Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

Kelly tried to explain it, but the spoken words didn’t sound the way they had in his head. It sounded like he wanted something from Hernandez, when what he wanted was only to reestablish their old connection. “Remember how you got the Humvee out of the ditch?” he asked. “Remember how Harraday smoked those guys down by the canal just before the helo got there?”

“Hey, man. I’m trying to forget.”

“I was thinking you could come out and help us with the site,” said Kelly. “If we don’t sell it, that is, or if we start a new one. Either way, we could work something out. I can send you a ticket, just so you can see the place. And I might buy a convertible — I haven’t decided yet. If I do, you can help me pick it out.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Hernandez. “But I’ve got a kid, you know? He’s already three years old. And I’ve got Maya, and a little house — maybe you should get a woman too. It’s not perfect, you know what I mean? But it’s sure as hell not bad.”

“Yeah, that’s something I’ve thought about. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

But Kelly needed a woman who could stand up to him, which basically meant he needed a man.

“There are men in the army,” said Hernandez.

“Ha!” said Kelly. “No way I’m going back there. Besides, I’m pretty good at what I’m doing now.”

“Me too,” said Hernandez. “Not great or anything, but definitely pretty good.”

10.9 Le Roy Jones

An inspector from the building department knocked on the door one evening when Le Roy and the other men were eating fried chicken out of a paper bucket. “I heard you guys were living here,” he said. “This area is zoned commercial. No COs for permanent occupation.”

“Hey, man, nothing’s permanent,” said Danny, and Kelly said, “Hell, we’ve lived in bigger shitholes ’n this.”

“We just work long hours,” said the captain.

“I heard you’re here day and night.”

“This is a start-up, so we kind of are.”

“I’m afraid you’re gonna have to find another place to live. I’ll give you a week or so, but I can’t let it slide much longer than that.”

“Fuck that shit,” said Le Roy.

“Christ,” said Danny when the housing official was gone. “It’s like they don’t want us to succeed.”

“We’ve already succeeded,” said Kelly. “We should definitely sell.”

“I’m telling you. They’ll buy it and they’ll shut it down,” said the captain.

“Why would they spend a million dollars on a website just to shut it down?” asked Kelly. And then everyone was quiet except the captain, who said they all knew why. Everyone but Le Roy knew why. “Why?” he asked, which started up another argument, with the captain going on about “visions and goals” and Kelly banging his fist on the desk and Danny pacing up and down saying, “Let’s all calm down here. I’m sure we can work this thing out.”

Le Roy couldn’t fully comprehend the source of the disagreement, but he suspected it was located in the place E’Laine kept harping on when she talked about the things they used to do together or about how Le Roy’s body had been taken over by someone else’s soul. So when Kelly said, “What do you think, Le Roy? Weigh in here,” Le Roy could only try to guess what Kelly wanted him to say. It was like hacking a password, but with no end run where you used machine language to reset the basic user information. “What if I make a memorial to the guys in the company?” he asked. “Or what if we make a second site?”

“We can’t do that ’til after we sell,” said Kelly. “We don’t want to divert traffic and scare the buyers off.” Kelly did the thing where he slammed the refrigerator door and chugged a beer and threw the can so hard it hit the wall behind the trash can.

Le Roy thought it might be time to bring out his new idea. “I’m thinking about a simulation,” he said. Just the thought of it was calming. Just the thought of all that new-idea blankness turning into lines of code. He started to describe how in the simulation, the parameters could be set so that most of the people would be totally screwed, and then they would band together to take their country back. Wasn’t that what the captain meant when he said “visions and goals”? It had occurred to him that they were in a simulation now. The odds of it were good. It was generally accepted that intelligent beings would eventually create realistic computer simulations, which meant that someday the simulated worlds would far outnumber the real worlds, which meant a person would have a better chance of being in a virtual world than in a real one. Maybe someday had already come. “In the simulation—” he started to say, but Kelly interrupted him.

“We’re not talking about any simulation here, Le Roy. We’re talking about real life.”

“But what if we’re already in a simulation? What if we only think it’s real? In that case…”

“Besides, there’s plenty for you to work on finding people to help authenticate that new batch of documents. Whether we sell or not, we’ve got to keep going full strength for now.”

Then the conversation died down, and after a while, everyone went back to work.

“Hey,” said Kelly later in the day. “I got a funny call from Martin.”

Le Roy had forgotten about Martin Fitch, but now he said, “What’s up with Martin?”

“He’s getting some heat about the sources for his new Guardian series, and he wants to make sure our security is up to snuff.”

“Blast it on over here,” said Le Roy. “Let me take a look.”

“What do you think he means when he says ‘heat’?” asked Kelly.

“I guess we can’t expect to post some of this stuff without ruffling some feathers,” said the captain.

“But Dolly’s okay?” asked Danny.

“Yeah,” said Penn. “Dolly’s just fine.”

“All the more reason to sell,” said Kelly. “Get out from under while we can.”

Here it came, Kelly yelling and throwing another beer can at the wall and the captain telling everyone to calm down and Danny taking his notebook out onto the porch and staring off up the tracks to where they disappeared behind a patch of urban bamboo and Le Roy snapping his noise-canceling headphones into place and trying to induce the sensation he got when someone was passing through his peripheral vision, when he could feel them sliding along toward being forgotten.

The issue of the sale didn’t go away, and a week later Danny suggested they vote on it. “A yes vote means we sell,” he said.

Kelly voted yes, Danny voted no, and the captain abstained. “The website belongs to you,” he said. “Besides, I redeploy in another couple weeks.”

“That leaves it up to you, Le Roy,” said Danny. “You get to decide this thing yourself.”

“That makes zero sense,” said Kelly. “That makes less than zero sense.”

Le Roy looked from Kelly to the captain and tried to figure out which of them had the more compelling expectation, but just then a glitch on the screen caught his eye and he was narrowing the cone of his vision and feeling the music of the ether coming up through the pads of his fingers and letting his mind resonate with the vastness of the universe, of all the worlds within the universe, of all the worlds within the worlds.