Unhaunting The Hours

by Peter Sargent

  Balder said, “My profiler doesn’t think the jimmy wants to frame you, because he’s so ballsed up that the idea wouldn’t occur to him. Likely is, he just wants to butcher you. Case studies show that’s what mentally unstable clones do. Damn hormones - I don’t know. Do you follow? So I want him to find you. Trust me. It’s in your best interest. But he doesn’t waste time, so let’s move.”

  “You really think he wants to kill me?”

  “What difference does it make? If all he wants is to borrow your boxers, I’ve still got him. But look, he’s gone to all the trouble to cut himself, because he’s got such and such a dementia. What do you think he wants from you?”

  “Dementia.” I said. “You think it’s genetic?”

  That made Balder stop short. He put his hand over his mouth, the way some people do when they’re thinking of a way to say something unfriendly.

  He said, “It’s usually got a lot do with childhood trauma. Sexual abuse, that kind of thing. I’d shudder to think of who raised him. But do I look like your shrink, George? I’m sorry I can’t help you. I really am. But you’re not very homicidal at the moment – not any more barking mad than the rest of us, at least – so let’s drop it. Time’s wasting, and you can do all the soul searching you want in 48 hours. Now – listen. I had a plan, but now I’ve got a new one – given this.”

  He grabbed the side of my face. He pushed the hair aside, revealing the silver neural connector socket above my ear.

  He said, “I’ll get it checked out to make sure it’s operational. Then we’ll fire it up.”

  I jerked my head away and said, “I didn’t say anything about that.”

  “If you want to live, I’m not sure you’ve got a choice. Trust me, this will work much better than what I had in mind originally.”

  * * * *

  “Where’d you get this guy, Balder?”

  I said, “I’m right here; why not ask me?”

  I was sitting in a tiny windowless room, on a cushy table covered with paper. A doctor had something plugged into me, and he was watching the output on a diagnostic screen. The detective stood across from me.

  “What’s the story?” said Balder, to the doctor.

  “This one jack’s connected to a multiplexer that branches out all across his brain. It’s got tendrils everywhere.” He counted out the connections, “Visual, auditory, olfactory and motor regions of the cortex. And look at this; it’s even got a line into the reticular system. This is a beautiful job; you can send it sensory input and motor output.”

  “And you can wiretap it?” said Balder.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  The doctor said, “Yeah, with this reticular fiber. You’ve just got to figure out the mux code for that pin. Just a moment… here we go. Do you want a look?”

  “Hey!” I grabbed the cord and pulled it out.

  Balder raised his hands and said, “Sorry. But do you mind telling me how you got this done? It must’ve cost a fortune.”

  “Honestly, I don’t remember. The Abderans…”

  “Yeah, the Abderans. I get it. Fine, we’ll talk later. Right now, what I want is a remote transmission from your eyes and ears. This is better than wearing a wire, do you follow? We can even program the transmitter to come on when something interesting happens – you know, ah – when you get fight or flight arousal? So we won’t miss anything.”

  All I said was, “Mm.” I figured they were going to do it anyway, so I let them hook me up to their machine again. I didn’t expect it to hurt as much as it did. They woke up the very thing I was trying to kick, and it was like they lit a fire in my head. I figured that if I ever activated the jack again, all the old images would come rushing back to me. But all I saw were clusters of paint spots and glowing colored strings. It was just like the floaters you see when you squeeze your eyes shut, only with the volume turned up. I figured it was because their machine was a receiver, and so there was nothing for my starved neurons to consume. They gasped and twisted up inside my skull. Then I lost time again.

  I awoke an hour later. The doctor had a tiny device that looked a bit like a plastic pushpin, and he stuck it in the jack. Then he played with my hair a bit, to make sure it covered that transmitter.

  I said, “Did you see anything interesting?”

  There was a silence. Then the doctor said, “Like I said, you’ve got quite a system there. It cost somebody a lot of money.”

  Balder grabbed my shoulder. He looked at me, as if he had something important to say. And then he said, “Do you think you’re ready?”

  “As you’ve said, I don’t have a choice. So you’ll send the SWAT team when that red-headed butcher sinks a knife into me?”

  Balder grinned. “You bet.”

  * * * *

  I declined the ride home, because I wanted to sit on the El train and brood. My good mood was over, just like that. What the hell? I’d split my back in two trying to salvage my life and get something good going again. It was ironic, because I was easy to please. Honestly, I could find happiness just staring at the wall like some kind of Zen Buddhist, if only everyone else possessed the common courtesy to leave me the hell alone.

  “So what’s your problem now, George?” I said.

  My problem was, I’d burned out all of my most useful neurons to get out from under the Cipher’s digital thumb, and then I’d gambled on debt to buy myself an education. But you can’t start a new life when some asshole with a gun and a badge wants to string you up and reprogram you for a suicide mission. And you can’t start a new life when your lost twin wants to carve you up, either. That happiness I’d risked it all for? It seemed a good bet, because I figured I was so insignificant that no one really cared enough to screw with me. Everyone had a chance of winding up somebody’s dinner; the trick was to look less tasty than the rest.

  “Hold on, George.” I breathed. “Don’t lose it. Remember the plan?”

  I hit my fist on the seat. A little boy snapped his head up from a sing-song book; he looked terrified. There were moments when I thought that maybe I kept odd hours because running into your average circadian rhythm types reminded me of how they saw me.

  I had to get a lift that wasn’t Spectrum or a jack-in to Abdera. I went to the grocery store. Now there’s a calming place. It’s clean, bright, and full of food. I just had to forget that it was the same place my twin had struck one day ago. Or maybe I was curious.

  I gathered up my ingredients and headed for the registers. As I stood in line, listening to the beeping bar code scanner, I noticed a big man in a suit yelling at one of the clerks. He stretched his arms and jabbed at the guy with his finger, and I saw a tiny mark on his hand every time the cuffs shook back from it. It was a tattoo, one that I knew I’d seen before. It had me fixed for a moment, until the guy at the register called me up. I filed the scene away in my brain.

  * * * *

  When I reached my apartment, someone red-haired was waiting for me. It was that orange cat I’d displaced from the garbage bin the night before. He looked up at me as if to say that he’d been wondering where I’d been all day. When I opened my door, he trotted inside and sat on my kitchen floor.

  “What is it?” I said. “You think I’m going to feed you?”

  He meowed and waggled his head. I checked the collar. It was Mrs. Brown’s cat. Of course I had to feed him. Who else would? He snapped up the pepperoni I gave him, and reminded me that I better check on his owner. I left the cat in my apartment and walked to the top of the hill. There was a shabby wooden building there, with an old store marquee that read “Berm Shelter”. I walked up the stairs and stopped short. There was Molly, sitting behind the reception desk. While my mind tried to come up with something interesting to say, my brain came up with something stupid to pass the time.

  “I live just down the street.” I paused. “I brought an elderly woman in. Mrs. Brown. I’m a friend of hers, and I wanted to check in on her.”

  Her finger drummed out a nervous beat.<
br />
  She said, “So you brought her in. I was wondering. We haven’t seen her in a couple days.”

  “Oh. So you work here?” Stupid brain. “I come here on Sundays, and I’ve never seen you.”

  “I’m a volunteer. Tuesdays and Fridays. You live down the street?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mrs. Brown usually stays on your street?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess you better go find her.”

  Right; fine. I started to walk out the door, but then Molly called after me.

  “She left some things behind. Maybe you’d like to come get them?”

  I followed her into the basement. It was musty, bounded by the exposed stone foundation. Cots pressed against the walls, but only two were occupied. Old men sat on each, one of them staring at me with glassy eyes, and the other tucked beneath a cap. Between them, there was an empty cot, a folded sweater on its pillow. Molly gestured in that direction and I went to get it. By the time I turned to say thank you, she was gone. I heard her light footsteps going up the rickety wooden stairs.

  There were dark spots on the sweater. I lifted one fold, and saw dried blood inside.

  Then my head buzzed, and I heard a voice coming from somewhere behind my eyes.

  “Shit.” said Balder.

  I said, “I thought this wasn’t on all the time.”

  “I was curious. Now get the hell out of there.”

  I opened the sweater. The entire inside was covered in blood. I looked to my side. One of the old men was nodding off, and had his hat pulled over his face. The other still watched me with that vacant stare.

  “Get out of there.” said Balder. “I’m coming for you.”

  I climbed the stairs, and at the top there was a figure blocking the light. Then the door slammed shut, closing me in pitch darkness. I felt a jab in my side, and I was falling, tumbling over the steps. I think I bruised a bone, when I banged around the corner and collapsed in the basement room. I looked up. The two men were there, still as ever. Then someone pressed my back with a heavy knee.

  “Why don’t you take it back?” said Healing. “You are what you always were, you murderous bastard.”

  Something hard and thin pressed against my back, and my jacket ripped. Then I felt the cold metal from the blade, and he slit my shirt. For the second time in the same day, I thought - what’s this guy going to do to me? Healing dropped a plastic syringe cap on the floor, stuck the needle in my IV, and pushed the plunger. I jerked like a snared fish, but then my muscles relaxed and disappeared. I didn’t even feel it when Healing took his knee off me; I was startled to see his boots in front of my face. He knelt down and pulled Balder’s device out of my head, and inserted something of his own. Then he left.

  My eyes filled with static flakes, and a shape emerged from it, a ghost. It came towards me, with something in its hands. My neck had frozen at an odd angle, tilting the room at a crazy slant. I panicked – my breathing was shallow. My lungs were failing me, seizing up. The stuff we’d used in Abdera was usually just strong enough to lubricate the mind-machine connection, but this was too much. This was something else, something – well, something much worse. Healing hadn’t come here to scare me. That wasn’t the usual juice he put in me. Think. It was something more like – yeah – it was pancuronium bromide. Some of the more hard-core Abderans used it when they believed their minds were ready for the final transfer into the graphene – for passage into immortality. Your body dies when your lungs paralyze, just before your soul departs for the machine.

  Against a snowy background, the silhouette inched closer to me. I rolled my eyes, and I saw a man on the cot. Weren’t there two before? Now there was just one, the one with the glassy eye, and there was that figure close to me, that phantom shimmering in the half-light. It had something heavy in its hands, and it lifted the thing over its head. Then I was out.

  * * * *

  At first it was all black, and I heard a bodiless voice, neither male nor female.

  “Memory front load. Record Hex Prefix Echo Foxtrot 7836 Bravo 1”

  And the memories snapped on in sequence, like a dreams inside a television…

  * * * *

  I could’ve killed him then, but I didn’t. There he was, at the back of that grimy little café, his eyes rolling at the ceiling in a hallucinogenic stupor. I’d stopped short when I first saw him. I knew at once who he was, because fifteen years earlier he was the one leading the chants of my school mates. They came after me, yelling,

  “Georgey has no mommy! Georgey has no daddy!”

  They picked me up and carried me to the thorn bush at the end of the school yard, where they dumped me in it. And now here I was, and the guy was a shrunken core of what he’d been as a child. When I approached him, he lolled his head in my direction, and I knew he recognized me. Maybe for a moment, he thought I might take advantage of his frailty. Or maybe he thought I was a Spectrum-induced ghost from his past. Either way, he held out a hand and offered me the drops I’d paid for, and I took them and left him there.

  * * * *

  “Memory front load. Record Hex Prefix 44 Delta Foxtrot 175 Charlie…”

  The woman with the crew cut held a vile of my semen. She was dressed in a lady’s business suit, but it covered the large shoulders of a man. When she reached forward with her cell phone, her sleeve rode up her arm and revealed a tiny tattoo just above the gold watch. I’d suspected it all along, but now I knew I’d gotten mixed up with organized crime. No matter, this was just a sale. In a few moments, I’d never have to look back. It didn’t occur to me then that the moment might catch up to me whether I looked back or not.

  I said, “Can you tell me where he’ll go?”

  “Do you honestly care?” She said. “Or do you just want to make yourself feel like you do?”

  I paused. Every moment I was with her felt like a weightless free fall. I feared that at some point, I’d fall too far to get out.

  I said, “Just give me the money.”

  I placed my phone on the table next to hers, and she pushed a few keys to transfer credit from one to the other. The screen on my phone registered the new wealth in my account. As I reached for the cell, she put her hand on mine and caressed my fingers, and grinned.

  She said, “If you must know, I think you have been very useful to us.”

  * * * *

  “Memory front load. Record Hex Prefix Bravo 1 Bravo 1 Echo 398…”

  Spectrum might’ve given me fantasies, but not like this. I stood on dock at the harbor. Snow fell hard around me and the wind made my body feel as insubstantial as the air. The sun rose over the ocean. A phantom ship, sails billowing, skirted around modern vessels and approached the shore. Others stood in a half circle behind me. I could move enough to even turn to see them, and a single wire stuck out of my head and trailed away behind my back.

  “This is where we all begin.” said the teacher’s voice. “Waiting for our vessel to transport us.”

  “It looks difficult.” I said.

  “Only because you’re used to the fractured world. But this represents your own mind, revealed to you by the Abdera Cipher. Opening it is only as difficult as mastering your own mind. It’s a challenge, but not impossible.”

  “And immortality?”

  “Each time you go under, you imprint more of your mind on the machine.”

  The images Spectrum gave me had been like dreams, a disheveled pile of unconnected images. For centuries, people had tried to gain insight from hallucinogens, and tell the future with dreams. But they usually ended up like my old school bully, counting the ceiling tiles, hoping the number might add up to something meaningful. As I stood on that barren wharf, that space inside my brain, I knew that Abdera could actually take me somewhere. I could almost feel the Cipher’s presence, giving shape to my tangled thoughts. And unlike Spectrum, which sometimes tormented me with images from the past, Abdera made me feel as though the past didn’t matter. At last, I could forgive myself,
and forget.

  * * * *

  Finally I awoke, with Balder standing on one side of the hospital bed. The pain in all my muscles made me jump.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Two days.”

  “It was Healing.” I said. “It wasn’t my clone that got me; it was Healing.”

  “I know. We’re looking for him.” He shrugged. “Guy lives alone. He used to live with his old man, but he died of cancer some weeks ago. As much as I hate to say it, I sort of understand the hole he’s in.” Balder put up his hands. “Not that I’m making excuses for him. But you know, each one of us is a sad SOB, when it comes to it.”

  Balder was trying to distract me. I wondered if he’d watched the memories my dreams had replayed to me. Then I felt my arm tingling, and when I looked I saw a swarm of tiny red insects crawling on my elbow. I found myself gazing at them, pondering their philosophical meaning. Yes, they seemed to gather into a pattern. They wanted to impart a message, some nugget of buggy wisdom.

  “George?” said Balder.

  I looked up, then back again. They were gone. This was the worst part. Balder’s device, and whatever Healing stuck me with - they aroused all those half-dead neurons that had been tied into Abdera’s server. Only the program wasn’t there, and the neurons called out to a vacuum. That had been what I needed the Spectrum for, especially after I first quit Abdera: I needed something to supply me with images, a whole mythology even. It was like food. Now I was off both Abdera and Spectrum, and these bastards had woken the beast. This wasn’t going to be fun.

  Balder held up a little paper bag.

  “We got the thing he put in your jack. Do you know what this is?”

  I shook my head. “It was all just a mess. It put me out cold.”

  But now I knew. When I left Abdera, I left a piece of myself there. It was a bit like tearing my hair out, and taking pieces of my scalp with it. Healing had retrieved some of the lingering scraps, and forced them back into me. It all came back, all the isolation and torture of my childhood, and the Spectrum habit it drove me too, and finally the day I joined Abdera to chase both demons away. And the single biggest crime of my past, the one that paid for my neural implant, the one I’d thought would ransom me for good. The day I sold my DNA into slavery.