Imago, page 25
“You can’t get away,” Harmon snarled. “There is no away. This place is mine.”
Dick was silent. He had never been the fastest runner, but this was still Dick the football player, not old Dick, tired Dick, slow Dick.
He was not running from Harmon so much as he was running toward Julie. Trying to find some way out of the storm and back to her.
At last, he saw a door and he leapt for it.
Harmon roared in rage as the portal slammed in his face. Dick braced himself the door, feeling Harmon scrabbling against it. It would hold, Dick thought, at least for a little while.
Dick surveyed the area beyond the door. He had not been here before; he supposed it had been something Harmon was thinking of. He smelled Harmon’s taint, though the room was plain, blank and antiseptic, showing no other sign of the enemy.
Dick felt around a bit. This was some sort of security room. He saw another door at the other side of it.
As Harmon began to break through, Dick leapt toward the second door, and fell. Not into another storm, but into a hospital room.
Julie, he whispered.
She lay under twisted covers, her skin pale and veiled in sweat, dark eyes enormous in a wasted face. Dick tried to reach for her, realizing with sick dread that he could not. He had found a seeing place. He was still trapped here — in the otherwhere/otherwhen that formed the fabric of the PerfectTown. He could not go to her. Her breathing was ragged. Her chest rose and fell with great effort.
Like my brother. Harold had suffered so much before he died. That same emaciation, that same struggling for breath. And there had been nothing Dick could do. It was the same now, as then.
In the distance, he heard Harmon’s cries of fury and impotent rage. At least Dick was not the only one who was having trouble in the storm.
If Dick was to reach Julie and help her somehow, he’d have to leave the seeing place. And it would almost certainly lead him back to another confrontation with the imago of Harmon Jacques, dogging his path through the storming DisLex brain.
As he turned, another view opened in the seeing place. The view was familiar: a mountain retreat. So long ago, they had gone; Dick, Pat, and some of the others, up to such a place. Pines and rocks under the blazing sun and painfully blue sky. Dick glimpsed more of the mutants, similar to the ones from Camp Roberts. But this was not Camp Roberts. The mutants were dressed normally. There were other men. Dick saw helicopters and men with the guns, wearing DisLex coveralls and crazy masks.
The mutants didn’t have a chance.
He watched three of the DisLex men drag Julie from a cabin. She was unconscious, dead weight.
Then came a sudden shift. There were more of them in yellow coveralls, holding some of the mutants prisoner.
Then a fellow, quite brave, ran out of the woods like a hero and tried to free one of the mutants.
Dick cringed as the man fell. Though Dick had seen death, it still shocked him. He suspected that if he ever got over it, he would truly be damned. It was chaos after that; until the eventual and obvious conclusion — all the surviving mutants and a few “normal” people stood, waiting for ambulances that arrived, far too late to do much good. The men in coveralls fled back to their helicopters.
Sighing, Dick turned away. He began to press outward, tentatively, looking for a way to reach Julie’s side. He came upon a dark, narrow door, and tried it. It was another seeing place, but... different. Ordered like a library. Records were stored deep and wide, extending as far as Dick could see.
Dick touched one of the nearest records. He immediately saw Julie in a small, homey living room, curled in a rocking chair. She was weeping.
He shook his head. Why? Then, he realized that these were videos of some sort. Like his videos. His films. This was how Harmon planned to “create her” as an imago. All of this information, just as he’d “created” Dick. Quickly, Dick sampled from the records. Thousands of hours of Julie. Tens of thousands of hours: years. Julie had known no privacy for a very long time.
Dick had taped a great deal during his lifetime, but nothing like this. He remembered the endless saving: scraps of paper and notes. Everything he wrote by hand had been copied, archived and filed from the Presidential years, but it had begun long before. He had somehow thought that it was important to keep the huge bag of telegrams from the Checkers speech; the one where he’d talked about Pat’s good Republican cloth coat. He supposed that he had wanted to wave those hundreds of thousands of thin half-sheets of goldenrod paper, saying, “Ike, look how wrong you were.” Look at what the people say, Mister President, Mister General, Mister... God, and the telegrams had many years later become Rose Mary Woods’ recorder. Every damn grunt and belch and expletive deleted, preserved for history.
But he had wanted it that way.
Julie had no choice. This wasn’t Dick’s style, it was Hooverlike taping. Dick shivered thinking of that old monster and the files he had kept. Yet even that old faggot sack of filth, J. Edgar Hoover, couldn’t have matched what Harmon Jacques had done to Julie Curtez. But he was still down there, listening, and looking. Deep in the guts of the brain, spying again.
Dick was no cold-blooded killer, but he had ample reason to murder Harmon Jacques in all his incarnations — living and imago. But maybe there was something worse than killing. It was worth some thought, and if there was one thing Dick Nixon knew how to do, it was think. It was worth special thought, for what Harmon had done to him; the shuddering horror of the deception and betrayal — that beautiful girl Katie— somewhere she was real, Dick knew. Somewhere in the otherwhere/otherwhen... and she meant something. He knew that. She had been real, at least for a moment. More than that, Harmon Jacques needed to suffer for what he had done to Julie. And to her husband. Dick knew that the man who had died at the hands of the DisLex men at mountain retreat has been Julie’s husband. His name was — had been — Frank. Harmon was not merely insane, he was a murderer. And more than that, he was mad as Hitler or Stalin; only he had the power they’d never had to do what they had wanted to do: remake, or destroy, the world in their own image.
It was just about fucking right that the world thought Dick Nixon was evil, just like them. Just about right, as if he would ever, in a thousand millennia, do something... like that.
Think, Dick. Think. You let them lie to you, before. You let the conflagration come down; you destroyed a nation. Thousands of little innocents, dead because of you. It was never your war — not then — and not now, but it became your war. You owned it. You lied to keep power, take power, and what was that power but the power to destroy? Humiliate. Ultimately to humiliate yourself, your country, and everything you ever believed in. And you see what has become of things. No one believes in anything any longer. They are rotting, literally, with the evil from inside. Because it’s the absence of good! That’s what that virus is, really. They are rotting from the inside because there’s no honor any more. No goodness, no belief, and no hope. Every last one of them is just like Harmon: a dirty, perverted thief and liar with his soul, dead and gone.
Dick gently put the things he had seen back in order. He felt dirty, because he had been looking at Julie. He had seen her changing clothes and eating breakfast. Combing her hair while looking sadly in her bathroom mirror.
Who was she, really? Why was she? This girl came from a picker’s shack, that Dick knew. But why her, above all other girls? Why had Harmon picked her? Why had Dick picked her? Was it just her name, Julie?
No.
You did it, Dick. You made this fucking mess and Harmon Jacques was never wrong to call you back. No wonder that little pansy made you his idol. You lied, Dick. You cheated. You turned your back on everything you knew was right, and all for the prize — a prize that didn’t mean a goddamn thing once you were moldering in your grave. When did you lose your innocence? Would that have been with Helen Gahagan Douglas? Or before — when you realized that if you were just dog-assed persistent enough and groveled enough, eventually Pat would give in. And marry you. Even though you knew she did not love you, Dick, even though you overlaid your dreams on her and ate that good woman’s soul like a piece of chocolate cake. Even though you shamed her. And yourself.
What is a good man?
What is a good woman?
You used to know. This girl, Julie. She knows. Her idea of a good imago was Mister Lincoln, balky and simple as he was — who knew where the old stovepipe hat wearing bastard had got to — and Harmon’s was... Dick. That’s why she shrank from you when she first saw you and fucking quit lying to yourself, Dick Nixon... quit lying to yourself and pull your ass out of this and do what’s right. You might not have been what you could have been while you were alive, but you’re not bad, either. You had within you the seeds of greatness. You could have died for your country... no... not died for your country. Died for what was right. So that others could live, free.
Along with the shame and fury, Dick felt a strange glimmer of hope. He would have to go back into the storm, and go straight through Harmon’s imago to reach Julie’s side. To help her. Save her. Dick was ready. For in his investigations, he’d learned something else about Harmon. Harmon was in love with Julie Curtez, or whatever passed for love in his twisted mind. And something even more interesting: Harmon Jacques had the virus, and Harmon Jacques had a son. A son who might have passed for a DisLex character, under different circumstances. The boy lived up at that place Harmon had raided, with a gray wolf woman for a mother and some kind of clown with a worse nose than Dick’s for a dad. Dick Nixon was not above using any of these interesting facts as a weapon.
Jaw set, the Fighting Quaker leapt back into the ice storm which raged in the center of the ravaged PerfectTown somewhere amid the tortured DisLex brain.
oOo
The fire ate Julie from within. Her stomach, her heart, her lungs. It was so hard to breathe. And all of a sudden, the fire turned to ice, and blackness. She was in a horrible storm; an ice storm, somewhere in the black night. Wandering, frigid, with a pair of thin-soled shoes on her feet and no gloves. She had no idea where she was, but saw a light in the distance. She began to walk toward it, though each step was an agony.
It occurred to her that she was dying.
“I want a priest,” she whispered. The words flew away on the wind like dark snowflakes.
“I’ve got some time next Tuesday,” Harmon Jacques told Agent Rick Millian.
Rick Millian shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll —”
Joe Prinn, the lead DisLex imagineer, had interrupted, cutting him off.
Harmon grimaced at the intrusion. “What?”
“Sir,” the imagineer said, voice trembling. “There’s a pretty serious problem. In the brain. Half the building’s down and we’re cut off the net almost completely. It’s total chaos in there.”
“Well, fix it!” Harmon said.
Joe Prinn nodded. “Of course,” he said. “We’re trying. But there’s something else you need to know,” he added.
Harmon wondered what Agent Millian was thinking about this interruption. It wasn’t any help, for certain.
“What?” he said, itching to cut the man off and then get rid of Millian, so he could get back to Julie.
“We used your imago to attract Mr. Nixon, because he’d gone AWOL in the system.”
“You what?” Harmon glared at the anxious imagineer.
“We’ve, uh,” Prinn sputtered, “well, you know we’ve used your imago for some time. Training and such. It’s been in and out of the system for years. And, uh, well, we’ve lost it, too.”
“Look,” Harmon said. “I’m not sure what you just said, but what’s the solution to these problems we’re having?”
To make matters worse, Agent Rick Millian’s face on the screen collapsed into a snowlike shattering of white. Harmon tried changing channels, then dropping the imagineer, but it had no effect.
In a moment, Joe Prinn reappeared. “What I was trying to say, sir, before we got cut off, is that things are galloping out of control. The directories are gone and we don’t quite know why. And it seems like the data is storming somewhere out there in the PerfectTown, and it’s cutting off the rest of the brain. Your imago is in the middle of this... storm... along with Mr. Nixon.”
Harmon struggled to make sense of what he’d been told. “Well, can’t you just reboot?”
Prinn shook his head, grimly. “Sir, we haven’t rebooted this machine for twenty-five years. We have no idea of what would happen.”
“What do you mean? Reboot and restore!” Harmon shouted.
The imagineer cringed. “We’re not, uh — if we restore we’ll lose everything that’s been done... lately,” he said.
Harmon slammed his fist on his desk as Martha buzzed him with the message that Agent Rick Millian was back on the line, “quite displeased” at being cut off.
“Tell him we’re having technical difficulties,” he said.
“Let us try some more things,” the imagineer said. “Before we go to that extent.”
“Okay,” Harmon said, sighing. “Okay.”
He turned back to Rick Millian, who was staring impassively, arms crossed.
Julie was dying out there while he was tied up in this mess. He fingered his laser gun under the table to soothe himself while he negotiated with the damn agent, wishing all the while that he could just fire the gun at him and be done with it. But of course, he could not.
oOo
Joe Prinn had worked with the DisLex brain for a decade. He rubbed his forehead, then rested his elbows on his workstation and, sighing, began to rub his temples vigorously.
“Reboot and restore,” he said, turning to his partner, who was attempting to navigate formerly orderly directories which had melted into madness in the sudden data storm.
The partner’s eyes widened.
“What?” he said.
“That’s what he said,” Prinn replied.
“Shit,” the partner said.
“It always comes home to roost. Would you like to tell him we haven’t backed this thing up for ten years, because we can’t, or shall I?”
“But I thought we did tell when we stopped making backups? You said we told them we needed a second brain because of otherwhere, otherwhen. When the data started being temporally complex, randomly generating itself. And they wouldn’t pop for it, so that was that.”
“That was that,” the senior imagineer muttered. “I’m not even sure it would have been possible. Making something like this brain — the power required — they’re out there on their own doing God knows what. You can’t make something like that and ‘back it up’ like somebody’s taxes. They didn’t listen.”
“I know,” the partner said, continuing his search through the scrambled structure.
“It’s all fucking cut loose and there’s no way back.” Prinn blinked at his screen, which was covered in fractal patterns. He watched, incredulous, as a tall, cadaverous figure wearing a stovepipe hat, a black coat, and impossibly long shoes walked among the shimmering fractals, hovered a moment, then disappeared. There was no mistaking Mister Lincoln, who had come out of nowhere, and just as quickly slipped back into nowhen.
“Don’t say that,” the partner said. “Did you get a load of that? Where the hell did that come from?”
Prinn retrieved a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blew his nose loudly, because he had begun to cry and he hoped to convince his partner that he was just coming down with a bad cold.
After a moment, the partner spoke. “Yeah,” he said. “Look at that. Goddamn Mister Lincoln walking. Just makes you want to cry.”
Just then, the red phone rang. It was Anaheim. The park manager. “There’s some kind of storm centered over the PerfectTown. We’re shutting down for the day — I can’t believe this. What the hell is happening? We had to turn on the generators just to put through this call.”
“It started here,” Joe Prinn said. There was no use in lying.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the manager said. “When’s it going to stop? It’s damn near about taking the roof off. I’ve never seen anything like it — a black cloud, with fifty-mile an hour winds — right over the PerfectTown! Guests were injured.”
A real storm! Jesus H. Christ! “I’m sorry about that,” Prinn replied. “I honestly can’t say when it will be over. You did the right thing. Close the park down.” He paused. “And you go home, too. Get everyone out of there.”
“Holy shit,” the manager said. “You mean you can’t —“
“No,” Joe Prinn said. “Right now, there’s nothing we can do.”
“Okay,” the manager said. “Can’t wait for this one to hit the newsfeeds. They’re outside right now,” he said, pausing. The line crackled. “They’re right here in fact. I’ll talk to you later.”
Then, the line went dead.
“I can get the east coast feed just fine,” the assistant said. “Look at this.”
The Fox News anchor’s face was serious, under his thick, careful makeup.
“There’s trouble at the Magic Kingdom,” the anchor said. “A bizarre storm has appeared, localized over Main Street U.S.A. Up and down the state of California, power is reported out in dozens of communities; in Los Angeles, the subways have stopped running and the CalTrak Express line is stopped between Santa Barbara and Ventura. We’ve also got reports of trouble in Orlando, too, with tourist centers shut down, and a reported monorail tragedy — more details as the story progresses.”
“Deep shit,” the assistant said.
“There’s no call for profanity,” Joe Prinn said, and he turned back to his controls, even though he knew there was nothing to be done.
The assistant rose, and Joe Prinn decided that the man was going to leave... a little early.
“Don’t bother,” Joe said. “Power’s out all over the building. Unless you want to walk down forty floors... along with everyone else. You might as well sit and wait. Why not try to help?”
“Shit,” the assistant said, sitting back down. “Sorry! I’m sorry, Joe. Damn, this sucks!”
