Luminarium (22 page)

Fred was torn between fascination and queasy repulsion. The latter won out. “I can see it from here.”

He turned instead to lose himself in the golden Art Deco engraving of the Empire State Building on the wall, an almost Escher-like brainteaser of nested simulations, remembering, for some reason, the night in the office a couple years back when George had issued his self-diagnosis—
holomelancholia
—as the two of them watched, in real time, the sun crest over a virtual Afghanistan valley, its uniform gray edging into scrubby greens and poppy pinks. If this world was no longer George’s, and no longer his, Fred thought, in every way but ownership, it still seemed to be Sam’s. He had to admit, Sam was finding a way of squeezing the lemons of his constant stress into managerial lemonade—an enthusiastic stress, an adrenaline that spread through the whole team. He disliked himself for it, but there it was: every order his brother happily barked out caused Fred to squirm as if a bucket of slugs had been dumped down the back of his shirt.

“Ha! Alive!” Sam said.

Fred looked. In the air above the reddened, blackened head, in green letters, the word
BREATHING
pulsed.

“Medic!” Sam shouted, loud enough for his actual voice to resound across the room.

If he keeps it up
, Inner George muttered,
he’ll be needing a medic
. Sam, it came as no surprise, was grating even more on Inner George than on Fred.

Little Sam ran off, returning a few seconds later with an EMS guy, whose sparse mustache identified him as Len, the Armation-Urth lead designer.

“Looks like a hot fudge sundae,” Little Len said, kneeling by the body. The repeating pattern of irregular loops and waves his hands made over the body was meant to indicate triage, but more closely resembled the ritual motions of a witch doctor. It reminded Fred of
Guy
sucking the evil spirits out of him the night before.

“Weren’t you supposed to be with the suits?” Sam asked.

“A meeting’s running late. They should be here soon.” Len’s avatar revolved a bit unrealistically around the burn victim so as to face Fred, then broke off his voodoo motions and stood up. “Hey, that you, Fred?” “Yeah. It’s me.”

Len laughed, uneasily. “You spooked me. That big-eyed face. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Fred wondered if Len had thought he was George at first. He supposed he and George were both equally ghosts around here.

“You … ah, thinking about joining us again?” Len asked.

Word of Fred’s being sacked seemed to have gotten around.

“We might not want to discuss that now,” Sam said.

Len made his avatar grin and give the thumbs-up signal. “Well … hope you do.” He looked left, up, right. “Hell. You don’t want to stay
here
, do ya?”

Little Len winked. Len was big on the emotes. Fred tried to make his avatar belly laugh but fumbled the keys, causing Little Fred to shoot up his hands in surrender. Little Len stared blankly. Sam broke the silence. “What’s your take on real estate down there, Len?”

“With the boom down here, all MEC-AA’s pretty hot right now. I’d try Oviedo. Nice little burb.”

“What about Celebration?” Sam said.

“The Disney town. Very nice. Great investment.”

“Good,” Sam said. “That’s what I thought.”

Above the charred body, the word
DECEASED
flashed in red.

“Ah fuck,” Len said.

“You just killed me, man.”

It wasn’t immediately clear where the voice was coming from.

“Who’s that?” Sam asked.

“Mike, man.”

“What are you doing playing a toastie?”

“Testing the POV.” The corpse’s lips, Fred now saw, were moving. Mike must have gone into God mode, overriding the mortality constraints. “Kinda awesome to see the flames coming up out of you.”

“Go be an upper-floor civilian,” Sam said. “Send a distress call.”

Back at the security desk, Conrad was handing out floor assignments. As previously arranged, he gave Fred and Sam the highest, the fiftieth floor, and, if possible, upward from there. Fred followed Sam to a stairwell and they began to climb. A more or less steady stream of terrorized non-player characters passed on the left, heading down.

“The
Disney
town?” Fred asked.

“Disney built the downtown and planned the community, but the houses are privately owned.” Sam’s tone, unlike Fred’s, was adamantly conversational. “I’m sending you some links. Check your email.”

The stairs were slow going. As they climbed, following a line of other firemen, Fred brought up his email on his second screen and began following the links, to photos of wood-frame houses in various traditional styles and pastel hues, with spacious, immaculately manicured front lawns. Now that he was seeing the pictures, he vaguely recalled reading about this place, back in the nineties. After the houses came a series of shots of more fancifully styled commercial buildings—a cylindrical post office, a town hall bristling with an absurd number of columns, a street full of small shops, which, if possible, seemed even more freshly minted than the houses, though by now they must have been a decade old. He wondered if the pictures were remotely up to date. The last was a longdistance shot from the far side of a landscaped lake, of an idyllic waterfront walkway, lined with trees and sidewalk cafés.

“Doesn’t even look real,” Fred said.

“It’s not
not
real.” Sam sounded a little annoyed. “It’s just well planned.” It looked just a bit like Urthville, Fred thought, the first town on Urth they’d built. The houses there had been more imaginative, but the colors were similar, as was the overall sheen of ideality. Fred wondered if this had something to do with Sam’s apparent affinity for the place. There were no dune buggies, or giant-wheeled, nineteenth-century bicycles, or magically airborne surfboards like they’d stocked that virtual village with, but in the pictures of the downtown area, there did seem to be some strange little vehicles.

“Are those golf carts?”

“They’re electric,” Sam said. “People use them to get around town. There
is
a golf course, too, though.”

Fred clicked back through the images. As suspicious as he was of the place, he found it hard to pull his eyes from one shot to the next. The bright, trimmed lawns looked so spongy and inviting. Even the sunlit sidewalks seemed like nice places to lie down on and take a nap. Accidentally at first, just drawn by their sleepy smiles, he began scrutinizing the people sitting at the cafés and riding in the little electric buggies.

“Sam? Why are the people all old in these pictures?”

“They’re not all old. Which picture are you looking at?”

“Um … all right, the one of the café.”

Sam took a minute to reply. “No, see, there, the girl standing by the table. She’s not old.”

“I think that’s a waitress.”

“You have something against waitresses?”

“You want to move to a retirement community?”

“It’s not a retirement community,” Sam huffed. “It’s a town. All ages. They’ve got a school and everything.” Striving for lightness, he added: “Probably plenty of single women in those apartments downtown.”

“Widows, you mean.”

Fred was enjoying Sam’s irritation, but was genuinely disturbed, too. Ever since college, Sam had been living on the Lower East Side. In the early days of their company, Sam had scraped together a down payment and a mortgage and bought a small apartment there, the value of which had doubled, which fact, until recently, had seemed almost immaterial, as Sam was a creature of anxiously ritualized habit, and Fred had never really thought he’d leave. It was hard enough imagining Sam living anywhere else at all. But this place. Fred felt he barely knew his younger brother anymore.

“It’s a town,” Sam said. “There are old people—it’s Florida. But Celebration’s got all kinds. They’ve got protected marshland areas, a top-ofthe-line hospital, the golf course, which I mentioned.”

“Shuffleboard courts?”

“And,” Sam went on after a tense pause, “it’s probably one of the most secure places in the area. Not gated, quite. But private security. Active citizen boards.”

“I see.” It made at least a little sense, now. Sam was all about security, these days.

At about the twenty-fifth floor, Fred noticed their movement had slowed.

“We’re barely moving,” he said to Sam. “I bet it’s the client-side simulation timer. Either that or the predictive modeling is bogging down.” It felt good, making the diagnosis. The mere words “predictive modeling” had lent his voice a bit of the old CEO snap.

“That would be the new fatigue code. Our legs are tired.” Sam gave slow articulation to the words. “And by the way, you just aired your ignorance over the walkie-talkie. Keep your fingers off Control-Shift.”

“Aha,” said Fred. He’d been trying to run. That was just Shift.

Ahead of them, the other firemen, cops, and EMS teams were thinning out onto their assigned floors. The o-mouthed NPCs passing on the right had slowed to an intermittent trickle. The walkie-talkie chatter began breaking up. Conrad was saying something about 911 calls from the seventieth floor and above. Someone else mentioned smoke on thirty-five. “It would be an alright place for Mom and Dad, too,” Sam went on. “One of these days I could probably cover the down payment on a small condo for them. The prices are high, but not as crazy as here.”

Here it was again, Fred thought, Sam’s masquerade of familial feeling. Fred was surprised Sam had the gall to attempt it with him.

“What’s Dad supposed to do without his acting?”

“What acting? Let him retire. He seems to have decided he’s retired already anyway. Besides, there’s always the military sim stuff, if he really still wants to.”

“What’s Mom supposed to do without her Reiki friends?”

Little Sam stopped and turned to face him. “Exactly.”

Their avatars stared each other down. Fred got the feeling that Sam was serious, that Sam had actually managed to convince himself that all his selfishness to date had been part of a plan to save them all. From a doomed city. And sure, why not, from a doomed family member, too. It reminded Fred of Sam’s routine as a three-year-old, when Vartan’s friend Manny came over to visit. Sam hadn’t much liked Manny, who, having laid claim to godfather status to Fred and George, in a way belonged more to them, and whose gruff manner simply terrified him. So, wanting to pawn off his own feeling of exclusion on someone else, Sam had hit upon the idea of luring each of the family members out of the room and away from Manny one by one, telling them there was something he wanted them to see (namely, himself, in the other room). Now it was George Sam wanted to lure them away from, down to that Disney hideaway he’d picked out. A reconstituted family, in a fabricated town. Like none of their problems had ever been.

Fred couldn’t get the image of George languishing all alone in the hospital out of his mind, though he knew Sam was probably thinking post-George. But even this—one more indication that Sam had already written him off—made Fred burn. He recalled the third day of George’s coma, calling Sam to ask if he could come to the hospital with some supplies and help spell the rest of them, and how his only response had been to say he was too busy and then ask, his voice shaky but determined, if Fred was planning on being in the office at all that day. Fred thought about how at each other’s throats Sam and George had been in the period following that meeting in the coffee shop; how, for months afterward, the two of them had figured out a way to always be on opposite sides in the combat playtests, Sam going crazy because he could never seem to kill George, and even crazier when he’d discovered that George had fudged the code to make himself invulnerable only to Sam. For a dizzy moment, Fred wondered if it was Sam behind those emails and IMs, his way of telling Fred that George needed to be put out of his misery, or
their
misery; or to see how Fred felt about Armation; or simply to rattle him. Though the messages seemed too playful for Sam’s temperament. No, Fred told himself, Sam wasn’t creative enough for that.

“Mom and Dad aren’t going to want to move to Florida,” Fred said flatly.

“It’s time for us all to get real,” Sam said, matching his tone, “don’t you think?”

Little Sam’s mouth moved lugubriously, out of time with his words. His eyes blinked at randomized intervals. The stairwell had grown dimmer and greenish a flight ago, simulating emergency lighting.
Get
real.
Sam was using Fred’s own refrain, throwing it in his face—or probably, in Sam’s mind, waving it in front of Fred’s nose like smelling salts. Sam thought he was coming unglued, Fred knew, had been thinking this for a while, now.

“And this Disney town is your idea of getting real?”

The greenish light played on Sam’s helmet as he swayed and rocked in a slight, steady pattern, an exaggerated kind of breathing simulation generally thought to make avatars seem more lifelike. Wisps of smoke began curling in the air between them.

“It’s a rational choice. I’ve already put a deposit on a place.”

It took Fred a minute to process this. “You put down a deposit without even seeing it?”

“All the floor plans are online. Some pictures, too.”

“Why don’t you just rent for a while?”

“I want to be settled when I get there. No more moving.”

They were alone on the stairs. The smoke was getting thicker.

“Wonder where it’s coming from,” Sam said. “A fire door must be jammed open somewhere.” He rotated 360 degrees, looking around the stairwell. “Anyway, the condo is pre-inspected. I just need you to go and make sure nothing’s obviously wrong with it before I sign and make the down payment.”

“What?
Me?
”

“I’m too busy here.”

Idiotically, Fred was glaring at Little Sam’s face, and more idiotically expecting a reaction.

What the fuck are you,
Inner George said,
his gopher now?

“What the fuck am I, your gopher now?”

Little Sam breathed, moved his mouth. “I didn’t mean to step on your pride, I just thought you’d like the opportunity to poke around down there, since you’re thinking about joining us. Besides,” he swiveled to face the stairs, “you’ve got the meeting with Armation the next day, 9
AM
sharp.”