I walked over to him and came to a stop half a step away. He was an alien; the alien that I somehow knew. I squatted down. His eyes looked at me, hating me, hoping that I would rescue him, damning me for betraying him, begging me to kill him, praying for me to gather him in my arms and hold him.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me.”
“You won’t do anything,” he sobbed.
“I will. I promise.”
“You won’t do anything.”
I held out my hands. “I can do everything. Here I can do everything. What do you want?”
There was a low growl from deep within the building. The boy winced, his head twitching slightly as his neck muscles tensed. “You’ll run!” cried the boy. “You’ll run! You always run!”
“No,” I protested, but the little boy scrambled to his feet and ran down the sidewalk. As I stood, the growl from inside the house grew louder, lower, more menacing. My breath was shallow, the skin on the back of my neck tingled.
There wasn’t any reason to go into that house. No reason of mine. Only a figment of an android’s imagination had accused me of running; accused me of betraying him; accused me of being a coward. And there was nothing to fear. I was the traveler. I was in control. All was symbol. Nothing was real.
I walked to the base of the steps and looked up into the blackness of that open doorway. A chill, fetid odor came rolling over the sill, down the stairs toward me. Earth, rot, feces, perfume. Sick and sweet.
I whispered to myself, “I am the traveler, I have control, all of this is symbol, none of this is real.” Affirm, affirm, affirm.
I took one hesitant step toward the stairs and the entire front of the building exploded in a roar of flames, deafening me, blinding me, burning my face and hands.
The smoke cleared.
I could see it standing where the building used to be. Four stories tall, roaring fire, acid dripping from its great fangs. The chimaera.
“You,” I began, my mouth too dry to speak. “You are not real—”
It leaped at me, opened its huge jaws and devoured me, the street, my universe. “You are not real!” I yelled as the great jaws crushed my spine. In the distance I could hear the boy screaming. He was alone. I knew I should’ve been there with him. I had betrayed him again.
Everything filled with black; silence without end.
I walked my dreams, the chimaera again small and harmless. The chimaera, an impossible monster, an impossible and foolish creation of the imagination. From where had it come? That was years ago in Danvers, north of Boston’s great armpit. At Nimura Intel, android psychological technician orientation.
“We chase electro-chemical bugs,” said Art Rankin, visiting speaker from Akagi Artificial Intelligence. “Bugs are mind creations, illusions, dreams. In androids it works the same way it works in humans: a contradiction, gap, or other error in the bioprogram. Find the error, fix it, and you get a gold star.”
But there were dangers about which the man from Akagi warned us. The causes of the errors are sometimes real, sometimes not. The bugs, however, are always not real. They are only representations of the errors. “When those giant snakes, machine monsters, and one-eyed drool-dripping horrors come at you, they will sure as hell seem real, though,” he warned.
We were assigned images that we would never fail to recognize upon sight. One of them was the chimaera. It was an outlandish looking thing, and the double meaning amused me at the time. “Represent the most threatening errors with your preselected images,” said the man from Akagi. “That way you will always be able to recognize them for what they are: nothing.”
Nothing.
How had “nothing” invaded my safe place?
How had “nothing” eaten me alive?
Awake.
I was on my back, the surface beneath me hard, unyielding, gritty with filth. Before I opened my eyes I lifted my arm and reached my fingers to the base of my skull behind my right ear. The connection port was vacant. The plastic cap hadn’t been replaced, but I was disconnected.
I opened my eyes and found myself on the floor of the warehouse next to the truck. The android, Alex Shields, was seated in an old plastic chair, his elbows on the armrests, his fingers intertwined. He was dressed in what looked like a set of Keegen’s discarded baggy pseudo leathers. His eyes were open but I could read no expression on his face. He looked done in, which was a vast improvement over a few hours before when he was done for.
“Where’s Keegan?” I asked.
Alex Shields winced as he changed his position in the chair and cocked his head toward the door. “He went home around three, right after the doctor finished closing me.”
“Is that why I’m on the floor?”
“The cutter needed the table. He didn’t want to bend over.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows, my head spinning. “Me on the floor and you with your guts just stitched, and he just left us?”
The andy nodded. “The health plan in this plant really sucks.”
I sat up the rest of the way. A sick headache flowed into my skull and sloshed against the top of my brain pan. As a wave of nausea followed the headache, I closed my eyes against the glare of the lights. “Shields? Your operation. You got much pain?”
“There wasn’t any pain during the operation. The cutter used local nerve blocks. They expired some time ago.” Andys were designed to manage pain well, which is more than I could say for my own unit.
“What about your head?” I asked.
“My head?”
“Before I wiped out, I saw that you’d gone multiple. At least three, maybe four, personalities.”
The android shifted position in the chair, the move causing him some pain. “Right now I’m me, my nervous system seems to be up to specs, and I’m looking at the world through regulation lenses.”
What a load of crap. Did the andy think I was the incarnation of the original mushroom boy? I’d never even gotten to the andy’s illegal modification. I was sure there was more to do, but right then I was too ragged to press it.
I looked at my watch, slightly surprised that Keegan hadn’t taken it. The time was 4:23 in the morning. I looked back at the andy. “Okay, so why are you sitting there watching me?”
“To see if you live or die.”
“Die?”
Alex Shields winced as he nodded again. “The cutter said you had a psycho seizure of some kind with maybe a one in four chance of not coming out of it.”
“And they left me on the damned floor?”
“They couldn’t register you at the local hospital, could they? Doctors with clean coats ask too many questions. If you died or went veg I was supposed to stick your body in the cooler.”
“Keegan’s just a sentimental slob, isn’t he? So what now?”
“I go home with you. I need a place to stay.”
“Did Keegan say that?”
“I did. I need a spot to park.”
I leaned a hand against the truck and struggled to my feet. “What in the hell makes you think I’d take you to my place?”
Alex Shields leveled his unblinking gaze at me. “Has Keegan paid you for your work on me?”
“No.”
“I’m your collateral, Shannon. Give me a hand up and let’s go.”
We helped crip each other to my walkup on 91st. It was a bedroom bathroom thing, change your own bed, fresh towels every five days, fresh paint every millennium. The pig at the desk picked his nose and smirked as I paid him a couple to bring a cot and some extra bedclothes up to my room.
In the room the andy undressed and went right to bed. I caught a glimpse of his middle before he went under the covers and he was wrapped like a mummy. Here and there blood had seeped through the bandages and no one appeared to have cleaned up anything after the operation. Spatters of blood were on his shoulders and legs. The blood spots shocked me for a moment, then the moment passed. It wasn’t important. Andys were designed to be infection resistant.