Those That Wake 02: What We Become

by Jesse Karp

  “Kiss me,” the Old Man said.

  She gaped at him, her face slack with disgust.

  “That will be . . . our physical contact. I am the oppressor and . . . you are the victim. Without it, there is no contract. Kiss me.”

  Rose could not swallow. The air whistled dryly through her throat. His hand rested on her forearm, exerting the gentlest downward pressure, less than that of a sleeping baby.

  She closed her eyes, her last sight that of the gray, cracking lips, seamed with dried saliva and yellow crust.

  Mal, she thought. Mal.

  She brought her face forward until the putrid breath, the stench of his rotting insides, filled her nose. She gagged, and as she swallowed back bile, she felt the rasp of sharp, cracking skin on her lips. She almost pulled back, almost. But as soon as their lips touched, she felt his consciousness flash across, forcing its way in.

  With only a small portion of her awareness, she felt his moist, flicking tongue enter her mouth, slide across her gums. But that was far, far from the worst of it. She also felt the slow crackle of the Old Man’s synaptic electricity prickling like spider legs across the folds of her brain, searching, searching . . .

  She felt the aperture to the neuropleth in her head open; she glimpsed the pathway of buzzing light branching endlessly to the effervescent brains.

  Then a flash of electricity, the spider amputating something from her brain and scurrying away with it. Instantly, the view of the neuropleth was gone. The aperture hadn’t simply closed—it had been burned out of her, stolen away forever by limitless greed, limitless hunger. Just as suddenly, the spider was gone.

  The humid red world rushed back, and Rose tumbled to the floor, her mind aching with a sense of disconnection, of loneliness as she had never known in a lifetime full of loneliness.

  “Mmmmmm.” It was a deep, orgasmic moan from the depths of a primordial chasm. The Old Man’s flaccid body twitched in a hundred different places. “Feel them,” he said, the voice already growing more potent, the timbre deepening. “Feel them.”

  Rose tore her eyes from him, looked at Mal. Could she lift him, drag him out of here herself?

  “No,” said the voice, vibrant with strength, responding to her unspoken question. “No, you cannot.”

  The Truth

  “TELL ME, LAURA,” THE ELECTRONIC voice inquired, and perhaps the merest touch of sentiment vibrated through the Hoffman tiles. Or perhaps Aaron was reading that into the exchange; the voice liked Laura better because she was sweet and vulnerable and Aaron was too smart. “What is your life like now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Over the last few months, what have you done in your life? Nothing more complicated than that.”

  Laura stiffened, straightened her posture as though she were facing a verbal examination for a crucial grade. Her hands were trembling on her lap.

  “I’m in college. I take classes. I see my friends. I date—I dated a boy. I speak to my parents sometimes.”

  “Is that so bad, Laura?” The question rang down like a judgment on her.

  “Yes!” Her response was instant and harsh. “Yes. Because it’s not mine. I know it isn’t. It’s like—” Aaron watched her face enter a rigor of strain. “It’s like someone dropped me into a fake life, with a family and friends and a job, but none of them are real. But I have to keep up the charade, have to keep up this performance, because if I don’t, if I run offstage, behind the curtain is horrible, horrible darkness.”

  “Then don’t, Laura,” the voice said, and now Aaron knew that it felt this, that there was a person behind this electronic camouflage who was pleading with Laura, pleading with her to just, God help her, hold on to the fake life she had. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

  “I have to. Otherwise I’m empty. There’s only this fake person living a lie. There is no more me.”

  The room throbbed with a heavy silence. Aaron looked at Laura’s trembling hands, and it struck him that now would be the time to offer his own hand, to let her hold it in that crushing grip again. That was what she needed right then: human contact. Aaron’s hand fluttered but didn’t take hers.

  “There were four of you,” the voice said. “Each of you was caught up against the Idea for different reasons, had each stumbled across it in the course of your daily lives. But unlike so many others, you four resisted it. It took everything from you—your lives, your friends, your families. It snatched you out of their heads as though you had never even existed. But each of you had something that allowed you to cling to hope, to fight. Ultimately, that was how you beat it. One of you knew about me, and you came to me for information.”

  “To Pope Springs,” Aaron said, driven by his unflagging interest in proving himself right. “At the site of the fire.”

  “Yes. There. I told you what I could, and you went to confront it, as I already described.”

  “Who?” Laura asked. “Who were the others? What were their names?”

  Silence.

  “Please . . .” Laura’s voice was choked with anger and grief, her expression caught between the two extremes, anguish and rage burning her face. “Please just tell me.”

  “Jon Remak. Mike Boothe.”

  Laura clutched her stomach, her shoulders folding forward to protect her from the names.

  “Mal Jericho.”

  It was as if a jolt of electricity went through her, seizing her muscles and bunching them into painful knots.

  Aaron’s fingers moved across the cold space between the two of them and touched her shoulder as they would a most delicate piece of digital equipment, the fingers barely exerting pressure.

  “Do you remember?” he asked softly.

  “No!” Her eyes were on fire, gushing tears, and she glared up at him; he pulled his arm back as though it had been singed by her gaze. “No, I don’t remember anything! The names are killing me, but I don’t know them. Why can’t I remember them?” she demanded of the empty room.

  “I’m sorry, Laura,” the electronic voice filled the room coolly. “I know you came here to find out what happened to you. For ‘the truth,’ as you put it. But this is an area where my information falters.”

  “You’ve got to know something,” Laura said, and Aaron judged it not a question but a plea to salvage her fracturing sanity.

  “All right, Laura, all right. I’m prepared to make you a deal. I can see you’ve already set yourself on a course. I’ll tell you what I can. Conjecture mostly. But as I do, you have to unmake up your mind. You have to examine what I say and, only then, decide on your course.”

  Aaron stared at her, unable to understand why she sat there, in trembling silence.

  “Say ‘yes,’” he whispered to her, like a stage manager prompting an actress who had forgotten her lines.

  She didn’t heed him, just sat, staring into the middle distance, quivering as if chilled to the bone.

  “What?” Aaron hissed. “What’s wrong?” But then he realized, even before the last angry syllable left his mouth. She was actually thinking about her answer. She was not simply working to get the information she needed. She was trying to figure out whether she could take that deal and then answer honestly.

  “Yes.” Her voice echoed in the room like a pronouncement from God. “I’ll take that deal.”

  “Mike Boothe”—the voice proceeded without further preamble—“died in the confrontation with the Idea. It was, in fact, his sacrifice that ultimately defeated it. You and Mal emerged from the battle together. You . . . stayed together for a time. I wasn’t keeping constant surveillance on you, but I did, of course, make a point to check in. From what I observed, you began to build a life, of sorts. But it was a troubled life, troubled by circumstance. Things kept . . . interfering, interrupting. Matters of settling your pasts: your parents, Mal’s brother; there was great trouble, a great deal of guilt and suffering putting things in some semblance of order.”

  “Sounds like you were watching us plenty,” Laura
said, not without a cool resentment in the midst of her desperation that managed to impress Aaron.

  “And then, of course, there was the Old Man.” The voice carried on without noting Laura’s rebuke. “He was in the process of learning about you. He sent out tentacles, kept probing and testing you both to see what you were capable of.”

  The narrative trailed off, and the electronic hum buzzed through the room long enough that Aaron was finally the one who could stand it no longer.

  “Then?” He struck angrily into the emptiness.

  “Then you were in college, Laura, back with your parents and your friends. And Mal was alone.”

  “How?” Aaron had taken the role of her proxy, since she was clearly too shaky to keep this goddamned torturous retelling moving along.

  “Yes. This is where the conjecture begins. After your confrontation with the Idea, Jon Remak disappeared. From what I gathered, neither you nor Mal knew what had become of him. I know there was strife between him and the two of you, a differing of philosophies and strategies. I assumed he had died. But over the course of time, I have received both queries and information from an individual I believe to be Jon Remak, based not only on knowledge he had of how I work and intelligence he was able to turn up, but on purely factual elements: syntax, grammar, word choice, and tone.

  “The thing of it is, that the inquiries and intelligence I received from what I thought was this single individual all came from wildly differing sources: CEOs of major corporations, directors of intelligence organizations, journalists with reputations for paranoid secrecy. And yet I would swear to the fact that every one of them was Jon Remak.”

  When silence fell again, Aaron had no immediate words. He was not even, strictly speaking, clear on just what the Librarian was suggesting.

  “I believe,” the voice continued, unbidden, “that Remak was somehow able to alter your brain topography and that of your friends and relatives in such a way that you could be returned to your proper life.”

  “Not my proper life,” Laura said in a soft voice.

  “Maybe. But now comes your end of the bargain, Laura. Consider this: it could be that you got that life back because your companions didn’t want you with them any longer. If Remak did this, he did it for a reason. He was not a man who acted impulsively or without sound motives. What he did to you may have been motivated by factors beyond your ability to fathom now.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and Aaron watched her muscles bunching again; not reflexively this time, but rather to contain her anger. “It wasn’t my choice.”

  “Are you sure?” the voice responded coolly.

  “What?” Her voice was struck empty of that anger all of a sudden.

  “How can you be sure, Laura, that you didn’t ask for this? Who, in their right minds, wouldn’t opt for a future filled with warmth and love and hope over a life of constant tension and danger?”

  “But . . .” Laura’s voice picked up its familiar tremble again, and Aaron’s stomach turned at her feeble inability to control this emotional roller coaster. “But I never would have left Mal alone.”

  Aaron opened his mouth to respond, to remind her that Mal was no one she knew anymore. This Mal might have been a monster. He might have been cruel to Laura, might have beaten her every day.

  “Maybe Mal isn’t alone,” the Librarian’s voice echoed down before words reached Aaron’s lips. “If Remak is alive, as I surmise. Perhaps others have been recruited. I’ve no doubt that they are fighting the Old Man right now. Maybe you’re here, Laura, because you don’t belong in the middle of a war, and you knew it.”

  Laura stood up with such speed and intent that Aaron thrust back on his own seat as though he were about to be attacked. She held her place, her body extended as if she were about to give the room the harshest reaming out in history. But her clenched jaw formed no words.

  She spun around, marched to a wall, put her back to it, and slid to the floor, clutching her knees to her chest.

  Aaron watched her a moment longer. When he was certain she wasn’t about to burst back up again, he spoke.

  “I think we’re done here,” he said.

  When no response came back immediately, Aaron imagined an image of a man sitting in shadows, surrounded by screens showing this room, and the man in shadows staring at Laura like a precious creature, a child of his own, even.

  “Yes,” the voice returned, obliterating the image. “All right, then. I’ll have Ms. Hubert come for you.”

  Aaron rose and went over to Laura’s huddled figure. He stood over her, his hands at his sides, his eyes searching her warily.

  “Where are they?” she asked, down to the floor. “Where are they now?”

  “I don’t know, Laura,” the voice said. “And it surprises me. They were in New York the last time I knew of them, and I have no record of them trying to leave. I’ve tried to find them, but if Remak is alive, then he’s working hard to hide them. It only makes sense. The Old Man would have access to many of the same resources I do. Don’t go to them, Laura. Let something good have come of all this. Go back to the life you had, and make it your own. Make it a happy one.”

  Laura looked up, and maybe there was a response within her. But the room suddenly felt lifeless. The electronic hum popped and disappeared, and the room felt like a coffin now.

  Aaron looked at Laura impatiently. Her eyes wandered aimlessly about the white.

  There was a sudden hiss of air seals, and the door opened, letting a musty darkness into the pristine expanse.

  Ms. Hubert examined them with her curious blue eyes, beneath the neat cut of her short salt-and-pepper hair.

  “This way,” she said, gesturing through the cellar, still dense with shadows.

  They stepped through into another world—their world. Crossing the threshold, Aaron activated his cellpatch, and the information coursed into him, lighting the world up in the digital rainbow of data. It produced a nearly physical high in him, and he felt his muscles shudder, his extremities tingling. He was armed again.

  “Did you get what you needed?” Ms. Hubert asked as they mounted the stairs.

  Laura came to the top, out into the library proper, before she answered.

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Truly sorry.”

  Aaron walked slowly through the town, his eyes sliding suspiciously from storefront to storefront, as they might if he were trying to move through a cave full of sleeping snakes. Did everyone here know they lived in the Librarian’s town? Surely they all knew that the trappings of contemporary technology weren’t welcome here and managed to function without it. But the polite pressing on of strangers, the smiles covering the vague misdirection of questions—were they all, in fact, serving the Librarian in some larger way, part of some vast operation of which Aaron had caught only the merest whiff?

  There was Laura going on about how technology was digging the world a tomb, but the truth was it was people who lied to you, hid things from you, betrayed you, and abandoned you.

  A woman sitting behind the counter of a bookshop “happened” to look up as Aaron passed and gave him a nod calculated to impart warmth, but looking beneath the surface, all Aaron could see was a knowing show of superiority. He slid his eyes away.

  Eventually he came back to the town square, found Laura sitting just as he had left her, hunched with her arms wrapped around her knees, atop a rock with an old burnished plaque on it.

  He approached from behind and stopped on the grass several paces away. Her position was nearly identical to the way she wrapped herself up in the corner of the room, lost and alone. Aaron surely knew from lost and alone. Well, alone, anyway. And who had pulled him from that? Frankly, he pulled himself from it, as he solved all problems in his life. But he did owe Laura something.

  “When I asked for some time alone,” Laura said without turning around, “I didn’t exactly mean you should stand back there and stare at me.”


  “I wasn’t staring at you.”

  “Right. Sorry. You definitely don’t stare at me, here or in the shower.”

  “Damn it, Laura, I’ve had it with—”

  She cut him short by turning around. He had chosen to overlook the humor in her taunt, but the fact that she was smiling caught him by surprise. That was not, however, what struck his words from him.

  Laura’s eyes had always been bright and alive. Even through the pulsing lights of the dataflow, her nearly luminous blue eyes made the letters and numbers that filled Aaron’s world seem to fade. But from the moment he’d come face to face with her, those eyes had always been drawn inward, studying the flaws and inconsistencies of her fissuring life. Sitting on the rock now, facing him, her eyes were looking outward for the first time, in front of her, at where she was heading. For one small, perfect moment, Aaron was lost in them.

  “I’m ready to get the hell out of here,” she said, hopping from the rock with a sprightly spring. “Our first step is going to have to be finding Mal.”

  “What? Are you serious? Did you hear what the Librarian said?”

  “Yes. And I considered it, like I said I would. But if someone offered you your father back as he was—flawed, troubled, and real—or a perfectly functioning, flawless robot version of your father, which would you take?”

  She didn’t bother waiting for his response, but walked past him and back toward the car.

  “But, Laura, you can make this new life the real one,” he said, as he fell into step behind her. “That’s your choice.”

  She spun on him again, in the middle of the empty street, and this time her eyes were bright with rage.

  “I already made my choice, and this Remak asshole tore it away from me.”

  “Or you chose to leave it behind.”

  “I didn’t,” Laura said simply, and turned back toward the car.

  Aaron followed her in silence until they got to the car. He stopped at the passenger side and watched her go around.