Idempotency (33 page)

“Hey—I’m sorry, quick question.”

Kane flinched, clearly not used to being interrupted in his monologue.

“Just wondering if we are trying to—I don’t know—send a message, or something? I’m just wondering because it’s so rare—and, frankly, sometimes controversial—these days to see such a—uh, brash biblical presence. Am I missing something?” Dylan glanced at Kimberly, who was not paying attention.

“No message is intended, Mr. Dansby. St. Titus is merely one of two different Titus themes.” Kane appeared annoyed. He placed his hands behind him, causing his large suit coat to fan open. His lips turned downward momentarily before he was off again to the races. “You’ll notice in the St. Titus wing a clear baroque theme. While St. Titus himself lived around the time of Christ’s death, these days the baroque style of art is ecumenically associated with religious themes. As you tour the facility on your own, you will find many informative holo-stations explaining the inspirations of the designers.

“As for the southern section of the Titus facility, it is themed around water, inspired by a gentleman by the name of Silas Wright Titus. This particular Titus was an engineer credited with discovering deep-water pumping techniques, allowing cities such as New York to thrive during a time of great population growth. Fountains, streams, and waterfalls inspire the design of the southernmost wing of Titus.”

Kane cleared his throat and began pointing in several directions as he told Dylan how to find his way about. The descriptions were largely unnecessary, as directions were available from holographic assistants at every turn, in addition to the intra-corp network that all guests could access freely. Because of this, Dylan hadn’t felt too bad about tuning Kane out. Instead, he chose to take in the enormity of the structure. Five hundred meters above him, panels of holoGlass protected the enclosure from the harsh summer’s sun. It was midday and Dylan noticed the ceiling had attenuated the sun’s light, just slightly. He lowered his gaze and inspected the fifty-story-high walls of the enclosure. The walls were filled with open walkways, decks, and patios, allowing people to look out over the vast courtyard. Many people were doing just that, though it was obvious to Dylan that the present capacity was far below eventual capacity. The grounds of the courtyard were filled with a vast number of trees and plant life. The place did remind Dylan of Central Park, and he guessed that there were numerous open areas within the parklike setting. The one area of the grounds visible between the trees was a hill around the center of the park. The hill rose nearly halfway toward the ceiling; at its apex was a rotunda made of a reddish marble, adorned with ornate designs of golden swirls and golden statues of various pudgy-looking, childlike angels. The structure approximated the pulpit of a grand Catholic cathedral.

Church bells began to ring out, rudely cutting off Kane’s speech. The entire cloister ceiling darkened momentarily, then erupted into action, as a kilometer-wide vision of the underside of a bell lit up the media-enabled glass panels of the ceiling. The bell swung in unison to the ubiquitous sound reverberating around the guests. The bass shook Dylan’s innards. He guffawed as he craned his neck upward to take in the awesome spectacle.

“I have never seen anything so grand,” Dylan remarked.

Kane spoke again the moment the bells ended. “Well, I could discuss these details ad nauseam, but there’s plenty of time to do this the next few days. We’ll let the bells serve as my curtain call. I’ll let the two of you find your rooms, and we’ll meet at noon on the twenty-seventh-floor vista for lunch. It overlooks the external mountainside, rather than this courtyard. There are many alternate paths to arrive at your rooms, but I’d recommend taking the grand staircase on either side of us. At the top, you will find an open-air elevator that will take you up. At the bottom is park access. Any questions?”

Dylan had hundreds. “Nope, not at the moment,” he responded.

“Excellent.” Kane twirled, clicked something on his ear, began speaking to someone or something, and walked away using short and hurried steps.

Dylan turned to look at Kimberly, who was staring back at him with a large smile. He shook his head and smiled back at her.

“It’s a bit overwhelming the first time, right?” she asked.

“You bet.” Again he chuckled as he looked around. “Just the ceiling alone—that giant bell—It’s insane. I can’t believe you—we—have done all of this.”

“It’s a great thing we’re doing here,” she responded.

“Yes, it’s a great thing,” Dylan responded in kind, still disturbed by the odd phrase.

Kimberly grabbed her bags, told Dylan she looked forward to seeing him during dinner, and headed up to her room. Dylan grabbed his own bags and walked over to the edge of the gallery. He leaned on an ornate marble railing and stared at the massive indoor park.

An anxious feeling crept over him, as if a spider were slowly scuttling down a web just beyond his periphery. He stared at a throng of people meandering around a gazebo near the entrance to the park below him. His eyes blurred, and he noted a person standing within the gazebo. She was standing perfectly still. His eyes focused, and he saw the expressionless woman staring at him.

“Sabrina,” he whispered.

His bags dropped to the floor and he took off running. He descended the grand staircase three steps at a time. He lost sight of her as he reached ground level, but sprinted toward her location. He began to call out her name, softly at first, but soon he was shouting. He shoved a few people out of the way and they looked back at him as if he was crazy.

Maybe I am crazy
,
he thought as he reached the gazebo, only to find it empty.

Kristina had become uneasy about Dylan’s trip to Mexico the instant he mentioned it to her over holoVid. At one point, she’d even asked him to consider quitting altogether. Dylan put on a confident smile and assured her that SOP would be watching his every step, but that assurance had rung hollow. Kristina had an uncanny knack of knowing when Dylan was lying. And he had been lying.

After blowing Dylan a kiss good night, she hung up her holoVid and barely summoned the energy to step into the shower. Her short hair washed and dried fast, and within fifteen minutes she found herself in bed, trying to read herself to sleep.

It wasn’t working.

She waved aside the floating holoBook above her head and thought about Dylan. She wondered, as she had so many nights over the past few months, whether she was doing the right thing. Doubts crept in, as they always did. Could they really make a difference in the world? SOP had been trying for the better part of a decade and nothing ever seemed to change.

A light knock fell upon her window, and her head swiveled in its direction. She held her breath, staring at the updated windows within the old brick, and just before she exhaled, the tapping came again.

She bolted out of bed, crept to the side of the window, and risked a cautious glance outside. Sitting still on the ledge, a pigeon cocked its head and stared her in the eye. She asked her home to crack the window. Her home obliged, and the pigeon ducked inside the window and lowered its head.

As she neared it, she realized it was mechanical and, more important, that a note was affixed to its lowered neck. She untied a piece of string and grabbed the rolled-up note. The android pigeon bowed, then flapped its polymer wings and was gone in an instant.

Kristina unfurled the note, but it was full of hexidecimal gibberish ciphertext. She immediately recalled the key Simeon had made her memorize:
Being aware of your fears
will improve your life.

She fed the key into several simple decryption algorithms. It took less than a second for the plaintext message to be discovered:

You’re needed. Leave tonight. Hire a driver. Go to Laughlin, Nevada. Section 5, row 18, yurt 1. Plan on staying some time.

Kristina’s heart raced, but not nearly as fast as her feet raced toward her closet door to pack.

Dylan sat on the edge of his bed panting loudly. His mind was a confused, warped lump of tissue. Memories from two different men swirled together as one. He tried to focus, pleading with his weathered brain to retrieve the proper data, just this once. But the dueling memories—the dueling lives of two different selves—were battling over a table for one.

After finding the empty gazebo, Dylan had labored up the elevator shaft and into his room with the help of his companion. On his way upward, memories of Dalton’s life bombarded his brain. His face was flushed with anger toward Sabrina.

What I wouldn’t give to give that bitch a piece of my mind!
his head screamed to itself.
This is madness. She’s not real. I am not Dalton! There is no Dalton, there is no
Sabrina.

Visibly shaken, he had apologized to the onlookers around the gazebo that he was feeling ill. They didn’t seem to care and soon went about their day. He had felt woozy to the point of passing out, as if he had just downed a bottle of vodka five minutes earlier. His steps had become sloppy, and he remembered thinking he was lucky to have the holoAssistants, as they helped direct him to his room. He remembered his door, the edge of his bed—breathing slowly. Then darkness, as a stressful sleep settled in.

Dylan now held a damp washcloth in his right hand. It was the first thing he had done after waking up from a brief, twenty-minute nap. He raised the cloth to his brow every ten seconds, like clockwork. His mind raced as he tried to grapple with reality. Maybe he’d just seen someone who looked similar to Sabrina.

No! The golden hair and green eyes—it had to be her.

Tossing multifarious possibilities over in his mind only seemed to make the memories swirl closer together. Dylan glanced at the clock with trepidation—twenty more minutes before he had to meet Kane. Twenty minutes to pull himself together. He rubbed his eyes, then brushed his thick hair back several times while dabbing his forehead once more. His mind felt like a piece of flammable plastic thrown into a starving fire; it slowy twisted and became malformed as the fire burned more brightly every passing moment. And he felt its heat against his forehead.

An antique clock ticked noisily behind him and Dylan turned to stare it down, but it was incorrigible. He gave up the battle and took notice of the room for the first time. The company had placed him in a suite on the top floor. The furnishings and decorations were impeccable and lavish. Dylan guessed that his bed’s headboard alone—an ornately hand-carved monstrosity—was worth more than all of his worldly possessions combined. The rest of the room followed suit: thick curtains laced with gold, a mirror hanging in a perfectly polished frame of silver, an armoire that must have been older than any living human. This was a room for a king, Dylan thought . . . or a pope.

Potent
—
That was my signal to Simeon. My safe word
, Dylan thought.
If ever I needed
some help, this is probably it.
He opened his BUI and typed up a quick text to Frank:

Made it to Mex. Some potent sun down here, hoping the salsa is equally potent. Let’s grab a beer when I’m back.

Dylan glanced at the clock. He had ten minutes to make it to the seventy-fifth floor for lunch with Kane. He exited his room and began walking back to the main hall, but as he rounded a corner, a holoPod sprung to life to his right, causing him to jump back in surprise. The image of a generic man’s torso and face floated atop a round base. The base was short, coming up to Dylan’s knee, which caused the entire holoPod to appear short, as the assistant’s holographic head only rose to Dylan’s mid-section. Under normal circumstances, Dylan found the devices off-putting; now, they were downright frightening.

“Hello Mr. Dansby,” spoke the smiling holographic face, “I suggest you turn around and head in the other direction. It’s a shorter route to the seventy-fifth-floor overlook.”

Dylan squinted at the wavering, generic-looking torso and head. He did as he was told and spun around. As he began walking, holoPods seemed to pop up out of nowhere, instructing to take lefts, rights, magLifts up, staircases down. Each subsequent holoPod that appeared seemed just a bit happier than the last one.

In tandem, two holoPods guarding the entrance to a cavernous hallway popped up and spoke simultaneously, “Almost there, Mr. Dansby, just through this next hallway.”

He entered, and the hallway seemed to darken with each step he took. The once stark white of the walls had, at some point—and Dylan couldn’t recall when it had happened—changed to a dark brown. There were no discernible doors or windows in this hallway, and it seemed to be narrowing without actually shrinking in size. Dylan shook his head, and just as he was about to ask the holoPods behind him,
Are you sure I’m heading the right direction?
he turned around and saw that the entrance had somehow disappeared. The hallway now appeared unending in both directions.

A booming sound rang out around him as a brilliant flash of white light erupted in front of him. He began to back up slowly in shock and confusion, and as his eyes adjusted again to the low light, he saw a silhouette coming toward him.

“Dalton, you are to come with me.” The female voice sounded familiar, as if he had known it for many years.

The silhouette reached out toward Dylan, and in her hand was a stasis inducer. She pointed it at him and said, “Dalton, follow me.”

I know this person
, he thought.
Of course I know my own wife. My own murderess
wife.

Dylan gritted his teeth, fighting back the urge to remember someone else’s memories.

Or have they been my memories all along?

“This isn’t real, Dalton, it’s all in your head. Now walk that way.” She motioned down the hallway with her stasis inducer.

“And if I don’t?”

“I can shoot you and drag you with me. It’s your choice.”

He started to walk, and as he passed her, he smelled her perfume and vowed that he would kill this woman, this murderer of children, the first chance he got.