After Death(52)

In childhood and adolescence, Michael had been an outsider for reasons different from those that condemned Shelby to that status. His mother, Beth, had been known throughout the neighborhood as a mental case. Some adults called her “Batty Beth,” but to most kids, she was Bugshit Beth or worse. She earned the names. Because she didn’t engage in physical violence—only the emotional kind, with her son as primary target—she wasn’t committed to a psychiatric ward, therefore never diagnosed. Maybe she had not always been a colorful eccentric, but Michael had never known her otherwise. She married at just seventeen. Her husband, Lionel—Michael’s father—was seven years older, a city employee in the street department. Shortly before Michael’s first birthday, Lionel was killed when the brakes failed on a flusher, a water-carrying street-cleaning truck, and he was crushed against a building wall. Because the flusher proved to be poorly maintained and obvious negligence was involved, the city avoided a courtroom by promptly authorizing a settlement, part in cash and the rest in the form of an annuity that would pay Beth a monthly sum for the rest of her life. Over the years, she complained that her attorney sold her out and took an under-the-table payment in return for accepting far less than was warranted. Maybe that was the case, maybe not. One thing for sure is true: Michael never heard her say that she loved Lionel or that she missed him. When Beth was in her best mood, she called her son “Mickey” or “Mickey Mouse” or “Mouse.” On those days when her grip on reality unraveled further and her spirits darkened, she either didn’t speak to him or called him “boything” or various obscenities.

That unstable environment, with the heavy burden of humiliation attending it, inspired his interest in the security industry, which to him was all about safety and stability, preventing irrational people from ruining the lives of the rational. Deadbolts, electronic locks, perimeter alarms, motion detectors, bullet-resistant glass, panic rooms, the strategies and tactics of bodyguards: He wanted to know everything he could learn about how to make life safer for others and, in the process, for himself as well. Later than should have been the case, as recently as a year ago, he came to understand that eighteen years of life with his mother had also inspired in him a fear that committing to marriage might trap him in a domestic situation alike to what he had escaped when he was eighteen. There were women in his life, some whom he loved, but when a relationship became too promising, he eased away from it.

Now, as he exits the freeway for a state road, motoring into sparse traffic and away from suburban lights, the night becomes immense. The wind and rain seem to be sweeping everything off the curve of the Earth, into a void. Those long-ago words Shelby spoke come to him again, with greater power than ever. What life have you if you have not life together? Those were not, Shelby said, his own words, but were those of a poet who more than half a century earlier foresaw the evolving isolation that an ever-more mechanized society would impose on those who existed within its coils and circuits. What life have you if you have not life together?

Michael has become the long-heralded Singularity, much less of a mutant than those who desire such a transformation hope to become themselves, but a mutant nonetheless. The insertion of nanowork into every cell of his body, into his genome, has in some ways made him more gifted than all other human beings. At the same time, he’s at risk of becoming so different from other men and women that he will have no life in community with them. The internet and the millions of computers associated with it, the virtual reality that therein exists and that will become more vivid in the years ahead, is not a reality at all, and to live in such a fabrication is to be buried alive without the release of death. Desperate and empty and confused people might choose such an existence. Such a choice will lead not to Shangri-la, but to a vortex of madness. Avatars do not make a community; they are shadows of people, not people. Mile by mile, Michael more fully understands the truth of the future that could overtake him, and he is chilled to his core. Nina needs him, and John needs him. Michael needs them even more than they need him. His commitment to them must be complete, at the risk of a second and permanent death, if he is to have a hope of a life in true community with others.





HORSEMEN




Bearing no light, Aleem and Kuba and Hakeem and Carlisle and Jason and Speedo are born out of the dead trees like a final fall of spoiled fruit.

Before them, buildings slab the clearing, darker than the night and without detail, large but giving the impression of greater size than they possess, magnified by their mystery.

Aleem is reminded of a cool video game in which the ultimate sequence is set in a ruined castle where the Princess of Time lies bespelled in a secret redoubt, during the last hours of the world. She alone has the power to turn back the clock to an age of peace and plenty. As a player, you can choose to be Prince Endymion, in which case your goal is to find the princess and wake her so that she can live in the world to save it. Or you can be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine, or Death—who are seeking the princess to murder her and complete the destruction of the world. Because the weapons given to Pestilence and Famine take longer to obliterate someone, Aleem has always chosen to be either War on a red horse or Death on a pale horse. The horses look like powerful stallions, but they are really machines equipped with all kinds of kick-ass weapons. With his skill at devising strategies and tactics, with his keen reflexes, Aleem routinely runs up such a kill score of knights defending the princess that Prince Endymion is doomed, the princess remains asleep, and the world ends in a most satisfying frenzy of rats and bats and bursting bombs.