Authors: Matt Ruff
WHEN LOVE FINALLY LET ME GO, I
went down to the street and stood there taking deep breaths until I was sure, absolutely sure, that I was really outside, on the actual Vegas Strip, and not in some ant-farm extension of the Mudgett Suite. What ultimately convinced me wasn’t the air quality so much as the sheer number of tourists bumping past me on the sidewalk: even the organization, I figured, couldn’t afford to hire that many extras.
It was late afternoon.
Which
afternoon was harder to say, but that didn’t matter: I had a job to do. Panopticon had confirmed that John Doyle was in his suite at the Venetian. It was time to pay him a visit. I joined the flow of pedestrians headed north, past the Casino Royale to the fake Doge’s Palace.
The tourist crowd inside the Venetian was salted with Clowns, white-faced Italian mimes and harlequins. None of them made eye contact with me, but I knew they were watching—when I started to follow the hall of shops towards the Grand Canal, a passing mime caught me by the elbow, spun me around, and pushed me back in the direction of the escalator bank. I rode down to the lower level and found the hotel lobby, where a red-
headed bellhop, his long hair combed in a Bozo flip, was waiting to slip me a keycard.
It wasn’t until I’d boarded the elevator that I really let myself think about who I was going to meet. I took out my NC gun and checked, twice, that the dial was on the narcolepsy setting. “Do
not
pick up any other weapons,” I reminded myself.
The elevator arrived on the penthouse floor. I located Doyle’s suite and used the keycard to open the door, stepping through into an entry hall that was larger than most hotel rooms. The walls and ceiling were mirrored and the floor was polished marble, so whichever way I looked I saw infinite Janes holding infinite NC guns that they didn’t dare fire.
I followed the hall to its end, to an enormous sitting room with still more reflective surfaces: another mirror wall; a line of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Strip; assorted glass-and marble-topped tables and cabinets. Here, though, my gaze was drawn to the body on the floor, the blood fanning out from it in all directions already beginning to dry to a dull finish.
John Doyle’s throat had been slit, and his face, palms, and chest all bore slashing cuts. His legs were curled under him, like he’d been on his knees and flopped over backwards. The thought that he’d died begging for mercy didn’t exactly break my heart, but this was obviously a problem as far as interrogating him was concerned.
As I dug in my pocket for my comm unit, I sensed movement in the room. I looked up and saw what seemed like an optical illusion reflected in the mirror wall: there I was, standing over Doyle’s corpse, while above and slightly behind me a second Jane extended upside-down from the ceiling. I turned and raised my head; sure enough, there was the bad Jane, standing on the ceiling with her hair and jacket dangling
up,
like
gravity was reversed just for her. “Hello again,” she said, and while I was still trying to make sense of this, she reached down, grabbed my head with both hands, and gave it a sharp twist.
I woke up paralyzed in a chair, facing the mirror wall. Doyle’s body was at my feet, and my NC gun was on a table to my right, within easy reach, if only I could reach. The bad Jane was behind me, standing on the floor now like a normal person, only not normal: as I watched her in the mirror, she kept shimmering, disappearing, and reappearing, just as she had in the diner parking lot.
“How’s the neck?” she said, solidifying long enough to lay a cool hand against my jugular. “I hope I didn’t overdo it. Phil would be pissed if I did any permanent damage.”
I couldn’t reach, but I could talk: “What the fuck are you?”
“What, you don’t recognize your evil twin? Or do you mean this?” She winked, and winked out. Her voice came from thin air: “It’s the drugs, Jane.”
“You drugged me?”
“Not you, genius. Me.” She was back, crouched behind me with her chin propped on my shoulder. “Altered-state theory, Jane. Remember?”
I remembered.
Altered-state theory, that was a Berkeley thing. She must have gone there too. Small world.
What is altered-state theory?
This stupid acidhead idea about the relationship between consciousness and reality. There was this crazy guy, right, leftover flower child, who used to hang out on campus. He had great dope, and he was willing to share, but it was like the Salvation Army, where before you get the free soup you have to listen to a sermon. So this guy would go on about this theory he had, that any time you altered your perception of reality, there was
a corresponding alteration in the way reality perceived you, or something like that…
Getting stoned changes the laws of physics?
In a nutshell. Which, you don’t have to tell me, is the kind of insane logic that makes people jump off of buildings thinking they can fly. But this guy, he’d spent a lot of time refining his hypotheses, and if you pointed out that gravity doesn’t seem to care how you look at it, he’d say that it wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence, consciousness was obviously more flexible than truth, and so you’d need a big change in perception to produce even a small change in reality. In other words, ordinary drugs weren’t strong enough, usually, to let you do magic. But he claimed to have heard rumors about this other, much more potent class of drugs, called X-drugs. With X-drugs, he said, you really
could
fly, bend time and space, or even go back and undo history.
So the bad Jane—
—was telling me the Troop had access to X-drugs. Which I would have laughed off, if she hadn’t been so busy demonstrating her powers.
Did it occur to you that it really was you who’d been drugged, and that this “demonstration of powers” was simply a trick?
Of course it occurred to me, but the thing is, I didn’t
feel
drugged, I felt sober. Trust me, I know the difference.
I’m sure you do. But by your own account, at this point you were recovering from an overdose.
A
simulated
overdose. I wasn’t—
Simulated, but still…And you’d just been knocked unconscious a second time.
I know all that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t the one who was tripping,
she
was.
Of course, I still tried to deny it: “You’re full of shit! X-drugs don’t exist!”
She laughed, faded out, and phased back in again.
“Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t believe me?” she said. “Or can we get down to business before J.D. here starts to stink?”
“What business? What does Phil want from me?”
“We’ll come to that. But first, check out the painting.”
A portrait of a Renaissance nobleman hung on the wall behind me. The bad Jane angled my head like a camera, aiming it at the portrait’s reflection in the mirror, and zoomed in my perspective until I could make out individual brush strokes. Closer still and I began to see, very faint around the portrait’s eyes, the outline of a pair of lenses.
“Panopticon.”
“Yes,” the bad Jane whispered. “They’re watching. They
think
they’re seeing. They know we can jam their signal, but what they don’t know—Shh! Don’t tell!—is that we can also substitute a
false
signal. Would you like to know what we’re feeding them now?”
My point of view zoomed out again, until I could see the whole mirror wall. It flickered, and suddenly in the reflection John Doyle was alive again, down on his knees in front of me. I had my NC gun leveled at his chest and was forcing him to keep still as I took swipes at him with a knife.
“Ouch!” the bad Jane said, as my reflection made a particularly nasty cut across Doyle’s scalp. “You know, I don’t know what Love’s orders to you were, Jane, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell you to do
this
…”
Unable to take the pain anymore, Doyle tried to pull away. Instead of shooting him, my reflection bent forward and slashed his throat. As blood geysered from the wound, I felt real wetness splash me in the chair.
“Oops!” said the bad Jane. “You really want to stand
behind
the person when you do that…” She clucked her tongue as the vision in the mirror faded. “So what do you suppose Dixon is thinking right now?” As if in an
swer, the elevator dinged off in the distance. “Uh-oh. This can’t be good…” I heard the suite’s outer door burst open. Footsteps echoed in the hall of mirrors. “All right, Jane, you’re on. Think fast.”
She slapped the back of my neck, and I could feel my arms and legs again. I dove for my gun, but by the time I got turned around in the chair she’d disappeared, and I found myself drawing down on a pair of harlequins. They were armed with horns: rifle-length, brass-belled instruments with rubber squeeze-bulbs.
“Put down the weapon, Jane,” the lead harlequin said. Then he clapped a hand to his head and dropped dead of an aneurysm.
“I didn’t do that!” I shouted at the remaining harlequin. Weirdly enough, he believed me. Instead of blasting me with his horn, he pivoted towards the mirror wall.
Then he was dead, too.
The bad Jane’s gun hand extended from a ring of ripples in the mirror glass. “There are more of them on the way,” I heard her say, as the hand withdrew. “You’d better get out of here.”
I tried to find my comm unit, but she’d taken it. “If you can hear me,” I told the nobleman’s portrait, “I didn’t do this!” The nobleman stared back skeptically.
I left the suite and ran to the elevator. When the doors opened on the lobby a minute later, the corpse of Bozo the bellhop fell into the car. I stepped over the body and saw two more harlequins coming for me. I ran the other way.
A flight of stairs brought me up beside the Grand Canal. A gondola floated by, the tourists inside it all staring. Although I’d tucked my NC gun back in my jacket, my hands and face were still covered with John Doyle’s blood spatter. “It’s just ketchup!” I called to them. Hurrying along, I rounded a bend in the canal and came face-to-face with a mime, who immediately drew a hatchet from his belt.
“Wait!” I said. “I surrender!”
The hatchet clipped a lock of my hair as it flew past my head.
“I
surrender,
God damn it!”
The air behind the mime shimmered. The bad Jane reached around with her knife, and the front of the mime’s white blouse turned red.
“You see?” the bad Jane said, as the mime crumpled. “Not a drop on me!”
Wink. Gone again.
And I ran on, past more staring tourists, through a door marked
NO ADMITTANCE
, down another hall and some more stairs, coming out finally on an underground loading dock.
A sports car idled at the dock’s edge. “Get in,” the bad Jane said.
I felt the weight of my NC gun pressing against my ribs. My hand twitched.
“Try it and I’ll leave you here,” she said. “You
don’t
want that.”
Behind me, a door banged open.
“Last chance…”
I got in the car. An ax blade kissed the back bumper as we pulled away.
“Better buckle up,” the bad Jane advised, steering us up a ramp and out onto the Strip. As I clicked my safety belt into place, I heard a squeal of tires and looked back; a subcompact stuffed with Scary Clowns was coming up fast behind us.
The bad Jane saw them too. “All right,” she said. “Let’s play.” She shifted into a higher gear and began zigzagging through the traffic. The subcompact, nimbler than it looked, kept right on our tail. Hatchets started thunking off the sports car’s trunk.
My hand was twitching again. I asked myself:
if
I could get my gun out from under my seatbelt, and
if
I managed to shoot the bad Jane before she shot me or
stabbed me in the neck, and
if
I brought the car to a stop without crashing it, would the Clowns let me live long enough to explain what had really happened?
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” the bad Jane said. The rear windshield exploded, and a hatchet buried itself in the back of her headrest. I screamed; she laughed.
Up ahead, two identical trailer trucks rode side-by-side with an open lane between them. The trucks’ back panels were unmarked, but as we got closer, I saw that their mud flaps were decorated with mandrill faces.
“Pattycake, pattycake,” the bad Jane said, and flashed her high beams. The trucks began drifting towards each other. The bad Jane floored the accelerator and zipped through the narrowing gap; when the Clown car tried to follow, the trucks swerved aside, causing their trailers to swing together like clapping hands. The subcompact was caught and crushed.
That took care of the pursuit, but not the threat of looming death: the sports car was doing like a hundred and ten, and the light at the approaching intersection had just turned yellow. “What do you think?” the bad Jane asked me. “Can we make it?” Laughing hysterically, she took her hands off the steering wheel. The light turned red. I covered my eyes.
When the car jerked sharply to the right I was sure we’d been hit. The seatbelt cut into my waist and chest; the shift in g-forces combined with a sudden loss of friction was the cue that we’d left the ground and were tumbling through space. I braced myself for a final impact that never came.
Slowly the car leveled out. There was a light jolt as the tires reestablished contact with the road, and our speed began to drop back into a saner range. The blare of horns had already faded, leaving only the purr of the motor and the steady rush of air through the broken back window.
When I pried my hands from my face, we were out
in the desert under a starry sky. The lights of Vegas and the last rays of sunset were just a glow on the horizon behind us. The bad Jane wore the satisfied smile of someone who’s just had amazing sex.
“Evil,” she said, in answer to my stare, “is just
so
much cooler than even you know.”
The road we were on led to a ramshackle house that stood alone in the middle of the wasteland. The bad Jane parked the car and got out. By the time I staggered from the passenger side, she was at the front door with her back to me, which would have been a perfect opportunity if my NC gun hadn’t disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, without bothering to turn around. “I’m a little too tapped out to play hide-and-seek right now, but if you give me a chance to recharge, I’ll be happy to go again.”