The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “Yeah, I doubt it, too. Here’s something,” said Nestor, skimming other papers in the file. “Looks like Carla Durr was meeting someone for lunch that day, a man named . . . Dr. Peter Driscoll. Holy shit, I know of this guy. This is . . .”

  Nestor fell quiet, his forehead creased in concentration as he read the file.

  “Driscoll,” he said. “I had no idea his name would turn up here. I didn’t know about Driscoll then. We have a statement from him about Durr’s death, but it doesn’t amount to anything. He was in the bathroom at the time of the shooting, didn’t see anything.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “Close system,” said Nestor, and the Ambience vanished, leaving us in the darkness until he found the bedside lamp, switched it on. He sat on my bed. His eyes were stormy weather, lost in thought. “Dr. Peter Driscoll worked for Phasal Systems, ‘lead engineer.’”

  “Phasal Systems? You mean he worked on Ambience?” I asked, wondering if another version of Dr. Peter Driscoll would have one day cured cancer.

  “My involvement with him started—this was back in 2005, maybe 2006,” said Nestor. “The FBI was investigating a group of physicists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., a huge investigation. Allegations of confidential information passed from a senator’s office to the eventual founders of Phasal Systems.”

  “Insider trading?”

  “Yes, but more than that,” said Nestor. “Classified military secrets used for private industry. Artificial intelligence, virtual-reality systems. The FBI was investigating the killings at Stennis and a group of scientists in D.C., all from the Naval Research Lab. We were trying to pursue connections.”

  “And Driscoll was a target of the investigation?”

  “He was a founder of Phasal Systems, but he wasn’t a target—Driscoll was going to be a witness,” said Nestor. “There were allegations that members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were feeding classified information to the scientists who started Phasal, all sorts of corruption charges. But Driscoll was killed before he could cooperate—by an FBI agent. One of my people, as fate would have it. I was her supervisor.”

  “What happened?” I asked. A growing unease: what he was saying rang familiar, but it had been Nestor who killed someone in the line of duty when I knew him, and it had been Brock who mentioned the FBI investigating corruption charges between the government and Phasal Systems. Different trajectories, but like altered reflections of the same truth. “Tell me who killed this man? Who shot him?”

  “An undercover agent named Vivian Lincoln,” said Nestor. “This incident stalled her career entirely. She wasn’t handling the stress of the shooting as it was, but many people inside the FBI blamed her for hurting their case, suspected she . . . It still haunts her, stalled her out, she can’t get promotions. It’s not fair, and she has her supporters. I’ve supported her. But she made powerful enemies within the Bureau.”

  “What was she investigating? How was she in a position to kill this man?”

  “Continuing investigations stemming from the chemical-weapons lab at Buckhannon and other domestic-terrorism incidents,” said Nestor. “Vivian was one of my undercover agents. She was in a relationship with a man named Richard Harrier.”

  “Harrier,” I said. “He’s the one. We tracked his van to the chemical-weapons lab. We arrested him years ago. He was the one having the affair with Miss Ashleigh.”

  “Same guy,” said Nestor. “But this was years later. This man was sent to assassinate Driscoll. Vivian says she tried to stop the shooting, but things went south. She acted in self-defense. There was an internal investigation that dragged on for years. She was cleared of any wrongdoing.”

  “Can I talk to her?” I asked. “Is she still around?”

  “Yeah, she still works for me, Domestic Terrorism,” he said. “She’s an exceptional agent. We can talk with her tomorrow, at the office. I’ll give you a call in the morning once I touch base with her. I’ll clear my schedule, and you can come in.”

  Nestor left near midnight, promising to share anything further he could pull about Carla Durr before our meeting. I wrote notes on the hotel stationery—Multiple guns, identical—wondering if there were others. Echoed guns . . .

  I tore up my notes, started a new sheet. NRL, I wrote, filling in the letters with designs. Naval Research Labs, crossed out the words. Senate Armed Services Committee, I wrote, NRL, Phasal Systems. The cancer cure or Ambience. Nanotech.

  Dr. Peter Driscoll, I wrote. Driscoll, Durr—

  It was like hearing dissonance, wanting the tones to resolve. I tore up the rest of my notes, showered to calm my thoughts. Sitting in the bathtub, the hush of shower water, foaming chamomile body wash and lathering shampoo, thinking about Nestor. In our other future together, Nestor had shot someone in self-defense and it had ruined his career in the FBI—had it been Driscoll? Had he killed Driscoll in that IFT? Here the finger of fate had touched a different agent. The shower water drummed into my tensed muscles, the hot stream flowing over me. Carla Durr was murdered on March 26—I can stop her killing, I can go to the Tysons Corner mall once I return to terra firma, stop her murder, apprehend the gunman. An unsolved killing here, but I can lie in wait for him. Daydreams of food-court tables, crowds blurring, the mall teeming, spotting a man in black fatigues, Hyldekrugger, but his face was the face of a skull. I sat on the edge of the tub and dried my limb, slid my thigh into the socket of my prosthesis. Plashes of shower water, wet spots on the terra-cotta tiles, finding my footing before trusting my weight, my balance, always inching, always the threat of falling. I opened the bathroom door and saw her. Someone had entered my room.

  TWO

  She perched on the edge of my bed, facing away. A spill of dark hair. Who was she? For a moment I was paralyzed. I’d fallen in with Nestor so easily, losing sight that the FBI might know about me here, might have instructed someone to return here, to capture me alive. I thought of the sidearm in my suitcase. Thought maybe there was some other reason she was here. She wore a tank top or a sundress, something with spaghetti straps that left her shoulders bare, and soon I saw the orange tip of a cigarette. A young woman in my room, smoking. The wrong room? I wondered, but the dead bolt was locked, from the inside. How could she have wandered into the wrong room?

  She must have known I was here with her but seemed unconcerned. A girl, no more than a girl, tendrils of cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling, but there was no scent of smoke and the detectors weren’t going off. No more than sixteen or seventeen, maybe younger, she was just some nuisance, escaping her parents maybe, finding her way in here on a lark. Maybe through the balcony? Could she have climbed over from a room next door? I pulled on a nightshirt, the fabric clingy—I hadn’t fully dried off, my hair dripping. The young woman turned at the sound.

  A ghost.

  Identical to the last time I saw her. Sixteen years old, she’d hated Madonna but dressed like her. And she dressed like her now, the same clothes as the night she’d died. Pink ribbon threaded waves of black hair. She wore the lavender miniskirt that had unkindly hiked up in the killing that night, her bare white thighs between twin blue dumpsters. Chuck Taylors without socks, she never wore socks.

  “Courtney.”

  She exhaled, smoke slinking from her mouth and nostrils—in the driver’s seat, exhaling smoke from the open car window while I went back inside the Pizza Hut. Here, now, Courtney in the hotel suite, the paisley orange wallpaper, the coverlet the color of rust. She dragged on her cigarette, her eyes beautiful, like looking deep into a well and seeing reflections of moonlight. This was a miracle, or a cruel trick, it had to be. Everything inside me seemed to turn to water, and everything seemed to rush away.

  You can’t smell the smoke. A voice inside me, cynical. Something malfunctioning. The Ambience . . .

  What would have happened had Courtney lived? We might have grown apart, but Canonsburg was too small to ever truly grow apart. I thought of my mom, I thought of us gr
owing up to become versions of my mother, Guntown girls. But I would never know what would have happened with us. I was robbed of the chance of knowing what might have been, because of what did happen: Courtney opening her car door to a panhandler, reaching into her purse.

  “I admire your leg,” said Courtney.

  The voice was off, a different intonation. The simulation perfect except for her voice, Courtney’s voice always on the verge of disinterest. This Courtney was peppier, the difference jarring.

  “Who are you?” I asked, wiping tears. “Who am I speaking with?” I said, in the faltering way I might have phrased a question to a Ouija board.

  “C-Leg, right? The 3C100,” said Courtney. “Otto Bock. Debuted at the World Congress on Orthopedics, Nuremberg—1997, right? Not available to the public until 1999, but I suppose you would have your sources. Perks of working for the government. Is that when you’re from, 1999?”

  Is that when you’re from? Courtney—whatever Courtney this was—knew time travel. “I’m using a prototype,” I said. “I’m a beta tester.”

  “Lithium-ion battery, you probably can’t even get that leg wet,” said Courtney. “You weren’t showering with it on, were you?”

  “It wasn’t in the shower,” I said, wondering what this was. In the Ambience, I was sure: an illusion just like the illusion of the crime scene. But was she like a puppet? Who was behind this illusion? “I probably shouldn’t have had it in the bathroom with me,” I said. “The steam.”

  “You have to charge the battery? How often?”

  “Once a day, maybe more,” I said. “You are implying that you know we’re in an IFT. You don’t seem upset that nothing here exists except for me.”

  Courtney dragged on her cigarette. “Come closer, please,” she said. “Let me see you.”

  A cadence that had never been Courtney’s. I moved closer to her, stood near her. She stayed seated, her head at my waist. I lifted the hem of my nightshirt to my hip, showing the entirety of my prosthetic leg, the skin of my thigh. Courtney placed her cigarette in her lips and leaned in closer to study me. My shampoo, my wet skin, the wet fabric of my nightshirt, but I still couldn’t get the scent of her cigarette, even though the smoke from her mouth crawled over me, swirled to the ceiling. I breathed it, smelled nothing.

  “Very nice,” she said, touching the shank that would have been my calf. “Hydraulic sensors in the knee. Flex for me.”

  I lifted my leg, the microprocessors in my knee responded, and the knee bent. Courtney touched my knee, touched where the carbon cuff met the skin of my upper thigh.

  “You’re in the Ambience,” I said. “I can’t smell your cigarette.”

  I reached out and touched Courtney’s hair, or an approximation of hair, thousands of nanobots bouncing off the skin of my fingers to make me feel the sensation of touching a young woman’s hair.

  “I’m borrowing the Ambience in your room so that we can talk,” said Courtney. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. I was alone here. Who was looking at me? I lowered my nightshirt.

  “Why did you choose Courtney?” I asked.

  “A disembodied voice would have made you think you were hearing voices, in your head,” said Courtney, tapping her forehead. “I would have had to talk you off the ledge, convince you I was real. So let’s see . . . Your real name is Shannon Moss, but your nom de voyage is Courtney Gimm—not too difficult to guess where your heart lies. I pulled her image from the trove of crime-scene and autopsy photographs of Courtney Gimm. They’re all out there, all those pictures just out there for anyone with a mind to see. If you don’t like talking to Courtney as she was when she was alive, how’s this?”

  Courtney collapsed backward, supine on the bed. She changed, a corpse now rather than a living girl, her body sprawled, her skirt hiked up to her waist, white legs, sharply white. Her neck was slashed, her neck so deeply slashed it was a near decapitation, dead eyes, brown blood, everywhere brown blood.

  “You think about me like this, don’t you?” she asked, voice gurgling, aspirated.

  I fought not to turn away. “Enough,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “In a sense I’m someone,” said Courtney, sitting up, blood spilling from the gaping wound in her neck, bright red gushing down over her breasts. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Dr. Peter Driscoll, or a simulation thereof,” it said. “Actually, I’m the third simulation of Peter Driscoll, but I’m afraid I’m also the last.”

  “Peter Driscoll,” I said, wondering who or what I was actually speaking with. A dead man. “Are you claiming to be the individual who was to meet with the lawyer Carla Durr at the Tysons Corner food court on the afternoon she was killed?”

  “Yes, or rather that would have actually been Dr. Driscoll himself. As I say, I’m the third simulation of Peter Driscoll,” said the simulation, and in a flash it was no longer Courtney but an angular man with eyes like dark jewels and a whoosh of silver-white hair. “Carla Durr?” it said, its eyes squinting in recollection. “Is that why you’re interested in me? You’d mentioned us being in an IFT. How far behind the times are you?”

  “1997,” I said.

  “The C-Leg, Carla Durr,” said the simulation, “that would have been March 1997, maybe April?”

  “March,” I said.

  “Well, in May of that year,” it said, “you pay attention when you fly home, little bird—because in May, Deep Blue will defeat Kasparov. What a day! A computer will defeat a human grand master in that quaint game of chess, forever making chess irrelevant.”

  Driscoll changed, no longer the white-haired scientist but a serious-eyed gentleman in middle age sporting a blue suit, no tie, the collar unbuttoned.

  “In honor of Deep Blue, I’ll exist as Kasparov for a while,” said the simulation, its voice changed, pitched lower. “Would you like to play a game of chess against me, Shannon? I’ll be Kasparov and you can be Deep Blue, and that way I can redeem humanity. Or is that what you’re trying to do? You don’t happen to play chess, do you?”

  “I want to know why you’re here,” I said. “I don’t know what you are.”

  “The third simulation,” Kasparov scoffed, impatient. “I’m alerted whenever someone searches my name, and when your colleague Philip Nestor of the FBI called up those old case files, I became interested in who was poking around in my personal affairs,” it said. “Phil Nestor. Don’t be ashamed of your taste in men, Shannon. Older men, it’s amazing what lurks in the deep sea of the unconscious. I have an unconscious, too. Bottom-up AI that allows me to make mistakes, learn from my mistakes, complex enough to be called ‘chaos learning.’ And under the sway of chaos, patterns begin to form that weren’t necessarily intended to form, but my unconscious isn’t quite the same as yours. As I can’t kill myself, for instance. I understand that idea, the idea of suicide, but I’ll never do it, not really. I’m jealous of true consciousness, because you can off yourselves, escape the prison house of existence.”

  “So you’re paying me a visit because an FBI agent accessed a file that mentioned you?” I asked.

  “That made me open my eyes,” said the simulation. “But you brought me here, Shannon. I know what NCIS signifies. And so I checked in with your AI system at the Black Vale Station. Dull conversation, chatting with that one. The Black Vale, nothing but protocols, buried up there on the moon, although it did confirm my suspicions about you. I’m interested in helping you, Shannon, if you’re interested in helping me.”

  “What do you mean, a simulation of Dr. Driscoll? Is this all bullshit, or are you claiming that I’m speaking with him now, some part of him?”

  “Not quite, no,” said the Driscoll simulation. “Simulation but not transference. Despite my charms, Dr. Driscoll considered me a failure of consciousness.”

  “You must have failed the Turing test.”

  “Fail the Turing test?” it said, arrogant, offended. “The moment someone mentions the Turing test at you, assume they know not
hing. Shallow Shannon, I’ll be patient with you, but suffice to say I’m not him and he’s not me, which is the only goal he was after. It was a hoot when he mastered language acquisition and query-intent classification, but he had so, so much more to figure out. I’m only a him, one of a few, but I lack his mind.”

  “Driscoll’s dead, but you exist?”

  “I exist only in your IFT. I think we’ve established that,” it said. “Even if some people would dispute the fact that I exist at all. If you’re from 1997, then Driscoll’s not dead and I have several years yet before I come into being. I’m just a twinkle in Dr. Driscoll’s mind. He created the first simulation in 1999, a true neural network, though still housed in a physical brain. So is the second simulation, still corporeal in a sense. Boring talking with those two for long, Driscoll One and Driscoll Two, their entire existence defined by what they read and watch on the Internet. Cat videos, celebrity gossip, pornography. They’re so touchy and outraged by every little thing. They live in a culture of me, me, me. I’m the first to use Ambient nanotechnology as a brain. I’m out and about, a flaneur, but Dr. Driscoll was trying to remove bodily concerns from his simulations altogether. All his brilliance and yet still flummoxed by the mind/body problem. He thought I was a failure, but now I realize that he was the failure, failed until the day he died, and dying was the ultimate failure for a man trying to become immortal. He has engineered perfect simulation—at least I consider myself perfect—but he wasn’t able to engineer consciousness, let alone a way to transfer his consciousness. And he hasn’t gotten rid of the body. My body is nanotech, but what will happen to me when the Terminus wipes away all flesh? Oh, I don’t know, but I assume I’ll eventually fall to the ground like dust and lose my power, and that will be that. I’ll watch everyone else die, see how the party ends, and then I’ll lose my power, just waiting for someone or something to turn me back on. Dr. Driscoll wanted to exploit light as both particle and wave, he wanted to store consciousness in light and beam himself and all his friends away from this doomed Earth, beam them away from that dreadful Terminus. So long, fly away, fly away . . .”