The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces

by Ray Vukcevich

  For a moment I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking at. It might have been a set of summer clothes carefully laid out. Maybe the person wearing them had gone to bed and then disappeared. A pretty weird person, too, judging from the outfit. Long black socks, and what looked like black rubber briefs, a vest of the same material, and gloves. I picked up a glove and discovered it was connected to the bed by a long flexible cable.

  It was a dataglove.

  Both gloves were datagloves. And the socks. Datasocks? The vest, too.

  I picked up the briefs. They felt the way soft rubber feels—somehow wet but not wet. I couldn’t help looking at my fingers to see if anything had rubbed off on them.

  I discovered a ribbon of cable attached to the back of the rubber briefs like a multicolored tail. The connections were clicking into place, but the kicker was the little logo in small white letters along the lower edge of the left leg of the briefs: DATAPANTS.

  Frank was somehow mixed up with the Russians and Evil Empire Software! The edges of my two major cases were blurring together. Somehow the two cases were one case. It was more than the fact that Frank was the investigating officer for the murders. He was involved at an entirely different level.

  I put the datapants down and picked up the vest. I followed a cable from the vest down to the floor and found the virtual reality helmet. Sound and sight, the works. Everything terminated at a box beside the bed. I knelt down beside it and saw a small red light. This would be the computer and it was on. I suppose I could go in and see what was what. Did I want to do that?

  All those times Frank had slipped away to spend his lunch hour in this room, he had been going into a virtual reality and doing God only knew what.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. Then I stood right back up again. I had sunk into the surface. In fact, I could see that the impression my butt had made was only now slowly filling in. I pushed a hand down on the bed. The surface was warm, probably the temperature of the human body, and my hand sank and was swallowed by the stuff. It looked slick, and it felt like Jell-O. I wondered how far you sank when you were in the helmet and pants and vest and gloves and socks and fully reclined on it.

  There was something sleazy about the whole set up. The cheap decor of the motel room didn’t help nor the dim light and lonely shadows, but it was more than that. I took out my camera and carefully photographed everything in the room.

  Maybe things looked better from the inside.

  Someday VR will be so good you won’t be able to tell the difference between it and what we’re currently calling reality and when that happens we will have achieved our ultimate purpose as technological beings. If you think about it, you’ll agree that it’s possible the reason we hear no one from the depths of space is because when a society reaches a certain level of technology, people discover they can go in and have whatever they want, so they no longer struggle to go out.

  I put my camera away and walked to the window and peeked out again. Still not much activity. I put the security chain in place. I considered putting out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, but then decided I couldn’t chance it. What if Frank never put it out? Maybe he had an understanding with the management. Surely ordinary maids wouldn’t be making up this room.

  I picked up the yellow legal pad on the dresser. Underneath it was a brochure from Evil Empire Software. How to use the DATAPANTS and other VR stuff. I thought it was pretty considerate of Frank to leave me the instructions.

  Or maybe not.

  If this pamphlet ever came to the attention of the Documentalist Killer, whoever had produced it would be toast. To begin with, the equipment in the first illustration was entirely different from the stuff on the bed. The first sentence read, “These remarks may not pertain to the equipment you have just removed from the box.”

  It got worse.

  By the time I’d jungle-chopped my way to the end, I had no real idea what to do. I did have a few general guidelines, though, and a couple of possible principles—one of which was that the surface of the vest and pants should be in contact with bare skin.

  So you took off your clothes and got into the stuff on the bed. You put on the helmet. You lay down. Were there switches to flip? Key sequences to enter? Magic words? Those were not the kind of questions the documentation answered. I tossed the pamphlet back onto the dresser.

  I flipped through Frank’s legal pad and decided he could benefit from an aggressive schedule of therapy. The drawings mostly included two stick figures perhaps engaged in martial arts or maybe having sex (or even dancing). The notes were absolutely indecipherable. Frank must type his own police reports. Who could read his handwriting? There were pages and pages of mathematics, but it all looked like simple arithmetic. Columns of numbers added up. Columns of numbers multiplied. Maybe he was taking a remedial math course in cyberspace. I put the legal pad back down on top of the VR pamphlet.

  There was only one way to find out what was going on here. I took off my coat. I slipped off my shoes. I’d known I was going to do this as soon as I’d dropped the security chain in place. Reading the instructions and Frank’s legal pad had been delaying tactics. I took off my pants.

  There was a question of hygiene, and I did what I could (I don’t want to talk about it). Once in the gear, I could see myself in the long mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Black socks to mid-calf. Black rubber briefs and vest. Close fittings gloves. The data helmet under one arm. I would never get into the Space Rangers looking like this, but outer space was not my destination anyway. I lowered myself onto the bed and put on the helmet.

  The bed grabbed me. I felt myself being pulled down, and I struggled for a moment. Relax, I told myself, float. Okay.

  I was in the dark. Maybe there really were magic words or magic passes you had to make to activate the thing. Sudden panic. What if the bed had pulled me under the surface of the Jell-O and now nothing whatever would happen and I’d be trapped like a bug in a smear of maple syrup?

  Things clicked into place just before I would have flipped out. A low hum from the left side growing and changing until it was the whomp whomp whomp of an approaching helicopter. Light on a new horizon like dawn. Super speed. God pulled up the blinds of the world to take a peek inside. A puff of air that made me gag on the smell of sewage. The taste of apples and cinnamon.

  The taste and smell stuff needed work. Maybe they were the same; maybe the taste was a side effect of the smell.

  The light grew until I could see a checkerboard of green and red and yellow squares stretching away to infinity. Big spheres floated down from the sky, bounced, and floated back up and disappeared in the clouds. My first reaction was disappointment. This virtual reality, at least visually speaking, was not an advance over others I had seen on TV.

  Then I realized this was a place, an actual space you could occupy and move around in. Experiencing such a reality is a lot different from looking at it on TV. I held out my hands, and they were stylized computer drawn hands. I looked down at my feet. They were hairy with big dirty toes—nice comic touch, I thought. I stepped forward and the world turned. I was not flat on my back floating in warm goo. I was upright and walking.

  I could see how I was perfect for a world like this. It didn’t matter that it was still pretty crude. I had always had a lot of control over my own reality. It would be easy for me to layer over the bare bones of this world deep and rich structures of my own.

  I reached down and grabbed the ground and pulled it up as if it were a flexible multicolored sheet and fashioned a tree. I sat down and combed my fingers through the surface and grass grew in the furrows I made. I rubbed my feet, molded them, and made shoes. Dennis’s shoes. I pulled his glasses out of the surface of my face. “Hey, neat!” Dennis said.

  I pushed his glasses back into my face and grew Sky’s mustache again and stood up.

  I softened my body, molded it this way and that, grew a wondrous purple satin gown, became Lulu.

  So easy. Even the tacos would be per
fect here, Dieter thought.

  A cloud of fish swam by, and Scarface grinned, and if you knew Scarface you would know how rare (and horrible) that was.

  “The Average Guy” flashed on and off, on and off, confused because things were changing so quickly the average was hard to calculate.

  We finally settled on being Lulu, because we liked the easy and open way she handled new situations.

  We could be anything we wanted here.

  And that, I realized, was a tremendous danger for someone like me. I could see myself coming into a world like this and never coming out. It was spooky how this all felt so much like coming home.

  Right now though I had work to do. What would Frank be doing in here?

  I turned in a complete circle to get a look at everything. Before I completed the circle, I saw a figure approaching. I felt a shiver of fear run through my entire body. I was not alone. That changed everything.

  The figure grew rapidly as if the person were zooming over the surface, floating rather than walking or running. A man, I could see. He swung way to the left and got very small and I thought maybe he wasn’t coming my way after all.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  The man became a small black dot in the distance, but before he disappeared, he turned and swooped back at me fast, faster, much faster than he’d been traveling before. In seconds, he was full-sized and standing in front of me. I gasped in surprise and took a step back.

  If the person standing before me had not clearly been a man, I might have thought I was looking at Prudence Deerfield with a new haircut. He held out his hand and a crazy fractal bluebird landed on his finger.

  “Hello,” the beautiful man said. “My name is Pablo.”

  seventeen

  The bluebird flew away. Pablo tore a hole in the air and reached in and pulled out a metallic red fruit. He bit into it and waves of tartness radiated from his grin. Red juice ran from the corners of his mouth. “What’s with the new look?”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Come on, Franky,” he said. “Get with it. Are you asleep or what?”

  He thought I was Frank Wallace. I had come into the system where Frank usually appeared—Frank’s “node” or whatever, so I must be Frank—no matter how I looked. Did I want to pretend I was Frank? Did I think I could?

  “I’m not Frank,” I said.

  “Of course you’re not,” he said. “My mistake. Maybe it’s the light.” He touched me, and the feel of his hand on my arm was so real I gasped.

  “I’m really not Frank Wallace,” I said, backing away from him.

  He took a step after me. “Okay, you’re a stranger. Do you come here often? Do I know your sign? Have we played this game before?”

  He kept advancing and I kept stepping back. Did I really want to know what Frank had been up to in here?

  I held up my hands. “Will you stop and listen to me?”

  He did stop. There was still a sly smile on his face. “Okay, who are you then?”

  “Your sister hired us.”

  “My sister?” He took a step back. He dropped the red fruit, but it disappeared before it hit the ground. Trees sprang up, grew leaves, grew alarm clocks with mechanical hands and brass bells like teddy bear ears. All the alarm clocks went off at once.

  The world rocked to the left, and I stumbled and fell to my hands and knees. The world rocked back to the right. Swarms of birds with boom boxes blackened the sky. I scrambled to my feet as big-stepping R. Crumb babes pushing lawnmowers appeared from every direction. It looked to me like I was the point at which they’d all converge, and I wanted to run off every way at once. I cycled through my disguises like riffling through a deck of cards and settled on Sky.

  I bent my knees and leaped straight up just before the gum-chewing, sweat-slinging cartoons and their grass-tossing machines came crashing together. Sparks and smoke and jagged yellow light below. The words “Kapow” and “Boom!”

  A breeze moved me away from the carnage and I floated gently back to earth. Pablo appeared at my side.

  “Skylight?” His voice had changed. His face blurred. His body became clay molded by invisible fingers, and when she was done shape-shifting, Prudence said, “I can’t imagine how you came to be here. Since you’ve come in through Frank’s port, you must be in his room in the Quack Inn. Is he there with you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “This can’t be good,” she said. “I told Yuri if we didn’t watch out, you’d find out more than you needed to know.”

  Our voices seemed just right in the infinite plane of diminishing squares. Prudence had on the same shirt and jeans she’d been wearing when she was Pablo. I reached out and when our hands touched, I shuddered. Here was a real advance. The sensation of touch was deliciously real.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Bells and whistles,” she said. “Welcome to the future.”

  “You really do work for Evil Empire.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “‘Welcome to the future’ is a very corporate thing to say.” I hadn’t let go of her hand. “And you didn’t really answer my question.”

  “An intruder alarm,” she said. “I’ll clean up the mess.”

  Mountains formed at the horizon. They grew impossibly high and then rushed across the plain like a tsunami and overtook us. They washed away the lawnmower carnage and grew up and under and around us, and I held onto her hand and we rode it out.

  At first the meadow was merely sketched, but details soon appeared. Birds, grass, and the gurgling sounds of a creek, puffy white clouds, bugs, forested hills on all sides. The air grew cooler and thinner, and the sunlight felt good on my skin.

  A Disney deer popped out of the trees, took a look at us, and darted away.

  Prudence tossed a scrap of cloth onto the ground, and it multiplied in many colors and became a patchwork quilt. A bump struggled like a trapped puppy and then became a brown wicker picnic basket. Prudence got down on her knees beside the basket. “Sit down,” she said.

  I sat down on the quilt. She opened up the basket and looked inside, then she looked up at me and smiled. “What would you like?”

  “Pablo doesn’t exist,” I said.

  “Potato salad?”

  “Prudence.”

  “No, he doesn’t exist,” she said. “At least not out there. Not the way you mean.”

  “You have no brother? You’re the P in GP Ink?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m the P. How about some juice? I know you’ve been drinking a lot of juice lately.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Juice. Do you run the Pablo persona in here all the time?”

  “What kind?”

  “What kind of what?”

  “Juice,” she said, “what kind of juice do you want?”

  “How about kiwi, strawberries, and kumquat?”

  “I don’t know what a kumquat is exactly.”

  “Me either,” I said. “Do something simple. Surprise me.”

  She handed me a glass of red fluid and watched me closely while I tasted it. Bananas and strawberries. I swallowed but the liquid seemed to disappear before it reached the back of my throat.

  “Good,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Tell me about Pablo,” I said.

  “Pablo was still pretty much on autopilot before you set off the alarm,” she said.

  I thought the words “pretty much” were pretty important in that sentence. “Does that mean someone was monitoring? Pablo wasn’t just a program running?

  “Someone’s always monitoring,” she said.

  “You?”

  “Not at first.”

  “You’re not always the one behind Pablo?”

  “Are you always the one behind Brian Dobson?”

  Definitely a trick question.

  And she had another one. “Who do you suppose is behind Roger?”

  “My therapist? You know about Roger?”

 
“We followed you there a couple of times,” she said. “Early on. When we were still unsure if you were our man.”

  I may have seen one of them in the cyberhall outside of Roger’s office. I remembered thinking that no one could spy on me there. I guess I was wrong about that.

  She took my hand. “Who is behind Roger? Who do you think is talking when you’re talking with him?”

  “No one,” I said. I took my hand back. “Roger’s a program. Dennis has a couple of degrees in this subject, you know.”

  Her expression gave away nothing about what she was thinking. I’ve always thought total lack of reaction to what you’re saying somehow breaks the conversation contract. I mean how are you supposed to know what to say next if you can’t gauge the effect of what you’ve just said?

  “Roger is like ELIZA,” I said, “which was written by a guy named Joseph Weizenbaum back in the sixties. The program is not artificial intelligence. All it does is construct utterances from your input. It doesn’t really understand what you’re saying.”

  “So if you already know that, why do you use him … it, since it’s really just you talking to yourself?”

  “Me talking to myself is what therapy is all about,” I said.

  I waited but she had nothing to say to that, so I said, “Let’s get back to Pablo. What is he for?”

  “If anyone should understand the value of disguise, it would be you,” she said.

  I did know she hadn’t really answered my question, but I thought I’d probably gotten all I was going to get on that subject. “What about Frank?” I asked.

  “Frank is easy,” she said. “This is all to do with the net and control of the net and international and national meddling with the net. Dumb attempts to regulate that which cannot and should not be regulated. You’d do better to pass laws on how the wind should blow.”