City of Sand

by Robert Kroese

  “Marina,” he said. “Is she…?”

  “She’s still Marina, as far as I can tell. She slips in and out of this Finnish persona. She’s not as far gone as….”

  “As me,” said Benjamin. “Completely delusional.”

  “I was going to say ‘as Estefan,’ but yes.”

  So at least Marina hadn’t lost herself completely. Maybe someday she’d even get out of here, and live something like a normal life.

  “Of course, the information Marina can give us at this point is nothing compared to what’s in your head. We could try pushing her harder, but she may very well end up like Estefan. I doubt very much we’ll ever have another subject like you: one who retains full memories of the next fifty years, and remains in possession of his wits. That’s why I can’t give up on you. You’re simply too valuable.”

  “That’s why you’ll risk giving me an overdose of dangerous drugs? Because I’m so valuable?”

  “I have nothing to lose. If you don’t talk, you’re worth nothing to this program. I’m doing what I can to help you, Benjamin, but I can’t change that underlying fact. If you give me something—anything—I can work with you. I don’t want to put you back under. But if you don’t, I have no choice.”

  “Of course you have a choice,” said Benjamin. “You’re choosing to work for this program, choosing to ignore what it really is. Look into the dumping. Ask David Stockton if he’s still working on creating more subjects for you. See what he says.”

  “I’ll do some poking around,” said Holst. “If you tell me everything you know about the war in Korea. How long it lasts, who wins, whether the Chinese get involved.”

  “Not a chance,” said Benjamin. “I’ve told you everything I’m going to tell you.”

  Then I can’t help you.”

  “I’m not asking you to help me,” said Benjamin. “But at some point you’re going to have to come to grips with what you’re doing here.” Benjamin wondered again if he should warn Holst about Stockton’s retaliation. Would Holst believe that Stockton was going to have him killed? If he did, would that make him realize the kind of man Stockton was, and spur him to try to stop WISE? Or would it scare him into silence? Perhaps if he told Holst the details of Spiegel’s accident, he could avoid being at that intersection at that particular time—but of course he didn’t have that information. That was the one absolute flaw in his memories, the thing that couldn’t possibly have happened the way it had appeared to happen. He couldn’t warn Holst about the accident if he wanted to. And if there really were no coincidences, then that blind spot existed for a reason. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to warn Holst.

  “Well,” said Holst uncertainly, “I suppose we’re done here.”

  “Yes, we are,” replied Benjamin.

  Holst looked like he wanted to say something, but then he turned and left the room. It was the last time Benjamin ever saw him.

  A few minutes later, the two orderlies entered his room, followed by the nurse. The orderlies held Benjamin down while the nurse gave him a series of injections. Benjamin didn’t resist.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The car fishtailed, sliding perpendicular to its vector of motion. Agent Hill tried to correct, but the Lincoln’s mass fought against him. The car’s right tires left the ground and the vehicle rolled. The next thing Benjamin knew, he was lying crumpled against the roof of the car.

  Taking a moment to get his bearings, he realized that Hill and Kassel were still in their seats, hanging upside down from their seatbelts. Both front airbags had deployed. The rear windshield had spider-webbed into a thousand pieces, and it only took a couple of kicks for Benjamin to detach it from the frame. He crawled onto the street and stood up. He was shaking with fear and adrenaline, but other than a few scuffs and bruises, he was unhurt.

  Several other cars had stopped, and a ring of onlookers had formed. Benjamin was vaguely aware of people asking him if he was hurt, but he ignored them. He was straining to see beyond the ranks of onlookers to get a glimpse of Jessica. Was she an illusion? Maybe. But she had appeared to him for a reason, and he wasn’t going to let her get away this time.

  “My daughter,” he mumbled. “Jessica.”

  The people let him pass. In the distance he heard sirens. Hopefully Hill and Kassel weren’t seriously injured, but Benjamin couldn’t worry about them right now. He needed to find Jessica.

  Benjamin strode past the gawkers and stopped traffic to the section of road where Jessica had appeared, but she was nowhere to be found. Once again, the apparition had vanished. Benjamin looked around frantically, but there was no sign of her.

  He stopped. Something was wrong. He’d been here before—experienced these events before. After this, he would go to find Felipe, but Felipe could only speak in echoes. He would try to leave town, but the highway looped back on itself. Then he would find Jessica.

  But how was this possible? How could he remember what hadn’t yet happened?

  This is a dream, he thought. No, a vision. A vision I’ve had before.

  He had a vague memory of being in another place, another time—a dark, sterile place. A man had been talking to him, pleading with him to do something, but Benjamin wouldn’t do it.

  He realized suddenly that the street had become unnaturally quiet. Snapping out of his reverie, he looked around to find that the cars and pedestrians on the street had vanished. The street was completely empty.

  No, not completely. A woman was walking down the street toward him. Her hair and clothes were damp. Jessica.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, stopping a few feet from him.

  “Jessica,” he said. “How…?”

  She smiled at him, and he remembered her words. This isn’t a mystery you can solve.

  “You’re not real,” he said.

  “I’m as real as you are,” she said, and he laughed bitterly.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “I’m sorry, Jessica. I tried to stop them. To stop this.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Dad,” she said. “You did stop them.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. His experience in the hospital was coming back to him in flashes. He remembered driving the shiv into David Stockton’s eye. “I tried to kill him, but I failed.”

  “You planted a seed,” said Jessica. “Adam Holst will look into the dumping, and realize that Stockton has been lying to him. He will write that letter, and fifty years later someone will find it. That will be the beginning of the end for WISE.”

  “Fifty years!” Benjamin cried. “They’re going to get away with this for fifty years?”

  “You were never going to be able to stop them,” Jessica said. “The best we could do is contain them. We tried before, with other subjects, but the lure of self-preservation in the others was too strong. You were the only one strong enough to see it through.”

  “I don’t understand,” Benjamin said. “See what through? What do I have to do?”

  “Nothing,” Jessica said. And he remembered what she had told him before, in the orchard: You need to let go of the past. Just live. Just be.

  “You wanted me to stay here,” he said. “In the delusion.”

  “It’s what you have to do,” Jessica replied. “You can’t go back, ever. They will extract your memories. Everything you know. They will try to shape the future, to improve it. But they will make things worse. Much, much worse.”

  Benjamin shuddered to think how bad things could get. Would WISE somehow cause the nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviets they were trying so hard to prevent?

  “How do you know all this?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Jessica. Your daughter. I’ve been chosen to explain these things to you, now that you’re ready to understand them.”

  Benjamin set aside for a moment the fact that he didn’t have a daughter. “Chosen by who?”

  “I’m not sure I can answer that,” she said. “It may be what you think of as the collective unconscious. Or possibly some
higher power. God, maybe.”

  “How can you not know?” Benjamin cried.

  “These kinds of questions aren’t going to get you anywhere. You need to accept that I’ve been told things about the future that you aren’t aware of. Events that make it very important that you never return to the year 1950.”

  Benjamin shook his head. This was all too confusing. It was too much to take in. “Why did you try to keep me from going back to 1950—back to the hospital—if you… I mean, if whoever is behind all this needed me to convince Holst to try to stop Stockton?”

  “Because I’m your daughter,” Jessica said, as if she were surprised at Benjamin’s confusion. “I didn’t want you to go back to that place.”

  “You’re not my daughter!” Benjamin cried. “You’re a construct! Your whole purpose was to get me to try to stop WISE!”

  “Well, then I guess it worked,” said Jessica, with a smile.

  Benjamin could only laugh at that. She was right, after all. She had done what she needed to do, and so had Benjamin. After all, he was just a construct too. Felipe—or God, or the collective unconsciousness—had seen what needed to happen, and had created the people necessary to bring it about. What needed to happen had now happened—or was going to happen—and so the constructs were no longer needed.

  “What happens now?” he asked. “To you, I mean.”

  “You don’t need me anymore,” Jessica said. “I should go.”

  “Go where? If you leave, won’t you just pass out of existence?”

  “I’ll live on in your memories,” Jessica said. “That’s all I am anyway. It’s all anybody is.”

  “No,” said Benjamin. “Please, don’t go. I can’t lose you again.”

  “There’s no place for me here, Dad. You know that. It’s okay. You mourned me once; you don’t need to do it again. I’ll just be gone.”

  “No!” Benjamin cried, stepping forward to embrace Jessica. He felt her damp hair against his cheek, the warmth of her body against his chest. “Jessica, what will I do?”

  She hugged him back for a moment, and he felt the dampness of her clothes soaking through his shirt. Then she pulled away, and he released her. “Whatever you want,” she said, with a smile.

  “But I don’t understand. I don’t even know who I am. Am I Benjamin, or am I Felipe?”

  “That’s up to you,” said Jessica. “You have plenty of time to figure it out. Goodbye, Dad.” She looked into his eyes for a moment and then turned away. He watched as she receded down the street. Benjamin wanted to call after her, to stop her, but he knew that it was pointless. Whatever force or being had created Jessica had now decided that she was no longer needed. And that raised another question: was Benjamin still needed?

  He stood on the curb, considering this, while he watched Jessica vanish in the distance. He was now completely alone in this strange town, this imagined version of Sunnyview, with its Starbucks, its Blockbuster, and its sushi restaurants. Impossible questions bombarded him: What was this place? Why did the illusion persist, even after he’d seen through it? Who is creating this place? Felipe? The collective unconsciousness of humanity, past, present and future? God? Or am I creating it, even now, by continuing to believe in it? If someone other than me is creating this place, where do they end and I begin? Who the hell am I?

  But as he walked, Jessica’s words kept coming back to him: Let it go. This isn’t a mystery you can solve. He was beginning to realize the truth of her words. He would never fully understand what this place was, how it came to be, or how “real” it was. He would never know for certain what had happened to GLARE/WISE. He might never know who he was. But like Jessica said, he had time to figure it out.

  Another realization struck him as well: Somehow he felt less alone in this ghost town than he had when it was bustling with khaki-clad engineers and soccer moms. It felt almost like home. He began walking toward downtown, without any real purpose in mind. If he didn’t look too closely at the updated storefronts, he could imagine that he was back in the Sunnyview of his childhood again. The main thing that was missing was the sounds: shopkeepers sweeping in front of their stores, dogs barking, children yelling and laughing in the distance, the occasional roar of a passing Chevy or Buick. He closed his eyes for a moment and he could almost hear it.

  No, he did hear it. He opened his eyes and stopped short on the sidewalk. Down the street, a 1940s model Ford was sputtering toward him. On the next block, a young couple was window-shopping at a jewelry store. He heard a yell in the distance behind him, and turned to see a policeman chasing a teenage boy down an alley.

  Benjamin smiled. He looked up at the buildings and saw hand-painted signs marking an appliance store, a plumbing supply company, and a drug store. Further down the street was the feed store and Schulman’s Hardware. Somehow he’d managed to tap into the creative power that had built this illusion, and bent it to his will. This was his town, the town that existed in his memory. It was perfect, down to the smallest detail. It was exactly like the Sunnyview of his youth.

  Well, not exactly. As he closed his eyes, spreading his consciousness to each corner of his creation, he acknowledged one small difference, a flaw he had allowed to creep in. He had left the course of Sand Hill Creek as it existed in the year 2000, allowing Fremont and Olive to intersect near the edge of town. In this reality, there would be no Sand Hill Children’s Hospital. GLARE/WISE would not exist, and no children would ever be subjected to dangerous experiments for the sake of “American interests.” This would be Sunnyview as it should be, not as it was.

  He opened his eyes again, and took in the aroma from Clark’s Bakery down the street. Yes, this was a place where he wouldn’t mind killing some time.

  “Good morning,” said an elderly woman in horn-rimmed glasses, as she passed him carrying a bag of groceries.

  “Good morning,” said Benjamin with a smile.

  “Beautiful day,” she said.

  “It certainly is,” Benjamin replied, and began walking toward Fenneman’s corner store. He had a hankering for an ice cream sundae.

  A real ice cream sundae.

  Afterword

  I originally envisioned City of Sand as “Chinatown as told by Philip Dick.” I’ve long been fascinated by stories about memory and identity, and I’m a fan of the hardboiled noir genre and Chinatown in particular. Those who have read Dick’s Time Out of Joint will recognize the town-that-isn’t-what-it-seems trope, and those who have seen Chinatown will recognize the device of the murder that connects to an Evil Conspiracy. The use of the city’s water supply as a plot device is, of course, also a nod to Chinatown.

  Much of the inspiration for the setting of this book comes from my own experience. I lived for twenty years in a small farming town in the California Central Valley, commuting several times a week to work in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a small way, I experienced on a near-daily basis the culture shock that Benjamin Stone experiences as he tries to reconcile modern-day Sunnyview with the town of his youth.

  Before the tech bubble burst, I worked for several years as a software developer in the East Bay Area, making the astoundingly bad decision in January of 2000 to leave an established Fortune 500 company to go to work for a small startup. The promise of riding the Internet wave to success and riches was soon revealed to be a collective delusion, and I spent most of the next three years unemployed. I went back to work full-time in 2003, and in 2008 I started a two-year contract working at Google headquarters in Mountain View. Google was a bizarrely idyllic, almost utopian, place to work at that time, like being on a college campus with arcade games and ping-pong tables in the halls, pick-up volleyball games between the buildings, and free food in fourteen different cafés. Google ultimately pulled the plug on my project, but the time wasn’t wasted: I got really good at Joust and finished my first novel, Mercury Falls.

  The idea for City of Sand didn’t really come into focus, though, until I ran across an article about the staggering amount of water po
llution in the Silicon Valley area. Santa Clara County, it seems, has the most Superfund sites in the country. You might think that honor would be reserved for some industrial wasteland in New Jersey or strip-mining capital in Appalachia, but it turns out that beneath the heart of the new economy flows some of the most polluted water in the United States. This issue first received wide attention in 1981, when it was learned that the groundwater in south San Jose was contaminated with chemicals such as trichloroethane and Freon, toxic substances that were later suspected to be the cause of birth defects in many children.

  The source of this pollution was primarily two tech giants: Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM. Information technology is popularly thought of as a clean industry, but the process of making semiconductors and other electronic components produces a lot of toxic byproducts. When these companies started out in the 1950s, there were very few if any environmental controls to prevent them from simply dumping these byproducts into the ground. Sandy soil and a shallow water table contributed to the fast spread of the chemicals into the local water supply. Even today, it’s very difficult to determine the extent of the damage this pollution caused, partly because those who were most affected were poor immigrants who tended to move around a lot, making precise data collection and analysis difficult. It was a bit unsettling to find all this out after having worked in the area for several years, and this sense of something very wrong going on literally beneath the surface was a big inspiration for the paranoia of City of Sand.