Luminarium (11 page)

Indeed, the office itself had taken on an increasingly bunker-like feel over the years. It used to have five large windows, but when their backing dried up, and before the Armation money came in, they’d been forced to cut a deal with the landlord, who’d proceeded to wall four of the windows off to create an expanded office space for the hedge fund down the hall—which was rolling in cash and wanted nothing but the cream, windowed offices with downtown views to inspire their hedging—leaving Urth, Inc. one small window alcove and a large, dim back area. The remaining window’s sunny exposure had eased the pain somewhat, at least until a few months ago when Sam, whose desk happened to be in front of it, had declared the light was making it harder to see movements on his screen and covered the view with posterboard.

Through the meager desk-lamp pools, Fred made his way over to his desk. The newly gore-enhanced battle test was over, though everyone’s eyeballs were still abuzz with adrenaline as they murmured into their headsets, conducting their post-game analysis, from which would be compiled lists of debugging and upgrading assignments for the Florida team, so that at the next scheduled runthrough the whole process might be repeated. At one end of the red plush couch (its upholstery a holdover from more carefree days) a blanket and pillow lay in a heap—evidence that someone, probably Sam, had spent the night. Fred nodded to Conrad (who acknowledged him fleetingly with his eyes while saying something into his voice-over IP headset), and Jesse (who, with his glasses filled with monitor light, gave the impression of not seeing him), and a few of the younger, reed-thin versions of Sam, headset-wearing and fuzzily facial-haired (who nodded back warily). They all no doubt knew Fred had gotten the axe. His very presence here was probably making waves of weirdness, guilt, and discomfort for all. He told himself he didn’t care, that like some vengeful ghost, he’d go on haunting the office, and with a little luck, all their dreams as well.

Inward bluster notwithstanding, he stopped trying to make eye contact and more or less tiptoed across the room, nearly bumping into a new workstation, the little office’s tenth, that had been plunked down in his weeklong absence, along with a twentysomething kid with a mop of curly hair and a face too pink and fresh for the surroundings. Fred wondered if all of them, even this new recruit he vaguely remembered signing off on, had consented without so much as a grumble to be packed up and shipped off to Orlando along with the hardware.

To make room for the new kid, George’s former desk, long since pressed back into service, had continued its glacial migration from his old corner toward the art department; and Fred’s six-foot-long, six-foot-high blue vintage 1993 Cray Y-MP supercomputer had been pushed, by some almost unthinkable group effort which had left a trail of gouge-lines across the hardwood floor, four feet farther into his own workspace. There were only about twenty inches of air now between the Cray and his desk, requiring Fred to climb over the arm of his chair and then slide himself at various counterintuitive angles down to a seated position. As a jokey birthday gift for Fred, for little more than shipping costs, George had bought the Cray off eBay, where he’d found it being auctioned by a fashion-trend-forecasting firm that had finally gone belly-up in the summer of ’00. He’d kept hinting to Fred at the size of the gift, leading him to think it was a car, or even a boat. When it had arrived, in parts, in a series of wooden crates wheeled off the freight elevator, George had stuck a ribbon onto the nearest one, patted Fred on the shoulder, wished him luck, and gone home to celebrate his own birthday with his wife. It had taken Fred and George a week of late nights to assemble it. To at least attempt to simulate typical mainframe clean- and cold-room conditions, they’d duct-taped a pleated air filter over its intake vent, then duct-taped a floor fan to the filter. Once they’d done all this, however, they couldn’t find any real use for the thing. They’d programmed it to speak in tongues through a voice synthesizer at an office party once; otherwise, it had just sat here, unplugged and collecting dust. Sam wanted it gone, but Fred couldn’t bring himself to part with it, for sentimental reasons, though, too, the thing now seemed to be his last remaining business asset. Its new location, he understood, was a not-so-subtle escalation of Sam’s ultimatum to use it or lose it.

At least the blue metal wall at his back afforded him a bit more privacy, made it easier for him to pretend he was hard at work, preparing to shuck and jive for his job. He laid his arms on his desk, his head on his arms, and tried to engage in a kind of self-help exercise, or maybe just outright fantasy, he’d invented for himself, in which he took on the hazy, barely imaginable persona of some future self well out of all these problems—a self for whom everything had, somehow, worked out happily—and regaled some equally vague group of future listeners with the story of his travails. They could be friends, acquaintances, even total strangers, these future listeners, at a party or a bar or any other likely place.
And
there I was
, his calmly smiling future self would say,
so panicked about
this Florida thing, so exhausted from those sleepless nights, so fried from all
that helmet nonsense …

And that was as far as he got before his mind started browning out and he was seeing the old woman’s hair whorls starting to spin, feeling himself and all of Broadway starting to warp and whip around her, seeing the spinning box with the little birthday girl inside, seeing the girl through the walls in the flashlight’s glow, her eyes like discs, the toucan cradled in her pink-sleeved arm. Then it was himself in there, or somewhere, without a flashlight, spinning in the dark.

A ping from his computer pulled him awake. He looked at the screen, his head still on his arms.

A message in his inbox. From the semi-secret industry listserv:

Subject:
  NUKIN’ ODDS

From:
  
MECSERV

Fellow MEC-AAns:

See link below for current NUKETHREAT odds. FRESH INTEL from CIA OPERATIVE EXCALIBUR’S TURKMENI SOURCES has handicappers upgrading NYC, what with the upcoming 5th anniversary (and that’s wood, a coffin … er … *box* full of dreams, for all you thoughtful gift-givers!) to FRONTRUNNER STATUS at 3:2!

D.C., L.A., Chicago, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, respectively.

Want a longshot? Try your luck with KANSAS CITY—35:1!

Be Ye Fruitful & Multiply in the

*untar-get-able*

of MEC-AA!

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

Excalibur.
All the CIA operatives went by fantasy names like this. Dragonfire, Captain America, Pegasus, Beowulf. Yet one more piece of corroborating evidence, if any more were required, that the whole national defense complex—from the remaining Bush-Cheney Vulcans for the historical moment still suction-padded to their posts, all the way down to Corporal Punishment grinning from some Orlando cubicle or basement rec room in the surrounding Military-Entertainment Complex Accommodation Area—couldn’t get a date in high school.

He hit Delete. Bringing the previous message into view:

Subject:
  Help, Avatara!

From:
  
George Brounian

Idly, head still on his arm, he began mousing and clicking over the empty message pane, the closest he could get to feeling the space with his fingertips. Something appeared:

It looked like someone giving him the finger. That or redacted text. He sat up and kept playing with the mouse. The bars disappeared, smaller rectangles blinking in and out. He was highlighting words, words that seemed written in invisible ink.

He opened the text-color panel. Sure enough, the text was white. He switched it to black:

Cut off last time. Must kp messgs short.

Lookng fr a more stable & secure channel.

Time measrd in Kalpas hre (4.32B yrs.) fr crissakes.

Who knows when we mght spk agin....

He read over it a few times, mystified. He brought up the first message and performed the same procedure:

Cloudbanks cloudwalled. Aethernet unhackable.

This limbo is dull dull dull.

Shock gave way to something darker. If nothing else was clear to him, he at least knew now that it was a prank, aimed at him, with full knowledge of George’s condition. What else could that dull limbo be but a reference to George’s coma? In which case, what? Was this some kind of campaign to guilt him into euthanizing his twin?

And again, who could be behind it?

Anyone
, he realized. Any one of the hundreds of programmers he knew.

He climbed on his chair and snuck a look over the top of the supercomputer around the office, trying to catch someone sneaking a look his way. Nobody was. The post-combat discussion was over, and the dozen employees had all gone back to work, leaned into their screens.

Sitting back down, Fred arranged the two messages side by side, looking from one to the other. He hit Reply to the second, typed what/ who the fuck? and hit Send. He waited a minute, another. Nothing came back.

Who knows when we mght spk agin?

For the first time, he noticed the date and time stamp in the upper right corners of the messages:

Sent:
Tue 8/22/2006 5:00 PM

The two stamps were identical, as though they’d both gone out at the same minute. And the time they indicated was neither ten days ago nor two hours ago, but six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-five minutes in the future.

A light is on, and Fred’s lids are cracked just enough to foggily make
out blond hair, the swell of a breast beneath the sheet: Melanie, her head and shoulders propped on pillows against the headboard, reading one of those ad-thick, perfume-scented magazines of hers. He can’t move, his body still asleep. Arms pinned beneath his weight. Nose buried in the pillow—he can barely breathe, is barely breathing, might suffocate. If he could only move a finger, then maybe the finger could move the hand, the hand the arm, and he could get this pillow away from his nose. Marshalling his will, he thinks he’s succeeding, that his hand is moving, only to realize he’s been dreaming the progress. If the dream pulls him under he might never get back, might fade to black and never even know. He focuses on breathing; if he can keep breathing louder, maybe he can gain control of his vocal cords and make a noise that she’ll hear and then wake him. It’s exhausting, but finally he’s doing it, moans the words
wake me up
,
wake me up—
he’s sure he does, he can feel them vibrating in his throat—but she ignores him. She won’t wake him. Why won’t she wake him?

From sheer bodily strain, tearing himself awake.

No Mel, just a vaguely Mel-shaped rumple of blanket.

No perfumed magazine, just, on the nightstand under the lamp, a decades-old LED clock radio and his mother’s decades-old, used-bookstore copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking.

No headboard on this fold-out futon replacement for the bunk bed he and George had shared.

No Zeckendorf Tower, or dream version thereof (everything in it, he now recalled, Mel’s breast included, had seemed slightly aglow). Just his childhood bedroom, if he could even call it that, the space having beenlong since converted first to a guest room where no guests ever stayed, and over the last year into a kind of new-age showroom. A massage table lay folded up against the brick wall. A boom box and a small stack of ambient music CDs occupied the top of the dresser. To the closet door were affixed charts of chakras, meridian lines, calligraphic Reiki symbols with their various functions listed beneath—the Cho Ku Rei, to generate Reiki power; the Sei He Ki, to treat emotional pain; the Hon Sha Ze Shô Nen, for healing from long distances; and the Dai Kô Myo, the great illuminating light. The corner shelf by the bed had become a shrine to jade Buddhas, polished stones, a photo of George smiling in a gown and rakishly tilted mortarboard, his arm around the shoulders of Fred in his cracked and tattered motorcycle jacket. On the other shelves, his and George’s old books mingled with personal-growth literature, tomes on shiatsu massage, channeling, reflexology.