question was, could I trust her the way I trusted HARV? Was there enough HARV left in HARA to trust? There was only one way to find out.
“What’s the punch line?” I shouted.
“What?�
��
“The joke you wrote, the Archimedes Bakery,” I said.
“How did you know about that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just tell me the joke.”
She swallowed once and spoke slowly and shyly.
“Why are there no round boxes at the Archimedes Bakery?”
“Why?”
“Because their Π r2.”
I thought for a nano as the wind swirled around me and the arena continued to tear itself apart. Then I smiled and suppressed a bit of a chuckle. Then I laughed out loud. HARA saw me and smiled as well.
“Okay,” I said. “I trust you.”
She aimed the gun at me. I saw the OLED light flash in response to her silent command as she overrode the security system. Then her hologram shimmered and her form disappeared, reassembling itself into HARV.
And he fired.
47
The blast hit me full in the chest and enveloped my body in a thin layer of intense pain. Every nerve, every bundle, every ganglia, synapse, and neuron in my body fired at once with a soul-twisting blast of pure agony. I was on fire. I was being pierced by a million needles. I was being tom apart. I was sitting through a never ending Adam Sandler film retrospective.
I screamed once, loud and long, as darkness rolled in at me from all directions. Somewhere in the distance I heard another scream and felt the winds of Carol’s psionic storm envelope me.
And then there was nothing.
48
I awoke in a void. Bodiless and shapeless, I was nothing more than a floating consciousness in a sea of nothing.
“This better not be eternity.”
A white light appeared in the distance. Actually distance isn’t the correct term because in a void, distance has no meaning. So let’s just say that the light was very small at first and slowly grew larger. It took on a form after a few nanos and I recognized it.
“Carol.”
She was luminescent, almost ethereal and I didn’t like where all this symbolism seemed to be heading.
“Hola, Tio.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I went a little crazy,” she replied with a shrug. “Lost control of myself, broke some stuff, almost destroyed the earth. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “What happened after HARV shot me?”
“Pain,” she replied.
“That I remember.”
“Me too,” she said. “That was the point.”
“What do you mean?”
She flashed a very mature and knowing smile at me that made me feel kind of old.
“I needed something to snap me out of my trance in order to give my mind a chance to regain control of my power,” she said. “HARV knew that. But he also knew that in the state I was in, I was fairly impervious to physical pain.”
“So he shot me?”
“Your mind has always been an open book to me, Tio,” she said. “It’s sort of a bond we share. When HARV shot you, it hurt.”
“You can say that again.”
“I know, because I felt that pain just as much as you did. It was like a slap in the face.”
“That’s all?”
“A very hard slap in the face,” she said with a smile. “It brought me back reality and gave my mind a chance to power down.”
“So you’re okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
“And everything else?”
“Well, the Fart’s pretty much destroyed. The walls collapsed. They found the roof in the bay.”
“What about Electra?”
“She’s fine; she and everyone else who was there, they’re all safe and most of them don’t remember what happened.”
I relaxed a little and felt a peaceful feeling wash over me.
“I suppose in the long run then it was worth it.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s not a bad way to go out, really. Saving your loved ones and fifty thousand innocent bystanders with crappy taste in music.”
Carol smiled and shook her head softly.
“Tio, you’re not dead.”
“I’m not?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m in a void here. I have neither shape nor form.”
“That’s because you’re not thinking of one.”
I looked around again and saw my left hand appearing from the darkness, becoming more and more real with every nano. My right arm soon followed as did the rest of my body.
“Any chance I could get some clothes, too?” I asked Carol, covering myself.
“Think harder.”
I did, and a nano later I was wearing my favorite gray suit, trench coat, and fedora.
“So let me get this straight, when HARV shot me …”
“He used the big hurt,” Carol responded. “Lots of pain, but nonlethal.”
“Wow. I need to get Randy to turn that down a notch.” I said. “So where are we right now?”
“We’re in your mind.”
“And my body?”
“Tio, look,” Carol said. “No offense but this is getting a little sappy. I came here to let you know that everything’s okay, but I really have to go now. I’m a little worn out psionically and I can’t keep this up.”
“What?”
Her form began to drift away, slowly shrinking.
“I’ll see you in the real world,” she said.
“Carol?”
“Oh, and Tio,” she said, turning to give me another ethereal smile. “Thanks again. You’re the best.”
I watched her form shrink away until it was a tiny white light against the lightlessness of the void. Then all at once, the void began to brighten. Ebon turned to black. Black turned to gray, gray to white, and then it was almost too bright to look at.
That’s when I opened my eyes.
“Hola, Chico,” Electra whispered.
I smiled and felt safe at last.
49
I woke in a hospital bed where I’d lain unconscious for four days. I had three cracked ribs, a hairline fracture in my left leg, and a concussion. All of which were painful, but none of which, fortunately, would do me any lasting damage. And as the months went by, the final threads of the case would play themselves out and come to resolution.
Sexy Sprockets, as promised, officially retired from the music industry, ending her career with the concert that has become known as the Last Fartz. She recently announced her candidacy for governor of California and, at the nano, is polling about even with incumbent Hans Spierhoofd.
Rupert Roundtree was arrested and charged with solicitation of murder, but was acquitted due to lack of material evidence (and Governor Spierhoofd’s refusal to testify, citing executive privilege). In retaliatory news, several tax loopholes for media corporations such as Faux were closed by the state government and the media deregulation legislation was vetoed and then killed by the governor. Undaunted, Roundtree has begun an all news channel, which unfortunately, reports mostly fiction.
It was learned that Sammy Smiles had once been employed in the weapons R&D department at the World Council Department of Defense. It was during his tenure there that he developed the technology of psionic augmentation and psionic broadcasting over the AM radio spectrum. The DOD is still uncertain as to how they lost track of him and the technology. Smiles’ current whereabouts are unknown. He disappeared from the Fart during its destruction and is currently a wanted fugitive.
Lusty (last name unknown) was tried for attempted murder but was acquitted by an all middle-aged jury on the grounds of insanity. In post-verdict interviews, the jurors claimed that, after listening to Sexy’s music in court, they completely understood Lusty’s desire to kill her and could therefore not hold Lusty responsible for her actions. Lusty has since become a solo artist and is currently the headliner at the Lively Little Lighthouse Club in Lafayette, Louisiana.
And the World Society of Isaac Newton Scholars recently put out a s
tatement saying that Newton had consumed a little too much absinthe on the night that he made his dire prediction about the world ending in 2060. What he really meant to say, they claim, is that the world will bend in 2060, which apparently was some kind of metaphor. Hey, the guy couldn’t be brilliant all the time.
50
A few weeks after I was released from the hospital, Electra and I took a trip to our favorite spot on the New Costa Rican coast. We spent most of our time lying on the beach planning our wedding with HARV.
“Are you sure you want the imported champagne for the toast?” HARV asked from his holographic lounge chair. “The domestic brands are becoming quite hip.”
“The domestic doesn’t taste as good,” I replied.
HARV smiled and nodded. He had returned to his original holographic interface since that last fateful nano at the Fart. His hair was a little more stylish now and his body seemed a little buffer as well. But at the core, he was still the same HARV.
“Good for you, Zach,” he said. “I was testing you. Your palate is evolving.”
“I want plenty of buffalo wings on the hors d’oeuvres table, though,” I said, trying to get to an itch on my leg that was just out of reach beneath my air cast. “With lots of bleu cheese dressing on the side.”
HARV sighed and shook his head gently.
“Alas, one step forward, two steps back.”
HARV claimed that the HARA experiment was officially over and that he had permanently erased her hologram from his memory. I couldn’t say that I was sorry to see her go. HARA was perfect in a lot of ways but, like they say, redheads are just trouble.
“Just a reminder,” Electra said, as she sipped her margarita, “my mother will be there and I don’t want her sitting next to any of your former clients.”
“Done,” said HARV. “And speaking of former clients, you’ve agreed to invite Ona Thompson. Are you also inviting Twoa and Threa?”
“Didn’t they try to kill me?” I asked.
“Technically yes, but if we’re going to exclude anyone who’s ever tried to kill you then we’ll need to cut another three dozen guests from the list, including several members of Electra’s family.”