Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  His scientific appreciation quickly turns to resentment. Paul remembers why he is here. He remembers what needs doing, and what it’ll mean to be done.

  The fractallic clusters pin-wheeled around these glyphs and these suggestive pillars look like neural pathways in a brain. A human brain reveals itself to Paul—actualizing his thinking and confirming his analogy.

  “Am I still myself without my physical apparatus?” Paul wonders. He craves solidity. He imagines solid ground.

  Paul’s mental glue begins binding elements in the non-space, creating—through their conversion—space relative to one another. Concentrating, he tries to revive the image of Pythia and Angela Sheffield.

  A photographic apparition of the girls frames Paul, setting him in a digitally-scrapbooked memory. The drab background colours cloned from a rainy Saturday afternoon in San Francisco coat him, simultaneously giving Paul shape and dissipating as a consequence of their chromatic sacrifice. He is an electric ghost painted in the colours of a dead moment. Paul’s virtual dendrites venture out into the black, making connections—bringing him into the pre-established World Mind as a photographic artifice.

  There are faint murmurs ahead.

  He glides through a mishmash of data, along a gridline now of black and blue, to the horizon—rigged with virtual towers and pyramids. It’s the chimeric, digital equivalent of the Los Angeles Blue Zone. Tracing the varied antennae and rooftops from Paul’s memory, the horizon realigns and details itself.

  With a silhouetted Los Angeles sprawling before him, Paul wonders what the difference between the here and there should feel like. His conjecture informs the locale parsing around him, which in turn forms water speeding past and below him. His mind reaches out to the cold, black surface, lapping into oblivion. His nub of a virtual hand is gloved by the foaming surge.

  Skipping along the grid’s surface, Paul’s joined on either side by two other sojourners, luminous and lyrical and burning towards the endless data-scape. Evidently the Anomaly is not the only entity left in the CLOUD, notwithstanding the Baal rain-out and quarantine.

  The complexity of their avatars demarks them CLOUD veterans: permanent residents of the CLOUD with little or nothing to return to in the physical world. The lost. Wraiths. Ghosts.

  Instead of clothes or armour, they wear a second skin composed of faces and eyes, internally radiant; composites of persons absorbed and lives lived. These faces, surely symbolic for lack of any real purpose in the CLOUD, remind Paul of his meat.

  “You have to leave this place,” Paul tells them, genuinely sympathetic. “It is not safe.”

  Unfazed by Paul’s concern, they maintain their course.

  “What good would a lie be here?” Paul asks. “I’m telling you to get the out of here for your benefit.”

  A number of the sojourners’ faces begin to mockingly smile in unison.

  Paul’s sentiments cascade over, one by one: “I am the maker that abandoned this abomination and left it to die. Only, instead of dying, it grew, and grew. How loathsome it is and those in it. The apocalypse has come. The creator has returned as a destroyer.”

  The sojourners’ faces begin to laugh in choir.

  I suppose that was a little melodramatic, after all.

  Paul’s avatar responds to his frustration and embarrassment, growing jagged and menacing. “So be it. I’ve a hammer for more than one nail.”

  Paul doesn’t mean it to wound, but the spiteful suggestion spills out of him anyway, slowing down the other two, and dashing them against the ebb of the tarry sea. They emerge from the muck behind Paul, and thrash off, injured, leaving him alone.

  Paul’s already losing himself. How do people manage? He wonders. How’d an UtilMart chickenhead clerk like Roddy keep it together in here?

  Schools of archetypes, levelled in gradations of sameness, swim over bow. Somehow, Paul recognizes distinct individuals within the nearest archetype—magnetically linked to the others, united by character and disposition, becoming nothing as the result of perpetual transit. This place is truly the land of deviancy and the impersonal, Paul laments.

  He speeds past, wondering about speed and how he’s so willing to accept the illusion of physical conceits in an immaterial realm. The different sensations continue to collude and collide, incarnating place and time and evening-out his learning curve. A naturalizing algorithm, no doubt.

  “Wait, I don’t need to travel,” Paul realizes. The grid waters vanish, leaving eternal vacancy. The data-scape crumbles, leaving the horizon indistinguishable from the multiple dimensions of computer-interpreted dark matter buffering around. Emptiness crackles as he tries to track his train of thought. Like some pitiful victim of war and science, he cannot hear, see, touch, or taste. It’s horribly lonely.

  Light! A little keyhole, far away in a dark haze, firing the apparition of a slim woman in a gold dress, standing still.

  Paul steadies himself. He reminds himself of the mission at hand. Fear and glory. Family and sacrifice. Redemption.

  The woman in the dress dissolves, but leaves her light behind, illuminating warped-hardwood floors, shelves, swaying lamps—a library by the look of it.

  Velum and writ-on-tree line the shelves, slightly askew like dominoes frozen mid-tumble. Paul’s water-gloved hand wets the leather and cardboard spines as he wills his way down the passage, now lit by the woman’s ghost—her phantom gold strained through the old, blown-glass, washing the upper shelves in amber.

  Touch. Paul simply imagines it, and it is so. The books rustle in accord with the drag of his prosthesis, turning now from water into a firmer substance. Pages tear free and flutter about him as if caught on a Bradburian breeze.

  I know this place, Paul realizes. He wills-open a random book, setting the rest of the dominoes in motion. The alphanumeric melts off the page. Only an insignia bordered by four golden lions remains: “Cambridge.”

  I’ve been here before. He throws the book aside.

  A micro-cluster of memories and thoughts tear through the bookshelves, offering themselves up to Paul. Yes, yes—New Cambridge. He’d taken Pythia and Angela here when they were just babies; read to them while waiting for Rachel to finish her exams.

  Paul hears whispering out of sight. It finds him in big swatches of purple and blue. Purple for Pythia. Blue for Angela.

  “Girls!” he sees himself say.

  Down the next aisle, there’re little violet footsteps.

  “Pythia? Angela!”

  A little tuft of hair corners the shelf and disappears, firing back machine-gun footsteps. The waist-level blur whips past Paul and the shelves, towards a winding, dimly-lit hall.

  “Pythia?!” yells Paul. The words crash and splinter the locale.

  He bounds after her—the exhaustion in his phantasmal legs felt, but ungrounded. The passageway tightens, and tightens some more. Paul is crawling, with darkness behind him and something peculiar, ahead.

  Chapter 35: IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

  AN EDENIC GARDEN, bordered by lush and sprawling forests, springs around Paul. Overhead, a blood-orange sky swirls about a white sun eclipsed to a crescent by an alien moon. Unlike the places that have already visited Paul in the CLOUD, this one is materially heavy. It feels real.

  An apple tree stands at the centre of the vision. Its trunks branch and bifurcate as far as comprehension will allow, wreathing and stretching out into the reaches of the de-populated CLOUD super-conscious.

  Paul coheres himself shape and presence. Bits of data teem around him, sculpting a resurrected body. It is Paul’s body, but with none of the scars or wounds or blemishes he bore in the real world; it is not dying. It is perfect.

  He feels comfortable with this complex anchor—this improved avatar complimented by fingers, arms, legs, and toes. Paul the what has become Paul the it. This form lessens his likelihood of suffering ego-death again, lending a sinner’s portrait to evidence life, consequence, and at least one cardinal point of virtual self.

 
He picks a fallen apple off of the ground. The weight and feel are dead-on. It’s as palpable as anything he’s ever held. He bites into it. It tastes like copper and iron. Spitting, he looks at the fruit where he’d taken a chunk. Maggots overflow the wound and spill onto the moist forest floor. Paul throws the apple off into the thicket.

  A shadow liberates itself from the trees, and—holding Paul’s apple—steps cautiously into the unnatural light.

  “Rachel?” Paul asks, this time feeling his lips move and the sounds thrash their way out of his mouth.

  Naked, with long, dark hair covering her breasts, Rachel consumes the apple staidly. White maggot flesh groups at the corners of her mouth. She does not appear to see Paul or comprehend his presence in this nightmare.

  Dropping the apple core to the ground, her skin begins to scale-over. A mucous film covers both her teeth and eyes. All limbic movement halts, and she assumes a gruesome pose.

  “Rachel? What’s happening to you? Rachel!”

  An unpleasant hissing noise overwhelms Paul. He steps forward despite the discomfort.

  “Listen to me, god-damn-it! We don’t have any time.”

  In carmine flashes, an oily-brown serpent appears, slithering down the apple tree. It sustains the hissing overloading Paul’s aural sensibilities.

  “Rachel, run!” Paul cries helplessly, he too feeling immobile—his legs moored into the ground like roots.

  The serpent rounds the bottom of the tree, and slithers over to Rachel. Paul looks on with terror.

  It braids around her leg, and makes a slow ascent up her torso. Finally, it rests its head on her shoulder while its rope-like body binds Rachel’s. Under the stricture, she buckles. It sounds like a ration pack being flattened.

  “Hello Paulie,” hisses the snake.

  Paul studies Rachel’s face for any signs of pain or struggle. With no recourse other than to reason with her captor, he elects to bide his time and choose his words wisely. A lightning storm appears above his head like some Satanic crown.

  “What are you?”

  “Oh, Paulie.” The snake’s voice drops to a flat timber. “Sorry for the smoke and mirrors. I just thought that my appearance and this choice of scenery would be fitting.”

  “Fitting how?”

  “Given your late-friend Edmund Barros’s vocation and untimely death, of course.”

  “What do you know about Ed?”

  “I know a lot, Paulie. A great deal, actually. I do plenty of research on everyone I have killed or intend to kill.”

  “But you didn’t…” Paul’s crown flames red, firing wiry tentacles around his avatar. “He got shot by a PIT rat.”

  “Well, if we are aiming for historical accuracy, then the fact of the matter is that an Outland flak cannon along the Partition was hacked by an ‘unknown entity’ and used to fire at an unidentified vessel traversing the gulf. Now, I was aiming at you…”

  Paul tries to mute his anger. “He didn’t deserve to die. He was a good man.”

  “Hard to find, is my understanding. But, understanding aside, his welfare is none of my concern.”

  “What is of your concern?”

  The snake’s eyes, a hornet-yellow, widen, entrancing Paul. No words are spoken aloud—the eyes neuro-transmit revelation telepathically: “The nuance of my original plan is lost on me now. Little bothers that would vex a single-minded mortal. Retribution for abandonment. Retribution for having to watch my fiancé marry an abusive peon. Retribution for being deceived into fore-manning this unfinished project…Strange how this shadow on my need remains, even with the animal essentials feeding the worms.”

  Retribution? Abandonment?

  Paul had once worked a job for the Chief, and ending up leaving a pederast buried up to his neck in sand under the Venice Beach pier. Creep had a gun, but pulled slower than a soggy cigarette. After maiming him in the duel, Paul brought the pederast out at low tide during a citywide lockdown, affording his victim plenty of time to think on his sins.

  Paul’d also hacked a sub-orbital mining station for a geo-corporation based out of Denver. Twelve Peers’ Palladium wanted a rogue engineer silenced for her costly subversion. She’d sent over three hundred distress calls. Not one of them made it to the surface.

  The snake grips Rachel especially hard. Her virtual skin crimps and balloons around the beast’s demonic coils. “No, Paulie. I am not one of your deviant marks. I was not beaten. I was betrayed.”

  It might not be Rachel’s actual body under duress, but therein—thinks Paul, foggy on the details regarding his mission and preliminary success with the Baal storm machine—must be her mind. “Let her go!” he yells.

  “How I would like to think I have matured! I know it must seem like eons ago, but this vengeful compulsion…it has made me petty. Edmund Barros? He may have actually threatened my safety. That was business. But your dogs? Turning off the kibble dispenser like I did? Or even setting the dominoes to fall on Camp Mud?”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  The snake laughs. “I suppose I am just being thorough. An unintended addiction resultant of power and ability. You, above all, understand addiction. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

  Paul silently watches the snake’s evil mouth round another delivery.

  “It is clear that the two of us need to think about the bigger picture.”

  The snake crushes Rachel outright.

  Paul tries to scream, but the verbal comet gets lodged in his throat. He tries to lunge forward, but this attempt is similarly prevented. Only the frenetic wires about his head come close to an advance.

  The snake releases Rachel’s still remains, which collapse into a cloud of ash.

  Weighted with words unsaid and declarations of love overdue, Paul sinks into the ground. “I’m so sorry, Rach,” he whimpers.

  The snake reformulates into a faceless man wearing a shiny taffeta suit. He adjusts his red tie, and jerks Rachel’s dust off his striped Oxfords.

  Every part of Paul trembles, and the tentacles above his head recede, leaving only a sad and broken version of his crown. Paul imagines the specter before him being torn apart.

  “Please Paul, as my guest, I would prefer it if you left the telekinetics to me.”

  Failing to sever his mind from his avatar, Paul searches his soul for the Empty Thought. It’s somewhere in here, he thinks aloud. The Anomaly must not know yet, Paul taunts the clairvoyant; he cannot have it.

  At the sight of Paul’s inward struggle, the faceless man smiles. “Our friend in common, the dear, late Dr. Katajima, had surmised that I needed to attend to certain outstanding desires for me to fully shed my human skin and be reborn a digital god. Not completely accurate, but a good guess, nonetheless.”

  Paul, locked into position, can’t help but listen. He closes his eyes. Still, the serpent-turned-man finds him, superimposing its smile and voice onto Paul’s sensory plate.

  “To Hell with you!”

  “Again with the anger, Paul. Unlike a clock, a broken record is never right in its repetition…That same anger is what got you in trouble in the first place, and prevented anyone from saving my vessel.”

  “What?” Our friend in common? Paul wonders out loud, his thought process projected around him. The forest shakes. “Your vessel?” No, it can’t be. Paul looks to the faceless man. “You died…” His memory carves features and details onto the blank slate.

  The faceless man’s smile lights up with details previously omitted.

  “They erased the drive,” continues Paul. “The partition was…”

  “You’re forgetting the fact that I engineered that prison, Paul. I masked my signature.”

  “No…”

  “The drive would have read as empty. All I needed was a way out. And when they went to kill me a second time, they unwittingly gave me life.”

  “It’s you. You’ve…You’re the one who called me.” The crown projected above Paul melts into two horns, which slip to the sides of his head. He looks through
the demonic fork at the man’s face, finally rendered. Paul’s shock colours him over in glitch plaid.

  “You do not look happy to see me, Paul.”

  “Allen…” says Paul. “Allen Scheele.” Instead of welling up inside him, Paul’s darkness billows out of the grass, and roils around him like a horrible TV static.

  “Ah! I cannot tell you how nice it feels to be recognized. Recognition, like reiteration, is a second-hand confirmation of existence.” Allen’s eyes glaze over, and then turn a bright spectral blue. “God, that feels good.” He stabs his arm through the smoke and grabs Paul by his neck. “Let’s go someplace comfortable to talk.”

  Chapter 36: DEUS EX DOMUS

  PAUL’S DARKNESS dissipates. He finds himself sprawled out on a grid of tiny blue tiles. He lifts himself up by the beige countertop bordering the tile.

  Behind him is a harvest table, bedazzled with silver cutlery and steaming plates laden with food. Hot water sizzles, pouring effortlessly and unpiloted into the sink opposite the table. A low-hanging ceiling light embedded in a navy blue and cloudy-white orb paints the feast in faux candlelight.

  I know this place.

  Paul finds a wood-framed doorway missing a door. He walks through the threshold. His feet, apparently naked, find plush, brown carpet. It's a comforting feeling, provoking a bloom of nostalgia. Home.

  Along the carpeted hallway hang pictures of Rachel, Paul, and the girls. It’s not real. He’d been taken out of this heart-warming gallery in one of Rachel’s reactive and resentful re-historicization campaigns.

  “Hey asshole, I know it’s not real!” Paul shouts. His words bounce and echo, as if spoken in some colossal amphitheatre. “You hear me? I know it’s not real.”

  Allen appears, exiting Angela and Pythia’s room. “Please pipe down, Paul. You will wake them. What would Rachel say?”

  Paul’s eyes light up with rage.