“You’d better hope that didn’t hit anybody,” Bickle said. Skinner yanked him off the couch by the throat and wrestled him to the jagged, framed air. He didn’t squeeze hard enough for Bickle to stop breathing, but enough to make the guy panic. Skinner dangled him over the sidewalk four stories down. Below, a taxi swerved to avoid the chair that now sat comically upright in the middle of the street.
“You probably won’t die unless you land on your head.”
“Get it over with. Do it.”
“You people killed my family.” Skinner jerked him back in, spun him around, pretzeled him into a full nelson, shoved him up to the broken window’s edge. The wind smelled like salt, like shit, like dead things, like low tide.
“We didn’t kill anyone. I’m a curator. I arrange mis-en-scènes. I make sure certain people are in certain places at certain times. I appear at the right moments to ensure that things proceed according to Mr. Kirkpatrick’s plans.”
“My grandson.”
“They’re keeping him comfortable in a room with no Bionet access. If your grandson got out he could take down the whole platform. He’s got super-admin permissions. He can erase whole directories. Suspend immunities. Unleash plagues. Authorize cancers and virgin births. Millions could die.”
“Why didn’t you just kill him?”
Bickle rubbed his neck and sighed. “This is the violence you inflict to extract increasingly unreliable information.”
“Answer my question.”
“Mr. Kirkpatrick is the only one we know of who’s ever had super-admin privileges. Your grandson could be the heir, the one who can seed the universe with new life, fulfilling our purpose.”
Skinner threw Bickle onto the couch, danced to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of water. Behind him, Bickle said, “I don’t care if you take the boy. I’m just connective tissue. I’m a concept, I’m like a mathematical theorem, Al. But I do know that every possible path open to you leads to extinction. This interrogation, or whatever you want to call it, is about you working through that theorem with a dull pencil, trying to get your big dumb brain to put it together.”
His big dumb brain. Yeah, that about summarized it. Skinner: meat moving through space on dancing legs, a wall of viscera. A montage of comic book encounters with thugs and lowlifes with heavy jaws, faces cracking under his hammer fist. Nightclubs, menacing piss-fragrant alleys. If he let go of what few memories remained, this was how he could live, as an action-movie caricature, a distilled id in the form of a geriatric commando with muscles out to here. Memories persisted in their needled prodding, forcing him toward some unbearable decision. He’d watched these buildings burn to the ground and gazing at them now he saw through their fabricated surfaces to the ruins they once were, those stinking repositories of cadavers.
“Your violence belongs to the old world, the fallen world,” Bickle said.
“What do you call this world?”
“This is the afterlife, Al. Except this afterlife is real and it’s on earth. It’s beautiful. It’s our redemption. It’s the time when we fulfill the task we were put here to do from when we crawled up out of the slime. Mr. Kirkpatrick teaches us that long ago we fearfully opened our eyes and searched for God. Now we open our eyes with love and create new life that will behold our fading shadow in awe. This is how it has been for all time. Intelligence moves relentlessly toward the creation of new varieties of intelligence and the greatest achievement of intelligence is the dissemination of new life forms. This clone of your son is the one we’ve been waiting for.”
“I have no idea whose side I’m even on,” Skinner said.
“You’re on the side that lifted man from the animals. But we don’t need you anymore.”
“I don’t remember how I got here.”
“You took a cab.”
“No, this island. The segues are missing from my memories.”
Stretching his neck, Bickle crossed the room to the stereo. “That’s because you’re a forgetfulness junkie. And by the way, that was a really expensive chair you ruined, I’ll have you know.” On the shelf next to the stereo sat an Apple memory console and a stack of cards. “You really want to know how you got here?”
Skinner didn’t answer, and in not answering indicated that he did.
“Did anything about your trip to Bramble Falls strike you as odd?” Bickle said.
“Lots of hallucinations.”
“Right. The kid with no face and the Indian by the fire. All those detailed memories of your hometown, the trails, the trees. The suddenness with which you were standing at the trailhead eating fruit cocktail from a can. Not to mention you’re never going to find a town called Bramble Falls on a map. The place is an invention. The real stroke of genius, thanks to this young hotshot developer we’ve got assigned to the project, was to embed your dad’s memories in this patched-together memory network where you’ve spent the past couple weeks. But that’s not the highlight. The highlight is this little guy right here.” Bickle held a card between his thumb and index finger. “You remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory and so on. Here it is. The master file. The memory of when you killed your son.”
Skinner fritzed out a bit at the edges. “You’re lying.”
“Your last mission, Al. The final hurrah of Christian America. The ultimate test of a soldier’s loyalty to laws and order and dogma. You carried out your orders impeccably. Your son, the first Waitimu, was born with super-admin privileges. When you learned this you volunteered for the task. This card will show you the abandoned building where you cornered him. It’ll show you the vines that grew up from the concrete beside the door you walked through, the chipped aqua-green paint on the wall. His pleas. You came into our office immediately after the deed and erased the memory, then erased the memory of erasing the memory. You kept doing this until no trace of the original memory remained.”
Skinner tried to breathe.
“And this one.” Bickle held up another card. “This is the sequel. The latest one. The one where you murder the rest of your family.”
“It was newmans.”
Bickle shook his head. “Newmans rescued the boy when you went psychotic. You think you’re going to the Met to save the boy but that’s not in your programming. You’re going there to kill him.”
And Skinner knew it was true. He walked to the window.
“You’ve done what you were designed to do, Al.”
“Who designed me?”
“Guy by the name of Nick Fedderly.”
“I am so confused.”
“Like I said, A+B=C is not the way to go here.”
“Release me.”
“That’s what these weapons are for.”
“I understand. Before I go. The man in the desert. The one with the refrigerator. Who is he?”
“Some call him the Last Dude.”
“What is he doing out there?”
“He’s running everything.”
“What?”
“You mean you haven’t figured that out?” asked Bickle. “The Last Dude is Mr. Kirkpatrick.”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 9
Star never showed. I slept in her bed, ate whatever was canned in the pantry, and did my best to clean the place up. The ground around the house was still muddy, the roof covered in moss. The old, uncompleted frame of the house had started to crumble. I chopped wood. I kept waiting for her to appear but she never did. I was used to keeping to myself and I’d forgotten how much I loved the woods. But what kept me there was the shed. Every morning I made myself coffee and breakfast, then walked to the shed where I’d make a fire in the potbelly stove and study Nick’s dad’s plans. I grew to love the chemical-sweet smell of blueprint paper. I came to see that this wasn’t just a collection of random blueprints. His plan was to transform the island in phases. Chop down hills, fill in gullies, reshape Bainbridge’s irregular coastline into smooth, tapered Manhattan. Once the island was regraded, he’d build from the underground up. Start with subways, sewer, natural gas, communications. Lay down streets, foundations of buildings. Then, somehow, re-create every building in the city. It was an insane plan any rational person would have considered pure science fiction. But the care he’d put into these blueprints made me wonder if they were the product of a true believer.