by Jesse Karp
“Let me start at the beginning,” the man said, beginning to pace around the couch. “Mal’s brother disappeared. Mal went looking for him but stumbled onto a much larger situation. The last place Tommy was seen was in a building. Mal went into that building and found several impossible things. Among them was a room filled with doors that led to other locations, other buildings, all over the city, all over the world. Are you all right, Rose? Let me get you something to drink. This is just the beginning.”
She nodded minutely, and he went to a mirrored bar behind a wall panel and returned with a bottle of water, which he passed to her and she held numbly, her hand limp on the sofa.
“Mal was taken away. His knowledge of the doors made him a liability, and he was put in a prison of sorts. There he met several other people, myself among them. I worked for an organization, a cooperative that used a schema of human interaction called the Global Dynamic to study demographic trends and social currents that were hidden in statistics. We studied them, and, where no one else could, we acted on them. This is how I uncovered the same trail Mal had. And I, like Mal and these other people, was imprisoned for it.
“This was a most unusual prison, in the form of a forest and a mountain. But they had been cut off from the rest of the world by people’s minds. By forgetting that the place existed, by letting go of it, people detached it from the world we know, made it one of the forgotten places. They’re all over, these places, but we don’t see them. They’re behind the world, like old, dirty alleyways that no one walks through anymore. Some of them are alleyways, in fact. I know that Mal uses these places to get through the city. Being in that forest tripped something in Mal’s head. He’s trained himself to find these forgotten places, spot them. Remember them, I guess you’d say.”
“What about you? Can you see them?”
“No. I’m . . . not like Mal.”
The more she listened, the more Rose came to understand that. The more he spoke, the less his voice seemed to fit the mouth that was issuing it. She felt like she was watching a badly dubbed movie or watching a puppet speak the words of its master. This more than anything else made the story this man was telling disturbingly easy to believe.
“I’ll get to that shortly,” the man continued. “The four of us found a way out of the prison, and we attempted to find out what was happening to us. When we did, though, we learned that we had all been erased, forgotten like the prison we had escaped from. No one remembered any of us, not the people we worked with, not our friends, not even those closest to us, like our families. Essentially, we no longer existed. I imagine that’s what Mal meant when he said he wasn’t in this corporation’s ‘system.’ At any rate, I knew of a person, a sort of living database, called the Librarian. This person sent us in the right direction, which turned out to be the building with the doors, the building Mal had started in.”
The man turned away then and went to the window. His body remained stiff, at attention, as he looked out at the city through the tinted glass, the forest of gleaming spires surrounding them. The movement also seemed unnatural to Rose, like a body being controlled by remote. She looked down at Mal’s quiet, bruised face. She would have touched it, as she did sometimes when he slept, if the man had not been there.
“This next part is difficult,” he said from the window. “The building was not a building, really. It was part of our enemy, part of the being that had done all this to us and was, in fact, exerting control over most of the people in the city, if not the country and the world.”
“Corporations do that every day,” Rose said, unintentionally dismissive of it. “Mal talks about it sometimes. When he talks.”
“Yes, that’s true. The corporations were doing this thing’s work. They were, in some sense, just a part of it. The thing was in people’s minds, riding them, controlling the way they saw and thought and felt. That’s how we were erased.”
“What are you talking about?” Even frustrated, Rose’s voice hardly went above a whisper. “What was this thing?”
“It was an idea, Rose.” The man turned back from the window and put his sharp eyes into her. “An idea that had evolved into a living thing because it had grown so powerful in people’s minds. The idea of hopelessness. It grew and it thrived, and it was going to eat us all alive, everyone that ever lived, so that there wouldn’t be people anymore, just machines made of flesh that carried this thing around in their skulls.”
The eyes searched her, looking for disbelief, panic. But it wasn’t there. Of everything he had said so far, this Rose had the easiest time believing. She knew the touch of the thing he was describing, had felt it eating her own mind—had, in fact, never known a time without it.
“The four of us confronted it.” The man walked over, stood above her again. “But there was a disagreement about how to deal with it. I wanted the thing destroyed as soon as possible, but Mal and the others, they needed their loved ones back. Mal and I fought.”
It was almost enough to make Rose laugh, this polished, pristine sculpture of a man trying to topple the blunt, stony Mal. She had little question of how that fight had ended.
“Mal beat me,” he said without chagrin. “And he went on to confront the thing. But during our fight, a window was smashed. Remember, now, that the building we were in was not really a building at all, but a metaphor, the inside of this thing, the mind of this living idea. Realizing I couldn’t accomplish what I set out to, I came up with a hasty theory and acted on it. I threw myself out the window. As I said, I wasn’t jumping from a real window. I was jumping from the inside of this thing to the outside of it. And outside was a boundless neurological interface, a tissue that connects all the human minds in the world. This mindscape—or, more accurately, ‘neuropleth’ because it interacts with the entire nervous system, everyone’s nervous systems—is what the Idea traveled through. It was through the neuropleth that the Idea could enter people and control them.”
Rose was staring up at him, for the first time as though he were mad.
“That’s where I am. Right now.” As if to bear her out, his eyes became unfocused, looking at something unspeakably vast inside him. “This isn’t my body. My body is gone forever. Throwing myself into the neuropleth converted my body into pure neurological impulses, pure consciousness. I can move from person to person, like swimming from one pool to another through the earth between them.”
Or, Rose thought, like a ghost, haunting houses, driving out their proper occupants.
“Like the living idea you were fighting,” she said, not sure he would even hear her. But his eyes snapped back into focus, and he stared down at her, not with anger but with mild confusion.
“No. Not like that,” he said easily. “My consciousness can only enter certain sorts of minds; minds that are . . . how to put it? Unguarded, you might say; open minds. Once I’m in, I can move the body, speak through it as I am now, with Alan Silven. But once my consciousness leaves, I alter their memories, but nothing more. Like with Mr. Silven, here. I can’t very well leave him the memory of all this. I create different memories of the time that he’s missed and leave him with those.”
He looked down at her, guilelessly expecting that she would have no doubts, no suspicions of his intentions. Momentous though it was, Rose had fixed on something else.
“What about the other two people?” Rose asked. “You said four of you confronted the thing.” There was something there that Remak had passed over too quickly. She sensed in it the bonds that tied Mal to something else, that kept him eternally just out of her embrace.
“There was a man, a teacher, named Mike. He was the one who finally defeated the creature with his own sacrifice.”
“How do you defeat an idea?” she asked.
“You prove it wrong,” Remak answered, the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s what Mike did, right at its heart.”
“Destroyed it?”
“I think so,” he allowed. “Yes. Made it vastly less than it was, at any ra
te. And Mike died for it. The building we were in, it was here, where we’re standing now. That specific structure is gone now, crumbled away when Mike beat the thing. This place”—his hands opened around them—“is just a building. That’s why I ride Silven sometimes, to check in, make sure.”
“We don’t seem to be so much better off,” Rose said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“With the Idea gone,” Rose explained, quiet but resolute. “You weakened it, you said, but the people I see every day, they don’t seem so much better.”
“The Idea helped to dig us a deep hole,” Remak said, his head dropping in thought. “The problem is that no one seems terribly interested in looking around and seeing that hole closing in around them. They would rather look back at themselves, focus on their own concerns, through the screens of their cells or the programs on the HDs.”
Rose nodded. She didn’t really need anyone to explain to her how the world sucked.
“You only mentioned three people.” Rose drove the conversation back on the path Remak had again steered them away from. “Who was the fourth person?”
“A girl. Laura.” His voice and face didn’t change at all. There was no telling if she meant anything unusual to this man. “She had it worst in many ways. She had the most secure life, the happiest. She lost the most of all of us.”
Laura. The enemy that had wrapped its tentacles around Mal’s heart and kept Rose from touching it now had a name. Laura.
“What happened to her?” Her hand had again found Mal’s, her fingers touching his rough knuckles.
“She got her life back,” Remak said. “And she’s safe.”
“How did she—”
“What’s happening?” Remak asked, his attention suddenly fixed on Mal.
“Nightmares,” Rose explained. She had already felt Mal’s slack grip tighten in twitches and jerks. “They won’t leave him alone.”
“Well,” Remak said distantly, “Mal has certainly earned his nightmares.”
Mal stirred. She took her hand back carefully, watched his dark eyes come slowly open.
Remak looked down at the boy, the same cool mathematics working in his head but also something else. Sympathy? Gratitude?
“You need a doctor, Mal,” he said. “And we need to talk.”
The doctor arrived with a severe face and a business suit over his slim frame. He referred to the young CEO casually as “Alan” and let no evidence whatsoever onto his patrician features as to what he must have thought about the two uncouth-looking kids lounging in the office. Rose had never imagined a doctor looking like this, and certainly not a doctor who came to you when you called him. Her experience with doctors topped out with the diagnosis app on her cell.
The doctor studied the lacerations on Mal’s head, gently probed the bandages on his torso, opened his lips and reached in with a gloved finger, looked into his eyes with a small intense light that made Mal flinch, then took Remak aside and spoke quietly to him. He returned to Mal with a preparation, in hypodermic form, from a small leather pouch he carried in his briefcase. Without protest, Mal allowed the needle to slip into his arm, and for the second time in two hours, Rose watched Mal receive an injection of God only knew what from a total stranger.
The doctor peered into Mal’s eyes with a dimmed flashlight, then rose to his knees and deposited a small packet of pills on the chrome and glass coffee table before the sofa. He nodded once at Mal and Rose, then shook hands with Remak and departed.
“You have three cracked ribs that have been adequately wrapped,” Remak told Mal when they were alone again, “and a concussion that seems to be improving rather than worsening. The doctor gave you some stimulants to keep you on your feet for the time being. You have a tooth cracked off at the base, and the gum is infected.” He motioned to the pills on the coffee table. “That’s for the infection. Everything else is just bumps and bruises.”
Rose took in each beat of the diagnosis as though the blows were landing on her own body. Mal’s eyes wandered lazily around the room.
“He also noted that he’d never seen so much scar tissue on a person,” Remak concluded after a pause. “So it was the Old Man who did this to you, wasn’t it?”
Mal’s eyes didn’t fix on anything in particular. Rose was staring at him now, too.
“Wasn’t it?” Remak pressed.
Mal’s eyes snapped back to him, his face finding its stony default.
“Yes.”
Remak nodded, rearranging his equation.
Rose had heard of the Old Man. Everyone had. He was a rumor. The rumor. The corporate bogeyman that made cities rise and fall, a composite of every fat cat who ever sat in a corner office with a nice view and adjusted the fortunes of the world according to his private agenda.
“Why does he want you, Mal?” Remak asked in a tired drone. Clearly, he was familiar with the process of trying to extract information from Mal.
Rose watched Mal go through the nearly imperceptible hoops of figuring out whether or not the information really, truly needed to be divulged.
“He doesn’t want me,” Mal finally said. “He wants you.”
Remak, preternaturally collected until now, reeled as if the floor beneath him had become liquid.
“What? How? How does the Old Man even know about me?”
Mal looked up at Remak from beneath his brow, silent. The answer was implicit in the question; even Rose could see that. If the Old Man was real, then his resources were beyond conception. Eventually, he knew everything. That was his nature.
“This is too dire, Mal. It changes everything,” Remak said. “If he knows about me, does he know about the neuropleth? If he could gain access to the neuropleth . . . I need you to go back in Mal,” Remak said it flatly, “to find out what he’s planning.”
“You go,” Mal said, creaking himself up to a standing position.
“I’ve tried,” Remak said. “My consciousness, it can’t even get close to him. I keep scraping up against their inner circle, but their minds are too guarded. I can’t enter anyone: his bodyguards, his assistant, this Kliest woman; certainly not the Old Man himself.” When Mal didn’t respond after a moment, Remak came down hard on his last words. “Do you understand how dangerous that is?”
Dangerous because you can’t control them, Rose didn’t say.
Remak straightened from his beseeching posture.
“All right, Mal,” he said, the urgency gone from his tone, and the quiet confidence having rushed in to fill the space. “Our arrangement was made perfectly clear: One day you’d have to do something for me, no questions asked. I’m calling it in.”
Mal’s body tensed, his fists closed tightly, then he let go.
“They put a geolocator in me,” Mal said. “They know where I am all the time.”
“They know you came here?”
“I went other places first, confused the trail. This place won’t stand out. But they will see me coming if I try to get close to them.”
“We can fix that,” Remak said, relaxing into a problem of logistics, an operation he clearly thrived on. “We just need to find its frequency. We duplicate the signal, then if we can get yours offline, even for just a second, we can replace it.”
“I can get it offline,” Mal said, and only then did Rose completely realize that the argument was over, and a shifting of allegiances had magically and invisibly occurred while she was watching.
“But Mal . . .” she said, and when they both looked at her, she flinched, cleared her throat, and started again. “But Mal isn’t in any shape to fight.” Despite the doctor’s recent visit, that fact seemed to have eluded them both. Wasn’t that just men all over? The strength of their bodies was their strength as human beings. Even Remak, who had no actual body anymore, was trapped by this pattern of thought.
Remak looked back at Mal appraisingly, and Rose already knew him well enough to know that he was judging not by how much more Mal could take for his own health, but how much more
he could take before he became a liability to the operation.
“I’ll help however I can,” Remak said. “I can’t get to the Old Man, but I can help get you in unnoticed.”
Mal nodded, predictably ignoring Rose’s plea as though it had never even been spoken. She wondered, Would Laura have ever been so unceremoniously ignored?
“This is it, Remak. This is the one I owe you. Do what you need to,” he said, and then looked at Rose. “And I’ll do what I need to.”
Silven’s limo, appallingly out of place, pulled to a curb in the shadow of two rotting apartment buildings. The policy of the mayor’s office was to camouflage such symbols of municipal failure by maintaining solid, plain façades and leaving the insides to molder. Here, however, they were far enough on the outskirts of the “civilized” city that the well-heeled citizen and the average tourist would never see it. There was little purpose in draining resources to fix up these hulks, unless, of course, you cared about the people suffering inside them. A few sets of shadowed, cautious eyes shot over and collected the details of the three figures stepping from the limo.
“Hold your position,” Remak said so that his cellens pickup would convey it to a man named Gerald Fisher, an employee of a Silven subsidiary who had been pressed into service as a decoy. A geolocator that transmitted on the same frequency as Mal’s had been shot into Gerald Fisher so that his movements would appear to be Mal’s. All that remained was to remove the transmission coming from Mal.
Mal’s eyes scanned the sidewalk, the buildings, the seams in between them, and seemed to find something Rose couldn’t see. Whatever the doctor had given him was doing something. Mal’s eyes were focusing more sharply, and the squint of pain had disappeared. It was helping him now, but what would it do in the long run? Did Remak care? Did Mal? He led her and Remak over to the place where the wall of one grimy apartment building met that of the other.
Remak’s eyes were scanning the area from behind cellenses, even as his jaw worked, subvocalizing orders. Mal looked up at him, and he nodded.
