21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  “Good God,” says Silverman.

  “I have a feeling God’s not really paying attention at the moment,” says Carter.

  They watch Ted continue to tear into Ashley, his face covered with her blood as he chews on her flesh and motorboats her intestines.

  “I’ve got to hand it to him,” says Silverman. “He’s got great technique. And I like his enthusiasm.”

  “I told you,” says Carter. “The kid’s a natural.”

  Silverman nods. “He’s got a bright future. Though we’re going to have to beef up our liability insurance.”

  They continue to watch Ted in silence as he devours Ashley the intern, then Silverman closes the bathroom door and walks back over to the bar.

  “So what do you think?” says Carter. “Do we have a deal?”

  “That first idea you mentioned,” says Silverman as he grabs the decanter of scotch. “The one about following him around documentary-style?”

  “A Zombie’s Life,” says Carter.

  Silverman refills his glass, then pours another glass for Carter and hands it to him. “What do you think about calling it Reality Bites?”

  THE DROP

  Stephen Susco

  THE GIRL I MURDERED last December returned this morning, a few minutes after midnight, pounding on my apartment door. And I mean pounding—with a force and a will that should have been rendered entirely impossible by eleven months of decalcification and decomposition.

  Eleven months. Six days. Two hours. Death just hadn’t taken root.

  Maybe my parents were right after all—maybe I can’t do anything properly.

  The blows jolted me from a kind of sleep-mode-reverie that had been conjured by the rhythmic motion of the countdown timer on my preferred mirror site. I’d been staring at the screen for hours, as if the pot might boil early under my withering stare. Like the fifty-million-plus other Cynapse addicts around the world, I’d been waiting for The Drop. Ten hours a day playing the damn game simply wasn’t enough. No, us ’Napsacks were more than willing to sacrifice even more of our valuable time aimlessly ticking the days off our calendars, imagining the bliss to come as we suffocated the useless moments separating us from our next fix—the mythological “Revenant Patch.”

  It took a few seconds—most likely, more than a few—for my addled brain to register the aural impulse. I turned from the screen, freed momentarily from its hypnosis-inducing pulse, and faced the dark, brick-encased stairwell. Unsure if I’d imagined it. The storm had rolled in, a biblical downpour. The thunder had been rattling the windows of my loft for hours. It could have been a charge from a particularly low cloud. Surely no one would be out on the streets tonight, not in this weather, especially not in this part of town—

  The pounding, again. More insistent.

  It’s her. You know it’s her.

  Impossible. I’d ended her.

  But who else could it be?

  The visitors had trickled to a stop shortly after the murder. A few caring friends had found their efforts were in vain, and quickly realized—or was it rationalized?—that they had far better things to do. More numerous were the sympathy chicks with their late-night texts, casually fumbled queries inquiring as to the current state of my well-being, yearning for a greater moon of despair to come into their orbit to blot out the sweltering heat of their own unavoidable truths.

  Most of these, naturally, I’d accepted—hungry for the pull of a new celestial gravity, however fleeting. Seeking solace in even the palest reflection, the most vacuous echo of what had vanished long ago from my own night sky. A momentary flash of light, of heat, in a world of desolation. A passing comet to recall a brilliant star, now absent.

  Brilliant star, bullshit. She was a black hole. A crushing vortex.

  The pounding had stopped. Even without the blackout curtains I’d had put in to quell the stifling summer heat, the windows would have appeared dark. The dim bulb of my desk lamp—installed at the insistence of my ophthalmologist—illuminated only the far corner of the factory loft. Anyone outside—anyone but her—would assume no one was in. Had they gone?

  There was only one way to be sure. I pressed the button on the video intercom by the top of the stairs. The screen brightened to life.

  Apparently I hadn’t installed the camera in the right place—the LCD image was blurred by the rain, rendering useless the extra money I’d paid to ensure a crystalline 1080p view of any unwelcome intruders.

  But in this case, I didn’t need the heightened clarity. Even the most ephemeral image, as from the vestiges of our most inebriated and pharmacologically enhanced moments together, was enough. The vague outline of her body was enough: shoulders perpetually slumped, shielding herself from a constant psychic onslaught, rain-drenched hair draping limply across those Eeyore-inspired shoulders—long, now, a far cry from her more familiar, asymmetrical bob—the penetrating gaze that, in spite of the way her body trembled in the December rain, remained defiantly fixed on the lens of the camera.

  She knew I was watching. And she knew I would come.

  Eleven months dead. And knock-knock-knocking at my chamber door.

  I was halfway down the stairs before I realized I was in motion. Reaching for the dead bolt before I could even question why.

  You don’t let the dead in. Never let them back, not after—

  I’d scrubbed her memory. Deleted the e-mails, the photos, the mix lists. The boiler in the basement had consumed her old headshots, the chicken-scrawl notes she’d leave on the pillow, in the refrigerator, taped to the rearview. Rendering them to ash that I’d carried to the roof and spilled out across the city. Wishing I could somehow do the same to the residue of those same immutable images on display in my brain.

  You slaughtered her. And then you picked the bones clean.

  Yet, there she stood, the thick steel door no longer between us.

  No. Look again. That’s a dead girl standing before you—

  Undeniably alive. Lazarus risen.

  NO. A rotting corpse. A shambling, stinking, festering, rotten—

  She raised a hand. Palm down, fingers limp. Her eyes entreating.

  They need permission to enter, don’t they? The dead, the vamps—

  And I took it. God help me, I took her hand, her pale skin cold as ice.

  She melted into me. Sobbing into my neck. Making it wet with her tears.

  Not tears. Rotten flesh. Stale blood. Ichor and pus. Anything but flesh, vital blood, a beating heart. Anything but alive, again.

  I felt the warmth of her breath on my neck. Indisputable proof of resurrection.

  And in the wake of that singular sensation, I was damned.…

  * * *

  The things she’d left behind—her clothes, toiletries, books—these sheddings had been further victims of my rampage. Chalk it up to collateral damage. Or a weak resistance to physical association. Her tea was listed among the ranks of the dead, that horrible yerba maté she always quaffed, with just a touch of stevia, from a ridiculous hollowed gourd she’d had shipped from Argentina—a bonus item, most likely, added as a token of thanks for contributing to one of those ridiculous microloan scams. She always did have a soft spot.

  Where the worms first took root. Where the flies deposited their larva—

  I found a bag of the maté smashed under the lower platter of my Ikea lazy Susan—a piece of her that had become trapped in my life, like an irritating length of gristle wedged between teeth, the remnant of a meal that simply can’t be shaken free. This lucky survivor had been torn open, the twigs inside turned dry and brittle, speckled with more-fortunate stowaways—a few stale, scablike corn flakes, and the remnants of an ancient bag of brown rice.

  Mindy didn’t seem to mind. She’d already gulped down half the French press, even without a sweetener to cut the acerbic edge. Her color had returned. But she gripped the teacup so tightly that I was worried it might shatter, and rip into her palms.

  Nothing to bleed. Nothing but the powder of d
esiccated blood—

  “The Drop. It was The Drop.”

  It had taken an hour for her to speak. Most of that time I’d spent staring at the cup in her hands. Waiting for it to burst. It was easier than risking a look at those (dead, glassy, cataract-ridden) violet-tinged eyes. Because then, if I’d caught her looking back, I would have had to speak. To ask why she’d come. A question that would have been patently absurd, in the long shadow of the last thing I’d ever said to her.

  No, not said—written. To have spoken would have risked a response.

  It wasn’t even a year, and still the exact words remain elusive. But the intent, I’m certain that couldn’t have been clearer. That, I remember. “Don’t,” I believe was the subject line of the e-mail. “Don’t” was also the beginning of every sentence in the body of the message. Don’t write. Don’t call. Don’t think of me. Don’t think, if we ever pass each other on the street, that I will—

  Don’t be alive to me. Please. Just die.

  She defied death that night. By pounding on my door. By speaking first.

  “The Drop. It was The Drop.”

  I could feel her eyes. Waiting for mine. I considered remaining like that forever: just staring at that fucking teacup. Immovable as a statue. Lifeless.

  And then we’d have switched places. Dead to life. Alive to dead.

  Join us—we are legion—

  But instead I raised my head, as slowly as I dared. Seeking clues, wanting to understand how this had happened. There was twice the duct tape on her priceless Keds high-tops as there’d been before. And more vibrant oil droppings—deep-crimson and canary-yellow splotches punching through the pitch black of the sneaker fabric.

  Death had brought about few changes, it seemed.

  Higher, still: formless men’s worker jeans clung to her skinny legs in clumps, knees scuffed and torn, the denim drying unevenly along with the leggings she wore underneath. Even higher: the ridiculous hoodie she knew I fucking hated, over the tour shirt of the band I knew she fucking hated.

  So. She hadn’t planned the trip.

  I should have reasoned this earlier, when I hung her raincoat—his raincoat—on the hook in the landing. She never would have worn that deliberately.

  Guess I’ve always been a little slow. Even more since Cynapse started taking up most of my mental RAM …

  A memory of our first fight abruptly ripped back into my thoughts—another unwelcome, undead abomination I’d staked through the heart, now clawing its way from the sodden earth. She’d said the wrong thing—or maybe it was the right thing, that I simply didn’t want to hear. I’d stormed out, wasted a few hours downing pints of weak beer at Solley’s before staggering into the campus computer center. Late shift paid double, and the place was always deserted. I drunkenly flipped off the undergrad who gave me the stink eye for being twenty minutes late. He said something about filing a complaint. Kept him from theater rehearsal, or something. Put off his backstage blow job for a spell. I couldn’t have cared less. They wouldn’t fire me—no one else would work until 4:00 A.M.

  The outer doors opened only once that night. It was Mindy, in pigtails, knee socks, and a pleated schoolgirl skirt that ended well above her scarred, knobby knees. An apology on her lips. A key card to the lock for the seminar room down the hall in her hands.

  She knew how to work it. How to pull the strings.

  And she damn well knew what she could have worn on that night. Our first night together in eleven months, six days, and two hours. But that’s not the way her mind was working. Which meant she was desperate. And had nowhere else to go.

  Or—she knew exactly where to go. Where there was someone who would always take her in, in spite of vitriolic promises of rejection drunkenly tapped out on a crummy Dell keyboard.

  “The Drop. It was The Drop.”

  I crossed the River Styx. My eyes met hers.

  “What about The Drop?” I mumbled.

  “Connor. The Drop … took him.”

  “Took him where?” It was a sarcastic response. But she sat there and reasoned it out, brow furrowed, legs jittering, as if her old calculus professor had just popped out of the bedroom and offered her a million dollars if she could calculate the differential equation that determined the rate at which her tea was cooling toward room temperature, in Celsius.

  “Away. It took him away.”

  At this point I glanced at the digital wall clock. I remember this action clearly, because my eyes had previously been glued to the damn thing all day—until the moment Mindy had knocked on my door. From that point I’d forgotten I even owned a clock, or that time even existed and could be measured—

  … Eleven months six days two hours

  It was almost 1:30 A.M. Another hour and a half until The Drop. There was a clear logic to the idea of releasing the Revenant Patch simultaneously around the globe—at the stroke of midnight, naturally, in the Seattle home office of Cynapse. They didn’t want the basement trollers to get on the boards early, and poison what would surely be an overwhelming flood of orgasmic reviews. The Socioheads had studied how many prospective buyers always seek out negative commentary first, diving to the single-digit one-star reviews and giving them extraordinary weight even in the face of a majority of five-stars. “Sympathetic dissonance,” I’d heard it called. And the corporate bean counters had surely listened. Playing it safe, in spite of the fact that most of the current subscribers had most likely already preordered.

  There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how the ’Napsacks farther north, up the Atlantic seaboard and into Quebec, were panicking about a nor’easter that was rolling in. They’d lose their minds if there were power outages. Colleges across the country had even canceled classes the next day, making The Drop a de facto national holiday.

  The game itself was something of a cipher, a long and unusual reach from your typical MMORPG: instead of elves, orcs, warriors, and wizards, players adopted the elusive persona of a disembodied spirit—not in the supernatural sense but rather in the technological. No specific definition had been supplied by the game’s creator—ambiguity was a good part of the charm—but collectively the players had deduced that they were adopting the roles of an advanced alien race that had somehow survived a cataclysmic astral event by converting their essence to a raw energy state.

  Yeah, we’d all heard that before—at least, anyone who’d ever read a few sci-fi novels or seen any given Star Trek variant. But it was the execution that drove the concept. When you first signed up, it took ten hours of tests—psychological, intellectual, and symbolic—for the system to determine the foundational attributes of your avatar. Ten hours. That element alone exponentially multiplied the odds of Cynapse’s predicted failure upon launch.

  Naturally, the doomsayers—the game’s competitors, mostly—were wrong. Subscription numbers raced upward at record speeds, hitting record levels. So they simply raised their voices, like haruspices who had masterfully surveyed the entrails and summarily judged the Cynapse empire a stillbirth. They predicted that the ten-hour ordeal would create a massive backlash in the face of what the game had to offer—a landscape of abstract puzzles, each with its own unique set of rules (and physics, for the ones presented in 3-D), waiting to be solved in a kind of massively cooperative group session. Why would gamers want to join thousands of others in what amounted to hundreds of hours of, say, the folding of brilliantly colored cylindrical tubes in order to properly align an ever-shifting chromatic resonance field for a purpose that remained undefined?

  Every geek knows this old chestnut: Ken Olsen, cofounder and CEO of the legendary DEC computer company (the second largest for a time, behind IBM), famously pronounced, at a 1977 meeting of the World Future Society in Boston, that there was “no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” Though somewhat erroneous when taken out of context, the lesson should have been crystal clear—in the realm of technology, one should always, at least outwardly, embrace all ventures with the enthusi
asm and optimism of a child. Especially if one has far to fall.

  And Cynapse’s competitors fell very, very far. Memberships to their own digital realms plummeted. The converts were simply too numerous. And a ticket to Cynapse produced a level of commitment previously unseen. With World of Warcraft, the last of the titans to topple, the average player could be expected to dedicate twenty hours a week to gameplay—enough to certify it as a second career.

  The average Cynapse player logged in twice that much. There was room for little else. Especially other games. It was a phenomenon. A revolution.

  And everyone wanted to know what lay at the core—what connected all the thousands of seemingly unrelated modules. Books had been written; online referendums of professionals and civilians had been held ad nauseam. Some had theorized that Cynapse was an institutionally founded protein-folding project, a method of utilizing the computing and intellectual powers of the masses to achieve scientific breakthroughs—like the one pioneered at Stanford, which uploaded data-chewing screen-saver software to transform your PC into a passive supercomputer participant, one tiny gear of a much greater collective think tank. Or the more “active” breeds such as Foldit, out of the University of Washington, which in 2011 announced that gamers had solved in three weeks a mystery that had baffled scientists for over a decade—the structure of a protease molecule with the ability to hamper the proliferation of the AIDS virus.

  Another popular theory was that the engine beneath the surface was no more unique than any other successful commercial venture—a fortuitous marriage of capitalism and concept with an adept illusionist at the center, weaving a rich tapestry of mystery to conceal, for as long as possible, that there was in fact no Great Answer holding everything together. No chewy core to be uncovered, for all the licking in the world. Much like a certain ever-so-popular TV series, trumpeted for years as the height of innovation, yet revealed in postconclusion hindsight as nothing more than a vacuous experiment of narrative misdirection and manipulation—an attraction no more ingenious than a laser pointer used to wear out a particularly energetic kitten.