And Happiness Everlasting
by Gerald Warfield
T |
he ancient man at the head of the table leaned forward. “I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, his jowls quivering, “that your brother, Charles, is dead.”
Eddie blinked. A chill settled in his gut.
“He committed suicide,” the man continued, gripping the edge of the table with his gnarled hands. “Lethal injection.”
In his mind Eddie saw a smiling Charlie, not the real Charlie, but a holograph that sat in his living room taken on the day his brother began work at Celestial Games.
No one at the massive table met his gaze except Jeremiah Adolphus, a sagging pyramid of flesh whose blotched, domed head was uninterrupted by hair, not even eyebrows.
“There was no note, but I’m sure you know about Charles’s depressions.” He gave Eddie a knowing look.”
Eddie hesitated before nodding.
Why had they brought him here to tell him—and why in front of the board? He had almost refused the limo that had come for him this morning, but he feared Charlie was in trouble. Maybe he locked himself in a lab or something; he wasn’t the most stable person. But that was the worst he expected: that they needed someone to negotiate with Charlie.
“And,” continued Adolphus, pointedly, “I’m afraid there’s more. It appears Charles did something quite remarkable before he….” The man’s eyelids fluttered, his knuckles turned white as he gripped the table. “Although first,” he said, after a deep breath, “I should ask if you have any idea what your brother did here at Celestial Games?”
Eddie spoke at last. “My assumption was that he designed computer games.” The board members looked at him with a mixture of pity and condescension.
Adolphus leaned back. His shoulders sagged, and he put his fingertips together. “He was developing an interface that would allow gamers to interact with the game using only their minds.”
“Okay.” It didn’t sound possible, but Eddie never understood Charlie’s work. “My sister and I always said that he was the genius of the family.”
“He was brilliant,” agreed Mr. Adolphus, and there were assenting nods around the table.
A man slid into the vacant chair on Eddie’s right. Glancing at him, Eddie saw that his long salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt, his skin sallow, and his eyes seemed to protrude from his head. Hunched over in his chair, the man twitched as his gaze shifted around the table. Eddie had once seen a rat in an aquarium with a snake. The rat was bug-eyed and twitched.
“He was not successful,” continued Adolphus. “And there would be no reason even to mention it now except that, in the process, he did something else quite unexpected. He migrated his—how shall I say it—his persona into our primary development server.”
“His what?”
“He managed to transfer his conscious mind from his body to the computer before killing himself.”
“You mean he’s still alive—conscious in there?”
“Quite so,” Adolphus leaned back, withdrawing into the folds of his own flesh. “He spent months constructing a virtual world that we knew nothing about, and then, last Friday at six o’clock he sent his assistant home, ate half a pound of Chocolate, inserted the needle in his arm, set the timer, and transferred his consciousness over to the computer. He didn’t even know when the timer went off.”
The chill in Eddie’s gut crept up his spine and the back of his neck. He couldn’t let himself dwell on Charlie’s last moments, not now.
“Unfortunately, he left no instructions how to get in and out of this world. With effort, we’ve been able to access it, but we don’t know how to get out again. It requires some kind of exit key.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” In the back of his mind a niggling feeling warned that there was more—much more. “And why are you telling me?”
Adolphus clasped his hands together. “We need you to help us.”
“How? Do you think he mailed me some kind of secret formula?”
“Did he?” asked the ancient man.
Even the rat looked up hopefully.
“No! And I’m not a programmer, either, so I don’t see how I can help you.”
“Oh, but you can, Eddie. You can ask your brother for the exit key. In fact, we’ll pay you handsomely for that service.”
“Ask him?” Eddie’s mind went blank. “You mean—I can talk to him?”
“Even better.” Adolphus’s smile was benign. “We can send you into his virtual world. It’s a small site; you’ll find him easily.”
Eddie’s pulse beat faster, but his response was cautious.
“Okay…of course, I’d like to talk to Charles, but why are you asking me to do this and not somebody who’ll know what this key thing is all about?”
Adolphus nodded at the rat who leaned back, put his fingertips together in imitation of Adolphus’s gesture, and continued. “That’s the crux of the problem. The virtual address is based on select strands of DNA. We didn’t realize that when we…”
Adolphus cleared his throat, and Eddie thought he saw a warning glance.
“In order to get you to the same place in the computer that he is,” the rat said, nervously, “your DNA has to have a correlation coefficient of at least .925 with Charlie’s. That allows for a clone, identical twin, parent, child or—in your case—a genetic sibling.”
“What this means,” Adolphus interrupted, “is that we can send you in to see your brother, and it’ll really be him. He’ll have all his memories. You’ll be able to talk to him about old times, inquire about family secrets. You’ll even be able to ask what drove him to his final act—if you want.”
Eddie sank into the chair’s white upholstery, a clamp on his right index finger. He desperately wanted a cigarette.
“This is just to establish the DNA sequence,” the rat man said. His office was small and cluttered with electronic components and little yellow pieces of paper.
Closing his eyes, Eddie attempted to control his growing anxiety.
“You know, he never trusted me,” whined the rat. “I populated his databases, beta tested and checked his heirarchization tables, but he never brainstormed with me like the other programmers do with their assistants.”
Eddie didn’t want to hear the rat’s complaints. “So after Charlie tells me the magic word I get out?”
“Don’t worry.” The rat made a note on one of the screens. “He won’t leave you in there. We know his profile. He’s very close to you.”
Eddie wondered: close and distant at the same time? At their mother’s funeral Charlie had fairly radiated his discomfort at being physically close to him and their sister. They never even hugged.
“So it’s safe?”
“Oh, yes. Even the others are okay…” and he quickly turned his attention to a set of monitors.
“The others?” Eddie was suddenly alert. “What others?”
The rat looked stricken.
“You mean, you’ve sent other people into this damned thing? Where are they?”
The rat opened his mouth and gestured helplessly.
“They haven’t come back, have they?” Eddie stood and pulled the clamp from his finger.
“They’re in no danger.” The rat made calming motions with his hands.
“You should have told me about them before that contract was shoved in my face!”
“We did,” squealed the rat. “Adolphus told you we had accessed the virtual world—and couldn’t get out again.”
It was true. Eddie remembered that part of their discussion. “So what happened to them?”
“It appears they went into a setting just like Eddie’s, but he wasn’t there.”
“It appears?”
“They’re just in a different partition, is all.”
“Suddenly, I’m not liking this idea very much!”
“They’re perfectly safe. It’s that DNA sequence that tripped us up; you’ll go right to him.”
Eddie watched the rat squirm for a few moments, then sat back in the chair and exhaled loudly. “How many are in there?”
“Three.”
“Jesus!” He pressed his back into the chair. “What happens to them if I don’t get the key?”
“Their—minds stay in the computer and their bodies stay on the gurneys.”
“Can’t you just wake them up?”
The rat sighed. “The process doesn’t clone their consciousness. It’s a transfer, a real migration, and they have to migrate back. When we have the key, we’ll send in their relatives, and then they can transfer back, too.”
“My brother probably knows you’ll try something like this.”
“Perhaps, but the company knows things, too. They spied on him big time. They knew he was up to something, but Adolphus said to let him alone.”
“So, were you a spy?”
The rat hesitated. “Supposed to be, but I just ended up an assistant.”
Eddie laughed.
The rat looked up angrily. “I didn’t get my bonus!”
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