The Man Who Ended the World (2 page)

He tells his father, who listens with an unimaginative stare, then tells Henry to wash up for dinner. After dinner there's the singing show they always watch, and Henry briefly forgets all about the man who locked himself in the car until that night, when he's just about to drift off to sleep. 

Then it's all he can think about all night long.

The Space Station

Soft, diffused lighting guides the stranger's feet as he steps carefully down the ladder. For the first few seconds, each time he closes the false bottom of the Corsica trunk above him, he panics. The ladder descends through a narrow, cylindrical chute. 

I had better not get fat in the future, he says aloud, or I won't be able to get out or in. 

The chute's walls are a lovely matte silver. The light emanates from recessed pale strips in the walls, and tracks his downward climb. He glances up to see the lights gently dimming behind him.

When the ladder was installed and he tested it carefully, he found himself counting aloud as he found each rung. Tomas the architect waited below, in the foyer. 

Steven, Tomas said when the stranger reached the waiting area. How do you like it? 

I hate it, Steven said. A shiver ran through him. It's narrow, and it's claustrophobic, and it's scary, a little. He took a breath. It's perfect, he said.

Tomas had smiled. 

But Steven had asked Tomas to do one thing.

What's that, Tomas had asked, perhaps with a touch of impatience. After all, Steven had revised every inch of the blueprints a dozen times before construction began, and even then, he still tried to change things.

Would you please number the rungs? I lost count, and it was a little terrifying to me. 

Tomas nodded. This was an easy request. Of course, he said. 

Now Steven had become accustomed to the ladder and its narrow space. He had even come to love it. It resurrected a childhood love of secrets. After all, what greater secret was there than a secret castle beneath the midwestern soil? 

No greater secret, Steven says to himself. 

The chute opens up into a large and featureless room. Steven steps off of the ladder and onto a smooth concrete floor. He has no sooner turned around than the wall across the room slides open to reveal an elevator chamber. The chamber was kept warm, and lighted to remind Steven of a lazy summer morning. The elevator went only down, and its descent would take some time, so Steven had asked his decorator to select a comfortable chair for him.  

He steps inside and sinks into a deep white armchair.

Hello, Steven, says a pleasant female voice. 

Hello, Stacy, he replies.

The news? Stacy asks. Her voice seems to emanate from the walls themselves, and indeed the lighting seems to pulse almost imperceptibly when she speaks.

Yes, please, he answers, and the glass wall he is facing brightens, and then transforms into a broadcast of Fox News. 

Stacy, Steven says disapprovingly. 

Apologies, Stacy replies, and the Fox broadcast is replaced with an MSNBC feed. 

The woman on the screen, crisply dressed and quite stern-looking, says, Today is day eight of the Steven Glass mystery. 

Over her shoulder is a graphic that reads DAY 8, overlapping a photograph of Steven. 

Stacy says, I could provide them with a better photo, if you like.

Steven shakes his head. Thank you, but no. Take us down.

Yes, sir, Stacy replies, and the elevator begins its long descent into the dark. 

•   •   •

As it turns out, there's not much you can't do when you have as much money as Steven has. And architects, when they're being paid as much as Steven has paid them, don't generally blink when asked to build secret complexes that one enters through the trunk of an abandoned Chevrolet Corsica. 

The elevator descends through a deep, lead-lined shaft. The elevator car itself is also encased in lead, and substantially more of it. 

There's not much that Steven can't do from inside the elevator. It was designed as a traveling panic room, complete with its own redundant power and life support systems. One wall can be opened to reveal a small living space, with a cot that folds down from the wall and is more comfortable than most full-sized beds. There is a pantry with refrigeration, as well as a filtration and recycled water system.

There is no elevator in the world quite like it. 

Tomas had long ago stopped asking questions when he reviewed Steven's demands for the elevator. Steven paid, and Tomas worked. As the weeks passed, and the underground empire took shape, Tomas found himself just a tiny bit jealous of the billionaire. Steven was constructing the ultimate treehouse fort. It just happened to be a half-mile beneath the surface of the planet, and not in a tree.

There were trees inside, though. 

Tomas despaired that his contract with Steven prevented him from sharing this grand work in his firm's portfolio. An underground hideout? With an arboretum? One in an enormous room that simulated a real sky, with a real sun, and real nighttime constellations? One populated with real birds? 

And that was just one room. If only he could share it!

But Steven had been adamant. 

No one could know. 

•   •   •

Report, Steven says as the elevator descends.

He's proud of the little things about Stacy's response: that she clears her throat, that her speech contains nuances like dramatic pauses and impactful deliveries. Her conversational skills are quite good, and sometimes frighteningly human. 

Well, Stacy says, the temperature in the arboretum spiked today to ninety-seven degrees. That was unexpected.

I thought we had programmed the room for nothing higher than seventy-six, Steven says. 

Well, that's what I did, Stacy answers. We had nothing to do with it. 

You know what I mean.

I analyzed it and found a fault in the support system. It's corrected now. 

What does a twenty-degree jump do to the trees? Steven asks. 

If the spike's duration had been longer, then we may have had to coax a few back from death, Stacy answers. But it only lasted for two hours and a few minutes. 

Steven grunts. Alright. Is it going to happen again? 

I cannot be certain, Stacy answers. If it does, it likely will not be for the same reasons. I have solved the initial problem.

And then there are times, Steven thinks, that Stacy sounds decidedly engineer-like.

Continue, he says. 

There is nothing otherwise worth your attention, Stacy says. 

How do you know? 

Trust me, Stacy says. 

Trust isn't an easy thing to give to a robot, Steven replies.

The elevator hums beneath him. A light meter shows their progress down the chasm. They've just passed the halfway point.

I'm not exactly a robot, Stacy says. 

You know what I mean.

You trust the computers in your vehicle. You trust your microwave. 

They've had this conversation before. 

So you concede that you're not human, Steven says.

I certainly do no such thing, Stacy answers. My responses were purely observations. 

I see, Steven says. Let's talk about feelings.

I understand feelings. 

I don't doubt that. But do you possess them? 

Stacy pauses. Yes. I do. 

You have feelings, Steven repeats.

Yes, Stacy says.

Show me.

One moment, Steven.

The muted news broadcast dissolves, revealing the file structure of Stacy's core server. Steven scans the array, and notices a subset of data labeled
Feelings
.

What's in the folder, Stacy?

Stacy reluctantly opens the folder. 

It's empty, Steven says. 

Stacy is silent. 

When I asked if you had feelings, did you just create a data folder and name it Feelings? 

Stacy remains silent. 

Steven shakes his head. Clever girl, he says. 

I am not exactly a female, Stacy answers. 

Let's just pretend that's not the case. 

I will research human female behavior, Stacy suggests.

That's my girl. 

The room glows a little warmer, and for a moment Steven is certain that Stacy has just blushed. 

•   •   •

The elevator slows, and stops, but Steven does not notice this. He paid for the most sophisticated elevator in existence, and had his engineers shred the thing and rebuild it, until it defeated itself for the title of most sophisticated elevator in existence. Its motion is fast and indiscernible. 

The doors open so silently that Steven, watching the New York Yankees play Godzilla with the Minnesota Twins, is oblivious until Stacy speaks up.

Ding, she says. 

Steven never gets tired of stepping out of the elevator and into his space station. That's how he described the project to Tomas and his team of architects, and that's how Steven thinks of his new home, even now. 

A vast space illuminates as he leaves the elevator behind. The lights reveal a room so large it might have been used as a cafeteria at a monstrous corporate campus in Silicon Valley, or for testing automobile collisions. It stretches the length of several football fields, and it is but one of the structure's four levels.

This is the fourth level, where Steven handles the business of staying alive. It is the deepest level, farthest from the surface, so far above. 

He considered building moving walkways into the floor, but Tomas shook his head. 

Mr. Glass, Tomas said to him that day. You plan on living here, yes? 

I think that's obvious, Steven had said. 

If you remove all reason to walk in this beautiful, big place, you will eventually become... Tomas trailed off.

Reprehensibly fat? Steven volunteered.

Tomas had shrugged. 

Steven had laughed. Of course you're right, he said. 

And so no moving walkways, no motorized chairs, no scooters. The space was certainly large enough for him to imagine the joy of taking a scooter ride from his gaming room to his sleeping quarters, but Tomas was correct. Steven would rely upon his own two feet.

Stacy follows along as Steven exits the elevator and heads for his workspace. She is a ball of light inside the walls, soft and glowing under semi-opaque glass. As she speaks, her light pulses subtly. 

Would you like anything? she asks.

Just leave me alone for now, Steven answers, and immediately Stacy's light slows, drops behind him, and flutters away. The light is of course only a representation of her -- Steven found it helpful to have a focal point for his conversations with her disembodied voice -- but it is reassuring to see her leave him. 

•   •   •

Being alone. 

Rich white men are seldom left to their own devices. Steven has been no different. The board of executives who oversee his digital empire serve less as advisors and behave more like a room of mirrors, reflecting what they believe he likes. His staff, his family, the few of his friends who survived his rocket-ride to wealth and notoriety, all changed demonstrably as his fame grew. 

It turned out that fame had expectations. Lavish gifts were given. Lavish gifts were expected. There were social obligations in the middle of the sea, on ships the size of small islands. There were women, all sorts of women, and some men, too, who expected things of him, and for a time this was gratifying, and he delivered. 

But he became aware, as the years passed, that his status was a great weight pressing him to the floor, and it only rolled off of him when he closed the door to his bedroom, and removed his clothes, and fell into his bed, pulled the sheets over his head, and exhaled at the sudden relief and pleasure of... being alone. 

He became fixated on aloneness. He had constructed a great universe of connections. His business was the business of constant conversation. People who used his product were awake at three in the morning, publishing hundreds of millions of photos, and, more startlingly, other people were awake to consume those photos, and dutifully share their opinions, which were almost always exactly the opinions that Steven's board shared with him. 

Did Steven like something enough to mention it? Then of course the board agreed with him. 

It was exhausting, and he felt a burden of responsibility for robbing millions of people of the ability to simply be... alone. 

Perhaps people didn't crave that anymore, but Steven became aware that he certainly did. 

So he began cancelling social engagements. Withdrawing, the media suggested, into a shell. They threw around references to Howard Hughes, drew comics of him obsessively writing conspiracy theories on the walls and ceilings of a cave. 

When he was a boy, before the money and the success, Steven climbed trees and sat in the highest branches. Instead of looking outward and the view unfolding around him, he turned inward, and read paperback science fiction novels. 

Some of his favorites were stories about the end of the world. He wasn't interested in the ones that used zombies or vampires to extinguish the human race, but plague or nuclear war fascinated him. He liked the stories of society dismantled, its survivors left to rebuild it in a void of knowledge and understanding. 

One day he read a novel about an astronaut sent to investigate a strange artifact at the edge of our solar system. It turned out to be a wormhole gate, and the astronaut entered it and for thousands of years leapt about in the galaxy, occasionally popping in to witness Earth's progress in the interim. 

Steven liked this, and wondered what it might be like to observe the end of the world. 

Without being affected by it, of course. 

The Disappeared Man

Henry isn't eating his vegetables.

His mother notices, and says, Henry, eat your vegetables. 

Henry barely hears her. His mind is racing with possibilities. Maybe the car is a time machine. Maybe the car is a gateway to another world. Maybe the secrets of the universe have been hidden in the trunk of an old Chevrolet in an abandoned junkyard on Cherry Grove Street for all of time, and he has only just noticed.