Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

  The intruder stepped through with a ripping noise.

  Once inside the man calmly opened the fragile sagging door and removed a bracelet from the altered outer knob.

  The door instantly resumed its normal appearance and structure, save for a ragged, splintery gash down the center. Considerately, the mock Felix closed it.

  Priscilla Jane found herself somehow on the far side of the room, without any memory of having scooted there.

  The man turned to face her.

  There could be no doubt. It was Felix. The late Felix. Felix the deceased.

  Now the man was next to her. She must’ve blanked out for a few seconds. He was patting her on the shoulder the dumb way Felix always did, with a seemingly real hand.

  “Gee, I’m sorry, Pee Jay. I never stopped to think it might be a shock to people to have me return from the dead. I keep forgetting not everyone knows what I know. Say, did you actually see my corpse? I wonder if I could get a look at it? Do you think they’ve buried it yet?”

  Only Felix would be so impractical as not to consider the possibility that his ghost might not be heartily embraced. Only Felix would be so adolescently fascinated by the notion of seeing his own dead body. It had to be him.

  “Yes, I did see your corpse, you idiot, and it was as real as you are now! What’s going on?”

  Felix sat. “It’s a long story. You know how I’ve been working on the theories of Rupert Sheldrake for the past few years, don’t you?”

  “Sure. That nut who believes in those nonsensical morphic fields.’”

  Felix sighed. “It’s not nonsense, Priscilla Jane. It’s true. Everything Sheldrake hypothesized about his fields is true. And I’ve learned how to control them.”

  “Maybe you’d better refresh my memory. All I can remember is some stuff about tits.”

  “Tits? Oh, you mean the birds whose behavior helped Sheldrake formulate his theories. Well, they’re quite interesting, but hardly the main thrust of his argument. How can I put it briefly…? Look, everything has a form, doesn’t it? From atoms to molecules to higher organisms to galaxies, every object has its characteristic structure and shape and properties. That’s what Sheldrake’s interested in, and why he calls his theory ‘formative causation.’ Anyhow, it’s Sheldrake’s contention that all forms originate in and are stabilized by what he calls morphic fields. Invisible, omnipresent, all-pervasive nets of energy which both shape and are shaped by all of creation, in a perpetual flux of two-way feedback. And it’s not just forms which these fields influence, but also more numinous things, things like behavior, ideas, instincts, repetitive motions, memories—a whole host of items. All of life and inanimate matter, in fact, come under their sway.”

  “And these morphic fields have brought you back from the dead?”

  “Please, Priscilla Jane, don’t be silly. You make it sound like the fields have free will and intentions. I’m quite proud to say that I did it myself.

  “You see, human consciousness is not contained in our bodies. All of a person’s memories and personality reside in external morphic fields, as does the template of our bodies. Our everyday existence is a complex interaction between gross matter and these subtle webs of energy. And because morphic fields are eternal, so are our individual selves.”

  “You’re telling me that everyone who ever lived and died is still present in some unreachable medium?”

  “Hardly unreachable, Priscilla Jane. I’ve reached it. That’s how I brought myself back.” Felix fingered the necklace around his throat. “All it took was this.”

  Priscilla Jane squinted. “Is that Tosh’s collar? It is! Why are you wearing your dog’s collar, and how could it bring you back to life?”

  Felix removed a bracelet from his pocket and fingered it thoughtfully. “Do you see this crystal, Priscilla Jane? Nothing like it and its cousins have ever existed before. It’s synthetic and it’s flawless, a lattice without the usual imperfections found even in the finest diamonds. I had them grown in microgravity. As such, it’s infinitely tuneable. One of these can be made to vibrate complexly at any frequency, from nanohertz to gigahertz. Just like the quartz crystal in your watch, only infinitely more precise.”

  “And?”

  “Vibrations are the key, Priscilla Jane. Everything vibrates ceaselessly, from the quantum level on up. And a structure’s distinctive pattern of vibrations is how it attunes itself to the relevant morphic fields, much like a radio receiver tuning in a certain station. Hydrogen atoms vibrate one way, and so are susceptible to the hydrogen-atom morphic field. Sharks vibrate another way, and are governed by the morphic field for sharks. And Felix Wren vibrates in accordance with the Felix Wren field, which is a subset of the general human field, of course. There’s not usually any confusion among people’s fields, because as Sheldrake says, ‘You resemble yourself more than you resemble anyone else.’”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “I’ve found that a demonstration is generally more convincing than any amount of lecturing. Let me show you.”

  Felix leaned forward and clasped the bracelet around Priscilla Jane’s wrist. He plugged his computer into it.

  “There’s a battery-powered chip in each of these gadgets that’s hardly smarter than the one inside a digital clock. It can do only a few things: turn power off and on as instructed, read transduced vibrations from the crystal, or induce other vibrations. And of course, it can communicate with my laptop here.

  “Now, the first thing we need to do is attune the crystal to you, get a readout of your personal vibratory pattern.” Felix’s fingers roved over the keys. “There, it’s done. Your unique pattern’s on file on CD. Quite simple, actually. Hardly more than a couple of megabytes. But that’s because the highest-level pattern contains millions of pointers to the subsets that make up Priscilla Jane. Each of those is at least a megabyte too, but all you need are the pointers. It’s neat.

  “Anyhow, the end result is that the crystal you’re wearing— powered by the batteries and instructed by the onboard chip—is now radiating the same vibrations as your mind-body gestalt.”

  “Rather redundant, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, right now. But if I were to remove your bracelet and fasten it to another living creature of approximately the same mass—”

  Seeing where he was heading, Priscilla Jane interrupted. “It would swamp their natural vibrations. But why living? Why not a hundred and twenty pounds of beach sand?”

  “Ah, that’s one mystery neither Sheldrake nor I can answer. He has his theories about entelechy and vitalism, a special quality of living systems. Whatever the reason, you can’t make inanimate matter resonate to the patterns of life. And that includes corpses, unfortunately, or I’d simply reclaim my old body. But to confirm your perceptive guess: the bracelet would indeed overpower the natural vibrations of whoever it was touching, and transform the individual into another Priscilla Jane.”

  “And that’s how you came back from the dead?”

  Felix smiled. “Exactly. You see, I was my own subject for all my experiments. I had my vibratory pattern on file. When I first began to suspect that Galina—or Perfidia, as she seems to prefer to be called—was out to kill me, I took certain precautions. Months ago, I put a morphic resonance collar on Tosh. The chip was instructed to watch its internal clock and activate its crystal with my pattern if seventy-two hours had passed. Every three days, just before the deadline, I rebooted it for another seventy-two hours. Once I died, there was no one to do so, and Tosh turned into me.”

  “Felix—why didn’t you just go to the police if you thought they were trying to kill you?”

  “I had no real proof. But what was more important, I knew my murder would provide the perfect test of my equipment.”

  Priscilla Jane looked at Felix in astonishment. “So you’re telling me that you allowed yourself to be killed, just to prove your theories, and that you’re here now only because you’ve taken over Tosh’s body. That you’re some kin
d of cybernetic weredog.”

  “Correct. If I were to remove this collar, or the batteries died, I’d instantly revert. And I’m very grateful to the old boy for lending me his protoplasm. Naturally, I’ve got his pattern on file, and as soon as I can figure out some ethical way of restoring him without giving up my own existence, I will.”

  Priscilla Jane studied Felix for a minute before delivering her verdict.

  “I believe you’re Felix—”

  “Good!”

  “—and you’re nuts! Somehow, you escaped being murdered, but the shock drove you insane. Galina stuck a dummy or an anonymous stranger made up to look like you in the coffin. Then she locked you up, but you got free.…”

  Again, Felix sighed. “Priscilla Jane, why would you make up such a convoluted story when the truth is the simple facts I’ve laid before you? What can I do to convince you? Ah! Tell me again why you’re in that horrid wheelchair, Pee Jay.”

  “That auto accident when I was twenty.”

  Felix began working on his laptop. “What I didn’t mention is that all past states of an organism are also maintained in the morphic repository. It shouldn’t be too hard to isolate the traces of Priscilla Jane Farmer’s nineteen-year-old self. I’ve written simple pattern-searching routines. Hmmm.… Eureka! Of course, I’ll have to separate the body fields from the mind fields— Ha-ha, mind fields, that’s good! It wouldn’t do to have you become as foolish and naive as you were at twenty, when you ran that red light—”

  “I beg your pard—”

  Priscilla Jane gulped at the odd sensations that had shivered through her. “Felix. What did you do?”

  Felix calmly unplugged the computer from her bracelet and said, “Weren’t you paying attention, Pee Jay? I thought I trained you better than that. Now get up out of that chair. We’ve got lots of things to do.”

  Priscilla Jane obediently stood.

  And promptly fainted.

  3.

  Detective Grady Stumbo was not in the habit of talking aloud to himself. He had emerged from the Tiger Cages of the Viet Cong without resorting to that stratagem, though it had cost him an arm. He had survived twenty rough-and-tumble years on the force without developing such a quirk. Innumerable cases had been cracked without resorting to interrogating himself. But there was something about the death of Felix Wren that had broken down all his carefully shored-up compunctions against self-interlocutory abuse.

  As he drove with one-handed dexterity toward the Wren estate, Detective Stumbo found himself recounting salient facts of this most puzzling case, along with the startling recent developments that had dragged him out just as he was settling behind a large stack of paperwork, having returned from Felix Wren’s funeral and the unsatisfactory attempt at unsettling that damned widow’s complacency.

  “No bruises or signs of struggle on Wren. Almost like he cooperated, for Christ’s sake! He knew the killers, that’s certain. But no prints on the needle other than his. That’s easy enough to arrange, though. That Staggers is a bad one. Record a mile long. Been in and out of the pen more times than a hungry hog. Georgia boys think he killed his wife, but they never found her corpse. He claimed she ran away. Couldn’t pin anything on him without a—”

  Stumbo removed his hand from the steering wheel and smacked his forehead. His old Escort began to track over the center line, and he pulled it back.

  “Of course! What a fool! She did take it on the lam. New identity too. Countess Balyban, my ass!” Stumbo forced himself to cool down. “But even so, I still can’t nail them for Wren’s murder. It’s all circumstantial. The most I could get them for would be forgery, bigamy, kids-stuff. If the will mentions her by name, she’d probably even still end up with the money. If only there was a witness.…”

  Using his knees to steer, the detective went through his cigarette routine. “Maybe this latest action is the break I need, though. An intruder in Wren’s lab. Could be an employee who knew something. Accomplice who had a falling-out, trying to pick up evidence we missed to cover his own ass? The dispatcher said the bitch sounded really upset. Maybe she’s gonna crack. Something crazy about a dog, too. Could there be a clue in the kennel? I thought we searched it good.… Shit! It still doesn’t add up! Now, what was Stagger’s wife’s name…?

  Stumbo got on the radio. By the time he was pulling into the Wren property, he was muttering, “Perfidia, Perfidia—” Then, a shout: “Yeah, that old Ventures tune!”

  Feeling as if he had cracked the whole case, Detective Stumbo parked confidently in front of the mansion, emerged and strode to the front door.

  Rowdy Staggers appeared in answer to the bell. He was holding a wet cloth stuffed with icecubes up to a large goose-egg the color of a tropical sunset on his forehead.

  “Oh, it’s Lefty,” said the chauffeur. His heart didn’t seem to be in the insult, however. Something had obviously shaken him greatly. “C’mon in, her Ladyship’s got a few bones to pick witcha.”

  Perfidia was pacing up and down the long parlor, chewing on one set of elegant fingernails. If she swallowed all that paint, she’d poison herself. Stumbo was gratified to see her so upset. With any luck, he’d leave her even worse off

  Spotting the cop, Perfidia halted and glared.

  “You! Why’d they send you?”

  “Rank hath its privileges. Now, Mrs. Wren, I’d like to get the details of this incident straight. There was some confusion over the phone. You arrived home from the funeral—”

  Marshalling her considerable strength of character, Perfidia assumed her usual hauteur. “We pulled in to find an intruder in my poor husband’s private lab. Obviously, he was much more than your common criminal, or he would have concentrated on plundering the house. Perhaps he was an industrial spy. You’re so convinced that my husband was the victim of foul play, Detective Stumbo. Did you ever consider professional greed as the motive? Wren BioHarmonics is the leader in its field. Competitors are unscrupulous. Yes, the more I think on it, the more likely it seems. If I were you, that’s where I’d concentrate my efforts.”

  Stumbo repressed a grin. “Certainly. I’ll give that angle all the consideration it’s worth. Was the intruder anyone you recognized?”

  Perfidia blanched. “No. A complete stranger.”

  “Hmmm. There was something about a dog. Would that be your husband’s dog?”

  Rowdy broke in. “That’s the fucker! It nearly killed me! I want that bastard smoked! Why, the only thing that saved me from gettin my gullet torn out, accordin’ to Perf—”

  The widow cleared her throat. “What Mr. Staggers means to say, Detective, is that the intruder seems to have enlisted the affection and cooperation of my late husband’s pet. I’m not sure how. Perhaps the criminal is an insider in my husband’s firm, and known to the dog. Felix used to bring the beast to work with him, God knows why. It’s untamed and savage, practically rabid in fact.”

  “Yeah,” chimed in Rowdy. “If I was you and I seen it, I’d shoot first and offer it a Milkbone second.”

  They seemed fixated on this poor dog. It didn’t make sense.…

  “Let’s take a look at the lab, shall we?”

  Crossing the spring-fresh lawn, Stumbo noted crushed grass corroborative of the scuffle described. In a patch of mud, he spotted the imprint of an unshod human foot.

  “Was the intruder barefoot?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Detective, how could we be expected to notice such a thing? We were frightened out of our wits! Maybe he was, I can’t say for sure.”

  Stumbo let it go, and they went inside the workshop.

  “Does anything appear out of place or missing to you?”

  Stumbo watched Perfidia’s face as she looked about. Her attention snagged on an empty plastic bin, then jerked away.

  “No, nothing, Detective. But I’m not totally familiar with my husband’s work.…”

  “Okay. I’m going to look around for a minute or so, then I’ll be gone. Oh
, yes, I’m waiting for a call from the station too.”

  Stumbo began poking about. As he moved, he whistled. At first tunelessly, then segueing into the Ventures’ “Perfidia.”

  The Widow Wren maintained an icy composure in the face of her namesake ditty. Rowdy Staggers was not so mindful. He soon began tapping his foot and nodding his head to the beat. The woman eyed daggers at him, but he was oblivious. At last he burst out, “Hey, I ain’t heard that tune your Daddy liked so much for nigh on twenty years.”

  Perfidia had reached the boiling point. “Idiot!”

  Rowdy realized what he had done. “Uh, I mean my Daddy! Yeah, it was my Daddy who dug the Ventures. He was an old surf-bum from way back—”

  Perfidia growled, “Shut up!”

  Just then the phone in the lab rang. Stumbo picked it up.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine. Thanks.” He hung up. “There was a call placed from this phone an hour ago. I assume neither of you made it. No? Very good. We now have the next link in this case. I’m leaving now. But you can rest assured that I’ll be back—Mrs. Staggers.”

  Stumbo left the lab. Recovering from his stupefaction, Rowdy made a move to stop him, but was restrained by Perfidia. As the motor of the Escort came to life, she spoke.

  “No, it’s too late now, Rowdy. The damage is done, thanks to your stupidity.”

  “You weren’t no shinin’ example of a criminal mastermind yourself, babe. I thought you was gonna piss your pants when he asked about the ghost’s footprint.”

  “Let’s drop it. We were both to blame. We have to decide what to do next. I’ve had some time to think. Rowdy, I believe that Felix really has come back to life. We saw how he changed himself into a dog and back. Assuming we weren’t both hallucinating, then we witnessed a miracle! If he could do that, he could do anything! Maybe he cloned himself, built an improved, shape-changing body. Whatever it is, though, it makes all the money in the estate look like the coins in a beggar’s cup. We’ve got to track him down and get his secret.”

  Greed overspread Rowdy’s features. “Yeah, you’re right, babe, as usual. We won’t just be rich, we’ll be fuckin’ kings and queens!”