King's County

by James Carrick

  "Nice to meet you. What the hell is this thing?"

  He smiled, taking no offense at my bluntness,

  "You're on the Estrella."

  *

  Yuri showed me to a berth, a small efficiency styled in minimalistic steel and thin strips of wood. I asked him if Ed was aboard. He confirmed that he was. We were all having dinner together, as was their convention, later that night.

  I wasn't tired and I had brought nothing with me so I wandered the narrow hall of the rearmost car. At the end, the last berth was open. A man lay on the bed reclining against a stack of pillows and reading a book.

  The book dropped. His eyes trained on me for a few seconds. When he eventually spoke it was in a low, fluid accent that sounded vaguely foreign,

  "Newcomer, welcome. Dinner’s not yet ready."

  "Yes, thank you. I was just looking around, you know." I said.

  "Yes, I do. Dinner will be in the next car but they're also having a meeting now so you shouldn't disturb them. Someone will come to get you."

  "Is Edward Hart in that meeting? He's the one who invited me here."

  "I'm sure he is. It's the planning committee. What is your background?"

  "English, maybe, Dutch. My name is..."

  "No, not that, your educational and professional background. What do you do? You're not a muscle boy so you must do something or you wouldn't be here. My name is Tyndall, by the way."

  I really didn't know how to answer him. I felt any answer would be inadequate. For some reason I wanted to impress him.

  "Sort of a business degree, it was a long time ago. Then military, drone pilot, and I went to space with Ed."

  "The infamous Artemis project. I know it." He said.

  "Oh yeah, I was at this crazy art colony for a few days, after getting run out of the infantry."

  *

  I stayed talking to Tyndall until we went to dinner. For every answer he gave, I had a hundred more questions. He liked talking. Three hours in his small berth went by quickly.

  We were on a passenger train called the Estrella. Long disused and obsolete, it had been commandeered and refit by an entrepreneur type, a real dinosaur, named Leland. Leland was seen only occasionally by Tyndall and the others though he was suspected to spend most of his time on board.

  I learned that the guys in the rear car were different from the rest of the passengers up front. Yuri, Tyndall, Walter, Ed and a few others had segregated themselves back here for their own comfort. What they all had in common was a technical expertise of some kind along with a fine mind to use it.

  Tyndall described himself as a philosopher who was once a physicist. Walter was a computer scientist who specialized in assembly coding. I wasn't sure what this meant but it seemed impressive the way he described it. Yuri was a geneticist who also wrote music and who once decoded a cache of ancient clay tablets found in Armenia.

  Tyndall could not explain why he and the others were on the train. He sort of blanked out when I asked. Maybe he didn't know how to tell me. Maybe the answer was too complicated for him to express in the moment. I made a point to bring it up later.

  When the door to the dinner car opened, Tyndall and I both stood up, suddenly self conscious. Ed’s smiling face popped in our doorway.

  "Hola, señor. Come give your Papa a hug." Ed was smashed and obnoxious but I hugged him all the same.

  "What do you say, Major? Are we going to eat or should I stick my hand out of the window and grab some leaves?"

  "Eat! Eat! Dinner is ready," he said to me and banged on the thin wall of the next berth, hollering to the others down the hallway like a baboon.

  *

  We sat at a large round table, six of us. Plates of food took up every bit of space.

  Dinner was an amazing, flawlessly prepared spread. Elaborate Chinese and Japanese dishes lay next to French classics. There were steaming enchiladas, cheeseburgers, and gyros piled onto a side table. Walter sat by a Scandinavian style smorgasbord on a wheeled cart and wolfed down smoked salmon with cream cheese and capers.

  I crunched foie gras rillettes and toast and sipped a Sauternes. Right away I recognized them. They were mentioned in something by Flaubert that I'd read in the Artemis module.

  “Those are good,” Walter said to me, “Pretty much pure fat, calorically dense. You'll be needing the energy, especially on your first one.”

  Ed dodged my questions until he had eaten a sufficient amount of crab claws. He wiped his face and burped after slugging down a pint of beer,

  "If they didn't want you here, you wouldn't be here."

  "Who? The military? They said I was out." I said.

  "Military... hell no. I mean; what do I mean - It's them, the same old them it’s always been. Who they are doesn't matter. I can't really say," Ed held up one finger, pausing so he could clink glasses with the man next to him and guzzle a fresh drink.

  "This is Richelieu. Richelieu, Je vous presente Le Capitaine." The sixth man at the table nodded his head to me as he was introduced then loudly burped.

  "We’re being kept out of the way." Yuri offered. "I mean, I can't prove it, but it makes the most sense."

  "You'll love it," Ed said. "As of now you’re on the planning committee. Start thinking of ideas for the next one."

  Richelieu spoke up, "We were the engineers but we took over for the planning committee. God knows what they're doing now."

  "I don't understand - what are you planning?" I said.

  Ed answered first. "We plan the party."

  *

  "Most anyone you'll meet is no less than thirty years old. If you look closely maybe you can tell. Everyone is on it, and we’re all chipped, too. We'd be dead a hundred times over otherwise." Tyndall was getting loaded, his mental powers were near peaking before their slow but inevitable decline.

  "I'm not chipped. They took it out." I said but the room was too loud.

  We were in the next car from the one we ate in. This was what they had been planning behind the closed door. A crowd of young men and women were dancing and drinking. Ed and the others disappeared into the mob leaving me with Tyndall and Richelieu hanging around a table of pre-made drinks.

  The room was impossibly huge. It was tropical, somewhere in Mexico. On the far wall a blood red sun hung low over a crumbling Mayan pyramid and there was a mist in the air. I could see no ceiling instead there was a dim red sky with sparse thin pinkish-gray clouds. The walls around our courtyard were carved Mayan stonework. Beyond the side of one wall was a rolling pasture. A sparkling bay ringed with mountains was beyond the other.

  I told them I wanted to test the illusion and they encouraged me. The way back to the dinner car was through an old carved wood, iron studded door set in a three story high, Spanish colonial style facade.

  I reached out to touch the surface and pulled back. Again I tried but could not manage to completely close the distance. My head spun; the sound of a hundred mosquitoes buzzed in my ear. When I withdrew, the irritating sensation immediately went away. I tried again, going deeper, feeling my eyes starting to cross. The surface was just beyond reach - I was lightheaded and losing my footing. I bore down and stepped into it - the wall repulsed me as if it and I were two like magnetic poles. It yielded. I made contact. The door suddenly gave and I stumbled, falling forward with the simple stainless steel door of the dining car slapping shut behind me.

  *

  "It's pretty neat, right? Walter, Richelieu and I designed it." Tyndall said after I rejoined them at the table.

  “Touch the knob next time. It's a lot easier.” Walter said.

  “Whoa, hey there...”

  A dark, long haired woman in an orange and black dress danced into our group and led Walter away.

  "How does it work - how does any of this work? I understand it’s a hologram. Why can't I get near it? And this room, there’s no space for all these people, yet they seem real."

  Richelieu patted me on both shoulders, "He will explain it all; more than you wil
l want him to - in time. All we have is time, and I have an appointment in the next car. Goodnight to you, boys."

  He sauntered off. Within a few seconds he already seemed to be twenty-five or thirty meters away. At the base of the pyramid, which now dwarfed him, he vanished, passing into another realm.

  Tyndall handed me a highball glass,

  "Cognac, splash of coffee liquor, splash of cream. The ice cubes are frozen banana chunks. Specialty of mine... I’ll tell you about the holograms."

  We hung around watching the others mingle and chat. Tyndall seemed reticent to join in. He talked and I was happy to listen. Of what he said that I understood was that there were several of these party cars each in a different theme. The cars had been stripped down to all but a few fixtures. Tables, chairs, sofas, some hard physical items were still necessary. The rest, the sunset, the pyramid, the walls and trees, even the surfaces of the tables and chairs, were their current generation of high resolution holograms.

  The engineers had developed the holograms beyond a simple visual effect. The spacious Mexican courtyard was actually filled with real people. They were not part of the illusion. But as the car would be much too small for everyone to comfortably occupy the space, the holograms were dynamic, adjusting instantly, as necessary, to give a continuous effect. Someone who seemed six or seven meters distant in reality was likely between only one or two meters away.

  When I asked him how we all kept from bumping into each other he smiled and lit a cigarette. He was the one who had solved this problem.

  "Subtle cues generated by the room's controller. You see this big space - and it really isn't as big as it seems - but you won't enter the space just anywhere at anytime. You were beginning to discover this earlier," Tyndall said.

  "I had to force myself to touch the wall. It felt weird and it got really unpleasant the closer I got."

  "It steers you in the right place. Sort of like an old fashioned air traffic controller, or like a sheep dog, except you don't really notice it happening."

  “Until you fight it.” I said.

  Tyndall nodded, “Indeed.”

  *

  I downed my third cognac and we went into the pyramid. At the base of it was a dark, indistinct rectangle. Tyndall went first. He blurred for a second as he approached the door then disappeared.

  - One last step forward and the noisy courtyard was gone. I almost lost my feet again.

  I was in an antechamber. The heat and smells of the last car were replaced by cool, clean dry air. The walls and floor were made of gray stone blocks, the ceiling was heavy, well-joisted hardwood.

  Tyndall waved me forward into the next room.

  “This looks good. It’s a quiet one. Let’s sit down and we can talk,” he said.

  It was smaller, seemed smaller, than the other room. Two arched windows on one side revealed a snow covered mountain landscape. The room was lit by a rough iron oil lamp chandelier. A massive blazing fireplace took up one corner.

  We sat at a table beside a hanging tapestry. A handful of men deep in conversation were at the other tables. There was no music. We drank big steins of cold beer and took shots of peppermint schnapps.

  "Let me ask you, this place in Seattle you were sent to, what was it like, generally speaking. Was it very clean and orderly?"

  "Everywhere was. Very clean, and so were the army facilities in Alaska." I said.

  "But you didn't ask how it was so well kept?" He said.

  "Well, I noticed. My old base in Wyoming was usually filthy. That was years ago. I figured these things were now automated somehow, like everything else."

  "But you saw no, say, janitors or maintenance workers, man or machine. Am I right?"

  "I never saw anything. You're going to tell me why."

  "Yes, the same illusion as here. The cities are full of these machines tending the landscape, cleaning streets, cleaning up your mess - all carefully and efficiently disguised." He said. "Of course here the holograms are hosted in the structure of the train car. The cities and the military adapted our system to run on board their devices. They display their background to make themselves invisible."

  "When I was in space I read about Plato’s Cave."

  "Right! That's what it is. But these days I wouldn't waste any time trying to reach the other prisoners, so to speak. I think you'll find them indifferent."

  "You said the cities adapted your system. Who are these people?"

  "Whoever they are... Well, they're nobody. I really wouldn't know how to keep up with that kind of thing, even if I were interested."

  "Well, they seem like they know what they're doing, but Seattle was a mess underneath the surface. The people there were insane."

  "We’ve made a mess of everything, everywhere. No doubt about that." Tyndall lost himself in a moment of thought.

  "Did you ever read anything about inter-dimensionality?" He said at last.

  "A little. Hard to understand and it's all theoretical."

  "I argue that the holograms create a separate dimension," he said.

  "Huh. Wouldn't it just be an illusion of a dimension?" I said.

  "Yes, what I mean is they create a separate living dimension. One that has most properties of reality, eventually, inevitably perhaps becoming indistinguishable from reality – at least to our perception.”

  I shrugged and he went on,

  “Think about the concept of time. We’ve conquered it in our lives. We’ve beaten death. The formula pills beat aging. The chips do the rest to keep us healthy. Astronauts like you could alter your perception of time with a simple pill. Ed told us."

  “So what does that mean? We're messing with nature and that will eventually bring on our downfall? Or we're becoming isolated by our technology and we've lost the true meaning of life. Or did we kill God with our hubris and we're now alone in the universe? Choose your cliché.”

  “You really did read those old books. Maybe all those things're true,” He said and laughed at my teasing him. “But no, what I mean is that what's real has become less real and what's not real has become more real - whatever is coming out of this new world will not resemble anything we've seen before. That's my only prediction. This is a beginning as well as an end.”

  “I don't know. It doesn't feel like a beginning.” I said.

  “But it always is. Nothing can stay the same forever.”

  We hung out drinking a little while longer but kept the conversation light. A blonde woman in an alpine getup that showed off the top of her breasts brought us fresh drinks when we needed them.

  Tyndall was quiet for a minute. He was asleep in his chair. I left him at the table and the waitress showed me to a small bedroom. A single narrow window looked out high above a forested, snowy valley.

  I passed out on the cold bed for a few hours. When I awoke, I wasn’t alone. The waitress was in the bed waiting for me.

  I slept again, better than before, and woke up feeling pretty good, considering. The waitress was gone. She hadn’t spoken a single word since I'd rolled over on top of her.

  Outside, the fire was out. The hall was empty. I took a seat in the middle of the room and rested. There was the sound of a storm outside.

  The effect was perfectly realistic. Wind driven snow was tapping on the window and accumulating on the sill. I could smell the oil in the lamps in the chandelier.

  I studied an intricately inlaid, lacquered metal suit of armor that was set up against one wall. The hangover hit me, a dumb pounding in my head. I needed to take my time, to take advantage of the moment alone and relax. The moment didn't last.

  "Whoa! What are you doing?" It was Ed. "Hey, c’mon. It's going on in there, not here."

  "Jesus, are you OK?" I said. Ed looked rough. He had been going nonstop since I last saw him. His eyes were bloodshot saucers.

  "Am I OK? I'm fine. You're the one hanging out in a library with no books. You’ve got to come see the next car. C’mon." Ed put his arm around my neck and dragged me over to the door.
He was sweating booze.

  "Captain, I think you'll like this one. We spent a lot of time on it - it's exactly like Miami. And Miami is dirty."

  *

  Ed wasn’t wrong. The heat hit me in the face with a whiff of the swamp. We were on the doorstep of a white stucco mansion.

  Inside was a wild crowd. Bassy, frenetic Latin music necessitated shouting to be heard. Walking in, Ed immediately raptured off into the fray while I planted in one spot.