Luminarium (24 page)

Before Fred quite knew what was happening, he was out the office
door, down the stairs, into the street, heading north, trying to outpace his trembling limbs. What was the meaning of that chemotherapy angel—and why had he himself been the only one to see it? Like a ghost, he thought. That’s how it had felt, confusion and fright and longing and even joy all at once, and of course anger, too, as he’d known it had to be just more harassment from whoever was bent on persecuting him. Closing his eyes, the sunlight red on his lids, he could still see that bald, ashen head, those too-thin limbs poking out of the gown, those incongruously majestic wings.

And that axe, moving up and down continuously.

Hacking?

It seemed whoever was behind this cyberhaunting had been selectively stopping objects, more and more of them. Urth was a MOO, a multiuser object-oriented system. The objects, much as they arguably did in the real world, programmed the avatars, defined just about all that they could do. Stop the objects, and you more or less stop the game. No way to destroy or possess or use or dominate anything other than what one already was, a patterned light and nothing more.

So who was responsible? And what did they want from him?

Fred hiked the two miles from Tribeca to the hospital, the sky so cloudless, the breezes so gentle that he was almost calm by the time he reached George’s room. But seeing George there as inanimate as ever brought both the longing and the outrage back anew. He doublechecked George’s charts, cleaned the areas around George’s tracheostomy and the gastric-tube hole below his solar plexus, dabbed ointment on the reddened skin around where the Hickman catheter was dug through the flesh of his chest, talking the episode through with him. Before long, though, with no answers forthcoming from either of them, Fred fell silent, his questions growing larger and more numerous, until he was trying to fit together pieces that, it seemed to him, couldn’t even belong to the same puzzle: that chemotherapy angel stepping out fifty flights over 34th Street; their mother’s vision of George up in the sky over the city; Fred’s own out-of-body experiences; that game of spiritual evolution George had said in the coffee shop that he’d wanted to make. For a long time, Fred pointedly hadn’t brought up the subject. Not until two years later, hoping to make amends, did he ask George if he’d been developing the idea at all. It was the day they were waiting for George’s all-important CT scan, as they sat in the radiology waiting room, joggling their sneakers.

“Oh, that,” George had said, picking grit from his eye. “That was nothing. I practically made it up on the spot. Pulled it straight out of my ass.”

George’s tone was broad, overloud. Fred laughed with relief, smug over not having fallen for his brother’s creative genius act that day. It was only when George didn’t join in that it struck Fred that his brother might not have been telling him the truth.

Later, they’d sat in the cafeteria, watching white-garbed pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba on cable news.

“Figures they’d go counterclockwise,” Fred said. The first thing either of them had uttered since getting the results.

George went a little stiff, bridling at Fred’s remark, or at the mere sound of his voice, or simply at being recalled to the world.

“Guess I’ll take off,” George said, his tone light. He got up, steadied himself, and walked away. Fred trailed him through the lobby and out the front door. It was nighttime. A blizzard’s worth of snow was falling, but there was no wind, and the air under the buttery streetlights seemed almost balmy. George leaned back his bald head, bluish veins visible in his too-thin neck, and looked straight up through the descending flakes. “It
would
be a gorgeous night,” he said with a chuckle.

Fred couldn’t hold it in anymore. The words came out too fast and all at once. How he wished he’d never doubted George, never fucked up George’s company like he had, wished he’d just followed George’s crazy lead wherever it led. George held out his hands in warning, but Fred couldn’t stop. Apologizing. Pleading with him not to be angry anymore. George’s eyes went strange and feral, like he hadn’t even been listening to the death sentence upstairs, and was just now reading it on Fred’s face.

Abruptly, almost a spasm, George shook his head. Then turned, and, as fast as if he were in perfect health, ran off in the snowy night.

Visiting hours ended
at ten, after which, not ready to go back to Brooklyn, Fred retraced what may or may not have been George’s route that night, zigzagging south and west, spending a noticeable percentage of his net worth on a vegetable-covered pizza slice on Second Avenue, trying not to think about the hydrogenated oils and preservatives and pesticides working their way into him. He passed by the Zeckendorf, of course, alert for short, vivacious blondes, and made the embarrassing mistake of nodding hello to the familiar-looking hefty man in the blue security jacket, who was just then clocking out for the day. The man didn’t nod back, just stared, eyes slitting. Fred was so tired by that point and the air was so humid and dense with the day’s particulates that he began to perceive a strange viscosity to the passing sights and lights, as though the streets of Manhattan had been sunk, Atlantis-like, to some deep ocean floor.

Sam was still at the office when Fred got back, despite the lateness of the hour, alone in his lamp-lit alcove. He had his noise-canceling headphones on, a specially audio-engineered recording he’d bought called Metamusic, which supposedly synchronized the brain’s hemispheres and led to increased concentration, arpeggiating away. On his left screen, Little Sam was falling, in pixel-by-pixel slow motion, toward an even more pristine 34th Street, emptied of cars and people. On his right screen was a website with a photograph of an odd-looking structure, squatter than it was tall, tapered toward the top, and fronted with goldtinted plate-glass windows, like an office building that had swallowed a cathedral. The apex was in fact decorated with a burnished steel cross, and at the top of the page a logo gleamed in silvery letters across the pure blue sky:

Sam was scrolling down a list of links on the sidebar as Fred approached. Seeing him in the lamp, Sam killed the window with a click.

“What was that?” Fred asked.

“Nothing. Surfing for porn.”

“They’ve got porn in a place called Christworld?”

Sam glanced back in his general direction, annoyed, then pulled down the headphones. “I’m researching congregations,” he mumbled.

“What for?”

“For me. For Florida.”

“For you?”

Fred had never heard Sam so much as talk about religion, or even summon the interest to listen to anyone else talk about religion. The times Fred and George had started arguing about the subject in Sam’s presence, both as teenagers at home and as adults here in the office, Sam’s eyes had gone dead and he’d wandered off, as if they’d started speaking in Swahili.

“Yes,” Sam said. “For me. Why not for me?”

“You want to be a Christian, now?”

“It’s what people do, Fred.”

“People do a lot of things, Sam.”

“A lot of military people go to church. Even some of the tech guys do down there. It’s a cultural thing.”

“I see,” Fred said flatly. “You’re going to join a church in order to network.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Sam measured out his words by the syllable. “It’s not just sermons anymore. These churches are whole complexes. They’ve got all kinds of activities. They’ve got smoothie bars.” “Oh, smoothies.” Fred nodded. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Adaption’s not such a bad thing. You should try it, sometime.”

On the left screen, the impact finally began: Little Sam’s head opening up like the shell of an egg, blobs of violet, sprays of red, strands of purple, shards of white floating out of it in some dreamlike accompaniment to the sluice of synthesized horns from the headphones sitting around Sam’s neck. By the time the torso began to come apart, the head was a vast, dissipating cloud of color. The slow-motion explosion continued for two full minutes.

“Far too many calculations,” Sam said, with a little difficulty at first, as though his throat were caked with sand. “We’ll have to simplify. Anyway, it’s more realism than we need, in this case. We want scary, a little shocking. Not outright traumatizing.”

“Thoughtful of you,” Fred managed, feeling as if the cheese from the pizza he’d eaten had osmosed into his lungs.

“Hey, speaking of thoughtful. Thanks for crashing our playtest.”

This took Fred by surprise. “Sam, no, it wasn’t me.”

“Didn’t you hear Jesse say we weren’t ready for jumpers?”

“It crashed before I hit the ground.”

“The
predictive modeling
, Fred?” Sam tapped the Urth screen. “It was trying to get a head start on the pile of goop you were about to become.” Fred considered. The possibility made all too much sense. Maybe he really was at fault. Could the whole point of that encounter have been to make him look bad?

But not the whole point, certainly. Not if those flashlights and masks going out had been a part of it.

“What about all the object malfunctions?” Fred asked. “Are you blaming that on me, too?”

“Don’t know what caused that,” Sam said. “Just too much going on, probably. We’ll be debugging round the clock.” He rubbed his temples. Then looked up at Fred. “What was the matter with you up there? And what were you thinking, running out of the office like that after you crashed us?”

“I didn’t run.”

“It doesn’t look good, Fred.”

“I saw George.”

Sam stared back at him, defensive perimeters going up. “So? And?”

“In the playtest.”

Sam blinked, repeatedly.

“He was standing right next to you,” Fred said. “You really couldn’t see him?”

The look Sam gave him next, he hadn’t observed on his little brother in a while. It took Fred a moment to register it as concern.

“Have you been getting any sleep? Is that insomnia not getting better?” All Fred could do was laugh.

“Seriously, Fred. You look pretty wiped out.”

The next step was to unload the whole story on Sam, show him the proof, the emails and IMs still on Fred’s hard drive. But Fred found himself hesitating. He wasn’t so sure he wanted whoever was doing all this to be caught. At least not yet. Not before he knew why, what the point of it was. To hell with Erskine and Lipton and Gibbon, and Sam too. Once Fred was an employee again it might be his problem, but it wasn’t yet. Let them fix their own mess.

“Forget it,” he said.

Fred laughed again. “Nothing wrong with
me.
” He started walking away.

“I took care of your flight and hotel arrangements for next week,” Sam said, suddenly solicitous. “You’re leaving Monday night, OK?”

“Whatever.”

“I emailed you some other info, too.”

Fred wended through the ever-thickening desk maze. In the open metal cabinet, beside the mini-fridge and microwave and the hanging Lego Death Star, a bottle of champagne stood its hopeless ground, assailed from all sides by Sam’s lunchtime columns of soup and chili cans. Over the last few months, Sam had been stocking more and more of them, just for convenience, he’d said, though no doubt their potential usefulness in the event of a massive terror attack had occurred to him as well. As Fred clambered into the chair, wedged between the Cray and his desk, the mouse got joggled and the screens flickered on. His screensaver appeared, flipping and bouncing his name around a void:

The same font they’d used for Christworld.

Another synchronicity.

Of no use whatsoever.

He banished the screensaver, and went through a stack of emails from Sam, links he’d sent—press releases from the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, a couple newspaper articles on local business deals and partnerships and the burgeoning nightlife scene, reviews of slicklooking new restaurants and bars with pictures of giant steaks, snuggling couples, martinis on red- and blue-lit bartops. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lost in the sight of those martini glasses when another email appeared:

Subject:
  A Pray for a Pray

From:
  
George Brounian