Luminarium (51 page)

The group fell silent, eyes gravitating to
Guy
.
Guy
was the go-to guy, apparently, for these sorts of conundrums. Despite himself, Fred, too, was frozen, breathless for this globe-trotting, nominal-Frenchman dilettante-shaman to dispatch the age-old chestnut once and for all.

“
Someone
needs to drink these hot beverages,”
Guy
said.

The others laughed, of course.

“But if you don’t know what you’re really doing,” Fred persisted, “doesn’t it just boil down to all of you holding your hands up at the top of the Empire State Building for no purpose at all?”

Guy
hoisted his cup, gazed into the billowing caldera at close range.

“That would be the ultimate.” He nodded, blew. “That would be faith itself.”

They
oohed.
They
aahed.
Fred simmered with rage, jealousy, stupefaction.

“So what’s the frequency?” he asked, unwilling to give
Guy
the last word.

“Eh?”
Guy’s
nostrils thinned, as if to filter Fred’s hopeless juju.

“What’s the frequency of the planet?”

Guy
gave a little downward shrug of his lips. “Eight cycles per second. Why?”

He’s bluffing
, Fred thought. Yet the man’s face remained as unperturbed as a plate of pâté.

“Just wondering,” Fred mumbled.

Back in the office that night, Fred skimmed a scientific study finding
evidence that Reiki normalized the heart rates of stressed-out rats, another that registered increased electromagnetic fields around the hands of healers. Other studies found no measurable effects. Others linked electromagnetic fields to cancer, though most seemed to suggest they were safe. Some websites mentioned mood changes and electromagnetic therapy, treatments for depression using electromagnetic “wands.”

Straying to a site with a sky-blue background, he read that when all one’s millions and millions of heart cells pulsate away in unison, they produce an electromagnetic field strong enough to be detected by an electrocardiogram from over three feet away. The field is toroidal in shape, arcing outward, downward, upward, curving back on itself, encompassing the body from the pelvis to the head, and with it, the far weaker EM field of the brain.

Another site, with all the words in boldface, said that electromagnetic tori consist of recursive frequency patterns, and are therefore holographic in structure, each part containing the overall pattern the way every fragment of a holographic slide houses an angle on the whole object. This site went on to claim that all energy systems in the universe are toroidal and holographic, that the universe itself might be one giant holographic toroid, in which versions of the whole pattern are contained in the smallest part; and that, therefore, each person, cocooned in his or her personal energy field, could contain, access, be influenced by, and in some way influence in turn the whole of the universe.

A link from this site led to another, wallpapered with astral manand woman-shaped constellations, which claimed that pineal glands were oscillators, lungs were batteries, hearts and cellular mitochondria were electromagnetic energy coils, DNA strands were antennae—that, in short, people were machines built for transcendence and nothing else.
So what
if you were merely your body and nothing more, the thinking seemed to go, maybe your body was more than you gave it credit for, maybe materialism itself was the very realm of the spirit you’d been searching for all this time.
Hey
,
Paradise
. His mind teetered for a moment, something sad and plumbless opening at the memory of Margaritaville, before hurdling on. Sure. And all you had to do to activate this powerful transcendence technology was to allow the quantum potential of your visualized intention to synchronize with your pineal oscillations, exciting in turn the cerebral spinal fluid and transmitting the intention to your major heart scalar center, while electron-rich oxygen charged your lungbatteries, powering up your scalar waves to correct the noncoherent patterns of fear and ignorance of your true power, thereby resetting your quantum energy matrix; after which, it would be child’s play for the primary Mobius coil of the heart to transmit its purified wave structure to the microscopic mitochondrial Mobius coils within each of your hundred trillion cells, tuning the antennae of your DNA molecules to receive life-giving biophotons from the solar system and universe.

And if that didn’t work, you could always sign up for a holographic therapy session, which, terminology aside, seemed to involve the waving of colored crystals and the ringing of bells.

The humming and heat and other emanations from the great blue wall at Fred’s back probably weren’t giving him cancer, at least according to the current consensus. The Prayerizer’s EM torus probably wasn’t responsible for the baseline wooziness he was still feeling either, after the long day that had begun with him poised three stories over Brooklyn and ended with him holding his hands up over Manhattan, with a panic attack sandwiched in between. Even so, why take the chance? Why was he still putting this poor silicon stegosaurus through its paces? In its heyday, it had been a powerhouse of computation. Now, thanks to him, it was pointlessly REM cycling in machine meditation, an endless, mechanized mu. Soon enough, he’d have to put the thing out of its misery entirely. Sam was leaving for Florida in less than two days, and the office lease was up two days after that, the hedge fund next door set for another expansion. Fred told himself he should be looking into selling it for scrap. Maybe he could get fifty bucks for it and tide himself over for another week. Or if not, maybe he could at least find someone who wouldn’t charge him for carting it off.

He couldn’t bring himself to kill the power without checking on the stats one last time. Opening his laptop, he hooked the machine in.

Two hundred eighty-one trillion-odd prayerizations for God to DO something. He allowed himself to be impressed.

He pulled up the prayer buffer. And laughed.

“What?” Sam called out from his folding table.

“It’s got thirty-five prayers running,” Fred shouted, suddenly buoyant.

“Aha.” Sam sounded not in the least impressed.

“That’s a thirty-five hundred percent rise!”

An infinite rise, actually, if one didn’t count the business he himself had given it. Nowhere near the tens or hundreds of thousands of users he’d need to sell any significant amount of advertising, even assuming he had an office to house it, an outlet to plug it into. Nevertheless, he’d had so few victories lately he felt like getting up and dancing. Thirty-four fellow humans out there, in the space of days, had received more prayers on their behalf than any and every human in human history, the living, the dead, combined, by several multiples. It didn’t seem entirely like nothing, when put like that.

Way to spam the Lord, dude
, said Inner George with a laugh.

“Not too late for you to buy a piece of the action,” Fred shouted. “Get in on the ground floor.”

“Action’s all yours.”

Sam was probably still fiddling with the arrangement of his furnishings in a 3D home design program, as he’d been when Fred had come in.

Curious, Fred put the prayers themselves onscreen:

/* DO something */

/* Dear God, please let Ken Hwang be accepted to M.I.T. */

/* Dear God, please let Savannah get assigned a seat near Ken Hwang in homeroom. */

/* Dear God, please reward Ken Hwang’s friends and smite his enemies */

/* MAY THE MAKER OF THIS OFFENSE TO G-D CONTRAPTION DIE PAINFULLY AND SOON AMEN */

The remaining thirty, Fred found, when several minutes later he summoned the strength to read them, were from Ken Hwang, or someone very, very interested in Ken Hwang’s prospects.

Deflated once more, he reached under the desk, wrapped his hand around the power cord. And froze, awed by his inability to pull it.

Pull this plug
, Inner George quipped,
and the terrorists win.

Fred smiled, miserable and proud, and let the cord go. Then he got up and walked, putting some distance between him and the monster he’d created, meaning merely to pace around in circles, though in the end, loneliness brought him to Sam’s station. Sam’s headphones were off; he knew Fred was coming over, but made no move this time to hide what he was gazing at—a photo of a youngish woman with a pretty, broad face, a reddish nose, and blond curls. From the layout, it looked to be a dating site profile. The larger font along the heading bar bore the name of the service:
FISHYSINGLES.COM
. The logo, two smooching fish against a pink cross, pulsed and shimmered in the upper left corner.

“Aspiring homemaker,” Sam said, his chin nested in his palm, the top half of his head moving muppet-like. “Believes in traditional gender roles.” His fingers scrabbled over the mousepad. “We’ve got a date Friday night. I’ll pick her up in my convertible. Got to remember to buy one of those dashboard Jesuses.”

Maybe Fred had been wrong to worry about the sabotage, he thought. Sam and his team must have gotten everything working again, if this was how he was choosing to spend his time. Maybe the threat hadn’t been so great after all, just a bit of hacker hijinks.

Sam clicked open another profile: another blonde, this one with very tanned skin, in a pouf-shouldered dress.

“Lunch with her, Saturday,” he said.

“
Christian
dating, Sam?”

“I’m going to have a life there,” Sam declared. “A real life. In a real place. With a real woman.”

“You actually put up a profile on this site?”

“I didn’t lie. I said I haven’t been baptized yet. I think they think it’s hot. They want to save me.”

“But … could you believe in that fundamentalist stuff? Creationism? Heaven for Christians, hell for the rest?”

Sam picked up a squeeze ball and mashed it in his fingers. “You know what I believe in?”

The desk fan swiveled jerkily back and forth.

“Community,” Sam answered himself. “And they’ve got that. They’ll find you a house. They’ll come fix your fence, your car. They’ll fix you up with their daughter, their sister. They’ll take you in. Help you build a
bunker
.” His face shone with something akin to hope. “They’ll get your back. When push comes to shove.” Without looking her way, he’d been pointing, with the squeeze ball hand, repeatedly at the blonde on the screen, at first between her eyes, by the end between her breasts. “They’ll see you through it.”

“Through what? The apocalypse?”

“Well,
that
I have no trouble believing in. No trouble at all.”

“Literally, though? The horsemen? The Beast?”

Sam shrugged, like the question had no relevance.

“Sam,” Fred said, his voice softer, “do you have anything in common with those women at all? How do you talk to them?”

Sam studied the squeeze ball. Then glanced up. “Smiley-face emoticons, primarily.”

He cracked a crooked grin. They both laughed a little. In that moment, Sam looked as bewildered as Fred felt.

“Speaking of which,” Sam said, turning back to the screen. “I’ve got to write this one back. I’ve been making her wait for ten minutes. She’s probably jealous.”

Fred took a step away toward his own station, but couldn’t help asking: “So you got those bugs all ironed out?”

“No. They’re worse.”

Fred stopped.

“Every fix we try just backfires. More and more behaviors are getting unreliable. Today, we had a rocket-launching firehose.” Sam rubbed the raw-looking skin above his eyelids. “But I just can’t focus on it. I’ve been working for months straight, day and night. And I’m so close. I just want my new life to start.”

Why should I care?
Fred thought.
Doesn’t the little shit have it coming?

Eyes downcast to George’s checkered shoes, Fred was reminded of something he’d been thinking about lately. “Did George ever say anything to you about some dot-com burnouts he met on that trip to Europe?”

“No. Why?”

“Nothing. I just remember him mentioning we could get cheap labor in Eastern Europe if we’d started that new company.”

“Sure. Hire a few Bulgarians. You’ll be a praying computer mogul in no time.” Sam looked up at the posterboarded window. “I’ll have to smile in person when I go on those dates. I’ve been practicing in the mirror. This fucking city. I never learned to smile.”

“What are you talking about? You smile. Once a year, maybe.”

“Not for real. Not all the way, like other people. You have to learn that. But I’ve taught myself. I can do it now.”

He shot an eye Fred’s way, daring him to challenge the assertion.

“Oh?” Fred said, giving in.

Sam’s lips parted overwide. His teeth looked like they were wired shut. His eyes, meanwhile, remained discomfitingly uncrinkled. “
Hi
,” he said, proffering his hand. “
Sam Brounian. Nice to meet you.
”

His voice was unnatural, too. He was aiming for something mellifluous, probably, but his jawbone was backed so far into his trachea that Fred’s own throat began to ache.