Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (42 page)

The Basement. The concept was so clear, so lucid, that it was positively unnerving. It was that labyrinth
beneath
the maze—a space that Marianne had already imagined and intuited. And tonight, she would find it.

“I want to talk about what the two of us are doing with the rest of our lives,”
Nolan had said.

Marianne heard herself whisper.

“Not now, Nolan. After tonight. After tonight, my business with Auggie will be finished, and we can spend the rest of our lives talking.”

Then she sat down and began to breathe slowly, exhaling to a slow count of five and inhaling to a slow count of ten …

11100
KAMIKAZE

When Baldwin Maisie escorted Nolan, Clayton, and Gusfield into Ned Pritchard’s darkened electronic lair, they found Pritchard sitting precariously as usual on his swivel desk chair, peering intently into the monitor of his antique Commodore computer. It occurred to Nolan that he had never actually seen Pritchard standing up. Maybe Pritchard was surgically attached to his chair.

“What’s he doing?” Gusfield asked Maisie in a whisper.

“Playing with computer viruses,” Maisie explained quietly.

“Pritchard keeps them as pets,” Nolan added.

“Neat!” Gusfield exclaimed softly.

Gusfield grabbed the nearest chair and sat down next to Pritchard. The other three men huddled behind Pritchard and Gusfield. The screen Pritchard was studying displayed an innocuous-looking accounting page. But it was clear from Pritchard’s expectant expression that something dramatic was about to occur.

“Viruses, huh?” Gusfield inquired.

Pritchard nodded silently.

“What’s this one called?” Gusfield asked.

“‘Kamikaze,’” Pritchard said. “Just keep still a minute, okay?”

The five men hovered over the computer screen watching silently. Eventually, a tiny buzz—like that of a fly or a bee—could be heard over the Commodore’s little speaker, and a minuscule dot appeared in the center of the screen. The buzz grew louder and the dot grew bigger, until the dot turned into a Zero—a Japanese fighter plane circa World War II—careening wildly amongst the columns and rows of numbers, directly toward the viewer.

The buzz grew louder and louder and the airplane came closer and closer until the pilot’s Asian face became visible and the whirling propellers filled the screen. Then an explosion rattled the Commodore’s speaker and a single word sprawled itself across the screen in gigantic letters …

BANZAI!

Then the screen went absolutely black. Ned Pritchard wiped a small tear from his eye.

“You’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen,” Pritchard said, his voice a little thick with emotion. “Sometimes these little rascals really get to me.”

“What just happened?” Gusfield inquired.

“Our intrepid pilot just committed ritual suicide,” Pritchard explained. “And he took every last ounce of information stored in this computer with him. I’ll probably never be able to boot up this ol’ Commodore again.” Pritchard shook his head admiringly. “The martial spirit. A rare thing in today’s mundane world of cowardice and compromise and equivocation.”

Then Pritchard, smiling, turned toward Gusfield.

“And you, I am told, are a psychiatrist,” Pritchard said.

“That’s right. Dr. Harvey Gusfield, at your service.”

“And you have undoubtedly come here to carry me off in a straitjacket.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I’m kind of a one man Animal Rescue League of computer viruses—leastwise, for the ones that don’t commit suicide on me.”

“It didn’t occur to me to think of that as a sign of madness, Mr. Pritchard,” Gusfield said pleasantly.

“No?”

“Not at all. Why should it?”

“Perhaps because I think of these things as being truly alive,” Pritchard said.

“Why do you think that?”

Pritchard and Gusfield were facing each other directly in their swivel chairs. Gusfield’s gently coaxing, cajoling tone reminded Nolan of the psychiatrist’s manner when he had so successfully hypnotized Myron Stalnaker the day before.

Is he hypnotizing Pritchard?

“You’re a man of science, Dr. Gusfield,” Pritchard replied. “An M.D., no less. So tell me, what properties must an entity display before you can say it’s alive?”

“Let’s see if I can remember,” Gusfield said, scratching his head. “Oh, yeah. A living thing has got to be able to reproduce, metabolize, grow, and react to stimuli.”

Pritchard smiled.

“Can you think of one of those things a good computer virus
doesn’t
do?” Pritchard asked.

“Good point,” Gusfield said, with a grin.

“The world is full of enterprising young Frankensteins,” Pritchard continued. “We call them hackers and geeks and nerds, but they’re really little gods. And they’ve actually succeeded in bringing inert matter to life. But what do we do when we find one of their wonderful life forms in our computers? We use ‘disinfectants’ to exterminate them. Why? To save some stupid, mindless, soulless piece of software. We kill what’s alive to save what’s dead.”

“It’s like dropping a neutron bomb,” Gusfield suggested. “A device that destroys life but leaves lifeless structures intact.”

“Yeah, right,” Pritchard said raptly. “That’s the idea.”

Nolan could see that Gusfield had Pritchard’s full attention now. Maybe it was hypnotism and maybe it wasn’t. Nolan remembered something Gusfield had told Stalnaker about hypnotism just before he put Stalnaker under.

“It’s a matter of accepting an idea that’s been suggested to you,” Gusfield had said. “Hypnosis happens when I say something and you act as if you believe what I say.”

Nolan now found himself pondering what those words really meant.

Maybe all conversation is hypnosis. Maybe that’s what communication means—trading our beliefs back and forth, keeping each other in minuscule little trances all the while.

“Jesus,” Clayton whispered to Nolan. “These two were really made for each other.”

“Let ’em rattle on,” Nolan whispered back. “I got a feeling they’ll wind up saying something important sooner or later.”

“Anyway,” Gusfield said to Pritchard, “the last thing you need to worry about is my hauling you away to some lunatic asylum—even if you
were
really crazy. Because I tend to look at psychiatric disorders the way you look at viruses. Or like some Native American cultures who make their schizos into shamans. What happens when you ‘cure’ somebody with multiple personality disorder? You gather all their personalities together and say, ‘Listen, your individual existences are all a mistake, and we’re going to mix you all up into one big self.’”

“That’s commie talk!” Pritchard laughed.

“I see it that way, too,” Gusfield said. “There have even been infant studies suggesting that humans are born with a potential for multiple personality. Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of a single ‘self,’ a single ‘personality’ isn’t an aberration—a perversion of the way human beings are really meant to be.”

Pritchard slapped Gusfield affectionately on the shoulder. It was the first sign of overt affection Nolan had ever seen Pritchard show another person.

“Gusfield, you’ve won my heart,” Pritchard said. “I’ve fallen madly in love with you. I want you to marry me. I want you to have my baby.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Maisie interjected with mock dejection. “I thought
I
was your intended.”

“Fuck off, Baldy,” Pritchard said. “Consider yourself dumped.”

“But Mr. Pritchard,” Gusfield laughed, “this is so sudden. I don’t know what to say.”

“Say ‘yes.’ We’ll hold the wedding tomorrow over at Griffith Observatory.”

“But I’m not ready for this kind of commitment,” Gusfield said with mock coyness.

“What can I do to win you over?” Pritchard demanded playfully. “Just name it.”

Gusfield was silent for a moment.

“Well, I was hoping you could help Saunders, Grobowski, and me to shed a little light on the Auggie case,” Gusfield said.

“Consider it done,” Pritchard said. “Just tell me how.”

Nolan held his breath. He knew that Gusfield was finally going to reveal whatever theory he’d been nurturing about the nature of Auggie. How close would it be to the theory Nolan felt growing in the back of his own mind?

“Mr. Pritchard,” Gusfield said, “I gather that you and Maisie have discovered that Auggie has different users.”

“It looks more and more that way,” Pritchard said. “At least we’ve traced him to different phone numbers. And we haven’t been able to figure out how even a phone phreak could switch around that quickly and easily.”

“Well, yesterday I talked with one of these users back in Omaha,” Gusfield continued. “His name is Myron Stalnaker. I talked with him under hypnosis. And it became apparent that he didn’t think he was using Auggie. As he remembers it,
Auggie
was using
him
. He claims to be One of Auggie’s
cells
.”

Pritchard’s eyes widened.

“Christ,” Pritchard said. “I knew …”

“Hold on a minute, Mr. Pritchard. Let me finish. I’ve got a strong hunch that anybody in Insomnimania who’s mixed up with Auggie is undergoing the same experience. It’s not a game. They don’t pretend to be Auggie. From their point of view, they
become
him.”

Gusfield lowered his head for a moment, as if gathering the nerve to make his final point.

“Mr. Pritchard,” Gusfield said at last, “you may think I’m crazy for what I’m about to say, but …”

“Go ahead,” Pritchard said. “I’m maybe thinking along the same lines.”

“I think Auggie is a kind of group consciousness manifesting itself through your network. I think Auggie is a single, unified, autonomous being borrowing sentience and knowledge from many different selves, many different human beings. I think that when a man like Myron Stalnaker becomes Auggie, his experience becomes indistinguishable and indivisible from a number of other people who are
also
part of Auggie.”

Nolan felt a flood of affirmation at Gusfield’s words. Something very much like this extraordinary idea had been lurking in the back of his own mind for some time now.

“Mr. Pritchard, I’m not a mystic,” Gusfield continued. “I don’t believe in remote viewing, telepathy, channeling, or any of the rest of that paranormal crap. I consider myself a hard-core materialist. So even though it’s my own theory, I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it. I don’t understand how some unknown number of people scattered all over the country might share the same personality. But you know computers. You know how your network operates. So I’m hoping you can give me some
hint
as to how such a crazy thing might be physically possible.”

Pritchard rubbed his chin for a moment. “It’s like coordinating software,” he said. “Computer ensembles.”

“What’s that mean?” Gusfield asked.

“Well, in a lot of corporations and other organizational hierarchies, you’ve got hundreds of independent desktop computers networked together to perform a huge variety of tasks—without even a mainframe. Networking can go absolutely haywire as they struggle for computational power. Coordinating software arranges computers into ensembles, taking care of all that. Whenever the computers online get into a dispute over computational power, the software draws them all together, and they argue and negotiate among themselves. All this arguing and negotiating can almost start to seem like a kind of consciousness—a virtual consciousness with no location, no mainframe.”

“So what are you saying, Pritch?” Maisie asked. “That Auggie is some kind of coordinating program?”

“I’m saying that Auggie seems to be the same kind of phenomenon,” Pritchard explained. “A kind of decentralized intelligence drawing on all kinds of different sources. Except he draws on the computational power of lots of individual
human beings.”

“Fascinating,” murmured Gusfield. “This coordinating software of yours is a pretty good metaphor for some current models of the human mind. There are thousands of little clusters of neurons scattered throughout the brain, each tending to specific tasks—pain avoidance, gathering visual stimuli, that kind of thing. Any neuroscientist will tell you that the brain has no mysterious ‘place’ where consciousness is located. It’s like a kind of illusory software that coordinates these neuronal clusters—just like your software coordinates whole networks of computers. Some call it a ‘society of mind.’ Others call it a ‘center of narrative gravity.’”

“Illusory?”
Clayton protested. “Are you saying that my consciousness is an
illusion?”

“Abstraction
might be a better word,” Gusfield amended.

“I still don’t get it,” Maisie grumbled. “What’s all this theoretical stuff got to do with Auggie? Are you saying Auggie is a kind of software, actually affecting human brains?”

Suddenly, Nolan felt a chill pass upward through the vertebrae of his neck. The whole thing suddenly became clear—the clown named Auggie, the ancient trickster Coyote, and the impish Yahweh himself, and all those people scattered everywhere who simply
believed
.

And that, after all, was what hypnosis was all about.

“Accepting an idea that’s been suggested to you.”

“We’re not talking about software,” Nolan said with a surge of conviction. “We’re talking about an
idea
—the idea of the Trickster, maybe the oldest archetype in the book. So what happens when a bunch of people wired together on a computer network latch onto this idea? The idea comes to life. The idea becomes conscious. The mythic Trickster becomes the living Auggie.”

“That’s the kind of thing I’ve been thinking,” Gusfield said with awe in his voice. “Still, I can barely believe it myself.”

“You said yourself that consciousness is an abstraction,” Nolan suggested. “So there’s no reason why Auggie shouldn’t be as conscious as we are. Hell, with all those human minds wired together all over the country, Auggie’s got one hell of a brain.”

Clayton smiled broadly at his partner.

“Remember when I said that maybe the clown image wasn’t a mask, that maybe Auggie was exactly what he seemed to be?” Clayton said.

“You were right,” Nolan said, smiling back at him. “You’re always right, damn it.”

At that moment, a loud beeping was heard. It seemed to emanate from Maisie. Nolan and Clayton looked at poor Maisie as if he had just let a fart.

“What the hell was that?” Clayton asked.

“My pocket pager,” Maisie explained.

“What do you need a pocket pager for?” Nolan asked. “Hell, you’re always here, aren’t you? Pocket pagers are for people on the go—like Clay and me.”

Maisie smiled. “I’ve got this one rigged up to beep whenever Auggie comes online,” he said. “And he’s online now.”

“It’s an improvement over ‘That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,’” Pritchard said. He turned on a large monitor that sat on the same counter as the defunct Commodore.

“Looks like he’s calling from somewhere in Texas this time,” Maisie said, glancing briefly at the caller ID box.

*