Those That Wake (19 page)

Laura glanced behind her: Mal listening intently, Mike in a dead stare locked on nothing. She wanted to prod him, let him know something important was happening, but Mike looked as if his mind had taken him so far away that he wasn't really here anymore, just a man digitally inserted into an environment he wasn't a part of.

Behind them, the dome, glimpsed between buildings, edging over roofs, receded as they left the city behind. It had become such a part of what the city was that Laura couldn't even imagine the city anymore without the image of it being slowly swallowed by the thing.

"So we catalog these indicators," Remak said, "and we watch them, and when there's an obvious anomaly, either an aberration from previous statistics or indicators suddenly pointing toward something significant, we investigate."

"And that's what you were investigating this time?" Laura asked.

"Yes." Remak nodded slowly. "The occurrence of desolated response—that is, behavior indicative of apathy or desperation on a large scale such as street crime, domestic violence, and suicide. The occurrence of desolated response experienced a massive spike in the neighborhood of Mike's school." Mike looked up absently, having heard his name, then looked away again just as quickly. "A certain level of desolated response is standard in low-income, high-need neighborhoods, and while the sudden rise was astonishing, it wasn't the only notable element.

"Out of fourteen acts of random violence, five of them had been committed by people of widely varying demographics simply passing through the neighborhood. A teenage girl who had just disembarked from a bus, for instance, attacked her mother. The family, who owned a chain of Laundromats, were quite well to do. Of thirty-one reported domestic disturbances, eight were likewise committed by people who just happened to be in the neighborhood. A stockbroker began beating his wife as they passed through the neighborhood on the way to a restaurant. The traffic accidents actually reflected a higher number of perpetrators among those driving through, especially taxi drivers. Even among the shocking twelve suicide attempts, four of them had been by visitors: two cheerleaders, for instance, from out of town and separated from their group, were waiting for a train and threw themselves in front of it.

"Of course, we know the cause now," Remak concluded. "To some degree."

"The doorway," Mal said hollowly.

"Yes. The building you were in contained some sort of psychic virus. But when the door was left inadvertently open, it escaped through Mike's school and into the outlying neighborhood, affecting everyone who lived there, or was just passing through."

Laura could see Mal's face without turning to look, could see the guilt twisting deeper into his eyes.

"What do you mean, 'psychic virus'?" Laura said, thinking of the darkness crawling into the Starbucks, how it seemed to actually infect the people within.

"It's a hypothesis," he said. "A convenient name for a pathogen that thrives in the environment of human synaptic transmissions. Its form is unknown, but it has the capacity to alter human perception and information storage. It could even, conceivably, control its host's actions."

"That's exactly what this is!" Laura said with more vehemence than she was expecting.

"Possibly." Remak glanced at her with interest. "Much of the Global Dynamic is founded on similar thinking, that ideas multiply and transmit in a viral fashion, though documented proof is difficult to come by. I had been hoping to bring the information we had to my superiors, but when I tried this morning, well, you can imagine what happened. I'm lucky to be here and not in some basement interrogation room."

"What is this cooperative you work for?" Laura said. "A cooperative between who?"

"The cooperative is all funded by anonymous individuals and entities, collaborating interests outside the standard sociopolitical superstructure. We don't take a cent from government or industry; it's in our mandate. But we do recruit from government and industry, for our analysts, investigators, and theorists. Any field operative may be required to analyze, interpret, and act on any intelligence gathered. Multiple areas of expertise are required even before recruitment: economics, advanced mathematics, logic, strategic systems, game theory. Then the training: tactics, close-quarters combat, firearms, counter-insurgency, de molitions."

"You?" Mal asked.

Remak nodded.

"I used to work for the IRS."

"Sorry." Mal leaned forward. "The IRS?"

"They're not all accountants, Mal." Remak smiled only a little. "Some of their operations require more field know-how than military operations."

Mal nodded and sat back, trying to decide whether or not that could possibly be true.

"The cooperative was created to pursue avenues opened by the Global Dynamic, a theory developed by one man, culled from years of research in the corporate field. You see, after 9/11 there was an upsurge in government interest in the Global Dynamic. My cooperative predicted something like Big Black months ahead of time." Remak let out a long breath. "But governments work from a philosophy of definite, provable necessity: does this
need
to be done for things to keep working? Corporations, on the other hand, work from a philosophy of investment: will attention
now
profit us later?

"The kind of thinking—about social structures and interactions—that led to the Global Dynamic existed long before 9/11 and Big Black, and corporations saw its efficacy long before the government did. Corporations were collecting numbers on such social interactions decades ago for marketing purposes."

"So this one man," Laura said, "the one who developed the Global Dynamic, he worked for a corporation. Who is he?"

"I don't know his name. No one does. He's kept it well hidden. Even my superiors never knew it, though he was our primary consultant for many years and, I believe, a major benefactor of the cooperative. He was once a lower-echelon administrator, a corporate librarian for a company based in California called Intellitech. They collected raw data on human interactions and responses to a vast array of stimulation and input the world over. The company was founded by two graduate students with degrees in the field, and consequently, Intellitech's efforts in this area were far in advance of its competitors. Various departments accumulated the data, but this librarian was the first to collate it all.

"He saw ramifications, and he created the Global Dynamic rubric. It was a predictor of human behavior that was to be a great boon to human knowledge and understanding. But Intellitech saw other possibilities for it, far more ... profit oriented. Any corporation would.

"They weren't just interested in how to read the Global Dynamic, but in how to push it one way or another. In essence, how to
make
people think and feel according to the corporate agenda. Corporations were interested in how to get an entire city or state or nation to move in a desired way by faking this Global Dynamic, by creating the symptom and, in effect, having the symptom create the disease."

"Like launching a massive increase in action-figure marketing," Laura tested, "and
causing
the military action to follow in its path."

"Exactly." Remak nodded. "Reverse-engineering the Global Dynamic. Imagine what an arms manufacturer could do with the ability to manipulate a nation's aggression by, say, contracting a toy manufacturer to launch a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign for a particularly militaristic new line of action figures. There's no more producing the goods and waiting for the demand. With this kind of control, you can manufacture the demand as easily as the product itself."

Heavy silence fell on the car.

"In any event," Remak continued eventually, "the Librarian broke off from Intellitech, began using the Global Dynamic to serve other causes. As I said, he was once a great help to our cooperative. He was like an information dynamo, a living computer. He had always been private, though. His name was never disclosed. And, a few years ago, he cut himself off completely, with no warning, no explanation. He went away, wouldn't consult or advise; he just kept taking reports, collecting information. He still does. Reams of data go in; nothing comes out."

"What happened?" Laura asked.

Remak gave a small shrug and touched his glasses.

"We think he figured something out, saw something coming that none of the rest of us could, and it was so terrible, he removed himself."

"What do you think?" Laura persisted.

"I think," Remak said, "I'm going to ask him myself."

"
I THOUGHT NO ONE KNEW
where the Librarian was," Mal said.

"No one
knows
where he is," Remak responded, looking through the windshield and scanning the large house and sprawling lawn cut by the long shadows of twilight. "But there are educated theories. The one I favor was corroborated by another agent, who claimed to have traced the route of certain electronic files transmitted to the Librarian."

"Traced them to here," Laura said, her eyes gazing somewhat mournfully over the still and tranquil expanse, not altogether dissimilar to her own town.

"For isolation, it's rather an ideal choice," Remak said.

Laura could hardly argue that. Given the condition of the GPS, they'd had to stop at a gas station to find a paper map. Laura had been flabbergasted to discover that such quaintly antiquated things still existed, and she'd had a crash course in how to navigate by them, as Mike was categorically useless, gazing out the window dimly as though the world were diminishing while he watched. It had taken them long enough to find the minuscule town of Pope Springs, Remak's first landmark, and then another hour to track this house down based on his complicated triangulation methods.

"So..." Mal hesitated, and silence filled the space. "Do we just knock on the door?"

"Yes," Laura said resolutely.

"Absolutely not," Remak said at the same time.

They looked at each other, and something crossed Remak's usually placid face. Was he impressed that she was stepping up, or irritated?

"I'm going to reconnoiter," he said. "You wait here."

"Listen." Laura put her hand on Remak's arm, and Mal felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. "You need him to trust us, right? Suppose you snoop around and he catches you. How's that going to look to him?"

Remak looked back up at the house, a gothic construction of wood with curtains drawn over all the windows. It presented a distinctly unwelcoming picture.

"Yes," he said, at the very least always able to see good sense. "You're right." He held his eyes on the house a moment longer and opened his door even as Laura opened hers.

He stopped. "What are you doing?" he asked her.

She looked at him and back at Mal and Mike, neither of whom had moved to exit the car.

"Uh," she said, "going with you."

"Laura"—he looked at her sharply—"this man is a recluse and probably for very good reason. He's not going to—"

"What's less threatening," Laura countered, "a scary stranger by himself or a dude with an innocent-looking young girl?"

Remak removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"All right," he said quietly. "Let's go."

"All of us," Mal said from the back.

Remak froze at the door again, his chin falling to his chest and his eyes closed.

"She's not going into that messed-up-looking place without me," Mal said.

Remak was uncharacteristically speechless. He looked at the two of them: Mal's flat resolution, the tiny smile crawling up the corners of Laura's lips.

He shook his head in resignation and finally got out of the car.

"Mike," Laura said. "Mike! Let's go."

Mike snapped to attention and looked around as if for the first time, then slowly departed the car with the rest of them.

They crossed the gravel road from the place beneath a shaggy tree where the car was nominally obscured. They trailed the curving dirt driveway up to the house, their shadows casting weirdly elongated monsters across the grass of the lawn.

"Hang back," Remak said to Mal and Mike as they neared the door. "Please."

Remak and Laura went up a short flight of four stone steps and stood before a large wooden door with an antique knocker on it. Laura's hand came up, but Remak's hand shot out and got to it first, lifting and banging the heavy thing three times.

They waited in a chilly breeze, the sounds of the first crickets beginning to ring in the evening. Remak knocked again.

After a minute, they exchanged glances and Laura shrugged. What now?

"Sir," Remak said to the door, "my name is Jon Remak. I ... I'm associated with the cooperative. I'm here on a matter of some urgency."

He looked around the doorframe, at the lintels of the roof, anywhere there might be a camera.

"Please," Laura said to the door, knowing her tone was a beseeching one, knowing it always convinced her parents to tack an extra hour on to curfew. "We have nowhere else to go."

No response.

"Maybe this is the wrong place," Mal said from behind them.

"Please," Laura said again, and now there was no mistaking the ache in her voice. "No one knows who we are. No one remembers us. We need your help."

There was an anxious moment of silence, then a click.

Laura looked at Remak, whose attention was now riveted on the door. Feeling as though she'd earned the right, she pushed it.

There was a large if minimally appointed foyer. A table on one side and a large couch on the other flanked a flight of old wooden stairs traveling up to a dark balcony. Remak stepped in first, then the rest came. The door closed behind them, sealing off the outside world. The interior of the house was a set piece, furnished and well-ordered, but like an artifice, untouched and empty of more than just people.

"What are your names?" A voice reverberated through the room. It was so clear and vibrant that only electronic alteration could have achieved it.

"Remak. Jon Remak."

"Laura Westlake."

"Mal Jericho."