by S. T. Joshi
“Frederic, bro, I’m stuck, digesting in Azathoth, no hope for me, doesn’t matter, ready to disintegrate, only way out, but your brother, nearby . . .”
Frederic’s stomach lurched. “Shut up about Jackie, Buster!” he blurted.
Then he snorted at himself. Buster wasn’t really there. His mind had probably superimposed the image, made up some story about Buster, put it in the program. Supposedly the AI wasn’t supposed to take anything from your mind but a literal interpretation of your words, subvocalized, and occasional motional directions, and certain very defined projections . . . but for a while ecog chippers had suspected that there was an unpredictable involuntary telepathic level to the connectivity. Here it was—this fantôme, this digital ghost, was proof of espering chips. He’d have to tell DG and the torrent skaters about it.
The iridescent crystal entrapping “Buster” mutated into a solid icosahedron—and went opaque.
Buster vanished.
Had Buster been—digested?
Cut it out, you’re getting sucked into the fantasy. This program is some kinda lulz hoax and somewhere some programmer’s laughing his fucking ass off right now.
Didn’t matter. It’d do for what he had in mind—it’d do for Filrod.
He had planned to insert Jackie into the images; to toss in the candid footage he had of Filrod jerking off over tranny porn, which he’d gotten when he’d hacked Filrod’s webcam system, whirl it all together in this sick place, let it iterate, copy and paste it into every variant of youtube there was. Make Filrod pay for what he’d done.
The plan was to get Filrod stuck in this place, long enough to really make him feel it—because when you went into overdrive mode on this program, that’s what happened. It was hypnotic, was Azathoth, inexplicably hard to look away from, and you could mix in any image you projected so it looked as if you were in Hell surrounded by . . . whatever the programmer inserted. If he wanted to put images of the new Republican president’s inauguration into it, you’d see the Prez and his backers splashed all over the Azathoth landscape. And you could feel weirdly trapped there . . . Images of Filrod’s shame, Filrod’s guilt, could be wrapped around him in overdrive mode . . .
But now—he might have a more direct mode of attack on Filrod.
Filrod himself. He had an ecog chip, after all . . .
He glanced at his watch—and right then, as if on cue, the doorbell rang upstairs.
Filrod was a broad-shouldered college student, with widely spaced front teeth, a dull, blunt face and faux-hawked brown hair. Frederic had heard that Filrod was barely passing his classes; the jock was not exactly stupid but never far enough from his interchatter channels to focus on anything. He was a wide receiver on the football team and wore the school jersey with his number, 8 on it.
Behind the eightball, you asshole, Frederic thought, as Filrod hunkered on the futon beside him.
“You wanna hit some syntha?” Filrod said, when he came in, waving the e-pipe.
“Nah, I gave it up, you go ahead,” Frederic said, distractedly, as he tinkered with the hardware by the futon, trying to get the best signal.
Filrod sucked on the e-pipe, blinking at the floating AIs, and asked as he blew out a stream of chemical-laden water vapor. His eyes glazed as the drug hit him. “Don’t those things use up a lotta power, floating around?”
“They’re made of super-light materials, man, and they tend to get less interference from the drives if I keep ‘em floating . . . do have to change batteries pretty often.” Frederic finished tinkering and waved smoke out of his face. “Enough with that shit, I don’t want your secondhand smoke, dude.”
“Whatever.” Filrod switched the pipe off, tucked it away in a pants pocket. “So can you get me the stuff I need to see or not?”
“Yeah, if you transfer the money to my account.” The money he never actually expected to get. This wasn’t about money.
“You show me the stuff, I transfer, right here.”
Frederic shrugged. “‘Kay, fair enough.” He prepared the virtual screen and gave Filrod the frequency, so he could see it too. Then he decided to prep Filrod himself a bit more. Set him up good. “Okay, you sent me the password, the ISP, all that— file names. You sure you sent me everything?”
“Everything! My mom’s will’s in there, man. I need to see it, I gotta know. She’s pretty sick. But the mean ol’ cow lingers on and on.” He shook his head sadly. “I think I’m gonna get kicked outta school—won’t have my school money, nothin’ to live on. I need to know if money’s coming.”
Frederic looked at him. Something in Filrod’s voice, a certain tightness, said cover story.
Christ. Was Filrod thinking of killing his mom, easing her off into the ether, since she was sick anyway? Was he going to if he had enough inheritance coming to justify the risk of a murder? Wouldn’t be surprising . . .
“Okay, Filrod, so . . . this isn’t going to look like a conventional penetration program. This’ll look—different. It’s three dimensional, it’s cyberspace stuff, it’s very . . . hard info-animation.” He’d made up that last term to keep Filrod confused.
It worked. “Hard info . . . whatever. I just need to see her will and testament stuff and I know this fucking attorney has it on e-file.”
“Sure, we’ll get there. But see, this technique is more . . . stealth. You know? Don’t want ‘em to know we did this, right?”
“Right, that’s for fucking-A sure. Don’t want nobody to know.”
“Then—lock in. Stare right into that circle you see forming there. It’s called SpaceHole. Look right into it, keep your eyes on it, and we’ll see what we find.”
“That thing? It doesn’t look like any kind of . . .”
“Trust me, dude, this is what you need to see.”
Filrod blinked and stared into the SpaceHole, and Frederic sent a message to the AI, moving into Mode One of Azathoth.
“What the fuck!” Filrod blurted, staring into the changeworld, the shifting landscape that was a mind—that was an entity, Azathoth; that was a program, really—and what would be Filrod’s Hell, if Frederic had anything to say about it.
Frederic sent the second signal, to overdrive Azathoth into full manifestation—and looked away from the floating threedimensional screen as he did so . . .
Filrod gasped.
Frederic smiled grimly—then uploaded the first vid, of Filrod pleasuring himself as he gaped at some serious porn.
Filrod made a choking sound.
“Turn that shit off!” he managed, his voice hoarse, almost inaudible.
“Why, man?” Frederic asked calmly, looking at him. “It was you who found that video of my brother posing all sexy for an under-twenty gay dating service. My brother wasn’t ready to come out to my folks yet—we got some old-fashioned grandparents he was worried about—and he was going to a private school because Dad was trying to get churchy. My père was raised Roman Catholic . . . and there’s been big pushback from the religious types about gay marriage last few years and the school is like brainwashing these kids against gays and . . . well, my brother Jacques, little Jackie, he was full-on gay. I knew it, but we didn’t really talk about it much, and he didn’t tell anybody else, he wanted to do it all private until he could face the bullshit as an adult living on his own. But then you hacked him, Filrod, because he was talking to your girlfriend and man did you misread that shit, until you found out he wasn’t hitting on your girl, you saw the dating service video he’d made for Gay Youth Meet-Up. And you told everyone, showed the jocks at his school, and they beat him up and he lost feeling in some nerves in his arm, and his left hand wasn’t working, and then the priest saw the dating video, when you guys put it up online, and brought him into his office and gave him the hellfire talk and made him thoroughly miserable . . .”
“I didn’t know that was going to—”
Frederic shook his head and pressed o
n. “And then you posted some lies about him stalking some teenager, that Danny Zoski, which was totally not true, and so then people said Jackie was a pedophile—he was all about real adult men, not kids—and then people stopped talking to him and he took some drugs over it that left him depressed and then they were going to kick him outta the school and . . . lemme see, I leave anything out? Oh yeah. He killed himself. He fucking hung himself.”
“I . . .” Filrod made an uck sound.
Frederic could see Filrod was trying to look away from the hypnotic drain of Azathoth . . . and Frederic was careful not to look into it himself. “Yes, ‘Filrod’?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Spit it out, dude!”
“. . . didn’t know he was your brother.”
“Jackie didn’t like the surname DuSang, ‘cause it means ‘of blood’ and Jackie had hemophilia, and my folks said he could go by grandma’s name, once he turned eighteen. So he changed it. Then you met him. Then he killed himself. Cause and effect: sensitive person runs afoul of an emotional cretin and dies.”
“. . . sorry.”
“Oh, because he was my brother? But it’s okay to hound a gay kid into suicide? Long as they’re not related to someone you know?”
“Um . . . no.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you—and you’re sorry. You boasted about what you did after he killed himself, I got the e-mails . . . see ‘em there? They’re going up around you too. Read ‘em, asshole. You’re in that world, in your mind now, and it’s not easy to get out. All that stuff is there. Now I’m going to upload some—”
Then Frederic heard Jackie’s voice. And for a moment he was struck dumb.
“Sorry to see you hurting dumb animals, Frederic,” Jackie said, gently chiding.
“What?”
The voice had come from the floating screen. And Frederic had to look.
He saw his brother’s face, in a wobbling globe of translucent emerald and gold, a fantôme floating over the Azathothian landscape. His brother was looking right at him.
And Jackie said, “The idiot Filrod here is just a dumb animal. It’s like poisoning a dog that bit you ‘cause it went crazy being locked to a short chain all day. Not really the dog’s fault it bit you. But I do hate Filrod, that’s true. Even now. And it’s hard to hate anyone where I am now.”
“Where you are . . . ?”
“I’m in a kind of limbo sorta place kinda oblique to Azathoth. Where Azathoth is, that’s where lotta people get stuck. Poke their noses in the wrong place. Me, I’m in another world, and it’s not bad. It’s pretty awfin’ awesome. I’ll be here a thousand years or so, the guardians tell me, and I don’t mind. But see, it’s like it’s a through-the-looking-glass inside-out upside-down mirror place in relation to Azathoth; they’re opposites, you know? Symmetrical opposites. It ain’t Heaven, where I am, and Azathoth ain’t Hell—but close enough.”
Frederic gawked at the apparition of his dead brother. It sounded exactly like him; sure looked like him, even down to that typical humorously rueful expression.
Frederic wondered if he were being pwned somehow. Was this some hoax? Had Filrod outsmarted him?
But he could see Filrod himself, a replicant of his mind inhabiting Azathoth—trapped in a crystalline world of self-loathing.
The miniature Filrod in the floating screen image was a kind of Filrod avatar, matching the physical one who gasped and moaned and whimpered beside Frederic.
Frederic shook his head slowly. “Jackie . . . is it really . . . ?”
“Yes. It is. I’m not in Azathoth—but I heard you messing around in it, I heard your mind . . . and I’m able to talk to you through it, because I’m in its opposite, and they’re connected, in a weird way. Like, you know, those old Yin Yang symbols, the white and black going around and around in one circle together. You know?”
“I guess . . .”
“So I’m able to talk to you from my world. See, dude, Azathoth is real. It’s not a program. Azathoth is a real world. And a real creature—all at once. But you’ve got a kinda digital device for looking into it. You’re not seeing into a program— you’re seeing it through a program.”
Frederic felt sick, hearing that. Somehow, it all came together in his mind with a click. This is real. “I’m going to get sucked into it!”
“I don’t know if you are or not. I hope not, bro. Once you’re there, I probably can’t help you. Your body’ll die and . . . well, let’s see if I can head it off.”
“Jackie . . . listen . . . I’m sorry I didn’t help you . . . I should’ve helped you when you were so depressed. I was caught up in my own stuff . . .”
“I know. It’s okay. I just . . . wanted to say . . . don’t worry about me. I’m in pretty good shape now. It’s not Heaven, where I am— I’m stuck in this place for a while, but it’s not a bad place. It’s just somewhere you go if you kill yourself. Then you get held up there, for a long, long time. So that part’s not good. Killing yourself, you get stuck in the next world, and you have to work that off. So don’t ever do that, Frederic. But it’s not bad here, and one day I’ll move on. And that’s something I got an ache to do, to move on . . ” Jackie smiled. “To move on in the right way.”
Frederic couldn’t smile back. He felt a mounting terror, seeing the hideous, encroaching reality of Azathoth widening, stretched out from the floating screen, like a beast widening its jaws to swallow him . . .
Then Jackie’s image seemed to expand—and seemed to rush at him, getting between him and Azathoth, Jackie’s face coming like the grill of an onrushing car bearing down on him, Jackie grinning mischievously—
And then Frederic felt the shove. He heard Jackie shout, “Go, bro!”
And there was a tremendous pressure, physically throwing Frederic backwards, so that he crashed into some of his hardware. That was going to hurt, later.
But now all he felt was dazed, as he lay on the angular pile of electronic odds and ends, sparking smoke around him, staring at the ceiling.
Frederic was distantly aware that he’d been about to fall into Azathoth . . . and now he was free, staring at the AI bobbing near the ceiling, the light on it like a green eye glaring down at him . . .
Jackie had saved him—his brother had pushed him out of the jaws of Azathoth.
But what about Filrod?
It’s like poisoning a dog that bit you ’cause it went crazy being locked to a short chain all day.
Filrod howled pitifully.
Wincing from his bruises, Frederic sat up—just in time to see Filrod’s soul sucking out of his body; his naked form, translucent, turning in midair to try to claw its away back, struggling against the hungry vortex, face contorted with horror. Mouthing Please help me!
Then there was a nasty sucking sound . . . and Filrod’s soul was gone, into the whirling SpaceHole.
In Frederic’s room, Filrod’s body slumped—lifeless. Frederic looked at the Azathoth image, now in Mode One . . . saw Filrod’s soul in there, mangled but recognizable, as jaws of crystal closed and crushed and chewed and chewed . . . and chewed harder.
Frederic looked away.
He called to the AI, floating overhead, to come to manual station— meaning into his hands.
It floated down to him, he grabbed it, switched off its flight power—and then threw it, hard as he could, at the wall.
And the AI smashed into crackling pieces.
The floating 3-D screen vanished—Frederic thought he heard a cry of despair from Filrod as it went . . .
Frederic sat for a while, trembling. The trembling seemed to metamorphose into sobbing. And once, loudly, he shouted,“Jackie!”
He glanced over at Filrod’s body. He didn’t want to touch it. But he had to.
He got up, grimacing, and knelt by the ungainly body, felt the still-warm wrists for a pulse.
No. Nothing. The guy was stone dead.
That wasn’t something Frederic had planned for. But it was hard to feel bad about it. What was he going to tell the police?
The truth. Hey, the guy was smoking that synth dope, just a lot of it, then he keeled over. Bad ticker, I guess.
Frederic turned away, stood up, looking for a cell phone. Sooner he called the cops, the better.
He heard the door open—turned to see his father looking at him, puzzled, concerned. The old dude had heard his yell about Jackie.
Frederic felt as if he’d never seen his father’s face clearly before . . .
The look on his father’s face was so deep—had so many levels of pain. Like someone trapped in Hell.
Frederic wiped his eyes and got up. He wended his way through all his gear, went to his dad, and put his arms around him, and together they wept—though Frederic knew his dad didn’t understand any of it.
It didn’t seem to matter.
The Girl Between the Slats
Michael Aronovitz
Madeline Murdock crept to the edge and leaned over it with her hands clamped up at her chin. The snowflakes looked like little angels falling into the darkness of the pit, replaced by their sisters the moment they vanished.
“Walk the plank, idiot!”
Madeline’s mouth turned down to the hideous frown Mommy was trying to help her manage. Her palms wiped the air before her chest as if she’d just eaten something hot, and they were all laughing now as they had in the classroom, the gym, the beginning of recess. But it wasn’t fair! She just liked to touch things and taste them, that’s all. It wasn’t her fault that the cobwebs under the radiator in the choir room felt like the soft mane of some baby unicorn. She wasn’t the one who made the kickballs look like big cherry jawbreakers, and it wasn’t her idea for the puddle under the slide to have rainbows in it just like the Giant Swirl lollipops Daddy brought home from the store when she was good.
“Stop calling me names,” she said, turning back toward the group of third-grade girls gathered on the other side of the caution tape. “At my old school they were nicer!”