Cronix (27 page)

After each session came an extensive debriefing. Fitch took notes while Stiney recorded all the details on camera. Laura was always on hand, and Doug took her off afterwards to confirm that the sights Glenn was relaying were actual episodes from Lyle’s memory, not some strange hallucination induced by the drugs. But mainly Laura wanted to be there to know her brother was somehow safe, although no one had yet explained to Glenn what the looming threat to his life might be.

Clearly Lyle had lived a dangerous life. One day, early on in the sessions, Glenn found his mind drifting through a scene in a desert, a soldier surrounded by other soldiers. He saw a dusty, desiccated hand sticking out the ground. Over there a boot. A head, half submerged, as though the man had drowned in these dunes.

Glenn was sweating as he related the episode to the assembled scientists. They raised their eyebrows knowingly at each other, as though they had been waiting for this very image to emerge. Glenn could not resist asking them what the ghoulish scene was that they appeared to recognize so readily.

“All in good time, Glenn,” Fitch said. “We can’t let you know too much at this stage, otherwise you might build up an affinity with the subject that could interfere with the test results. There can absolutely no conscious interaction between your mind and…the subject,” he said, avoiding Laura’s gaze.

And so it went on. Fleeting images of restaurants, people, houses and hotels, desert highways and refugee-clogged jungle tracks, run-down cities in countries Glenn could not even pinpoint afterwards. Lying in his room at night, he went over the strange memories again and again, events he had never experienced, something he found both deeply disconcerting and tremendously exciting. On days when he had no sessions scheduled, he paced around the house impatiently, hungry for more of the vicarious experiences of a life lived so much more fully than his own.

Yet part of him was also afraid, worried these new memories might fade, when they already felt so much a part of him. He wondered if, after all this was over, he’d need therapy, but how he could ever begin to explain to a shrink what had gone down inside his head?

Occasionally, when the adrenaline got much and his racing pulse worried the scientists, Fitch would pull the plug. One night, Glenn awoke from a memory-dream with a bellow, and was surprised to see Laura pad in quietly in her pajamas to soothe him.

“It’s okay, honey, It’s going to be alright now,” she said, and offered him a glass of water and a Valium. “Shush now.”

She ran a soft hand over his brow, plastering back the damp hair from his forehead. Glenn was inordinately grateful, but also puzzled. It was difficult to equate this mother-hen with the gun-toting psycho he had encountered a few months earlier at the snowbound gas station. The sedative dulled his mind, lulled him back to sleep. But as he drifted off, a disturbing idea wandered into his drugged mind.

Was Laura talking so sweetly to Glenn, or to her brother?

Mercifully, he fell asleep before he could dwell too long over the question.

***

Lupo had coveted the mayor's job long before he returned to Earth. Way back before the Exodus, he had twice held the mayoral office in his small hometown in Ukraine, and had always enjoyed the jostle of local politics, the wrangling and horse-trading, as well as the attention and occasional fawning that it afforded him. When the position in London had come up, he had jumped at the opportunity.

Sitting now in his office, Lupo was having second thoughts about the joys of office. He stared at the blank screen before him, smoke from his cigarette coiling into his eyes. He was supposed to be composing a report to the authorities airside, but wasn’t sure where to even begin. As someone who saw himself as a benevolent guardian of the Sapien community, he had been shaken by Dawes’ confession that so many saw the good-natured Lupo and his fellow Eternals as mere phantoms, unwelcome strangers in their old home.

There had always been some support among younger Sapiens for the Santa Muerte, a bunch of terrorists spawned long ago when Mexico's drugs gangs had fought the construction of the Zone in their home country. The militant luddites had fused, through late-stage globalization, with a new strain of radical Buddhists in southeast Asia to create a shaky ideology opposed to immortality. But for whole communities to suddenly start backing their crazy pseudo-philosophy? Lupo had never come across such a thing before. Put that together with the unprecedented attack on the Rangers, and Lupo felt like he had an undigested rock sitting in his stomach.

His screen flashed with an incoming message. It was Harrell, his police chief, looking the very picture of discomposure. The knot in Lupo’s guts tightened.

“What is it now, Harrell? I’m very busy.”

“Mr Mayor?” the police chief said. “Listen we have a serious situation down here. You’re going to have come on over. Now.”

***

And then, abruptly, the dreaming was over.

After months of haunting Lyle’s memories, Glenn was told by Fitch that this particular phase of the experiment had proven a success. They were ready to move on to the next level.

Glenn had known the day must be coming. He had been in the house for almost all of the six month’s stipulated in his strange contract. Still, the news was a shock. He had come to love his sojourns in the other man’s head. Aside from the drugs and the excitement of the whole undertaking, there was the sheer buzz of being Lyle, a pulse that had been totally lacking in his own humdrum life until the last year, when he taken that unprecedented decision not to report Rick's death. That was the point of connection, Glenn knew, the cross-over moment when the grey life of the failed artist Glenn Rose had come close to matching the adventurous existence of Lyle McLure. They had become, in Glenn’s own mind, kindred spirits, their stories inextricably interwoven by fate.

“So what happens now?” It was late afternoon, and outside, the sky was clouding to deep ink. The first star winked over the plains. Glenn would miss this place, filled with it lonely beauty and strange phenomena.

Fitch had already started to pack up his laptop and bundle his papers into the small backpack he always toted around. He did not even pause in his packing as he answered.

“
We
are going to Texas tonight, Glenn. We have to prepare for Lyle’s execution,” he said. He had scarcely uttered the word when Laura walked past the door. She didn’t say anything, just dropped her own traveling case next to Fitch’s in the hallway. Kevin the bodyguard came in and hefted the baggage out to the car.

“Lyle’s going to be executed?” said Glenn. “For what?”

“Officially, he’s going to be executed,” said Fitch, clearly trying to reassure Laura, hovering by the door. “But thanks to our work here, and due to your own excellent contributions, we are confident that while a lethal injection will be administered a week from now, we will actually be able to save Lyle. His mind is here with us already.”

Stiney burst in, looking flustered. “Anyone seen my keys? I can’t find them?”

Laura glared at him. “No, I haven’t seen them. You’re always leaving them lying around somewhere. They’re probably in all that clutter you call your desk.”

Stiney was rooting among the pot plants on the window sill, slamming draws and up-ending jars full of pens. “No, I definitely left them down here somewhere,” he muttered. “Got my swipe card on them too.”

“Well, you won’t need them in Texas,” said Fitch. “And Kevin’ll be here the whole time, so it hardly matters. Now, if you could just give us a minute…”

Stiney stomped out again. Laura seemed to have lost her usual focus for a moment, before coming back to herself.

“I guess you’ve earned an explanation,” she said. “Come with me.”

For the last time, she led him through the house and into the warm kitchen. The place felt deserted already, a chapter closing in Glenn's life, almost certainly the most exciting one he would ever know. Laura poured him a final shot of whiskey, even though it was still only mid-morning.

“One for the road,” she said. “Listen, you’ve been living in Lyle’s head all these months now, I think you’ve probably got quite a feel for the type of person he was.
Is
” she corrected herself. “Lyle’s no saint, but he’s a good person, deep down. He had some tough breaks, but he never gave up struggling to make a better life for himself. I think now that you won’t be surfing his memories any more, it’s safe for me to tell you what happened. The plane leaves in four hours, so I’m afraid it’ll have to be a fairly potted history.”

It was a perfunctory account, and seemed to Glenn woefully lacking in depth after the strange visions he'd experienced. Laura was clearly trying to control her emotions – she didn’t know, after all, if her brother was about to die or be saved by her and her colleagues’ handiwork. But Glenn still felt somehow cheated, as though his moment of catharsis was merely an item on her check-list of chores.

It was no surprise to hear that Lyle had gotten into trouble as a teenager. Drugs, insubordination, screwing around. Petty crime. By sixteen, he'd served time in a juvenile facility. Bored and on the look-out for cheap thrills, he easily found them. When he was eighteen, he bumped into an army recruiting sergeant scouring the streets, looking for lost souls like Lyle, people searching for a way out of their cramped lives. Lyle signed up, and was part of the vast American army shipped off to liberate Kuwait in 1990.

As Laura spoke, Glenn recalled the hands he had seen protruding from the sand. He shuddered at the memory, glad this particular memory was another man’s.

But Lyle didn’t flinch, and didn’t go postal afterwards. He went on to serve in the Special Forces: assassinating a jihad leader in Mogadishu, abducting a drug lord from the Venezuelan jungle. Raids on mountain hideouts, stake-outs in Afghan slums, helicopter attacks on fishing villages full of pirate and smugglers.

But eventually, it had proven too much. Struggling with his drinking, he returned home with severe PTSD and no way of coping with normal life. He found a job as a security guard at a chemical plant in Houston. Paranoid and increasingly abusing prescription meds, he carried his service pistol with him wherever he went. One day, on the drive to work, he got into a road rage argument with a driver who cut him up at a junction. Lyle finally lost it: he pulled out his Glock and shot the man.

Staring at the body, bleeding out in main street America, not some broken foreign land, Lyle had turned his gun on himself.

Perhaps he hesitated at that last minute, as the police sirens howled, wondering what he was doing. Or maybe he'd known this was how it would end, one way or another. He pulled the trigger. There was a shockwave like a meteor impact followed by silence, a silence which he mistook for eternity. Then a voice that had no place being there filtered through the shattered synapses of his brain. “Hey Bob, this one’s still breathing.”

The bullet has passed directly between the two hemispheres of his brain, cauterizing the corpus callosum and exiting the back of his head. He was rushed to hospital and patched up. Months later, he emerged from the coma remembering nothing, not even his name. But the state of Texas tried him for murder anyway. The trial didn’t last long: Lyle was sentenced to execution by lethal injection.

That was five years back. Laura tried fighting in the courts, called for a gubernatorial pardon, but it was an election year, and murder rates were high: someone would have to take the drop.

Her colleague Fitch was already in an advanced stage of his research by the time Laura came to him with her proposition. As Lyle’s next of kin, she was able to sign papers on his behalf, and convince him to play ball with the team. They started making regular trips to Texas, mining the memories that were still there. He was an ideal candidate for the experiment, a stripped down shell of a man with nothing to lose. As it turned out, there were far more memories than they had suspected: it was only Lyle, sitting on death row, his once handsome face disfigured almost beyond recognition, who did not have access to them.

Laura finished her story, looked at her watch.

“Now you know,” she said. “I always wondered you might experience the final shooting. Probably just as well you didn't.

Glenn felt the old animosity slip away. “It’s lucky for Lyle he’s got a sister like you …”

She said nothing. The old coldness crept into her face. “I have to go. Plane to catch.” She walked out to the porch, where Fitch was already waiting.

“What about me?” Glenn called. Fitch came back in and led him back into the living room.

“You’ll be staying here until we return,” he said. “Should be about ten days. Once we are back and the operation is safely completed, there will be a debrief with the Colonel. Then you will be paid, and be free to go.”

“Just like that?” Glenn said.

“Just like that,” echoed Fitch.

“And you guys ... you aren’t at all worried that I’d tell someone about this? I mean, I won’t, but it’s all so extraordinary, that it surely wouldn’t surprise you if I was tempted…”

Fitch turned stared at him. “I wouldn't advise it, given the agreements you signed.”

“But those only apply if I’m in the States, surely. What if I was back home in England?” Glenn had no idea why he was needling Fitch this way: perhaps it was the unceremonious way he was being dumped, on the verge of becoming a mere footnote in their experiment. He realized he must sound like he making a threat, something he had no intention of doing.