“Curious,” Curzwell comments.
Reidier finishes his absinthe in one gulp. “Who would . . . ?”
“Obviously our clientele would be very exclusive as we’re offering the ultimate high-end service,” Curzwell says. “We’ve already got a sizable pool of investors and prospective clients.”
“Your only limitation would be when someone comes in for the original scan,” Reidier says.
“Yes. At least for Restoration 1.0.”
Reidier stops watching the dancer.
“We hope to do much more than that in subsequent generations. By 2.0 we expect to use DNA excavation to reconstruct a client’s physique from any age. Third generation, as envisioned, would allow us to diversify physique entirely, allowing clients to choose race, gender, or even design personalized attributes. Although we’re not sure about how the psyche would handle such a drastic shift in hosts. And depending on how your work progresses, both technically and economically, we might eventually even develop a Death Insurance division where clients would regularly have their minds copied and stored monthly, weekly, or even daily in the event of an unforeseen demise.”
Reidier takes a moment to respond. “Sounds like your marketing department is ahead of the research curve.”
“We want you to know how big we’re thinking. This would be the end of ends. The death of death. The world, as we know it, will never be the same. And you’ll be at the center of it all. The alpha and the omega.”
“This is certainly a lot to take in.”
“A task I’m confident you’re up to.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, aren’t you nervous about sharing this with me? I mean, what’s to stop me from striking out on my own?”
“You are free to do so. But you’d need significant funding, time, and resources to set up a new lab and develop an adequate power source. All of which would need to be done in secret, more or less, because more than anything, you’d need protection. All it takes is a memo from Pierce, and you become a National Security commodity, devoid of any civil rights. Beimini is already in the position to facilitate your transfer from the public to the private sector and provide the necessary cover.”
Curzwell smiles once again at Reidier, but Reidier provides almost nothing in the way of response or body language.
Curzwell holds out a business card. “Please, should you need anything. It’s a bit on the nose, I admit, but still an easy way to hide a purloined e-mail. An innocuous underscore away from reality.”
The card is matte black, constructed out of heavy stock paper. On one side is a gold-embossed fleur-de-lis.
Reidier flips it over and laughs.
On the back is a solitary e-mail address: [email protected]
An innocuous underscore away from reality. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Curzwell smiles. “Rest assured, though, it will find me. Whatever I can do to help. The truth is that, for every great man in history, there has been another more powerful man who helped him get there. It’s not enough to have the talent, you need a paladin as well. Nikola Tesla had his Westinghouse, Roy Cohn had his McCarthy, and you have me.”
TITLE CARD: GALILEE 6:21
TITLE CARD: EXPERIMENT 47 OMEGA
CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2008-08-08 01:02
Only the console lights, console video screen, and the ambient light from Mirror Lab illuminate the room.
Ambient light bleeds in from the Mirror Lab.
On video screen in console, SPLIT SCREEN-
RIGHT SIDE, target room: blackness.
LEFT SIDE, transmission room:
Fiber-optic cables circumscribing the Entanglement Channel flare red for several seconds, then morph into an orbiting white light as the Entanglement Channel opens.
An orange sits on the pad. A small section of its rind has been torn. Roughly a finger’s width wide. The rind has folded back into place, but a jagged, white outline demarcates the damage.
The Boson Cannons and Pion Beams twitch to life. SOUNDS of the rapid ACCELERATION and DECELERATION of GEARS as the men take a series of readings of the orange. Once complete they settle into optimized focal positions.
On another console screen, SPLIT SCREEN:
ANGELL LAB RIGHT: lit, though empty, target pad.
ANGELL LAB LEFT: shows Dr. Reidier’s tweed sport coat draped over the back of his chair in Angell Lab. SOUNDS of Dr. Reidier PUTTERING AROUND offscreen.
Dr. Reidier’s arm comes into view from the right side. In his right arm, he holds one of the twins (boy is only visible from waist down, wearing a onesie).
Reidier’s left hand quickly dances across the keyboard.
Encrypted calibrations fill the Mirror Lab console computer screen.
NOTE: as with other nocturnal, unofficial experiments, calibrations and settings were encrypted. I2O cannot decrypt.
Dr. Reidier sings quietly to Ecco offscreen (“59th Street Bridge Song” by Simon and Garfunkel). Ecco joins in.
Dr. Reidier’s torso comes into view. With his left hand, he picks up the sport coat folded over the back of the chair and tosses it on the desk to the left of the keyboard.
He presses “Enter.”
INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME
On the console, inside their Plexiglas covers, Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo sink down, simultaneously engaging.
CUT TO:
---CONSOLE SPLIT SCREENS---
ANGELL RIGHT: empty target pad.
MIRROR LEFT: orange on the transmission pad.
The Quark Resonator emits a SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED DRONE as it powers up.
Orange remains perfectly still.
At 2008-08-08 01:04:37.3571113 nothing happens.
NOTE: for 200 picoseconds prior to transmission, on the left side prior to transfer, the orange tessellates, but ultimately simply sits there throughout.
ANGELL RIGHT: at 2008-08-08 01:04:37.3571113 the orange appears. Frost has condensed on the pad and surroundings.
ANGELL LEFT - 01:04:40
Dr. Reidier immediately leaps up and heads offscreen for the orange. Offscreen he continues to SING excitedly with Ecco.
MIRROR LEFT - transmission room: dust settling on target pad.
ANGELL RIGHT - the orange sits on the transmission pad. Dr. Reidier’s tweed-sport-coated arm comes into view. He picks up the orange with his right hand and turns it over.
The orange has a consistent hue. No jagged white marks. The rind is smooth. Whole. No torn rind.
Dr. Reidier’s left hand comes into view and “pets” the rind. He continues to rotate the orange, while rubbing his fingers over it . . . prodding it for rips or tears. There are none.
ANGELL LEFT - MOMENTS LATER
Dr. Reidier drops into his office chair, orange in hand.
He doesn’t even look at the information on his screen. Instead, he just strikes a command key, while placing the orange on top of his sport coat on the desk.
Dr. Reidier leans back and stares at the perfect orange as the ANGELL LAB screen flashes off.
INT. CONTROL ROOM - MOMENTS LATER
Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo depress.
Data scrolls up the screen, then stops, and the screen and computer shut down.
The console lights turn off.
INT. MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME
The HIGH-PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out as the machine powers down.
GEARS SPINNING NOISE ramps up and down as the Photon Cannons retract.
The circling indicator lights surrounding the Entanglement Channel orbit to a standstill, flash green, and then switch off.
The Mirror Lab Transmission Room light turns off.
XIII*
* * *
* Hilary’s formal report stopped with Chapter XII. The briefcase had plenty more stuffed into it, just none of it presented in the manner I’ve grown accustomed to. From here on out, it’s just manila folders stuffed with transcripts, legal pads, notes, margin scribbles, article clippi
ngs, and the likes thereof. I mean it was organized, sort of. Just not formalized. I’ve done my best to put it in the “right” order. Chapter divisions were arranged mostly folder by folder or groups of folders as the material dictated. The quotes selected are still her choices, penciled on the front of some folder in no particular order or orientation (kind of like what Reidier did with his notebooks). The organization of the remaining material is my best approximation of how she would have continued her PsychoNarrative.
* * *
~Hilary Kahn (as scribbled in her legal pad)
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life, you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
~René Descartes
—Reality is what remains when faith has f a d e d.
There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
~Josh Billings
—Non sum qualis sum eram*
* * *
*
~Danny Brand
Translation: I am not what I used to be. Reference? ➔ “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae,” a poem by Ernest Dowson (late nineteenth-century English poet associated with the Decadent Movement [finally a poetry movement I can get behind]), in which he himself is quoting the First Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace (wheels within wheels):
Yet again thou wak’st the flame
That long had slumber’d! Spare me, Venus, spare!
Trust me, I am not the same
As in the reign of Cinara, kind and fair.
. . .
Wherefore halts this tongue of mine,
So eloquent once, so faltering now and weak?
Now I hold you in my chain,
And clasp you close, all in a nightly dream;
Now, still dreaming, o’er the plain
I chase you; now, ah cruel! down the stream.
I did not find this.
Lorelei did. And she did her due diligence too. Went to her own random Starbucks, borrowed a man’s iPad, did the research, wrote it down on her own pad (not in an e-mail), and brought it back to me.
Apparently it was the only way to calm me down and get me to stop scrawling my own bizarre doodle over and over. Clutching my mother’s legal-pad page of Latin to my chest with one hand and furiously scribbling ampersands over infinity signs (see above) with the other.
Apparently, once she did that, I finally slept.
It’s been three days now. Three days since I broke out of my oubliette in the asshole of Hell’s Kitchen. Getting up enough escape velocity to outrun its gravitational pull, going against currents of Lethe, cost me, though. Still, I managed to hold on through the taxi ride.
We had had the cab swing over to Tenth Avenue to find a gas station for us. I hopped out, ran over to a payphone, and put in fifty cents (I had no clue how much a payphone costs anymore but sure as hell wasn’t about to put my SIM card back into my phone). I waited for the click of approval and dialed Lorelei. While waiting for that first ring, I realized after freeing myself from the hook that I was, of course, diving into the net. Echoes of Heraclitus danced around the concrete canyons of Manhattan: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.
They’d have her phone bugged too. And no matter how much the movies liked to draw out a call-tracing scene, in reality it doesn’t take more than a few hundred milliseconds for the powers that be to trace a call.
My vision filled with flashes of red and blue hallucinations as the NYPD pulled in from every direction, boxing us in. No. This wasn’t smart. I had to hang up before it rang.
CLICK. My finger pressed down on the trap lever. My fifty cents cascaded its way down and out.
“Did you get her?” Toby asked.
“We have to go someplace with free WiFi. Someplace ubiquitous, like where terrorists would go,” I said with remarkable lucidity, as I floated weightless around the backseat of the cab. I grabbed the door handle and pulled myself down to the seat as the cabbie took off.
Starbucks. Upper West. Had to try and get upwind of our downtown scent. Plenty of buzzheads swarming the coffee house, jockeying for seats, fluttering in front of the beckoning blue lights of their Macbooks, like vampire moths, hovering, waiting to strike at the coveted outlets, and sink their three-fanged, white umbilical cords into the mother lode.
We gave a Columbia kid twenty dollars to let us use his laptop. Well worth it, the cost of caution. Toby’s phone was clearly out of the question, and long-since dismantled in the cab, phone in one pocket, battery in another, SIM card in a third. Once again I had to craft a personal “haiku,” this time for Lorelei. Something that would slide under the Department’s radar while setting off alarm bells and whistles in Lorelei’s apartment. No small task in the semi-lucid state I was in. Obviously another poem was out of the question. You can’t step in the same river twice. Evasion 101. Finally I gave up on clever and went for a blatant inside joke. I created an anonymous e-mail address.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
Date: 4/4/2011 11:24 p.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Chameleon.net
Hey Sweet Tits,
Sorry I’ve been so out of touch. Family shit, business trips, all the normal excuses. You know how it is, though, grinding away at your organ, until you finally realize you’re the dancing monkey.
Anyway, I’m back, although don’t tell my office, as I’m hiding from work for a little bit. Feel like a kid playing hooky. Care to sneak around with me? Or maybe dole out a little punishment . . .
I’ll be hanging out under the bridge, hiding with all the other trolls.
Come find me.
Tri-Me
It took a lot more effort than I thought it would to capture the tone of one of her D-bag suitors. Wasn’t so much for her benefit as it was for any potential eavesdroppers. I’m betting they’re at least a little like me and aggressively work to ignore douchery. Of course she’d know Tri-Me as me, it was her goddamn nickname for me after all. And the Sweet Tits would immediately tip her off that something was off with me. I am much more of an ass man. Christ, I almost scribbled in a winking emoticon. I must still be pretty off.
It didn’t really matter if she understood my reference about not being able to go into the office or not. All that mattered was that she got the message to come find me, that she took note how it’d be best to be discreet, and that she remembered one night last summer when we somehow ended up at the Boat Basin on 79th and the river. Its vaulted stone arches held the West Side highway up over our heads and made us feel like we were drinking under a bridge, surrounded by trolls in Polo shirts with popped collars.
After much debate, Toby and I had settled on the Boat Basin. It was well lit, had open vantage points, and there were a shitload of exits so, if need be, we could run up one of two underpasses to 79th street or dissolve in either direction into Riverside Park. All our forethought didn’t even matter at the end of the day. By the time we got there, I was barely mobile. If the Department or my Michelin Man had somehow tracked us there, Toby would’ve been hard pressed to drag my semiconscious body along any escape route. The last thing I remember is sitting in a plastic chair, under the stone arches, clutching my oversized briefcase like it was a woobie.
I woke up in Purgatory.
Floating over Manhattan, I looked out the window. I appeared to be halfway between the star-speckled heavens above and a massive, grave-shaped portal into hell below. The center of the city seemed to have been swallowed up, a bottomless rectangle of darkness, dotted with brimstone bonfires. No rosy-fingered dawn for me, rather a bloody-fingered gloaming that reached up through the window and got a hand-hold on the floor.
Purgatory was very feng shui’d. A queen-sized bed hovered in the center of the room. A red Roho Barcelona chair and stool sat by the floor-to-ceiling win
dow, which framed the aforementioned constellations and hell fires. An arco floor lamp stood guard over the chair. Against the wall, opposite the bed, a red and white orchid dangled off of a dark oak table. Purgatory, apparently, was très art deco.
Clean lines. Clean flow. Clean mind.
I threw back the white, twelve-hundred-thread-count, Egyptian cotton sheets, and gingerly hopped down onto the floor (the side opposite the window—I wanted to avoid that precipice at all costs). It was then that I noticed my feet were bare. The rest of me was wearing white silk pajamas. They were not mine. The only clue as to who they belonged to were the initials EL embroidered in red thread over the breast pocket. Although there weren’t any periods after the letters. Maybe they weren’t intitals. EL, Ēl, Elohim, the ancient god, father of all gods?
I scanned the room. My clothes weren’t there.
My briefcase! My briefcase wasn’t there.
I was halfway across the room when I stopped myself. The door loomed big. What if it was locked? What if I were locked in here? A prisoner of Purgatory. Sartre’s cackles echoed around my skull.
What if it wasn’t locked? Did I really want to find out what was on the other side? Was I in any state to handle that? What if it were the exact same room, with the same view, and the same bizarre levitating bed? No way could I handle that. Or what if it were some high-end, übermodern Department oubliette relic left over from the ‘50s?
Wherever I was, my briefcase had to have come with me. And whoever was in charge had obviously and purposefully made the decision to separate us.
CLINK, CLINK.
Silence.
OMP.
Silence.
A CLACK followed by what sounded like a marble rolling across concrete and punctuated with a quiet Goddamnit.
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