Oncertain days of his childhood, when he’d been ill, feverish, and kept home from school, he’d lie on the couch and watch TV and his mother would bring him soup and fruit and juice. He would never make it through an entire episode of anything; he’d always nod off and wake up halfway into the next show, so that circus personnel would warp into cowboys and then sailing enthusiasts intent on some mystery, and it struck him then how people were all much the same, scrabbling for a living and being with their family and looking for interesting things to fill their days, hoping to find something beyond themselves. Often some crisis occurred. Often you had to start again from square one.
His mother was at her best during those times of sickness. She’d always been a nervous person, uncomfortable in her skin and with other people, even with her own children. She never knew what to do with him or his sisters. But if your child is sick, you keep him home, you encourage his rest. You bring him food and medicine, and you touch him, you comfort him as much as you can bear. It was pretty clear that she waited for these perfect opportunities to be a good mother.
Perhaps there were parents who really knew what they were doing, but Daniel had not been one of them. He was as a father as he was in the rest of his life—killing time for months, for years, waiting for the event, the phone call, the conversation that would at last make perfect sense of everything.
Now, before he’d even opened his eyes the morning smell of the barracks hit him. An accumulation of terror sweat and the stench of sadness. And there were always those who had fouled themselves as they’d tossed and turned under the grip of some past evil. You adjusted to it just enough to be slightly surprised about how bad it could be.
Nearby, one of the residents struggled to dig something out of the back of his neck. Apparently it was buried deeply, causing the fellow to gouge the skin, his nails breaking, but still cutting flesh, drawing blood.
“Could someone help me! I can’t get to it! It needs to come out!”
Falstaff came up behind the man and slapped him on the back. “A button, right? You’re looking for a button. You got it! I saw it pop out—it bounced across the floor somewhere over there.”
The man visibly relaxed. “Should we go find it? Maybe it’s dangerous, just leaving it lying around?”
“I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t touch it. It’s out, it’s disconnected, exposed, it won’t bother anyone. But still, I wouldn’t go near it if I were you.”
“Thanks. Oh, thanks.”
Falstaff walked over to Daniel and spoke softly. “He’s another Charles Whitman. I don’t know what the roaches have been doing back there, but there have been four Whitmans so far today. And it’s not the first time one of them believed there was a button embedded somewhere on their body, and that someone had secretly pushed it, and that’s what turned on the craziness, and that’s why he killed all those people.”
“I was Whitman,” Daniel said, “but I never believed that.”
“It’s rare. I gather they did find a small tumor in the real Whitman, during the autopsy. But if it was a button, it was a button that turned on nothing. At least that was the consensus of medical opinion. We’re full of buttons and switches. And we like to hold them responsible, but most of the time they don’t do a thing. They’re just these odd bits of scar tissue, unless you make them active, unless you electrify them, because they seem like they’re the only thing that will lift you out of the emptiness.”
“Why do the roaches keep repeating the same scenarios? Just during my time here I’ve seen a dozen different Jack the Rippers wake up in this room, not counting my own. A huge number of Hitlers, Green River killers, Albert Fish—”
“I saw two Albert Fishes yesterday. Have you noticed how, the more recently a character lived, the more their character—absorbs you?”
Daniel nodded. “Like with Whitman. At first I was a presence in his head—or at least I was aware of having a presence, of being someone with my own mind, and then I just disappeared into him, and his thoughts were my thoughts, and it was me doing these terrible things.”
“I believe what the roaches can do, they can probe through time, and they can detect past brain activity, and they can translate that activity into a recording of a person’s consciousness, of varying completeness. Do you believe in ghosts?”
Daniel smiled, laughed. “No, of course not.”
“You might want to reconsider that position. Because you’ve been spending a great deal of time inside these specters, these ghosts. I don’t know what else to call them. However their personalities have been recorded and received by us over the centuries, as what we’ve called ghosts, hauntings, it’s a process the roaches have amplified with technology—the superstition has become science.”
“So why do they repeat these scenarios?”
“Because naturally the signal must degrade over time—to varying degrees there are the inevitable holes. They need the processing power of your human brain to fill in the gaps—you become part of the software, and of course each person is going to process that information differently. At some point they must balance all of that input to get a fuller picture of a Hitler, a Himmler, and how their brains worked.”
“And then what?”
“And then they learn whatever it is they’re trying to learn about us. You’ll notice they rarely try to make us into a Caligula, or a Genghis Khan. They lived too long ago. There must not be enough signal left to build a reasonable persona out of.”
They’d walked to the opening to the hallways. Two giant roaches lounged there staring at them. Something about them emanated disinterest. “And no one’s ever tried to escape?”
“Where would you go? At least in here you’re fed.”
“Still, you’d think some people would take their chances out there, rather than continue to endure this.”
“Really, Daniel? Just imagine brushing up against one of the roaches, touching its body, physically struggling with it, as you would have to do. What do you feel when you imagine that?”
Daniel drew a blank. He couldn’t imagine it. He just knew it was the last thing he ever wanted to do. He’d sooner peel off his own skin, bite through his tongue and eat it slowly.
“Here.” Falstaff grabbed Daniel’s hand and thrust it against the shimmering exoskeleton of the nearest roach.
Daniel howled, falling to the floor. It was as if his skin had ruptured, followed by a massive invasion of countless small, dark, wriggling things working their way into all parts of his body. Not that he could actually see them, but he knew they were there, and ravenous.
“That’s why we don’t rebel,” Falstaff said. “That’s why we don’t even try. And sometime you might notice that the more problematic residents, they don’t always come back from a scenario.” He turned and walked away.
The roaches had disappeared from the hall. He stared at Falstaff’s back, moving away, shimmering. He felt properly punished—Falstaff had made his point. But what troubled him went deeper than the futility of an attempted rebellion—he understood that Falstaff had been here a long time, but still, how did he know so much?
When Daniel rejoined his group in the barracks he found them gathered around Bogart, who apparently had just awakened from another scenario. He was severely shaken, occasionally crying as he attempted to speak, and the confusion Daniel had noticed previously in his speech had become more pronounced.
“Hitler, Jack the Ri—ipper, of course those I—I understand, but Picah—ahsso? I’d always thought of him as just a painter?”