by Eric Brown
Barney stared at the ground, trying to take all this in. ‘So let’s get this straight. The bottom line is, I’m stuck in here, living a long holiday while time dawdles by in the outside world, right?’
‘That’s about the size, Barney.’
‘So when are you guys gonna get me out?’
‘Believe me, we’re working on it. We’re confident that any day now we’ll make a breakthrough.’
Barney matched his gaze. ‘I hope so, Lew, for your goddamned sake I certainly hope so.’
‘In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do to make your stay here any easier—’
‘Can you transfer me to another site? You wouldn’t believe how dull paradise can be.’
Lew shook his head. ‘Sorry, Barney. No can do. If we could achieve that, we could get you out. But I might be able to transfer things into this site for you.’
Barney laughed. ‘Sounds great. Like what, a troupe of dancing girls?’
Lew pursed his lips. ‘Something like that might not be out of the question.’
Barney waved. ‘Forget it, Lew. Know something? Along with the ability to feel, I’ve lost all those other human urges, too. To tell the truth, I can’t even bring myself to feel that pissed with you - now ain’t that something?’
‘I’ll be in touch, Barney. Rest assured, we’re working to get you out pronto, okay?’
Barney nodded wearily. ‘Sure, Lew. Anything you say. See you around.’
As he watched, Lew Kramer sketched a wave in the air and dematerialised like a holo-image breaking up.
Barney turned and stared down at the obsidian slick. What had Lew called it? A rent in the basal matrix?
It seemed to draw him closer, invite him to dive headfirst into its inky depths. He wished he’d asked Lew about that, now. Why did it seem so alluring?
He thought of Lew’s warning, and the explanation the exec had proffered for his imprisonment here. Barney had developed an astute ear over the years for what some people called the adept management of the truth, and others, lies. He preferred the much simpler term, bullshit.
Lew Kramer was hiding something, he was sure of that.
He stared into the basal rent, and it came to him suddenly - from nowhere - that the rip in the matrix might afford him a means of escape from this site.
* * * *
Ten
Halliday was woken by the persistent summons of an alarm.
He rolled over onto his back, still half asleep. He’d incorporated the alarm into his waking dream: he was in a burning building, searching in vain for Casey, with the alarm bell shrilling in his ears.
He blinked up at the ceiling, banishing the dream images. The noise persisted, a constant, high-pitched shriek. He recalled quitting the Virginia site last night, pulling himself from the tank and vomiting before passing out. He must have come to his senses at some time and made it to bed.
He tried to ignore the alarm. It seemed to be coming from the office. He had no idea what might be making the noise, but it wasn’t going to go away. He rolled out of bed and dressed, his vision blurring with the sudden exertion.
He stumbled into the office, light-headed. The noise seemed to be coming from the case that Wellman had given him the other day, on the desk where he’d left it last night.
He slumped into his swivel chair and opened the case. The alarm cut off instantly. The computer screen flared and flashed a two-word message: Status Alert!
Halliday tapped the touchpad. The screen cleared, the flashing warning replaced by the nano-med program showing Anastasia Dah’s physiological status.
He tried to make sense of the horizontal slide-bars.
Where before each bar had extended itself into the middle of the screen, dipping when she had entered VR, now each bar had retracted to within one per cent of the range.
Halliday shook his head in an attempt to clear his mind and think straight. He found an option on a menu that read: Report, and selected it. A text window opened and he read: Subject status: comatose. Traumatic physiological destabilisation. Emergency condition.
Into his head came the vision of Anastasia Dah, glamorous in her scarlet wrap. What the hell was happening to her?
He opened the program that he hoped was still tracking the woman. He expected to see a map of Manhattan on the screen, with Dah’s position indicated by a flashing red star. Instead, a map of New York State appeared. The star was flashing, but not in the city. It appeared that Dah had travelled upstate during the night, and was now somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack.
He zoomed in. Dah was situated three kilometres north of Nyack, in the country overlooking the Hudson River. He expanded the map even further. The red light pulsed in an area that had once been woodland, at the end of a deadend road.
He returned to the nano-med program. There was no improvement in Anastasia Dah’s condition.
He moved to the bedroom, strapped on his body-holster and took his automatic from the drawer beside the bed. He returned to the office, closed the case and carried it with him down into the street.
It was dawn, around six, and to the east the sky above the city was discoloured with a huge and sulphurous sunrise. Already it was hot, and the humidity made each drawn breath a physical effort.
On either side of the street the food-vendors were preparing for another long day. They set out their stalls with the bored, economical movements of people who had gone through the same routine a thousand times before.
Halliday bought a coffee and, recalling his resolution to look after himself a little better from now on, handed over an amazing ten dollars for one apple.
He drove north out of El Barrio and took the slip lane onto Interstate 87, set the cruise control at fifty and settled into the slow lane. He took one bite from the apple, then spat the pulpy mouthful through the window and pitched the rest of the fruit after it. He washed the taste from his mouth with an invigorating draught of bitter coffee.
His was one of the few cars on the road this morning. The highway curved ahead of him like the deserted set for a post-apocalyptic holo-movie. Not having to concentrate on other traffic, his thoughts wandered.
He recalled the feeling he’d experienced last night in the Virginia site with the Casey construct. He had felt shame, a disbelief that he had allowed himself to program a companion. He looked back to the time immediately after the Vanessa Artois case, when he’d been at his lowest. Perhaps it had been his only way of coping back then, his only hope of staying sane.
Later, tonight some time, he’d go over to Casey’s apartment and apologise for his behaviour the other night. He’d try to explain to her why he had acted as he did, and tell her that he was sorry. He’d suggest they see more of each other, maybe go out for a meal from time to time. Try to get back to how things had been in the old days, when they’d been good friends and could chat for hours on end.
Hell, she had come searching him out yesterday. She had split with her boyfriend, lost her job, and had been worried about Kim - and he had lost it with the boxer in a fit of jealousy and hate.
When she had needed someone to talk to, someone who understood and who could sympathise with her, he’d acted like a thug.
He entered Westchester County, passing through what once had been great tracts of forest. He recalled that, just twenty years ago, plantations had patchworked the land around here. Now the trees were blackened and stunted, and even the once-green grass had a sear and unhealthy appearance.
Living in Manhattan as he did, and rarely venturing beyond the city limits, he had become accustomed to the lack of greenery in his day-to-day life. There had been few trees in the city anyway, so when they began dying fifteen years ago their absence was hardly noted. Only when he left the city, heading north, or over to Long Island where his father had lived, did the enormity of the devastation hit home. Plagues and blights had decimated the natural world of the North American continent, and the meltdowns five years ago in Raleigh and Atlanta had placed a greater stra
in on the already labouring ecosystem. He lived in a world that was slowly dying, despite the work of scientists and environmentalists to develop new strains of disease-resistant flora. He’d read optimistic reports that a corner was being turned, that all was not yet lost, and that in five to ten years the recovery of the country’s devastated environment would be under way.
And he’d read other reports that claimed there was no hope, that the poisoning of the system had gone unchecked for so long that there was no chance of recovery.
Was it little wonder that he and millions like him sought solace in the dream realm of virtual reality?
He thought of Casey, who had turned her back on VR after experiencing it a couple of times. He admired her strength of will to resist something that was so easy and, at the same time, so gratifyingly rewarding. She had gone through a lot after losing her family in the Atlanta meltdown, had lived rough on the streets before he had taken her in. Perhaps the reality she lived now was safe and secure compared to the life she had led; perhaps she did not need the artificial succour of VR.
He crossed the Tappan Zee bridge high above the mud-coloured waters of the Hudson. The coastline ahead stretched left and right, dim behind the grey morning mist. For the most part the foreshore was denuded of trees, but here and there, where affluent landowners had the means and the desire, areas of holographic forest covered the slopes in displays at once beautiful and banal, an electronic homage to a lost cause.
He motored off the bridge and turned right along the coast, passing through the town of Nyack and heading north towards what had once been the Hook Mountain State Park.
He considered Anastasia Dah and what might have happened to her. He had last seen her, fit and healthy, entering a Chinese restaurant with the silver-haired Charles last night. Halliday had seen nothing to suggest that the guy had had any ill-intent towards Dah; in fact, quite the reverse: he had formed the impression that they were complicit, working together in something he had yet to fathom. The Methuselah Project...
And now Dah was somewhere not too far away, in a comatose state on the borderland of death. He found it hard to square the facts as reported by the nano-med program with the vision of her last night, so full of life and beauty.
He recalled something he had overheard in her apartment, as she and Charles made to leave. He had asked her if she needed anything other than her handbag, and she had replied, ‘How much do you think I need, where I’m going?’
What the hell had she meant by that? Was it a reference to the restaurant they were dining at? But her answer had suggested that she was going somewhere alone.
At least he had made inroads on the case. He had leads. Dah and Charles were implicated in something which he was sure involved the disappearances of both Kim and the Charlesworth kid. It was more than just a start.
He pulled into the side of the road and opened the case on the passenger seat. He accessed the map. The flashing red star was situated a kilometre ahead, on a rising headland that Halliday could make out from where he sat. The promontory bristled with the remnants of a once extensive forest, a thousand dead trunks creating an eerie, nightmare landscape.
He eased the Ford back onto the road and motored north, aware of the sudden sweat that soaked his skin and had nothing to do with the heat of the day.
He slowed the car when he came to the headland. A narrow track led from the road at right angles and climbed through the dead trees. In the distance, on a rise of land overlooking the river, he made out a big, three-storey weatherboard house, sliced into sections by the intervening tree-trunks. Three cars and a white van were parked beside the building.
He checked the map on the computer screen. The red star indicated that Anastasia Dah was somewhere within the house.
He sat for a while and considered his options. He would take a look around the place, unobserved if he could manage it.
First he had to find somewhere to conceal the Ford.
The dead woodland continued over the road to his left, though it offered little in the way of cover. A hundred metres ahead, however, set among the dead trees a little way off the road, was a derelict filling station.
He started the engine and drove until he reached the station and pulled off the road. He parked the car in the lot behind the tumbledown building and hurried across the road.
He stepped into the bare forest, the leaf mould of centuries giving like a soft carpet beneath his feet. There was a rank smell in the air, the bitter reek of diseased woodland. Very little grew on the forest floor, other than the occasional bramble or courageous flourish of bindweed. There was no birdsong, no sound of any kind other than the scuffing of his footsteps. The air was filled with a silence which, when he stopped to listen, seemed far more profound than the mere absence of sound.
His hand strayed involuntarily to the automatic in his body-holster. He found himself creeping through stunted undergrowth, loath to make any more sound than was absolutely necessary. Ten metres ahead he made out a high mesh fence encircling the grounds. It seemed as old as the house, he was relieved to see, and in places it had worked free from the concrete pillars. If he chose, he could enter the grounds without difficulty. Beyond the fence, the house stood in quiet isolation, surrounded by extensive lawns, green and well-tended.
Halliday concealed himself behind the trunk of a blackened pine, staring through the mesh at the side wall of the house. The upper windows were shuttered, but the windows on the ground floor revealed two white-walled rooms.
He decided to take a closer look. He scanned the grounds to ensure there was no one in the vicinity, then moved quickly along the fence until he came to a rent in the netting. He grasped the wire mesh, pulled it back further, and stepped through. Doubled-up, he sprinted towards the house, heading for the wall between the two ground floor windows.
He made it and flattened himself against the timber, breathing hard and grimacing at the pain that shot the length of his left thigh. He took deep breaths, heart pounding. There had been a time, two or three years ago, when he’d prided himself on his fitness. Now he felt nauseous. He knelt, hanging his head and closing his eyes in a bid to banish the dizziness.
Perhaps five minutes later he suspected that he might survive the exertion, after all.
He stood and, his back pressed against the weatherboard, edged towards the nearest window. He peered cautiously inside. The room was empty except for minimal furnishings: half a dozen uncomfortable-looking vinyl armchairs. The place had the appearance of an institution, a residential home for the elderly or handicapped.
He moved along the wall towards the back of the house, came to the corner and peered round. He made out more windows, a brick extension that might have been a kitchen.
He reminded himself of the vehicles parked around the front of the house. Someone was obviously inside, other than Anastasia Dah.
He moved along the rear of the house until he came to the first window, and peered in.
He backed off immediately, pressing himself against the wall and breathing hard. He’d caught a glimpse of a female nurse in baggy blue overalls, tending to someone in a narrow bed.
When he chanced a second look minutes later, the nurse was no longer in the room. He stared through the window at the figure on the bed.
Anastasia Dah.
He drew back, wondering what the hell to do now. Was this some kind of clinic, to which she had admitted herself voluntarily? Would that explain her comments to the silver-haired guy last night, that she would need nothing other than a handbag where she was going?
But she had been in perfect health last night, and now, according to the nano-med, she was at death’s door.
Halliday took another look. Dah was hooked up to a battery of impressive-looking apparatus. He recognised a heart monitor and a respirator, but little else. Her head of luxuriant black curls had been shorn, and electrodes connected her skull to an array of monitors.
Before Halliday could react, the door opened and someone wal
ked into the room. The man moved around the bed, his back to the window, and leaned over the woman.
It was the silver-haired guy, Charles.
As Halliday watched, he took Dah’s hand and raised the long black fingers to his lips. Then he reached out and stroked the woman’s cheek.
Two nurses, one pushing a wheelchair, entered the room. While Charles stood back and watched, they peeled the electrodes from Dah’s head and arms, disconnected other leads, and between them lifted the woman carefully into the wheelchair.
Only then, as Dah sat upright and faced Halliday for a second, did he see that her eyes were open and staring without sight or seeming awareness.
