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They took Marilyn and gutshot me. Here’s exactly what happened, Dannyboy, I’m
sorry I haven’t said a word until now. For the past six months, I’ve been spending my
weekends in a warehouse in Virginia in the employ of a global consortium constructing
a means of transmitting data right through the air. Into your head, like. The Internet,
via radio waves. But last Saturday, there was an accident. Joel, this guy I work with, got a
blast of the stuff in the wrong way. The entire Motown catalogue piped directly into his
sinus cavity in under three seconds. It deranged him. He lunged at Dean, right for his
neck. I tried to pull him off but he swatted me into the wall, then went back to throttling
Dean. I brought a chair down on his head, which turned into a bloody mess on the floor.
Dean’s face was about the pinkest color I’ve ever seen and he was making these sad little
gasps. I think Dean and I caught some backlash from that Motown. It was hard to think.
But we were moving in time, even standing there. And my judgment went all funny.
It seemed like a fine idea to loadup every note Pink Floyd ever recorded and
fire them all into Dean’s right ear. Pupils ballooned, he writhed around on the floor, the
strangest smile on his face.
Of course, the junta’s cameras were recording all of this. I grabbed my laptop
and Dean’s too. He had the master copy of the source code. I tucked the soundgun into
the bag next to the Macs, then on second thought pulled it out and uploaded the rise and
fall of the Roman Empire. Didn’t need to use it on the guards downstairs, they waved
me by like always, no problem. Fired up the Chevy and drove around, wondering why.
Stopped at some crap bar and had two shots of whiskey, fingering the soundgun in my
jacket pocket the entire time, trying to imagine what it would be like to mainline all that
Caesar, the crest of power ascending up and out, across the known world. Got out of
there, had to keep moving. Watched the bar burn down on the news that night in my
crappy motel room, they’d missed me by minutes. I was holed up with a warm Mexican
beer in my left hand and the gun in my right, heart pounding every time someone walked
by outside my locked door. Miserable night.
Sunday. I took the train to New York, refining my facility with the code for the
soundgun on the way. Twisted up cocktails of contradictory images calculated to chasm
synapses. I caught a cab outside Grand Central to the main offices of my weekend
bosses. Had figured out how to program up to nine sequences at a time, more than
enough for the four guards on the first floor. Except there was only a girl there, I took
her for a secretary at first. Damn resourceful though, she managed to whip a mirror out
of nowhere and refract the light right back at me, mountainous terabyte waves surging
over me. I was pure bronze, the embodiment of Hermes, cast in what would come to be
known as 481 B.C. by the Greek sculptor Antenor and carried away the following year by
Xerxes, found in Susa with no face over two-hundred and fifty years later by Alexander,
all that time rushing by roaring loud in my ears.
Woke up to find my wrists duct-taped together and the soundgun in my face.
The girl was short, not more than five-six and looked Mexican or maybe Indian. She
raised an eyebrow and asked what the ammo was. Didn’t believe me when I told her
and pulled the trigger again, shot me up with tumbling layers of anomic Philip Kindred
Dick, I was the thirteen year old boy trapped in the recurring dream, forever returning
to the bookstore in search of the issue of Astounding Stories containing The Empire
Never Ended and The Secrets of the Universe interspersed with his 2-3-74 visions, the
intricate laser webbing binding everything in impossible fractal patterns occasionally
coalescing into Christ or Rome or whatever overmind was running things before
focusing back into the girl, who said her name was Cola, and we had to go out the back
because someone was banging on the door, two men in suits, they made it around to the
alley just as we were coming down the fire escape and it was here that I thought of you,
how funny you’d find this, our adolescent feud over whether or not everything is bound
by a single purpose or just a random mass of coincidence erupting through the pores of
fate, it certainly seemed at that point that there was some intelligence driving everything
who had set its sights on me and was laughing, all the old seventies cop shows we used
to mainline late at night, of course by then my thought processes were compromised by
injections of lightdata and the whole world had accelerated into a blinding whirly rush,
they shot at us and Cola replied with a dagger, hit one in the throat, blood gushing, air
escaping from his neck like a deflating balloon, no chance for last word profundities.
The other one kept shooting at us, but we made it down the stairs and in through the
sliding doors of the train in time to leave him behind.
Cola tried to explain to me what was going on but she kept turning into a cartoon,
her silhouette wouldn’t stay the same and I didn’t believe her anyway, the ground giving
way beneath my feet, sidewalk made out of trampoline. Next, we were in my living
room and she was telling the whole story to Marilyn, but her words just hung in the
air, molasses in zero gravity. A chiming rang out, the door, tried to keep my wife from
answering but no matter what I told my body, it stayed immobile. Surprised to see
Vincennes and Norris from work walk in the living room, the story they told Marilyn
was different than Cola’s, Vincennes sounded like bugs chattering, I kept wondering why
no one could understand what I was saying or thinking, then the chattering started to
make sense, they told her all about me stealing the gun and going up to New York and
Cola made some allegations that didn’t sound accurate and Marilyn started losing her
mind, flailing around just as my legs started working and of course I went to her aid, but
that was when Norris shot me in my right side with ammunition measured in calibers
not bits. I passed out and woke up alone on this carpet in a warm puddle.
Was still able to get remote access to my laptop from my desktop terminal and
wiped all the software on it, most of it was backed up on Dean’s but without my hard
drive, it’ll take them weeks to guess the missing code. I’ve spent the past two hours
zipping every autobiographical personality algorithm I ever wrote into a compressed
drive that the gun should be able to read, if you can ever find it. I don’t know if I was
having a waking dream or just hallucinating news footage a few minutes ago but seems
like it’s that statue’s fault, the missing one of Hermes, apparently some genius robot
designer built an android of Philip K. Dick but left the head in the overhead bin of a
connecting flight because he was so tired and delirious when he woke up. The airline
found it in Las Vegas and put it on the next plane to LA but it’s gone missing. I don’t
trust that artificial intelligence, full of unpublished novels. I can’t help thinking that the
combination of that head atop that statue is the mastermind of my recent troubles,
that has been manipulating me all this time, Hired me for the weekend job in the first
place, all that. But desperation breeds innovation and I’ve got as much of my personality
attached to this e-mail as I can code so all you have to do to get your brother back is
somehow find that gun and fire it at a likely candidate of your choosing, someone fairly
attractive if possible, but watch out for that head and that statue, especially if one’s
mounted atop the other, I’m positive this is their fault. Better send this while I’m still
able. Maybe if the datastream mutates, I’ll wind up being the force that binds everything
together and prove you right after all this time.
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