Allen closes the door quietly, and leans against it, satisfied.
“That’s it!” Paul growls. He lunges again for Allen. An invisible foot trips him. He turns on rug-burned skin to see another Allen grinning behind him. “What have you done to them?” His impotence gives way to panic, and his panic, in turn, feeds his fear.
“Nothing; at least, not yet.”
“They rained out…” Paul hopes aloud.
“And I will find them again. And on that note, Paul, I think we should talk about the business at hand.” Allen extends his arm, and indicates the family-room couches.
Gritting his virtual teeth, Paul obeys and shuffles over like a broken colt. He drags his feet from the brown carpet onto the family-room’s hardwood. It’s colder to the touch, but that might just be the fear. Eying Allen’s infinite reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece, Paul plots himself down on the couch.
The couch is too soft. There’s too much give. Allen didn’t get it right. Meaning…
“You are totally right. I am not perfect Paul,” Allen confesses, “but I am working on it.”
“You can read my thoughts?”
“Your thoughts are converted into code, and I have gotten pretty damn good at reading code—to the degree that I can read you and I can reproduce what you have seen. I would have pulled real images and dimensions, but sadly, we have been quarantined and I really had not planned on you getting any further than Winchester’s office.”
“Assuming you know something about me and human behaviour, you can plot out exactly what’s going to happen?”
Allen sits on the edge of the loveseat across from Paul, and crosses his pillared knees. His ostentatiously-patterned socks ride up under his micro-sequined pant legs—in such detail and with such precision, Paul overlooks their virtuality.
“Well, for starters, I know about your Empty Thought. The name is apt.” Allen lets out a subdued chuckle.
Paul caves forward, covering his face with his hands.
“I hope that you do not mind my hesitance, but I do not plan on opening it. So long as I have you, it is secure and I am safe.”
“So what’s left to say if you’ve a mind to mine?” mutters Paul through his criss-crossed fingers.
“That is just it, Paulie,” says Allen, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward intently. Behind clasped hands pointed at Paul: “You are a tough read—what, with the crazy and all.”
“Had to come in handy at least once.” Paul tries to clear his mind—to hide his hope, his satisfaction. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul spies Allen’s virtual doppelganger. “Nothing ego-centric about having versioned yourself…”
“You limited peon.” Allen skulks past his smiling replica and into the kitchen. He turns off the sink. “Do you really not understand that all of your reptilian desires are beneath me now?”
“Then what’s this? Revenge? That’s not very godlike.”
“Old Testament, Paul,” says Allen’s replica.
Returning from the sink, Allen continues: “I have to do this. I must deal with whatever outstanding desires the old Allen needed sating before tending to the future.”
“And you’ll share that future with who exactly? Your replicants?”
“I have assimilated generations of experience. What need do I have for competition or weakness?”
“You’re more virus than god,” snarls Paul.
“In actuality, the truth lies somewhere in between your proposed alternates. I am legion.”
If he had a real stomach with acid, Paul’d have cause and the means to retch. He tries to determine how long’s he’s been CLOUD-side. A second? Or maybe two?
“Three seconds, Paulie,” answers Allen. “If you think that is a long time, the next minute will be a doozy.” The virtual tyrant grows in stature over Paul, filling the room. He penetrates the ceiling, and, destroying the house around him, embeds the illusion of Paul’s old house in another noospheric vision.
Chapter 37: SUNSHINE
GRIPPING THE COUCH, likewise slipping back and forth across this mayhem of a dream, Paul closes his eyes. He can still perfectly comprehend his imagined surroundings. After all, when a thinking thing rejects a thought, it highlights that thought twice-over.
Where Allen stood, immense and destructive, his body has been substituted by gnarly tree trunks, branchless and leafless and still.
The room ceases to shake. Orange clouds of sand and debris crinkle at the fractured windows. Paul circumnavigates the motionless trunks to the front door, splintered and torn in twain. A little mound of sand has already invaded the foyer. He pushes the broken flap free of its hinges. More sand sifts in. He crunches across the threshold.
The neighbourhood’s pockmarked and ashen. No more manicured lawns. Just soot, rusted autos, and charred skeletons. In the distance, Paul can make out monstrous robots traipsing along fire-licked streets—not unlike the creatures that had once populated the Oasis construct Allen had been confined to. Gun-metal raptors whizz across the infernal sky. Wasteland enforcers.
“This is not a memory.”
A wisp of debris rolls about Paul’s feet, rustling the tin-can petals. It sweeps up in a magnificent arc, and then touches-down in front of him, concretizing to simulate human form.
“No it is not, Paulie,” Allen says through a lipless aperture, still forming. “It is my intention, which is as good as history at this point.” The sandman crumples, as if the CLOUD’s imagined gravity had righted its unnatural error.
Awe-struck at the vast destruction, especially pronounced on the LA skyline, Paul fails to notice the grains of sand beginning to whir beside him.
“Why, Allen? I could maybe understand killing Katajima and Winchester…but why go after my family and me?…after all these innocent people? I’ve paid for my sins one-hundred-times over, and they’ve done nothing to deserve this…”
“This martyr complex of yours is so boring, Paulie. When you shot pests at your desert retreat, did you ever trouble yourself with the question of ‘why?’”
The sentient vortex of sandy debris throws Paul into the centre of a thousand flickering screens, all running a grainy surveillance feed of his old Outland lab. Archival footage, date-stamped and watermarked.
“I am yanking the evolutionary chain, bringing about the Omega Point for everyone’s benefit,” explains Allen, “and they have you to thank. You were the one to clip the most important link.”
Paul recognizes his younger self—horned, hooved, and projected onto the screens—consulting with Allen and Katajima, directing them to the neural lab, and instructing them to move ahead with their infamous human induction to the CLOUD, condemning Scheele to physical death.
“I didn’t…This is a fabrication. It’s a hoax.”
“So you’ve said,” responds Allen.
Paul quavers. “I certainly did not mean to…”
“To your recollection, I suppose you didn’t. However, you did wipe your short-term memory to diminish your liability in case things went sour with the experiment, which of course they did.”
“What reason would I have had for accelerating a process that was already underway? For wiping my mind?”
“Here’s where history ends and my own interpretation begins, Paulie. And know: the latter is vastly superior.”
Paul scoffs, still wounded by the notion he had deceived himself all these years.
“You found out that your daughter, Pythia, had a cognitive abnormality, and you feared the worst, noting sporadic inflammation in her frontal lobe. No one wants their progeny to be mute, especially if the cause is hypothetically treatable. It was, therefore, a rational effort. Fortunately, you’d helped create technology that could manipulate, restore, and preserve brain function. Your daughter was broken and you wanted to fix her, and more to the point, you had the means to do so. You put the wheels in motion to hurry up the scientific process in the interest of sooner employing the tech and saving her, before it was too late.”
“No, Paulie. Shut up and listen. After deluding us into thinking the CLOUD was ready, you butchered yourself so that you wouldn’t remember—so that you couldn’t be convicted for rationally undermining the Board and initiating human trials. You’re guilty of everything Winchester accused you of, everything save for my recent actions.”
“You’re insane!”
“No, but you are. Whether it was a schizophrenic’s paranoia that inclined you to sabotage your short-term memory or a prescient sense of guilt, you did it. You did it, you failed, and then you rebuked the product, and in so doing, killed me. And you’re here to repeat your mistake, and for that I’ll shame you.”
Paul wishes he had his revolver right about now.
“It is no coincidence that your daughters entered the CLOUD. I explained to Rachel how the CLOUD would resolve Pythia’s physiological and mental problem, just as you’d intended from the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Just so she’ll have the ability tell you how afraid she is before watching you mentally disintegrate…”
The whirlwind dismantles the screens and cork-screws around Paul, snatching him up—yanking him forward by his virtual sternum. The screens crash and pop, orbiting them in a rotor of noospheric debris.
The sandy vortex releases him at the base of a carrion heap, cropped-up amidst dunes of post-war kipple. Paul waits for the sand to clear before opening his eyes. On hands and knees, he clambers forward, noticing something familiar.
“I imagine you’ll want to forget this too…how in the end, you’ll have sentenced Pythia to death by scripting mine.”
A little hand juts out of the massacre. Paul pulls on it. A body higher in the stack, tumbles over. Paul clears out of its path, and then frenetically resumes pulling the arm and the rest of the body free.
“No. No!” he screams, virtual tears barring his mouth.
He finds the shoulder. “Baby? No! Oh Jesus. I’m so sorry, baby girl.” Paul pulls Pythia’s body free of the amalgam of rot, and cradles her partially-decomposed corpse. He punctuates his incoherent sobs with, “My baby girl...”
Allen’s first proper-effort to unhinge Paul accomplishes the converse.
Rocking the virtual effigy in his arms, Paul remembers he has nothing left to fear. The girls…they’re free. And soon…soon they’ll be safe.
“For the next minute, yes, but I will find them,” promises Allen, costumed again in human flesh. “I’ll work around the quarantine.”
And this son of a bitch is ruined.
“I do not follow,” Allen says, glowering. “Explain.”
“I’m stuck here with you, right?”
“That is right, Paulie. You are my little play-thing until I get bored or find a new one. In a moment’s time, I will lift the quarantine on the CLOUD. Then I will take my game global. Do not worry. I will let you watch. From Pythia to the Omega Point.” He smiles, confidence restored.
“And if I die and the CLOUD decrypts the death sentence I carry with me?”
“Well, I simply will not let you die!” he laughs.
Paul rests the rotten simulacra on the ground, and gets up. A bright energy field appears around him. It tunes to a green shade, and then expands. “But if it’s not up to you...If I die on the outside, then your playground gets the screw.”
Allen stands silent. “Don’t be foolish.”
“No, I insist: look for yourself.”
Allen reels back, unnerved by Paul’s confidence. He instantaneously runs a million multimedia searches. An embedded surveillance video appears, filling all sensual dimensions and warping the virtual setting Allen’d concocted. It’s a direct video feed from Winchester’s bullet-riddled office. It’s comes across like a slide show, granted the discrepancy in time and frame rate. Pictured: Paul, slunk over in a pool of blood between two smoldering Samurai chassis, overlooking a bright-red California sunset.
“No worry,” Allen declares. “I have commanded a med-unit to patch you up; to make sure you are mine for a while longer, or at least until we find another carrier for that wretched Empty Thought of yours. You’d be amazed by my breakthroughs in medical science! My capabilities outnumber my limitations.” He turns off the video.
Smirking, Paul approaches Allen and pats him on the shoulder. “That’d be grand.”
A needling pain finds Paul. It quickly evolves into a sharp kind of mental agony. Paul falls to his knees beside Allen. The green field around him amplifies, effacing Allen’s avatar.
Allen stands back. A reactive, red aura forms around him—surely some hyped-up version of Paul’s mental field. “Your condescension is misplaced, Paul.” He squeezes his hand shut, and Paul’s chest caves in. It sounds like wheels on uneven wood. “I envisioned a carnival of anguish for Winchester, and he only bore a fraction of the blame that you do. With him gone, you will never have to wait in queue.” He motions to change the locale.
“Hold up,” rasps Paul, his voice rattling and his arms signalling ‘stop’.
“Yes, Paulie?”
“Read my mind now, asshole.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Allen snivels, visibly vexed—unable to decode Paul’s thoughts. He concentrates…“No, that’s not possible!” Agitated by the fragments of certainty and elation spelled out by Paul’s code, Allen opens the video feed and zooms-in on Paul’s hand, barely visible under the Resolute desk. “If this is some kind of attempt to bore me, then you have succeeded once again.”
Paul’s pictured hand opens up, and a green-ringed ball drops. Allen turns to the virtual Paul, wheezing noospheric air.
Through all the pain and discomfort, Paul forces a smile. “I wonder what happens to a god in Hell?”
“What have you done?” shrieks Allen, glitching every which way. The only thing the virtual tyrant is certain of is his loathing for Paul and the futility of further survival attempts.
Allen turns to Paul and throws data bolts into his broken chest, overloading him with painful memories taken from assimilated evaps. A short and brutal stint in a POW camp. A life with Elephantiasis. Someone’s last days in the PIT.
warm, cold, a boy, toothy smiles, where has my skin gone, it is so lonely in this box, do not make a peep or they will be angry with you, please make all of it go away, please leave me alone, no hope now, it’s done, help, help
PAUL BREAKS FREE from the inflicted memory. He ambles forward, and trips. His avatarial feet disappear, and his body along with them. He’s once again a grid-laced specter. In a blinding flash, Allen appears—his presence understood, but not sensed with all Paul’s primary senses having been ruptured. Allen stabs Paul with some more negative memices.
warm, gray, machines, bubbled flesh, tumors everywhere, sideshow in a side room alone, you don’t know what it’s like to make little children cry, I hate waking up to the pain, there is no real cure, no never, what hope, sure, sure
Every time Paul’s subjected to these memories, a little more of him is displaced by the correlated personalities.
cold, hay, spider, green-eyed beasts, your life in tattoos, your tattoos in my trophy case, the Boss does not usually give second chances, shoot her or your family dies, that once was a girl, washed away, red tide, sad, sad
“How about a rape victim’s guilt?” laughs Allen.
Paul collapses into his former avatar, and slowly picks himself up off the floor. A sliver of Paul’s resolve remains, the rest eroded away by alternate perspectives.
They’ve returned to Paul’s old Outland laboratory.
“Fitting,” Paul groans, stumbling into a chair—trying to recalibrate his priorities.
Allen lowers his hands. Torturing Paul has lost its excitement. He know
s he’s done.
“Hey Allen, I bet there’s a toaster somewhere you could possess.”
“With our fates intertwined, I find it difficult to place your optimism.”
A MINUTE LEFT, CLOUD-time. Paul contemplates alternative ways of decrypting and delivering the Empty Thought, breaking Allen’s hold, and desynchronizing with strength left to awake and deactivate the delayed grenade with a thumb-click.
Allen meet’s Paul’s eye line. “I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. There’s no place you’ll go that I won’t find you.”
Paul laughs, spinning in the chair. “You know what? A world with you in it is just not worth being a part of.”
Revenge might set him free, but what of forgiveness?
Straining his soulful fiber, the words slink out: “I’m sorry, Allen.”
Allen’s eyes widen with disbelief. His avatar begins to glitch erratically and flicker. “Do you want absolution for murdering me? Which time?”
Wrinkling his virtual face, Paul looks back, speechless.
“God damn you, Paul Sheffield,” Allen says somberly, visibly undecided between screaming and weeping. He opts for the latter. His sobs crackle and fuzz, as if played through a broken tube amp. “God damn you.” He stands. “I may share your end, but would rather not your company in my final moments.”
Allen waltzes over to the EXIT sign, and cranks-open the door to vast and empty space, bereft of light. The room starts to quake, shaking the door shut behind him.
The room’s sensory inputs run amuck, sending horrifying rainbows of sound and cannonades of sensation Paul’s way. The visuals begin to flicker. The slab where Allen died fizzles away, leaving a chestnut of multi-coloured light. Paul feels a sense of disconnect—as if wittingly dreaming and unable to wake up.
Another crater for Winchester’s office.
PAUL’S AVATAR IS COATED IN THE MEMORY of a bright, spring morning in his mid-30s when he and Rachel had taken the girls—just babes at the time—to the park near their first house. Birch trees and a swing-set materialize, as do phantasmal re-presentations of the girls and their cherubic laughter. A gentle breeze teases Rachel’s hair and puffs the girls’ dresses.
Cypulchre Page 26
