Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (7 page)

00100 MAZE

Marianne dragged the table closer to the windows. It was a pseudo-period piece with curved rococo legs, and the two flanking chairs displayed characteristics of an earlier but equally elaborate style. She sipped a glass of sparkling water and studied the paintings on the wall—one of shepherds and flocks and storm-bent trees, another of a laughing young woman in a swing that seemed to hang from a climbing rosebush.

What a weird place to hold a design conference. The organizer’s idea of a joke, probably.
Opened during the full frenzy of 1980s ostentation, the Quenton Parks was awkwardly out of style in the more restrained nineties—although no doubt many patrons took a kind of forbidden satisfaction in such opulent surroundings. The place seemed popular enough.

Tonight, the opening speeches of the conference had included all the standard up-and-over bluster about exciting times and new trends in the field. However, the profession’s underlying dilemma was clear—finding ways to design for clients who were currently eager to show that they were
not
trying to impress anybody, and still spend enough to make the designer’s percentage worthwhile.

Marianne had stayed only briefly for the social gathering afterward, where she downed one good sized bourbon, spoke to a couple of familiar faces, absorbed a few bits of gossip, and then slipped away.

People. Too damned many people.

The whole thing seemed stupid and shallow. Marianne wished she had just spent the time with Renee. Santa Barbara had put more distance between them than either of them had expected.

How sad, the distance geography makes.

Of course, the electronic age was supposed to make geography irrelevant.

“Here’s a place where we can do things together no matter
where
we are,” Renee had said. Marianne had joined Insomnimania at Renee’s urging. But the truth was, they hardly ever communicated with each other on the network at all.

Mental memo: Call Renee first thing in the morning. Make plans. Don’t wait.

As for now, Marianne had plenty to do. Since she wanted to work on her current projects in her spare moments, she had brought her portable computer and printer. And to duplicate the luxurious working space she was accustomed to at home, she had rented a large color monitor.

Marianne opened her powerful little computer, which was complete with keyboard, built-in modem, and a small, flat monitor. She hooked it up to the printer and the big monitor, attached the mouse—which she still preferred to a trackball or stylus—and plugged in the power cords. She set the modem controls to turn on the computer if a fax came in or if there was a telephone call that she did not answer. It would take voice-mail messages for her.

There, that will do for an office, at least for a couple of days.

Now it was time to get to work. But at that moment, the stain on the corridor wall flared in her mind again, flashing urgently like the light of an ambulance.

Marianne realized that Insomnimania had been online for quite a while now. Maybe she could do something more effective than make futile phone calls to the police. Maybe she could do a little detective work of her own. In any case, it suddenly seemed impossible to work on her design jobs right now. If Auggie was logged onto Insomnimania, he was only a mouse-click away.

Marianne plugged the modem into the jack provided by the hotel. She felt a fleeting sense of awe that this tiny telephone connection could funnel a single stream of signals—a frail, isolated thread of information—into her machine from a vast multitude of sources. And through feats of electronic sorcery far beyond her comprehension, this one-dimensional succession of ons and offs could be transformed into multidimensional worlds on her computer screen—vivid, tangible
spaces
into which she could step like Alice through the looking glass.

She sat down at the table, turned on her hard disk, and punched a key on the keyboard. The computer leapt to life. She moved the cursor on her desktop to the Insomnimania icon and double-clicked.

*

Lucifer jumped onto Renee’s stomach, purring and beginning to knead her with his claws.

Getting time to give you a trim, big guy?

Normally, Renee would have scolded Lucifer and put him aside, but she was in a slightly masochistic mood and let the fluffy Manx knead and scratch her happily.

It was getting toward eleven, and Renee had just gotten home from a long session in the radio station’s recording studio. She had flopped down among the pillows on the single bed that doubled as her office couch. But she found herself too tired to look through the pile of magazines and newspapers she had stacked up there. She had been taping and editing an installment of her weekly talk show,
Sunday Stew
—an interview with a married couple who bred and sold potbellied pigs to affluent Southern California pet fanciers.

Not the prettiest things, those pigs. Certainly not like miniature horses. Why can’t yuppies get interested in something really exotic—like tiny giraffes?

It wasn’t Renee’s idea of a terrific scoop. But the station manager, a thoroughgoing potbellied pig of the sexist variety, was determined to assign her only the softest subjects. If she wanted to interview activists, politicians, or movers and shakers in the arts and letters, she had to do it on her own time.

Renee had the drive and ambition to do just that, which hadn’t exactly made her popular with the good old boys at the station. She’d once intercepted a memo in which a male employee described her as an “obnoxious broad” and a “pushy bitch” in a single sentence. Someday she hoped to run across another memo that described her as an “out-and-out ball-buster.” Then she’d give herself a medal.

Battling this kind of mentality while also keeping up her schedule was very tiring. With
Sunday Stew,
occasional news stories, and her early morning show that aired live each weekday, Renee put in long hours at the station. She was beginning to worry about turning into a full-scale workaholic. And she was afraid that she was becoming dreary company.

All work and no play …

Indeed, she felt that she had spent the whole couple of hours with Marianne acting like a radio personality—loud, abrasive, and pushy. It was hardly the way to greet a friend after a solid year. But then, how long had it been since she had really
talked
to a friend?

She suddenly wanted Marianne to come back so they could talk again, more pleasantly this time. So Marianne wouldn’t think that Renee had grown into some sort of media monster. They hadn’t found a time in their schedules to get together again during the next couple of days, but they would just have to work something out. Renee wanted a second chance to be more, well, human.

At least I’ll make sure she comes to my open house on Sunday. No excuses. Maybe I ought to call her right now.

But Renee was too tired to talk to anybody. At the same time, she felt sure that if she went to bed, she would certainly not he able to go to sleep.

Insomnia. A lot of it going around. Lots of “Insomnimaniacs.”

From her prone position on her office bed, Renee found herself staring at the blank face of her computer monitor, thinking about turning it on, thinking about logging into Insomnimania. For some reason, that brought to mind an image of her father back in Iowa, dozing in his armchair. Every day he would come in from the fields, eat his dinner in front of the TV, then sit there like a lump until he was fast asleep. Renee also remembered yelling at her mother for buying him a remote-control unit for one of his birthdays.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Renee had exclaimed. “The only exercise the old man ever gets is walking across the room to change channels! He’ll never walk again for the rest of his life!”

“Now, Renee,” her mother had admonished. “He gets plenty of exercise when he’s working.”

“Sure, if you call shifting gears on a pickup truck exercise. Wake up, Mother. He’s got a serious problem with that damned tube.”

A serious problem.

Was she developing a similar problem with Insomnimania? Was electronic addiction an inherited trait?

No, it’s not the same thing at all. Insomnimania’s interactive, participatory.

But she felt her standard rationalization growing thin. Maybe Insomnimania was all the more addictive
because
it was interactive and participatory. It blurred life’s edges in a way that television never could. Too many times, Renee had fallen asleep at the terminal, then awakened blurry and confused, wondering where Insomnimania had ended and her dreams had begun. It was time she quit using it altogether. It was time she quit going there.

But what about Auggie? What about getting him on the air?

She knew that was the most feeble excuse of all. Auggie wasn’t the last potential talk show guest in the entire postmodern world. Renee decided that she was getting a little too old for imaginary friends—particularly secondhand imaginary friends.

I won’t turn it on. Not tonight, and not tomorrow night, either. Never again.

Her breathing slowed and her body relaxed. It felt good to have made a decision. It felt good to know she was going cold turkey, effective immediately.

*

“wunderkind, tinlizzy, shakesbeer, fishbate, sodbuster …”

Marianne frowned at her computer screen.

No Auggie. Damn, and I was sure he’d he here by now.

A little pair of disembodied eyes with lengthy lashes blinked up at her from the computer screen, as they were programmed to do at random intervals of between thirty and ninety seconds. The eyes were labeled “l-fy.”

“So you’re sleepy, are you, Elfie?” Marianne murmured. “Me, too. But hang on. Let’s look around just a little more.”

Marianne used the mouse to move the eyes away from the Ernie’s Bar icon and back into Insomnimania’s desktop maze. When Marianne had first joined Insomnimania last year, the maze fit onto her computer screen with wide margins on all sides. Now the pattern of pathways spilled off the screen in all directions, and Marianne hadn’t found her way to any of its edges so far tonight.

What had once been a good-sized virtual mansion was fast becoming a small city, with a new room appearing every day or so. These included a funhouse, a beach club, two astrologers, a debate society, three book clubs, a chess club, a casino, two temperance unions, three churches, two comedy clubs, three museums, at least four psychotherapists …

It seemed that almost every kind of activity or enterprise was represented in the rapidly developing virtual township known as Insomnimania.

Real estate sure is booming here.

It was cheap, too. Initial investments were small, and overhead was literally nonexistent. You could open a room of your own if you were a member. If the activities required special programming that you couldn’t handle—and most Insomnimania members were not programmers—then you could call upon the people who ran Insomnimania for help.

Most of the rooms offered their services free. The few that had fees made charges directly to members’ credit cards. Businesses practically never failed here. How could they? Of course, the network’s owners took a certain percentage of the gross from profit-making activities, but that was no big deal to Insomnimania’s burgeoning entrepreneurs. Marianne was strictly a consumer, though. Her work didn’t leave her time to run any kind of electronic concession stand.

She moved Elfie northward up the corridor toward one of the casinos.

Maybe he’s doing some serious high rolling tonight.

When she reached the Casino del Camino icon, she hit a command to see its log of tonight’s guests.

“twolip, caligula, rubberbarren, hejhog, loosy, supersloth …”

Again, no Auggie. This hit-and-miss process really ought to have been much easier, but there was no master list so that clients could see who else was logged on. Insomnimania was designed for mystery and adventure, so if you wanted to find somebody, you had to bounce through the maze from room to room to room, looking for them.

Okay, so he’s not in the Drunk Tank, the Bunraku Theater, the Planetarium, the Wax Museum, the Pyramid,
the Speakers’ Corner; or the Casino del Camino. And I’ve checked Ernie’s Bar twice
now. Just where else should I look?

Elfie’s eyes blinked again.

“Patience, sweetie,” Marianne whispered. “This might take a little while.”

Marianne sat staring at the screen for a moment. Renee had mentioned a place where Auggie claimed to hang out. What was it called?

Oh, yeah. The “Basement.” He called it his “sanctum sanctorum.”

Marianne had never seen anything in the maze called the Basement, and Renee apparently hadn’t, either. It sounded like some sort of clandestine, subterranean space—perhaps something Insomnimania’s founders hadn’t exactly had in mind. Marianne’s eyes scanned the intricate web of corridors, and she imagined a whole realm underneath it belonging to Auggie alone.

Maybe there’s a stairwell somewhere. Or maybe a trapdoor—or a sliding panel.

But she was no hacker, and her chances of cracking the code to such an opening were nil. And she didn’t know where else to look for Auggie at the moment. It seemed pointless to go on a wild goose chase—particularly since she was sure Auggie would turn up at Ernie’s Bar sooner or later.

“Let’s take a breather, shall we?” she murmured to Elfie’s eyes. “We’ll check Ernie’s again later. In the meantime, we could get in a little reading …”

Excerpt from
My
Secret Life
(circa 1882); anonymous author; La Bibliothèque Érotique catalogue listing C 51:

With lewd intent, but nervous about my intentions, I still listened and heard movements as of a woman undressing. Then I half undressed myself, brought the pot nearest to the door, and pissed, making it rattle as much as I could to excite her. Anything which brings man and woman to think of the genitals of the opposite sex has a stirring lewd effect! Then I knocked gently, and called, using the name (Mrs. M***l**d) she had entered in the hotel-book. “What do you want?” said she, coming to the door. “To talk to you,—I feel so dull.” “And I’m so cold,—good night.” “Haven’t you a fire?” “There is no stove.” “There is one in my room,—and it’s quite warm,—come in and chat,—you are not going away tomorrow?” A long pause. “No thank you.”

Rustling movements again, and a cough. I hesitated, for she had given me no encouragement. My prick got voluptuous, it had not entered a woman for a week or more. I put wood on the fire, summoned courage, and knocked again. “Come and have a chat.” “No thank you. I’ve got my gown off.” How rapid is human thought. I saw in my mind’s eye her half-naked breasts and arms, and my prick rose stiff. Has she bolted the door, or found out that it is unbolted? I turned the key, then the handle, and the door opened! “Oh! who’s that?” said she, running to the door. “Oh! you really must not—the maid ought to have locked it.” Her voice had dropped, and we stood looking at each other, when she found it was I who had entered.

Marianne hit the return key, turning the image of a page on her computer screen. The tome’s simulated paper appeared yellow, wrinkled, and a bit torn, to suggest brittle antiquity. Even the typeface had a slightly ragged look to it. To add to the overall effect, Marianne’s computer speaker made a faint crackling sound as a new pair of facing pages appeared.

The text went on predictably enough with a perfunctory enticement followed by vigorous sex. As always, Marianne was amused by the quaint terminology: “priapus” for erect penis, “uncunt” for withdraw, “gamahuching” for oral sex, and “fuckstress” for woman—
any
woman who happened along.

And as always, Marianne found herself immensely curious about the author—a wealthy and anonymous nineteenth-century gentleman. He’d had six copies printed—only six!—of his eleven-volume, 4,200 page memoir, making the original edition the most coveted collector’s item in all erotic literature.