21st Century Dead Page 9

  All the deduction, the scrutiny, proved to be a fruitless exercise. The purpose of the game remained inscrutable, a fact that didn’t deter the ever-growing throng of enthusiastic ’Napsacks. Whether they were oblivious of the enigma or compelled by the surety of inevitable Revelation was an irrelevant data point. The ranks swelled. The world’s average BMI ratio skyrocketed. Centuries of man-hours were logged in seconds.

  And just when the soothsayers, having learned nothing from history (as usual), decided Cynapse had nothing left to surprise its audience—they announced the end of the game.

  Rule 1 of any commercial venture: you never announce the end of the game. Not unless the game is already dying. And especially if it’s the most popular game in recorded history.

  The announcement of the Revenant Patch was accompanied by a surprisingly strongly worded promise from the usually taciturn game developers: All Will Be Revealed.

  The public reaction had been akin to that of a flock of prepubescent boys to a cheerleading competition held in high wind.

  Many of the holdouts—the noncommittal, the skeptical yet curious—bought a ticket to the final show. The servers were pushed beyond capacity. Governmental agencies fretted over the potential toppling of the ’Net itself and the societal disruption that could result.

  But society held—and ’Napsack society held its collective breath.

  Waiting for midnight, Seattle time.

  Ninety minutes away.

  “Away. It took him away.”

  “The Drop hasn’t happened yet.” I almost choked on the words, instinctively avoiding using her name. As if speaking it would summon her in a more fully realized fashion than the one sitting across from me, clutching her cup as if it were the wrong edge of a cliff the rest of her body was clinging to.

  “He was QA. Got it a week in advance.”

  QA. Quality Assurance. In this case, game testers. The last line of defense.

  The bastard had done it. Connor was obsessed with Cynapse from the beginning, always swearing he’d find a way to penetrate the Dyson Sphere of silence the company had built around the identities of the personnel involved in its development. Back then it seemed like every moment of his day, every free moment of awareness, he’d dedicated to hammering away at the Cynapse shield, using every connection and resource available to him. I remember being bewildered, when it happened, that he even had the time or the inclination to steal Mindy away from me.

  “How’d he find a way in?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me the details. He just quit his job and … started locking his door.” She shivered. I refilled her tea. It didn’t seem to help.

  “He’d stopped coming to bed, and I knew he couldn’t stay up all night. I waited until after three. The monitors were on, I could see the glow under the door. But his typing, that constant typing had finally stopped.…”

  She hesitated again. Her eyes glazing, moving up over my shoulder. To my computer. There was nothing to see—just the countdown clock, inexorably moving closer to zero.

  “Mindy?”

  Her focus returned, her eyes immediately locking on to mine. I’d said it, I’d spoken her name, and in that transgression an unspoken bond passed between us.

  Now there was no turning back.

  “I picked the lock. It wasn’t hard. Just took a paper clip. He was sitting in front of his monitors, hunched over, like he was awake and thinking or something, but … he wasn’t. His eyes were open. And there was water on the floor. Below his chair. It was coming from his mouth. And that wasn’t even…”

  “What did you see?”

  I regretted the words instantly. They revealed that I cared only about getting a glimpse, an early peek at The Drop. They betrayed the depth of my craving.

  Her eyes knew it. And forgave me.

  “They were filled with … fluid.”

  “He drooled on the screen?”

  “What was on them moved like fluid. Like water on the surface of a deep pool. Like there was something down below, something rising up.”

  I didn’t understand, but pressed on. “What did you do?”

  “I thought something was wrong—like he’d had a stroke or something. I moved forward, just a step. And the screens just switched off. By themselves. And there was—”

  Mindy glazed over again. This time it wasn’t my computer, or the wall clock, or her tea upon which her eyes settled. They drifted up, ever so slowly, toward the ceiling. As if in a great effort to recall the specifics of a memory she’d tried to stuff away in the dusty corners of her mind—

  … Anything but alive again …

  “Mindy?” Her eyes kept rolling. Ever higher. Turning to whites.

  I grabbed her shoulders. Shook her. She felt flimsy, somehow. Diaphanous. But her focus returned, and she continued as if she’d never paused.

  “They saw me. They saw me.”

  I didn’t press her—there was no point. It was shock. I’d seen it before, when my best friend in fourth grade, Bobby Doyle, sliced off the tip of his index finger, fooling around with the industrial paper cutter they’ve long since banned from use. I sat with him in the nurse’s office, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, as he gently stroked the severed hunk of flesh in his palm and sang it Christmas songs.

  Funny thing, shock.

  “Did you talk to Connor about it, when he woke up?”

  “He was awake. When the screens went off, I couldn’t see anything—not right away. But then there was this … glimmer. Like a firefly. Like two. He’d turned around and he was just staring at me. His eyes, they were so … wrong.

  “I went back to the bedroom. And this time, I locked the door. The next day when I came home from work, there were holes in his door, places where the screws had broken through. They were dead bolts. Five of them. He’d put them on backward, on the door instead of the frame.…”

  She wobbled again. I put a hand on her leg. My pinky slid into one of the rips in the fabric and I felt the soft tension of the leggings underneath. A year ago the sensation would have made me rock hard in under a second. But not now. Something wasn’t right here.

  “When was this?”

  “A week ago. Maybe longer. I haven’t seen him since, except from outside.”

  “Outside?”

  “There’s no bathroom in that room. It’s just a walk-in closet he uses as an office. And the window doesn’t open—”

  “Maybe he came out when you were at work?”

  “I stopped going. I used sick days. I even slept on the floor, right next to the door. He never left.”

  I wasn’t sure how to parse the next question flashing in my queue. There isn’t a polite way to phrase, Did you smell anything? But she read my mind.

  “He was typing, at first. So I knew he hadn’t … and then, when the typing stopped, I heard the creak of his chair. He’d just jerk around every few minutes. Like he was having a seizure.”

  “What did you mean about seeing him outside?”

  “I waited until it was dark, and went to the roof. Climbed down the fire escape. He’d painted the windows, but I could see inside.…”

  That’s when the tears started again. And in her eyes I could finally see the only thing I’d never seen there before, in all the time we’d been together: pain.

  Something I’d never been able to elicit, no matter how hard I’d tried.

  “I saw the wires. The new wires.”

  Funny thing, shock.

  “Do you want to call the police?” For a moment she looked bewildered. Then she shook her head, and put the teacup down, rubbing away the indentations it left in her hand.

  “I need you.”

  The static returned to my brain. How dare she. How dare she—

  … Stake in her heart aim for the brain fucking walking undead …

  “I need you to come. To come and see.”

  * * *

  We went down the street to Solley’s. They’d closed, but the occasional taxi driver kne
w enough to fly by on the off chance that an overenthusiast would wake up in the alley and need a late-night ride home. Easy to help yourself to a generous tip, from those types. But the alley was as abandoned as the bar—and the streets. I figured the drivers somehow knew this—imagine the sixth sense a guy could cultivate slinging fares in this city—because after fifteen minutes of no cabs, I tried calling. No one picked up at 411. No way to reach Dispatch.

  We could have gone back to my place. But that would have brought Mindy back to a dangerous proximity to my bedroom—and I’d already fought that battle that night. So we trudged through the rain to the light-rail station a half mile deeper into the Dead Zone of downtown. It, too, was deserted. Two A.M. on a Thursday. The bars at the safe end of the city would still be open. I assumed it was the rain. And maybe The Drop.

  There, at least, I was correct.

  The train arrived right on time—to the very minute. Naturally, it was fully automated. The axiom holds: remove the possibility of human error from the equation, and generally the equation sings.

  I think, therefore I am.

  I am, therefore I fuck up.

  QED.

  All the cars were deserted, and I led Mindy to seats in the front. Maybe it was an instinctive attempt at consoling her—a symbolic and quietly desperate gesture to give the impression that we were in any way, shape, or form in control of this ride. As if we could, at any point, grab the reins and be in charge of our destiny.

  Our destiny. As if the past year had never occurred. As if I could wipe it clean, the same way I’d tried to wipe the memory of her clean.

  And look how well that had gone.

  She settled back, and under the awful, energy-efficient LED lighting I could finally see the dark blotches under her eyes, the beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. Too many cigarettes. Not enough sleep.

  I almost nodded off myself, in the somnambulant rocking of the car. No, it wasn’t that, was it? It was her. It was the fact that now that I’d touched her, I couldn’t stop. My fingers stayed on her leg, caressing that exposed patch of nylon. She needed my comfort. She needed to know I was there.

  Yeah. Sure.

  The abrupt twitch of her body brought me back to attention. It was a sudden, jerking motion, so quick that I might not have noticed had the soles of her high-tops not slammed against the bottom of the seat when it happened.

  Her eyes were drifting again. No, not drifting—reeling in their sockets.

  Then she grabbed my leg. Squeezing with a strength that didn’t seem possible.

  I snatched at her wrist, startled—and the fugue ended as quickly as it had come, her muscles relaxing their grip. She looked down, saw my hand in hers. Her body shuddered in relief.

  So I didn’t let go. I couldn’t.

  And I didn’t notice the pinpricks in my jeans until they started bleeding. Five, count ’em, tiny spots of red. Her fingernails, chewed down to nubs, must have punched right through. That’s what I thought then, and that’s why I didn’t look.

  I didn’t look. So I didn’t see.

  We made it to Connor’s just before two thirty. Only a half hour left until The Drop. It was all I’d thought about for months, ever since the announcement of the Revenant Patch. But Cynapse was the furthest thing from my mind as I rode up the elevator with Mindy.

  I was going to Connor’s place. I was going there to help him.

  Because Mindy needed me.

  There had never been an explanation, from either of them. Not that I’d given her a chance. Maybe I’d secretly hoped that she’d have seen through my e-mail …

  … Don’t look back the sun has set don’t you ever look back …

  Seen through the hurt and seen with clarity that my words were nothing more than yet another childish and desperate ploy to get her attention, to elicit a response. How do they always describe those mismanaged suicides? A “cry for help.”

  Jesus. Is that all it was?

  But Connor—between us had risen an ocean of silence. A million images from our childhood friendship, suddenly drowned in the bleakest of seas. He went dark on Facebook, his blog. Even deleted his precious LinkedIn bio. He had swiftly bowed out not only of my sphere but the Sphere Entire. Our mutual acquaintances were polite enough never to mention his name. Everyone knew. But there was an undeniable sense that everyone had lost Connor. That some great force had surrounded him without contest—that he hadn’t resisted as it built a wall, planted a flag, dug a moat, and scrubbed the maps clean.

  Mindy had that effect on people. It only took seconds.

  Early man didn’t need to be told the value of gold. The glitter was enough.

  It was a handshake in the dark, with deal terms forged in shadow. Her belongings had abruptly vanished from my apartment—and Connor McKittrick, social-network butterfly, had simply gone extinct. With no apologia to remember him by.

  Eleven months. Six days. Two hours. And I was about to see him. The best friend who ruined everything.

  And I hadn’t brought a weapon. So much for those fantasies.

  Mindy stopped halfway down the hall, far from the door of the place they’d been sharing. “It’s gotten worse,” she whispered. “The smell.”

  It took me a moment to pick up on it. But it was there, festering under the collection of odors wafting up from the dingy hallway carpet. A meaty stench, not of decay but rather of heightened ripeness. It was worse at the door itself—an apartment filled with a million flowers, blossoming all at once, spilling the sickly scent of their nectar into the air, to draw forth the pollinating insects.…

  Every biologically innate alarm was blaring in my head but …

  … Anything anything but alive …

  But I’d come this far. I was at the door.

  And Mindy needed me.

  I showed Connor more courtesy than he’d ever shown me, in the act of stealing Mindy—I knocked on his door. “Connor. It’s me.”

  Silence.

  I didn’t realize Mindy had shuffled forward until I heard her whisper close to my ear, “He can’t answer you.”

  Those other alarms, the remaining few that hadn’t triggered, that I guess I didn’t even know I had up there?

  Yeah. All at once.

  “I’m coming in, Connor. I’m coming in.… I’m coming.”

  * * *

  The stink rolled over me, filling every empty space, every available void, straight down to the gap between nucleus and electron. It was like I’d just belly flopped into a fetid, stygian pond straight out of Lovecraft’s darkest nightmares.

  But Mindy needed me.

  The apartment lights were off, so I navigated my way using the feeble light from the hallway. I didn’t want to risk touching anything, especially the walls. Not with that smell penetrating my soul. Not with the squelching sounds my feet were making on the floor.

  My mind was conjuring some remarkable imagery, the things I might see if I dared find a light switch. And I had no interest in challenging their veracity. My eyes were adjusting well enough anyway—and it didn’t take me long to zero in on what must have been Connor’s makeshift office.

  I could have found my way there with just my nose.

  But instead it was the pulsing light seeping out from under the door, as clear as a homing beacon. It drew me into its gravity, the most careless of moths.

  There were the screw holes, just as Mindy had described. If I hadn’t checked for them, I might have missed the condensation that covered the entire length of the door. The paint was loosening, and peeling. It could have been made of …

  … Rotting decaying flesh …

  The knob was warm. Almost invitingly so.

  “Connor.” I tried to put some authority behind it. To establish a baseline. To ensure our positions in the world were understood. “Connor, can you hear me?”

  There was a metallic creak from inside. His chair. A weight shifting.

  “Mindy’s here. She’s worried.” I wanted to spit, to clear m
y sinuses of the horrific stench, to clear my mouth of the shit-movie dialogue. I glanced back at Mindy, who had closed the apartment door. I didn’t ask why.

  I didn’t think to.

  “Do you want me to break the door down?” She didn’t answer. Fuck it, I wanted to break the door down. And then I wanted to use my fists to beat Connor’s face into …

  … Oh God why why couldn’t you have just …

  Splinters of the door frame battered my face, the perspiration from inside the room must have been incessant, and finally weakened the wood. I brushed fragments from my eyes, staggering backward, momentarily blinded.

  My vision finally cleared. And I saw the machine.

  That’s what it looked like, at first: a hulking metal morass in the center of the room, misshapen and angular, the creation of a tangled mind. The floor was nearly knee deep with snarled cables, some as thin as a straw, others as wide as a finger. Some fed into the desktops under the table—they’d punched through the outer casings, squirmed between the narrow cooling vents. Others wriggled into the walls and floor of the room itself, and a bundle of narrow ones even draped along the window ledge, ending in a fist-size hole they’d made in the glass. The shards around the edges sliced into their sinuous skins and a dark ichor flowed out, seeping down along the wall below.

  It was a lair of sleeping serpents, undisturbed by the pulsing sapphire embers emitted by the computer monitors above them, swirling windows of fluid …

  … Saw me it saw me …

  That framed the oblong hulk of metal, giving it contour and—

  The chair. The machine squatted right where a chair would have been.

  I stepped tentatively over the coils, knowing before it became clear …

  It wasn’t a machine. It was Connor. He was the root from which all these branches emerged. His skin—what was left of it, anyway—bulged horribly under the tension of the cables …

  … The new wires …

  That had forced their way out from within. I found myself wondering if the thicker cables had hurt more than the slender ones, as they created a string of three-ring tents along his arms, his legs, his forehead. The wires that extended from his tear ducts were thin as gossamer, and connected to nothing but air. Tightly wound bundles that relaxed once they’d cleared his cheeks, and seemingly of their own power swirled independently, as if caught by some breeze I couldn’t detect.