“Yes, sir.”
The man slumped in the booth, looking almost incoherent, but he roused himself a little as Eadie approached. “Good evening, sir,” she said. “Do you know what you’d like?”
The man’s mouth hung open as he stared at her face. His long, ashen hair had shifted under his cap, revealing a smudge of grease or dirt that made an almost perfect circle on his forehead.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
His eyes widened. “It is you,” he said. “At last. I have been looking forward to meeting you for such a long, long time.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry it took me so long to get to your table, sir. I just clocked in.”
He blinked slowly, pondering her response. “Ah,” he said. “You are a waitress, still. Well, then, General, I would have a cup of Vibrantia, if it pleases you.” The man’s expression never altered and his lips remained mostly still as he spoke, making it seem as though his voice was coming from somewhere or someone else.
Eadie clenched her teeth, trying not to laugh, though his words made her feel as though she was being tickled with a feather along her spine. “I’m sorry, sir. This is a corporate restaurant owned by McGuillian Corporation, so we synthesize only McGuillian patents. We have Synapsate but not Vibrantia. Would that be all right?”
“Of course, General. That would be lovely, if it pleases you.”
“Okay, sir. And my name is Eadie, by the way.”
“Thank you, General Eadie. And, if you like, you may address me as many have lately come to do. I am the Prophet.”
2
Williams household
“You can’t hide in here forever, Sett. And I don’t need to tell you you’re in trouble for leaving the table like that.”
Lawrence had slipped into the elders’ room, hoping no one would choose to follow him. His father opened the door and stepped in. His mother’s dog, ankle-high and snuffling, scooted in with him and he slid it backwards with his foot. “Damned thing,” he grumbled. His father had always hated the dog, found it stupid and filthy. Lawrence’s mother insisted this pet was the ultimate status symbol because it was one of the only remaining wild type animals in the world. Even genetically spliced dogs were rare anymore since it took so many nutrients to maintain them. Lawrence knew his father’s ire arose mostly from the fact that she’d challenged his authority in buying it. The dog jumped over his father’s foot and back into the room, making a little yipping sound. Williams Six made an irritated growling sound and bent down to snatch it by the neck, tossing the dog into the hallway and shutting the door. “I was told cutting its balls off would make it more compliant.”
Lawrence stayed next to his maternal grandmother’s sleep chamber, watching the machines push air in and out of the lungs, the monitors silently tracking a hundred variables. It was similar to his own sleep chamber in many ways, transparent and hyperbaric, but with life-support systems instead of hypnotic light displays and music. All four of his grandparents were here, along with three great-grandparents and a great aunt, providing tremendous tax advantages for the family.
“So many,” he said quietly. “I’ve never even known anyone else with all four incapacitated. Almost everyone still has all their grands and greats.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes,” his father said. “God’s will. Thanks be to Him that we have your Esteemed Uncle Darius. You’re probably the only person you know with a medical doctor in the family.”
Lawrence nodded.
“Sett, I did the best I could for you.”
“Matt Ricker’s company will come in as a full subsidiary, sir,” Lawrence said. “With himself as CEO. That’s eighteen grades above standard entry.”
“That’s not exactly true. Matt comes in all those grades higher, but his father still runs the company until he’s incapacitated. Matt will have a higher grade in the conglomerate right away, but he won’t run his father’s company until much, much later. Just like you, except he gets a little more because he’s bringing more to the table.”
“I’m bringing the greatest gypsum mining company the world has ever known,” Lawrence said.
“True,” his father said. “But RickerResources is one of the wealthiest private companies in the world, Sett. You know that. Matt’s great-great-grandfather was a genius, buying up deeds to those old garbage dumps way back before they were valuable. Now they’re digging it all up, selling it off … Not many companies are doing better as the world runs out of resources, son.”
Lawrence wiped an eye and sniffed, his nostrils filling with the room’s disinfectant smell and the not-quite-disguised odor of slowly decaying flesh. “But you’ve always said Grandpa was a visionary, too, sir … that he came up with new uses for gypsum, like using it as abrasive in toothpaste when silica became too expensive to granulize.”
His father ran a hand along the edge of Nana Catherine’s chamber. “Yes. And we’ve had great gifts from the Lord, too. What a blessing it was when sterile nutrient companies started using gypsum in synthesizers as a source of calcium. Our product is alive! Everyone who has ever eaten from a synthesizer is made partly from our gypsum. But back then we had six functioning mines. Now we’re down to one, and it won’t produce much longer. All McGuillian will get from us is an infrastructure and some damned fine workers. Beyond that, it’s really just some desert real estate, torn inside out.”
He clapped a hand on Lawrence’s shoulder. Though in truth Lawrence’s father was not unusually strong or robust, he gave the impression of being indestructible. It was real power of the economic and political variety that he radiated rather than physical, but for some reason the effect was the same. The hand felt as forceful and unyielding as the heavy equipment the company had in the mines, and briefly Lawrence imagined his shoulder bones crumbling back into the Williams Gypsum chalk from which they’d been grown. “That’s why we have to do this; if we keep the company, what will you be left with? Even the Rickers understand that they’ve got to come under the protection of a larger corporate shell … People say their dumps have been excavated quite deeply already. In business, one must accept reality.”
“Yes, sir.”
The hand dropped from Lawrence’s shoulder. “It’s the way of the world, Sett. The Lord’s will. Leaders are chosen for us, just as the Lord chooses which homes to hit with floods and fires and tornadoes.”
The words stung, though Lawrence realized his father was right. The world was as it was because God willed it so. It was the most basic fact of life, and floods and fires and tornadoes stood as perfect examples. At one time, people had tried to hedge their way out of God’s judgment with insurance. It was an exceedingly complicated form of gambling, with probabilities and premiums and actuarial tables. As the weather had become more violent and unpredictable, the insurance companies had gone bankrupt, one by one, becoming Lost Populaces—whole corporations of unemployed workers wandering together until starvation and disease dissolved their affiliations completely. Their former policyholders found themselves abandoned and unprotected. When disaster struck, they ended up as Departed, scrounging for survival in the Zone. Now everyone realized that only employment within the world’s largest corporations could protect individuals from such devastation. God’s plan would always prevail. There was no escape.
Lawrence nodded, unable to meet his father’s eyes. He let his jaw slacken and turned away. His Nana Catherine’s synthesizer readout showed that her medications had been changed recently; the machine had discovered some new issue with her health. It was strange and sad to know that she was completely non-cognizant. Her brain now served only to store and manipulate government data, thereby earning tax credits for her family. The Rickers’ company was big enough to keep their incapacitated workers in private trust, processing information for their own company’s benefit instead of the state’s.
“Think of it, Sett: What if we were in silica instead of gypsum? We’d be gone, because we couldn’t sell it for what it cost to get it out of the ground. God has sheltered u
s all along. Now God has led you to McGuillian, and you couldn’t find a better reciprocator.”
Lawrence was pleased that his father thought so highly of the company to which the rest of his life was tied. An arrangement of reciprocal duty with a stable and powerful corporation was the best possible assurance of survival and success. All of a worker’s needs—housing, food, education, security, medical care, everything—were met in return for the pledge of only one duty: total dedication to the company.
Lawrence traced a pattern with his fingertip across the chamber’s transparent surface. He looked up at the wall where his mother had hung a picture of Nana Catherine with a tiny Ani on her lap. A vague memory flashed through his mind of Nana smiling down at him when he was very small, but she had come to this room before he was old enough to have actually known her. The synthesizer on the wall beeped, sending a stream of opaque liquid through the lines running to the Dermabsorb packs on her forearms. The readout in the machine’s lower left corner changed, reflecting the monetary debit from her account and credit to that of the supervising medical doctor, his Esteemed Uncle Darius.
“And think of this, Sett,” his father said. “With an instant three-grade advancement, you’ll start eating at the table before Ani. Won’t that be nice?”
“Yes, sir,” Lawrence said. “Thank you for all you have done for me, sir.”
Vacuum, the space between spaces where all moments exist concurrently
Sato Motomichi was alone, bodiless but not gone, frozen in absolute cold and crippled by blinding pain. The isolation was different from being alone on a mountain or by himself in a room. It was the absolute sequestration of having been cut away from all other forms of life, sealed apart from nature’s cycles. Here, time did not exist. There were no hours or days or years to count off.
There was nothing, even, with which he could react. No body to shake in fear at the realization that this could go on forever. No eyes to pour tears, no voice to cry out. Nothing.
A light appeared. Sato filled with euphoria as he realized he was moving toward it—not through his own power, but rather through some pull that was the light’s own. And even that was not quite true; this was not a place and there was no distance here to travel. Time stretched and twisted, seconds becoming infinite, years gently flowing through him as fast as a living eye could blink.
Sato was pure spirit, borne effortlessly through nothingness toward the warm, golden light. It was brighter than any light he had seen in life, and from it emanated a strange, vibrating energy. It passed forcefully through him with the intensity of a hundred suns, yet he felt no urge to turn away or shield himself from it. It was part of him … or rather, he had always been part of it. Small tingling sensations came like thousands of gentle fingers undulating in currents of soothing heat and pleasure.
From each of the innumerable touches came ripples that radiated through him with increasing frequency until they blended together into larger and larger waves. All his senses melted into one as he felt, heard and even tasted the waves of pleasure and light. And sound, too, which he now comprehended was just a different form of touch, like bells of every tone chiming at once without trailing off again. Light was everywhere now, absorbing him as memories of his life drifted in and out of his mind.
And he understood. This was the source of all life. He had come from this energy and he would rejoin it, merging back into that infinite and glorious immensity. The feeling was the divine antithesis of the isolation he had felt before. He was melting into a wholeness the living could never understand.
Suddenly the memory of his suicide blocked out all the new sensations. His mind froze on the image of the wakizashi in his hands, tearing through flesh—his flesh—the body that he had been given by this infinite source.
His motion stopped. The tingling ceased. The light disappeared, shrouded suddenly in cool gray mist. The warmth diminished but did not disappear, instead passing through him now in a twine-thin line from somewhere ahead.
He tried to run, to struggle, to scream, horrified that he would return to the icy, painful darkness and utter isolation—the pure, terrible nothingness of non-existence.
The message was clear as he felt himself tearing his own body apart: He had squandered his connection to the eternal Life Force, and had now to earn his way back to it.
Weight and form returned, and he seemed to be walking upon some surface, though whatever it was remained hidden from view by the swirling vapor. He marched on, following the thin line of warmth. A new understanding bloomed in his mind: He was to be reassigned. His journey was not yet complete. His ritual suicide seemed only moments ago but in truth he had been gone for many centuries. He retained his own identity for a mission, though he knew not what it would be.
An Entry from Eric Basali’s Precious Journal
I’m on the tram again, headed home. I think it’s the longest ride in the entire corporation.
When I close my eyes, this greasy, black, putrid hate boils up from inside, filling my head so I can hardly move. But when I open them to try and pour it all out into this journal, I pay the price. Not only the extraordinary expense of actual paper—it’s worth that—but the social cost of having them all stare at me, even make fun of me sometimes. It’s part of the system: By punishing me for being different, they pressure me to be more like them.
Why doesn’t this job beat them down the way it does me? My responsibilities are the same as theirs: matching applicable regulations to queries. Their days are just as long and tedious as mine, yet they all do just fine.
I had to go drink and watch Traverball with them last night. When I don’t go, they’re merciless the next day. So I drank and drank and drank, until I forgot how miserable my life truly is.
When I got home, Mother was on me at the door, telling me how I had to keep quiet so I didn’t wake my grandparents, which is stupid since they sleep in sealed hyperbaric chambers, so they can’t hear anything at all. I didn’t bother arguing because the topic was irrelevant. She was just venting her own day’s worth of servitude and degradation onto me. “God wants people over eighty-five to get lots of rest, so they’ll still be productive at work the next day,” she said. She kept talking and talking while I took off my shoes: God-this and the-Lord-that; we’re at war against our competitors for our survival; do your duty to the company; and all the rest. Same as always.
Then she told me that Ms. Anders from next door—who happens to outrank Mother and even Grandma but not Grandpa—saw me outside the other day, writing in this notebook. “Even Golden people like us have to avoid the sun, Eric,” my mother said.
“I am Golden, Mother,” I told her. I was too drunk for her to hold me responsible for protocol. “I’ve got magic mildew in my flesh that protects me from sun.”
“Everyone is Golden, Eric,” she said. “The symbiotic fungus in our skins is engineered to secrete blocking enzymes, but you know it can’t protect us from extended exposure. The sun is much too strong. You need to stay healthy or you won’t be able to perform your assigned tasks—”
Then I puked on her floor. (Really, it’s Grandpa’s floor. It’s his company housing assignment, of course; even Mother doesn’t have rank enough for a D-3 housing grade.) Puking felt like dumping some of the misery back on her that she’s been dumping on me my whole life. It was the most satisfying thing I did all day.
Now, after a mere twelve hung-over hours on the job, I’m headed home to Mother again. Lately she’s been on me to “visit” my father. He’s down in that huge corporate brain bank I can’t even see the end of, with so many stinking carcasses I have to wear a gas mask. Brain Trust employees have outnumbered the conscious people on the planet for decades, but how anyone can still consider them “human,” I’ll never know.
The last time I went there and stood next to my dad’s bloated body I was about 14 years old. For some reason I started talking to him, as if he could hear me—as if he was still something more than a component of the company computer
. I told him how lonely and empty my life was, and when I stopped, I saw a tear rolling slowly down his cheek. Just one tear, and then it was gone. I ran away and never went back. I can’t ever go back there.
There’s no one to listen, no one who understands, even a little. At least I have this notebook. It’s the only thing that helps me organize my thoughts, pointless though that effort may be. Without it, consciousness would be excruciating.
Dok Murray’s clinic, a few blocks inside the Zone
“Brian? Can you hear me?” Dok Murray opened Brian’s eye, turning his head toward the light, covering and uncovering the eye with his palm. The pupil did not react. Brian had collapsed to the floor shortly after arriving, and Dok had eventually dragged him over and positioned him to lean against the wall.
“I took the gun and coins out of your hands, Brian,” Dok said. “I’m keeping them safe for you. Don’t know how you made it here with that stuff, running through the streets. Mandatory death sentence if they catch you with a gun, you know.”
Of course it was now Dok in possession of the weapon. His eyes drifted toward the pressure cooker where he had placed it. Dok, the last African-American in the city, as far as he knew, or perhaps the whole world, was now hiding a drug dealer’s handgun. He shuddered and turned back to Brian.
“People say that sometimes talking to a coma patient can bring them back, but I’m running out of stuff to talk about … And I need you back on your feet fast. I want the weapon out of here, you know.” Dok was known for his pacifistic and compassionate nature, though he had lived all his 55 years in loneliness and isolation. Growing up as the only black kid among people who assumed his heritage made him dangerous, he’d spent his childhood hiding indoors, eventually teaching himself naturopathic medicine in his many hours alone.
The Book of Eadie, Volume One of the Seventeen Trilogy Page 3
