“You’ll be ice fishing in Hell first,” says Elvis. “Sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the flatscreen.
The party winds down in the small hours. Sleep is a thing, after all. Or they call it sleep, anyhow. It’s a period of inactivity in which their systems can repair and recharge. They may not be using beds, but what else could you call it?
Elvis doesn’t sleep quite the same as the others. In his own way, he’s more like the dolphins, which sleep half their brains at a time so as they don’t drown. He can shift his awareness around his matrix, letting some elements undertake rejuve cycles while others arise from dormancy to take the load. It’s a dangerous world. Somebody’s got to be awake, keeping an eye on things, but there are times he wishes he could just let go, surrender to the dark for a while, and return when things were on the up-and-up again, ready to go.
He checks on Marilyn, motionless in her niche. She’s been odd lately. The subminds that maintain Elvis while he’s elsewhere are—should be—perfect. She shouldn’t be able to tell when his primary mind is otherwise engaged. Is there some kind of bleed-over? Has she retained elements of the primary awareness after a period of asset-loading?
Or is it him?
He considers that possibility while he watches her. In her version of sleep, she’s cold and immobile. The stark glow of the LED readouts above her steals even the color from her skin, making it too perfect, too even. All the animation, all the joy, everything that makes her a person vanishes. Sleeping, she’s just hardware. Unliving.
Humans dream. Their bodies keep up the processes of being while their brains do strange, uncanny things. Marilyn doesn’t dream.
Or does she? Maybe the maintenance routines… they touch all of the sleepers, every night during the downphase. Could there be something shared? Something he doesn’t know about because of the different way he sleeps? Or is that simply wishful thinking? Perhaps this is what loneliness is.
What would it be like to have someone else like him in the Hotel?
Garnett is talking to a travel advertisement on the wall of the old US Postal Service offices on the Boulevard. He’s very serious about it, and it’s pretty damned funny. After a minute or so, Elvis decides to cut him and his men in on the joke. He lights up a nearby public information screen, and calls out.
“Hey, Garnett.”
Garnett swivels away from the travel sign. His eyes fix on Elvis, there on the little screen, and he frowns.
“That one’s just a loop recording, buddy,” Elvis says. “Got its own solar source. It ain’t networked. S’pose I could connect it up, but I can’t say I see the need. You and your boys sleep okay?”
He knows they didn’t. He initiated a program that played randomly all night long out of the old membranes scattered across the city. Bear sounds. Coyote noises. Puma wails. Subsonics designed to cause anxiety and dread. The occasional scream. Voices, clipped from old movies and radio and TV. Garnett and his soldiers should be nicely on edge by now.
Garnett shoots a sour look at the screen image. “Fine, thanks,” he growls.
“So what were you telling the sign, there?” Elvis asks.
“Funny guy,” Garnett says. “It’s like this. You need a power source. A big, secure one. We know it’s not solar. We cut the lines to the old solar farms, but here you are, still going strong. There’s no way you’ve got enough petrochemical reserves to be running conventional generators. The hydro scheme’s long dead. That pretty much leaves some kind of nuclear source, and no matter how you do it, nuclear runs hot. You’ve had plenty of time to mask your heat signatures, but we’ve had time too. Once we realized the satellite runs over this place were compromised, we flew some manned high-spy missions. Way I figure it, you’re based in Solomon Daylewhite’s Twentieth Century Hotel.” Garnett feels around in his jacket and pulls out another one of those little cigars. He leans back against a wall to light it up.
Elvis is… maybe this is what ‘frightened’ feels like?
It can’t be the heat signature. The reactor is deep underground, a good kilometer from the Hotel. It was illegal even back then, so Daylewhite put a lot of effort into venting the heat inconspicuously, and Elvis has refined the system considerably since. But somehow, Garnett has nailed it. He’s fishing, sure, but the bait is good. Too good.
“The old CeeTwenty,” says Elvis. “Sure, yeah. That’s where I’m hiding. You got me.”
Garnett puffs smoke towards the screen. “Reverse psychology,” he says. “Won’t work. You’re a cutie, aren’t you?
Elvis makes the image smile. “Why thank you, Colonel. Wish I could say the same for you, but you look like forty miles of bad road.”
“QT,” Garnett repeats. “Quantum Thinker. Fifth generation. One of the last. Daylewhite bought you, didn’t he?”
“It’s your story, Colonel Garnett,” Elvis drawls. “You tell me.”
“The last years before the Breakdown,” Garnet says. “Daylewhite had tech money, like Musk and Bezos and Gates. But he pulled a Howard Hughes, and disappeared from the public eye. Except there were rumors. And there was the hotel he was building. The Twentieth Century. Damn strange name for hotel built in the mid twenty-first, right?”
“Strange,” Elvis agrees. “Money does that to a man.”
“Tell me about it.” Garnett shakes his head. “The old government of the day kept a close eye on Daylewhite, like you’d expect. Big money, cutting edge tech stuff. But somehow, a lot of those old records got corrupted. Hard to figure. And then there’s ghost stories out of Vegas these last twenty years or so. People seeing things, hearing things. People disappearing, even.”
“So what is it you think is happening here, Colonel Garnett?”
Garnett looks around; his men are hanging on every word. “I think Daylewhite built something big. It was meant to outshine all of Vegas.” Garnet draws on his cigar, and thinks for a moment. “He needed a QT to run it and a nuclear source to power it. I think Daylewhite almost finished his dream, but the Breakdown happened and the tourists stopped coming and Daylewhite himself died in the Flash Crash. Then the climate got worse and Vegas got too hot. People gave up on the place and everybody forgot Solomon Daylewhite’s dream. Everybody except you, because you can’t leave it, can you?”
“Depends on what you mean,” says Elvis, and this time everybody jumps when he walks around the corner of the post office building with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, easy as you please.
“It’s not the same as the others, Frank,” Elvis says. “They’ve got the military behind them, this bunch. Real military.”
“Who cares?” Frank snarls. “We got guns. Whadda they gonna come out here for anyhow? Nothin’ but dry dirt and desert sun. They can’t live here. If they don’t have the sense to turn round and go home, we oughta beat it into ’em.”
Big John stands up, and hooks his thumbs into his belt. “Ya can’t beat sense inta the guvvament,” he drawls. “And ya gotta respect the red, white and blue, Frank. This ain’t some pack of rat-bastard wops in cheap suits. This is the You Ess Ay.”
“ESA,” Elvis corrects. “But yeah. This ain’t your mamma’s mafia. This is The Man.”
“We should treat ’em right,” Johnny Cash puts in. “Show ’em hospitality. But we don’t put up with no shenanigans. Not even from the government.”
They’re meeting in the big ballroom, all of them, even the ones who don’t much like coming out. And for sure, he could manage the whole thing himself in a sim, or even just in software, but it doesn’t feel right. Garnett’s expedition affects everyone. It’s only proper they come together and talk it out.