by Stephen King
She hadn’t had an answer.
And here we were again, only this time I wasn’t crying over her.
I put a hand to my temple.
“So,” I finally mustered, “what brought you here?”
“I need your help,” she said.
“Ah, I seem to recall that getting you help got me into some trouble before.”
She told me how different she is now, of course, can’t I see it?
She smiled. “We create our lives, Hank.”
Ah. Then I knew. She’d become one of them:
“Singularity Knowledge—unity in higher thought and immortality.”
The Sygs. Our new enlightened ruling class. With their prosthetics and their Tatts and their insufferable positive-speak.
She told me how amazing her life was now, with this newfound power. How she did all this, attracting it with her powerful mind and the force of Singularity Knowledge in practice. Her husband was 95 years old but still very healthy with all his synthetics and prosthetics and probably could screw her harder than he could when he was 35.
She has manifested the life she wanted, she said.
But I knew she just married it. And then when her legally bound John moves along to the great drive in the sky she will get to keep what she never earned, just like it’s been happening for eons. Same story, she’d just updated it with the new religion, and the irony was with the new implants she might move along before him. What a joke. I thought maybe I’d make that joke. But I didn’t because there was something about seeing those creases in her eyes that got me kind of liquid in the chest.
When I first knew Danika she was practically a kid, calling herself ‘Dandy’ and she stripped in bars for cash, back when people still used it. People would put their dirty paper in her underwear and that’s how she got paid. Demeaning times for women and for everyone, so we were all glad to salute the Syg Flag and say thank you for all the awareness training that makes the elite fit to rule and saps like me drooling infants that need everything monitored, measured and analyzed. But don’t mistake me as bitter. I wasn’t then.
I didn’t have the Tatt but it wasn’t because of religious differences like the backwoodsy God-Knocks. I’d just learned to be suspicious. And in my line of work, it helped to not be so … visible. I guess I was old-fashioned. You’d be surprised at how effective a detective that made me in this day and age.
Which I guess is why Dandy—excuse me, she’d been Danika for over a decade now—was asking me for help.
“What do you want?” I asked her. I tried to growl, but it came out like a whimper.
She wanted me to find the killer of her lover, Lancaster J. He’d gotten a shaft of metal through the chest while sleeping in his bed. They’d had a date a day later and when he hadn’t shown she’d gone to his place and found him like that. She’d called in the cops who’d scuttled the place back and forth, she’d called media who squawked some real colorful stories, but it was all just noise. No one knew who stuck him, so whoever did it either had no Tatt or knew how to keep their fingers clean.
She was tired of waiting and tired of getting theories on her feed that went nowhere. She wanted answers. Who would do such a thing to a musician, an artist, already almost immortal for his beauty and his brilliance? She was still so in love with this dead man I almost wished I could kill him again.
She put down three hyper-drives on my desk.
Based on the rock she had on her hand, my first suspect was her husband, but she brushed that away. They had an arrangement, she said, and had for years. He wasn’t the jealous type. He was the one who suggested she find me, he was the one who would be paying my bill. Her husband suggested me because I got a reputation with all the old codgers whose parents were alive when black and white movies were the norm. They appreciated the anomaly of a work-for-hire who brought my level of nostalgia to the table. I shrugged. Maybe I wasn’t even who I thought I was, just some marketing scheme I’d dreamed up and was living out. It was possible. That I was living it out so well I’d forgotten I’d ever even dreamt it up in the first place. That was damn near too likely.
“When he recommended my services, did he know about us?” I asked.
She seemed confused so I clarified our carnal history for her recollection.
She brushed a wisp of hair from her face. It was not red anymore, it was not a curtain. It was now blonde and piled on the top of her head like a crown. She used polite and affirming terms but assured me that our history was so inconsequential as to be nothing her husband cares to know about.
“But he cares to know about your lover and who stuck him?”
“Lancaster was important to everyone,” she said, her eyes misting up. “He was going to be somebody and do something important.”
“Sure he was,” I said. “I’m sure he was gonna do something real swell.”
She didn’t like that.
“Let me tell you something,” she says. “You think this performance of yours, this living like you’re some detective out of the nineteen-hundred forties black and white movies makes you special?”
“Your husband seems to think so.”
She ignored that and went straight to inspirational Syg-talk.
“Why make yourself a character in a world that’s dead?” she asked. “Especially now, when we are so close to being able to live forever?”
“Oh, not everyone will get to live forever,” I replied. “Just rich assholes.”
“Rich assholes that pay your tab,” she spit at me.
“So pay it,” I said. “Or just accept your dead lover and get back to your holier than thou Syg-life.”
She sighed then. Real pretty like, and sad. She nodded. “I’ll pay it. You find who killed him, I’ll pay the amount you want.”
She held out her hand. On the back of it was a rose—one of the newest styles.
I shook my head. I swigged out of the bottle.
“I don’t do the Tatt. Just cash.”
“Cash? Are you kidding?”
“Nope. It’s nothing but old-fashioned green.”
She talked a bit about how that’d take time to get, and I told her it was her clock ticking, not mine. I just had this bottle to drink, is all. She asked me what I had against the Tatts—this amazing way of making commerce and memory flow seamlessly.
“Just old-fashioned enough to think getting branded and tagged makes you a target for slavery or extermination.”
She laughed in a hard sort of way.
“Old-fashioned. That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“I got a million nice ways.”
“Sure you do.”
I got up close then, leaning in like I was ready to kiss her. “You remember some of them.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” she said. “And you smell like a drunk beggar.”
I’d been called worse. I kept close. I touched the rose with my fingertips.
“Not having it doesn’t mean you’re invisible, you know,” she said. “It just means that you can have everything you own stolen.”
I touched her Tatt to my lips. I said something about how I remembered how she used to be pretty fond of cash.
And then I made a joke that it was only fitting, considering her history, that she put that cash in my underwear.
She pulled her hand away from my lips and gave me a quick slap to the face.
She called me a drunk again and asked if I was taking the case or just going to continue to embarrass myself.
I said I’d do both.
She left then, leaving me the drives to see what I could see of her dead lover’s mind.
Part 2 - Memory and the Machine
I got the system to read the drives. No work for hire could live without ‘em, and I figured I’d finish what was left in the bottle and then go cold turkey the next day. Tomorrow, right? That was always the best day to start. Right then, a little Jack would help walk through another man’s memories.
Lancaster J.’s thoughts ca
me up on the walls in thumbnails I could touch and expand into three dimensions, and I was in a room of ghosts.
Thumbnails. You could leave them with fingerprints when you have the Tatt. Everything you’d see becoming something someone else can sift through, anyone with access could be inside your first person.
Being inside Lancaster J. was as good as any drug. If only I was actually him instead of me, I wouldn’t have needed to finish the bottle of Jack.
Memory—this was our new contested ground. What we thought, what we remembered. How do you fight for what’s in your own mind?
One of Theo P.’s best raps, and he could crack it sharp, was the story of the Luddites. I never remembered all the lines or the way he made it rhyme, but he had it down like a history lesson. He had the characters, the dates, the marches, the executions, the attention to sensory details and the rallying cause to give it an inspiring air. He told how the Luddites were heroes demanding living wages for skilled labor, warning against becoming mechanical in heart and mind, and he would end with a chorus of something like, “Bring the Hammer down, and if you have no hammer, throw your body on the machine!”
The God-Knocks in the neighborhood ate it up. Someone down there might still remember how it went.
And then as I was watching Lancaster J.’s memories, thinking of memory and the machine, suddenly I realized I’ve let one play for too long and she was there again, in the room with me. It wasn’t really her, of course. It was his memory of her. Her eyes were more blue than gray. She was smiling in a way I’d never seen her smile. The way she looked at me made me feel like there was hope for me after all. That I was more than shark chum in the human highway rapidly moving toward both immortality and extinction. These were new nightmares, but really it was all just the same story that had always been told. Boy meets girl. But of course, she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at him.
That’s the thing about these memories. These first person camera eyes we have. Even knowing—knowing all along she’s looking at him—I was watching it and it’s me.
Me me me me me me me.
I turned it off and stared out my window, past drunk now.
No one was gonna bring in three hyper-drives of Theo P.’s loves, thoughts, snapshots his mind took. Theo P. was somebody important. He was going to do something important, more than this Syg gigolo, Lancaster J., whose head I was in. That no one would remember Theo P. was wrong in a way I had never felt anything was wrong before. I had to do him some homage. Something.
But I was stumbling, falling into a blackness. I’d succeeded then in blotting out my own mind. My last thought before it all faded to black:
“Tomorrow I am going to stop drinking.”
I dreamt she came back in that sharp dark. She made slow love to me again, both as Dandy and Danika, telling me the new technology is that they write it inside the skin so it’s invisible. She did it while I was sleeping so I couldn’t refuse. “It will make it all so much easier, better,” she said. Then she told me she took the liberty of having the Tatt made as her name and placed in the skin above my heart. Now all business will be so much more convenient.
I woke up from the dream with it still dark outside, mad because everything hurt and the dream was too on the nose to even be interesting. Was that dream mine? Hers? Lancaster’s? It felt like my poor brain cranking itself, trying to ask my poor heart to feel again. The dream was a gift, though, because I realized I didn’t have it anymore. That liquid in my heart was crusty and dry. I was alone, still drunk and Theo P. was still popped with not a person to say boo about it.
Then I had a real diamond of an idea. I knew what I’d do, and I knew how to fix it all. All it took was my losing a piece of conscience to gain some sense of righteousness. I could suddenly understand the appeal of all of Sygs, the God-Knocks, the whole history of anyone who’d ever had a religion they’d kill or die for.
I had a cause.
I knew what to do.
I’d plant a memory in the Lancaster’s hyper-drive. I knew an Anarchist hacker who could do anything in the hyper-world, who’d do it just to do it. But I’d give her some of the dirty green paper when I got it just to make it real sweet.
I’d plant a memory and frame an innocent kid. It would make everyone stand up and pay attention. Oh, it was going to be beautiful. What a story I could put together, a poor God-Knocking street kid, radicalized to murder.
I practiced announcing my findings a couple of times because it felt so good to say it, like a lullaby to get myself back to sleep.
“Danika,” I’d say, “I found your killer. His name is Theo Pesca-dora. They call him The Fish.”
In the contested battle I’d have thrown Theo P.’s body on the machine.
He’d be remembered.
And to be remembered as a villain is as good as being remembered as a hero.
Maybe better.
Part 3 - Tomorrow
I woke up later that day, remembering my plan but my eyes were seeing nothing but white, and it felt like a hammer was inside the machine of my head pounding out, threatening to, at last, bust it wide open.
I remembered also that Today was Tomorrow, the day I would stop drinking.
I braved daylight. I went back to the Fairfax district. I was like a Robespierre there in my suit and pasty skin, accepted like a moving historic landmark. Everything was too bright, too loud, too tight. When was night going to fall? This day had already been too damn long and maybe it was time I gave up on it. When was that sun going to set?
Kid C.—only twelve and already with the bug eyes of someone who smoked the Rattail that was all the rage—was standing looking up at the traffic going back and forth in the sky.
“Hey Ludd,” he called, too loud. “You looking for a new squeal?”
I tried for it. “Do you know who popped Theo P.?”
“Nope,” he says. “Nobody knows nothing. You know how it is.”
Then I noticed on the back of Kid C.’s hand, as bright and shiny as a new sore, a big rose tattoo.
“When’d you get that?” I asked.
He was proud. “Just got it!”
Tatts are rare in the Fairfax district. It’s crawling with God-Knocks, and they refuse it with old-school religious conviction as the sign of the Beast from the Good Book.
“Why’d you go and do a thing like that?” I asked.
He gave me a real ‘smile for the camera’ type grin. Then he looked back up into the sky at the traffic. “Ludd, man. You old.”
We just stood there a while, me staring at this kid, him staring at the sky, me thinking about Lancaster J., Dandy, Theo P., but most of all, how I need a drink, I need a drink, dear God, I need a drink.
Tomorrow I’d go talk to my Anarchist friend.
Tomorrow I’d call Dandy back and start putting out the breadcrumbs to lead us to the memorial candy house of the martyr to the cause.
To the cause.
What was the cause again?
God, my head hurt. Every thought. Hurt.
Tomorrow. Today I was going to finish the bender I started the day before. Today I was going to get so drunk I forgot who I was or why.
I turned around and walked away.
Kid C. called after me, “Wait, Ludd! I can help! I can figure it out! Just give me a mystery!”
I stopped. I felt something in my heart pushing against my chest, some dam behind my eyes threatening to burst. I walked back to the kid.
“Help me with this mystery,” I said to him, my voice soft and shaking. “What are people for? Tell me that, kid. What are we?”
The kid looked at me straight a moment.
“Oh, that’s easy,” the kid said. And then he started laughing.
I waited for him to say more, but he was so high he just laughed and kept laughing.
I walked away and something broke in me for good as I got it.
No mystery. Just a big joke.
DITCH TREASURES
RICHARD CHIZMAR
&nb
sp; 1
A two-hundred-year-old bible.
A brand new pair of Air Jordan sneakers.
An iPhone in a leopard skin case.
A cigar box containing ashes.
An expensive fly fishing rod.
A framed velvet Elvis.
A George Foreman grill still in the box.
A rusty Sucrets tin filled with Buffalo nickels.
Three dead puppies in a burlap bag.
A wallet containing $269 in cash.
A loaded handgun.
A gold Rolex wristwatch, broken but still beautiful.
A Ziploc baggie of marihuana.
A powder blue tuxedo balled up in a paper bag.
A battered suitcase full of wind-up monkeys.
A laptop computer with a smiley face sticker.
2
These are just a handful of the more unique items I have found strewn along the grassy shoulder and median strip of I-95 in northern Maryland. For reasons I can’t figure out, womens’ shoes and compact discs are the most common. I once thought I had found a dead body lying there in the weeds, but it was dusk and the light was bad, and it turned out to be nothing more than a mannequin incredibly lifelike, nude, with BEAT PENN STATE written across the torso in black magic marker. Some people sure are weird.
3
My name is Jake Renner, but most everyone calls me Rhino on account of a fight I once got in with a big Mexican. I lowered my head and charged and actually managed to knock the huge bastard off his feet. He still kicked my ass without breaking much of a sweat, but I got his shirt a little dirty, and got a nickname and a little respect out of the deal.
I’m 34 years old and have worked the I-95 grass-cutting crew for going on six years now. Despite the Maryland summer heat and humidity, it’s a pretty good gig; we work eight months out of the year and make seventeen dollars an hour. Plus benefits. For a guy with no college, it beats laying asphalt or working construction, that’s for sure.
The job is simple, but that’s not to say easy. It mainly consists of pushing or riding a mower or working one of those big industrial weed-whackers. The whackers are heavy suckers and can do serious damage in careless hands. That’s the first thing we learn around here; those things aren’t toys.