Charlie Huston - Sleepless

Cager stayed where he was.

“For the murder of Hydo Chang. That’s. Not what I expected. My dad made it sound like you suspected much more. Much worse.”

He began to comb his hair.

“It was kind of flattering. Being thought a mastermind.”

Park walked to him, took him by the left wrist, swept it behind his back and pushed it up toward his neck while putting a knee in the back of his right leg. Cager went to the floor and Park finished the takedown, pushing his face flat against the marble while unclipping the cuffs from his belt.

Cager grunted.

“What are you doing, Park?”

Park snapped the first bracelet over his wrist.

“I’m arresting you.”

“Why?”

Park snapped on the second bracelet.

“Get up.”

Cager let himself be pulled to his feet.

“You don’t understand even a little about me. You don’t understand what I was trying to do. What Hydo did to ruin it.”

Park stopped walking him toward the door.

“What? What did he do? What does a person do to get murdered? What does that take in this world?”

Cager wrenched free.

“It takes being greedy and stupid!”

He looked at the floor.

“I’d like to comb my hair.”

Park didn’t move.

Cager turned around.

“Will you comb my hair for me, please. It’s out of place. I can feel it.

Park took the comb from Cager’s back pocket and combed his hair back into place.

Cager relaxed slightly.

“Thank you. Can you put the comb back, please.”

Park put the comb back.

Cager nodded.

“Thank you. I’m sorry I lost my temper. But thinking about Hydo upsets me. And I’m not used to being upset. That’s probably why I reacted the way I did. But I gave him so much. I gave him the Dreamer. I’d tried so hard to make something physical with it. I thought it would be a way to push people into a quest mentality. Increase the investment in their lives. Get them thinking and feeling with the same level of commitment as they do in Chasm. But they didn’t want to be that aware. They said, Give me the Dreamer. Here’s my money, give me the Dreamer. Like you. I was trying to open eyes to the possibility that there was room left, time left for magic in this world, and they just want to score. If that’s all people want, they can score off Hydo. I didn’t even take anything up front. It was credits in my account at the farm. And he couldn’t even get me the codex I needed. But I told him, one rule only. I told him, ‘no selling to my gamers.’ No selling to my sleepless. My sleepless, they are living at the absolute verge of human evolution, pushing barriers back. Not just living but creating. They’re planting seeds. Because after we’re all sleepless, Park, after we all die, something will persist. Information, energy coded as information, that will last when we are dust. When the last generator runs out of fuel, when the last windmill rusts and falls over, when the last solar panel cracks, the Web will stop, but the information will persist. After 9/11, they recovered hard drives in the ruins. They could still be read. Flesh turned to paste and mist, but data survived. When our society is excavated, our data will be our relics. And the characters, the personas the sleepless are creating, those will be the most unique, the most durable, the most diverse, the most cherished artifacts. They’re what we’re going to leave behind. And Hydo, he was killing that. Selling Dreamer to my sleepless, he was killing the future. Our future. So arrest me for murdering Hydo and the others. I did it.”

Park was thinking again about the gun he’d used earlier to kill the man who’d come out of his daughter’s room. The room where he’d left his wife. He thought of how it had looked, lying on the floor next to blood. He was glad it wasn’t in his hand.

He took Cager by the arm and pulled him toward the door.

“You’re under arrest.”

“Officer Haas.”

He stopped and looked back down the foyer.

Senior stood there, still in his pajamas and robe, Imelda and Magda just behind him.

“I’m sorry to see you again, Officer Haas.”

Park nodded.

“I’m arresting your son for murder.”

Imelda and Magda moved away from each other, creating firing lines.

Park put his hand back on his weapon.

“I’m arresting your son.”

Senior’s hands were buried in his pockets.

“It’s not that I don’t understand, Haas. I just can’t allow it. You take those handcuffs off now, and you go home.”

Park saw that Imelda and Magda had their weapons in hand already. Not the submachine guns that would spray indiscriminately, but high-accuracy SIG 1911s.

He shook his head.

“Your men already came to my home, sir. They’re dead.”

Cager shook his head.

“Dad.”

“Be quiet, Junior.”

“Dad, I can’t believe you did that.”

Senior took his hands from his pockets and plucked at a loose thread.

“That was something I had to do. I don’t take any pride or enjoyment from it. And it’s my own fault for talking at such length with you, Haas. But everything is at stake now. The whole world. Blood relations aside, arresting my son would cause too many questions to be asked. There’d be chaos. Too soon for that. Too much left to do.”

Park opened his mouth, but he had no more to say. Instead he turned and pushed Cager toward the door. He’d never drawn his weapon. He never did.

Walking, he thought about what it had been like when he first felt himself made vulnerable by his love for Rose. The fear. How that had been compounded to terror when Omaha was born. How willingly he had embraced the horror that he might lose them one day, in exchange for their miraculous presence in his life.

He said something then, but it was lost in a sudden noise.

LADY CHIZU’S TOWER WAS SURELY SAFE FOR A DAY, BUT IT would not do over time. Nor, for that matter, was Chizu herself safe. She was sleepless, dying. And when she died, so too would Thousand Storks. And the maggots that would crawl out of that instrument of destruction would ravage anything she had touched. I saw her last when I returned from the Culver City house for Omaha. She was not disappointed to see me, but there was some regret, I think, when I took the baby girl from her arms and placed Park’s father’s watch in Omaha’s hands. She stared at the light reflecting off it, and began to chew on the leather band.

Chizu thought for a moment.

“Her father was killed?”

I nodded.

She thought for another moment.

“And her mother committed suicide?”

Standing in the Culver City house, I had looked at Rose’s body in Omaha’s crib and thought of all the beautiful things that I had left behind in my house to be destroyed by either fire or water. My apocalypse collection, not one work among it casting a greater foreshadow than the dead body of a sleepless mother in her daughter’s crib.

I shook my head, still awed by what I had seen.

“Her father killed her mother.”

“Ah.”

I watched her eyes, an act more brazen than I would have dared just a day before.

“Does that deepen the beauty of Cipher Blue?”

She looked at Rose’s laptop, resting now in the center niche of the display wall.

“It intensifies what I feel when I look at it.”

She touched Omaha’s cheek.

“She is a quiet baby.”

I watched her chewing the buckle of her grandfather’s watchband.

“Her parents are dead. She’s sad.”

“No. Babies cry when they are sad, Jasper. She is watchful. Listening.”

Both of us, childless, watched the silent baby.

We left Chizu in her tower, with her digital ghosts, the remains of the dead sleepless who made them.