The Annihilation of Foreverland (33 page)

Mr. Jackson cradled his hand against his chest. It was probably broke. The Director moved the bed out of his way. He wasn’t concerned about the Investors or the aborted crossover lying in the bed.

“Problems,” Mr. Jackson said. “Yeah, I think we need to start in the observation booth, Director. Some of the Investors don’t have a pulse.”

“Yes, we’ll get to that. First thing’s first. Let’s have a look at the network room.”

The boys watched them cross the room. Mr. Jackson kept his distance.
Why doesn’t he just knock them out?

The Director was barefoot. He let Mr. Jackson lead the way. They stepped over Mr. Lee – spread-eagle in the doorway – and crossed the hall to the only other door on the fourth floor.

There were endless racks of servers in the network room that went up to the ceiling in
aisle
s that paralleled the curvature of the building. The network room took up half of the fourth floor. Midway around the semi-circular room was a large monitor with continuously scrolling data.

Mr. Jackson sat down. His left hand took the majority of Zin’s stick. He couldn’t move his fingers.
Broke, for sure
. He placed it gently on his lap and worked the mouse with his right.

“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Power is out on the entire island. The Chimney only has about three hours of charge left in the backup generators. And the Investors…” He looked back. “How could this happen?”

The Director stood behind him, arms crossed, staring at the monitor.

“Something unexpected happened, Mr. Jackson.” He fiercely scratched his beard. “Call up the Looping Program, please.”

“Looping…? That’s not active. We shut that down after Danny Boy hacked into it and thought it was the outside world.”

“Humor me.”

The Director was acting weird. He was an odd-ball, but none of this seemed all that alarming. Things went wrong, but never at this magnitude. And now he was concerned about some insignificant computer program.

“All right, well, let’s see.” Mr. Jackson executed a few commands, the screen went blank. More data came up. He leaned closer and squinted. “That’s strange. It’s been activated. How did you…”

“What’s in there? Tell me what you see.”

Mr. Jackson wasn’t aware that the Director couldn’t decipher the data.

He used his good hand to peck out a few more commands to interpret what he was seeing. It didn’t seem possible, but there was an identity inside the Looping Program that was often used to mimic the illusion of Foreverland, but they didn’t use it that often. An identity could be damaged if it spent too much time solely in the artificial circuits of the network. That was why the Director had become the interface between the boys and the network, serving as an organic “computer” that became Foreverland.

But now there was someone in there. Someone got left behind. Everyone should be out of the Haystack.

Mr. Jackson leaned closer. He could see just fine, the monitor was six feet wide. He leaned closer because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Couldn’t believe who it was that was inside the Looping Program.

“Tell me what you see,” the Director said. “Tell me.”

Mr. Jackson turned slowly. His lips were moving, finally uttered, “Password, Director. Give me the password.”

The Director stared back.

Mr. Jackson waited.

And waited.

He knew what he had seen inside the Looping Program. He saw the identity that was trapped inside it.

And then he saw the Director put his hand inside his pocket.

Mr. Jackson didn’t flinch. Didn’t try to escape. He just waited for the darkness of unconsciousness to arrive.

It was painless, when it did.

Mr. Jackson crumpled in the chair, falling to the floor in a heap.

He didn’t see the Director watching him. Didn’t see the Director look at the meaningless data on the monitor. The Director couldn’t interpret it, but Mr. Jackson’s expression told him everything he needed to know. Asking him for the crossover password to confirm who the identity was inside the Director’s body.

Mr. Jackson also didn’t see the Director go to the window and begin to weep.

“Something’s not right,” Zin said. “That guy has no mercy and he tells us to just hang out after we just brought the whole island down? No sense, Danny Boy. It makes no sense.”

They leaned against the wall like they were told. They looked through the window at the Investors, still motionless. Some of them were breathing. Occasionally, they’d twitch like the tracker was still hitting them with a low dose of voltage to keep them out. Danny didn’t feel so sad about Mr. Jones, not after putting it all together. Maybe he did care about Danny, maybe he did want the best for him while he was here. It didn’t matter. In the end, the old bastard brought him here to steal his body.

And that could not be forgotten.

Zin was hunched over Sid, looking closely at his open eyes. Danny walked around the bed toward the back wall.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“I’m not waiting around to get zapped.” Danny put his hand on the doorknob.

“Hell, if you’re going to do that, let’s just get out of here.”

“And go where? We can’t outrun this.” Danny smacked the back of his neck. “Let’s see what else these old bastards are up to.”

Zin thought for a second. He was right behind Danny.

The room was fairly dark, lit only by a few backlights beaming up the wall near some of the desks and the faint glow of tiny lights flashing on computers and various machines.

The room was dominated by a large stainless steel table in the center with a big lamp hanging from the ceiling. A number of shelves and steel carts held more computers or medical equipment.

“Think they did surgery in here?” Zin asked.

“I don’t know.”

It didn’t look like surgery. There was just the one table and too many computers. If anything, it was an autopsy room.

There were nine doors on the wall to the right arranged in three stacks of three. Like a tic-tac-toe board. The doors were only three feet by three feet. Danny had seen doors like that on TV. They were used to store bodies. Pull the handle and the bed would slide out just like a filing cabinet with a plastic bag and a body inside.

He touched the handle on the one in the center.
Did they deep freeze a new candidate until they were ready to suck out his memory and scramble his mind with random ones? It would be so claustrophobic inside. And what if they woke up?

He yanked the handle. An empty slab rolled out with a cloud of frosty air. It was a freezer. They were storing bodies in sub-zero temperatures. Nobody would survive that.
Did they just hold the old men in these things after they crossed over into the candidate’s body?

He had his hand on another handle—

“Danny Boy.”

Danny jumped. Zin scared the hell out of him.

“Come here.” He had his hands around a small window on the other wall. “You need to see this.”

Zin stepped aside to let Danny have a look. The window was on a heavy-duty door. There was a slab inside but it wasn’t like the freezers on the opposite wall.

“Watch this.” Zin punched a button next to the door.

The interior lit up with blue flames. The room flickered with an eerie glow.

“A crematorium,” Danny said. “They burn bodies in there.”

“You thinking what I am?”

Danny nodded.

Once the Investor crossed over, their body was empty. They had no use for it. So they cremated it. That’s why the Chimney smoked whenever someone graduated. It was the Investor’s body they were destroying.

“Boys.”

They jumped back. The crematorium’s blue light illuminated the Director standing in the doorway. His eyes flickered with strangeness. Danny and Zin backed up.

“I need to show you something.” He turned around and left.

Danny and Zin waited for him to come back. After a minute or two, they found him across the hall in the network room. He offered the chair in front of a large monitor to Danny. They moved slowly, suspiciously. The Director stood several feet away from them, but distance didn’t matter. Not with the controller in his pocket.

Danny sat down. The Director told him to tell them what he saw on the monitor.

It took Danny a few minutes to understand what he was seeing.
H
e was abl
e to interpret the information and
it became apparent who was standing next to him. The Director was inside the Looping Program, even though his body was
standing next to him
—
“It’s me, Danny Boy.” The Director held out his arms, displaying his new body. Tears brimmed on his eyes. “I made it out.”

Zin was a little shocked to watch Danny hug the Director.

Harold Ballard’s mother was a beautiful woman. She was tall and slender and – given the right breaks in life – could have had a career as a model. Instead, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She received electric shock therapy on three separate occasions. Each time she ret
urned home, things were better b
efore they got worse.

Harold’s father was a genius. He was an unassuming fellow with glasses that sat crooked on his nose. He was nothing close to model-quality. Seeing him with his wife at a party, one would guess he had tons of money.

He did.

He was recruited by every computer manufacturer’s research and development department. He was, arguably, the most sought after man in the computer industry; that is, until he was fired for unethical practices. His crimes were never made public, but the word behind the scenes had tainted his reputation enough to make him untouchable.

No matter. He didn’t need to make money, not with the number of patents that belonged to him. His basement had become his laboratory.

Harold was their only son. He was not pretty, not ugly. Not brilliant, not stupid. What he lacked in looks and raw intelligence, he made up for in cunning.

He was never allowed in the basement. Instead, he spent his nights looking at the stars through his telescope. But during the day, he shot squirrels with a pellet gun. He’d put birdseed on a plate in the middle of the yard and hide in the bushes. He’d
lie
there sometimes for an hour, pretending the enemy was coming over the fence, and then he’d plug the first squirrel that dared to grab a sunflower seed right through the eyes. Sometimes he’d nail them to a tree, put them in poses of the crucifix. The yard stunk like death, but his parents never went back there.

He was a loner at school. He was the weird kid with weird parents. His mom was crazy and his dad a nerd. The jocks put rotten food in his locker and the burnouts tripped him in the hallway. At the bus stop, Blake Masterson got on his hands and knees behind Harold and John Lively pushed him over. They laughed, all of them. Even the girls.

That night, Harold climbed on the roof with his pellet gun and a high-powered scope. He was up there until his fingertips were numb from the cold. When John Lively – who lived two doors down – walked outside, Harold put a pellet in his left eye. It was an amazing shot.

The doctors saved his eye. No one ever found out who did it. But John knew. Off the record, everyone knew.

They caught him getting off the bus.

Even though Harold wasn’t physically fit, he got away by swinging his book bag and losing his jacket when they grabbed it. He bound up the steps of his house and through the safety of the back door. But John and Blake didn’t stop there. They went inside after him. Harold threw the kitchen chair at them and ran through the basement door.

He stumbled down the steps, falling all the way to the bottom. There was a sharp pain in his wrist. He rolled into the corner and watched John and Blake stalk him. But, halfway down the steps, they stopped.

Across the room, there were two bodies lying side by side. One was his mother. The other, his father.

Needles sticking out of their foreheads.

Harold’s father was arrested after John and Blake told their parents what they saw and the FBI showed up with search warrants three days later. The computers were confiscated. The needles, too. Harold went to live with his grandparents. He rarely saw his parents after that.

But he picked up where his father left off.

Computer-Assisted Alternate Reality (CAAR) had been banned from all developed nations as cruel and destructive to all forms of life. No animal would be subjected to the debilitating effects that plagued the users of such technology, invented by his father.

But a dictator will look the other way when the bribe is big enough.

Harold used his trust fund to begin CAAR research. He set up labs in
Mexico
,
Ethiopia
, and
Somalia
. He went through thousands of unwilling subjects. None of them were healed in any way. They all died. All destroyed. Sometimes, tragically. Sometimes, horrifically.