Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330)

by Mitchell, Laura Remson

  “Still lawyering away, Arthur,” Keith said with a tight smile. “In fact, that’s why I’m calling. I’m doing an adoption search for a client, and there seems to be a problem with getting clearance.” He paused briefly. “Well, actually, I’m having a bit of a problem just getting an answer.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Judson, his eyes narrowing. “How very odd. When did you file the formal request?”

  “About 11 weeks ago. Essie?”

  “Request filed June 10, 2021,” Essie’s voice responded. “Case Number 9J/8600015GLA. Jurisdictions 5B, 6E—”

  “Send report to disk,” Judson instructed Essie via the comm link. “I’ll check the records, old man, but frankly, I suspect that your original request was lost when the Los Angeles Public Library was vandalized. That caused quite a stir, you know. Many records had to be retrieved from backups in other libraries, and, as you may recall, communications in and out of Los Angeles were not very reliable for about three days. You never sent a follow-up request?”

  Keith looked down in embarrassment, then glanced up sheepishly, shaking his head with distaste at his unprofessional behavior. If the client had been anyone but Rayna.... “I’m afraid I didn’t, Arthur. Do you think you could expedite things now?”

  “I’ll certainly give it the old college try, sport.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should be hearing from us in a week or two. If not, don’t hesitate to call again.”

  “Right. Thanks again, Arthur.”

  “Take care, my friend.”

  Keith took a deep breath as he watched Judson’s face dissolve, to be replaced on the screen by the features he had selected for his electronic secretary. Funny, he thought, examining the oval face framed by a mass of curly, dark brown hair. Essie looks a little like Rayna. Except for the eyes. No CRT could ever capture Rayna’s deep-set hazel eyes. No programmed image could ever reproduce those mystical flecks of green and gold and aquamarine that seemed to shift with the light, making Rayna appear as vulnerable as a newborn kitten one minute and as powerful as a lioness protecting her young the next.

  A sudden tone from the communicator interrupted his .

  “Daniels,” he answered simply as he pressed the comm link’s “RECEIVE” button.

  “Keith, it’s me,” Rayna’s voice blurted out before her image had even coalesced on his terminal screen. “I need to—”

  Suddenly, the air seemed intolerably thin and Keith’s throat was too constricted to contain his throbbing pulse. “I know, I know,” he said at last. “I haven’t gotten back to you on the adoption thing. I’m sorry about that, but remember, we did have that breakdown in the CDN when they broke into the library here, and things got screwed up. I just got—”

  “I know all about that, Keith. I—”

  “Well, I guess they lost my original request for the search, but I just talked to my friend Arthur Judson in London, and he said—”

  “Keith!” Rayna shouted over the comm link, stunning him into silence. “Will you please shut up and listen! Right now I don’t care about that damn adoption search!”

  For the first time, Keith looked closely at the haggard face that gazed out of the screen at him.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Rayna pressed her lips together in concentration and began twisting strands of hair about her right index finger in a familiar nervous gesture.

  “I can’t explain it over the comm lines. I need to see you face to face. How soon can you get over here? There are some things I have to show you. Some things you’d better hear, too. If I’m right, we’re in for some big trouble. And I do mean big!”

  “We?” Keith queried tensely. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Everyone. The whole damn world. And it looks like it all may have something to do with Al’s death.”

  Chapter 10: Discontinuity

  “Holy shit,” Keith breathed, eyes riveted on Rayna’s computer terminal display. “I see what you mean. I never noticed the pattern.”

  “I didn’t, either. Not until I ran this trend-analysis program. I’ve been having some problems getting through to my students lately. I thought maybe if I could tie the lessons into the latest social and political trends—things that mean something to the kids—it might help. Having 24-hour world-watch service makes it pretty simple to use the program. News events automatically plug right in. But I never expected to find anything like this.”

  They gazed silently at the screen as the display scrolled to a new set of graphs.

  “They all say basically the same thing,” Keith said, more to himself than to Rayna. “All those things that have been happening. New problems in the Middle East. The rumblings of war in Africa. The rumors of revolution in South America. Even the increasing crime rate right here in Los Angeles. The world’s going straight to hell!”

  Rayna nodded uncomfortably. “Yes.”

  “And the trend line leads back to mid-April? Just about the time Al Frederick died?”

  Another nod.

  “But what makes you think there’s a connection?”

  Without saying a word, Rayna tapped the appropriate instructions into the terminal’s keyboard, and a new chart appeared on the screen.

  “This trend line’s based on a composite index using the same kind of statistics that the other graphs used. Only this one gives an overall picture of what’s been going on for the last hundred years. The solid parts of the line cover the periods before 1971 and after Al’s death. The broken line here covers the period in between. Notice anything peculiar?”

  Keith studied the screen carefully before speaking. “It almost looks as if... as if....”

  “As if there’s a discontinuity,” Rayna interrupted. “As if something—or someone—skewed the curve and made it veer off its natural course!”

  “And you think that something might be related to Al Frederick’s death?”

  Rayna tilted her chin upward and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. Keith could almost feel her body shaking. Finally, she released her breath in a heavy sigh.

  “I’m not really sure, Keith. You still don’t know the whole story. Al was.... I don’t know. Maybe Al was crazy. Maybe I’m crazy even to consider the possibility. But it certainly would explain what’s been happening lately.”

  “Go on,” said Keith, “I’m listening.”

  Rayna frowned thoughtfully. “No,” she said slowly, “I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to Al.”

  Keith’s eyebrows arched in surprise. Rayna reached beneath the computer table and slid out the permastore box that Al Frederick had left her. “Here,” she said as tonelessly as she could manage. “Take these in the other room. Listen to the first two or three tapes.”

  “Look, why don’t you just give me a summary.”

  Rayna swallowed, pressed her lips together firmly and repeated simply, “Listen to the first two or three tapes.”

  “Honey, I really think—”

  Keith’s protest was cut short by the electronic tone that signaled an incoming call. Rayna pressed the “accept” key on her comm terminal, and a vaguely familiar face took shape on the screen.

  “Aurora?” Rayna said with surprise. “This is certainly unexpected! I don’t think I’ve seen you since we went to that concert of colonial music six months ago!”

  That’s right, Keith recalled as he examined the angular face on the screen. Her name’s Aurora—Aurora...something. Oh, yes. Sanger. Aurora Sanger. Tall, attractive woman in her mid-twenties. Her boyfriend Rafe’s some kind of artist—the guy who made that holopainting for Rayna. The four of us went to dinner and then a performance of some way-out electronic music from the Asteroid Belt that Aurora got to like a couple of years ago when she was in the Merchant Fleet.

  “...and now I really don’t know what to do,” Aurora was saying. “Vince has changed. He was never terribly bright or sensitive, but he used to be kind of sweet in his own special way. Last night, though, he was almost raving. I th
ink he would have killed Rafe—maybe me, too—if I didn’t agree to have dinner with him tomorrow night. Listen, Rayna, you know me; I’m no coward, but I really don’t want to be alone with him. I know it’s asking an awful lot, but I thought maybe if you and Keith could join us, it might help keep Vince in line.”

  “Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?” Rayna began. “Maybe Vince was overbearing and impolite, but after all, this isn’t the mid-Twentieth Century. People have been pretty civilized for the last 50 years, and....”

  A printout from Rayna’s trend-analysis program caught the corner of her eye. No, it wasn’t the mid-Twentieth Century, she thought, but things were no longer what she used to consider “normal,” either. She shot an inquiring glance at Keith, who responded with a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders.

  “Well, I don’t know if it’ll do any good,” she told Aurora, “but we’ll try to help you out. When does Vince go back out to the colonies?”

  “I’m not sure. He was pretty vague about what he’s been doing lately. I couldn’t tell whether he was being secretive or whether he realized that I really wasn’t very interested in anything he had to say.” She shook her head uncertainly. “Anyway, I really appreciate your coming along. See you at Eduardo’s at 1930 tomorrow.”

  Rayna nodded and broke the connection.

  “Looks like we’re in for a pretty sticky evening,” said Keith.

  She nodded again. “Sure does. But we’ll deal with that tomorrow.”

  Rayna closed her eyes, inhaled deeply through her nose and then blew the air slowly out of her mouth. Keith recognized the relaxation technique, but it didn’t appear to be working very well. Despite a comfortable room temperature, she seemed to shake with a cold that was more than physical.

  “I still want you to hear these tapes, Keith. It’s important. We need to talk more about this, and I think it’s best if you get Al’s story the same way I got it. You’ll understand once you hear the tapes. Please—just take the box with you. Listen to them tonight, but try not to jump to any conclusions. Can you spare me a few hours tomorrow afternoon?”

  Keith glanced at the box of tapes.

  “I’m not sure I’ll have the chance to listen to them all by then, Ray.”

  Rayna rubbed her chin nervously.

  “Of course, you’re right,” she sighed. “I’ve been listening to these things at my leisure over the past couple of months, and here I am trying to rush you into a marathon session. But Keith, this is…. The implications of the trend analysis…. Well, let’s put it this way: If I’m right, what’s in these tapes is a lot more important than we thought.”

  Chapter 11: Reunion

  Keith tore another piece from the stick of cherry licorice in his right hand as the fingers of his left began tapping out a nervous rhythm on his thigh. It was past midnight. He should get some sleep. That dinner with Rayna’s friends tomorrow night promised to be something of an ordeal, and he had a stack of work awaiting him before that. But he had made the mistake of playing the first of Al Frederick’s tapes as he was preparing for bed, and now, despite increasing fatigue, he was finding it hard to stop feeding cassettes into the tape player.

  Strange to think of Frederick as a young man, Keith mused. The former newspaperman had impressed him as a sour old apple from the first time they met. Brooding, almost haunted brown eyes had glared at Keith from beneath bushy eyebrows that matched the gray of Frederick’s dry, wiry hair. The gaunt face was wrinkled and careworn, and Frederick insisted on using a hearing aid instead of having his hearing problems corrected. (Like everyone else in the country, of course, Frederick was covered by MediNet, but Keith suspected that Frederick rather liked the idea of being able to use the hearing aid to tune others out whenever he pleased.) No question about it, Keith thought, Al Frederick looked much older than he should have. After all, he was only in his 80s. Keith knew many people who lived healthy, productive lives well into their 120s.

  Intellectually, Keith also knew there must be another side to the man. Rayna spoke of him with such warmth and respect. Keith realized that Frederick must once have been youthful and vigorous. Still, it was hard to reconcile the haggard curmudgeon he’d met with the audio-taped voice that had been speaking to him across the years.

  Though he’d heard only the first few tapes, Keith already had learned enough to understand Rayna’s concern about Frederick’s sanity and her suspicions about the connection between Frederick’s death and the recent problems that seemed to be cropping up at every turn. Was it possible, he wondered? Could that headstrong old man have been the force that kept the world on a peaceful, upward spiral of political, social and scientific progress for 50 years? He shook his head doubtfully. More likely that all this psychic control nonsense was just wishful thinking the result of an idealist’s frustration over broken dreams.

  Keith yawned and stretched. His thermofab sleep suit was designed to keep his body at optimum temperature for slumber, but as he sat, robeless, debating with himself about whether to play another tape or retire for what remained of the night, he realized that he felt uncomfortably cool. He glanced at his watch.

  “What the hell,” he said aloud, popping the next cassette into the player and reaching for the robe at the foot of his bed.

  “Today is Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1986,” announced a somewhat hoarse voice that Keith recognized as Frederick’s. Frederick coughed in an effort to clear his throat before proceeding.

  “Sorry ’bout that. I think I’m fighting off a cold. Pretty strange. With all the practice I’ve had for the last 15 years, I’ve gotten pretty good at steering important things the way I want them to go. You’d think I could generate enough psychic energy to shake a damned cold! Oh well. Maybe it’s better this way. If I could direct things in my personal life the same way I can for the world ‘out there,’ Brad Hershey and Ed Baumgarten, to name just two, would have been goners just because they crossed me when I was in a bad mood.

  “I worried about that sort of thing a lot back when Azey and I first started working together in ′71. I remember getting sore as hell at George Locke one day at the Star. I was afraid I was going to wind up wishing him dead. But Azey assured me that, according to the experimental results, I have only passive psychic powers when it comes to personal matters. I can receive telepathic or clairvoyant messages in personal crisis situations, but I can’t influence reality unless something conflicts with my ‘reality matrix,’ as Azey calls it. I’m just grateful that he was able to explain that much before the accident. I’ll always wonder where the experiments might have taken us if he hadn’t been killed in that fire.

  “I bumped into Vickie Kingman a few days ago. Funny, I really thought I was over her, but seeing her again, even after all these years, got my heart to pounding so hard that I half expected an invitation to join the percussion section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic!...”

  * * *

  “Hello, Al,” she said, eyes flitting nervously between his face and the ground. “It’s been a long time.”

  Al stared at her in numbed silence. Vickie Kingman was the last person he’d expected to see when he decided to attend his first Press Club meeting in five years.

  “How how long have you been back in town?” he finally managed to croak.

  Vickie smiled weakly. “I’ve been back for three years.”

  Al pressed his lips together and shook his head up and down in a controlled nod. “You look good. Lost some weight, I see. Hair’s different, too. I almost didn’t recognize you with it short and curly like that. The Vickie Kingman I remember had long, straight, black hair.”

  “Nice of you to notice the style but not the color, Al. I’m afraid the gray’s out to get me, but then, I guess that’s the way it goes when you hit your 40s.” She paused to inspect him more critically. “On the other hand, you don’t seem to have that problem, and you’re what, 53? All you have is a slight touch at the temples, and that just makes you look more distinguished. Now, is that fair?”
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  “Don’t worry about it. You look great.”

  They studied each other uncomfortably.

  “So,” Al began. “Tell me what you’ve been doing for the last— Oh, hell!”

  He closed his eyes and snapped his mouth shut, praying that he didn’t look as flustered as he felt. What an idiotic thing to say! That’s not what I want to ask her! I work with words for a living. Why is it that when I most need to think of the right words, they go into hiding! He ran a hand over his bearded chin and gazed for a moment in the direction of the bar.

  “What happened, Vickie?” he asked at last. “Why did you disappear from my life like that? You were supposed to come back to Los Angeles in January of ‘72, and instead I get a cryptic telegram announcing that you’ve got a new job in New York, and you’ve decided you don’t want to marry me after all. I think I deserved better than that.”

  Vickie tried to force a smile, but her lips trembled as she attempted to curve the corners of her mouth upward. “You’re right, Al. I treated you terribly, and you deserved better. Still do.... Look, we can’t talk here. How badly did you want to hear Tom Benton?”

  Benton, the Press Club’s Man of the Year, was scheduled to discuss his expose of irregularities and corruption in the city’s Housing Assistance Agency. Paul Fielder, head of the HAA, had been taking bribes from a few racist hate groups in exchange for directing housing applicants into segregated areas. That sort of thing, of course, would have undermined Project New Start’s underlying goal of stable, integrated communities a concept that had been working remarkably well since the project was initiated after the 1971 riots that followed the attempt on Sen. John Martin Roberts’ life.

  “I’d rather talk to you,” Al said without hesitation. “Besides, I probably know more about how Benton got the goods on Fielder than Benton knows himself.”

  Vickie looked at him uncertainly. “How about Roland’s?” she suggested. “With most of the Star’s staff here, the place should be pretty deserted. That ought to give us a little privacy not to mention a few memories.”