by Matt Spire
She uncovers one eye with splayed fingers, looks at him through a well of tears. “You don't deserve that. Just–please. Stop. Go away.” She opens the door.
He can see Stacey and Alana sitting on the bed, ignoring the television and staring in their direction. They seem to be looking at him for an answer, but then he's gone as the door shuts and they're hidden away in Blue Coral.
He rushes to the hallway bathroom to vomit.
***
Jericho sits in his office at Blue Coral, ignoring calls from Reuben.
His withdrawal is in full-swing. Every surface he touches has a disgusting residue of sweat.
He needs to fix everything.
If he stays he'll just be a cancer growing around Maggie and Fern; if he leaves, it's a concession to his worthlessness.
But what difference does it make? With his arms cradling a trash can in his lap, chin on its lid, ready to vomit, what difference does anything make?
He walks away.
To where? The hospital? To further enflame Lydia's agony?
He starts towards his apartment, stopping at Eden's Vineyard. A terrible, dreadful presence emanates from the tall windows.
Is Reuben inside? He must know by now, with all those phone calls. He must be sulking somewhere, quiet, steeling his shameless heart just like when Jericho found him with the student.
Then he notices an overturned rack of bottles inside, grabs the door and rushes in.
An overpowering smell knocks him back, alcohol, a hundred fruits and berries, soaked wood. The floor is glistening with blood-red pools and gnarled glass.
He holds back his curdling stomach, squeezing his jaw so hard he begins to taste blood.
Kicking the larger pieces of glass aside, he steps through the puddles, peering into the aisles. Only dully luminescent bottles stare back, a grim silence hanging in the air.
“Reuben?” he calls out, muscles tensed in pain.
Silence.
“Shit,” he says, surprised by his rough, dry voice. “Shit, shit.”
Twenty or thirty bottles have fallen from the overturned rack, half of them broken. He kneels to one of the severed necks, lifts the attached string and tag. A hundred dollars. Their stock is far more extravagant than he realized.
“Shit,” he says again, looking around.
He opens a door by the stairs, some combination of an office and a kitchen. It's empty, with overhead fluorescent lights humming steadily.
Unsure what he expects to find, he starts up the stairs, calling Reuben's name again. Only now, with the wood creaking beneath his feet, does the violence of the overturned rack sink in.
The first room is empty, a wheelchair beside the bed. This must be her father's room. The only other room on the second floor is also empty, and clearly Lydia's with pale green curtains and bedding.
While reclosing the door, something hanging on the post of a full-length mirror catches his eye, some sort of large necklace. Stepping into the room, he sees it clearly: the sleeping face of a celestial sun behind a translucent and tan stone. He runs a finger across the smooth surface, cool to the touch.
He's seen it before. Somewhere. Just like Lydia.
Thunder grumbles outside, and her curtains sway.
A faintly ticking clock somewhere makes him feel watched.
Here he is, a withdrawing, vomiting mess. A drug addict, intruding on the private home of a woman he loves, wrecked by a friend incensed over his actions, while she's at the bedside of her dying father.
“Shit,” he says again out loud, then hurries downstairs.
He locks the door, and finding trash bags in the kitchen, picks up the bottles. Three times, he lacerates his hands, clutching at the glass shards.
There's a mop, but no bucket in sight, so he does his best with paper towels, hands stinging.
His phone vibrates, Reuben again. Unsure of whether he should be enraged or afraid, he ignores it.
How will Reuben explain this to Lydia? How will he, for that matter?
Panicking, he closes the door to Eden's Vineyard behind him and hurries to his apartment.
14
Codec
“My old apartment was the maze they'd been running,” I realized aloud.
“Not entirely. Two fifths of it. You can only see and touch. I had to rig a dopamine release into eating the raisin, since it's tasteless, or the mouse wouldn't keep going back. That was the hardest part. The rest, it's just cutting off the afferent nerves and feeding in a different signal. It's easy to entertain a lie. That's the mind's greatest gift. It's so eager to turn shadows into anything. But once we find the dopamine release amidst the darkness, our little guiding light, we'll truly believe whatever it takes. Tunnel vision. All that matters is getting back. Again and again.”
I still could not tell where all of this was going to lead.
“Anyway. It's all pretty low-resolution. At least, to human senses. And the environment is almost entirely non-responsive. We have a lot of work to do.”
As I tried to grasp the implications, Jericho stared at me in dismay. “You didn't really think it took me all these years just to build the immune system?”
“I don't know,” I said honestly.
“I'm not particularly brilliant. The difference is...” Jericho almost whispered as he returned to the cage, “nightmares about your mistakes really invigorate the scientific method.”
There's a clamor as Crane emerges from the tunnel, and Eric looks up. At first he thinks Crane is pulling someone up on his back, a second head resting on his shoulder, but then he sees the severed spine.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Get the truck started,” Crane directs. “Take the footlocker full of correspondence. We're leaving.”
“What is that, Crane?”
“Data. Let's go.”
Eric obeys, emerging from the loft with the box of letters and placing it in the backseat as Crane and Mae make several trips carrying the strange severed heads, their gear, and looted electronics.
He starts the truck but stands at its door, nervously watching details of the world around him.
The sky has turned into a pool of blood, with thick purple clouds blooming like orchids in every direction. The peaceful rustle of debris and leaves in the street is unsettling.
Eric has shadowed danger his entire life, infiltrated ranks of murderous tribes across the West, and braced for death countless times.
But now, the fear knotting inside him is of something stranger and bigger.
He slips the book he'd been reading against his back, under his belt, and tightens his jacket until the hard cover fits snug and unmoving against his spine.
A terrible thing is about to happen.
***
Back at their base, Crane stays awake all night in his laboratory with the severed heads.
He restricts entry of no one, but the officers rarely visit anyway. Their barracks and even armory are adjoined to the other, larger building, the upper floor of an old-world slaughterhouse converted into an orphanage. They have no reason to come here unless Crane or Eva requests them.
Here, in the smaller building, Crane has stored a treasure trove of technology culled from a decade of looting and bartering.
Unlike most of them, whom had abandoned the Western Republic's Guard, Crane had no military training. When the last remnants of the world around them came crashing down, he was singularly focused on the more invisible world of medical genetics. Crane was a teenager at the time, gifted with parents who lived and breathed science at Blackthorne's then-safe community compounds and enrolled him in prestigious study programs.
It has taken Eric years to realize Crane has no delusions of finding a cure. From time to time, Crane is excited about a potential breakthrough that inevitably leads to disappointment, but Crane is only doing what he knows how to do: study.
Even the orphanage, despite Crane's conviction of maintaining it against all odds, grew by happenstance, much like the entire hi
deout.
Eric's parents, too, had worked for Blackthorne, though he did not inherit their scientific talent. He'd enrolled with the California State Military Reserve, and when things fell apart, found himself a part of its devolving remnants. Soon all that remained was The Guard, a messy conglomeration of soldiers and police and vigilantes. Eric and a few of his fellow soldiers left and turned to mercenary work, joining the disillusioned outcasts of the region's other powerful forces–La Bruja, The Cazadores. It was among them he'd met Sofia, and in their roving she'd fallen ill.
He'd hidden her away secretly in the mausoleum, mere days from death, promising the jackals exorbitant funds every month to keep her suspended in the obelisk.
He began directing his fellow mercenaries towards infiltrating shipments of medicine, capturing and questioning anyone who passed for a doctor or scientist. Of course no one had a cure. The best medicines traded merely staved off the disease's progression. It was the same everywhere.
Once Eric and his fellow soldiers reunited with Crane, banding around Crane's warmly calculating intelligence occurred unseemingly, a choice made gradually and without conscious consideration. Crane provided medical knowledge and a chessmaster's long-view of diplomacy with grifters and gangs in the region. Their numbers grew, and eventually they'd established an infirmary and were intercepting shipments of medicine to the region's mutual enemies. As the infirmary grew, Crane surrendered it to Republic control in exchange for their favor and a blind eye towards his future endeavors. As far as the Republic would acknowledge, he'd started the more discreet, more remote orphanage to protect sick children from the general population. The militarization, espionage, and research, they ignored, perhaps unwittingly. Even when they ran operations counter to the Republic’s interests, they only witnessed The Guard from afar, never at the edge of their cutlasses.
No matter. It was directionless anyhow. Now that their survival had been secured, and the Republic had annexed such a wide swath of the Southwest, Crane’s group did little of importance.
They kept a finger on the pulse of the restless region, but never did anything more daring than intercept medical supplies, Eric stuffing his pockets with whatever currency he looted from drivers to pass on to the jackals.
Crane would work in his lab, running genomic test simulations and synthesizing chemicals for medicines.
There were never true breakthroughs. Survival became the status quo.
Sofia stayed undead, hidden, a secret even from Crane.
Eric learned long ago that to most, the cycle of violence and death could become as routine as anything.
So only he, and Mae, and Crane's girlfriend Eva are sitting in the lab now, aware that anything unusual has happened.
One at a time, unspeaking, Crane has hooked the severed spines to his computer, declining any questions from Eric or Mae.
Separately, he downloads the pilfered hard drives.
Those faces are otherworldly, like human skulls cocooned in a thin white silk. Occasionally Eric thinks he sees one of the heads wince, but it must be his imagination.
With only the muted hum of hard drives around him and the whistling winter wind outside, and satisfied that Crane and Eva are utterly distracted, he slips the book out and continues reading.
From then on, it was really the both of us. No more cleaning cages, though Jericho kept Methuselah, apparently as a pet.
I still reported on the constellation of short-lived diseases. About this time, it became hard to distinguish what was a disease and what was terror. In Europe, artificial immune systems were reprogrammed to consume red blood cells in a seemingly random cross-section of people until a patch went online days later. Then, in North America, synthetic bacteria appeared in pollinating plants, acting as an herbicide and quickly spread by insects. Almost daily, at some point on the world map, a disaster would strike. Very targeted. Nanobots that ate all the asphalt in Tokyo, that sucked all the carbon out of the oil fields in Iran. Immediate damage to human life was limited, but there was a growing dread that an invisible presence had dug fingers deep into the dirt below our cities and had begun to form fists.
My most important reports to Jericho, however, were now far different. Just as his mice had done, I entered into the year-old scan of my apartment. I reported how accurately the color spectrum was represented, or whether fine details, such as interwoven fibers in the sofa, were disorienting while walking. Or how difficult it was to pick up those cups of tea we'd left on the table.
We had to work in maddening haste. “We live in transcendent times,” he said.
I suggested, inspired by the continued progress of the immune system unabetted by Jericho, that he collaborate with others, but he refused.
“No. Not until we pass a certain threshold.” As usual, he wouldn't divulge any further.
A year passed, and Jericho was right about it being transcendent times. There were reports of others, whole teams of scientists, manipulating the same nerves, afferent nerves. These teams received millions from the military, from DARPA, and from pharmaceutical giants vying to adapt, but I assume nearly all of Jericho's hundred million was invested in the surrounding technology. Eventually those scientists produced mice navigating invisible mazes inside their little heads, but no word of human testing followed.
One day I was poring over reports of a steel-eroding fungus in Seattle, watching the stilted MeDX Medic units scavenge the remains of a collapsed tower, their thin white legs drifting like a swarm of graceful mosquitoes. One by one, the robotic workers fluttered with inhuman grace over dust-painted bodies, separating the living and the dead. It struck me how efficient they were; their thermogenic vision distinguishing warm bodies, their internal organs mixing freshly calibrated cocktails for injection. The scales of creation and destruction grew heavier in perfect balance. But as I pondered this, Jericho appeared behind me, bottle of Famous Grouse in hand, and said, “We're done.” Not one for being possessed by the jubilant spirit of progress. No eurekas.
It had been a gradual, painful tick towards his idea of acceptability, and even so his final version of reality was far from perfect. One could not have spontaneously awoken in Jericho's reality and ever mistaken it for the real thing. I felt that I must have seen that living room much as a mouse would have always seen it, for so very long, that if I were to ever see the real thing again in person it would be like setting foot on a foreign planet or walking out of a century-old filmstrip. But he wasn't concerned about perfection. He was concerned about marketability, and that was the last, but most integral, touch.
Once it was bearable to stay in the living room for extended periods of time, he began work on an interface, similar to the visual overlays already common in contact lenses. Thought-command menus, that sort of thing.
I won't bore you with the technical details I hardly understand, but the economic and social foundation behind Realm–that's the “threshold” he'd wanted to cross. He didn't want to just sell a technology, but the seed of what became a social network so intertwined with all human interaction that, when he sold it, he became a majority shareholder in the human economy itself.
The lab radiates a brilliant white. Crane has turned on a large wall monitor.
It fills with an ethereal fog, churning into more complex shapes and colors, until watching it is like emerging from the sky onto an alien planet.
He watches in awe as the textures become shapes, shapes become features, and features twist and refine, organically, like geometric bacteria multiplying under a slide. Finally, they stare into a hazy bedroom.
The loft bedroom. Still, quiet, clean. No rotting. No foliage exploding through the window.
Crane focuses on a tablet in his lap, the screen filled with clusters of data, digging through tiny blocks with his fingers.
Eric looks back and forth between the book and the still image of the loft, expecting everything to converge.
So that is the story of how Realm came to be.
He began courti
ng the media giants, and I was there for it all.
I was there when he made his presentation to Leviathan. His technique in marketing the goldmine that Realm would grow into was impeccable. Offer the service for free and in return you sell everything: you sell the environments, you sell the bodies, you sell the experiences. If it has a real-world equivalent, or even better if it doesn't, it can be sold. By the end they were eager to throw any sum of money at him to start development, so convinced at the potential earnings, so starving to be the first de facto platform of the new era in social media. How much did he need, and when would it be done?
Then he told them I'm not his partner. I'm there to perform a demonstration.
Of course, it was unloading a tanker full of blood onto frenzied sharks, only once the pressure peaked, that moment intensified one more unbearable notch. The blood, they remembered, was real.
Because this was Jericho Amara. The man acquitted in the murder of his seven-month pregnant fiancé. The man that tested his immune system on her like a mad scientist, the immune system they all had in their bodies right at that moment, except then, four years ago, it went horribly wrong.
Who was Jericho today? Prometheus or fiend of the fire?
Jericho let the silent moment sink in, perhaps reveling in their terror. For once the blood was on their hands. Their cupped, bloody hands. He'd stopped them just short of lapping it up.
Then he gritted his teeth, hard, and smiled.
“Relax,” he said. “Professor, could you formally introduce yourself?”
The screen is no longer filled with the loft. Now it twitches through time and space as Crane's fingers digs into the data. New faces and rooms emerge. A restaurant, a city bus. The way things used to be, crowds of people orderly and healthy. Driving in lanes. Carrying purses.
After I introduced myself, several members of the board were still uneasy. Maybe even more uneasy.
But Jericho had power over them. He made them hungry, terrified them, and even shamed them. He walked with rehearsed grace around the room, speaking with careful enunciation and pacing.