And they made an image of the beast, and did worship it…
The words of a sermon preached in his church by an elder came to him almost in spoken form, but then the thought was gone and he found he could interact with the picture on the screen simply by opening and closing his hand in front of him. He was just getting the hang of manipulating the image of the farm when everything in his view flashed white, and again he was submerged in the dirty waters, unable to feel anything, floating, reaching for the light. Feeling the urge to panic. Then blackness swarmed over him again, and he slept.
Jed awoke upon a firm and thin mattress in a darkened room. The only light came in through a small square window on a door that was six or seven feet away from the bed. As his eyes slowly adapted to the darkness, he could make out that he was in some kind of cell. He was still wearing his Amish clothing—his broadfall pants, long-sleeved white shirt, suspenders, black boots—and his hat was near him on the bed. His hands and feet were no longer bound. He sat up on the bed, and as he did so a light came on in the room and some music started to play from somewhere. Soft piano music with no lyrics. He was trying to gather his mind and to get his thoughts in order when he heard a buzz, and the sound of air… like when an air compressor on one of his more liberal neighbors’ farms was being voided of its compressed contents. He looked up, and from a crevice in the brick walls of his cell he saw a mist descending on him. It smelled like orange zest, and his mind zoomed back to the time when he was interrogated by Hugh Conrad in the Transport Security office and a canister had sprayed into the room, releasing that very same smell.
The scent relaxed him, and he leaned back on the bed and felt his vision go still and black. Once again the white screen appeared before him, and he felt like he was standing in front of it. The screen expanded until it wrapped all the way around him and over him, and on the screen a farm appeared. It was his farm, and he was standing in the paddock next to the milk barn, and Zoe walked up to him and reached toward him with her nose. She was hoping he had some sweet treat, some cow cubes perhaps, to give her. When he touched her nose she realized that he didn’t have anything for her to eat, so she turned away, uninterested, and sauntered across the green grass of the paddock, her empty udder swinging with each step.
This time it was more real. Well… it felt real. There was still just the slightest hint of that sense of everything being too perfect, but for some reason Jed’s mind was now taking over and fixing the “too-right” things that should have been “wrong.” His brain roughed up the image until he agreed to be convinced that what he was experiencing was real. He looked up into the clouds and he could see the three dimensional wispiness that modern artists never seem to get right. (He’d seen art before, in school, or on trips to town with his father.) He looked toward the road, and his attention fell on a mud hollow the pigs had dug out while rooting. A recent rain had filled the little hollow with muddy water.
Jed turned and saw the barn. That beautiful, glorious structure that held so much meaning for him. His eyes tracked upward and he saw the place where the special window should have been in the gabled end of the uppermost peak of the barn. The window—frame and all—was missing. He looked back down, and at the base of the barn he saw a set of hay hooks he’d dropped there on the day he’d left for New Pennsylvania. He’d forgotten to put the hooks back in the barn—and there they were. Still there. The hay hooks were a detail, one of a thousand that convinced him the vision was real, not something concocted in order to trick him. Then he looked toward the house.
And he saw Dawn.
So beautiful. He heard the thought, and it embarrassed him.
She was standing only ten feet from him, and she was the most captivating thing he’d ever seen in his life. Everything about her was perfect, and she was smiling. Only, there was a sadness in her smile even though she looked authentically happy to see him. And she was dressed Amish, with cape and white apron and a white kapp with the ties hanging down.
He felt ashamed because a part of him knew that this wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, and that Dawn hadn’t consented to be seen this way. His mind—just below his consciousness, but still invading it—noted the irony of a man feeling shame for imagining a woman in modest, plain, and unrevealing dress. But a fantasy is a fantasy, isn’t it? It cannot be right. His face flushed red, and Dawn saw it.
She looked down at herself and smiled back at him. “Don’t be surprised, Jed. I really like these clothes. I love being dressed like this. It’s beautiful.”
Jed shook his head. “Only it’s not you saying that. It’s all in my mind. It’s what I would want you to say.”
“You’re wrong, Jed.”
Jed looked around. “So is this heaven? Were we killed?”
Dawn shook her head, and the sadness in her eyes multiplied. “No.”
Jed reached down and picked a piece of grass, then put it in his mouth. He chewed it and tasted its sweetness. He could feel the fibers on his tongue.
“Are you sure this isn’t heaven?” he said.
“I’m sure, Jed. In fact, this is a whole lot more likely to be hell.”
(17
Q
Jed and Dawn walked toward the house, and as they walked Dawn took his hand in hers. At the house, they sat on the porch in wooden chairs that his father had made in his workshop using only hand tools. His parents were nowhere around. He didn’t feel an urge to look around for them, because some part of him was still telling him that what he was seeing wasn’t the real world. A gentle breeze touched his hair, and he felt it this time, like the wispy fingers of evening and history. He removed his hat, and he smiled when he heard the familiar creak of the porch as he pushed his legs out and crossed his boots.
Glancing again at Dawn, he almost couldn’t stand to look upon her for fear that his heart would jump out of his chest, and because he thought that if she caught him looking she would read his thoughts. She was so stunning in her Amish dress that he had trouble controlling his breathing. He looked away rather than stare at her. “If this is hell,” he said, “and I know it might be blasphemous… but…”
Dawn flinched and interrupted him with an upraised hand. “We can’t stay here. It’s not real, Jed.” She pointed out across the farm. “This is all a lie.”
“But you said you were real.”
She grabbed his hand in hers and looked into his eyes. “I’m real, Jed, but this place is not. Transport Intelligence put a BICE unit in your head. In mine, too. I’m back online. And they have you on Quadrille—we call it Q—so that your mind will more easily accept the transplant… and believe the things you see and hear while they’re trying to reprogram you.”
Though he tried so hard not to, he found himself staring at Dawn’s face. It was so right that he wanted to kiss her. He didn’t want to talk at all. But then he knew it would be wrong to kiss her, so he tried to focus on what she was saying. “If this isn’t real—” But I know it isn’t real. “If this isn’t real, then why are they letting you tell me this? Don’t they control the computers? Aren’t they listening to us right now?”
Dawn smiled. “Well, they don’t know that TRACE has back doors, shells, and traps throughout their system. We’ve been infiltrating their programming for years, and there’s been nothing they could do about it. It’s a byproduct of a technological ecosystem: any system that relies on creative people to keep it running is going to be riddled with secrets and back doors. Most of the programmers who designed the BICE and integrated it with the Internet had hacker and rebel tendencies. Those people always do, God bless them. It’s always been that way and it always will be that way. There was no way to keep us out. That’s how the SOMA got in touch with me through my BICE when you were checking in at customs, back when I first met you.”