Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“How does it work?” Lyle asked.

“Quite effectively. Before you know it, everyone at the mall, everyone in the world, will be on pause. No more violence, no more”—she looked for the words—“crimes of passion.” She paused. “Then when they come out of it, if they come out of it, they’ll have forgotten what got them so incensed in the first place. Think of it, Lyle! A reboot for humanity.” She knew that wasn’t the question he was asking. “We’ve got a few minutes. I’ll bring you up to speed on the process.”

From the way they were talking, Lyle couldn’t tell if she felt he was softening to her, or whether she thought he remained her sworn foe. In any case, she was still keeping him in a physically inferior position. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to extricate himself or stop her, if he could even figure out how to do that. He tried to think about what he would do if she were a deadly virus. In such a case, he’d try everything to hold the disease at bay—through fluids and managing infection spread—until the body came and healed itself or he could figure out another solution, a medical miracle. His original plan looked like it was going to fail, miserably. She was going to destroy the entire planet. He could imagine her hitting the proverbial green button and everyone heading into some strange seizure and crashing their cars, falling down and splitting open their skulls, failing to turn off their ovens and having fires burn down the world.

18:16

18:15

18:14

“Is it a channelopathy?” he said. “Or more seizure?”

She perked up at the question. She loved his engagement with her, as peers, as equals.

“Physiologically, you’re probably better equipped to analyze the mechanism. But, to answer your question, somewhere between the two, seizure and channelopathy, but with much longer lasting effects. Indefinite, as far as I can tell.”

“It’s why I saw an immune response in Steamboat.”

“Right. That was so exciting to watch. Your gift emerging again. Anyhow, yes, to stay on point: the electrical signals evidently stimulate an immune response, the body recognizing something alien.”

She pointed over Lyle’s shoulder and he looked into a room that he hadn’t even realized was behind him. It was on the other side of a two-way mirror. And there sat a woman slumped in a chair. “Lyle, meet Alex. Alex has been rather unresponsive for days.”

Lyle grimaced and turned back. “Let me help her.”

Jackie just laughed again, as if to say Give me a break, Lyle .

“If you ask me, and you did, I think that all our heavy use of devices is predisposing us to this seizure state, this syndrome. It’ll be interesting to see when I flip the giant switch in the sky, whether everyone succumbs or just big groups of people. You can’t really know until you try.”

“Big switch?”

“Proverbial. I’ve already programmed it to push the algorithm through to every major transmitter in…” She looked at the countdown clock. “Fifteen minutes or so. No switch that needs flipping. I can’t believe it’s really here.”

“You said they might come out of it.”

She shook her head, not understanding his comment.

“Earlier, you said they would come out of it, if they come out of it. Will they come out of it?”

“If I reverse the frequency process. I did it in Steamboat. No harm no foul.”

“After people crashed their cars and died and who knows what else.”

“Small price to pay to save the world from itself.”

“How do we stop it, Jackie?”

She just shook her head. “I’d hate to discover you were someone who wanted to fight, not listen.”

Her eyes were wet.

“No more time. You have to decide now, Lyle. Save ’em or join ’em.”

She clicked along on the wireless keyboard and a second window opened on the monitor with the countdown clock. Lyle recognized Jackie’s intensity as the sort that might overtake him when he was in the midst of discovery. He didn’t feel seen by her, as she insisted, but he could acknowledge distant similarities. Not sufficient to have him accede to whatever she was asking him to decide in her favor. He was waiting to find out what that might be.

The clock said eight minutes and thirty seconds.

In the second window, an image appeared. It was a green field with a path cut through it leading to a mountain where aspen trees grew. It dissolved and there was an image of Melanie climbing into bed with the father of her child. It was on video feed. Lyle was watching his ex-wife climb into bed with the man she’d cheated with.

“Stop it, Jackie.”

“Fair enough, I’ll spare you the gory details.”

She closed the window. “Which world do you want to live in, sweetheart?”

He didn’t speak.

“The one where we must constantly fight to curtail the worst parts of humanity, or the one less traveled? I’m not so stupid, so naive, as to think a world on pause is a perfect world. I’m not insane, not that insane.” She laughed. She didn’t think herself nuts at all. “It’s just a world we haven’t tried yet. A world of two, for the time being at least.

“Will you join me?”

She held out her hand. It struck Lyle he might grab and yank it.

“I made this world for you, Lyle. To awaken you, and then to take away all the pain of indecision: What’s right? What’s wrong? Are people good or bad? They’re on hold, at least until we can figure out what we want to do.”

“I have a question first.”

6:56

6:55

“If I join you, if we take the road less traveled, and it doesn’t work, will you wake everyone up? Can we return to the way it was?” Lyle asked.

She shrugged. “It’s a relationship. We’ll work it out.” A nonanswer.

“How would we do that?”

“Work it out? We’d talk and we’d listen.”

“No, how would we return it to the way it was, the way it is?”

She smiled. “Are you really still trying to figure out how to reverse this?”

“I’m a doctor, Jackie. I never quit trying to figure out how to kill the disease.”

“You are a doctor, Lyle. You never stopped being one. I know that. I love that about you. So I’ll answer, in general terms. It’s a password, of course, that I’ve no need to tell you about at this point. So, what’s it going to be?”

5:27

“You know I can’t do this, Jackie.”

She looked at him, curious, shaking her head.

“It’s a chance to make something beautiful and pure.”

“You’re on your own, Jackie. I’ll go down with the ship.”

“I’m so disappointed to hear that.”

“How does that work? Do I go outside?”

“Yes, that’s one way. But I prefer something more intimate,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I’ll need you to go into that room there, behind you. It will get the signal. I will be spared it in here. You can sit, and I can watch as you fall into a stasis state. I hope the bears don’t eat you.”

“What?”

“Kidding, Lyle. If I let bears eat you, then how would I be able to enjoy looking at you now and again.”

4:47

It’s not working, he thought, the plan has fallen apart.

“Up you go,” she said.

Lyle stood. He looked at the woman on the other side of the mirror, her body inert, as Lyle’s was soon to be. He turned back to his captor.

“Jackie, would you offer me any final thoughts?”

She smiled.

“Hickam had it right.”

Now he smiled sadly, recalling his own lecture on Hickam’s dictum. It must have had an impact on her. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please,” Lyle muttered.

“So true, right. It’s sheer and utter chaos, nothing so obvious and simple as Occam’s razor. What is doing us in? Everything. What can we do about it?” Then she looked at the monitor of the live feed from the National Mall, as if the image of people about to kill one another off made her point. “Hit pause. Anyhow, off you go.”