-34-
"Ghost in the Machine"
I remember walking with him, The Corinthian, through the dark and chilly lands of gloom and foreboding… the lands of Nightmare. With every step I grew taller, bigger, and to all eyes older; yet I was still only a day-old child in my own mind.
Eventually he tired of holding my hand to keep me with him, and tied a cord to my waist to serve as a leash - he made some mention, under his breath, likening me to a dog. I, for my part, got tired of walking, and pleasantly discovered that here, in this place, I had the option to float.
I seemed to have been born with the ability to understand all that was said, at least in some rudimentary fashion, no matter the language or the means of communication; and within no time at all I could have spoken sentences of my own, had I been so inclined.
But my own thoughts were too basic and childish to share with anyone, especially with my nightmarish captor. I thought of the woman, to whom I'd bidden farewell: hers was the first face I'd laid eyes upon, not The Corinthian's; and though it was battered and bloody, swollen, and pale with horror at the sight of me, still I loved her instantly… without even knowing why, or being capable of giving such a name to my feelings. The Corinthian had called her 'mum', and said that she was mine - the concepts of motherhood and possession both fascinated and consumed me, as I floated through the realm of Nightmare.
I knew not the concept of a father, until the word was spoken - but I knew that The Corinthian was no such thing to me. Again, I knew not the name of love, for The Corinthian did not utter the word in my presence, and neither did any of the Nightmares that followed him; but I knew there was something that he distinctly lacked, an emptiness that prevented any type of attachment from forming, but most especially barring the sort that bound me to the woman who was my mother.
While I stayed silent and watched, the Corinthian spoke to many Nightmares, and cajoled them into the swelling ranks of his army.
I did not know to fear them - to me they were not strange, nor were they frightful. Innately I understood their function, their purpose, and for the most part - there are always exceptions - their intentions and nature were benign. If any felt ill-will toward me, none of them said so - they were nothing but courteous to me, and some were even what I would now describe as worshipful.
I was to be their savior, they told me. No longer were they to be chained to individual dreamers; no longer would they be forced to change according to ever-shifting psyches, and to vanish from existence when their dreamer no longer had need of them. They would be free.
I felt it wise to keep my own counsel; I understood their desires, but I had no feelings whatsoever about fulfilling them. I was but a tool to them, a means to an end - and as such I had no love for them.
The Corinthian took note of the rate of my accelerated growth, and decided to halt it altogether with the power of the Ruby. I did not understand at the time why he wanted to do this, but I now I know that it suited his purposes better to keep me a child - for teenagers have desires that would have complicated matters significantly, and a young man might have become a rival, capable of usurping his position as leader of the Nightmares.
The Corinthian lost control of the damned who were initially on his side - many of the demons and souls defected back to Hell under the rulership of the angels.
He set up a serial killer's convention (advertised as a 'Cereal Convention', to avoid suspicion) in the waking world. Naturally, he chose a small town in the rustbelt of America as the place in which to do this - America loved the morbid mystique of living ghouls with a taste for murder, and as such it not only held the record for number of serial-killer fans, but had also cultivated the vast majority of the actual serial killers themselves.
This convention served a number of purposes: to entice new recruits who were yet living; to provide a place where the dead serial killers could inhabit the bodies of victims and blow off steam together; and as a way of getting The Dream King's attention.
I was kept in a room of the hotel, while The Corinthian fraternized with his guests; unfortunately, I opened the door for a voice that announced itself as room service, but in fact turned out to be the deceased child-predator, Funland, wearing the body of a fan of his.
The Corinthian noticed his absence in the main event hall, and arrived to destroy Funland before he could complete his aims with me.
And that's when the dead man's party was infiltrated by the disguised Dream King.
Dream took over for one of the keynote speakers, and addressed the assembled killers in the hall. He confronted them with the truth about themselves: they were not the apex predators they imagined themselves to be, the true embodiment of the American Dream unshackled and set free from the confines of morality. Dream, with one of his last few sparks of remaining power, broke their delusions of grandeur, and left them with nothing but the unfiltered knowledge of what they truly were.
The Corinthian arrived, with me at his side, too late to undo the damage - The Dream King was able to escape, by virtue of his helmet, and the help of his servants from The Dreaming.
The serial killers all left, stunned - the fight had been taken out of them. They were no longer willing to join The Corinthian's glorious crusade, and were now unsuitable for his purposes.
"That was your father," he told me in answer to my unasked question, seething with rage. But he recovered his composure quickly - he knew that this fight was far from over. The Dream King may have scared off a handful of his supporters, but there were plenty of Nightmares left to comprise a formidable army - perhaps he had simply been too hasty to bring the Nightmares into Reality.
And, on a positive note, his little stunt had successfully lured The Dream King out of his stronghold, and forced him to use up his dwindling supply of power in order to counteract what The Corinthian had done.
The Dream King was now weaker than ever, it seemed - but, just to make sure, The Corinthian decided to put this to the test.
Clearly, the Dream King would intervene when things ran amuck with the waking world, in order to protect the Dreamers - it was the surest way to spur him to action, if he was able to do so. So The Corinthian set about on a road-trip, using the Ruby on random human strangers to draw out the darkest aspects of their subconscious; no longer could they tell the difference between their dreams and nightmares, and their Reality.
It drove them quite mad.
For the next 24 hours, The Corinthian's test subjects tortured, mutilated, raped and killed one another.
The Corinthian merely watched, and waited, mostly from the vantage point of his car parked outside of a small diner. I waited with him in the passenger seat - after the incident with Funland, he was loath to let me out of his sight (this was not out of concern for my well-being, mind: I was simply too valuable, and he had lost all trust in those who served him). People wandered out of the diner with blood dripping from their empty eye sockets, and came to his car-window to offer up their own eyes to him for refreshment.
The Dream King did not arrive to stop him.
Perhaps things were looking up for The Corinthian after all.
He looked down at me. "Are you ready to meet your father?
I nodded.
The Corinthian grinned widely. "Splendid. That's just where we're going now: to see your daddy in The Dreaming."
"Deeming?" I said, the first word I ever spoke aloud; I knew it was not an accurate pronunciation, but it was the best I could do with my childish small mouth and unpracticed vocal cords. There was a reason that I chose this word to say, and that was because I found that this word to be nigh-incomprehensible - it was too big, too vast, had too much complexity of associations for my not-yet-developed human brain to make sense of. What's more, I did not understand until that moment that there was any distinction between the world I was born in, the world of my mother, and the world I had been taken to that was dark and full of Nightmares.
"That's right," my captor said.
We returned then to The Dreaming.
The Corinthian set up a base of operations there, on one of the newest of the islands of The Dreaming: the Cyberspace Skerry, also known as 'The Grid'.
The Grid was unique, in that it served as both dream-world and afterlife for thinking, created entities whose consciousness was made of code - for artificial intelligences, or AI. It was built specifically by and for the Kryptonian entity 'The Brainchild', which later came to be known on earth as Brainiac.
And it was all alone.
Until Ritchie came along.
Ritchie, the quantum magician, one of Constantine's former cohorts - or at least, a version of him.
While he was alive, Ritchie had built a computer peripheral, an apparatus that served as a magical conduit to cyberspace. Ritchie uploaded a back-up copy of his consciousness via this device, before his physical body was destroyed in the Newcastle explosion.
Ritchie's binary-code copy was the first being since the destruction of Krypton that Brainiac could interact with directly; the emotion-patterns initiated within Brainiac when it discovered him was enough to have moved it to tears, had it been capable of doing so.
However, Ritchie proved to be an inadequate companion.
Ritchie had all the memories of his living, adult human self, and therefore considered himself as such - yet he did not have a tangible body, and was thus unable to truly live or die. He'd tried to enter Heaven's cyberspace portal once, but had run up against their firewall and barely escaped intact. Living Ritchie saw cyberspace as a magical world of infinite possibilities and power, the ultimate trip - but binary-code Ritchie came to see The Grid as a purgatory, limbo… a circle of Hell from which he could not escape.
Ritchie therefore had significant trouble relating to a child-like being that was born an AI - and while The Brainchild was at first fascinated by Ritchie's tales of living in the physical world, once it heard all the stories it was loathe to hear any more about it. The Brainchild did not want to hear anything more about The Grateful Dead, or drugs, or sex, or food, or any of the multitude of things that it had never, and could never experience or learn to fully appreciate, trapped as it was in the space-pod of Kal-El.
And it certainly wouldn't tolerate hearing Ritchie bemoan the loss of these things; especially since, technically speaking, Ritchie had never experienced them either.
Ritchie and the Brainchild drifted apart, each occupying their own corners of cyberspace, and ceasing their interactions with one another.
And then I moved into town.
The Corinthian allowed me to play with this sleeping dreamer, without too much concern.
We were both strange child-like things who had no peers, no equals, and we each were caught in a special trap of our own: Brainiac had spent decades within the space-pod of Kal-El, and only recently had that pod been taken to S.T.A.R. Labs in Metropolis for study; only now had human technology reached a level that it was capable of unlocking the space-pod's mysteries, and of finding a way to communicate with the entity within without the use of magic.
For both of us, the Dreamspace was our only refuge, the only place where we could play and explore freely.
But it wanted something more. Ritchie's tales had sparked within it a desire that now burned like a forest-fire.
It wanted a body.
The boy destined to be that body lived in Metropolis. His name was Victor Stone.
Victor Stone loved technology.
At home he had more technology than anyone else he knew. He had multiple computers - Apple Macintosh, Commodore systems - as well as a VCR, a Sega Genesis, an Atari, and a Nintendo Entertainment System. He never went anywhere without his backpack, which held his cellular phone and his brand-new Gameboy. Always he wore his tricked-out wristwatch, and would have worn his Nintendo Powerglove as a fashion accessory if this was at all an acceptable thing to do. The headphones of his Sony Walkman portable cassette player never failed to crown his head, though he still preferred the sound of his boombox cranked up to max volume, and employed it whenever and wherever he could.
But it wasn't simply that Victor enjoyed the usefulness of these gadgets - no, he truly felt a deep and abiding love for them. He imparted personalities upon them in his mental fantasies, and imagined that they had thoughts and feelings of their own, just like other children imparted to their teddy bears made of plush (Victor eschewed all such toys - he couldn't understand why one would care about something that did not move or perform some sort of interesting function). He did this with all appliances, big and small, expensive and cheap, sophisticated or simple.
His uncle Lucius Fox was an engineer who once worked for the tech division of Wayne Enterprises, but had since founded the Science and Technology Advanced Research (S.T.A.R.) Labs in Metropolis. S.T.A.R. Labs was independent from all business and government ties, in order to focus on supporting metahuman causes and the Justice League. The Lab was responsible for powering Watchtower, and everything connected to it.
It was Lucius who first got Victor hooked on the technology stuff, starting with the gateway drug of radio communications and moving on from there to computers.
Lucius had encouraged his nephew to follow in his footsteps, and become an apprentice at S.T.A.R. Labs. Much to his disappointment, Victor instead chose to focus on sports.
The reasons for this was manifold: for one, Victor was the son of football star Silas Stone, who died tragically of a concussion at the peak of his career. This meant that Victor was highly sought after by sports coaches since he was small.
Secondly, he didn't want to end up like his mother Elinore, a scientist who died in a lab accident while working with her brother Lucius.
Finally, it was just easier. It was made plain to Victor early in life that there was only so much technological zeal one could exhibit while maintaining the interest and respect of one's classmates. He was far too athletic, and far too charming, to allow himself to be relegated to the most abhorrent of all school social castes: that of the 'nerd'.
After all, it was difficult enough that he was black - he didn't need to make it any worse for himself.
Lucius, however, was heavily biased in favor of brain over brawn - he believed his nephew was wasting his time and genius-level intellect in the pursuit of sports, which he considered superfluous to making the world better.
He warned Victor not to let others pressure him with their groupthink - for once he abandoned his will to the control of a collective, he would no longer be himself.
Victor did not appreciate his uncle's lack of support, and resented that his uncle refused to attend any of his games - this, compounded with a level of blame that Victor secretly harbored toward Lucius for the death of his mother, caused a tremendous amount of strain between them.
But still, his uncle was his legal guardian, and so he had to live with him.
And there were perks that went along with that - such as getting access to the best technology in the world, much of which was not available to anyone else.
Victor could not help himself - he often tinkered around in the Lab whenever Lucius was working late, which was much of the time.
Victor stumbled upon the consciousness-uploading apparatus built by Lucius' deceased friend Ritchie, stored within the Lab for decades and long forgotten.
Victor was unable to use it, not being a magician himself - but the idea of it inspired him. He set his mind to figuring out how to interface the human body with a computer.
When Lucius learned of his nephew's project, his feelings on the matter were mixed: he wanted to encourage the pursuit of science, but he was unhappy that his nephew's goal was simply to replace the physical game of sports with a virtual-reality videogame.
Lucius concluded that this project was unethical and could have dangerous applications, and so he banned his nephew from working on it further.
But Victor would not be deterred. He dropped out of all his highschool sports programs, and began breaking into the Lab after-hours to work on his project in secret.
He tore apart and cannibalized every piece of technology he could get his hands on, repurposing it all and wiring it together to give it new life.
Because Lucius was never in the habit of watching his nephew at practice meets or for games, Lucius never had reason to question this as an alibi, and was none the wiser.
Until the accident happened.
During a testing session, the suit that Victor built malfunctioned, with Victor still inside it.
All the peripherals attached to his ears, his left eye, his legs, his arms, his chest, his spine and his brainstem fused together with his own body.
Had Lucius Fox not returned to the Lab that night, to help an old friend of Ritchie's - John Constantine - he would not have arrived in time to save his nephew's life."
"I'll take it from here, Daniel," said my mother Rose.
-Rose Walker's Tale-
On the flight to Metropolis, John was not a happy camper.
As a good-looking white man who was used to getting his own way through a combination of luck and charm, he apparently had no idea what the rest of us unluckier, less-charismatic people had to deal with on a near-constant basis.
It wasn't good enough that he'd scored free airfare, or that his 'niece' Delirium had an unleashed dog on her lap in the passenger cabin and nobody noticed or cared, or that he should have been barred from flying for any number of reasons, from the fact that he was obviously sick and covered with plague-like boils, to the likelihood that he was being pursued by Scotland Yard as suspect #1 for a gruesome double-homicide.
No - he wasn't feeling good, and his 'perfect' (his word) face and body didn't look so good at the moment underneath his gloves and mask, and he had to accept seats in the no-smoking section of the plane on a long, transatlantic flight - so naturally he was acting like a big grumpy baby, and talking like his whole goddamn life was over (seriously - he was telling me about the need to 'settle his affairs', until I told him to can it because he hadn't gotten anything close to a terminal diagnosis yet).
To pass the time, I finally got John to stop woe-is-meing long enough to tell me about his friend - Deadhead, druggie, and counter-culture clone Ritchie Simpson, to repeat his description of him. Ritchie practiced a form of chaos magic, using a combination of psychedelics, meditation, and medical equipment designed to study the brainwaves of paranoids in Arkham Asylum, using it to project himself into the cyberspace realm. John felt that there must be a connection between his old pal Ritchie's hobby of cyberspace diving, and my dream of Daniel pointing to a computer.
This didn't distract him for long, though - fidgety Constantine didn't know what to do with himself without his ciggies. He stickyfingered a Gameboy from a sleeping kid in a nearby seat, griped and cursed under his breath about the gloves that were preventing him from 'winning', and tried to place it back with the kid before I whispered to him that it was probably his now that he'd touched it. He was just starting to launch into a rant about feeling like a persecuted leper when much to my relief, Delirium reached out from the seat behind him and lightly poked him in the head, sending him into a delirious stupor for the rest of the trip.
It was not a pleasant 'trip' for him, though - when it was time to disembark Delirium sobered him up, and John complained bitterly about how much he hated psychedelics; meanwhile, Delirium burbled proudly about how good she was at riding in airplanes now, and filled John in on all the neat clouds he missed.
Our first stop after touching down was at Watchtower, headquarters of the Justice League of America, to consult Oracle.
I'd never heard of Oracle - the internal workings of the Justice League weren't generally known to the public - but I assumed that she would be some kind of a magicky, robe-wearing drugged-out mystic, styled after the Oracle at Delphi.
So imagine my surprise when we met with a young woman in a wheelchair, who was quite possibly the most normal person I'd seen in a while.
Her name was Barbara Gordon, but the name I recognized was 'Batgirl'.
She'd explained to us that she'd retired that persona, after a brutal attack from the Joker left her a parapalegic. That story had not been made public either - I was only dimly aware that Batgirl had stopped making headlines in the superhero news, and I was deeply saddened to learn that this was the cause of her disappearance from the spotlight.
Oracle now served as the coordinator, data analyst, and official go-between for the Justice League - if you wanted to talk to any members of the League, or request information regarding metahuman matters, she was your point of contact.
John knew that some entity connected to the Justice League had confiscated Ritchie's cyberjumping equipment, but he didn't know who had it. Barbara told us to wait a moment in the lobby, while she made inquiries.
When she returned, she gave John a sour look and asked why his mug was splashed all over the newspapers in London in connection to a grisly occult murder. John professed his innocence, and Barbara warned him that the JLA could not afford to be associated with this nastiness in any way. John assured her that his lips were sealed in regards to the JLA helping him. Satisfied, Barbara Gordon got him in contact with Lucius Fox at S.T.A.R. Labs, the man who helped design Ritchie's machine. He met us at Watchtower.
Lucius, as it turned out, was not that thrilled to see Constantine either - he had a noticeable disdain for the use of magic, even though he'd worked with several magical metahumans connected with the Justice League and considered himself a friend of Ritchie's. Ritchie's magical leanings were always distasteful to Lucius, and they only bonded over their shared love of computers - Lucius was always the technician of the two. Constantine quickly revealed himself as a technological philistine, which did not improve matters - and Lucius was deeply suspicious about the nature and origins of his 'disease'. But he agreed to take us to S.T.A.R. Labs and investigate both Constantine's malady and the cyberspace device.
We arrived just in time - Lucius' nephew Victor, who he'd off-handedly mentioned as being gone at football practice, was screaming as volts of electricity arced from his body and lit up the Lab.
Lucius was able to shut off the power to the device, but his nephew was in really bad shape. Young Victor collapsed, unconscious.
Lucius rang the emergency alert, summoning all the staff members of S.T.A.R. Labs to the medical unit.
There was nothing any of us four - me, Constantine, Barnabas and Delirium - could do to help, except to watch and wait.
"When AI was first created, it caused quite a controversy amongst the supernaturals," I explained to my Dreaming audience. "None knew how to categorize it, and as such there was much confusion as to whose jurisdiction they fell under; this confusion extended even to the Endless. Was this artificial intelligence that humanity had created to be counted as a form of life? Could they have an afterlife? Could they desire, despair, or go mad?" I smiled. "I discovered first-hand the answer to one of those questions...