Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (44 page)

“Yeah. Some of them near-miss wannabes like Myron Stalnaker,” said Nolan.

“I’ve sure seen my share of them,” Clayton continued. “I’ve seen them in banks, in judges’ chambers, in doctors’ offices. These guys put on a mask every day, they play a role, they spend minute after minute of every single day
acting
like they’re in control of their destinies—and other people’s destinies.”

“Surgeons, college professors, stockbrokers, CPAs, airline pilots, politicians, celebrities,” suggested Gusfield thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” Clayton agreed. “We’re not talking about short-order cooks and construction workers and garbage men and cleaning ladies—people who can curse when they fall down the stairs, who rush out to the bars after work, who make fools of themselves whenever they feel like it, who openly
admit
their helplessness in the face of real-world stupidities. We’re talking about people who’ve got a lot invested in appearance. And who don’t really have a life.”

“Christ,” Pritchard groaned. “That profile fits just about all the subscribers to our site.”

“I imagine so,” Gusfield replied. “And for the record, that profile fits
me
pretty well, too.”

Then Nolan remembered something. “On the plane, you mentioned some sort of condition where people don’t experience their own feelings,” Nolan said.

“Alexithymia,” Gusfield said.

“Is that what we’re dealing with here?”

“It must be. People who have no idea what their own feelings really are—probably with deep anger, even fury. It’s not like they’re
repressing
it. They just don’t
experience
it. Their bodies undergo all the stress of anger and fury, but their minds never get the message. They don’t know how to experience it, much less express it. Auggie fills a terrible void in these people’s lives by being playful, angry, uninhibited, powerful, even godlike. He’s the self they all wish they had. He’s more real to them than
they
are.”

It seemed clearer and clearer to Nolan by the minute.

They’re the White Clown. That’s what they all are. The clown who wields or imagines that he wields authority. Pierrot, he’s sometimes called—Auggie’s eternal nemesis. And Auggie’s ultimate victory over Pierrot is simply to absorb him. And when a Pierrot refuses to become absorbed—that’s when he gets killed.

“Of course, it could be that we’ve all just gone completely off our rockers,” Nolan remarked.

“Could be,” Gusfield agreed. “But we’ve got to remind ourselves that we’re only speculating. Everything we’re saying is pure hypothesis.”

“But what actually takes place when Auggie appears on the computer?” Clayton asked. “What’s really going on when he walks and talks and buys drinks in Ernie’s Bar and stuff?”

“Well, my guess is that one of Auggie’s so called ‘cells’ is at Auggie’s controls,” Gusfield said. “Like the one just a few moments ago. That cell was sitting at his computer keyboard, punching in commands, typing in dialogue, just like other Insomnimania users do with their animated alters. But this person—this cell—experienced a kind of dissociative symbiosis with Auggie, had the feeling of actually
being
Auggie.”

“But up until now, you’ve been talking about Auggie as a
collective
consciousness,” Clayton continued. “And now you’re talking like he only has one user.”

“One user at a time,”
Pritchard interjected. “He probably trades off a lot. That’s why we keep picking up different addresses for him—sometimes a couple in one night.”

“And when cells trade off, that doesn’t actually affect Auggie’s personality,” Gusfield added. “Auggie’s
consciousness
is
consistent and seemingly continuous, no matter who’s running him. The cell’s individual personality, however, is almost totally submerged. Myron Stalnaker described just this sort of experience to me. But I’ve got a strong hunch that the cell at the keyboard—the one who’s directing Auggie and speaking his words—is never actually alone. Lots of other cells are watching. And they, too, experience the sensation of
being
Auggie—of performing his actions, of speaking his words.”

“How?” Nolan asked.

“It could be a little like a schizophrenic hallucination,” Gusfield said. “Perhaps, when the other cells see Auggie’s words flash across the screen, they imagine that they hear Auggie actually
saying
them. This sort of hallucination often arises in situations involving sleeplessness and sense deprivation—and after all, your game is specially designed for insomniacs.”

Nolan felt a jolt of recognition. Just a few moments ago, he had found himself whispering both sides of the barroom conversation between Elfie and Auggie—and had experienced an eerie sensation of hearing both voices. The effect had been brought on by exhaustion. It wasn’t hard to imagine this sort of illusion getting out of hand for hard-core insomniacs.

“And when these cells kill people?” Nolan asked.

“From what Myron told me, I would say it’s
Auggie
who actually does the killing.”

“But
why
does Auggie kill people?” Clayton asked.

Gusfield shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “For all I know, we’re all imagining this whole thing.”

Nolan wished they
were
imagining this whole thing. He wished that Auggie was a cult, a conspiracy, a secret society, even a deliberately created artificial intelligence—anything except this mysterious, spontaneously-evolved collective consciousness they were now contemplating. But intuitively, he felt that most or even all of what they were guessing was absolutely true.

“And what about Zoomer?” Pritchard asked. “What’s his role in all this?”

“Zoomer created Auggie, but I doubt that he was ever a part of Auggie,” Gusfield said. “But consciously or unconsciously, Zoomer may have shared all kinds of information with Auggie before Auggie actually ‘left’ him—that is, before Auggie had enough other ‘cells’ to take off on his own.”

“So that might be how Auggie got to be a master hacker,” Pritchard suggested.

“That’s right,” Gusfield said. “Zoomer’s hacking skills have long since become absorbed into Auggie—have become the collective abilities of Auggie as a whole.”

“And that’s how Myron Stalnaker, who doesn’t know how to knit, made a ski mask when he was Auggie,” Nolan suggested.

“Exactly,” Gusfield said. “Somewhere, one of the cells knows how to knit. Therefore,
Auggie
knows how to knit.”

Clayton shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “You said you wanted to avoid supernatural explanations, and that sounds pretty spooky to me.”

“Listen, we’re talking about a kind of inversion of multiple personality disorder,” Gusfield said insistently. “Instead of one body containing a lot of personalities, a lot of bodies add up to one big personality. And far stranger things than this happen in MPD cases. Different personalities living in the same body can require different eyeglass prescriptions, experience different allergies, have different IQs, display different degrees of physical strength—and researchers still don’t understand why. Believe me, some of the psychiatric literature on dissociation makes a lot of our craziest ideas sound downright mundane. I’m convinced that there are physical, causal explanations for everything we’re suggesting, but it may be a hell of a long time before we know what they are.”

Everybody in the room was quiet for a moment.

“How many cells do you think we’re dealing with?” Pritchard asked at last.

“I don’t know,” Gusfield said. “How many people are members?”

“About fifty thousand.”

“And how many phone numbers have you collected among Auggie’s users?”

“Six, I guess. No, seven including today.”

Gusfield shrugged. “Then I’d say it’s somewhere between seven cells and fifty thousand cells. Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah,” Pritchard grumbled. “Thanks a bunch.”

Gusfield shook his head. “One thing really worries me,” he said. “We just heard—or read—Auggie mention a place called ‘the Basement.’ That sounds to me like some kind of space or setting or stage where Auggie’s cells may ritually congregate—like the ‘spot’ some MPD patients describe, where their personalities take turns controlling the body. This would be the place where all the cells merge together, where they
become
Auggie.”

Pritchard almost roared with outrage.

“You mean another fucking room?” he cried. “Are you telling me this bastard’s hacked into our system and smuggled his own room into our maze? One we can’t even see?”

“That’s my guess,” Gusfield said. “And finding it is our best hope of stopping Auggie. It may be our only hope—short of shutting down your entire site.”

“We’ll find it,” Pritchard said furiously. “Don’t worry, we’ll make goddamn sure of finding it. Nobody fucks with my network behind my back.”

*

“Eternal,” Elfie said, her high, delicate voice sounding faint and barely audible over the roaring of the waves. “I can’t comprehend what it means to be eternal. I just can’t grasp it.”

“No, but you shall,” said Auggie. “You shall very soon.” Auggie leaned closer to her. “You see, eternity is beginning at this very moment. Eternity is always quite simply
now
—and it continues afterwards forever. And so it should be easy to understand that I have been here throughout all eternity.”

Elfie laughed.

“For that matter, then, so have I,” Elfie said.

“Indeed you have, my dear,” Auggie said, laughing, too.

“Then why do I find myself ignorant of so many different things?” Elfie asked ruefully.

“For example?” Auggie inquired.

“For example,” Elfie replied, pointing to the thin clouds floating across the sun in the center of the screen, “what are those clouds called?”

“Stratocumulus,” Auggie said, matter-of-factly.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Then I owe somebody ten bucks,” Elfie said sadly.

“Your friend Renee?”

“Yes.”

“And do you hate me for having killed her?” Auggie asked.

Marianne remembered what Evan had said to her when he realized that she was actually leaving him.

Evan had asked, “Why do you hate me?”

Marianne had told him that she didn’t hate him, that she couldn’t hate anybody.

“That’s why you can’t love me,” Evan had said. “You can’t really love unless you can also hate.”

Evan had made her believe it at the time.

“I don’t hate you,” Elfie told Auggie. “I don’t know why. I think I want to hate you. But I can’t.”

Auggie shrugged. “Well, hate me if you want to,” he said. “Hate me if you think you should. Me, I hate people all the time. I try to run the gamut of the passions—hatred, fear, laughter, ecstasy, the emotional works.”

“Can you also love?” Elfie asked Auggie.

Auggie paused for a moment.

“Yes,” Auggie said sincerely.

“My husband said I didn’t know how to love,” Elfie said.

“Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“You never had a husband, Elfie.”

“Yes, I did. His name was Evan.”

“No,” Auggie said. “Your
simulation
had a husband.
Marianne Hedison
had a husband.”

Marianne felt a chill of fear.

My name. He knows
my name. What else does he know about me?

Auggie shook his head sadly.

“You cling to your illusions too strongly, Elfie,” Auggie said. “You really must give up this idea that you and Marianne are one and the same. You are perfect. She is not. She is a figment of your imagination, a simulation—a manifestation of Pierrot, the White Clown.”

“The White Clown?”

“Yes, the White Clown, with his vain presumption of perfection, authority, good sense. Look at them all, Elfie—all your simulations, the creatures of your imaginings, the ones you call Evan, Renee, Nolan, Clayton, Stephen. Look, and you will see that their appearances are all the same—that their faces and their gowns are all white, and that their haughty brows and their cold lips are thinly painted black or red. Look, and you will see that they are ghosts. I know you believe me to be a murderer, dear Elfie. But how is it possible to kill a ghost?”

“All the same, I care about them,” said Elfie. Marianne felt tears welling up and falling, falling, falling from her eyes—but she couldn’t tell if they were rolling down her own cheeks or Elfie’s.

Auggie paused for a moment, staring deeply into Elfie’s eyes.

“Don’t let them hold you back,” Auggie said, caressing Elfie’s hand. “We are perfect creatures, you and I—beings made from pure information. You, I, this beach scene, our whole multifaceted, multifarious world, are all comprised of a single, eternal stream of ons and offs—a stream constantly shaping itself into a hundred billion thoughts and shapes and entities. Isn’t it flawless? Isn’t it beautiful?”

Elfie was now raptly staring at Auggie’s beautiful, joyous face through her own eyes, not Marianne’s. She searched her mind for some sign of Marianne, searched behind her eyes for Marianne’s presence, for Marianne’s guidance, but Marianne had disappeared into some distant part of her imaginings. Marianne was a ghost of her memory.

The scene flickered wildly. For a split second, nothing was visible except a blazing white seagull flying jerkily across a field of blackness. Then the beach and the ocean fleetingly reappeared, leaving black cut-out spaces where Auggie and the seagull ought to have been. At last, Auggie reappeared, fluttering and threatening to disappear into the depths of a waning vertical hold.

“I’m frightened,” Elfie said.

“Don’t be,” Auggie said comfortingly.

“I’m about to lose you.”

“No. You’re about to
become
me.”

Auggie winked and fluttered into increasing invisibility. Explosions of blackness and light filled Elfie’s vision as Auggie became less and less perceptible.

“You know the words, don’t
you?” Auggie asked.

“The words?” whispered Elfie.

“The words that will bring us together.”

“Yes, I know the words.”

“Then say them with me,” Auggie commanded.