by Stephen King
I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.
To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau’s mind, there might not be another.
• • •
The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was “exposing Mr. Hartsfield to external stimuli.”
Mr. Hartsfield didn’t mind the News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff—cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men—was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she’d win.
Brady watched her wide eyes moving from side to side as she studied the screen, and knew he’d found what he was looking for. The pink fish, he thought. They’re the ones that move the fastest, and besides, red is an angry color. Pink is … what? What was the word? It came, and he smiled. It was the radiant one that made him look nineteen again.
Pink was soothing.
• • •
Sometimes when Freddi visited, Z-Boy left his library cart in the hall and joined them. On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2014, he handed Freddi an electronic recipe. It had been written on the library computer, and during one of the increasingly rare occasions when Brady did not just give instructions but slid into the driver’s seat and took over completely. He had to, because this had to be just right. There was no room for error.
Freddi scanned it, got interested, and read it more closely. “Say,” she said, “this is pretty clever. And adding subliminal messaging is cool. Nasty, but cool. Did the mysterious Dr. Z think this up?”
“Yeah,” Z-Boy said.
Freddi switched her attention to Brady. “Do you know who this Dr. Z is?”
Brady shook his head slowly back and forth.
“Sure it’s not you? Because this looks like your work.”
Brady only stared at her vacantly until she looked away. He had let her see more of him than Hodges or anyone on the nursing or PT staff, but he had no intention of letting her see into him. Not at this point, at least. Too much chance she might talk. Besides, he still didn’t know exactly what he was doing. They said that the world would beat a path to your door if you built a better mousetrap, but since he did not as yet know if this one would catch mice, it was best to keep quiet. And Dr. Z didn’t exist yet.
But he would.
• • •
On an afternoon not long after Freddi received the electronic recipe explaining just how to jigger the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, Z-Boy visited Felix Babineau in his office. The doctor spent an hour there most days he was in the hospital, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. There was an indoor putting green by the window (no parking garage view for Babineau), where he sometimes practiced his short game. That was where he was when Z-Boy came in without knocking.
Babineau looked at him coldly. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”
Z-Boy held out Zappit Zero, which Freddi had upgraded (after buying several new computer components paid for out of Al Brooks’s rapidly shrinking savings account). “Look at this,” he said. “I’ll tell you what to do.”
“You need to leave,” Babineau said. “I don’t know what kind of bee you have in your bonnet, but this is my private space and my private time. Or do you want me to call security?”
“Look at it, or you’ll be seeing yourself on the evening news. ‘Doctor performs experiments with untested South American drug on accused mass murderer Brady Hartsfield.’”
Babineau stared at him with his mouth open, at that moment looking very much as he would after Brady began to whittle away his core consciousness. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about Cerebellin. Years away from FDA approval, if ever. I accessed your file and took two dozen photos with my phone. I also took photos of the brain scans you’ve been keeping to yourself. You broke lots of laws, Doc. Look at the game and it stays between us. Refuse, and your career is over. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.”
Babineau took the game and looked at the swimming fish. The little tune tinkled. Every now and then there was a flash of blue light.
“Start tapping the pink ones, doctor. They’ll turn into numbers. Add them up in your head.”
“How long do I have to do this for?”
“You’ll know.”
“Are you crazy?”
“You lock your office when you’re not here, which is smart, but there are lots of all-access security cards floating around this place. And you left your computer on, which seems kind of crazy to me. Look at the fish. Tap the pink ones. Add up the numbers. That’s all you have to do, and I’ll leave you alone.”
“This is blackmail.”
“No, blackmail is for money. This is just a trade. Look at the fish. I won’t ask you again.”
Babineau looked at the fish. He tapped at a pink one and missed. He tapped again, missed again. Muttered “Fuck!” under his breath. It was quite a bit harder than it looked, and he began to get interested. The blue flashes should have been annoying, but they weren’t. They actually seemed to help him focus. Alarm at what this geezer knew started to fade into the background of his thoughts.
He succeeded in tapping one of the pink fish before it could shoot off the left side of the screen and got a nine. That was good. A good start. He forgot why he was doing this. Catching the pink fish was the important thing.
The tune played.
• • •
One floor up, in Room 217, Brady stared at his own Zappit, and felt his breathing slow. He closed his eyes and looked at a single red dot. That was Z-Boy. He waited … waited … and then, just as he was beginning to think his target might be immune, a second dot appeared. It was faint at first, but gradually grew bright and clear.
Like watching a rose blossom, Brady thought.
The two dots began to swim playfully back and forth. He settled his concentration on the one that was Babineau. It slowed and became stationary.
Gotcha, Brady thought.
But he had to be careful. This was a stealth mission.
The eyes he opened were Babineau’s. The doctor was still staring at the fish, but he had ceased to tap them. He had become … what was the word they used? A gork. He had become a gork.
Brady did not linger on that first occasion, but it didn’t take long to understand the wonders to which he’d gained access. Al Brooks was a piggy bank. Felix Babineau was a vault. Brady had access to his memories, his stored knowledge, his abilities. While in Al, he could have rewired an electrical circuit. In Babineau, he could have performed a craniotomy and rewired a human brain. Further, he had proof of something he had only theorized about and hoped for: he could take possession of others at a distance. All it took was that state of Zappit-induced hypnosis to open them up. The Zappit Freddi had modified made for a very efficient eye-trap, and good God, it worked so fast.
He couldn’t wait to use it on Hodges.
Before leaving, Brady released a few thoughtfish into Babineau’s brain, but only a few. He intended to move very carefully with the doctor. Babineau needed to be thoroughly habituated to the screen—which was now what those specializing in hypnosis called an inducement device—before Brady announced himself. One of that day’s thoughtfish was the idea that the CAT scans on Brady weren’t producing anything of real interest, and ought to cease. The Cerebellin shots should also cease.
Because Brady’s not making sufficient progress. Bec
ause I’m a dead end. Also, I might be caught.
“Getting caught would be bad,” Babineau murmured.
“Yes,” Z-Boy said. “Getting caught would be bad for both of us.”
Babineau had dropped his putter. Z-Boy picked it up and put it in his hand.
• • •
As that hot summer morphed into a cold and rainy fall, Brady strengthened his hold on Babineau. He released thoughtfish carefully, like a game warden stocking a pond with trout. Babineau began to feel an urge to get touchy-feely with a few of the younger nurses, risking a sexual harassment complaint. Babineau occasionally stole pain medication from the Bucket’s Pyxis Med Station, using the ID card of a fictional doctor—a fiddle Brady set up via Freddi Linklatter. Babineau did this even though he was bound to be caught if he kept on, and had other, safer ways of getting pills. He stole a Rolex watch from the Neuro lounge one day (although he had one of his own) and put it in the bottom drawer of his office desk, where he promptly forgot it. Little by little, Brady Hartsfield—who could barely walk—took possession of the doctor who had presumed to take possession of him, and put him in a guilt-trap that had many teeth. If he did something foolish, like trying to tell someone what was going on, the trap would snap shut.
At the same time he began sculpting the Dr. Z personality, doing it much more carefully than he had with Library Al. For one thing, he was better at it now. For another, he had finer materials to work with. In October of that year, with hundreds of thoughtfish now swimming in Babineau’s brain, he began assuming control of the doctor’s body as well as his mind, taking it on longer and longer trips. Once he drove all the way to the Ohio state line in Babineau’s BMW, just to see if his hold would weaken with distance. It didn’t. It seemed that once you were in, you were in. And it was a fine trip. He stopped at a roadside restaurant and pigged out on onion rings.
Tasty!
• • •
As the 2014 holiday season approached, Brady found himself in a state he hadn’t known since earliest childhood. It was so foreign to him that the Christmas decorations had been taken down and Valentine’s Day was approaching before he realized what it was.
He felt contented.
Part of him fought this feeling, labeling it a little death, but part of him wanted to accept it. Embrace it, even. And why not? It wasn’t as though he were stuck in Room 217, or even in his own body. He could leave whenever he wanted, either as a passenger or as a driver. He had to be careful not to be in the driver’s seat too much or stay too long, that was all. Core consciousness, it seemed, was a limited resource. When it was gone, it was gone.
Too bad.
If Hodges had continued to make his visits, Brady would have had another of those goals to grow—getting him to look at the Zappit in his drawer, entering him, and planting suicidal thoughtfish. It would have been like using Debbie’s Blue Umbrella all over again, only this time with suggestions that were much more powerful. Not really suggestions at all, but commands.
The only problem with the plan was that Hodges had stopped coming. He had appeared just after Labor Day, spouting all his usual bullshit—I know you’re in there, Brady, I hope you’re suffering, Brady, can you really move things around without touching them, Brady, if you can let me see you do it—but not since. Brady surmised that Hodges’s disappearance from his life was the real source of this unusual and not entirely welcome contentment. Hodges had been a burr under his saddle, infuriating him and making him gallop. Now the burr was gone, and he was free to graze, if he wanted to.
He sort of did.
• • •
With access to Dr. Babineau’s bank account and investment portfolio as well as his mind, Brady went on a computer spending spree. The Babster withdrew the money and made the purchases; Z-Boy delivered the equipment to Freddi Linklatter’s cheesedog of a crib.
She really deserves an apartment upgrade, Brady thought. I ought to do something about that.
Z-Boy also brought her the rest of the Zappits he’d pilfered from the library, and Freddi amped the Fishin’ Hole demos in all of them … for a price, of course. And although the price was high, Brady paid it without a qualm. It was the doc’s money, after all, the dough of Babineau. As to what he might do with the juiced-up consoles, Brady had no idea. Eventually he might want another drone or two, he supposed, but he saw no reason to trade up right away. He began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted.
It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow.
• • •
This state of affairs continued until February 13th of 2015, when Brady’s attention was caught by an item on News at Noon. The anchors, who had been laughing it up over the antics of a couple of baby pandas, put on their Oh Shit This Is So Awful faces when the chyron behind them changed from the pandas to a broken-heart logo.
“It’s going to be a sad Valentine’s Day in the suburb of Sewickley,” said the female half of the duo.
“That’s right, Betty,” said the male half. “Two survivors of the City Center Massacre, twenty-six-year-old Krista Countryman and twenty-four-year-old Keith Frias, have committed suicide in the Countryman woman’s home.”
It was Betty’s turn. “Ken, the shocked parents say the couple was hoping to be married in May of this year, but both were badly injured in the attack perpetrated by Brady Hartsfield, and the continuing physical and mental pain was apparently too much for them. Here’s Frank Denton, with more.”
Brady was on high alert now, sitting as close to bolt upright in his chair as he could manage, eyes shining. Could he legitimately claim those two? He believed he could, which meant his City Center score had just gone up from eight to ten. Still shy of a dozen, but hey! Not bad.
Correspondent Frank Denton, also wearing his best Oh Shit expression, went blah-de-blah for awhile, and then the picture switched to the Countryman chick’s pore ole daddy, who read the suicide note the couple had left. He blubbered through most of it, but Brady caught the gist. They’d had a beautiful vision of the afterlife, where their wounds would be healed, the burden of their pain would be lifted, and they could be married in perfect health by their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
“Boy, that’s sad,” the male anchor opined at the end of the story. “So sad.”
“It sure is, Ken,” Betty said. Then the screen behind them flashed a picture showing a bunch of idiots in wedding clothes standing in a swimming pool, and her sad face clicked off and the happy one came back on. “But this should cheer you up—twenty couples decided to get married in a swimming pool in Cleveland, where it’s only twenty degrees!”
“I hope they had a hunka-hunka burning love,” Ken said, showing his perfectly capped teeth in a grin. “Brrrr! Here’s Patty Newfield with the details.”
How many more could I get? Brady wondered. He was on fire. I’ve got nine augmented Zappits, plus the two my drones have and the one in my drawer. Who says I have to be done with those job-hunting assholes?
Who says I can’t run up the score?
• • •
Brady continued to keep track of Zappit, Inc. during his fallow period, sending Z-Boy to check the Google alert once or twice weekly. The chatter about the hypnotic effect of the Fishin’ Hole screen (and the lesser effect of the Whistling Birds demo) died down and was replaced by speculation about just when the company would go under—it was no longer a matter of if. When Sunrise Solutions bought Zappit out, a blogger who called himself Electric Whirlwind wrote, “Wow! This is like a couple of cancer patients with six weeks to live deciding to elope.”
Babineau’s shadow personality was now well established, and it was Dr. Z who began to research the survivors of the City Center Massacre on Brady’s behalf, making a list of the ones most badly injured, and thus most vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. A couple of them, like Daniel Starr and Judith Loma, were still wheelchair bound. Loma might get out of hers; Starr, never. Then the
re was Martine Stover, paralyzed from the neck down and living with her mother over in Ridgedale.
I’d be doing them a favor, Brady thought. Really I would.
He decided Stover’s mommy would make a good start. His first idea was to have Z-Boy mail her a Zappit (“A Free Gift for You!”), but how could he be sure she wouldn’t just throw it away? He only had nine, and didn’t want to risk wasting one. Juicing them up had cost him (well, Babineau) quite a lot of money. It might be better to send Babineau on a personal mission. In one of his tailored suits, set off by a sober dark tie, he looked a lot more trustworthy than Z-Boy in his rumpled green Dickies, and he was the sort of older guy that chicks like Stover’s mother had a tendency to dig. All Brady had to do was work up a believable story. Something about test marketing, maybe? Possibly a book club? A prize competition?
He was still sifting scenarios—there was no hurry—when his Google alert announced an expected death: Sunrise Solutions had gone bye-bye. This was in early April. A trustee had been appointed to sell off the assets, and a list of so-called “real goods” would soon appear in the usual sell-sites. For those who couldn’t wait, a list of all Sunrise Solutions’ unsaleable crapola could be found in the bankruptcy filing. Brady thought this was interesting, but not interesting enough to have Dr. Z look up the list of assets. There were probably crates of Zappits among them, but he had nine of his own, and surely that would be enough to play with.
A month later he changed his mind about that.
• • •
One of News at Noon’s most popular features was called “Just A Word From Jack.” Jack O’Malley was a fat old dinosaur who had probably started in the biz when TV was still black-and-white, and he bumbled on for five minutes or so at the end of every newscast about whatever was on what remained of his mind. He wore huge black-rimmed glasses, and his jowls quivered like Jell-O when he talked. Ordinarily Brady found him quite entertaining, a bit of comic relief, but there was nothing amusing about that day’s Word From Jack. It opened whole new vistas.
