It was strange to see contentment on her. Her photos were always intense, all business, get the job done. Even their wedding photos, like she was imitating joy.
A bad actor pretending to be happy.
But that picture on the computer—that was the real deal. She felt it in her toes.
A ten.
“Where you going?” he asked.
She had her hand on the back door. There was a little blank spot between staring at the laptop and going to the door. She couldn’t remember that short little walk.
“Getting some fresh air,” she said.
The leaves had fallen, but Samuel had picked them up. The flower beds had been put to sleep, the grass neatly trimmed. A squirrel or something squabbled in the bushes.
She pulled her robe closed, but the winter air rushed up her legs. It felt clean, the deck boards hard on her feet. She took a long deep breath through her nostrils and closed her eyes.
Somewhere a child laughed.
It wasn’t far away. There were kids in the neighborhood, but this sounded like it was right in front of her. The backyard, though, was quiet, still and empty. A wave of voices passed overhead, like a speaker mounted on a passing drone—those fragmented pieces of language all mixed together like a pot of stew.
Thunder rumbled in a blue sky.
Her toes had become stiff. She wandered deeper into the backyard, walking like a monk, thinking about Tyler Ballard. She had never gotten around to transcribing her notes. It was probably the best interview she’d ever done. At the very least, the most revealing. And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to pick up where she left off.
Not the best interview...the most satisfying.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, though. What had been so gratifying? Was it what he said? But as she dragged her feet across the lawn, she couldn’t remember anything he said.
Or was it the way he said it?
A door slammed.
Alex was on the driveway, the concrete colder and harder than the grass. Her knees were sufficiently numb, her fingers and nose aching. A brown truck had pulled up to the curb.
UPS.
The deliveryman stepped out of the open door. He rushed up the driveway with long strides just short of a trot with a box under his arm. It was wrapped in brown paper. He smiled at Alex.
“Bit cold today,” he said.
There was writing on the box.
She didn’t have to sign for it. He just handed it to her.
Her name was on the front. It was written in green ink. Alessandra Diosa.
“You’re going to freeze.” He took the box away. But it wasn’t the UPS guy. Samuel put his arm around her. The truck was gone. How long had she been standing there?
Long enough that she couldn’t feel her lips.
They went inside. They ate stew. They watched a movie. Later, they made love.
When Alex woke late the next day, she tried to remember her name and the day. She eventually did. But she never saw the package addressed in green ink again.
Never even remembered it.
She just wanted to sleep.
28. Tyler
ADMAX Penitentiary, Colorado
A headlight.
One bright locomotive.
Tyler was on the tracks. He tried to move, to look away, blink, but it only got brighter, only got closer. The ground didn’t shake; the wind didn’t blow.
Everything was silent.
The light went away and came back twice. It was after the second time he saw shapes. They emerged from the glow like Polaroid snapshots. A white coat.
A white man in a white coat.
The good doctor.
He put the silver pen in his white coat and stepped back.
Tyler saw spots. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His forehead was inflated and hard like the shell of a tortoise. His pulse thumped just above his eyebrows.
Sensation came back to his hands and feet first. His whole body vibrated with pins and needles, the kind that felt like a giant hand squeezing a lemon.
More tears.
Someone else was in the room. Tyler could feel him without turning. Gramm was off to the side, his arms folded, observing the good doctor. Tyler remained a solid object mounted on the examination table, but his mind was expanding like a net, capturing Gramm’s thoughts like minnows. There were too many to make sense, silvery flashes that darted about in the ethereal mindspace.
But Tyler’s mindnet went beyond the room.
It went out to the prison yard, where inmates squared up on the basketball court, walked the track or read books. He heard them all simultaneously.
Hundreds of them.
They chattered like the roar of a sporting event, the crash of a waterfall, a thunderstorm smashing across a flat rock. He covered his ears—
“You had a stroke.”
Tyler turned his head. Gramm was near the doorway.
“Wheh?” Tyler slurred the word.
“Almost three months ago.”
Three months?
“The good doctor saved you. I thought we lost you.” Emotion strained the last couple of words. Gramm cleared his throat. “He maximized your biomite content and injected you with a new strain to repair the damage and restore your identity.”
Tyler closed his eyes, working his finger and thumb around the bridge of his nose. Too much, it was too much. He closed his mind, withdrew until he only heard his own thoughts.
“Whah...” He worked his tongue and lips. “What happened?”
“A clot had formed around the stent.” Gramm paused. “The good doctor thinks.”
“Thinks?”
“That was the biofeedback. It was a miracle we saved you.”
Again, the emotion in Gramm’s voice.
They couldn’t take Tyler out of the prison. If a doctor besides the good doctor were to see Tyler, the entire operation would be compromised.
Tyler agreed.
“From what we understand, the clot formed from overuse. Your last session was extremely long and stressful. And when we began to lose the basement network...”
Tyler lifted his head too quickly. Stars flitted through his eyesight. Memories reported for recall. He had just seen Alessandra for the interview, then went to the basement, where his carefully selected network of volunteers—all wired into Foreverland, all lending Tyler their minds to support the cause—began to fail.
All that red.
Gramm handed him a glass of water. “You’re infused with maximum biomite capacity. Your body is now 49.9% biomites, as close to artificial as we can make it without the government coming for you.”
The government’s halfskin laws denied humans the right to exceed 50% biomites. At that point, the lawmakers claimed, people were more machine than human. And machines, the government decided, didn’t deserve to live.
As long as he was breathing and thinking, Tyler didn’t care how many biomites kept his heart ticking.
“There are special biomites we can use,” Gramm said, “ones the government can’t detect, if we need to increase your levels. There are advantages, Doctor.”
Doctor? Who’s he talking to?
Gramm was addressing Tyler, not the good doctor. It was confusing.
“It would halt some of your health concerns, but it’ll take some time to locate—”
“No, thank you, Gramm. This is just fine.”
Tyler caressed his forehead. It was senseless and leathery, without the deep wrinkles that once carved horizontal tracks from temple to temple. There was something missing.
“The stent was removed. No more needle, Doctor.”
“Why are you calling me that?”
Gramm looked to the good doctor with concern. “Do you know your name?”
“I know my name, damn you. Why are you calling me ‘doctor’?”
“Please tell us your name.”
“Tyler Ballard.”
“You are Doctor Tyler Ballard.”
That wasn�
�t it. He was calling him doctor. He never called him that. Or maybe I don’t remember it.
“The stent,” Tyler said. “You removed it completely?”
“Yes.”
Tyler’s sense of emptiness was confirmed: he was now a junkie without his needle.
“Reed was coming through the needles.”
“Reed?”
“The volunteers. We determined it was Reed that killed them.”
Tyler rubbed his jaw. Numbness was slowly fading. He was riding a wave of dull sensations into awareness, his thoughts becoming sharper and cleaner.
“The biofeedback suggested a termination command was initiated,” Gramm said. “Someone or something simply told the bodies to just...turn off.”
“We lost them all?”
Gramm shook his head. “No, we saved one. You saved him, actually.”
Tyler had run to the back of the room. Samuel was the only one he needed to save. The rest he could lose, but that one volunteer he had to keep alive.
Alessandra depends on it.
“The Institute?” Tyler blurted. “Were they—”
“No, the volunteers at the Institute were unaffected. We took Samuel off the needle, increased his brain biomites, and converted him to wireless connectivity like you. He was offline for a short spell, but Alessandra didn’t notice. Even if it’s not Reed causing these problems, something’s out there, Doctor. We can’t risk you using the needle. We’re too close.”
The emotion got to Gramm this time. He rubbed his eyes and apologized. It seemed genuine.
“It’s all right,” Tyler said. “I understand.”
“I thought we lost you, that all of this was...that Foreverland would just...”
“Now, now, Gramm. You did good. You and the good doctor, you both did good.”
The good doctor, in a brief moment of clarity, nodded.
Perhaps Patricia was right: he should cross into her Foreverland and leave his body behind. Gramm and the good doctor would watch over it until Alessandra was ready.
Tyler held out his hand. They helped him stand. His legs were weak. Blood rushed to his head, thumped in his forehead. The guards appeared with a wheelchair.
“No, thank you.” He waved them off. “Let’s go to the basement.”
“I don’t think that’s wise, Doctor.”
“Nonsense. Time is short.”
“You need rest.”
“Apparently, I’ve been resting for months.”
He made it to the elevator before succumbing to the wheelchair when the fuzzy static of the random voices buzzed in his head again. He assumed these were thoughts from the inmates, that the new biomites were spontaneously connecting with other minds, but they crackled in his inner ear like a stadium of angry spectators.
Gramm pushed him to his cell, where he closed his eyes and laid back on his bed to rest. The basement would have to wait.
——————————————
Tyler spent weeks sweating on his mattress like a heroin addict gone cold turkey. The voices of static had become fingernails clawing through his scalp, pulling his brain apart a neuron at a time.
And Patricia...she was a snowflake in a blizzard of thoughts. If he couldn’t find her, if he couldn’t go to her, be with her, then none of this mattered.
He sat up and squeezed the sides of his head, as if that would quell the voices, but the vertigo caused him to vomit. Gramm assured him this would end, that he would return to normal. Occasionally, Tyler heard Patricia’s voice rise above the din.
She was out there, waiting for him.
“Do something, Gramm.” His voice scratched his throat.
It was another week before he was able to leave the room. The static of voices faded. Gramm and the guards came for him and took him to the basement.
The room was dark.
The lights had been turned down. The tables were empty slabs, red lights casting enough light to illuminate the aisles. The bodies had been removed and disposed of, all done while Tyler was in an induced coma.
Despite the emptiness, he opened his mouth to breathe, the heavy odor of decay and infection saturating the walls, clinging to the ceiling. Nearly a lifetime of work wasted in a single day.
These were the volunteers, the inmates that readily gave themselves to the needle. Their deaths would go unnoticed. They were lifers without family, men forgotten by the world.
It took great effort to make them disappear from the system—creating false documents, trails of paperwork, deleted notes. It had been over twenty years and no one had come looking for a volunteer.
And volunteer, they did.
Once Tyler showed them a way out of their suffering, a simple means of closing their eyes and going to a new reality, a way to leave their life, go where they could be anything they wanted, do anything they desired. They would never be imprisoned as long as their minds were free.
And Foreverland was the doorway.
Tyler’s son, Harold, had learned this lesson from his father. He discovered that people would do anything to escape their suffering and they would take the needle willingly.
Harold found an island, found investors and collected the lost children that would never be missed. Their bodies would not go to waste, and neither would the minds of the elderly men that didn’t deserve to die.
Harold made a great sum of money and funneled it back to the prison, where Tyler expanded his empire of volunteers. In a perverted way, Harold helped build the basement, helped bring his mother and father closer together. It was all in the name of science, a means of discovering a new reality. All the volunteers were potential candidates to become a permanent host of a boundless Foreverland.
But now they were gone.
As long as the volunteers at the Institute survived, none of that mattered. And Samuel.
All the lamps were off except one. It shined on a bleached and sickly body, like that of a drowning victim. His once olive-colored skin, the genetic trait of his Hispanic heritage, was pasty. Teardrops were tattooed on the side of his face; an enormous crucifix on his chest was etched in fuzzy blue lines.
Samuel was one of the first volunteers.
He’d renounced his affiliation to gangs and crime, had taken up a life of solitary study in the library, of assisting other inmates in their spiritual study. He taught himself law at night, reviewing case notes. Serving a life sentence, he would never practice, but his advice was often sound.
Next to Gramm, he was Tyler’s most important soldier. Samuel was caring for the new host.
Alessandra’s husband.
Tyler’s last trip through the needle was to meet Alessandra for the interview. She was in her own Foreverland and didn’t know it. And Samuel was making sure she stayed there.
“He’s stable, Doctor.” Gramm stepped through the green light. “Because of you.”
Tyler touched Samuel’s arm, the veins still pulsing.
“Samuel discovered Reed is behind this,” Gramm said.
“How?”
“He intercepted a UPS package addressed to Alessandra. It was written in green ink. It’s why we haven’t been able to locate him. He’s done nothing electronically—no email, no texts, phone calls or video conferencing. He went completely off grid. I suspect he’s been communicating this way all along.” Gramm cleared his throat. “Clearly, he’s alive somehow.”
“What was in the package?”
“More reminders of Alex’s past and a poem of sorts. Cryptic. I assume he wrote that way in case we saw it. We could go back and search Danny’s and Cyn’s belongings, even Reed’s old apartment. I still don’t understand how he’s doing it—”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“It appears he’s trying to jar her memories loose, create a disturbance in her acceptance pattern. If she remembers certain events, it’ll set her back. I think he knows our time is limited. He’s just trying to stall.”
“We have more time than he thinks.” Tyler lifted his han
ds above the body. In the bright light, they looked twenty years younger. The biomites bought him all the time he needed.
But with the noise in his head, did he want to?
“It’s time to relocate, Doctor.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need to leave the prison.”
“Move?”
“Alessandra is nearly asleep. It’s almost time.”
Tyler felt dizzy. “No need to leave; I can do it from here.”
“You need to be closer to Patricia.”
“Distance isn’t a problem, Gramm.”
“We’ll need to be out—”
“We can’t be hasty!” He bridged his temples with finger and thumb, the voices spiking with his anger. “I need her fully asleep; there can be no instability.”
Gramm knew this. If Tyler committed to the host, if he crossed into Alessandra’s Foreverland and she woke up, there was the risk of being thrown into an expanding Nowhere. He had already taken that risk once when he went inside her Foreverland for the interview. To be sentenced to the Nowhere...that was worse than death.
“The feds are investigating the prison,” Gramm said.
“What?”
“There have been inquiries by the FBI into abuse and lack of response by the warden.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“You were in a coma.”
“Now, damn you!” He backhanded him across the table. “I’ve been awake all this time, and you tell me this now?”
Gramm dabbed the bead of blood swelling on his lip with the tip of his tongue. “We’ve been holding the authorities off. The trail of missing paperwork, missing prisoners is unmistakable. They suspect the warden has been involved in a ring of money for escape. They came to investigate a month ago, but the warden kept them out of the basement, kept you hidden. They’re scheduled to come back in a week.”
Fear radiated in waves. Gramm always cringed in the presence of Tyler’s intense emotions.
He didn’t flinch.
“There was no need to hamper your recovery, Doctor.”
The feds were coming. All of these tables wouldn’t matter, empty or not, when they stepped inside. The trail would quickly lead to the Institute. They had contingency plans, they could relocate all essential personnel out of New York within the day.
Ashes of Foreverland Page 19
