by Dean Koontz
'Shep likes Cheez-Its.'
'I know you do, buddy.' To Jilly, Dylan said, 'They're a nice square snack.'
'What would he do if you gave him those little cheese-cracker fish – what're they called, Goldfish?' she wondered.
'Shep hates Goldfish,' the kid said at once. 'They're shapey. They're all round and shapey. Goldfish suck. They're too shapey. They're disgusting. Goldfish stink. They suck, suck, suck.'
'You've hit on a sore point,' Dylan told Jilly.
'No Goldfish,' she promised Shep.
'Goldfish suck.'
'You're absolutely right, sweetie. They're totally too shapey,' Jilly said.
'Disgusting.'
'Yes, sweetie, totally disgusting.'
'Cheez-Its,' Shep insisted.
Jilly would have spent the rest of the day talking about the shapes of snack foods if that would have prevented Dylan from telling her more than she could bear to know about what those nanomachines might be doing inside her body right this very minute, but before she could mention Wheat Thins, he returned to the dreaded subject.
'In that interview,' Dylan said, 'Proctor even claims that one day millions of psychotropic nanomachines—'
Jilly winced. 'Psychotropic.'
'—might be injected into the human body—'
'Injected. Here we go.'
'—travel with the blood supply to the brain—'
She shuddered. 'Machines in the brain.'
'—and colonize the brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum.'
'Colonize the brain.'
'Disgusting,' Shep said, though he was most likely still talking about Goldfish.
Dylan said, 'Proctor envisions a forced evolution of the brain conducted by nanomachines and nanocomputers.'
'Why didn't somebody kill the son of a bitch years ago?'
'He says these nanomachines could be programmed to analyze the structure of the brain at a cellular level, firsthand, and find ways to improve the design.'
'I guess I failed to vote when Lincoln Proctor was elected to be the new god.'
Taking her hands out of her armpits, Jilly opened her fists and looked at her palms. She was glad that she didn't know how to read them.
Dylan said, 'These colonies of nanomachines might be able to create new connections between various lobes of the brain, new neural pathways—'
She resisted the impulse to put her hands to her head, for fear that she would feel some faint strange vibration through her skull, evidence of a horde of nanomachines busily changing her from within.
'—better synapses. Synapses are the points of contact between neurons in a neural pathway inside the brain, and apparently they become fatigued when we think or just when we stay awake too long. When they're fatigued they slow down our thought processes.'
Dead serious, not reaching for a wisecrack, she said, 'I could use a little synapse fatigue right now. My thoughts are spinning way too fast.'
'There's more in the interview,' Dylan said, pointing again at the laptop screen. 'I skimmed some of it, and there was a lot that I just didn't understand, a lot of fumfuddle about something called the precentral gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus, Purkinje cells... on and on with the arcane words. But I understood enough to realize what a hole we're in.'
No longer able to resist pressing her fingertips to her temples, Jilly felt no vibrations. Nevertheless, she said, 'God, it doesn't bear thinking about. Millions of tiny nanomachines and nanocomputers salted through your head, squirming around in there like so many bees, busy ants, making changes... It's not tolerable, is it?'
Dylan's face had gone gray enough to suggest that if his usual optimism had not burned out, at least it had for the moment grown as dim as banked coals. 'It's got to be tolerable. We don't have any choice but to think about it. Unless we take the Shep option. But then who would cut our food into squares and rectangles?'
Indeed, Jilly couldn't decide whether talking about this machine infection or not talking about it would lead more surely and quickly to full-blown panic. She felt a dark winged terror perched within her, its feathers fluttering agitatedly, and she knew that if she didn't control it, didn't keep it firmly on its perch, if she allowed it to take flight, she might never bring it to roost again; and she knew that once it had flown long enough, frantically battering its pinions against the walls of every chamber in the mansion of her mind, her sanity would take flight with it.
She said, 'It's like being told you've got mad cow disease or brain parasites.'
'Except it's intended to be a boon to humanity.'
'Boon, huh? I'll bet somewhere in that interview, the nutcase used the term master race or super race, or something like it.'
'Wait'll you hear. From the day Proctor first conceived of using nanotechnology for the forced evolution of the brain, he knew exactly what the people who underwent it should be called. Proctorians.'
A thunderous bolt of anger was the ideal thing to distract Jilly from her terror and to keep it caged. 'What an egotistical, self-satisfied freak!'
'That's one apt description,' Dylan agreed.
Still apparently brooding about the superiority of square-cut snack crackers to the sucky-shapey Goldfish, Shep said, 'Cheez-Its.'
'Last night,' Dylan said, 'Proctor told me that if he weren't such a coward, he would have injected himself.'
'If he hadn't had the bad grace to get himself blown up,' Jilly declared, 'I'd inject the freak right now, get me an even bigger damn syringe than his, pump all those nanomachines straight into his brain through his ass.'
Dylan smiled a gray smile. 'You are an angry person.'
'Yeah. It feels good.'
'Cheez-Its.'
'Proctor told me he wasn't a fit role model for anyone,' Dylan said, 'that he had too much pride to be contrite. Kept rambling on about his character flaws.'
'What – that's supposed to make me go all gooey with compassion?'
'I'm just remembering what he said.'
Motivated partly by the twitchy feeling that she got from thinking about all those nanomachines roaming in her gray matter and partly by a sense of righteous outrage, Jilly became too agitated to sit still any longer. Supercharged with nervous energy, she wanted to go for a long run or perform vigorous calisthenics – or preferably, ideally, find someone whose ass needed kicking and then kick it until her foot ached, until she couldn't lift her leg anymore.
Jilly shot to her feet with such agitation that she startled Dylan into bolting off his chair, as well.
Between them, Shep stood, moving faster than Shep usually moved. He said, 'Cheez-Its,' raised his right hand, pinched a scrap of nothing between thumb and forefinger, tweaked, and folded all three of them out of the motel room.
29
Being an attractive, personable, and frequently amusing woman with no halitosis problem, Jillian Jackson had often been taken to lunch by young men who appreciated her fine qualities, but she had never before been folded to lunch.
She didn't actually witness herself folding, didn't see herself become the equivalent of a Playboy Playmate sans staples, nor did she feel any discomfort. The cheesy motel room and furnishings instantly rumpled into bizarrely juxtaposed fragments and then doubled-pleated-creased-crimped-ruckled-twilled-tucked away from her. Beveled shards of another place folded toward her, appearing somehow to pass through the receding motel room, the departure point shadowy and lamplit but the destination full of sunshine, so that for a moment she seemed to be inside a gigantic kaleidoscope, her world but a jumble of colorful mosaic fragments in the process of shifting from a dark pattern to a brighter one.
Objectively, transit time might have been nil; they might have gone from here to there instantaneously; but subjectively, she timed it at three or four seconds. Her feet slipped off motel-room carpet, the rubber soles of her athletic shoes stuttered a few inches across concrete, and she found herself standing with Dylan and Shepherd outside the front doors of a restaurant, a diner.
Shepherd had fo
lded them back to the restaurant in Safford, where they had eaten dinner the previous night. This struck her as being a bad development because Safford was where Dylan had introduced the cowboy, Ben Tanner, to his lost granddaughter and, more important, where he had beaten the crap out of Lucas Crocker in the parking lot before calling the police to report that Crocker had been keeping his mother, Noreen, chained in the cellar. Even though the restaurant staff for the lunch shift probably didn't include any employees who'd been at work late the previous day, someone might recognize Dylan from a description, and in fact at least one cop might have returned today to examine the scene in daylight.
Then she realized that she was mistaken. They weren't all the way back in Safford. The establishment looked similar to the one in Safford because both shared the creatively bankrupt but traditional architecture of motel restaurants across the West, featuring a deep overhang on the roof to shield the big windows from the desert sun, low flagstone-faced walls supporting the windows, and flagstone-faced planters full of vegetation struggling to survive in the heat.
This was the coffee shop adjacent to the motel out of which they had just folded. Immediately south of them lay the motel registration office, and beyond the office, a covered walkway served a long wing of rooms, of which theirs was the next to last. Shepherd had folded them a grand distance of four or five hundred feet.
'Shep is hungry.'
Jilly turned, expecting to find an open gateway behind them, like the one Dylan had described on the hilltop in California, except that this one ought to provide a view not of the motel bathroom, but of the empty bedroom that they had a moment ago departed. Evidently, however, Shepherd had instantly closed the gate this time, for only the blacktop parking lot shimmered darkly in the noontime sun.
Twenty feet away, a young man in ranch clothes and a battered cowboy hat, getting out of a pickup truck that boasted a rifle rack, looked up at them, did a double take, but didn't cry out 'Teleporters' or 'Proctorians,' or anything else accusatory. He just seemed mildly surprised that he had not noticed them a moment ago.
In the street, none of the passing traffic had jumped a curb, crashed into a utility pole, or rear-ended another vehicle. Judging by the reaction of motorists, none of them had seen three people blink into existence out of thin air.
No one inside the coffee shop rushed out to gape in amazement, either, which probably meant that no one had happened to be looking toward the entrance when Jilly, Dylan, and Shepherd had traded motel carpet for this concrete walkway in front of the main doors.
Dylan surveyed the scene, no doubt making the same calculations that Jilly made, and when his eyes met hers, he said, 'All things considered, I'd rather have walked.'
'Hell, I'd even rather have been dragged behind a horse.'
'Buddy,' Dylan said, 'I thought we had an understanding about this.'
'Cheez-Its.'
The young man from the pickup tipped his hat as he walked past them – 'Howdy, folks' – and entered the coffee shop.
'Buddy, you can't make a habit of this.'
'Shep is hungry.'
'I know, that's my fault, I should have gotten you breakfast as soon as we were showered. But you can't fold yourself to a restaurant anytime you want. That's bad, Shep. That's real bad. That's the worst kind of bad behavior.'
Shoulders slumped, head hung, saying nothing, Shep looked more hangdog than a sick basset hound. Clearly, being scolded by his brother made him miserable.
Jilly wanted to hug him. But she worried that he would fold the two of them to a better restaurant, leaving Dylan behind, and she hadn't brought her purse.
She also sympathized with Dylan. To explain the intricacies of their situation and to convey an effective warning that performing the miracle of folding from here to there in public would be exposing them to great danger, he needed Shepherd to be more focused and more communicative than Shepherd seemed capable of being.
Consequently, to establish that public folding was taboo, Dylan chose not to explain anything. Instead, he attempted to establish by blunt assertion that being seen folding out of one place or folding into another was a shameful thing.
'Shep,' said Dylan, 'you wouldn't go to the bathroom right out in public, would you?'
Shepherd didn't respond.
'Would you? You wouldn't just pee right here on the sidewalk where the whole world could watch. Would you? I'm starting to think maybe you would.'
Visibly cringing at the concept of making his toilet in a public place, Shepherd nevertheless failed to defend himself against this accusation. A bead of sweat dripped off the tip of his nose and left a dark spot on the concrete between his feet.
'Am I to take your silence to mean you would do your business right here on the sidewalk? Is that the kind of person you are, Shep? Is it? Shep? Is it?'
Considering Shepherd's pathological shyness and his obsession with cleanliness, Jilly figured that he would rather curl up on the pavement, in the blazing desert sun, and die of dehydration before relieving himself in public.
'Shep,' Dylan continued, unrelenting, 'if you can't answer me, then I have to assume you would pee in public, that you'd just pee anywhere you wanted to pee.'
Shepherd shuffled his feet. Another drop of perspiration slipped off the tip of his nose. Perhaps the fierce summer heat was to blame, but this seemed more like nervous sweat.
'Some sweet little old lady came walking by here, you might up and pee on her shoes with no warning,' Dylan said. 'Is that what I have to worry about, Shep? Shep? Talk to me, Shep.'
After nearly sixteen hours of intense association with the O'Conner brothers, Jilly understood why sometimes Dylan had to pursue an issue with firm – even obstinate – persistence in order to capture Shepherd's attention and to make the desired impression. Admirable perseverance in the mentoring of an autistic brother could, however, sometimes look uncomfortably like badgering, even like mean-spirited hectoring.
'Some sweet little old lady and a priest come walking by here, and before I know what's happened, you pee on their shoes. Is that the kind of thing you're going to do now, Shep? Are you, buddy? Are you?'
Judging by Dylan's demeanor, this haranguing took as a high a toll from him as it levied on his brother. As his voice grew harder and more insistent, his face tightened not with an expression of impatience or anger, but with pain. A spirit of remorse or perhaps even pity haunted his eyes.
'Are you, Shep? Have you suddenly decided to do disgusting and gross things? Have you, Shep? Have you? Shep? Shepherd? Have you?'
'N-no,' Shep at last replied.
'What did you say? Did you say no, Shep?'
'No. Shep said no.'
'You aren't going to start peeing on old ladies' shoes?'
'No.'
'You aren't going to do disgusting things in public?'
'No.'
'I'm glad to hear that, Shep. Because I've always thought you're a good kid, one of the best. I'm glad to know you're not going bad on me. That would break my heart, kid. See, lots of people are offended if you fold in or out of a public place in front of them. They're just as offended by folding as if you were to pee on their shoes.'
'Really?' Shep said.
'Yes. Really. They're disgusted.'
'Really?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'Well, why are you disgusted by those little cheese Goldfish?' Dylan asked.
Shep didn't reply. He frowned at the sidewalk, as though this abrupt conversational switch to the subject of Goldfish confused him.
The sky blazed too hot for birds. As sun flared off the windows of passing traffic and rippled liquidly along painted surfaces, those vehicles glided past like mercurial shapes of unknown nature in a dream. On the far side of the street, behind heat snakes wriggling up from the pavement, another motel and a service station shimmered as though they were as semitransparent as structures in a mirage.
Jilly had only moments ago folded miraculously from one place to another,
and now here they stood in this surreal landscape, facing a future certain to be so bizarre at times as to seem like a stubborn hallucination, and yet they were talking about something as mundane as Goldfish cheese crackers. Maybe absurdity was the quality of any experience that proved you were alive, that you weren't dreaming or dead, because dreams were filled with enigma or terror, not with Abbott and Costello absurdity, and the afterlife wouldn't be as chockfull of incongruity and absurdity as life, either, because if it were, there wouldn't be any reason to have an afterlife.
'Why are you disgusted by those little cheese Goldfish?' Dylan asked again. 'Is it because they're sort of round?'
'Shapey,' said Shepherd.
'They're round and shapey, and that disgusts you.'
'Shapey.'
'But lots of people like Goldfish, Shep. Lots of people eat them every day.'
Shep shuddered at the thought of dedicated Goldfish fanciers.
'Would you want to be forced to watch people eating Goldfish crackers right in front of you, Shep?'
Tilting her head down to get a better look at his face, Jilly saw Shepherd's frown deepen into a scowl.
Dylan pressed on: 'Even if you closed your eyes so you couldn't see, would you like to sit between a couple people eating Goldfish and have to listen to all the crunchy, squishy sounds?'
Apparently in genuine revulsion, Shepherd gagged.
'I like Goldfish, Shep. But because they disgust you, I don't eat them. I eat Cheez-Its instead. Would you like it if I started eating Goldfish all the time, leaving them out where you could see them, where you could come across them when you weren't expecting to? Would that be all right with you, Shep?'
Shepherd shook his head violently.
'Would that be all right, Shep? Would it? Shep?'
'No.'
'Some things that don't offend us may offend other people, so we have to be respectful of other people's feelings if we want them to be respectful of ours.'
'I know.'
'Good! So we don't eat Goldfish in front of certain people—'
'No Goldfish.'
'—and we don't pee in public—'
'No pee.'
'—and we don't fold in or out of public places.'
'No fold.'
'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,' Dylan said.
'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold,' Shep repeated.
Although the pained expression still clenched his face, Dylan spoke in a softer and more affectionate tone of voice, and with apparent relief: 'I'm proud of you, Shep.'
'No Goldfish, no pee, no fold.'
'I'm very proud of you. And I love you, Shep. Do you know that? I love you, buddy.' Dylan's voice thickened, and he turned from his brother. He didn't look at Jilly, perhaps because he couldn't look at her and keep his composure. He solemnly studied his big hands, as if he'd done something with them that shamed him. He took several deep breaths, slow and deep, and into Shepherd's embarrassed silence, he said again, 'Do you know that I love you very much?'
'Okay,' Shep said quietly.
'Okay,' Dylan said. 'Okay then.'
Shepherd mopped his sweaty face with one hand, blotted the hand on his jeans. 'Okay.'
When Dylan at last met Jilly's eyes, she saw how difficult part of that conversation with Shep had been for him, the bullying part, and her voice, too,
