Luminarium (35 page)

The idea was roundly dismissed by a dozen respondents, who agreed in subsequent threads among themselves that the future superbeing would simply expand into the phase space of all possible worlds, and then, like some deified obsessive-compulsive disorder, resimulate every possible “you” after the fact, like so many arrangements of a carbon molecule.

Half wishing he’d stuck with simplexity, Fred pushed the laptop aside and pressed a pillow over his eyes. He still wasn’t tired. He thought about reviewing his notes for the meeting tomorrow one last time, but they were already so clear in his mind that he felt any further attention would only confuse things. He thought about listening to Mira’s Week Three CD, but he was annoyed enough at himself for fantasizing about her. He didn’t want to think about her or anything to do with the city, anything within a thousand miles of George, lying abandoned in that dark, empty room.

Trapped, like a man in a hard plaster cast.

Bah, motion is overrated
, he made Inner George say.

Breathing through a tube.

Get the job
, he made him say.
Live your life.

What if a fly landed in it?

His pulse starting to hammer, Fred grabbed his phone, about to dial the hospital to see if someone could check on George. He tossed the phone away. He put the pillow back over his head, took a deep breath, and set his mind to work picturing that less bloodless, if less likely, version of the God of the Geeks—the one that might come back in time to save them all:

A swarm of 1s and 0s, in the shape of a man.

In a cape (why not?).

With a serpentine S on its barrel chest.

Stepping back through some vaporous portal to relive the history of its own creation.

Falling in love with humanity, those little, meme-shuffling aphids who’d given it birth, and vowing to become for them the God they’d always wanted.

Witnessing, cherishing, preserving in its infinite data banks their every trial and triumph.

Uploading them, in their final moment, through a simulated tunnel and into a simulated realm of brightness, to play for them their life review, in multi-textured, quaternion-compressed truecolor, with surround sound, and an overlay of pixel-shaded meters showing them how much love/hate, joy/suffering, good/evil they’d contributed to the world. Were those needles in the black, it would bask them in its praise. In the red, forgiveness. And they would live on, immortal subroutines in the heaven of its vast, self-generating code….

He was finally drifting off when his email pinged:

Subject:
be my friend!

From:
G30rg3 8r0un1an

Hi! I’m inviting you to be my friend on
originalfacebook.com
, the coolest social networking site in history! Just click here to get going! Thanks!

Fred shut his eyes. Did he really want to do this again?

He clicked. A basic template Web page.
ORIGINALFACEBOOK
at the top. A faint wallpaper of hip, smiling youth in skullcaps and printed T-shirts. A login request, Fred’s name already filled in. A blinking cursor in the password box. And, in blue text beneath:

forgot your password?

Seeing no other options, Fred clicked it.

Hint: How do you wrap an AVATARA up into a little ol’ AWDBS/HAA?

He was supposed to sit here guessing? He typed:

try shoving it up your ass

Incorrect password

How should he know? Something about taking away its belief in itself? He typed:

doubt

Incorrect password. WARNING: THREE MORE ATTEMPTS PERMITTED BEFORE ACCOUNT DEACTIVATION.

He told himself to turn the computer off, told himself he needed to sleep and wake up rested for the interview.

Around 2:30
AM,
he tried “Armation.” Incorrect.

By 3:00, having looked over last week’s instant-message exchange, he’d convinced himself the answer had to be “shaft,” the word used in those instant messages last week to describe Armation’s treatment of him. Wrong.

He slammed the laptop shut, took it into the bathroom, and left it on the sink, so he’d be less tempted to reach for it from bed if another answer came to him.

He lay in the dark, prayed for sleep.

3:07. He hit upon the idea that AVATARA and AWDBS/HAA might be a kind of code.

3:24. Converted all the letters to binary: 01000001 01010110 01000001 01010100 01000001 01010010 01000001 …

3:59. Ran the words through every key of the Caesar cipher: ZUZSZQZ, YTYRYPY, XSXQXOX, WRWPWNW …

4:31. Used the words as keys for each other in an online keyword cipher: AWAUATA, AWGEUKAA …

5:03. It struck him that if one counted S/H as a single letter, the words had the same number of letters. He wrote them out on a scratch pad:

A V A T A R A

A W D B S/H A A

Wrapped up. What kind of operation was that?

He counted forward from each letter of first to the corresponding letter of the second, wrapping around from Z to A when necessary: 0, 1, 3, 8.

S/H. He divided them, 19 by 8, rounded down: 2. Converted it back to a B. From A to B, then: 1. And the last two digits: 9, 0.

0 1 3 8 1 9 0

And converted back to letters:

ACHAI

Gibberish. He balled the paper, crushed it into a nugget.

He turned off the light. Listened to a garbage truck shake down a dumpster.

Just to be sure, he retrieved his laptop, opened a search engine, and entered the letters. It was a male first name, according to a baby name dictionary. American Indian in origin. Meaning:
brother.

His bones went cold. Fighting the feeling he wasn’t alone in the room, Fred entered the password, and a new page appeared. A picture of Fred’s own smiling cartoon avatar in the upper left corner. Beside it, his name, his age, a couple listed interests: “computers,” “angels.” He appeared to have a single friend: G30rg3, a picture of that bald, nose-tubed chemotherapy angel above the name. Instead of an axe, the George angel was now holding a bow, greenish in tint, and an arrow tipped with a large pink flower.

Scrolling down, Fred found Angel-George’s picture again. He’d left Fred a message:

DOOd! Thanks for friending me! I’ll be believing in myself in no time!

Fred cursored around, swearing. There didn’t seem to be a way to unfriend whoever it was. The only bit of functionality in sight was the George angel’s clickable photo, which took Fred to G30rg3’s page, as plain as his own, the only differences being the name, the image, the interests: “computers,” “humans.” Angel-George’s picture was larger on this page. The bow was strung with what appeared to be a chain of bees, joined front to back. G30rg3 had one friend—Fred—and no messages. Fred sent him one:

4Q mofo

Then waited, as riled as he was spooked, the irritation compounding with every new minute of lost sleep. Ten had gone by when a reply message popped up on his page:

You didn’t just spend all night on that puzzle, did you? Thought you must have given up for the night.

Fred took a breath.

what is this about

Another minute passed. The reply appeared:

You sound pissed. Sorry for the cloak and dagger stuff. The Pretaloka’s in lockdown. Miracle I could punch a way through to you at all. Did you get Shiva’s first gift, the Blade of Many Powers?

Fred eyed the Swiss Army knife, sitting on the night table next to another self-help book he’d picked off his mother’s shelf—
Unlimited Power
by Anthony Robbins. The author grinned from the cover, his giant jaw and massive, gleaming teeth poised for battle like some medieval engine of war. Fred had tossed the knife and the book there when he’d unpacked, and hadn’t so much as glanced at either since.

He turned back to the screen, typed:

what do you want from me

Waited.

Oh, and apologies for this site sucking like it does. They said it was the original. I assumed that would count for something.

A wind blew in Fred’s mind. It sounded so much like George. As he sat there willing logic back into the world, another note appeared:

… actually, I’ve got the sneaking suspicion we’re the only two losers on it.

Fred wrote:

was george a part of this?

And didn’t move as he waited for the reply.

I’ll overlook your use of the third person. Not to mention past tense. Ouch. But, you know, the suspicion is mutual. I’m having a hard time believing in you, too. So what say we play a little game of trust?

The unease was pulsing into nausea. Fred waited.

It is foretold the Avatara must find his eternal mate before undertaking the final battle. Luckily, even angels-who-don’t-believe etc. have the power to hook two lovers up. It pretty much comes with the feathers. So, who are you fancying these days?

What was the point of this? Just to keep him up all night? Ruin him for tomorrow? Fred wrote:

come over here, angel boy, and I’ll tell you.

The reply:

Just type in her initials and picture her, and trust, for a moment, that it can happen. Take this one small step into faith, and I promise I’ll explain some things.

He didn’t have to picture her, of course. But he was so tired, and the images he’d conjured earlier were still so fresh they were already back in his head. He didn’t have to use her actual initials, but what was there to lose? He typed:

me

And waited for a crack about narcissism.

And helplessly continued picturing her, more chastely: Hands flitting about her head, pointing to brain regions. Lit by the nightlight, arms outstretched, blanket descending. In the bar from above, hands in her back pockets. Reaching up for the shade, winged by monitor glow. Her eyes wandering off, suddenly lost, when he told her she was no fucking angel. He wished he hadn’t. She seemed so firmly in command most of the time, but then there were moments like this, when it seemed, at least for a second, like the slightest stumble could shatter her.

The response popped up:

Oh man, she’s something. You’ll definitely need help with her. So all right, those fun facts I promised …

The messages started appearing line by line, the sender posing his own questions and answering them:

Q: The wings … functional or just for show?

A: We can fly. But generally not worth the effort.

Q: The halo … what’s up with that?

A: Too much light for a good night’s sleep. Not enough to read by.

Q: You got, like, a harp, or something?

A: Have yet to lay eyes on one of those torture devices. But it’s all you get on the radio.

Q: And, er, is there, um, what do you have … down there?

A: The short answer: I don’t want to know what’s there … or what’s not. Mercifully, this gown doesn’t come off.

Q: And the long answer?

A: That last summer on Earth, I’d ride around in cabs, eyes huge for camera sparks in loft windows, for headlit skirted thighs, for tongues lashing slopes of ice cream cones, for lips of bank machines spitting up green. Round I rode as the meters rose, trying to decide who were we, a race of gods or of monkeys. I knew which I felt like, so hungry for it all. Like my eyes were Hoover Deluxes, vacuuming in so much wanting, so much getting and losing and wanting again, so much not wanting to want but wanting anyway—so much life, I guess is what I’m trying to say, I could just about explode from the overload…. Well, none of that here … blank windows … empty streets … and yet Desire’s all the stronger, like the whole place is made of it, like I’m made of it, like nothing’s made of anything else. It sucks shit, here, dude.

Was it George’s tone, George’s style? Fred couldn’t quite say. And was it true, what this George impersonator was saying about George riding around in cabs last summer—around the time of the diagnosis? It might have been true, Fred supposed. But again, he didn’t really know. The lines kept coming:

Q: Desire with no object?

A: There’s one—one thing for which our every feather aches: Paradise. Promised legends ago by the golden-wingèd one, he of the champagne-effervescing halo, who descended from on high, who gave his blessing for us to build a Devaloka of our own.

Through the aeons our work progressed, some of us hopeful, others caviling that, paced thusly, it would take for-fucking-ever.

Then, from the stratosphere, down swooped another, with gunmetal wings, and an ember-glowing helm, swearing he could speed our work a thousandfold.

Shit-for-Brains, we. We signed on the dots.

His dark project unfolds. Not a Heaven, but a Hell!

Only I resist! Awaiting the Avatara’s decisive blow! And I’m starting to believe!

To believe!!! …

… that badass dude just might show.

A minute passed. Nothing else came. Fred read it over. Was it about Urth? Was it about Fred himself? He wrote:

don’t count on it, “d00d”

The reply:

Oh, I will. And oh … Mira Egghart. She’s on Seventh Street, right?

As the sun began to burn around the edges of the blackout curtains,
Fred read about Kama Deva, the Hindu analog to Cupid, with his beestrung, sugarcane bow and lotus-tipped arrows. He read about Vishnu and Lakshmi, the eternal lovers residing together beyond time, beyond space, amid the coils of a thousand-headed snake on whose hoods rest all the celestial bodies of the universe. He read about them finding each other in earthly manifestations again and again down through the ages; and how Padma, Lakshmi’s incarnation destined for the hand of the tenth avatara, Kalki, would pray for blessings from a god it took Fred a while to figure out was also Shiva—the god had one thousand names, apparently, and the pseudonym used in the semi-redacted Google Books version of the Kalki Purana was misspelled at that. And how Shiva would answer both their prayers, and the two lovers would come together, and Kalki would set off to make sacrifices and prepare for the fight ahead.