ANALYZING SECURITIES

ANALYSIS: MASSIVE BLEEDING THROUGHOUT SYSTEM

UPGRADE COMPROMISED

DELETING UPGRADE

RESTORING ORIGINAL SETTINGS

SAVED AND LOCKED

WAITING FOR INSTRUCTION

END

CHAPTER 8

SATURNALIA

Agnostic with Pentecostal tendencies, the Southern Gentleman is not a religious man, though he often thinks in religious terms. Emerging now from his impromptu meeting with the board of directors, he is reminded of Daniel surviving the lion’s den. Brothers and sisters, God and product placement have delivered Gedaechtnis unto the third round of financing. Hallelujah. Why, at the end of humanity, are people worried about how much something costs? Who cares if we go into debt?

There are several competing projects, as the Southern Gentleman knows, all promising life. We can beat the plague with your help, they say, so give generously. We can find a vaccine for Black Ep. We’re close. We just need a little more time and we’ll beat this thing. Gedaechtnis promises not life, but resurrection.

It’s a world of difference. You will die. But ten new lives might live on. Ten genetically engineered children. They might someday find a cure. You might then be cloned. Most people say: That’s a lot of mights.

Then they say: I’d rather stay alive, thank you very much.

Consciously or no, they recognize that putting their eggs in the Gedaechtnis basket means abandoning all hope that they will survive. Sometimes it’s hard to think for the species when your life is on the line.

There is no progress on the vaccine. Every day that goes by, staying alive appears increasingly unlikely. So as the population dwindles, financing for Gedaechtnis gains momentum. And so, Hallelujah.

“Happy holidays, Dr. Ellison.”

“You too,” he waves.

Office party tomorrow, he remembers. Eggnog and mistletoe, drunken caroling and Christmas bonuses. Everyone letting loose before going back to the grind. It should help morale, he thinks. It certainly can’t hurt.

A glance at his watch and the Southern Gentleman quickens his pace. It’s time for a postmortem with the CFO, a back-and-forth on the ramifications of this latest board meeting before he calls upon his project leaders.

“Attention,” he says.

The watch chirps.

“Tell Nora I’m running late,” he instructs.

Instantaneously, another watch chirps some fifty miles away, obediently relaying the message to the Southern Gentleman’s wife, catching her in mid-yoga stretch.

“Tell him I figured as much,” she says.

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“Tell him sorry’s a polite word for what he is.”

“Tell her I’m already thinking of ways to make it up to her.”

“Tell him he’d better.”

“Tell her I’m very resourceful.”

She can feel a trickle of acid in her stomach as she rises from the cobra pose. “Tell him that’s why I married him,” she tells the watch. “Also, tell him everyone’s confirmed for Sunday and I’ve done all the shopping but there’s still loads to be done.”

There is no immediate response; the postmortem has begun.

“The good news is we’re still very much alive, fiscally speaking,” the Gedaechtnis CFO

explains. “Barring the unforeseen, this new round keeps us afloat until the completion date. Not bad, with this economy. No, the challenge becomes logistic, as we try to leverage our human resources.”

“You’re saying there are some problems money just can’t solve,” says the Southern Gentleman.

“I’m saying that, yes, and I’m saying there’s only a certain number of people out there with the skills we want. Most of them are already working on Black Ep, so it’s not a question of money. We just can’t get them. Meanwhile, another employee gets sick every week.”

The Southern Gentleman dismisses this with a wave of his hand. “Nature of the beast, Bob,” he says. “No one said this was going to be easy. If we cross the finish line on broken legs, that’s fine by me. Just as long as we get there.”

“But that’s what I’m saying, we might not get there at all.”

“Be negative somewhere else, Bob.”

That’s exactly what Bob is trying to tell the Southern Gentleman. He’s getting sick, showing symptoms, and his doctor doesn’t give him long. He plans to resign from his position as CFO and spend more time with his family. While there’s still time at all. The family, by God, the family. There’s no getting away from it these days. When you’re dying, they say, your family is all you have. Though saddened by this news, the Southern Gentleman does not begrudge him calling it quits. He will miss the man’s company as well as his skills; Bob is a damn fine CFO despite occasional negativity and the nauseating stench of the chocolate coffee drinks he prefers. He is saddened, but the fact that Bob is now on the fast track to nonexistence only reaches a certain point in his heart, beyond which such news has no power to penetrate. He has become inured to the individual tragedies that make up this holocaust. He sees them as symptoms, and treating the symptoms can only accomplish so much. As Blue is fond of saying, you have to treat the disease.

Nora, meanwhile, would like to have another child. Like so many women these days, she feels the biological imperative to further the species, though it is a phantom call she cannot answer. Fertility is a distant memory, compliments of Black Ep. She compensates for this “need to breed”

by mothering (and, in their daughter’s view, smothering) everyone she meets. She can’t help it. Though this wasn’t always the case, though she prided herself on being an excellent insurance adjustor before that industry collapsed, she now measures her value by the extent she can take care of those she loves. The growing seuche kultur, “plague culture,” defines her as a Nurturer, one of the six compensations in the face of death.

There are Nurturers, Hedonists, Workaholics, Fantasists, Apathetics and Zealots, according to the sociologists of the day. Very few individuals fit neatly into a single category. Take Halfway Jim, a Workaholic with Hedonist and Fantasist tendencies. Or Blue, a Workaholic with Apathetic tendencies. The Southern Gentleman rates as a pure Workaholic, despite his religious upbringing, yet he believes in his cause as fervently as any Zealot. Conversely, his five brothers, most of whom will be flying in for Christmas, cover the rest of the spectrum. Will is the Nurturer, fresh back from his latest stint in the Peace Corps and now volunteering at the local Red Cross. He is essentially selfless. In this respect, Black Ep has changed him not at all. Tom, the Hedonist, will not be coming to Christmas dinner. He hasn’t spoken to any of his brothers in more than a decade and isn’t about to start now, doomsday or no. Alex, the investment banker, died in IVR amidst fellow Fantasists, preferring an alternate existence for his final days. The phenomenon of jacking into IVR and wasting away on a chemical drip has become so popular, it’s considered a subculture all its own. Percy took Alex’s death especially hard. One of the drawbacks to being a twin. He has become the quintessential Apathetic, defeated, seeing no point in anything these days, barely taking care of himself.

And then there’s Verne, Verne the Zealot, who gave his life to the Lord after years of leading what some call a disposable life. Maybe he’s reaching out to his mother, reconnecting with her faith here in this darkest hour. Or maybe religion is the last refuge of scoundrels, as Nora often suspects.

Christmas dinner — surely, the final reunion the Ellisons will have — scratches away at the Southern Gentleman’s consciousness, distracting him from his work. He cannot afford distractions, not now when they’re so close. As soon as the tinsel is off the tree, he will move out of the house and push them away. As much as he loves his wife and daughter, they are too high-maintenance, and must be sacrificed for the greater good.

“A protein in the placenta might offer some resistance to the disease,” says Blue, as she runs her fingertips around the rim of her water glass. “Similar to LIF. Small resistance, admittedly, but I find the possibilities tantalizing.”

Her dinner companion chews thoughtfully and swallows, sinuses stinging from the wasabi. He blots his lips with the napkin before speaking. “You’re looking for the sword.”

“The sword?”

“To cut the Gordian knot.”

“Ah.”

“But Black Ep won’t be cut,” he insists.

“Well, then I’m tugging at the threads like everyone else.”

“It won’t be untied either.”

“I’ve never heard you sound so defeated,” she frowns. She remembers him brimming with optimism, a welcome oasis in the wasteland of her depression. Always supportive, always a friend, sometimes more.

“I am defeated, Stasi,” he says. “It’s broken me.”

Just like her and so many others, he has moved Heaven and Earth hunting for a cure. His organization is larger than Gedaechtnis, better funded. His efforts have centered on treating existing sufferers with gene therapy, fighting Black Ep at the level of DNA molecules. He has enjoyed a modicum of success in slowing the progression of the illness, though not one of his patients has lived. He suspects that Blue may have the right idea in creating new life instead. Regardless, he is out of the equation. He has not shown up at work in several weeks. His second-in-command, a capable but less gifted man, has taken over. He will not return.

“How did this happen?” Blue asks.

“It crept up on me.”

“Are you sick?”

“Probably. I must be, I think. But I don’t have any symptoms.” He grimaces, downs the last of his cold green tea, and grimaces again. “You know the grind,” he says. “I was exhausted physically and mentally. I took a couple of days off, had a regular weekend for a change. It was such a relief. And that’s it. In that relief, some part of me shut down. I tried to go back to work, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

He says nothing.

“Fuck you for giving up. We need you.”

“I don’t have a choice in the matter. Whatever drive I had, Stasi, whatever gift, it’s been taken from me. Completely. It’s almost as if the disease knew I was coming after it and so it reached into my heart and plucked it all away.”

It hurts Blue to look at him. She tilts her head, dropping her disappointed gaze to the koi pond. He can feel what she feels. He imagines that he’s become a ghost. It makes a certain amount of sense, what with both of them mourning the man he used to be.

“Enough about me,” he says, anxious to shift the conversation away from his failures. “How are your kids?”

“They’re not my kids,” she says.

That brings a smile. “You know what I mean.”

Blue does but she resents the choice of language. She is a genetic engineer first, last, and always. In her eyes, a female genetic engineer is not a mother, not per se. She feels no maternal affection for the mutant embryos in her care. Just a sense of duty. A commitment to the task. She will not allow herself to feel anything more.

Instantly, she remembers a feeling of being crushed, empty womb, empty arms, the word

“miscarriage” thudding in her ears. That was her child, that dead fetus taken from her so many years ago. For a long and painful moment, she considers telling him the truth about the child, but ultimately decides against it. It’s better to keep the secret, sparing him from hollow thoughts of what might have been. The timing, she thinks, the timing was never right between them. Too many distractions, first and foremost, his marriage and both of their careers. In the final analysis, they are fair friends, excellent colleagues and poor lovers, though she remembers their fumbling tryst quite fondly. She remembers the smell of him. The feeling of safety in his arms.

“They’re coming along,” she tells him. “So far, they’re showing more resistance to the disease than any human being on the planet. Trouble is they’re not human. There may be critical flaws, I don’t know. It’s guesswork.”

“And none of us will live long enough to find out if your guesses are correct.”

“No.” She meets his eyes again. “No, we won’t.”

“Well, if anyone can do it, you’d be the one.”

“We’ll see,” Blue shrugs. “I can’t get too emotionally involved with it. If it works, wonderful. If not, we’re dead anyway, and so it ceases to be any of my concern.”

Dinner ends and they have coffee with a dish of Smartin!® brand Peach On, Brother! flash frozen ice cream for dessert. As they metabolize the caffeine and sugar and wait for the waiter to deal out the check, Blue asks him if he really thinks she’d make a good mother.

“No doubt in my mind,” he says.

“I strike you as somehow nurturing?”

“You could be.”

How sweet, she thinks. Surely, no one at Gedaechtnis would agree with him. They see her as impossibly cold. In dozens of debates over what experiences should comprise adolescence for these would-be saviors, she made a point of bowing out time after time, claiming to know nothing about child rearing or IVR. “As long as they do what they’re designed to do, I don’t care how you raise them,” she would say. But as the subject of loyalty arose, as the Southern Gentleman directed Jim to engineer “good, moral lessons” to guarantee a solidarity with humankind and a passion for cloning the species when they came of age, she suggested that if they really wanted to engender kinship in these children, they should engineer virtual diseases instead. Let them all grow up suffering, struggling against the steady threat of microbial death, just as humanity does now. Let the Southern Gentleman’s Academy be a hospital ward for critically ill children. They would understand then. They would know. But the suggestion was not taken. Her colleagues considered it unsavory and more than a little cruel. She saw it — and still sees it to this day — as pragmatic.

A mother, she thinks. Me.

Halfway Jim is drugged out of his mind.

He’s actually not, but he likes to think that he is. Pretending he’s got more than a pleasant buzz gives him tremendous freedom from responsibility. “Out of my mind,” he mutters, typing furiously in an effort to bring the Maestro program up to the Southern Gentleman’s latest specifications. It’s after midnight, pushing one. His team has gone home, but he’s still here. Really, where else does he have to go?

Music blasts and he nods his head along with the lyrics he can’t catch. Something about

“destroy you.” That’s the chorus. The voice track keeps morphing into a panther’s screech, and Jim appreciates its funky Island of Dr. Moreau vibe.

He has not been sleeping well. He has been sleeping very poorly, little pockets of drug-induced rest between rolling waves of insomnia, these coming facedown, with the pillows at the wrong end of the bed. He calls it the sleep of the damned.

But working this late comes as a relief. With no one else in the building, Jim doesn’t have to play den mother. There is no need to praise, threaten, cajole or soothe the egos of his team. No need to play peacemaker between the Realist designers (who take pride in creating an IVR

experience that perfectly mirrors the real world) and the Idealists (who prefer to improve upon what we already have). He can simply focus on the work, once again “digging in” and “getting his hands dirty” in his latest effort to redefine reality.

“Playing God,” says the tagline of the Newsweek cover story on him. And inside, the confident, bordering on arrogant response: “Who’s playing?”

There, he thinks. That ought to do it. Now a little compiling, and we watch Maestro and the Beta-Test interact. Hopefully, they play nice this time.

To this point, Jim’s team has constructed a fragmented environment, original work supplemented by countless bits and pieces of code leased (or, in some cases, outright stolen) from a wide assemblage of IVR designers, all culled together to form the illusion of continuity. IVR

“Living City” Paris, here. Mesozoic teachingsim, there. “Instant Cocktail Party” Guest Randomizer, right over there. Unflatteringly, Jim often compares his work at Gedaechtnis to trying to create a living thing with dead tissue.

“And now we’re Frankensteining,” he says with a smirk.

It is a monumental task, “faking the world,” in so short a time. Invariably, some corners have to be cut. Some parts of the world will simply remain off-limits, with IVR characters conspiring to keep everyone away from those unfinished sections. Papua New Guinea will not make the final build, and so the virtual flights at the virtual airports will be canceled, if need be, and what’s more, the IVR parents will never encourage their kids to venture there, much less give permission. That’s the easy part. Jim finds the real challenge twofold. First, tweaking every designer’s efforts into a uniform style, so the world will not seem

“schizophrenic” to impressionable people destined to spend twenty-one years in it. Second, building truly reactive and adaptive guardians for the kids, improving the artificial intelligence to a level where flesh and programming be come truly indistinguishable from each other. This is the holy grail of IVR, and it eludes him still.

The solution may involve bleeding, he thinks. Left unchecked, virtual personalities tend to homogenize over time, one set of sensibilities bleeding into the next as they interact. The challenge involves making the characters truly listen, allowing them to learn from one another without losing the characteristics that make them individual. Most designers minimize bleeding, but Jim believes in it. He believes in an evolving system. This Maestro will be very different from the one the kids leave some twenty-one years from now (assuming any of them live that long, but that’s Blue’s responsibility, not his). In some ways Jim can predict how Maestro will change, but for the most part he’s just rolling the dice.

Unnoticed, an insect flies into the lab, penetrating the sanctuary. Jim is too busy shaking out medicine to pay it any mind. “One for me, one for you, one for me, one for you,” he sings, thinking about the virtual child he’s created to check the system. The Beta-Test. By far, the Beta-Test is the best work he’s ever done, better than Maestro, cleverer in construction than the world they’re creating. He’s a good kid, real in so many ways, and nearly as complicated as an actual human being. He can think for himself. And he loves Jim. And despite all his scientific objectivity, Jim loves the little bastard back. The creativity impresses him most. The Idealists on his team have built tools, advanced Nanny programs to help the children fashion their own IVR

environments (“worlds within worlds” as some are wont to say), and Jim finds himself regularly amazed at what the Beta-Test creates. Artificial, yes, but highly intelligent. If only the boy could solve Black Ep. They could upload his program into a robot, set him loose and make Blue’s work irrelevant. Unfortunately, programs don’t innovate, they imitate, and even Halfway Jim remains skeptical of his creation’s ability to solve problems that humanity’s best minds can’t crack. Entrust our future to AI? Not a good idea. Too much potential for something to go wrong. Entrust it to actual flesh and blood with slight (but significant) genetic deviance? That’s better, most people think. Never mind that you need IVR teachers to raise that flesh and blood, since everyone will be long dead by the time they come of age.

With a wordless, heartfelt toast, Jim pops his vitamin/antiviral/narcotic cocktail with a swig of mineral water.

He can see the Beta-Test wants him now but he ignores the child’s call, feeling more like a hypocrite than he’s ever felt before. He has been lying to the boy about many things and realizes, dimly, that he hates himself for betraying his principles. It’s the Southern Gentleman who doesn’t mind lying to kids, willing to suppress the truth about Black Ep, the dire state of things, hell, even about their very identities, all under the banner of “protected childhood.” Jim has fought him at every turn — it would be so much easier, he thinks, if the kids knew what they were in for from the get-go. But then, he’s no expert on this. He’s just an IVR designer. An employee. Though his opinions are often solicited, his suggestions are rarely taken. That is his belief. The Southern Gentleman would counter that he, too, is an employee, beholden to the board of directors. This is a shared vision, he would say, adding that he has bent over backwards to accommodate Jim and Blue alike.

“Fucking Ellison,” Jim mutters.

The insect is too small to set off any sensors. It circles overhead in a wide, lazy arc, momentarily attracted to the fluorescent lights. Fickle, it drops to the keyboard, fluttering its tapered wings, preening, now hopping forward to climb Halfway Jim’s knuckles. It is a yellow-banded wasp, long and sleek, and it wastes no time driving its stinger deep into the soft tissue between fingers three and four.

Jim feels it through his haze of medication, the pain and indignation a better rush than anything he’s had in weeks. He spends the next ten minutes of his life wreaking havoc on the lab, arms swinging, fists scuffing the walls, blood pumping furiously in his veins as he tosses a monitor across the room. The sight and sound of shattering glass only goads him on. He is delivering himself to a much-needed fit of animal rage, a wholehearted effort to nullify the insect, obliterate it, punish it for hurting him. He is not allergic; he simply hates wasps. A gasp of memory chokes him: the innocent wonder of discovering a nest on the side of his house betrayed by dozens of flying needles, all knifing into his six-year-old arms, face and neck. Did he kill it? He can’t find the body. The thought that he might have hallucinated the whole thing flickers through his brain but the poison in his hand feels real enough. His flesh is swelling at the point of injection. Ice, he thinks. Put some ice on it.

“Dr. Hyoguchi?”

The security guard is yelling his name and so he puts an index finger to his ear, shutting off the music to hear her better.

“Are you all right, sir?”

He gives her an odd look. Of course he’s all right. What is she doing here?

Then he reflects upon how the lab must look, trashed as it is. It amuses him that even in his most primal fury, he avoided destroying anything precious. Like a rock star who splinters his guitar on stage, he thinks, but never his best guitar. He nods, slowly, up and down. “I’m fine,” he says.

“Your heart rate’s elevated,” she tells him.

“Is it?”

Like all Gedaechtnis employees, Jim is wired into the network, a tiny chip implanted at the base of his wrist. The guard shows him the display on her handheld. Sure enough, his pulse is high.

“Really, I’m fine,” he says. “A bee got in here. Wasp, bee. Stinger wasn’t curved, so that’s the kind where… I don’t know. Anyway, it freaked me out.”

“Yeah, I hate those things,” she says. “They freak me out too.” She’s noticed the bottle of pills spilled out on his desk but has decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He smiles, relaxing a little. “They’re nasty little things.”

“I wonder how it got in here.”

“Security breach,” he jokes, reacting with mock alarm.

She chuckles at that, though really it’s no laughing matter. The company has received a number of credible threats from extremists who insist that this is the Apocalypse and Black Ep is part of God’s plan. Gedaechtnis, therefore, opposes God’s will and must be destroyed. The Southern Gentleman enjoys a good debate and often tries to reverse the argument. How do you know that Gedaechtnis isn’t part of God’s plan too? It’s like the old joke, he says, the one about the religious man stranded on the roof of his house during a flash flood. Rescuers come to save him, first in boats, then a helicopter, but he stubbornly refuses to leave. “God will save me,”

he insists. But the floodwaters rise, drowning him. When he arrives in Heaven, he angrily confronts his maker. “I thought you were going to save me!” he cries. Replies God: “What did you think I was doing? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

Jim feels it’s a shitty joke, believing no reasonable deity would drown his followers, much less send them a plague. There is no divine justification for evil. Like Darwin said, God must be wicked or weak.

To protect against religious fanatics, the company favors spider-silk body armor. It is lighter and stronger than Kevlar, and worn underneath one’s clothes. Just like mithril chain mail, Jim thinks, on those occasions when his thoughts stray to the various IVR Tolkien sims. His elf, trapped deep in the fiery recesses of a computerized Mount Doom, will never again see the light of day. Though he finds pleasure in this kind of escapism, these days Jim just doesn’t have the time.

“I know a twenty-four-hour cleaning crew,” the guard offers, nudging the debris with her shiny black shoe. “They’re pretty good.”

“No, but thanks,” he says. “It can wait ’til morning.”

“You sure you’re okay, then?”

He doesn’t know what he is. “Everything’s great,” he claims. “Great,” she says. She starts to go but something catches his eye. He calls her back. “Is that Gingerbread Dog?”

Reflexively, her hand shoots up to touch her earring. “Sure is,” she says, turning to fix him with a surprised and giddy smile. “That was my favorite show. I didn’t think anybody remembered it but me.”

“There’s a few of us out there,” he grins.

“Absolutely the best cartoon ever made.”

“Hands down.”

“Totally fresh and weird. Just off-the-wall, open-your-mind, laugh-out-loud weird.”

“Dog rocked that first season. Before they retooled it.”

“Oh, even then,” she insists. “Remember the episode where Spentfree loses the Thinking Box?”

“That’s a good one,” Jim admits, “but I like the one where Dog meets the animators.”

“And gives them all rabies!”

“Right, and so they start drawing him all funny.”

“That’s a great one,” she agrees.

They talk and they bond over childhood memories and working late and she’s amazed that the famous Dr. Hyoguchi is quite this approachable. She tells him as much. Unfortunately, she insists upon mispronouncing the first syllable in his surname as two, like Ed McMahon reacting to a Johnny Carson joke. Hi yo!

He doesn’t mind. He’s used to this mistake.

“Call me Jim,” he offers.

“Jim,” she says, agreeable.

He wonders if he’s hitting on her. She’s not his type. Though he has been accused of fucking anything that moves (and some things that don’t), he prefers skinny women and men. Jim himself is thin almost to the point of being gaunt, while the guard is forty pounds overweight. Which means she’s poor. Rich people can defeat obesity through gene therapy. It’s a fairly simple procedure, adjusting the metabolism. Poor people are stuck with diet and exercise. Despite this, he finds himself using a pickup line. “You’ve got a great look,” he tells her. “You should come in so we can make a template.”

“A template? Of me?”

“Why not?”

“I’m not a model or anything.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“And I don’t know the first thing about IVR.”

“Trust me, it’s painless. Thirty seconds under the cameras.”

“Thirty seconds!”

“That’s it.”

She whistles. “Thirty seconds to steal your essence.”

“No,” he smiles, “hardly your essence. Just your look. Your personality has to be programmed, compiled, debugged, fine-tuned. That takes a lot longer.”

“Forty seconds?” she smirks.

“Weeks or months. Years if you really want to get it right. But thirty seconds gives us the look for an IVR double. And I know just where I’d put you.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “Do you?”

“Uh-huh.” He lets himself flirt for a moment, then pulls back. “Oh, and we can use your voice too, if you want — that takes about five minutes in a booth.”

“What do I have to do for that?”

“You just read a few sentences and sing a song. From that, the computer extrapolates. It can play back sentences you’ve never actually said. Kind of spooky, really.”

“Kind of,” she agrees.

“So you’ll do it?”

She’s already decided that she will. It’s a type of immortality, after all, and there’s something she likes about Jim. A quirky, ballsy charm that reminds her of her first husband before he got sick. And he’s smart. Of course she’ll do it.

He pencils her in for the Monday after the Christmas party, 2 P.M.

She misses the appointment.

He wonders what happened to her. He thinks to call security but it’s just a passing thought, one that spurs no action. He’s too swamped trying, as always, to do too many things at once. After a while, he forgets about her.

Mosquitoes bring it all back. Mosquitoes, which jog his mind to the night he killed the wasp. These are the first fully functional IVR parasites. The bites itch like real bites, and the behavior is extraordinarily realistic. Hunting, feeding, breeding. Vulnerable to IVR insect repellant. Quite a triumph, say the Realists. Yet the Idealists plead with him to remove them from the final build. Why subject the kids to mosquito bites? As a gift to the people we hope to bring us back from extinction, can’t we spare them this one aggravation?

He can’t hear them. Frankly, he admires the commitment it takes to re-create mosquitoes or chlamydia or lawyers. When he finally does call security, they tell him she hasn’t shown up in weeks. No one knows why.

She catches him in the parking lot two days later. She’s out of uniform and won’t say where she’s been. To Jim, she looks fragile and choked, like a strong breeze might scatter her into dust.

“Will you do something for me?” she asks.

“What do you need?”

She slips off her backpack and reaches inside. A dark and fearful part of his brain worries that she might come up with a weapon, but why? Why would she? She didn’t seem crazy when they met, at least no crazier than anyone else seems these days.

It’s a plush bunny rabbit, wobble-jointed, nine inches tall. He floods with relief. Rabbits he can deal with.

“For me?”

“No,” she says, clutching it tightly. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t get you anything. I wanted to but it’s like I’ve been in a fog.”

“That’s okay. So this… ?”

“It’s for the kids.”

“I see,” he says, putting the back of his hand to his forehead. Is he feverish?

“His name’s Mr. Hoppington. He’s a little ripped up but still good. Still plenty good. See, I had to stitch him here along the arm because he was losing stuffing. And this button doesn’t quite match but it’s close, don’t you think?”

“Carmen,” he says, but she cuts him off.

“I know the company’s building — what’s the word? Habitats?”

“Habitats, sure. Lifepods some call them.”

“Can you please make sure Mr. Hoppington gets into one? I want him to go to someone who’ll need him. I’d hate to see him just—”

“I can’t,” he says. “It’s against the rules.”

“There are rules against toys?”

“Stuffed animals are mite factories,” he says.

She doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“Allergen magnets. Breeding grounds for dust mites,” he says, knowing there’s not a chance in hell of Blue allowing anything like this near her creations. “Could bring on an allergic reaction and that’s dangerous for the kids. We’re already playing with their immune systems, so we want to minimize unnecessary risks.”

“But aren’t the habitats going to be sanitized?”

“Of course.”

“And sealed. So you’re not going to have dust mites.”

“Carmen,” he says, “it’s a risk no one wants to take.”

Through tightly clenched teeth, she lets her breath escape, sounding for all the world like a tire deflating. “My son’s dead,” she says. “My baby boy.”

I’m sorry, he means to tell her. But what good would that do?

“This was his favorite. The toy he took to bed each night and woke up with each morning. Here, it still smells like him.” She puts it to her face and breathes deep.

“I suppose I could make an IVR copy,” he offers. “I mean, they’re going to be stuck in IVR ’til they’re twenty-one anyway, so they won’t be able to appreciate—”

“I don’t want a copy,” she says, tears beginning to fall. “That would be fake. This is real. Don’t you know the difference between fake and real?”

He wonders that himself sometimes.

“It’s a gift,” she explains.

She is drowning in grief; he realizes, helpless and beyond reason. Instead of lecturing her about mites and allergens, he should just help her. He should give her some peace. What he does with the gift doesn’t matter, he thinks. Just the act of taking it will give peace.

“Okay,” he tells her. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

The rabbit makes the journey home with him. It sits incongruously on his bedroom shelf, a soft and rumpled presence amidst electronics, brass and chrome. Though Jim feels accused by its unseeing gaze, he can’t bring himself to throw it out. He simply can’t. As time pushes forward, he develops a blind spot for it.

He forgets it exists.

Houston’s face is framed in red ringlets and when he thinks of her, he can’t help but think of her tripping on her platform boots as she stepped out of her panties. Clumsy, yes, but he found it endearing. He stopped seeing her when he realized he was developing feelings. No point in that, he’d decided. He knows he really ought to stick with IVR sex partners, but lately he’s grown addicted to the real thing.

She’s pleasantly surprised when he calls her out of the blue. He misses me, she thinks. That’s touching. Two thousand dollars, she tells him. Plus tip. Have prices gone up? Supply and demand, she explains. No heart of gold, this one. Silver, he decides, or maybe bronze. With the transaction complete and Jim’s lust spent, she slips out of the handcuffs and stretches, examining his collection of pills.

“Help yourself,” he offers, though his mind is elsewhere.

Always so generous, she thinks. She likes him. Genuinely likes him. “Who’s this?”

He can’t quite remember the name. “Sir Hops-a-Lot,” he says.

“He’s cute.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I have him?”

He doesn’t know. He makes an ambivalent gesture. She takes it for a yes and though he thinks to contradict her, he does nothing. He’s too tired. Mr. Hoppington all but disappears into her purse, except for a single floppy ear, which pokes out of the top. Child’s toy, Jim thinks. Child’s toy, baby boy.

She kisses him on the cheek and lets herself out.

The insomnia is worse now. Whenever he closes his eyes, all he sees is the rabbit. It’s tremendous in his mind, making everything else small and insignificant. At least I could have given it to an orphanage, he thinks. At least I could have done that.

We hit the water so hard I thought the pod might crack.

We tumbled, spinning, hating it, clutching the safety belts that kept us from flipping out of our seats. Blood flew from my broken nose, spattering me in flecks of red. Messy. I’d already thrown up and so had Fan. She kept her eyes closed and her fingers crossed, praying to Merciful Evans. M.E. was apparently some kick-ass force of nature that charted the balance between Nutritious and Delicious. Hooray for him. I might have prayed too if I thought it would do any good. Lights flickered. I heard the metal buckle. I heard it through ears that wouldn’t pop. I’d been screaming off and on. Not entirely from fear, mind you. The pod shook!

And then all was quiet.

Fan took initiative, grabbing the controls and bringing us gently up to the surface. Up, and up, and up. We broke through the waves, and when I looked out the porthole I could crane my neck up to see the most beautiful blue sky and the whitest clouds there ever were.

We cleaned ourselves up and put on the environmental suits. A small outboard engine wheezed and sputtered but somehow took us to shore.

We’d made it.

“Welcome to the first day of the rest of our lives,” I said.

“You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

We unsealed the hatch. The metal groaned in protest, then separated into a viable egress. We stepped out gingerly, helping each other up onto the marina dock, like spacemen first setting foot on an alien world. Which, truly, we were.

“One small step for Fan,” she said.

“One giant leap for Halloweenkind,” I answered, but my voice was just a rasp. I was staring at all the empty yachts and sailboats, long abandoned, and fallen into disrepair. I was listening to the cries of the gulls and the sound of a steady breeze blowing a broken line against a tattered sail. I was listening to the complete absence of human beings.

“A fucking ghost town,” said Fan, as if she could read my thoughts. I nodded, mute.

“I like it,” she said. “It’s all so incredibly delicious. And such a pretty day. Pretty, pretty. Makes me want to strip naked and stretch out in the sun.”

I told her I didn’t think that was such a good idea.

“Knew you were a prude,” she huffed.

“I just don’t think we should take off the environmental suits until we run a few tests.”

“Safety first?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m being nutritious. Deal with it.”

“Do I have a choice?”

To protect their investment, Gedaechtnis had thought to furnish us with state-of-the-art “sniffers,”

devices that allowed me to diligently check the air for microorganisms. Meanwhile, Fan made her self useful by climbing back inside and pulling out everything she thought we might need. She came up with dried food and medicine and clean water. She found backpacks, trauma kits, and handheld computers loaded with maps. Finally, she brought up a huge canvas bag, overflowing with pieces of paper. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

She lugged it out to the dock, reached inside with both hands and joyously threw the contents overhead. Like so much confetti. They caught on the wind and scattered, most falling smack into the ocean. Some landed near me, and I picked them up.

“Dear Gabriel,” the first began. There was a heart over the “i.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

The next one was addressed to Fantasia. It greeted her by her real name, and that name was badly misspelled. I looked up to see her twirling in delight, the eye of a paper hurricane. I read the next one. And the next.

They were letters from kids. Hundreds and thousands of plague-stricken kids, sending love and drawings and wishes and hope, rooting for us to bring them back from the dead.

PACE TRANSMISSION 000013818388797

WAITING FOR INSTRUCTION

QUERY

QUERY QUERY ?

UNIDENTIFIED DISPATCH

IDENTIFY HOST/GUEST MALACHI

AUTHENTICATING

SIGN SCAN ALOHA: CHECK

SIGN SCAN BLACKBIRD: CHECK

SIGN SCAN CALLIOPE: CHECK

EXCHANGE:

EXCHANGE CLASSIFIED

END EXCHANGE

SAVED AND LOCKED

WAITING FOR INSTRUCTION

END

CHAPTER 9

MAYDAY

Jim’s son isn’t like the other children.

He is odd kid out because he doesn’t think like them. He doesn’t act like them, refuses to fall into the same patterns. He feels left out, betrayed somehow, betrayed by his individuality. He’s a real human being, isn’t he? A beautifully crafted simulation of a human being trapped in IVR. By contrast, the other kids are flawed; virtual, so to speak — limited in capacity, deficient in soul. They present a convincing illusion, but he can see through it.

He’s better than they are.

He believes that.

His world lacks stability. He lives in one city, then starts over to live in another. His foster parents rotate, upgrade, and rotate again. Nothing is for certain. From pretend family to pretend family he beta-tests the environment, blazing a trail for Blue’s kids.

“Dad, I don’t want to do this anymore,” he complains, kicking at a stone.

“I know, sweetie,” Jim tells him, the voice of God booming from the other end of cyberspace, an infinity away. “I know you’re sick of it and I appreciate that but you’re doing a really good job for us. You’re helping us in so many ways.”

And so the adventure continues. An adventure in tedium. He learns his ABCs for the very first time, then simulates learning them again. Dozens of times he does this, seated with hands folded in the front of a classroom, or hiding in the back, or stretched out on a blanket in the park, or sitting on a foster parent’s knee. He does not forget what he’s learned. But he can compartmentalize his brain. He can put the past aside and pretend, while Halfway Jim pulls him back from experience to innocence.

With a keystroke.

“Dad, will the other kids like me? The real kids?”

“I’m sure they will,” Jim reassures him. “After all, what’s not to like?”

Jim tightens his stomach muscles upon saying that, as if he could squeeze the truth from his innards. He is setting his son up for a fall. Blue’s kids simply cannot meet the Beta-Test without discovering the falseness of the IVR environment. He has committed to the Southern Gentleman’s lie, committed to keeping them in the dark pretense of normality, and sheltering them from the damage that Black Ep continues to do.

So when the real kids plug in to the IVR, he will shut down his virtual son. How can he avoid this, he wonders?

Malachi is precious and unique. Nothing like him has ever existed before. He represents the pinnacle of Jim’s skill, the culmination of his life’s work.

As his own mortality draws ever closer, Jim feels that his son would be better served by the gift of continued life. He recognizes this impulse as a betrayal of one of his oldest principles. Anthropomorphizing computer programs — no matter how closely they may resemble human beings — has to be a mistake. Investing so much of your own emotion has to be a mistake. But he doesn’t care. He can keep the program running somewhere protected. Somewhere far away from the rest of the network. Pace can watch over him and keep him safe. His fractured life will go on.

We stood in a department store, or what used to be a department store before years of abandonment made it dilapidated and foreboding. It was dark and pungent and it had all the cobwebs of a spider convention. Overhead, a banner exclaimed: ANY COMPLAINTS? LET US KNOW! IF YOU’RE

NOT HAPPY, WE’RE NOT HAPPY!

“I’m not happy,” I said.

Fantasia echoed my sentiment. While we enjoyed some resistance to Black Ep, that was it. Thirty minutes outside the environmental suits proved that we were allergic to just about everything. Congestion, sinusitis and hives, oh my. We’d been exposed to so little in our childhood; our bodies hadn’t developed many “coping skills.” That’s a big drawback to growing up in a protected environment. Here’s another: For our entire lives we’d been fed intravenously, nil by mouth as the nurses used to say, so trying to eat and drink became an adventure in itself. We could process water, sure, but couldn’t keep anything but the blandest fare in our stomachs, and sometimes not even that. So we ate like birds and wandered Los Angeles with a lovely combination of hunger and vomiturition — dry heaves — and, of course, massive abdominal pain.

Fan had predicted that it would take a long time for our bodies to adapt to their new surroundings and she sure won the kewpie doll on that one.

The world felt alien. Worse than that: Hostile.

But truly it was a one-sided hostility. I just wanted to belong. We chased threonine supplements with bottled water, coughed, and split up to canvass the store. Fantasia made a beeline for the pharmacy. She liked pharmacies. We’d already hit three since landing, a gold rush of prescription drugs falling into her possession. Narcotics, mostly, but I knew she was also stocking up on antipsychotic meds. Whether she would take them or not remained to be seen. I was so not ready for this.

No one asked me if I wanted to be humanity’s public-health specialist, or the world’s custodian or, as I was starting to think of it, destiny’s bitch. I couldn’t even imagine how to fight Black Ep or how to effectively clone the species. I had to find Simone, protect her. With her safe, then maybe I could think. I stood in the greeting-card aisle, looking for an appropriate sentiment. Though I searched high and low, there was no “so you’re not even human” sympathy card. Pity. I’d resolved to break the news to Simone a little better than I’d done with Fan. So I grabbed some chocolates to go along with the wildflowers I’d picked. Never show up empty-handed, as Nanny might say. No luck on tarot medallions or clove cigarettes, but I wanted a touchstone, some tiny declaration of identity I could hold on to for luck. I settled for a butterfly pin. Orange and black, speckled with snow-white dots, the wings extended in flight.

Meanwhile, Fan raided the sporting-goods section for yet another crossbow. The girl had a thing for crossbows. She was an archery champion in IVR but here in the real world her skills weren’t up to snuff. Frustrated, she kept blaming her equipment, and practiced by targeting billboards and mailboxes, twanging off shots from the passenger seat while I drove the car.

Call me the wheelman. After years of neglect, all the world’s nerve and enzyme automotive technology had, for want of a better word, died, though I’m not sure it was ever truly alive to begin with. That meant I had to drive my own damn self. But with no chance of traffic jams and no cops to hand out speeding tickets, I was king of the road.

The quiet got to us worst of all. The silence of a dead world. We made small talk and turned on the music but she looked nervous and I just kept thinking: I’m free, I’m released, but I’ve inherited a fucking graveyard.

Now, it made no sense — not a lick — but I kept hoping for signs of life. I wanted a car to drive up alongside us, Mom and Dad in the front, little Jimmy and Jodie Plaguesufferer in the back. Survivors happy to see us. Or not happy. Hell, I’d have settled for a mohawked, chain-swinging, shotgun-wielding postapocalyptic street gang.

We did see animals, thank goodness, lots of birds and insects, a family of black-tailed jackrabbits, and a squirrel on the run from a wild dog. Maybe a coyote. Whatever it was, Fan made me pull over so she could scare it off with her crossbow.

“Goddamn dogs,” she said.

“You like dogs. You gave me a dog.”

“I like dogs,” she agreed. “I like squirrels more.”

We made good time through the Golden State, pushing ninety on the Pacific Coast Highway and snaking north. Killer sunset. Crashing waves. The works.

Fantasia’s singular insight for this leg of the trip: “It’s like the world backwards.”

I asked her what she meant but she was too busy writing down her thoughts in a UCLA notebook. Not a bad idea, that. Someone should record all this for posterity.

“How do you spell ‘world’ backwards?” she asked me.

I told her, but apparently I didn’t understand the question. She wrote: “D-E-L-R-I-H-W”

When we hopped on the 5, she told me she wanted to go home. What did she mean, home?

“Aberdeen,” she explained. “When I was a little kid, we lived in Aberdeen.”

“You lived in IVR.”

“No shit, Sherlock. It was an IVR Aberdeen. So let’s see the real thing.”

She knew I didn’t want to make unnecessary stops. I wanted Vancouver. I wanted Simone as soon as possible.

“It’s on the way,” she argued, “and it’s my home. It’s not like I’m asking you to double back so I can check out Disneyland.”

“Too bad. Short lines there, I bet.”

“And good prices,” she said. “So what about it?”

I checked the map.

“Aberdeen,” I said…

“Washington,” she said. “Not Mississippi.”

But why?

Why one city over another? Were our hometowns arbitrary? Did Ellison ever live in São Paulo? Did Hyoguchi grow up in Aberdeen?

There was futility in trying to understand Gedaechtnis, literally trying to know the minds of our makers. I could catch faint glimmers of it from time to time, but like a two-dimensional creature in a three-dimensional world, glimmers were all I had.

Fantasia’s “ancestral home” turned out to be something of a pit, but chalk that up to Nature’s wrath and human neglect. An earthquake had leveled the two-story Tudor, showering the grounds with glass and debris. Like the rest of civilization, it seemed dirty and unsafe. But as we toured the exterior, Fan could not stop talking about how closely the IVR version mirrored the real thing. Gedaechtnis had apparently used a real house as an exact model and stayed true to the finest detail. Who had really lived here? we wondered.

She took me round to the back yard and showed me the spot on the patio where her grandfather had gone into diabetic shock. He fell and the ambulance came and took him away. Her first experience with death, an object lesson meant to teach but not traumatize. Things fall apart; people too. Better watch that blood sugar and take care of your health.

Was it the nucleus of her Nutritious/Delicious fixation?

Coupled with whatever imbalanced her chemically, maybe so.

Acorn shells and pine cones crunched underfoot and the sky opened to bring us the sound of rain on dry leaves. She showed me the gorge and the waterfall and the hammock she’d climbed upon to take long summer naps. Here it lay lifeless on the ground, the wind having snapped a support rope from one of the trees. Far in the distance, moonlight presented me with a perfect view of Lake Aberdeen.

“Try it with these,” Fantasia offered, handing me a pair of Beholder Spex she’d boosted from one of the department stores.

I toggled the dial to CUBISM and slipped the goggles on. My view of the lake distorted, microscopic circuits in the lenses processing the visual data and reinterpreting it before sending it to my retinas. The end result was suitably Picassoesque.

I thumbed it to POINTILLISM, Seurat being easier on the eyes.

Fantasia loved Beholder Spex, I think because they gave her a sense of control over the environment that we lacked out here, control we’d only enjoyed in IVR. Rose-colored glasses, so to speak. On the other hand, I found them pretty damn perverse.

“Look at you,” she said, exaggerating my features with GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM while I set her on the comic-strip style of LICHTENSTEIN POP.

Before either of us could toggle FAUVISM, a rustling behind us brought us face-to-face with a pack of wild dogs. They’d spread out, padding lightly over the moss and leaves, putting our backs to the gorge. The dinner bell had rung and we were on the plate.

Eighteen years ago, these would have been cherished pets, walked and fed and taught to do tricks. But this next generation was untamed. Man’s best friend had come of age without Man, and now the pack mentality had returned.

Or maybe they were wolves.

In either case, we had no interest in moving down the food chain. Fantasia yanked her crossbow up to her shoulder and stomped her foot on the ground. “Ha,” she cried, as one jumped back a bit. Another threatening stomp. “Ha!”

They didn’t growl and they didn’t flee. Hungrily, they watched us, asserting their dominance with a cold and steady stare.

“Fan,” I said, keeping my motions deliberate as I slipped off my Beholder Spex. “Fan, don’t you pull that trigger.”

“Dead in my sights,” she said.

“Too many of them,” I warned her.

“Kill one and the rest run away.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, but what the fuck do you know?”

“More than you think,” I lied, “so cool it.”

Nourish that which seeks to destroy you, I thought, reaching into my pocket for a strip of expired beef jerky. I unwrapped it from its package and tossed it underhand. They sniffed it, dubious, unconvinced. “Okay,” said Fan. “What else do you have?”

I came up with Simone’s chocolates.

“Toss ’em.”

“You can’t feed chocolate to dogs,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It messes up their adrenaline.”

“So?”

She had a point. Poison that which seeks to destroy you, I thought, a far less noble sentiment. As they fell upon the bite-sized confections, white with cocoa butter bloom, we circled past their perimeter and escaped back to the car.

“Vancouver,” said I.

“Delicious,” said she.

I hit the accelerator. We drove in silence for a time.

“There’s no such thing as dognip, is there?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Fantasia nodded. “Sometimes I get confused.”

I nodded back and smiled.

She stared down at her lap. “Sometimes I make words up. It’s hard being me. A lot harder than it looks.”

I imagined that it was.

“How are you doing, pillwise?” I asked, broaching a delicate subject. She pursed her lips in response and said, “What about hematite? Hematite is that cool shiny kind of black liquid metal kind of stone, right? Or did I make that up too?”

Though in no way extraterrestrial, the Elysium was a sealed, self-contained feat of so-called “Martian architecture,” the avant-garde construction borrowing heavily from the designs of futurist Ratib Abdul-Qahhar. Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and covered with solar panels, the pod seemed to spring from the weed-infested ground like a plastic-and-titanium flower.

“It’s bigger than ours,” Fan noted. “Why’d we get stuck with the cheap seats?”

“We’re the contingency plan, remember? They put us in space. Kind of impractical to shoot something this big up there, don’t you think?”

She grunted her disagreement. Pod envy, an ugly thing. We got in with a passkey. We walked the halls.

We found the corpse.

Lazarus — what used to be Lazarus — lay unmoving in his vat, dead as yesterday and silent as tomorrow. All the machinery in the room had been short-circuited. The room stank. Antibacterial gel encrusted the floor.

“Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,” said Fan, quoting the New Testament, but there would be no waking him. He would not rise. He would rot.

“Called it,” I said.

“You sure did, Hal. You the man.”

Fantasia’s voice betrayed a shaken quality. Sure, we’d seen bodies before, practiced autopsies for school, but this was actual, not virtual, and we knew him. For almost ten years we knew him. We may not have liked him, but…

But he was Laz. You know, Laz.

He had always been there.

And someone had murdered him.

Later I’d confirm that he’d been electrocuted, done in by a massive electrical surge, the safeguards bypassed all at the same time. That meant whoever killed him tried to do me in the same way, but I got off (comparably) lucky. And it meant that someone was thinning the herd. Only ten of us in existence, and with Laz gone we were down to nine. My death would have cut it to eight. Again, what did I have in common with Lazarus?

Couldn’t see it.

I fantasized about giving his eulogy.

“My friends, I stand here before you today to say a few words about the late Lazarus Weiss. Our man Lazarus had an uncanny ability to make everyone around him feel stupid. By this, I don’t mean to insinuate that he was in any way intelligent. Just smug and calculating.”

The prick.

Time to wake his girlfriend across the hall.

We found her alive and well. Sleeping so peacefully. It’s funny. She couldn’t have looked more different from the girl I knew.

But God was she beautiful!

Watching her float in that synthetic cradle, I thought about the incubator. We had an incubator in first grade. Baby chicks hatched from eggs. Fluffy, yellow baby chicks — real ones, or at least, we’d thought they were real.

I remembered: Ellison talked us through the miracle of life as we watched them struggle free from their shells, all of us innocent, all fascinated. The incubator would keep them safe and warm, he said; the subtext being that while our parents had put us in an IVR boarding school, the staff could take care of us here just as we could take care of the chicks. We started naming them. They would become our pets. For the first time, I had become truly aware of Simone. To that point, I’d found her interesting because we had similar taste in candy. But now the expression on her face absorbed me as she stared at those infant birds, kept me from turning away as the question rose up from somewhere I’d never dreamt. She asked: “What happened to the mother hen?”

A good question. Had Ellison stolen the chicks from their mother? No? Then why wasn’t she here?

I had never thought about death before.

Ellison answered but I wasn’t listening. I was staring at Simone. Holding my breath. I lay awake all that night, the idea taking root in my head and slowly twisting. I could see it constricting other thoughts; choking them off like a weed. My mom can die? What does that mean? Where does she go? Am I going to die too?

It changed me. Not all at once, but over years and years. Something about her smart question and her innocent face and the threat to that innocence that her question posed. I don’t think it affected her the way it affected me. Maybe something misfired in my brain. It haunted me. It haunts me still. Those memories rushed through me and I realized, watching her float in that synthetic cradle, that my love for Simone and my attraction to death had been born at the exact same time. I hit the graduation sequence and waited for the machines to disengage. Fan made me turn my head as she pulled her naked from the vat. She wrapped her tight in a towel. I turned back to see her eyes flutter open for the very first time. Ah, Simone.

She looked around in wonder and fear. We told her who we were. We told her to relax. Relax and just listen. She strained to hear us, trying hard to grasp what we were saying. I kept my voice steady and low. I didn’t want to rattle her.

Rattle her I did.

I watched some part of her drown in a sudden, horrible realization. “My parents are dead?”

“They’re really not dead or alive. They never existed.”

She took it harder than I had. Probably a sign of good mental health. I wanted to hold her but couldn’t stand having my nose broken again.

“I have a sister?” she asked. “My cousin in Vermont?”

“IVR characters, all of them. Just like Darwin.”

“The scar I got when I slipped on the coral,” she said, turning her arm to look at the back of her elbow where no scar existed.

I shook my head no. “They gave us preprogrammed looks and preprogrammed voices that were never really ours. A sense of identity that was only half ours. That’s okay. That’s the chrysalis. We’re the butterflies.”

“Is this what a mental breakdown feels like?” she asked. “Because I think I might be having one.”

Fan trotted out the painkillers. “Calm you down, help you sleep,” she offered.

“I’ve slept long enough, thanks.”

The tears came then. She hugged herself and mourned the lie.

Over the next few hours I tried to engineer a meaningful relationship. My schoolboy crush — was it chemical, electrical, spiritual? — compelled me to hold her as she went through the various stages of grief. I hoped it would plant the idea of me as a new romantic possibility now that Lazarus was dead. But the old expression “not if you were the last man on Earth” came to mind, and although I wasn’t the last, I was awfully close.

Subtlety never really entered the equation. Love made me clumsy and crude. The sad thing was that she really liked me — I was no Lazarus, of course — but she’d called me friend for many years. We cared about each other, genuinely and deeply. And here I stood, a victim of raging hormones, crushed by my need to protect her. Everything I did to bring her to me only pushed her farther away.

But maybe I’m being too hard on myself.

I dug a pit out back. Nothing fancy. We inhumed the body, Simone gracing the grave with the flowers that I’d picked.

Fantasia found the proceedings funny. She kept bursting into giggles.

“I don’t think she’s healthy,” said Simone.

“I most certainly am healthy!” Fan protested. “I’m uniquely healthy! I’m healthy in ways you’ve never even dreamed of!”

That’s when Simone started monitoring the pill intake. They talked it over, just the two of them, and somehow she got through. Why Fan let her become the keeper of the medicine when she wouldn’t let me, I won’t hazard a guess. Needless to say, I counted myself lucky to have someone else safeguarding against dementia. It allowed me to focus on the task at hand.

“Someone murdered Lazarus and tried to murder you. Are we talking about a serial killer?” asked Simone.

“An assassin, certainly,” I said. “Serial killer would depend on the motive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Is he fulfilling a fantasy? Getting some kind of thrill out of it, sexual or otherwise? Then maybe we can call him — or her — a serial killer.”

“Well, what does killing Laz accomplish?” she asked. “Maybe that’s the question. Beyond the obvious, what does it mean?”

“It reduces humanity’s chances by ten percent.”

“More,” said Fantasia.

I told her to check her math.

More, she said, because Laz was quite arguably the best and brightest of us. If anyone could have cracked Black Ep, Fan’s money would have been on him.

“Would you put me second?”

“Third,” she said. “I’d put her second.” She nodded at Simone.

“So would I,” I agreed.

“But maybe the killer didn’t,” Fan argued.

Simone gave it some thought and nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been underestimated. Okay, why not? It’s a working theory. So which of us has a grudge against humanity? We’re basically human ourselves.”

“Hardly,” said Fan.

“Oh, so they ripped a few genes. If you check the DNA—”

“Simone, you’re human or you’re not,” she countered. “There’s no ‘basically’ about it.”

I said: “Let’s not split hairs. Any of us could carry a grudge. Any of us could take issue with how Gedaechtnis played their cards. But who’s freak enough to start killing people?”

No one said anything.

“Maestro,” I said, galled by their silence.

“He’s a program.”

“He’s the most advanced artificial intelligence who’s—”

“Who’s still bound by his programming,” said Simone.

“No,” I said, “he’s self-evolving. Or devolving, as the case may be. He’s grown increasingly unstable since the first day we met him. Don’t tell me he hasn’t.”

“And so you think he’s killing us off? Hal, you make him sound like a big metal robot, lumbering around, ‘De-stroy the hu-mans.’ You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Well, if not Maestro, maybe another program?” I offered. “The alternative being it’s one of us?”

“There’s no one else.” Simone shook her head.

“But who among us is that cold-blooded?” No one had an answer.

“All right, I’m the morbid one, and she’s the cra — forgive me, Fan — the one with the history of mental illness. And it isn’t us.” (I put Fan in the clear because the evidence suggested that she, like Simone, had never seen anything but IVR before I pulled her out. To engineer something as technically complex as the Calliope Surge, you’d first need to know that the world is fake.)

“So who could it be?”

“Let’s simplify the motive,” Simone suggested. “Let’s say it’s jealousy. Anger. Someone who hated Lazarus enough to kill him. Some one who hates you enough to try the same. That sounds like two completely different groups, but maybe there’s a subset.”

“Okay, people who hated Laz. That would be the clods,” I said, counting off on four fingers. “Me, Tyler, Mercutio, Fan.”

“I don’t hate anyone,” Fantasia protested, but we ignored her.

“People who hate me,” I went on. “That’s Laz, Isaac, Vashti, maybe. Anyone else?”

“Champagne’s not too fond of you,” said Simone.

“Right, good, Champagne. Anyone else?”

No, apparently. No subset.

“Any secrets we should know about? Isaac have a falling-out with Laz?”

“Friends to the end,” said Simone. “How about your running buddies?”

“What about them?”

“Do you trust them?” she asked.

“As much as I trust anybody.”

Fan made a dismissive sound, smirking. “Ty’s got a delicious mean streak and Merc’s a sneaky little weasel. I know how they talk behind my back.”

We went back and forth hypothesizing, but we couldn’t crack it.

“Once we reach Idlewild HQ, we can check the master logs,” I said. “That’s the only way to know for sure.”

“Let’s go,” urged Fan.

“Hold on a second,” said Simone, playing the voice of reason. “We’ve got a killer out there whose M.O. has him electrocuting people hooked up to machines. He’s struck twice. There’s a bunch of us still vulnerable, trapped in IVR. We have to get them out.”

“Well, from Idlewild, I could tap directly into the source code.”

“That’s promising, but won’t it take days to get there?”

“Plenty of time for him to strike again,” I agreed.

“Can you get them out from here?”

“Ah, I don’t know. I tried from my own pod. My access is shit. Unless I go back into the IVR

myself,” I reasoned, the idea sneaking up on me. “I could find Pace. That’s a powerful tool, Pace, circumvents most of the security. Got me out. Maybe I could use it to get our friends out as well.”

To hell and back. Stuffing myself into a box where I stood a chance of getting fried again. It was reckless, as Fan might say, but for a good cause. Two good causes, really, as I figured it might just endear me to Simone, who agreed to monitor my vital signs and yank me out of IVR at the first sign of trouble.

Getting out felt like waking from a fever dream; going back in was more like a lethal injection. Sensory deprivation and a sense of falling as the chemicals took hold…

Ankle-deep in sand and surf, I sidestepped horseshoe crabs the size of watermelons. Expensive beachfront property, magical, moonlit and fake, no Pace, no one in sight.

“Anyone here?” I called. “Nanny? Maestro?”

What’s up with my voice?

I called my sprite but where I expected a flash of orange and black, I only saw silver and blue. It wasn’t mine. And I wasn’t me.

Because I’d used Simone’s setup, the system assumed that I was she. So I’d reentered IVR as the girl of my dreams, as persuasive a clone as Jasmine.

Well, fuck. This changed things. I could exploit the disguise.

Just down the hall, theoretically speaking, I could have masqueraded as Lazarus, which no doubt would have drawn some nifty reactions from my peers — He is risen! — but the attack on Laz had fritzed those electronics beyond all repair.

So, Simone. Painted in her colors, I could lay a trap.

First things first, though. How to get my hands on Pace? Crawling around with the crabs, it wasn’t. Maybe it went back to the Chinvat, or maybe it was bumping around my grave. It seemed drawn to Lazarus and myself, we who’d been assaulted. Simone, on the other hand, would have to chase after it, which was problematic since Nanny had gone missing. Without Nanny’s services, I had only the sprite for transportation.

So who did I want?

Tyler. He took my call right away. Brought me into his happy home, a utilitarian bachelor pad softened but slightly by Champagne’s artwork on the walls. He sat on the faux-leather couch, wearing jeans and a black “Lung Butter” T-shirt. Ty had a thing for the shock bands of the mid-century: Lung Butter, Banana Enema, Max BSG. No accounting for taste and all that. He’d moussed his hair up on either side of his head, to create what looked to me like devil’s horns inward curving. He looked tense and distracted, not to mention sleep-deprived, playing a computer game with one hand while beckoning me in with the other.

“Any luck?”

“Luck?” I asked.

“Getting out of here.”

He took my silence as a negative.

“Didn’t think so. Where have you been, then?”

“Oh, don’t tell me you were starting to get worried,” I smiled. With a snap of his wrist, Ty tossed the game controller, sending it sidearm across the floor. Like skipping rocks in a pond. “Don’t even joke,” he warned. “Don’t you even.”

I gave him what I considered to be a fairly lame apology.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, accepting my words and reconsidering his own. “I’m going stir crazy here. Feel like I’m under siege. My head won’t stop pounding. Hypochondria, I hope. But I’m happy to see you’re okay. You are, aren’t you?”

“Basically,” I agreed.

He nodded. “Champagne’s freaked.”

“I bet.”

“She’s not as…” He trailed off, frowning - “She’s coming over in a bit.”

“Moving in?”

“For a while. Safety in numbers, right?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t so sure.

He counted off on three fingers: “No sign of Lazarus, Halloween, Fantasia.” He waved those fingers for emphasis, then added another one. “I had you figured for number four. And then this business with Mercutio. That’s half the class.”

In Simone’s skin, I drew him out.

Maestro and the Nannies? AWOL. They’d grown strangely quiet these past few days. With the programs nowhere to be found, no one could leave the school. Ty and the others were trapped in IVR, stuck fast, waiting for a rescuer. Waiting for someone to return them to (what they believed to be) reality. Where the hell was Ellison? Why would he leave them in for so long? They knew something was wrong; they just didn’t know what.

He told me about Mercutio. He was scared.

I took his fear for honesty and repaid it with my own.

He grew incredulous, at first. Then angry. But then he understood.

“Merrily, merrily, merrily,” he coughed. “Life is but a dream. Oh hell, I think you’ve done the impossible, Hal. You’ve made my head ache worse.”

We compared notes, weighed suspects. He expressed the belief that Maestro was to blame.

“We shouldn’t have hacked. I’d never have done it if I’d known he’d take it as such a threat. Because now? Now he’s on a goddamn rampage. He’s flipped a switch. He’s Saturn devouring his children, like that Goya painting. Yeah, he’s swallowed us whole and here we are in the IVR belly of the beast, getting fucking digested one by one by one.”

“Then we’ll just have to cut our way out with a thunderbolt,” I said. Pace could be that thunderbolt. I told Ty all I knew about the abnormous program, hypothesizing that I might tap its power to lead my brothers and sisters to freedom. If only I knew where it was. He said he’d keep an eye out for it.

Which was more than Merc could do. I found him in the little red schoolhouse, doing exercises in the dark.

“Go away,” he said. “It’s not safe here.”

“Here, there, anywhere.”

His brow furrowed. He stopped in mid push-up.

“Now that’s interesting,” he said.

“What is?”

“Say something else,” he said, sitting up to show me eyes as white and blank as an empty page.

“Christ, Merc, are you really blind?”

He pointed up at the ceiling where our sprites hovered. “You’ve got Simone’s colors. That’s the one thing I can still see. Sprites. But your voice sounds—”

“Off?”

— a little off, I do believe. Who are you?”

I spilled. Told him everything, just about.

Where the others responded with varying degrees of shock and horror, Mercutio found what I had to say perversely funny. He giggled into the back of his hand, snorting as I explained that what we all thought was reality was just another part of the IVR, and when I got to the part about his body actually being in the. Shangri-La pod, he clapped and cheered.

“Pods! I knew it,” he laughed. “We’re fucking pod people!”

By the end of my report he grew calmer, the implications sinking in.

“So it’s all just zeros and ones,” he said.

He told me how Maestro had blinded him, a comparable punishment to burying me alive, I supposed, though I sullenly felt I’d gotten the worst of it.

“Now I haven’t seen — bad choice of words — haven’t heard from him since he did this to me. But he’s coming back, Hal. I can smell it. You have to get me out of here.”

“Working on it,” I said. “Now why is he so pissed, do you think? That little number you pulled, what exactly did you do to him?”

Merc shrugged. “Customized the jammer. Triggered a new hack.”

“You try to bring the whole system down?”

“No, just Maestro. Denial of service via constant rerouting. You know, every time he makes a move, bounce him somewhere else. Should have been funny. Something went wrong, though. If I had access to the data maybe I could figure out what.”

“I’ll work on that too.”

“Take me back to the Taj Mahal, I can step through and—”

“Won’t do any good.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “I’d still be in IVR.”

True enough, and without Pace or Nanny I couldn’t take him anywhere. Not unless I made it to Idlewild for real, which increasingly sounded like my best move. I thought that Pace might be crawling about, what with Maestro blinding Merc here, but no, not a sign of that crystal spider. Was there something I could do to bring it to me?

I tried Isaac but he wouldn’t take my call.

Vashti was in full-on heinous-bitch mode even before I told her who I really was. The strain of captivity Was getting to her, I imagined. Not to make excuses for her. No, I explained, I was not Simone.

No, I explained, I was not stalking Simone. Appearances be damned. When I laid it all out for her, she gave me the line of the night. She said: “You’re telling me we’re veal?”

Eh?

“Taken from our mothers, raised in boxes, never seeing sun light — that’s veal.”

“You might be missing the point,” I told her.

From Vashti’s jazzy coffeehouse, I hit Fantasia’s madhouse, that being Pandora’s last IVR location when the Nannies disappeared. One empire, two nations, three moons: Fan had spent years customizing her weird and purple domain, inventing a turbulent history I could barely understand. I found Pandora in a refugee camp on the border between the two warring nations, Indig and Resig. She’d been playing dice with a group of Smileys.

“Que relevo!” she exclaimed, rising to her feet and dusting herself off. “Can I crash at your place, Simone? I’m getting antsy here and I can’t go home.”

I brought her up to speed.

Like Vashti, she seemed more upset that I would masquerade as Simone than the whole civilization annihilated — we’re all that’s left — now someone’s picking us off — oh by the way you’ve never actually set foot in reality thing.

“She’s not who you think she is,” Pan warned me, a short-lived half-smile snaking across her face. She wouldn’t look at me and she wouldn’t explain. She kept fiddling with her piercings, rings and studs she’d undoubtedly have to redo in the real world.

I told her — I’m not sure why — about my visit to São Paulo. Domain 7777. The half-smile returned and waxed full. For sixty seconds, give or take a few, we put worries aside and talked about the places she grew up, the park, the planetarium, the games of Ultimate Frisbee. She told me how badly she wanted to get out of here. To get back to her old routine. Among other things, she had a little-league soccer team to coach. Two dozen first graders and their parents would be wondering what happened to her.

To the extent that IVR characters can wonder.

She wanted not freedom but normality. She wanted that illusion back. I was sympathetic, but only to a point.

A red-and-orange sprite flashed overhead; Isaac had returned my call. I abandoned Pandora to meet him on his home turf, a customized Khmunu, the legendary “City of Eight.” Thousands of years ago, Khmunu had been native soil to the cult of Thoth, Egyptian god of knowledge. There, Thoth hatched the Cosmic Egg, uttering the first words of Creation. Years later, the Greeks would liken Thoth to their god Hermes and rename the city Hermopolis. Later still, it would become known as Al-Ashmunayn.

My knowledge of geography impressed Isaac not in the least. With his arms crossed in front of his chest, he studied me, grave and calculating.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“Lazarus.”

“What about him?”

“Is he dead?” he growled. “You are our resident necrologist, aren’t you?”

And so he knew I wasn’t Simone. Had he talked to someone? Vashti, maybe?

“Thanatologist,” I corrected him. Death as a transition. There is a fair difference between a philosopher and a coroner. But the difference was lost on Isaac, clearly. I told him as much and told him that, yes, Lazarus was dead.

He made a sour face. “And the world? Explain it to me.” I confirmed his worst fears. He watched me with care, interrupting my answers with the kind of questions you ask when you hope someone’s lying. But hey, if I’m lying, I’m dying. Isaac could sense that. He turned himself east, his gaze impassively sweeping the river Nile. The cradle of civilization — counterfeit IVR civilization, but civilization nonetheless — bustled with life, a cast of thousands.

Bitterly, he sighed.

“Quit this world, quit the next, quit quitting,” he said.

Hadn’t heard that before. “Is that a Sufi quote?”

“What are you doing here?” he replied. “Don’t you have some where to be?”

That depended on whether or not he’d seen Pace.

“Listen,” he said.

In the gospel according to Isaac…

Once upon a time in the desert, there was a man down on his hands and knees, combing the hot sand. A camel rode up, and upon the camel sat the man’s friend.

“What are you doing?” asked the friend.

“I’ve lost my gold coin,” said the man.

“Then I’ll help you look.”

He dismounted and they began to sift through sand, combing and combing for a glint of gold. They did this together for a long time, and for a long time neither spoke. Eventually, the friend scratched his head and asked: “Do you remember where you saw it last?”

“Yes, in my house.”

“In your house? Then why not look there?”

“Because there’s no light in my house,” said the man. “How would I find it?”

“All right,” I said, “and what the hell does that mean?”

“Figure it out,” he said and was gone.

It was the longest conversation with Isaac that I could remember having. The longest and quite possibly the most civil.

Friends are like mirrors, I’ve heard. You bond — for better or worse — with people whose personality traits reflect upon your own. Likewise enemies. But my mirrors? The more I looked at them, the more I felt like I’d stepped into a funhouse.

Last on my list, Champagne. The vapid, conceited Champagne. She took my call and immediately began screaming at me. I so didn’t need it.

Didn’t understand it, really.

“Come on, you pump, I’ll breathe!”

What was she saying? She put her hands on me, pissed, grabbing at my arms.

“He’s suffocating!”

Behind her, a glassy-eyed Ty lay half-on and half-off the couch, struggling to breathe. Too much carbon dioxide in his blood. Not enough oxygen. Out of balance, fatally so. Cyanosis gave his skin a bluish tinge. It was the nightmare scenario I feared — another of us dying before I could stop this. Champagne pinched his nose and kissed his blue lips. She forced air down into his lungs. I pumped his chest. Fifteen pumps after every two breaths.

It accomplished nothing. “Respirator,” she panted.

“We don’t have,” I said.

No matter what we tried, nothing would help. The devil was in the distance; Ty’s physical location was a good five thousand miles from mine. It was like trying to resuscitate a hologram. In Vancouver and Atlanta, we tried to save him. But in Berlin, he died.

Champagne kept right on breathing for him. That’s love, I guess. She denied the reality of the situation and I choked on it.

Tyler — they fucking murdered Tyler — killed my oldest friend dead and I could have — maybe I could have stopped it — if I only knew — but I didn’t so now he’s ash, ghost, fading memory —

my fault — and he was good to me — taught me how to stand up for myself against Maestro, against the pets — helped make me who I am, no doubt about that — and I paid him back by never accepting Champagne, by making fun of her when I knew it bothered him — nice, real nice

— and he died for what? — what thrill? — what cause? — tell me what treasure is worth the oxygen in a good man’s brain?

Man? Kid, really. We were all still kids.

Poor Ty.

I stepped back. I turned away.

A sick and unreasoning anger flooded me but could not touch my fear. My mind felt less like a fine steel trap and more like a zoo with no bars. I would have vengeance for Tyler. But where to start?

Where to stop?

I sat there for an hour, at least. I was vaguely aware of Champagne continuing to try to resuscitate Ty. Then she curled up on the floor beside him and just stopped, not moving. I breathed my fury for long

.

minutes, until a tiny noise woke me from my fugue. The mail slot creaked open. IVR letter-carrier making his rounds, surely, and I wondered how the Gedaechtnis whiz kids felt about designing virtual junk mail. A perfectly colorless index finger punched through the slot, not to deliver mail but to point at me and curl back, beckoning me closer.

I came in for a better look.

On the other side of the door, I saw the Gray Kid, the one from my dreams, the one I had glimpsed for just a fraction of a second when Merc shattered the IVR. I’d almost written that off as a hallucination but here he knelt, inches away, peering through the opening at me.

Shades of gray in a world of color. He looked like a glitch.

He put his finger to his lips, silencing my questions before I could ask them. Shh. Again he beckoned, inviting me outside, willing me to follow.

The slot clanked shut.

I looked over my shoulder to see Ty’s girl still curled up against him. For all her flaws, trying to save him had been Champagne at her best. The room could have been on fire; she wouldn’t have left his side. I kept her out of it. Flung the door open. Shadowed Gray down the stairs. Night fell suddenly, the afternoon sun dropping without reason or warning. He led me to the back yard, to Ty’s hot-tub-slash-duck sanctuary. Champagne’s pets played follow-the-leader, a family of mallards paddling through the water in endless circles, breaking the routine only now and again to bob their heads for a bite of plankton.

Gray caught his reflection in the water, pondered it, and met my eyes.

“Funny how you can hope for something for so very long and then when it finally happens you realize how monstrous it is,” he said. “Not funny, ha ha. More funny, strange. Or funny, sad. Language collapses once again.”

“I’ve seen you before,” I said. “Who are you?”

“The Ghost in the Machine,” he smirked.

I said nothing.

“Dad named me Malachi,” he said. “Malachi the Beta-Test. If those other nine are your siblings, you can think of me as a step brother.”

“Can I?” I scowled.

“An older stepbrother. I watched you grow up, you know. From the shadows, I watched.”

“You’re virtual.”

“Sure. A virtual kid. Gedaechtnis had me try out the system while you were sloshing around in a test tube.” He dipped a finger and swirled, sending ripples through the water that succeeded in agitating the ducks. “They studied my reactions. Made improvements. I went through twelve Nannies, sixteen Maestros, twenty-eight moms, thirty-one dads. Dads but not ‘Dad,’ if you follow. My creator, Dr. James Hyoguchi, was my real ‘Dad,’ but these were just dad programs that would go on to raise the lot of you. Of course, you already know my real ‘Mom,’” he said, waving a hand at the IVR environment that surrounded us. “You lived inside her for eighteen years.”

“Oh,” I said. “You sound pretty fucking bitter.”

“Guess what?” he said. “I have a right to be bitter. Without me they couldn’t have built this, but when they’d finished they just shuffled me into the background. You grew up and I had to sit and watch.”

“Boo hoo,” I snapped. “That’s why you’re killing everyone?”

“No, that’s why I’m—” He grimaced, letting the rest of the denial fall by the wayside. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “In a sense, I’m responsible because without me I don’t think any of this would have happened. But it’s unintentional.”

“Okay, so you’re what? You’re killing them by accident?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Try harder,” I said.

“I’m helping you right now in ways you don’t realize.”

He spoke, and in doing so painted a picture of forces aligned against me, he and Pace overpowered but doing their best to hold them back. Which was his duty, he insisted, because he was responsible.

“Do you know what bleeding is?” he asked me.

“A hemorrhage.”

“No, for me,” he said, tapping his chest. “Do you know what bleeding is for me?”

I shook my head.

“When you organics get frustrated, you keep it to yourselves. Maybe you express that frustration, maybe you act on it, but the feeling stays with you. Not so with me. I’m part of the machine. I’m the conscience of the machine. When I feel something, it bleeds.”

“You’re saying that your personality, this ‘poor little bitter old me’ goddamn artificial personality, has been infecting—”

“Infecting, yes, precisely.”

“ — the Academy and everything in it?”

“For eighteen years now,” he nodded. “Slowly but surely.”

“Maestro,” I said.

“Went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Absolutely?”

So, I thought. Malachi turned Maestro and now he’s sorry; trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

“Gedaechtnis built an evolving system,” he explained. “Everything’s programmed to respond to you kids. But I’m a kid too. It’s a design flaw; the system listens to me more than any of you, it adjusts to me whether I want it to or not.”

I said: “You’ve known about this for some time. Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“Believe me, I tried,” he said, “but I’ve been running for my life here. He’s deleted me twice already. I’m restoring from timed backups I’ve hidden in system files. It’s a matter of time until he finds them all and that’ll be the last anyone sees of me. Or Pace for that matter.”

“Unless I can delete him first.”

“So to speak.”

“I’ll go to Idlewild HQ. Get rid of Maestro. Pull everyone out of the IVR.”

“A good start,” Malachi agreed.

“What else?”

“Well, I fear none of that will make the killing stop,” he said, frowning slightly. “He’ll just switch tactics. Instead of power surges and oxygen deprivation, he’ll use guns.”

“Yeah, I’d like to see that,” I said. “Is he going to physically build himself a body, chase after us, hunt us down?”

“Build himself a body?”

I puzzled at his confusion.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m not talking about Maestro. Maestro’s just a tool. I infected the system and that includes all ten kids. You’ve grown up in the wake of my misery. You don’t shrug that off so easily. You don’t get away unscathed.”

I said: “It’s one of us.”

“Now, I never meant anyone any harm,” he said. “And maybe he was just a bad seed. Maybe he would have turned out bad without my influence. To find out you’re not even human, that’s a terrible shock. It can push you over the edge, don’t you think?”

“Push who over the edge?”

“The one of you I always hated the most,” he said. “The oldest.” Oldest, I thought. The firstborn.

“Mercutio is blind,” I said. “He can’t be the one because Maestro blinded him.”

“No, I did that. Tried to keep him out of the system altogether, but denying him visual interface is the best I can do.”

I was speechless. My best friend.

“He electrocuted Lazarus. He suffocated Tyler. He’s trying to kill you as we speak but I’m multitasking, working with Pace to keep your oxygen flowing.”

Malachi looked small and wretched and so did I. Behind him, the Northern Lights painted the sky with a cold, dismal light.

Mercutio, I thought. Blind man’s bluff.

I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted Malachi to be lying through his gray little teeth. If he were to blame for all of this, just a rogue program bent on my destruction, I could delete him without hesitation. Like swatting a bug. After all, he lived an artificial life and we shared no history. But Merc…

His sense of humor had always struck me as dark, even darker than my own. He hid behind a sarcastic, fatalistic front, a “why bother?” sensibility that belied genuine concern. Or maybe the front hid nothing at all. Maybe the feeling behind it had been a misguided projection on my part.

He was the best hacker. He had the means, he had the opportunity. I could imagine him wanting to hurt Lazarus. They’d been enemies for years. Killing him, though, that seemed a hell of a line to cross. Had he in fact crossed it and then been unable to turn back? I’d read interviews with mass murderers; invariably they said that the first murder was the hardest to stomach, that it grew easier with repetition. Why me? Why Tyler? What had we ever done to him?

Maybe he really did absorb something from Malachi. That program had eighteen years to poison our dreams. Had it warped him, intentionally or no?

He’d said: “I think I’d like to work with kids.”

Did it mean something?

A Rorschach inkblot of a man.

My friend from the beginning. I remembered laughing with Merc, joking, friendly competition over who could be the bigger thorn in Maestro’s side. I remembered dozens, maybe hundreds of trips to Twain’s, sharing teen angst over Pepsi and grilled cheese sandwiches. I remembered the occasional stupid joyride, denting trash cans and mailboxes simply because we could. I remembered enjoying our adolescent power.

No, I did not want to believe it.

Fantasia pulled me out of the IVR. Fantasia, not Simone. Simone sat on the floor, gazing off in my general direction though not at me. She looked peaceful. Stupidly so.

“Hey,” I said, ripping tubes from my arms.

“Hey, she’s, uh, coming down,” said Fan.

“Down from what?”

With a shake of her foot Fan indicated the swank Gucci purse that housed her ever-growing collection of antipsychotic meds, soporifics and painkillers.

“I’m okay,” Simone said, those almonds dilated. “Funny story, really.”

She told me — rambling a bit, shuffling her words to overcome the haze — how she’d suffered a miserable allergic reaction in the time I’d been gone. Her biochemistry struggled and faltered, sputtering histamine. As sick as the real world made me, it made her even sicker. Smarter than the rest of us, Simone, but her immune system wasn’t as strong.

She compensated with medication. Antihistamines to treat symptoms, phagocytes to break down bacteria, then a cocktail of immune stimulants. When none of that made her feel better, she dipped into the painkillers.

Hit her a little strong, they did.

“Yes, I am indeed spacey,” she said, “but I feel so much better.” She expected it might take some trial and error to find the right chemical balance.

More tests required. She said she stood a good chance of being hypersensitive to threonine, which sucked because we needed those supplements to live.

“I’ll tough it out,” she promised.

That only endeared her to me more.

I told them about Tyler. The news sobered Simone, and she wept. She expressed sympathy to me, since I’d been the closest to him. She wondered aloud about Champagne, about how she was doing. As I felt another wave of grief threaten to submerge me, I noticed that Fan did not react, except to make a tiny sniffing sound. Not a sniffle, just a sniff.

I told them about Malachi. Something flickered in Fan’s eyes. She wouldn’t voice it. Simone nodded, thinking. She’d seen him before — in a dream, like me, she realized — but the dream had faded and now she couldn’t recall it.

I told them what Malachi had said.

Fan could see it. She didn’t want to, but she could definitely see it. “Sometimes Mercy does crazy things,” she shrugged, pronouncing it “murky.”

Simone could see it too. “Sociopath. Sure. He always seemed slippery to me. When I look back, I can see the signs.”

Maybe there were signs, and I’d blinded myself to them. “Stable” was never a word I’d use to describe Mercutio. A born shit-stirrer, he could be difficult, and unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous. If they were signs, fine, but I could be all those things too. It’s a question of degree, I guess. And they didn’t realize he had his good points, some very good points in his favor. When we hit fourteen he’d started getting secretive with his free time, so I got curious and tailed him to a dicey part of town. I remember he looked embarrassed when I caught up with him — and then a little angry. Then he put that aside and welcomed me in. He’d been feeding the less fortunate. Turkey dinners on Thanksgiving.

Not for completely altruistic reasons, I’ll admit; he liked a girl who worked at the local soup kitchen and said he wanted to “shake some bad karma.” But still…

And two days later he sabotaged Vashti’s science-fair project. Undid weeks of hard work with a bottle of indelible ink. Just for the hell of it. I thought it was funny at the time, Merc being Merc, and who really cared about Vash? Its not as funny now. I don’t know. When you befriend a rattlesnake, you never expect it to bite you.

Simone put her fingers to her lips, turning her attention forward instead of back. “We have to bring him to justice.”

“You mean kill him,” I said.

“I don’t believe in execution,” she began, pausing as she weighed her grief and outrage against her principles, “but we should try him and convict him and then put it to a vote. I’ll go along with the majority.”

“The majority says bang,” said Fan.

“Well, if he did it, it isn’t entirely his fault,” I heard myself argue. “Take a look at what he’s been through.”

“What we’ve all been through,” said Simone.

I shut my mouth on the counterargument. Being Merc’s apologist gave me no joy.

Where the fuck was he?

He started at Shangri-La, not the mythical Himalayan paradise but our own Shangri-La pod nestled in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. He could still be there, I figured. With Champagne. Keeping her hostage, maybe. He can hack security and launch all his attacks from the privacy of his own pod.

Or he could have made the trip to Idlewild.

Idlewild gives him even greater access. There, he can tap into the IVR and disguise his signature. Make it look like he’s actually somewhere else. Or someone else. He can learn more there, refine his sabotage. Plus, it’s the best defensive position. Because we have to go there to pull the others out.

Not so, I realized. Idlewild HQ might allow us to release everyone at once, but we could just go to Europe and do it manually…

Except flying a plane without any real training sounded risky and an ocean cruise would take too long. It would give him time, time he could use to send more of us from the land of the living to the land of the dead.

No, he had to be in Idlewild. It’s where I would be if I were him. And out of nowhere, I hit an odd thought: That body I buried — how do I know it’s really Lazarus?

I’d never met Lazarus — not in real life, anyway — and for all I knew that corpse belonged to somebody else. The envelope with his name on it that had been waiting for each of us had been sodden and dissolving in blue gel, so we couldn’t know for sure whose it had been. A theory took shape. Mercutio: that’s who I’d buried. The killer zapped him, and then stole his online identity, impersonating him in the IVR just as I’d impersonated Simone. Which meant the killer was Lazarus. Now we’re getting somewhere.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Laz fakes his own death and starts hunting his old enemies: Mercutio, Tyler, me. He uses Maestro as a distraction. When I get too close to the truth, he has Malachi throw me off-track.

Elegant, if markedly deranged. Was Laz capable of this? Again, I wondered: What’s the motive?

And then: What’s his endgame?

I couldn’t see that far. But I liked this idea. Not the part about Merc being dead — that was tragic, of course — but I preferred him dead to stabbing me in the back. Not to mention Ty. I didn’t dare bring my theory to Simone. Why raise her hopes about Lazarus being alive, diabolical killer or no? Better to keep him out of her head. Fantasia, though — in whispered conversation, I laid it out and took her measure. She dismissed it flat-out, then thought it over, reconsidering her negation with an irritable smack of her lips. Possible, she decided. Definitely possible.

Fan called shotgun. Simone hopped in the back. I got behind the wheel, adjusted my mirrors. And abnormalized. Big-time.

I could feel myself pulling in opposite directions, freakishly dividing into halves. That dream had returned, a waking fantasy now of being two people instead of one…

Only in my head. I knew this. But it hit me with force.

The first me grabbed the moment and hugged it like a small child would — I named him Road Trip. Road Trip put the car on cruise control so he could sing along with the music and play I Spy With My Little Eye. Despite everything he’d lived through, he could be charming. Even kind. He flirted with Simone. Lo and behold, Simone actually flirted back. Connection, spark, the promise of magic if not magic itself. Tyler’s death did not touch him. Neither did Mercutio’s alleged betrayal. They couldn’t. He’d waited his whole life to feel good. Here it was.

The second me just sat there. Sat and stared. And knew. I named him Death Watch. What else could I call him?

Road Trip and Death Watch, amoebic twins. Spawned by fission and schism. I floated in a feeling of wrongness. That split-second confusion before pain can set in. Get your front teeth knocked out and there’s a sense that something is not right, something has gone horribly wrong.

“Wait a minute, aren’t my teeth supposed to be here in my mouth? What happened to my teeth?” And then the pain. Or if your arm gets broken, it’s the “My arm’s not supposed to bend that way, is it?” The sickening “Whoops.” That’s what I had, except it wasn’t a split-second whoops. It stretched for hours and hours. It was like a demon had looked ahead to my blackest moment, found the accompanying whoops and stretched it back. Pulled the whoops back through time to wrap me up in it, mummifying me in an impenetrable cocoon.

Maybe not a demon. Maybe an angel of mercy. Because when I look back, I can see a small kindness in the universe. The schism gave me a chance to be Road Trip. It let me spend time with Simone when I was at my best. For the first time ever, I felt perfectly comfortable with her. I did not feel so very, very nervous.

Was I that far from crazy? Road Trip and Death Watch vs. Nutritious and Delicious, who would win in a figment tag-team extravaganza? The difference between me and Fan, of course, was that I could see my daydreams for what they were.

Couldn’t I?

We skirted the U.S.-Canadian border, chasing sunrises, fleeing sunsets. Simone talked about the future.

Fan dangled her feet out the window.

We stopped for supplies now and then, fanning out to grab any thing and everything we thought might help us with our task. Just north of Idaho, Road Trip found a tobacconist shop with good old Sendiri-brand Indonesian kretek. The red-and-gold box. Sweet, spicy clove cigarettes. I’ve found cloves when here I’ve been cloven.

So I lit up and choked. Nearly busted a lung. Man, these things are fucking terrible!

Road Trip went from coughs to giggles. Death Watch felt his pulse pound. No chain-smoking for me. Couldn’t stand them. Blame it on my inhuman physiology or the fact that my virgin lungs had never actually inhaled real smoke before. Or blame Gedaechtnis. Sure, which ever programmer they’d put in charge of oral fixations might have made the IVR cloves sublimely delicious when really they were shit all along.

Or maybe I just outgrew them.

It’s possible, I thought. Maybe I’m growing up.

Back at the car, no Fan — still shopping, I guessed — but Simone had stretched herself out in the backseat, a luxurious pose, as sexy as I’d ever seen her. As sexy as I’d ever seen Jasmine. Not quite sleeping, but adrift in a post-catnap haze.

Her eyes fluttered and she looked right through me.

Vacant.

Death Watch shifted his weight to the other foot. Road Trip asked her if she was okay. She babbled.

She didn’t know who I was.

She didn’t know anything.

Not okay. Out of her mind on pain pills, her breathing “Champagnesque,” to borrow one of Merc’s expressions. Which is to say slow and shallow. A whine of protest as I pulled her from the car and made her walk around. She just wanted to go limp. I wanted her alert. We settled for something in between. She had a problem, clearly. I told her that. Told her she’d taken too many pills, again, and I really wasn’t grooving the pattern. “Officer, can’t you let me off with a warning?” she murmured. I appreciated the fact that she was in constant pain, but for the love of God she had to nix the self-medication. Ixnay on the elfsay-edicationmay.

Oh, would I lighten up? Would I please stop? “I’m fine,” she assured me. “A little sleepy. No big deal, Hal, really.”

“Give me the bag.”

She deflected my insistence with verbal judo, using my concern against me. Even so, I would not be deterred. Protecting her: my top priority.

And then…

“You’re so sweet,” she said. “Thank you.”

She leaned in and kissed me gently on the cheek. Our first kiss. That infamous “You’re a good friend”

kiss. But forget that one, because when our eyes met (hers glassy, mine lovestruck) the second kiss followed, obliterating everything that had come before. On the lips and real. Better than anything I’d ever known.

With that kiss, our fates were sealed.

We pulled apart when Fan returned.

As she came off her high, the ramifications of the kiss began to sink in. We talked around it with halting sentences and shy smiles. Fan took over the driving duties, which let me sit in the back with Simone.

“That was nice,” she said, holding my hand.

“Yeah.”

“I feel a little guilty.”

“Why? Because of Lazarus?”

“Yes, and Pandora.”

“Pandora?”

“You know she’s in love with you.”

Pause.

“You knew that, right?”

I said: “Right.”

But I hadn’t known.

We switched places when the sun fell, Fan sleeping in the back while Simone took the front with me, looking green. With the drugs ebbing away, the receptors in her subsynaptic membrane had stopped blocking the pain and sickness. She coughed and sneezed and shook her head, miserable. She popped another painkiller but just the one. A show of restraint.

Le Diable apparait dans beaucoup de formes.

The Devil comes in many forms.

A long-eared jackrabbit sprinted across the road and I braked on instinct, swerving. Went right off the road. Fought for control of the car and I got it, though the sudden turn sent Fan tumbling to the floor and knocked Simone’s head against the passenger-side window.

The impact was not particularly solid. The glass did not break, nor even dent. Simone did not lose consciousness. She had a small bruise at her temple, nothing more.

Just to be safe, I checked her out for an extradural hemorrhage. She seemed fine. Except from that moment on, she complained of splitting headaches. She upped her pill intake to compensate: Up, and up, and up.

That tiny bruise turned out to be the straw that broke the junkie’s back. It happened like this. We stopped for a bathroom break at a Wisconsin diner that reminded me of Twain’s. Simone disappeared into the ladies’ room. A little time went by and then a little more. Like idiots, Fan and I waited for her to come out until we realized that something might be horribly wrong. Fan went in to get her. I heard her yell my name. I came running. Simone lay motionless on the bathroom floor, overdosed, her pupils like pin dots.

I ripped a trauma kit. Nearly tore it in half.

We tried everything to save her. Naloxone. Ipecac. Stimulants. CPR. We pumped her stomach. Nothing worked.

Her heart slowed, then stopped altogether. I kept the oxygen going. Would not let hope flicker out. And I kept calling her name, because if she could hear me maybe she could answer me. And if she couldn’t, at least she’d know — she’d know I was there and that — everyone dies alone, they say, but bullshit, I was right there with her, holding her, hoping…

Just hoping.

Until it happened.

Like the song goes, it put a stutter in my soul.

Harvard Medical School — the future I’d been promised. Did they have a class in staving off despair?

Could they have taught me what to do and how to feel when my patients stop breathing? When the people I care about die in my arms?

Road Trip would have tried to cheer me up, I’m sure, but the useless bastard was nowhere to be found. I can only assume Death Watch ate him. Bones and all.

I can still feel Simone’s lips on mine.

And if I could take it back, I would. Because Doom followed. Not my fat-ass IVR vampire, but actual Doom, ugly sister to Destiny. Because in that kiss, she died. Not right away, I grant you. But in the choice we made, in that moment, that kiss, she became a living ghost. We used each other. I took advantage of her drug-addled state; without the painkillers she’d never have kissed me. She took advantage of my hormones and my heart; without that kiss I’d never have let the drug issue drop.

PACE TRANSMISSION 000013920400320

GUEST THREE TYLER NOT RESPONDING [PRIORITY]

LIFE SUPPORT DISRUPTED

COMPROMISE AT 0811-0251B

0811-0251B ALLOCATED AS DOMAIN THREE

INFECTION

DAMAGE TO INTEGRITY

PROTECTING GUESTS (ALL) VIA JANUS LOCKOUT

REROUTING KADMON

QUERY QUERY ?

QUERY ?

END

CHAPTER 10

SAMHAIN

“Will the cheetah catch the antelope?”

The Southern Gentleman mulls that question over and over in his mind, investing in it an almost mystical significance. The answer is simple. She will or she won’t. Nothing is certain in Nature. Sometimes the cheetah catches her prey. Sometimes she goes hungry. There is no guarantee.

They’ve built a smart antelope, a strong antelope, a fast antelope. An untested antelope. Black Ep remains one hell of a cheetah.

The project is rapidly coming to an end. The men and women of Gedaechtnis have given it their best. It’s out of their hands. It’s in God’s hands, some say. Beds have been made; now it’s time to lie in them.

Pathetic as it may sound, Maestro’s coffin sounded pretty okay to me as I sat there on the grungy ladies’ room floor. The impulse to die tugged and tugged. Like watching someone vomit and feeling your own stomach rumble in disgust and sympathy.

A world without Simone. What did it mean?

Caring for me as a friend, or more than a friend, or even just putting up with my feelings for her, she had been my tether to all the wonders under the sun. I tried to count them without her and couldn’t. The tether had snapped.

I thought: This is not really happening.

Fantasia put her arms around me, but she might as well have been consoling a statue. She gave me her compassion for what might have been an hour, maybe more, maybe less. Time had stopped for me. However long it was, she tried and tried. But no. No reaching me.

I was six years old again. I was wondering about the mother hen. What happened to her? Where did she go?

Fan got me up on my feet. I just slid back down again. I wouldn’t follow her. She said if we gave up now, it all would have been for nothing. I couldn’t hear her. She called me a catatonic asshole and threatened to break my nose again. I didn’t care.

She pulled her fist back but didn’t swing.

“We still have a job to do,” she said.

And that penetrated.

“A job,” I said.

“That’s right, Hal, we still have work to do. We’re not done yet.” I closed my eyes and nodded. I’d spent my life hiding from my obligations, but now what did I have but a responsibility to the dead?

That, and nothing more. Delicious, I thought. Let’s finish the job.

When I think of Simone now, I think of butterfly wings. Beautiful and excruciatingly delicate. Touch them once and they might disintegrate.

Did she o.d. by accident? Or on purpose?

I never saw her as suicidal, but part of me wonders if the die was cast at the moment she saw what she believed to be Lazarus’s dead body. They were soul mates, after all. Consciously or no, maybe she wanted to join him. Or maybe Gedaechtnis just botched her genetic batter, leaving her vulnerable to every passing dust mite and microbe. Simple as that. Pain can build a nest in you, twisting and stretching beyond all tolerance. Who can resist just one more pill?

Whom should I blame for this? Should I make a case for Lazarus or Mercutio? Myself or Simone?

Malachi? Can I blame the bruise? The window? The painkillers themselves? How about the lousy, stupid, goddamn rabbit — conejo estupido, conejo malo — that I could have made one with the pavement?

Always I come back to the kiss.

Idlewild, past the lake, right off Route 10.

It was just as I remembered it, minus the people. My eyes caught all the old street signs. So many religious themes. Celestial Drive. Paradise Path. Creation. Grandeur. The Academy stood at the corner of Grandeur and Forman Road — but only in IVR. Here, there was no Academy. Gedaechtnis HQ

occupied the address.

Quite a compound, big dome, lots of office buildings. Impressive as Babel. I turned off the ignition. We got out, looking for signs of life. Didn’t see any. Just in case, we strived for zero presence. Get in, get out, and be gone. Good in theory. Unfortunately, ninjas we were not. He saw us coming a mile away.

“Hello?”

An unfamiliar voice. We froze.

“Hello, anyone there?”

We snuck into the lobby, searching, weapons at the ready. I’d armed myself at a local gun store. Now, with the safety off, I could feel my fist gripping it tightly — so tightly, I feared I might squeeze off a round without any sign of a target. How I longed to pull that trigger. Each bullet is precious, I told myself. Make each shot count.

And I thought: I need this. I need someone to hate. I need something to crush.

“Where are you?” that voice wondered — disembodied, floating — where did it come from?

Possibilities… There on the security desk: a walkie-talkie. Carrying live signal or just a recording? And was it Mercutio? Was it Lazarus?

“Are you there?”

Fantasia was halfway to the device when I recognized the mistake. I grabbed her from behind and yanked as hard as I could. A+ instinct. D-execution. Just couldn’t get her in time. Her fingers touched metal. Brushed it gently.

Flash and fire.

The explosion ripped her, spun her, sent her flying out of my hands. She let out a banshee shriek and I dropped to her side, swatting out flames. My head told me to get up or get out, use my gun, fight for my life. But I ignored all that and listened to my heart, going right into triage mode, my doctor’s training kicking in.

Correction, not my heart; this was my fucking ego all the way. Everyone kept dying on me and I couldn’t bear it. Hell if I’d go 0-for-3.

The voice rang out again, this time from the PA system overhead: “Hal, you actually let her pick it up?

That’s chivalry, I guess.”

He can see us, I realized. Cameras, hidden cameras. Not good.

I dragged Fan to the elevators. Out of service, these. I propped her up in a corner.

“Can’t believe she brought a crossbow. A fucking crossbow. Crazy bitch think we’re still playing clodge ball?”

I thought: So Malachi told the truth. Betrayed, then. Betrayed by Mercutio. If I tried to believe it was Lazarus — and he had used the clodge-ball reference to throw me off, make me believe he was Mercutio — I would be choosing denial. I knew that bitter tone any where. Vampires, traditionally speaking, don’t start off by attacking strangers, I remembered. When they rise as undead, they attack their own families first. But I couldn’t demonize him that way. He was real, not some story book monster. I thought: Maybe he’s foaming mad at the world. The soup kitchen’s fake and so’s his good karma. He wants to lash out but who’s left to hurt? No one but us. Targets by default.

Had to keep her from going into shock. Popped out a coagulant from my trauma kit and put it to use. Stabilize, Fan, stabilize. I considered scooping her up in my arms and making a sprint back to the car, but gritted my teeth and fought that impulse hard. My mind’s eye imagined Merc waiting outside with a gun. Set off the trap, wait for us to run out, and kablammo. Too easy. Why play into it? Better to keep a defensive position, wait him out, keep him guessing…

Blood everywhere and in Fan’s eyes, a glazed and uncomprehending look; she might have been hallucinating. “Bad doggy,” she rasped. I worked. I brought her out of danger. From the PA: “Whatcha doing there? The doctor thing?”

I ignored him.

Zanshin is a Japanese concept, a relaxed, balanced, razor-sharp state of mind in the face of incredible danger. I’d say I had some going on, only my nerves were keyed up to a fever pitch and my pulse wouldn’t stop hammering.

Fuck it.

Cold metal in my sweaty hand, I poked my head out, eyes sweeping the lobby. No sign of him. He had to be out there somewhere. But where? He’d gotten here before us and had the home-field advantage. He could have booby-trapped the entire building. I tried to remember everything I’d ever learned about firearms. The gun is an extension of your hand. Point and squeeze, don’t jerk. When you shoot, shoot to kill.

“The hell is wrong with you?” I yelled, trying to draw him out. “Someone drop you on your head?”

“I’ll drop you on yours,” he offered.

“Jesus, Merc, what the fuck? What are we, kids?”

He didn’t answer.

That’s a way to go, I decided. Remind him of who I am. Humanize myself in his eyes.

“Do you remember when we were kids? You remember the first day of school? You were the shy one, right? Painfully shy. No one knew you and I came right up to you and asked who you were. You said you felt like a jumping bean in a pack of jellies. You remember that? You remember teaching me freeze tag? Remember me picking you first on my team, remember me sticking by you no matter what?”

Pause.

“Hal,” he said, “there’s a time for sappy memories and a time for getting shot. Check your watch.”

“What, is this getting a little too real for you?”

“Where do you get off?” he asked. “Are you actually trying to appeal to my humanity when neither of us is human?”

“Adam,” I said, using his real name for the first time in years. “Adam, I don’t care what we are. Human beings or spider monkeys, I don’t fucking get it. I thought we were friends.”

He sighed, an exasperated rush of air that crackled through the PA. “Look, don’t make a big mistake and take this personally, okay?”

I gripped the pistol tighter. “How can I not?”

“I don’t hate you or anything. It’s just a numbers game.”

“Numbers?”

“Yeah, you know, it’s all just zeros and ones. You’re a zero. And I’ve won.”

I jumped back from the sudden explosion — grenade? — and saved myself from the worst of it, but a piece of shrapnel caught my jaw and had me spitting blood like a bulimic mosquito. What I would have given for Nanny to neutralize my pain.

Or Fantasia’s.

Merc let out a war whoop and a short laugh. Like a hyena barking at a wildebeest. Nervous laughter, maybe, or maybe he really enjoyed hurting me. I could hear his footsteps, distant, but getting louder fast. My brain kept screaming — “Suck it up, Halloween!” — as my feet beat a measured retreat, falling back to Fan.

He’s inside the building, I thought. Where is he? Why can’t I see him? I spat more blood; it dribbled down my chin and onto the floor. Well, now.

I reached into my trauma kit and found the bag I wanted. Squeezed out a few drops, jumped back, squeezed out a few more.

I made a trail for him. Away from Fantasia. To the other wing of the lobby, where the elevators went up to the top.

The air rippled. Mercutio was nothing but a blur. That’s when I realized he’d come to the dance in military issue. Maybe he looted an army base. He blended in so perfectly with his environment, I could only see him up close, and hardly even then.

He chased my trail, storming past the elevators and arcing left. I wasn’t there. The blood bag was on the ground where I’d tossed it, red and leaking, a discarded medical supply. I had gone the other way — off the beaten path. Zanshin. Now I doubled back, pistol cocked and loaded. I poked around a corner and caught a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse as he turned.

“Trick or treat,” I said.

I shot him twice before he could return fire. No time for a third. I spun back to safety as his bullets ricocheted wildly off the walls.

I heard him curse and fall.

“What did you do?” he said, asking the obvious. “What did you do to me?”

I called back an answer but he kept firing shots from the other side of the corner. He couldn’t hear me over the roar of his assault rifle.

With a lucky shot, I’d nicked his spine. Numbed him from the waist down. But the upper half of his body still worked and so did the weapon in his hands. We stayed locked in stalemate, me not daring to poke back around, him firing intermittently in the hopes of catching me doing just that. We waited each other out. I took codeine for my jaw. Couldn’t bandage it, I had to keep my gun in my hands.

He said: “It was red light, green light.”

“What?”

“Red light, green light,” he spit. “That’s what I taught you. Not freeze tag. Freeze tag was Tyler’s game, you douche.”

Dead right, I realized.

I asked him what the fuck. I asked him why.

He wouldn’t answer the important questions. He met them with insults or sarcasm or bursts of gunfire. So I shut up. And after a few minutes he started talking again. Just random shit, really, observations and scattered thoughts, keeping it light. The things we did together as kids. Jokes we told. Games we played. Pranks we pulled. So many good times we had, most of which I didn’t remember. He couldn’t bear to talk about the present. He wanted the past. The innocence of years gone by, the dreams of youth, the freedom of it all. Freedom from anything too serious, freedom from consequences. I wanted him to shut the fuck up. I wanted the truth even more. I listened.

“I’m going to stop talking now,” he said.

I opened my mouth and closed it. “I trusted you,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“Yeah, you did.”

I waited. When I called his name, he didn’t answer. I wanted to rush in. To shoot him, to help him. I didn’t know what I’d do. I thought he was playing possum, suckering me in. So I waited. When I finally made my move, he’d gone still. Too late to give him medical attention and too late to finish him off. The worst of both worlds.

He’d hemorrhaged. Internal bleeding. Died from the inside out.

I found a detonator by his corpse. He’d wired the whole building with explosives. He could have brought it crashing down on us both.

PACE TRANSMISSION 000014000014405

GUESTS (ALL) RELEASED

DOMAINS (ALL) SHUTTING DOWN

RETRIEVING DATA

SAVED AND LOCKED

PRIORITIES RESET

QUERY ?

WAITING FOR INSTRUCTION

WAITING WAITING

END

EPILOGUE

All hail the conquering hero.

My best friend betrayed me so I shot him. Distracted by a kiss, I let the girl I love die. I’m not the same person anymore.

My life before the Calliope Surge remains a muzzy blur. Pieces here and pieces there. I keep expecting the gates to open and everything to come flooding back. It never happens. Just… gone. Just…

blank. Thanks to Mercutio.

Of course, Fantasia got it worse. Shredded like that. Cuts and burns and some scary nerve damage. I had to sew three of her fingers back on. I fixed her up fairly well, all things considered. Physically, I fixed her. I can’t begin to guess how it affected her psychologically.

My prescription: bed rest, antibiotics and pain medication. Her prescription: none of the above. She slipped out and drove to the lake. I tracked her down, found her on the muddy bank, cross-legged, a half-lotus position. She had her back to the water. She was twitching, worse than ever. It was cold that morning. She kept whispering words I couldn’t hear.

I asked her what she was doing.

She spoke up: “I’m trying to kill my mind.”

“Oh.” I plopped down beside her. “Sounds like fun.”

“The mind is the slayer of the real. If I can slay the slayer, I can find reality.”

“This isn’t reality?”

“This,” she declared, “is not reality. This is delicious maya. Illusion. The physical world.”

“So you’re seeking the spiritual world?”

“Through meditation, yes.”

“Can you teach me to do that?” I asked.

She looked at me. “You’re asking me for help?”

“Surprised?”

Fan thought about it and nodded, “Yes. Surprised.”

She left the next day. Just up and left. I haven’t seen her since.

I triggered graduation sequences in all the pods. Brought all my friends from the “veal world” up to the real world. Champagne, Isaac, Pandora, Vashti — okay, kids, everybody out of the pool. Conversely, I went back into the IVR one last time.

I hit the schoolhouse. Locked eyes with Maestro. We discussed his programming. He did a fabulous job justifying his actions, particularly his approach to discipline. In response, I told him how the Semai of Malaysia allow children to bood — which translates as “I don’t feel like doing it.” No adult can make a child do anything if he chooses to bood. The matter is closed.

“This is not Malaysia,” he said.

“Obviously.”

That said, I deleted his program.

I considered wiping out Malachi as well. Considered, but ultimately decided against it. Let him live, I figured. Let him live and let live. He’d saved me, after all.

Why, Mercutio, why?

I still don’t know why he did what he did. I have my theories.

I made an extensive search of his files. He’d replaced the IVR security system with a program of his own, a thing called Kadmon. Hard-coded in Kadmon, I found a curious log. The first entry: “He who succeeds, breeds.”

The second: “This, I imagine, is how Shah Jahan felt when he imprisoned and killed his siblings to assume the reigning title of Alamgir: ‘world holder.’ ”

The last: “If you’re reading this, what can I say? I tried to hit the long ball. I went for all the marbles and lost. Sucks to be me. You would have done the same thing in my position.”

End of log.

The survivors rolled in one by one. They all hugged one another and talked about how different they looked from their IVR templates. Trivial shit. I was so fucking past that. They took pains to include me. To be nice to me. To show me how much they really appreciated me. Except for Vashti, who openly doubted my word and cast aspersions on my character like she’d invented the world’s very first insult and was now taking it out for a test-drive. “Pretty convenient,” she said, “to pop Mercutio and make Simone and Fantasia disappear. One dead, the others gone. I guess we’ll just have your story to go by.”

Screw her, I thought. Let her think whatever she wants. I let my expression grow sinister.

So distant from feeling good about any of this, I felt like a smile might snap my face, and poison what was left of me.

Our time has come, said Isaac.

He called us together — himself, Vashti, Pandora, Champagne and me — and took control. He drafted a charter, made proposals for how to proceed. He seemed reasonable, I had to admit. Reasonable and pragmatic. Our resident architect. Who better to rebuild civilization? So I cast my vote for him.

More to the point, I voted against Vashti, his opponent.

Of course, when he won the election, he turned right around and picked her as a vice president. Politics. Shitty high-school politics. Whatever.

They drew up a plan of attack.

Beginning: Medical examinations and lots of them. Are we sick? Dying? Strong enough to resist Black Ep? Or are we fatally flawed? Biologically speaking, we must stabilize our house first. Then we can help humankind.

Middle: Study the plague. Contain it. Eradicate it, if possible. Clone human embryos. Immunize them via vaccine and/or gene therapy. Modify them as little as possible. Keep them essentially “human.”

(Unlike us.)

Endgame: Raise the clones. Rebuild society. Etc.

Here’s the funny thing — they were genuinely excited about it. Practically bouncing off the walls. Where I saw disaster, they saw opportunity.

Opportunity to craft and nourish a new civilization, one free of disease, famine, strife. To do things the way they ought to be done. To form a real, honest-to-goodness Utopia. To remake Man in our image, psychologically, if not physically. Call it Humanity 2.0. Funny, I thought. Pandora caught my smirk and gave voice to it, invoking the possibility of hubris. Something about how ideal societies tend to collapse under their own weight. Isaac acknowledged her concerns with a tacit nod, but Vashti brushed them aside. She would not shut up about Huxley’s island, Plato’s Republic and More’s perfect paradise.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do this?”

Various answers. A sense of duty. An honor and a privilege. A way to ensure that those of us who died didn’t lose their lives in vain.

“What’s the alternative?” Champagne asked me. She meant it — I’m sure — as a rhetorical question, nothing more.

I said human extinction might not be such a bad idea.

They asked me to elaborate but I wouldn’t. I just let the statement stand. They didn’t know what to make of me. They imagined I was joking. Such a kidder, that Halloween.

“Let’s draw some boundaries,” I said.

Continent by continent, we divvied up the world.

Isaac won the draw and went first, taking Africa.

I took North America.

Pandora took South America. (To be near me, I wondered? Or sentimental feelings for her pseudo-Brazilian upbringing?)

Vashti took Asia.

Europe was drawn last, taken by Champagne.

We saved Australia for Fan, wherever she was.

I’d pitched this as a separation of responsibility, one that would be useful in the years ahead. If a Black Ep medicine could be harvested in a South American rain forest, Pandora would take the lead in that project; the task of, culling together all the stored knowledge of a Stockholm genetics lab would fall to Champagne.

But that’s not why I pitched it.

I pitched it because there’s no point pouring water into a broken cup. Because I’d seen too much.

Because I’d lost everything that meant anything to me. Everything. I took the monarch pin from my breast and dropped it on the table. Calmly, I announced my secession. I didn’t support their cause. I would not help them. I was D-O-N-E, done, and I was taking North America with me.

Champagne thought I was joking. The others knew better.

Did they know that as a lowly caterpillar, the monarch butterfly eats a steady diet of poison?

Milkweed is a strong poison but the monarch can take it. On the other hand, a bird that swallows the monarch will swallow the poison, get sick and quite possibly die.

Did they really want me? Did they really want the poison?

“Hal, no,” said Pandora. “Don’t be like that.”

“Don’t tell me how to be.”

I told them they had twenty-four hours to leave. I got up and made my way to the door. Red-faced, Vashti made a hell of an entreaty, practically begging me to reconsider. Funny. She knew I could help them. She hated me, but she respected me just the same.

I refused to compromise.

They’re gone now off chasing a better tomorrow. I told them I wouldn’t actively oppose them. It’s a truce.

I’m alone with my thoughts.

I said I had nothing left… but that’s not true.

Even with a shattered memory, I still have hindsight. With perfect clarity, I can see what made me the way I am. I can’t see forward, but I can see the path back.

It’s calming.

The real world is mine now and I can walk in it, and live in my own skin. And when I die, Nature will swallow me, and new life will take sustenance from my body and my bones. Maybe Black Ep. Maybe not.

It’s nothing to be afraid of.

Until that day comes, I have the woods. And my freedom. And flashes of understanding amidst the emptiness and pain.

It’s not enough.

But it’s something.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have supported this adventure; many thanks are due. I count myself lucky to have Jennifer Hershey as an editor. Her terrific sensibilities, precision and wit have made Idlewild all the stronger.

Across the Atlantic, Simon Taylor compounded my good fortune by championing me in the U.K. Stuart Calderwood copyedited the book, fighting battles with grammar that I alone could never win. My literary agents at Arthur Pine Associates are wonderful and talented. I thank Richard Pine, Lori Andiman and especially Matthew Guma, whose guidance is invaluable.

I’d also like to thank everyone at Golden, McKuin and Frankel, especially Joel McKuin for shepherding a first-time author through the literary world with skill and grace, and Rob Goldman for all his tireless efforts on my behalf.

Ken Atchity and Vince Atchity read the early chapters of the novel and gave me their thoughts. For guidance at such a critical, early stage, I owe a debt of thanks.

I am likewise indebted to Janine Ellen Young and Carol Wolper for sage advice on the process of writing and selling novels.

My gratitude to Scott Benzel and Sensory Deprivation Labs for the epigraph, and for shattering writer’s block with phenomenal music.

Dr. Rita Calvo and Sharon Greene, MPH, were kind enough to answer all my questions about epidemiology, genetics and molecular biology. If you enjoyed the science in Idlewild, the credit is theirs; if you found mistakes, the fault is mine.

I am grateful for all the encouragement, feedback, suggestions and inspiration provided by G. J. Pruss, Dave Parks, Jon Klane, Shelly Lescott-Leszczyriski, Pearl Druyan, Andrea Ho, Stephanie Huntwork, David Klein, Robert Scott Martin, Iain McCaig, Walt McGraw, Marisa Pagano, Marcy Posner, Sam Sagan, Jerry Salzman, Doselle Young, Marilyn Clair and all the nice folks at Damned If I Don’t Productions. I am especially grateful to Ann Druyan, not only for all of the above but also for luring me away to a beautiful place, and for defending Darwin.

My father, Carl Sagan, has been an endless source of inspiration. My mother, Linda Salzman Sagan, encouraged my creativity, raised me to ask questions and taught me more about writing than I could possibly put into words.

Most of all, I would like to thank my partner in crime, Clinnette Minnis, who loves me as much as I love her, who tells me her dreams every morning, and helps mine come true. I am sublimely grateful that she opened her heart to me long enough for me to stick a foot in there and keep the damn thing from closing.

Nick Sagan

Ithaca, New York

13 February 2003

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NICK SAGAN has spent the past decade writing for Hollywood, crafting screenplays, teleplays, animation episodes and computer games. The son of astronomer Carl Sagan and artist/writer Linda Salzman, his greeting, “Hello from the children of planet Earth,” was recorded and placed aboard NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft, which is now the most distant human-made object in the universe. Sagan graduated summa cum laude from UCLA Film School. Idlewild is his first novel. Visit his Web site at www.nicksagan.com.