Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  “So,” said Dr. Peericks, steepling his hands in that inspectorish way of his, “the two of you are going to be married.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, but seemed to call for a response. I stammered a halting “well, yes,” while Vera, in a much more exuberant vein, said, “Absolutely, as soon as we can!”

  “And your memories have returned,” said Peericks, still registering the rummy skepticism I suppose one has to foster when serving in the position of chief loony-wrangler.

  “They have!” said Vera. “I’m certifiably good-to-go! No more problems. Why, I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from signing my release papers on the spot!”

  “I’d like to run some tests,” said Peericks.

  “You needn’t bother,” said Vera. “Everything’s back to factory specs. Besides, as my fiancé, Rhinnick here can sign me out.”

  I’m fairly familiar with hospice rules — I having been a long-term resident in at least some versions of the Author’s prior work — and I could see what the popsy was driving at. Having been discovered alone, without any memories, Vera had, no doubt, been bunged into the hospice on the director’s own warrant, rather than having been ordered here by a magistrate or other official busybody. In those circs, a family member could sign her out so long as she didn’t pose a danger to self and others. She seemed to have Peericks by the short hairs.

  Peericks didn’t admit defeat. Keen as always to keep his loonies under guard, he threw a spanner into the works.

  “I’d need proof,” he said. “There are forms to be filled out, records to be filed. In a case like this we’d need a copy of your marriage license, for example. As well as official copies of your ID. You arrived without any form of identification. We have to make sure these memories of yours are accurate, that you are who you think you are, and that you really are engaged to Mr. Feynman.”

  “I say,” I said, shoving an oar in. “I can understand you not trusting Vera, because she’s here as an inmate. But surely you can take it from me that—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Feynman. There are rules that must be observed. I’m afraid that, without that marriage license, I can’t release Vera to you. She’ll have to stay with us in the hospice until I say she’s ready to leave.”

  “But dash it,” I said.

  “We’ll get you the marriage license,” said Vera. “And the ID. No problem at all.”

  “We will?” I said.

  “Of course! We’ll just pop over to City Hall. They’ll have the license waiting for us. We registered for it right before my accident.”

  “We did?”

  “We did! So if you’ll just slip me a day pass,” said Vera, addressing Peericks, “we’ll pop right up and pick up all of the papers.”

  Peericks seemed poised to object to this day-pass idea, but Vera wiped the words from his lips by carrying on with her oration.

  “You can see I’m making improvements,” she said, a melting tone entering into her voice. “And you can take Rhinnick’s word that he’ll keep an eye on me while I’m out. He’s a responsible citizen! And we’ll be able to check in at City Hall, pick up copies of my ID and the marriage license, and be back before you know it. I expect I’ll be here in time for supper.”

  And blow me tight if the doctor didn’t agree. Such was the magic of Vera’s personality that, no sooner had the shrimp finished her case for the defence than Peericks had drawn the day pass up, shoved it across his desk, and bid the two of us a safe and happy journey. We were out of his office and making our way for the open spaces before Peericks could say “what, ho!”

  “I can’t believe that worked,” I said, as Vera and self left Detroit Mercy’s grounds and instituted a round of cab-hailing. “I’d have thought Dr. Peericks, as rule-bound a medical blighter as has ever pushed a pill, would have had a bevy of objections ready to shove into the path of your release. How in Abe’s name did you know he’d let you out?”

  “Easy,” said Vera. “I remembered you telling the story of my escape to Ian Brown.”

  “To Ian Brown?” I said, agog.

  “Yes, to Ian Brown,” she said, “sometime next year.” She topped her answer off with a laugh that, while silvery, sounded to me like nails on a chalkboard.

  It occurred to me that, once we’d finish with the “will you, Vera, take this man” business, we’d have to have a talk about all of this scrying into the future and prophesying. It seemed unfair that one member of any marital union should have privileged access to intel from the future. The soothsaying half of the sketch would have the other over a barrel. I mean to say, the prophetic partner could pick and choose what visions to share with her helpmeet, more or less bending him to her will by claiming that she knows, from reliable sources beyond the veil, that ruin and desolation will ensue should the hapless husband have a second martini, spend a night out with his pals, or fail to support some goofy purchase by his bride. The thought that this would be a permanent feature of our happy union made me wince. If I’ve said it before, I don’t mind saying it again: unless managed carefully and shared equally by both parties, television can ruin a marriage.

  Chapter 11

  I wonder if I’ve ever told you about Detroit’s City Hall. It’s an imposing old edifice, surpassing even the most striking buildings to infest the grounds of Detroit University. I believe the thing is listed as one of the four ancient wonders of the world, and the only one featuring toilets and municipal offices. The outer walls of the place, crawling with ivy and heavily gargoyled, rise to a height of thirty metres, give or take a turret or two, and must have kept an army of stonemasons busy for at least couple of centuries.

  We arrived at these outer walls, passed through a series of gates and things, and made our way into the vast, marble-tiled foyer of the building’s north wing, where Vera assured me we’d find personnel able to point us in the direction of marriage licenses and IDs. We presented ourselves to one of those automated screen thingummies that tell you where to go, and it directed us to the fourth floor.

  We made our way to the elevator bay and summoned the machine. On entering the carriage I aimed an eager finger at the button marked 4, but was stopped short of my objective when Vera grabbed my outstretched arm and stayed my hand. She then smiled what I believe is called a wry smile, and, after winking at me, leaned into the speaker mounted on the elevator panel and spoke as follows:

  “Sub-basement nine. R’lyeh.”

  The machine spoke back, repeating the soothsayer’s words without delay. I then perceived that the elevator was travelling downward, into the bowels of Detroit.

  “Sub-basement nine?” I said, bafflement no doubt spreading across my map.

  “Sub-basement nine,” said Vera.

  “And . . . did you say ‘R’lyeh’?”

  “I did say R’lyeh,” said Vera.

  I instituted further inquiries. Hitherto I’d never encountered the word “R’lyeh,” and it seemed to me to be dashed useful, both for conversations with elevators and for getting out of a pinch in a game of Scrabble.

  “But what in Abe’s name does it mean?” I asked.

  “Search me,” said Vera. “It’s the password. You can’t get into sub-basement nine without it.”

  “But why are we heading to sub-basement nine? If my maths check out, that’s about nine sub-basements and four above-ground floors away from marriage licenses and IDs.”

  She laughed another one of those light, silvery laughs, a practice to which she’d become far too addicted.

  “Silly ass,” she said, still laughing, “we’re not here for a marriage license. We’re here to find out what’s going on in sub-basement nine. It’s critical to your quest to find Zeus and save the world. It’s one of the first things I saw when my memories started back: you and me riding an elevator to sub-basement nine in City Hall—”

  “Abe’s drawers!” I said, re
membering. “Oan told me about that while you were out of the room.”

  “While the two of you were busy planning your wedding,” she said, unleashing another of those wry smiles.

  Of course this caught me amidships, but I forced myself to rally. I’d spent a good deal of the time since we had left Detroit Mercy waiting for this particular conversational shoe to drop, as it were, and trying to come up with some scheme for extricating myself from the bouillon. But I’d be dashed if any idea worth the name had presented itself. I mean to say, I couldn’t say anything suggestive of the fact that my engagement to Oan had been a mistake and that the real plan had been to hitch Peericks’s wagon to that of the weird old bird, as such a claim could well fall under the heading of “speaking lightly of a woman’s name,” and wouldn’t be couth. Nor could I tell Vera that my engagement to Vera herself was news to me, and that the Author must have bunged this into my history via edits which were unknown to yours truly, for I didn’t wish to take this young prune’s marital hopes and dash them to the ground. Now that the time had come, and I was caught in Vera’s crosshairs, I gulped like a landed trout and said, “Oh, ah.”

  This didn’t appear to satisfy. Vera just stood there, staring at me, grinning in what seemed to me to be a mischievous fashion.

  “Well, about that marriage to Oan,” I said, still gulping, “No doubt you’ve perceived that there’s been something of a mix-up, what with self appearing to have become affianced to more than one potential bride. That wasn’t the plan, I mean to say. I intend no disrespect to the polyamorous, if that’s the word I want, but Rhinnick Feynman — if he intends to marry at all — intends to be a one-woman man.”

  “Go on,” she said, crossing her arms and leaning back in a manner that seemed about fifty thousand times more relaxed than I could have managed at the time.

  “Well, you see, there are times when one finds oneself overtaken by events. I mean to say, set adrift on the seas of vicissitudes one didn’t precisely see coming.”

  “I see,” said Vera.

  “And these vicissitudes,” I said, orating like nobody’s business, “well, they’ve put me into a spot I should very much like to explain.”

  “It’s all right,” said Vera. “You needn’t bother. You should know I’m—”

  Here she broke off. Not so much because she’d finished what she had to say, but because on the cue “you needn’t bother” the elevator had said, “Sub-basement nine” and opened its doors.

  “Saved by the bell,” said Vera.

  “What bell?” I said.

  “Just an expression.” And so saying, Vera stepped out of the door and into the darkness cloaking what, I’d been given to understand, was sub-basement nine.

  The elevator closed behind us, and the darkness was complete. The air was filled with a low, chest-squeezing “thrumming” sound, like the breathing of a vast engine with a touch of pneumonia. The air chilled me to the bone, as though some penny-pinching miscreant had failed to pay the heating bill. I could have seen my breath had I been able to see anything at all.

  “You go left, I’ll go right,” said Vera. “Grope along the wall and look for a light switch.”

  This I did, and found success a moment later. I flipped the switch and bathed our environs in an eerie, greenish light.

  “Abe’s drawers!” Vera exclaimed through teeth which chattered with the cold, and I couldn’t blame her. For the sight that now confronted us wasn’t anything I ever expected to see, let alone something you’d plan on finding beneath an army of municipal paper pushers and file clerks. What I saw, as the greenish lights flickered on, was a warehouse-sized space filled with row upon row of innumerable metallic, table-like thingummies topped by what appeared to be high-tech torpedo casings, each about seven or eight feet long. Each was thoroughly festooned with lights, wires, panels, and alphanumeric keypads suggesting that, whatever the purpose of these torpedo contraptions, it quite possibly involved science.

  We moved in for closer inspection.

  What I saw sent shivers down the Feynman spine. Well, I mean to say, the spine was already shivering, what with the chill that filled the air. But the shivers now redoubled their efforts. For when we moved toward the nearest torpedo casing, what we learned, unless our eyes deceived us, was that these did not, in fact, encase torpedoes. Each of the eyesores in question contained no weapon, but rather a sleeping human person. One could perceive the face of each slumbering occupant through a transparent, frosted glass-ish panel near the end of each casing.

  Vera wiped the frost from one of these transparent panels and peered within.

  “Gosh!” she said, and I couldn’t blame her. The young shrimp’s frost-wiping actions had revealed that the occupant of the doodad, like the casing itself, was liberally adorned with tubes and wires which seemed to penetrate the skull.

  “Gosh indeed,” I said.

  “They’re dormant,” said Vera. “Some form of cryogenic stasis. Suspended animation. And all of these wires penetrating their skulls — they’re forming relays between each of these . . . these tube things. The people inside them are connected to each other.”

  “Connected?” I asked.

  “At the cerebral level,” she said, her fingers dancing along the keypad of the cryo-whatsit. She paused to examine a readout on the screen. “I think — I think they’re all sharing the same thoughts. Their brains are somehow being . . . I dunno . . . synchronized. All of these people. They’re physically dormant, but their brains are connected, thinking together as one. All part of a single, centrally governed network that extends between all of them.”

  “Like some sort of warehouse-wide-web,” I said, marvelling at the lengths to which scientists will go in pursuit of a grant.

  “Exactly,” said Vera. “They share memories, thoughts, ideas. And look here,” she said, pointing toward a thickish tube that penetrated the side of the cryo-thingummy and continued straight into its occupant’s bean. “These tubes are pumping some kind of solution into their brains. I think it’s — it’s altering their brain chemistry.”

  “Their brain chemistry?”

  “Yes. It’s changing their memories,” she said, still drinking in whatever gobbledygook was being displayed on the infernal machine’s display. “Whoever controls the cerebral network,” she added, tapping her way through a few more screens, “can control what everyone in it thinks. They can . . . well . . . rewire their memories, it seems. Completely change their perceptions of the world. They might even change their personalities.”

  “How in Abe’s name could you know all of that?” I asked. “You can’t have read it all on that screen.”

  “I just know it. It comes naturally. It’s what I told Ian when your gang first came to my shop — I can almost always see what things are for. I think it’s related to my television. As soon as I see any kind of device, I know its purpose. Helps a lot with my repair work.”

  “No doubt,” I said, remembering that the moppet under advisement spent as much time fiddling with machinery as she did perceiving the future. And while I’d never really be fond of the idea of marrying anybody, it occurs to me that, if one absolutely must don the sponge-bag trousers and shuffle up the aisle, one certainly saves something from the wreck by hitching up with a woman who knows her way around an engine.

  “Sarcophagi,” said Vera.

  “Gezundheit,” I said.

  “No, no. These tube things. These cryogenic storage devices. The word ‘sarcophagi’ comes to mind. I’ve no idea where the word comes from, but I think it’s the right word for these devices.”

  “Sarcophagi, eh? I suppose it’s as good as the next word. Certainly mot juster than ‘cryo-thingummies’ or ‘person-freezers.’”

  “Sarcophagi, then,” said Vera, pressing a few more buttons on the one over which we were still hovering. She examined the effects of her button pushing. She tapped
a few letters and numbers onto the keypad, read the response, and came across with a diagnosis. “Whoever put these people into these sarcophagi is giving them new memories. These chemical compounds mirror the changes that take place in the human brain when long-term memories form.”

  “Why in Abe’s name would someone want to do that?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Maybe if I can figure out who’s stored in these things . . . let’s see if I can pull up a name.”

  She instituted a brief stage wait while tapping away on the sarcophagus’s keypad, waited for a response, and then gave something of an excited cry.

  “They’re decamillennials!” she yipped. “I recognize some of the names. Kushim. Harad. Iselle. Tubal-Cain. Fanny!”

  “Fanny?”

  “Short for Tiffany. An ancient name. These are some of the first people to cross the Styx — the first people to find Abe in the barren wastes that formed Detroit. The ones who helped him tame the wild. I’ve read about them in history texts. And there are a lot of other names here that I don’t recognize.”

  “But why in Abe’s name would someone keep a warehouse full of freeze-dried decamillennials?” I said.

  “They have to go somewhere,” said Vera. “I mean, loads of decamillennials go dormant. We learned all about it in school. Their sense of time changes as they get older. Once you’re past about eight or nine thousand years old, any timespan shorter than a few months passes like the blink of an eye. What seems like a year to you might seem like a minute to them. Most of them can’t carry on conversations with younger people — there are only a few anomalies, like Abe, Hammurabi, or Woolbright Punt, who manage to keep the same rate of time-perception as newer arrivals. The rest of them just sort of . . . go to sleep, I suppose. Until today I hadn’t thought about where they went. I certainly didn’t know that any of them were being kept together in a warehouse under City Hall.”