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The world felt empty without Count Down in my bike’s sidecar as I came back to New York from Dorchester. The pooch had insinuated himself into my heart so quickly, but he was better off with Mama Neeta and the kids.
I kept thinking about Thom’s recording. It sent a thrill through me, to realize that he might still be living, although his hold on life was probably very fragile. It was easy to imagine how The Pinnacle Bar recording came about. Thom probably had put one of his brain-computer modules in record mode with the idea of reliving his adventures with those college beauties later on. It was unintentional, but the recording allowed me to experience what happened.
I kept thinking about how badly damaged he must still be. It was pretty amaz that he could embed the recording in the graffiti hologram and allow me to relive his experience. If only I’d been able to save it, but Thom hadn’t allowed me to do that.
There wasn’t much I could do. Sure, I could go to the police and recount what I knew. But Thom didn’t have much respect for cops. And it didn’t seem likely that they’d actually be able to solve the mystery of who was behind the women’s gruesome deaths, theft of the Juice and Thom’s maimed state.
If only I could find Thom and talk to him.
I parked my bike on Main Street in Flushing, Queens, ate some lo mein at my favorite noodle joint, then took a circuitous half-mile walk. If someone really wanted to, they could use some satellite birds and the NYPD security cameras to track me. But it was a point of my pride to make it as difficult for them as possible. I slipped through some strip malls that had closed down long ago, then in the front door and out the back door of a couple of Eastern medicine shops where I bought most of my massage supplies. Then I went through an abandoned garage that was devoid of security cams. I put on a ratty sweater and floppy hat that I’d stuffed in the bag I was carrying. Then, I popped back out into daylight again.
Five minutes later, I made it to a sleepy Victorian house. It was one of only a few remnants from the early 1900s left in the area. An ancient aluminum reindeer permanently adorned the tiny front lawn. Wide-sided metal window blinds, rusted into a solid mass, made it impossible for any passerby to look inside.
Over the few years that I’d owned it, I’d explored the house’s every nook and cranny, turning it into a place that would allow me some privacy—rebuffing all the government and commercial detection programs to the best of my ability.
After the door was unlocked, I activated a detector program I’d developed on my mobile and did a search for miniature drones and wall cameras. Even if intruders did manage to get inside, they wouldn’t see much of who I really was: just a garish collection of old furniture and rugs. A scattering of dirty dishes helped complete my fictional Middles slob tableau.
I climbed the old wooden stairs to a bedroom with a few more set pieces: stray clothing hung over a couple of chairs, socks stuck out of a drawer. The silence in the darkened room was only tinged by the faint hum of the quick freeze downstairs.
A series of flashing lights on my mobile’s intruder detection program gave me the “all clear” signal. I opened up the closet, pushed aside some boxes, and lifted a trap door in the floor. Within seconds, I had dropped through the hole and worked my way down a ladder that descended two floors to a basement room. It had once been used for coal storage and was completely blocked off, undetectable to the outside world unless someone followed me down that secret passageway.
Standing in the blackness, I breathed in the earthen air. It was so satisfying to be truly alone. The room didn’t have automatic lighting, so I flicked on a lamp the old-fashioned way, with a switch.
The space was fastidiously tidy—except for a dog food bowl shoved up beside the pallet of old blankets where Count Down had slept before I took him to Mama Neeta’s. It had been quite the process, lowering him down the hole, and then up again, with ropes.
There were just a few sticks of furniture and an invisible airbed in one corner. (I allowed myself that one luxury.) A long table was covered with neatly arranged painting supplies. Portraits were propped up against the walls, charcoals and acrylic renderings of Mama Neeta and all her children. I’d painted them from memory. Visual art was something I’d always done and would never give up.
Yes, the pictures were the work of an untrained artiste; I recognized the crudeness and accepted it. But creating them always gave me a sense of release, and that’s what counted. I picked up one of my latest paintings, of the venerable old Theodore Tseng, based on my recording of what he’d looked like during our one holographic conversation.
He had been right; his grandson was still alive. But where?
An old conversation surfaced. I’ve inherited 37 islands in the South China Sea. That’s what Thom had said, rather smugly, during one of our chats long ago.
# # #
THIS WASN’T THE FIRST time Thom disappeared. Back when we were at MIT, it happened just after he revealed to me what the Juice could do. There was no sign that he was using his brain station. In fact, it didn’t appear that he was visiting campus at all, except for one occasion when he stumbled into class looking completely tapped out.
The professor demanded that he stay afterward for a few words, which would undoubtedly be explosive. So Thom fled. Then he dropped out of school entirely.
He didn’t pick up any of my calls or answer any of my messages. I had to know if he was in town. Becoming a stalker went against the “grain” of who I was. But I missed my friend, and the memory of how attracted I’d been to him, in his Juiced-up state, made me extremely curious about what he was up to.
One night, I hid outside Thom’s apartment building. He emerged in his extraordinarily alluring Charismite state around 1:30 in the morning and took off in his car. Over the following few nights, he did the same thing.
It became an obsession—the need to know where he was going. And in truth, I was a little bit magnetized to him. So eventually, I trailed after Thom, always at a safe remove, and discovered that he was barhopping in places cast far afield, cities like Portsmouth, Providence, and Brattleboro. He never visited the same location twice (at least not while I was tracking him) and always seemed to mesmerize a new group of lovelies. The women couldn’t seem to keep their hands off him, intoxicated by his very essence. I lived vicariously through his exploits.
That part made sense. If you had super-charismatic powers, why not enjoy them?
But as the nights passed, Thom seemed to have other objectives in mind.
“Why on earth do you keep those gorgeous breasts of yours covered?” he asked a voluptuous auburn-haired young woman one night. “Show them off to the world.”
“Show them off! Show them off! Show them off!” the crowded chanted.
The girl laughed as Thom touched her, saying: “I’ve never wanted to lick anything so much.” I could almost feel the thrill of him running through her. She ripped off her tight little shirt. He stuck his face into the middle of her pillowy center. After a few more of his suggestions, she jumped up on a table and bounced her boobs around as a patriotic march blared over the speakers. Everyone gave her their rapt attention.
A few nights later, I slipped into a bar to find Thom murmuring into the ears of a rather comely female police officer and an equally stunning bartender. The cop pulled away from him suddenly, yanked out her laser pistol and yelled, “Everybody! Get back!” The crowd fled to the far corners of the room. She zapped all the bottles of booze behind the bar, shattering all of them. Sticky glass shards were all over the joint. The bartender nearly crippled up with laughter, fueled by Thom’s love drug.
I tried to stay hidden from view during these espionage exploits, but it didn’t take long for Thom to catch on. One night, he left his apartment earlier than usual. I hadn’t been there in time to track his route. It was impossible for me to just go home and try another night. I was addicted. What would he do next?
There was a fairly easy solution to my problem: hack into my father’s national navigational grid—something I’d been doing for years. By plugging Thom’s car license into the database’s search field, I was able to determine that he was hanging out in Montreal. I found his car outside a high office spire that was built to sway, ever so slightly, in a stiff breeze. The building’s directory informed me that there was a very chic restaurant on the 102d floor. It was pretty easy to guess that’s where he was.
When I entered the restaurant’s cocktail lounge, every person in the room was plastered against the windows with a gaga stare. I wedged my way through the bodies and made it to the plexiglass. It was dizzying to look down into the city from the tower as it listed back and forth.
My friend was visible on a balcony just outside the windows. I was so magnetized to his feverishly radiant state. A wire had been strung from the balcony’s railing across to another swaying tower, about a city block away. Thom called to a young woman at the other end of what was clearly meant to be a tightrope. Her brunette hair billowed out in the breeze.
I activated the telescope on my mobile screen to look at her more clearly. She was far too buxom to be any kind of gymnast—a Rubenesque delight who couldn’t have been older than 16. Her feet were in flimsy little slippers, and she looked stunned to be standing there. The girl’s eager eyes locked on Thom’s across the expanse.
It sent a chill through me.
“Okay, darling,” Thom called to her through his mobile megaphone. “Walk this thing for me. You can do it!”
She stepped out on the thin wire, seemingly in a trance. It was a pretty good guess that she’d never done anything like this before. My fear curled tighter. Thom was risking her life. I shoved through the crowd to the balcony doors. “Thom! What are you doing? Stop! Tell her to go back!” I shouted.
Thom smiled knowingly as if he had been expecting me to do that, but he didn’t look away from the girl. As she walked the wire toward him, it sang shrilly in the wind, rocking as the building swayed over the concrete 102 floors below.
Her face beamed at Thom brightly; it was as if she was walking toward the splendid genius of God. She didn’t slip at all. And when she finally reached Thom, he lifted her up and carried her inside as the crowd let out a laughing roar of adulation. The girl consumed Thom with a series of kisses, as if he’d given her the most precious gift.
I left abruptly. I didn’t want to see anymore.
The next evening, as Thom left his Cambridge building, I surprised him with a left punch to the kisser. He crumpled to the ground and spit out some blood, gazing at it in fascination. A long, derisive laugh spilled out of him, which infuriated me even more.
“How could you play with that poor girl’s life that way? How could you?” I shouted. “I took you for more than a heartless prick.”
“There was no way she ever would have fallen.”
“If that’s true, then why did you need to test her?” I walked off, cursing myself for feeling such an attraction for him, even then.
Thom shouted after me, “Because it gave a whole lot of people pleasure, including me! I can make anyone do anything!”
That killed any interest I had in following him. Bare boobs and broken bottles were one thing. Now he seemed cruel. It was too disturbing. I would never tell a soul about his Charismite secret, but as far as I was concerned, my friendship with Thom was over.
A few months later, I had two unfortunate “run-ins” that pushed me even further away from thinking about Thom. One of them involved my parents.
I was the sole offspring of Bianca and Evander Ellington. They had bioengineered my DNA so that I was gifted at developing technology, just like dear ole Dad. But their interest in me was decidedly distant. Raising kids really wasn’t their forte.
My mother’s claim to fame was an exceedingly powerful family, the Rothbirs. It had made a fortune developing hybrid forms of metal that were much stronger than traditional building materials. Bianca seemed “made to order” for Evander. He was the CEO of Silverton Enterprises—a company that had developed the national navigational system. It also had constructed some of the most beautifully designed buildings in the world.
Just before our blowup occurred, I’d hacked into the navigational system that my father had created so I could fly my bike manually—the little trick that had made Thom admire me when we first met. The Federal Aviation Service had finally caught on. It rewarded me with one night’s stay in the best prison cell on Riker’s Island, a token punishment in recognition of my family’s standing.
When I dropped by the family mansion after my release, my father was beside himself. Evander liked to play the part of the hip CEO. Usually, not a hair of his ponytail was out of place. And there wasn’t a wrinkle in his crisp white shirt and black drawstring pants made of linen sourced from antique fabric purveyors in Brussels. But in his ticked-off state, he looked old and rumpled.
He began reading from a news story on his air screen: “‘The national navigational grid that was created by Evander Ellington has been undermined by his own son. Jarat Ellington has attacked the –’”
“I didn’t attack it. I just don’t care to use it.”
“Do you know how many years it took me to create that grid? And for what? So idiots like you would never die.”
“It was so you could make a shit load of money ...”
“That’s –”
“So the U.A. government can control everybody’s movements, from the crib to the crypt, in every way it can think of.”
My mother’s light green eyes embraced me as if I were still a little boy. “Really, darling, there’s no need for conspiracy theories. Your father did an amazing thing. The death toll from car accidents has gone down to almost zero since that grid was installed. If you let others control the simple things in life ...”
I slammed out of the house. Didn’t she understand that the grid was a vast manipulation—part of the age-old plan to know where everyone was, what they were doing, to guess what they were planning at any one point in time?
No way in hell was I going on the grid, ever again. I was so blinded by fury as I drove my bike across the Rhode Island border on my way back to school in Cambridge. I flew faster than I ever had outside a hypertube, 200 MPH—which was pretty much why I failed to see a truck hang a sharp turn. My bike slammed directly into it.
Shards of its windshield lodged in my chest and popped out my back. The bones in my right leg were broken in several places; muscles throughout my system were badly ripped; my skull was smashed.
One afternoon when I was lying in the hospital bed recovering from everything that I’d done to myself, Thom appeared. He was in his normal state and looked shocked and forlorn. “What the hell?” The sincere worry on his face melted my anger towards him.
“I went off the grid,” I muttered.
Thom coughed. “Yeah, I got that part. Might try doing it with a tad more finesse.”
We both burst out in a sort of black laughter. It felt so good to do that. Then Thom took my hand. It was amazingly comfortable, that touch. His golden face was so round, his smile so large. I was reminded of storybook illustrations of the sun. Even though he wasn’t pumped up on the Juice, there was enough residual effect for me to suspect that I was wearing his tightrope walker’s expression. It felt as if I were staring at a heavenly presence.
“There’s something you need to understand,” Thom said. “I wasn’t playing with that girl’s life. I knew she’d never fall. But I wanted to see it. When you have as much power as I have, it’s hard not to use it.” There was such high hope on his face. “What you saw, that’s just the beginning of what I intend to do.”
I believed him, and I found the good in him again. It was impossible to stay angry. No one else had visited me in the hospital, except for my mother (certainly not my father). Thom was the most true-blue friend I had.
At that time, I didn’t know that someone’s brain was implanted in my sorry head. And I didn’t know about Mama Neeta and the rest of her family. There was just this troubled hunch that my request for a synthetic brain had been ignored. The thought was weighing on me. If I got ready to talk about it, Thom would be the first person I’d turn to. He’d always help me if he could.
Suspicion spread across Thom’s face. He released some tiny bots that scanned the room for eavesdropping security cameras—a strictly illegal act, in that hospital, not that it mattered to Thom. After “cleansing” the wall paint of at least half a dozen, he began again. “Listen, Viz. It’s not safe for me to stay here anymore. Somebody’s following me, and probably trying to get the Juice.”
“Shit! What are you going to do?”
“First stop, Beijing.” The Tseng corporate empire must be beckoning.
“Oh, Gawd. Is your family trying to reform you again?”
He tossed a little device up in the air and caught it again. I vaguely recognized it—the little pencil-sharpener-like thing he’d filched from the Tseng H.Q. some time ago. “I’m working out a plan to outrage them.”
“I wish I could be a drone on the wall to see that.”
“Easily arranged, old chap.”
“The mind is willing, but I’m not sure it could take the excitement right now.” Thom grinned at that. “Are you ever going to tell them about the Juice?”
“No!” His sudden anger startled me. “They can never know about that. Do you have any idea what they’d do?”
“Not reall—”
“They’d sell it to the Asian government. It could be devastating—how they’d use it to control people. You can never ever tell my family or anyone about it!”
“Jesus, FG. Calm down. Of course. Whatever you want.”
“Okay.” His anger went from 1,000 miles an hour to zero in two seconds flat. “Sorry.”
“What are you going to do after this little tête-à-tête with the fam?”
“Relocate to one of my jewels.”
“Jewels?”
“I’ve inherited 37 islands in the South China Sea. And a nice little group of them are replete with rare-earth substances. I’ll make sure that whoever is following me will have a tough time tracking me there.”
# # #
THAT WAS THE LAST TIME I saw Thom in the flesh. I came out of the old memory, conscious once more that I was in my secret room. Was the person who had been following him in Cambridge years ago the same person who attacked him outside The Pinnacle in Astoria? Exactly how did this fucking creep intend to use the Juice?
Someone who had super predatory drones at their disposal wasn’t just interested in coaxing women into bizarre behavior. What if one person became so magnetic that they could lead a massive number of people to do certain evil things without any concern that they’d lost their mental control? What would it be like if a bunch of rogue Charismites roamed the world? That’s what Thom had been worried about. But it wasn’t his family that had it now.
“I can make anyone do anything.” Those were Thom’s words. Was the person who stole the Juice saying that same thing now?
I pulled up the Señor KickingBird holo graffiti and gazed at a freeze-frame of the character’s face. It was as if the image was waiting for me—waiting for me to find far more than the recording of the attack.
“No more guessing games, Thom. Take me to your damned island.”
KickingBird’s mouth moved suddenly, no longer in freeze-frame. It curled up, up into a jolly smile. And then I fell into a dreamisode.
A small aircraft carried me across a dark ocean. The waves, only a few feet below, spiked endlessly with primeval, relentless power. An electric thrill raced through me.