The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  “Most don’t, it’s true, they stick to either Bahasa Malaysian or one of the Chinese dialects, but I come from up north. As for my color, more of us have blue hair than orange, except we prefer sticking to the deep forests and our underground cities.”

  Underground cities?

  “Oh,” I said.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, the conversation would have seemed insane, yet there I was, discussing food preferences with a being once considered as legendary as the Yeti. Talking apes, interdimensional rhinos, nightmarish visions in some chamber out of the Twilight Zone; my brain processed all of it as data the same way it did the texture of gelato or the smell of brackish water, and without preconceived notions of whether they were facts or not.

  There was no reason not to gulp down my breakfast, so I did. My mom always told me to eat slowly and savor my food. But I always found the opposite to be true, the faster I ate, the more I liked it. Other people thought it rude, though, so in public I showed polite restraint, especially if a lady was sitting across the table from me.

  Once finished, I leaned back with my third cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. Merkus gave me a disapproving look—I think it was a disapproving look, either that or he wanted to bite my face off—and slid an ashtray my way. The smoke curled upward where powerful scrubbers sucked it into vents in the ceiling.

  After two drags, however, I looked at the burning tobacco wondering what had happened. The first cigarette of the day usually gives me a rush, both physically as the nicotine enters my bloodstream, and mentally, as I enjoy the flavor. But not this morning, now it tasted like ashes. I stubbed it out.

  “They’re waiting for you in the conference room,” Merkus said when I finished putting out the smoke. Was he smirking?

  “There’s a conference room?”

  “Bloody fookin’ hell, Steed, if there weren’t no conference room, why would they be waiting for you there?”

  I patted the air with my palms. “Okay, okay, just tell me how to get there, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’ve never been to the conference room?”

  “O’ course I have. You fookin’ Yanks drive me stiff!”

  With that he cleared the plates and began cleaning the kitchen, turning his back to me as if I’d already left, which I finally did, fearful he might explain what he meant by that last comment. “Driving somebody stiff” had never been a goal of mine, although I knew plenty of girls who couldn’t say the same thing. Of course, that was their job…then his meaning struck me. I’d left the living quarters entirely and taken two lefts off the main hallway before I realized that “stiff” was an old slang word for a dead body. Simultaneously, the thought came that I was moving toward the conference room, even though I didn’t know the way.

  I pushed through oversized double doors into a utilitarian space with gun racks mounted on three walls, holding an assortment of advanced weaponry, and more than 100 folding chairs leaning against the back wall. A gigantic flat screen display covered the wall to my left. The entire room measured about 90 feet by 30 feet. Ribaldo and Jürgen sat in folding metal chairs on one side of a convention-style table with folding legs. A third, empty seat stood between them, along with a cup of freshly poured coffee and, standing to one side…Merkus?

  “I thought you didn’t know the way,” I said.

  Hands clasped behind his back, he stood there like a Victorian footman.

  “I don’t. I don’t need to.”

  “But—”

  “Quit monkeying around, Steed, and sit down,” Ribaldo said in clipped tones. “Time is short, and you have much to learn.”

  Today their accents sounded different again, maybe…Spanish?

  I sat, and Jürgen leaned over to whisper in my ear.

  “He’s been waiting for years to use that joke,” Jürgen said.

  “Silence!” Ribaldo said. Rising, he rubbed his chin and pointed to the display, which appeared to have turned entirely black, until I saw a tiny pinpoint of yellow-white light at its center. “That dot is your current understanding of the nature of our universe, Steed, after successfully discovering the Balance. It is more than 99 percent of the human population will ever know. What we will reveal to you in the next two hours would normally have taken six months. That was the original plan…until two days ago.”

  “Why will this take two hours?” I said. “Is that when we break for lunch?”

  “You just ate breakfast,” Jürgen said.

  I shrugged.

  “Stop!” Ribaldo gave his brother a stern look, to no apparent effect. Jürgen merely arched his eyebrows. “Listen to me, Steed; in two hours fifteen minutes Cevdet will land the plane for you to board and return to Jamaica. What you learn in the interim may mean the difference between life and death. Do you understand?”

  I started to answer “no,” but realized that I actually did understand. His words fit some type of pattern in my brain, one I’d never been aware of until that moment. So instead of speaking, I nodded, leaned forward, and paid attention.

  “I am first going to answer the question you most want answered,” Ribaldo said, and even before the words slipped out of his mouth, I knew what they’d be. Again, I don’t know how I knew, I just did. And it was like that for the rest of his presentation. “What is the meaning of ‘discovering the Balance?’ We would have spent weeks discussing it, but now there is no time.

  “The hominid brain has evolved to become what is essentially a biological computer. When we are born, we have certain instincts. Think of them as your hard drive, long-term memory that you can access when, and if, it is needed. It is how you found your way back from the place we have romantically dubbed the Chamber of Wayward Souls, or how you found the conference room. That knowledge was imparted to your brain’s long-term memory when we walked to the Chamber of Wayward Souls, and on the way to our living quarters. Your brain mapped it without your conscious volition; information you then accessed when you required the knowledge. The area of your brain where this data is actually stored, though, is quite small. You may have heard it said that humans use no more than ten percent of their brain’s capacity, but the true figure is closer to seven percent. People with eidetic memories are said to access more than ten percent, but that is false.

  “If we continue with the ‘your-brain-as-a-computer’ analogy, then your brain also has what we might call RAM, which as you know means random access memory. This is where we store commonly needed memories, reflexes and such things. These are oversimplifications, but there is no time to explore the exact mechanisms by which they work.

  “Now, imagine this computer we call a brain is operating with a central processing unit faster than anything currently known to science, but without an operating system. Imagine how well a computer would run with nothing but short- and long-term memory storage with no system to direct its operations and never having been de-fragmented, with bits of memory stored in every nook and cranny of your gray matter. That was you before yesterday.”

  He paused to sip coffee, prompting me to do the same. Otherwise, I could only blink.

  “When you discover the Balance, your brain is repatterned to make memories more accessible, both short- and long-term. Doing that requires your brain to release all data stored within—”

  “But I saw things that don’t exist!” I said, without actually meaning to speak.

  Ribaldo didn’t get angry at my interruption, though. Instead, he lifted a forefinger and pointed it straight up.

  “Don’t you see? That is what memories are, our perceptions of our experiences, not a factual record of them. The blind man will remember a shared experience in a much different way than a deaf man. Memories are less constructs of occurrences than of our biases, preconceived notions, and imaginations. For example, people who dismiss the possibility of the creature you Americans call Bigfoot are being willfully ignorant by basing their statements on a lack of evidence. They seek to prove a negative by
using negatives, and by definition that concept is invalid, yet most of the people who hold such a view do so by claiming they are being scientific. This determination then becomes a fact in their minds, but there is no discernible pattern to their thinking. Ask them about UFOs and you will surely get the same answer. Yet ask the same skeptics their opinion about life on other planets and the majority would say that with so many galaxies in the universe the likelihood of humans being alone is impossible. Somewhere in the stars there must be another Earth-like planet that supports life.

  “Do you see the illogic? Hundreds of thousands of Bigfoot and UFO sightings, videos and physical artifacts are not proof those things exist because they don’t constitute provable evidence. The statistical probability that all the witnesses could be wrong does not sway the skeptics, yet they turn to that same statistical probability to as prima facie evidence there must be life on other worlds. I can state all of this as fact because yesterday this was you, Mr. Steed.”

  “Just Steed, please,” I said, distracted. Fuck if he wasn’t right about all of it. “Go on.”

  “The difference between your brain yesterday and today is that now you can access far more of your memories, including those you were not aware of. With those memories will come the realization of your innate…talents.”

  “I’ve had a few women tell me I’m talented. Not many men, though.”

  “Humor is not required at the moment,” Ribaldo said, even as Jürgen chuckled beside me. Once again, he directed my attention to the black display, where the white dot had now grown a hundred times bigger. “That is your new awareness of the universe in which we live.”

  “Timothy Leary preached that acid could do that.”

  “Acid?” Ribaldo said.

  “Lysergic acid diethylamide,” Jürgen put in. “LSD.”

  “Yes, I know what it means! Focus, Steed!” Ribaldo said. “Even operating systems require the user to read the manual.”

  “Sorry,” I said again, surprised that I meant it. “But what talents are you talking about, Ribaldo? Seriously, I can’t draw a straight line or carry a tune or do anything artistic. I’m not bad with numbers, I guess.”

  “Less than twenty-four hours ago, you were in a damaged limousine being violently jerked from side to side, with two military-grade drones armed with automatic weapons expending hundreds of rounds to kill you. That’s you Steed; you were the target. Yet with six shots from an unfamiliar handgun that is noted more for the size of its bullet than for its accuracy, you managed to destroy them both.”

  “Yeah, I’m a good shot. So are a lot of people.”

  “Skill cannot explain it. Mathematics cannot explain it. There are simply too many variables for any known physical science to explain such precision.”

  “Then what was it, luck?”

  “In a manner of speaking—”

  “My father always told me it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  “Your father was both right and wrong. Luck doesn’t exist, but what humans interpret as luck, does exist.”

  I could tell he was leading me to answer my own question, that seemed obvious even without whatever discovering the Balance did to my brain. But then a word came to mind, an unfamiliar word that I had nonetheless heard at some point in the recent past.

  “Kaval,” I said quickly, almost barking the word.

  Ribaldo straightened and his eyes opened in surprise. “Yes, Steed, that is correct. You surprise me yet again, well done. Only kaval explains it.”

  “So then tell me what the hell is kaval?”

  I seemed to have passed some test because from that point forward Ribaldo’s manner toward me softened.

  “Kaval is what most people call magic.”

  Chapter 17

  “Magic…I used magic to shoot down those drones?”

  “Yes, Steed, you used magic to do that. It’s a very broad category, and will take some time to define and hone your latent potentials, but you scored fifteen on the Quatron Scale, which is high enough that you may be able to improve your abilities with practice and education. How much that could improve is unknown, but that potential makes you dangerous. Most humans don’t score above a three.”

  “I’m already dangerous.”

  “Yes, you are, largely because of your talents. Think how much more dangerous you will be once you’ve learned to control them?”

  “Would it be useful to say that I have no clue what you’re talking about?”

  “I can only give you a brief overview before you must leave. Humans innately have the ability to control a naturally occurring energy that is sometimes called magic, but which we at SAD call ‘kaval.’ Never mind its etymological roots for the moment. Some people, such as Alexander the Great, Cicero, and Hitler, had it in great abundance, while others do not, but many so-called rags-to-riches stories that depended on a series of unlikely events were actually the result of magic. That does not mean those who wielded it were aware of doing so, however. Tell me, did your parents ever exhibit extraordinary abilities?”

  I started to say no but stopped. Memories flooded back like thumbnails on a computer page, which I accessed and read.

  “My father sometimes knew things about me that he couldn’t have known.”

  Ribaldo nodded as if that were significant.

  “You said I had some kind of score?”

  “Yes, the Quatron Scale. You scored a fifteen.”

  “Is that good?”

  “The highest possible score on the Quatron Scale is forty-two—”

  “Why forty-two?”

  “Legend has it that Judy Quatron was a Douglas Adams fan.

  “Putting some numbers into perspective, Mozart’s estimated kaval score was thirty-three, Einstein’s, thirty-two. Both were mathematical geniuses, but their genius manifested itself in two very different ways. Your score also places you in the mathematics category, albeit much further down, which the Quatron Scale also takes into account. Hitler, for instance, scored an estimated thirty-five in the personal category, and that explains the magnetic charisma everyone who met him talked about…and which brings us to Dawn Delvin and why you’re going back to Jamaica on such short notice—”

  “Dawn has some of this kaval?”

  “Yes, in the sense that you mean the question, but no as to its semantic accuracy. Kaval is not something you have, any more than is, say, sunlight. It is an ever-present energy source that varies in how much is available in any one place, at any given moment. Gatandis, the word we use to describe manipulators of this energy, can affect their environment by either conscious or unconscious use of kaval. Sunlight is used by the natural environment without our ever thinking about it, yet if we need to harness that energy for own purposes, we do so using any number of devices, from burnished shields at the Battle of Syracuse to farms that convert solar rays to electricity. Dawn Delvin used it on you when you went to Guatemala to kill her.”

  “That explains a lot,” I said, because it did. I’d never believed in love at first sight until it happened, only now I saw that it hadn’t really happened, it was some sort of spell. And the fact that I could even think a word such as “spell” might have actual meaning, indicated just how much my mind had been repatterned.

  “You must understand that Miss Delvin is not aware of her talents, they are simply something she has learned to use to her advantage, as you did with your marksmanship. She turned kaval on you twice. Do you recall thoughts about suicide rather than carrying out the contract?”

  “Yes,” I answered, vividly recalling those moments.

  “Don’t blame her, Steed. It was a defensive reaction based on her thinking you were there to kill her.”

  “Which I was.”

  “Well, yes,” Jürgen said. “But also no. We would not have let you actually carry out the contract.”

  To stall as I pondered things, I rubbed my eyes and then ran my fingers through my hair. My hand came away smelling of shampoo, the green goo kind I liked so mu
ch.

  “You might need to elaborate on that,” I said.

  “Do you recall Walter?”

  “Skinny guy, jumpy? Sure.”

  “Walter is an SAD agent, a highly skilled gatandi. He would not have let you kill Miss Delvin, or yourself if it came to that.”

  “I’ll be damned, so did he block those thoughts of suicide in my head?”

  “No, Walter played no part in anything that happened. You did that, Steed. Miss Delvin instinctively tried to manipulate you into killing yourself as a defense against you killing her. What she did not count on was your own kaval talents blocking hers. I will explain why that happened when we have more time. For now, know that when that didn’t work, her mind tried something else, something you were already prone to doing.”

  “Falling in love with her?”

  “Likely more akin to extreme lust, but at some point they become the same thing.”

  My new brain worked faster than my old one at deciphering things left unsaid, specifically the elephant in the room concerning Dawn Delvin. And as the thoughts formed themselves, my anger level spiked on whatever scale measured such things.

  “So, when I went to Guatemala to fulfill a legal contract LEI took steps to prevent me doing it? But then they punished me for not doing what they didn’t want me to do anyway?”

  “You could not be allowed to destroy such a potentially valuable asset,” Ribaldo said, but the words sounded lame even to him. I could tell that from his expression as he spoke them. “We had been observing Miss Delvin for quite some time and arranged for a series of tests during her childhood to measure her talents. They were considerable and could be made more so with the proper training. Hers are potentially quite formidable, you see. When her father arranged to have her killed, it provided the perfect recruitment opportunity. Once in our employ, she would be safe from Shooters, no matter how much money her stepmother offered for a contract.”

  “And me? I was expendable?”

  He looked away for a moment. “Quite the opposite. We badly wanted you here at SAD.”