by Mick Brady
The next morning, he packed his belongings in an old army duffle bag, took one last look at the empty studio and set forth into the world, floating like an Indian sadhu through the darkening streets of the city, searching for a soul to hold on to, crashing wherever he could find an empty couch or a willing bedmate. The space between sanctuaries soon became longer, as friends grew weary of his muddled presence, or drifted away from the city themselves, desperate for fresh air and safety. But for Will, there was no way out, nowhere left to go. To stay afloat, he tripped some, smoked some, sold some, then tripped some more. Come night, he often fell asleep clutching the silver pendant, praying for the coming light.
On one of those nights, desperate for love and salvation, he dropped in at a party in the West Village, and there, hidden among the literati and the cognoscenti, he found a sweet little Nuyorican chica named Juanita, who spoke directly to his soul in the language of the streets. After a few hours alone together in a corner of the crowded room, she took him back to her joyous digs on 4th Street and kept him warm for the winter with her bed and her cuchifritos and her Ray Baretto records, the de facto soundtrack to their tumultuous lives. But this was a rescue project, and she knew it. She was the mamacita, a spicy dish of molten lava, ever ready to ignite the world, and he was the Black Irish poet with the broken wing. It had to end badly. As long as he was with her, there was no need to fly.
The letters from Dante began arriving in late winter, just as the melting snow began to expose the mountains of trash lining the streets of the city. They came in a flurry, sometimes two or three at a time, but once Will had scanned the acid-fueled hieroglyphics on both sides of that first envelope, he simply tossed the rest into his duffel bag. He figured Dante, like many of his fellow dharma bums, had gotten lost in the woods, and he was not about to launch a search party. Besides, they hadn’t spoken in years. They had been roommates in college, but their friendship had come to a crashing halt in the middle of a star-tangled joyride across America, making his letters even more of an enigma.
In fact, the last time he’d laid eyes on him was in the orchards of the San Gabriel Valley, where the two of them had stopped to pick blood oranges for some quick cash before rolling into Los Angeles in Dante’s midnight-blue Mustang fastback. They came undone one drunken night over a pretty little Mexican girl whose name Will couldn’t even remember. Dante, brazenly invoking his Mediterranean roots, said there was no way he was going to share her with an Irish Mick, and so the next morning they were gone, headed west in the Mustang, leaving Will stranded in the orange groves. Judging by the postmark on the letters, it would appear he ended up in Palo Alto.
One day, confined to the apartment by a rare late-winter snow storm, Will decided to study the letters in depth. Perched on a windowsill overlooking the street, with both feet on the radiator and the letters in his lap, he began to open them one by one. Working chronologically, he pored over them, searching for clues to their meaning. With each successive page, he began to feel as though he were reading an illuminated manuscript, written in an unknown language—it was English after all, but it was arranged visually, as if the patterns meant as much as the words—a kind of pyroglyphics. Reading them was like eavesdropping on someone speaking to himself in tongues.
These were not letters in the ordinary sense, where word follows word, line follows line, all streaming forward to some final resting place where conclusions could be drawn and meanings could be gleaned. There was none of that. In fact, there was no order in any ordinary human sense. Words went flying in all directions, some glancing off one another in a zigzagging spiral while others went tramping up and down the page in a ragged column like a marching band full of margaritas. There were puns, double entendres, scraps of Dylan songs, obscure references to Hindu scripture, all buried in impenetrable word clusters—dense messages etching themselves directly onto the frosted window of his mind until, suddenly, it all became clear: it was the language of the angels, the voice of God.
“He’s reached a state of beatific madness,” Will thought. “He’s a holy fool, channeling a blizzard of divine simultaneity into the mind of a hungry seeker.” Once he had cracked the code of the mysterious letters, he read through them once more and put all the pieces of the puzzle together in his head. Dante had found a doorway to nirvana, and acid was the key. “Hey, this is America, right?” he thought. “Why torture yourself with yoga or meditation when you can just press a button and the door opens, drop a pill and the lights go on? Why not kickstart evolution with some instant karma?” Will was all in.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, he was about to be cracked open like an egg and tossed onto a frying pan. But this was all he had, these were the bread crumbs that had been scattered in the forest, and so he convinced himself that this was the sign he was waiting for, a sign foreshadowed by the visitations of Chromium and Juliette. It no longer mattered that he hadn’t seen either one of them for months and that they could not, apparently, be summoned; they must have been working behind the scenes all along, he figured, and had arranged for him to meet the One, the True and Living God, and, Holy Hallelujah, he was heading home at last!
All this happened while Will was staying and playing with Juanita down on 4th Street, and it only served to heat things up. She had let him in when the streets were cold and the sex was hot, but now it was going nowhere and, one way or another, a change was gonna come. His constant babbling about meeting God and going to the Promised Land had just about worn her out. “God ain’t payin’ the bills, Willy, so from now on, no money, no honey,” she screamed in the heat of their final blowup.
“Love ain’t nothin’ but a firecracker, mamacita; blink once and it’s gone,” he mumbled as he packed his things, shuffled out the door and headed down the piss-stained stairwell, shivering cold into the dirty wet snow of a dying winter.
“Life is full of purgatories,” he thought, “gulags of the soul, way stations where you say your prayers and do your time for the sins of your father and, if you’re lucky, move on to the next big slice of darkness. But, man, I’m finally breaking out of this goddam prison. If only Daddy could see me now” He was smiling for the first time in a long while as he slid into the back seat of the battered yellow cab, touching the silver pendant gently as the taxi began whipsawing through the snow, suddenly shooting forward when it hit raw pavement. The cabbie called to him over the front seat.
“Where ya headed, buddy?”
“Paradise, man; take me to paradise.” Will was still smiling at the thought of his big adventure.
Juliette, after witnessing these events from afar, zoomed in and hovered above the empty street, watching as the taxi took its place in the endlessly churning traffic down on Avenue A. She wished with every pixel of her being that she could drop from the sky like Wonder Woman and stop the cab with her bare hands, but she knew that this was how it had to be. She knew deep in her heart that the only way for Will to reach Channel Two was to pass through the inferno, to be stripped right down to the mainframe and rebuilt from the ground up. A single crystal tear rolled down her cheek. This was her first taste of human love, and it hurt like hell.
14
A PERFECT BLUE FIRE
Somewhere along the vast circle of time, Chrome lay dreaming on the cool halocrete surface of the sky platform. It was the eve of his final show in SubVersa—a retrospective of the works that had brought him fame and glory, a trove of visual thought experiments that had carried him to the peak of his creative powers. It was an otherworldly art made of math and pixel dust, limited only by the range of his imagination and his fluency in the living language of code. Chrome, it was said, could write in tongues.
But rather than reveling in past glories, he found himself daydreaming about the mission ahead, the mysterious work of soulmining, and the dangers he might face in the atomic world. On the surface, it might appear that his art career had come to an end, but he now understood that his greatest work of art was himself, and there was much m
ore work to be done. Come morning, he would sync his energies with Juliette’s, shift their creative powers into overdrive, and begin focusing on the wellspring of their own being—their souldriver, Will Powers. His thoughts were suddenly punctuated by the flash of a brilliant blue comet streaking across the midnight sky.
Seconds later, she appeared above him, hovering; an angel in black satinelle; midnight wings aflutter, violet eyes beaming, dusky-rose lips on moonlit skin. Treading air like a ballerina, she casually descended on him in a slo-mo blur, all feathers and fingers of light. There was motion, heat, then stillness. Twice warmed, they lay together soundlessly, drenched in starlight, soaking up the black-velvet night. Chrome broke the spell by whispering into her hair.
“That comet…That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Mmm, lovely thought. I’ll tuck that one under my pillow,” she said dreamily.
Though her true powers were hidden beneath that glow-in-the-dark smile, he was fully aware of her capabilities. She had been conceived in the Celestial City in a rare collaboration between Quin and his own maker, Will (who by then was an old man, in human terms, and already prepping for convergence), and because they had chosen to deliver her into this world through the streaming power of his own mind, he was intimately acquainted with every feature of her system and had, from the start, held her in awe.
When Quin was preparing to write the code for her personality, for instance, she calibrated the most exquisite feminine aspects of Will’s being, carefully interweaving them with the fiery algorithms of a Code Warrior princess. The entire construct was then primed to interface with Chrome’s masculine creative template. When the full-blown engine of her AI was complete and the entire database of neural history was uploaded, she became a glimmering, shimmering, creative machine, designed to gobble up new data from the minute she was turned on, scanning endlessly in search of new patterns and possibilities.
“Going up against the creators of Dark Math will be a challenge,” he said, “but with you by my side, it won’t be an insurmountable one.”
“When we’re running in tandem, Chrome, we’re unbeatable. You’re my Chrometheus, the one to my zero; together we’re a font of digital procreation. We’ll make the Nomads look like a bunch of high school griefers.”
“Yes, yes, and yes; glad to have you riding shotgun, honey.”
“You know, Chrome, sometimes I find myself wishing I’d been here all along, working with you from the beginning, whispering in your ear when you made all this magic. I often wonder what we might have created together…,” she said wistfully.
“I often wonder that myself. But the timing of your arrival wasn’t up to me; I needed a bit more polishing, it seems. I wasn’t quite ready for you in the beginning.”
“Did you miss me before you met me?”
“Miss you? I missed you so much I tried to make you.”
“But how? When?”
Taking a deep breath, he recounted the story of Neon in flaming detail, from the days and nights he spent building her in the studio, all the way down to his final moments with Raven. It was a long, hard fall, as he recalled, and he barely survived the impact. But it was worth it, he said, for the real thing was now lying right here in his arms, and he never would have known just how real she was if he hadn’t been forced to walk that last mile over the burning coals of human love. And her skin was so cool to the touch.
After a long silence, Juliette spoke, softly. “I’ve never experienced that kind of heartache, Chrome, and I’m sorry you had to go through it. But now all of that is behind us and we’re ready to fully engage with the future.”
“So we’re still fine, Q?” he asked, like a man out on a limb who hears the sound of a chainsaw.
“Fine for all time, babe,” she said, nuzzling the soft undercoat of his gleaming metal hair.
“Then we’re headed for the future; are you down for the struggle?” His question drew her to an upright position.
“Ready as you are, Comandante, and not a moment too soon. Now that Will’s dreams of art stardom have gone up in smoke, he’s being drawn to a much hotter flame than a simple quest for fame: a long lost friend is luring him to the West Coast with a promise of instant enlightenment. According to the data, this is where he begins drifting away from the herd to graze on the fringes of human identity, test the limits of human understanding. Unfortunately, it’s a terrifying thing for a human being to step outside the zeitgeist, and the further he wanders, the higher the risk of suicide or madness. Unfortunately, it’s the only way to scrub the code before the upgrade.”
“We’ll be there, Q. But timing will be everything; we have to get in before the digital dogs of Cyberia descend on him and drive him back to the herd.”
“Exactly. Keep him safe until the upgrade is complete, while giving him enough strength to endure the process. But just think about it, Chrome—when all this is over, the three of us will be one, launched like an Apollo rocket, co-starring in an endless theater of the mind and streaming the new infinity, live on Channel Three.”
“Amen to that, honey. Hallowed be thy game.”
Thus, the artist and his muse lay suspended between two great epochs of their lives. They spent the rest of that night reminiscing about their days and nights in paradise and dreaming of the road ahead, eventually slipping into deep sleep mode enfolded in one another’s arms. Their new lives would dawn soon enough.
