The Unfortunate Expiration of Mr David S Sparks

by William F Aicher

  “I was, honey, but I’m okay.”

  “Why Mommy? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, glancing at David as she used the sheets to blot the few remaining tears from her eyes. “I just love your Daddy.”

  “Gross!” Aiden stuck out his tongue and scrunched up his face.

  “Hop into bed, mister. Mom and I will be there to tuck you in in a minute. Teeth brushed?”

  Aiden looked down, silent.

  “Brush your teeth and we’ll be there in five minutes,” David said, patting Aiden’s bottom as he crawled off the bed. “Now go!”

  “They love you.” Alice said to David.

  “They love you too, Alice. And like I said, nothing’s going to happen. It’s just a backdoor. No one will even realize it’s there—not until it’s used at least. Save your worrying for then.”

  “I don’t know what we’d do without you. It’s going to be hard enough with you not working, but that’s something we—”

  “—don’t have to worry about. Trust me. This time tomorrow it’ll be over, and we’ll be here in bed again together and everything will be fine.”

  ---

  That night David dreamt of monsters. Only this time they were under his bed, not Aiden’s. As he lay in his bed, his brain conjured up another instance of himself in bed, woken from his dream within a dream by the scurrying sound they made as their claws scratched their way across the wooden floor. In his dream, he lay still, listening to whatever it was that was in the room with him. Praying they wouldn’t surface. He kept his hands and feet from the bed’s edge. His body, covered safely by the sheets, was damp with sweat.

  The moon shone in through the big picture window on the south side of the bedroom, casting the room in a pale glow. The scratching came in fits and bursts, like whatever lurked below was darting from one place to another, eventually leaving the confines of the darkness below him, zipping across the room. If he hadn’t been locked in place on his back, his vision limited to the ceiling above, he would surely have seen whatever it was as it ventured out into the dimly lit open spaces of the room.

  The scratching had moved across the room, to the dresser, and he heard the sounds of its little claws digging into the wood as it climbed to a higher space in the room. Whatever it was, it elevated itself to a height where it could surely see David—and all David would have to do is lift his head slightly and he’d surely see it in return. This being a dream, David found his courage to be considerably greater than it would have been if this were real. So dream David did what waking David could not: he lifted his head from his pillow and looked. What he saw shocked him enough to wake him from the dream, but not before he registered that the scurrying had not been from a monster at all—but instead from what looked like a free-moving surveillance camera. A little webcam on eight metal legs had crawled up his dresser, and was pointed directly at him, a red blinking light where its eye would be, signaling that he was being recorded.

  Sensing David’s restlessness, Alice woke. She didn’t say a word but put her hand on David’s chest. The warmth of her touch was enough to calm him down, and after a few minutes of controlled breathing, he relaxed enough to fall back asleep.

  He didn’t dream again.

  FORTY-FOUR

  BLOOD ON A TISSUE ON THE FLOOR OF A TRAIN

  The first thing David noticed was the increased security. Armed guards covered every entrance, stunshots at the ready, with the more serious firepower of classic fully-automatic weapons hanging at their sides. In addition to eyescans, all travelers taking the train from Bandleshore into Plasticity now were also subjected to full body scans, and their bags and other items went on a conveyer belt where they could go through a series of x-rays, radiation and chemical scans.

  “Security hasn’t been this tight in at least twenty years,” said Carlson, the stocky agent who’d been one of the two to escort David from his ‘prison’ at Garfield.

  David slept for most of the trip to Bandleshore, only waking up as the slidecars settled down at the landing pad in the military zone of the Bandleshore station. As they made their way through the restricted areas to the public part of the outpost David realized the presence government had in policing and defense of this sole entrance to the city. Groups of heavily-armed soldiers marched in order. Others performed what looked like anti-terrorism and bomb defusing drills. Unlike the civilian portion of Bandleshore David had experienced in his first visit, everything here was immaculately clean, new and decidedly sterile. This was not an area of ramshackle weather-worn buildings. Instead the military’s space here more closely reflected the utilitarian clean lines and technological nuances that defined Plasticity and the Bandleshore train station itself.

  When they landed, part of David expected the soldiers to put him into some sort of restraints—to treat him like a prisoner and frog-march him through crowds on the way to his tribunal. Instead, he was treated as a peer, if not an even higher-ranked member of The Reconstruction than his liberators. He was lucky they found him, they said. They thought they’d lost him at the house on the lake, when the last tentacles of tracking signals exhausted the distance they could reach into the mainland.

  The eggheads had been sent to see what they could jack into and discover from what remained of the house’s security network, but the meltdown destroyed everything. It was the meltdown itself, however, that gave the eggheads the idea of where David might have gone. Something had to have caused the meltdown to happen, and after accessing old-world records they discovered the house once belonged to a banker with offices in New York and Chicago. One of those rich bankers installed an Aeropod depot to allow him to work in the city but live his life in the country. It took a few weeks to determine, but the analysis of the meltdown signatures matched what had been previously recorded at other Aeropod meltdowns, and in each of those instances the meltdowns had occurred when a launch took place from a depot with a faulty core. The question then was where had he gone—New York, or Chicago? And that was a pretty simple question to answer, since New York had been destroyed long ago—before The Chemical Wars even, when a radical terrorist group finally did the unthinkable and smuggled a dirty bomb into the city, leveling it completely and rendering most of New England uninhabitable for the next several thousand years.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, and the search for David had indeed grown desperate. From what they gathered up to the last data uplink, The Cause was up to something big and David was going to be a major part of it. Still, after the train bombing back when David first entered Plasticity, the Reconstruction didn’t put anything past The Cause … and it had been determined that retrieving the asset and getting whatever information they could was more important than the risk of allowing The Cause to move forward with their plans. As these desperate times required, they tracked down the radioactive signature of David’s pod into Lake Michigan, east of Northerly Island in Chicago. Following the trail, they came across Ghost … and Ghost wouldn’t talk. So they made him.

  Now it was time to take David back into the city. A data dump would be first, as there was considerably more information to process than what David could cover in a debrief. Besides, none of these grunts were cleared for that level of intelligence—it was way more classified than they could ever access, especially with rumors of insurgents embedding themselves into The Reconstruction’s lower ranks.

  So, David was escorted like a king through the security checkpoints (but still required to pass all checks) and given a seat on the next train into Plasticity.

  Even with the increased safety measures, and the value of their package, the soldiers didn’t go to the lengths of restricting the train solely to government use. The day was only starting, and droves of commuters from the mainland needed to get into the city to fulfill their daily duties.

  But more had changed than just the security and his military detail. It was possible he simply hadn’t realized it before, but many of the people on
their daily commute, looked considerably less enthusiastic than he remembered. The last time David took the train it felt magical, like taking the monorail into Disney Land, but today’s journey was the dismal drone of worker bees, shuttling into the hive. A trip out of duty and necessity. Many dressed in worn out clothes, dirty and in need of a wash. The eyes of several held that same glassy sheen David recognized as hallmarks of sickness from his time in Garfield.

  Still there were those who contrasted this vision completely. Separate from the commuters, several groups of what he assumed were the “Eggheads” Calvin and Bethany spoke of milled about. He saw a few of these on his first trip, and even more during his time in the city—but in David’s mind they changed. Dressed in suits with pant-legs tailored like capris just below their knees, their thin white legs stuck out like the sticks of cotton swabs before disappearing into their shiny black loafers. And while David remembered their heads were larger than most people’s, now they looked like giant ostrich eggs with hollow eyes perched on sallow, elongated bodies.

  Within their big hairless heads, David searched for any sign of the illness in their eyes but what he found was a different kind of emptiness. Each of their eyes was perfect, free of any blemishes—perfectly crafted in a factory and wired up directly to their software brains to make them the next phase of human evolution.

  A woman, no more than 25, coughed in the aisle across from David. She dozed off while the train started its trip east over the Atlantic. Her hand relaxed and the blood-stained tissue she held dropped to the floor.

  The Eggheads broke out into laughter. One of them had just told what they all agreed was a very funny joke.

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE MERGE

  “We have good news for you, David,” said the woman in blue. Only she didn’t wear blue anymore. On this day Juliet had chosen a steel gray for her hospital garb. A crew of medical assistants examined David as she spoke, checking his heart rate, blood pressure, reflexes—all the makings of a standard physical as he remembered it.

  Immediately after arriving in the city they transferred him to one of the automated vehicles that roamed the city, free for use for anyone who had someplace they needed to go. Every citizen could use one of these at any time, although to encourage foot travel or use of the tube system, each person was limited to five autocar credits per month. As a VIP, David had no such restrictions, and would be free to use them to move about the city at his whim … but only after he checked in at the medical center.

  He was back in the room where he had first woken up after the explosion on his initial visit to Plasticity. He was also back with the same woman who had promised him his memories in exchange for his allegiance.

  “And bad news too, I suspect?” David replied.

  “No, not this time. This time the news is only good.” Juliet said, smiling. She ushered the assistants out of the room and examined a readout on her data pad. “The first good news is, even though you spent what would normally be considered an unsafe amount of time in The Green Zones, you appear to be relatively unaffected by the exposure. There are minor abrasions in your lungs, but nothing that won’t heal itself in a few weeks of isolation in the city.” She set down the data pad and stepped closer to David, crouching down to examine his eyes. “It’s pretty remarkable, I’d say. Although your time away was unplanned, your little excursion gave us the longest test we’ve had yet of a pair of implant eyes in that level of exposure. And they’re unaffected. Remarkable.”

  “You used me as a test subject?” David fought the urge to push her away at the thought of being used as a lab rat.

  “No, David, you did that yourself. We didn’t send you out there, but we’ll certainly take results where we can get them.”

  David stood and walked to the window. The chilly air of the sterile room sent a shiver through him as his hospital gown fluttered. Down below in the city, autocars shuttled people to and from their appointments. A couple sat outside a café, enjoying an early lunch. Birds flew from tree to tree, unaware they were trapped, prisoners in a big glass cage.

  “There’s more,” said Juliet. “While you’ve been gone, the processes have had a chance to run their course. Your memories are rebuilt.”

  These were the words David had been waiting for since waking in that grassy field. They were the words he imagined hearing during every silent pause of self-reflection that had been afforded him in the past few weeks. The time since the suppressor had been installed had been both a blessing and a curse. At first, he’d been grateful to Rosa for giving him the chance to gain a sense of control over his unconscious, but within a few days he began to miss the glimpses. His dreams since the suppressor was installed no longer followed any sort of narrative, other than their own internal logic and stories. Dreams of being late for a college exam, mastering the art of self-flight, and even nightmares of what might lurk in the foliage of The Green Zone filled his sleep. The dreams of a past life, of his time with Alice or the strange men and the sick brother had ended—and he missed them. The blast from the stunshot, when they liberated him from Garfield must have shorted out the suppressor, however, which allowed him to return to the memory-like dreams for the first time in weeks, and David had been glad to have them back.

  “Of course, we’ve been watching them as they unfold, David. We know a lot about you—about where you came from, and who you are … or, were, should I say.”

  “Then you know more than me.” Unsure of what they uncovered, but fully aware that any secrets revealed to him of his past were no longer secrets, he feared what came next.

  “The weird thing is, we were only able to retrieve successful surveillance on some of your memories. Bits and pieces here and there. From the data file we rebuilt, everything appears to be whole, but there are major gaps,” said the woman. She stood behind David, looking out at the city with him and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Still, what we did discover was quite interesting. You might be surprised at what you find … maybe even frightened. But the mission will continue as planned.”

  David took a deep breath, allowing the tension in his shoulders to disappear with his exhale. “Okay then. So, when do we do this?”

  “Now, David. We must do it now. The thing with memories is they follow a timeline, and your timeline has almost reached its end. I’m afraid if we don’t start a merge now, your memory rebuild will hit the end of its file, and although we’ve done quite a bit of miracle work here, we still haven’t figured out how to stop temporal progression,” Juliet said. “Basically, if we don’t start merging the data into your subconscious, new memories will start to be created—from within the simulator. And without any input, your memories will experience nothingness—and once they go there, well, people can’t process the concept of nothingness.”

  The couple on the sidewalk below finished their lunch, leaving their plates for a waiter to clean up. A cloud crossed above the dome of Plasticity, blocking the sun and casting the city into shadow. A sparrow crashed into the edge of the glass, its dead little body plummeting to the ground like a stone.

  “Then let’s do it,” he said.

  “Already started,” Juliet replied. His port engaged with the neural cable with a familiar click. “When you wake up, you’ll be a whole man.”

  ----

  “I can’t believe we just crossed paths, like fate or something,” Chris said through the speakerphone.

  The clock on David’s computer read 3:47 a.m. All lights of David’s office building were out, his glowing monitor the sole source of illumination in a sea of cubicles. Outside, time moved forward as it always did. In a few hours the sun would come up and a new day would begin. The only difference was by the time this new day began, David would have helped The Cause score the first major coup in their mission.

  “I just wish this would be able to change things. Fix things.” David said.

  “It’s too late to fix things, my man. You know that and so do I,” said Paul. “But this is going to gi
ve us access to so much more. We’ll be able to save people. Maybe put a stop to all this.”

  “If this thing works like I think it will, you’ll have the keys to the kingdom. Access to everything in the network. All they’ll have to do is initiate the latest update and it’ll be part of the firmware. No matter what they do, as long as they don’t ever find this, you’ll always be in. I set it to replicate. This backdoor won’t ever go away—not unless they do a complete wipe.”

  “This is why we were so lucky to find you,” said Chris. “A government contractor in cyber security. What are the odds.”

  “Listen guys, this is going to take a while, and I’ll be offline while it happens. Everything’s set here, so it’s time for me to sign off. We’ll talk soon.”

  “Yeah, talk soon. Good luck.”

  As the phone went silent, David took the headset from his desk and placed it on his head. A mesh unit, the wires were built into the structure, allowing for an advanced brain structure scan. A replacement for EEG units, it fit snugly around his recently shaved skull. After checking to make sure all points were in contact with his skin, he extended his right index finger and tapped “enter.” A wave of heat washed over his head as the program began to execute.

  In front of him, the structure of David’s brain came slowly into focus as the scan proceeded. As the neural structures transformed into a distinguished network of nervous fibers, what began as a sensation of warmth mutated to a burn. The scan continued, and David checked the activity of his brain in the readout panel. An alarm rang out from his speakers and a message popped up on screen.

  WARNING: RISK OF BRAIN DEATH

  David dismissed the message with a click of his mouse, allowing the scan to continue. The fire in his head was excruciating, and spots started to dance at the corners of his eyes. The smell of pancakes and maple syrup invaded his nostrils. The readings for his brain activity all went red—but the scan was almost complete.