Life on the Preservation, US Edition (30 page)

He did.

They waited into the early afternoon, but Kylie never showed. When Zach returned after his second trip down to the greenbelt to pee, he said, “We can’t just sit around here all day pissing in the bushes. Besides, some old lady with one of those shits-you dogs saw me zipping up this time.”

Ian looked at his watch. “Ness will be coming through pretty soon. Let’s see if we can catch her right when she hits the highway.”

“Cool.” Zach started the car. “Hey, I was thinking something, and it all came together while I was taking a piss. It doesn’t make any difference, what you were saying about androids and ghosts and all that.”

“
Yeah
it makes a difference.”

“No, it doesn’t. I’m me and you’re you. We remember stuff. We think and feel the same as always. We’re us, no matter what. Even if there’s another us someplace else.”

“I don’t think you really get it,” Ian said.

“I don’t think
you
really get it,” Zach said.

Ian thought:
Step two?

Zach pulled the VW away from the curb and swung around. Ten minutes later they stood on the sidewalk watching traffic coming off the south end of the Aurora Bridge.

“All these people coming into the city get cheated out of a good chunk of the day,” Zach said.

“Yeah, but they don’t know it. And besides, they aren’t people.”

“Don’t go there.”

“Look, I think that’s her.”

A silver Jetta bore down on them. Ian and Zach started waving frantically. The Jetta immediately began to swerve. Traffic adjusted around it, horns blaring. The Jetta, trying for the side street nearest Ian and Zach, jolted over the curb, screeched to a halt.

They ran to the car. Vanessa threw open the door and bolted out. “
Wow
, Icky.”

She hugged him hard.

“I guess you remember,” he said.

“Everything.”

Ian was so relieved he didn’t even mind the hug. In fact, it felt good.

“Dude,” Zach said, “you’re like fucking Keanu Reeves. You wake people
up
.”

“Well,” Vanessa said, “it probably helped that I gave myself a post-auto-hypnotic suggestion before I even walked across the bridge.”

“When did you do that?” Ian said. “I didn’t see you do anything.”

“When I went to the bathroom back at the coffee shop.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t want to encourage you. But I wanted to cover my bases, just in case.”

“Hey,” Zach said. “If you woke up that easily, other people will, too. Right?”

“We could certainly try,” Vanessa said.

“That’s my idea,” Ian said, excited. “When androids wake up – become aware of what’s going on – maybe they become something
more
than androids.”

"I
DON’T LIKE
that, Icky.”

They were in Vanessa’s Bell Town office. Zach stretched out on the couch with his hands laced behind his head. Ian slouched in the chair and Vanessa sat on the corner of her desk, swinging her legs, looking troubled. Ian had just told her about androids.

“He’s all hung up on us not being real people,” Zach said. “Get used to it.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t real. Just not original.”

“Whatever.”

Vanessa said, “That’s so disturbing, Icky.”

“Look, you guys, it doesn’t matter. You feel, think and act like yourselves. So what’s the difference?”

“That’s what
I
was saying,” Zach said.

Ian ignored him. “What about your idea, Ness, about hypnotizing everybody?”

“Not everybody. We were talking about waking people up, but there’s so many. One at a time would take forever, even if it worked. But I woke up simply by giving myself a post-auto-hypnotic suggestion, right? So maybe it isn’t necessary to go through a long convincing process with each individual. I can plant suggestions in my clients.”

“But that’s still not very many people,” Ian said.

“No. That’s where my idea comes into play. Have you ever heard of Rupert Sheldrake?”

Zach snapped his fingers. “Isn’t he that magician who can make an elephant disappear?”

“Shut up,” Ian said.

“No,” Vanessa said. “He was a scientist. Sheldrake noticed that white rats were able to pass on their laboratory training to their offspring. The babies weren’t trained – they were born already knowing. Do you follow me, Icky?”

“Sure.”

“Well, here’s the even stranger part. Sheldrake discovered that other rats in the lab, the control group that hadn’t taken part in the training,
also
picked up the learned behaviors. So Sheldrake came up with what he called ‘morphogenetic fields’ – some kind of telepathic induction. Icky, what if we view the Preservation as one giant control group?”

“And we – you, me, Zach and Kylie and anybody else you can implant with the hypnosis thing – are the self-trained white rats?”

“Something like that, yes. Anyway, the more people we train by waking up with post-hypnotic suggestions, the more likely the morphogenetic field theory will kick in. This might be especially true if what you say about androids is accurate. We’re all part of the Preservation field, then, just like our originals all shared a collective unconscious. In other words, we’re already connected, under the surface. Maybe the idea of being real will spread even faster.”

“Sounds good. Who’s your first victim?”

“My… Oh, my first client is Matt Chadwick. He’s a retired cop and he has nightmares about a bad shooting when he was young. I’ll put him under and suggest the shooting maybe isn’t his main problem. We’ll see. Icky?”

“What?”

“I’m scared about tonight. About what happens at midnight. I don’t want to disappear again, even if I do come back. What if this time I don’t remember?”

“I don’t know, Ness. Why wouldn’t you remember, if you did this time? Anyway, we’ll all meet back here, so we’re together when midnight hits.”

“I want to stay,” Vanessa said, “the way you do.”

“That could happen,” Ian said, having no idea whether it could or not.

“All right. You two better leave now. My client will be here soon. Give me a hug, Icky.”

During the hug Ian said, “It’s going to be cool, Ness.”

“Well, thanks for saying so, Icky.”

Ian broke the embrace, even though he could sense she wanted to keep holding on. Then he thought something bad. He couldn’t help it. She wasn’t his sister, just a thing that looked and acted like her. Waking her up just meant he was hugging a thing that knew it was a thing.

Zach said, “I ain’t hugging you, man. Don’t even ask.”

“Don’t worry.”

Back in the car Zach slotted the ignition key and said, “Where to? What’s the plan?”

“Back to my apartment. I still have to find Kylie.”

T
HE APARTMENT WAS
empty. Big surprise.

“How’d you do that?” Zach said. He was looking at the faded mural. “How’d you get it all dim, like that?”

Ian, standing by his desk, said, “It wasn’t dim when I painted it. I did it during the last Advent.”

“But–”

“I know. Everything’s supposed to re-gen, so why’s my wall still up, even if it is faded?”

“Yeah.Why?”

“I have no fucking idea.” Ian picked up the locator, which had been lying face down on the desk. The screen glowed pale blue; he had never switched it off after messing with it in the morning.

“What’s that thing?”

“It’s Kylie’s. Some kind of electromagnetic field detector. She was trying to use it as a locator. It’s supposed to zero in on the Preservation generator or whatever makes the Dome. She was on a mission to blow the thing up. Only the locator never worked, because–”

“What’s wrong?”

Ian looked up from the device. “What if it did work?”

“Huh? I’m not following you, man.”

“It’s from outside. Outside the Preservation. It’s the only technology under the Dome that creates a non-Preservation energy signature. Kylie told me… Kylie told me the Hunters were after her when she first landed. They chased her plane into the Preservation and shot it down. Then they came after her on the ground. Only they weren’t so great at finding her. Except when this thing was turned on.”

“She told you that?”

“Not exactly. What she told me, she said stuff like, ‘I turned on the locator and the aliens started chasing me.’ She wasn’t making the connection. I wasn’t either, until now.
Fuck
. I had to fix the stupid fucking thing. I couldn’t leave it alone.”

“Hey, man. You’re just guessing. You don’t know.”

“It’s what happened. I even saw one of their ships, on my way back to the apartment. Like it was hovering over the building, not really there. I didn’t think I saw anything, but I did.”

M
ATT
C
HADWICK SAT
on Vanessa’s sofa. If you stretched an Oz Munchkin to five feet nine or so and plucked out most of his candy-cane-red hair, that would be Chadwick.

“I’m hinky about going under,” he said.

“It isn’t like anesthetic, Matt. You’ll be aware of everything around you, but you will feel very, very relaxed and receptive.”

“I guess it can’t hurt. I mean, that’s why I’m here. Real shrinks just want me to talk. I tell them I can’t sleep, they give me pills. No offense meant about the ‘real shrink’ thing.”

“None taken. Shall we begin?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

Vanessa held up a pencil and told him to concentrate on the little eraser end, and then she began to instruct his body to relax. Chadwick had Samsonite-sized bags under his bloodshot eyes. She could almost feel his exhaustion radiating like heat waves. She took him down, far deeper than she had told him she would, down to where only her voice filled his world. His eyelids became droopy. He swayed slightly on the sofa. Like a secret gardener, Vanessa planted her seed of self-reality. And she wondered, Who am I talking to? Where does this suggestion go? Does an android possess an unconscious, or does the seed lie in some alien matrix, waiting for the next Advent of re-creation to occur? What
was
this thing on the sofa?

And
what
am I?

I
AN SAT IN
the wicker chair with a sketchpad, trying to draw his anxiety away. He filled page after page with hasty slash-and-shade iterations of
know WHO you are
. Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do but wait for Kylie to come back – which she wasn’t going to do. He nailed his total concentration on the sketchpad. When Zach patted his shoulder he started; Ian had been so absorbed he’d almost forgotten Zach was there.

“I’m heading out. Take it easy, man.”

Ian squirmed his shoulder, and Zach lifted his hand away. “Heading out where?”

“Back to my place. I’m not really here, anyway, right?”

“Sorry. I just want Kylie to come back.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

Ian looked around sharply, but Zach was sincere. Still, he really wanted him to go away. That’s what people did, right? You open the door a little and they barge in and start to make you feel safe. Then when your guard is down they check out. So maybe quit opening the door. It wouldn’t be so hard to close it on this Zach-thing, who wasn’t a real person anyway.

“We’re meeting your sister at eleven, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be back at ten-thirty to pick you up, then.”

“Cool.” Ian’s head was down again, concentrating on the sketchpad.

“Ian?”

“What?” Why didn’t he just go?

“Forget it.”

Ian grunted. He barely registered the sound of the door closing. His full, laser-focused attention was on the sketchpad.

T
HE RAIN HAD
begun. Ian pulled his hood up. The sketchpad was dry under his sweatshirt. He and Zach stood on the sidewalk outside Vanessa’s office, waiting for her to open the door. A group of loud drunks spilled out of the Lava Lounge, laughing and playfully shoving each other.

“Maybe we need a drink,” Zach said.

“I doubt it.”

Vanessa opened the door. She looked nervous and sick. Ian said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m scared to death, Icky. What if I get rejected out of the Preservation this time?”

“You won’t.”

“I could. You know I could. Why not? I have a corrupted memory matrix and I’m trying to corrupt the memory matrices of other androids. The Curator has every reason to reject me.”

“We don’t know how it works,” Ian said.

“But you
said
that’s how it works.”

“That’s right, man,” Zach said. “You’re the one who talked to the Boogeyman.”

Ian shot him an annoyed look. “Let’s try not to lose it, okay?”

“I’m
not
losing it.” Zach shucked his coat and dropped onto the couch. “I’m just sayin’.”

Ian hiked his sweatshirt up and brought out his sketchpad.

“What’s that for, Icky?”

“It’s an experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“If it works, I’ll tell you.”

“The mystery man,” Zach said.

Vanessa pulled open the top file cabinet drawer and lifted out a bottle. “I bought this today. There’s half an hour to go. We’re going to relax.”

“Holy shit,” Zach said. “Your sister’s a fucking genius.”

She poured paper cups full of the ruby port and handed them around. Zach drank his immediately and practically spat it back out. “What kind of wine is
that?
”

“It’s port.”

“Christ, it’s really good. Not.” He held his cup out for a refill anyway.

Ian watched them, his old detachment rising. He didn’t fight it much. A bad feeling possessed him. A very bad feeling. “How did it go with the cop?”

“Fine. I planted the idea that at midnight he would stay wherever he was at that moment, that he would remember.”

“Do you think it took?”

“Icky, how could I possibly know?”

“It’s almost time,” Zach said.

“Give me your hands, you two,” Vanessa said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m scared, Icky. I told you. And maybe it will help.”

Ian set his full cup down and Zach his empty one. The clock on the wall behind the couch was a tick or two away from straight-up midnight. Ian stuffed the sketchpad under the waist of his jeans again and reluctantly took Vanessa’s hand.