Which makes sense, because Walter Wickliffe was kind of a superhero. He even had an origin story. The film did a good job showing Young Walter recoiling in horror as his dad strangled Walter’s mom in an alcoholic rage, then got shot dead by the cops.
Every film had The Moment when tiny Walter laid a bouquet of dandelions on his mother’s grave – the only flowers he could afford – and young Walter shook his fists at the heavens, proclaiming, “From now on, death will never again take anyone I love!”
The actor playing Walter was good. Most actors ham it up. This guy whispered. He slipped into Wickliffe’s square-shouldered look, a clear-eyed gaze that said, This will not stop me.
Which was cool the first six or seven times.
After that, you start yanking on the doorknob to get out. You know they’re playing this to soften you up before your trial, to get you feeling bad about betraying the system. And I did. I mean, Walter had saved the world. I couldn’t even save my sister.
So I started mocking the show.
There was a lot to mock; post-origin, The Man Who Conquered Death was all downhill. How could it not be? There’s only so many ways you can show a guy perfecting consciousness uploading in a lab. So I started catcalling Walter. “Oh! Yes, Walter, spend some more time sitting at a keyboard, looking intense! Surely that will solve death!”
With nobody else to hear, razzing Walter Wickliffe just felt lame. I wished I had more friends at the orphanage. Why were all my friends online and far away? And shouldn’t someone have come to visit by now? The Time-Out Chamber wasn’t meant to be solitary confinement.
…how badly had I screwed up?
The next stage is a depressive funk where you tune out the show except for the coolest bits. For me, that was always Walter’s showdown with Congress. Even the actor knew better than to try repeating those words. He let the archived recordings roll as Walter testified, telling the world if the United States didn’t acknowledge uploading as a fundamental human right, then he would dismantle his technology:
America thinks that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are fundamental human rights. Well, the Upterlife offers eternal life, boundless liberty, and infinite happiness. Black or white, rich or poor, zealot or atheist; all should pass through, but for the lowliest of criminals. And if you do not allow this, then this country is not free, and these servers are not paradise.
I pumped the fist. Void yeah, Walter. You show ’em.
How many times had I seen this show now? Ten? Twenty? I’d been here for half a day with no food. They should have hauled me before the orphanage board of directors already. I knew the drill, and the fact that it was taking this long to get a hearing meant I was deep in the soup.
I should have let them kill Therapy. She was just a pony. People sacrificed animals for good fortune, right?
How could they look them in those big brown eyes and do that?
A quiet rap at the door.
“Don’t react,” Nadi whispered through the lunch-hole. I didn’t, of course. The ghosts were always watching cells. Cells were where the living did their craziest things – escape attempts, black-market transactions, smearing shit on the walls – which made it prime footage to harvest for Sins of the Flesh.
I was glad to hear a friendly voice, but also disappointed; Nadi was barely ten. Which made sense. The older kids had refused to talk to me ever since the sprinkler incident.
“The cameras out here are still clogged,” she said. The tie dye paint spraying out of every fire sprinkler had turned the walls glorious colors, as I had planned – but they also blotted most of the cameras. The hours my fellow orphans spent being forced to scrub camera lenses with toothbrushes had not improved my standing at the Wickliffe Orphanage.
“Yeah, well, I probably should have done a better job with the pony,” I whispered. I slumped in mock despair by the door, burying my head in my hands so the cameras couldn’t see my lips move.
“Are you as bored as I think?”
“If Beldon came on to give me a lecture, I would listen with rapt attention.”
“Going crazy,” she said. “Got it. Anything I can do?”
“Entertain me?”
“I can’t slip you an earputer; Gumdrool’s watching the feeds.”
Gumdrool was a living kid my age, and Beldon had given him camera access? Letting him view the world through the eyes of the dead? Crazy. Then again, Beldon always had used Gumdrool as his meat-world enforcer.
That explained Dare’s absence, though. If Gumdrool caught Dare trying to talk to me, he’d revoke Dare’s Upterlife trial time – and then Dare couldn’t access his online architecture projects. And Dare needed to prep his building schematics so he’d be ready to audition on Career Day.
“Then do something else,” I begged Nadi. “I’m going crazy in here.”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
“OK. We’ll think of something.”
She vanished. I trembled; this was the longest I’d ever been without Shriving. What if I died? Everything I’d experienced in the last day – meeting Therapy, the hospital chase, my promise to my sister – would vanish like a corrupted file.
What made it into the Upterlife wouldn’t be me.
A stupid fear, I know. Humans forget things all the time. We forget names, the last place we put our wallets, the facts on the test we’ve studied for – and yet we never worry that scoring 86 percent on a test means we’ve become someone 14 percent different. You can’t Shrive at the moment of death – that’s when your brain’s already turning to mush – so you’re always missing a few hours when you arrive. But that’s still you in there.
Worrying about whether the me that uploaded would somehow be different from the me in this cell was one of those dumb moldy-oldie philosophy questions – “What if the color yellow I see isn’t the same color that you see?” We all had moments fretting about that discrepancy – but if my parents’ irresponsibility had taught me anything, it was that you became more you in the Upterlife.
Still, there was a reason the first thing couples did after they got married was to get Shrived. You’d be incomplete without some memories. And what if I lost all of these recent experiences of pony-based excitement and my promises to Izzy? I wouldn’t be me then, would I?
I itched to save my brain to the servers.
Then it occurred to me: maybe they weren’t letting me Shrive because the orphanage was preparing a criminal trial.
I was going to disappear into the void.
Just as I was about to hammer on the door and beg to be uploaded, Nadi whispered: “Think outside the box.”
What the void did that mean? I peered through the lunch-hole, trying to see where Nadi had gone to…
…and the entire wall facing the Time-Out Chamber’s door had been transformed into a penciled mural.
“You kids,” I said, realizing Nadi and her friends must have been up all night while I dozed off in exhaustion. They weren’t good drawings; without computerized curve-correctors and autofills, the best they could do was crooked stick figures. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.
It was also a rerun.
They’d drawn last week’s Transformers episode. Which was, in turn, a remake of an old Transformers I’d watched as a kid. You could expect a remake of your favorite series about every eight years; why should the dead devise new ideas when there were classic episodes waiting to be mined, remixed, and graphically updated?
Someone else shoved a bowl of gruel through the lunch-hole. Good; they didn’t intend to starve me. But I wondered how Izzy was dealing with things, whether Therapy was safe somewhere. I hoped I hadn’t completely fucked my future.
…all should pass through, but for the lowliest of criminals…
And there was Walter, saving the world again. Shut up, Walter.
When I was on the verge of breaking down, I’d peer out the lunch-hole to look at the mural. It made me happy and uncomfortable all at once. Late
r, one of Gumdrool’s Junior LifeGuard painted it over.
Hours later, Nadi crept out again. “You’re still here?” she asked.
“They’re really trying to break me this time.”
“It’s not you – some NeoChristian crazy broke into the school. Took like seven guys to tackle her. They’re trying to figure out what to do with her, and until then we’re all on lockdown. Where’d my mural go?”
“They painted it over.”
“Weird. You mean it didn’t autosave?”
I hid my smile from the cameras. “That’s the real world for you.”
“You want another one? Nora found some pencils in an abandoned building. It’s pretty messed up, drawing on real things. You know how hard it is to draw a straight line when the computer’s not helping?”
“I do, I do. But listen. That picture was… great, but it… it wasn’t you. Can you draw something I’ve never seen?”
“Sure. What shows do you watch?”
“No, no.” I turned around to face her through the lunch-hole, hoping nobody was watching me through the cameras at that moment. “Look, the Transformers are something that other people made. And that’s cool, but it’s not nearly as cool as the things only you can make. So can you show me something only you could think of?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. How about… someone having an adventure? Not in the Upterlife. In real life. Where they… have to fight a mean guy.”
“Like Gumdrool? He took Sarah’s candy once. Said the temptation of hunger made her unfit to serve.”
“Yeah. Have them fighting Gumdrool.” I thought how Gumdrool would react when he saw himself as the enemy in a mural. “But don’t call him Gumdrool. I don’t want you to get into trouble.”
She pursed her lips. “But how…” She sized up the wall like it was a cliff to be climbed. “All right. Only ’cuz the school looked so pretty when the fire alarm went off. It was like splattery rainbows everywhere.”
I smiled. I’d wanted to do something that made people here pay attention to the real world… and I’d done it.
I fell asleep – or tried to. But I heard Nadi and Nora muttering in hushed excitement, trying new things, crossing out stuff and starting over again. Their eagerness fed mine.
“All right.” Nadi’s voice trembled. “I think we’re ready.” A brief debate, then agreement. “OK. Now.”
I looked through the lunch-hole, and saw the majesty of Woman-Pony.
Woman-Pony was a crazy snarl of illegible stick-figures – but that was OK, because Nadi and Nora started explaining it from start to finish, talking over each other’s sentences in their eagerness to explain it all.
Woman-Pony was having a grand adventure in Little Venice, searching for a mean musclebuilder (whatever that was) who’d stolen her candy. Along the way they fought off what were either mutant batflies or tiny dragons – Nadi argued they were batflies, while Nora staunchly insisted upon dragons.
Regardless, they fought either dragons or bats, found a mystical land of orange groves in the sewers and sold the oranges to a snakeman, who gave them a magic sword, which they used to threaten to cut the mean musclebuilder away from the Upterlife and he gave them back their candy.
“The end,” they said. They bowed, then looked shyly to me for approval.
The door smashed me in the face.
“Amichai Damrosch,” said Gumdrool, shaking his head as if he expected better. Behind him, his Junior LifeGuard members – really junior, not a one over thirteen – sniggered and seized the girls.
Gumdrool sighed dramatically as he turned to look at the mural. He was one handsome sonuvabitch, all chiseled chin and piercing blue eyes. He wore a spotless white Junior LifeGuard uniform, a harsh blond buzzcut, and a chest full of medals Beldon had given him. Rumor was, he wore that uniform to bed.
He looked magnificently sorrowful, noble, like a painting.
“Amichai, Amichai,” he muttered, massaging the bridge of his nose. “You’re encouraging young girls to break curfew, risking their Upterlives for… this?” He waved one beefy hand at the mural, wrinkling his nose.
The girls shivered as the younger LifeGuards laughed. “Y’can’t even see what it’s s’posed to be,” one said. The rest tried to pose like the ludicrously unanatomical stick-figures, exchanging dumb guffaws.
“Drawing murals won’t make them Shrive Criminal,” I shot back. “It’ll make them artists.”
He whirled on me, furious. “How dare you take a chance with these girls’ eternal lives, Damrosch? I suppose it’s all fun and games to you. You hang out with Mama Alex, you’re used to the idea of meat-death–”
“– don’t you shit-talk Mama Alex–”
“– but I’ve seen people die unShriven, Amichai. I’ve seen the terror in their eyes as they realize their brain’s dying and nothing will survive them. Gone, like the moldy oldies…”
The girls looked at each other, terrified.
“You keep thinking if you act up enough, you’ll find someone who loves you in this world – but your family will leave, your friends will leave, and by the time you realize you can’t join them in the Upterlife because you’re trying to impress these pathetic meat-sacks, it’ll be too late.”
My cheeks flushed with a shame I should not feel. “They’re not doing anything illegal, Gumdrool! They’re just… drawing! Drawing awesome things!”
The junior LifeGuard tried to restrain their laughter. Gumdrool shushed them with a hand, looking at the girls with deep concern.
“So,” he said quietly to me. “You think this is… awesome.”
“Yes.”
“This crudely drawn collection of figures.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Boys, quiet the girls.” Gumdrool’s Junior LifeGuard clapped their hands over their mouths.
“Now, Amichai.” Gumdrool rested his index finger on a penciled snarl. “Tell me what’s happening here.”
I tried to remember what they’d said. But they’d been so eager to show off their ideas, stepping on each other’s sentences in their haste to finish, that I couldn’t keep track.
And without their excited explanations, well… the drawings weren’t very good.
This is why I hate you, I thought.
“That’s the, uh… the snake-vendor, right?”
The girls slumped, disheartened.
“There’s your lesson, girls.” Gumdrool knelt to dab their cheeks with a handkerchief. “You’re terrible at drawing. But feel no shame! The dead have been writing and drawing for centuries. That’s what they’re good at. And you, with your strong bodies? You’re good at moving things.”
“Of course they’re not good artists now!” The girls flinched; I felt horrible. “But once their talent matches their ambition, they’ll be magnificent!”
The girls looked to Gumdrool, who shook his head. “You might make something OK, given a lifetime’s effort – but why bother when your lives are better spent protecting the Upterlife?”
Gumdrool shoved me back into the cell, casually, as if to remind me how many years he’d spent studying martial arts.
“Girls,” he said, “There’s a neural network in the Upterlife devoted to analyzing every desire you’ve ever had. It’s picking apart your last Shrive right now, making sure your postmortal existence will satisfy your wildest dreams.
“The servers will love you forever… If you work to protect them.” Gumdrool bared his teeth at the coral walls as though he wanted to chew through them. “Here, in this rotting meat-world, where everything decays, we’ve built one perfect thing. The only important thing is to maintain the servers for the next generation, for as long as your body will last. Then you may pass into a well-deserved eternity.”
“And if they’re bored now?” I asked.
“I guess I could bore them,” Gumdrool allowed. “Maybe if I asked Mr Beldon to take away their trial-Upterlife for, I don’t know… a month…?”
“A month?” They danc
ed like they had to go to the bathroom. They begged Gumdrool not to do it, don’t take their trial-Upterlife away, they were almost all the way through the Licorice Forests…
“You see?” Gumdrool spread his hands. “Nobody wants to spend time in this stupid world, Amichai.”
He slammed the cell door shut.
“Don’t worry, girls,” he assured them. “I wouldn’t actually take your trial time away. Boys, on the way back to their rooms, ask Mr Beldon if they can have some extra trial time for being such obedient citizens.”
They left.
Gumdrool hauled out a can of white paint and painted over the mural.
6: THE WALTER WICKLIFFE ORPHANAGE HEARING ROOM (AGAIN)
* * *
In theory, Dr Beldon ran the Walter Wickliffe 82nd Street Orphanage with an iron fist. But while the living kids under his roof had no rights, their dead parents could still intervene for them.
Some kids wheedled their dead dads into letting them stay up late at night, watching slasher flicks while Frank steamed about the inappropriateness of it all. Whereas my parents showed up twice a year, made a mild fuss about how Mr Beldon should allow Izzy and me more visits, and then vanished – allowing a smirking Frank to force me to bed at 8pm nightly.
But I was really hoping Mom and Dad would show up for my trial.
I watched the clock on the gray coral wall. It was screwed in above the video monitors, and I watched in anguish as the seconds ticked down. Mom and Dad had to come – I’d emailed them, Izzy had bombarded them with emails…
The clock read 2:57 – three minutes to go. The two video monitors marked “GUARDIANS” stayed blank.
The monitor inscribed “ORPHANAGE ADMIN” had Frank giving me one of his watery, compassionate glances – the busybody dead were sticklers for punctuality. But what made me nervous was Dr Greywoode, a stern black woman glaring at me from a monitor marked “WITNESS.”
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