Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (3 page)

But enough of that for now.
I am just trying to give you an understanding of what
phenomenon
means to me,
personally. It means, simply, anything not ordinarily perceived via
the human sensory apparatus.

I saw an apparition, an
"appearance," some energy form that did not have atomic structures
packed into it as densely as mine are packed into me. If you prefer
to call it a ghost, go ahead. For myself, I am much more
comfortable trying to relate that particular type of phenomenon to
some sort of psychic energy. That keeps my feet planted on solid(!)
earth while I try to understand what is happening in my little
parcel of reality.

At the moment in question I had enough
solid-earth problems on hand without looking for more in rarer
atmospheres. Karen Highland absolutely fell apart when Bruno died.
She apparently had no family, no close friends, absolutely no one
to turn to—and the same for Bruno. I could not just send the lady
toddling along Pacific Coast Highway, all starey-eyed and terrified
and totally alone in the world. She seemed convinced that
"something evil" had done in Bruno and I had the impression that
she was a bit worried for herself too.

I gave her a sedative and put her to bed at
my place. Then I went looking for Bruno.

I found him in a refrigerated room at
County. I did not even know the guy's family name, but they had all
that from personal papers found in his wallet. The name, by the
way, was Valensa. The "person to notify in case of an emergency"
was Karen Highland, ditto for "name of employer." The home address
and telephone number were the same as I had in my book for
Karen.

Well, she had said that Bruno was "like an
uncle."

The tag on the remains simply read
"DOA"—without further comment.

I called an acquaintance at the coroner's
office and told her what little I knew about Bruno Valensa and the
circumstances of his death. I also said that I was acting on behalf
of Karen Highland and requesting an autopsy at the earliest
possible time. The coroner's assistant promised to pierce the
bureaucratic veil and get something happening immediately; I, in
turn, promised to call her soon for dinner.

She also suggested that I touch base with
the cops. I did not feel like doing that at the moment. I had
already been away for a couple of hours, and I was a bit uneasy
about my new housemate. It was now about five o'clock and the
traffic situation was frantic. I stopped at a little market for a
few groceries, got home about six.

Uneasy, yeah, with good reason. Her car was
still there. The clothing she had worn was there, folded neatly at
the foot of the bed. Water was running in the shower, but the
bathroom door stood wide open and no one was there—damp spot on the
carpet—one large bath towel missing.

My place is not that
large; took me all of thirty seconds to shake it down and to
realize that I was the only one at home. I found her about a mile
down the beach, wrapped in the towel, sarong fashion, walking
aimlessly through ankle-deep surf. Her eyes were sort of blank. I
was not positive that she knew where she was or that she even
recognized me. But she took my hand like a trusting child and
allowed me to lead her back to my place. We had no conversation. I
put her to bed again and called my doctor. We are drinking
buddies. He came out, took her temperature, and did the vital signs
bit, asked her a few routine questions to which she responded in a
monotone—name, rank, serial number, that sort of stuff.

Outside, he told me that she seemed healthy
and rather archly inquired if we'd been "doing any stuff." He meant
drugs, and he knew better. I told him about the sedative. Said I
should just keep an eye on her, let her sleep it off.

By now it is nine o'clock or so. I go back
inside to check her out, hoping she's asleep. She is not. She has
the bedcovers kicked back and she is naked. I stand in the doorway
and the dialogue is at that distance. She speaks first.

"Are you going to do it?"

"Am I going to do what, Karen?"

"You know. Give me an orgasm."

"If I could, sure. I'd do that. But that is
not something someone else can give you, babe. You have to go get
it for yourself. Maybe I could help you with that. Let's talk about
it tomorrow."

Which shows you what a nice guy I really am.
I was looking at heaven. But the moment was all wrong, the
rationale was wrong—and I was not all that sure that it was the
real Karen Highland in my bed. The eyes were still sort of blank,
as though no one was home there.

"Tomorrow? Promise?"

"Promise, yeah, we'll talk about it."

"Is Bruno really dead?"

"Yes."

"What can I do?"

"About Bruno? Not a thing, kid. Unless
there's someone I should notify."

"No. Bruno is the last—there's no one. He
had a brother. Like him."

"Like him?"

"You know. Mute. He died too. Year ago,
'bout. Same way."

"Same way?"

"Yes. Here one moment, gone the next."

"We'll talk about that tomorrow."

"Kiss me good night?"

"God, no."

Something moved within those blank eyes and
she giggled. "See you tomorrow, then."

I was closing the door when she very
sleepily informed me, "She came for him too."

"What?"

"Tony, Bruno's brother. She came for him
last year."

I went straight to the bar and made a drink,
took it outside to watch a great orange moon rise into the
sky—seeking, I guess, confirmation of an ordered reality.

So there I stood, whiskey and soda in hand,
feet planted trustingly upon a whirling cinder that moved in
endless circles around a nuclear fire in the sky, watching another
cinder or ash or whatever whirling around my cinder, seeking reason
and logic in an incomprehensible universe.

What fools we mortals be.

Chapter Three: Falling,
Falling

I spent the larger part of that night
tiptoeing about in repeated checks on my guest while also playing
code games with my personal computer.

Even with the strong sedative, her sleep was
restless and punctuated with muffled little outcries, but I
elected to let her sleep it out without interference from me;
sometimes that is best.

Besides which, I was having a devil of a
time with my computer linkage to the world brain. Amazing what you
can do with these little gadgets—the so-called "personal
computer"—if you know the tricks—and, of course, I had learned most
of those under navy tutelage. It's a modest investment in
"linkage." Smart shopping can set you up proudly for just a few
thousand dollars, allowing you to tap in to the monster system
costing millions.

A word or two is needed
here about "monster systems," in case you have not noticed any.
Modern human society is highly complex, much more so than one would
imagine from casual observations of the common, workaday world; so
complex, in fact, that it is only marginally manageable and—from an
inside view—appears to be in daily danger of total
collapse.

The whole thing is held together by a
tenuous network of "management systems" and "data parameters" that
embrace the full spectrum of government and private sector
interests, most of which operate at cross-purposes and with a
notable lack of cooperative effort. That the thing works at all is
a testament not to the ingenuity of man but to the stubbornness of
some impelling force of evolution that somehow keeps things
stumbling along despite all efforts to frustrate it.

If that sounds cynical, then call me a
cynic, but I am not really cynical about mankind per se, only about
the mechanisms that are trying to stick us all together in
manageable clumps. The mechanism has to be there, mind you, else
all is chaos—witness modern Lebanon as an example of what happens
when the machine collapses—but chaos is an inherent and basic
constituent of every management system ever devised, more and more
so as complexities increase.

I include any and every form of political
government in the definition of "management systems." Include
also, if you will, every religious and educational and commercial
endeavor of mankind. Keep that in mind, please, then consider that
the computer age has ushered in the most beautifully complex
mechanisms yet conceived by an exploding race consciousness—while
concomitantly producing the most menacing potential for utter
chaos.

Artificial intelligence.

Sound like something from a
science fiction movie? Sure, but it is also military-industrial
jargon that you might encounter any Sunday in the L.A.
Times
classifieds under
"Scientific Help Wanted." Artificial intelligence is the newest of
the growth and glamour technological pursuits of our space-age
society—mostly in military applications at the present state of
development, but it has already crept into various private
enterprises. The very term implies that more is under contemplation
than mere data-mashing, which is mainly what a computer does; it
suggests some sort of silicone brain that can reason both
deductively and inductively, make decisions and execute them—the
real-life equivalent of the old (ten years ago, I guess, is old by
present standards) science fiction themes concerning the
domination of mankind by monster computers.

But I digress. I was trying to make the
point that our highly complex society of today is being managed,
in most parts that really count, by computer technology and
"artificial intelligence." A lot of the chaos that erupts in our
personal lives, and in our personal interactions with a
computer-managed society, is caused when an individual or an
action does not match some mathematical model that is attempting
to orchestrate the social conventions in a given sphere of
activity.

I am trying not to sound
professorial, but I think round so I guess I have to talk that way.
Really what I am trying to suggest is that the monster computer is
already among us, governing us to a large extent that we are being
governed, controlling us to a large extent that we are being
controlled.

I tend to resent that.

All of which, above, is a roundabout way of
saying that I feel no pangs of conscience in using that same
mechanism as a service to help me hold chaos at bay while I attempt
some useful task.

So, yeah, I play the code
games. Not in a frivolous sense, and I do have a rather stern ethic
that keeps me from mucking around where I have no business. Most of
the data pools that I have accessed from my little TRS-80 contain
public records, anyway. Only occasionally have I invaded
confidential files, and then only when the need seemed to justify
the trespass.

The lady had come to me for help. If I am a
physician and you come to me complaining of a bellyache and I
suspect that your appendix is trying to explode, am I ethically
justified in giving you a Rolaids and sending you on your way
simply because you will not acknowledge the appendicitis? No—I
cannot work that way.

Karen Highland had a problem that was much
more ominous than the complaint that brought her to me. I did not
exactly know the parameters of that problem, but I felt that I owed
it to her as well as to myself to find out all I could about
her.

I hit every major data bank in the state in
that pursuit.

Know what? I found nothing. Nothing.

The mechanism that sticks
together the people of California had no knowledge of the lady; she
did not exist in that system. No driver's license, no work record,
not even a record of birth, no medical records, no police records.
Apparently she had never been insured, had never gone to school,
never married or divorced, never applied for credit, never bought
real estate, never paid taxes.

Along about three a.m., I began to get the
feeling that I was falling toward chaos.

I have a distinct distaste for chaos. So I
shut down the computer, took off my shoes, and stretched out on the
couch to give my right brain a shot at the logic.

Instead, I guess I fell asleep because the
next thing I knew, sunlight was streaming through the windows and
my home had been invaded by a number of energetic men with nasty
faces, two of whom were peering down at me over gun snouts.

I moved eyes and mouth only in a cautious
query as to the nature of their business there.

One snapped, "Shut up."

Another, outside my area of vision,
announced, "She's in here!"—and I was aware of energetic movements
in the general direction of my bedroom.

It happened faster than I can describe the
action. One moment they were there, the next they were gone—and
Karen Highland too. I heard several vehicles pull away before I
ventured to my feet. It could have been a dream for all the
evidence left behind.

Even Karen could have been a dream.

But I knew that she was not.

For some strange reason,
maybe only to validate the reality, the first thing I did was to
call my friend at the coroner's office. It was a Saturday, but I
knew that she normally worked the weekends. But she was not there,
would not be there at all today, something about a family emergency
out of town somewhere, no idea when she would be returning to
duty.

The people at the county hospital kept me on
hold for upwards of ten minutes before firmly assuring me that
there was "no record" of my DOA.

Falling, yeah. Chaos loomed.

The 911 supervisor could find no record of a
dispatch to my address on the previous day, and a telephone
canvass of ambulance companies serving the area produced a solid
ditto.