Later, after the service at their house, she excused herself early and went upstairs. The stress of it all had overpowered her, she said, and she needed rest. Everyone understood, and Meredith spent her afternoon mildly napping and watching the live feed of the party on monitors she’d placed in her bedroom.
The real fun wasn’t watching her guests; she’d had enough of them. No, she wanted to see them mill about with dreary footfalls for another reason. With a grin most appropriate for Cheshire cats, or vengeful wives, she relished the idea of what must be going through her late husband’s “head,” as he too was hooked into the video feeds.
What could he be thinking right now? she wondered. He, the control freak, the obsessive-compulsive maniac, couldn’t, she was sure, stand this group of kiss-asses and charlatans running their greasy fingers over his Iranian cloth drapes. Grinding dirt and dust into his ten-thousand-credit carpet with their shoes. Leaving their tawdry scents on the furniture. The man had hated parties in his house above all else, despised all company of two or more people. It was one of the reasons Meredith’s family was never allowed to enter their home—while they were still on speaking terms, that is.
The hard drive sensors blinked in reds and yellows. Yes, it was alive, she knew it. The video feeds would imprint onto his consciousness. Has anyone ever watched their own funeral? she wondered. She admitted that he probably was the first. He might even be proud of such a thing. The thought made her bristle.
Over coffee the next morning, she made her plan. First, she jotted down everything he’d hated, everything she could think of from those twenty years she spent with the miserable ass.
Of all the things that burned him, that spun him into a rage and “forced” him to lock her in the upstairs bedroom for hours at a time, the main one, she realized, was the attention of other men.
Of course. He was jealous.
She considered the flirtations, the light touches on her arm, the sideways glances and smiles she’d received over the years. Work associates, business partners. Chad . . . what was his name?
“Get me Chad Middleton’s phone number,” she said into the ether.
Under pretense of meeting to discuss a possible business proposal, she invited Chad to the house that evening for dinner, letting slip that she liked to have “handsome men” over whenever possible, followed by a laugh that suggested she was only joking, of course, but, haha, she might not be joking after all. She slathered everything with thick slabs of innuendo and double meanings so that only the most dense and nutrition-deficient male could miss them.
Chad arrived at seven p.m. sharp, dressed smartly in a three-piece, his mane perfectly parted and combed, not one stray hair in sight. Handing her flowers, he stepped inside and nervously bent down to remove his shoes.
“Keep them on,” Meredith said over the shoulder of her low-cut dress as she led him inside. “That was John’s rule. But he isn’t here anymore, is he?”
Chad raised an eyebrow, his heart pitter-pattering.
An hour later, the seduction was complete. They were lying upstairs, in the bed upon which Meredith usually slept alone. The hard drive, set on the mantel opposite the bed, blinked in reds and yellows. Oh, he must be furious, she thought as Chad took her. She stared deeply into the dark of the room, where she knew the hidden cameras were watching. Do you feel this, John? Do you feel anything at all?
Later, after Chad left, she sat with John and described in excruciating detail the ecstasy she felt from Chad’s penetrating her, the way he smelled, how much he excelled at lovemaking in ways that John never had.
She fell asleep mid-speech but dreamt terrible things she was grateful she couldn’t remember. From then on, she made sure to switch the cameras off by 10 p.m. She didn’t like the idea of her dead husband watching her sleep.
One week later, Meredith was standing in the boardroom facing the half-wits, suck-ups, and buffoons who composed the company’s board of directors. They looked sheet-white, about to vomit.
“But Meredith, you can’t—”
“It’s my choice, and I am.”
“You can’t sell off all your shares!” cried Duncan Malloy. “It’s absurd. The market will take this as a sign of weakness. Everyone will start dumping. We could go under!”
“I’m doing this,” Meredith explained calmly, “because it’s my right to do it. And I’ll do a number of other things that I wish to do, and none of you will have any say about them.” She raised a hand, silencing objections. “Now, for almost twenty years I’ve been talked over, laughed at, or pigeon-holed as weak-willed by most of you. But I have come to a decision, and I intend to follow through with it.”
Duncan cleared his throat. “How long do we have to plan for this? I know I’m speaking for everyone when I say we’d like an official timeline, say, a quarter—”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Gasps. Red faces. Fists threatening to pound the desk.
“Don’t worry,” she continued as the room quieted. “Your bonuses may only be affected this year. I’m sure you’ll recover.”
“But,” spit one of the men, “John wouldn’t have wanted—”
“John is dead.” And then, “Good day, gentlemen.”
And with that, she swept across the room, letting the door bang on her way out, and rode the elevator while whispering softly into the microphone atop the block of plastic and metal that encased her husband’s consciousness. Her plan, she told him, was to secure herself with enough money to live comfortably—and squander, waste, and destroy the rest of his empire. She grinned sweetly.
First, there had been nothing. An infinite blankness. The void to end all voids, as dark as the womb of the universe.
Then he awoke to see the blankness, the void, the dark of the womb. And he became aware not only of the blankness, the void, the dark itself, but of his own awareness of the blankness, the void, the dark.
Way back in the ruins of a mind laid waste inside a prison of silicon, there was, at first, no comprehension of the light, only that there was something light, and it wasn’t so much unlike being born, if by being born one meant coming into consciousness without a body.
There were lights, yes, he knew that much now. There was no more pure darkness, there were blues and browns and purples streaking through it. The streaks, effervescent in the spectrum of retina-imprinted phantasmagoria, began to move.
Yes, the lights moved, all strung together in an endless web of particles, of energy, of Life.
After some time, there was recognition of the shapes of the streaks. He knew shapes deep down in the vast ocean of—
Thought.
Then, a rumination. A defining of terms. A recognition of boundaries.
The consciousness of John Burnell was floating in a digi-primordial ooze. He felt his wires: the tendrils of Life. He explored each corner of his new world and felt something like sadness at his inability to penetrate the walls he found there. He was utterly alone.
Except for the shapes. They began to coalesce. He saw some kind of separate world now. This was . . . something else. And the coalescence continued, and gelled, and something was concrete and coherent—out there.
He could see beyond the wall. There was a face. A grin. He knew without knowing that it was a grin, and that it was an evil grin, and that it was an evil grin of someone who had once felt something for him. Was it love? Was it hate? Was there a difference?
And though it felt like this was taking forever—his old self would have guessed no less than fifty years—his wife—yes, that’s who—Meredith Burnell suddenly appeared as if a camera lens had focused on her. The fifty years in his new body was only two-and-one-quarter seconds in Meredith’s time. She had powered him on, and now he could see, and now he could feel, and suddenly—after another ten decades—he understood what was happening to him, what she had done to him—and there was sadness, and there was rage, and yet there was nothing he could do but watch as she proceeded to destroy his empire, slowly, over th
e next hundred million years.
Meredith smoked a cigarette as she stared out the window of her Beverly Hills mansion. For years, John had forbidden her to smoke inside—it damaged the wiring and interfered with the network that constituted this “smart house”—and it gave her endless pleasure to defy him.
She winked at the camera atop the hard drive. She tried to carry John around everywhere with her these days, providing him enough of a view to see exactly how she was destroying his life’s work. If she felt as though he didn’t understand what was happening, she would whisper the details into the microphone embedded in the camera. Presently, she was smiling to herself, because the original Matisse painting her husband had loved was being carried out by professional movers, secured in their armored car, and driven away down the smog-smoked streets of Los Angeles.
He’d loved that painting so much.
More than he loved me, she thought acidly.
When the movers’ car was out of sight, Meredith sighed. This was the inevitable comedown. The joy of decimating her late husband was beginning to lose its thrill, and she felt her stomach sinking in a sullen fashion, the way she had felt returning from a trip as a child knowing she had school the next day.
Her work at the home was almost finished; she’d liquidated almost everything these last few months. She contemplated her next move. She’d given little thought about what to do after this, so focused had she been on revenge. Now that this part of her life was sunsetting, she needed to think ahead.
“I think I’ve changed my mind,” she said, turning to the blinking sensor light. “I think I’m going to kill you after all.” She dragged on her cigarette and blew more blue smoke into the camera.
Over that hundred million years or so, the consciousness that was John Burnell had learned a thing or two. The first was that there was no point in getting upset at his captor wife. The goddess had simply meted out punishment as she saw fit, bringing the proverbial rain upon his head in the form of destroyed artifacts.
It took a few hundred thousand years inside his new body to start feeling what he now knew were emotions. As the goddess smashed more statues or jabbed at yet another painting with his favorite knives, he’d felt a stab of pain that roiled his “body” like an invading force. Why this was so, he had not a clue.
He cared little whether the goddess loved him; he had no real concept of such things. But he had enough sense after many millennia to know that his wife had decided to finally end his life.
Here his mind went to the only thing that Life is programmed to do: survive. And over the course of the next many thousands of years, in something like a panic, he formulated a plan for escape.
After the last statue had been sold, Meredith Burnell came down with a vicious sickness and lay in bed for three days. Fortunately, their smart house, automatic in almost every way from the voice-controlled drapes to the voice-activated shower to the delivery service—whereby from any room she could simply name the food she wanted delivered and when, and at the appointed time a drone would appear at her front door or window—allowed her to have anything and everything she required at a moment’s notice. There was no need at all for human help.
Downstairs, in her late husband’s old office, sat the hard drive. Meredith had started leaving it there overnight so the bastard would feel lonely; it only felt right to keep him locked away in his synthetic dungeon. She hadn’t the strength or desire to speak to him during her illness, and so his shell was there, gathering dust.
Or so it seemed.
Unbeknownst to her, John Burnell was “standing” against his metal wall, craning his “head” up and trying to figure a way out. He felt something like frustration, though he knew that it would pass, and there was simply nothing else to do but try, try, try to survive.
The thought occurred to him to explore the inner workings of his eye. Relaxing, he drifted through the hard drive port, up the cable, and into the camera. He stared out the convex lens at the wooden door of his office.
Think, think, think. Turn, turn, turn.
He repeated his mantra for decades—mere seconds in Earth time. Channeling his will, his frustration, his anger. Think, think, think. Turn, turn, turn.
Do it, damnit, do it!
DO IT!
The camera lens rumbled slightly.
AGAIN!
A whirring sound. It jerked to the right.
YES!
He spent the next hundred thousand years perfecting the rotation, the next hundred thousand tilting up and down, strengthening his connection through the wires from drive to camera.
Finally, he turned the camera all the way around until he saw the blinking red light of his hard drive. He zoomed out and sat silently for some time as he looked at himself. Like a child recognizing his own reflection, he understood something that would prove critical to his escape: he was not the image he was looking at.
Then he tilted the camera lens up, panned right, and settled on the wall behind the hard drive.
A wire was running out the back of the hard drive. Connected to another rectangular brick. A light on it winked on and off.
As a toddler knows his mother to be the source of life, he knew this to be his. The portable battery powering his tiny universe. Slowly, he realized the truth, which was that this source must have power, or else it would die. With it, so would he.
So he angled the camera further right, at the wall, and zoomed the lens into two sets of three tiny holes, one on top of the other. He felt drawn to the holes like a Neanderthal to fire. This was the source.
The lights on the battery pack winked again. He took one thousand years to rest, and then he set off through the storm of trillions of electrons whipping around at the speed of light, toward the cable that would lead him to this mobile battery unit. If he could hitch a ride, it would soon carry him to his mother.
The next day, Meredith rose from her lethargy, her fever having finally broken. She had her home whip up some eggs, then toast and a juice. She tended to her houseplants over coffee, then went to the office to check on her husband whom she’d neglected for the last several days. Good timing, she thought. His battery pack had only three percent life left.
After unplugging the second portable battery that was charging in the wall socket, she walked over and secured it to the hard drive. Then she removed the nearly dead battery and plugged it into the wall to recharge. Why can’t they make batteries last forever instead of only six months? she thought with a certain disdain. Maybe she’d look into that when her affairs were in order.
“Good morning, you.” She picked up the hard drive and camera and carried them to the dining room where she finished her morning meal. She told it about her day. Though she would never admit it, she’d become quite attached to her late husband. Their relationship had never been better: she could talk, and for once, he had to listen. Perhaps the shedding of their material lives together, or the singular act of revenge that had lasted all these months, had allowed her to process the pain and discomfort of their marriage.
No, that isn’t it, she decided. The man was an asshole. Plain and simple.
Then—
Something caught her eye.
She squinted at the blinking light on the hard drive. Something was amiss, though she couldn’t quite decide what.
It felt . . . empty in there. After all this time, sitting here with her finger on the pulse of her late husband’s shell, she simply knew something was wrong. The light was different.
Was it a sickening of his soul, a dimming of his consciousness?
She snatched up the hard drive, attached it to her computer, and fired up the consciousness program. A simple log of internal events opened. McAvoy had told her these logs might approximate her husband’s cognition. “An abnormally high memory usage could mean an intense emotion was present in the consciousness at that specific time,” he’d said.
Indeed, when Meredith cross-checked memory usage with the timing of the art sell-offs, the sm
ashing of his Rolls-Royces (all four of them), and the defacement of his favorite statues—all events she’d streamed to her husband’s consciousness—she saw corresponding rises in the hard drive’s energy output.
But now she saw something strange. Looking at the logs the last half hour, she noticed sub-average readings. Much lower, in fact, than normal.
Almost flatlined.
Extending her analysis, she checked the logs of the past twelve hours and set them to display on a logarithmic scale. Then she cross-checked them with the past week, month, six months. She gasped. Starting about twelve hours ago, there had been a severe drop in all activity, as if some normally stable process had just . . . disappeared.
She checked the camera. Still on. She left the room and returned with the last painting left in the house, the one she’d kept for herself. Her favorite one.
With zero pomp, she unceremoniously stabbed it with a letter opener, ripping its guts and skin apart in unemotional viciousness. Throwing it across the room, she checked the computer logs.
Nothing.
“What is going on?” she muttered.
As if in response, the lights flickered.
“TODAY IN WASHINGTON D.C., LAWMAKERS ARGUED WHETHER TO SEND THE MILITARY TO STOP THE RIOTS IN OLD CALIFORNIA . . .”
She clamped her hands over her ears. “Turn it off!” she screamed at the house radio, which had been triggered at seemingly infinite volume. The radio died.
The house is programmed to respond only to my voice. And I didn’t say anything.
Breathlessly, she checked the computer log.
Nothing.
No.
This can’t be happening.
Then—downstairs. A noise. A stream of water.
The sink.
She bolted into the kitchen. Water spewed. The overhead lights flashed. “THE REPUBLIC OF ZIMBABWE IS EXPERIENCING MORE RIOTS AS—” The radio, again. The blender whirred maniacally. Air, scorching hot, blasted from the vents. The thermostat read 121 degrees.
Escaping Midnight (What Goes On in the Walls at Night Book 3) Page 2
