Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  I came to La Guardia Airport in New York with a ticket to London. I want to go to England because the only person who can help me is Dr. Anna Backer, at All Souls College in Oxford. I’ve read her research on identity. She can explicate the infill trait, help me sublimate, eradicate …

  The old Indian woman snatches the dog and leapfrogs back like I might attack. She can’t know that I won’t harm her because she has no armor. My arm. The one that’s down, it’s thin and brown. I realize I’m a young Indian boy, an age between ten and fourteen. A fresh sheen of sweat forms on my skin.

  I roll over, pat my shirt, my pockets—I no longer have a ticket, an ID, any money. It makes me sick; it’s not me, not funny.

  The old lady may have them for me, or for the boy who was her grandson, who’s undone, now that he’s me. She steps back, her face still more worry than fury. I could try to reason with her. Or, better, I could ignore her and try to find my prior body—

  An emergency cart, red light spinning, alarm beeping.

  My heart races, I fumble afoot, stumble apart. The cart parks one gate over, where I notice a superfluity of Transportation Security Administration agents. They are not transporting anything, they aren’t secure, and they don’t have agency. What they have is their hands on their hips, inflated looks of self-importance, and a body lying on the floor.

  My prior body, alas, nobody any more.

  His name was Konrad Jerzy, and he was a data warehousing expert being sent to England to consult for a client, or so I guessed from the papers I found in his room. He pushed himself too hard, lived constantly on the edge of exhaustion. I was only in his body for nine and a half hours.

  They won’t be able to wake him up again.

  I’m sorry that he’s dead. Not that he was a particularly good or bad man, but he could have been useful to me. Once I had identified him in the hotel airport last night, I had to move quickly to seduce him with a red-headed call girl that I drugged to fall asleep at the moment I could no longer keep my prior body’s prior body’s prior body.

  Sometimes I have to wire the prior so it doesn’t tire.

  Konrad Jerzy needed fire. Goddamned Konrad Jerzy. Damned in fact, but no god and no good, and his damned no-good connecting flight to London through Montreal. I knew I should have tried for someone with a direct flight out of JFK. But beggars can’t be choosers, and because I chose poorly I’m about to be a loser.

  The old Indian woman is not in my way, but I knock her down just for spite, and stroll casually toward the security checkpoint.

  My body is light on its feet, fleet, discreet, and full of energy. It has been a lifetime since I have been a twelve-year-old boy, a boy between ten and fourteen. A lifetime, and that was in my own body, a dozen priors ago, a dozen times asleep, all since my breakout, the fakeout, the takeout that set me free from the training cell at Langley.

  The TSA agents glance up as I pass, but for the moment they are more interested in the man who fell asleep in his chair and died. It’s as if they know that airport seats are designed to be so uncomfortable that no one could ever fall asleep in one, and that way no one could ever fall asleep and die in one, and so what they have witnessed, in finding Jerzy’s dead body, is not only unfortunate but ought to have been impossible.

  If they want to know impossible, they should walk with, talk with me.

  Behind me, the old woman shouts “Anand!”

  A small Indian girl, maybe five or six runs after me, shouting the same name. So that is my name now. Anand, Anon, Anonymous, Anandymous. I like it.

  Nearing the checkpoint, one of the TSA agents, an overweight black woman with a friendly smile and a clear intent to be helpful, steps in front of me, waving her hands. “Hold on, honey. Hold on. If you go out that gate I can’t let you back in—”

  I dodge her and dash through.

  I hear the old woman shouting, and now the TSA agent starts shouting, and I could shout too as I weave in and out of the crowd trying to get lost because I know I’m in trouble. I have committed to a course of action with limited options, in a concourse with limited exits and zero hiding places. They have to be designed that way because of terrorists of heroes.

  The intercom crackles overhead. “Will Anand Mukherjee please report to the nearest Transportation Security Administration Agent?”

  Well fuck me.

  I duck when I see heads stretch over the crowds to look for me. I fall in beside a laughing family making their way toward the exit.

  A little boy, maybe two years old, in a Mets ball cap, stares over his mother’s shoulder at me. His eyes are wide with fear. He sees. Little children haven’t yet learned to be trapped in their own bodies yet, so they can see someone else who also isn’t trapped.

  Don’t fall asleep, I want to tell him in a singsong voice. Don’t ever fall asleep around me. I’ll steal your body and throw your soul away.

  “There he is,” a voice shouts behind me.

  Three security guards have spotted me. They’re spreading out to surround me.

  A large TSA agent speaks into the radio on his shoulder like he’s a real cop. More will be coming so I need to act fast.

  They’re treating me like a terrorist like a hero.

  Fortunately I have been training to be a hero be a terrorist. They don’t know that I exist, and they don’t know what they don’t know, and so they can’t see I’ve got to go.

  I push through the family, pinching the mother with the baby so she almost drops him. Maximum screaming and confusion results. The father is carrying a bunch of bags and has some larger rugrats hanging onto his sleeves. He yells but has no chance to catch me. Instant traffic jam slams the corridor.

  Fleet, discreet, light on my feet. Heads are turning toward the commotion, and turning toward me in motion, from every direction but one. A young woman totters along in 4-inch heels and talks too intently on her cellphone to see me coming up behind her.

  Even in heels she’s not much taller than I am. I bump into her and grab the phone as I run past.

  “Sorry,” I say to the stranger on the phone, just before I hang up. “Jimmy doesn’t live here any more.”

  My voice sounds young and strangely accented.

  Poor Anand. I’m sure he had such a promising future.

  I hop down an escalator and hurry through baggage claim.

  An exit opens ahead of me like the promise of a better life, like the chance to make a difference in the world, and I sprint for it.

  A massive hand closes on my shoulder. The thumb screws down like a vise in the blade.

  “Got him!”

  Twisting free doesn’t work, so I scream. “Rape!”

  “What? I’m not—”

  He’s almost shocked enough to let go, but he doesn’t. It was worth a try. Still is. “He’s trying to molest me! Rape! Rape! Somebody help me! Help!”

  A whole crowd responds. A group of corn-fed white boys built like factory-assembled offensive linemen from a major college football team come over to see what the brown-skinned security man is doing to the little brown-skinned boy.

  I reach down, grab the guard’s nuts, and twist them like a bottle cap.

  He squeals and lets go.

  I stagger away from him, shouting, “Oh my god, he touched me, mommy, help me! Did you see him touch me? Help!”

  Everyone looks at him.

  I slip between them and run out the automatic doors. Down the sidewalk, past a long row of windows.

  My reflection keeps pace with me, only the face with me isn’t Anand Mukherjee. It’s the haggard face of another young man, starved for light and fed on speed, a face of need, the babyface of the volunteer who wanted to serve his country in the war on terror. The face of a zero of an error.

  I give the other me a little wave, a little grin, a whisper. “Hi, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy scowls back. Jimmy never smiles.

  Jimmy was a soldier who answered a call and went to Langley to learn the protocol. IPAE: infiltrate, penetrate, assa
ssinate, extricate. It all starts with the I that is not I only, the I that can pass as a we. Jimmy was the prototype for the protocol, the only one of the recruits who could demonstrate the I-into-we, who had the infill trait.

  Then it’s bye-bye, Jimmy. I dodge cabs and cars, skip across the road—literally skip across the road, since I’m a 12-year-old Indian boy and Indian boys skip, don’t they?—to the parking garage, where I scurry down a level, crouch low, and zigzag through the maze of SUVs.

  Off in a corner, I sag against a tire.

  I’m tired, suddenly so tired. Anand shouldn’t be tired. But I am tired, I’ve been on the run for three weeks through a dozen prior bodies, and I don’t dare fall asleep. Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a different body. Every time I fall asleep someone ends up dead.

  So far none of the dead have been a target that I was supposed to infiltrate, in a group that I should penetrate so that I could assassinate to make America safer. They’ve just been ordinary Americans, innocent Americans, white and yellow, black and brown, they all fall down, the men and women, young and old, all go cold.

  They’re collateral damage. Collateral, which is like what you give to a bank to get a loan. I think they’re the price we pay to the bankers as security to have security …

  My head hurts. I have to stop thinking when the thinks stop making sense. Sweat drips from my hair and fills my eyes with salty water. It stings and it flows into my eyes and it flows out of my eyes and it stings.

  When I wipe my forehead, I notice blood under my fingernails. Where did I get the blood?

  Dr. Backer!

  Bloody Dr. Backer, think I, in an English accent. English patient, English eager. I still hold the phone I stole. And I know Dr. Backer’s number. I enter it with my sweaty, bloody, nail-chewed finger.

  The phone on the other end rings. I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does.

  “The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.”

  The woman’s English accent nearly makes me orgasm. I say, “Oh, oh, oh!”

  I’m hilarious. I have charm. Charm disarms people, and a soldier, a spy, has to be able to disarm people. That’s one of the reasons why I was chosen to be an infiltrator.

  After a pause, probably to laugh, the woman says, “I beg your pardon.”

  “Sorry. I need Dr. Anna Backer.”

  “May I tell her who’s calling?”

  “I need bloody Dr. Backer right now!”

  There’s silence on the other end and I’m afraid that she’s hung up, but a moment later comes the familiar voice, the soothing voice, the moving voice.

  “James,” she says.

  I don’t like that name. When I was James, I was never James, I was Jimmy, I was corporal, I was shit-for-brains. But Jimmy’s gone, he’s gone daddy gone, has been gone ever since the day he woke up I woke up in someone else’s body. James was a good soldier, but he died when he didn’t wake up. He died an error a zero so that I could wake up a hero a terrorist.

  “James,” Dr. Backer says, “you frightened our student.”

  “Terror reaches, but fear teaches,” I say. “Did the student learn something from being frightened? Tell me what she learned, Dr. Backer.”

  “The only reason I’m taking this phone call from you is because I’m worried you may hurt yourself or someone else.”

  “It doesn’t hurt. I told you, it never hurts. I fall asleep in one body, I wake up in another. I feel sick when I wake up, and sometimes I even throw up, but—”

  “I don’t want you to hurt anyone else, James.”

  “It can’t hurt anyone else. They just fall asleep and then they don’t wake up. I told you, it doesn’t hurt.”

  There is a pause. Clearly, she is accepting the reason of what I say. I know it’s hard to believe, but the logic is inescapable. “James,” she says finally. “You know that what you’re describing is impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible?” I shout. “Consciousness is nothing but data, zeros and ones in a biological wet drive. It’s just like moving the contents from one computer to another over a wireless connection. You know quantum physics, Dr. Backer—we’re all part of a giant wireless connection called the universe.”

  “Those are metaphors—”

  I don’t blame her for saying that—I know they’re making her say that—but I don’t have time to let her finish. “They’re not just metaphors any more. I have the infill trait. My consciousness can jump from one wet drive to another. Just like you write about in your papers. That’s why I need your help.”

  She pauses again. “I agree that you do need help.”

  “I can’t control it, except by being close to the next body I want to jump into when we’re both asleep. And that’s no good. The doctors and officers at Langley, they don’t trust me any more. I need to control what I do, so I can show them. I want to be a hero so I can be a terrorist.”

  A pause. “I think you’re confused.”

  “What? No. Wait. I want to be a terrorist so I can be a hero. A hero a terrorist—they’re the same thing—”

  Oh, God, my head hurts. Sweat is pouring into my eyes, my eyes are overflowing with sweat.

  “James,” she says. Her voice is a lull in the storm, a warm in the cool, a worm in the skull. She’s worming into my skull. “I don’t think you want to hurt anyone else—”

  “I told you it doesn’t hurt!” I punch the car next to me, leaving a huge dent in its side; the car alarm goes off and I have to run, saying “see what you did, see what you made me do, see what you ruined, see,” as I run toward the other end of the garage and up a level.

  People stare at me, but I ignore them, I have to run, I run to have, I’m gasping, and I stumble, crying, “Are you still there, Dr. Backer, please don’t leave me Dr. Backer, I’m scared, Dr. Backer, I’m,” it hurts to breathe, “bloody,” it hurts, “Dr. Backer.”

  “I’m here, James,” she says. “Where are you right now?”

  “Why are you trying to trick me? I ask the questions. If you won’t help me, at least tell me why they are trying to kill me. I did everything they asked me to do—I learned how to become the enemy so even the enemy doesn’t know I’m the good guy. I can infiltrate. I have the infill trait.”

  “You cannot project yourself into someone else’s body.”

  “It’s not projection. You erase the wet drive when it’s sleeping and then fill it in again with someone new. When you project, you reject, you eject—that’s not it. You empty, then you fill it in.”

  “James, there’s no such thing as the infill trait.”

  “Then how am I sitting here staring at the brown hand of a 12-year-old Indian boy?” I stare at my own tiny brown hand, my shaking hand. “Hold on, I got an idea, hold on—I’ll take a picture of it with the camera phone and I’ll show you.”

  My voice shakes, that I figured this out, that I can kill her doubt with proof.

  “Calm down,” she says calmly. “Breathe deeply,” she says, taking a deep breath. “James.”

  I hyperventilate and speak emphatically. “Don’t! Call! Me! James! Don’t don’t don’t don’t!”

  The phone is a shattered mess of plastic shards and metal scraps on the floor where I smashed it. My palm is sliced and bleeding.

  “They just lost the signal,” a voice says from two rows away. Feet pound on the concrete running my direction.

  “I thought I heard something down here,” says a second voice.

  “Who are we looking for?”

  “Somebody Homeland Security wants. But they didn’t give us a picture or even a description.”

  “So what’re we supposed to do—arrest everyone?

  “Just kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

  They both laugh.

  I scoot under a van—I’m lucky Anand is so small—and sweep in the phone parts with me just seconds before two pairs of cop shoes trot past. Everyone is looking for me now.

  The radio squawks, and I don’t understand the words, but
the first voice says, “Somebody thinks they spied him on the upper level,” and then the feet pound up the ramp and are gone.

  As soon as they are gone, I climb out from under the van and walk the opposite direction, with my head down. A man in a suit, with a carry-on slung over his shoulder, a phone held up to one ear, and a key fob in the other hand, hurries along the row, clicking to find his car.

  The bland sedan beside me beeps.

  Things happen to me because they’re meant to be for we.

  Suit bounces around the front of the car, saying, “yeah, hey, I finally found the rental, yeah, right where I left it, so I’ll call you back next week—”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I say in my most plaintive voice as I approach him, holding up my bloody hand. “I’ve just been attacked and I need help. Can you call 911, please?”

  I see all the different reactions people have to me when I’m inside different bodies. If I were a man right now, if I were the soldier who went to Langley to have my ganglia rearranged, then Suit would be nervous to see me approach him. Defensive. He would back away. Instead, he just looks momentarily puzzled.

  That moment is all I need to step in and crush his windpipe with a finger strike to his throat.

  “It’s for your country,” I whisper to his startled eyes.

  In this body, I can’t reach high enough to get him with an elbow strike to the temple, so it’s a heel to his knee instead. I make it look like I’m trying to catch him as he falls, but I smash his head into the door.

  A quick glance around shows nobody watching me. I love public spaces—they’re so private.

  I grab the key fob and pop open the trunk to roll him in. That’s hard work for my size, but I get it done quickly. I slip on his jacket and sunglasses to hide the fact that I’m twelve years old. His wallet, full of cash, and phone go into my pocket.

  This is good. The people looking for Anand won’t expect him to drive away. I pull the seat all the way up so I can reach the pedals. Then I put the key in the ignition.

  The Somali woman working in the booth barely looks twice as she takes the ticket and the money.