Cronix (11 page)

“And that was funded by the government?” The old man took a slurp of his coffee. It had become a morning ritual to have a cup with Poincaffrey in his office before his deposition. They got along well, and the professor was always happy to chat about affairs unrelated to Oriente’s own tale.

“On paper, it was organized by the US Agency for International Development. But it was underwritten by the New World corporations. The more people they could sign up, the greater their computing power would be, and the better the New World packages they could offer. That particular expedition was one of MEvolution’s, I believe. Horrible place. People dying like flies, and always the danger of being raided by the militias.”

“Did the people know what they were signing up to?”

Poincaffrey shrugged. “They were desperate. We gave them a few biscuits to keep them alive long enough to chip them, then cut off further rations. It was a sort of triage, but millions survived because of it.”

“But did they know?”

The professor shrugged. “I don’t know. It would have taken too long to explain it all, and their religious leaders would probably have kicked up a fuss, right when time was of the essence. So we simply concentrated on saving them.”

“And MEvolution became one of the biggest corporations in the Afterworlds.”

“It did, indeed, Mr Oriente. But don’t think it was all about selfish corporate profit. People like myself came from across the world to help the Peace Corps.” He smiled. “Or the 
Rest in Peace 
Corps, as we called it. Not only because of the chip camps themselves but because of the risks we ran as volunteers. I myself was killed in a raid in Sudan, by the Janjaweed militia. Remember them? Obviously we were all chipped, but it was not a pleasant way to make one’s first transition. Especially as by that time they had already started attacking the soul poles, like these Santa Muerte idiots today. Quite a few of us didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry, professor, I didn’t mean to imply…” started Oriente. His host, gracious as ever, waved him down.

“No harm done, Mr Oriente. It was a fair point to make. MEvolution did become a giant, and still is. But it also came up with many of the incredible breakthroughs we now take for granted. The perfection of olfactory memories, for example. That was a huge leap forward to replicating a genuine human experience. And consciousness blocking, that was one of theirs too.”

Oriente frowned in incomprehension.

“Come, now, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of CB?” Poincaffrey tried to mask his surprise, as though he had just encountered a musical genius who had never heard of Mozart.

“I’ve been out in the woods a long, long time, Professor. Lots of water has flowed under a lot of bridges.”

“Quite,” nodded the academic. Consciousness blocking, he explained, was a procedure whereby the uploaded human mind could be induced to forget its original identity for a limited period of time, allowing the person to be ‘reborn’ as another. It allowed Eternals to escape the tedium of centuries of self-hood, and had also spawned myriad new projects, such as the realistic recreation of vast tracts of history.

“A person submits to CB and is ‘born’ into a new world with a new identity. For example, you can be born as a child into the fourteenth century, with an entire world rendered historically accurate. You ‘grow up’ believing you are a late Medieval peasant. When you die – which would be fairly quickly in a scenario like that – you return to your old self, but retain the memories of the CB life you have just lived. It can be a wonderfully liberating experience. I myself was trampled to death by Wallenstein's cavalry charge at Dessau.”

It sounded awful to Oriente, but he kept his observation to himself. “Seems like I’ve a lot of catching up to do,” he said. “What other wonders are out there in the Inner Worlds?”

“Too many for me to recount now, I’m afraid, Mr Oriente.” Poincaffrey glancing at his watch. “Let's continue the conversation tomorrow? I’m afraid your guests will be waiting for the star performer to take the stage. Shall we?”

***

East Kansas. A late afternoon in November. The plains didn't change. A plane of nothingness, so vast and lonely it made Glenn’s head hurt to stare at it. Thunderheads towered in the last hinge of daylight that still joined heaven and earth, grey ramparts of bad weather fifty miles off. They looked solid, as though some capricious god of the prairie, bored with the monotony of his own creation, had cantilevered the horizon to a crazy tilt, just to fuck with the little man's head.

Glenn concentrated on the narrow road ahead but was already starting to feel the busy tentacles of paranoia. No way out here of telling if it was the edgy effect of the blunt he'd just smoked, or the unnerving expanse of prairie stretching out forever. Suburban man, lost in the big country. A tightness gripped Glenn’s throat, made him feel like an alien breathing in the wrong kind of atmosphere.

Definitely the dope. No more. No way. He’d bought it in a dive bar in New York, terrified of being arrested but desperate for something to cut the tensions of recent months. His muscles were balled up in the back of his neck: even though everything indicated he’d got away with his sort-of-crime, he knew it would be a long time before he could really think about what he’d done, and work out quite where he was going now.

He’d been driving for weeks, a vague idea of Jack Kerouac, California beaches and tanned, happy people. He couldn’t say for sure where he’d been, so erratic was his course. Just drive.

He glanced nervously the fuel gauge. The vast tank of the beast was almost full: the firm hand of the dial soothed his jangling nerves.

The pump jockey at the gas station in Bend, or whatever the last little no-motel dorf was called, said the forecast was for snow. The kid wrinkled his pimply nose and hunched his shoulders like a prairie rodent emerging from its burrow to sniff the biting wind for any scent of the promised storm.

"Should hold a while. Might get a few flurries" he said, wiping his snout with the end of the scarf.

Glenn considered postponing the next leg of his journey. The kid stood beside him as he lingered, undecided, on the forecourt, his boiler suit rippling in the wind, his windburned face immune to the elements.

"Anywhere to stay in this place? Motel, rooming house?" Glenn asked.

The kid looked at him like he hadn't understood.

"You wanna 
stay 
here?"

"Just till I see which way the weather jumps," Glenn said.

"Whoa, you could stay till March to see which way the weather's gonna jump, mister. Only thing you should decide is if you're gonna jump." He cackled at the idea of someone actually staying the night in the town he was doomed by birth and lack of natural ability to spend the rest of his life in.

“Besides, there's no motel here. Dunno where you'd find one, at least not before, let me see..." He scratched his upper lip, grey-tinted by the birth of a moustache, then shook his head, the mathematics of road-touring as profound a mystery as sine curves or Latin grammar. "Beats me where you'd find one."

Glenn stared at him for a moment, burdened by a dislike welling into depression, as though the forlorn kid's existence might be somehow contagious. He felt the urge to be out there on the road again, music blaring, joint in hand and Bend receding fast in his rearview mirror. He got behind the wheel, slipped into drive and throttled on to the empty blacktop.

He lit a joint, gulped down smoke like spring water. The drive and the smoke peeled away the pressures of his mind, little post-it notes of anxiety whipped away in the breeze of acceleration. The music swept over him as he sped off, signs of civilization dwindling around him: faded billboards advertising engine lubricants ceding to wooden stumps that marked the run of the road during high snows, the occasional pylon corroding in the brittle air.

Hours passed: the thrill of acceleration decayed into the fidgety boredom of endless driving. The vast smoky mirror of the sky receded into darkness. He had lost track of time when the first flakes of snow brushed the windshield, whipping off in the slipstream.

"Oh crap," he said, looking for reassurance at the brightly lit gauges on the dash, glowing like the controls of a space ship. The LCD clock showed it was 20:57 and minus two outside. The dials beckoned him back into a warm world of man-made utility, contrasted with the dark sweep of nature gathering around him.

He scanned the road ahead, chiseled from the night by his brights. No light, nothing, just God's empty country, asphalt emerging eternally out of nowhere, then disappearing behind into the same vacuum.

Glenn gnawed at a ragged thumb nail. He had snow chains in the trunk but had no idea how to fit them. He wondered if they had instructions, or if Americans just assumed that everyone knew how to use them.

"Calm down, for fuck's sake," he said out loud, looking in the rear-view. The skin round his eyes was red, exhausted. The idea occurred to him that after years of dreaming of escape, he wasn't actually enjoying his big adventure, wasn't quite up to this whole Jack Kerouac thing. His mind held the idea like an unsightly bug accidentally caught by its wings in mid-flight, then dismissed it. Kerouac must have had off days too.

He pulled over and opened the map, resolved to get off the back roads and find an interstate to California, anywhere, a.s.a.p. Beaches and babes and greener grass. In the glow of the overhead lamp, he traced the road over half a page of featureless map. He thought about turning back. The snow was falling softly, settling now on the glass of the windshield. There were a few farmsteads along the road: if things got really bad he could always stop for shelter. Even thinking the words cast an eeriness over the land, conjured up the dark side of Mother Nature in his modern, grid-pattern mind.

He slid out across the powder-covered road. Unease was soon nipping at his heels again. The road ahead was white now, a raised bump in the snowfields building up all around. Once or twice he felt the tires leave the tarmac, bite the grit of the hard shoulder before he corrected himself. Beads of panicky sweat formed on his forehead.

"Easy now," he said. But he wondered how soon it would be before the difference between highway and prairie vanished under the snow and he found himself nose down in a ditch. A man could freeze to death out here.

His attention was so wrapped up with the immediate stretch of snow ahead that he failed to spot the gas station until he was almost upon it.

He slammed on the brake, slewing the huge carapace of metal around in the middle of the road, where it stood, engine panting in the cold.

Sunoco
, read the yellow sign. 
Sunoco serendipity salvation in the middle of a freezing night. 
Glenn eased the car round to the front of a single-story structure of whitewashed cinderblocks. A night-light glowed in the garage shop, dimly illuminating shelves of potato chips, candy bars and sodas.

He got out, not bothering to pull on the thick parka tossed across the back seat. In the headlight glare he could just make out the fading tracks of another vehicle. He peered through the store window. A cash register sat half covered with a plastic wrap. The place was evidently closed.
 Shit
, he whispered. The tire tracks must have been the cashier scurrying home before the blizzard hit.

He circled the building, shoes scrunching the snow. The locked door of the restroom in back rattled in the wind that whipped off the plains, sending Glenn scurrying to the lee of the building.

He decided he wasn't going anywhere for a while. The idea of heading off again into a landscape of dread cold consequences was too forbidding. Hunker down, engine ticking over for heat, until morning when the gas station opened, and he could wait until more travelers arrived to lead the way. He got back in the car and settled down for a long, uncomfortable night.

The heater pumped warmth into his cocoon. Glenn closed his eyes and drifted off.

He awoke hours later, gummy and disoriented. The cerulean clock display told him it was 00:37 am. The fuel gauge showed that three hours of idling had barely dented his reserves of gas. He was safe for the night. He was hungry, though, and thirsty, most likely both side-effects of the dope. Beyond the gas pumps, he spotted the somber glow of a vending machine. A Coke and a freeze-dried burger suddenly seemed like the very fruits of Eden.

The wind had dropped and the snow tailed off. Glenn rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a sprinkling of coins.

The machine only dispensed drinks. He brushed the hoar frost off the list to see what choice he had. Coke, Coke Zero, Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew. He decided on a Coke, inserted coins and something whirred in the mechanical bowels. Glenn waited for the thump of the can, but it didn’t come. He pushed the metal flap where the drinks were supposed to be dispensed.

Nothing had come out. His mouth was dry as a leaf, and he only had three quarters left, not enough for another can. He pressed the button to return his change, but nothing happened. “Shit.” He kicked the machine, then knelt down and put his hand under the metal flap. Groping around, he couldn’t feel any blockage, but couldn't locate the missing drink either. He pushed his hand up and felt the rollers that were meant to dispense the cans. Maybe if he prodded them…

"Oh shit." Panic as his fingers jam between the rollers. He gave a reflexive tug and felt like he had dislocated a knuckle.