Player One Page 7

  Rachel turned to look at Leslie Freemont. “I’ve seen that man on TV.”

  “It’s that fraud — Freeman . . . Freemont — what the hell is he doing here?”

  “Being on television would make him a good genetic donor, would it not? And his skin is tanned. He must be a sportive outdoors type.”

  Luke was surprised by how angered he was that Leslie Freemont had become a threat to his potential hookup with Rachel. “Suntan? That’s fake-and-bake, trust me, and the TV thing? It’s infomercials for some quack self-help cult.”

  “He seems confident and virile.”

  “He’s a complete hoax.”

  Yet, of course, the two continued watching as Leslie seduced the western side of the bar. They even participated in a toast with the man. And after the briefest of visits, capped by a quickie snapshot, Leslie and his assistant were gone.

  Rachel

  Rachel is trying to establish whether Luke might be a suitable father for her child — a man with a wad of cash in his pocket who recently stopped believing in religion. Religion strikes Rachel as reproduction-neutral, but Luke says he once had a vision of a spaceship headed heavenward — perhaps he is a poet? Neurotypical people are an endless source of puzzles. Religion is one of the biggest.

  In any event, when oil hits $250 a barrel, Rachel’s brain senses a threat to her body, making her amygdala kick in to create a duplicate recording of her cocktail lounge experience, which, afterwards, she will be able to scan for data that she can learn from, to protect herself in a similar situation. Her brain’s double recording of the event will make it feel as if it happened in slow motion. The doubling of neural information simulates the lengthening of time, and because Rachel is different, she is able to keep dual recordings of intense events running far longer than neurotypicals. Thus, Rachel will be able to revisit the arrival and departure of Leslie Freemont and his assistant, Tara.

  Rachel is grateful for Leslie’s cocoa butter tan and white outfit and white hair, as it gives him distinctive non-facial characteristics that allow her to recognize him without having to resort to eyes, ears, and mouth. She has no idea how the rest of the world can tell each other apart. What would be wrong with everyone wearing name tags? It wouldn’t be difficult or expensive — and yet nobody is interested.

  Rachel is also relieved that nobody in the cocktail lounge makes laughing noises when she announces that she breeds white mice for a living. She received a lot of the laughing noises back in high school, when she first went into business. As she walked past other students, they’d say, “Squeak-squeak” — a bad imitation of the noise white mice make, which is, in fact, almost no noise at all. The laughing noise usually means her day is going to be just that much harder.

  Once Leslie leaves, the group of five clusters around the truly dreadful computer in search of news. Warren seizes control of the keyboard. Nobody else seems to care, but Rachel can tell that Warren isn’t actually that good with computers. “Fricking hell, it’s asking me to download some kind of patch.” Warren’s tone reminds Rachel of her father and thus her mating mission.

  Her current situation may be bewildering and slightly scary, but Rachel presses forward, saying, “Push CONTROL-4 to override that request.”

  It works.

  Karen says, “Go to CNN.com. Hurry! Hurry!” But Warren is klutzy and hits the wrong keys, triggering a cluster of frozen windows.

  Rick asks Rachel, “You — what’s your name?”

  “My name is . . . Rachel.”

  “Rachel, take over from this guy.”

  Warren rebels, saying, “Well, my name is Warren, and screw you. I’m almost in.”

  “Warren,” Rick says, “my grandmother’s more web-savvy than you.”

  Karen says, “Both you men, just shut up. Wait — CNN’s on the screen.”

  They look at the CNN page, which is shattering into digital fragments. During its two seconds onscreen, the group sees the words oil hits $350 and new info sheds light on anna nicole smith’s drug suicide.

  Then the connection dies and the server asks if they’d like to test a new Microsoft upgrade for their system.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” barks Warren. “This hunk of crap probably has a dot matrix printer, too.”

  “Actually,” Rick says, “it does, but I can’t find paper with tractor-tread holes on the sides anymore.”

  Rachel begins thinking about a world in which oil costs $350 a barrel, and it’s not a world the people she knows would want to live in — not exactly a world of empty roads and starving masses, but getting there. Fewer planes. Fewer vegetables and fruits. Anarchy. Crime. Maybe some suicides. There may no longer be a need for high-quality white mice in this world, and then what will she do? For a brief moment she thinks of the pizza-sized black circles cartoon characters throw onto the ground — portable holes — which they jump into to escape difficult situations. In her mind, that’s where people go when they die: down Daffy Duck’s cartoon hole. How comforting to have a wide array of cartoon friends to meet you on the other side! Cartoons were introduced to Rachel as a means of explaining the concept of humour, but she ended up preferring cartoons over real life because in cartoons she could at least tell whose face was saying what. She hasn’t watched a film in years. But there, in the stress of the bar, she wishes she had a cartoon hole she could escape into. But no — she’s on a mission, and this is no time to bail.

  ___

  Warren was yelling at the hard drive, and Karen was yelling at Warren for yelling at the machine. The two reminded Rachel of her parents, but she knew from Luke that they had met only an hour beforehand. Perhaps they were . . . What is the term? . . . a match made in heaven and ought to reproduce as quickly as possible.

  Warren clearly held Rick responsible for the lounge’s lame computer and for his inability to get a cellphone connection. “How hard can it be for a hotel lounge to have decent wireless? You’ve got nothing to do all day but make three margaritas and stick some bar mix in a bowl. You’d think you’d have time to find a computer that works.”

  “Right, Warren. I’ll put it on the agenda at the next board meeting, right after my PowerPoint presentation to implement a chain-wide series of planet-friendly green initiatives.”

  “There’s no other computer in this place?”

  “In the hotel’s main office. Be my guest and go use it.”

  “Smartass. Wait — I think I’ve got CNN again.” The screen’s address bar indicated a connection to the website, and the loading bar indicated it was about to appear. Then an ad for Tropicana orange juice popped up. Warren was incensed. “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Rick said, “Why don’t we let Rachel give this a try?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Warren said. “I get it. Out with the old, in with the young.”

  Karen said, “Warren, just move. Rachel, try and get us online here.”

  Rachel sat and executed some keystrokes that unclogged much of Warren’s mess. She considered rebooting but decided not to risk it. As she tried reaching various news websites, she reasoned that if oil was now $350 a barrel, most airline flights would soon be grounded. Gas stations would be emptied in minutes, and all grocery stores gutted. She asked Rick, “Do you have a radio?”

  “Just in my truck,” Rick said.

  “We should go out and listen to it,” Rachel said. “We’ll get the news
faster that way.”

  “No!” said Warren. “We are going to get the real facts online. Keep trying, Rachel.”

  Karen said, “I’d rather listen to the radio right now.”

  Rick said, “Me too.”

  Warren said, “Then go. I’m getting my information the modern way. Radio is for losers.”

  Rick said, “Right then, the truck’s out back.”

  Luke decided to join them. They walked out the lounge’s glass door, which was covered in blistering, peeling sun-screening material, and into the baking afternoon.

  The air outside seemed much quieter than it had when Rachel entered the cocktail lounge. Then she realized that the relative silence stemmed from the absence of air traffic into and out of the airport. Rick said, “This way,” and they walked to an aging black Dodge Ram pickup and opened the doors. The four of them got inside. Rick put the key in the ignition to activate the radio.

  Luke said, “At the moment it’ll probably cost you five bucks just to idle the car. God only knows what the pump price is right now. Airport’s pretty quiet, too.”

  Rachel said, “I doubt the airlines can afford to fly. People booked on flights today won’t be going anywhere. Probably not tomorrow, either. Maybe never.”

  Karen snapped, “Quiet, all of you. Rick, turn on the effing radio.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They tuned in to the local AM news/traffic station. The normally cheery banter was gone, replaced by a very factual reading of incoming bulletins.

  . . . the Niagara Falls crossings have been closed until further notice, and authorities have requested that civilians not go near the half-kilometre buffer zone. In downtown Toronto, we have confirmation that the Gardiner Expressway has been closed after a series of noises we’re told sounded like explosions. Listener phone-ins report what seems to be a riot at the Eaton Centre, but 680 News has yet to confirm . . .

  Suddenly there was a flash on the horizon, followed by a booming sound that raced through the truck’s cab like a banshee. Its four passengers looked up and saw a small mushroom cloud maybe five kilometres from the lounge.

  Luke said, “Holy crap!”

  Rachel instantly analyzed it: “It’s not nuclear. It’s chemical. Oil, most likely, given the black smoke at the bottom.”

  Warren rushed out of the lounge and looked at the fireball. He looked around, saw his barmates in the truck, and shouted, “Holy crap!” Rachel wondered what it was about extreme disaster that made people invoke both religion and excrement — bookends to mark the polarities of the human condition?

  Rick and Karen tried using their cellphones, without luck. Luke was entranced by the chemical cloud — he just kept looking at it, mesmerized, as if it were the face of God.

  Warren started to head their way, but three steps from the lounge door his head jerked sideways, with what looked like an explosion of red feathers but was obviously, when Rachel thought about it for a millionth of a second, blood.

  Because Rachel’s amygdala was still double-processing, this event, like everything else that had happened since the price of oil hit $250, occurred in slow motion.

  A second pulse of blood shot from the centre of Warren’s chest, and even before he hit the ground, it was obvious that he was dead.

  Time stopped. Karen screamed. The sun suddenly seemed a dozen times too bright. Rick swatted the cab’s passengers down with his arm: “Everyone, down!”

  Rachel responded to the violence with the fugue state her brain often deployed when overwhelmed, a state that made the meaner boys in her class at school call out during fire alarms, “Rachel’s gone to her Happy Place.” Rachel thinks there’s a lot to be said for Happy Places, and if the bullies and teasers knew what the Happy Place was like, they’d not only leave her alone, they’d be begging her for directions. When Rachel goes to hers it’s like being in a noisy, crowded restaurant with music blaring, when suddenly the music is turned off and everybody leaves. There is calm. She can be objective. She can analyze. She feels free and powerful — it’s as if suddenly she’s been given the search result for every keyword ever put into Google. She comes away from her Happy Place calm and unworried, as if her brain has had a chicken white-meat sandwich and a glass of milk.

  Sitting there in the truck with Rick, Karen, and Luke, Rachel was in her Happy Place, and she remembered something her mathematics teacher had once said to the class: “When you think about all the coincidences that might have happened but never did, then you begin to look at the universe in a different way. At any moment, trillions of sextillions of coincidences might have happened in your daily life, and yet, upon reflection, you realize that coincidences almost never occur. Coincidences are so rare as to be remarkable when they do occur. Coincidences are, in fact, so rare that it’s almost as if the universe is engineered solely to keep them at bay. So when a coincidence or something extraordinary occurs in your life, someone or something worked awfully damn hard to make it happen — which is why we must always pay attention to them.”

  Rachel’s take on this is the opposite: she believes every moment of life is a coincidence. It’s all or nothing.

  The teacher, however, also said, “The opposite of coincidence is entropy. Entropy is laziness. Entropy is energy being sucked away into nothingness. Entropy is the universe clocking fake hours on its time sheet. Entropy wants your car’s tires to go flat; it wants your cake to fall; it wants your software to crash. It wants bad things for you. So remember, stay halfway between coincidence and entropy and you’ll always be safe. Take my word for it, a day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle — it’s a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong failed to go wrong. A dull day is a triumph of the human spirit; boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.”

  That was when Rachel left her Happy Place and looked over at Warren’s body. Karen was still screaming, but Luke kept her from leaving the truck. Rachel was trying to figure out if Warren’s shooting was a coincidence or if there was cause and effect between his death and the fireball five kilometres away. Terrorists? Oil depot screw-up? Anarchists?

  Rick, meanwhile, continued to yell to everyone to lie as low as possible, out of view of snipers. He said, “I’ll start the truck and we’ll boot directly out of here.” But when he turned the key, the engine made a sickening I’m-not-going-to-start noise. “Oh God, Pam is right, I’m nothing but a goddam genetic dumpster. I do deserve everything that happens to me. I am a bad, bad person.” He paused. “Does anyone else here have a car?”

  No one did.

  “What did Warren drive?”

  Karen, through tears, said, “A truck, I think.”

  “What kind?”

  “A truck truck. I don’t know. They’re all the same to me.” Karen’s voice had gone very high and pitchy.

  Rachel said, “The only safe place to be is in the hotel. The lounge is too isolated. We have to run for cover.”

  Rick said, “I agree.” The forcefulness of his words made Rachel wonder if Rick was an alpha male. Maybe he ought to be the one to father her first child. But there wouldn’t be any child unless they ran to safety. Crawling out the passengerside doors, the group of four readied themselves to sprint hotelwards. Rick said, “One, two, three . . . go!”

  They sprinted past Warren’s corpse into the breezeway bet
ween the hotel and the lounge. They tried entering the main hotel building first, but on reaching its doors, they found them locked. They rattled the doors to little effect. They saw no people through the tinted glass.

  Rick yelled, “Plan B — back into the lounge!”

  Like flocking sparrows, they raced across the covered walkway to the lounge. Rick bolted the glass door and then he and Luke moved an ancient, dust-covered cigarette machine from a closet and pushed it in front of the door. On top of it they jammed a collection of folding tables and navy blue tablecloths. The door opened out, but anyone trying to get in would have a fairly substantial obstacle before him, and getting past it would slow down the intruder enough to give the group of four time to assume the best defensive positions.

  Rachel peered into the closet where the cigarette machine had been stored. On the floor were spiders’ nests and a clump of business cards so old they lacked area codes in front of the phone numbers. Even amidst the confusion, this absence of area codes struck Rachel as remarkable. Sometimes the events that mark the change from one era to another are so slow that they are invisible while they happen. At other times, like now, eras change within the seconds it takes words to scroll across the bottom of a TV screen.

  Player One

  This is Player One here with your story upgrade. I know that you, as this story’s user, may be curious and wondering what are the next sequences to come, so I will not tease. What will happen next is that Karen’s head will continue to spin, and as with Rachel, Karen’s brain will make a duplicate copy of the afternoon’s events. She will remember a game she played as a child, called Pretend You’re Dead. She and her friends would run around, and someone would shout “Stop!” and they’d all drop to the ground. As quickly as possible, they had to shout out how they’d like to reincarnate, without overthinking their decisions. More often than not, they chose horses, cats, dogs, and colourful birds and insects. It will dawn on Karen, as she sits there behind the bar, in hiding from one or more snipers, that never once in all the times she played the game did anybody choose to come back as a human being. Good decision, she will think. We are a wretched species, indeed.