Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

There. That was it.

I froze the image and marked its endpoint, then I moved back to the beginning of the video. When I had reached that point and marked it, I opened the menu bar at the top of the screen and selected the EDIT function. Another command from the submenu caused a window to open at the bottom half of the screen, displaying a transcript of the conversation.

I then began to work my way through the transcript, highlighting certain key words. It took me a few minutes, but when I was through I had a couple of lines I had pieced together from the videotape. I took a deep breath, then I moused the line and tapped in commands to verbalize those lines.

Jamie’s voice reemerged from the computer, speaking something he had never said in life, but which I had heard over the phone earlier that night:

“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … can I talk to you, Daddy?”

And on the computer screen, Jamie’s reedited face was exactly the same as I had seen it on the phone.

“Gerry, what the hell are you doing?”

Startled, I jerked away from the keyboard and spun around in the office chair to find Marianne standing in the doorway behind me.

Her arms were crossed in front of her robe; she had a look of horror on her face, as if she had just caught me trying on a pair of her panties. Maybe reality was worse than that; after all, she had just discovered me in the act of editing one of the last tangible memories of our son.

I lay back in the chair, letting out my breath as I rubbed my eyelids between my fingertips. “Part of the deal was that you wouldn’t ask me any questions,” I murmured. “And believe me, if I told you, you’d just think I was crazy.”

“I already think you’re crazy,” she replied, her voice harsh with anger barely kept in check. “Leave Jamie’s video alone. I mean it …”

Before I could do anything, she stalked across the room and began to reach for the computer. “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands over the keyboard. “I’ll get out of this, so long as you answer one question for me.”

She stopped and stared at me, not pulling her hands away. “What is it?”

“Did you load this disk into the hard drive?” I asked. “This file in particular?”

Marianne blinked, not quite comprehending the question at first. “Yes,” she said at last, “I did. I wanted to preserve the disk. This was the last video we made of him and-”

“And do you still leave the computer on all day?”

She shrugged. “Of course I do. My clients have to talk to the expert system when I’m gone. You know that.” She peered more closely at me. “What’s going on here, Gerard? Why were you editing the-?”

“Never mind. Go ahead and restore the video.” I withdrew my hands from the keyboard and pushed the chair back from the desk. Marianne gave me one last look of distrustful confusion, then she bent over the keyboard, using the trackball to undo the work I had just done. It didn’t matter; I had all the answers I needed.

Some of them, rather. Just as I had managed to piece together a message in Jamie’s own words, so had someone else. The video was stored on the computer’s hard drive and Marianne left the computer switched on during the day, so that her clients could ask questions of the computer’s expert system. It was therefore possible for a good hacker to access the JAMIE.6 file through the root directory and edit together the phone message I had heard earlier that night. By the same means, it was also possible for them to recreate my own voice; a good hacker with the right equipment would be able to mimic my voice, since my vocal tracks were recorded on this and many other CD-OP files Marianne had stored in the computer.

But why go to such extremes? If the culprit had been trying to get my attention, why imitate the voice of my dead son … or my own, for that matter? If anything, it was a sick prank, tantamount to calling up a grieving widow and pretending to be the ghost of her late spouse. Yet this was the second time in as many days someone had used a computer to send mysterious messages to me, and the technical sophistication necessary to do this went far beyond the capability of some twisted little cyberpunk trying to spook me.

In fact, now that I thought about it, how would some pimplehead even know to call into Marianne’s computer? Its modem line was listed under her company’s name, not hers or mine, and very few people were aware that Gerry Rosen even had an estranged wife.

It made no sense …

Or it made perfect sense, but I was unable to perceive the logic.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

Marianne’s question broke my concentration. She had finished saving the file and was exiting from the program. I looked at her as she switched off the computer, ejected the disk from its drive, and slipped it back in its box.

“Yeah, I miss him.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, suddenly feeling very old. “He was the best thing that happened to us … and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” Marianne put the box away, then leaned against the shelf next to the desk. For the first time since she had let me into the house, she wasn’t playing the queen bitch of the universe; she was my wife, commiserating the passage of our son from our lives. “God, I’ve even kept his room the same, thinking somehow there’s just been some awful mistake, that he wasn’t on that train after all …”

The train. Always the train …

“He’s gone, Mari,” I said softly. “There’s no mistake. There was an accident, and he died … and that’s all there is to it.”

She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s all there is to it.” She stared at the floor. “Tell me you just wanted to look at him again, Gerry. Tell me he isn’t mixed up in whatever trouble you’re in.”

She raised her eyes and stared straight at me. “This isn’t part of some story, is it?”

I knew what she meant. I had lost one newspaper job because I had been trying to stop kids from dying; I had thrown myself on the sword in order to save some youngsters I had never really known, the children of complete strangers, because that had been part of a story. Yet when the time had come for me to protect my own child, I had not been available. Jamie had perished without ever seeing his father’s face again because Daddy had been too busy with his career to do anything but buy him a train ticket to eternity.

The accusation in her eyes wasn’t fair, but neither is the timing of earthquakes against MetroLink schedules. Or death itself, for that matter.

When I didn’t answer her question, Marianne lowered her head and began to walk out of the office. “I’ve made up the living room couch and told the house to wake you up at eight,” she said. “That’s when the coffeemaker comes on. There’s some sweet rolls in the fridge, if you want ’em …”

“Okay, babe. Thanks for everything.”

She nodded again and began to head for the stairs. Then she stopped and turned back again. “And by the way … there’s nobody else upstairs, if that’s what you were wondering. G’night.”

And then she left, heading back to her bedroom before I got a chance to ask her how she managed to pick up that mind-reading trick of hers.

(Friday, 8:00 A.M.)

I awakened to the faint sound of church bells striking eight times as if tolling from a distant country steeple, although neither of the two churches within a block of the house had bells.

The sound came from the ceiling; Marianne had programmed the house to wake me at this time, just as she had instructed it to start brewing coffee in the kitchen. Although I could have used another hour of sleep, I was grateful that she hadn’t selected another noise from the alarm menu; if she had wanted to be a real bitch, she could have jolted me with an eight-gun salute, or worse.