Idempotency (5 page)

The colored dots all blinked in varying rhythms, until finally they all locked onto a shared cadence. Their colors also merged into a singular gray. Edward smiled at the thought of the confusion each individual within the low-rent high-rise must be going through—one minute jacking in and off to scenes of perversion, the next minute being bombarded by images of purity and holiness.

He waved his hand in front of him, and the wall returned to a 30 percent opaque view of the lake and city beyond. He cursed as he felt another fit of coughing coming on. As he hacked phlegm into a handkerchief that he produced from the depths of his pocket, Rev. Coglin wondered how the past five years would have transpired had he not been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of the few remaining incurable diseases. Certainly, he wouldn’t have aggressively sped up his plans. And, of course, he wouldn’t have required research into technology surrounding transference and idempotency. He didn’t have a choice, really—his work had to continue.

“Show me patient ten-L, Randall Dansby. Display on the holoFloor,” Coglin grumbled.

In the middle of his office, a life-sized hologram of a hospital bed appeared, upon which lay a beleaguered man in a hospital gown. The man twitched slightly. His hands were folded on his lap, allowing his thumbs to twirl incessantly.

“Hello Randy, how are you doing today?”

Randy Dansby swiveled his head as if he were a caged animal. His eyes widened. He began to mumble, “You are not real. You are not me. I am not you. I am Randall—I am Randy—I ran—I once ran races . . . sprinting. Did I tell you about my days as an Olympic sprinter?”

“Shh . . .” Coglin shushed the troubled man. “Oh, Randy, I do apologize for your misfortune, but when you’re building a church you have to fell some trees. We won’t make the same mistake with your nephew.” Coglin cocked his head, then looked away and shouted, “Turn it off.”

The hologram evaporated.

With his opposite hand, Edward dove deep within his robe. Clutching a small ivory cross hanging from a chain around his neck, he rubbed the visage of the baby Jesus in the middle of the cross. The small nose on the child was nearly imperceptible now, rubbed obsessively into oblivion, yet still Edward rubbed—back and forth, up and down, back and forth . . .

An older monorail shuttled Dylan from the EGC tower back to his private transport, which was parked in EGC’s transport recharge and holding station (often referred to as a transPark), located just on the edge of EGC corpSoil. The barren Nevada landscape rolled past him, and he immediately reflected on his trip to Mars. He had sugarcoated the memory when he recounted it to the EGC employees. Certainly it had been fascinating, but there had been something preternatural about it, almost as if the experience had been fabricated—a fake Mars, a prop, a simple piece of reddish wool held above his eyes. It had something to do with the fact that he could only interact with a landscape that was protected by environmental bubbles. Perhaps if he wasn’t claustrophobic, hiking in an atmospheric suit would have helped his experience, as he was unable to freely wander the landscape. His senses had been stunted, only allowed to take in that which had been carefully designed to be taken in.

Conversely, Dylan’s personal experience with SolipstiCorp’s new deathTrip tech had affected him so profoundly—and in many ways negatively, which he had been careful not to hint at during his talk with EGC—that he had required the help of a team of psychiatrists after his deathTrip had failed idempotency. SolipstiCorp’s product managers were beyond concerned with this. This bug Dylan encountered during his experience represented the single greatest risk to the product’s launch, and the scientists and programmers were no further along in identifying the root cause than they were when Dylan woke up screaming mad.
Still
, Dylan thought,
it was so much more real than the
real
trip to Mars had been . . .

His BUI blinked a notification in his periphery, rattling him from his reverie. He was now on national public land, and his boss had pinged him forthwith. Dylan ignored the entreaty momentarily, as he wanted to get inside his transport before connecting.

The monorail arrived at the transPark moments later. Dylan found his transport and the door shut noiselessly behind him. The interior was two meters wide by four meters long. The walls were bare and opaque, but the ceiling was translucent.

Dylan took a deep breath, loosened his tie, then removed his jacket and threw it casually on one of the four cushioned cloth chairs that resided in the corners of the transport. He grabbed a glass of water out of a cabinet—one so nondescript that it was nearly invisible—which sat at the front of the small room. Finally, he plopped down on the chair in the front left corner, turned on his BUI, and set his presence to
available
. Before he could reply, his boss began pinging him a notification to a SolipstiCorp-encrypted video conference. He answered, and Frank Cunningham’s perpetually overwrought mug was suddenly once again projected a little too closely in front of Dylan.

“Dyls, hey, looks like you are still at EGC, yes?” Frank had been looking away from the camera until he spoke the upwardly inflected
yes.
The question was perfunctory. Frank knew Dylan’s location down to a centimeter.

“Ya, I just passed out of EGC corpSoil, Frank. We should be good to talk. Assuming you have anything worthwhile to discuss.”

“Ya.” Frank brushed the comment aside. “Look—on your way back I need you to pick up one of our new high-priority investors. Given all these rumors swirling around, secrecy on both ends is an absolute must." As usual, Frank was speaking with alacrity, even as his eyes darted between multiple media sources at once.

“EGC went well, thanks for asking,” Dylan shot back with a playful grin.

“I want you to give him first-class treatment and sell him all the while. This is about as big a fish as it gets. He’s in SF at the moment.  And if EGC hadn’t gone well I woulda fired your ass already.” Frank, now absently rubbing his balding head, had turned his attention away from the camera again.

“We’ll be meeting with EGC back on our corpSoil in a few weeks. Which corp am I picking this Mr. X guy up at?”

“No corp.” Frank looked back at the camera, and when he began talking again his voice slowed and dropped a semitone. “Dylan, you’re picking him up in downtown San Francisco.”

“Downtown? Where? Why?” Dylan asked, incredulous surprise forming the creases on his face.

“Geary—I’ve already sent you the address, and you’ve already been granted clearance to the building. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more about the client. He’s being handled at the level of the board and Jack himself, though I’m not even sure how much Jack knows about this character.” Jack Carpenter was SolipstiCorp’s chief executive officer.

“Ok, then." Dylan paused in thought. “Well, I’ll charm our mystery guest as best I can. I should be there in a couple hours depending—”

Frank cut him off. “You’ll be there in thirty-seven minutes, because you’re going to take the autoTrans highway.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. He loathed the autoTrans highways, preferring the more scenic autoTrans byways, but a playful smile returned soon as he replied, “Yes sir, leaving now, sir."

“You’re the shit, Dylan. Thanks," Frank replied with no emotion, almost as if he was speaking to a different Dylan who happened to be standing in the room with him. Before Dylan could gesture Frank off of his BUI and out of his sight, Frank beat him to the punch—his image blipped into the ether. Dylan sighed and chuckled, then wasted no time enacting his autonavigation system.

The transport hummed to life, snaking its way silently through the parking structure. As he neared the exit, a few vintage retrofitted automobiles caught Dylan’s eyes. They were dwarfed by his midsize transport. He scanned the cars, hoping to spot an old Porsche—he dreamed of one day owning a mid-2000s electric Boxster—but alas, the cars were predominantly Indian and Chinese imports. He sighed, longing to be in control of a vehicle, rather than trusting the now ubiquitous multi-corp-sponsored global autoTrans byways and highways.
Traffic
had become a deprecated term. All transports traveled at the same speed, within exactly one meter of each other—the definition of efficiency.

“Walls, opacity 100 percent, blue,” he commanded flatly. The walls became a dark blue color; the ceiling remained translucent, providing a warm, ambient light from the sky. He could no longer see the vehicles next to him; he could see only the blue sky above him.

Dylan clicked on his BUI and brought up his destination. The building was an older high-rise on Geary, just a few blocks west of Union Square. Not a good part of town, according to the alert on the map he was viewing. He gestured and expanded the data on the building itself: The structure housed the Federal Trade Commission and several South American embassies. Dylan squinted in confusion. Why the federal government, in this day of lax regulations, would have any interest whatsoever in a product such as SolipstiCorp’s made no sense to him. While he could imagine some nefarious use cases for their new product should it fall into the wrong hands, weapons and counterintelligence efforts had long since been farmed out to corp contractors and away from any direct federal agencies. Not to mention, the government certainly couldn’t afford their prices.

“May I recommend a nap during the drive, Mr. Dansby? Your pupils are slightly more dilated than average,” spoke a gentle and omnidirectional feminine voice.

He sighed heavily and looked around the room for nothing in particular. “Sure, why not? Roof opacity: 95 percent.”

The blue sky darkened to a nearly imperceptible blue, and the chair reclined slowly as Dylan placed his drink on a tray that appeared out of the floor on his right. He loosened his tie, closed his eyes, and tried to recall the last time he had been to San Francisco.

Dylan awoke naturally when his transport stopped moving. Immediately he wondered why his AI hadn’t awoken him before arrival. He asked and it smugly rejoined that they had not arrived yet. Annoyed, he followed up, asking why they had stopped if they hadn’t arrived. The AI eerily skipped a beat and replied with a
default error
message. Dylan scrunched his face in confusion, raised his chair, and faced forward.

“Walls, opacity 100 percent, externally reflective.”

As the walls became transparent, Dylan’s jaw went slack. Standing directly in front of him, not two meters away, stood the grotesque semblance of a man. The thing stood naked, and he swayed north to south. The aberrant nature of the scene was enhanced by the thick, ever-present Bay Area fog that was dampening the city.

The man turned his head toward Dylan’s transport. As if looking at Dylan, but probably looking at his own reflection, the man appeared as though he were trying to speak. The skin around what was once the man’s face was stretched and wrinkled to the point that blood seemed to exhume itself from within the creases. The hole that served as a mouth had fluids leaking out of it, and the man absently raised a withered and crooked—yet well-muscled—arm up to his face and promptly smeared the yellowish sludge around his cheeks: Blood mixed with an inscrutable goo to paint a demented Van Gogh upon a withered Edvard Munch canvas of a face. The thing’s head suddenly bolted to the left, its eyes darting frantically to and fro. Then it leered back at Dylan’s window, its expression—if it could even be called that—appearing agitated now. The muscles of the skinless thing ripped to life, spraying tiny droplets of blood and pus in every direction, and the thing pounced on the window of the transport. Its hands balled into fists and flared violently against Dylan’s window, just one meter in front of him. Dylan yelped a slurred combination of “shit” and “God” that sounded more like “shod” and nearly fell out of his chair. The thing’s mouth moved vigorously as it pounded away at the glass, leaving smears of blood slowly cascading down the window. Had he turned on external audio, Dylan would have heard the thing ranting a nonsensical, frenetic diatribe between horrific screams. In an instant, the thing’s head turned back to its left, and it raised its hands to its neck as it did so. Its convulsions began to slow, finally swaying like a kite before takeoff, then it collapsed owing to a dead wind. Dylan catapulted himself out of his chair to get a look at the now dormant and supine body. In the neck of the victim, where it had been grasping, sat a small metallic object. Dylan breathed for the first time in a while.

Five security officers appeared out of the fog from several sides. They wore black suits with black helmets, and they quickly encircled the body. Within moments everyone and everything was gone. The transport warned Dylan that he should sit down—he summarily ignored this entreaty—just before it proceeded on its way.

Still standing, Dylan barked, “Search, recent news, San Francisco, vagrant, blood, traffic disruption.”

The feminine voice responded, “Mr. Dansby, the item is trending locally among personal observation; however, there are no official reports on this particular incident, as yet. There are several related incidents matching—”

“Is there a known cause for the . . . man’s condition?”

“The most likely cause is external epidermis atrophication, more commonly referred to as dermatraphy, caused by an inability to procure cell regeneration for skin while maintaining longevity through more meager black-market products, such as organ transplant and gene manip—”

“I’ve heard about the vagrant cell regeneration issues, but this is an extreme case, yes?”

“Please provide the boundaries of the question, Mr. Dansby. Also, we will be arriving in five minutes.”

Dylan shook his head and rubbed his temples. The image of the thing’s jabbering mouth coupled with the dull
thud
of its fists rang in his head. “Never mind.” He resolved to research this later, eschewing his garrulous AI.

After plucking up his brown jacket from where he had left it, Dylan asked the transport’s AI to make his inner window reflective and proceeded to tussle his messy brown hair until he arrived.