The Malicarn #2
Jules already had three different adventures planned for other Council members. Glenn did not know which of these Prion would be a part of, but he knew the king would not have much time to rest, or for peace.
“Surely, you agree that Prion will be a peaceful king?” Evangeline asked. Glenn’s silence disturbed her. “Gregorian, you know him well, but I promise you that he wishes for there to be no more war. You must believe that.”
“Oh, I do, my lady. I believe he will strive for a peaceful reign.”
Evangeline softened quickly, smiling again. “Yes, he will. He wants peace for our children above all. This I know.”
She was comforted easily. Glenn looked over at Prion, who was chatting and laughing with one of the visiting knights, and felt a horrible knot in his stomach.
He didn’t really know what Jules was planning.
He didn’t know anything. He wished he could talk to Lilly.
Even when she didn’t have any advice to give, just talking to her had always helped.
“What is wrong, Gregorian?” Evangeline looked up at him with concern. “Are you ill?”
“I am fine, my lady. Let us enjoy this meal.”
The next night, Glenn attended another feast, this time at the office Christmas party.
There was no Christmas in the Malicarn—the generic religion that operated in the kingdom had no holidays at all, as far as Glenn could tell—but the Citadel still managed to throw a pretty good holiday bash in the production offices.
Glenn spent most of it dodging Lilly, who wore a Hanukkah sweater and seemed to be avoiding most of her colleagues, as well, by constantly sneaking behind the cash bar and mixing herself new martinis.
Jules cornered Glenn before the karaoke started.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jules said.
Glenn didn’t protest and followed him into the elevator. He was finishing his spiced rum when he realized they were in the infirmary. And the murderer’s body was still waiting there.
“What are we doing here?” Glenn asked. The body was on a gurney in the middle of the room. No one else was there except Jules and Glenn.
“Might be time to start lining up our timeline with the original films,” Jules said, ignoring him.
“Institute a ban on magic throughout the Malicarn. Not yet, but soon. We’re too reliant on tricks.
We need a second set, a second land where everything is dark and evil.
Like a Mordor, with scanned characters who can just be villains. ”
“Are you drunk?”
Jules was fiddling with the body, and Glenn was going to ask again what he was doing when Jules pulled out a neuroscanner from a cabinet and began placing a node connected to a neuroscanner wire onto the dead killer’s head. Jules connected another one to his own head.
“Um, what are you doing?” Glenn asked.
“Whitman said the current from the machine should generate enough electrical activity in the brain,” Jules said.
“Was she drunk?”
“Come on, Glenn. This is the fastest way to find out.”
“Find out what?”
Jules adjusted some dials, but Glenn was sure he didn’t know what he was doing.
Jules turned the machine on. It happened quickly.
A spark shot out of the node attached to Jules and into his forehead.
The corpse remained still. Whatever was in there, among the decaying synapses, flew straight into Jules’s own brain.
Jules yelped, tore off the cord, then bounced around the room as if he had had a hit of cocaine.
“Did it work?” Glenn asked. “What did it feel like?”
“Like lightning,” Jules said. “Like a movie, but the movie’s in your veins, in your lungs, in your fucking heart.”
“That’s interesting,” said Glenn. He almost meant it, too.
2.
Somebody tried to kill the president. They took a shot at his limo. A dumb idea. The car was bulletproof, impenetrable. But it was enough for a protest in Knoxville to turn to a riot.
Somebody else had made a viral video of their dog dressed up as Groucho Marx.
And there were a number of clips from a match between Arsenal and Tottenham.
ASMR videos of shipping containers being unloaded in Shenzen.
The Rose Parade canceled due to poor air quality.
And tips on grilling flank steak. Also there was a winter cyclone forming in the south Atlantic that was headed north-northeast, expected to clip the Azores although no one in Madeira was worrying about it yet.
Lilly watched it all from her computer in the corner of the implementations lab. It was the middle of the night, her other colleagues off for New Year’s Day. Whitman was visiting California and sending emails about upcoming implementations from her hotel room in Burbank.
Most of the lights were off, save for a lamp over Lilly’s desk and the glow of the computer screen.
She was supposed to be going through prechecks for tomorrow’s implementations, but instead she cycled through the news and social media feeds.
She watched a press conference about the assassination attempt on MSNBC.
She did a crossword puzzle and took a quiz explaining which SpongeBob character she most resembled.
She clicked “like” on a picture of a college friend’s baby on Instagram without really looking at the baby or the friend.
She browsed through some porn but decided it was all produced for a primary audience of fifteen-year-old boys and watched clips from Bridgerton instead.
She didn’t really feel horny, so she watched more MSNBC.
She closed her browser and looked through the implementation notes.
Lots of subjects for the new arc. Guards for the king.
A group of thieves pledged to the Necromancer who would terrorize the farmers.
A number of new fighters for an upcoming battle.
Their personalities were thin, barely sketched in.
“A traumatic past,” or “raised an orphan,” or “spent a year as a mercenary across the sea.” The writers were rushing now, in need of bodies more than coherent characters.
There was an email from Jules, replying to an earlier one from Whitman, who had cc’d Lilly.
He had borrowed a neuroscanner again and was keeping it a few more days.
Lilly objected but no one responded to her directly.
She didn’t want to lend it out but Jules had permission from the producers to borrow it, doing God-knows-what with his writer buddies.
We’re gonna use the extractor to get some ideas together, he wrote, see what our collective intelligences assemble! He sounded giddy, but Lilly knew that most of the writers had been fired.
You should do this down in the lab, she wrote back. It would be safer.
Whitman responded almost immediately. You’re too busy. Jules can handle it. @JulesWalker: The documentation’s all in the share folder.
Lilly reopened her browser. Five new series to stream this weekend. NBA statistics. Best funds to grow your IRA. A video of a kid whose home was bombed. Cheesecake recipes.
She opened a new tab and looked up her father’s obituary. She read it again. She had read it almost every hour.
Herbert Kaminsky, 67, of Pasadena, died Tuesday after a brief illness.
Mr. Kaminsky was born and raised in Riverside.
He served eight years in the Marines, including a tour in Afghanistan and a tour in Iraq.
He then attended California State University, Northridge, where he studied electrical engineering.
He worked as a quality-assurance specialist for Lockheed Martin for over thirty years.
He is survived by his wife Lisa, daughter Lilly, brothers Victor and Alan, and several nieces and nephews. Funeral arrangements are private.
Eighty-four words, that’s all you get in the end.
Lilly admired the portrait it painted: a man without passions, without ambitions, without mistakes or flaws.
A man with no interior life or exterior charms. A man who never had nightmares or played golf or cut the grass or drank bourbon or badgered Lilly to clean her room or missed her dance recitals or forgot her name because his brain turned to mush.
The obituary was the précis of a life without the mess of living.
Another tab in Lilly’s browser had a news alert about the arrest of several members of a drug cartel.
A bouquet of flowers, still in their paper since she couldn’t find a vase, sat next to her computer with a note that read, “I’m sorry for your loss.
Thinking of you. Glenn.” Maybe she should call him.
Tell Glenn about Jules’s behavior. About how quickly everything was spinning away from her.
But she wouldn’t know what to say. He would want to console her and she didn’t want to be consoled.
He was so immediate, so focused on the task in front of him.
He had to be, constantly improvising through his day while still trying to follow the beats and story points Jules laid out for him.
She needed him to be a bit more hands off, opaque, unemotional.
Plus, if she talked to him about anything he would probably interpret it as an excuse to get back together.
Lilly was too busy, anyway. She had so much work to do, but that morning she simply stopped doing it.
She didn’t fill out any reports, didn’t handle any quality assurance, didn’t prep any implementations.
She just sat at her computer and read the news.
Her inbox filled up. Whitman wouldn’t notice for a day or two.
She watched lip-sync videos. She read essays about the challenges of new motherhood.
She played online chess. And as she did all this, the bank of servers against the back wall of the lab, full of PersMats and data and algorithms waiting to be people, suddenly began to make a noise.
Or rather, now without the constant barrage of tasks needing to be cleared, Lilly heard the noise for the first time.
She heard the hum of the servers. And the less work she did the louder they got.