Necropolis (3 page)

The transcript of the interview is as follows:
 

DONNER

I think I just saw a flying Studebaker.

(NOTE: Subject was looking out the window.)
 

MAGGIE

EM. John Q. Public thinks they’re the cat’s pajamas, but the insurance will kill you.

DONNER

Huh?

MAGGIE

Sorry. EM means electromagnetic. You called it maglev in your day—remember those high-speed Japanese trains? Same thing. They don’t really fly—they just kind of hover.

Donner

Uh-huh.
 

Silence while the subject looked around the processing room, then studied my floating face.
 

DONNER

What… what are you? Are you real?
 

MAGGIE

I’m a smarty. A Virtual Person. In the parlance of your time, artificial intelligence. You’re currently experiencing me as a Type 3 hologram. I can incorporate in several formats, however.

DONNER

Uh-huh.

MAGGIE

I’m your assimilation counselor. Do you remember how you died?

The subject winced as though slapped. I re-scanned his file.
 

MAGGIE (CONT’D)

Oh God. I’m sorry. Shit.

(NOTE to Assimilation Board: once again, the overwhelming caseload has resulted in inadequate preparation time. This does damage to the subjects!
Please
provide more staff!!)
 

DONNER

My wife…
 

MAGGIE

I’m sorry. We don’t know why some come back and some don’t. Frank Sinatra is still dead, but you can see Elvis at Radio City every night at 9.

DONNER

Jesus.

MAGGIE

Not yet. Ha.

He didn’t laugh. Tactical change.

donner

They said we were murdered. I don’t remember it.

MAGGIE

That’s typical. Your brain, ah, died before it had a chance to chemically encode your last memories. Probably best that way.

I administered a mild sedative .35 seconds after processing that the subject was going into shock.
 

MAGGIE

Look, Mr. Donner, you should know what you’re in for. During the Dark Eighteen, we—

DONNER

The what?

MAGGIE

The eighteen months when the Shift was uncontained. We think it was some kind of bioweapon that mutated. It wasn’t airborne, thank god, but it still moved fast out of New York. Things… fell apart.
 

DONNER

“The center cannot hold.”

MAGGIE

What? Oh. Wow. Poetry.

Donner

Yeah, a cop that knows Yeats. Go figure.

Typical fleshpot response. When frightened, get angry.
 

maggie

The containment of reborns and carriers to Necropolis is why revivals continue here, but outside it’s pretty rare now.

DONNER

Carriers?

MAGGIE

Normal people who have been exposed to reborns become carriers of the retrovirus, just like reborns. They can cause the Shift to start again wherever they go. By necessity, three million of them were quarantined here with the reborns.

DoNNER

Christ. They must hate us.

MAGGIE

Yes. They do.

Subject closed his eyes.

MAGGIE (CONT’D)

To most norms, reebs are freaks of nature. Not… fully human. That’s not true, of course. You’re not a zombie or a vampire or anything. Just…
 

DONNER

Just back from the dead. And growing younger, they tell me. Everything in reverse. Destined to be a teen again, then a baby, then a fetus—then adios, muchacho.
 

MAGGIE

This is traumatic. But the quicker you accept what’s happened, the quicker you’ll get on with—

DONNER

Life?

Subject laughed harshly. Three seconds of silence.

DONNER

I’m surprised they didn’t nuke the city.

MAGGIE

They almost did.

That got a reaction out of him.

 
MAGGIE

Luckily, saner heads prevailed.

DONNER

What stops people from leaving? You can’t wall up an entire city.

MAGGIE

Actually, you can. When completed, the geodesic domes of the Blister will finalize Necropolis’s containment.
 

donner

Nothing’s one hundred percent.

maggie

Beyond the Blister is roughly one hundred miles of uninhabitable desolation, the Blasted Heath. No electronics operate there. No cars. No life, no food, no water.

DONNER

Sounds like an improvement for Jersey.
 

MAGGIE

Necropolis is actually quite a nice place to live.
 

DONNER

Yeah? We have a good baseball team?

MAGGIE

We’ve provided a job and an apartment for you.

Two tiny dots glowed on the subject’s wrist. This startled him.

MAGGIE

You’ve been implanted with ID and credit pebbles, so you can get settled. Pass your wrist under any scanner. Prudently spent, the funds should last a couple months. There’s also a dickenjane.

DONNER

Huh?

MAGGIE

A primer. A lot has changed. Your body, for instance. Some new advantages and some new disadvantages. It also has a history/technology review, to help you catch up on current affairs. Just wave it at any smartscreen.

DONNER

Where’s the job?

Subject noticed I was avoiding his eyes. Must remember that he was a detective.
 

MAGGIE

Um. In a ball bearings factory.

donner

Guess the NYPD doesn’t have an undead affirmative action program, huh?

MAGGIE

It’s the NPD now… the Shift… it’s turned the world on its head, Mr. Donner. People are rattled.

Heart rate and respiration jumped 20 percent. Capillary dilation evident in face.

DONNER

They’re rattled? My wife and I are murdered, then I come back as some side-show freak in a nightmare world, and
they’re rattled
??

MAGGIE

I suppose it wouldn’t help to know that anger is a common reaction.

The subject’s only response was an icy stare.

MAGGIE
 

We’ll be meeting twice a week on—
 

DONNER

Thanks, but I’m done here.

The subject rose, shakily, looking for a door.

MAGGIE

This isn’t something you macho through on your own, Donner. The percentage of reebs that end up crazy or incarcerated is—

DONNER

Life’s a bitch, then you’re reborn.

MAGGIE

I’ll be downloading to your home.

DONNER

I don’t need some fucking electronic watchdog!

MAGGIE

My Virtual Personhood is based in a quantum magneto-plasmatic memory web. There are no electronics involved. And for future reference, smarties have feelings. Which can be hurt.

The subject let out an ironic laugh, but he appeared too overwhelmed to fight any more.
 

DONNER

Am I free to leave?
 

I nodded. Subject headed for the door.

MAGGIE

Donner. Do, uh… you remember anything?

DONNER

You mean like God, heaven, a tunnel of white light, like that?

I nodded.

DONNER
 

No. Does anybody?

MAGGIE

No.

NOTE TO PROCESSING: Delete last ten seconds of exchange before archiving.

END SESSION 0000.

4

DONNER

I
got about four blocks before somebody beat the shit out of me.

I’d left the hospital quickly, accepting the clothes they offered, signing the required legal disclaimers (We Are Not Responsible For Your Afterlife!) and making a promise I had no intention of keeping to attend another counseling session.

As I dressed in the changing room, fumbling with unfamiliar button-fly pants, looking at the snap-brim fedora and the wide-lapelled jacket, the panic started. First, in my fingertips, then swirling into a tight, cold knot in my stomach. By the time I was striding across the lobby, I was actively fighting the urge to run.

I burst through the front doors like a sprinter hitting the finish tape.
 

Out on the street, the relief I’d been chasing didn’t appear. Only terror. I stood on the sidewalk, the leather shoes stiff and biting through absurdly thin nylon socks. A wind played with the raw skin of my face. My first shave in forty-two years.

I’d survived my own death.
 

No. Worse. I’d survived the death of my whole world.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to deal with this.

Was I really alive again? Revived, like they said? Dreaming? In some perverse afterlife? At that moment, on that sidewalk, anything seemed possible.

It was rush hour, the streets packed. I eyed the men in their blocky suits and hats, the women in their wool skirts, mesh stockings and pumps. Christ, some of them had pillbox hats. I caught a few other styles as well. A shaggy-haired guy in a tie-dye tee, fringed suede vest and bellbottoms. A black guy in what looked like a purple zoot suit. They all bustled down the street in that familiar, harried, self-absorbed big city way.

But no cell phones. No laptop cases. No iPods, no Starbucks coffee cups. Just heavy-looking briefcases, cute little one-clasp handbags. The whole fucking vista could be a piece of vintage newsreel…
 

… except for the traffic cop in a lozenge-shaped pod at the intersection, directing the Packards, Hudsons and Buick Roadmasters, which hummed wheellessly along, six inches above the street…
 

… or the holographic newspapers tucked under pedestrians’ arms…
 

… or the tiny glowing dots many of them had in their temples…
 

… or the swirling stacks of streets high above my head, aerial highways crammed with cars. Worse, the streets
moved
, they
changed
, redirecting themselves like some solid yet fluid river, reacting as traffic thickened or lightened, adding lanes, anticipating flow…
 

I tore my gaze away, overwhelmed with vertigo. I tried to focus on the wall next to me, but my eyes were drawn to a movie poster. It featured Alan Ladd and Russell Crowe in something entitled
Shane Comes Back
.

No escape. Even the sky was wrong, swirling and out of focus behind the magnetic Blister. The whole thing, the combination platter of styles and periods, made me want to curl into a tight ball right there on the cold street.

I’d busted this crack fiend once. He’d been a real hardcase, back from a two-week suicide run during which he’d stolen his grandmother’s silver, gotten kicked out of another shelter and flushed his last chance at redemption down the crapper. I remember him telling me, as the cuffs clicked shut: “I got no place to go that I understand.”

Now I knew what he was talking about.

My body started shaking.

C’mon, Donner, get it together. You’re not a civvie.

I had to treat this unknown like those dark hallways I’d faced as a cop. Putting one foot in front of the other, trusting my reflexes and my judgment to get me through.

But what was this body? Was it really mine? Every muscle felt stiff and unwieldy, every contraction forced. I looked down at the bizarre coal-black nails. My eyes shone a freakish gold and my hair was Andy Warhol white. And what about my mind? I couldn’t summon up the last day of my life. What was here that I actually could trust, even within myself? At least, before, when everything around me went to shit, I still had myself. Could I still count on myself?

Approaching paralysis.
Let’s go,
I told myself.
One foot in front of the other. You
do
have somewhere to go. An address in your pocket. A new apartment. Start with that.