Cronix (15 page)

“And these drug worlds are new?” asked Oriente.

“No, they’ve been around for ages, in one form or another,” said Porter. “People will always try to throw off the burden of consciousness one way or another, even in heaven. Especially in heaven. Nothing like eternity to make you want to escape yourself. Especially if you’re a dull person to start off with – you’re stuck with yourself for donkeys’ years. No, the authorities are always hunting for the drug worlds and closing them down. If you get caught building one, or participating in one, you get at the very least a vastly prolonged and nasty CB sentence, and probably spend a few centuries toiling the dirt as a slave or getting butchered again and again as a monster in someone else’s mythical fantasy.”

“Although doing time isn’t a great disincentive in eternity,” noted Poincaffrey. “Hence the difficulty in shutting them down. What we were talking about when you came in, however, is something that is new. Almost a year ago, one of these worlds was legalized. It has created quite a stir.”

“Have the powers-that-be realized that prohibition never really works?” asked Oriente. “Or have they found a drugs world that doesn’t destabilize personalities?”

“Neither, actually,” said Porter, getting a refill from the coffee pot. This world was developed by two notorious Tamagochiite brothers, twins in fact. Pegomas and Tilloch Shustra, who were linked to all sorts of drugs worlds over the years, but were too smart to ever get caught.”

“You were asking me the other day about MEvolution,” said Poincaffrey. “Well, the engineer who headed the team that developed CB, Ivan Shustra, was the ‘father’ of the twins. He built them himself. It seems he taught them rather a lot about post-human consciousness.”

“Quite,” added Porter. “These two had something…well, the word usually bandied about was supernatural, to describe their ability to dream up worlds. Hugely successful engineers who were said to have built half a dozen drugs worlds that catered to the most elite crowds, which may explain why they were never caught.”

“And the rich and famous never got turned into monsters in these underworlds?”

“No, as I said, these two are geniuses. It was the cheaper imitations that did the damage. But should I say
were
geniuses. There’s apparently only one of them now.”

“What happened to the other?” Oriente had quite forgotten his own narrative that was due to resume at any minute.

Porter leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “They built something that they call ‘mood pools’: on the surface, a normal world, with forests and fields and what have you, but within it are these huge pools, seas almost, that you can wade into. As you do, you experience the unbinding of your consciousness, a kind of ecstasy that the twins said was the Afterworlds equivalent of Nirvana, and therefore should be classified as a spiritual experience, not as a narcotic. Tilloch managed to prove in court that when a soul who enters the mood pools can emerge fully intact – they simply choose not to. And why would you, if you are in a state of enlightenment and bliss? But the math was so complicated that only the surviving twin, Tilloch, could really claim to understand it. The board of inquiry, some of the best post-human minds out there, struggled to keep up. But they eventually approved it. Maybe they were too embarrassed to acknowledge they didn’t understand how it worked,” said Porter.

“The point being,” added Poincaffrey, “that the mood pools were classified as a holistic spiritual experience and granted full certification. And they have proven such a wild success that millions of people have entered them already, and more are going in every day. In droves. Yet so far, no one has emerged to prove that it is actually possible to leave them.”

“What about the designers, Tilloch and … what was the other one?”

“Pegomas. Well, that’s the thing,” said Porter. “Pegomas volunteered to test the first mood pool. He went in, and he never came out. But Tilloch was able to prove, mathematically, that he was still an intact entity. His base profile – the pulse of his identity, what makes him
him
– still registered. It was just in a state of perpetual bliss.”

“Which is, ultimately, the goal of humanity, isn’t it?” said Oriente.

“That is the question many Eternals are asking,” said Poincaffrey, rinsing his coffee cup at the sink. There was a knock at the door and his secretary popped her head in.

“Mayor’s here professor. They’re ready to go.”

“Very good.” He looked at his guests. “To be resumed,” he said, and led them to the conference room.

***

Glenn’s car was still parked behind the Sunoco gas station. Someone had simply moved it off the forecourt, which stood empty in the morning sun, snow melting at the edges. For a heart-stopping moment as his taxi pulled in, Glenn thought the car was gone, before spotting the broad radiator poking out from behind the low white building.

The gas station was no more than fifty miles outside Holsten City. In his distracted state, Glenn had driven much farther than he'd imagined, set up emergency camp with striking distance of safety. He paid off the cab and went to the car. A woman's face peered out the shop window.

The car door was still unlocked, the mess of litter untouched in the back. Frost on the windows made it look like a trashed igloo. Glenn felt like an explorer discovering some archaeological relic from his own past. The keys weren't in the ignition. He sighed and got out the vehicle.

A middle-aged Asian woman was standing outside the shop, staring at him. She looked anxious, as though unsure how to approach him.

"Hi," she said, holding out her hand, then pulling it back when she saw his bandages. Her wrinkled face seemed to lose whatever elasticity it still retained. Glenn thought she might cry. Instead she stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders, reaching up to him. She stared into his face.

"I'm so sorry," she said, sniffing. She dabbed her eye with the sleeve of her pullover, then looked up at him. "I'm Shushay. I run the place. Come inside and have a coffee with us. Please."

Glenn followed her inside. He wasn't sure who the 'us' was until a plain young woman with lank dark hair emerged from a back room, a box of Chupa Chups in her hands. She was introduced as Shushay's daughter, Cindy. She put down the box and proffered her hand, slightly confused at the sudden formality her mother was according to this customer. Then she saw Glenn's useless hands and registered who he was.

Shushay fussed with the coffee, made Glenn sit down on the cashier's stool, then handed him the keys to his car.

"We found them in the ignition. The sheriff moved the car after he'd made his report. It was blocking the pump," she said. Then, unable to restrain herself, she gushed, "How
are
you, honey?"

Glenn smiled politely, not sure how to react. "Fine," he said. These were the people he had instructed his newly engaged lawyer Morrow earlier that morning to threaten with legal action, just to “test the waters.” He looked round the store: the entire contents couldn't have been worth more than a thousand dollars, just an aged immigrant mother and her unmarried daughter trying to get by. God alone knew how they'd wound up out here.

"The doctor said there'd be no real lasting damage," he said, to allay their fears, even if they had good reason to be worried.

"Honey, we're so sorry about what happened to you out there. Oh lord, you coulda died out there, all alone. I wanted to take an axe to that horrid machine except the sheriff wouldn't let me. Said it could be evidence. Criminal negligence, he said.” She looked at him intently, as though probing for some reaction. “But goodness knows, we didn't know. Of course we didn't know. If I would have known I would never have let it be out there," she looked imploringly at Glenn. "We didn't know," she repeated.

He gripped the coffee cup with difficulty between his thick mitts and muttered some reassuring sounds.
No way
, he said to himself. He'd phone Morrow as soon as he was out of here and tell him to drop the case. Shushay warbled on in the sing-song tones of a worried bird, while her daughter stood with her arms crossed and stared at her feet. Outside, the road stretched empty off to the white horizon, the sky glittering blue.

Shushay recounted how she and Cindy had spent the whole of the previous day watching the camera crews and photographers pull into the gas station, the interviews, the denials, then watching herself on the local news.

"But honey,” she said. “Why didn't you tell them about 
her
?"

Glenn looked up sharply from his coffee.

"Who?"

Shushay cocked her head, a slightly sly expression on her face.

"The woman in the video."

"What video?"

"Well, after the police had been and all the TV people had come and gone, and people were saying we could be sued and Lord knows what else, Cindy had the idea of watching the security camera, you know, the uh..."

"CCTV," put in Cindy, looking up timidly.

"Yeah, the CCTV we had installed last year. Not that we ever look at it, there's never trouble here. So we look at it, see, you know, how things really happened..." She looked expectantly at Glenn. His mind went blank and they sat in silence.

"Why didn't she help you? She pulled a gun on you, turned the lights out on your car. We watched it and we couldn't make any sense of it."

"Did you show anyone?" Glenn said, a liquid fear in his stomach.

"No, we ... like I said, we only thought to look at it after everyone was gone. And then we heard the news, and there was nothing about this woman. It was a woman, wasn't it? It was kinda difficult to tell on the video, what with the dark and the snow and all."

Still feeling queasy, Glenn said, "Can I see it?"

"Well, sure, but ... can you tell us why
she
didn't help you? Where did she go?"

"I don't know. She just appeared. And then she left again before, without saying why." He wondered how far he could go without telling them too much.
Tell anyone and I'll kill you.
This is her territory, he thought: this is where she found me. She could walk through that door right now, for all I know.

Shushay loaded the tape and they all three stood over the grainy screen. The camera was centered on the shop front, with a slice of forecourt visible. The vending machine was square in the middle of the shot.

Glenn watched in silence as the hood of his car entered the bottom of the screen, saw himself shamble over and grope in the vending machine. He felt oddly distant from his trapped self on the video, squirming and twisting in silence as it tried to free itself from the box.

The screen flared briefly into white light, before the camera adjusted its aperture to another car's headlights. A rangy figure moved into the light. Glenn watched her squat beside him, then disappear. The headlights dipped from her car, then his. Then she was back on the shadowy screen.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

Shushay shook her head. "Can't be from round here. No one round here woulda left you out there like that so long. There's good folk out here. Look, she's going away again. This is the part where she leaves you almost 10 minutes. We timed it. You coulda died out there." She shook her head.

"She might be one of those government people," said Cindy, her voice low and uncertain. Glenn guessed she didn't have a lot of contact with the outside world, just told people how much their gas and soda cost.

"What government people?"

"Oh there's a bunch of people coming and going around here the last few years," said Shushay. "There's some kind of research facility they built out on the middle of the prairie. Soil research, or something. Some of them bought up a few of the farm houses that was going cheap. Lot of kids don't want to live out here anymore, on account of it being pretty lonely. So they move to town, then their folks get older and they move to Holsten."

"And these out-of-towners pick up their farms cheap?"

"Yeah,” nodded Shushay. “They seem to have money, judging by the cars they drive."

"Is she one of them?" Glenn nodded at the screen.

Shushay squinted a few inches from the screen, pulled the corners of her mouth down.

“There's one of them I seen, skinny blonde woman, lives out at the Devlin's old place. Might be her, though could just as easily be someone from out of state. Looks like the way some city weirdo might go acting" she said. "Anyone from round here would of helped you right off, like Pat Robalt did."

"I'll tell you what, Shushay,” Glenn said. “I want to be completely level with you. My lawyer recommended we try and sue you for what happened with that machine." She looked at him with a hardened mouth, trying to build up a head of ferocity she evidently didn't feel. He hurried on. "But listen. I'll tell him to drop everything if you give me that tape. "

She was still suspicious, but after a moment she nodded. "We can get a copy made," she said. Not dumb, Glenn noted. He agreed.

Back on the small screen, the frozen tableau came to life. The woman walked back into view, squatted over a Glenn. She pulled the pistol out of her pocket. Glenn flinched both on and off screen at the violence of the gesture.

"That's why I didn't tell anyone," he said quietly. Shushay looked at him and rubbed his arm comfortingly.