“What do you call this world?”
“This is the afterlife, Al. Except this afterlife is real and it’s on earth. It’s beautiful. It’s our redemption. It’s the time when we fulfill the task we were put here to do from when we crawled up out of the slime. Mr. Kirkpatrick teaches us that long ago we fearfully opened our eyes and searched for God. Now we open our eyes with love and create new life that will behold our fading shadow in awe. This is how it has been for all time. Intelligence moves relentlessly toward the creation of new varieties of intelligence and the greatest achievement of intelligence is the dissemination of new life forms. This clone of your son is the one we’ve been waiting for.”
“I have no idea whose side I’m even on,” Skinner said.
“You’re on the side that lifted man from the animals. But we don’t need you anymore.”
“I don’t remember how I got here.”
“You took a cab.”
“No, this island. The segues are missing from my memories.”
Stretching his neck, Bickle crossed the room to the stereo. “That’s because you’re a forgetfulness junkie. And by the way, that was a really expensive chair you ruined, I’ll have you know.” On the shelf next to the stereo sat an Apple memory console and a stack of cards. “You really want to know how you got here?”
Skinner didn’t answer, and in not answering indicated that he did.
“Did anything about your trip to Bramble Falls strike you as odd?” Bickle said.
“Lots of hallucinations.”
“Right. The kid with no face and the Indian by the fire. All those detailed memories of your hometown, the trails, the trees. The suddenness with which you were standing at the trailhead eating fruit cocktail from a can. Not to mention you’re never going to find a town called Bramble Falls on a map. The place is an invention. The real stroke of genius, thanks to this young hotshot developer we’ve got assigned to the project, was to embed your dad’s memories in this patched-together memory network where you’ve spent the past couple weeks. But that’s not the highlight. The highlight is this little guy right here.” Bickle held a card between his thumb and index finger. “You remember erasing a memory of erasing a memory and so on. Here it is. The master file. The memory of when you killed your son.”
Skinner fritzed out a bit at the edges. “You’re lying.”
“Your last mission, Al. The final hurrah of Christian America. The ultimate test of a soldier’s loyalty to laws and order and dogma. You carried out your orders impeccably. Your son, the first Waitimu, was born with super- admin privileges. When you learned this you volunteered for the task. This card will show you the abandoned building where you cornered him. It’ll show you the vines that grew up from the concrete beside the door you walked through, the chipped aqua-green paint on the wall. His pleas. You came into our office immediately after the deed and erased the memory, then erased the memory of erasing the memory. You kept doing this until no trace of the original memory remained.”
Skinner tried to breathe.
“And this one.” Bickle held up another card. “This is the sequel. The latest one. The one where you murder the rest of your family.”
“It was newmans.”
Bickle shook his head. “Newmans rescued the boy when you went psychotic. You think you’re going to the Met to save the boy but that’s not in your programming. You’re going there to kill him.”
And Skinner knew it was true. He walked to the window.
“You’ve done what you were designed to do, Al.”
“Who designed me?”
“Guy by the name of Nick Fedderly.”
“I am so confused.”
“Like I said, A+B=C is not the way to go here.”
“Release me.”
“That’s what these weapons are for.”
“I understand. Before I go. The man in the desert. The one with the refrigerator. Who is he?”
“Some call him the Last Dude.”
“What is he doing out there?”
“He’s running everything.”
“What?”
“You mean you haven’t figured that out?” asked Bickle. “The Last Dude is Mr. Kirkpatrick.”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 9
Star never showed. I slept in her bed, ate whatever was canned in the pantry, and did my best to clean the place up. The ground around the house was still muddy, the roof covered in moss. The old, uncompleted frame of the house had started to crumble. I chopped wood. I kept waiting for her to appear but she never did. I was used to keeping to myself and I’d forgotten how much I loved the woods. But what kept me there was the shed. Every morning I made myself coffee and breakfast, then walked to the shed where I’d make a fire in the potbelly stove and study Nick’s dad’s plans. I grew to love the chemical-sweet smell of blueprint paper. I came to see that this wasn’t just a collection of random blueprints. His plan was to transform the island in phases. Chop down hills, fill in gullies, reshape Bainbridge’s irregular coastline into smooth, tapered Manhattan. Once the island was regraded, he’d build from the underground up. Start with subways, sewer, natural gas, communications. Lay down streets, foundations of buildings. Then, somehow, re-create every building in the city. It was an insane plan any rational person would have considered pure science fiction. But the care he’d put into these blueprints made me wonder if they were the product of a true believer.
I lived, ate, slept, chopped wood, and thought constantly about those blueprints. Then one day, I was clearing moss off shingles and it occurred to me that Nick’s dad would’ve had to print them somewhere. There must have been some kind of machine that produced them. I dug around in the shed and found a banker’s box with old pay stubs, with the name of Marc’s employer on them. Kern, Nagamitsu, & Nichols Civil Engineering and Land Surveying.
I should say that I had done my best to avoid anyone I knew on Bainbridge and keep to myself. When I needed groceries, I rode an old ten-speed across the bridge to Poulsbo and filled up my backpack. I was sporting a pretty rangy beard again and went unrecognized whenever I had to go into town. People looking at you, instantly figuring out your place on the totem pole—I didn’t want anything to do with that. Maybe some of Star’s antisocial behavior was coming out of me. But I recognized that I had to get myself respectable if I wanted to launch another investigation and get people to divulge information. I shaved, and as the whiskers fell away I saw the old high school football star, the dot-com drone, older, heavier, the skin around my eyes sagging and wrinkled from years of pained expressions. I had been wrong to think that anyone would remember that kid and bother to formulate an opinion about his grown-up self. I was a complete nobody now.
The office was in a building next to a chiropractor and a day care. A little place with a lobby, a room for drafting, and a room downstairs in back where they kept all the surveying equipment. I just walked in and asked to speak to one of the civil engineers. The receptionist called up Don Nagamitsu, a trim guy with a gray beard and a denim shirt tucked into his Levi’s. I told him I was living on the Fedderly property and had some questions about Marc. We went around the corner to a bakery and Don insisted on buying me coffee. He asked me what I wanted to know. I told him about the blueprints. He sort of laughed and looked out the window.
He told me a story. He said, “We were having a company party in I’d say ’79, ’80. Business was good and Dave Kern, our chief, had just had a hot tub installed on his deck overlooking Seattle. Twelve or so of us, getting drunk, shooting firecrackers off the deck, living it up. So I’m there in the hot tub on my fourth glass of wine. Marc across from me, Star next to him, my wife Sandy beside me. And Marc says, ‘You want to hear something really interesting? Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size. And you know what’s funny? Before Seattle was Seattle it was called New York Alki. It’s an Indian word that means “by and by.” In other words, sooner or later this place is going to be as big as New York City. I say we regrade the place and build ourselves a Big Apple.’ And you have to understand something about draftsmen. These guys, at least then, were the longhairs. You had your civil
