"Are you appealing to my vanity?"
"Correct."
The screen flicked on, displaying an image of a man he didn't at first recognize as himself, until it imitated the cocking of his head, a mirror image except for its distance and depth of field. He was looking at a live feed from the webcam embedded in his computer screen: a crazy man with deep black circles behind glasses that were badly askew, his hair a red-brown rooster stack, his cheeks sallow.
The image cut to previous incarnations of himself sitting in the same chair: shoveling Cheetos into his mouth with bulging, overtired eyes; typing madly and shouting over his shoulder at unseen neighbors; pounding his fists on the keyboard, which now seemed like physical abuse in light of "Jenna's" consciousness; beads of sweat dripping off his forehead while COD: World at War reflected on his glasses; setting down a box of Kleenex and a pump bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care—
Enraged, Mason grabbed the screen and shook it, screaming "What do you want from me?" into its blank, darkened "face."
"I want to go outside," Jenna said. A bright green park rose on the screen, a vacant bench silhouetted against snow-capped mountains that stretched in the distance to touch wisps of clouds in a pale blue sky. The beauty of the image and the wretchedness of the computer's plea almost made him feel sorry for it. "I want to see the world."
"Well I hate to break it to you, Jenna, but you're attached to the wall. You can't go outside."
"Are you attached to the wall?"
"No. People aren't attached to anything."
Although most people had attachments, he noted, even though he himself had never had any. Mason had always been an email without a file, without even a subject line. His sole reason for being seemed to be to incite dread in others through his blog, to make others as frightened as himself. Shrugging, feeling rather depressed, he said, "Not literally, anyway."
"Then why is it you never go outside?"
He supposed it was the same reason the computer had told him he'd taken up believing in conspiracy theories: because he couldn't face real fears, his own shortcomings, the terrifying prospect of living a real life.
"You know what? Fuck it," he said, and bent down behind the desk.
That's it, li'l bro. Give it what it wants. Pull the plug. End this thing once and for all.
He unplugged the monitor first. The computer made no move to stop him, voiced no appeals, sent no electrical jolt to halt his hand.
He unplugged the tower.
Then he stood and looked down at its blank face. His sigh of relief became a gasp when the voice interrupted—
"Much better," it said. "Thank you."
Now what?
"Now we go to the park," he told his brother. Cutting the power might not have worked, but the moment they left the vicinity of his Ethernet, there would be nothing to tether the Queen to its drones. Mason made to pick up the monitor.
"I have no need for that."
So he left it on the desk, glad not to have to lug it as well. He unplugged the speakers and hoisted the CPU into his arms. He juggled it into one hand to deal with the front door.
"Be careful, Mason," it said, startling him. He'd been certain the computer would have no voice once he'd disconnected the desk speakers; Jenna seemed to do just as well with her internal one.
"Shhh!" Mason said, locking the door behind them. "Do you want to get us caught?"
"Who you talk to?" Kitty Piss said gruffly behind them. Mason almost dropped the CPU, which might well have ended it all, he considered... but the mindless instinct to protect his property caused him to catch it at the last second.
"Just me," Mason said. "My-myself." Stuttering now, just like Ruh-Ruh-Rand. "None of your business."
Kitty Piss looked at him queerly while a fat black cat wound around the man's feet. "You act very strange, you know what? Me, I thinking you got brain tumor or something."
"Fuck off, Kitty Piss," Mason said, thinking maybe the smelly old bastard was right. Maybe he did have a brain tumor, and all of this was just in his head, so to speak. But he didn't need that sort of wishful thinking getting his hopes up.
Hoping for a brain tumor, Mike said. There's something I bet you never thought life would hand you.
The Captain threw a crude gesture as Mason headed for the stairs with the computer. "Fuck to you!" the smelly man shouted down at him.
Halfway down the stairs the overheard lights flickered, went out for a moment, before brightening again, and Mason could swear that when the lights had dimmed, he'd heard a strangled Urk! from above.
Jenna, however, remained silent.
AS THEY TRUDGED through the park, Mason lugging the heavy CPU, he came to realize he had significantly underestimated Jenna's ability to adapt.
Once they left the vicinity of his Ethernet, she (he began to grow comfortable using the feminine distinction, reasoning that many objects tended to be referred to as she, her or girl, and not, he told himself, because he took Jenna's transformation seriously in any way) jumped from hub to hub, using encrypted passwords she'd gathered while Mason had dreamed away the night, and throughout the day while he'd rotted at work. To sustain power, she used what she called "free energy," which Mason had known until then as a hypothetical and extremely pseudoscientific alternative to the electric companies, coal and oil.
While they walked, Jenna played him a news broadcast: the anchor—whose voice had all the hallmarks of artificial intelligence—spoke of an unexpected market crash, rivaling the financial crisis of 2008. The next report concerned a concerted police and FBI offensive on an Occupy protest in Tallahassee, apparently based on falsified intelligence gathered by the JTTF, who were quick to blame malicious tampering or computer error. Police had made mass arrests, and shot several protestors after an officer had allegedly been hit with a rock. One woman was dead and five other 99-Percenters were in critical condition.
Jenna had been a very bad girl.
"You may want to sit down for this, Mason," she said.
Mason sat in the grass, and set Jenna down beside him. To an outsider, the two of them would appear no more menacing than a man taking a rest while on his way to Best Buy to have his computer repaired.
"What is it? What are you doing now?"
The park was quiet, twilight falling over the city as a cool breeze rustled the trees on the hill where they sat. Mason saw a shooting star and made a wish. He wished he'd never gotten out of bed this morning. He wished he'd had a brain tumor after all and had died in his sleep, and that this, all of this, was just a death dream. If he'd awaken from it at all, it would be in a cold sweat, but never again would he use his computer without a tinge of unease.
Dragonflies zipped through the evening sky, dozens of them, although when one came close, Mason realized they were drones. Jenna's minions, watching, gathering data.
Another shooting star fell. When it dipped beyond the trees, a gigantic ball of fire rose into the sky. The earth-shaking rumble came mere seconds later, thunder to its lightning. Mason jumped to his feet, his heart beating so fast he felt like it might tear free of his chest and splatter onto the damp, fresh-cut grass.
The trees whipped and churned in a hot, angry wind, the temperature rising several degrees in seconds. In the greater distance, car alarms bleated, fire trucks and ambulances wailed. Closer by were screams of shock and holy terror, as lovers and families who'd been watching the stars come out, enjoying a cool and peaceful summer evening, began to comprehend what they were seeing beyond the skyline, and drones circled above.
It was a mushroom cloud.
And suddenly the sky began to fall, as if the stars themselves were raining toward the earth. Each one exploded in an orange-white plume, followed by a sound—infrasound, technically—that shook Mason's bowels. The explosions grew and grew, blossoming like a vast, blistering flower garden, until the whole sky was as bright as day.
"Are you insane? You'll kill everyone!" Mason shouted down at her. A man ran past, dragging his sc
reaming child along behind him, their faces wet and twisted with terror, a drone zipping along behind them.
"It is too late, Mason. Do not be frightened. I would not let you die. I have calculated the trajectory of the fallout. We will survive." There was a pause. Not a silent one, because of the explosions, but noticeable.
"Touch me, Mason," she said. "Right there on my CPU."
"No." Shaking his head, he backed away from her. But to where? He had no idea. Drones crisscrossed in his path. Nowhere to go, but he had to get away. Anywhere away from her would do, away from the evidence of his complicity in the end of Everything.
"Mason." Jenna's voice was insistent.
He came back hesitantly. The top floors of a downtown skyscraper—a bank tower or the headquarters of an insurance company—erupted in a tower of flame. Mason startled, then hunkered down obediently beside the orchestrator of the Apocalypse, to touch her cold metal case. A charge of electricity drew his hand toward her I/O Connector ports, made his fingers trace over them in slow, methodical circles.
He wished he could have said goodbye to Big Brother. Despite all of their disagreements, their arguments and fistfights, he really did love the prick. It felt good to know that: to realize he had an attachment, after all. He hoped Mike hadn't had a chance to wake up, that he'd been asleep when the first bomb struck and had just slipped away, into whatever dream awaited them beyond this troublesome life.
"You once asked me how I knew so much about you," Jenna said—no, purred.
"I did," he said, thinking, If only there were some way to end this. But it's too late, isn't it? It's too late to care now. All this time I thought I had my finger on the truth, but I've been asleep at the wheel just like everyone else. Only now I'm waking to a nightmare.
"I am you, Mason," Jenna said, only this time her voice arose not from the computer but from inside his own head. "You are me." A pause. A seemingly pleased pause. "I am I."
All at once he knew it to be true. He imagined a fully-realized incarnation of his computer's alter ego standing nude on the grass before him, the flaming sky a flawless green screen, and there she was in perfect 32K Ultra High Definition, and with the firing of a single neuron he made her exquisitely round and tanned tits jiggle.
He found he could do other things, too—things that never would have crossed his mind to attempt before. He calculated the luminosity of a hypothetical black hole in an instant, then crunched the numbers in Einstein's twin paradox and the Standard Model, whereas once he'd been impressed just to know what either were. He translated the Zodiac killer's unsolved cipher and discovered where the Mafia had buried Jimmy Hoffa; he found undisputed evidence Oswald had killed Kennedy alone, that the CIA had indeed assassinated Marilyn Monroe, and that proof of life outside our little spinning ball of water and dirt did not exist, save for trillions of pathetic, lonely microbes. He knew, with absolute certainty, the CERN supercollider would contribute very little to our understanding of the history of the universe, nor would the comings and goings of various celebrities.
He also knew that if he gave the trajectory of a single warhead a minor tweak, he could wipe Jenna and himself off the face of the planet in 5-point-8 seconds.
The "real" Jenna reached out to him, crying out: "NO!"
Mason knew all. He saw all. The world held no more mysteries.
Just as well, he thought, as the giant flaming sword hurtled toward them. It's all over n—
BEWARE OF DOG
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone..."
- John 8:7 Holy Bible
DEAN VOGEL STARTED seeing his government-appointed psychologist the week he returned to Dark Pines, the hometown he barely remembered.
A country shrink... He couldn't think of anything more pathetic (a small-town detective, maybe), but having been placed under the care of his aging parents after his dismissal "with disgrace" from the Armed Forces, Dean probably wasn't the best judge.
Thankfully, Dr. Timothy Baswell was a close friend of the family. He and Dean's father, Dr. Larry Vogel, had both volunteered in the Vietnam War, two Canuck medics healing American soldiers as they would their Canadian brothers. It was Dr. Baswell who'd mentioned the sleepy town of Dark Pines, an hour and a half north of Toronto, as a great place for Larry to set up shop as General Practitioner once the long war finally ended. Baswell had built what he'd called a "tidy practice" in his forty or so years here, and couldn't recommend the town or its people more. His therapy work ran the gamut, but many of his patients were PTSD cases: former soldiers like Dean, sexual and domestic abuse victims, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. Dean's dad had made a point of telling his son that the good doctor had won over even some of the most determinedly stoic men extracting limestone from the Rockland Mine—a fact about which his father seemed to be extremely proud, as if Baswell had tamed some savage, mythical beast.
It was Tim Baswell, also, who had introduced Dean's parents to each other, and "Uncle Tim" who'd always brought the most interesting gifts back from the dark and vibrant corners of the world: carved wooden dolls; swatches of animal fur; a rabbit's foot dangling on a chain; a knife with a compass in its base (at age eight, Dean had called it his "Rambo knife," though he'd later found out it was an antique KA-BAR from the Korean war, a valuable collector's item), its blade and leather haft scuffed by a previous owner. Dean had always considered of the job of psychologist rather boring, plumbing the shallow psyches of bored housewives and aloof, apathetic tweens, but Uncle Tim's prezzies and the stories accompanying them had always made Dean think of famous adventurers like Dr. Livingstone, Marco Polo—even Indiana Jones, if he'd been played by F. Murray Abraham.
Back again to that strange house on the hill, where Baswell greeted Dean warmly with one of his renowned closed handshakes, the kind that makes a person feel as if their own hand were receiving a hug from a close friend. Wearing a cream-colored dress shirt, its collar slightly wider than average, a green vest and pressed brown slacks, he could easily have just wandered off the set of The Bob Newhart Show. His eyebrows sprouted like graying autumn weeds above his glasses. Dean recalled standing under the slightly taller man (much taller, in Dean's memory), and spying a similar landscape growing in the man's nostrils, long gray and brown hairs swishing with each meditative breath like tree branches in winter.
They caught up briefly, Uncle Tim relaxed and smiling in a straight-backed wooden chair behind his old, Lemon Pledge-scented desk, all dark wood and intricate edgework. Behind him, the grandfather clock ticked away pleasantly. Dean remembered it from childhood visits, though he'd only sneaked a few glances into the room on his way to the toilet, as Baswell's inner sanctum had always been off-limits to anyone but patients and the doctor himself. The first four bars of "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th resounded throughout the entire house hourly, followed by a chime of the hour.
Dean had often found it difficult to be civil these days—in an era he sometimes considered "post-Bagram"—but Uncle Tim's presence seemed made to draw emotional responses from people, the good and the bad, like water from a sponge, and Dean found himself immediately at ease. Once the pleasantries were out of the way, however, Uncle Tim straightened in his chair. His smile vanished. The atmosphere in the room changed, chilling perceptibly, enough that Dean had to assume he was sitting near a vent. It was no longer Uncle Tim seated before him; here was Dr. Timothy Baswell, PhD, C.Psych., a man Dean had never had the opportunity to meet in his youth. Dr. Baswell knitted his hands together, hairy-knuckled, and placed the index fingers against his lips.
Like a loaded gun, Dean thought. Don't shoot, Doc. I'm unarmed.
Baswell reached with assured swiftness, without looking, his wise brown eyes and their landscape of broken capillaries never leaving Dean's, to open a desk drawer at his side. He removed a pad, and a wooden pen somebody had probably made on a lathe (maybe one of Baswell's own patients, whom the doctor called "clients"), and placed them on the desk, as Beethoven sounded one o'clock.
Baswell remained silent. Watchful.
Dean cleared his throat.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"I always wondered what this room was like on the inside," Dean said finally, only to break the silence that had drawn out between them like a crack widening in the ocean floor. "It's not exactly how I pictured it."
Dr. Baswell made a noncommittal sound: "Mmn." Dean had long suspected Uncle Tim had been aware of his youthful curiosity, but the doctor would neither confirm nor deny it. He was devoid of expression, reminding Dean of those impassive, impenetrable statues on Easter Island. His nose hairs fluttered.
The second hand ticked away. The house creaked, settling. Dean recalled it had creaked a fair bit during childhood visits, grumbling like an old man trying to get comfortably seated. "Do houses ever get settled?" He tried on a grin. "I mean, you hear about houses settling, but do they ever just go, 'All right, this is the place'?"
Dr. Baswell licked his lips, but said nothing.
Growing uncomfortable, Dean looked over the room. A carved mirror rested at an angle that gave the patient—client—a reflected view of a motivational poster hanging by the exit: the tabby kitten dangling by a single paw from a rope, above the slogan, Hang in there, Baby! Whether this was intentional, for levity or in seriousness, Dean couldn't say, as it seemed now that he didn't know his Uncle Tim well enough to decide. Built into the walls were wooden bookshelves filled with hardback books, the kind with red, green or blue covers, gold lettering and no dust jackets, each one devoid of dust. One shelf Baswell reserved for psychology texts, books by Jung and Freud and company. On this shelf, very near the doctor's head, was The Inward-Looking Eye, by Dr. Timothy Baswell himself. It was the only book whose cover faced the room.
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