Imago Page 2
Moments later, they were at the end of Main Street, turning the corner to Tomorrowland and the PerfectTown.
oOo
Their PerfectTown guide was a lovely young woman with porcelain skin, smooth blond hair, and perfect teeth. Max noticed Cindy’s expression when she caught sight of him looking at her with a pleasant and possibly dreamy expression: the set jaw meant that he’d hear about that later, too.
“I’m Marisa,” the guide said in a soft, modulated voice. “I’ll be your guide to where the past meets the future: DisLex’s PerfectTown.” Max wondered how it was possible that a dress with a Peter Pan collar and a neat bow at the back could look sexy. It did.
They followed the guide down a long, padded ramp. Fifteen-foot high, seamless metal doors opened with a whispery rush as they entered what the guide Marisa called “the lobby.”
“Tina, look!” Max said, lifting his daughter up.
Beside him, Cindy took a deep breath. “My God,” she said.
They stood on a balcony that overlooked the PerfectTown. The guide’s words seemed to fade. For the town that lay at their feet under what seemed to Max to be a transparent bubble appeared to cover several square miles. Max felt his stomach grow light with vertigo. How had they managed to build something like that — under Disneyland? It looked bigger than the entire above-ground Magic Kingdom. He shook his head, trying to make visual sense of it.
“It’s huge,” Martinez said, rushing to the railing and leaning over. “Look at that! I see a park, and over there — look! You can see the cars!”
“Houses,” Cindy said in a breathy voice. “Thousands of them.”
“There’s a steeple,” Tina added. “Daddy, I see a horsie!”
“It doesn’t look like a hologram, does it?” the guide asked.
“No,” Max admitted. “It doesn’t.”
“They look real. Look! That man in jogging pants is scratching his head, wondering what to do,” Cindy said. “Honey, look!” She guided Tina’s small dark head to see the man. Tina’s brow wrinkled.
“I can’t see him,” Tina said. “I see the tall man in black with the funny hat.”
“Yeah,” Martinez said. “It’s Cesar Chavez.”
“You!” His wife poked him in the ribs. “That’s a little girl. She’s dark, like this one here.” She pointed at Tina and smiled a tight little smile.
“You’re all seeing something different,” Marisa said. “That’s the way it works. The simulation shows itself differently to each person who comes to it. There’s never been —”
“You mean Tina sees the horse, my wife sees the guy scratching his head, and I see the cars and churches?” Max asked.
The guide nodded, flashing her polished smile. “You must be interested in technology and architecture,” she said. “Children are —”
Tina grabbed Max’s sleeve and tugged. “It’s not a horsey any more,” she whispered. “It’s a big brown dog now.”
“Is he friendly?” Max asked.
Tina nodded.
“You must be wondering,” the guide said, gesturing over the bubble of the town with one pale, slender arm, downed with hair in the lambent light, “where do these things come from?”
“I figured it’s all a computer program,” Martinez said. Max looked briefly at him and wondered how the other man could interpret the figure who’d ambled into his view as Cesar Chavez. Aside from the one-foot height difference between the two cultural heroes, the tall man with the black knee-length coat and stovepipe hat was so obviously Abraham Lincoln that even Tina could have recognized him.
Cindy started giggling. “It’s a clown, Max,” she said. “And his nose is falling off!”
“You’re absolutely right,” the guide told Martinez. “It is a computer program, but the most sophisticated program the world has ever known. The figures you see are real. They change as you look at them, and as they interact among themselves.”
“Interact?” Max asked. Cindy looked at him; he could tell from the way that her eyes narrowed suddenly and the pupils contracted that she was fascinated, but also fearful. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and drew Tina close.
“Daddy, now the doggy ran away. I just see a little boy. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt and dumb-looking tennis shoes.”
“That’s nice,” Cindy said, smoothing Tina’s hair.
“Yes, as far as they’re concerned, they all live in the same town. A real town. The PerfectTown,” the guide said. “They’re called imagos. That’s an unusual word that has several meanings.”
“Images?” Cindy asked.
“Yeah,” Martinez said. “Like the movies, only three-dimensional.”
“A movie made with dolls,” his wife said. “I guess this is —”
“The world’s most expensive puppet show,” Max said, laughing.
The guide smiled at him. It reminded him of the way his second-grade teacher had looked at him when he’d come up with the wrong answer.
“No, they’re not puppets. They think. They can do things for themselves. They live, get married, go to church and school — even have children. Or, something like that,” she said. “They’re changing right now, even as we watch them.”
“There’s something not right about that,” Cindy whispered in Max’s ear. “It reminds me of a poem I read. Or maybe it was an old TV show. There were all these dolls trapped in a —”
“Shh!” Max silenced her, because the guide was continuing with her explanation.
“An imago is the mature stage of an insect,” the guide said. “Like a butterfly, coming out of its cocoon.”
“We had silk worms at school,” Tina said. “They spun their cocoons, then they came out as pretty moths while we were at home asleep.”
Max began to wonder if the guide was one of these imagos herself, as he watched her lean over and pat Tina’s cheek.
“I don’t see any bugs or butterflies,” Martinez said.
“He just saw Cesar Chavez in a black suit with a stovepipe hat,” Max whispered in Cindy’s ear. “Cesar Chavez was four feet tall.” She slapped his arm, rolling her eyes. He grinned to himself.
“An imago is also an image. Something as real as, but other than, the the world that is.”
Martinez started laughing. “I get it now,” he said. “It’s like that old game. What was that? Sim Town?”
The guide turned her lovely face toward him. “It has its basis in something like that,” she said.
“So, what if somebody pulls the plug?” Martinez made a nasty popping, snapping noise back in his throat, like a lightbulb burning out.
The guide shrugged. “There is no plug,” she said.
“How can it —”
“It’s alive,” she said. “The PerfectTown grows each day. It is part of the DisLex central computer, but completely separate from —”
“From our bills?” Max said.
The guide nodded. “The computer is now divided in two parts. It has —”
“Mama, listen!” Tina exclaimed.
“Don’t interrupt,” Cindy said, leaning over.
“No!” Cindy said. “A song. Can’t you hear it?”
Everyone turned toward the PerfectTown.
“I think I can,” the guide said.
“It’s the little boy,” Tina said. “He’s singing.”
At first, Max heard only a bare whisper. Then the song grew louder. He could almost make out the words. “I hear it,” he said. “I think.” Then he turned to the others. “Do —”
“I do,” Cindy said. Her hands reached for Tina’s shoulders and she drew her daughter to her. Max had never seen quite the same kind of look in her eyes. He moved close, but something in his wife’s eyes pushed him away like a magnetic repulsion. She covered Tina’s ears. The boy’s voice filled the room.
Katie, Katie give me your answer, true
r /> I’m half crazy, all because of you
You once were my dear grandmother
But you just could not stay true
Katie, Katie
When the sun goes down, I’ll burn the city
Then I’ll murder you
“Oh, my God,” Cindy said.
“Look at the kid!” Martinez cried.
“Tina, don’t look!” Cindy crushed Tina’s head into her belly and stared down at the PerfectTown, her eyes growing wider and wider.
“He’s burning that church,” Martinez’ wife said.
“Are you nuts? Look at him! He’s running after that lady with a knife.”
“Holy —” Max’s oath was cut short in utter shock. It was like a dream, one of those dreams where you try to scream — something is chasing you — something horrible and dark, with foul breath and claws — and you can’t quite get away, and you can’t scream, or say a word — nothing. Not ever.
The kid in the blue striped shirt and geek tennis shoes cut off Mister Lincoln’s head with a machete.
“He’s got a bottle now, with a cloth sticking out of it,” Cindy said.
Somehow, Tina managed to squirm free. Max didn’t know how. Cindy shrieked, but it was too late.
“He hurt the doggy, Mama!” she cried.
Max hoped he would never again see anything like the expression on his daughter’s face.
The guide’s hand was over her mouth. A quarter-inch of bloodshot white showed all the way around her big, pretty blue eyes.
She spoke into her wristband. Max watched her pale fingers trembling. Her lips were trembling as well.
“You’ve got to stop this,” she said. “Control — we have a —”
Max heard something coming back from her wrist, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“It’s a boy,” she said. “Some kind of insane boy.”
Again, the buzz of a voice just beyond Max’s hearing. The horrible song continued. And changed. Grew dissonant. Stopped rhyming. Became a chant. Like something they’d sing in a blasphemous monastery where the crosses hung upside-down. There were words that he didn’t want Tina to hear. Words he was sorry that he’d heard, especially in the Magic Kingdom. Other words he didn’t know, but which chilled his body deep inside to hear them all the same.
The guide’s voice broke through, high and desperate. “It’s his imago. No — it is him. He has blond hair. A knife. A bomb. Sword-thing. I don’t —”
“We’ve got to get out,” Max said. He grabbed Cindy’s shoulder and spun her toward the double doors where they’d entered, lifting Tina by the waist.
“What should I do?” The guide looked around and gestured toward them.
“The doors won’t open,” she said. “They’re programmed not to until we’re —”
“Like Hell they won’t!” Max cried. He looked at Martinez, who gaped at the carnage below them, his wife clinging to him as she gasped and wept. “Help us!” Max yelled at the older man. Martinez moved one leg forward with excruciating slowness. It was like one of those cold-sweat dreams. Max began to wonder if he’d made any sense at all, or if his words had been heard.
“We have ten more minutes,” the guide called toward them. She was wringing her hands, then she opened them toward Max, Cindy and Tina, pleading. “We can sit and wait. Look away from it. It will stop. They said it would —”
Max felt a sharp rush of pity for her. She was young. He knew it wasn’t her fault; knew also that she was as frightened as any of them were. He remembered the man who’d been killed in that terrible accident on Space Mountain. The Magic Kingdom took a lot of pride in the fact that nobody had ever been hurt badly there since, not even nuts who tried some crazy stunt, like trying to kill themselves by flinging their bodies from the bridge of Snow White’s castle. It was a different Magic Kingdom now than it had been when he was a kid. Back then, it had been the happiest place on earth. Now it was perfect. DisLex, not Disney. Hell, they ran the whole state. Power, water, trash, newspapers, satellite, net, movies...
Max looked back at her a long moment, and then he realized that Martinez had moved and was standing by his side.
“Together,” he said, looking at the older man. Martinez looked out of shape, but his shoulders were big. He had some weight to put toward it.
At once, they rushed the double doors.
Max felt the pain in the meaty part of his back, right where you were supposed to punch someone if you really wanted to hurt them.
“Chingadera!” Martinez swore, rubbing his shoulder.
Max knew that was a really bad swear word in Spanish, but he had never quite been sure what it meant.
“Madre de Dios!” Martinez continued. “That won’t move,” he added.
Max knew what Madre de Dios meant.
When he looked toward the guide, she was sitting in a fetal position, her arms wrapped around her knees, head resting above that. Her eyes were closed and she was rocking back and forth.
The song was now a series of long, keening wails, something like what Max thought you’d hear coming from a ward for the criminally insane.
“Mama, Mama,” Tina said, over and over. Cindy held her tight. Fear and a mother’s fierce protectiveness had made her face as taut and expressionless as an Aleutian mask.
“For God’s sake,” she said through her teeth. “Get us out of here!”
Max sensed something amid the wailing roar. Later, he could never had said what made him turn away from the Armageddon of the PerfectTown, away from the double doors, and away from the guide, but he did, all the same.
To see a sliver of light, perhaps two hundred yards away, in the opposite direction along the rail that kept them from falling into the PerfectTown. Or PerfectHell, as he would later term it.
The sliver of light grew until Max could make it out as a door, and it was not artificial, but natural light.
He grabbed Cindy’s wrist and spun her. Martinez turned as well. His wife’s wailing, which had joined the horrible death-cries coming from below, softened.
A hand beckoned through the door. Something about the hand was not quite right, but Max didn’t question that. He grabbed his wife’s wrist. This time, she took Tina and carried her like a baby, though she weighed seventy-five pounds, and he heard Martinez breathing heavily as he followed.
Max pulled up short as they reached the door. He put one arm out, protecting Cindy, Tina and the Martinez’s, stopping them from going any farther.
Because there had been something wrong with the hand at the door. The fingers were wrapped in gray-yellow rags, twisted, and grimed with oil and filth. The hand led to a thick arm in an army surplus jacket, and the face that peered through the door at them was nothing any decent person could look at without shuddering.
Their rescuer was a freak. Max didn’t know if it was the same one they’d seen on the way in. It probably was the same one, he thought, because this was a pig man and there weren’t many of those. Or so he’d read. Or heard.
“Look man, we’ve just had a bad experience. If you’re going to try to rip us off or infect us, you’ll have to come through me,” Max said, steeling his voice. He felts his hands ball into fists.
The freak shook his head.
“I was outside. I heard screaming,” he said.
It was almost impossible to believe, but the voice that came out of his diseased face was normal, even gentle. He sounded educated.
“You’re not going to —” Max blurted.
The pig man averted his head. Maybe the brief movement was something that an animal would do if it was in trouble, or wanted to defer to a stronger beast. Max guessed that was what he was to this freak: a stronger form of beast.
“Goddamn freak!” Martinez blustered. He pushed his way past Cindy and Tina, his wife in tow. He was shaking his fist.
“I heard the bad noises,” the pig man said. “I know how to get in and out. I thought you might need some help.”
“Max,” Cindy whispered
. “Don’t make any trouble with him. He was just trying to —”
Max put his hand on her cheek, then looked back at the pig man, who was truly one of the most filthy, boil-ridden, bristle-tufted and twisted creatures he’d ever seen, and that included pot-bellied pigs at the Los Angeles County Fair and embalmed creatures sewn together at the Museum of the Weird in Hollywood, and slowly, he smiled.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“No problem,” the pig man replied, swinging the door open wide and stepping back as far as he could to let them all pass.
Inside the PerfectTown, the hideous, wailing, shrieking song stopped.
The guide screamed once, then she too was silent.
Chapter Two
On a discreet palm screen, DisLex chairman Harman Jacques watched his new assistant Julie Curtez checking her makeup in the mirrored surface of the outer doors to his office. It was amazing what people would do when they thought no one was watching. Someone told him once that character was what people did when they thought they were alone.
“No one’s ever alone,” he whispered.
He liked the thought that Julie thought she was alone, though. After a moment, he released the doors and let her in.
“I suppose I picked a great day to start,” she said, standing in front of his desk, her arms folded at her waist. She meant the PerfectTown mess.
Harmon swiveled in his chair to face her, and as always, he smiled inside at her polished good looks. Like a good girl, she wore her gloves. He wore none, of course, but unlike most others, he had no fear of the Human Mutational Virus, or any other nasty bug that might be festering out in the mire beyond his air-scrubbed office and his clean, perfect world.
“Somebody told me once that you might as well learn to firefight in a maelstrom as a bonfire,” he said as he stood. Harmon wasn’t about to entrust the PerfectTown public relations disaster to the good people down at the Magic Kingdom.
“We’ll take my Lear down there,” he said. “We’ll pay a personal call on Max Prinn and his family. I assume the packages have been shipped?” Julie nodded. The first order of her day had been to gather gifts for the Prinns: a peace offering after their visit to the PerfectTown had gone so horribly wrong.