(The homunculus flew about Kelly’s head, a flashing red siren strapped to its head. “Warning, warning,” it screeched. Kelly waved it away.)
Peter didn’t smile. I licked a line of sweat off my top lip. In the headspace, My Pet Dog went sniffing after shadows. Downstairs, he was in a basement cell: George Proios. One command line, one task endlessly replicated by his Sinner Self, the Holy Spirit, and A Young Lamb, the monk’s custom acumen agents. Some religious people even installed Jesus Christ masques, to keep them from fucking strange women or swearing. I’d never seen anyone with a lamb before. Certainly not one standing alongside a dove bathed in nearly blinding light and a haggard, leprous monk who was mindlessly repeating “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner.” My homunculus slapped its little claw against its forehead (“We could have had a V8!”). Then the monk turned to me, staring with his dead eyes, and linked our jacks. The shadow on the cave wall of my headspace began to murmur a prayer. Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner, so I won’t have to think anymore.
(Kelly Angelakis, age 14. She was thin and underdeveloped, with a huge mop of black curls splayed on the pillows. Her palm ran over her nude stomach, sliding down between her legs. Then guilt and bitter vomit filled her mouth.)
“I am sure you will help him, Ms. Angelakis. Brother George assures us that you are a good Greek girl. Also, he tells us that the state he is experiencing is … how would one put it … contagious, no?” He turned on his heel and led me to my room. I glanced up at the back of his neck, just to make sure. Smooth skin and wiry black hair. No jack.
They were all dry here. I could only sense one other signal, the drumbeat of George Proios and his begging cybernetic prayer. It overwhelmed his system and hit mine hard too. The homunculus scratched at headspace’s new walls, trying to get out, but it was grounded. I was cut off from the network now, thanks to distance, granite, and the white noise chant of “Jesus forgive me.” He had trapped me. The last message he’d allowed out was for the equipment I needed.
In the headspace, Victor Mature stepped into view. “Kelly, listen. We can get through this. Don’t forget how good you are. Proios sounds dangerous, but he’s going to let you knock him out and uninstall his jack. We can do it and then we’ll be able to call the police, the sysops, the FBI. All we have to do is take it easy for a few hours, do a job just like we were planning, and then we can leave. And all we need to do to succeed is not fall apart right now.” I opened my mouth to answer him like he was standing next to me, then caught myself.
(My Pet Dog whimpered, knowing that even if the company was interested in Kelly’s location, it would be cheaper to hire some 13-year-old right out of college to replace her than to waste the copter fuel on retrieving her. Kids worked more cheaply and had a useful decade in them before burning out. And everyone was too busy to worry about Kelly or where she was anyway.)
My room was spartan, with blank walls, a cot, and a small table where a candle, a Bible, and a bunch of grapes were laid out for me. A water cooler bubbled to itself on the opposite end of the room. My wetnurse suggested flipping though the New Testament, “purely to keep our mind on something else right now.” I hadn’t read a whole book in years, hadn’t needed to. I flipped through the pages and ran my palms over the vellum, and quickly sliced my finger open on the gold leaf of a page from Revelation. I sucked on my finger for a few seconds, then decided to try something else. Being alone, without the net, was … disconcerting. Hell, it was scary.
I thought I’d to make a game of seeing how far I could spit grape seeds, but the grapes were seedless. I stretched out on the bed—the mattress was hard and lumpy—and closed my eyes. In the headspace, my ego agent brought out the old film projector and suggested a movie. I shrugged and pulled down the screen.
(Victor Mature took his place in front of the projection screen, the cave morphing about him into a Hollywood studio. My Pet Dog jumped into his arms and licked his face, “Oh, Won Ton Ton,” the ego agent crooned, “you’ll be perfect!” “Yeah, Nick, he sure will be!” someone called from offscreen.)
I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. I’d already seen this movie too many times. Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, a cheesy bit of tinsel that I’d caught on television at three in the morning once, when I was seven. Victor Mature had played Nick. I was so happy to hear my father’s name on TV. It was either Victor Mature or Santa Claus, so I glommed onto Victor.
George Proios was still in my mind. He dug through my memories like someone picking through a bowl of pistachios.
(Kelly Angelakis, age 7. Nick Angelakis towered over her, a torn book in his hand, the pages falling around Kelly like feathers from a burst pillow. “Why do you read this garbage! This is for retarded kids, Kalliope, with the space ships and pointy ears. What is he supposed to be,”—the back of the hand slapped the cover of the novel—”the devil?”
From the kitchen, Vasso Angelakis called out “Leave her alone, let her read what she wants!”
“I’m trying to raise my daughter right!” Nick shouted back.)
Childhood was another movie I had seen too many times already. I took a deep breath, pulled myself up out of bed, and hit the hallway. Peter was waiting for me, his eyes wide with confusion, his lips still going, and a package in his hands.
“Ms. Angelakis?”
“Come on, let’s go see Proios now. He’s doing … something.”
“What?”
“…Praying!”
“Well, yes, I certainly hope so,” Peter said, glancing out one of the dark windows in the hallway. “It has been only four minutes since I showed you the room. Please, try to get some rest. I brought you blankets. I’ll come for you after morning prayers. I’m sure your mail will be here by then.”
There was no threat in his tone or body language, but I took a backward step into the room anyway. Then he said, “Will you need more blankets?”
“No, I’m fine.” I closed the door. Goddamn, I needed to turn off my head, but Proios was digging through my old files. He introduced a virus into my headspace, one smarter than my wetnurse—an artificial mental illness called existential angst. Bastard.
(Kelly Angelakis, age 17. The back of her head was shaved. Her father, now an inch shorter than she, shook his head slowly as she explained, “I can talk to people with it, access information. Everyone’s going to have one, one of these days, just like the computer.”
“I never used the computer,” Nick Angelakis said. “This is terrible. You want to talk to people? You can talk to me, you can talk to Mama, your friends in school. You should have learned Greek, if you wanted to talk to people. Your poor grandmother can’t say two words to you.”)
My eyes refocused from the blank walls of my headspace to the blank walls of the room. I decided that I would lie still and be perfectly silent, to listen to the building. That lasted two seconds. The homunculus flung itself against the headspace’s cave walls again. Back to the grapes, this time making a game of how many I could fit into my mouth at once (fifteen!) but I started gagging and had to dig a few of them out of my mouth and crush the rest by pushing on my cheeks with my palms.
I had already used up my sleepytime with that damn nap on the helicopter. I counted the beats of a cricket chirping and then counted the holes in the ceiling tiles. One hundred and eighty-five holes per tile, thirty-eight tiles. Seven thousand and thirty ceiling tile holes in this room. The dimensions of the room and layout of the hallway suggested eight rooms of identical size on this floor. Was it dawn yet? Fifty-six thousand, two hundred and forty holes in the ceiling tiles on this floor. How many floors? Four.
Was it dawn yet? (“It is three fifteen ay em,” the homunculus whispered.) Random facts littered headspace. Saint Nicholas (there’s that name again) was the patron saint of Greece and of sailors. “And of prostitutes,” the shadow on the cave wall whispered. Only twenty percent of the land in Greece is arable, while nearly ninety-two percent of Greece’s population lives near the endless coastlines. (Jesus forgive me.)