He tried again to get up but he couldn’t and the Japanese girl kept turning to her friend and giggling. The sound grated on Dylan, and he was really sweating now, the world coming in and out and back into focus as the music in the warehouse began to rise toward another frenzied peak, strobe lights spinning through the dark and although he wasn’t sure if the girls were giggling about the blood, or about sucking his cock, or even why they would giggle with the vacant outline of his face—the one traced with his own blood—staring back at the room he couldn’t focus: At this point he was just trying not to pass out. His thoughts spiraled out of control: cocaine-blood paparazzi whore celebrity vanish designers father lights information meghan.
It was at that moment Dylan realized he was overdosing, but as the lights from the club reflected off his blue eyes, making them glow ghostly silver, the music continuing to climb toward a moment—toward the moment—he simply did not give a fuck. He finally felt like he got his old man, finally understood why the motherfucker pulled the trigger. Staring straight ahead at nothing, he lurched to his feet, laughing a soft, sick laugh as he moved toward a glowing red sign he thought was an exit but then someone was calling out to him, warning him that it wasn’t an exit and then he was falling forward, crashing through the glass table into utter nothingness.
He was his father’s son.
Chapter 15
Tiber City: Jungle District
Sept. 3, 2015
2:27 a.m.
Once upon a time, the motel bed on which Campbell now lay on had been stiff as the lid of a freshly cut coffin. However, after more than a decade of service, the mattress—a virtual Jackson Pollock of piss, blood, and semen—teetered on collapse. The springs and coils were shot; the passing years had seen too many dull-eyed whores moaning canned porno lines while cranked up johns railed away. The busted springs didn’t bother Campbell; the hourly rates splashed across the neon sign out front led him to expect as much. No, what pissed him off was the junkie sag, the section of the mattress where smack heads must have lain for days, shooting up with the same dirty needle, into the same collapsed vein, before, during, and after pissing and shitting all over themselves. Such occupants only got out of bed for two reasons: Pizza guy was at the door or they were out of smack. And occasionally even such blessed events were not enough to rouse the junkies—overdoses made getting out of bed real tough. In such instances, they would just lay in the motel room for days, their rigor mortis ridden bodies sinking a little deeper into the flame retardant rayon, sunken eyes staring at reruns of All In The Family while the neighbors bitched through the crumbling concrete and plaster wall about the smell: These were the images dancing through Campbell’s dreamscapes the past few evenings as he lay on a motel bed somewhere in the teeming, anonymous slums that were the Jungle, his own feverish body already reshaping the sheet-less, shattered mattress in his own ruined image.
On the third night, when Campbell came to a little after sunset, stripped to the waist and slick with sweat, he tried to take inventory of the situation. The last thing he recalled was the inferno engulfing Sweeney’s bar, the ceiling beams collapsing around him as the whole universe seemed to bow before the flame. By any account, he should have been dead. Instead, there was just a lot of blood, a hell of a lot of blood, but, so far as Campbell could tell, nothing was broken and he almost certainly was not dead. Were he dead, his environ would be a lot hotter. Then again, maybe he was dead but someone had cut him some slack and this was only purgatory. Languishing in a seedy motel for a few millennia while the Big Bureaucracy upstairs reviewed his case? Not exactly paradise but given Campbell’s previous predilection for the mortal variety of sin, such treatment wouldn’t have come out of left field.
For the time being, however, Campbell was sticking with the assumption he was still a terrestrial being, attributing his survival to yet another side effect of the Treatment: abnormally resilient bone structure. This made sense: Living to 120 wouldn’t do much good if your hips were brittle as a gingerbread house. So when he fell over the railing and onto the floor of Sweeney’s bar—a tumble that would have killed most men his age—he walked away with only a few nasty bruises. Not that it didn’t hurt like all hell; he just wouldn’t die, which, at the moment, didn’t feel like such a good trade-off.
But the pain wasn’t even the worst part of the deal: Without somewhat regular injections of the Treatment, those pains would pale in comparison to the agony of withdrawal symptoms. And therein lay perhaps another problem: His last batch of the Treatment’s black market approximation Jael had procured for him had been in his room above Sweeney’s bar.
Groping over the edge of the filthy mattress, Campbell’s sweaty, swollen fingers discovered a nightstand. A plastic whiskey bottle, streaked with condensation, lay on its side on the middle of the stand, right next to a compact cell phone that did not belong to Campbell. He wasn’t sure how either the phone or bottle got there; hell, he didn’t even know how he came to occupy a very used mattress in some anonymous fuck pad miles away from his last memory—Jael dragging his sorry ass out of Lazarus bar just before the whole thing collapsed in a massive inferno.
But Campbell felt way too fucked up to try and answer such questions; he was simply glad he—or maybe Jael—had the good sense to purchase plastic: Glass bottles and memory blackouts were a bitch. Eyes shut tight against the pain, Campbell yanked the mystery bottle off the table and raised it to his blood-caked lips. Cheap, piss-warm whiskey flooded his mouth, careening past his esophagus as smoothly as discarded motor oil. There was a gaping socket along Campbell’s lower gum line that had once upon a time housed a molar or two. Now only the raw nerve endings remained, jutting out into his oral cavity, twitching furiously as the whiskey washed over them. Campbell gagged, but shoved the bottle further into his mouth. Not too much, he cautioned himself; just enough to get yourself together.
A bottle of pills, initially concealed by the whiskey bottle, was also on the nightstand—an ancient, “some assembly required” piece of shit covered in nicks and tattooed with knife grooves—next to the bed. Even as the whiskey slithered through his system, that warm familiar feeling extending its way from his gut to his extremities, announcing the alcohol’s arrival, Campbell’s pain continued to grow, until another blackout seemed inevitable.
Shooting up from the motel mattress like a reanimated corpse, Campbell grabbed the bottle and tore off the lid, the plastic seal still bound around its edges. He dumped several—maybe even a dozen (it was too dark to even bother counting)—colorful capsules into his right hand.
“Down you go,” Campbell muttered to the darkness as he catapulted the painkillers into his mouth. A splash of whiskey sent the pills ricocheting off his pharynx before the mess of medicine and alcohol cascaded into his belly. If he didn’t go into a coma, the pain would stop. The. Pain. Would. Stop.
For an instant, these words were all Campbell could focus on, lighting up his brain like the flickering neon lights outside his window. Somewhere in the distance, a chopper slung low across the city’s grid, stalking Tiber City’s Jungle district, its searchlight glued to the back alleys, the city’s unseen arteries, its dying slums where government housing projects were begun and then forgotten and then begun again, concrete stacked on top of concrete, shantytowns built on top of shantytowns, buildings stacked like corpses in a concentration camp. The search beam cut through the blinds, bathing the room in a bright white light as the chopper wheeled around, preparing to make another pass, continuing its hunt for some motherfucker whose dog/car/plasma screen television told him—downright insisted upon it if you wanted to know the truth—that he slaughter the teenage girl who lived next door after raping her for several agonizing hours. And this was the world Campbell had, once upon a time in the New Mexican desert, sought to save.
Vertigo set in and Campbell knew Yeats was right, that the center could not—would not—hold and that all was lost. That men like Michael Morrison, having flung the meek down several flights of
the socio-economic stairwell, were now first in line to inherit the earth, whether God liked it or not.
Morrison. The name reverberated through Campbell’s skull like the thunder of heavy artillery. How was he, lying half-naked, barely alive, and soaked in whiskey on the floor of a junkie flop pad, going to stop Michael Morrison? A leveraged buy-out? Perhaps Campbell would just place a call to his broker, try and buy up all outstanding shares of Morrison Biotech. Despite the pain in his jaw, Campbell could not help but laugh out loud at the idea of himself standing before the board of Morrison Biotech, looking sharp in a new three piece pinstripe suit and proclaiming himself the new CEO; he’d be dead before he got within 100 miles of that place. Or maybe not: At the moment Morrison seemed far more interested in dragging Campbell back to Exodus—literally; hell, there was a reason Morrison’s thug at the bar was carrying a syringe rather than a semi.
The helicopter made another run over the industrial graveyard, the illumination from its searchlight, amplified by the neon of the Jungle night, again breaching the motel room’s twisted Venetian blinds with ease. As the light raced across the room, Campbell caught a glimpse of the entire room as reflected in the cracked mirror hanging above the dresser where the television might once have been. That’s when he saw it: Carved into the back of the door was the symbol of the Order: an asterisk in a circle. And in the middle of that sign, nailed like the Wittenberg theses, was a large manila envelope.
Lurching upright from the dilapidated motel bed and onto his knees, Campbell reached into the middle of the symbol and tore away the envelope, leaving the bare nail firmly ensconced in the cracked plaster. Inside the singed envelope was a stack of paper an inch thick: It was the research Morrison had given him. There was also a makeshift cover page, informing Campbell not to leave the room unless absolutely necessary.
Campbell collapsed back onto the broken bed, wondering about the strange silver cell phone resting on the nightstand next to him, the collection of papers tumbling to the floor next to the bed as the alcohol and pills washed over him in a great neurological tidal wave while outside his window the chopper continued to hunt its prey, the entire city laid out before it, endless and terrible.
Project Exodus Memorandum # 99-081-3382-x
Re: Mneme Group Status Report
Summary:
Ten years ago, the Mneme Group was formed to address one of Project Exodus’ greatest challenges: human memory. Early on in the Exodus process, it was decided that adult males, not infants, would be the most efficient means of meeting the Project’s primary goal—genetically engineering a new breed of American leader. As has been noted in various Exodus-related studies, even the strongest gene pool can be undermined by socio-environmental factors. Many negative adult tendencies are the result of negative childhood experiences and are capable of undermining even the most powerful of genetic codes.
In order to maximize the likelihood that the Project will succeed, the Exodus team must be capable of not only producing a genetically optimized human being, but a fully developed adult male with 18 to 20 years of artificial memory. These memories, however, must be the product of rigorous study and evaluation: Simply simulating a childhood, although necessarily part of the Project, is insufficient. Therefore the Mneme Group has worked to develop not only the method of simulating and then implanting human memory, but to also devise a series of artificial experiences that, when pieced together to form the product’s “memory,” will provide a psychological profile that will not undermine, but actually enhance, the product’s genetic perfection.
In order to meet these objectives, Mneme worked along with the Project’s human genome team to isolate the areas of the brain where “memories” are stored. It is important to note that, unlike a computer, the brain does not store all memories in a single location. Rather, the several components of the brain all contribute to the creation of long-term memory. Mneme was able to break the concept of “long-term memory” down into several subsections and, in turn, isolate the sections of the brain responsible for each section, a process aided by Exodus’ groundbreaking work on the human genome.
By determining which sections of the brain were responsible for storing and accessing long-term memories, Mneme was able to produce a series of memories, which were then uploaded directly into the Exodus subjects. By relying on focus-group feedback, as well as input (presented as hypothetical scenarios) from leading psychologists and childhood development researchers, the Mneme Group was able to create a series of memories that would allow the Exodus subjects psychological and emotional profiles to match their tremendous physical capabilities.
Due to computational and logistical limitations, however, the subjects were unable to be fitted with concrete memories. Rather, the memories uploaded were vague and impressionistic; the subject is left with a series of images and associations that, when considered as a whole, seem (to the subject) to form a cohesive, extremely positive narration—one that, with the aid of modern media such as television and cinema, will come to resemble an American childhood. The images the subject draws upon will bear enough similarity to modern media archetypes that the subject will subconsciously begin to associate these popular culture images with those already uploaded into his memory banks, each reinforcing the other until Mneme’s inability to create a complete narrative is neutralized. Furthermore, this process will be aided by the subject’s own need to have some sort of “growing up” narrative; this need, combined with the sheer implausibility that an individual might not have such a narrative, will spark the Exodus subject to fill in any remaining gaps with an internally constructed narrative substitution.
Conclusion
There has been a great deal of internal debate regarding the childhood/family background narrative being created for Exodus product Robert Fitzgerald. For obvious reasons, Fitzgerald’s family must be both unknown and transient—creating a “Kennedy-esque” family history is unnecessarily complex. Therefore, it is proposed that Fitzgerald be presented to the public as the ultimate rags-to-riches story; a self-made man whose parents died when he was young, and who has no extended family. Specific physical reminders, ranging from personal mementos to public records, will be in place to support the narratives created and implanted by the Mneme Group.
Chapter 16
Tiber City
Sept. 4, 2015
11:12 a.m.
The languid sky hung heavy overhead, pressing down on the mourners gathered for Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s funeral. Dylan, dressed in a dark suit, sat in a chair a few feet from the newly dug grave, staring into the earth. It had been drizzling all morning and despite the crowd, the cemetery felt enormous and empty: Everything was washed out and fucked up—no colors, just variations of gray and black. Every now and again, the harsh cry of a crow would echo across the cemetery, its tidings of hunger, remorse, regret reverberating through Dylan’s skull. He shut his eyes tight, trying to focus on the priest’s eulogy for his mother, on Meghan’s hand pressed into his.
Four days ago, after overdosing at an End of the World party, he had woken up in Meghan’s apartment. Details were vague and the Internet was roiling with rumors, forcing his spotty, hazy recollection to compete with blogger bravado. This much was clear: The coke had been cut—maybe with a methamphetamine but there were also whispers of new strains of coke turning up on the streets, powerful designer models black market chemists came up with to counter the stream of stepped on baby-powder laxative shit coming in from Mexico. Maybe the whole situation was some enterprising dealer’s decision to circulate a new strain at a party filled with Tiber City’s wealthiest reprobates—a misguided attempt at product placement.
But whatever the cause, Dylan had managed to leave Meghan enough voice mails that she arrived at the party just as Chase and Mikey were dragging him, bleeding and unconscious, through an alleyway and into a cab. It remained unclear whether his friends were planning on accompanying him to the hospital or just tossing a wad of cash at the driver: Dylan’s br
eathing had grown shallow and concerns over liability, potential police involvement, and drama over who would appear on which cable news show loomed large. So Meghan had intervened, taking Dylan back to her place where she forced several benzodiazepines down his throat, reducing the strain on his cardiovascular system. He passed out and slept for two days, his dreams formless and terrifying. When he finally woke up, Meghan told him the news: His mother was dead.
As his mother’s casket was lowered into the raw earth, the steel chains that held it creaked and groaned against the strange warm air washing down from the hills, suffocating the city. The priest’s words were hollow and empty, swept away by the wind as soon as they left his mouth. He made all the proper incantations, all the prescribed gestures and facial expressions and yet there was nothing. The eulogy was sheer self-indulgence, polished and pretty, and most of all, sound-bite ready. A pang of disgust shot up Dylan’s spine, eluding the numbing effect of the two tranquilizers he had choked down immediately upon waking that morning and realizing that before he was 25 he would have buried both his mother and his father.
The priest was saying “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and then his mother was in the earth and everyone was throwing flowers on the casket, filing past him, hugging him, touching him, telling him, “I’m so sorry.”
Suicide: That was the official explanation.
His final visit: That was the insinuated motivation.
Kingdom Page 15