Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Information

  Quotations

  The Story Before Reality

  00000 PROLOGUE

  00001TREMENDUM

  00010OLICE LINE DO NOT CRO

  00011KUDZU

  The Insomnimania User’s Manual

  00100 MAZE

  Insomnimania Manual: Your “Alter”

  00101CYBERVICE

  00110MESSAGES

  00111WASTELAND

  01000OPEN HOUSE

  01001PUNCH AND JUDY

  01010LOOP

  01011 FILED

  01100DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE

  01101OLD CLOTHES

  01110EDGE

  Insomnimania Manual: Into Action

  01111L-FY

  10000SOLACE

  10001CONTROL QUESTION

  10010TURING TEST

  Insomnimania Manual Addendum: The Pleasure Dome

  10011WHORE

  10100HACKER

  10101TRAVELING HORSE

  10110DIALOGUE BETWEENA PRIEST AND A DYING MAN

  10111RESEARCH

  11000INTIMATIONS

  11001DEPOSITION

  11010SIMULATION

  11011RUNAWAY SHRINK

  11100KAMIKAZE

  11101THE BASEMENT

  11110DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW?

  11111EPILOGUE

  The Authors and Their Other Works

  Copyright Information

  Cole Perriman’s

  Terminal Games

  Wim Coleman & Pat Perrin

  Madeira Press speculative fiction www.madeirapress.com

  © 1994, 2007, 2013 by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except brief quotations used in a review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Sources and credits, see “Notes and Acknowledgments,” at the end of the book.

  DIGITAL EDITION ISBN: 978-1-935178-35-4

  Quotations

  Control, in other words, is nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient.

  —Norbert Wiener

  The Human Use of Human Beings

  AUGUSTE: I’m thirsty.

  WHITE CLOWN: Have you any money?

  AUGUSTE: No.

  WHITE CLOWN: Then you aren’t thirsty.

  —Federico Fellini

  Fellini on Fellini

  The Story Before Reality

  We wrote Terminal Games under the pseudonym Cole Perriman, and it was first published in 1994. At that time, New York publishers were just discovering fax machines. Most people hadn’t used email, and “Internet” wasn’t yet a household word. There was no Google, Facebook, The Sims, Twitter, Amazon, WiFi, texting, or … well, you get the picture.

  Terminal Games sold well, got translated into German, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, and Romanian, and was optioned by a major studio for a movie that didn’t get off the ground. The trouble was, our publisher thought it was science fiction, and tried to market it that way. It was an easy mistake to make, and after a few years the book went out of print. Then reality began to change.

  Anyway, after almost twenty years, times have finally caught up with Terminal Games. Here’s the original book again, with its 90s-era technology intact. See for yourself how well Cole Perriman’s Terminal Games prophesied the today’s infoworld.

  —Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin, aka Cole Perriman.

  (The original publisher insisted on a single name for the author.)

  00000

  PROLOGUE

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1994: 1:35 a.m.

  The night is carpeted, quiet. City noises are intercepted by walls and rooms and murmurs of sleeping guests. The man with steel-gray hair hears only a discreet whisper of cables gliding invisibly behind the elevator doors. He admires the efficiency of the world’s machinery—obedient, respectful of his wishes. Machines understand the meaning of acquiescence and compliance.

  He sees his own reflection in the mirrored wall at the end of the short hallway—a lean, elegant, Armani-clad gentleman with yacht-weathered skin standing, tired but dignified, in the ornate hallway. He adores mirrors, but this time he doesn’t dwell on his image. He turns away and studies instead a design that embellishes the wall between the two elevators, an intricate raised pattern of garlands circling a sun.

  Tired as he is, he is pleased with the moment, with the rich carpet and the ornate wall, with his sexual satiation and with his timely compliance with his own private and unspoken law: Never spend the night.

  Now he looks forward to a few hours of sleep.

  But can I sleep?

  He thinks of the very young woman he just left behind in the room down the hall.

  How old was she?

  He didn’t ask her, and if he had, he would not have expected the truth.

  People can be trusted to lie. A fact of life you can bank on.

  Besides, it’s best not to know now if she was underage—best not to dwell on any danger. It’s all over. All in the past.

  Nevertheless, he recollects her thin blond hair, her smooth white body—a whiteness just on the edge of being chalky, anemic, almost disagreeable. He refrained from bruising that body as he might otherwise have done, and the sex was admittedly a little tame for his exacting taste. Nevertheless, the frail body was too eager, too unreserved, too facile to belong to someone without a fair amount of experience.

  There are no virgins in the world. He feels his lips shape themselves into a comfortably familiar smirk. People aren’t even born with virginity anymore.

  The gray-haired man quickly grows tired of these musings. Now the whispering behind the doors has ceased. The elevator must have stopped at another floor. His smugness fades. His satisfaction dissipates a little. He has no time for this waiting. Nothing he does is free—not even in the seeming privacy of his own brain tissue. His most intimate thoughts cost money.

  Where is that damned thing?

  The gray-haired man hears a soft, rhythmic brushing sound behind him. What is that sound? Rubber soles scuffing against the plush carpet? The brush of inseam against inseam? He does not turn to look. He never turns to look at anybody if he can help it. Other people never occupy his curiosity or his interest. It is he who expects to occupy theirs. Other heads must turn, not his.

  Even so, he regrets having faced away from the mirror. A glance, just the slightest motion of the head, would show him the person’s reflection. He silently curses this spasm of interest. His discipline has slipped a little.

  The quiet brushing comes to a halt behind him. How far away? Two feet? One foot? Less? The man with the steel-gray hair intuitively knows that his companion is not merely waiting for the elevator. No. This person has found him. This person knows who he is. The gray-haired man does not much like this. He has taken pains to be alone.

  Then a voice behind him whispers, with the conspiratorial sweetness of an imaginary childhood playmate: “Hi, Jo-jo-boy. It’s me. Auggie.”

  The man starts slightly at the sound, smiling with surprise.

  Auggie!

  Can it be possible? It is, indeed, as if a childhood playmate had come to life. So many games, so many merry im
postures. The man begins to turn, eyebrows raised in pleased expectation.

  He is about to ask, “How did you find me?”

  He is about to say, “I hope you’re not still angry.”

  He glimpses the figure’s face—a white, red, and black face comprised of tiny squares. A mosaic? Pixels? The gray-haired man’s eyes squint to bring the face into better focus.

  The rest of the figure is dark. Its right arm is outstretched. At the end of the arm, at the very threshold of the gray-haired man’s peripheral vision, floats a bright glint of steel. The steel flashes inward and downward. The glint blinds momentarily. The man feels an implosion at his throat—a sudden, violent pressure accompanied by a noisy thud that reaches his ears through the resonant cavities of his skull.

  There is no pain.

  The man’s head is suspended, motionless, held up by something imbedded in his throat. The brightly colored face with gigantic eyes becomes abruptly clearer. For a moment, the gray-haired man is aware of the large, red, downturned mouth scowling at him. Then, with a furious jerk, the shining thing releases itself from his throat and he swings exuberantly, dizzily around.

  He finds himself staggering, facing the wall again with its garlands, its sun. A red liquid spray shoots rhythmically out of his throat. A rumbling exhalation out of his lungs accompanies the spray. The man is briefly enamored by the orgiastic ferocity of the spurting. For fifty-eight years, his body has struggled to contain this awful force—and now it is free.

  How vigorous. How godly.

  But now he grips his throat clumsily, his fingers unable to contain the jubilant, pulsating fountain. His thoughts begin to stammer.

  These hands—these hands are too weak. Whose hands? Some damned incompetent …

  The man is dizzy. He is still waiting for the pain, but it does not come. He is a dancing marionette whose strings have been cut. His body crumples to the carpeted floor in an unseemly heap. He tries to breathe but can’t. He doesn’t actually want to breathe—not under these demeaning circumstances. This entire struggle is a terrible imposition, and he despises it—just as he despises waiting in lines.

  Why isn’t a subordinate here to take care of this?

  What does he pay people for?

  The man feels his body jerk and thrash. He wants to shout, “Stop it! Let go of me!” But without air and the use of his voice box, the effort would be futile and humiliating. Besides, he quickly realizes that his body is thrashing on its own mindless power.

  The man’s eyes flash back and forth too hastily to take in more than a blur. He fleetingly thinks he detects the dark shape of his companion, but he can’t be sure. His vision continues to gyrate crazily, even after his nervous system ceases to register his bodily convulsions.

  Then he is still.

  There is no pain.

  There has never been any pain, never any terror.

  The man stares unblinkingly upward at the wall. A wild red pattern like an aggressive abstract-expressionist splatter now overlays the sun and scatters across the garland’s white curves. Huge, glistening droplets hang in precarious suspension, but do not move. Have the droplets frozen, or has time stopped?

  The question does not much concern the gray-haired man. It is a mere point of curiosity. The entire scene has been rendered with breathtaking clarity—and clarity is its own justification. Death is much brighter, much more orderly than he had expected—and infinitely more accommodating.

  The man is pleased.

  *

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19, 1994, 12:03 a.m.

  On a computer monitor, facing the viewer:

  An image comprised entirely of tiny, square computer pixels. It is a beige door against a white wall. The door is stamped with a bright red number—636. Near the top of the screen, numerous pairs of disembodied eyes appear, blinking and staring. Letters next to each set of eyes give them a frail semblance of identity:

  “sudopod, starlitestarbrite, goldnrod, safir, tilly-the-hun, tomsantpolly, prayreedog, 1-fy …”

  Music, heard over tiny, sputtering speakers:

  Slow, gentle, lilting orchestral music, beginning with a discord in the low strings, but immediately turning cheerful in the violins. The beginning of a Rossini overture, perhaps, but which one? It doesn’t much matter. They all start off quiet and end up loud.

  The door swings open away from the viewer, revealing a black vacancy from which emerges a cartoonish, gray-haired man in a three-piece suit. He turns toward the darkness and blows a noisy “smack” of a goodbye kiss toward his unseen lover. He closes the door behind him.

  Zoom in on the gray-haired man’s face. A silly, self-satisfied smile forms on his lips. Violinists slap their bows against the wood of their instruments in percussive applause.

  Zoom out, taking in the man’s whole figure again. Track backward in front of the man as he starts to dance away, the hotel hallway with its parallel rows of doors retreating into the distance. But the perspective is a little off. The lines do not converge correctly as the viewer lumbers backward, keeping the man in view.

  Keep tracking in front of him down the hallway and around numerous corners through an increasingly preposterous maze, to a corridor with facing pairs of elevator doors. At the end of the corridor is a wall mirror. The man stops at the sight of his full-length reflection. The violin bows clatter against wood again, sounding slightly bemused, intermixing this time with halting queries from the other stringed instruments.

  The perspective is momentarily unglued as the view moves behind the gray-haired man. He pushes the elevator button and glances at a design on the wall between the elevators—an intricate sketch of garlands surrounding a sun.

  A short silence, then clarinets and oboes and English horns carry the music into a brisk up-tempo. An enormous hand—as if belonging to the viewer—reaches into the scene and taps the gray-haired man on the shoulder, accompanied by the now-familiar clacking of the violin bows.

  There is momentary silence.

  The man turns toward the viewer. His face fills the screen. He looks slightly puzzled, even as a smile shapes itself across his face. The violins sigh with pleased surprise.

  Then ...

  The screen is wiped clean by a swift, slashing movement accompanied by a comical electronic gurgling sound. The music reaches a madcap gallop. The hallway, the mirror, the sun and its garlands, and the elevator doors reappear, whirling around the gray-haired man.

  A tight zoom-in, quickly, on his face as his throat explodes in a pyrotechnical display of spouting red pixels. He clutches his throat. His eyes bulge and roll ludicrously. Shimmering globs of red cover the screen, briefly obliterating the view, then draining away to reveal him lying on the floor, flopping about in time to the music as it cartwheels into a reeling, festive finale.

  View the man from above as he lies on his side, his scurrying feet twirling him in a crazy windmill motion. Then move down beside him as he flips on his back and flops like a fish, his pelvis lurching upward with the climax of the overture. Finally, zoom in on his face. The violins make one last clattering statement as the man’s protruding eyes turn into little Xs.

  With the closing chords, the screen shows a cluster of pixels scattered across a cybernetic white background. This bright crimson pattern overlays the sketch of the sun and is splashed across the garlands. A red trickle follows the edge of a curl.

  00001

  TREMENDUM

  “Bargain-basement tracheotomy,” Deputy Coroner Bernard Smith remarked, shining a penlight into the gaping throat wound and studying it through lowered bifocals. “Windpipe’s sawed halfway through. Carotid arteries’re severed. Sternomastoid muscles, too.”

  “Meaning?” Lieutenant Nolan Grobowski asked.

  “Meaning I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

  Nolan chuckled grimly. E
ven from about five feet away, Nolan could see that the wound—only an hour or so old—was showing signs of decay. The dead man’s smell was nasty, too—the stench of raw, freshly cut meat and the mixed stink of feces and urine made the plush and well-lit hotel corridor smell incongruously like an outhouse.

  Smith shined the penlight into the victim’s eyes, and Nolan could see that they had already flattened slightly—their fluid apparently had begun to drain. Nolan made a note ...

  “2:56 a.m. The stiff is wilting a little.”

  Nolan always wrote down whatever entered his head while on the job, no matter how seemingly trivial, redundant, or absurd. Even though the local Hollywood detectives had surely taken notes, he would need his own records. And even photographs sometimes couldn’t be counted on for crucial details. Besides, note taking was one of the few really natural things to do at a homicide scene. It kept one’s hands busy.

  “So how’re you calling this one, Smitty?” asked Nolan’s partner, Sergeant Clayton Saunders, who was gingerly stalking the area with a tape measure.

  The gray-haired, pudgy deputy coroner sat back on his haunches.

  “Reckon it’d be natural causes,” Smitty said. “Maybe just plain old age.”

  “Could he’ve choked on a chicken bone?” Clayton asked. The black detective finished his measuring and turned to study the bloodstain on the wall.

  “Possibly, just possibly,” Smitty said. “He might have stuck his finger in a wall socket, too.”

  “What about suicide?” Nolan asked.

  “Get serious, Nol,” Smitty said, padding puppy dog-like around the body on his hands and knees. “Why would a guy that rich off himself?”

  “Hell, we’re talking about one of America’s champion cutthroat buccaneers, here,” Nolan said. “Think of the guilt he must have been toting around. Here’s what happened. About one thirty-five this morning, G. K. Judson’s corporate sins caught up with him. He couldn’t live with himself for one more minute. So he took a big butcher knife out of his suitcase, walked down the hotel hallway to the elevator, rode it two floors down, stepped out into the corridor here, and sliced himself open.”