Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 31

"Neither do you."

"Odd that you should put it that way." My Hollywood career, while successful to objective observers, has always baffled me, because I am completely unsuited to the business. In addition to the obvious irony-an action adventure television director in a wheelchair?-I am too outspoken, too impulsive, and, lately and perhaps inevitably, too unemployed. "Where did you meet Peter?"

I expect Jasmine to answer "rehab" or "a nightclub" or "I don't know him, I just came with a friend." What she says is, "About a billion years from now."

I'm not the first person in history to continue a ridiculous line of conversation because he's attracted to a woman at a Hollywood party. I must admit, though, that Jasmine from Beyond the End of Time, aka a billion years from now, is not remotely the typical actress/model/ whatever, all b.o.o.bs and lips and creamy skin and blond hair, the usual dispenser of this sort of silliness. Before I can offer anything more than a non-committal "Oh, really?" I hear the sound of something smashing in the kitchen. Jasmine focuses her blue eyes on mine and says, "Clark, will you excuse me for a moment?"

Maybe it is because I am rebounding (Amy, my own actress/model/whatever, having finally tired of the role of girlfriend-nurse), but I feel as though I am about to see one of the more fascinating, not to mention attractive, woman in this or any other time, glide across the room, disappearing into the crowd and the night.

"Not at all," I say, as smoothly and confidently as I can, which is not too.

"I promise I'll be back," she says. "We have to talk further."

That curious addendum buoys me so thoroughly that I don't notice Peter himself shambling up behind me in his flannel shirt and faded jeans. "Great, isn't she?" he says, meaning Jasmine.

"Intriguing. She said you'd met a billion years in the future."

"Right. It was a very strange s.p.a.ce." Now, you can expect Peter Deibel to say things that don't make sense in the real world. Part of this is just his screwy view of the universe as a realm of mysterious powers and alliances, magic formulas and secret histories, which helped him carve out a lucrative career as creator of unusual television concepts. Part of it is off-and-on pharmaceutical intake that made it impossible to see those concepts realized under his control. At least, this is my semi-informed judgment. Peter and I worked together for most of a decade, but I really don't know him well. Even though I directed twenty episodes of three different Peter-created series over that span, this party marks only the second time we have had what you'd call a personal moment. Even when we were on a series, we never spoke about any subject other than the job.

So I have to chose whether to react with my usual direct skepticism, or go post-modern. I pick the second: "She doesn't look a day over five hundred million."

"Age isn't important to her. The concept is meaningless."

"I wish I could say the same." At that instant, I know why Peter Deibel and I have never truly connected.

He raises one eyebrow and half-smiles behind his Frito Bandito mustache. "Sorry," I say, blushing. "You're serious."

"Yeah. Weird, huh?" He offers to wheel me out of the party and toward his office. Feeling like a small-minded s.h.i.t, I let him.

Crazy as Peter is in his professional dealings, he always takes great care in his physical surroundings. His home office looks like something from the New York Times "Style" section, lots of burnished wood and expensive rugs framing a tiny iMac. Neatly-bound television scripts sit in a row beneath a picture window alive with what are, to my aging eyes, the fuzzy lights of Hollywood. A pair of Emmys and a CableAce award rest in their illuminated nooks.

I offer praise on the design, which he dismisses. "All rented for my new project," he says. "The food, the music, the lighting, even the women are merely an illusion to convince people I'm a player."

Which makes Peter's next statements seem less bizarre, if that's possible. "Jaz is an emissary from another time," he says.

"Beyond the End of Time, she said."

He grins as he collapses into what appears to be a vastly expensive leather desk chair sculpted to his frame. "Not from these parts."

"Well, then, what is she doing here? And how did you hook up with her?" And why does she want to talk to me?

"We met at an Other Ones concert about a year ago," he says, mentioning a sort of Grateful Dead survivors group I am surprised to recognize. Peter has been a Deadhead since the 1970s. When I first began working with him, he was always chartering a plane and flying off to concerts on the weekends. I still remember how he broke down when Jerry Garcia died. "It was in Eugene, Oregon. I was hanging out backstage, and wound up talking to her over the snacks." Snacks, in this situation, being recreational chemicals. "She didn't fit in at all." I had noticed this about Jasmine even at this party. It was nothing overt, say, like wearing a silver lame jumpsuit, but she did not seem to belong. "All the ex-hippies and heads were giving her a lot of room." He swung his feet up on his desk, showing me his beat-up Adidas. "At first I was just going to hit on her, but I sort of forgot about it." He laughs. "Forgot about the concert, too."

"Pigpen was probably in the middle of a twenty-minute guitar jam." In all that time on Peter's sets, I have absorbed a smattering of Dead names.

Peter looks over his gla.s.ses at me like a professor dealing with a first-year law student. "Pigpen doesn't play guitar, Clark. It was probably Bobby Weir. Anyway, Jaz and I started talking, just the way you were, out comes this 'Beyond the End of Time, a billion years from now,' yada yada.

"I just thought it was one of those weird raps you hear at a Dead concert, but Jaz didn't seem stoned or strung out, or crazy. At least not crazy in the way I know crazy." Peter managed to marry several questionable women he met through the Dead, so while he isn't some kind of sanity expert, he has a bit of experience. "So I let her come home with me." Home being Monterey, I recall.

Note that he doesn't say he asked her to come home with me. Let. I actually start to feel a bit jealous.

"Sounds like a relationship."

He smiles. "No way. Jaz immediately got hooked up with some job over at U.C.-Santa Cruz, some s.p.a.ce survey thing. She was always around to talk to, but nothing was the way it should be. Forget s.e.x. She didn't eat, she didn't drink, she didn't sleep. She never used the bathroom. Can you imagine a chick who never goes into the bathroom?"

"So, then, what is she," I say, "some kind of ghost? This sounds like Weird Romance." Weird Romance was my first project with Peter, a cable anthology series where the typical story concerned a man and a woman who could not possibly have s.e.x, because one of them was... well, weird. The silly thing ran for 66 episodes.

"Not a ghost. She has a physical presence. She picks up the phone. She leaves an indentation when she gets up from the couch."

"Good thing you weren't watching her closely." I smile to take the edge off the sarcasm. I am getting testy, probably because I am now expecting some kind of pitch from Peter that involves mental healing, financial support, or possibly religion. "Did she happen to say, during these six months with you, why shewas here from wherever?"

"She's got a project. I'm helping her with it, which is why I moved back down here."

"Let me guess... an idea for a screenplay."

"She's got a lot of ideas, but they've got nothing to do with our former business."

"Now I'm really intrigued."

"You should be. Because the first person she wanted to meet down here was you."

I am as suspicious as I am flattered. "A television director who is staring into the open grave of his career?"

Peter closes his eyes, as if searching for strength. "Look, Clark, I hired you the first time on Romance because I could see that you were smart and talented." And because Peter was what used to be called a bleeding heart liberal who thought a kid who had broken his spine in a high school auto accident should still have the chance to become Steven Spielberg. "All you needed was a chance. And I can honestly say, you never disappointed me, either. Not on the set." He squirms in his fancy chair. So do I, to the extent I can, because I hear the last countdown ticks on a missile of criticism aimed right at the bridge of my nose. "We never really...." He moves his hands back and forth in some kind of vertical seesaw gesture.

"Became friends?" I prompt.

"Not that. I think we are friends." Which makes me feel s.h.i.tty. "We were never able to... join forces and become more than television hacks."

"It's never too late." I'm joking.

But Peter is serious. "That's why you're here."

Before I can process this statement, Peter continues: "We spent years figuring out how to tell stories, Clark. We were using Dutch angles and nervous cameras and casting guys with earrings and girls with tattoos. Remember when we decided on B.C. Cops that no scene could run over sixty seconds?" B.C. Cops was our second project.

"We were very f.u.c.king hip and very successful. But really sort of predictable, too. Because all we were doing was wrapping s.h.i.t in pretty paper. We threw out anything that resembled reflection or an actual idea and replaced it with a rap soundtrack and lots of eye candy. We made it impossible for anyone to recognize the truth if it wasn't packaged the right way."

"Jesus, Peter, a few more minutes of this and I'm gonna start to feel bad."

"You know, Clark, that's what Carter Bales used to say on B.C. Cops. Did I ever tell you I based him on you?"

Bang! The missile explodes in my face. "What do you want, Peter? We can't go back."

"No. We can go forward with open minds."

A billion years into the future? Beyond the End of Time?

Some semi-retired actress/model/whatever (by that I mean she's forty) comes to the door, and my session with Peter ends. I flee back to the party, and immediately encounter Jaz, as I now think of her.

She smiles and lowers herself to a couch, so our eyes are roughly on the same plane. "Did Peter explain everything?"

"Not remotely."

"It's not his strength."

"Why don't we save ourselves a lot of time. Just tell me what you want from me," I say, making the conversational equivalent of an Acapulco cliff dive. Jasmine has not become less attractive in the s.p.a.ce of fifteen minutes, but I possess the ability to shake off the effects of a beautiful woman's force field-provided I'm out of range.

"That's direct."

"It would be the first thing this evening, after your little dance a while ago and Peter's big secret briefing.

Frankly, it's like an episode of B.C. Cops."

Actually, by this point I am thinking of my third project with Peter, the one that prompted the big lawsuits.

It was called Syn, short for synesthesia, and it dealt with a guy whose senses had been scrambled by an accident. I remember Syn right now, because I'm seeing cold. But only for a moment. Jasmine's placid disposition returns in a heartbeat. "I suppose we are being silly."

"I promise I'll listen."

"Easy to say before you've heard me. You see, Clark, the answer to your very polite earlier question about where I'm from is what I told you. At least, sort of." She glances around quite prettily, then whispers. "I lived in Claremont before going up to Eugene." Claremont being the name of a college town within the greater Los Angeles area. "Jasmine is a name I adopted. Before that I was Jennifer Leigh Camden."

"Now that really doesn't sound like a name from Beyond the End of Time."

"Do you still want the answers?"

"I'm intrigued. And not out of patience yet." "Okay, then." She gets up and lets me roll after her toward a corner of the big living room. The party is still boiling around us. Some kind of fusionoid music is playing on a very expensive system-or perhaps it's live from a combo on the floor below; Peter is capable of that.

And here's pretty much what Jasmine tells me: The part of her personality that is not Jennifer Leigh Camden from Claremont, CA, is a consciousness formed literally a billion years in the future.

This ent.i.ty, which we might as well call Jasmine, is actually a "cl.u.s.ter" of 70,000 or so individual minds.

("Exactly 70,000?" I say, and I'm really not trying to be funny. "Is there some significance to the number?") ("No. It varies, sometimes by several thousand. Other cl.u.s.ters have fewer, sometimes only a dozen or so.

Our... messaging software doesn't work well when the number goes above 70,000." She says this all patiently, but I suspect that further interruptions will be dealt with harshly.) Even the "billion year" figure is just a figure of speech. "That kind of data point has lost its meaning. I mean, we know from ancient history that the year was a common measurement of the pa.s.sage of time due to the agricultural basis of the early human societies. Planting and harvesting were part of a cycle dependent on the planet's revolution around the sun. But we have not been agricultural for a billion billion seconds."

Oh, another thing. "We live in seconds, fractions thereof. Or in what used to be called millennia, ten to the third power based on the planet's rotation. And many places in between." Whatever. They live a long time. Or a short time, and they make it seem long.

"We have different bodies at different times. Some of them are organic; most are what you would call machines." Figured.

"What brings me here, to you, is the Mapping Project," a term which doesn't begin to explain it.

Here's what I got: the human race, or some chunk thereof, took to heart the Biblical injunction to "name and cla.s.sify all things". Not just the "birds of the air, the fish of the sea and things that grow on the land," but everything in the whole universe. Every galaxy, every star, every planet.

Every gas cl.u.s.ter. Every pulsar. Every black hole.

No wonder she says, "I will tell you many impossible things, but the first such you must believe is this: our project is one million years old."

"That's a lot of data," I say, taking refuge from this madness in humor.

"We discovered that you needed a memory the size of the universe in order to properly map the universe."

At this point my head is hurting. My crotch, which has been disturbingly silent not just this evening, but for weeks (doing nothing to improve my mood, believe me), begins to throb. I'm beginning to imagine that my feet, which I haven't felt in twenty years, are itching.

But it gets worse. Jaz says, "You can't just create a map that's frozen in time. Macro and micro processes are always in motion. So the project expanded until it literally became a working, running model of the universe right down to the fishes of every sea, the birds of every atmosphere." She smiles, as if that will make it all better. "Even you."

"Well, if I'm part of your model," I say, wondering how the h.e.l.l I am going to make an escape, "I've got some complaints." Specifically about a fender bender one snowy afternoon in February some twenty years ago.

"That's why we're talking."

"If you're talking to everyone in the universe who doesn't like his life, you're going to be busy for a billion years."

"Right now it's just you."

"I don't know whether to be flattered or horrified."

"It depends on how you choose."

"Choose what?"

She sighs and closes her eyes. I suspect I'm turning out to be stupider than she'd hoped. "There are two factions in the Mapping Project. One wants to create a perfect simulation which will replicate the history of the universe in all its glory and pain. Those are the Realists.

"I'm one of the Romantics. We want to make things different, and better."

"For what it's worth, you've got my support."

"Oh, but we need more."

"I'm a has-been television director! There must be two billion people ahead of me on any list of helpful human beings!"

She shakes her head. "Too many of them are already Romantics. You are a Realist."

Jaz might be right about that. For example, I have always been brutally realistic with the women in my life, telling them that the house is full of ramps and low shelves, that making a trip to the grocery store is a major undertaking, that you will wind up being my maid, and, oh yeah, that the s.e.x will be unpredictable at best.

"Granted. There are still millions of Realists walking the streets who would be better subjects for whateveryou have in mind. What is it again?"

All through this conversation, and I've tried to shorten it and straighten it out, Jaz has given no sign of impatience. She has not grabbed a drink from a pa.s.sing waiter, or even stood up and stretched. "You are alive at the time in history when the seeds of the Mapping Project first take root."

"The beginning of the s.p.a.ce Age?"

"The end of the s.p.a.ce Age. This is the beginning of the Virtual Age, the Modeling Age. Human beings are not going into s.p.a.ce, not physically. That should be obvious by now. Their sensory avatars will, which is how the Mapping started. Others will turn inward, creating their own virtual worlds. Still others will be reconstructing the past in a detail never before seen. That really started with photography and sound recording, but it's expanding into genetic archaeology, too."

In spite of my Realism, I find this intriguing, because this subject is one of my few areas of interest, aside from my failing career-the ability to slice and dice some genetic material that proves, for example, that the Irish and the Basque share the same heritage.

"Are you sure this isn't a screenplay idea?" I say. "Because it feels a little expository so far. You need to have somebody show up naked on a side street, let the audience feel his story." I smile, picturing Jaz naked.

"Or her story."