Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  Odd phrasing, but it at least seemed to translate into their not wanting me dead. I believed the guy, but I asked, anyway. “Why should I trust you?”

  “Mr. Trayne. Please.” Patient corporate voice. “It stands to reason. If that were all we wanted, we could have figured out a much easier way of accomplishing it.”

  These are the comforts I live with. I told him I’d meet him in the junkyard, and hung up.

  * * *

  The rats came out to greet me.

  I was hardly into the ’yard—I’d driven Geldt’s Hudson out from the city’s edge—when I heard them scuttling about, and felt the needle-push pressure of their eyes upon my back. I got out of the Hudson; the junkyard was too crowded with rubble and war debris to penetrate with a car. Made sure all the doors were locked—I didn’t want to come back and find some retro technophile drooling on the dashboard gauges.

  One came dancing out. He’d made himself a hula skirt of multicolored transistors strung on black PVC. A Shockley T-shirt ripped to expose body paint lifted from old circuit boards, gold traces on sick green; a clattering boogaloo as he twitched in front of me, desiring my attention.

  “Not bad, huh?” He paused and panted for breath, hands on knees, looking up at me from his half-crouch.

  He was standing right in my way, but I didn’t want to touch him, shove him aside; the paint looked wet.

  The rat gave another shake. His blond dreadlocks were braided with ribbons from a shredded Hefty bag. “Really—pretty good, don’t you think?”

  It dawned on me. He was auditioning. Even in the junkyard, people knew who I was. And my connection to Identrope. The big money (or so they’d like to think). Fame and immortality (that latter part was at least true). They figured since I was listed on the end credits as choreographer, the road to a dance gig on Identrope’s broadcasts ran in front of my judgmental eyes.

  I could just see a kick line of these hard-core technophiles, a little old-style Rockettes action, a time step garbed in fragments of old machines. The tin can chorus.

  “Hey, pal—it’s just not working for me.” I hated always being the one to have to break it to these types. That their lives were futile and their hopes a gut-hollowing delusion. The only contact this poor bastard was going to have with Identrope would be to sign up for the web. “I don’t think it’s the kind of thing our audience would go for.” Unless they all went blind or something, but I didn’t say that.

  This all came as news to the rat. He stared at me in bewilderment. “You’re kidding.”

  That was the problem with these ’yard types. They were all so in love with the bright sparkly bits, the ancient once-powerful scraps of metal and silicon, that they couldn’t imagine anyone else not being wired to the same thrill.

  “Seriously.” I moved to step around him and continue on my way. “Keep working at it, though.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him to give up and die.

  He fell back, crushed like a dead leaf. If steel trees dropped aluminum leaves, that is. Without looking behind me, I knew the ’yard rat was drifting into shadows, blown by a wind of no consequence.

  Somebody had been working amongst the junk. The farther I got into this zone, the more I saw evidence. More open space—I could have driven the Hudson in, if I’d known how much things had been rearranged. Big lanes had been created by shoving piles of the metal debris to either side. The soft dirt was marked with the tracks of some major operating machinery, cranes and loaders and stuff like that. I could even see the gantry of one such piece, fresh and unrusted, tapering over a pile in the distance.

  Whoever these New Moon people were, they had definitely made an impact in this little corner of the world. Different outfits had gone rummaging in the junkyard before, looking for various scraps of military and even prewar technology that could be turned to profitable use. Not much ever came of these expeditions; if someone dug up a flesh-boiling laser that could be made to work, there was little commercial application other than as the ultimate toaster or something like that.

  Nobody had ever hit the ’yard this heavy before. This was way beyond mere pot-hunting, as the archaeologists would say. There was some effort—read bucks—being expended here. New Moon was either getting results or expecting them soon.

  Where the scraped lanes converged, I spotted the New Moon field office. The company logo rippled on a flag over a potted xeriscape of scrubby desert plants.

  The office’s air-conditioning chilled the sweat on my face. I told the receptionist—it looked like a skate job for her, with zip people coming by this lonely outpost—that I was there to see Harrison.

  I got taken down a bolted-together prefab corridor, and shown in. The receptionist closed the door behind me.

  Harrison sat behind the desk, leaning back in a high brown leather chair, and playing with a gun. The twin of Geldt’s.

  I didn’t even get to sit down. Harrison stretched his arm out, pointing the gun right at my chest.

  He smiled over the barrel. “Nice piece, huh?”

  TEN

  “IT’S lovely.”

  My heart went on ticking at its normal speed, but my gut had done a small clench. Intestines are always cowards, probably because it would hurt more there.

  The little black hole moved away from me, as Harrison used the gun to point. “Have a seat.”

  I did an irritated slump in the chair. It annoyed me having to deal with all these amateurs. The way they flopped these cannons around with no respect, as if nobody could get hurt by accident. It showed they were civilians who didn’t handle these things on a regular basis, and hadn’t gotten over their movie-stroked fascination with them.

  Harrison laid the gun down on the desk. He looked like a nice enough guy, like his voice over the telephone. Like a third-generation photocopy of a real person. I had been prepared to find him okay, until I had come in on him dicking around with the firepower. Don’t people in air-conditioned offices ever have any real work to do?

  Now he’d have to work to get back into my good graces. I folded my hands over my stomach and waited for him to talk about money.

  “Mr. Trayne.” He smiled at me. “Trayne . . . is that what people call you?”

  “My friends do.” I wasn’t giving anything away.

  “Your friends . . .” Harrison’s face went all thoughtful. He obviously thought it unlikely that I would have any such commodity.

  He tossed a manila folder beside the gun. “You’re an interesting character . . . Mr. Trayne.”

  Characters are what you see on the tube. I was getting more pissed off by the minute. I leaned forward and hooked the folder—Harrison made a grab for it, but settled back in his own chair when I glanced up at him

  I always enjoy seeing what people think they know about me. My name was on the folder’s tab, but there wasn’t much more beyond that of any value. Some telephoto shots taken on the sly of me going in and out of my apartment . . . nothing too recent. I had grown my sideburns long a while back, a side effect from unearthing a trove of Patsy Cline recordings from the archives. The photos were all from before I’d whacked the ’burns back off.

  Harrison had recovered his face. “You’ve been hanging out in the Madlands for quite a while, haven’t you?”

  No big secret there. Anyone could have figured that out from the list of my broadcast dates tucked in with the photos. I nodded. “A while.”

  “Most people don’t last that long. As long as you have.”

  “Guess I’m just lucky.”

  He was giving me the bug-under-a-microscope look. Leaning back, making a cage out of his fingertips. Expression of mild distaste. “You know, I’ve seen some medical reports. On people who . . . stayed too long. Out here. What’s the term—” His gaze drifted away, searching for vocabulary on the ceiling.

  “Multi-cancer. Or n-formation. Take your pick.”

  “That’s right.” Again, the smooth smile. “They’re not quite the same thing, though, are they?”

 
I had to give him credit for knowing that much. “No. One’s a precursor of the other.”

  “I imagine you might be quite an expert on the subject.”

  A shrug. “There’s not much to know. Only a couple things you have to remember. The disease is peculiar to the Madlands. The cause is uncertain. The symptoms are kind of unpleasant.”

  Harrison shook his head, the corner of his mouth curdling in distaste. “You know, it’s a real mystery to me . . . to a lot of folks I work with . . . about just why these people come out to the Madlands, and hang out until they come down with something like that. I mean . . . what could possibly be the attraction?”

  What he really wanted to know was what could be the attraction, compared to staying all your life in normal territory and working for whatever megacorporation was venture-capitalizing this New Moon outfit. Watching cable in your little apartment and paying off the car through the credit union. Who in their right mind would turn their backs on all that?

  You’d have to be out of your mind. Harrison, and the crowd he ran with, obviously weren’t on that wavelength. He was insulated. Probably taking all the approved precautions, limiting his exposure to the Madlands’ field, and so forth—and none of that was even necessary in his case. He was so far off the zone’s wavelength that he would never pick up the buzz; if he didn’t feel the attraction, he’d never feel the ill effects, either.

  What could be the attraction? He wanted to know, so I told him.

  “It’s all got to do with loss of pattern discrimination.” I had given this canned lecture before—I knew it by heart. “People come into the Madlands mainly because of that. You’ve got this zone here, it has certain properties the actual neurophysics of which I don’t even want to get into. These said properties are the ones that produce the n-formation disease, which is basically a loss of pattern discrimination on the cellular level; that’s what causes the stuff you saw in those medical reports. You following me so far?”

  Harrison nodded.

  “Now, the properties of the Madlands zone—” Christ, I could reel this stuff off. “—the properties apparently also extend to all other modes of pattern discrimination, and not just to that which determines a life-form’s physical existence. The concept that you have to get into your head is that the whole cellular replicating process encoded in the DNA is merely a small subset of all possible information. Like radio signals are a subset of all possible electromagnetic radiation—you got that? Now, the reality that is normally perceived—you know, this stuff we see when we look out the window?—well, that’s a subset extracted out of the larger set of all possible realities. The normal percept system is a filter that excludes all other realities and lets pass through only the commonly perceived reality. Now—”

  “Excuse me.” Harrison coughed. He looked apologetic for interrupting me. “But, um . . . this is all just a theory.”

  “Yeah?” I looked at him as if he were a bug. “So?”

  “Um. Nothing.” A nervous little smile. “I just wanted to make that point.”

  “Yeah, well, you made it.” Now shut the fuck up. People buy the ticket, they should take the whole ride. I didn’t say any of this to Harrison, because there was still the smell of money in the air. I might still be doing business with him. “As I said, only the commonly perceived reality passes through the filter. You don’t get unicorns and people who can set fire to their own methane production and fly through the air—at least not out in the ordinary world. In the Madlands it’s different. The zone’s properties, the loss of pattern discrimination, set in, in a major way. The percept system’s filters begin to break down. This allows progressively wider and wider ranges of other realities to be perceived. Now, you may not think this is a great idea, but for the people who come to the Madlands voluntarily, this is exactly the attraction. The reality filters breaking down, and all the new sensations and perceptions that come flooding into the neural system under discussion—that’s considered to be a neat thing. Very pleasurable and exciting. Worth making the trek to the zone for. Worth even winding up as a cross between a rubber glove and a squid, with two big blue eyes staring up, when your cells go all mega-squamous. Historically speaking—tell me if I’m losing you here; I only know this stuff because I spend a lot of time rooting around in the archives—this might be called ‘consciousness expansion,’ a phenomenon touted for certain neuro-specific drugs a long, long time ago. Not that those actually did anything, apparently. However, as with those chemicals, hanging around in the Madlands to get that buzz also has its inevitable drawbacks. You play, you pay. It’s easy to get addicted to the sensation, all those new worlds opening up to your nervous system. You come into the zone for a little taste, you wind up staying for the whole banquet, right down to the dessert, which is yourself. There’s the risk—actually more of a sure thing—of contracting the n-formation disease due to prolonged exposure to the zone’s field. There’s also the eventual loss of the ability to distinguish the commonly shared reality of the human species from all the others that are now perceived. Sort of a mental equivalent to the mere biological condition of multi-cancer that results from the n-formation disease. You could call it multi-schizophrenia, maybe. Not just a split from the rest of the world, but many, an infinite number of chasms between the mind and everybody else’s reality. A real maze to get lost in.”

  “Jesus.” Harrison actually looked sick, a little green blush moving up from his gagging throat.

  I couldn’t resist; I wanted to see if I could push him all the way to the vomit point. I’m always entertained by how squeamish people get when you talk about dicking inside one’s head. “Now, another way to look at it—another whole system of metaphors—is to think of it in terms of acoustic science. There you’ve got a distinction made between what is called ‘white noise’—which is more or less the result of all possible frequencies being played simultaneously—and what is called ‘pink noise,’ which is the result of all possible frequencies within the range of human hearing being played simultaneously. So you could posit a ‘pink reality,’ which would be all possible sensation comprehensible to the human nervous system, and even, I suppose, a ‘red reality,’ which would be that little narrow band of sensation that is the commonly perceived reality. You got me on that? So—theoretically, of course—in the Madlands it would be possible to go all the way to ‘white reality’—all possible perception, regardless of comprehensibility to the human nervous system. In theory, this progress could be made, and maybe that’s what some of these poor bastards hanging out in the zone are after. The big one, everything at once. In practice, however, it doesn’t go down that way. If somebody hangs out in the Madlands long enough to approach that point, the n-formation gets him. It’s that loss of pattern discrimination ability, what keeps you you, and not a porcupine or a jellyfish. That’s what n-formation is. An individual who comes down with it eventually dies of multi-cancer, a biologic anarchy where all cells become increasingly disordered, taking on all the characteristics of all other possible life-forms at random. It’s not a pretty way to go.”

  “Excuse me.” Harrison got up from behind his desk and headed for the door, at a quick trot.

  I leaned back in my chair and smiled. This made us even, for the bit with him greeting me with that stupid gun.

  The usual problem with these prefab buildings. The walls are thin. I could hear him from down the hallway, redecorating the porcelain in the executive toilet.

  ELEVEN

  HARRISON came back, mopping his lips with a stained handkerchief.

  I was sunk low in my chair, legs sprawled out, playing with a fountain pen I’d taken from a block of travertine marble on his desk. It’d taken a bit of work, but I felt in control of the scene now.

  A blue flower glistened on my fingertip; Harrison glanced with irritation at the use I made of his toys. He swept the papers off the desktop and into a drawer.

  “It’s kind of stuffy in here,” announced Harrison. I only inhaled the cool, d
ehumidified sting of the air-conditioning, but his nose was loaded differently now. “Why don’t we go out and get some air?”

  I followed him down the corridor and past the receptionist. A white flash bleached her face as she leaned over a photocopier. The smell of money, the kind made without work or pain, billowed up from each step on the carpeting.

  We walked in the shadows of the junkyard. I could feel the ’yard rats watching us, from their Indian perches on top of the larger piles, but Harrison seemed oblivious. He bent the line of his grey three-piece by slouching around with his hands shoved in the pockets.

  “You’re probably wondering—” People say that whether you give a shit or not, but they have this burning desire to tell you something. “—just what it is we’re up to out here.” Harrison was in a deep musing mode, rubbing his chin as he walked. He looked over at me. “You can tell this is a big operation, can’t you?”

  I shrugged. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. This New Moon bunch had certainly done a lot of moving stuff around, treating the whole junkyard like some kind of rusting chessboard. That didn’t necessarily mean they were accomplishing anything.

  Harrison took my silence for being all impressed. He nodded slowly. “A big operation . . . A lot of changes are going to be made. Lot of changes . . .” Muse, muse, stroke chin. “This is going to affect everybody.” The look came my way again, something gleaned from a dark lab seminar at a sinister Dale Carnegie course. “Everybody, Mr. Trayne. You catch me?”

  It would’ve been hard not to. I was trying to crawl out from under this fogbank he’d laid on me. “Yeah, I got it. Big changes. Everybody. Just like that.”

  More slow nodding and rubbing of chin, gaze gone off to that distant inner horizon. Goddamn corporate ideologues always expect you to get on their wavelength, operate by telepathy or something. He’d have to come up with something solid pretty soon, or I was going home.