“You know, somebody just might snap, shoot you, then claim temporary insanity,” the officer told us. He looked like he was seriously contemplating it.
“Bite me!” Albert laughed, throwing the car into gear. The officer watched us leave with a horrible, glowering expression.
We rode for a while in silence, and then I said, “I don’t think we had to be so … extreme.”
“Yes, we did,” Albert said. “There’s a big difference between creating a few cards and an authorization in a database somewhere, and changing all of society so that it accepts the card.” He grinned, very pleased with himself. “It worked perfectly.”
I had to admit that it did.
“This has vast implications,” Albert said. He was very, very pleased with himself.
#
During the next couple of weeks we indulged in an insane excess of total wish fulfillment. A lot of it was pretty nasty, and much of the nasty stuff had a lot to do with famous actresses and models. It didn’t make me feel good afterwards — I felt like I was using people, manipulating them without any regard for them.
I also came to the conclusion that if I could get anything I wanted with no effort, then everything felt worthless. Disposable.
Albert seemed to like it this way, he enjoyed the disposable aspect of everything.
“Look,” I told him one Monday. “Let’s do something real with your terminal. Let’s make some changes that are worth making.”
“Like what?”
“Stop those wars in Eurasia and Africa. Give some plentiful food source to India. Make life better for everyone, not just us.”
“I always figured you for a Democrat,” Albert said. “You’re right, though. Let’s do something about the common lowlife scum.”
We watched CNN for a while, getting a good idea of where all the trouble spots were, and then Albert isolated the areas and adjusted parameters so that everyone there just lost their will to fight. That night all the news programs were buzzing with special reports on how truce talks were going on everywhere. Some people who were interviewed thanked God that people were finally coming to their senses; others called for investigations and alerts, insisting something evil was going on. The next day, however, while Albert was working on getting more food to the starving, we learned wars had broken out in different areas. Albert stopped those, and did some poking around. “Arms dealers are really vile and ruthless people,” he said at one point. “Did you know they cause most of the small wars?”
“Obviously.”
“No, they really arrange them, set them up. I’m going to delete them from the program.”
“Delete them!” I was very alarmed.
“Yep.” He tapped on the keys, peering at the screen. “Done.
Arms dealers are gone. All guns everywhere are disappearing into rusty balls of harmless junk.”
The next day there were new arms dealers, and plastic guns were being produced in mass quantities. Albert was only slightly miffed. “Figures. This stuff happens naturally. There’s no point in trying to curb it, it’s part of the program.” He did change parameters so that plastic guns had a tendency to explode, however, which forced the arms industries to divert their energies back to research instead of production.
“Look at this,” he said late one afternoon. “Look what happens when you give the starving a limitless food supply.”
“What?” His computer screen didn’t make any sense to me. Then again, it never did.
“There’s a soaring increase in reproduction. That’s all we need, another eight billion people.” He thought about it a moment, then started tapping on the keyboard. “Time for an attitude change. Everyone everywhere will think sex is repulsive without birth control.”
“Hey!”
“What.”
“Hey, dammit. You did it to me too.” I had felt the sudden attitude change myself. “Don’t go changing me.”
“I already have. Several times.”
“What!?”
“Way back when I first showed you what I was doing, you didn’t want to be in a room full of naked cheerleaders. Then you didn’t want to go joy-riding in the Viper. You’ve had fun since, haven’t you?”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“Well?”
“Whatever.” I was angry, but I was also afraid. He could delete me or change me around any time he wanted. I had to watch my step. “I guess it hasn’t hurt me any.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you! You’re my best friend, my only friend.”
He turned back to the computer. “I’ll always make sure you’re well taken care of.”
“Thanks.”
#
“You know what our problem is?” he asked one day while we were out on our favorite yacht. “I can transport anything anywhere except myself. In order to do it, I’ve got to be at the terminal.
I’ve thought about creating a portable terminal, but that could be dangerous, because what happens if it drops carrier and we’re out of control? So I thought to myself, why don’t I play around with the laws of physics and create some inter-dimensional doorways?
That way we can always have a quick way back to the terminal when we need it, and we could go anywhere we want.”
Play around with the laws of physics? I struggled to sit up, but I was too drunk. “I have serious doubts about that,” I said to Albert. “I think that would be extraordinarily dangerous.” It took me several tries to get the word “extraordinarily” out.
“Why?”
“You’re messing with the programming of reality!”
“We’ve been doing it for a month now. So what?”
“We’ve been doing just little things, Albert. What you’re talking about is a major change.”
“So?”
“So Somebody might notice.”
“Who cares?”
“I mean Somebody Big.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no Cosmic Sysop.
There was one at one time, but there’s no sign of Him now. He’s either dead, or gone off somewhere else. This system is in self-run mode and has been for eons.” He stood up and pulled his Bermuda shorts up over his belly button. “If anyone is the Cosmic Sysop right now, it’s me.”
“You’re calling yourself God?”
“Well, I’m not the Creator, but we could easily argue I’m now the Caretaker.” He was silent for a moment. I think he was waiting to see if I would argue with him. I didn’t. That is, I didn’t dare.
That night after we returned from the coast, Albert went right up stairs and began reworking the laws of physics. Putting loopholes in them, actually, to allow him to open the dimensional doorways. Apparently this was a lot more complicated than any of the other tinkering he’d been doing, because he was at it for over two days.
“Brad, it’s ready,” he said. It was just after noon on Tuesday. He hadn’t showered at all, and his hair was sticking out every which way. “I opened the first doorway — it’s between my room and yours.”
“Cool.” I followed him up the stairs and into his room. There was a new door in his room, and through it I could see my room over at my house. “Whoa,” I said. I had to admit I was very impressed.
“Go ahead,” Albert said. “Step on through.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Have you tested it yet?”
“No. You’re testing it.”
“What?!”
“Don’t worry. If anything happens to you, I can undo it. Go on, step through.”
Shrugging, I walked through the doorway into my room.
Something happened when I did — the light changed suddenly. It was like it went from a sunny day outside to sudden gloomy overcast. There was also a long, low thudding sound, like that of an enormous base drum, that seemed to echo through the whole house. I knew immediately something bad had happened. Turning around, I found Albert’s doorway had disappeared.
I ran through the house and out the front door, then nearly fell over in shock. The sky had gone insane. There were dozens of moons, a ring of fire, and patches of night and day like a crazy quilt. The horizon was uneven and bizarre. In one direction it seemed to stretch away into infinity, and in the other direction it was much too close, as if the Earth were only a fraction of it’s usual size.
Cars on the road were all stopped, the drivers missing.
I jogged all the way to Albert’s house, and found it was only half there. It looked as if a huge chunk had been cut out of the house, and that missing chunk included Albert’s room. I yelled out his name several times, but I really didn’t expect to hear a reply. There was no one in sight anywhere.
I wandered for a while, feeling lost. The Earth as well as the sky had become a crazy patch quilt, as I found whole sections of town had been replaced by fields, by rivers that ran from nowhere to nowhere, and blocks of buildings that looked like they belonged in Europe. It was all empty of people. It was empty of all living things, period, except for a cat which stood on a board fence and stared at me. I walked over and petted it for a moment, and it purred, meowed, then abruptly jumped down and ran away.