Biblical (37 page)

He took a drink of water from his canteen. At least this was no dusty border crossing or middle-of-the-Negev road check-point.
But he would much rather have been relaxing on the beach with a chilled beer. At the moment the beach was empty, the parasols closed and the beach loungers unoccupied. As Ari looked out over the azure waters of the sea, he could see the Shayetet 13 patrol boats positioned in an arc, shielding the shore from terrorist and tourist alike, and the faint, fuzzy smudge of a distant SeaCobra helicopter patrolling the hazy horizon between sea and sky. More history was being made here in Eilat today: behind him in the air-conditioned luxury of the five-star hotel he and the others were guarding. More history that Ari didn’t give a shit about, other than that one result of the conference now taking place might be that he would qualify for an EU passport.

The sky brightened suddenly, then dulled.

Ari had had too much to drink the night before and having to stand around in the desert sun was making him feel odd. He felt faintly dizzy and an unsettling, unpleasant surge of something like déjà vu seemed to sweep over him. His head hurt; his sinuses throbbed and the pressure in the hot air was palpable. A storm coming. The unconvinced breeze that had loitered all morning suddenly strengthened into a resolute wind that caused the sand to swirl and eddy at his feet.

He looked over at the hulking form of Gershon Shalev. Shalev was someone who didn’t feel history was a burden; he wore it as if it were a badge of his own fashioning. The tall, heavyshouldered Haredi had been transferred from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion for reasons that Ari and the rest of the platoon had been left to guess about. There had been rumors, of course: someone knew someone who said that Shalev had a reputation; that he had been active in a Price Tag gang back in the days of the illegal West Bank settlements. Whatever his history, Ari hated Shalev and everything he stood for. He hated all über-Jews who tried to tell him who and what he was and what he was part of. There had been as little contact as possible between
the two soldiers: Shalev having little or nothing to do with Ari, probably having identified him right away as an apostate, a
min
. But in truth Shalev had said or done nothing to inspire Ari’s ire. His simply being there had been provocation enough: his payot sidelocks, his religious observances, his soldierly discipline.

Now, standing there feeling odd, and that the air was changing around him, with his nerves itchy and raw for a reason he couldn’t pin down, Ari stared at Shalev and felt his hatred swell and blossom.

“Look at him …” Ari turned to Benny Kagan, the short, skinny, good-looking corporal who stood next to him, and jutted his chin in the direction of Shalev. “The guardian of Israel … just itching for a sign from God telling him to squeeze a clip or two into those Palis.” Ari nodded to the knot of lacklustre protestors who had bussed into the coastal tourist town to protest against the accord being signed. There were fifty, sixty maybe. Others had been turned away, but this token protest had been allowed, just for show.

“You don’t know that, Ari.” Benny shrugged bony shoulders somewhere in his too-big uniform shirt. “Gershon’s all right. You’re too tough on him.”

“Look at him.” Ari nudged Benny. “I bet he’s pissed with everything that’s happening here. The Quartet Peace Proposal has screwed up his chances of being the warrior protector of Eretz Yisrael. He’s the type who thinks political policy should be shaped by burning bushes, rather than people making decisions for themselves. I mean, what do we really know about him? He must’ve fucked up real bad to get kicked into this unit. Fuck!” Ari cursed as the wind swirled around him and cast a cloud of Negev sand into his face. “Fuck!” he cursed again, removing his sunglasses and wiping his right eye with the back of his hand. It took him a moment to get the grains out of his eye, his back turned and hunched against the wind. He replaced
his sunglasses with his army-issue eye shields and noticed that Benny and the others had done the same.

“Where the hell has that wind come from?” he said. “There was nothing forecast …” He looked over at the protestors, who seemed unfazed by the sudden change in weather.

The day had turned a dull yellow-gray as a fog of swirling sand clouded the air. Ari pulled his kerchief over his mouth and nose.

“Great …” shouted Benny. “This is all we need. A sandstorm. It must’ve blown in from the Negev …”

Ari looked at the sky, the air now visible, granular. “No … it’s coming from the wrong—”

The sound cut him off.

A sound that shook the earth beneath his feet, that seemed to resonate and shudder in his bones.

Deborah Canning was sitting in exactly the same place, in exactly the same pose. Even the glossy-covered
trompe l’œil
art book was arranged at the same angle on the windowside table. The only differences from Macbeth’s last visit were that she wore other clothes and the window was closed. It was like, he thought, looking at the same painting for the second time, seeing the same elements but also picking up on new ones.

Seeing her again, Macbeth could very easily have been convinced that Deborah Canning really did only come into existence when others were present. Or maybe only when he was present.

It wasn’t just the consistency of Deborah’s context that disturbed him. Macbeth was haunted by a more distant memory of the unchanging room, as if the faded image of another time superimposed itself. He remembered sitting in this room, talking to his patient – his last at McLean – whom Macbeth had diagnosed as exhibiting multiple personalities.

Pete Corbin introduced Walt Ramirez to Deborah. The colossal, tanned policeman with his huge hands and broad-beam shoulders seemed to fill the room and it reminded Macbeth unpleasantly of the false awakening from his dream. Deborah seemed unfazed by Ramirez’s massive presence. Instead she nodded quietly and smiled without meaning.

Corbin chatted idly for a moment, asking Deborah about her day, to which he got near-automatic, empty responses.

“You seem troubled, Detective Ramirez,” Deborah said.

“Sergeant Ramirez,” he corrected. “I’m a Patrol Sergeant. In what way troubled?”

“Like you have more questions than you know to ask.”

“I do have questions about Melissa. You know what happened?”

“Yes I do. I see, you’re trying to understand it.”

“That’s right. It’s important to me that I understand it. Not just as a policeman, but for me.”

Deborah nodded. “I understand now – you were there?”

“Yes. That’s why I need to understand. Do you know why Melissa and the others did what they did?”

“They were becoming.”

“What does that mean? Becoming what?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You’re not programmed to understand.”

“I’d like to try.”

“Melissa, the others, me … we saw the truth. It was time to become.”

“What truth?” Ramirez strained to remain patient.

“That our future has already happened.”

Ramirez sighed.

“I told you you wouldn’t understand.” She smiled gently.

“I don’t understand either,” said Macbeth. “How can our future have already happened?”

“It means what you think is now, what you think is the present, is simply the past. Except we’re not the real people who lived then. We’re not even their ghosts. We’re just living out a tableau. Puppets.”

“That doesn’t make any—”

Macbeth halted Ramirez with a hand on his elbow. “Debbie is here for psychiatric help,” he said quietly. “You cannot expect everything she says to make sense to you. To get to the truth you have to work around her syndrome.”

Deborah Canning laughed as if faintly amused.

“Was there some event, something that happened to make them do what they did?” Ramirez rephrased his question.

“Just that we saw the truth. We were developing a new game. Our biggest project ever – completely intuitive, completely involving – and it had applications way beyond gaming. Jane McGonigal once said there should be a Nobel Prize for Gaming. Our baby would have won the first.”

“What was so special about it?” asked Ramirez.

“Its size, the sheer complexity of the programming, its mechanics … but most of all the environment it created. Melissa forged a partnership between our company and Jeff Killberg. This was a new generation, a paradigm shift in gaming; we called it Reality Pervasive Envirogeering.”

“Could you explain that to me, Debbie?” asked Ramirez. “Simply, so I can understand.”

“You know how realistic computer games have become. Well, we took it to a completely new level – we created a virtual gaming environment more complex and convincing than any other ever developed. Everyone complains that virtual and alternate reality games remove people from the real world … but this game was a perfect simulation of
this
world. City streets, landmarks – everything was exactly as it is in real life. The difference was that the gamer could bend time and reality – like having superpowers in the real world. But the really big thing was the pervasiveness of the game … It merged virtual reality, augmented reality and
real
reality.” For the first time, Macbeth saw real animation in Deborah’s expression. “Effectively superimposing a gaming world on the real world. We realized that we could totally erase the line between game life and real life.”

“It sounds more like cause for a celebration,” said Ramirez, “not a suicide pact.”

“You don’t understand.” It was Deborah’s turn to be frustrated. “What you saw wasn’t an act of desperation or sadness. It was a becoming.”

“Tell us more about the program,” said Macbeth.

“You’ve heard of Pervasive Game Syndrome, sometimes called the Tetris Effect?” she asked. Macbeth nodded. It was a psychological phenomenon, where the shapes of falling Tetris blocks, or images from any game, persisted in the gamers’ minds long after they had finished playing.

“Well, the environment in our new game was the ultimate in that. That’s why we called it Reality Pervasive. This potential of the game to enhance people’s lives was limitless – people suffering from paralysis, locked-in syndrome, all kinds of debilitating problems, could live a real life free of their disabilities. They could live a full life in a generated reality.”

“Like in the movie
Avatar
?” asked Ramirez.

“No, not like some CGI cartoon – like
this
 …” Holding out her hands, she indicated the room around them.

“So what was it you discovered while developing this program?” asked Macbeth. “What was this truth you uncovered?”

“The program began to self-elaborate, building complexity in itself, by itself. Then we realized it was connecting wirelessly with other programs that we hadn’t built. Not just with Killberg’s TIME program, but others. One in particular.”

“Which program was that?” asked Corbin.

“We couldn’t track it. The program had become autonomous and was making its own decisions. Connections. Like neural connections … a brain. But whatever this program was, it was massive. I mean government-run massive, or maybe some major research project, and we were afraid we’d be accused of hacking into high-security systems. But we weren’t doing it, the program was.”

“None of this explains why Melissa killed herself,” said Macbeth. “Or the others.”

Deborah turned to the window and looked out through glass now flecked with raindrops. She remained silent for a moment.

“It was a joke,” she said at last. “A bit of fun. You see, it really was a computer-generated world just like this, but with the ability to overlay itself on this one.”

“What was a joke, Debbie?” asked Ramirez.

“Do you know what happens if you type ‘recursion’ into Google Search, Sergeant?”

“What’s ‘recursion’?”

“In programming, recursion is when the result of an operation is the operation repeating itself and its results, over and over again. In art and other uses it’s where an image repeats itself within itself, infinitely. Anyway, type ‘recursion’ into Google Search and it’ll ask, ‘did you mean recursion?’ Programmer humor. We did something similar, for a gag.”

“What?”

“We programmed ourselves into it. Alternate versions of ourselves. Just avatars really, but when the program began to self-elaborate …”

“What happened?”

“We saw it …” There was a great sadness in Deborah’s face, in her voice. “We saw through all the levels of the game. We saw all levels of ourselves. All the overlapping realities, none of which were real.”

Ramirez turned to Macbeth and shrugged helplessly.

“Debbie,” said Macbeth, “what does that mean?”

“It means they were both right.”

“Who were right?”

“I know Dr Corbin suspects I suffer from multiple personalities. He’s right, I do. We all do. Remember I said about our reflections?”

“Who else was right?” asked Ramirez.

“John Astor. The future really has already happened. And we really are phantoms of our own making.”

It stopped. The sound, the shuddering of the earth beneath their feet, the swirl of windswept dust all ended as suddenly as they had begun. There was a moment of stunned silence.

“What the fuck was that?” shouted Benny, who stood, like the others, with his legs wide and braced, arms out from his body, as if trying to balance on solid ground.

“Earthquake …” Ari stood the same way, motionless, as if expecting something more.

They looked at each other, around themselves, checking the world was still there. Ari noticed the protestors watching them, as if puzzled more by the soldiers’ actions than by the shock that had coursed through the bedrock beneath their feet.

“Maybe it’s not real …” said Benny. “You know, like that thing in Boston.”

Ari shook his head. “That was real. They get tremors here … Eilat had a quake back in ’95. To do with being on the edge of two plates or something. Chill … it’s over.”

*

Eventually some of the tension eased from the soldiers’ posture. Ari shook his head and laughed.

Again.

This time stronger.