Ashes of Foreverland (16 page)

He took his research to the basement.

There were pictures of Patricia in the basement with a needle protruding from her forehead, Tyler in his basement lab with eyes that hadn't slept for days.

And a photo of them lying in bed, holding hands.

If she didn't know how the story ended—Foreverland kidnapping youth—her heart would ache.

——————————————

A
lex threw the papers on the kitchen table and shuffled through them like gold coins.

The postcard was on the bottom.

She held it up as if it was hard to see. Even under the light, it felt dim. It was a picture of a twelve-year-old boy. He was Hispanic with short black hair, his eyes large and brown. His smile sly and knowing.

The back door slammed, but no one was there.

The room began turning.

She needed water. Dehydration caused room spins. She stood at the sink, downing a tall glass of water when the music began.

It was upstairs.

“Hello?”

It wasn't a radio. It was more bells and tones, something more soothing, like a lullaby.

A crib mobile.

“Samuel?”

She put one foot on the bottom step and the room suddenly turned her toward the couch.

There was a box of crayons on the floor, paper on the end table, but not the papers from the car. These were pulled from a coloring book with bright faces and purple lips and yellow eyes.

She threw herself against the wall and followed it through the kitchen, made it to the back door in time to puke over the railing.

The petunias were a mess.

A car pulled up as she heaved round three, this one squeezing her gut like a wrung towel.

Samuel jumped out. He was by her side for a moment, running inside the house. She sat down and closed her eyes, the acrid taste of vomit in her sinuses.

The Tilt-O-Whirl began to slow.

“What happened?” Samuel put a wet rag on her forehead.

She didn't know, explained the room-spins, the sudden nausea. She thought he was home, that he was upstairs playing...
music
? What the hell happened?

The biomite sync.

She'd been fine all week. Better than fine, in fact. She'd been perfect.

A ten.

When she was ready, when she trusted her body to stand up, she made it inside the house without assistance. The floor didn't spin, the walls didn't turn. She just wanted a warm shower and a nap.

On her way past the dining room table, the papers were neatly stacked. The front room was clean, no coloring book pages scattered on the floor. And no music.

It was later she thought something was missing.

A postcard, or something.

ADMAX Penitentiary, Colorado

T
yler's bed didn't creak, just gently squished under him.

He reached beneath the mattress and stared at the surgical steel needle encased in a tube of gel. He broke the seal—his arthritic hands knobby in the joints, the thin skin spotted—and admired the perfect symmetry of the needle, the silver gleam and dangerous point.

Anticipation wet his mouth.

Pins rolled beneath the mattress, massaging his legs, back and buttocks. He positioned the tip of the needle near the stent. The leathery flesh began to throb. Sometimes, he rammed it into his head and his consciousness would be slung into another dimension.

He kept his eyes open, breathed deep the musty odor of the prison's painted walls and slid it slowly into his forehead. The cold spike sank its fang.

The ceiling swirled into the sky, the walls fell apart.

There was no sensation of travel, no illusion of space.
The needle's kiss.

His reflection looked back from a ticket kiosk. He was wearing khaki pants and a navy blue blazer. He ran his hand through thick wavy hair the color of honey and straightened his open collar, a gold ring glinting in the theatre's lights.

The city smelled like a cleansing rain. There was no exhaust, no trash—just the sterilized version of a perfect society.
A perfect reality.

The usher opened the door.

A few people milled through the lobby in tuxedos and long gowns. Beyond another set of doors, a tenor bellowed opera.

An escort led him to a grand tier box with two seats. Below,
Phantom of the Opera
unfolded. He sat next to Patricia, reached into her lap and took her hand. She held him tightly, her other hand holding a tissue to her chest.

She would sob when it was over.

She always did.

——————————————

P
atricia slid her hand over the brass rail.

The theatre was empty. The crowd had dispersed, leaving in their cars or calling cabs, heading back to their supposed homes. In Patricia's Foreverland, they were just illusions of her own mind, but he often wondered if she replicated them from actual people in the city.

The details of the theatre, the opera singers and the custodians sweeping the stage were flawless. Her ability to absorb these details from the space around her physical body, as it lay in the Institute, and project them into her Foreverland was as uncanny as it was unexplainable. Her mind was an ethereal sponge.

Is the physical world any more legitimate than Foreverland? Under what pretense is physicality the gold standard?

That was the question he begged all of humankind to answer.

“Tyler? Are you listening?”

“I'm sorry, lost in thought. You were saying?”

“I'm concerned.”

“And what are your concerns?”

“Your body, for one. I was looking at the results of your latest physical.”

He didn't want her to worry, frequently hiding the dire conditions he encountered in physical reality, but it was difficult to hide his thoughts or emotions when he came here, where all was on display.

“I want you to consider using the good doctor's new biomite strain. It will stabilize your health, guarantee longevity.”

“It's too much risk.”

“Your health is far too fragile to argue. If you lose your body at the wrong time, then where will I be?”

“I fear government intervention is more to be worried about than my health. Abusing biomites will set off alarms. We don't need the authorities watching us too closely.”

“What about undetectable biomites, the ones Gramm spoke of?”

He shook his head. “You speak of things far more risky. My body is old, yes. There are aches and pains, but it will last as long as we need it to last. And when the time comes, we will cross over into Alessandra's eternal Foreverland. Don't worry yourself, please.”

She drummed her fingers on the brass rail, watching men push brooms across the stage. “Perhaps you should stay here, then. We'll cross over when she's ready.”

She didn't look at him when she said it.

He could feel her loneliness when he was gone. Living in this Foreverland, within her own mind, knowing these were merely reflections of people in the physical world and not actual beings was distressing. No matter what shapes and sizes and colors she looked at, no matter how human they seemed, they were all projections of her mind.

She needs me.

“I can't leave my body,” he said. “Not yet.”

“But she is almost ready.”

“That's not it. I need to be here, in the prison. There are still matters to attend.”

“And Gramm cannot do them?”

He trusted the former chemist, but he was weak. His mind was too open, his taste for biomites too strong. Tyler feared his assistant could be overwhelmed by the wrong person too easily. And that he could not risk.

“Perhaps it's time to abandon the prison,” she said. “It's always been a risk. And now that the Institute is fully functional, there's no reason for you not to come here.”

He cocked his head. “What's really bothering you, dear?”

She wiped her eyes and stuffed the tissue in her purse. Perhaps the opera jarred loose long-held emotions she didn't want to face, or didn't know were there.
There is so much in the subconscious that a thousand lifetimes could not uncover the secrets we keep from ourselves.

“I don't think Alex will sleep,” she said. “There have been too many disruptions.”

“Anomalies.”

“More than anomalies, Tyler. Someone is purposefully enticing her to remember.”

She refused to name him, as if uttering
Reed
would somehow summon him into being.

“She won't remember her past. And even if Reed is behind this, he won't succeed. Her life is perfect, darling. She'll soon forget everything and sleep.”

He floated a thought into this world. Unlike physical reality, a thought here could become a wish that, falling into the right context, was fulfilled. Tyler envisioned a man dressed in black and called him to the stage.

Moments later, a man dressed in black strode across the stage, his face partially obscured by the white mask. The custodians continued sweeping as he lifted an arm and his voice carried into the empty theatre.

“Think of Me”
,
he sang all alone.

It tugged at the emotion welling just beneath Patricia's eyes.

Tyler held out his hand. There was no more talk of biomites and host, no more worry about the future. Everything was going near enough to plan that Tyler pulled her close for the remainder of his stay.

In the grand tier box, they danced.

——————————————

H
e opened his eyes, a concrete ceiling above him, a dull wall beside him. And all the aches and pains, the stiffness of eighty years surrounded him.

He extracted the needle.

It slithered out and left behind an antiseptic sting. Tears involuntarily welled up. He hated to leave her, to come back to this plane. If hell existed, it was in the physical world, not some distant make-believe. He no longer doubted that.

The opera still echoed in his head.

He wiped his eyes. The throbbing continued.

An infection was setting in. Soon, it would alter the function of his brain and, in turn, the quality of his mind. Even if he avoided the needle and went to wireless brain biomites, the infection was already there.

Have I already failed you, dear?

He blinked away the tears. More had pooled against the bridge of his nose. Patricia trusted him. It was her vision to create Foreverland, to build a new reality. She was the one that conceived of it in the very beginning, not him. She knew, long before biomites were ever conceived, that all the minds in the world could be linked, that human singularity was possible, that the illusion of separateness could be dispelled.

And peace would reign.

While astrophysicists searched for new worlds in faraway solar systems, she knew that a new reality was not light-years away, but the distance of a thought.

It's here.
We
are the new reality.
We
are the endless possibilities. We are heaven, we are hell.

And she trusted him to bring her vision to fruition, trusted his technology, trusted him to plug her into the needle first. It nearly killed her. Had it done so, he would surely have taken his own life, not strong enough to bear the guilt, not brave enough to go on without her.

But now there was little sand left in the hourglass for him. Time was the god that meted out each grain with methodic timing and refused to sell more. Time was a cruel god that promised eternity.

But delivered only the past.

His bare foot found the floor. Slowly, he slid his feet into slippers and opened the cell door. Moonlight cast his shadow. He passed a guard holding the elevator open at the end of the hall, and pressed a button on the panel.

Tyler's stomach dropped all the way to the basement.

The smell greeted him.

Sunrise was still hours away. His guards were at home, sleeping next to their spouses. He was alone. If he fell, he would call them. Despite his confidence, he managed to keep the depth of his concern hidden from his bride.

Reed is more than an anomaly.

Tyler went down the hall and put his hand on a metal door. Death and decay slammed into him like a hot cloud, licked his face with a humid tongue.

Tables were lined up.

Their metal edges dull and curved, their surfaces soft—each held a nude male. Tubes ran from their thin arms, trailing over their protruding ribs. Some of them were connected to respirators.

All of them had a needle in their forehead.

A lamp was positioned over each table, exposing each body with the spectrum of sunlight to stimulate vitamin D. They were a much higher form of plants. The bodies were necessary for the mind to exist.

One day that would change.

Tyler idly walked amongst his people. Green lights glowed at the head of each table, splashing the floor with an eerie effect. Some of the indicators were yellow instead of green, indicating stress, whether mental or physical. A few were red.

These were the ones that smelled the worst.

They would need to be disposed of in the furnace like annual flowers that had reached the end of their life cycle and fulfilled their duty.

These were his people. They were willing to send themselves into Foreverland, to sacrifice themselves to create a new reality. They were willing to die for him. Some did so consciously, others he convinced.

The justice system thought they had sentenced Tyler to prison. This was to be his punishment. But he chose to be here. Where else would he find so many lives that didn't matter? Where else would he find so many men that wouldn't be missed?

Men to build the next Foreverland.

——————————————

G
ramm rose from sleep.

His awareness floated to the surface like a hand gently lifted him from the sandy depths, a whisper that commanded he wake. His senses clouded, he nabbed the webbing of flesh between his finger and thumb and twisted until cold flames lanced into his palm.