Strong Light of Day

by Jon Land

  “You boys here to have your fortunes told?” Paz said, just as they noticed him. “Because I can do that for you for free. Gratis. As in no charge.”

  They’d all pulled back their flannel shirts to showcase nine-millimeter pistols stuck in the waistbands of their sagging pants, but made no move for them as he stood there.

  “I’m afraid your futures are bleak,” Paz continued. “Lots of pain and broken bones. I see ambulances and rescue wagons and jaws wired shut. But this is your lucky day. Know why?”

  None of the gangbangers seemed intent on answering.

  “You ever read A Christmas Carol, maybe saw one of the movie versions? See, old Scrooge learned he could control his own future, alter the path he was on, by changing his ways, rethinking his decisions. That’s what you can do today. Alter your path by walking out of here and never coming back. Comprendes?”

  “Mind your own fucking business, man,” the one Paz took to be the leader said, swallowing hard when he finished, as if drained of bravado.

  Paz smiled. “So you wanna choose a different path, muchachos? Fine by me.”

  Two of them went for their guns, but they never even touched steel. Paz lurched forward, a single stunningly long step, more like a leap. He had the wrists of the two who went for their guns in hand by then, jerking down and in at the same time and hearing one splintering crack followed by another.

  The third gangbanger used that moment to go for his gun and actually managed to strip it from his pants, leaving them to sag even lower. Paz grabbed the gun as it swept toward him, a toy in his hands as he stripped it free and tossed it aside.

  “Fuck you!” the banger leader screeched at him. “Fuck you-u-u!”

  His lips were still puckered forward when Paz snatched a lit candle from Madam Caterina’s table and jammed its flickering end through them, straight into his mouth, shoving the wax down his throat. He saw the banger’s neck expand, his eyes bulging desperately as his face purpled.

  “You can’t breathe,” Paz said, holding him up. “That’s your present. You’re going to die—that’s your future.”

  The other two bangers were trying for their guns again by then, using their off-hands now in place of their ruined ones. Paz took an oversize plastic tarot card in either hand and lashed them outward. He had no idea where they were going exactly before the cards sliced through the air and dug home beneath the bangers’ brow level, carving thin, razorlike lines through the eyelids of both men. Blood pooled outward, the pain throwing both men into a squint even before the blood blinded their sight. They began to howl in agony, crumpling to their knees.

  “Guess you can’t see your own future now,” Paz grinned, and proceeded to smash their heads together with a bone-crunching rattle as skull met skull. “You can’t see anything.”

  Madam Caterina had lurched backwards, shoulders pressed against the wall, peering at Paz as if she were seeing him for the first time. A glimpse into his soul, far beyond what cards, intuition, even the counsel of the spirits could provide. She seemed to be looking through Paz as much as at him. But he couldn’t stop himself, even though he might be scaring the psychic more than the gangbangers had.

  The tarot cards had been sprayed to the floor in his initial assault on the bangers, most of them ending up scattered between the two of them now cowering next to each other with blood running down their faces.

  Paz knelt between them, taking a card in hand. “Time to take a good look at your future, amigos. Let’s see what we’ve got here.… Hey, it says Judgment. How fitting is that? But do you know what it means?” he asked one of them, flashing the card before his blood-filled eyes. “No? Let’s see if this helps.”

  With that, Paz stuffed the card into his mouth.

  “Spit that out, amigo, and I’ll break your teeth.”

  He snatched another card from the floor, focusing on the other banger now. “Hey, the Six of Cups. I don’t know what that means, but I’m guessing it’s the asshole card, since you’re a serious asshole.”

  Paz crumpled the Six of Cups and stuck it through his teeth. “How’s the future taste to you, amigo? I’m betting not so good. But here’s the lesson of today. The future’s ours to control. That’s why people come to Madam Caterina, so they learn what’s coming. You didn’t give her the chance to tell you boys about that, so it’s a good thing I was around to fill in the gaps. Starting now, you can change your future. And if you don’t, I’m going to come back and change it for you. Comprendes?”

  One nodded. The other tried to.

  Paz looked up at Madam Caterina. “When does the trash get picked up?”

  “Today,” she managed, seeming surprised she’d found her voice. “Any time now.”

  “Good,” Paz said, hoisting the two bangers up by the scruffs of their necks, “I’ll put these perdedors out on the curb. I’ll be right back for the other one.”

  “You didn’t have to do this,” Madam Caterina said, when he reached the door.

  “Yes, I did,” Paz told her. “There are some things nobody can change.”

  42

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “So what am I supposed to be seeing here, Doc?” Caitlin asked Frank Whatley, peering up from the microscope he’d told her to check.

  “What’s it look like to you?”

  Caitlin pressed her eye against the lens again, left it there as she spoke. “Some kind of insect larvae is all that comes to mind.”

  “Close,” Whatley nodded, as she raised her gaze to meet his. “It’s insect dung, better known as frass. What you’re looking is consistent with beetle frass, specifically bess beetles. I found it all over the skeletal remains of those cattle, which makes sense, since this kind of beetle uses its dung as a kind of defense mechanism.”

  “How’s that exactly?”

  “Well, when feeding on plants, the beetles ingest alkaloids that are toxic to animal predators. The toxins get excreted in their frass. Then, as the beetles poop, they contract muscles to direct the flow of feces onto their backs, rendering them utterly unappetizing to animals that would otherwise snack on them.”

  “I can see why,” Caitlin told him. “Now tell me what it all means.”

  The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office and morgue was located just off Loop 410, not far from the Babcock Road exit on Merton Mintor inside the Bexar County Forensic Science Center on the University of Texas Health Science Center campus. Caitlin had been coming here for over twenty years, and what struck her was how it always smelled exactly the same—of cleaning solvent, with a faint scent of menthol clinging to the walls like paint. The lighting was overly dull in the hallways and overly bright in offices like Whatley’s.

  The lab he supervised never changed, at least not in Caitlin’s memory. It was sparkling clean everywhere, not a speck of dust or grime anywhere to be found, the cheap tile floors so shiny she could see the outline of her shadow. It smelled of the powerful antiseptic cleaner Whatley insisted his staff use after every examination and procedure, in a concerted effort to pay homage and respect to those who crossed his slabs. It was almost as if he was trying to make some kind of moral amends, especially to the victims of crime, who had already been treated with the ultimate indifference and cruelty.

  “It means I found inordinately large concentrations of beetle frass over the remains of those cattle,” Whatley explained, “the condition of which stoked my suspicions as soon as I examined them in that grazing field.”

  “How’s that, Doc?”

  “The skeletons were entirely intact.”

  “Okay.…”

  “You’ve seen what happens when predators lay siege to livestock.”

  “Sure, and first of all they tend to leave some meat on the bones, not pick them dry.”

  “They also wrench at those bones themselves, often shredding or dislodging them. That’s why scattered bones are more normally associated with animal remains, not entire, whole skeletons picked to the bone.”

  Caitlin checked th
e view through the microscope lens again, as if something might have changed. “Where you going with this, Doc?”

  “I wish I knew. That farmer’s herd wasn’t wiped out by coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, or the boogeyman, Ranger,” Whatley told her. “It was wiped out by something we can’t identify, and what we can identify doesn’t make any damn sense at all.”

  She was about to ask the doc to elaborate on that when his phone buzzed with an incoming text message he excused himself to check.

  “Looks like this is for you as much as me, Ranger,” he said, looking up from his phone. “It appears we’ve got a firm location on that unidentified circle near Waco, from the map back at that Dallas crime scene.”

  “I’m listening, Doc.”

  43

  MIDLAND, TEXAS

  “Life’s about the future, S., not the past,” Calum Dane told Pulsipher, trying to sound convincing as they climbed out of the Suburban in the company of three other plainclothes security men. “That’s why we’re here today. I understand a breakthrough has been made.”

  The parking lot on South County Road, off Interstate 20 in Midland, sat adjacent to a flat-roofed warehouse slab of a building that had once been used by a now-bankrupt distributor of industrial plumbing parts. Once emptied out and refurbished, its nearly ten thousand feet of open space was perfect for another of Dane Corp’s latest pursuits. In addition, its isolated location and fenced perimeter made it easy to secure and kept the locals away—a key component, given the secretive nature of the ongoing research and development going on inside, virtually nonstop.

  Dane considered it no small irony that buying the building for a relative song represented a kind of homecoming, since the land was located in what had once been the same county as the farm his family sharecropped. If he squinted, maybe he’d be able to see the pauper’s grave where he’d buried his father, a straight shot across the flat stretch of parched land to the south.

  The fifth technical team he’d hired to make his latest technological dream a reality had phoned that morning insisting they had big news to report, insisting that they meant it this time. Dane sincerely hoped so. The profit projections of this particular Dane Corp spin-off were staggering, not to mention the ancillaries and fresh market share this new venture would bring the company.

  If it worked, which so far hadn’t proven to be the case.

  His investors and corporate team told him he was crazy, when Dane told them he was branching off into the video game industry. Of course, people had said the same thing when he bought up millions of acres of mineral rights for supposedly dry oil wells, now lined with pumpjacks for as far as the eye could see. Or when he built the largest petrochemical plant in the country, which had reaped billions of dollars in profit worldwide from the production of agricultural supplies and pesticides.

  Dane had learned not to listen to them.

  He’d gotten the idea while attending an annual electronics and technology convention in Las Vegas. There he noticed that the biggest crowds by far were attracted to the next generation in video gaming, multiplayer and three-dimensional graphics. There was even a less-elaborate display by Samsung of a room-based gaming system in which players found themselves confronted by life-size figures springing from what the company called “electronic wallpaper” displays. It may have been the next step in virtual reality, but it left Dane impressed more by the graphics than by what was essentially a standard gaming experience played out between walls instead of on a big screen. A letdown, in other words.

  But it gave him an idea.

  “Impossible,” one expert said.

  “Come back in twenty years,” another told him.

  “Twenty years and a billion dollars,” surmised a third.

  “I’ve got the billion dollars,” Dane said. “But not twenty years.”

  After four other teams had spent various fortunes building systems with more kinks and breakdowns than functionality, Dane found the Bass brothers, twins generally regarded as outcast rebels in the gaming industry. Utterly identical save for a mole on the cheek of one, with matching wild shocks of curly red hair, the twins, though in their midtwenties, still dressed the same and remained fond of completing each other’s thoughts.

  “Far out, man,” said Frank Bass.

  “Deep,” added Fred, “truly deep.”

  “But can you do it?” Dane said, explaining where he’d gotten the idea, after they’d scribbled their names on a confidentiality agreement without reading it.

  “Fucking A we can,” from Frank.

  “We’ll nail this bastard,” Fred added.

  “Start with the wallpaper thing—

  “And build from there. Build you something truly immersive.”

  “Not like what you saw at the tech shit show,” Frank explained.

  “That was based on this dome-shaped system, covered with projectors, wall to wall,” Fred picked up. “Uses surround sound, augmented reality—”

  “And other technologies to fabricate a real world. Emphasis on ‘fabricate’—”

  “Because there’s no real interaction between players and figures.”

  “That’s total immersion.”

  “What we intend to build for you.”

  That led to the challenge of moving the characters off the wall by creating artificially intelligent wallpapers that were expanded to include the floors and ceiling. Dozens and dozens more projectors, light-refracting mirrors, and display tubes needed to be added to the mix. All built from scratch at a mind-numbing cost and all controlled by a supercomputer capable of a trillion computations per second, at an even more mind-numbing cost.

  Dane never flinched, never blanched. He was building something the world had never seen before. If the proprietary technology worked, the profits would be staggering—as well as unregulated in any respect whatsoever. The video game industry was the Wild West of business, the ancillaries and international arena alone turning the potential from vast to unlimited.

  The problem was, every time the Bass twins surmounted one obstacle, another surfaced.

  “This artificial intelligence is for shit, man,” was Fred’s analysis.

  “You got a hundred thousand permutations for every movement and action,” Frank added. “A hundred code writers working twenty-fours a day would take a century to write that.”

  “You’ve got a year,” Dane told them. “So long as you tell me it can be done. So long as you tell me you can do it.”

  “Fuck yeah!” the brothers said in unison.

  44

  MIDLAND, TEXAS

  The solution the Bass brothers came up with was to rely more on the AI software, not less, to the point that the life-size characters game players would actually be interacting with would utilize learned behavior in their responses. The initial test results after nine months of round-the-clock code writing were incredible, sometimes, and incredibly frustrating at other times. The intensity of the initial realism needed to be dialed back a bit, including turning the surround sound down a notch and making the bad guys less “frigging ugly,” as one of the Bass brothers put it. Dane wasn’t sure which.

  “We got three demonstrations for you,” Frank said, after greeting him inside the Midland warehouse that had become the brothers’ personal electronic playground.

  Fred looked up from a laptop that would be controlling the basic game elements in the sprawling open space that had once been jam-packed with distribution fulfillment stations. “Man of War, Titans of Terra, and History Comes Alive.”

  “Talk to your favorite historical figure.”

  “Tonto inside an authentic tepee, smoking peyote.”

  “Tonto wasn’t real, Fred.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “Anyway,” Frank picked up, “call it the ultimate school field trip.”

  “We can put the game on demo—”

  “Or give you a gun so you can play along,” Frank explained, unslinging a futuristic, full-size rifle.

  “
I think I’ll pass,” Dane told them. “A demo will do.”

  “Far out, man,” said Fred from behind his laptop. “Fasten your seatbelt.”

  An instant later the open floor space went totally dark, only to be pierced by a million slivers of light an instant later. And then life-size soldiers appeared in full battle gear, off to fight insectlike beings who’d invaded Earth. Even though they were projections, their artificial intelligence allowed them to skirt around the three visitors to their domain, instead of passing right through them.

  “They even appear to acknowledge you,” Frank noted to Calum Dane.

  “What do you mean, ‘appear to’?” Dane asked that brother.

  “It’s almost like they’re self-aware,” the other brother answered. “A fringe benefit of the AI code we wrote.”

  “Which brings us to the demo,” Frank picked up. “That was just a graphics showcase. Utterly rudimentary.”

  “And here we go with the main event,” Fred followed in rhythm, starting to work the keyboard.

  Predictably, the primary lighting went dark, a fluorescent haze that would soon birth the game dynamic.

  “Let’s start with Man of War,” Fred continued.

  “Get ready to be immersed,” his twin brother said, as Fred hit a final key.

  But nothing happened.

  “Like I said,” Frank groped, “get ready to—”

  And then something happened. The warehouse confines suddenly turned from stark white to a war-ravaged and utterly decimated city landscape. The realism was so incredible that Dane imagined he could smell the decay in the air and thought that if he reached down and touched the floor it would indeed feel like concrete instead of tile. Then the life-size, incredibly realistic versions of soldiers fighting the alien enemy—hopefully soon to be accompanied by gamers paying a fortune for the experience—appeared from all directions.

  The computer-drawn figures were actually beyond lifelike. Dane could see them sweating, bleeding, breathing with the heaviness of battle. The smaller ones even seemed weighed down by the weight of their extended weapons and packs. It couldn’t have been more impressive.