Authors: Christopher John Chater
Bock had suggested a tour of the main house, but had taken them almost immediately to the library. Kurt soon found out why. It was an extensive library, two levels, with the railing, bannisters, and shelving made of a rich colored teak, glowing almost caramel-colored in the soft light. There were three rows of desks on the first floor, each with their own lamps and partitions, giving the reader the experience of being in a wooden nook. There were even more private reading areas, stuffed leather chairs nearly hidden behind shelves, and a bench attached to the wall almost directly under the stairs.
“This is my collection,” he said grandly. He was standing in the center of the room that was marked by a large four-pointed star in the carpet.
“You can put all of these books and a million more on a cell phone these days,” Kurt said.
“But then you’d have to carry around a cell phone and you might as well put a gun to your head.”
“I’ve been saying that for years,” Ursula added.
Kurt sensed their simpatico technophobia and wondered how these two had found each other in a world full of technophiles. When Bock came back from the shelves, it became clear. He was holding Ursula's book in his hand, now bound in leather with her name emblazoned on the front cover and the spine.
He handed it to her with delicate chivalry and when she turned it to reveal her name and the title, she gasped. She opened it and rifled through the pages as if to prove its authenticity. “It’s my book. I don’t believe it. Where did you get this?”
“Long story short, I have friends in high places.”
“Meaning?” Kurt asked.
“I have a deal with the government. I volunteer my expertise to Homeland Security on the nature of our affliction in exchange for Intel on some of our infected brethren. Because Ursula is a memeticist, I told them her book could help me.”
“Has it?” she asked.
“Most definitely. It will be required reading in the future if I have anything to say about it.”
Ursula beamed.
“I have something for you as well, Kurt, though it may seem a bit self-promotional.” Bock went to a back room and brought out another bound book, this one with his name on the spine. “My latest work. As a fellow writer, I would appreciate your opinion.”
Kurt knew false modesty when he saw it, but he accepted the book politely. He wasn’t exactly sure why Bock was giving it to him. Was it that he thought him a fan? Certainly his ego was big enough to assume everyone had to be. Was Kurt supposed to pretend to melt like Ursula at the chance to read the latest unpublished work of world famous Richard Bock?
“Thank you. I look forward to reading it,” Kurt said.
“Consider it an invitation.”
An invitation?
A female member of Bock’s staff entered the room.
“What is it, Harriet?”
“Ray’s in stage four,” she said.
Bock’s expression fell gloomily. “I’ll be right there.”
“Is there anything I can do,” Ursula said.
“There’s nothing any of us can do. He’s in the final stages of the illness.”
While Ursula went with Bock to tend to the infected man, Kurt already believed he knew the man’s fate, so he asked to be taken to his new dome-shaped bungalow. The room was decorated like the hotel room of a tropical resort, but with no telephone or television. Kurt sensed immediately that the room was being monitored.
Dana was still playing on the swings and Kurt could see her through the opened front door while he lay on the bed reading Bock’s book. When he wasn’t concentrating on the words he was reading, he wondered how long it would be before Dana got bored with the small playground. A more suitable play area for her might be the CERN laboratory, though she might tire of that just as quickly. Most current science wouldn’t sufficiently challenge her intellect.
As far as Bock’s book was concerned, Kurt guessed that it represented a type of beginning. Bock was using his increased intelligence to start the greatest literary movement in history. After only a few chapters, Kurt began to see that it was a superior work, at least in its scope and ambition, though, in this case, the ideas peppered in the text and subtext would have a profoundly negative effect on its readers. It was a work of fiction but it had philosophical, spiritual, and political underpinnings, brilliantly infused to the story and barely recognizable in the context of the fiction. Because of the philosophy it subtly endorsed, it would easily garner a following. It encouraged sacrifice in the worst way, it inspired devotion to an ideology Kurt could only describe as totalitarian, and it made people, life, and the universe appear to be hostile and cold. As far as the author of the work was concerned, without the guidance of a superior intellect, in this case Bock’s, mankind was destined to live an impoverished and meaningless life.
Kurt assumed Bock had given it to him to show what was possible, given their intellectual ability. The work was brilliant; brilliant in its complexity; brilliant in its story telling; brilliant in its prose; and, most of all, brilliant in its wrongness. Bock knew it would appeal to Kurt’s literary ambition. It was only human to be tempted. Bock was inviting him to be a part of the most influential canon of writers since Hemingway’s Paris of the 20s. It was one of the best fictional stories Kurt had ever read, which came to him as a terrifying realization. It certainly put all of Bock’s other books to shame. Despite his many best sellers, Bock had always been panned by literary critics. He was considered a science fiction populace writer—and though his books often depicted the complexities of modern science, including astrophysics and quantum mechanics, they were often dismissed by the critics as “light reading.” This would not be the case with this work. This would hit the literary world like a nuclear bomb. If recognition was what he wanted, he was sure to get it now. Bock would no longer be associated with geeky kids and silly costume conventions. This book would win every possible award afforded literature and probably a few outside of that.
Kurt realized this was the way in which the infection was manifesting itself in Bock. Where Kurt had been given superior insight into people, Bock had the ability to influence them. In this case the ability was being used inappropriately. Should his readers absorb the philosophy the book championed, the lies it espoused about the human condition, and should people begin to incorporate it into the way they viewed the universe, there would be a society of intellectual slaves the size and scope of which the world had never seen.
He already felt the ideas worming their way into his mind, trying to steal his thoughts. Reading that book had been a mistake.
Feeling like he had just been in a cage fight, exhausted and angry, he went out onto the beach and sat in the sand. He wrapped his arms around his shins and looked out at the vast ocean before him. Ursula was walking the beach toward him. The ocean breeze was causing the colorful sundress she was wearing to cling to her body.
She was smiling, which he knew was a reaction to his smile.
“Why are you sitting out here all by yourself?” she asked.
“Just taking in the view. Where did you get the dress?”
“Richard gave it to me.”
“Oh, it’s ‘Richard’ now is it?”
Ursula was an intelligent woman, but she was no match for the enhanced Bock. Obviously, he had charmed her.
She sat down next to him, sinking her toes into the sand. “This will be a good place for you to write, won’t it?”
The comment felt patronizingly optimistic. It was as if she was blatantly saying,
take your mind off the fact that you’re going to die from a mysterious illness by banging out a few chapters and hope you live long enough to see them in print.
Yet he was more surprised Ursula had yet to mention the cameras hidden in palm trees, painted to match the greenery. Had her paranoia gone into remission? Here they were, surrounded by surveillance technology, and Ursula, the most paranoid person he had ever met, was suddenly completely at peace. Although paranoia wasn’t necessarily the superior part of her personality, he had grown used to it, to accept it as part of her—she wasn’t the same without it. He also knew that she was in trouble: Bock had taken an interest in her.
“Sure. I suppose I can get started on a new novel after we get settled. Are you sure you want to stay here? There’s no reason you have to stay. You haven’t been infected,” Kurt said.
“There’s a lot I can learn here. For the time being, I’m going to stay.”
“Did Bock tell you what happened to Ray?”
“Richard has a treatment center somewhere on the island, so he took him there. He said, in this final stage of the infection, people begin to deny reality. Ray doesn’t even believe he’s sick.”
Suddenly a burning in his chest caused his whole body to spasm.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“A little heartburn. I’m fine.”
“Let’s get you inside,” she said, helping him stand.
It was like the worst case of food poising he had ever had. His stomach was turning in knots and it felt like there was a hot coal burning in his chest. Something definitely wasn’t right.
Fear overtook Ursula’s face as she supported his weight on their way to his bungalow.
“Don’t worry, Ursula. I’m not sick. Ray was right. We don’t have Bock’s fatal disease. There is no disease. It’s a lie.”
“It’s a . . . lie?”
A sense of urgency came over Kurt. There was something he had to tell her, something that could no longer wait. He took her by the hand and escorted her to the bathroom. He shut the door and turned on the shower. He took a minute to consider his words carefully. The episode at the gas station had shown him that he shouldn’t try to rush the truth on people who weren’t ready for it, but there was no more time to wait. In the short time they had spent together, he felt he had an adequate understanding of the way her mind worked. He had come to respect and admire her intellect, and there was also a growing desire within him to care for her, but to him, she was both beautiful and broken. She was capable of great scientific understanding, but, through no fault of her own, she was totally unable to consider anything outside the confines of rational thought. How could he blame her? Her parent’s death had been devastating for her. That trauma had caused her to retreat inward, forsaking her emotions and taking refuge in the safe structure of empirical thinking. It wasn’t that he wanted to “fix” her. She was a survivor and could manage her own life (what other trust fund baby had a rainy day duffle bag full of money and an escape route through the sewers of New York?), it was that he was excited by the challenge of introducing her to a part of her consciousness that he himself was just getting to know. Had she read the manuscript and allowed it to affect her, she would now know of its power. But without the book, it could take him years to convince her of its message. He wasn’t sure they had the luxury of that much time.
“I’m not sick. None of us are,” Kurt said.
“Is that right? Tell me then, what’s happening to you?”
“A few months ago an idea was put into our minds.”
“An idea?”
“A meme. A very advanced meme. But it wasn’t put there by the government or by an apocalyptic social media.”
“Then who?”
“Imagine a race that doesn’t crave power or celebrity or even respect. The only thing they care about is where ideas come from. They believe it’s an actual place.”
“What are you talking about? Why are we in the bathroom?”
“I believe the rooms are being monitored.”
“I thought I was the paranoid one?”
He already felt her resistance, but continued despite it. “The place where ideas come from—it’s an actual place. The race I’m referring to has been there.”
“There’s a race that’s been to the place where ideas come from? How?” Ursula asked.
“Their scientific understanding is different from ours. It makes allowances for a psychic force—a fifth force. They can move through dimensions in non-corporeal form, as pure consciousness. But when they got to this special place, even though they wanted to stay, they couldn’t.”
“What was the problem? They couldn’t get work visas or something?” Ursula asked, scoffing.
“They realized that the only way for them to stay there was to find a way to bring the entire universe with them, all of its inhabitants, everything and everyone. The only way to do that is to make our universe more complex. Though it may take centuries, raising the consciousness of every sentient being in the entire universe will eventually cause space-time to rupture.”
“You’re talking about the law of complexity. The Omegasphere,” Ursula said with a chuckle.
“That’s right.”
“And which race is trying to get to the Omegasphere this time? It
was
the Christians. We’re still waiting for that one.”
“I can only tell you that they’re an alien race much more advanced than we are, and that their only goal is to increase the complexity of the universe. They’ve been seeding ideas into our noosphere for centuries. They’ve been helping us and other species evolve. If not for them, we’d probably still be throwing feces at each other.”