Blueprints of the afterl.., p.33
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 33
A voice came through Sylvie’s phone.
“I’ve got your boyfriend,” the man rasped. “Let me give you the address.”
Half an hour later, facing a theoretical New Jersey, Abby walked briskly across the planks of a pier toward a squat structure, the temporary office of a building contractor. She entered the building without knocking, squinting to adjust to the dark.
This kind of room had appeared many times in movies. Empty but for a chair in the center, with a battered man tied to it. Scribbly explosions of blood spattered the floor. Abby didn’t immediately recognize that this was Rocco, his face was so fucked-up. A figure stepped out of a shadow, a man seemingly composed of three bodies. His head was gray and old, sorrowful, unblinking. This head rested on the torso of a bodybuilder, a shirtless gristle of muscles, veins, and scars. This torso in turn sat atop a pair of legs that moved in spastic jerks, almost dancing toward her.
“This is your boyfriend?” Skinner asked.
Abby nodded.
“Should I let him go?”
Rocco was unconscious, his chin against his chest, his breath going in and out of his body in irregular sputters and coughs.
“What did you do to him?”
“He’s a DJ. He’s got hundreds of embodiments. Including you, before the monks snipped your connection.”
“He’s not a DJ. He’s just a Bionet technician.”
In the anime version, Skinner touched a key on a remote, bringing banks of monitors to life on every wall, the room’s darkness bleached by surveillance-camera shots of human figures going about their routines. This didn’t prove anything, really. It could have been footage of anybody. Here and there a person sat motionless in a chair or at a table. Others walked in circles, did jumping jacks, pounded their heads repeatedly against walls. Skinner pointed at a monitor displaying Abby sitting on her chesterfield, watching television. “These are just some of his embodiments,” Skinner said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Watch this.” Skinner fiddled with the remote some more, muttering grumpily at the buttons. For a second the screens went blank, then sequences popped open, shots of this room with the chair and Rocco more or less confined to it. Each monitor ran a different clip culled from hours of torture. In some Rocco was conscious and talking, or not talking. In others he screamed and writhed and passed out from the pain. Abby shielded her eyes but the violence came through the audio, the smack of flesh getting rearranged, bones snapping beneath muscles, the high-pitched panic of dental extraction. Bile curled in her throat. She turned her eyes to Skinner, expecting to see the smugness of a torturer, but finding his face defeated.
“I inflict violence on the world,” Skinner said.
“You’re a monster.”
“That’s about right.”
“Did you get the information you wanted from him?”
“He gave me a name, an address. I have no way of knowing if it means anything.”
“I still love him.”
“That may be true.”
“You think I should hate him because I was his embodiment.”
“I don’t care what you feel about him,” Skinner said. “I was just doing him a courtesy. Someone was going to have to retrieve the guy after I finished with him. He gave me your name.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “You think I do this because I’m strong and you’re weak? I do this because it’s my only recourse. I don’t enjoy this.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo for you.”
Skinner fiddled some more with the remote and all the monitors went blank except for one, in which Rocco, close-up, blood gushing out of his nose, spilled the beans. Off-camera, like a mobster-hunting detective from the world of noir, Skinner asked who he worked for. “Mr. Kirkpatrick. There have always been the slaves and the enslavers. The passives and the actives. I’m just a technician. I don’t pick the slaves. I get assignments. I establish their routines. When they wake up. When they eat. When they sleep. When they fuck. What they buy.”
The off-camera Skinner in the clip said, “I’m going to ask again why they took my boy.”
“There’s been talk there’s a clone baby with super-admin privileges. Not good. With super-admin privileges you can take down the whole ’net. You can lock out all the DJs or turn admins into embodiments.” Rocco spat out a gob of blood. “There’s only one super-admin, and that’s Kirkpatrick.”
A new clip. Rocco with his head cocked a different way, making a noise like laughing or crying, hard to tell which. “I saved Abby from getting arrested because I thought she was cute,” he said. “I wrote a program that kicked up her hormones to make her fall in love with me. Then I got tired of her. That fucker Bickle needed someone to babysit Kylee Asparagus so I volunteered her. While she was away we ran routines on the whole city. A massive orchestration. Every citizen an embodiment, their daily lives planned out for them without their knowledge. Just think of what you can make an economy do. Then she returned before she was supposed to. We stuck her in the apartment watching TV.”
Another clip, more violence. Coin-sized pieces of skin removed from the surface of Rocco’s body. Skinner turned it off midscream, then pulled a Bionet transmitter from his pocket and tossed it to Abby. “Most of the heavy organ damage has already been fixed,” he said.
“What address did he give you?”
“I’m not telling you. I don’t want to put you in any danger.”
“You’re a relic. You should have died in the FUS.”
“You’re probably right,” Skinner sighed. “Have you ever thought about why the world had to end? That once we hit nine billion people living on this rock, the only honorable thing to do was for most of us to kill ourselves off? And yet somehow the likes of you and me survived. Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He pranced, skipped, and twirled his way to the exit. Abby peeled away the duct tape binding Rocco’s hands and legs and pressed his bloody face to her white shirt.
“You’re safe now,” she whispered.
“Now?” Rocco wheezed. “Now I’m definitely not safe.”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 8
You know that unsettling feeling when you’re moving from one place to another and you finally empty your old house and as you’re vacuuming you realize it’s just a space? That was how it felt at the academy. Something of consequence used to be here, but for whatever reason it disappeared. The windows were boarded up, the exterior was covered in grime and graffiti. Dead weeds where there used to be landscaping. As the real estate agent took down the “For Sale” sign I entered the main building. It felt like a grade school that had gotten roughed up and left for dead on the side of the road. All the rooms empty. No furniture, no artifacts to indicate this had once been a place to learn. The main building contained a dozen classrooms on two floors. There was a science lab building with a little planetarium, a library building with empty shelves, a maintenance building, and a dormitory with a cafeteria. There was a small athletic field and a gym.
I moved into what seemed like the headmaster’s suite in the dorm building, bought some cheap Ikea furniture, and made it up like a monk’s room. Minimal. I started to ask around the neighborhood about the building’s previous inhabitants.
What kind of neighborhood was it?
Typical southwestern exurbia. Retirees and Latino families. That weird, thick, southwestern grass kept green with constant irrigation. The academy itself was right up against the mountains. There was a strip mall with a Starbucks. I started hanging out there, introducing myself to my new neighbors and asking about the academy. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Some thought it was a typical grade school. One lady who lived three blocks away from it argued that it didn’t exist. I got monotone answers from the few young people I met. Everybody was entranced by their own gut-level routines, the pursuit of Frappuccinos. I got nowhere and soon gave up. Besides, it wasn’t as important to me anymore that I learn the history of the academy so much as that I start fixing the place to prepare for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. I started signing up for classes at the local Home Depot, reading home improvement books, educating myself on electrical wiring and plumbing. I did as much as I could on my own but when a job needed more than one guy I hired Mexican day laborers and learned what I could from them, too. I discovered things my hands could do. I spent the days sanding, painting, refinishing woodwork. I replaced broken toilets and installed light fixtures. I got scrapes and bruises and splinters under my fingernails.
How long did it take to restore?
About two years. Pushing a bucket around with a mop one night I realized I’d become a custodian. I laughed. What a thankless job, holding chaos and disorder at bay in the silent halls of an empty school.
Did you consider getting back in touch with Wyatt and Erika, or with Star?
What would I tell them? They belonged to a previous version of me. My holy task required that I cut off as many human connections as possible and wait patiently for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. His academy would be in perfect shape, ready for pupils. I imagined he’d confer on me some special role, the caretaker of the academy. I found this solitary duty suited me.
He never arrived.
There’s still time.
You sound pretty confident about that.
I know this because the one person who did show up was Dirk Bickle. He just pulled into the parking lot in his ridiculous Hummer while I was mowing the play field. The Sikh guys weren’t with him this time. His gratitude was obvious in how ferociously he embraced me. I invited him in and showed him around, pointed out the work I’d done on the electrical and ventilation and floors. He beamed. In my quarters I served him coffee and asked him what was supposed to happen next.
He told me he was ready to reveal the master plan. He started with a hypothetical question. What if I was faced with the following choice—I could save the human race from self-imposed destruction, and the rest of humanity’s existence would be peaceful for another thousand years until an asteroid obliterated the earth, or I could single-handedly destroy the human race and by doing so ensure that new life would appear after earth’s destruction, on Mars.
[laughs]
I told him the choice was false. First, if humans lived another thousand years on earth, we’d surely develop technology to either obliterate the asteroid or escape the planet altogether. Second, how would new life emerge on Mars if humans weren’t around to make it happen?
Bickle answered in the form of another question. Wasn’t it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we’d become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We’d thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of “the environment” as if it’s something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes. Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing. The only rational choice, Bickle said, was to adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewardship and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial. Mr. Kirkpatrick saw through the cultural construct that would segregate nature, humanity, and technology. His was an effort to redeem the human race through understanding that we were meant to control the course of nature and engineer it for the purposes of beauty.
Did you ever suspect that Bickle was just fucking with you?
I considered it. But why would the guy go to so much trouble just to mess with my head? There had to be a reason for him to follow me around, show up with a mystical refrigerator in the desert, save my life. Obviously he was a true believer of something. Even if that something was a delusion, it was an attractive delusion. Keep in mind I was surrounded by a society in which people didn’t appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they’re descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they’ll reunite with all their dead relatives. Let’s not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy fucking shit, the crazier the better. What Bickle was hinting at seemed a lot less crazy than praying to Jesus to make you rich. Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you sexy or that God is keeping track of how many times you masturbate?
[laughs]
So Bickle moved into one of the spare dorm rooms and began revealing Mr. Kirkpatrick’s teachings to me. The rift between Kirkpatrick and the dropouts had pretty much destroyed the academy, he said, and he had no idea where Mr. Kirkpatrick had gone. Into the desert, maybe, where all prophets go. He told me of great awakenings and celestial visitors, Kirkpatrick’s series of prophetic dreams in which he communicated with Freidrich Nietzsche on the Bardo plane, becoming one with the philosopher and finding himself, in this act of communion, transformed into a planet-devouring phoenix. Kirkpatrick was Nietzsche’s heir, spreading the word that the distinction between the overman and the human was the overman’s responsibility to spread life itself through the universe. Bickle led me through the prophecies, late into the night. He said Mr. Kirkpatrick had been waiting for me to reach a state of receptivity before briefing me on the program.
Or maybe they were waiting for you to become wealthier so they could come after your money.
I feel sorry for the smallness of your thinking, I really do.
It all sounds bogus to me.
Do you want to hear the rest or what?
Why not. Go ahead.
One night after our lessons I asked Bickle what had caused the strife between the dropouts and Kirkpatrick. He became solemn and started speaking about Nick’s final invention. You remember how he created that machine when we were in high school, the one that took itself apart?
The science fair.
Right. Well imagine such a machine operating on a global scale. Actually, you can’t call it a machine, per se. Consider it a program, a system, a Rube Goldberg series of actions and reactions spreading outward from a central node. To call it a weapon would be too reductive. It was a device that set certain events in motion. The finger that topples the first in a row of dominos. Bickle called it the Rebooting Device, a technology designed to reconfigure the planet and bring about a new era.
What kind of era?
[laughs] He called it the Age of Fucked Up Shit.
Where was the device?
In a safety deposit box in a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan. Bickle gave me the name of the bank, the box number. I remained expressionless and didn’t let on that I had the key. We continued our lessons. A month passed in deep meditation. The desert heat pressed down on me and just looking at the world outside my head was like one long good-bye. Finally Bickle packed up his Hummer and left, promising that Kirkpatrick would return. I waited a day, then caught the first flight to JFK.
After years of living in the desert suburbs working with my hands, speaking to few people, in a sort of monastic haze, stepping out of a cab in Midtown Manhattan was like getting electrocuted. I checked into a hotel in Times Square. It was a Sunday, so I waited until the next morning to go to the bank. I arrived as they opened and asked for access to box #3487. I had to sign something, and when I provided my ID and signature, they matched the info on file. This seemed like further confirmation that I was supposed to be pursuing this particular path, like the dropouts had forged my signature ahead of time. In a room of brass-doored safety deposit boxes, I took the key that Erika had vomited up and turned it in the lock. The clerk turned his key, and I pulled out a box and set it on the table.
Inside I found a smaller cardboard box, and inside that box the device. It was a cheap video-game controller from the 1970s, a scuffed black plastic case with a big red button on it. It looked like a joke. I wondered if Bickle hadn’t sent me across the country so I’d leave the academy unattended. Maybe I was being fucked with. I took the device back to the hotel and sat on the bed looking at it. If I believed it was bogus, some sort of prop, then it didn’t matter if I pushed the button or not. But if it really did set in motion the end of our times, then it mattered very much whether I pushed it. If I pushed the button, it meant I wasn’t sure whether it was real and I was only pushing it to find out. Pushing it was an admission of skepticism. If I didn’t push it, on the other hand, then part of me really did believe that it brought about the Fucked Up Shit. Did it matter whether or not I pushed it? I thought of my dead parents, my sister. My childhood home swept into the sound on a tidal wave of mud. I paced the room. I was in a rock/paper/scissors stalemate. Belief versus disbelief versus curiosity. Had Nick really invented a remote control to end the world? Ridiculous, right? I had to get out of the room, so I walked through the tourist shit of Times Square, mumbling the arguments for and against, blending with the human tide. Some subterranean part of me whispered that it was only a matter of time before I pushed the button. I was going to push it! I talked myself down. I’d operate as though I’d never come out here. I would throw the controller in the East River and catch a flight home.
