Geekomancy (5 page)

And that’s when she lost it, Doctor,
Ree imagined Sandra saying as she looked down at a future Ree, locked in a padded room.

Wilco was mostly empty at 10 PM on a Thursday night. There were students here and there, a few homeless people, and the random unplaceable folks in clusters of ones and twos.

Making her way through the sporadic crowds, Ree reached Auburn, which was ten blocks south of Main. She’d left the U-District and entered a boring neighborhood filled with offices and apartments where rich kids from Cali and New England lived. This allowed them to attend U of P without ever having to deal with the inconvenience of seeing any parts of Pearson besides their classrooms and bars.

Ree walked a block, then turned left again, walked one more block, and turned left a third time. Why Eastwood couldn’t have just said “Go south nine blocks and then go in the first door on the right” was hard to say, but maybe he had a yen for folklore. Or was a jackass with a yen for folklore.

Remembering the rampant awesomeness of the lightsaber, she knocked on the door, hoping to get answers. She waited a few seconds, and then the door swung open with a reassuringly archetypal creak. The genre-loving part of her brain chuckled in approval as she stepped inside to see a stairwell going down.

Ree pressed the Record button on her voice memo app and started down the stairs. If nothing else, she’d be able to turn this into some kind of one-act.

“Eastwood of Eden”? No. “East by Eastwood”? Nah. “Tunnels and Trollops.” Yes. That’d do.

There was another door open at the bottom of the stairs, lit by one naked bulb flickering consistently enough that she wondered if it was Morse code.

The room beyond looked like a cross between the Science Fiction Museum and the dealer’s hall at Origins. Stacks climbed to the ceiling, forming narrow, dimly lit rows across the room. At the far side of the room, Eastwood stood in front of a desk piled high with books, yellowed paper, and a leaning tower of laptops. The far wall was covered by flat-panel TV screens.

Eastwood threw open his hands and said, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” His voice carried easily through the long room, the air still.

She snerked. “Morpheus, eh? Your coat needs to be bigger, and you need that awesome gap between your teeth.”

“Whatever. Just come in and close the door. We don’t want to be interrupted, and you may have been followed.”

“What, by fratboys?”

“If only,” Eastwood said. “I can deal with the Bromance crowd.”

Eastwood said the phrase with surprising seriousness.
Curiouser and curiouser.

Ree made her way across the room, sneaking a look at the boxes and artifacts on the shelves. There were a lot of bound manuscripts, some old Betamax videos, DVDs, longboxes of comics, and costume pieces from TV shows and movies across the 20th century, among others. She stopped and looked at a piece that looked like Gort’s head from
The Day the Earth Stood Still
.

“Okay, I’m here. Lay some exposition on me, donor figure.”

“That’s Folklorist talk. Did you go to Berkeley?” Eastwood asked.

“Didn’t. Dated someone who did.” Ah, Berkeley, home of the best Folklore program south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Now,
that
had been a wild six weeks. Ree’s romantic history had several advantages, namely all the strange nonweapon proficiencies she’d picked up over the years from her partners. Do it right and you can get a general studies degree from dating widely, or an honorary doctorate if you stick with one person long enough. Ree hadn’t made it past the B.A. stage, though she’d learned more than a few handyman tricks from Jay.

Her stomach dropped at the thought of Jay, and she took a deep breath with her eyes closed, trying to push the feeling away.

When she opened her eyes, she looked up to Eastwood, who was waiting. He rolled a chair out in front of her. “Have a seat, this might take a while.”

“You have any popcorn?”

“That’s some impressive Snark Armor you have. I’d say +3 at least. Urban Outfitters?”

“ThinkGeek.” Ree considered and raised her hands. “Sorry. I’m here to listen, so talk.”

Eastwood picked up a mug from his desk, took a long sip, and started. “You’re a geek.”

“Yes . . .”

“You grew up watching sci-fi movies, reading fantasy novels, hiding under the covers after watching
Alien
. You probably played with lightsabers, maybe you had your cowboys fighting Picard and the spandex crew on the holodeck.”

“Close enough. But what does that have to do with the big pile of ugly back at Trollope’s?”

Eastwood waved to his stacks. “We tell these stories for a reason. They let us simultaneously remind ourselves of what’s out there while reassuring us that they’re not real. Humanity can’t quite manage to stop telling the tales of the monsters and beasts, gadgets and robots. We keep the warnings alive, even in ridiculous contexts: monsters that eat co-eds and aliens that kidnap nubile maidens to Mars.”

Ree sat forward. “Wait, are you saying these things are real because of the stories or despite them?”

“Good question,” Eastwood said.

“You don’t know?”

Eastwood started to pace back and forth, talking with his hands but never making eye contact with Ree. “There are a range of opinions, most of them crappy and none conclusive. Some say we told stories to explain the shadows at the edge of the cave, and in the telling, they became real. Some say that the shadows at the edge of the cave were already alive and our stories made them whole, bound them to individual forms that could be known, and when they were known, they could be killed.”

“And what about this Doubt thing? Sandra and Darren don’t even remember stepping out into the alley.”

“The doing of some jackass a while back, during a massive throwdown in Europe during the Enlightenment. It was a virulent meme, spreading with humanism and rationality and all that rhetoric. The Technomancers wanted to be the alpha and omega of magic, so they tried a massive retcon, wanted to write the creatures out of existence.”

Eastwood swiped one hand through the air. “Sadly, like any good meme gone viral, it took on a life of its own. Instead of eliminating the beasts entirely, the Doubt just settled into our minds and let us
MIB
ourselves out of believing such things exist when we do run into them. When they realized what had gone wrong, the Technomancers got into the secret-police gig. As they spread around the world with the various empires, the Doubt went with them. It’s not fully settled in everywhere, and some people are immune, like with chickenpox or common sense.”

Ree took another deep breath, processing the backstory while delaying judgment on whether she believed it. “So maybe you’re telling the truth. Maybe you’re some whacko predator with a damn fine hologram generator. And maybe you had someone slip something in our beer. How do I know you’re for real?”

Eastwood nodded, walking around the corner into one of the stacks. Ree heard the sound of rummaging, and a minute later, he returned with a gray-white sphere. It looked for all the world like the training remote from
A New Hope
. Eastwood pushed a few buttons on the sphere, raised it to head level, and let go. The remote stayed in place, hovering and spinning slightly. Then Eastwood pulled the lightsaber prop out of his coat and handed it to Ree.

“You know what to do—elegant weapon, civilized age, all that good stuff.”

Ree smiled. “Can you put on some John Williams?”

Eastwood smiled and pressed a button on a remote she had never noticed him pick up. Luke’s theme started playing on the massive sound system, and a chill washed over Ree.

Okay, this is pretty cool.
She had to admit, the prop was damned pretty. The metal was cool to the touch, and its rubber grip was sturdy but flexible in her hands. She found what should be the activation switch, then struck a stance she remembered from
The Force Unleashed
and flipped the switch. The saber jumped to life with the appropriate sound, but the blade didn’t feel any heavier.

Ree smiled from ear to ear. “Wow.”

Eastwood grinned. “Right?”

“So if I can’t use the Force, how am I supposed to keep from chopping my own hand off?”

“I’ve tweaked it so that it won’t cut through matter, but it will absorb the blasts. Speaking of which.” The drone spun and floated to the left, shooting out a white bolt of energy. Ree tried to bring the blade across her body to parry, but missed. The bolt hit her in the left shoulder, hurting like a bee sting. She let go of the lightsaber with her left hand and curled the arm up in pain.

“Sonofa . . . But this is all stuff you can do with a good animatronics department and a roofie,” she said, not sure she believed herself. Or what to believe at all.

The drone spun and moved to one side, then fired another bolt.

Ree continued trying to block the zaps while Eastwood talked. “Really? Or are you just trying to keep from freaking out? You accepted the troll’s existence when it was about to crush you into smithereens, but now that you’re only getting stunned, you feel like you can play Doubting Thomas.”

Damnit.
He was right. There were too many weird-ass things to be able to brush them all off with roofies or David Blaine sneakiness. Eastwood might be a crazy stalker, but he was giving her more answers than she’d had before, and the weird had stacked up way past the level of prank. Was her lingering skepticism good old human logic, or was it all the Doubt?

Ree walked up toward the drone and grabbed it, looking for the off switch. “Okay, that’s enough drilling for now. Keep spilling your guts about these Technomancers, but first go to the part that tells me why you came into the store and why there was a troll in the alley but I’ve never seen anything weird before today.”

“It could be that you’ve never run afoul of any creatures or magicians before today, or maybe someone’s been protecting you, or maybe you’ve had encounters before but this time the Doubt didn’t cover it up . . . What do you think?”

“Is this some kind of test?”

Eastwood shrugged. “I actually don’t know, but I’d like to hear your opinion. In case you didn’t notice, I’m no Dumbledore, and I have better things to do than spend all day educating nascent Geekomancers—but you do intrigue me enough to figure out why you fell through the cracks.”

Ree walked back to the chair, sitting and feeling it roll toward the stacks. She reached out and stopped herself before she hit anything. “Well, for one, I wouldn’t know if someone’s been protecting me, since, to my knowledge, this is the first time I’ve seen something that would make normal people run screaming for Prozac or the psych ward. And what the hell kind of title is ‘Geekomancer’?”

Eastwood shrugged. “The name stuck. It’s no less ridiculous than Bromancer, Plutomancer, Celebromancer, or any of the other schools of magic.”

“How many schools are there?”

“Seems like it changes every day. Blame postmodernity, it’s an easy scapegoat.”

“Really? I’d expect it to be dodgy, full of unstable referents and all.”

Eastwood cracked a smile. “Touché.”

“So what was up with the Grant Morrison trade?”

“I was tracking an
oni,
and I needed a power boost to follow it up the walls and over the rooftops.”

Ree cocked her head to one side. “So the comic let you climb walls?”

Eastwood nodded. “That’s my thing. I take artifacts and use their power. In a pinch, I can take a manuscript or DVD or tape and break it to take on something from the story. Animal Man trade paperback plus my portable shredder equals instant animal empathy for one hour.”

“Let me parse that for a second. One:
Oni
are real, like big-gnarly-teeth Japanese-demon
oni
.”

“Yes.”

“And two: All of the comics in my store might as well be single-serving superpowers as far as you’re concerned.”

Ree looked over to one of the stacks and saw a dusty pile of individual comics issues, including three beat-up copies of
Marvelman
. Ree restrained the urge to swipe one and stow it in her coat. She’d never read it in paper, only scans.

“Not just that,” Eastwood said. “They can be used in rituals, too. It’s slower, but you get more bang for your book.”

Ree took a breath and voiced a question. “So why don’t you just carry copies of
Superman
around and channel Kryptonian badassery all the time?”

Eastwood nodded, thoughtful. “You can do that, but even with the artifacts, you’re still channeling power. An average collector-level issue is good for at best one post-Crisis Kryptonian punch. To get any kind of sustained power, you need ridiculously important artifacts. I saw someone rip up an
Action Comics #15
for power once.” A doofy grin passed over his face. “It was astonishing.”