Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  “Before you died,” I said to the ghost, who was alone in my glasses again, “you made a comment about me being the ‘true peacer.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “That I hope you will be the one who brings an unprecedented peace and justice to the Bay Area, Michael, and even to the rest of the world.”

  “So far my involvement in BASS has only brought a lot of conflict and death,” I said, “and because of me we’re now on the verge of war with the biggest country on the planet.”

  “Sometimes swords must clash before they can be beaten into plowshares.”

  “I have one more question for you,” I said, my mind jogged by his reference to justice. “One of my protection team members has a Dreamscape rig that records dreams and supposedly predicts which ones will come true. And supposedly it’s saying that another member of the team will die protecting us. Lynn, more because of her bleeding heart than anything else, thinks we should send her away, so we won’t be complicit in her death.”

  “That seems like a stretch to me, Michael.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. But given your, uh, spiritual interests … do you think that it’s possible for people to dream something that happens in the future?”

  “You don’t have to be spiritual to think that is possible,” the ghost said. “Time is a mysterious thing, as Einstein showed us long ago, and no one since has figured it all out. If there is a Supreme Being who can see all of time, then of course it’s possible he might reveal something that will happen, though I’m not sure why he would. But even some who worship science instead of God believe in alternate universes, or other ways that different parts of time could intersect with one another.” He paused for a moment, and when I didn’t say anything, continued. “Take déjà vu for example: no one has ever figured that out either. ‘It’s not so bad—I don’t have to sleep or shower or even go to the bathroom, and I never forget anything.’ Do you recognize that statement?”

  “I think you said it to me once.”

  “Yes, Michael. I said that to you in our very first conversation after my death. I merely pulled the data with the exact quote from the past and inserted it here. And if such codes exist for the future, too, they could presumably be inserted into an earlier time, if someone had the ability.”

  “Do you think this dream might have happened so we would send the woman away and save her life?”

  “Or it might have happened so you would think about this issue for some reason. That’s the problem with basing decisions on paranormal events, even though I believe they can happen—you don’t know how to interpret them, unless someone who knows more than you do tells you what they mean. But I’m not the best person to talk to about these things, Michael. Have you called Ian Charles yet?”

  “No,” I said. “You just told me about him earlier in this conversation.”

  “Oh,” the ghost said.

  I made a mental note to do what it was suggesting at some point, if only because this man had been important enough for Saul to feature him prominently in the ghost’s programming. But after disconnecting from it, I called Lynn, because even though I didn’t understand or agree with everything that had been said, I felt strangely warmed toward the idea of making peace with my significant other. The ghost’s cryptic implications of some kind of global destiny for me reminded me of how Lynn had encouraged me after the great time we had at Sausalito, when we were last together, which in turn reminded me of how great a partner she was for me.

  She was working in the kitchen, cleaning up after providing brunch for the protection team, which reminded me of another thing I loved about her. I told her that I wanted to talk to her in private, so she asked Tyra and the twins to move the game they were playing from the adjoining living room into the separate family room. Her desire to keep working was stronger than her dislike for earpieces, so she put one in. I watched her from the kitchen’s cameras, enjoying all her curves, but especially the one inside which my little Lynley would be living for another couple months.

  “The bananas are being delivered again?” I asked, noticing a bunch of them in a basket on the counter.

  “Yes, and the Artesa wines, too. Since we already survived the yellow- and red-colored attacks, Terrey said I could enjoy them again. I think he got tired of my complaining. Tyra still has to test them first, though, since you’re refusing to let her go.”

  One difficult topic was enough for today, so I didn’t comment on that one.

  “I don’t know the best way to say this, Lynn,” I started, “so I’m just going to jump in.”

  “Do I have to stop doing the dishes?” she asked.

  “It’s up to you, I guess. But this is pretty heavy.”

  She kept doing the dishes, and I swallowed hard to prepare myself.

  “I love you very much, Lynn,” I said, still a bit choked. “And the only reason I didn’t tell you this before was because I was afraid of how it might hurt you. But it doesn’t have to hurt you at all now, and it won’t hurt you anymore.”

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “I never did anything bad with Tara, but I kinda led her on and let her think we were still a possibility—until recently, when I dealt with it for good. I was just damn chickenshit, Lynn, and I’m really sorry.”

  “You haven’t slept with her?” she asked, and I noticed that she had stopped doing the dishes.

  “No, I promise.” I didn’t say that I had wanted to, because I felt that was included in my apology. I figured that part wasn’t necessary to confess, and it would only make it harder for her.

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” she said and put her face in her hands, sobbing slightly.

  “You’re not angry?”

  “Not as much as when I thought you were sleeping with her!” She wiped her eyes, and amazingly started doing the dishes again. “I’ve known something was going on with that woman. In fact, I was convinced that you were at her house.”

  “I’m glad you’re not angry,” I said, passing on that topic, too.

  “It’s easier for me to know,” she said, “than not to know.” I should keep that in mind for the future, I thought. Then she continued: “Why did you decide to do something about it now? And why tell me now?”

  “Well, it’s been bothering me for a long time,” I said. “But to tell you the truth, something happened. Jon ended up in bed with Tara when he was at the castle.”

  “Ohhgg,” she said. “Disgusting!”

  “Don’t blame him too much. He’s got this condition that makes it hard for him not to—”

  “Yeah, the condition is called ‘being male.’ But you’re right, I can’t blame him or you too much for wanting to be with someone like her.” So she knew that I’ve lusted after Tara, I thought. There’s no use hiding anything from this woman. “She looks like a model, she’s talented in her career, and she’s assertive—all the things I’m not.” I started to protest what she was saying, but she waved me off. “No, really, Michael. I’m insecure a lot of times about who I am. I don’t know if it’s my personality or my upbringing, from Mrs. Rabin’s programming at the orphanage, but I like being a mom and being around the house. I like cooking, I like decorating. I even like cleaning sometimes.” As if to punctuate that, she paused and scrubbed harder on the dishes. “But I also do like getting out and accomplishing things in the world. In fact, I’ve decided to take Hilly and Jessa to the Presidio and get involved, on the board and part-time staff.”

  “That’s terrific, Lynn,” I said. “I think that will be great for you.”

  “Hopefully it will be great for the kids,” she said, and I stood corrected and admired her more for a few quiet moments.

  “I miss you,” I said finally.

  “I miss you, too,” she said, and then we whispered about some of the things we planned to do when we were together again.

  The whole conversation had gone better than I could have ever hoped, but unfortunately that hope was short-lived. It was fun making tho
se plans with Lynn for when the kaleidocide was over, but we never would have planned what actually happened to us at the end.

  39

  DREAM COME TRUE

  Stephenson spent most of the next day, which was Wednesday, on walking patrol or running various errands for Terrey or his Japanese cyborg assistants. The protection team’s boss kept Korcz standing guard in one place all day for some reason, and Min was doing so near the Ares woman, so everything that required physical exertion seemed to fall on his small shoulders. It was hard work, but he preferred it to how some of the other team members spent their day.

  Tyra was doing her cupbearer thing in the house, helping with the little girls who were staying there, and one of the triplets was still recovering in the infirmary. The double was in a net room conducting everyday BASS business like a high-tech puppet for Michael Ares, who was telling him what to do from somewhere in hiding. Terrey himself stayed more or less in his makeshift office, plotting his protection schemes and barking orders like a third-world dictator, and the other two triplets didn’t move around much either because they were immersed in cyberspace most of the time. Terrey and his assistants had decided together that they thought the next attack might be attempted through the invisible world of the net, because none of them had yet been associated with the color white. The Chinese word for white (bai) could also mean “ghost,” as in “Ghost in the Shell,” so the thinking was that there might be an attempt to sabotage the hill by hacking its security systems.

  Stephenson thought there was a hole in this hypothesis—“Ghost in the Shell” was a familiar term from the popular arts in the triplets’ home country, but not in the very different culture of China. That didn’t stop him from having to crawl around in various parts of the base’s superstructure, however, cutting wires or planting extra scanning equipment as the Trois told him what to do and watched him do it through his glasses. Nor did it keep him from having to walk out far from the base and do similar things to the air defense arrays hidden in the surrounding hillsides, to make sure that they couldn’t be used to destroy the structures that they were built to protect. Despite the degree he had earned in a difficult field of mathematics, Stephenson didn’t know what he was doing in any of these projects, but he was confident that the triplets did. Their technical expertise amazed him.

  But they were also slave drivers, so he was very excited to finally get a break for an hour at the end of the day. He was excited about the opportunity to rest his aching body in his room in the hill, but he was even more excited to look again at what had been going on his mind while he was sleeping at night. He pulled out the black Dreamscape rig and plugged it in to the dime-sized yellow jackpatch on the back of his head. Then he lay back and perused the list of dreams that the software had identified as having “High Precog Potential.”

  There were about ten dreams on the index, and the highest rating currently belonged to the one with the black woman who dies while eating something at a table. Stephenson knew that the high rating might be because he had shared this with the protection team, thinking that it applied to Tyra, and then dreamed versions of it again because it was heavy on his mind. But he did sincerely believe that it was going to happen, and had to ruefully admit that part of him wanted it to happen. So he left it on the index, but the next one on the list had to be deleted. The Dreamscape software made sophisticated calculations from factors like the location and type of brain waves, but its accuracy also depended on the user eliminating those dreams that could not be precognitive, or were not likely to be. And in this particular case, the second dream listed was one that seemed to be based on Stephenson’s prior experience.

  In this rather elaborate dream, he was being attacked by a swarm of well-armed soldiers who arrived in armored SUVs and helicopters. The soldiers’ armor and the vehicles were painted a blue-green color, which made Stephenson realize that this dream was inspired by the video he had been shown of the triplets’ battle with the mercenary assault team in Oakland, which had happened just before he and Korcz were hired to the protection team. It was a shame that this dream was not precognitive, however, because in it he fought off big numbers of enemies and emerged not just alive, but as a hero. He deleted the dream from the list, however, assuming that it came from something that had already happened.

  The next three dreams were not nearly as rousing, but were merely recapitulations of random events that had occurred in his past. So he deleted them from the index also. Then he came upon a very interesting item, which was new to the index, so he had probably dreamed it the night before. It was a dream in which Michael Ares fell to his death from a big bridge, so he left it on the index and determined to tell the rest of the team about it. The next entry was one that was clearly much more fantasy than reality, involving him and the triplets, which probably only made the list because it recurred so often. He deleted it and determined not to tell the rest of the team about that one. Then there were a few more past events that needed to be deleted, and a dream in which Korcz and Tyra got married. That contradicted the much higher rated one where Tyra dies from poison, of course, but Stephenson left it on the index because he wondered about the possibility of alternate futures.

  As if God or the gods of fortune wanted to make a decree on that particular topic, Stephenson’s Dreamscape session was abruptly interrupted by an emergency call from Terrey, broadcast throughout the base and calling the whole team to the house. Stephenson tore off the Dreamscape rig, strapped his gear on again, and quickly made his way up there.

  When he saw the scene in the living area of the Ares house, a rush of conflicting emotions surged inside of him—all of which he was careful to hide from the rest of the team gathered there. He felt euphoria that his dreams had come true once again, guilt and sorrow for how they had come true, and no small measure of fear for the implications of the fact that Dreamscape was once again being proven right.

  Tyra was slumped over the kitchen counter with her head in the sink, and in her lifeless right hand was still clutched a half-peeled banana with a bite taken out of it. Lynn Ares was sitting on a couch on the other side of the room, sobbing with her head in her hands. One of the functioning triplets was sitting next to her, rubbing her back to give her comfort, and the other was examining Tyra’s body and bagging the poison delivery method. The Black Italian girl had been dead for a while, so nothing could be done for her at this point.

  “Where are the girls?” asked the disembodied voice of Michael Ares, who was obviously watching them all through the room’s cameras.

  “They’re playing a game in their room,” his wife said in between sobs. “I needed to rest … I asked her to do the rest of the dishes left over from lunch. I’m so sorry.”

  “Lynn, don’t be sorry,” Ares said. “You didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “I started ordering the bananas again,” she sniffled.

  “That was Terrey’s call. Right, Terrey?”

  “Yeah, right,” the man said, in his half-Aussie, half-British accent. “We already had the color yellow with the sniper, so I thought—”

  “It’s white,” the crying woman said, pointing toward the kitchen. “Bananas are actually white.” Then she burst out in louder crying, and about half of the team experienced a collective “Ohhhh” when they finally realized what she meant.

  “But like Michael said, it’s on me.” Terrey was obviously trying to mollify the woman and take control of the situation. “And it may have been a daft move on my part, but at least now we know more, and have drawn out another of the assassination methods. We know what the white is, as she pointed out.” He made an awkward gesture toward Mrs. Ares. “And there’s never been any more than one poisoning attempt in the previous killings, so I think we can safely say we’re done with that. Nonetheless, we should all switch to the astronaut food we brought along with us for the duration. I don’t think it will be long now, but since, you know, we don’t have our cupbearer anymore…” Now he gestured awkwar
dly toward the lifeless body at the sink.

  “I don’t know how long this will last,” the lady of the house said. Terrey’s stratagem had worked, apparently, because she had gathered herself more now. “And I don’t know how you even can tell when it’s over. But until it is, I’m gonna have to go somewhere else, like maybe the Presidio when I take the girls there. I can’t be around here right now, after … after that.” Now it was her turn to gesture at the body, and at a nod from Terrey the triplet next to her stood up and walked over to the kitchen where the other one was. Together they lifted Tyra’s body and carried it out of the room, in the direction of the hill base below. A disturbing vision flashed into Stephenson’s mind, of them dissecting it in an attempt to trace the deadly chemicals.

  I guess I can delete that dream from the index, he thought. Korcz won’t be marrying her anytime soon.

  “Your idea of going to the Presidio might dovetail with an idea I have,” Terrey said to the woman, “for something else down in that direction. I was talking to Michael about this earlier today, but I’ll let you all in on it. BASS peacers have had John Rabin under surveillance since his mother died in the fire, because of his antagonistic attitude toward the company. And sure enough, this morning he was caught making an illegal purchase of a gun, and then found to have been researching BASS locations like this one on the net. So he was taken into custody and is being held at the Marin County Jail. We were looking for a safe place to do this, so now that we have one I think that Jon and Lynn should take his sisters to visit him. This will stop the increasing speculation in the press about why Lynn hasn’t been seen in public, especially with Michael, and it will also help BASS with a significant public relations issue. The CEO will be showing kindness to someone who has been openly critical of him, and head off the worse criticism he would get if he never visited the boy.”