Lesser Gods

by Duncan Long

  But any government hacker worth his salt could get around the traps and exploit the systems just like anyone else. Not to mention the government super-systems that could be, and undoubtedly were, smuggled online to brute attack data banks before protective algorithms could respond.

  I doubted that the government would need to employ me for searching, so if they were involved, it probably meant they had expected me to jet until I found him or blew out my brains. If so, that meant once they knew I was no longer jetting, they might be knocking at my door.

  If they weren’t in the loop at all, then Death must have been lying about the buy-off contract on Huntington — bringing me back to the possibility that Death simply wanted Huntington to gain control over the jet market. Maybe Death even knew about the new form of jet that Huntington must be using.

  That had to be it.

  That meant the government would be in the equation before long, because the Powers wouldn’t sit around if a whole new, and very dangerous, form of jet was about to hit the streets.

  Which was another reason I had to hurry and locate Huntington. If the government got into the whole thing, my job would only get harder. Maybe fatally so, since they played just as rough as Death. Time was running out, In a very serious way.

  Within ten minutes I’d launched a flotilla of the stealth agents I’d designed, directed my MC to hit the usual search engines, and also initiated several searches with three renegade systems most people aren’t aware of and which sift through the gray areas operating barely within the law as well as within the data pirate sector. Today I was in luck since only one of the latter group had been taken offline due to the almost daily government raids on zombie hideouts. And of course I worked through an anonymous server from a bogus and discardable account. As an added precaution, I used my illegal and almost untraceable tap into the fiber optical cable next to my apartment. So while I wasn’t completely safe, the odds of being successfully backtracked were within acceptable limits.

  Within five minutes, the MC announced, “Your agents are returning results and I’m filtering all the search data, and stripping out ads and press releases.”

  “Let me have it,” I ordered, lowering my VG. As the view screens covered my eyes, I found myself surrounded with piles of glowing data files. Within two minutes I had brought the information into the system’s virtual hardware to weigh the data. The IIS was modeled after the grayware between my ears — which most agents and thugs like Death didn’t have the first inkling about. And often those IIS circuits worked like magic, chugging along even independently of intellect from time to time.

  I slipped into a power glove and shuffled through the data matrix, at first tossing information into loose groupings then carefully sorting through the stories and data that were more likely to lead to Huntington. Then I started to study what I had.

  One news story I’d actually seen before: The report about the mall panic. How did that relate to what I needed to know? Or was it just an IIS blind alley. As I studied the other stories retrieved by the system, I realized my IIS hunch circuits were onto something.

  There was a pattern; the stories all had one important thing in common: Large crowds had all seen the same basic, but impossible, happenstance.

  The last of the group of stories chilled my blood: A dragon-like creature had chased a young woman who had apparently thrown herself from a rooftop.

  Alice.

  For a moment I felt a pang of guilt; what had happened to Alice? More importantly, was she — or had she been — real? Or had she simply been a complex computer simm that was part of the SupeR-G?

  But the whole thing seemed insane. How were innocent bystanders who weren’t using jet somehow being sucked into the games. How could non-players be hallucinating visions from the SupeR-G?

  Impossible, I told myself. Or, at least, it should be. Something in the water? Doubtful. Even those who’d poisoned drinking supplies had discovered the sheer volume of water running through a city system diluted the most deadly of concoctions to the point they were harmless.

  Some sort of mass telepathy? Science had disproved such things a century ago. Well, except for the quantum shift of the brain to anticipate things by a few seconds in some people. But…

  I made a mental note to find out what the girl who’d fallen to her death looked like, should I ever get out of the mess I was in.

  But what was the connection between all the stories and Huntington? That was the key question.

  Or maybe the answer was that there was no connection. Things get complicated with intuition-ware, and sometimes too much thinking on top of that only makes things worse. Yet I felt there had to be a connection.

  I manipulated the stories in my data pile onto a grid, masking them over maps pulled from the net. I studied the star pattern cluster that much of the data formed, with long tendrils branching from it into stars located at distant points.

  The dragon/Alice hallucination fell into the center of one of the clusters, and it lay not far from my neighborhood. In fact, the Vietnam helicopter escapades had happened just blocks from me. If Huntington was capable of controlling both the SupeR-Gs and causing hallucinations among groups of people, then it would make sense that it was happening in my area.

  Yet there were clusters of stories in Vietnam and New Florida. How did that tie in?

  Something occurred to me: Suppose Huntington were creating peripheral hallucinations. That would be a reason for the government to be interested in capturing him. Being able to control people’s minds across a large area would be a very valuable capability.

  Only if that were true, then why would they hire Death who, in turn, hired a small fry like me to search for Huntington? I was good, but not that good. There were better hackers and searchers. And if the government was, or shortly would be involved, they could afford to hire the very best, too, without working through a scab like Death. It hurt my ego to admit it, but there was no reason to hire me if there was that much riding on finding Huntington.

  Unless….

  Unless no one had yet linked Huntington to the events.

  If knowledge is power, then I was sitting on a suitcase nuke. Finding Huntington first and learning his secret might put me ahead of the rest. Or get me killed. The stakes were getting higher by the minute and I realized I was in even greater danger than what Death presented — if that were possible. That I needed to be extra careful was an understatement.

  Trying to remain calm, I pulled in peripheral data that might or might not be connected, having the computer plot their locations and drop them over my cluster map. I then filtered the results against my old data.

  Bingo!

  The data intersected in one area, and at a place not that far from me. And it was only miles from Huntington’s original address.

  It seemed too easy. Yet it made perfect sense that he might still be around. Sure, as rich as he was, he could have gone anywhere in the world. But with this address he wouldn’t have had to go far and it was still a good hiding place, because few sane people ventured into the area.

  But the dangers it presented made it a possible location for someone with money who needed to hide.

  So it seemed I had a good idea where Huntington was. I could give the address to Death and be done with it. But there was a catch. By the time Death’s men got into the area — if they survived — my time would be up. And if they failed to find him, my time would not only be up, I’d be dead, too.

  So I had no choice but to do the searching myself to be sure it was done right. And to do that, I had to go into the really bad part of Topeka where no one in their right mind went without an armored limo with machine guns mounted in it. “A treacherously bad part of town,” I muttered, shaking my head after I’d removed my visor.

  I wanted to go right then. But I was dead on my feet. I decided to get a good night’s sleep before going. But after tossing for an hour, I realized that I was only wasting precious time. I got up, cleaned my weapons, rep
laced the broken plates in my body armor, and headed out the front door.

  Right into the arms of two government-issue thuggites.

  So much for the Powers-aren’t-involved-in-the-search-for-Huntington theory, I told myself as they began beating me with their government-issue blackjacks.

  They beat me unconscious. Or so I thought — I awoke disoriented, in the middle of what appeared to be a SupeR-G world. The worst kind, too, with artificial memories of a wife, job, the works, all somewhere in the mid-twentieth century.

  I rose to my feet in the gray world, and fought back tears and stared at the casket lying at the front of the church. The smell of flowers clung to the air like a funeral shroud. Bathed by floodlight, the coffin bore a soft halo. In the casket, Alice lay, motionless as if she had simply fallen asleep and might awake at any moment. I ignored the recorded prelude and simply stared at her, continuing to do so through the short service, hoping that she would gasp, take a deep breath, and wake up. Then we would tell everyone to go home, the whole thing had simply been a big mistake.

  Only she never awakened.

  I went through all the surreal motions society required of me, shaking hands with the friends, relatives, and neighbors as each mumbled clichés that were supposed to comfort. One by one, each grew aware of their hollow words, turned, and nervously fled the cemetery. They slithered into shiny cockroach cars that scurried away as if fearful they might be tainted by the death around them.

  “It’s time to go,” my brother-in-law finally told me, pulling me away from the grave long after everyone had left. I let him lead me to the black limo next to the empty hearse and climbed in without a word as my brother thanked the funeral director.

  I had spent the next six months away from my job, too upset to work, living off the funds Alice and I had saved during our thirty years of marriage. My days were spent searching first in the university library and then grubbing through grimy bookshops, devouring first the books on religion and then, not finding the answers I sought, delving into white and finally the black arts, obsessed with discovering some way of resurrecting Alice.

  A year later, sitting in my kitchen, I pushed aside a leather-bound book and traced the cigarette burn on the surface of the oak table with my finger. The burn had come with the table, put there by the previous owner decades before Alice had rescued the antique from a dusty secondhand shop.

  I turned my attention to my steak, carving off a chunk before glancing up at Alice.

  “So what’s bothering you?” she asked. “Go ahead and tell me about it. We’ll break our rule about not talking shop at the table.”

  I put down my knife and hitched up my horn-rimmed glasses. “This spell I’ve discovered,” I said, tapping the leather-bound book on the table beside me. “It’s pretty complicated.”

  “That’s okay, I’ve got all the time in the world.” Alice maintained eye contact with me as she lifted a glass of water to her full lips.

  “I think I could sit here and look into your dark eyes the rest of my life,” I told her.

  “Very romantic but don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay,” I said around a bite of steak. “What it boils down to is that the work I’ve been doing…”

  “The magic spells?”

  “Yeah. I thought it would be complicated — but it’s so simple. It looks like… I know this is impossible to believe.”

  “Try me.”

  “It looks like it’s possible to bring people back from the dead. I know that sounds crazy, but I’ve already done it with —”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy at all. It makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Yeah, I guess it would,” I said with a sheepish grin. “You were always going to church all the time and trying to make me feel guilty. You and your parents. Always conspiring to save my soul. Then you were in the accident and…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s weird,” I said, putting down my fork. “I thought you were, uh, dead. But I guess I was wrong.” I looked at her for some hint of what she was thinking, but her face was a mask.

  “Let’s not get sidetracked,” she finally said. “What’s the problem?”

  “I’ve either got to falsify documents or somehow mislead people into thinking that… Well, if anyone knows I can raise people from the dead, it will be a disaster. The whole world will be at our front stoop wanting Aunt Edith or Uncle Frank restored to life. I have to be careful.”

  “There’s always a solution. Think it through. Talk it out.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Who could that be?” I asked.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Then I’ll get it,” I said, wondering how Alice could know it was for me. I pushed away from the table, stood up, and wove my way past the china cabinet. Crossing into the living room, my shoes clattered on the wooden floor.

  I could see a figure indistinctly through the frosted-glass windows on either side of the front door in the foyer; a golden glow shone like a halo over his head, yet somehow this seemed nothing out of the ordinary. I grasped the knob and opened the door.

  Jesus, in the flesh, one eye swollen shut from the beating he had taken from his Roman guards, pushed his way into the room. “Why are you plotting to rob me?” he demanded

  I stood speechless, unsure how to answer.

  “And why are you such a doubter?” he added.

  I struggled to answer but found I couldn’t speak. The deity’s face slowly changed and I found myself in the bathroom, gazing into the mirror, a halo now sparkling over my head.

  “Why are you afraid to play God?” the mirror’s reflection asked me. “You need to get on with your business if you’re going to bring Alice back. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the world take care of itself and you keep your eyes on the prize.”

  With a cry, I sat up in bed, blinking in the darkness, and swore under my breath before lying back and closing my eyes. I felt so alone. Alice hadn’t been there at all. She was still dead. My stomach churned and I closed my eyes and hugged myself. She’s lost, dead and gone.

  A thought shoved itself into my consciousness. I sat up again. I’d been flirting with the idea subconsciously for the last few weeks, turning it over in the back of my mind. Yet I’d suppressed the thought, not letting it sink in, refusing to come to grips with it. The book did exist, and it held the secret that could bring Alice back. Only I was too fearful to follow its instructions.

  I lay back in bed, too agitated to fall asleep, even though my eyelids were heavy.

  “Ralph,” a voice called softly.

  I groaned, turning over in my bed and putting the pillow over my head.

  “Ralph,” the voice called again, this time louder.

  Abruptly, I rolled over, twisting the sheets around my ankles. “Go away. I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Ralph,” the voice murmured a third time.

  “What do you want, Mom,” I finally answered, now fully awake.

  “Did you say your prayers?”

  “No. I can’t. My prayers will raise the —”

  “You must say your prayers,” Mother insisted.

  “Do I have to?”

  “If you don’t —”

  “Oh, okay.” I freed myself from the snarled sheet, struggled out of bed and got down on eleven-year-old knees, as I’d been taught. “I don’t really have anything to pray for,” I said, peering up at my mother and hoping my tactic would work.

  “Just pray for those you love.”

  Abruptly, the room darkened and my mother vanished. I was again a grown man, now in my own home. “Damn,” I whispered, “what a nightmare.”

  Yet I knew there might be something to this idea of praying. The magic book had suggested that one might trick God, or, at least, trick the celestial consciousness that heard and answered prayers. It couldn’t hurt to try, I decided. What did I have to lose?

  “Pray for those you love,” my mother murmured again.

  I swal
lowed, closing my eyes to recall what I had discovered in the book. I made the magic signs in the darkness and whispered the Latin phrases etched into my memory from the many times I’d read and re-read the passages in the ancient manuscript. Then I switched to English to complete the task. “God, if you’re really there, please send back my wife Alice.” I uttered another phrase of Latin and a second in Hebrew. Then, not knowing how to stop, said a loud, “Amen.”

  I waited a moment, wondering if there really might be some sort of answer.

  But there was no bolt of lightning, no thunderclap.

  Nothing.

  “You’re losing it,” I told myself and laughed. “That has to be the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done.” I got off my tired knees, straightened out the sheet and blanket, and climbed back into bed.

  Punching my pillow, I wondered if I’d ever get back to sleep again. I closed my eyes and tried to relax.

  Then I became aware of a far-off hint of scraping in the darkness.

  I opened my eyes and listened.

  Nothing.

  No. There: A grating, somewhere at the far side of the house, or maybe even in the basement.

  I continued to listen for a moment and then swore. “Damn it all. Every year those blasted mice get into the house. Have to set the traps tomorrow.” I shuddered at the thought of killing the stupid little rodents, but hated having them chew on things in the kitchen and leave their droppings all over. Maybe I should get a cat.

  I tried to ignore the scratching.

  Only I could not. For the noise had taken on a rhythm, growing louder by the moment. That’s no mouse. More like someone walking. Could somebody have broken into the house? What the devil is going on?

  I threw back the covers and stepped onto the chilly wooden floor, jerked my robe off the back of the chair at the base of the four-poster, and made my way to the open bedroom door, wishing I owned a gun.

  I peered into the darkness beyond and listened.

  There it was. The thumping continued. It seemed to have entered the dining room.