The Emoticon Generation (27 page)

“Random images?
Random
images?! Tony’s last ten seconds, and we see her dead mother giving her a last kiss, welcoming her to the next world?”

“No, no, Tony, you’re putting in your interpretation. That’s not what you saw.”

“Really? You want to turn that thing on again and tell me that’s not what I saw?”

“Tony, all you saw is Tony’s mother kissing her. That’s all.”

“That’s
all
?”

“It’s something the equation filled in. There was a blank; it got filled. It’s just the equation.”

“That movement makes too much sense to seem random.”

“The equation assumes reality is continuous. And so movement is continuous.”

Tony thought for a long time, his mouth puckered. Finally, he said, “What’s in the other two times?”

“The same thing.
Slight
variations between each time, as if she did three ‘takes’ for the same scene in a movie or something. Nothing new.”

“What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean
anything
. It’s not exactly the same because different numbers fed into the equation give you the same pattern but not the exact same numbers. It’s simple math.”

“Everything is explained in the equation?”

“It has to be. There’s no other explanation.”

“But the equation represents the human brain.”

“Yes.”

“But then something, somewhere inside our brain can see things that are –”

“Don’t even go there.”

“Where
should
I go?”

“Nowhere. It’s jarring, I admit. Even to an atheist like myself. But I checked it out. This is just an equation coping with something it wasn’t meant to cope with. Reality is finite. You slow it down too much, it’ll break down. Numbers are
in
finite. You break them down forever and they’ll still behave the same.

“The equation
has
to give us an image, so it gives us an image. It only has Tony’s brain to work with, so it gives us images that come from Tony’s brain. It is programmed to assume continuity, so it gives us continuous images – it gives us motion. These are random images and nothing more.”

“That’s it?”

“I have an explanation,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t have to do with big things like
god
or the light we see when we die or ghosts which only dead people see. There’s nothing supernatural about it. This is just
math
. Simple, plain math. I have the truth. My world works again. So I’ve had a
long
day, and I’m going home, taking a bath, and taking a long, calm sleep.” He took his jacket. “And, besides, my equation works. Good night.”

“Yeah.... Thanks for all your efforts.”

Matt shut the see-through door on Tony, and made his way through the maze of corridors that constituted Eternity Plus. He climbed the stairs, went out the front doors, and into the parking lot. He stood over his car, pulled out the keys, when he heard someone yell: “Matt!”

He looked up. Tony had just come through the doors. Matt took a deep breath and waited for Tony to come over.

“Tony, I, really, my mind is frazzled. Any more questions can wait till I’ve had a few hours’ sleep.”

“No, no problem. Go home, sleep, come back tomorrow. But when you come back ...”

“What?”

“I was thinking. We only looked at three spots with a resolution of five thousand frames a second. Who’s to say that if we don’t look at the whole thing with 1/10,000th of a second, we won’t find something else? Who’s to say we can’t dig even deeper, to go for 50,000 frames a second, or 100,000? We might see more images.”

“Uh ... Sure, we might. But why would we want to just pull random images out of her mind? You know it doesn’t mean anything, right?”

“Because ... I mean ...”

“What?”

“Matt ... It’s all I have of her.”

And Matt felt the same way he’d felt during the funeral. He nodded to Tony, indicating he’d do it, then got as quickly as he could into his car and drove off.

The wedding was nineteen days away.

~

The next day, Matt broke down the last ten seconds of Tony’s life even further. The two of them spent the day watching it in slow motion, looking for a frame that had something more in it. Tony watched it, afraid to blink, afraid he’d miss the single frame that would lead to another set of images.

But at the end of the day, there was nothing other than what they had already seen.

The next day, Matt broke reality into even smaller pieces. And as time on the screen slowed down, they found two places, one near the beginning, one near the end, both giving them an image of a small boy walking next to the wall on the far side of the room. Tony identified the boy from Tony’s photo albums. It was Tony’s brother, the way he’d looked twenty years ago.

Tony’s brother walked from the left side of the frame and slowly exited on the right, his left hand always touching the wall. He never looked aside. But a millionth of a second later, he came in again on the left side and repeated the same action, moving from left to right. His steps were different this time.

Breaking it down further gave them another image compounding this one. Tony’s father, as he had been twenty years ago, was leaning on the far wall, staring into the air. Her brother was still there, walking as he did before, now in extreme slow motion. Their father (in what appeared to be real time) sees him approaching, straightens up, and moves forward, allowing him to pass.

Matt called this spot a ‘Strange Attractor’, which meant that there are numbers in math around which a lot of things happen.

But then the Strange Attractor seemed to dry up. There was nothing more underneath. The movement itself, existing only between milliseconds, turned slower and slower the more they broke it down, but there was nothing, nothing more to see between those numbers

They returned to search the whole ten seconds again, and Matt broke them down further.

And suddenly, after a day, there was an explosion of images. Her mother, her father, her friends, past, present, everyone she knew, everyone she had to know – the equation seemed to pull them all out of her brain. It was as if, under certain magnification, if they looked at numbers smaller than ten millionth of a second, the ‘dead space’, the air itself, teemed with life. It was a quantum-sea of images popping into reality then, less than ten millionth of a second later, disappearing as if they’ve never been.

It was almost impossible to believe that just yesterday, every number they’d tried had been dry and now, using only numbers that are inbetween the numbers they’d tried, there was nothing but movement and people and action. It was as if the air was teeming with ghosts.

Oddly, not once had they seen someone ‘popping’ into reality. They were either there or they weren’t. If someone was there, then there was always a number that came before in which that someone was already there. Disappearance was the same. They never actually ‘caught’ anyone disappearing. There was always a miniscule number later in which that person was still there.

The more Tony and Matt worked, the more Matt was forced to put some of his research aside and focus on this. Some he gave to others, some he just put aside, hoping this will blow over soon. But he also liked working on it. He’s been working on the human mind, and this was like the opposite of a Rorschach test to him. It was fascinating to watch.

Tony focused on the places that included him. Aside from the Tony sitting there on the chair, seemingly frozen in time, there was another Tony walking around behind him.

There was a reenactment of the first time he and Tony had met. The three of them – the two Tony’s and Tony’s friend – leaning on the wall of the hospital room (instead of on the hood of the car). The three were holding a conversation which Tony and Matt could not hear. Still, to Tony it seemed accurate.

At another spot, he and Tony literally popped into the room, undressing each other while kissing. He recognized it. It was the first time she’d stayed over. If it wasn’t for the strange frozen surroundings of the hospital room, it would have been the perfect video reconstruction of what had actually happened.

And here, floating around another Strange Attractor, the moment he’d proposed to her in that restaurant, being played over and over and over, in a sick playback loop.

Tony stared at these moving images again and again, obsessed. And he took tapes of everything, to play at home, to keep forever.

And then the dryness returned.

As they broke the numbers down even further, looking to see what happened between the moments in which things popped in and out of reality, there were massive expanses of nothing.

Another day passed. They broke it down further. And there was still nothing.

Another. Nothing.

Another. And now even the bits in which things had popped into reality had frozen in time. Nothing happened around them or between them. At the end of a day in which Tony and Matt had stared at nothing but still pictures of frozen people, Tony suddenly said: “Freeze it!”

Matt tensed. “What?”

“Something jumped. Another ‘scratch’ on the ‘film’. Roll it back a few seconds.”

Matt did so, and replayed the same few seconds in slower motion.

“There! Stop!” Tony said.

“What?” Matt stopped the action a few frames late. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Roll it back, frame by frame.” The two watched silently. “There!”

“What?”

“Go one frame forward.” Matt did, and Tony almost fell from his chair. “Oh my god.”

“What?” Matt looked at the picture. It was the same basic frame they’d started out with. There was no one else in the room, no additional people, only Tony. Matt looked at him. “What?”

“How can you not see it? Look, in that chair, where I always sit, looking at her –”

“Oh, my god,” Matt whispered, finally seeing it. He’d gotten so used to it that he had never looked. But sitting in that chair in the same position ... “That’s not you!”

Tony put his hand on his face.

Matt looked at the picture and took his time. “Well,” he said as a smile slowly spread across his face. “At least things are interesting again. So,” he turned to Tony. “Who’s this one? That’s not someone we’ve seen before, right?”

“No, this one’s new. But the thing is ... She didn’t know this guy.”

“What? How can you know that?”

“She’d never seen this man before in her life.”

“Tony, come on. Look at the position he’s in, look at the way he’s replaced you. This is probably one of her past boyfriends.”

“This is not one of her boyfriends.”

“You’re being ridiculous. So there’s someone she didn’t tell you ab –”

“Matt, there are things you know for certain! Tony and I had stayed up hundreds of hours in bed just talking about everything in her life, about everything in my life.

“I’ve seen pictures of all her past boyfriends. I’ve seen pictures of all her teachers from all the yearbooks, all the annual class pictures. I know what all her ex-classmates look like today. I know everyone in her family and everyone in
their
families. I even know what her neighbors looked like in all the apartments she’d lived in. She’d described them to me and I described mine to her. I’d even recognize the people she went to kindergarten with. I know
everything
about her.”

Matt looked at him, wondering how seriously should he take what he’d just heard. Tony
did
have an obsessive nature. If he said he knew everyone, he knew everyone. “So ... You’re saying you know for certain that the equation didn’t pull this guy out of her memories? Are you saying the equation
invented
a person? A
person
?!”

“I obviously don’t know everyone she ran into on the street or the subway or the bus or whatever. But this couldn’t be someone of any importance in her life.”

Matt stared at the picture. “I’ll take your word for it. For the time being.” He stared at it further. “Well, he reminds
me
of someone, that’s for sure.”

“Who?”

Matt scrunched up his mouth, and presently said, “Don’t know.” He looked at it a bit further, then sighed, and stood up. “Oh, well,” he took his jacket. “It will come to me.” He kept the door open for Tony. “Let’s go home.”

They turned off the lights and left the lab.

“One thing’s for sure,” Matt said as they walked the dark corridors – it was the middle of the night “Tomorrow we’ll be concentrating on that.”

“Yeah.”

The two exited the building, Tony stayed behind to lock the doors. “Go,” he told Matt. “Go.”

Matt left him there, took a few steps, when suddenly he stopped and turned around.

“I know who this guy reminds me of.”

Tony turned around. “Who?”

“Larry Steele.”

“The actor?”

“Yeah. He was a huge movie star when I was in grade school. Around the time Tony was in –”

“High school!”

“Yeah. All the girls were crazy about him. He was a
mega
star, not a superstar. He was compared to James Dean all the time. Until, just like James Dean –”

“He died,” Tony whispered.

“Don’t start thinking ghosts on me, again, Tony. That wasn’t Larry Steele. It just looked like him, but it also clearly
wasn’t
him.”

“No, Matt, you don’t understand. It’s not that he’s dead. It’s that Tony ... when she was a young ... a teenager ... she always thought that the man she’d fall in love with would be someone like him. Not him exactly, but someone like him. He was her dream. The ultimate –”

“The ultimate man?”

“Yes.”

Matt laughed. “Well. At least we know where the image was pulled from. Not from her memories, but from her desires. Or her dreams, maybe.”

“But you didn’t pull this image from her teenage brain. You pulled it from her brain today. I mean ...” he put his hand on his forehead. “I mean, from a few weeks ago.”

“So what? We never find our
ultimate
dream mate. We find someone close, a variation of the archetype. I mean, you must have had a dream woman in your head when you were that age.”

“I did. She looked exactly like Tony.”

Matt frowned. “Well,” he said. “Look. I’ll work around that number, see if he’s moving, too.” He looked at Tony for a second, and seemed to want to say something more. Then he turned around, and said, “Good night.”