Lesser Gods (21 page)

“I’m not a flatterer. Now tell me, what are we really doing here? And how did I get here?”

I suppressed a smile as I put another spoon of sugar into his Earl Gray tea and carefully stirred it. “You know it’s rude to talk business while you’re still eating. I should sulk and make you finish your meal before I say another word. But since you probably don’t have much more time here before walking away, I must offer you a clue, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it is doubtful you will stay here much longer. Soon you will return to wherever you were before… Before I brought you here to visit.”

“You brought me here?”

“I think so. I’m not sure how it works. But I seem to be able to —”

“You mean I’m about to go back to the prison?”

“Only if that’s where you were before. If that wasn’t where you were then I don’t suppose that’s where you’ll go.”

Ralph looked perturbed and then spoke. “This is just a SupeR-G, right?”

“No, I don’t think so. But I haven’t quite sorted it out myself, I’m afraid. It seems that our exposure to Huntington’s games, or maybe the jet…. Something has changed us. I can go places — or seem to go places — just by thinking. And now I have brought you into my reality as well, though I suppose you could just be my imagination, in which case it doesn’t make much difference to you, does it?”

“Do you suppose Huntington has the same abilities?”

“Your guess is as good as the next Joe’s. But one thing’s for sure: When illusions become real, the idea of reality and illusion don’t have much meaning anymore, do they?”

“No, I suppose not, if what you’re saying is true.”

“It’s like being in the middle of a String Theory demonstration and being able to control the excitation modes at will. That is, had String Theory proven true.”

“This is all crazy,” Ralph said.

“Yet here we are, eating jumbo shrimp and enjoying our meal like the real thing.”

“Doubly so since I haven’t eaten since the first of never.”

“Which,” Alice said, “ is as good a reckoning of time as needed since time really means very little any more, near as I can tell.”

“Well, the food seems real enough. I was famished.”

I took a sip of tea.

“You may have a point, though,” Ralph continued. “When reality and illusion become impossible to tell apart, then they were for all practical purposes — at least to the observer in the middle of it — one and the same thing.”

“Does it make any difference as long as you’re enjoying the experience?”

“That’s the question,” Ralph said.

“My question,” I said, stirring yet another spoonful of sugar into my porcelain teacup, “is what we’re going to do with our new skills and knowledge.”

“Huntington is trying to kill us.”

“You think? Bet you got the drift the last time he tried to give you a haircut down to your neck. Though such a haircut couldn’t be much worse than what you have now,” I added with a giggle as I glanced at his scalp. “Looks like your barber attended a hair stylist school run by head-hunters?”

“Very funny.”

“Head today, gone tomorrow?”

“Stop. This is serious. We need some sort of edge over Huntington. We’re not as in control of things as he is — but there are two of us. “

“I don’t think he’s figured out who I am, yet. Last night I concealed myself as a tree and gave him quite a bloody whopping when he came into limb reach. He never even saw me because I winked out before he could find his good eye to put it back in.” I flashed Ralph my most innocent smile and batted my eyes.

“Huntington may have met his match,” Ralph said. He started to add something else, but our mouthless waitress came to the table, interrupting him in a silent sort of way.

“I don’t think we need anything else, thank you,” I told her.

“Nothing more,” Ralph agreed. “I’m loaded to the gills.”

The waitress tapped the tabletop and a bill spun onto its surface. “We hope you’ve enjoyed your meal,” a pre-recorded message told us. “Thank you and please visit us again.”

“Thank you very much,” Alice said, beaming at the waitress who did her best to return the smile with her eyes.

Ralph reached for the bill saying, “I think I have enough squirreled away in my vest to cover this.”

But I snatched it from him. “Better let me have that. You’re starting to fade. You’re going back to wherever you were before I snatched you.”

“What?” he asked, looking down at his hands that, like his chest, were becoming transparent. “Going back?”

“I’m afraid so. I’d suggest you just relax and — “

“I have an idea,” Ralph said, grabbing the metal serving tray and placing it on his lap.

“You’re getting that Cheshire Cat look that I’ve always admired so much,” I said. He grew so transparent he looked like a ghost. “Be careful — I want to see you again — so to speak.”

Ralph Crocker

Everything seemed to blink.

I was back in my previous pickle.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” the medical bot said, shoving the sharp needle of the empty hypodermic syringe into my groin.

Or at least, that’s what would have happened had I not had the metal serving platter in my lap. It had come with me, and now the hypodermic needle bent against it, leaving my family jewels untouched.

“You’ll only be asleep for a few hours while I extract all your teeth and eyes. Then, once you’ve rested for a bit, we can work on your skull.”

With renewed strength perhaps brought on by the full meal I’d enjoyed, I broke free of the tentacle holding me down and rolled of the examination table into the mass of cable that rooted the medical bot to the floor. The machine bent at an extreme angle, three of its hands snatching at me as I rolled farther out of its reach.

“Don’t resist,” the machine ordered. “You won’t feel a thing and then you can be on your way to detox classes.” It snatched at me again.

I zigged when I should have zagged.

The med-bot latched onto me and then its mechanical tentacles twined around me as well. Once I was secure, the machine reeled me in and tossed me onto the table where more restraints snapped into place, little by little securing me to the surface, arms and legs securely bound as if by so many Lilliputians.

A rusty scalpel appeared in the med-bot’s claw, and slowly inched its way toward my right eye. Brave person I am, I closed my eyes and whined, waiting for the inevitable, reflecting on the fact that now would be a great time to — what had Alice called it? Wink. Come on, wink now, I ordered myself.

Wink, wink, wink!

Nothing happened.

I waited.

Still nothing.

I opened my eyes.

I was still on the table.

The scalpel was just a hair’s breadth from my eye and the med-bot stood frozen in place, motionless, as if trying to extract the most terror from the ordeal as possible.

I waited and still nothing moved. The room was silent, except for my beating heart.

Finally: “End of line. Error message 4,562,” the mainframe announced with a grating drone only computers can achieve. “System on hold until reset.”

Never have I been so overjoyed by a computer glitch. Oh, wondrous, beautiful bug of programming.

The only thing that might outdo the glitch I now enjoyed would have been a government tax computer crash, destroying its records of my existence. But this current malfunction was certainly the runner up in a contest of such events.

The error has saved my teeth, eyes, and God only knows what else, I thought, eyes fastened on the scalpel. At least for a while — but I was still trapped.

I squirmed around in my restraints and glanced at the bot that had escorted me to the medical room. It, too, was frozen in place.

How to get free?

I spied the restaurant platter lying on the floor. That had been in the restaurant. Somehow I had brought it back with me.

So my experience with Alice hadn’t been a hallucination of some sort. I had carried the platter back with me.

I didn’t waste any time pondering how any such thing might happen, or what was real and what was not. Instead I wriggled and wiggled until first one hand, then a foot, and then all of me was free of the restraints. I cautiously rose from the table, crossed to the door, and squeezed past the automaton blocking the exit.

After cautiously checking up and down the hall and seeing nothing, I boldly stepped into the passage and then tried to decide what to do next.

One thing was certain: I’d be dead or horribly crippled if I stayed here for even a few more days. If I wanted to stay alive, I had to escape.

But how?

I was clueless.

The irony was not lost on me. Here I was, free as a bird, and I had no idea of how to escape or which direction to flee. It dawned on me that proper direction for a getaway might very well be inscribed on the floor in front of me. “Follow the red line,” was the phrase the bots had drilled into us the night before. So, in theory at least, by backtracking along the red line I should be able to get to the front door.

Provided I went the right way; the wrong way would only lead back to the cells.

I knew I had to act quickly. Once the mainframe rebooted, all bets were off because I was certain one or another bot would grab me before I got far.

So, hoping I was headed in the right way, I raced as fast as I could along the red line snaking down the hallway.

Ralph Crocker

Thirty minutes and two false trails later, I was at the front gate of the pit that formed the entrance of Timothy Leary’s Home for the Addicted. Feeling like Peter freed from Herod’s prison, I stared at the open gate as if an angel had flung it aside. Beyond was the loading ramp where the slaughter had occurred the night before. Then up the incline.

Freedom, sweet freedom.

But was I really free? Were there guards outside? Was it possible they might operate on a system separate from the mainframe?

I cautiously crept onto the dock. There sat an empty truck loaded with prison cubicles.

Empty prison cubicles.

I wondered if it had been full of prisoners half an hour earlier when the system shut down. If so, they had escaped. At least that’s what I suspected. There weren’t any bodies on the dock and the killer mechs were lined up at the ready, frozen in place as if in eternal anticipation of the arrival of the new prisoners to terrify and slaughter.

I prayed my assessment was correct and that everyone in the truck had escaped and that the machines were petrified by the mainframe glitch.

The alternative was that the machines might simply be waiting. How can you tell whether a mech is on its lunch break or if it’s dead?

I cautiously stepped onto the arrival dock and then climbed upward toward the rim of the pit where freedom lay. The guards were truly immobile. It seemed then that the prison wagon must have come in a short time ago, with the glitch allowing the prisoners in the cages to escape. How long before cops from outside the compound came to see what had malfunctioned here at the drug detox hospital? Probably days, weeks, or months. The place was automated and supposedly cared for itself.

I squinted at the sun that shone brightly above the rim of the pit like a beacon of liberty. All I had to do was waltz up the ramp and say “so long” to the insanity behind me.

Yet I didn’t.

Because I was haunted by the plight of the men still imprisoned in the bowels of this nightmare.

So, once more, I became a victim of my own conscience. While a few days before, I would undoubtedly have left without another thought, today I did not. Today my conscience won the match.

The thought of leaving all the inmates back in their prison cells, waiting perhaps for eternity until the system timed out and rebooted or a technician was summoned to check the automated machinery, was more than I could bear. Leaving them in prison was a death sentence, whether the mainframe rebooted or not. If starvation didn’t get them, the errors in programming would, just like they’d got Francis Scot Key this morning.

Heads they lost, tales they lost.

Instead of climbing the ramp, I looked around, trying to fathom where the main controls to the system might be hidden. If I could locate them, and do so before the system rebooted, there was a slight chance that I might set the captives free. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine the most logical spot to place such a system within the prison.