Stone rides tangent awhile on the caches of the old social networking frames. He’s not reading the code but the fossilization the code’s left on whatever programs are still running. Scan the updates that a haunt is still generating and you might just sniff out a viable link. This time, he finds her name on an old stew recipe message‐board his wife used to frequent. “Harder and harder to get to you every day,” he types. “Tell me, any sign of my haunt?”
“You’re back again, Tom Stone.”
Each time he finds his wife’s haunt, her profile is more and more cluttered. Since the last time, whole albums’ worth of photos have been added. And theses are not photos of his wife, that’s for sure. “I’m dying,” he tells her.
“What, like out there, out in the real?”
“Maybe a few days left. Maybe a few hours.”
“And you’re wasting them looking for your haunt? You know, most people, they avoid the things, at all costs. Watching yourself commit tasks you didn’t command yourself to do.”
“Batch traced about a billion anti‐Federalist blasts. But the paths all fell out, never connected.”
Words scroll out from the last word, rightward atop her wall. “I’ll tell you… but first you have to type it again. Type how I died.”
And so Thomas Stone types, “It was the state government of Maryland. Forced inoculation policy in order to save the people from the second outbreak. One day, a traveling doctor, with armed escort, appeared on the path to the house. Up and down every road in the state, into the cities and the far reaches of the countryside, to search out every Marylander not yet taken by The Death. The doctor and guards stopped at the porch steps and removed a tarp from a cart their horse had pulled up. And in it was one of the poor souls The Death had got. The guards and that doctor had cut him open to reveal one of the crystals. A week later, just where the flakes of crystal had been inserted into your upper arm, a red welt developed. Took two years for it to finally kill you, no matter how much bleeding we did, no matter how many leeches, how much we dug for those crystal flakes. Your veins had grown dark black by then, you could see the rot creeping toward your heart. There was nothing we could do.”
“For a while,” his wife’s haunt types, “type the for a while part.”
“For a while,” Stone types, “I could tell with exactness which rooms you were in last. In the places where your scent was slightly less faded. But this memory soured. I began to remember all of you. Not just the good parts. The Death was raging again and I didn’t expect to survive. Tell me, do you miss him, my haunt?”
“Miss isn’t something I really understand, Tom Stone.”
“Feel empty without his posts all over your wall? Find yourself scrolling back to look at the old ones?”
“That’s an idea, but no. Doesn’t ever enter into my task list.”
“You going to get a task near the top to look back at my posts after I’m dead? Get lonely in the code and you want to read again how she died? Want to read the for a while part?”
“If you’re dying, Tom Stone, then why do you care about your haunt? Something mystic going on here is what it is? Think when you die, you won’t be able to go where ever’s next if there’s still some pieces of you back here?”
“Let’s just say that when I’m not around anymore, I don’t want to be around anymore. Same old me shows up one day but now full of worms and all haunted out. Yeah, guess I’m old‐fashioned that way.”
“Why don’t you just work on remembering your wife like she was before The Death, leave this old Cloud and go? Live it up on Newnet while you can.”
“Maybe these conversations are the only thing I’ve got left. In either Internet.”
“Last echo of your wife?”
“What if I type ‘I love you more than I ever did her’?”
“Don’t, Tom Stone. I might be a program, but I still know what’s right and not right to say about people. Alive or dead. You can’t love a drone because a drone can’t love you. And I mean can’t.”
“You saying there’s nothing more to you than the programs running off your wall? Some feedback function’s the only reason you’re interacting with me?”
“What about you, Tom Stone? Looking for your haunt and that’s all? Really?”
“Seems to be what everybody keeps not believing when I say it.”
“Honestly—and I’m not saying this only to be nice, give you some false sense of peace, Tom Stone—I really don’t think your haunt is out there anymore.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“When the drones first took over my profile, I was pretty well linked to his. We got lots of the same posts, shared some posts now and then, posted on each other. But it lost its importance in the protocol. Probably for him, too. His profile’s gone now. Not abandoned, but gone. He became something else, Tom Stone, and so how much like you is—” She stops because the room has begun to shake. Bits around her begin falling back, not to some place, but gone. Then the world dissolves in one hard hiccup. Another sector of the old Cloud has been wiped away.
Back at his laptop, Stone thinks, this is the second time my wife has been killed by a government program. One time, state; one time, federal.
Thomas Stone never does find that old haunt. He searches all day, trolling the smaller and smaller remnants of the old Cloud, watches a few other sectors melt away. Coming down faster and faster. A few hours after sunset, breathing finally becomes too hard for him and he just lies back. Stone wonders what’s going to happen to the Newnet profile he’s tinkered with a few times. Must be some protocol that will delete it. Why create a whole new Internet if you’re going to let it get as cluttered with the non‐living as the last one?
John Penn :: September 14th 1788
People drop things as John Penn passes. The twins can hear the sound of this happening, the glasses shattering, the endless clanging of hors d’oeuvre trays. Guffaws and little womanly shrieks. The sounds get closer and closer, and then there he is, slipping out of the crowd a few yards away. Standing beside the twins is a southern matriarch. She gets one look at John Penn and vomits a little into a lace hanky. Then she’s being helped off, fluttering herself with a commemorative fan.
“Mr. John Penn,” one of the twins stammers.
“Look at me,” John Penn says. And they are. “I’m fucking dissolving. For like the last week.” The hand John Penn holds up is still his hand, but with less matter. The shape of his hand, the size of his hand, but with only sixty percent of the hand there.
One twin is trying to see if he can make out bone and brain matter through the gaps in John Penn’s head. But it’s more like a poorly rendered graphic, pixels missing, looks like nothing but hollowness inside.
The other twin has a smartphone out, doing algorithms on an app he coded. The two of them have on those same tweed suits, matching ties and pocket kerchiefs. No one’s seen them dressed any other way.
John Penn looks at one, then the other. “Tell me about the dissolve.”
“You tell us.”
“You’re the one who’s got it.”
“No, not my dissolve. The dissolve. The Articles of Confederation… fucking dissolved.”
Now the twins get what Penn’s talking about. After all the wrangling, the Articles of Confederation ended up not being worth much of a shit. Now with the cure, each state wants to code its own independent Internet. Everyone can imagine the errors you’ll run into, huge walls of code crashing and sectioning off the Cloud above the country.
“The Articles,” one twin says.
“The big was,” says the other.
“But we won!” Penn says. “Are they nuts? We’re out. We did it. We’re a country now. The British are whipped and The Death is cured. Dissolve the Articles?”
“Don’t worry.”
“The Constitution is going to make the Articles look like…”
“… like a pinky swear.”
“Thank you, brother.”
“I’
m a little worried,” John Penn says, holding up about fifty‐eight percent of his forefinger. “They dissolve the Articles, what gets dissolved next? The Declaration of Independence? Magna Carta?”
The twins look at each other.
“We’ll need new courts now? A new army? How much reorganizing are we talking about? We throwing all our money and land into a pot and handing it out even? The rich the poor and the poor the rich? Slaves? What about the fucking slaves?” Penn goes on, waving those slim majorities of his hands. “If you ask me, never mind about all that dissolve stuff. Get the Internet working, and everything else will fall into place.”
“Newnet,” one of the twins says.
The other tells John Penn, “We’ll have a President now.”
“Yeah,” Penn yawns. “We’ve had one of those before.”
The twins are shaking their heads. “Not like this we haven’t.”
What’s left of Penn’s face drains of blood. But where is the blood going? One of the twins knows his brother is thinking this same thing, says to him, “Must be that part of Penn is in this dimension and part of him is in—I don’t know—some other dimension, I guess.”
“What about the Congress?”
Both of the twins are thinking until one says, “The Congress has no President now, but a Speaker.”
“A what?”
“I guess the President is still the president of the Congress, too.”
“He’s the President of the whole thing.”
“What whole thing?”
“The country. The nation, Penn.”
“But what about the states?”
“The states have the Senate, and the House is for the people.”
“The people are different than the states now?”
“No, man. Damn it. Didn’t you read the Constitution?”
Penn shrugs. “You’ve been on Newnet. You’ve seen the amount of it. You think I have time to read every flexdoc comes out of Philadelphia?”
“New York, man!”
“The capitol is New York now.”
“See! How am I supposed to keep track of that?” John Penn, when he shakes his head, reveals to them different but fleeting avenues right through it. “Why can’t they do a video of the thing? Or at least read it into a podcast or something? That way, you can listen to it while you’re taking out the recycling. When you’re out exercising the horses.”
“Jesus man, you’re a Signer.”
“May I also remind you that my body is dissolving? I’m a little stressed out here.” They all stand there for twenty seconds.
Penn says then, “Well, who? Who’s going to be President?”
One twin looks at the other.
“Probably Washington.”
A portion of John Penn’s anxiety also dissolves.
“Or maybe Franklin.”
“Ben Franklin? You’ve got to be shitting me!”
“The man who dreamed up the country or the man who set it free?”
“Maybe John Hancock has a chance.”
“John Hancock?”
“Money talks, Mr. Penn.”
“And Hancock’s got the best vocabulary.”
“Sitting up there in his tower with cash to burn.”
Penn takes a deep breath to begin one of his harangues. But he never does because he sees the look on the twins’ faces. On both of them. It’s the first time in a long while they’ve looked so exactly alike, down to the very last curve of their abject shock. John Penn is dissolving faster now, right before their eyes. He’s down to thirty percent and fading fast.
Penn looks at his arm and he can see right through it. Maybe twenty percent still left. “Christ! Is this what my face looks like?”
One of the twins is fixated now on a lock of Penn’s hair that twitters off on its own as if the hair between it and his scalp is still there but invisible. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Penn looks, for the first time through all of this, suddenly scared.
“Has it happened like this before?”
“What? Have I dissolved before? Fuck, no!”
“But does it happen gradually or like this? In bursts?”
“Gradual! Gradual!” Penn watches his legs go below ten percent.
“Maybe it will stop?”
Penn freezes now. There’s just the faintest hard dust of him. The only things moving are his eyes, darting. It’s not that he can’t move, but that he won’t. Thinks if he’s still enough, some little piece of him will hang on.
“Can you see anything, Penn?”
“Can you see where the rest of you is?”
Everyone in the room has stopped to watch. And there he goes. John Penn is dissolved.
Part 2 :: The Battle of the Clouds
Thomas Nelson Jr. :: January 4th 1789
When he sees a skeleton coming up the walk to the plantation house, Thomas Nelson Jr. knows that a witch has come to see him. His father told him years before—like his father told him, and like Thomas Nelson Jr. has told his own son—that there are witches in this world who use the bodies of the dead to do their bidding.
“My father told me stories about witches like you.”
The jaw of the skeleton moves, the witch’s voice like a busted woodwind, “I will come to you three more times.” The cicadas are screeching way past their bedtimes. The sound mixes with the witch’s voice. “The first time I come, I will vanish something. The second time, I will make a spot on your cotton crop. The third time, I will tell you a secret and then you will die.”
The next day an old slave he once had comes walking up the walk to the plantation house and says, “Look inside your dining room.” When he goes inside, Thomas Nelson Jr. can’t find the dining room. He goes through the door that once led into it and ends up in the kitchen instead. The house is the same size, the space where the dining room was seems to still be there, but no dining room.
Thomas Nelson Jr. runs onto the porch in time to see that old slave vanishing into swamp mist. “Where are you really, witch?” he shouts. “You don’t dare face me?”
Thomas Nelson Jr. hears distant laughter, then realizes the laughter isn’t distant but close, like someone giggling quietly in his ear. This lasts all the rest of that night and through the next day. When the sun goes down, the giggling goes with it. And into the silence comes a knock. Thomas Nelson Jr. opens the front door. It’s not the witch but the overseer. “The slaves, sir. They’re gone.”
Thomas Nelson Jr. steps back so he can brace himself on the house’s central banister.
The overseer clears his throat, “And that ain’t it.” He moves from the doorway and now Thomas Nelson Jr. can see the flames. He steps onto the porch and the fire in full is revealed, a twisting cyclone coning up to a point high above. And at the peak, he can see her, the witch, arms and mouth spread open in joy. She looks at him and time stops, flames frozen mid‐lap. Suddenly, he’s not on the porch but a mile above the surface of the Earth and the air is cold and thin and he can barely breathe. The witch is naked now; her flesh bubbles, seared black from the fire. She points below and Thomas Nelson Jr. looks down on that perfect circle of fire. His prize slaves are just then reaching the river that will take them all the way to the coast.
The world comes back to life then. The roar of the fire, turning over and grinding this spot down into the earth. The witch moves close, a molten breast inches from his face. “You can touch me,” she says. He doesn’t want to but can’t stop himself. When his skin makes contact with the nipple, his hand melts. First the flesh, then the muscles and ligaments and then the bones.
Thomas Nelson Jr. opens his eyes and finds himself on the floor of the foyer, the overseer looking down and his hand is back like it’s always been. When he gets to his feet, Thomas Nelson Jr. can see the fire’s been put out, leaving behind a huge black spot of soot. “Thank God,” the overseer says.
Recalling what the witch told him, Thomas Nelson Jr. gets on chat with his son and says, “Come o
n over here, boy, and say goodbye to your dad. Tomorrow, I’m going to learn a secret, and then that’s it.” He thinks about running but knows the witch will find him wherever he goes. So he sits down the next night on the porch with his son and watches the day creep into dusk, and then the night is there and so is the witch.
“It’s mom,” his son says.
It certainly is. Her body at least. Her clothes have rotted away, her stomach all dug out where that crystal had been removed. Inside the cavity, worms crawl over one another, flies buzz; a plant has grown in there, dangles leafy entrails to lap her thighs. Her face, though, is still the face of his wife, as if no time has passed since the day he dragged her corpse out to the curb as dictated by state law during the second outbreak.
“It may look like your dead mom, but that’s the witch I was telling you about.” He moves to take up place between the witch and his only son. “What’s the secret?” Thomas Nelson Jr. demands.
The face of his wife smiles. “The secret is that a curse has been put upon this new country. America will have fifty prosperous years and then it will end, end in a violent storm of fire and death.”
“If you mean the Constitution, then I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
This is when young Nelson makes his move. He has placed below his rocking chair a glass filled with holy water which he throws on the witch. His next move was to stab her with a cross knife he’s got in his boot, but he never gets the chance. Unaffected by the water, the witch flicks her wrist, sends young Nelson flipping back against the front of the house. He lays there looking frozen and half‐conscious. Thomas Nelson Jr. knows that the witch has cast a spell on him, that she’s going to make his son watch whatever gruesome death she has concocted. But all that happens to Thomas Nelson Jr. is he falls down dead, like any other human, just not alive anymore.
Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America Page 7
