I walked closer to the blank screen. Its mute blinking cursor seemed both mocking and beckoning.
“What do I do?”
“Just type something.”
My fingers on the keyboard reactivated the body memories of playing crude videogames, using arrow keys to manipulate pixel creatures that only a child’s imagination could invest with a semblance of life.
—Hello. Are you Aeota?
—Yes, I am one Aeota.
—Can you tell me how to defeat the Dark Archon?
—Since act is perfection, it is not limited except through a potency which itself is a capacity for perfection.
Ströma had been reading over my shoulder. “That’s pure Aquinas, Dad’s favorite philosopher. He programmed AEOTA with the entire canon, from the Summa Theologica on down. But it’s not like a chatbot. It doesn’t just regurgitate text. It’s told me some things…”
Ströma paused, as if to say more would be too unsettling or incriminating.
The history lesson Ströma had just delivered suggested a different line of questioning to me, for which I was grateful, since I was just fumbling around like a blind guy with a Rubik’s Cube.
—Is Aeota a god? Is DUCA a god?
—Neither is the Prime Mover nor First Cause.
—Then DUCA can be defeated?
—Neither matter nor form have being of themselves, nor are they produced or corrupted of themselves.
This high-flown dialogue was getting old fast.
—Tell me how I can save the world.
—The will does not precede the intellect but follows upon it.
—That doesn’t help!
—I need more input.
—More input? Like what?
AEOTA did not respond.
“Goddamn it!” Frustrated, I kicked the table leg.
My action dislodged something from its niche among the equipment. The small object fell until the tether of its cable, left dangling in midair, stopped it.
I plucked it up. The thing was a bulky vintage light pen, usually used for drawing directly onto a CRT screen in the days before tablets.
Aelita said, “Daddy, I think the machine is telling you that it wants you to show it something new.”
Marty looked dubious. “That relic’s not a scanner, man.”
A queer impulse made me dig in my pants pocket. I came up with the two slips of paper that my Nokia had outputted. I smoothed them out on a small bare patch of tabletop, then drew the light pen slowly across each one in turn.
The eight emojis appeared on the monochrome screen in full color, all in a line. They spun like the icons on an old-school slot machine, then disappeared.
AEOTA displayed a street address on its screen, then a final message.
—Toward the time of the judgment the sun and moon will be darkened in very truth. My work here is done.
The screen went black.
Ströma looked at me with an initial incredulity that swiftly built to anger.
“You broke it. You killed AEOTA.”
I felt guilty, but wasn’t about to admit any culpability. “Hey, anybody who ever watched a single episode of Star Trek could have predicted this outcome.”
I thought it would be expedient to leave before Ströma decided to have my head on a platter, so I grabbed up the slips of paper from the table.
Now they were blank.
I kept them nonetheless.
I thought that maybe Marty Quartz would have insisted on coming with Aelita and me to the address that AEOTA had given us, but he surprised me by asking to be delivered home.
“I had a long night, Vern. I’m beat. And frankly, this weird quest of yours is creeping me out. I figure you’ll let me know how things shake out, one way or another.”
“Oh, you’ll know soon enough whether I succeed or not—along with the rest of the world.”
Alone with Aelita in the car, heading across town, I said, “Who do you think is at this address?”
“Someone to help us, not someone to harm us.”
“That’s reassuring. What makes you say that?”
“Nothing but a feeling.”
“No superior superhuman knowledge?”
“I’m just a little girl.”
“And I’m the last of the Romanovs.”
The address proved to belong to a simple moss-green ranch house in an innocuous suburb north of the city. Tidy lawn, old-fashioned curtains. I rang the bell with Aelita holding my hand.
The door opened, and after a puzzled second, I realized I had cause to lower my glance.
An old woman in a wheelchair had revealed herself. Dressed neatly yet not too fussily, she exhibited a keen gaze and general alertness that was the opposite of any kind of maundering senility. A gentle smile graced her face. I was reminded of a Mother Superior or some other emblematic matriarch. Her aged features appeared familiar to me in some fashion, but I could not immediately place them.
“Yes, how can I help you?”
“I’m not sure.”
The woman regarded Aelita and smiled. “My name’s Priscilla.
What’s yours?”
“Aelita.”
“That’s very like the name of another little girl I know. One named Aeota.”
Dumbfounded, I asked, “What’s your last name?”
“Cohen.”
“You’re Pris Cohen. You do my daughter’s favorite comic book.”
“Write and draw, yes. I assumed that was why you were here. I often receive visits from fans.”
“Yes, of course. Could we come in?”
“Certainly.”
Priscilla rolled backwards, and we entered. She spun her wheel-chair deftly about and scooted off. We followed.
The living room served as her studio. A drafting table with an unfinished page pinned to it filled most of the space, along the raw materials of her trade and a host of inspirational sculptures and toys and dolls and other tchotchkes.
“I’m afraid I can’t offer you any refreshments. Tomorrow is my shopping day, and the larder’s bare. But I suspect that you’re not here for cookies and milk.”
“No, we’re not. We need desperately to know all about Aeota. What can you tell us?”
“I was the original Aeota, you know. The inspiration. My uncle, Herbert Crowley, drew the Wigglemuch strip.”
I did some quick calculations. “That’s not possible. You’d have to be—”
“I am one-hundred-and-fifteen years old.”
“You don’t look a day over one-oh-five.”
Priscilla ignored my feeble witticism. “After I reached adolescence and my uncle died, I never thought much about my early role as an Alice Liddell–type figure. But my uncle’s drawing career must have inspired me. I spent my whole adult professional employment as a graphic artist in the advertising field. Afterwards, I lived a quiet retired life as a weekend painter. But then, recently, memories of Aeota began to recur to me, and I felt inspired to continue my uncle’s comic strip in monthly format. I was lucky enough to find a publisher, and here we are.”
“But aren’t you channeling messages from the real Aeota?”
“Who might she be?”
“She’s LUCA, or the Green Lady—I think. We’re fighting DUCA. He wants to conquer all of time and space.”
Priscilla smiled at me with a mix of benevolence and pity. “I’m sure this all means something to you, young man. But I fear it’s got nothing to do with me nowadays—if it ever did”
I turned to Aelita. “You can convince her, Lita. Just tell her we need her help.”
Desperation was driving me. I felt suddenly at the end of my rope. How many more blind alleys did I have to stumble down before this nightmare was over?
“I can’t do anything, Daddy. She knows better than me. I’m sorry.”
I looked back to the old lady. She had ceased smiling, and the lines of her face were relaxed into a webwork of wrinkles.
And her incompetent lips revealed a slice of
her teeth.
22. GO WITH THE FLOW
“You’re my daughter.”
As soon as the words emerged, I realized how insane I sounded. But the reaction of both my daughter and Priscilla Cohen confirmed my crazy revelation.
“Yes, Daddy, she’s me. One of me. And she knows so much more. That’s why I’m not pressing her for help. Whatever’s ahead, she’s already been through it, and so she knows just what to do now.”
The old dame regarded me with a placid humble majesty. I was reminded of the Green Lady’s quiet but vibrant charisma. I just hoped nobody expected me to have sex with this old bat as well. Not that I was necessarily morally against it, just that I was tired of being led around by my dick.
Pris Cohen’s voice exhibited no regrets or hesitancy. “I cannot affirm what you say. But I cannot deny it either. The truth is both and neither. So you will just have to trust me.”
Trust me. The same request Aelita had made when I looked dubiously at the Famous Hades Fireball candy that Holger Holtzclaw had brought back from the far future. (I patted my pocket and found the round packet still there.) Could I trust either of them? Hadn’t everyone involved in this hallucinatory affair taken me for a ride? But what choice did I have?
“Okay, you’ve got my trust. But only on the installment plan. So, what next?”
Priscilla looked at her slim silver wristwatch. “Just wait. It will only be minutes now.”
Aelita walked over to the old lady in the wheelchair and climbed onto her lap. Priscilla hugged her in grandmotherly fashion, and Aelita returned the embrace. Their faces, side by side, old and young, further cemented the truth of their unique kinship.
I walked over to the drawing board and studied the unfinished artwork. A “splash page,” one big panel, the deft pencil work depicted the heroine Aeota, expectant on some shore and faced with a tsunami, a huge wave clotted with debris that threated to cascade down upon her, surely crushing all life from her. But the comic-book girl’s unfinished face suggested resolve and certitude of ultimate victory.
Someone started banging on the front door, hammering at it with what sounded like a succession of small watermelons fired from an air cannon. I moved toward the entrance, but before I could take more than a couple of steps the door crashed inward, hanging from one hinge.
A small squad of semi-human creatures flowed chaotically in.
The front one wore the gnarly face of Brevis Baxter—but a face composed now of shoddy putrescence.
Back at Arturo Olvidado’s bar, when he had passed over the contaminant spore package to me, Baxter had resembled a crusty hobo, a burnt-out case, unwashed, wasted and trashed, but undeniably human. Now he looked like what a simpleton child, asked to represent the human figure, might assemble out of moldy cottage cheese and twigs. His companions, though sporting different countenances, mimicked this variegated but essentially monotone look.
I realized that Baxter was now composed entirely of DUCA substance, coarse maritime glop threaded with fibers and particles. His entire cellular makeup, as well as his clothing, had been transformed into the far-future slime. Here, then, was the beginning onslaught that Aelita had warned me about, the massing of the constituent grains of sand that would eventually avalanche our universe into DUCA’s desired state.
Baxter’s companions moved toward Aelita and Priscilla, while Baxter himself blocked me from coming to their aid. The convert to DUCA spoke in a voice even more grotty than his previous one, his kelp vocal chords straining to reproduce human language.
“Mister Thaumas wants you and the girl.”
“My interest in seeing your boss is zilch.”
“You will come.”
Baxter laid a hand on me, and it was like the heavy wet weight of a waterlogged corpse descending to implacably clamp my flesh. No wonder he and his pals had been able to batter the door down.
Another of the DUCA-men plucked Aelita out of Priscilla Cohen’s lap. Neither my daughter nor her other self resisted.
Another hench-thing croaked, “The old lady?”
“We do not need her,” replied Baxter.
Three of the creatures flopped themselves atop Priscilla like so many soggy mattresses, losing their individual definition in a pig pile. They writhed and squelched and squeezed for about ninety seconds, before retreating and reverting to their separate components.
Priscilla Cohen was gone, her wheelchair dripping with slime.
I expected Aelita to cry out or show some emotion, but she remained stolid and seemingly unconcerned. But I felt Priscilla Cohen’s absence like a rip in the fabric of reality.
Outside, a windowless van labeled aeota delivery service blocked my car. Into it all but three of the monsters surged: Baxter, still gripping my arm, and two creatures to guard Aelita. I supposed I should have been incensed that they regarded my kid as the more dangerous of us two.
Baxter hustled me into the driver’s seat of my own car, afterwards quickly slipping into the shotgun position, his malleable vegetable butt simply configuring itself to engulf the projecting booster seat. The two cronies cradling Aelita between them oozed into the rear.
“Drive,” said Baxter.
“Where?”
“You know the place.”
“AEOTA HQ?”
“Yes.”
I tried to recall what the empty factory had promoted itself to be the last time I had passed through, but couldn’t remember.
“But that site’s empty.”
“Not now it isn’t.”
“Can I just call my wife first, and tell her we’ll be late? She’ll be worried.”
“No. There is no need. You won’t be late. You will be never.”
23. RETURN TO AEOTA
The by-now familiar route to AEOTA HQ— how many times had I gone back and forth along this stretch in just the past two days?—had been transmogrified beyond all comprehension.
The changes became apparent as soon as we pulled away from Priscilla’s house, which had remained an oasis of stability. (But even as we proceeded a few yards down her street, I could see in my rear-view mirror that the forces of change had begun their assault on her house as well.) The abnormalities were, at first, intermittent, interspersed with irregularly situated and irregularly bordered expanses of normality. But the closer we got to our destination, the more the abhorrent transformations tended to predominate.
Many of the citizens we passed in the city had also morphed to full DUCA-hood. But unlike this crew of hired roughnecks that had come to capture me and Aelita, the alteration to their personages had not inspired any obvious devilry. Seemingly unaware of their debased natures, they slorped and blarfed along the DUCAfied pavement like so many human-shaped blancmanges, conducting their mundane errands, ambulatory piles of ocean wrack: Sargasso mailmen, housewives, businessmen, students and shopkeepers. A jogger trotted by, littering her path with dislodged wet bits of her pelagic body. A teenager texted away on a phone that was composed of the same material as its body, and which seemed fused to its hand. Behind the wheel of a car, the gray-green driver idly tapped a boneless floppy striated hand in time to the music of its radio.
But beyond the people, the landscape, both natural and man-made, had altered as well.
As in the forest where Holger Holtzclaw had been imprisoned, all the vegetation in the bad patches emerged seamlessly from the tainted substrate, mere extrusions of DUCA. The birds and squirrels in their branches were DUCA-forms too.
And many of the buildings, large and small, as well as lampposts, billboards, and traffic lights, had fallen victim to the spreading stain. The smaller structures seemed semi-stable, wavering slightly under the unnatural stresses of maintaining their forms with such unsuitable material. But the bigger, multistory buildings swayed and oscillated like Jell-O sculptures in an earthquake, appearing ready to snap and rupture and fall at any minute. Nonetheless, people continued to stream in and out of the banks and hotels and offices.
A defeatist thought jumped
up in my head. Was humanity really any worse off than before? I recalled my impressions during my first forest-fire-tinged trip when it felt as if civilization were collapsing. Maybe this kind of slimy rapture was the best we could hope for, given the human condition and our ability to screw things up.
Then I remembered Aelita’s simple innocent joy in seeing me come home, and knew that the answer was no, mankind wasn’t better off as DUCA’s slaves.
Not that there was much I could do about it at the moment.
I thought once or twice about pulling over to the curb as we passed through the normal areas and leaping from the car and running for help. But Brevis Baxter had one sloppy arm around my shoulder, and I was certain that with his strength and speed he could strangle me instantly at my first false move.
And then of course there was Aelita to worry about, cushioned between the two monsters in the back. I kept angling my mirror to check on her. She never once showed a trace of alarm or fear or concern. That was my girl.
When we passed the city limits and were out in the countryside, the changes persisted. It was no less alarming to see long seaweed-textured pastures full of DUCA cows.
And the prevalence of the contamination became almost universal.
A familiar barn caught my eye. It was the Aeota Farm where Philip Kendrick Langham and Martha Washington ran their egg business. Totally swamped with DUCA’s influence, the place reminded me of a Lovecraft tale I had not considered since those college days, a story whose name I could no longer recall.
Langham and Washington themselves stepped out of their farmhouse as we passed, all sloppy smiling briny heaps, and waved.
I finally broke my appalled silence.
“Aelita, honey—are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Daddy. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.”
Brevis Baxter unfurled a glutinous laughter like a hippo farting through wet cement, and his buddies joined in.
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