Transcendence (31 page)

When Luke opened the door, he saw for only a second the blunt frame of a short, heavyset man with hair graying at the temples and ruddy face. Luke recognized the man as someone who worked at the cheese factory with his father. The man’s eyes seethed with something that terrified Luke. He was framed by a grey mist.

“
Daddy?” Gladice asked, her voice cracking and high like a little girl’s.

The timeless second passed. One of the man’s hands balled into a fist and rose lightning fast to smash against Luke’s jaw.

He regained consciousness in the parking lot, his few personal items scattered around him. Gladice was gone. He put all the clues together and finally understood the cryptic look he had watched cross her face when she had to go home. He had seen it every day, spoiling their time together. Home. Daddy.

Luke climbed into his pickup, feeling several years older but despising this passage into manhood. He drove back to Big Stone without thinking anything, only watching the last of the city pass, and then field after field. He pulled into his father’s driveway and soon learned that the elder Herrschaft didn’t think his son was too old for a good thrashing. Despite an aching back and limbs, he fell asleep in his drafty room, hardening himself against the fall of tears.

Almost as if to display the badge which would prove his initiation, Luke went to school the next day, not making any effort to cover the black swelling along his jaw or the red welts up and down his arms. He wore a T-shirt with a V-neck collar. His classmates seemed to sense something had changed in this quiet boy, and watched him with questioning eyes. With a depth of bitterness he hadn’t known existed in him, Luke drank their attention.

As he expected, Gladice didn’t show up for geometry class. A friend of hers stopped Luke in the hall afterward. He hadn’t known Gladice had a friend. The girl passed Luke a folded note and smiled.

“
You’re real good for her,” the girl said, and walked away.

Luke unfolded the paper. His eyes picked out a single passage:

“
I can’t stand it anymore and I’m going to end it all because I know there’s never going to be any hope.” Stunned, he read the next: “I’ll always love you no matter where I go from here.”

He didn’t know what that meant, yet he understood all too well.

Without a thought about how it might affect his grades, Luke ran out of the school to his pickup parked in the gravel lot behind the building. He raced across town with no concern over speed limits or police or how his father would react to a ticket, straight to the house he had watched Gladice enter whenever she left him after their afternoons together. The wheels skidded to a stop just behind an old station wagon parked on the cement slab near a three-story house with peeling yellow paint. He jumped out of the truck and banged on the back door, calling Gladice’s name.

The inner door flung open and the blunt man who had punched him the prior morning threw the screen door against Luke so hard Luke stumbled back.

“
Get the fuck away from my house and my stepdaughter or I’ll kill your weenie ass,” the man said, spitting as the words erupted from his mouth.

“‘
Weenie ass’?” Luke mocked, regaining equilibrium. “What kind of phrase is that, you stupid asshole?”

Gladice’s stepfather seemed about to explode, literally erupt into a thousand bloody pieces, his face whitening and eyes bulging and veins in his thick throat expanding. Luke winced as he watched those fists roll into clubs. But he didn’t care. All that mattered was Gladice.

“
Where’s Gladice?” Luke asked in the face of danger.

“
Go away, Luke!” she cried from an upper story window. “I don’t ever want to see you again, you dumbshit!”

The words struck Luke harder than any physical assault could have. She continued.

“
I mean it. You’re such a loser, I can’t stand being with you. You don’t even know how to fuck like a real man. Now get away from me. I mean it when I say I don’t ever want to see your ugly face again.” And she slammed the window shut.

Luke’s attention returned to the stepfather. The man’s face had lost its threatening pallor, but not its hatred or sickness. It smiled at Luke, a yellow grin lined with stubble.

“
You heard the girl,” the man said in a singsong lilt. “I guess you disappointed her that night you kidnapped her. Maybe she thought you was a man, or even a male.” He laughed. “But you’re nothing. Get away from me before I puke.”

The screen door creaked closed just as the inner door banged like a gunshot, like a hammer driving a nail through Luke’s hopes and dreams. He stood motionless for a minute before returning to the pickup. He felt only numb.

What was worse than watching his dreams destroyed before his eyes just as he had begun to glimpse them was that he had dared to dream at all, he had consciously exposed himself to the danger which vulnerability engendered. He tried to cry on the way home but couldn’t. That evening, Luke’s father again applied the belt because he had heard of Luke’s truancy and had heard from a fellow employee that he had gone to see “the little slut” again. Luke knew who that fellow employee was without being told.

The next day, Gladice’s friend again met Luke in the hall, sobbing uncontrollably.

“
Gladice is dead,” she managed to say between gasps.

Luke heard the final nail driven into his coffin. He realized that he should have looked beyond the words his love had spoken, to what she had written him in the note. The spoken words had been no more than sounds. Perhaps a plea for help had even been hidden between the syllables, spoken in some dimension speech alone couldn’t reveal. Then he realized that she had spoken those words to save Luke from that man.

Anguish and confusion boiled within him until, at last, he couldn’t bear the stares of the students standing around him. They had heard the news.

“
You’re all blind and weak!” he screamed at them. “Sheep gathering in safe little flocks! You never even noticed me before, and now I scare you because you don’t allow pain in your stupid little world. Go to hell, all of you.”

He stormed out of the building and repeated the previous day’s actions, again ending up on Gladice’s back doorstep. But no one was home. Frustrated but not spent, Luke got back into his pickup and simply drove the next hours away, finally finding himself near a dirt path leading toward the lake.

At last, leaned against the hard plastic steering wheel, he wept, so long and hard that he thought his head would crack open and an ocean of pain would spill out and flood this whole region, drowning everyone he hated who lived here.

When the storm passed, his ribs hurt and his throat was dry. Luke discovered his grief had passed. All that remained was an emotion he dared not name, one which terrified yet seduced him. His one last hope for an understanding ear was his mother, who had always been kind to him although she had quickly learned not to expect elder Herrschaft to allow them time together. But Luke had lost any concern over anyone’s fate, especially his own, so he started up the pickup and drove to that tarpaper hovel near Big Stone, where he had been born.

His mother, a small woman who seemed shriveled in upon herself, looked startled at first but then welcomed him with open arms. Long brown hair blanketed his face as he fell into those arms. She said nothing, cradling him in her soft warm embrace, rocking him where he stood just inside the doorway. Silence. Luke felt an unspoken understanding pass between them.

“
Everything will be okay,” she finally said. Apparently she had heard.

“
I’m going to leave this place tonight and never come back,” he told her once he was sure he would not burst into tears like a baby. She nodded, then crossed a cluttered living room to another room. She returned with a roll of paper currency.

“
Here’s a few hundred bucks,” she said, pressing the money into his hand and closing his fingers around it. “I ain’t ever gonna get out of here. You deserve it more than me, having to live with that man all these years. I got away. I shoulda taken you with.

“
Go now. I always did love you, boy,” she added. Her front teeth were gaps in a warm smile.

“
Thank you,” he said, and turned away from Big Stone forever.

He spent the next few hours gathering tools, and planning. The thing he would do when night shrouded the land had to be done immediately, before fear could overpower the new feeling that blossomed within him like a flower bred to live on the surface of a black hole.

Two days later, living in his pickup in the woods near town, he finally read the front-page article he had been waiting for. Gladice’s stepfather had burned to death in the middle of town, setting the drug store ablaze, after his car’s taillight wire had ignited ten gallons of gasoline. Apparently, the article stated, the tragedy was a result of rotten insulation around the wire and a hole rusted in the fuel tank. No foul play was suspected.

Satisfied, Luke prepared to move on into his life. But a second article just below the headline caught his attention: “Local Woman Beaten to Death; Local Man Suspected of Murder.”

When he saw his mother’s name, he didn’t need to read further. He started the pickup and drove toward Minneapolis, veering around that haunted city before he reached it.

A few days later, he pulled into Chicago and enrolled in a high school there. The following year, he graduated with top honors. He entered Harvard Business School on a scholarship, graduated in three years, got in on the ground floor of a unique advertising agency that was just organizing. Soon, Luke Herrschaft was branded the mastermind behind the “adult feature-length cartoon,” essentially a two-hour ad set in the newest, lifelike virtual reality, which the agency marketed along with their hardware. The dawn of selling ads as entertainment had arrived. Luke Herrschaft quickly became the agency’s executive officer.

By the time he turned 40, when the first surgically implanted AI cards were becoming available, Herrschaft was a multimillionaire. His empire might have ended there if it had not been that influential personalities—including actors fearful of losing their jobs—were the first to obtain those primitive cards. At the time, they were still powered by an unsightly cord that led to a combination battery pack/external computer. With the income the sales generated and the second income their advertising customers provided, Luke ordered his growing team of technicians to improve on the first generation of cards.

Programmers working for him came up with educational programming that allowed students to interact personally with crude artificial intelligences—teachers—offering unprecedented opportunities for learning. Herrschaft had made this a priority. At first, only the rich could afford the equipment and programming for their children, and they hesitated to have their children surgically altered with implanted cards.

One August day, his technicians came to his glass office overlooking Chicago, elated and out of breath. They told him they had perfected the internal receiver/transmitter so a cardowner could be connected, via wireless, with his or her mainframe—or any available mainframe within range. A cardowner could now access any and all programming in the air or on the mainframe. No longer would they be limited by the amount of hardware that could fit in a human head or exposed around their waists. Luke had a moment of epiphany:

He foresaw the development of what would at first be called PCBN: The Public Card Broadcasting Network, providing a range of subscribable programming from interactive classrooms to pure entertainment. It soon overpowered even the prevailing telephone and cable empires. He foresaw the WCCB: The World Cybernetics Control Board, which taxed and controlled the deluge of programming available to cardowners. From there, he foresaw the blurring and blending of defining lines between corporation, advertising agency, and political institution. He even caught a glimmer of “standardized installation,” the plan that installed cards into children at the earliest safe age. This gave them the advantage of growing up with all the benefits of cardownership, making it an instinctive part of their paradigm.

Children would no longer be exposed to violence at public schools. They would be given educations unmatched by the dreams of great academicians. Luke realized he would make it his priority to bring this vision to life, and would also engineer every other means of protecting the children. Virtual reality programming would give them an escape from the dominion of adults—even if the sanctuary were only in their minds. Better than that, he foresaw that this internal two-way communication system would also provide the ultimate security: If the neural net/brain interface were sufficiently integrated, a victim could simply call the police in the silence of his or her thoughts, and they would arrive to either stop the crime or witness it, ensuring it never happened again.

And he would create individs and all-sex channels to relieve the violent and sexual needs of potential abusers. Let them do whatever they wish to electronic children, as long as it defused the danger to the real ones.