by Dan Simmons
Carol did not seem to notice her son’s reaction. Her own gaze was turned inward as it usually was these days.
We’re all on flashback even when we’re not on flashback, thought Robert. He felt a shudder of vertigo as he often did when he thought about his own flashback experiences, followed by a worse shudder of revulsion at himself. At his family. At America.
“Something wrong, Dad?” asked Carol, looking up from her coffee. Her eyes still had that myopic, distracted look, but she was also frowning in concern.
“No,” said the old man, lifting a hand in Val’s direction, “I just…” He stopped himself. While he had been lost in his own reverie, his grandson had left the table. Robert did not even know if he had gone upstairs or out the door. “Nothing,” he said to his daughter, patting her hand clumsily. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Years ago they had caged in the pedestrian overpass to prevent people from dropping heavy objects or themselves on the twelve lanes of northbound traffic below, then—when highway shootings had first reached epidemic proportions in the mid-nineties—they had covered it with a thick Plexiglas that was supposed to stop bullets. It didn’t—as evidenced by dozens of bullet holes, both outgoing and incoming, that fractured the warped plastic all along the tunnel—but it threw off the shooters’ aim enough that they used other snipers’ perches above the Interstate. By then, of course, most of the public figured that anyone driving in an unarmored car deserved a bullet in the ear.
In Val’s lifetime, however, wonky vets from the Asian and South American mercenary wars were beginning to drop fragmentation and other types of grenades from the overpasses, and pedestrian bridges were caged-over and sealed up again, this time with welded steel doors at either end to keep people off them altogether. Gangs blew holes in the steel plates and used the long, dark overpasses as meeting places and their own private flashback parlors. It was very dark in there and Val had to use his VR shades as nightvision goggles to find Coyne, Gene D., and Sully among the dark shapes huddling, nodding, selling, and buying.
Val pulled the .32 from his waistband and held it in the palm of his hand.
“Couldn’t do it, huh?” Coyne said softly, picking the pistol up. He was a radiant green figure holding a pulsing white tube in Val’s amplified night vision.
Val opened his mouth to explain about the kid and the fag cops, but then he said nothing.
Sully made a disgusted sound but the green figure that was Coyne shoved him into silence. Coyne handed the pistol back. “Keep it, Val my man. Like whatshername, the Southern bitch, said in the old movie, ‘Tomorrow’s another day.’”
Val blinked. Someone had lit a cigarette down the bridge-tunnel and that end of the span blazed in white light. A dozen voices shouted at the figure to douse the fucking light.
“Meanwhile,” said Gene D., throwing his arm around Val, “we scored some primo flash…”
Val blinked again. “Flash is just flash, asshole.”
Sully snorted again and Coyne put his hand on Val’s back. Val felt the contact with Coyne and Gene D. pulling him in, like a noose around his chest that made it difficult to breathe.
“Flash is just flash,” whispered Coyne, “but this flash has like, I dunno, some sort of pheremone-exciter shit in it, so if you’re flashing, like, fucking somebody like that time we did the Spanic bitch, you come harder than you did the first time.”
Val nodded although he did not understand. Flash was flash. How could you experience more than you experienced the first time? Also, he had never had an orgasm except when he played with himself, and he did not like to flash on that. But he nodded and let Gene D. and Coyne pull him down to where a bit of light through one of the cracks in the blacked-out Plexiglas spilled across the grimy concrete as bright as liquid metal.
Gene D. produced four one-hour vials. Val tried to think of what he could flash on. Most of his memories were miserable. He would never tell the others, but often—when he said he was flashing on the time they fucked the Spanic kid—he was actually replaying a Little League game he had played when he was eight. That was the first and last year he had played, after finding that none of the guys thought baseball was cool. As far as Val knew, no one played Little League anymore…no money. The fucking Reagandebt. Sending the fucking army to fight the fucking Jap wars for them wasn’t coming close to paying the interest on the fucking Jap loans.
Val didn’t understand any of it. He just knew that everything was shit. He started to take the sixty-minute vial from Coyne, but the bigger boy pulled him close and whispered huskily in his ear, “Tomorrow, Val my man, we’ll go with you and help you get your trash so you can flash…”
Val nodded, pulled away, and lifted the tube to his nose. The Little League game didn’t come when he tried to visualize it. Instead, he found himself remembering a time when he was a tiny little shit—three, maybe two—and his mother had held him on her lap to read to him. He thought it was before she began doing flash. He had fallen asleep on her lap, but not so asleep that he couldn’t hear the words as she read, slow and steady.
Feeling like the world’s greatest wuss and pussy wonk, Val held the memory and broke the tab on the flashback vial.
Robert did not like interactive TV, but when Carol was in bed and when he was sure that Val was gone, he brought up CNN/LA and accessed the anchorwoman persona. The attractive Eurasian face smiled at him. “Yes, Mr. Hearns?”
“The shooting on tonight’s news,” he said brusquely. He did not like talking to generated personas.
The anchor smiled more broadly. “Which segment, Mr. Hearns? The news is aired hourly and…”
“Seven P.M.,” said Robert and forced himself to relax a bit. “Please,” he said, feeling foolish.
The anchor beamed at him. “Would that be the shooting of Mr. Colfax, Mr. Mendez, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Kettering, the Richardson infant, Ms. Dozois, the unidentified Haitian, Mr. Ing, Ms. Lopato…”
“Lopato,” said Robert. “The Lopato shooting.”
“Yes,” said the anchor, disappearing into a box as the video lead-in to the story filled the screen. “Do you wish the original narration?”
“No.”
“Augmented narration?”
“No. No sound at all.”
“Realtime or slo-mo?”
Robert hesitated. “Slow motion, please.”
The gun-camera video began rolling. The CNN/LA logo was superimposed on the lower right corner of the frame. Robert watched the rough-cut jumble of images: first the victim, a woman a few years younger than Robert lying in a pool of her own blood, her glasses nearby, then the gun camera swinging up, a slo-mo jostling of people pointing toward the body and then toward a running figure. The camera zoomed on the figure and targeting data filled the right column of the image. Robert realized that he was seeing what the cops had seen through their telem peepers. It was obvious that the running boy was no more than twelve or thirteen.
Then a fire-confirm light flashed in the right column and the cloud of flechettes, easily visible in the extreme slow motion, expanded like a halo of ice crystals until it all but obscured the running child.
The boy’s coat exploded into a corona of leather shreds.
The back of the boy’s head expanded in a slow-motion unfurling of hair, scalp, skull, and brain.
The bit of skull on the trunk lid, thought Robert, feeling himself slide away from realtime. He forced himself back.
The boy tumbled, the back of his head gone, flechettes quite visible in his bulging eyes and protruded face; tumbled, slid under a rope railing, and was gone. The gun-camera image froze and faded. The CNN/LA logo expanded until it filled the frame and a copyright violation warning flashed across the screen. A second later the anchorperson persona was back, waiting patiently.
“Run it again,” Robert said. His voice was thick.
This time he froze the image five seconds into it, after the gun-camera lens had left the victim but before it had picked up the fleeing boy. “Go…stop agai
n,” said Robert.
The frozen tableau showed two or three adults pointing. One woman had her mouth open in a shout or scream. It was the shadow-within-a-shadow in an alley between two tents that interested Robert.
“Zoom there…no, up…there. Left a bit. Stop. Good. Now can you enhance that?”
“Of course, Mr. Hearns,” came the anchor’s simulated voice.
As the pixels began rearranging themselves into what might be a human shape, sharpening the white blur into a recognizable face, Robert thought, Jesus, if they’d only had this in 1963 instead of the Zapruder film…
Then all such thoughts fled as the image resolved itself.
“Do you wish further augmentation?” asked the smooth voice. “There will be an additional interactive charge.”
“No,” said Robert. “Just hold this a minute.” He was, of course, looking at his grandson’s face. Val was holding a pistol with the barrel vertical, only inches from his own face. The boy’s expression of horror and fascination somewhat resembled his grandfather’s.
Robert heard the tapping of the rear door’s combination lock and the chime of the cheap security system’s approval. Val came in through the kitchen.
“Off,” said Robert and the screen snapped to black.
Val was back in his own bed by 2 A.M. but the pressure and tension of the day did not let him sleep. He found two twenty-minute vials and flashed on the first one.
He is four and it is his birthday. His daddy still lives with them. They are in the apartment near the Lankershim Reconstruction Projects and Val’s friend from across the corridor, five-year-old Samuel, is having dinner with them because it is a special day.
Val is in the tall wooden chair that his mommy bought at the unpainted furniture place and decorated with painted animal designs just for him after he had outgrown his highchair. Even though he is four, he loves the tall chair that allows him to look across the table eye to eye with his daddy. Now the table is littered with the remains of his special dinner…the crusts of hot dog rolls, bits of red Jell-O, random potato chips…but his daddy’s plate is clean, his chair empty.
The door opens and Grandpa and Grandma come in. Val is struck, as he always is during this replay, not only by the fact that his grandmother is alive and unravaged by cancer, but at how alive and young his grandfather appears, even though this flash is only a little more than a decade in the past. Time sure kicks the shit out of people, he thinks, not for the first time.
“Happy Birthday, kiddo,” says his suddenly-young grandfather, ruffling his hair. His grandmother bends to kiss him and he is surrounded by the scent of fresh violets. Feeling his younger self’s happiness and eagerness to get on to the presents, the watching Val knows that the back of his grandfather’s closet, where the old man keeps a few of her dresses, still holds a bit of that scent. He wonders if his grandfather ever lifts the dresses to his face to recapture that scent. Sometimes, when the old man is out on a trip to his flashback motel, Val does that.
Val watches his own stubby hands play with the party favors and listens to Samuel’s giggles. Hardly noticed at the time but all too clear to Val now is the hurried kitchen conversation that he catches bits of…
“He promised to be home on time tonight,” his mommy is saying. “He promised.”
“Why don’t we serve the cake anyway,” his grandma says, her voice as soothing as a remembered touch or texture.
“His own boy’s birthday party…” Robert’s voice is heavy with anger.
“Let’s serve the cake!” his grandma says brightly.
Val and Samuel pause in their play as the lights go out. Suddenly the world is illuminated by a richer, deeper light as his mother carries in the cake with four huge candles on it. Everyone is singing “Happy Birthday.”
Val is old enough to understand that if he makes a wish and blows all the candles out successfully, the wish will come true. His mother has not said it, but he suspects that if he does not blow all of them out on the first try the wish will fail.
He blows them out. Samuel and Grandpa and Grandma and Mommy cheer. They have all just started to cut the cake for him when the door opens and Daddy sweeps into the room, his face flushed and jacket flapping. He is carrying a large stuffed bear with a red ribbon around the neck.
Little Val does not look at the gift. He glances at Mommy’s face and even the watching fifteen-year-old Val shares the fear of what he may find there.
It is all right. Mommy’s reaction is not one of anger but of relief. Her eyes sparkle as if the candles had been lighted again.
Daddy kisses him and lifts him and puts his other arm around Mommy and the three of them hug there above the littered table, with Grandma and Grandpa singing “Happy Birthday” again as if this time is for real, and Samuel wiggling to get at the toys and play with him, and Daddy’s arm strong around him and the tears on Mommy’s cheeks being all right because she is happy, they all are happy, and little Val knows that wishes do come true and he sets his cheek against Daddy’s neck and smells the sweet blend of aftershave and outdoor air there, and Grandpa is saying…
Val came out of the twenty-minute replay to the smell of festering garbage and the sound of sirens. Small-arms fire rattled somewhere in the neighborhood. Police choppers thudded overhead and their searchlights stabbed white through the darkness and spilled through his window like white paint.
Val rolled over and tugged his pillow over his head, trying not to think about anything, trying to recapture the flashback and incorporate it into his dreams.
His face struck something hard and cold. The pistol.
Val sat up with a stab of nausea, held the loaded semiautomatic a moment, then tucked it under his mattress with the Penthouse magazines. His heart was pounding. He pulled the second twenty-minute vial from his jeans pocket on the floor and broke the tab—almost too quickly—he had to rush to concentrate on the memory image so the temprolin could access the right neurons, stimulate the proper synapses.
He is four and it is his birthday. Samuel is yelling, his mother is preparing the cake in the kitchen, and the table is a mess of half-eaten hot dog rolls, red Jell-O, and potato chips.
The door chimes and Grandpa and Grandma sweep in…
Carol is watching Danny come out of the blue water and run toward her up the white-sand beach. He looks handsome, lean, tanned from their five days in the sun, and is grinning at her. He throws himself down on the blanket next to her and Carol feels her heart seem to swell with love and happiness. She takes his wet fingers. “Danny, tell me that we’ll always love each other.”
“We’ll always love each other,” he says quickly, only this time, locked away in herself, the more observing Carol sees the quick glance toward her under long lashes, the glance that might have been appraising or slightly mocking.
At the time, Carol feels only happiness. She rolls onto her back, letting the fierce Bermuda sun paint her with heat. Danny has said that they are exempt from worries about the ozone layer and skin cancer on this vacation and Carol has happily agreed. She sets her fingers against the small of Danny’s back, feeling the droplets of sea water drying there. Playfully, only slightly possessively, she runs her fingers under the elastic at the back of his trunks. The base of his spine and tops of his buttocks are very cool.
She feels him stir and shift slightly on the blanket. “Want to go up to the room?” he whispers. The beach is almost empty and Carol imagines what it would be like to make love right there in the sunlight.
“In a minute,” she says.
Coasting on the tide of her own sensations, the realtime Carol understands a simple fact: men tend to flashback their favorite sexual incidents—Carol knows this from their conversation—while most women travel back to re-experience times when closeness and happiness were at their peak. This does not mean that she avoids sexual incidents—in a moment she and Danny will go up to their room and the next thirty minutes will be passionate enough for anyone to choose to replay—but the momen
ts that beckon her back through time are the instants like this where her sense of being loved are absolute, her sense of closeness almost as palpable as the heat from the tropical sun overhead.
Carol turns her head and lifts a hand to her face, ostensibly to block the fierce sunlight, but actually to steal a glimpse of Danny’s face so close to hers. His eyes are closed. Beads of water glisten on his lashes. He is smiling slightly.
The bastard brought along a vial of flashback on this trip. He’ll show it to me on the last evening, explain how it works, suggest that we flash back to our first sexual encounters—with someone else! He turned that last night into a sort of double ménage à trois.
Carol tries to stifle these thoughts and her realtime anger as the then-Carol rubs her fingers across her eyes, ostensibly to brush away sand but actually to brush away tears of happiness.
The police officer in the yellow rain slicker is waving at the motorcade and Robert wants to have him fired. Luckily the cop is standing between the workers and the railing, so no one should be able to throw anything. Robert glances to the right at people eating their lunch on the steps of a brick building set right where the road swings left around the grassy plaza toward the railroad overpass. They are waving. Robert sees nothing amiss there and glances back at the approaching railroad bridge.
Go! Now! Get down and run!
He stays on the left running board of the chase car. It is very hot.
“Halfback to base,” their commander, Emory Roberts, radios from the front seat. “Five minutes to destination.”
Robert imagines the destination, the huge merchandise mart where Lancer is scheduled to speak to hundreds of Texas businessmen. The realtime Robert feels his own fatigue in the heat.
