"Sleepless" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huston Charlie)

5

7/9/10

CAPTAIN BARTOLOME HAD me arrested again. Old-timers named Hounds and Kleiner. They took Ecstasy (30 tablets of Belgian Blue), Demerol (15 commercial caps) and Valium (20 commercial) from my stash and replaced them with what appeared to be no more than an ounce of poor quality Mexican marijuana. Captain says the busts are still the safest way for us to talk face-to-face. I say the arrest record tells too much to anyone who takes a look. I keep getting picked up and kicked loose. Doesn’t matter that the booking is always at a different precinct with different cops. Anyone who makes an effort looking in the file will put it together. Either I’m a snitch or I’m undercover. Either way I’ll be against the wall. Bartolome says not to worry. He says no one but other cops see the jacket. I say that’s what I’m worried about. Hounds and Kleiner. What would it take to buy those two? Or maybe not. Just because they’re pre-Rampart, that doesn’t make them dirty. Or not any dirtier than any narcs cherry-picking from a dealer’s stash. But if not them, then some other cop. Some other cop could be paid off to look in my jacket. Bartolome says it won’t happen. He says he won’t push it too far. I say it’s already too far. Too long. I’ve been doing this too long. Sitting and talking with him, I worried as much about the customers blowing up my phone as I did about letting Rose know I was okay. Bartolome says that dealers always make their customers wait. He says it’s like “part of their credo.” But he’s not out there. The people he wants me dealing to are not used to waiting. That was supposed to be the whole point of me doing this. He says my client list is getting too big, anyway. He says there is no point in keeping them for more than a few weeks. He says we’re not trying to bust users, we’re trying to find Dreamer. “If they don’t connect to Dreamer, stop taking their texts.” But I need the good referrals to get the new customers. And some of them, they need what I get for them.

Srivar Dhar left five messages. He’s in final stages, the suffering, and only Shabu keeps him from falling into waking REM states. Every time he hits a REM cycle, he hallucinates the Kargil War. He was an officer in the frontal assaults on Pakistani positions that were inaccessible to Bofors howitzers and airpower. Uphill at eighteen thousand feet, near zero Fahrenheit, in darkness. His house is built on a slope. In REMs he charges the slope, falls on his stomach, and starts to crawl, shivering and crying. He says he can feel the cold. Smoking Shabu keeps him fully awake. He’s more aware of his body, the pain, but he says it’s better than going back to Kargil.

Bartolome wants me to dump him.

I told him that Srivar introduced me to a whole community of western-educated wealthy Kashmiris. The kind who have connections to bootleg South Asian Dreamer. Dumping him before he dies would alienate all of them. He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t insist on getting rid of Srivar. Other than maybe a few bottles worth of loose pills, the bootlegs are the only Dreamer we’ve seen dealt in quantity. Busts of scale, the only kind he’s interested in. Maybe the little ones are the only ones we’ll get. Maybe the Dreamer distribution chain is just that tight. Maybe no one is dirty enough to try and steal from that supply. No one greedy enough to risk it. I said something like that to Bartolome once. He didn’t laugh out loud, but only because he stopped himself. He says, “There’s always someone dirty and greedy enough when there’s that kind of money to be made. If they aren’t dirty and greedy to start with, the money will make them that way.” He can’t imagine there aren’t busts to be had. Big Dreamer busts. I hope he’s wrong. But he’s probably right. So I have to keep looking.

Something weird when I told him about the murders at the gold farm. He did that thing where he stares at me and knocks on the tabletop while he stares at me. I’m still not sure if it’s an intimidation thing or if he’s knocking on the table intead of my head. It’s completely unlike anything my father would have done but carries some of the same exasperation. My father would have become utterly still. I’d have had to check his pulse to know he was alive. Then he would have asked something like, “Tell me, Parker, do you think that is wise?”

“I’ve submitted a Personal Qualifications Essay and begun prepping for the LAPD Academy tests.”

Followed by the long stillness.

“Tell me, Parker, do you think that is wise?”

Anyway, when Captain Bartolome does the knocking thing, I get the same kind of feeling that I used to get when my father asked that question. A feeling like I want to either explain myself fully so that he’ll understand, or knock him down and kick his teeth in. But Bartolome didn’t ask if I thought something was “wise,” he asked, “What the hell were you doing at the gold farm?”

He didn’t want me there. Told me a couple weeks back to cut them off my client list.

Said they weren’t “upscale” enough to connect to Dreamer. I’d been trying to explain to him that they were not only plenty upscale but that they were natural connectors for all social levels.

I didn’t get it at first. At first Beenie was just a customer when I was building my cover dealing medical marijuana, but he was the one who got me to see the potential, and then he got me into the farms.

People don’t leave home. Gas is too expensive to go anywhere you don’t have to go. And people are getting more and more afraid to go outside, anyway. The servers that support most of the Internet have backup power for emergencies. Even when local Internet service is out or when you lose power, the Internet itself is still there. And so are the games. And these people, they’re using the game environments not just for the usual adventures, they’re using them socially. Families on opposite coasts can’t afford to fly or drive to see one another, and who knows what the phone service might be like, but an online virtual world like Chasm Tide is there. And the more time people spend in-world, the more committed they are. The demand for in-world artifacts, gold, highly advanced characters, is huge. The real-market value on virtual money, possessions, and people keeps going up as the stock market continues to flounder. Now people are trading in Chasm Tide gold futures. Farmers who spend their time hacking up orcs and zombies and collecting their treasure until they have enough to push it onto the market are building almost equal value in real-world currency. Most of it in dollars. Euro and yuan are weaker against the dollar than Chasm gold is at this point.

Where you’re from or what you’re worth doesn’t matter in Chasm. There’s no class distinction in-world. The level 100 Eldritch Knight is the clerk at your local bodega. The level 2 Stone Druid is your boss. And they have a venue for interaction that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

And they all come to gold farmers like Hydo and his guys for what they need.

And sleepless play. More than anyone else, sleepless play. Twenty-four hours a day they can go in-world and not be sick. Total insomnia becomes a virtue.

Rose plays. She always liked certain aspects of gaming. The parts that connected with her work. Like the graphics, the intricacies of world building. Her first real hit, the video she did for Gun Music, was all about the band falling into a game. But now she really plays. She says it feels like she’s getting something done. When she can’t focus enough to work. Which is pretty much all the time now.

Chasm Tide.

The ideal place to find connections to Dreamer.

But Captain Bartolome sat there and knocked on the tabletop and asked me, “What the hell were you doing at the gold farm?”

He told me to stay off it. Said, “Murder isn’t your beat.”

I nodded.

And I didn’t tell him that Beenie had said Hydo Chang might know the guy.

If I’d had some sleep, I think I would have told him. With a clear head, I would have done what I always do, given a full and complete report. But I’m tired. I can sleep, but I’m not getting any sleep.

Is that ironic? I think it is. I mean, I know it is. I think. Rose could tell me.

Rose.

After my paperwork was processed, Captain Bartolome cuffed me and took me to his unmarked. Dawn again. They had me all night.

He drove me back across the checkpoint. A column of Guard vehicles was forming up on the west side, getting ready to do a show-of-force patrol. Part of the response to the suicide bombing. We drove past the tanks and Humvees, a contingent of Thousand Storks, and neither of us said anything. When we were past all of them, he pulled over and he uncuffed me and drove me to my car.

It was still there. That was no surprise. No one steals cars anymore. But no one had drained the tank. Bartolome waited while I got in, made sure it started up, then stuck his head out his open window and told me again, “It’s not your beat. Stay off it.”

I should have told him about the hard drive then. But he doesn’t want to follow the investigation where it wants to go. He only wants to follow it toward those “busts of scale.” I don’t know if that’s where the gold farm murders lead. And it doesn’t matter.

Yes, Dreamer is my beat, but Hydo and his guys were murdered on my beat. And I don’t have to explain why that’s the way it is to Bartolome.

Or to anyone else. It just is.

I called Rose. She answered after half a ring. I told her I was fine. I told her I’d been caught in traffic all night, that a blackout had taken down the cell towers where I was and I couldn’t call. She said she’d waited up all night. And laughed at her joke. The way she laughs when she knows she’s the only one who thinks it’s funny. I asked about the baby, but I didn’t need to. I could hear her crying in the background. Rose said she’d just started, that she’d been quiet for hours. That she’d been “sleeping like an angel.”

That’s how I knew she was lying. Rose never says things like “sleeping like an angel.” Rose says things like “She was out like a drunken sailor on shore leave after fucking all night at the whorehouse.” But she hasn’t said anything like that in forever. Not since the last time we were sure the baby slept.

I told her I loved her and that I’d be home in a couple hours. And then I drove to Srivar Dhar’s and took him one of the Shabu dragons in my stash. To keep him from going back to Kargil. A worse place than this.

PARK AND HIS family lived in a subprime short sale in Culver City. As far as Park was concerned, there was initially little else to say about it. He felt the taint of others’ misfortune whenever he pulled into the driveway next to the unwatered brown lawn that matched all the lawns on the street.

He’d resisted buying, but Rose had been pregnant, and had wanted a house, and had fallen in love with the place on first sight. Once he saw Rose, with a swollen belly, smiling as she stood at a kitchen window and looked out at a yard still canopied in trees, there was nothing left to do but engage in some dispirited haggling with the seller. Both of them seeming in a hurry to give in to the other’s demands.

Now there was no separating the place from himself. The house where his daughter was born, in their bed, on a covering of secondhand hospital sheets. The house where his wife’s illness first manifested, where she slowly began to erode, losing layers of herself, being stripped slowly in front of him to thin strata of fear, anger, and want.

Standing at the back of the car, he watched as two boys from up the street took their skateboards over a ramp they’d made from bricks and a sheet of plywood. Coming off the lip of the ramp, flipping the boards with their feet, landing on hands and knees as often as on wheels. One of them caught him watching and waved. Park waved back, then took his gun, his father’s watch, the travel drive, and his drugs from the car and went inside, where he could hear the baby howling.

The baby was on her back in the middle of the living room floor, sprawled on a play mat, limbs flailing at the dangling ornaments and chimes above her. Park let the screen door swing shut. The cooler morning air from the Pacific had already baked away, and the thin foreshadow of a Santa Ana was snaking through the open windows and doors, shifting dust from corner to corner of the hardwood floors.

Park knelt next to the baby, called her name, cooed, and caught her eye. Just a few weeks before, her face would have opened into a wide smile at the sight of him, but that was when she was still sleeping, before the crying started. He called Rose’s name, waited, called her again.

He knew it meant nothing, the lack of a response, but still he went through the house with dread.

And found her in the detached garage that they had converted into an office, seated at her workstation, eyes darting back and forth across three linked wide-screen monitors that showed the same looping frames from an old black-and-white cartoon, skeletons dancing on loose bones in a graveyard.

At first he thought she was lost in Chasm Tide again, but then he registered the two-dimensional craft of hand-drawn animation.

“Rose.”

At the sound of her name she tilted her face slightly upward, eyes still on the screens.

“Hey, babe. Which one?”

Park came nearer.

“Which one?”

A finger lifted from a wireless mouse.

“Which one do you like better? I’ve been on this all fucking day, trying to get a loop that times at exactly three fucking seconds to run during that old school scratch Edison ’s Elephant has in the chorus of their new track. See, the song they’re scratching is off a Putney Dandridge seventy-eight called ‘The Skeleton in the Closet,’ and I thought it’d be cool to use this clip from a Disney Silly Symphony. ‘The Skeleton Dance,’ yeah? No one will have a fucking clue what they’re scratching; it will be like a subliminal clue. But there’s no three seconds from the original that works as is. I’ve been clipping frames but still trying to keep that great cell animation fluidity. So these are the three best I’ve got. And I’ve been staring at them so fucking long, I don’t know which one is best for the video. And where’s my fucking kiss?”

Park bent and kissed her. Both their lips dry and cracked.

She pulled away.

“What the fuck, Park?”

She was staring at the gun he still had cradled in his hand.

“You know I don’t want that fucking thing in the apartment. Leave it at the goddamn station, will you.”

Park clipped the holstered weapon to his belt at the small of his back, out of sight.

“Rose.”

She was staring at the screens again.

“Yeah, what? I’m trying to work, babe.”

“The baby’s crying.”

“What?”

“The baby.”

Her finger clicked the mouse, one of the screens froze, she moved a green slide at the bottom of the screen a fraction of a millimeter to the left and released the button, and the skeletons danced for her again.

She looked up at him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Park touched the top of her hair, where they gray was coming in along the center part.

“The baby, Rose; she’s crying. She’s alone in the house, and she’s crying.”

When she changed, it was not so much like a veil was lifted but more like a briefly surfaced diver, perilously short on oxygen, was dragged below again after a moment’s respite.

Park watched the memory of his wife submerge and her present self come bobbing to the surface.

“The baby. Christ. Fuck. How long? Fuck, Park, how long were you going to let me?”

She was out of her ergonomic editor’s chair, leaving it spinning as she went to the door.

“Was she crying when you got home? I mean, is there a reason you didn’t just pick her up, for fuck sake?”

“I have my gun.”

She stopped at the door.

“Of course you do, I mean, of course you can’t pick up your crying daughter because you have your gun in your hands.”

“I don’t like leaving it anywhere but in the safe. And I don’t like holding her when I have it on me.”

She turned.

“Then get fucking rid of it. Get rid of the fucking gun and the fucking job that goes with it and come home and be with your daughter before the fucking world blows the fuck up and you don’t have her any fucking more, you fucking asshole!”

Park waited, and watched realization come over her, and wished he could do something to keep it at bay, at least stoke her anger further if he could not salve the regrets that always followed it.

She banged her forehead with her fists.

“Shit, shit, babe. I’m. I don’t fucking. You know I don’t. I just.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“I’m so fucking tired.”

He came to her, pulled her hands down.

“I know. It’s okay. I love you. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, it does. It, everything is so hard anyway and I. Fuck.”

He shook his head.

“Rose. It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. Really.”

Her head was turning, pulled to the sound of their crying daughter drifting across the small yard.

“I just. If we could have a little time, the two of us.”

He nodded.

“Sure. I’ll try and get a night. I’ll just do it, get a night. Francine can be here with the baby. We can go stay somewhere for a night.”

She was drifting out the door.

“Yeah. That would be. I’m gonna go check on her. She. I love you, babe.”

“I love you.”

She slipped out, Park standing at the door of the office, listening as she entered the house.

“Hey, kiddo, hey, sweetheart, Mom’s here. I know, I know, you’re right, yep, I left you alone, I know. I’m sorry, Mom’s sorry. My bad. But you know what? Here I am. Yep, that’s me. Right here. And I love you. I love you. I love you. Come here, come here, I got you, baby, I got you.”

Before leaving the office he glanced at the monitors, seeing no difference at all in the way the skeletons danced.

He crossed the dry yard, back into the house.

In the bedroom where once he and Rose had slept together, before sleep had been taken from her entirely, Park stepped inside the closet, took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the lock of the Patriot Hand-gunner on the shelf above the clothes bar, punched a sequence into the keypad, turned the key, and opened the safe. Inside, a sheaf of birth certificates, passports, a marriage license, and various financial documents that may or may not have had any remaining value, also a.45 Para Warthog PXT that served as backup for the Walther, ammunition and extra clips for both weapons, an ivory broach that had been his mother’s, four plastic-wrapped rolls of troy ounce Krugerrands, a four-gig flash drive that stored all his reports on his current assignment, and, in assorted baggies, vials, and bottles, his retail stash.

The drugs he’d taken from the car were in a faded olive drab canvas engineer’s field bag that Rose had bought for him at an army-navy store on Telegraph when he’d moved to Berkeley to live with her after his Ph.D. was completed. He’d always complained about the number of pockets available in the average messenger bag or backpack, not nearly enough to organize his pens, pencils, student papers, grade books, cellphone, charger, laptop, extra battery, assorted disks, iPod, headphones, lunch, and miscellaneous. Now the pockets served to organize Ecstasy, ketamine, foxy methoxy, various shades of heroin, crack, crank, and powder cocaine, liquid LSD, squares of dark chocolate hash, gummy buds of medical marijuana, Dexedrine, BZP, Adderall, Ritalin, and two remaining Shabu dragons, carefully wrapped in origami-like complexities of tissue.

He needed to catalogue the stock. It had been more than two full twenty-four-hour cycles, nearly three, since he’d last done so. Much of what he’d sold and acquired was in his notes, and just as he’d been able to in college and at the academy, he relied on his exceptional memory and recall for details that he didn’t have a chance to write down or record. But that memory was beginning to fragment.

No, not beginning to; it was well along in the process.

He needed to keep the record straight. When it came time to make arrests, issue indictments, call witnesses, do justice, he needed a clear record.

Names, dates, amounts. Crimes committed.

Captain Bartolome might not be concerned about anything but Dreamer, but Park didn’t know how to approach his work with tunnel vision.

He needed to make a record. But he was too tired.

And the window of opportunity for sleep had swung past, as if he were fixed to a single point on the earth, waiting for the perfect alignment with the heavens that would allow him to ascend into orbit and, having missed that opening, was now forced to wait until it rotated back again.

He slid the engineer’s bag onto the bottom shelf of the safe. Popped the clip from the Walther and placed it and the gun next to the Warthog. Snagged the flash drive by its lanyard and closed and locked the safe.

Gun hidden. From anyone who might use it. In desperation.

He buried that thought. There were ample options in the house if Rose ever decided she’d had enough. Locking away the guns eliminated only two of them.

Anyway, that was not the best way to protect her. Or the baby. The best way to protect them was to do what he was doing. That buried world, hidden, frozen beneath the madness outside, he had to dig, find it, and hack at the ice until it was free.

So he walked past the living room where Rose was feeding the baby from a bottle, her own milk having dried up after the first few days of sleeplessness, and did not stop, as he used to, to marvel at them. At the unlikelihood of them. Two people, entirely his, to love.

Back in the office, he switched off his wife’s monitors, hiding the skeletons, though he knew they continued to dance invisibly; touched the power button on his own Gateway UC laptop, took the biohazard-stickered travel drive from his cargo pocket, and plugged in the USB cable.

And watched as Hydo’s world appeared on his desktop.

A sickly luminous green mist spreading from the bottom of the screen, erasing Park’s familiar wallpaper collage of baby pics, scattered with icons, that Rose had put together for him, leaving, as it crept upward, a hyper-real boneyard of rust.

An auto wrecker, somewhere in the Inland Empire, rendered by Hydo as a high dynamic range photograph. Digitally composited from various light exposures of the same image, HDR photography had been Hydo Chang’s only passion beyond gaming, drugs, money, and pussy. What he’d referred to as his higher calling.

The wrecking yard on Park’s screen, centered on twin rows of flattened cars stacked ten high under a sky tortured by streaks of fast-running cloud and the violent umbers of a doomsday southern California sunset, was photography as Van Gogh might have dreamed it. Thick lashings of color, layered so deep and in such relief, that it seemed you would feel them in ridges and dimples if you ran your fingertips over the screen.

Park’s eye caught on a freeway sign glimpsed over the high barbed wire fence around the yard. No information regarding the next exit ahead, but a list of HDR forums and photo pools. Park ran his finger across the Gateway’s touchpad and watched the cursor flicker from arrow to pointing hand and back. Now tuned to the detail, he started to see wrinkled license plates, alphanumerics exchanged for some of the usual names: Google, eBay, Firefox, Pornocopeia, YouTube, Facebook, Trash. And some not so usual: modblog, tindersnakes, felonyfights, shineyknifecut, riotclitshave.

Not just extra storage, a place to preserve and protect sensitive and valuable information away from the gold farm’s Internet-linked LAN, the travel drive was a clone of Hydo’s own personal machine. A mirror of the dead man’s desktop mythology.

Park maneuvered the cursor over the screen, watching it douse icons on peeling bumper stickers, grease-smudged handbills on the side of an office shack, rocks, an airplane, a decapitated street lamp. All of them stamped with either a domain or a file, revealing it as the morphing hand passed over. Until it crossed a blackened grate of scaling iron set into a cube of graffitied concrete. The graffiti themselves were surprisingly dead to the cursor’s touch, but the grate prompted the transformation into a hand without revealing what was beyond.

Park double clicked. A box appeared, requesting a password.

He chicken-pecked the keys with his forefingers: XORLAR

And a plain file blinked open, one that might be found on any accountant’s computer, filled with Excel spreadsheets.

Labeled each with a name. Last, first, middle initial.

He flipped his finger down on the thin black line along the right edge of the touchpad, watched the thumbnails roll up the screen and stop. Then blinked at something subliminal and slowly dragged his finger up the same line, thumbnails rolling down now, eyes scanning left to right, and lifted his finger: AFRONZO, PARSIFAL, K., JR.

In 2007 the chances of having fatal familial insomnia were one in thirty million. In early 2008 those odds tilted fractionally against the players.

Until that point, virtually all cases of FFI had been restricted to about forty family lines, most of them in Italy. And then, quite suddenly, that was not so. A disease that was thought to be contained exclusively in a bit of genetic code, an inherited protein mutation in which aspartic acid was replaced by asparagine-178 and methionine was present at amino acid 129, inexplicably jumped ship.

The initial, and quite reasonable, theory espoused when these oddball cases emerged was that the sufferers must be unlucky distant relations to one of the FFI families. The fact that the number of new cases utterly defied the odds and rendered this theory all but laughable was circumspectly ignored.

And then there were more.

More people, diverse and dispersed, came stumbling stiff-necked, sweating, squinting from pinprick pupils, into the light. So many, and so widely distributed, that FFI was discarded entirely as a possible suspect in this mystery, and the true culprit was nabbed red-handed.

Mad cow disease.

Or, as it is more prosaically known, bovine spongiform encephalopathy

As enabled by the global expansion of American fast food franchises and the rise of the hamburger.

Already well known as a prion disease with similarities to FFI, BSE was clearly the guilty party. Granted, this was some new mutation of BSE, one almost as communicable as it had been long feared BSE might someday prove to be, but most definitely BSE-related.

And how comforting it was to know what was killing people by stealing their sleep. To have a name to put to the face of misery. To know that these mutated BSE prions, simple proteins that had folded into shapes so baleful and malicious that they spread their geometry to any healthy proteins they came into proximity with, were caused by eating Quarter Pounders.

The fact that several of the infected were avowed vegetarians and vegans seemed to be no impediment to this theory, and the air soon smelled like barbeque. Hairy, shitty barbeque.

PETA and the SPCA lodged protests with the appropriate authorities, but public sentiment was against them. Which is not to say they were without allies. The team-up between animal rights activists and the Cattleman’s Beef Board was one of the more amusing juxtapositions that heralded the rapid tilt of the world into a landscape that was less Dalí and more Hieronymus Bosch. As evidenced by the vision of vast herds of cattle being machine-gunned from above by helicopters, then coated in napalm and set ablaze. An inferno of beefs, not all of them dead. I summon for you the image of a wounded cow, running, in flames.

How shocking when it turned out that no BSE had been found in the dissected brains of the victims.

But the sheep and chicken ranchers made out well.

A fact that was pointed out by some of the more colorful cable commentators as they began to wax, inevitably, conspiratorial. Not that they were taken seriously. Not by anyone but the cattlemen, anyway. But truly, when the first indications of a deadly pandemic appear, how far does one have to search for a conspiracy?

It was clearly the work of The Terrorists.

Which ones was academic. A virtually simultaneous worldwide outbreak of a never before seen prion disease? Could there be any doubt of what we were dealing with? No, there could not; terrorists were at work. Pretty much all the countries of the world were in agreement and joined in pointing their fingers, or more lethal indicators, at one another.

And perhaps they were all right.

A new viral spongiform encephalopathy, exhibiting all the symptoms of fatal familial insomnia. Perhaps it was born in a lab. Twisted into existence by endless manipulations. Applied nucleation creating self-assembling systems, designed materials, refined, until a special grotesque was found, the shape of sleeplessness.

The shape of the sleepless prion, SLP, as it was dubbed, when isolated and revealed. That shape became a familiar thing. Part of the evening news graphic for every SLP-related story. Which meant pretty much every story. As what was not related to SLP?

An icon on protest signs. For. Against. Up. Down. Applied as needed. Defined as desired.

A T-shirt decal, endlessly riffed upon. Twisted and elongated for a Coca-Cola can. Blunted and squared for an MTV name check. Quadrupled in calligraphy over a burning Hindenburg in obtuse tribute to Led Zeppelin.

An endlessly repeated graffito. Black spray-over showing where the edges of a stencil had been. The absent portions of a negative image, applied to every surface. Recalling, somehow poignantly, the similarly sprayed aspect of Andre the Giant. Resonating, I guess, with the looming specter of his death, brought about, as it was, by a mysteriously mutating condition.

The tattooed insignia of an especially virulent strain of ultranationalistic fascism that seemed to manifest globally in much the same way as the disease itself. Spontaneously and without reason.

A spray-painted word on the front doors of homes, informing SL response teams that there was work to be done inside, decapitating the dead so that slides of their brains could be added to the CDC registry, the bodies added to the pyres.

The lone sigil of a thousand suicide notes.

A replacement, in the lexicon of Armageddon, for the number of the beast.

So much meaning and poetry in one squiggle of tissue.

Until, finally, it appeared in a slightly but significantly modified form: broken in two, pierced, in a brief corporate animation, by the chemical shape of DR33M3R.

One can imagine it, the shape of the SL prion, reflected in the eyes of the sales staff, breaking open like a piñata, dollar signs spilling out and heaping on the ground beneath it.

Those dollars were almost not scooped up. When word got out that there was a cure for SLP, an immunization, a salve that would bring the dead back to life, the labs where the drug was being perfected, the office where the packaging was being focus-grouped, the factories that were being geared for production, were all stormed.

Bloodshed was minimized. The military and police having had nearly a year of experience by then with quelling the madness of crowds. The traditional fire hoses, Tasers, tear gas, beanbag guns, and riot batons augmented with DARPA favorites such as microwave emitters, nausea-inducing lights, and focused-volume sound projectors that literally rattled metal fillings out of teeth.

The labs and offices and factories withstood the onslaught. And the story clarified. There was no cure, no panacea. Only relief. For the suffering millions upon millions, some relief.

A chance to dream. No more than that. A chemical plug to fit shorted sockets of the brain, a patch to allow the sleepless to sleep and to dream. An ease to suffering, but death just as assured at the end. With no other relief at hand, nothing short of a bullet, arms were outstretched, palms cupped. Dreams of sleep.

Dreams of Dreamer.

A chemical needle to knit the raveled sleeve of care.

Only, not enough.

Not enough Dreamer to go around. Not enough to bring rest to every mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, uncle, aunt, cousin, friend. A taste for sleep, a craving for it the world over, and only one curb for the general appetite.

So yes, the dollars rained down. A year or two earlier and it would have been raining Euro and yuan. But the initial SLP hysteria had put paid to the European Union and the might of that combined economy. Once Italy had been quarantined as the suspected ground zero of the disease, it had taken less than a month for all the countries of the union to seal their borders. Trade and travel faltered, xenophobia and nationalism flourished, and pounds, lira, francs, deutschmarks, and various other quaint relics were soon being dug out from beneath rocks in the gardens and put back into circulation. As for China, the world had seen the relative quality of the dragon’s infrastructure when the earth shook in 2008. Tens of millions of sleepless leaving the workforce, burdening the health-care system, combined with the effective end of economic globalization and the contraction of markets clamoring for inexpensive goods, hexed the Chinese Miracle. The engine of their economy shuddered, lurched, and crashed to the ground, soon to be followed by the thrown-together factories of manufacturing cities like Shenzhen, as the inhabitants returned to the countryside, fleeing the plague, leaving the buildings and roads to deteriorate and begin crumbling in scant months. When the great droughts struck and wiped out the rice crops, it was an almost unnecessary grace note to the collapse.

The Yankee dollar ruled again.

The combined weight of the subprime fiasco, collapsed investment and commercial banking, credit freeze, and the GDP-sucking military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran had certainly wounded the beast, but once the United States declared de facto bankruptcy by refusing to pay its international creditors, it roared back to life.

The roads and bridges were crumbling, the waterways drying and clogging, the forests burning, the last-ditch conversion to national health was a Byzantine horror for the millions and millions forced into its clutches, power failed with great regularity, gasoline was nigh unto a luxury item, and one could not always be certain that the local supermarket would have received a toilet paper delivery this week, but the standard of living had been so vastly higher in the United States than in most of the rest of the world that there was still quite a distance left to fall before hitting the ground.

Global food shortages that might have struck deeper in the United States with the slaughter of the beefs were offset when the grain that had fed the bulk of the herds was redirected to human consumption. Corn, long bioengineered to pest and drought resistance, was the new American staple, as it was the world over; we just had more of it.

Free from the illusion that its debts could ever be paid, America was rich again. Yes, it did draw inward, a spine-backed turtle bristling with ICBMs, expeditionary forces establishing kill zones around the oil fields in Iraq, Venezuela, and Brazil, but still, in one way or another, it was the source of a dream.

Dreamer, a pillar of the new new economy.

There were mutterings.

It seemed odd that something so specific as DR33M3R should be so far along in development when the SL prion struck. After all, why should anyone have anticipated the need for an artificial hormone that could induce, in even the most damaged brain, one crippled by growths of amyloid plaques and peppered with star-shaped astrocytes, the long rolling delta waves that cradle bursts of REM sleep?

Congressional hearings were a must. Closed congressional hearings. And from what one heard, they seemed to answer all questions. Or, in any case, all questions that were asked. Whatever those may have been. In any case, when the doors opened, the patent holders on Dreamer came out smiling.

And why not? The world might have been ending, but Afronzo-New Day Pharm had what everyone wanted while the credits rolled. You could see it in the smile on Parsifal K. Afronzo Sr.’s face, as he read his prepared statement: A new day was clearly dawning.

And Park, in the month during which the chances of being infected with SLP had grown to one in ten, with the name Afronzo, Parsifal, K., Jr., on the screen of his computer, thought about what Beenie had said, that Hydo knew “the guy.” He opened the file, a spreadsheet unfolding, cells filled with long number sets that struck a distant chord without imparting any meaning. But he listened to that chord and wondered if he heard a cracking in the ice around the world. Uncertain to say if it was the sound of a fracture announcing a thaw or another layer freezing over.