Death Dream (54 page)

Gradually the scene dimmed, faded. He sighed with relief. It's all over. They'll take me out of it now.

But instead the soft grayish light flickered, shifted, and then a different scene slowly built up before Perry's eyes. He was standing before a joint session of the Congress, giving his State of the Union speech.

"The drug lords of South America long ago declared war on the Untied States." His voice was suddenly powerful and commanding. "For decades they have been killing our people and destroying our property. Well, we have declared war against them. Real war, not rhetoric."

The entire cabinet was sitting there watching him with rapt attention. The joint chiefs of staff, the whole Congress. The gallery was packed. Television cameras focused on him.

He went on. "Now, thanks to the courage and sacrifice of the finest fighting men and women in the world, we are winning that war!"

The applause was thunderous. Perry stood behind the podium and let it wash over him, wave after wave, at last it quieted and he could continue.

"But this war has many different fronts. There are battles to be fought in our own cities, even in our own schools. I have declared a National Emergency to deal with the drug problem. I have activated the National Guard. I ask the Congress to agree to a temporary suspension of the habeas corpus and certain other provisions of the civil rights laws, so that we can fight this war and win it!"

The entire chamber rose to its feet and cheered wildly. Hal Perry stood there basking in their applause, forgetting the nausea and terror that had clutched at him only a few moments earlier. He made a mental note to see how the scenario worked out if they used cruise missiles against the drug processing plants instead of troops. Cut down the casualties that way. Tactical nukes. Clean bombs, low radiation.

He smilingly accepted the Congress's plaudits. It was a huge let-down when the scene faded out and he found himself in the bare VR chamber once again.

Dan worked through the usual lunch hour, all track of time lost as he slowly convinced himself that the stuttering program had been debugged properly. Grudgingly he admitted that the artificial intelligence system was going a reasonably good job. Better than reasonably good, actually, although he still wanted to go through every line of the program for himself before he would really trust it.
I'll have to tell Gary that he's doing fine.

The voices in the corridor shook him out of his work once again. This time, though, it was the needle-sharp voice of the visitor from Washington that Dan heard.

"It's fantastic! It's incredible!"

Dan looked up as they passed his door. The sour-faced guy was sour-faced no more. He was glowing. He was gesticulating exuberantly. He had not yet bothered to comb his thinning hair, mussed by the helmet he had worn. Even at this distance Dan could see that his eyes were alight.

"Didn't I tell you that you've never seen anything like it?" Smith said, smiling broadly.

"When you're right, Chuck, you're goddamn right. We've got to get this set up in the West Wing right away."

They headed on up the corridor, Vickie still keeping a few paces behind, wearing a feline smile of satisfaction.

Now's the time to grab Jace, Dan said to himself as he slid out from behind his desk and practically sprinted toward the VR lab.

He saw that the light over the lab door was still blinking red. Jace must be still in there. Good. The control booth was empty, although the monitor screens were still lit up and running. Jace was in the VR chamber again, in helmet and gloves, just standing there with one finger slowly tracing along his lips, just visible beneath the helmet's visor.

Dan leaned on the intercom switch. "Jace, it's me again. Time for us to talk."

A wait. Then, "Come on in, the water's fine."

"No. You come out."

"No way, Jose. You wanna talk to me, you come into my world."

"No!"

"What's the matter, scared I'm gonna shoot you again?" Jace laughed softly. "Don't be afraid, Danno. This isn't the gunfight sim."

Dan swept his eyes across the monitor screens. He could not tell what simulation Jace was into; the screens showed alphanumeric symbols and data graphs, not visual imagery.

"I'm going to turn everything off," he said. "I have to talk to you right now."

"You can't turn it off, pal. How d'you think I can run this sim all by myself, without any of those asshole technicians in the booth?"

His voice sounded slurred. Dan looked through the one-way window and saw that Jace was tapping one gloved finger on an electronic black box hooked to his belt.

"I'm running the whole show by myself, Danno. All by myself, in my own little world. Come on in. You wanna talk to me, you gotta join me in my world."

"Dammit Jace, stop this shit and come out here!"

"I can't hear you."

Dan fumed and stared at the scarecrow figure. Jace wore a black tee shirt with one word emblazoned on it:
Baaad
.

"If you're saying anything, Dan old pal, I can't hear it I turned off my earphones. The only way you can talk to me is by coming into my world."

"Son of a bitch," Dan muttered. But he grabbed a helmet and a pair of gloves from the shelves lining the end of the ramped booth and pulled them on like a soldier grabbing his helmet and rifle: reluctant, afraid, yet almost anxious to get it over with.

Then he yanked open the door to the VR chamber and stepped in. Jace stood waiting in the center of the bare room, skinny arms folded across his narrow chest, visor pulled down over his eyes. All Dan could see of his face was a lopsided smirking grin.

"Didn't know I built a remote control unit, did you?" Dan heard as soon as he connected up his helmet. "I can run the whole kit and caboodle while I'm in it. Don't need technicians or anybody. Just me myself."

"All right, I'm here. Now let's talk."

"Pull your visor down, Danno. You're not here with me until you're here with me."

With an angry snort Dan pulled down the visor of his helmet. For a moment he felt blindfolded, vulnerable. But then vague lights began to stir in the distance and . . .

He gasped involuntarily. He was floating in deepest blackest space, beyond the stars, out in the cold emptiness where there was nothing at all except the faint distant spindle shapes of galaxies, so far away that they looked like flickering candle flames. Everywhere Dan looked, galaxies, and more galaxies, the smallest of them containing billions of stars.

"We're going backwards in time," Jace said out of the nothingness. Then his voice took on the deep hollow tones of grandiloquence. "You're going to see . . . How It All Began."

"Jace, I want to talk to you about—"

"Shut the fuck up, willya Danno? We can talk after. Lemme get this done first."

The galaxies were drawing noticeably closer, rushing together in eerie silence. Dan knew what he was seeing: the Origin of the Universe exhibit, one of the first that ParaReality had created, before Muncrief had hired Dan. Jace bragged that he had put it together over a weekend.

It was a simple cosmology tour of the universe, from its beginning to its end, all in twelve minutes. He was witnessing the end, the Big Crunch, when all the galaxies coalesce into a single point of incredible energy density that explodes and starts the universe all over again.

"Jace, why are you—"

"Silence, mortal!"

Dan breathed out an impatient sigh. There was only a couple of minutes to go, and at least Jace hadn't turned on the sound track of ethereal music and schmaltzy commentary about the mystery and beauty of it all. All the galaxies were streaming together now like drops of water sliding down a funnel. Dan could see them elongating, stretching out into thin lines of blue Cerenkov radiation as they streaked down to the single point of blazing brilliance at the center.

Then it all stopped. There was nothing in all of creation except that one incredibly bright point of light. Everything else was total darkness: not a star, not a cloud, not a molecule to be seen.

"Jace—"

"In the beginning," Jace's voice intoned, slightly raspy despite his attempt to be sonorous, "I created the heavens and the earth."

Oh my God
, Dan thought.

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And my spirit moved upon the face of the waters."

He's gone off the deep end, Dan said to himself.

"And I said, LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

The tiny point of tight in the center of nothingness exploded soundlessly. Blazing light flooded the universe, almost blinding Dan, sending him staggering backward with its ferocious brilliance.

"And there was light," Jace said. "And I saw the light, that it was good."

"Dammit, Jace, you're not God!" Dan shouted.

"I have the power of life and death in my hands, Danno. Isn't that God?"

Streams of light were rushing outward, pulsating, making Dan's eyes tear with their intensity.

Jace said, "I'm going to tell the President of the United States what to do, what to think. Isn't that godly power?"

"Jace, for Christ's sake, we have to talk."

"And the Congress, too. They'll all come to worship me, Danno. I'll have them all eating out of my hand."

"Now, Jace," Dan demanded. "You talk to me now."

"I didn't mean to kill him, man." Jace's voice dropped several notches, took on an almost apologetic tone. "You gotta believe me, pal. I didn't think it would kill him."

"Ralph?" Dan guessed.

"You know how he was always pushing me to make the simulation tougher, more realistic. It was his own friggin' fault, really."

The light was dimming slightly. Modulating. Evolving into vast clouds of shimmering colors.

"What did you do to Ralph?" Dan asked.

"When I set him up with the sex sim. It was easy, Dan. Poor bastard never knew it. I got his brain wave patterns six ways from Tuesday. Alpha rhythms, beta—all of 'em. Dumb sucker even let me make CAT scans of his brain, over at the base hospital. He thought it was for his stupid sex sim; he was eager to do it!"

"But what did that have to do with the flight simulation?"

Jace laughed, a low sly chuckle. "I mapped out his sensory receptors, man. In his brain. I figured out how to stimulate sections of his brain directly, with electrical inputs from circuitry in the helmet."

"That's impossible!"

"Not for me, Danny boy. That helmet Ralph wore was like a live bomb. I rigged it to pump enough current into his sensory receptors to sizzle 'em good. Rev up his heart rate, boost his blood pressure, the whole nine yards, pal. Fear is a physical thing, Danno. It makes your body react and your body's reactions make you even more scared. Basic biofeedback loop."

"And it worked on the other flier, Adair?"

"Sure as hell did. Took me years to track down those biofeedback loops. Did you know there are musical notes that can make you afraid? Did you know that the noise from a rocket engine can make you cry? Took me years to figure it all out. Every night, for years and years. I even worked with amputees and made them feel like their arms or legs were back in place."

"But you didn't like Ralph. Why did you—" And even as he started to ask the question, Dan realized what the answer was.

"Didn't like him?" Jace replied softly. "I hated the sonofabitch. He always thought he was better than me. Always pulling that crap on me: he puts his ass on the line and all I do is tinker around with toys."

"You murdered him."

"Damned right! I snuffed him and what of it? Was his own damned fault. He hadda fly the simulator himself, big brass-balled hero. I knew he'd do that. I knew it! And that's when I had him. I didn't even have to be there. The program was waiting, buried in the computer. Not even you could find it, could you Danno? It was right there under your big wop nose and you never even smelled it!"

"Jesus Christ," Dan muttered.

"It's so friggin' simple, once you know how," Jace said. "All those nights I worked in the lab, back in the old days. You thought I was just amusing myself, didn't you? Jerkin' off. But I was learning how to get that brass-balled sonofabitch. Learning how to put feedback into the simulations that zap right into the brain's autonomous control systems."

"You deliberately raised Ralph's blood pressure to the point where he had a stroke."

"And the other guy, too. I didn't mean to snuff him, but by the time I got the system finished Ralph had got himself redlined and taken off flight duty."

"Jace, you're a murderer!"

"Not me. I didn't murder anybody. I didn't force those guys to fly the simulator. I even left the joint and moved to Florida, remember? I was a thousand miles away."

"You killed them!"

"I executed them. It was all Ralph's fault and he paid for it."

"I can't believe this. Jace, what the hell are we going to do?"

"Not a friggin' thing, pal. There's nothing you can do."

"I've got to warn Doc, tell him what you've done."

"The hell you will!"

"Jace, you need help."

He laughed. "Me? I don't need anything or anybody, buddy boy. I have the power of life and death in my hands. And I'll have protection from Washington. Smittie promised me that. Protection from the White House itself."

"And Angie?" Dan snapped. "What are you doing to my daughter?"

"Nobody's hurting the kid."

"What are you doing to her?"

"It's almost finished."

"Goddammit, Jace, what are you doing to my daughter?"

A long silence. Dan was about to rip off his helmet and go after Jace physically. The universe was speckled with blazing blue points of light: quasars and the beginnings of galaxies flickering faintly in the eternal dark.

Jace said, "I told you, nobody's hurting her. She's perfectly all right."

Dan had to take a deep breath before he could say, "You just told me you've killed two men and now you're saying I shouldn't worry about my daughter? When I don't even know what the hell you're doing to her?"

"I'm just mapping her emotional reactions," Jace replied, almost carelessly. "Like having her sit to have her picture drawn. Just takes a little longer, that's all."