In Extremis

by John Shirley

  My dad went to high school with Milly, he knew her pretty well and he told her it wasn’t her fault. He told me to go to bed, and then he drove Milly to the hospital where they were taking her mom—she was all hysterical, she couldn’t drive—and they followed the ambulance out . . . The truck driver went with the police, to make his statement and all that . . .

  And I was alone there with the space demons.

  Then the space demons went through the walls of Doug Bench’s house—he’s this guy who makes his living selling mostly bullshit on EBay, stuff that looks like it’s valuable but it’s not, and he spends the rest of the time playing World of Warcraft online. He’s this big sloppy guy with bad teeth and matted hair. I looked through the window into his little living room where he’s set up his laptops, he’s got three of them. Two for eBay one for World of Warcraft. He inherited this little ranch-style house from his parents and they’d be pretty upset to see how it’s never ever been clean in there since he moved in—most of it’s taken up by those plastic see-through tubes that his pet white rats run through, like sixty of them, running around in there, stinking the place up. Once he asked my sister to come in and look at his rats and she did and then he put his hand on her butt so she went home. I told her to tell Dad but she just said, “For that?!”

  Now I could see the rats running through the plastic pipes and around on treadmills and through a plastic cage filled with rat poop and torn newspapers . . . and I saw the two space demons talking to Bench. They turned and looked at me, through the window. I could feel the look on my skin, again.

  Then they pointed at his computer. And his computer monitors all started showing that window into Heaven. Another heaven, though. I couldn’t see what it looked like exactly except I made out pink girl shapes, so I guessed.

  He looked sort of glazed and then he went into the garage and he came back with a gas can and started splashing it around—making sure he got the rats, like he couldn’t stand for them to live longer than him—and I was yelling, “Don’t do that, Bench!” And I had my cell out, was calling 911, then I remembered that 911 didn’t work for cells around here, I was trying to remember the emergency number for cell phones—and then WHOOSH and BOOM and I got a face full of glass and smoke and I was sitting on my ass, watching the house burn . . .

  I heard him screaming, in there. And the rats screaming, too. So much more high pitched, like lots of little piccolos played backwards by a crazy piccolo soloist.

  I picked bits of glass from my face—no serious damage, just little cuts—and walked over to my house, feeling kind of zombielike from all I’d seen, just glad my mom and sister weren’t there. There were neighbors outside, and someone was saying they’d called 911 and someone else was asking was I okay, and offering to put antiseptic on my cuts and saying I should go to the hospital and then, blip blip, blip, the space demons were among them—five people: three housewives, two retired men—and they all looked over at the interdimensional window into the other place, opening, again, in the middle of the street.

  I looked into it too and since there were so many of them looking at it there was no one point of view for me to share on it, so then it was all snowy . . . and then after a moment I saw it my way. My own paradise. I saw something that looked kind of like the land where Donkey Kong goes—a videogame I played with my dad a lot when I was little, haven’t played it in years—and I saw me and my friends and my family there dancing around and, like, cavorting and shit, in a videogame paradise with Donkey Kong. How were we cavorting? Well—skateboarding down waterfalls, in this kinda perfected digital Hawaii. Dancing and skateboarding and swimming. And I did long to go there, but I knew better, and since I’d seen the space demons they didn’t have any strong power over me. But for the others it was different, the space demons had dipped into their brains, in some way; they’d really gotten into their wiring. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It was persuasion, yeah, but it was a kind of deep-in-yourbrain persuasion. It was like jacking an Ethernet cable into them. But right into their souls.

  There were three space demons now. And then a fourth one, climbing down the smoke from Bench’s burning house like someone climbing down a ladder. Then sliding down a plume of flame to drop to the street . . .

  This is a marvelous experiment, this new space demon said to the other two. I’ve always wanted to do this; to use their theological illusions in a sociobiological setting. The irony is delightful, the data indubitable . . .

  I’m not sure it follows the rules, said the fourth.

  But we are not in violation with certitude. If we concentrate our influence . . . The protocols of this methodology . . .

  They sounded like scientists, to me. I started wondering, then, about this experiment I heard about where these really old scientists were trying to be immortal through some kind of downloading of their minds, copying themselves onto some computer program, and I remember someone asking them, “But what happens to their souls if you put their identities on that machine, won’t their souls get lost when they die?”

  And the scientists said, “Ha! There are no souls!”

  And the other guy said, “But what if there are souls? What happens if you’re copying yourself in some way—but not the souls?”

  But I heard, on the internet, that a bunch of them had done the experiment and . . . something had gone wrong but no one could find out what, it was all hushed up. So maybe this was what. These guys talked like lost scientists. Like sick, lost scientists. But they acted like you think demons are going to act, too. Setting people up that way. Because what else are demons, but lost souls? And what happens to them, they get sucked into some bigger thing’s agenda, when they’re lost. Doing work for some other, like, entity . . .

  I didn’t hear what was said after that, because I was trying to tell the neighbors not to listen to the space demons, I was really upset and crying and they were saying I was crazy or else they were plain not listening to me and then they were staring at that little Puerto Rican lady, Mrs. DeSanto—she was climbing the tree. A really high eucalyptus tree behind Bench’s—and it had caught on fire from the explosion in his house. She climbed almost to the top of this tree, around the burning parts, but it was catching her dress on fire anyway. I had heard from her daughter she was on some kind of antidepressants and then she had gone off them and gotten kind of weird so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when she was the next one. She was ignoring the flames going up her housedress, and everyone yelling at her—and then she just jumped, from near the top, coming down like a roaring lady comet, WHUMP onto the street. Thinking she was getting a short cut into paradise that way, see. Someone started listening to me, finally, with that one: Danny Brewster, the Reverend Brewster’s bucktoothed son. Senior at El Sobrante high. “Three suicides, something is happening, for sure, dude,” he said.

  “It’s the paradise window,” I said. “The space demons make ‘em see that and they kill themselves to get there.”

  “Okay, you’re all fucked up too,” he said. Took a step back from me like I had a disease he didn’t want to catch. “You dose these people? You on something, dude?”

  I told him, Oh never mind. I tried to talk to the adults there—but they weren’t listening. Especially the older ones—they were staring at the paradise window, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, each seeing something different. Hearing how they had to get there . . . how a quick death would be the sure way . . .

  Mr. Baolaban—this gangly black guy immigrated from somewhere around Australia—he was chanting something in some native language and climbing a power pole. He clipped into a wire there. I yelled at him to stop—but he broke the wire and grabbed it and fell off the pole, hit the ground hard, clutching the live broken end, spasticating as the electricity went through him, his body rippling on the sidewalk.

  The cops and fire trucks and ambulances were just getting there when that Chinese lady whose name I don’t know, and a heavy set blond woman I don’t know either, both of them grab
bed onto Mr. Baolaban and started to go all spastic too, with their hair standing up and sparks jumping out of their mouths and their shoes flying off, all three electrocuted, and the fire trucks were rumbling in there pretty fucking fast, man, and two more people came out of their houses, Mr. Gimbelowski the alcoholic and that young guy from Pakistan who always seems so homesick, and they threw themselves under the fire truck’s tires before the trucks had quite come to a stop and then Reverend Brewster drove up, looking for his son, but the space demons crowded around him and said in paradise he would be forgiven for being a homosexual if he went now and took his son, and he tried to drag Danny over to the power lines but the cops pulled him away and then Reverend Brewster grabbed a cop’s gun and shot Danny and himself in the head and one of the cops pulled his own gun and started waving it around hysterically and Mrs. Galworthy rushed at the cop waving the gun, jabbing at his eyes with a nail file, forcing him to shoot and he blew her brains out, and he screamed, himself, as if he’d been the one shot, and then an old lady from the corner house, at the opening of the cul-de-sac, was trying to get away from two firemen, and she bit one on the wrist and he lost his grip on her and I saw why they’d been holding her: she bolted into Bench’s house, which was all flames, and threw herself into it, saying something about going through Hell to Heaven—she didn’t scream for long, only about ten seconds—and then someone fell face down WHOOSH SPLAT right next to me on the pavement, jumped from the top of the highest house in the street and to my left that pale guy with the beard who talks to himself and throws his mail down, I never did know his name, he knocked down an ambulance driver and then he was driving the ambulance real fast through a fence, knocking down the slats, WHAP-CRUNCH, WHAP-CRUNCH WHAP-CRUNCH , following the fence back, knocking the boards down one after another, with splinters flying, all the way into the backyard and right off that near-cliff, down the steep hill, the ambulance turning over and over—we could hear it crunching and bouncing—and that Mrs. Klepsky whose husband had left her, who used to come to Mom’s book club coffee klatch and then started avoiding her, the one whose face was so tight from all those operations—she was sticking a burning rag in her SUV’s gas tank and then climbing into it and the cops were yelling at her but then BOOM! it went off and she was in a fireball and then WHOOSH SPLAT someone jumped out of a tree and hit the ground next to that previous WHOOSH SPLAT and . . .

  And the cops were dragging me away, asking me what I knew about this, hadn’t this started with me somehow, what was going on, was I on drugs, had I dosed those people? Comparing it to Columbine, in some shady-ass way. And then I saw the space demons were talking to those cops and the cops were glaring at me, and the space demons were talking and talking to them, and two of the space demons seemed to be rolling joyously around on the ground and quivering in a kind of ecstasy, as the sirens screamed and the burning houses crackled—because the fire was spreading around the cul-de-sac now—and people screamed in pain and somebody else went WHOOSH SPLAT onto the street from above . . .

  Man it was fucked up.

  I was really glad when the cops shoved me in the back of a cruiser. Officer Blume, whom I know—he’s actually the older brother of a friend of mine—was telling the others not to hit me, he didn’t see how I could be responsible, it was like he was fighting that space demon influence, and he was the one who drove me to the police station . . .

  Well. That’s most of what happened. Nobody believes me. I shouldn’t have told anyone about the space demons because they think that if I’m making up something like that—they just assume I’m making it up—well then, I must be covering up something. And why, they want to know, was I the only one not affected back there?

  I’ve tried to explain that—and that the only reason they don’t believe me is because the space demons did all that suggestion, all that brain washing. On them.

  They just shake their heads.

  So, now I’m telling you, Mr. Court Appointed Psychiatrist, and you can believe what you want.

  I’ve stopped seeing the space demons. Because at the police station, the space demons started talking about rules again, and said they were going to have to report somewhere, and then they just went. Blip, and blip, blip, blip right into the corners.

  I can still see things you can’t, though. If I want, if I sort of squint, I can see a window into another place. Only, I see what it really is, in the next world. What that other place really is. It has a kind of screen over it, and on that screen we project what we think we want to see. But I can see past that, into the real afterlife. Into bardos, they call them. My Aunt Gilliam gave me that Tibetan Book of the Dead about bardos. And I can see right into them . . .

  I see Reverend Brewster and Mrs. DeSanto and Danny and Mrs. Klepsky and Bench and Mrs. Hasslet and the others over there. They’re going around and around, bumping into one another, weeping, in a thing that is an endless drain that never finishes draining, a spiritual cul-de-sac without an exit; they’re stuck there from looking, from looking, from looking-looking-looking for what they were told would be there, and looking for it is keeping them there, in something that’s not Heaven, or Hell. Not really Hell exactly. Those people are stuck, just endlessly hungry and wandering in circles inside circles, right outside time; they’re caught up in a place where certain kinds of lost souls go. And where they stay, for thousands of years, and sometimes longer . . . and maybe forever.

  And the scientists, the space demons are there too, doing experiments on them. Experimenting and testing and conjecturing. Around and around.

  It’s all they know how to do.

  GOTTERDAMMERGUN

  Listening to the rasp of Dad’s station wagon backing out of the gravel driveway, Randy wondered how long he could continue to convince his father that he was sick. He ate his tepid oatmeal, congratulating himself that he’d managed to stay home from school for ten days. Ten days spent playing videogames most of the time. But Dad was getting seriously suspicious. There was talk of dragging him to Doc. Jenners. And Jenners was a grumpy white-haired old man with bad breath and dandruff who thought he was a wise country doctor, the kind who always said you were faking it even if you had a fever.

  But going to school meant facing Harold Sparks who was fifty pounds heavier than Randy and who was going to sit on him and do that slapping thing over and over that left no marks but made you feel like you wanted to die.

  He wished Mom wasn’t working. She was working so much she was just too tired to talk to. But she’d really gotten into this career thing, “cold-calling” for some company that sold extra insurance. He could talk to her when she was in the mood to listen. She just wasn’t in the mood much anymore.

  You couldn’t talk to Dad about anything except sports. Complain about the Harolds of the world he’d just say, “Kick their asses.” Yeah right. Randy was short, spindly, and tended to freeze up when people swung at him.

  So Randy just played sick and played videogames and waited.

  He got bored with the RPGs, Car Theft Seven and SewerCrawl—but he was seriously hooked on World War Two, Part Three: One Man, One War.

  Randy went to the living room, switched on the GameGem system, feeling a familiar thrill go through him at the warm-up tone that meant he was going to play. He had hours and hours to play. And he was so close to beating the game . . .

  Maybe he loved to play this one because it was easy to pretend these generic Nazis were Harold—despite their oddly clipped helmets, their shouts of “Achtung!”, their M1s. They had three models of Nazis in the game and the big blond flat-top haircut ones were especially Harold-like.

  “Die, Sparks, you bitch!” he muttered, as he hit the jump button, taking his first-person point-of-view over a wall and pressing pulling the controller’s R1 trigger, hard—cutting the big blond Nazi down. Blood splashed across the screen as his enemy spun about, shattered by bullets.

  Randy dashed up a stairway and blew away eight more Nazis, and then—all at once—he was there! He’d gotten t
o the Gotterdammer Gun!

  He had been working for nine damn days to get to this checkpoint in the game, saving his progress little by little. This was the last level, where you got control of a gigantic “experimental new cannon”—which hadn’t existed in the real war but, in the world of the game, it was a machine gun cannon that fired thousands of rounds off a huge belt of ammunition, each shell as big as a cruise missile.

  The cannon seemed to have infinite ammo as he fired at the army coming toward him. World War Two depended on him—the game had made that clear. He was at a key point in the Secret History of the war and if he didn’t destroy this army the Nazis would overrun all over England and then the USA.

  It was a delicious rush of power to fire the Gotterdammer Gun—

  Then a voice spoke to him from the television speakers.

  And it called him by name.

  “Randy . . . Randy we need your help—in der name of Gott, listen carefully!”

  “Oh shit. I’m losing it,” Randy muttered. Too much time playing this stuff.

  “Randy . . . Randy Rheinhold Steiner? We are contacting you from . . . Rolf, he’ll never believe us . . . yes, yes, I’ll try . . . Randy—we’re contacting you from the future.” It was a woman’s voice with an odd accent, crackling in and out. “Randy—listen very carefully—the designers of the game you are playing accidentally set up a space-time rogue-wave with their enhancement of a certain microchip. The past is not necessarily fixed, Randy! The past of the world—the real world—is not set in stone! It can be changed! We have two contiguous realities intersecting here in the future, Randy Steiner. Are you listening? Can you hear us?”

  “Uh . . . yeah?”

  Randy put the game on pause—-and the voice erupted in panic. “No! Do not pause the game! Not for more than—what does it say, Rolf? Fifty-five? Yes, ja—fifty-five seconds, Randy! Please, I beg you . . . do not pause the game more than fifty-five seconds! It has to do with quantum transmission through resonating brainwaves. We’ve traced the problem, traced the intersecting realities from conflicting historical pasts. Rolf, I don’t know if he’s still there! Mein Gott, we only have one chance! Randy—are you listening?”