The city’s population swelled, drawn to its shores by viral marketing campaigns and rumors of epiphanies. Newcomers stood marveling at how thoroughly the first wave of inhabitants had adopted the personas of their ghostly forebears, circulating the blood of commerce and art through Chelsea, Tribeca, Wall Street, Harlem, Midtown. Newmans marched twenty abreast chanting conciliatory mottoes and welcoming these immigrants with promises of freedom from the stress of industrial production. Here and there a crime erupted, mostly human-on-newman violence, handled discreetly by those who’d absorbed the personas of New York’s finest. Bald eagles careened over former Bainbridge Island, orcas nudged its seawall, and from the city’s bowels screeched rats, subways, and data. The by-products of human folly seemed to have expired outside the parapets of this cathedral. Block by block the last vestiges of the former island trembled under the sky’s robotic arms and joined the urban parallelogram teeming with offices and takeout pierogi joints, galleries, and gay bars. The more immigrants who arrived at this fever dream, the easier it was for a man or woman just off the boat to cast aside his or her former self and plunge psychologically whole into one of the diminishing number of roles doled out by the newmans. The rain-raked city strained under the weight of lost memories.
Woo-jin, lying on the master bathroom floor of the penthouse, head resting on a hand towel, succumbed to dreams once dreamt by Isaac Pope, which mainly consisted of endless lines of code with the occasional appearance of a Star Trek character asking for instructions on how to fuck. Woo-jin woke to a shoe tapping his wrist. He couldn’t see the man’s face from this angle; and the lunar eclipse of the heat lamp cast the face in shadow. The guy smelled of shoe polish and breath mints. He extended his hand and pulled Woo-jin up so that he could sit on the toilet. Then the man took a seat on the edge of the tub. Woo-jin tried to reset his eyes but the guy’s face seemed to come out of an obscure memory.
“You’re that movie star,” Woo-jin said.
“That’s right. I’m Neethan F. Jordan.”
They shook hands. Woo-jin accidentally leaned on the flusher.
“You’re Woo-jin Kan,” Neethan said.
“Please don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. Don’t you remember me? We were both in the Happy Sunset Home together. When we were kids?”
“The group home?”
“Yes, the group home. You’re my brother.”
“I have a brother?”
Neethan shrugged. “Brother in the sense that we came from the same lab. We got sent to the home because we came out not exactly to spec. They had designs for all of us. Some of us came out different from how the recipe said we’d come out. I was a false negative. They thought I was a rough draft, but they made a mistake.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The ones who pushed civilization’s RESET button. They designed me to be a movie star. Made me a descendant of an Indian tribe that got wiped out even before the FUS. They made you, I don’t know—”
“I’m a really good dishwasher,” Woo-jin said.
“There you go. I played one of those once.”
“Did you ever play a writer?”
“I did, yeah. Why? You want to be a writer?”
“I tried to write a book about how to love people but it fell apart.”
“How do you love people?”
“I still don’t know.”
“Who does?” Neethan shrugged. “By the way, when I showed up they assigned me the life of some homeless guy. You wouldn’t mind if I crashed here, would you?”
The penthouse quickly filled with characters. While Woo-jin slept they sprawled on living room furniture and helped themselves to the pantry, uncorked pre-FUS bottles of port, and confiscated art off the walls. Mornings Woo-jin shuffled in pj’s to the bathroom to piss only to be sideswiped by Neethan, who supported on his arm a woman named Sarah or Kateesha or April, pleasant enough ladies doing their panicked best to adapt to the lives they inhabited in this fabricated metropolis. A cadre of filmmakers held court on the balcony drinking brandy from to-go cups and debating the methods by which qputers cinematicized reality. A chef arrived, accompanied by a woman with one leg, a horn section in search of a band, some cracked-out bike messengers, and a newman crooner who sang spot-on versions of period show tunes. A couple times Woo-jin woke to find socialites unconscious in his bed or the bathtub. Group sing-alongs at all hours, creative uses for whipped cream, a sink bloodied by some poor bastard’s unfortunate encounter with a shattered highball. Various drugs rampantly traveled through the collected horde, with substances snorted, swallowed, injected, shoved into rectums, and illegally downloaded. A shaman of sorts—at least he looked like a shaman—danced spastically in the butler’s quarters in coils of sage smoke. Pots and pans clattering, someone going to town on a seven-piece Ludwig trap set, bowls of M&M’s and newman-human genital interactions. Vomit, assorted. This was, Neethan Fucking Jordan informed him, the party.
Every night after booklessly wandering the city in search of an agent, dragging himself through the door of his building, Woo-jin found his penthouse that much more infested with marauders high on one thing or another and their dogs and cats. Which made it all the stranger when he returned one night to find the penthouse fairly empty, just a man who looked like a fire fighter asleep facedown, snoring in the book-lined library. Then, from above, snickers. Woo-jin craned his neck to see that twenty feet up the usual rabble had ascended to the ceiling. Just kind of floating there like astronauts in zero-G. One young gentleman spilled his white Russian on Woo-jin’s shoulder.
Neethan spun around the chandelier, brushing aside a couple pairs of groping hands, encircled by cameramen standing on the ceiling. “Woo-jin!” he called down, “Take a hit off one of those balloons and join us!”
In the corner, beside the bigass FUS-era globe marked with graphic representations of fires, tornadoes, rogue glaciers, earthquake fissures, swarms of locusts, and the like was a bouquet of balloons with their strings tied to a paperweight in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Inhale the air inside it!” Neethan said. “Like you’re doing a whippit!”
“Like I’m whipping what?”
“Just open the end of it and breathe in the air.”
Woo-jin emptied the contents of a balloon into his lungs. Right away he felt a nagging absence of gravity. Some force seemed to pull his legs out from under him and he gradually rose to the ceiling, where Neethan looped an arm around him.
“How you holding up, buddy?” Neethan asked, half to the cameras.
“I think I need to start writing my book again.”
“Go for it, buddy. Hey, can I get one of those mini pizza things over here? Get this—I met this crazy couple of university professors who happen to know a lot about my tribe. They’re over there by the guy in the bear suit.”
Cut away to the Vacunins pausing their zero-G heavy petting to pinkie wave at Neethan.
“I need to go home,” Woo-jin said.
“For real?” Neethan said, pretend-disappointed. “Come on, no…”
“I can’t write the book I’m supposed to write here.”
Neethan nodded to the cameras. “You guys getting all this? Cool…” He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “Hey. Can you see me?”
“See you? Yeah?”
Eavesdropping onlookers chortled. Neethan lowered his voice, somewhat panicked. “Seriously, bro, I need to figure out what kind of real I am.”
A rumble of conversation passed through the floating assemblage. Woo-jin caught pieces of it. Supposedly the messiah was near. “The king! The king! He has arrived!” Perplexed grins and bursts of laughter all around. A waft of combo hash-crack smoke. “In Central Park? Dude, I am so there.” Someone, an actress maybe, wearing little more than a shoe, opened a high window and squeezed out to drift moonward in the night. Others followed, cackling, anxious for their chance to witness the messiah’s return. Eventually the exodus left Woo-jin and Neethan alone, floating on the ceiling, while someone snored inside the chandelier.
“The messiah, huh?” Neethan sighed. “I was supposed to abort that son of a bitch.”
Eventually they floated to the floor. Woo-jin walked in a circle to shake out his legs as gravity reasserted itself. Neethan tossed cubes into a glass and poured something brownish on top of them.
“Maybe you’ll find your people,” Woo-jin said.
“I’m not a person, I’m a character. And I am fabulously famous and sexy and wealthy,” Neethan said almost sadly, then killed his drink.
“How should I get home to Seattle?”
“Easy. Just catch the Q from Fifty-ninth.”
That night Woo-jin said good-bye to New York Alki, hopping on a subway just before it left the platform. Here and there folks crammed words into crossword puzzles or slept listening to iPods. After a time Woo-jin closed his eyes and let his head rock back and forth as it rested against the glass. Later, a sense of motionlessness woke him. He clambered out of the train into a deep darkness that confusingly revealed streets and houses. He headed toward the rivery car sounds and found himself on Aurora, Seattle’s avenue of hookers, gun shops, and moving-van companies, then veered south as day broke over his left shoulder, the purple serration of the Cascades rising beyond the repaired and repellent city. Most of these neighborhoods were abandoned but here and there a house suggested the presence of a family sleeping inside, with mowed lawns and new shingles, vehicles glossy with dew parked out front. Aurora turned into 99 and Woo-jin dipped beneath the city and when he came out of the tunnel it was morning with seagull cries and the salty, creosote stench of the waterfront. After this brief view of the sound the roadway dipped under the dome and Woo-jin trudged through artificially lit Pioneer Square, stopped to buy a cookie, passed the stadiums, came out on the other side of the dome onto Fourth Avenue, and crossed Lucile into Georgetown.
He expected the trailer to still be gone but there it was, parked in the spot that had recently been a patch of littery dirt. He stood numb from walking and blinked in the dust. After a moment the door creaked open, revealing a statuesque woman in a glittery silver bikini.
Patsy spoke. “Woo-jin! Where the heck have you been? Why are you wearing that stupid suit? Take a look at what they did to me! Oh my God, Woo-jin, they made me not a pharmer anymore! Check this body out! Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! They took off the penises and tissues and everything! Oh, my God I’m so hungry! Don’t you tell me you didn’t bring me leftovers to eat! Don’t just stand there grinning like an idiot, Woo-jin Kan. Feed me! Feed me! FEED ME!”
Towels, water, rubbing alcohol, blood, gauze. Abby dressed Rocco’s wounds in the bathroom of the apartment, tossing saturated clothes and absorbent materials into the tub. He murmured codes into the pocket transmitter then slept wrapped in a comforter on the couch while the Bionet went to work rebuilding tissues. Abby stood over him, watching him sleep, knowing that if she was going to kill him, it would have to be now.
Midway through the bread at their favorite Meatpacking District wine bar, Sylvie told Rocco about a manuscript she’d just accepted.
“I missed you,” Rocco said.
Sylvie wanted to say she missed him, too, but that wouldn’t have been entirely true. Part of her—most of her—didn’t even know who the hell he was. Some guy plowing his fingers through cheek stubble, considering the Malbecs. Who was he again? Oh, right, he was Rocco. She knew him? Yes, everything about him looked familiar. She anticipated the eyelid flutter thing he did when he laughed. A script of possible behaviors whirred away somewhere cranial, and thinking about how or why she knew him seemed to disrupt it.
“I’m Sylvie Yarrow now.”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
“I’m Sylvie Yarrow?”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
They ordered the Australian pinot noir pimped by the sommelier. The candle guttered, sending up a foul feather of smoke.
“If I’m Sylvie Yarrow, who are you?”
“I’m Rocco. Your boyfriend, remember?”
“But—”
“What is it?”
“My boyfriend is Bertrand.”
“You were with Bertrand but you broke up. Now you’re with me.”
“I think there’s something wrong with me. I don’t feel like myself.”
“Who do you feel like?”
“I feel like I’m between two someones. And where are we?”
“At the wine bar—”
“I know that, but more generally. We’re in the city, right?”
“Have some wine,” Rocco said.
“Seriously. This is Manhattan?”
“That’s correct.”
“The air doesn’t smell right to me.”
“You had nightmares last night. You kept moaning in your sleep. What were they about?”
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“I’m your boyfriend. Rocco. The nightmares. Tell me.”
Sylvie quaffed red. “I was in a morgue. There was a coroner. He kept pulling out slabs. On every one of them was the same woman. Dozens of identical corpses.”
“Sylvie?”
“I feel weird about you calling me that.”
“All I’ve ever wanted for you is a happy life. Out of all the lives in New York City I reviewed, this one was the happiest. So I made arrangements to assign you this life.”
“What do you mean ‘assign’?”
“The world you’ve known isn’t the world you’re actually living in. Your name is Sylvie Yarrow and you’re an editor at a publishing house. You live in the twenty-first century. You have an extraordinarily rich and rewarding life. Go deeper into this self. Relax your ego. Drift into this welcoming new person.”
“I can’t remember my real name.” Sylvie squinted. “It’s like a painful tip-of-the-tongue feeling.”
“Can’t you see what kind of heaven this is? All of it re-created just for you. You’re free to live in this place as it was at the height of its glory.”
The salads came.
“That looks good,” Rocco said. “What kind did you order again?”
“Arugula Gorgonzola something something.”
Rocco, his voice low, said, “Take this life. It’s yours. All the memories, the belongings. How many people have this kind of opportunity? How many people would die to trade lives with someone happier?”
“I’m Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You’re Sylvie Yarrow.”
How arduous this process was, turning one person into another. Way way more complicated than manipulating some douchebag’s actions via the Bionet. DJing was all about making another person succumb to your will. This kind of work, on the other hand, was like translating a book from one language into another, except instead of languages one translated entire personalities, and instead of words one worked with white matter flickering in gray matter. Rocco didn’t entirely understand the personalities, so it was a little like coding in real time with no QA process to grab the bugs. He detected a little panicked fluttering at the edges of her mouth, a momentary wobble toward tears. He cupped his hand over her non-fork-wielding hand. Would Sylvie’s personality successfully map onto Abby’s, or would little Abby remnants crop up from time to time, like continuity errors in a movie? Watching her disappear into Sylvie was a bit like watching someone die, he was hesitant to admit, and for a moment a miniaturized sadness presented itself in his thoughts. Then he remembered that the whole point of this experiment was to turn his girlfriend into someone more interesting. He wondered if she’d take on Sylvie’s sexual proclivities, if it would feel like sleeping with a new woman.
Rocco summoned the waiter and ordered the olive and cheese plate out of sequence with the salads and entrées, then rubbed the veiny bulges on top of Sylvie’s hand. “So tell me more about this guy’s novel?”
Sylvie sighed. “It’s about the beginning of a new world. There’s a rampaging glacier in it. Clones. Giant heads that appear in the sky.”
“One of those.”
A significant aspect of replacing one personality with another involved what came to be called, in academic circles, third personing. Most of the time this involved the use of a prop, specifically a doll or figurine, life-size or not, into which the subject discarded his or her former personality. For Abby’s third personing, Rocco’d purchased a custom sex doll manufactured to his specifications—a precise, to-scale model of Abby, with the same color eyes, hair, measurements, etc., crafted of a rubberized polymer and dressed in one of Abby’s white-blouse-and-black-pants combos. She sat positioned on the couch of Sylvie’s apartment, a fashion magazine open in her lap. Returning that night from the wine bar, Rocco snapped on the lights and addressed the mannequin from across the room.
“Hello, Abby,” he said.
Sylvie stood in the doorway feeling like maybe she’d entered the wrong apartment.
“It’s okay,” Rocco said. “She’s just going to hang out here. Say hello.”
“Hi there,” Sylvie said.
“Now be polite, Sylvie, and address Abby by her name.”
“Hi, Abby.”
“Abby here is a graduate of the University of British Columbia in digital data archaeology. She says you have a nice apartment,” Rocco said.
“Thanks. Sorry for it being so small,” Sylvie said.
“Abby says, ‘Oh, no, don’t apologize. I’ve seen way smaller apartments in New York City. And what a neighborhood. Right in the middle of the hippest part of Manhattan.’”
Sylvie said, “Oh, stop. Can I get you a drink, Abby?”
Rocco said, “Abby says that would be nice. ‘Do you have tonic water?’”
“I think I have that. Rocco?”
“Sure, tonic water sounds good to me, too.”
Sylvie retrieved the drinks from the kitchen and returned to find Rocco chuckling at a witty comment Abby must have just made. “Say, Sylvie, Abby says she just finished one of the books you edited, The Subject’s Object.”
“That was a bitch to edit,” Sylvie said, coastering beverages. “All those passages in Russian and Icelandic.”
“Abby says she loved the ending.”
“I’m proud of that ending,” Sylvie said. “It took a while to get there. At one point I was reduced to tears. And not the good kind of tears.”
“I couldn’t get into The Subject’s Object,” Rocco said, “but I’m not all that literary.”
“Rocco’s the left-brainer of the relationship,” Sylvie said.
“Shit!” Rocco exclaimed, looking at his watch.
“What is it, honey?”
“There’s an email I forgot to send from work. And I left my laptop on my desk. Damn. I’m going to have to hop over there and hit SEND. I won’t be long, promise.” He gathered his jacket and kissed Sylvie on the forehead. “Sorry, Abby, I was just starting to enjoy our conversation. You two carry on without me.”
With Rocco gone, there came an awkward silence. Sylvie swirled the cubes in her glass. “So what line of work are you in, Abby?”
“Good question,” Abby said. “I just graduated, so I’m looking for jobs. Digital recovery stuff. I specialize in DVDs. What I’d love to do is work for a museum, restoring old movies. By old I mean 1900s or earlier.”
“You shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job in Manhattan. I’m guessing you’ve already sent your CV out to the museums?”
“Not so much yet. I landed a gig for a while working for Kylee Asparagus.”
“No kidding?” Sylvie said. “I loved her Asia album. She’s way underrated.” She rose and tickled a docked iPod. The opening of Asia played through bookshelf speakers.
As promised, Rocco wasn’t long, or was as long as it took him to walk around the block four times. When he returned, Sylvie sat in bed with a damp washcloth over her eyes. Abby remained on the couch, the magazine still in her lap.
“I suddenly got a really brutal headache,” Sylvie said.
“Did you download anything for it?”
“Did I what?”
“Take anything. Acetaminophen.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t entertain our guest.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“I could barely get a word in edgewise.”
Rocco poked at his pocket transmitter and entered a mild pain relief code, then an equally mild tranquilizer that had Sylvie snoring in a minute. Returning to the living room he paused in front of the fake Abby.
“Can I get you anything to eat?” he said.
Sylvie arrived home early on a Friday and found Rocco in bed with Abby. Apparently he hadn’t heard her come in. She watched him huffing over the prone form through the doorway. Abby’s legs were up, one of them bent over his right shoulder as he pumped and strained. Watching someone else have an orgasm is like witnessing a machine seize up, a system grind to a halt. Rocco grunted “Fuck” as he rolled onto his back, his cock audibly popping out of the artificial vagina like a cork exiting a bottle. He noticed Sylvie standing in the doorway.
“This is nothing,” Rocco said.
Sylvie frowned and went to the kitchen. A minute later she leaned against the dishwasher and Rocco leaned against the sink.
“I’m telling you, it was nothing. You didn’t see that.”
“I don’t want her staying here anymore,” Sylvie said.
“How do you think she feels about all this?”
“I don’t care how she feels, Rocco.”
“You’re not really mad at me.”
Sylvie palmed a tomato. “I am too.”
“You’re not. And you’re confused as to why you’re not. You feel like you should be more mad.”
Sylvie caught his eyes for a second, nonverbally offered up her confusion, then cast her gaze aside.
“She’s not real, Sylvie.”
“She loved you.”
“Huh?”
“Abby loved you, Rocco. She trusted you. She told me what you did.”
“There’s no Abby anymore. Just Sylvie.”
“I am Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You are Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You were fucking her.”
“I was fucking her for the last time.”
“All she did for a month was watch TV, eat, and sleep. You set her up with the most boring routine possible.”
Rocco scritched stubble. “You assume I was her DJ.”
“Who then?”
“Someone else makes me do this. I only DJed Abby because someone else is DJing me.”
Sylvie’s fingers closed around the tomato, the pulp and seeds and skin running down her wrist. Her fist trembled.
Rocco continued. “I don’t have a choice about who I am. But you do. You can choose to live Sylvie’s life.”
“I am Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You are Sylvie Yarrow. There’s one thing left to do. It’s the right time.” From the butcher’s block next to the Cuisinart Rocco pulled a filleting knife. He pried open Sylvie’s hand and let the fingers curl back around the knife handle. He led her to the bedroom, where the Abby sex doll was still prone, dripping a thin drool of semen onto the comforter, the dummy eyes pointed toward the ceiling.
“A young, successful woman with her life ahead of her. A talented book editor making a name for herself. This is what you want,” Rocco said. “So you must kill her. You’re Sylvie Yarrow,” Rocco said.
“I’m Abby Fogg,” she said, wiping the blade across Rocco’s neck.
Rocco smiled a second, surprised, then seemed to realize this wasn’t fucking around. The sheets: they used to be white. He awkwardly genuflected, a hand over his throat, then crawled to the bathroom. Abby stepped over him and fetched the Bionet transmitter from the medicine cabinet, sat on the toilet, and held it out for him as he crawled around in a red slick. She’d never seen this much blood. Bubbles of it coming out of the fleshy, fishy slit she’d made. He reached for the transmitter, died, and settled into the pool.
Back in the bedroom, Abby dressed the sex doll and propped her against the headboard. She turned on the TV for her, switched to a nature show, and put the remote in the doll’s hand. A moment later somebody knocked on the door. She opened it to find Lamb, the qputer monk, now dressed in toddler-sized overalls.
“Good job, Abby,” Lamb said.
“I’m Abby Fogg,” Abby said, blinking her eyes. “I’m Abby Fogg.”
This was a sidewalk from a memory, a crisp overlayer of graffiti and fluttery newspaper trash. Skinner had been here before, chasing newmans through Old Navy display windows and the gutted burning interiors of hipster apartments. SoHo: a facsimile. The address Rocco had provided under duress led him to a block, a door, a stairwell, a creaky wood hallway, a steel door behind which played some hideous prog. The door was unlocked. Skinner found an apartment committed to Danish design. Shit was minimal. Like the place was intended to be temporary but had been temporary for a very long time. Dirk Bickle sat on a black leather couch, wearing a white bathrobe, his white hair slicked back after a shower. On the coffee table in front of him were spread a variety of brand-name guns.
“Make yourself at home, Al.”
Skinner took a seat opposite, on a box-shaped chair. “You’re an old guy like me.”
“You and I go way back. You wouldn’t remember.”
“What’s with the arsenal?”
“We figured you’d want to rearm yourself.”
“You have my grandson,” Skinner said.
“They have a clone of your grandson. I thought that made all the difference.”
“I’m tired.”
“Take a nap, my friend. The bed is comfy.”
“I’m tired of killing things.”
“I’d be tired, too. But you’re the reptile brain, remember? You’re doing what you were designed to do.”
“You know where they have him.”
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You’ll find him at the Egyptian tomb.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
Bickle shrugged. “You want an explanation. You want me to lay out the causalities. For what? The world we occupy doesn’t operate that way anymore, if it ever did. You want me to tell you where Waitimu is so you can do your heroic rescue routine?”
“I’ll lay down my weapons for good.”
“Let go of A+B=C, Al.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
Bickle laughed. “I’m just some stupid guy. Look at this place. You know what’s funny? This is my actual apartment. A replication of where I lived pre-FUS. I’m having reruns of dreams I had hundreds of years ago. I never got married, never shared my life with anyone. I’m just some asshole with a sociology degree who answered an ad in a newspaper in 1985 for tech industry recruiters and found himself working for the most visionary of men. I didn’t offer you anything to drink. Cocktail? San Pellegrino? I’ve got some re-created Limonata in the fridge.”
Skinner picked up the nearest chair and hurled it through the window.
“You’d better hope that didn’t hit anybody,” Bickle said. Skinner yanked him off the couch by the throat and wrestled him to the jagged, framed air. He didn’t squeeze hard enough for Bickle to stop breathing, but enough to make the guy panic. Skinner dangled him over the sidewalk four stories down. Below, a taxi swerved to avoid the chair that now sat comically upright in the middle of the street.
“You probably won’t die unless you land on your head.”
“Get it over with. Do it.”
“You people killed my family.” Skinner jerked him back in, spun him around, pretzeled him into a full nelson, shoved him up to the broken window’s edge. The wind smelled like salt, like shit, like dead things, like low tide.
“We didn’t kill anyone. I’m a curator. I arrange mis-en-scènes. I make sure certain people are in certain places at certain times. I appear at the right moments to ensure that things proceed according to Mr. Kirkpatrick’s plans.”
“My grandson.”
“They’re keeping him comfortable in a room with no Bionet access. If your grandson got out he could take down the whole platform. He’s got super-admin permissions. He can erase whole directories. Suspend immunities. Unleash plagues. Authorize cancers and virgin births. Millions could die.”
“Why didn’t you just kill him?”
Bickle rubbed his neck and sighed. “This is the violence you inflict to extract increasingly unreliable information.”
“Answer my question.”
“Mr. Kirkpatrick is the only one we know of who’s ever had super-admin privileges. Your grandson could be the heir, the one who can seed the universe with new life, fulfilling our purpose.”
Skinner threw Bickle onto the couch, danced to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of water. Behind him, Bickle said, “I don’t care if you take the boy. I’m just connective tissue. I’m a concept, I’m like a mathematical theorem, Al. But I do know that every possible path open to you leads to extinction. This interrogation, or whatever you want to call it, is about you working through that theorem with a dull pencil, trying to get your big dumb brain to put it together.”
His big dumb brain. Yeah, that about summarized it. Skinner: meat moving through space on dancing legs, a wall of viscera. A montage of comic book encounters with thugs and lowlifes with heavy jaws, faces cracking under his hammer fist. Nightclubs, menacing piss-fragrant alleys. If he let go of what few memories remained, this was how he could live, as an action-movie caricature, a distilled id in the form of a geriatric commando with muscles out to here. Memories persisted in their needled prodding, forcing him toward some unbearable decision. He’d watched these buildings burn to the ground and gazing at them now he saw through their fabricated surfaces to the ruins they once were, those stinking repositories of cadavers.
“Your violence belongs to the old world, the fallen world,” Bickle said.
“What do you call this world?”
“This is the afterlife, Al. Except this afterlife is real and it’s on earth. It’s beautiful. It’s our redemption. It’s the time when we fulfill the task we were put here to do from when we crawled up out of the slime. Mr. Kirkpatrick teaches us that long ago we fearfully opened our eyes and searched for God. Now we open our eyes with love and create new life that will behold our fading shadow in awe. This is how it has been for all time. Intelligence moves relentlessly toward the creation of new varieties of intelligence and the greatest achievement of intelligence is the dissemination of new life forms. This clone of your son is the one we’ve been waiting for.”
“I have no idea whose side I’m even on,” Skinner said.
“You’re on the side that lifted man from the animals. But we don’t need you anymore.”
“I don’t remember how I got here.”
“You took a cab.”
“No, this island. The segues are missing from my memories.”
Stretching his neck, Bickle crossed the room to the stereo. “That’s because you’re a forgetfulness junkie. And by the way, that was a really expensive chair you ruined, I’ll have you know.” On the shelf next to the stereo sat an Apple memory console and a stack of cards. “You really want to know how you got here?”
Skinner didn’t answer, and in not answering indicated that he did.
“Did anything about your trip to Bramble Falls strike you as odd?” Bickle said.
“Lots of hallucinations.”
“Right. The kid with no face and the Indian by the fire. All those detailed memories of your hometown, the trails, the trees. The suddenness with which you were standing at the trailhead eating fruit cocktail from a can. Not to mention you’re never going to find a town called Bramble Falls on a map. The place is an invention. The real stroke of genius, thanks to this young hotshot developer we’ve got assigned to the project, was to embed your dad’s memories in this patched-together memory network where you’ve spent the past couple weeks. But that’s not the highlight. The highlight is this little guy right here.” Bickle held a card between his thumb and index finger. “You remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory and so on. Here it is. The master file. The memory of when you killed your son.”
Skinner fritzed out a bit at the edges. “You’re lying.”
“Your last mission, Al. The final hurrah of Christian America. The ultimate test of a soldier’s loyalty to laws and order and dogma. You carried out your orders impeccably. Your son, the first Waitimu, was born with super-admin privileges. When you learned this you volunteered for the task. This card will show you the abandoned building where you cornered him. It’ll show you the vines that grew up from the concrete beside the door you walked through, the chipped aqua-green paint on the wall. His pleas. You came into our office immediately after the deed and erased the memory, then erased the memory of erasing the memory. You kept doing this until no trace of the original memory remained.”
Skinner tried to breathe.
“And this one.” Bickle held up another card. “This is the sequel. The latest one. The one where you murder the rest of your family.”
“It was newmans.”
Bickle shook his head. “Newmans rescued the boy when you went psychotic. You think you’re going to the Met to save the boy but that’s not in your programming. You’re going there to kill him.”
And Skinner knew it was true. He walked to the window.
“You’ve done what you were designed to do, Al.”
“Who designed me?”
“Guy by the name of Nick Fedderly.”
“I am so confused.”
“Like I said, A+B=C is not the way to go here.”
“Release me.”
“That’s what these weapons are for.”
“I understand. Before I go. The man in the desert. The one with the refrigerator. Who is he?”
“Some call him the Last Dude.”
“What is he doing out there?”
“He’s running everything.”
“What?”
“You mean you haven’t figured that out?” asked Bickle. “The Last Dude is Mr. Kirkpatrick.”