“You’re losing me again, Jane.”
“Just listen,” she says. “I’m getting to it.”
The Good Jane and the Bad Jane
WHEN LOVE FINALLY LET ME GO, I went down to the street and stood there taking deep breaths until I was sure, absolutely sure, that I was really outside, on the actual Vegas Strip, and not in some ant-farm extension of the Mudgett Suite. What ultimately convinced me wasn’t the air quality so much as the sheer number of tourists bumping past me on the sidewalk: even the organization, I figured, couldn’t afford to hire that many extras.
It was late afternoon. Which afternoon was harder to say, but that didn’t matter: I had a job to do. Panopticon had confirmed that John Doyle was in his suite at the Venetian. It was time to pay him a visit. I joined the flow of pedestrians headed north, past the Casino Royale to the fake Doge’s Palace.
The tourist crowd inside the Venetian was salted with Clowns, white-faced Italian mimes and harlequins. None of them made eye contact with me, but I knew they were watching—when I started to follow the hall of shops towards the Grand Canal, a passing mime caught me by the elbow, spun me around, and pushed me back in the direction of the escalator bank. I rode down to the lower level and found the hotel lobby, where a red-headed bellhop, his long hair combed in a Bozo flip, was waiting to slip me a keycard.
It wasn’t until I’d boarded the elevator that I really let myself think about who I was going to meet. I took out my NC gun and checked, twice, that the dial was on the narcolepsy setting. “Do not pick up any other weapons,” I reminded myself.
The elevator arrived on the penthouse floor. I located Doyle’s suite and used the keycard to open the door, stepping through into an entry hall that was larger than most hotel rooms. The walls and ceiling were mirrored and the floor was polished marble, so whichever way I looked I saw infinite Janes holding infinite NC guns that they didn’t dare fire.
I followed the hall to its end, to an enormous sitting room with still more reflective surfaces: another mirror wall; a line of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Strip; assorted glass-and marble-topped tables and cabinets. Here, though, my gaze was drawn to the body on the floor, the blood fanning out from it in all directions already beginning to dry to a dull finish.
John Doyle’s throat had been slit, and his face, palms, and chest all bore slashing cuts. His legs were curled under him, like he’d been on his knees and flopped over backwards. The thought that he’d died begging for mercy didn’t exactly break my heart, but this was obviously a problem as far as interrogating him was concerned.
As I dug in my pocket for my comm unit, I sensed movement in the room. I looked up and saw what seemed like an optical illusion reflected in the mirror walclass="underline" there I was, standing over Doyle’s corpse, while above and slightly behind me a second Jane extended upside-down from the ceiling. I turned and raised my head; sure enough, there was the bad Jane, standing on the ceiling with her hair and jacket dangling up, like gravity was reversed just for her. “Hello again,” she said, and while I was still trying to make sense of this, she reached down, grabbed my head with both hands, and gave it a sharp twist.
I woke up paralyzed in a chair, facing the mirror wall. Doyle’s body was at my feet, and my NC gun was on a table to my right, within easy reach, if only I could reach. The bad Jane was behind me, standing on the floor now like a normal person, only not normaclass="underline" as I watched her in the mirror, she kept shimmering, disappearing, and reappearing, just as she had in the diner parking lot.
“How’s the neck?” she said, solidifying long enough to lay a cool hand against my jugular. “I hope I didn’t overdo it. Phil would be pissed if I did any permanent damage.”
I couldn’t reach, but I could talk: “What the fuck are you?”
“What, you don’t recognize your evil twin? Or do you mean this?” She winked, and winked out. Her voice came from thin air: “It’s the drugs, Jane.”
“You drugged me?”
“Not you, genius. Me.” She was back, crouched behind me with her chin propped on my shoulder. “Altered-state theory, Jane. Remember?”
I remembered.
Altered-state theory, that was a Berkeley thing. She must have gone there too. Small world.
What is altered-state theory?
This stupid acidhead idea about the relationship between consciousness and reality. There was this crazy guy, right, leftover flower child, who used to hang out on campus. He had great dope, and he was willing to share, but it was like the Salvation Army, where before you get the free soup you have to listen to a sermon. So this guy would go on about this theory he had, that any time you altered your perception of reality, there was a corresponding alteration in the way reality perceived you, or something like that…
Getting stoned changes the laws of physics?
In a nutshell. Which, you don’t have to tell me, is the kind of insane logic that makes people jump off of buildings thinking they can fly. But this guy, he’d spent a lot of time refining his hypotheses, and if you pointed out that gravity doesn’t seem to care how you look at it, he’d say that it wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence, consciousness was obviously more flexible than truth, and so you’d need a big change in perception to produce even a small change in reality. In other words, ordinary drugs weren’t strong enough, usually, to let you do magic. But he claimed to have heard rumors about this other, much more potent class of drugs, called X-drugs. With X-drugs, he said, you really could fly, bend time and space, or even go back and undo history.
So the bad Jane—
— was telling me the Troop had access to X-drugs. Which I would have laughed off, if she hadn’t been so busy demonstrating her powers.
Did it occur to you that it really was you who’d been drugged, and that this “demonstration of powers” was simply a trick?
Of course it occurred to me, but the thing is, I didn’t feel drugged, I felt sober. Trust me, I know the difference.
I’m sure you do. But by your own account, at this point you were recovering from an overdose.
A simulated overdose. I wasn’t—
Simulated, but still…And you’d just been knocked unconscious a second time.
I know all that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t the one who was tripping, she was.
Of course, I still tried to deny it: “You’re full of shit! X-drugs don’t exist!”
She laughed, faded out, and phased back in again. “Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t believe me?” she said. “Or can we get down to business before J.D. here starts to stink?”
“What business? What does Phil want from me?”
“We’ll come to that. But first, check out the painting.”
A portrait of a Renaissance nobleman hung on the wall behind me. The bad Jane angled my head like a camera, aiming it at the portrait’s reflection in the mirror, and zoomed in my perspective until I could make out individual brush strokes. Closer still and I began to see, very faint around the portrait’s eyes, the outline of a pair of lenses.
“Panopticon.”
“Yes,” the bad Jane whispered. “They’re watching. They think they’re seeing. They know we can jam their signal, but what they don’t know—Shh! Don’t tell! — is that we can also substitute a false signal. Would you like to know what we’re feeding them now?”
My point of view zoomed out again, until I could see the whole mirror wall. It flickered, and suddenly in the reflection John Doyle was alive again, down on his knees in front of me. I had my NC gun leveled at his chest and was forcing him to keep still as I took swipes at him with a knife.