by Wim Coleman
“How?” Nolan asked.
“It could be a little like a schizophrenic hallucination,” Gusfield said. “Perhaps, when the other cells see Auggie’s words flash across the screen, they imagine that they hear Auggie actually saying them. This sort of hallucination often arises in situations involving sleeplessness and sense deprivation—and after all, your game is specially designed for insomniacs.”
Nolan felt a jolt of recognition. Just a few moments ago, he had found himself whispering both sides of the barroom conversation between Elfie and Auggie—and had experienced an eerie sensation of hearing both voices. The effect had been brought on by exhaustion. It wasn’t hard to imagine this sort of illusion getting out of hand for hard-core insomniacs.
“And when these cells kill people?” Nolan asked.
“From what Myron told me, I would say it’s Auggie who actually does the killing.”
“But why does Auggie kill people?” Clayton asked.
Gusfield shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “For all I know, we’re all imagining this whole thing.”
Nolan wished they were imagining this whole thing. He wished that Auggie was a cult, a conspiracy, a secret society, even a deliberately created artificial intelligence—anything except this mysterious, spontaneously-evolved collective consciousness they were now contemplating. But intuitively, he felt that most or even all of what they were guessing was absolutely true.
“And what about Zoomer?” Pritchard asked. “What’s his role in all this?”
“Zoomer created Auggie, but I doubt that he was ever a part of Auggie,” Gusfield said. “But consciously or unconsciously, Zoomer may have shared all kinds of information with Auggie before Auggie actually ‘left’ him—that is, before Auggie had enough other ‘cells’ to take off on his own.”
“So that might be how Auggie got to be a master hacker,” Pritchard suggested.
“That’s right,” Gusfield said. “Zoomer’s hacking skills have long since become absorbed into Auggie—have become the collective abilities of Auggie as a whole.”
“And that’s how Myron Stalnaker, who doesn’t know how to knit, made a ski mask when he was Auggie,” Nolan suggested.
“Exactly,” Gusfield said. “Somewhere, one of the cells knows how to knit. Therefore, Auggie knows how to knit.”
Clayton shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “You said you wanted to avoid supernatural explanations, and that sounds pretty spooky to me.”
“Listen, we’re talking about a kind of inversion of multiple personality disorder,” Gusfield said insistently. “Instead of one body containing a lot of personalities, a lot of bodies add up to one big personality. And far stranger things than this happen in MPD cases. Different personalities living in the same body can require different eyeglass prescriptions, experience different allergies, have different IQs, display different degrees of physical strength—and researchers still don’t understand why. Believe me, some of the psychiatric literature on dissociation makes a lot of our craziest ideas sound downright mundane. I’m convinced that there are physical, causal explanations for everything we’re suggesting, but it may be a hell of a long time before we know what they are.”
Everybody in the room was quiet for a moment.
“How many cells do you think we’re dealing with?” Pritchard asked at last.
“I don’t know,” Gusfield said. “How many people are members?”
“About fifty thousand.”
“And how many phone numbers have you collected among Auggie’s users?”
“Six, I guess. No, seven including today.”
Gusfield shrugged. “Then I’d say it’s somewhere between seven cells and fifty thousand cells. Does that answer your question?”
“Yeah,” Pritchard grumbled. “Thanks a bunch.”
Gusfield shook his head. “One thing really worries me,” he said. “We just heard—or read—Auggie mention a place called ‘the Basement.’ That sounds to me like some kind of space or setting or stage where Auggie’s cells may ritually congregate—like the ‘spot’ some MPD patients describe, where their personalities take turns controlling the body. This would be the place where all the cells merge together, where they become Auggie.”
Pritchard almost roared with outrage.
“You mean another fucking room?” he cried. “Are you telling me this bastard’s hacked into our system and smuggled his own room into our maze? One we can’t even see?”
“That’s my guess,” Gusfield said. “And finding it is our best hope of stopping Auggie. It may be our only hope—short of shutting down your entire site.”
“We’ll find it,” Pritchard said furiously. “Don’t worry, we’ll make goddamn sure of finding it. Nobody fucks with my network behind my back.”
*
“Eternal,” Elfie said, her high, delicate voice sounding faint and barely audible over the roaring of the waves. “I can’t comprehend what it means to be eternal. I just can’t grasp it.”
“No, but you shall,” said Auggie. “You shall very soon.” Auggie leaned closer to her. “You see, eternity is beginning at this very moment. Eternity is always quite simply now—and it continues afterwards forever. And so it should be easy to understand that I have been here throughout all eternity.”
Elfie laughed.
“For that matter, then, so have I,” Elfie said.
“Indeed you have, my dear,” Auggie said, laughing, too.
“Then why do I find myself ignorant of so many different things?” Elfie asked ruefully.
“For example?” Auggie inquired.
“For example,” Elfie replied, pointing to the thin clouds floating across the sun in the center of the screen, “what are those clouds called?”
“Stratocumulus,” Auggie said, matter-of-factly.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Then I owe somebody ten bucks,” Elfie said sadly.
“Your friend Renee?”
“Yes.”
“And do you hate me for having killed her?” Auggie asked.
Marianne remembered what Evan had said to her when he realized that she was actually leaving him.
Evan had asked, “Why do you hate me?”
Marianne had told him that she didn’t hate him, that she couldn’t hate anybody.
“That’s why you can’t love me,” Evan had said. “You can’t really love unless you can also hate.”
Evan had made her believe it at the time.
“I don’t hate you,” Elfie told Auggie. “I don’t know why. I think I want to hate you. But I can’t.”
Auggie shrugged. “Well, hate me if you want to,” he said. “Hate me if you think you should. Me, I hate people all the time. I try to run the gamut of the passions—hatred, fear, laughter, ecstasy, the emotional works.”
“Can you also love?” Elfie asked Auggie.
Auggie paused for a moment.
“Yes,” Auggie said sincerely.
“My husband said I didn’t know how to love,” Elfie said.
“Your husband?”
“Yes.”
“You never had a husband, Elfie.”
“Yes, I did. His name was Evan.”
“No,” Auggie said. “Your simulation had a husband. Marianne Hedison had a husband.”
Marianne felt a chill of fear.
My name. He knows my name. What else does he know about me?
Auggie shook his head sadly.
“You cling to your illusions too strongly, Elfie,” Auggie said. “You really must give up this idea that you and Marianne are one and the same. You are perfect. She is not. She is a figment of your imagination, a simulation—a manifestation of Pierrot, the White Clown.”
&n
bsp; “The White Clown?”
“Yes, the White Clown, with his vain presumption of perfection, authority, good sense. Look at them all, Elfie—all your simulations, the creatures of your imaginings, the ones you call Evan, Renee, Nolan, Clayton, Stephen. Look, and you will see that their appearances are all the same—that their faces and their gowns are all white, and that their haughty brows and their cold lips are thinly painted black or red. Look, and you will see that they are ghosts. I know you believe me to be a murderer, dear Elfie. But how is it possible to kill a ghost?”
“All the same, I care about them,” said Elfie. Marianne felt tears welling up and falling, falling, falling from her eyes—but she couldn’t tell if they were rolling down her own cheeks or Elfie’s.
Auggie paused for a moment, staring deeply into Elfie’s eyes.
“Don’t let them hold you back,” Auggie said, caressing Elfie’s hand. “We are perfect creatures, you and I—beings made from pure information. You, I, this beach scene, our whole multifaceted, multifarious world, are all comprised of a single, eternal stream of ons and offs—a stream constantly shaping itself into a hundred billion thoughts and shapes and entities. Isn’t it flawless? Isn’t it beautiful?”
Elfie was now raptly staring at Auggie’s beautiful, joyous face through her own eyes, not Marianne’s. She searched her mind for some sign of Marianne, searched behind her eyes for Marianne’s presence, for Marianne’s guidance, but Marianne had disappeared into some distant part of her imaginings. Marianne was a ghost of her memory.
The scene flickered wildly. For a split second, nothing was visible except a blazing white seagull flying jerkily across a field of blackness. Then the beach and the ocean fleetingly reappeared, leaving black cut-out spaces where Auggie and the seagull ought to have been. At last, Auggie reappeared, fluttering and threatening to disappear into the depths of a waning vertical hold.
“I’m frightened,” Elfie said.
“Don’t be,” Auggie said comfortingly.
“I’m about to lose you.”
“No. You’re about to become me.”
Auggie winked and fluttered into increasing invisibility. Explosions of blackness and light filled Elfie’s vision as Auggie became less and less perceptible.
“You know the words, don’t you?” Auggie asked.
“The words?” whispered Elfie.
“The words that will bring us together.”
“Yes, I know the words.”
“Then say them with me,” Auggie commanded.
And in unison, the two of them murmured ...
“Auggie is Auggie.”
The beach scene disappeared. Reality itself dropped out from under Elfie like a rudely opened trapdoor. She fell inexorably downward into a deep, black tunnel with a tiny white light at its end—a light that never seemed to grow any larger, no matter how far she fell. As Elfie spiraled and plummeted downward, she heard Auggie’s voice speaking to her, creating a new world inside her mind …
11101
THE BASEMENT
It is night. You are in a damp and dark alleyway—a strange, alien place. You don’t know how you got here, much less why you came. You look before you and behind you. The adjoining passages are hazy and graffiti-scrawled, and the howling noises from the streets beyond are barely human. You cannot go home. In fact, you have no idea how far away from home you are—no idea where or even what home is.
Now you notice a murky light coming up from under your feet. You look down. You are standing on a manhole cover. The light is creeping through its round holes. You pry the cover loose with your fingers, and with considerable exertion, you roll it aside. You look down and see a watery stream flowing steadily through the subterranean light. Sewage, undoubtedly. The smell of decay is pungent. Even so, the stream strikes you as inviting—certainly more so than the sinister world beyond the alleyway. Why is it inviting? Do you wish to drown yourself? Perhaps. Perhaps not. You really know nothing of your own motivations. You do not even know your name.
You climb down a ladder onto a bank next to the stream. Massive, rectangular columns support the street above your head. The ceiling is honeycombed with rusted steel braces. The light continues to permeate the stagnant air around you, making this place brighter than the world above. You cannot tell where the light is coming from.
All around you, you see formless and shadowy people wandering directionless. They are silhouettes with no faces, no apparent limbs. They appear to have no wills. They do not speak. They do not seem to know what speech is.
With no help from a mirror you realize that you look just like them. You mingle with them. You are of their kind.
Murky streams bridged by old wooden boards thread outward through these catacombs, breaking the concrete floor up into little islands. You feel these bridges strain and bend beneath your footsteps and wonder how deep, how filthy the water below might be.
Where do these catacombs lead? Into infinity, you suppose. You can see no end to the concrete islands in the subterranean fog. An underground infinity is neither a pleasing nor a displeasing thought. You cannot imagine a better world or a worse one. You can imagine no other world at all.
But deep in the mist, you detect a boundary. A plain, concrete wall becomes visible—an edge to the catacombs. There is a door in this wall—a battered red door with a five-pointed yellow star painted on it. Six yellow printed letters curve above the star …
AUGGIE
You approach the door, and your companions do, too. The door swings silently open to reveal a warm, yellow glow within. The shadowy figures in front of you begin to converge at the narrow entryway. They do not pass through the door successively. Instead, they seem to melt into each other, becoming a single dark shape, occupying the doorway.
You come nearer and nearer to the doorway. You step into the looming shape, joining it, becoming it. All the dark figures are one figure now, and you are this figure, too.
Now you can see the room. It is an old vaudevillian dressing room, replete with tattered wallpaper, a steamer trunk, and newspaper clippings pinned and pasted all about. Candles are lit everywhere. The only other light comes from the crude wooden makeup table. The mirror is surrounded by light bulbs, most of which are lit, but three of which are burned out. A couple of the sockets are empty.
You approach the mirror and see yourself in it. You are, as you already supposed, a black, featureless nothing. You sit down on the bench in front of the mirror and open a battleship-gray makeup box. Inside the box are dozens of little round tins and colorful tubes. You open one of the tubes and spread a gooey whiteness on your dark and shapeless fingers. You spread the whiteness all over your face until your head is a glaring, silvery oval. You reach inside the box again and take out a shining, bright red ball. You place the ball squarely in the middle of your face. Then you paint on a huge red smile and fat black brows and enormous rolling eyes.
You walk over to the steamer trunk. On the wall behind the trunk is a full-length mirror. You study your reflection—a garish face with wildly colored, wildly distorted features perched atop a black void. You mean nothing yet. You open the trunk and pull out a red tuft of hair, a hat, a bundle of clothes. You carefully fasten the tuft of hair around your head like a low-hanging laurel wreath attached with Velcro. For a moment, you look like some ghastly mockery of the monkhood’s sacrosanctity. But as you don the checkered vest, the checkered baggy pants (“one leg at a time,” as they say), the preposterously outsized shoes, and finally the tiny battered bowler hat, you assume a jauntier air. Now at last, you know who you are.
You know your name.
You are Auggie.
You turn and look at the door through which you arrived. You see that a poster is pinned to it, picturing a white-faced, white-robed, effete and affected chap. Gigantic red pompon buttons are arrayed down the front of his g
own, and he wears a conical white hat. His lips, eyes, and eyebrows are painted in thin, cold lines of black and red. This character has struck up a sham sentimental pose, holding both hands over a bright red heart painted on his chest. An aching detestation wells up in your own chest at the sight of him.
A name curves above the picture …
PIERROT
Pierrot’s picture is riddled with darts. You notice that you are holding a dart in your own white-gloved hand. You furiously hurl it, striking Pierrot directly in his painted red heart. As if by magic, the door swings open. You walk on through. But instead of finding yourself in the vast and watery catacombs again, you are now in a dim hallway, surrounded by stage props and tawdrily painted flats. Farther down the hallway, you hear the sound of laughter and applause and a tiny orchestra playing a merry tune. You walk toward the sound until, at last, you face another door upon which is printed the words …
STAGE DOOR
You step through the door and wander into the noisy near-darkness, pausing in the wings to observe counterweight-laden ropes moving up and down seemingly on their own power, carrying scenery up and down in a weirdly random fashion. Near the center of the stage, you duck and dodge the silent barrage of flying flats. You notice, too, that you are surrounded by dangling marionettes, but it is too dark for you to make out their clothes or features. You realize that it does not matter. The marionettes have no idea who they are, nor should you.
The applause and laughter and music have become almost deafening, and you are facing the patched and buffeted backside of a stage curtain. You know that, in a moment, the curtain will rise and you will be acting out some farce or tragedy with the marionettes. You have no idea what the play is. You do not know any lines. But to your own surprise, you are not in the least bit afraid.