Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 24

Bickle laughed. "I'm just some stupid guy. Look at this place. You know what's funny? This is my actual apartment. A replication of where I lived pre-FUS. I'm having reruns of dreams I had hundreds of years ago. I never got married, never shared my life with anyone. I'm just some a.s.shole with a sociology degree who answered an ad in a newspaper in 1985 for tech industry recruiters and found himself working for the most visionary of men. I didn't offer you anything to drink. c.o.c.ktail? San Pellegrino? I've got some re-created Limonata in the fridge."

Skinner picked up the nearest chair and hurled it through the window.

"You'd better hope that didn't hit anybody," Bickle said. Skinner yanked him off the couch by the throat and wrestled him to the jagged, framed air. He didn't squeeze hard enough for Bickle to stop breathing, but enough to make the guy panic. Skinner dangled him over the sidewalk four stories down. Below, a taxi swerved to avoid the chair that now sat comically upright in the middle of the street.

"You probably won't die unless you land on your head."

"Get it over with. Do it."

"You people killed my family." Skinner jerked him back in, spun him around, pretzeled him into a full nelson, shoved him up to the broken window's edge. The wind smelled like salt, like s.h.i.t, like dead things, like low tide.

"We didn't kill anyone. I'm a curator. I arrange mis-en-scenes. I make sure certain people are in certain places at certain times. I appear at the right moments to ensure that things proceed according to Mr. Kirkpatrick's plans."

"My grandson."

"They're keeping him comfortable in a room with no Bionet access. If your grandson got out he could take down the whole platform. He's got super-admin permissions. He can erase whole directories. Suspend immunities. Unleash plagues. Authorize cancers and virgin births. Millions could die."

"Why didn't you just kill him?"

Bickle rubbed his neck and sighed. "This is the violence you inflict to extract increasingly unreliable information."

"Answer my question."

"Mr. Kirkpatrick is the only one we know of who's ever had super-admin privileges. Your grandson could be the heir, the one who can seed the universe with new life, fulfilling our purpose."

Skinner threw Bickle onto the couch, danced to the kitchen, and poured himself a gla.s.s of water. Behind him, Bickle said, "I don't care if you take the boy. I'm just connective tissue. I'm a concept, I'm like a mathematical theorem, Al. But I do know that every possible path open to you leads to extinction. This interrogation, or whatever you want to call it, is about you working through that theorem with a dull pencil, trying to get your big dumb brain to put it together."

His big dumb brain. Yeah, that about summarized it. Skinner: meat moving through s.p.a.ce on dancing legs, a wall of viscera. A montage of comic book encounters with thugs and lowlifes with heavy jaws, faces cracking under his hammer fist. Nightclubs, menacing p.i.s.s-fragrant alleys. If he let go of what few memories remained, this was how he could live, as an action-movie caricature, a distilled id in the form of a geriatric commando with muscles out to here. Memories persisted in their needled prodding, forcing him toward some unbearable decision. He'd watched these buildings burn to the ground and gazing at them now he saw through their fabricated surfaces to the ruins they once were, those stinking repositories of cadavers.

"Your violence belongs to the old world, the fallen world," Bickle said.

"What do you call this world?"

"This is the afterlife, Al. Except this afterlife is real and it's on earth. It's beautiful. It's our redemption. It's the time when we fulfill the task we were put here to do from when we crawled up out of the slime. Mr. Kirkpatrick teaches us that long ago we fearfully opened our eyes and searched for G.o.d. Now we open our eyes with love and create new life that will behold our fading shadow in awe. This is how it has been for all time. Intelligence moves relentlessly toward the creation of new varieties of intelligence and the greatest achievement of intelligence is the dissemination of new life forms. This clone of your son is the one we've been waiting for."

"I have no idea whose side I'm even on," Skinner said.

"You're on the side that lifted man from the animals. But we don't need you anymore."

"I don't remember how I got here."

"You took a cab."

"No, this island. The segues are missing from my memories."

Stretching his neck, Bickle crossed the room to the stereo. "That's because you're a forgetfulness junkie. And by the way, that was a really expensive chair you ruined, I'll have you know." On the shelf next to the stereo sat an Apple memory console and a stack of cards. "You really want to know how you got here?"

Skinner didn't answer, and in not answering indicated that he did.

"Did anything about your trip to Bramble Falls strike you as odd?" Bickle said.

"Lots of hallucinations."

"Right. The kid with no face and the Indian by the fire. All those detailed memories of your hometown, the trails, the trees. The suddenness with which you were standing at the trailhead eating fruit c.o.c.ktail from a can. Not to mention you're never going to find a town called Bramble Falls on a map. The place is an invention. The real stroke of genius, thanks to this young hotshot developer we've got a.s.signed to the project, was to embed your dad's memories in this patched-together memory network where you've spent the past couple weeks. But that's not the highlight. The highlight is this little guy right here." Bickle held a card between his thumb and index finger. "You remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory and so on. Here it is. The master file. The memory of when you killed your son."

Skinner fritzed out a bit at the edges. "You're lying."

"Your last mission, Al. The final hurrah of Christian America. The ultimate test of a soldier's loyalty to laws and order and dogma. You carried out your orders impeccably. Your son, the first Waitimu, was born with super-admin privileges. When you learned this you volunteered for the task. This card will show you the abandoned building where you cornered him. It'll show

you the vines that grew up from the concrete beside the door you walked through, the chipped aqua-green paint on the wall. His pleas. You came into our office immediately after the deed and erased the memory, then erased the memory of erasing the memory. You kept doing this until no trace of the original memory remained."

Skinner tried to breathe.

"And this one." Bickle held up another card. "This is the sequel. The latest one. The one where you murder the rest of your family."

"It was newmans."

Bickle shook his head. "Newmans rescued the boy when you went psychotic. You think you're going to the Met to save the boy but that's not in your programming. You're going there to kill him."

And Skinner knew it was true. He walked to the window.

"You've done what you were designed to do, Al."

"Who designed me?"

"Guy by the name of Nick Fedderly."

"I am so confused."

"Like I said, A+B=C is not the way to go here."

"Release me."

"That's what these weapons are for."

"I understand. Before I go. The man in the desert. The one with the refrigerator. Who is he?"

"Some call him the Last Dude."

"What is he doing out there?"

"He's running everything."

"What?"

"You mean you haven't figured that out?" asked Bickle. "The Last Dude is Mr. Kirkpatrick."

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 9.

Star never showed. I slept in her bed, ate whatever was canned in the pantry, and did my best to clean the place up. The ground around the house was still muddy, the roof covered in moss. The old, uncompleted frame of the house had started to crumble. I chopped wood. I kept waiting for her to appear but she never did. I was used to keeping to myself and I'd forgotten how much I loved the woods. But what kept me there was the shed. Every morning I made myself coffee and breakfast, then walked to the shed where I'd make a fire in the potbelly stove and study Nick's dad's plans. I grew to love the chemical-sweet smell of blueprint paper. I came to see that this wasn't just a collection of random blueprints. His plan was to transform the island in phases. Chop down hills, fill in gullies, reshape Bainbridge's irregular coastline into smooth, tapered Manhattan. Once the island was regraded, he'd build from the underground up. Start with subways, sewer, natural gas, communications. Lay down streets, foundations of buildings. Then, somehow, re-create every building in the city. It was an insane plan any rational person would have considered pure science fiction. But the care he'd put into these blueprints made me wonder if they were the product of a true believer.

I lived, ate, slept, chopped wood, and thought constantly about those blueprints. Then one day, I was clearing moss off shingles and it occurred to me that Nick's dad would've had to print them somewhere. There must have been some kind of machine that produced them. I dug around in the shed and found a banker's box with old pay stubs, with the name of Marc's employer on them. Kern, Nagamitsu, & Nichols Civil Engineering and Land Surveying.

I should say that I had done my best to avoid anyone I knew on Bainbridge and keep to myself. When I needed groceries, I rode an old ten-speed across the bridge to Poulsbo and filled up my backpack. I was sporting a pretty rangy beard again and went unrecognized whenever I had to go into town. People looking at you, instantly figuring out your place on the totem pole-I didn't want anything to do with that. Maybe some of Star's antisocial behavior was coming out of me. But I recognized that I had to get myself respectable if I wanted to launch another investigation and get people to divulge information. I shaved, and as the whiskers fell away I saw the old high school football star, the dot-com drone, older, heavier, the skin around my eyes sagging and wrinkled from years of pained expressions. I had been wrong to think that anyone would remember that kid and bother to formulate an opinion about his grown-up self. I was a complete n.o.body now.

The office was in a building next to a chiropractor and a day care. A little place with a lobby, a room for drafting, and a room downstairs in back where they kept all the surveying equipment. I just walked in and asked to speak to one of the civil engineers. The receptionist called up Don Nagamitsu, a trim guy with a gray beard and a denim shirt tucked into his Levi's. I told him I was living on the Fedderly property and had some questions about Marc. We went around the corner to a bakery and Don insisted on buying me coffee. He asked me what I wanted to know. I told him about the blueprints. He sort of laughed and looked out the window.

He told me a story. He said, "We were having a company party in I'd say '79, '80. Business was good and Dave Kern, our chief, had just had a hot tub installed on his deck overlooking Seattle. Twelve or so of us, getting drunk, shooting firecrackers off the deck, living it up. So I'm there in the hot tub on my fourth gla.s.s of wine. Marc across from me, Star next to him, my wife Sandy beside me. And Marc says, 'You want to hear something really interesting? Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size. And you know what's funny? Before Seattle was Seattle it was called New York Alki. It's an Indian word that means "by and by." In other words, sooner or later this place is going to be as big as New York City. I say we regrade the place and build ourselves a Big Apple.' And you have to understand something about draftsmen. These guys, at least then, were the longhairs. You had your civil engineers like me, guys in blazers and ties, and you had your surveyors-old farts with crew cuts and rain gear coated in mud. The draftsmen were somewhere in between, each and every one of them a character. Whenever someone pulled an office prank, the draftsmen were the prime suspects. I knew a lot of them smoked dope at home but if you were to start inst.i.tuting drug tests, well, then, no drainage systems or parking lots would ever get built. As long as they kept doing their jobs, I didn't care what they did in their recreational time. And I liked Marc a heck of a lot. He showed up early, got his work done fast, was always at my desk asking for more. In fact, Sandy and I had invited him and Star and their kid over to our house for dinner a couple times. Good people. I would have forgotten that comment, with me being drunk and it being just one of those things the draftsmen always said. But one night my wife and I went out to dinner or to a Mariners game or something, and I'd forgotten something at the office. Friday night, about eleven o'clock and I walk in and there's Marc, working at his drafting table, drinking coffee. Those days, n.o.body worked long hours. Everyone was out of there by five on the dot. My first thought was that he'd messed up something real bad and was busting tail to fix it. When I asked him what the deal was he sort of shrugged sheepishly, stepped away from the table, and told me to take a look.

"He said it was a little side project of his and he apologized for using company paper and pens. I waved him off. Because what I was looking at looked more like art than any sort of drafting I'd ever seen. He had all the sewer and communications worked out, all the tunnels and streets. I didn't know whether I should get mad or what. It seemed like a weird thing to do but he was on his own time and he was my best draftsman, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And now you've got the blueprints."

I asked him how Marc had died.

Don said, "He fell, working on that new house of his. There's a right way to fall and a wrong way. I guess Marc fell the wrong way."

We were quiet again, then Don asked me if I'd bought the Fedderly property. I told him no, I was just staying there a while. He said he felt bad for Star and how he hoped "she's finally getting the help she needs." I took this to mean that she had been inst.i.tutionalized somewhere, and I got this deadly pang of remorse. Here I was trying to dig up the scoop on Marc's blueprints but I hadn't stopped to figure out where Star was. I was a real s.h.i.t. Don must've seen me looking upset because he asked what was wrong. I told him I'd been close to Star and Nick when I was younger and was sad to hear that things had gone so badly for her.

Don asked me my name again. I told him and he mumbled over my last name a bit then sort of went white. Real abruptly he looked at his watch and said he had to make it back to the office for a meeting or something. He couldn't have gotten out of there any faster. I was still thinking about Star, otherwise I would have been more suspicious about his sudden departure. That day I went to the library and got online and started compiling a list of mental hospitals in the area.

Did you find her?

Of course not. And having no claim to kinship I didn't have much ground to stand on when I asked these places if she was in residence. It was like searching for the Kirkpatrick Academy all over again. I knew I didn't have much time. I took the ferry into Seattle, I don't remember what for, but I do remember looking at people on the streets and thinking how sad it was that they weren't aware everything was about to end. Still, I envied their ignorance. I wished I'd ended up the guy Nick had told me to be years before, the guy with the career and the wife and the children. It was the children I felt most sad about. I pa.s.sed a group of them out on a day-care field trip, these toddlers strapped into a big wagon thing, and I had to duck into an alley to cry. I'm sure I looked insane. I was sitting on a bank balance of about three million dollars but I was filthy, a guy who talked to himself in the street. During this time I thought about killing myself a lot, but it never moved from an abstraction into a plan. Because I knew I was meant to be a witness. I woke up in the woods and didn't know how I'd gotten there. I walked long enough to reach a road and found my way back to Star's house. I crawled into bed and wept, terrified of what was to come.

How long were you in this condition?

It must have been a month.

And then what, you snapped out of it?

Then a little reality intruded, I guess. I was in the shed one morning when a Suburban rolled up. It was Don Nagamitsu. He asked if I had a minute to talk. When we sat down in the living room he sighed and rubbed his forehead and said, "I'll just come out with it. I'm responsible for the death of your family." He'd been the engineer who'd done the plans for the lot my family home had sat on. He'd had concerns that the lot was too close to an unstable embankment but he'd been under pressure from the developer. He explained it to me in technical terms but essentially he looked the other way when he should have said something about the location of our house. He started crying. According to him, the investigation after the mud slide had been a joke. Agencies sort of waved the whole thing along. He felt at fault for not saying something. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket with the name and phone number of his lawyer on it and said I'd probably want to get in touch with the guy. We were quiet in that room. Then I slowly tore the paper in half. I decided to forgive him. He looked at me as if he was unable to comprehend the moment, like he'd been prepared for this encounter to go another way.

Just like that you forgave the guy responsible for your parents and sister getting swept into the sound?

Yeah. And after he left I slept a deep, uninterrupted sleep. A nap that stretched into the night. And in the deepness of that night I was back at the encampment where Nick had shot me. It was dawn and an ancient man encrusted with dirt stood beside me. We faced the vast plain below the mesa. The man pointed toward the horizon and as the sun rose I began to make it out, a vast message, in capital letters made of piles of stones. It was a sentence, the letters as long as buildings, laid flat on the desert floor as if intended to be read from s.p.a.ce. It was easily ten miles long. And I understood that this was the reason for the encampment, that this message to the heavens was the work of the last man alive.

What did it say?

"The world was full of precious garbage."

I see.

That's when I woke up and found Nick sitting on the couch, reading a celebrity tabloid magazine. My first thought was that he looked healthy. Clean-shaven, hair cut short, wearing a blazer and jeans. He looked at me and it was the creepiest, most compelling thing. He was older but his expression was the same as when we used to run around the woods together re-creating scenes from Star Wars. He put down his magazine and said, "We have about twenty-four hours until it all goes down. We have a boat. It's waiting for us on the north end of the island. It'll take us to a ship. That ship will take us to an island where the artists and scientists are."

"You shot me," I said.

"You f.u.c.ked my mom," he said.

"That's not a good enough reason to shoot me," I said.

"I shot you for other reasons."

I must have looked incredulous.

"It wasn't a bullet I shot into you," he went on. "Well, yeah, it was a bullet, too. But it was also a delivery system."

I had no idea how to respond to this crazy bulls.h.i.t. Nick pulled out an iPhone and tapped the screen a while. He said, "The Bionet concept you and Wyatt came up with? It's already in development. Is it cold in here or is it just me?" He tapped something on the screen and a frigid blast ripped through me like I'd just stepped into a walk-in freezer. Then he said, "Or maybe it's too hot, what do you think?" and suddenly I was sweating, burning up.

I asked him what he was doing and he said, "I'm giving you a hard-on. Check it out." Sure enough, as he tapped in another code, my c.o.c.k got painfully stiff, one of those erections that totally hurts rubbing against the inside of your jeans. I thought my skin was going to split open. I demanded that he tell me what was going on.

"You tell me," he said. "You're the one who came up with the proposal. The Bionet is a nanotech-enabled system that allows users to monitor, dispense antigens, and remotely control the

vital functions of the human body. Just like you said. We've got big plans for this thing, Luke. Think about it-once you've mastered the erection, you pretty much own the biomedical industry."

I told him he'd betrayed Mr. Kirkpatrick.

"We came to a new understanding with Mr. Kirkpatrick. He's waiting for us on the island," he said. "And so is my mother."

I told him to give me a f.u.c.king break. This was some kind of hoax. A bogus b.u.t.ton that starts the end of the world. A boat. An island with scientists on it.

Nick said, "I'm not asking you to believe me right now. I'm asking you to come with me and discover what it is you truly believe." I must have laughed at him. He said, "Think about how long you've wanted to be a part of this. Think about how you've been shut out of the conversation. We're offering you a way in. We're offering to show you all the cards. Now you can be part of the small group of people leading humanity to redemption."

I asked him how. He said, "Say we figure out how to lower the global temperature and find a way to safely break down all the plastic we've dumped, all the toxins we've unleashed. Maybe we find a way to bring population growth down to a sustainable level and resurrect species we've killed off. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that be just peachy? And if that's the case, our little group, we become nothing but happy fools. That's Plan A for humanity. We're launching Plan B. We're the ones who love life so much that we have to pa.s.s it on. What is to come is a beautiful age, a heroic age."

But I couldn't go. "My family died here," I said. "They didn't know they were about to die. I don't have that luxury. I need to be here to take care of the people who don't live on that island with the scientists and artists. The impending dystopia you talk about only looks like dystopia to those of us who've lived surrounded by privilege. To everybody else it's called history. I need to be here for those people. They're my people. I belong to them."

And then he left?

Yes.

And now you're here.

Are we finished? Is it time?