“And her.” Susannah lifted the pistol slightly, and pulled the trigger. The bullet caught Alison high in the chest-not quite her throat, though not exactly at her heart. The impact knocked her down to the marble floor.
Blind fury ripped through Brad. I could feel the Brain Hotel quake.
“This is not going to be good,” Fieldman told me. Those were the first words to pass his lips that I ever completely believed.
Susannah lowered the pistol to her hip and laughed-a hollow, high-octave chirp. “It's better this way, Paul. I don't think she could have withstood the shock of hearing about how I sucked your dick last night."
Brad launched forward, ready to rip the woman's flesh from her bones.
Susannah took careful aim and shot Brad in the head. As awful as it must have been, I'm sure this was nowhere near as painful-I would assume-as seeing your wife killed. Again.
The view on the lobby screen flipped back and around. With a start, I realized that I wasn't a detached observer. Shit-I was shot in the head, too!
“Take this thing out of my chest and let me up,” I said in the most commanding voice I could muster.
“I can't do that, Collective,” Fieldman said.
“If you don't let me up, we're all dead."
“We're already dead."
Up on the lobby screen, Susannah Winston's face came into fuzzy view. Amazingly, our eyes were still transmitting, but our ears weren't. She was saying something I couldn't make out. Probably something nasty. Not to have sympathy for the devil, or anything, but I couldn't help but wonder what Susannah made of all of this. The poor woman was probably never going to trust another man for as long as she lived.
“You'll feel the fire, wench,” Fieldman said to the lobby screen with an unusual intensity.
Susannah walked off-screen.
Twenty-Four
H-Bomb in Vegas
Within minutes the Brain Hotel lobby was reduced to chattering chaos. Souls started flooding into the room, throwing a million questions at me. Tucked away in their own apartments, absorbed in their own pursuits, I guess they all had felt the shot to our collective head. I tried to explain things to everyone, even with the metal gizmo still lodged in my chest, which nobody seemed to notice. “Listen, everybody,” I said. “If we're all going to live, we're going to have to seize the body back from Brad."
“Not-gonna-happen,” Fieldman said in a sing-songy voice.
“Where's Paul?” Doug asked.
“Paul is dead,” I explained.
“That was a goddamned hoax,” a voice from the back cried out. “You've been listening to that Walrus song too much."
“Shut up, Tom,” somebody else said.
“Tell me one thing, buddy-boy.” It was Special Agent Kevin Kennedy. I hadn't spoken to him for eight months. He'd been lounging in his own retirement resort ever since I'd gotten him-or at least, his memory-in serious trouble with the Feds. Maybe his keen, analytical mind had noticed something important, something I'd overlooked.
“What's that?” I asked.
“How long before we all die and get out of this weird mental hell?"
I decided to go back to ignoring him.
Fieldman looked over the crowd of worried souls and lifted his arms like a priest giving a blessing. “Becalm yourselves! You must realize all of this is a computer simulation programmed to contain your immortal souls! We do not exist in real time! We are in no danger!"
“Shut up, asshole"-or a similar sentiment-was the collective reply.
I checked the lobby screen. A crowd of magazine staffers and drunken lawyers and floozies from steno pools across Center City-basically, anybody with an excuse to be here-started pouring down the stairs. Among them was Leah, who took one look at our bleeding body, then kept walking, a tiny smile on her face.
It was a surreal moment. A crowd of souls in an artificially-constructed hotel lobby within a single human brain, watching a crowd of the living-completely unaware they themselves were being watched-mediated by the body of a man with a massive head wound. I would have spent time pondering it, had my body not been fading away so fast.
Some of the Philadelphia magazine staffers-you could tell by the colored name stickers-started a debate on how to help the poor man who seemed to have been shot in the head. One in particular started to poke around authoritatively. “Alright-move back, people. I know what I'm doing. Somebody call 911? Somebody call NOW, please!"
“Don't bother, pal,” said Kennedy. “We're toast. We've bitten the bag and squirted wet shit."
The magazine guy started foraging around in our jacket, and finally managed to fish a wallet from our jacket. He started flipping through my forged IDs, and finally settled on one-my fake driver's license. “Let's see here. Okay. Who are ya?” the man said to himself. “Hmm. Del Winter. Says you're a power company employee."
A woman piped up: “God, Tim, shouldn't we move him or something?"
“You can't,” said Tim. “You're likely to paralyze him. Now, we've got to keep the body still until the paramedics arrive. Speaking of, has somebody called 911 yet? I mean, for Pete's sake, our friend…” He looked at my ID again. “…our friend Del here is losing quarts by the second."
A bloody hand reached up and wrapped around the license. Tim's eyes widened. Brad was still alive, for the time being.
But perhaps he wasn't reaching for the license after all. I saw another face peek from behind the crowd of magazine staffers. It was Alison.
“She was shot,” I said, mostly thinking out loud more than anything else. “How can she stand there like that?"
“You seem to forget: she's been reborn into a cyborg body,” said Fieldman.
“A what?"
“Android, robot-whatever word you care to use. Surely, you know this. You arrived at the party inside her."
Indeed, I did know. Alison's lips trembled as she tried to move closer. Tim's bushy black hair obscured part of her face, but Alison's eyes remained transfixed. Her bright, blue eyes.
Oh God. Now I knew why Fieldman was acting smug.
“Brad, don't!” I shouted, even though I was nowhere near the lobby mike. “Don't do it!” Maybe my anguish would transmit through the pulpy brain and shattered skull into his consciousness. Either way, it wouldn't matter. Because Brad did it.
He jumped into Alison's body. He even looked right back down at us, and winked, with Alison's face.
I felt the conscious presence leave immediately. The house lights dimmed, as if there were a sudden power shortage somewhere else in the world, and electricity was being sucked away to be shared elsewhere. The lobby screen went blank.
“I'll be with you always,” Fieldman said apropos of nothing, and vanished from our sight.
Leaving the rest of us inside our dying body.
Remember how I was complaining about being trapped in a toilet? A fate worse than death, right?
I was wrong. There is something worse.
The moment Fieldman vanished, the metal gizmo that had affixed me to the floor vanished, too. I was a free man. Wowee. A free man, trapped in a soon-to-be corpse.
Kevin Kennedy slapped me on my soul-shoulder. “I guess this brings the case to a close, doesn't it, buddy? I always knew somebody would get the better of you. Hell, this is the happiest day of my life. Or should I say death?"
“Nobody's dying,” I said. “I mean, not permanently."
I couldn't have picked a worse time to say those words, for the Brain Hotel chose that moment to start to collapse. It started in the uppermost floors, where a few of the more solitary souls resided: a loud, thunderous rumbling, like God bowling in an empty dancehall. Then it became louder and louder, as if each floor were collapsing and falling down on the next, and so on. For all I knew, it was.