Cure for Sanity - Chapter Three

Cure for Sanity - Chapter Three - Troubling Paradise







Pex drew odd stares from the device he wore, but few questions. He had acquired enough of the homeless look and demeanor that he was rarely bothered, as long as he didn't linger in places of business for too long. He began to compile a list of places to visit and collect data from.



Prince William, sound in neither mind nor body, came back to the shelter drunk, as was his routine, sucking on a complimentary starburst mint he'd grabbed from a restaurant. You weren't supposed to come back home with liquor on your breath.



He eyed the so-called radio again, and Pex couldn't resist messing with his head.



"I'm an alien," he told Willie, who said nothing in response.



Pex tried again.



"I'm so far advanced, you may as well consider me a god."



He thought about it.



"If not the God."



Prince William continued to stare, but wasn't biting.



"If thinking of you that way bothers you, consider me the only human, and yourselves animals in human disguises. Well," he said. "One of two humans."



He was thinking of Prail , his feminine equal.



"In fact," Pex said, "I never told any one this, but you're inside of a great organic computer. The trees do most of the processing, the dirt does storage. That makes you a rechargeable battery."



Willie belched.



"And who writes most of the scripts?" Pex asked.



"The ants?"



"Yes! Very good. How did you know?"



Willie shrugged.



"So you're some sort of animal in human guise. The secret is finding out which animal you are."



"I'm a fish," Willie said. "At least I drink like one."



Pex had to laugh.



"A fish, sure! But you don't travel in a school."



"No," William said. "I dropped out."



"Do you know what a random number generator is, Will?"



"Nar."



"It generates random numbers. Very hard to do."



"Ninety-six," Prince Willie said. "Fourteen thousand, seven hundred and eleven. One."



"Great," Pex said. "Now do that one hundred and sixty times per millisecond, forever. It's nearly exhausting."



"I'd rather not."



"Because it takes a lot of non-thought to make truly random numbers. Patterns develop, ordinarily. Blind spots and such."



"So you're a pinball," Willie said.



"Yes! Deaf, dumb and blind."



"A wizard," William said with a degree of awe in his voice.



"Technomage," Pex said, shrugging his shoulders. "Effectively the same thing."



"How does this affect me, a bloomin' alcoholic?"



"I'm self-appointed leader of the revolution."



"Oh? Against what?"



"My sister," Pex said.




###


Prail was beginning to think Pexxy the Midnight Runner was more trouble than he was worth. He was already making her work harder than she cared to, and that took a lot of doing. The trouble was, he fell to Earth with all of her knowledge, and then some. Although he was her junior, he was somehow also older than she was. Much older.



He played by the rules, but kept changing them, forcing her to continually leapfrog ahead in an effort to keep up. Each time she did, he pulled some stunt in the gap, leaving tiny holes in her knowledge base. Prail leaned quickly that when he hipped her to some new aspect, he was already on to something else.



It was deceptive, and frustrating. Plus, he had mastered things to the degree that he could be in one place physically, and another mentally. She could only track him physically. She was unsure as to how he could selectively block his thoughts from her.



She decided to bell the cat, so to speak. Luckily for her, he was easily influenced. Or so it seemed. She put the idea in his head that he should build something to physically map the world in 3D for her, and he went for it.



Prail quickly regretted doing so.



She received the initial burst of data from the 1975 Radio Shack and was shocked. Janique? He wasn't supposed to know about her yet. Plus, he was sent to '70, but jumped ahead five years overnight. He played the game for keeps.



Of course she knew to timecode the data as it came in, since he failed to include it in the stream. But she played dumb as well, and let him think he was helping her. When the data began streaming from 1995 tagged as 'Janique1', she simply made a duplicate entry in the database. But then she began receiving data from Janique2, and Janique3. A few days later, she risked buffer overflow.



The little bastard had embedded his microchipped version of the transmitter in an ASIC that soon would be in hundreds of millions of devices, burying her in information. Suddenly, she had to scramble to keep up.



Prail never had to deal with so much information in parallel before. Meanwhile, he was bumming around London, smoking cigarettes and putting tech ideas in the heads of programmers and engineers in the past and future so he'd have video games to play.



It was a little insulting. Prail had placed him in the big game, and he refused to play it, instead getting on some retro kick. Eight bits was her thing, not his. She knew he was in trouble when the first game he inspired was Space Wars. In response, she made Pac-Man, which was designed to bring women into the gaming world.



It was sort of sweet when he immediately made Ms. Pac-Man in response. It had little interludes that she found touchingly romantic. Act One was "They Meet", and Act Two was "The Chase". He was toying with her, subtly playing her emotions like Paganini possessed. She had to admit it was thrilling.



But how would she tell Sherman?



Prail decided to limit her involvement with him to the pre-marriage timelines. That was honest, following the letter of the unwritten laws, if not the actual spirit. Her involvement with the Earthlings was rubbing off on her, she thought. The idea that they were technically siblings nearly troubled her at times. Was she somehow gaining humanity? She shuddered. What next? Mortality?



Maybe she'd talk to Janique. After all, she was human once, and didn't seem to have absorbed many of their taboos. On the contrary, she seemed to delight in not only breaking them, but rubbing other people's noses in it. Prail knew she was overlooking something. Fuck! Of course. If Pex already knew about Janique...



"Come in, JT," she thought.



Before she had blinked, Janique was there.



"He knows," Prail said.



"Knows what?"



"Everything."



Janique rolled her eyes.



"Everything that matters," Prail qualified.



"So how does that affect us?"



"I'm not really sure."



"You call me halfway across the galaxy to pitch me a fear you're not sure about?"



"Sorry. It's hard to tell you."



"Just tell me," Janique said.



"I'll show you."



Prail took Janique's hand. Not because she needed to, but because she wanted the reassurance that only her touch could provide. They closed their eyes, and Janique received a vision of a scruffy, long-haired construction worker who looked a fair amount like her Chris.



Since Prail had rescued them, she had to think of him as her Chris. She knew there were lots of Chrises out there. Possibly lots of her Chrises.



He was on the phone.



"Pasadena, Texas. Your planet," Prail said.



She specified which Earth for the same reason Janique used "her Chris". She showed her the other end of the phone line. It was a slender, beautiful redhead. At first, she thought it was herself, and she felt uneasy.



"I want you to write one for me," the girl was saying.



"Okay, angel. I love you. Give me a little while and call me back."



More "I love yous" were exchanged, and both hung up. They guy went to work straight away, scribbling in a checkerboard composition book.



Prail paused.



"Okay? So?" Janique said.



"I don't think you're ready."



"Oh, bullshit. Do you know who I am and what I've been through already? I'm always ready. I'm ever-ready., the copper-top battery."



Prail smiled and shrugged.



"If you say so..."



She resumed the shared remote viewing, skipping ahead a bit.



"We need our own song," the girl was saying.



"I think I know what it is," the guy said. "But let me put it in the story."



"I think I know what it is, too," the girl said.



"Okay. I just love you. Call me back in a few minutes and I'll read it to you, sexiest."



"I will. I love you! Bye..."



Both hung up smiling, obviously crazy in love with each other. Janique was thinking about Chris when Prail skipped forward again.



"-a couple whose theme song was 'Life in the Fast Lane'..." the guy was saying.



Prail paused again and ended the remote viewing session.



"So they made a movie of our lives," Janique said, not understanding. "In an infinity minus one of universes, it was bound to happen. I mean, we were rich celebrities. If they made movies about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they damn sure had better have made at least one about us. Chris is better looking," she sniffed.



"Janique," Prail began. "He's your creator. She's his muse."



 "What? God? You're forgetting I know God, Prail. He's a client of mine. And he doesn't look like that."



"He's your maker, Janique. He's writing the books you came out of. She is a prototype you. He's the original Chris."



Janique turned white, shuddering. She didn't want to believe it, but all the same, she knew it was true. Prail was even more honest than she herself was.



"Then he is God," Janique finally said quietly. After a period of relection and contemplation, she said, "Who godded him?"



"I'll give you one guess..."



"Bastard," Janique said under her breath. "Why would he do a thing like that?"



"I'll never understand Pex fully, but I'd say he did it so you could be created."



Prail never considered the question of her own origin.



"It's not that big of a deal, Janique. Everyone has to come from somewhere."



"He's not my creator," Janique said, still in denial. "My father was Winston Albert Patton, born in Davenport-"



"Backstory," Prail said. "Sorry. Yes, your father was real, but he's also an invention."



"What's his name?"



"Jason Christie,"



"The robot poetry guy?"



"No, he's an American. Middle initial 'Z'."



"And her?"



Prail hesitated.



"Johnnie. Y."



"J-O-H-N-N-Y?"



"I E," Prail said.



"I.E. what?"



"What?"



"I.E. - In other words."



"What?" Prail said again.



"Say what again."



"What?"



Janique slapped the shit out of Prail, who turned the other cheek.



"Yum," Prail said.



"We're not playing fucking Words With Friends here, Prail. I.E. what?"



"Oh," Prail laughed. "J-O-H-N-N-I-E."



"Then what was the 'Y' for?"



"What?" Prail smirked.



"Why what?"



"Y for Yvette."



Janique felt slightly ashamed and foolish. At the same time, she felt a coldness and a desperation she had never felt before, not even toward Hazel, whom she had come to regret having killed, even inadvertently.



"Why?" Prail asked.



"I want them both dead," Janique said.



"What?"



"You heard me, bitch."



Prail grew concerned. This wasn't the Janique she knew. Or thought she knew.



"You can't kill them. They made you. The paradox..."



"There's no paradox. Don't treat me like some fucking third year PhD candidate. I'm here. I exist. I'm real. Killing them can't undo that."



Prail was effectively cornered.



"But why?"



"Because no one is going to control me. Us," she amended. "We control our destiny, not some fucking white trash Chris and Janique wannabes."



Prail looked at her questioningly.



"But if he stops writing... Or doesn't write you into existence..."



"I still exist. I think. Therefore, I am."



"What about your future?" Prail asked.



"I control my future. Not him. Not her."



"Yes," Prail admitted.



"So no two-bit writer-"



"Seventeen-bit."



"Whatever. No fucking Stephen King, Tom Robbins imitator is going to meddle with my fate."



"He can't be killed, J. I told you. Pex godded him. And he protects her. Or she protects him. They combined their powers. You don't want to mess with a godded couple. That'd be like...trying to come between you and Chris. I don't have to point out how suicidal that would be. I mean, I don't care, but..."



Prail had a very cavalier attitude toward killing. It was a fundamental aspect of gaming. But that applied to the sim. Janique was talking about going after what Prail considered real-worlders.



"How many of them are there?" Janique asked.



"That's another thing. They're singularities. One each. It can't be done."



"I can do anything I want," Janique said, puffing on a Marlboro.



"You can't stop smoking, or leave Chris."



Janique looked crossly at her.



"Dare me," she said.



"What's gotten into you, lately?" Prail asked.












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