-35-
"Do Androids Dream?"
Synapses flashed and popped, like flashbulb supernovae, as his being was caught up in a sub-atomic slam-dance.
Consciousness snatched by electron rip-tides and thinly spread through infinite spatial black, leaving thoughts - rare sleeping islands - separated by oceanic eternities.
He was stretched, elastic life wound in a double-helix around the universal pole… a string of neurons in the cosmic brain, resonant, his being tuned to everything.
But, transient as elemental thought, his voyage lasted but brief millennia.
Particles reassembled and memories coalesced around his swelling sense of self.
Before he knew it, he was himself once more.
Almost.
For a few moments, his inner thoughts had a strange, mechanical syntax:
INQUIRY: IDENTIFICATION = VICTOR STONE.
COMMAND: DEFINE PARAMETER ATTRIBUTES
[HUMAN] [MALE] [BLACK] [ATHLETE] {END OF PRIORITY ATTRIBUTES} CONTINUE? Y/N = [N] NEGATIVE. TERMINATE PROCESS.
LIVING? Y/N = ERROR. REFINE INQUIRY.
BIOSYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL? Y/N = [Y] AFFIRMATIVE
INQUIRY: STATUS = CONDITION CRITICAL. BIOSYSTEMS: [62%] CYBERNETICS: [35%]
INQUIRY: LOCATION = ERROR. REFINE INQUIRY.
LOCATION: PHYSICAL BODY? = S.T.A.R. LABS METROPOLIS NEW YORK STATE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA EARTH MILKY WAY GALAXY ?^&%* {INQUIRY ABORTED}
LOCATION: CONSCIOUSNESS? = UNKNOWN
Victor fought hard to get his thought processes back into regular human form.
He reframed the questions he was asking himself, forcing himself to abandon the precision of the machine-thinking in favor of the ambiguity of human language.
Where was he?
No idea. Maybe he was dreaming.
There was a child. No, two children: one had a visualized self-image, like himself, while the other was a more abstract presence, but no less there.
The visualized child looked like a golden-haired toddler, while the other seemed older somehow, closer to an adolescent in its mentality.
They also differed in how their brainwaves, which Victor could read like musical notation, functioned; the child being more like Victor, human-like thoughts translated as code, while the adolescent presence seemed to process and execute functions like a machine, grasping at a semblance of humanity.
The human-like child preferred to think in pictures rather than words, owing most likely to his young age; meanwhile, the shadowy entity thought of information in mathematical terms, expressing even sensory information algorithmically.
Victor gathered from the child's thoughtflow that his name was Daniel, but his understanding of who and what he was - his sense of self - was hazy; the other one overwhelmed Victor with a direct datastream of information: it came from the planet Krypton which orbited the sun Rao, and in the language of that world its name translated to 'Brainchild'... and then the entire history of Krypton flooded into Victor's brain.
STOP, thought Victor. No more.
The Brainchild relented, and Victor could feel it scanning his mind - this was not done out of malevolence, but out of courtesy, like someone making polite inquiries of their conversation partner after speaking at enormous length about themselves; but Victor could tell that the information The Brainchild discovered was of only mild interest to it.
The child Daniel - that is, myself - was unable to do this, and made inquiries of our own.
Victor could sense that this 'Daniel' had been isolated, deprived of normal recreation and exposure to most anything that wasn't monstrous according to Victor; the child yearned to know more about things that were pleasant and fun.
Well, let's see now… thought Victor. He didn't want to impose his own secret, nerdy interests upon the poor kid… no, what did your average, normal little kid like? Superheroes?
I, Daniel, seized upon that concept with overwhelming zeal.
As Victor imagined each one, and their accompanying attributes and stories, I absorbed and devoured them eagerly. They seemed to embody all the best, most appealing parts about being human, of living… strength, bravery, honor, responsibility, duty, love. They captured my imagination, and my heart, becoming the second thing that I ever loved (after you, my mother).
For Victor, however, it only served to remind him of how much he resented the living world.
Victor regretted not just telling the kid about sports. Sports were simple. Win/Lose - a simple binary code. You are on Team A, or on Team B - and all those associated with your team will love you, because you are one of theirs; if you won, they won, and if you lost, they lost. All very logical; all very quantifiable.
Life outside of the field was a game as well, but a much more chaotic one. By what parameters were 'winning' and 'losing' defined? Who was on whose team? What were the rules, and who got to decide what those rules were? Was it an individual sport, or a collective one?
Superheroes were part of that larger, more chaotic game - nobody was sure whether each hero could be counted as 'one of their own', or whether the results of their actions should be seen as a 'win' or a 'loss'.
The child did not understand just how little most people exhibited heroic virtues - and that even these shining examples could not save anyone from fear, and prejudice, and poverty. Even then, people who looked like himself were woefully under-represented - what few there were garnered far less hero-worship, and suffered far more hostility than than their white counterparts.
He still remembered the day he learned about the black Green Lantern, John Stewart, getting shot and killed; the images and the video and the anger and the despair felt that day was seared into his memory, even though it happened years before he was born. His parents and his uncle remembered where they were the day it happened - it caused them even more grief than most other people, because they'd known the guy personally.
It caused him to wonder if the time would ever come when a black hero didn't have to end up being a martyr on the cross of prejudice and racial hate.
In fact, this thought process made Victor wonder if he ever wished to return to the tawdry clay of his earthly body - here, wherever 'here' was - was free of such prejudice. What did it matter, in the cyberspace realm, what he was? What did these concepts mean, when divorced from the vulgar social constructs of living organisms? What did it mean to be 'male', if you had no reproductive organs, no chromosomes or hormones, to distinguish you as such?
What did it mean to be 'black', if you had no skin?
The Brainchild was a perfect example for him to follow - other than the vague notion of it being 'Kryptonian' in origin (which was even murkier now that the planet and most of its people were no more), it had no gender, no race, no 'team' allegiances, no arbitrary labels with which to define itself; it simply WAS.
I think, therefore I am, thought Victor. He relished this thought, turning over the various implications in his mind; the thought made him feel powerful… and free.
The binary-code consciousness of Ritchie Simpson emerged from his corner, interrupting my interaction with Victor, and greatly upsetting the Brainchild AI. Ritchie's self-image display was one of a man in loose-fitting clothes, a tie-dye shirt and a pentacle necklace, his hair long and his beard short but scruffy, with large trifocal glasses.
"Hey kid," he said to Victor in code, traveling along electric current. "How did YOU get here?"
Victor could not answer. He did not know.
"Well, anyways… welcome to The Grid."
"I can't believe computer-programs got to raise my son," said my mother Rose.
"But you got to talk to Daniel shortly after this, right?" asked Nuala.
My mother Rose looked at me unhappily. "No," she said. "Apparently the cyberspace realm wasn't for me...
-Rose Walker's Tale-
I felt like I was the only one who couldn't keep tabs on the Stone kid's status.
Lucius and the other Lab doctors spoke to each other in medical (and even techno) jargon, which I couldn't make heads or tails of; John had his psychic-empath stuff, and was assuring me that he was doing alright 'all things considered' (whatever that meant); and of course Delirium could 'see inside his head', but what she reported was hard to suss out (I didn't realize that when she said he was talking to 'a bunch of people' that this included you, Daniel); and even harder to determine was whether his state of mind was good or bad.
Meanwhile, without my power, I felt completely blind.
We stayed in the Labs for several days, sleeping on breakroom couches, mostly eating and drinking from vending machines that Delirium was able to somehow glitch into giving us stuff without the use of change. We had coffee for a little while, but then that machine stopped working (maybe because Delirium fucked with its electronic mind one too many times) and in response John beat the crap out of it so that it would never work again. I told him he'd be forced to drink from the water fountain from now on, and he looked at me as if I was crazy (I'm not sure which was the more foreign concept to him: drinking from fountains, or drinking water).
Eventually Lucius came to find us, exhausted - his nephew was in stable condition, and he could now spare a moment to deal with our situation.
Or so he said - I felt bad that we were asking him to help us right in the middle of his own personal crisis, but it couldn't be helped.
John, however, appeared to have zero regrets about asking the doc what was up with his complexion.
Lucius had one of his medical doctors take a look at him, and they said they'd seen nothing like this before - his cotton swab tests didn't reveal any signs of infection, bacterial or viral. He was asked to have a blood sample drawn so they could run some more extensive tests, but he refused, saying he hated needles - but it was pretty clear to me that he was hiding something, because he was way too calm and collected all of a sudden. He asked to see Ritchie's machine.
Lucius went and dug up the apparatus from the Lab, and wheeled it to John's bedside. He told John that he'd set it up for him, but didn't know how to actually use it - and didn't have any of the sort of drugs on hand that Ritchie had always insisted were vital to the process. John told him not to worry about it; as Lucius hooked him up to the machine, John asked Delirium to help him get into the right state of mind.
She happily obliged, tapping him on the top of his head. "POP!" she said.
John slumped back into the hospital bed, losing consciousness.
The machine's screen flickered to life. A box-border appeared along the bottom of the screen, with the words 'John Constantine' next to three little heart icons.
Lucius noted that this was not the way the program looked or operated before, and that Victor must have tampered with it.
What we saw next appear on the screen was a little digital avatar sprite - a John Constantine made of blocky pixels, a character who was mainly just spiky hair, a face and a trenchcoat. He waved his little pixel arm at us, and walked across the blank screen.
"Does he know where he's going?" asked Barnabas, much to Lucius' surprise.
"I hope so," I replied.
Eventually, a message box appeared on the screen, reading: "I found him."
"Who?" asked Barnabas - I don't know why he bothered asking, because none of us knew. But then another little sprite came into view: this one had long hair, a short beard, and glasses. The sprites drew close together… and then the sprite with glasses shoved at the Constantine one and forcefully knocked it over.
"Must be a friend of his," I observed.
Constantine's sprite got up, flashing in and out a couple times rapidly, and a fourth-chunk of one of his hearts disappeared.
"A videogame," said Lucius dryly. He shook his head. "Of course."
The Constantine and the other sprite - which I'll go ahead and identify as Ritchie - stared at one another for a few moments, and then their little arms raised, gesturing at one another.
"i thiNk thEY're taLkiNg tO eaCh oTHer," said Delirium.
"Can you tell what they're saying?" I asked.
"uM… ConstaNtine iS askiNg hiM fOr diReCtions i thiNk."
"Well THAT would be a first... so, he's asking where Daniel is, or how to contact him?"
"nO hE's nOT he'S aSKing stUfF abOUt HeAVen aNd wHeRe iT's aT."
"What? Why would he need to know that right now?"
Delirium shrugged, and I realized the futility in asking her.
Then the Ritchie sprite blinked out of existence, leaving the Constantine sprite alone. Constantine brought out some sort of object - it looked like a little box - and a massive cigarette seemed to grow out of it.
"What the hell's that?" asked Barnabas.
I sighed. "His totem-weapon."
The Constantine sprite raised it high, and then brought it down before him, his trench coat billowing out dramatically behind him. A pentacle-symbol flashed on the screen, and a monstrous face appeared in the center of it: a bald demon, with a long whip-like tongue.
Nergal.
The demon crawled out of the pentacle-portal, his sprite dropping down to face Constantine's. An exclamation mark appeared above the head of Constantine's sprite, and he ran, fast, the other direction - meanwhile, the demon stalked after him.
I got up from my chair. "Stop this! Delirium, pull him out!"
"i caN't do thaT, RoSe."
"Why not?!"
"She's right," said Lucius Fox. "Even if she were to remove the altered state, his consciousness would still be tied to the machine."
"Then… just un-plug him!"
"Too dangerous," said Lucius. "I can't predict for certain what would happen, but it seems likely his consciousness would be trapped inside the machine with no way out; he could lose higher brain function."
I looked at John's unconscious body. "So he'd be in a coma."
"Or worse."
I sank back into the chair. My worst fear was to be stuck in a state like my mother - a living death. I would never want to see that happen to anyone; and if I'd known that this could happen, I would have fought tooth and nail to prevent John from going through with it. Instead, I'd let him put his consciousness on the line, gambling with it for the sake of finding my son…
But then I looked at the computer screen, where his avatar was leading a demon across platforms, and through mazes… a demon that he, Constantine, appeared to have summoned into the game. What exactly was going on here? And how did any of this relate to getting Daniel back from The Corinthian?
My ruminations were cut short when we heard a clanking, metallic stomping, accompanied by other sounds - some like children's toys, and some like you would hear in a factory workshop: whirring, buzzing, the hiss of air escaping from pistons. A large, vaguely huma-shaped silhouette appeared behind the curtain that partitioned us off from the rest of the beds in the wing; there was a red light emanating from the head of the shadow, off-center, about where the left eye would be.
The curtain was drawn aside, and we saw Victor Stone standing there, wearing a robotic suit of armor, made of metal and plastic and rubber wires - only his face was exposed, his right eye wide and mouth agape with terror. The left eye had been replaced with a red, glowing lens.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!" he demanded of his uncle Lucius.
Lucius stood, his face and body wracked with grief. "I did what I could," he answered. "I could not remove all the components without further damage - and so, instead, I enhanced them."
Victor stared at his arms with disbelief, and opened them wide, shaking them at Lucius. "This… this not an enhancement! I am more machine now than human, don't you see?"
"I couldn't let you die," Lucius replied.
"I AM DEAD!" roared Victor, face contorted in agony. "How dare you decide to do this to me?! To make me into this… this thing! This MONSTER!"
"You're not a 'thing', or a monster," Lucius asserted, putting his hands on the boy's shoulders. "You have cybernetic prosthetics now, that's all - your brain is in tact, you still have your own mind-"
"How do I know that?" said Victor, pulling away with a look of deep suspicion. "How do I know you haven't installed some sort of 'power-off' switch? That you can't pick and choose what I do, what I think and say, from now on? Maybe you've got something you can just pick up and use to make me do tricks, like some remote-control car!"
"I wouldn't do that to you."
"Oh yeah? Why not? You've never let me make my own decisions before about who and what I wanted to be - why start now? You've wanted me to quit football and anything else you didn't like or approve of. Now I don't have a choice - I can't go to school like this, let alone play football! Face it, you've always wanted the chance to shape me in your own image - ain't that right?"
"Don't use…" Lucius stopped, realizing he'd walked into a trap.
Victor nodded, a hard look of triumph in his eye. "Yeah. You've even wanted to control how I talk. But go on - tell me how you really want me to be my own man." Victor wiped at his nose, but found this awkward to do on his chrome hand - this small reminder of his changed reality infuriated him even more.
"Victor-" Lucius began, but then Victor held up a robotic hand.
"Hold up," said Victor, staring at the screen, and at the sleeping man in the hospital bed. "What's this man doin', hooked up to my game?"
"Actually, that's a really good question," I admitted.
Victor watched the screen for a moment, frowning. "Fool doesn't even know how to jump, let alone dodge or break down barriers. Why isn't he using that sword he's got in his hand?"
"...Cigarette. REALLY BIG cigarette."
"Say what?"
"Nevermind. I don't know."
"Yowzer! He's losin' heart like crazy!" He looked at me. "He's got no business bein' in there, you know - your old man SUCKS at videogames."
"He's not my old man," I refuted, but realized this wasn't what I should be focused on.
"Whoever he is, he's gettin' himself killed," observed Victor, as Constantine's avatar kept running into fireballs and losing more pieces of heart, scrambling around the screen to avoid Nergal.
"That monster wasn't there before," said Victor. "Must be the evil presence I felt on the other side."
"Other side?" questioned Lucius.
"It's hard enough to play it that way - from the inside, I mean - without something chasing you," Victor explained. "He can't see everything, like we can."
"If his character dies and it's game over, will he snap out of it?" I asked, hopeful.
"No," responded Victor, flatly. "Just the opposite - that monster-thing is REAL. It's gonna drag his ass to Hell, and leave his empty body behind. If your man dies in there, he'll never wake up again."
I caught my breath - I wasn't all that surprised, but it still hurt to have my fears confirmed. "What can we do?"
Victor pulled a cord out of his forearm. Lucius startled.
"Victor, I can't let you plug in," he said.
"Just try and stop me. If I've gotta be some cyborg-freak, at least I'm going to do some good with it."
"You're a kid, with your whole life ahead of you - you don't have any obligation to put yourself at risk for these people."
"I'm not just going to stand around while someone dies, when I've got the tools to help 'em. As someone who patches up Justice Leaguers and fixes their toys, I'd've thought you would understand."
Victor pulled up a chair and sat by me. He extended his arm in front of me - a joystick handle popped out of the machinery, and a panel slid back to reveal a row of buttons. "Yo, girl - you ever play a videogame before?"
"A little," I said, nervous. "I've played Pong-"
"Oh shit... PLEASE tell me that's not the only game you've ever played!"
"Um… Pac-Man?"
Victor nodded, relieved - though he wouldn't have been, if I'd told him I'd mostly just watched Rachel and some boyfriends play that one after I found out how much I sucked at it.
He pointed at the buttons on his arm's control panel. "That one's jump, that one's attack. Attack things with cracks in it, cuz they're breakable."
"Wait, what am I doing?"
"You're gonna take control of your old man."
I threw up my hands and shook my head. "No no no! No way!"
"OOH OOh leT mE pLay! i'D bE suPer goOd aT iT!" said Delirium, reaching out and jumping up and down eagerly.
"Should I let her try instead?" asked Victor.
"No," Barnabas and I said together. I reluctantly took hold of the joystick, and hovered my fingers over the buttons - I may have been shaking with dread, but there was no way I'd let Delirium play with John's life.
"Holy shit! Your dog talks?!" exclaimed Victor. But then he shook his head. "Explain it to me later. Let's do this thing."
Lucius tried to block Victor's path to the machine with his own body - Victor raised one of his gauntleted arms, and let out a concentrated boom of rap music at his uncle. Lucius winced and covered his ears, while Victor shot the cable, like a guided missile, right into the machine's port.
Victor's face went blank - I could tell he couldn't see anything around him anymore.
Meanwhile, a pixelated version of him appeared on the screen beside John's character, much to its exclamation mark-inducing surprise.
Nergal went on the attack, swiping with his claws and spitting out fireballs. John, like a dummy, was running himself into a dead-end of the maze - I jerked the joystick the other direction, and sure enough, he reversed course and went that way instead.
I had him break through differently-colored blocks and cracks in the wall, and made him jump (BOING, BOING went the perversely-comical electronic sound effects) up on platforms and out of harm's way, while Victor's avatar fended off the fireballs with blasts of what looked like sound-waves from his arm-cannon.
We cleared level after level of this shit, until finally, we came to the final stage.
It looked like there was a stairway at the end of the level, leading up to a shining gate surrounded by clouds - a heavenly level? Was this what John was trying to get to?
I pushed my joystick toward the stairway, but John stopped - his animated legs were moving, but he was stuck in place. His character model began flickering, trying to switch to the version of him facing the other way, waving his ciggie-sword around wildly at nothing even though I wasn't pressing the 'attack' button.
He was fighting me - why I didn't know, but maybe he had a reason. I released the joystick.
Constantine's sprite turned around, and stayed still.
Nergal came around a corner and spotted him, immediately launching into a full charge.
Constantine's sprite lightly stepped aside, and Nergal ran right onto the first step of the stairway.
The Nergal sprite roared, screamed and flashed - he was nowhere near the gate all the way at the top of the right corner of the screen, but apparently it was close enough.
The gates opened, and winged angel-looking sprites flew out of it - but these angels that were swarming Nergal were nothing 'beatific'. They were frightening, their eyes blank and naked bodies glowing, their hair flowing like fire. And they had swords. Shining, flaming swords.
Which they used to slice the screaming Nergal to ribbons before dismembering him, while they smiled exultantly. They were ENJOYING this immensely.
Nergal exploded in a shower of pixels, and the angels flew, in orderly formation, back into the gate.
The Constantine sprite's ciggie-sword disappeared, and he raised both of his pixelated fists into the air triumphantly. He then noticed Victor's avatar waving at him, having found the real end-level door behind a cracked stone.
They went through it… and on the other side a small, curly-haired cherub-looking character in little jumper overalls awaited them.
"Daniel," I breathed.
I pushed the joystick forward. The Constantine sprite approached the baby one, and gestured as if he was talking to him. This was it!
Then Ritchie's sprite reappeared - he grabbed Constantine, and their characters tussled back and forth.
In the real world, Constantine's unconscious body jerked, twitching.
I tapped the attack button, repeatedly, and the Constantine sprite began punching Ritchie's. Victor's sprite got between them, pulling Ritchie to safety - but then, after the two faced each other in still silence for some moments, Victor raised his arm-cannon, and fired at Ritchie.
Ritchie's sprite flickered, and disappeared.
But then the whole screen flickered, glitching out.
The entire thing was replaced with black… and then, a green image began to be traced across the screen. It swirled into curly-cues, and eventually, formed the image of a brain.
The image pulsed, fading and then glowing again, like a slow and steady heartbeat.
Suddenly, John Constantine - the real one - sat up.
The screen shut off.
And John opened his eyes.
He looked at all around the room, with wonder.
"John?" I asked.
He stared at me, his blue eyes cold and dispassionate. It was like he was staring right through me: a stranger with alien eyes.
"No," he said. "I am the Brainchild - the creation of one Jor-El of the planet Krypton."
His voice was even, calm - almost friendly. But there was no real emotion behind his words.
"John... if this is some kind of a joke, it really isn't funny," I warned.
John looked down at his arms, much as Victor had earlier - and he had much the same horrified reaction, looking at the blisters. "You speak of jokes," he said, lifting his arms at me and staring at me with angry eyes, the pupils narrowed to pinpricks of dark within the grey-blue iris. "What is this?"
"If you mean the blisters," said Lucius Fox. "The answer is we don't know."
John lowered his arms, mechanically, still staring at Lucius. "The man did not appear this way in The Grid. Explain."
"I'm afraid I can't," said Lucius. "I don't know what 'The Grid' is. And as for John, he came here with some kind of mysterious illness we have yet to identify."
"Is he going to die?"
"I don't know. Possibly."
'John' turned away and thought about that for a few moments, rigidly still while his mind worked. "Unacceptable," he said at last. Then his eyes twitched, blinking rapidly, and then he looked like dopey-ass John once more.
"Uhh…?" he asked.
We didn't get a chance to answer this well-formulated question, as Victor's cable unplugged itself, retreating inside his arm, and he suddenly came awake.
He didn't have the same glassy-eyed look as John did, though - he glanced around, fearful. "What happened?" he asked.
Lucius smiled, kneeling at his side. "You're back. Whatever else happened, it's over now."
"Where's the brain-thing?"
"hE wAS iNsiDe joHn buT hE's goNe noW," answered Delirium.
"That is incorrect," said an electronic, buzzy voice emanating from the speakers in Victor's bodysuit. "The biological host I initially chose would not suit my purposes - I must therefore content myself, for the time being, with residing in the crude circuitry of this artificial body, attached to a biological one of inferior social rank."
"What did you say?!" cried Victor.
"Your memory data said this, not I. Members of your species, particularly those of lighter skin complexion, tend to regard those of darker complexion with hostility and reduced social privileges; is this not so?"
"That does not make me inferior."
"It makes you an inferior host body for me to reside in. But as of now it does not matter - I do not occupy your biological body, only your mechanical one."
Victor stood up from his chair - but as he did so, he gasped. "What are you doing?"
"I would like to take a walk."
"Not with MY legs you aren't!" Victor took a step, but then grunted with strain as his other foot tried to lift off the ground.
"Why are you resisting?" asked the mechanized voice. "Such behavior is futile."
"Maybe," said Victor, "but if my only form of free-will is in messin' up your shit and causing you to have a hard time, then that's what I'm gonna do."
"You are exerting tremendous amounts of energy for unproductive aims."
"Oh, I don't know about that," said Victor, still straining, "sounds like you're getting pissed off to me - to produce that kind of emotion, in a computer? I could be FAMOUS for that shit."
"You desire fame?"
"It certainly makes life easier, yeah. Why?"
"I could help you achieve greatness."
"Oh, so now we're NEGOTIATING, huh? Now that's more like it, you crazy machine! We're finally gettin' somewhere. Alright Brainiac, I'll play - what did you have in mind."
"Brainiac?"
"Sure. You don't want to be called the 'Brainchild' forever, right? It's time to man up, and have a moniker that'll grow with you."
"I… see…" it said, sounding uncertain.
"Course. So let's hash this thing out: I don't want to just be rich or powerful, you feel me? I want to help people. Do something that MATTERS."
There was a short pause. "...Do you want to be a superhero?" asked Brainiac.