In Extremis

by John Shirley

  I looked at Imber and he looked back at me. It was so clear to me, now, looking at him. The absence was nothing you could see—but it was nothing you could miss.

  The Empties. Maybe I’d known for a while. I’d seen them on the streets. In the patrol cars. On TV. More and more of them with nothing behind their eyes; with those reasonable, flat tones, talking of triage and necessity and putting the good of society over the good of the parasites. Thinning the herd.

  I guess I’d known they were soulless . . . I just didn’t know why there were so many Empties now. The Singularity . . .

  I stepped between Dresden and Imber. And it was almost like that plastic gun jumped into my hand. It was a kind of spasmodic act of revulsion, drawing that gun, Syke—and I pointed it at Mr. Dead Eyes and squeezed the trigger. Fired almost point blank.

  Imber was drawing his own gun when I shot him. He went over backwards, firing as he fell back. His bullet went between my left arm and my ribs, I could feel it cutting the air there, sizzling that close to me. I heard a despairing grunt and I turned to see that Imber’s bullet had missed me but hit Dresden—it was a charged bullet, I could tell because the wound in her side was shooting sparks and her back was arching . . . and Mercedes was shouting something at me and I was turning to snap another furious shot at Imber. I missed.

  He was flat on his back now, just outside the door, writhing around the first bullet I’d fired, the slug tearing up his brisket, and he was firing sloppily up at me. Bullets chewed the doorframe of the cubby to my left, made it smoke with the charges.

  I aimed carefully this time and fired and that big chin of his shattered; must’ve been busted bits of it going up into his brain, because he shrieked once and then went silent and slack. Not the first guy I shot—but that’s the first time I felt good doing it.

  Down the hall, people were yelling for security. I turned to check on Dresden, but she was dead, her eyes glassy. “Shit,” I said. “Dammit.”

  Then Mercedes was pushing me out the door. I had only a couple more shots in the disposable gun, and I used them as we ran out, heading for the back exits, firing over the heads of hospital security to keep them back.

  Then we were banging through the door onto the wet asphalt of a back lot, past a row of dumpsters, gasping in the muggy air. We sprinted through the rain toward the hurricane fence topped with razor wire. Have to get over that fence somehow . . .

  Mercedes ran ahead of me up to the fence, taking off her coat as she went. She tossed it up high, slung it over the razor wire on the fence, and I got to the fence, locked my hands together; she stepped into them and I boosted her up. She grabbed the coat, climbed up, was dropping over the other side, yelling at me to get over the fence—but I was hearing sirens, turned to see the patrol vans screaming around the corner of the hospital, the burly men and women jumping out, rushing toward me. I got maybe halfway up the fence when they grabbed me, dragged me down off it. I yelled at Mercedes to run but I didn’t have to, I saw her back disappearing as she darted through a rubbishy lot, into the alley between two high rises . . .

  They knocked me down but there was talk about being careful not to hurt me, he’s a perfect specimen, he’s young and in good shape, he’s what they want . . .

  I saw a man flip his mirror helmet back so he could look me over better. I saw his eyes. Empty.

  They sprayed some sleep-you-creep into my mouth and I was gone.

  I woke up in restraints, Syke. And naked. Lying on my back. There’s nothing more horrible than waking up in restraints—naked. Trapped and vulnerable. It happened to me once before, when I was a teenager, flipped out on Icy Dust. Woke up in a jail infirmary strapped down. Scary feeling. But not so bad, that time, I knew they were going to let me go, eventually . . .

  It was worse this time. Because I knew they’d never let me go.

  I could hardly move. There was a clamp holding my head in place. My upper arms and elbows and wrists were clamped down too. My knees and ankles were locked down.

  I couldn’t see much. Too many lights shining at my face. I made out several pairs of eyes, the rest of the faces hidden by surgical masks. Those empty eyes. I caught the gleam of instruments. Heard healthbots muttering reports.

  “Anybody want to tell me what the fuck?” I said.

  “Don’t see why we should,” said a woman in a surgical mask. Her voice pleasant. A nurse—or some kind of biotechnician.

  A man in uniform came into the ring of light. I got a look at his face. An old, lizard-like face I knew from the news. General Marsh.

  “This him?” What a rumbly, gristly old voice General Marsh had.

  “If you want one right away, this’s the best one we have,” the technician said. “There aren’t any better in the vats. He’s in excellent shape. He’s the age and size you wanted. Not a bad looking kid.”

  “Kinda skinny. I guess he’ll do. I’m sick. I need uploading quick . . .”

  “We just put the nanos in him . . . If you’ll go with the nurse to upload, we’ll get you in there.”

  “Won’t be any of his mind left in his brain to bother me?”

  “No, no,” the technician said soothingly. “All that—anything extraneous, his memories, consciousness, the holographic pattern—it’s all going to be pushed out when we upload you into him. It just kind of gets lost in the circuits of the transfer interface. Sort of like when you do a vasectomy—where does the sperm go? The body absorbs it. Our gear will absorb him, and he won’t be there to bother you . . .”

  “That old fuck . . . taking my body . . .” I said. “Hey general, they’re just uploading a copy of your mind—they’re not sending all you, man.”

  “Everything important,” he said distantly amused. “You believe in the soul, kid—that’s such primitive thinking.”

  “Look at these people,” I told him. “There’s something missing from them. That Boxell’s got no soul. He’s one of ’em! You want to end up that empty, man? Like Boxell? Let me up out of this shit and we’ll talk . . .”

  The general chuckled. “Superstitious! I do hope none of him stays.”

  “None of him will . . .” The technician leaned close and told me, ever so sweetly: “Now, Whim . . . we’re going to give you a mild tranquilizer—but we can’t put you completely under. It won’t feel like dying, really. More like going down a long, long slide . . . just slide on down and out and . . . it won’t hurt at all.” It’s funny, what she said then. Not to me, to the computer about initiating the process. She said, “Three, five, thirty-five . . .” Reciting the date. The time: “Three Oh-five a.m . . . and thirty five seconds.”

  The numbers know. That was the last thing I heard, alive.

  Then, all that was really me, mind and soul, went sliding down, down, and out . . .

  Souls. They can’t send them when they upload. Souls go where the universe wants—not where we want them to go. So when they try to put a shaky old General’s consciousness in my body, only his personality and memory will go in. Probably had a shriveled little soul anyway. What’s left of it will dissipate, during the uploading. It doesn’t go where mine has gone—that’s the difference between us, and the uploaded. Their souls just . . . disintegrate. Ours are shoved out of the way . . .

  When they pushed me out, I found I was in a somewhere—I was drifting through the circuits of the interface computer. I got stuck in the transfer equipment. Lots of us are wandering around in here. Souls in databanks. I can see ’em sometimes, in my mind’s eye. We can talk a little. I like to say to ’em, “Hey, raise your hand if you’re dead.” Just to show I still have a sense of humor. The real joke is, there are people walking around in perfectly healthy physical bodies, who are more dead than we are . . .

  And I found that I can follow the numbers, feel those 0s and 1s, reach out through these circuits and cables, and send a message to you, Syke, since one computer talks to another—and you’re always interfacing with a computer.

  I want to tell you: Come out of your v
irtual womb before it’s your virtual tomb, Syke. They’re going to come after you subworld people soon. You in particular.

  Come out—and go find Mercedes, and take care of her. Ask around Siggy’s Allnighter. You’ll find her. Because I know she matters to you. You and her, you’re soul mates.

  Me—well, I think I’ve got it figured out now. I’m not in my body—and something else is. Not someone—some thing. So I’m not ever going to be able to go back to my body. I’m just a soul, organized into a mind; a soul floating in circles, in a machine. And if my mind was uploaded to another body, my soul wouldn’t go with my mind.

  I wouldn’t want that.

  So no—you can’t help me. I answered my own question. I’m dead. One times zero equals zero. It all adds up. I’m only dead, though, in the physical way. Not in the way that matters.

  Don’t worry about me. I followed the numbers, and I’m about to lead the others out of here. I can feel them going into another computer, and then another—and then, one at a time, out through some kind of satellite transmission link. The soul, see, ends up flying through the sky, just like it was supposed to. And there’s something up there waiting. I want to see what it is. Maybe I’ll meet Dresden. I hardly knew her. But I feel cheated, losing her . . . But maybe I’ll meet her somewhere, between here and there—wherever we are.

  THE GUN AS AN AID TO POETRY

  “There’s no getting off the hook, short of suicide,” Eric wrote, in a Facebook message to Gwen. He was sitting at the glass table on the sunny terrace, wearing jogging sweats and sunglasses. As he typed on his PowerBook, a coffee cup and a blank notebook at his elbow, he was distantly aware of the breakers rumbling and hissing on the rocks below the cliff, beyond the redwood fence. He wrote:

  And my excuses for avoiding suicide are assorted: I don’t wish to be another depressed poet who ended it all; I don’t care for the collateral damage—though I like to imagine that all my exes would be depressed by my passing, you especially—and most of all, I’m simply too cowardly for self-annihilation. I will probably accept another year of slow suicide via teaching at Massachusetts State, by which I mean: suicide by heavy drinking before and after classes. I can hear you now: ‘You won the Pulitzer for Poetry, you putz, you’re one of the few poets to regularly receive significant royalties, you have a great day job at an undemanding school, you live in a comfortable modern house designed by a not untalented protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, just count your fucking blessings.’ But you have never had to teach people who ask if they can submit poems by text message and ‘does every line have to rhyme ?’ . . . If I can find the courage . . .

  “I had a moment of real hope for you, when I saw you working on the laptop,” said someone behind Eric. “I might simply have gone away . . .”

  Eric turned half about, looking over his shoulder, eyebrows raised—and then he saw the large silver-plated gun held firmly in the stranger’s hand. The man stood two yards way, aiming the gun straight at Eric’s head.

  “But then,” the man said, in a voice that was both silky and sulky, “the disappointment came. I saw you were on Facebook.”

  The stranger wore a rumpled linen suit, a panama hat on a head that, judging by the visible part, was shaved bald. He wore sunglasses like Eric’s—no, not quite like Eric’s. The man’s sunglasses were mirrored lenses. Eric could see his own startled middle-aged face staring dually back at him. The man had a weak chin, a slight overbite, oddly small ears, and a number of moles on his cheeks.

  Eric theorized that the best course was to put on his charmingly confident face and try to be verbally disarming, as it were. He managed a carefree smile. “Old-school we’d say, ‘You have the advantage of me, sir.’ And it’s doubly apt. By which I mean . . .”

  “By which you mean: Who the fuck are you? My name is Norman Conrad. Think back. I wrote a series of papers on your work. You refused to meet with me.”

  “Ah.” Norman Conrad. Eric Boyle’s own variant on the crazy journalist who’d stalked Bob Dylan, literally rooting through Dylan’s trashcan. Eric’s neck was hurting, so he turned about, very slowly, in his chair. “And I owe this visit, and this gun—to that refusal?”

  “No. I’m here because you stopped writing. I arrive, feel a chill as I see you writing, glance over your shoulder—and see it’s a private message on Facebook. I take it you’re wallowing in self-pity. Your poetry made my life meaningful, Boyle. My life was an idiot’s scrawl before your Antic Elegies—you made me feel that art could make life meaningful. Then—you just fucking stopped.” The gun was leveled fixedly as Conrad spoke. It never wavered. “Insight into the human condition is the only compass; art is the only way to reach that insight. Poetry is the highest form of art. You are the best poet in the world. Ipso facto . . .”

  Even at his most hubristic, Eric had never believed he was the best. He certainly felt no pleasure in getting the compliment from an armed burglar—a glib eccentric who’d badgered him with letters for years. He felt only a rising anger. He wanted to tackle Conrad, whip him with his own pistol. But he had no assurance that he could rush that gun and come out of it unwounded. Suicide by aficionado? No. He’d probably end up paralyzed—or internally shattered but still tottering about, like Andy Warhol.

  Eric did his best to keep his face impassive. “Well—nothing dries a man out like having a gun pointed at him. What do you say we have a drink and sort this out? You can keep your gun in one hand, a highball in the other . . .”

  Conrad shook his head—there was something absolute and definitive in the motion. “No. I will permit no ploy, no ‘tactics,’ no getting around me. My certain information is, you haven’t completed a poem in six years. But you will today. You will write many pages of poems. Or I’ll shoot you six times, in, say, the course of an hour or so.” By careful degrees, he lowered the gun to point at Eric’s crotch, his arm moving as smoothly as a computer-controlled crane. “I’ll shoot you in the parts that have had such famous congress with coeds, over the years,” Conrad went on, thoughtfully. “Then in the shins. I’ll let you writhe so you can feel some kind of punishment for wasting your ability. I have tried to write poetry and prose for twenty-five years and have turned out only tripe, regurgitated Eric Boyle—muck, trash, self-indulgence, a waste of paper, I’m not even a Salieri. But you—” He laughed with a soft bitterness. “You prick. Every truly completed Eric Boyle poem is powerful and existentially redemptive. If I cannot write it—then I will see to it, at least, that you do. You will now, right now, this minute, begin writing poetry, or I’ll shoot you.”

  Eric licked his lips. “Um . . . If you really appreciate my work, I can’t believe you’d really want to . . . to take me out of the world . . . at some point I’ll write again, after all.”

  “You’re a liar. I’ve read that fragment of a memoir you showed to your agent. You have no intention of ever writing another poem. You won’t write unless I make you.”

  Eric let out a long, noisy breath. “Norman, Christ almighty—if you want to complain about absurdity in life—well here it is. This is absurd. At least . . . fire the gun at the fence so I know it’s loaded . . .”

  “Don’t doubt me again,” Conrad said. He reached into his jacket pocket with his left hand, and took out an old fashioned Polaroid snapshot and tossed it on the table beside Eric.

  “A Polaroid. They still make these? I’ll bet you have to order the film on the . . .” He broke off, staring at the photo. The Polaroid showed someone he knew very well, someone with his head shot open. It was his literary agent, Donald Cantor. Staring in death, Donald looked quite startled. He was slumped back in the driver’s seat of his little lavender Volkswagen convertible, the top down—a car Eric had often ridden in to increasingly pensive lunches. The whole crown of his head was missing. His brains were exposed, and cratered. There was simply no chance it could have been faked up somehow. “You’ve . . . killed Donald?”

  Conrad nodded his head, exactly once. “Yes. For two good reasons. First, b
ecause he failed to induce you to work, and second, to show you that I’m serious. Very serious. It didn’t bother me at all. It won’t bother me to kill a spoiled prize-winning poet. Now—if you don’t wish to be shot to pieces, you will instantly exit from Facebook—do not write a single letter more there. You will completely log off the internet. If you like, you can hit send on that note, but nothing more.”

  “My Wi-Fi goes out a lot anyway,” Eric said hoarsely, still determined to put up a façade of blithe fearlessness. He turned to the laptop, hesitated a moment, wondering how he could send a message to the police before he signed off.

  “Don’t even think that way,” Conrad said, moving a little closer, and a step to one side. “I can see what you’re writing from here.”

  Eric swallowed, hit send on the note to Gwen, and shut down his internet connection.

  “Good. I’ll give you thirty seconds to start writing poetry. I do not have the safety on.”

  “But—thirty seconds!”

  “It’s no use whimpering about the absent muse—you’ve had six years. I’m convinced it’s all there in you and only passive aggression is keeping it locked up.”

  Eric felt a peculiar, reverberating shock at that. Because it just might be true. “Just start anywhere that feels emotionally in the moment,” Conrad suggested, “the first poem—you’ll write many of them today—could be filled with hatred for crazy critics who hold guns on you—that’s part of life too. Your life anyhow. Just start, Boyle. It doesn’t have to be terribly good. You can edit later, if I see you’re making a real effort. Start! Now! Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty eight . . . twenty seven, twenty six, twenty five, twenty four, twenty three . . .”

  “I don’t even have a word processing program open!”

  “. . . nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen—I’m cocking the gun—”