Devil's Plaything (15 page)

I
drive toward the address listed on a piece of paper that sits in my lap, the address I pulled from Adrianna's office, the only clue I've got to go on. This is where we'll find the computers associated with Biogen, ADAM, the Advanced Life Computing department—whatever the hell any of that is.

The phone rings. I answer.

“It's me,” responds a male voice. Bullseye. He never calls; he hates the phone.

“You cracked the thumb drive?” I ask.

“Couldn't do it. Tried everything.”

I digest the disappointment. “Will you try one more thing for me?”

I glance at the sheet of paper, though by now I've memorized the information. I tell Bullseye that I suspect the user name might be some variation of one of the following: Lulu Adrianna Pederson, or LAPederson, or maybe ADAM1.0, or Biogen. The password, I say, could be some version of Newton—with various different spellings.

“Bullseye, it could be—I'll spell it out: ‘N-e-w-t–0-n–1–2–3.' ”

“I'll call you back,” Bullseye says. He sounds more excited than I've heard him in years.

Before I can hang up, Samantha takes the phone.

“Are you still with Lane?” she asks.

“Yep.”

“Is there any way around that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I dreamed about you last night. The two of you were standing in the parking lot at Disneyland. You were trying to take her inside, and she wanted to stay in the car,” she says. “It's a message.”

“I get it.”

“You're like a brother to me, Nathaniel.”

“Okay.”

“So please don't take this wrong. I just wish you wouldn't drag your grandmother around on one of your treks. Take her home—to her retirement home.”

“I gotta go, Sam. Grandma's doing just fine.”

We hang up.

We've arrived at an industrial building located in a desolate cul-de-sac a few blocks off Highway 101—the thoroughfare that connects San Francisco to everything south of it.

The single-story beige building has a corrugated roof and tinted windows with bars on them. No signs on the building. No signs of life. Feels like industrial storage. We park in back in an empty lot.

Grandma's fiddling with her cell phone. Not playing, just looking at the screen and pushing on the buttons.

“Do you want to wait here?”

“I'd like to see Harry,” she responds, without looking up.

“Soon enough,” I say. “I'm back in five.”

In front, I pull on the cool handle of the thick metal door. It's locked. Next to the door is a keypad. Into the keypad, I type: “Newt0n123.” I hear a click. I pull down on the door handle. It opens.

The first thing I notice is the low noise and the cool air; it's the hum and lower temperature emitted by an air-conditioning system used to cool a gaggle of servers.

My eyes adjust to low light. I look across a relatively small room—perhaps four times the size of my apartment. It has a high ceiling and a smooth concrete floor. In its center are rows of metal racks holding uniform square boxes. It's a dazzling array of computing power.

Along the wall where I've entered stands another set of racks. On them sit two dozen monitors. Page after page of text scrolls rapidly down the screens.

These servers and monitors form some sort of nerve center.

But it's the human that is of the most interest to me.

He sits across the room at a metal desk, his back to me. He wears a gray hooded sweatshirt. He fiddles with a small square object.

“Hello, Mr. Idle,” he says without turning around.

“You drive a Prius,” I say.

He starts to turn. “Our dependence on foreign oil is bad for our sovereignty. Besides, gas is expensive. And the Prius has nice trunk space to store rifles.”

Staring at me is a ruddy face, a few years older than me, or aged poorly or baked by years in the sun, thick jaw, big shoulders, doughy nose that's been broken more than once. He's got an edgy toughness men instantly respect and some women wouldn't appreciate.

“What's your title at Biogen? Chief Mauling Officer?”

“Guess again.”

He's got a mild accent. English? Australian?

I divert my eyes from him so that I can look at the servers. On the side of the racks there is a sign with initials: “HMC.” I've seen the initials before—on the piece of paper I took from Adrianna's office.

“I get it,” I say.

“I doubt that.”

“Human Memory Crusade.”

He cocks his head to the side.

“You're recording people's memories. You're recording my grandmother's memories. You're storing them here. Why?”

He doesn't respond.

“Would it be easier if I asked true/false questions?”

“Sure.”

“You're studying the pace at which people lose their memories.”

“True.”

“You are?” I surprise myself sometimes.

“Sounds very sinister, doesn't it? Recording people's stories. Alert the Marines.”

“Vince is involved? And the nursing home?”

He stops tinkering with his box

“You're getting warmer.”

I pull out my phone.

“I'm calling the police.”

“I wouldn't. Listen. We made a mistake. We were wrong.”

“We?”

He's got my attention. He goes back to tinkering.

“We want to get the truth out of her as much as you do. We need the truth. Without sounding too dramatic, it has major national security implications,” he says. “We thought you were going to be able to help us get the information out of her head.

“Adrianna?”

“But you didn't come through. So we'll get it from her ourselves.”

“Her?” I repeat.

He shakes his head without looking up.

“What're you working on?” I ask. It strikes me he's stringing me along, stalling for time. Maybe he's erasing some evidence.

“Mr. Idle, if I were you, I'd be wary of trusting anyone—your family members, your closest friends, lovers, the police. Anyone. People have a way of looking out for themselves, even the ones you share your secrets with—especially them.”

“My grandmother?”

“Like I said, you're getting warmer.”

He looks up and at the monitors behind me showing scrolling text. Periodically, a word pops out and takes up a quarter of a screen in large font. On one monitor, I happen to see the word “Cadillac.” On another, the words “butter churn.”

On the top right edge of each monitor is an image of the globe. Within each image, a red dot located in a different spot within the globe.

“You're experimenting around the country, around the world.”

He looks down and fiddles intently with the box in his hand. His eyes fall to the ground. He looks at a wire that extends from the small object he's holding to the servers.

“You're not just warm. You're hot,” he says.

“This thing is everywhere.”

“You're about to get scorching.”

He presses a button on the box he's holding. He stands, walks away from me, towards the back of the room. I take a step to follow.

The servers and the monitors explode. I feel intense heat. My phone flies from my grasp. I picture Grandma, sitting alone in the car, vulnerable, keeping some great truth.

Surrounded by fire, I grow woozy, then succumb.

“G
randpa looks like a retard.”

“That's a horrible word, and keep your voice down,” Grandma says but I can't tell if she's really upset.

“He's flailing his arms around like a gorilla.”

Now she laughs. She whispers: “Now ‘flailing'—that's a good word.”

I'm ten, and visiting my grandparents. It's a hot day in their backyard. Grandma and I stand on the concrete porch while Grandpa Irving, wearing paisley shorts and a white tank top that betrays his farmer's tan, waters the grass. And he dances, more or less. The radio is on, and he's moving his arms and the hose—distinctly not in time with the music.

“Your grandfather has no rhythm. He's not like us.”

“You mean like he can't dance good?”

“Well. That's not just it. We're more colorful—you and I. It's in our bones. He has different bones.”

“You and I share the same bones?”

“Precisely.”

“Well then how can we both walk at the same time?”

She laughs. But I sense Grandma is communicating something serious that I can't quite understand.

The conversation stuck with me. I remember that it made me feel Grandma and I belonged to a special club and no one else in the family was a member.

And that happens to be the anecdote passing in an eye-blink through my mind, dreamlike, as death beckons me on a concrete floor of an industrial building. My proverbial white tunnel is a backyard from twenty-five years ago, and my angel of death is my grandfather, watering his lawn.

Then I cough. It's a violent spasm, sufficient to wrench me to consciousness. My first sensation comes from my legs, which pulse from the scorching heat. My eyes flutter, but I can't fully open them because of the waves of searing air.

Staying on the floor, I yank the bottom of my shirt to my face and cover my mouth and nose. I know that what will kill me first is not fire, but smoke inhalation.

Then, from above, I feel something remarkable—a burst of frozen air. I think for a moment I'm dead and this is part of the passage. Then I realize the cool relief comes from the air conditioner. The place must be highly climate-controlled to keep the servers from overheating—though the designers of the system never contemplated this. The air-conditioning system must be freaking out to cope with the explosion in heat. Where are the sprinklers?

The burst of air allows me to fully open my eyes. I can make out that the fire is localized in two spots—on the rack of servers to one side and on the rack of monitors to the other. I stand in an ever-shrinking island without flames. The air smells oddly fragrant, like a campfire, but it's doubtless toxic and filled with melted computer innards. Every few seconds, another circuit explodes, like high-tech popcorn kernels.

I strain to gaze through the heat to the wall the hooded man disappeared through. There must be a door on that side of the building. Regardless, my better survival option is the door I entered, but flames are rising to block the way.

I get up crouching, hold my breath and hurtle through a slight breach in the flames. I make it to the door and I yank it open. I hurl myself into oxygen and fall onto the ground on my knees.

I'm heaving, coughing, gasping, and then, I leap to my feet in a coughing retch and sprint-limp to the parking lot. Seconds later, I find our car, but not Grandma. The passenger door is open, Grandma's game device sitting on the seat. She's nowhere to be seen.

At the other end of the huge parking lot, departing, I see the back end of a car, quickly disappearing. It's the Prius.

“Grandma!” It's a wild, effete cry. I fumble in my pocket for my phone to call the police. Then I remember my phone is melting, has melted.

I put the key into the ignition and turn the key. The engine doesn't turn over. I turn the key again. No response.

“Fuck!”

From the building, I hear a pop. A window blows out.

The cops and fire department will be here soon.

Then I see it. Movement near the edge of the lot. She's standing next to a cluster of bushes that look like they were intended as landscaping but never got much attention.

“Grandma!”

I'm sprinting.

When I get to her, she looks nonplussed, but she says, “I should be embarrassed.”

“What?”

“I peed over near the picnic tables,” she says, looking over her shoulder at the bushes.

“You peed? In the bushes?”

“I grew up in Denver and we had a field where we went to the bathroom on the way home from school.”

I wrap my arms around her. “I love you.”

“Are you crying, Nathaniel?”

“We're fine.”

“Well, it's not polite to wear blackface,” she says.

I run a finger down my cheek, and sure enough. Looks like I'm ready for Halloween. I take her by the hand. “We have to go.”

We return to the car, as flames start to shoot from the building's sides. I reconnect the car battery again. I'm not happy I've gotten so good at this.

I hear sirens.

“Option B,” I say, as we climb back into the car.

“What?”

“Option A is to wait for the cops and tell them everything. Option B is to wait until we have more facts.”

What are we supposed to tell them—that we have a vague idea that someone possibly connected to Biogen tried to kill us for reasons we don't understand?

I start the car. It lurches forward. Then halts, then lurches again.

Something else is wrong—maybe a cut fuel line, or some other sabotage. Who knows?

Moving in fits and starts, I pull out of the parking lot. We lurch down the street, just as a fire truck passes us.

I hear a phone ring. I'm surprised because I'm certain my phone has been reduced to the basic elements table in the server farm. Then I look down in the center compartment and see the ringing phone; it's the prepaid model Chuck gave me. I ignore it.

I drive to the end of the block, take a right, then drive another block, turning into the empty parking lot of an abandoned warehouse with a grammatically incorrect sign on the door that reads: “Shanghai Bath Furnishings. Gone From Business.” My car is sputtering to the point of completely giving out.

I grab another wad of fast-food napkins and try and clean up. I'm not happy I've gotten so good at this, either.

I open the phone and I dial Samantha. She doesn't answer. I call again. No answer. Of course not; the Witch doesn't answer calls from numbers she doesn't recognize, or blocked numbers. She feels people should have the courtesy to announce themselves.

I call again, then again, and again. Finally, she relents. “This is Samantha. I love all people and respect your choices, but telemarketing calls throw me out of balance so I must . . .”

“Sam, stop! It's Nat.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Grandma and I are in an extreme version of a pickle and we need a ride.”

I tell her where we are.

“No problem. On the way,” she says. “I'm glad you called. The Whiz has been trying to reach you.”

The Witch and the Whiz.

She hands him the phone.

“I've opened your file,” Bullseye says. “You were right. The password was a variation of the name Newton.”

“What's on the drive?”

“A transcript.”

“Of?”

“Your grandmother.”

“Talking to who?”

“Whom,” Grandma interjects. “Talking to whom?”

“Talking to whom, Bullseye?”

“She's not talking to a person.”

Then it dawns on me. “She's talking to a computer—to a piece of software,” I exclaim.

“How'd you know?”

“The Human Memory Crusade.”

“Correct,” Bullseye says. “Seems like an AI program is asking her questions and she's answering.”

“What's she saying?”

He hesitates.

“I'll bring it with me. I think it's something you need to read for yourself.”

He hangs up.

I look at Grandma.

“It's time to hear what you told the box.”

She doesn't answer.

“Talk to me, Grandma. Tell me what's going on?”

She puts her hands to her face. She looks terribly stricken.

“Grandma, are you keeping a secret from me?”

“I'm keeping a secret from everybody.”