After Death(20)
“Maybe we just snatch the kid now.”
“And the brother who needs more convincin’? What about him?”
“We just do it, then Antoine he’ll come along.”
“Or won’t. Not a chance worth riskin’. Antoine got ambition.”
“Who don’t?” Kuba says.
“Antoine got it big-time. For now.”
“For now?”
“Not so much come day after tomorrow.”
Kuba thinks about that. “Antoine gonna be enlightened?”
“A sudden education.”
Kuba spends time thinking about it and then says, “Somebody might have a chance to move up come day after tomorrow.”
“You got somebody in mind?”
“I might.”
Aleem smiles. “You ready to make a recommendation, I’ll value it highly. Most highly.”
The afternoon slowly darkles, and rain falls in such volume as to float an ark large enough to spare all the species of the world from extinction.
A VIRTUAL JOURNEY
Aware that the GPS in the post-office vehicle indicates that it is in front of the house, Michael puts aside his wineglass and takes the elevator up one floor and crosses the foyer, where the etched-steel forest is forever without weather, where the still and silent deer gaze perpetually in witness of those who come and go. He steps outside into the rain just as the mail truck pulls away from the curb. He takes nine envelopes from the box beside the front door, returns to the house, leaves six envelopes on the foyer floor, and descends to the library with three pieces of mail, all from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The licenses, each with his photo but featuring a different name, should get him through the coming year.
However, he’ll soon be the most wanted fugitive in history. As those hunting for him become more aware of his capabilities, they’ll adopt strategies and tactics that force him to change identities as frequently as a chameleon changes colors as it scurries across the vibrant palette of a tropical forest.
Having drunk two generous servings of cabernet, he concludes that changes to his metabolic process have rendered him immune to the inebriating effect of alcohol—which is a disappointment—though he does feel somewhat relaxed. With a wine as good as Caymus, he’s happy to drink it for the flavor alone, and he pours a third glass.
In the armchair, Michael stares at the Pacific, where earlier Catalina had loomed in the distance and container ships had wallowed at anchor in the long lineup for the port of Long Beach. At the moment, all is formless—rushing rain, billowing mist, the ocean a gray amorphia of swells and swales and flung spume.
He is at all times linked to the internet by electromagnetic waves produced and managed by his own strangely altered physiology. Without need of a computer, he can for the most part reach into any website or digitized archives with which he is familiar, pore through its content, and access whatever information he needs in seconds, while remaining entirely aware of—and active in—the real world. In addition, if he plants a data trigger in a system, he’ll be instantly notified when the event that he has anticipated in fact occurs; the alert will come in the form of a brief text message he created with the trigger, appearing as neon-blue letters in his mind’s eye, as though he’s a clairvoyant receiving a vision.
Sometimes, when he is seeking to assemble and understand a complex chain of information, or when he knows what to seek but not quite where to seek it, he must enter the funhouse maze that mirrors this world in infinite fractal passageways, which is the internet and all linked computer systems, plunge into it rather than merely reach into it. In such a case, for the duration of his explorations, he loses all conscious awareness of the real place in which he exists.
He closes his eyes and prepares to enter the wonders of that alternate world built of ones and zeros, which can seem as fluid and chaotic as any moment of any storm. He has learned that negotiating its megacomplexity of channels is easier if he visualizes himself proceeding in a form of transport—such as a car quickening through a multilayered labyrinth of highways or a sleek cigarette boat speeding through a planet of endless Venetian canals. This time, he imagines himself behind the wheel of a self-driving Tesla, speeding toward the destination that he speaks aloud to its AI driver. His body remains relaxed in the armchair as the Tesla rockets him from the real to the virtual. Although he knows that his body reposes in the library, he can no longer see the room; he can neither hear nor see the storm-tossed ocean beyond the windows.
Because total immersion in an abstract world of coded data ferried on electromagnetic waves would confound the senses and be so disorienting that rampant panic might rapidly spiral into madness, the archaea-nano hybrid particles that have invaded Michael’s brain provide him with the ability to instantaneously translate that data into images that match the form of transportation that he has imagined. In this case, it’s a driverless Tesla on a highway system as fantastical as one that might be created if Christopher Nolan and George Lucas had collaborated on a science-fiction film based on an idea by Jorge Luis Borges. As he perceives them, the lanes are a wild ravelment snaking through a vast darkness, lighted by off-ramp signs glowing an eerie green. He flashes through underpasses, races upside down through barrel loops, takes corkscrew feeder lanes that drop him vertically through uncounted horizontal layers of freeways, and descends an exit ramp under the sign BEAUTIFICATION RESEARCH. Without any consequence of impact, he passes through a wall of the virtual version of the building in which he died, and he comes to a stop.