Harbinger (32 page)

I’d been walking for about five minutes when I heard a frightening sound. It reminded me of barking seals and was so bizarre in the present context that it raised hackles on the back of my neck. Afraid, I switched my flashlight off. But that was worse. The barking sounds seemed louder. And nearer. I pointed my sidearm down the black throat of the tunnel.

“Whatever you are, stop!” I shouted.

Whatever it was
didn’t
stop.

I pulled the trigger, once. A brilliant plasma flash, like Tinker Bell on heroin, streaked from the muzzle. It kept on streaking and then disappeared without ever striking a target.

Seal barking laughter was the reply.

I fell back, then I ran back, then I sprinted back—all the way to the melted trapdoor. I jumped, caught the now-cool edge, and hauled myself out of the tunnel. Kneeling there, breathing hard, scared, my mind roiling with fear and panic.

The wind had subsided, still blowing but not a gale.

I wiped spit off my chin and stood up, knees trembling.
Damn
it. I walked back to the Bus. When I was almost there I kicked something and sent it scaling over the road to clang against one of the big balloon mesh tires. I leaned over, picked it up, and immediately dropped the thing and staggered back. Something verging on madness skirled through my mind. The object I’d dropped was a dented rectangle of metal with a series of numbers and letters stamped out on the reflectorized face.

A Washington State license plate, circa mid-twentieth century.

I raised the door and ducked into the Bus
. The door sealed shut behind me. I blinked sweat out of my eyes. Laird sat in the driver’s seat, motionless, arms hanging at his sides.

“There was something down there,” I said. “It scared the hell out of me. I guess you’d say I got what I deserved, right?”

But Laird didn’t have anything at all to say. I forgot my fear momentarily and placed my full attention on his immobile figure. Presently a new fear rose up in me. Of course, Laird often sat or stood stock-still. But I knew this time it was different.

“Laird?” The cabin of the Bus smelled like burnt plastic. “Laird?”

I approached him, spoke his name a couple of more times, but was not rewarded with a response. When I stood beside him, I knew he was gone. The disagreeable odor was strong. There were no percolating sounds. I leaned over him and listened at the breastplate, my ear hovering above the name: RODNEY. Inside, faintly, something went:
wheeze, click, wheeze, click, wheeze click
 . . . then stopped and there was nothing.

A great drafty loneliness enclosed me. I knew that in all probability the human essence that had been Laird Ulin had ceased to exist more than a century ago, back on
Infinity
, that the individual with whom I’d shared conversation and innumerable games of chess, wasn’t an “individual” at all, but a compact collection of imprinted memory engrams doing a sort of inspired imitation of Ulin. Nevertheless, his departure left me alone. If he had been pretending to be alive, I had been pretending to care about him. And if you pretend something long enough the line between pretend and reality blurs to the point of meaninglessness. Fake it till you make it, the AA people used to say. I looked at the RODNEY shell and knew I’d finally arrived at a funeral I couldn’t skip.

Laird was gone but RODNEY was in the driver’s seat, all three hundred or so pounds of him. I hauled him onto the deck and dragged him to the back of the Bus, grunting and straining for every inch. I thought about covering him up, but unlike a human body, this biomechanical puppet did not possess the dignity of “remains.” It was merely a thing. A heavy thing.

I sat on one of the passenger seats to rest a moment. A dark haze passed over me, and I slept—I think. In any case I eventually sat up out of something like a nap to see firelight dancing on the interior roof of the cab. Something was burning outside the Bus.

I got up and walked to the front. Night had fallen. The mangled wreck was in flames. Three Trau’dorians stood watching the conflagration, their devil faces red as blood, their mouths open, black inside. They were laughing. Two bodies hung out of the smashed Bus, their flesh charring, bleeding, falling off the bone. And the Trau’dorians were
laughing
! I could hear them on the speaker, those seal barks.

Instantly I was angry beyond restraint. I grabbed my sidearm and barged outside. The aliens turned toward me, and I discharged my weapon repeatedly, releasing searing flashes of plasma energy.

The Trau’dorians went down.

When my weapon was empty so was I, and I pitched over onto my face. As I lay there the flat hardpan of the road underwent a transformation, and I found myself spread-eagled on rain-damp macadam.

More Quantum Core fantasies or stasis dreams.

Anyway, the misting rain was cool relief on the back of my neck. I pushed myself up on hands and knees. I was on an empty stretch of road, two lanes bordered by scrub pine. It was raining lightly. Directly in front of me was the aftermath of a cataclysmic collision. Was a theme emerging? A hubcap rolled wobblingly across the road and fell over on the gravel shoulder.

I stood up.

The wreck was silent now that the last hubcap had fallen over. Silent and full of death. I knew the Plymouth was my mother’s car and the Duster belonged to a drunken teenage boy named Mark Snyder. I couldn’t remember the other two boys’ names, but the driver was Mark Snyder, seventeen years old. My mother and brother had been on their way home from the supermarket with a couple of bags of Halloween candy. Mark and his pals were on their way to a party. Of course they’d been doing some serious partying already, a case of Rainier between the three of them.

I didn’t want to, but I moved closer to the wreck.

Gasoline smell, scorched rubber, beer. A few empty cans were in the street. A figure slumped over the wheel of the Plymouth. I looked away.

The Duster’s windshield was smashed out. The driver had gone through it. No seatbelt, of course. He lay sprawled in the street, thirty meters beyond the mangled vehicles. Good old Mark Snyder. Drunk and driving with his mask on.

His leg twitched; he was alive.

But when I reached him I wasn’t so sure. Even the dead have muscle spasms. And this boy looked as dead as they come. Then his fingers twitched on the wet macadam. Not dead.

I squatted beside him. One eye of his red rubber Devil mask leered at me. I grabbed the mask by the horns and pulled it off. The thick rubber had protected Snyder’s face. There was bruising around his eyes but no cuts or abrasions.

“It hurts,” he said. “It really hurts.”

And he was sobbing like a much younger child. He looked spitless and scared. Not at all like the cocky picture that had appeared in the newspaper, taken of Snyder and his friends the week before Halloween, all of them with shit-eating grins on their faces, all of them holding their Devil masks up like severed heads.

“Yeah it hurts,” I said.

“I don’t wanna die,” he said.

Who does?

A horn honked behind us. It sounded like a regular car, but when I turned I saw it was a big fucking anachronism: the Bus from Planet X. I started to get up, but Snyder grabbed my arm. He didn’t have much strength; I could have easily pulled away. But maybe not so easily.

“Please,” he said.

I knew he was going to die. No one had survived the wreck. Not Snyder or his two pals. Not my mother. Or my brother Jeremy. No one. And besides, this wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter if I stayed to comfort the dying boy, or stood up and kicked him in the teeth. Part of me
wanted
to kick him in the teeth. But it was a diminished part, a retreating part. I was tired.

The Bus flashed its lights at me, but I turned back to the boy.

“Take it easy, kid,” I said.

“I’m
scared
.”

He clutched my arm weakly, and then I started to cry, too. It wasn’t just Snyder lying there; it was all the funerals I’d missed, all of them.

The door opened and I ducked inside the Bus
. I would have tripped over RODNEY, but he wasn’t there. Why not? Anything goes in my scrambled world, including three hundred pound doorstops. Then I thought: W
ho did the flashing and honking?

Dr. Tamara swiveled around in the driver’s seat. Except  . . . for a moment my brain stuttered and I thought it was Nichole Roberts. And in that moment my heart stopped, then resumed, beating.

“Hello, Ellis. Now that you’ve come this far I’m glad you didn’t turn back. You’re doing wonderfully.”

“Am I? Is this one of the more entertaining psychosis you’ve witnessed?”

She smiled. “I’m not witnessing a psychosis. I’m witnessing Evolution.”

I groaned.

“Are you ready to see the Harbinger now?” she said. “I think you should drive.”

She vacated the driver’s seat for me. I didn’t take it. “No, thanks.”

“It’s all right, Ellis.” Her hand rested on the back of the seat, offering it to me.

I shook my head. “Nope. This is what I’ve been doing since I woke up out of stasis—if I ever did wake up out of it, or even go into it in the first place.”

“What do you mean, Ellis?”

“I mean I’ve been treating every shift of my cognitive reality as if it
were
reality. Every time the rules change, I quickly figure out what the new ones are and start obeying the hell out of them.”

“You’re very adaptive. That’s an essential trait of the Evolved.”

I laughed, sat down in an empty passenger seat, crossed my legs. I held my open hands up, palms outward. “I’m not playing anymore. You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m still interfaced with
Infinity
’s SuperQuantum Core. I think the Core was already corrupted and none of us realized it. That was bad enough, but then I made the mistake of insisting the SQC immerse me in my old Environment. It naturally created a paradox between my fluid memories and the established, outdated Environment. After that all bets were off. My mind is experiencing some kind of weird fugue. Everything that has occurred since I began the interface has occurred only in my brain. A series of vivid dreams. Quantum dreams. And like regular dreams they’ve been knitted out of the minutia and fragmentary images and memories of my waking experience. My past, my fears, my wishes, terrors, fantasies, thoughts. All of it recombining to keep my little dioramic funhouse going. Only lately the dreams are getting a little thin. The logic is slipping. My various so-called realities are overlapping, contaminating each other. I’m not sure what this means. Maybe my mind is breaking under the strain. Maybe the Core is dissolving in some exotic fashion. Or perhaps I’m coming to the end. A piece of me has been trying to withdraw from the interface since the beginning. Maybe it’s about to succeed. All that I remember may have occurred within the span of a few seconds outside my subjective experience. That’s why no one has forcibly disengaged me from the interface. Nobody
knows
. It’s kind of interesting. I even spun out a little story about Laird getting similarly trapped. Bits and pieces. The dripping faucet. Everything gets integrated into the vivid dreams of the SuperQuantum Core.”

Dr. Tamara listened to all this with a knowing smile on her lips. “Is that all?” she said.

“Pretty much, except what I said about the whole thing taking place in a second or two of objective time?”

“Yes?

“What if I’m wrong about that? What if it’s more like what happened to Laird in my vivid dream? It could be I’ve become completely integrated into the Core. Hell, Laird might have even planned it that way! He doesn’t require my memories or my grating personality, just my ever replenishing body, its organs and excretions. If that’s the case, I’m fucked. While I’m inhabiting these SuperQuantum dreams he could be harvesting me at will. What do you think, Dr. Figment?”

“I think it’s very imaginative. Shall we go see the Harbinger now? It will clear a lot of things up for you, Ellis.”

“Damn it, Dr. Figment, you haven’t been listening. I’m not a participant anymore. I’m opting out, submitting my resignation, quitting. I’m thinking maybe my active gullibility is a factor that keeps me stuck in this thing. So I’m through. If I stop engaging with the Core it might lose some of its grip on my psyche, and that will help me withdraw from the interface.”

“You’re not interfacing, Ellis.”

I folded my arms and refused to look at her.

“It’s all been real,” she said. “You’re on the brink of total consciousness evolution. Actually you’re over the brink already and don’t realize it. Sitting there won’t change anything.”

“You might as well stop talking, Dr. Figment. I’m not listening.”

Something clanged against the door of the Bus. It startled me.

“We’d better get rolling,” Dr. Tamara said.

The Bus rode high on its suspension. No one of normal stature could take a close up look into the cab. But there were people out there, and sirens winding down, and flashing red and blue lights splashing the windshield.

Stubbornly, I said: “None of it’s real.”

“It is, though,” Dr. Tamara said. “It’s as real as that cut on your shoulder. Remember you did that on Planet X. Why carry it over with you to this place if these are nothing but a series of quantum dreams?”

“Anybody in there?” someone with an authoritative voice demanded, and then he clanged on the door again, probably using his nightstick. A cop.

“It can’t be real,” I said. But I fingered the tender wound under my ripped shirt. “It makes no sense. You’re asking me to accept time travel and instantaneous teleportation. Plus, what would this
Bus
be doing here? No, I like my explanation better.”

“Think of it as mixing metaphors, Ellis. As for travel though time and space  . . . that’s a misconception. In a true sense there
is
no time and space. Not once you’re unshackled from the limiting idea of those concepts. Remember: Everything is simultaneous. You’re Evolved and don’t even realize it. You inhabit all worlds. You can even create your own, when you need to. Now let’s get out of here, okay? Unless you want to explain to these officers who we are.”