Bogdan considered buying a Sooothe at the NanoJiffy, but his latest Alert! was about to run out anyway, so he climbed the creepy stairs. He forgot to stop at seven and found himself at his old room above nine. It was sealed with a new metal door with a flashing NO ENTRY glyph. The door was locked, so he continued up to the roof.
Bathed in moonlight, the garden exhaled audibly, and the city around him grumbled. Across town in Elmhurst, E-Pluribus struck camp and moved with Annette Beijing to a city beyond his reach. The pirates in the bricks sang work songs as they mined Calumet clay, and the Oships left the solar system without him. The Beadlemyren and Tobblers fell in love and got married on top of a trash heap. If only he’d been able to connect with one good punch, it might have all been worth it.
When the Alert! ran out, there was no time to go down to Rusty’s room, so Bogdan slogged to the garden shed and unrolled a seed mat on the floor. He was asleep before he fell on it and he slept soundly for the next thirty hours.
FRED ARRIVED HOME at 3:00 AM, thinking only of sleep. The moment he entered the apartment, he sensed that something was wrong.
The living room was serving a self-teaching lesson on “The Regeneration Rates of Necrotic Neurotransmitters,” but Mary wasn’t in the room, and her spot on the couch was cool to the touch. The door to the bedroom was open, and the lights were on, but there was no sound.
The slipper puppy came over and waited expectantly. Fred sat down and traded his shoes for slippers. Only then did he catch the whiff of Samson’s odor on his own clothes. He sniffed his hand.
When Fred went into the bedroom, Mary was sitting up in bed, reading something. He said, “Hi, there,” and she flicked her eyes at him in the most perfunctory of greetings. He leaned over to see what she was reading. Poetry. For an evangeline to be reading poetry at three o’clock in the morning wasn’t a good sign, but not necessarily a bad sign either.
Fred went to the bathroom to tear off his clothes. He took a hot, pelting shower with plenty of gel. He scrubbed his hands. He exfoliated in the dryer. Had his hair trimmed. Shaved. Used an extra dollop of cologne.
When he returned to the bed, the lights were off, and Mary lay with her back to him. That could be either bad or good. He climbed in and spooned himself against her. She was very warm. After a couple of minutes, he whispered, “How was your day?”
For a while, it seemed that she was asleep, but then she said, “A very full and successful day, though exhausting. What about you? How did the chartist convention go?”
Fred thought about the event. “A little bumpy toward the end, but, overall, a wild success and a feather in my cap.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”
They lay still so long that Fred was drifting off when Mary said, “Fred, what is that odor?”
His fastidious toilette and the extra cologne had proven no match for Samson’s essence. Fred pondered how much he could tell her. Although he hadn’t worked for the Starke family for forty years, there was no statute of limitations on client confidentiality. Fortunately, there was no ban on talking about common knowledge.
“Did you see that guy on the Skytel last night?”
“Mmm.”
That was all he said. If she was curious enough, she could connect the dots on her own.
3.11
On Thursday morning, Reilly Dell was again on duty at South Gate when Mary arrived, only this time at the outer gate next to the brick drive. He greeted Mary warmly and inquired after Fred.
Mary passed through the gatehouse scanway, made her way around the barriers, and emerged in South Gate Plaza during the quarter hour of baked bread. On Mineral Way in front of Feldspar Cottage, she heard a strange sound, a sustained, dissonant chord. It grew louder as she approached the cottage door. The only thing it could be was some piece of therapeutic equipment. So she was surprised to discover the source of the sound to be the Ellen jacket lying on the daybed. Its arms were outstretched, its neck and spine arched back painfully, tendons taut as wires, and on its face a look of wild-eyed terror. “EeeEeeEee,” it screamed without pause. Mary searched the room for some explanation.
There were two male medtechs wearing elbow-length vurt gloves crouched on either side of Ellen’s daybed. Nearby, a gaggle of medical professionals, including Coburn, surrounded the tank and controller. The night evangelines, Cyndee and Ronnie, sat in the far corner. None of them had noticed Mary’s arrival.
The two medtechs at the daybed were rubbing the Ellen jacket here and there on its torso with their gloved hands. Their action must have been for some legitimate purpose, but it struck Mary as lewd. Then the medtechs each grasped one of the jacket’s outflung arms and tried to bend them to its sides. They seemed to be tearing them from their sockets. And all the while the jacket wailed its ululating cry.
“Stop that!” Mary shouted at them. “Leave her alone.”
The medtechs glanced at her and continued their efforts.
“Make them stop!” she cried to the others.
Medtech Coburn said, “Butt out, clone.”
Mary covered her ears but could not muffle the jacket’s cry. Outdoors, down the garden path, up the shady lane, across the athletic field, to the little pond she ran. Renata was already there, sitting on a wooden bench, contemplating the water. The two evangelines were at first surprised and then embarrassed to see each other. They had both arrived at the cottage within minutes of each other, and they had both fled to the same sanctuary.
Mary sat on the bench next to her sister. “So, they have you back on mornings,” she said.
“Looks like it.”
A mother duck swam across the sun-dappled pond, followed by a string of ducklings.
“The screaming upset me,” Renata said.
“Me too. I don’t know how Cyndee and Ronnie can stand it.”
Concierge strolled up the path and smiled when he saw them. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “I apologize for not forewarning you.”
“What’s happening to Ellen?”
“Without getting too technical, the jacket is expressing a condition similar to oculogyria. Note the position of the arms, the fixed stare, the cry. What you saw is a somatic response to a single thought pattern, probably a memory engram, that is restimulating itself in a continuous loop. When a human body does this, it can maintain a cataleptic fixation for hours, but eventually the muscles tire and the body collapses. A jacket, however, never tires; it needn’t even pause to draw breath.
“Of course, it’s not the jacket experiencing this but Ellen’s own brain. I think we can safely say that Ellen is no longer comatose, but her new mental state is just as grave.”
Mary said, “What’s causing it?”
“That’s uncertain. At the time it commenced, we were attempting to restore Ellen’s ideomimetic constellation.”
“Ideomimetic constellation?” Mary said. “You mean her ego?”
Both Renata and Concierge looked at Mary in surprise, and Concierge said, “Someone’s been doing her homework. Yes, Myr Skarland, her ego, or focus foci, or spirit, or soul, or any of the hundreds of other fanciful terms humans have applied to it over the centuries. It’s that particular and unique pattern of synaptic discharge that occurs inside our brains whenever we think, ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ In humans, it originates in the neocortex and branches downward into the evolutionarily more ancient lobes and encompasses the whole brain.
“In any case, we may have stimulated a memory engram instead. We believe it to be a part of her death experience, an impression not yet processed into long-term memory when her brain was flash frozen.”