Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Back in the bedroom, Abby dressed the sex doll and propped her against the headboard. She turned on the TV for her, switched to a nature show, and put the remote in the doll’s hand. A moment later somebody knocked on the door. She opened it to find Lamb, the qputer monk, now dressed in toddler-sized overalls.

“Good job, Abby,” Lamb said.

“I’m Abby Fogg,” Abby said, blinking her eyes. “I’m Abby Fogg .”

This was a sidewalk from a memory, a crisp overlayer of graffiti and fluttery newspaper trash. Skinner had been here before, chasing newmans through Old Navy display windows and the gutted burning interiors of hipster apartments. SoHo: a facsimile. The address Rocco had provided under duress led him to a block, a door, a stairwell, a creaky wood hallway, a steel door behind which played some hideous prog. The door was unlocked. Skinner found an apartment committed to Danish design. Shit was minimal. Like the place was intended to be temporary but had been temporary for a very long time. Dirk Bickle sat on a black leather couch, wearing a white bathrobe, his white hair slicked back after a shower. On the coffee table in front of him were spread a variety of brand-name guns.

“Make yourself at home, Al.”

Skinner took a seat opposite, on a box-shaped chair. “You’re an old guy like me.”

“You and I go way back. You wouldn’t remember.”

“What’s with the arsenal?”

“We figured you’d want to rearm yourself.”

“You have my grandson,” Skinner said.

“ They have a clone of your grandson. I thought that made all the difference.”

“I’m tired.”

“Take a nap, my friend. The bed is comfy.”

“I’m tired of killing things.”

“I’d be tired, too. But you’re the reptile brain, remember? You’re doing what you were designed to do.”

“You know where they have him.”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You’ll find him at the Egyptian tomb.”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

Bickle shrugged. “You want an explanation. You want me to lay out the causalities. For what? The world we occupy doesn’t operate that way anymore, if it ever did. You want me to tell you where Waitimu is so you can do your heroic rescue routine?”

“I’ll lay down my weapons for good.”

“Let go of A+B=C, Al.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

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 asshole 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. Cocktail? 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 shit, like dead things, like low tide.

“We didn’t kill anyone. I’m a curator. I arrange mis-en-scènes. 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 glass 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 space 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 piss-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 God. 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 cocktail 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 assigned 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.”