I had been to church once, years ago, after my father died. It was a blur now, thanks to my jack and my busy little brain. The priest was mumbling in Greek and my jack was off, at mother’s request—three hours of processing time I’ll never get back. No translation but the priest’s own, which was incomplete. The line “Life is more elusive than a dream” was the only thing I remembered from the sermon. I haven’t dreamed in eight years.
The night before my father—not Dad, not Papa—died, I slept with a boy named Thomas Smith. My Pet Dog dug a hole at my feet and found the old sensations, the breeze on my back, the moisture, the throbbing in my tired calves after a few minutes of squelching. Was it dawn yet? That’s all I wanted to know then, and all I wanted to know now. It wasn’t, though. (“It’s three forty seven ay em,” the homunculus whispered.) I gave up, closed my eyes, and actually, really, naturally slept. And I dreamed. I was taking a final exam after cutting class all semester. I was naked.
* * * *
I awoke to a knock on the door, and was up in point two seconds. Brother Peter and I slipped past half a dozen other monks. Their footfalls were quiet enough, but it wasn’t the sound of six dryboys, it was the lockstep beat of a jacked workplace. And the murmuring, the lips, each man I passed was muttering to himself. I glanced at the backs of their necks as they passed, but there were no jacks to be seen. Dry as a bone, and dry to the bone. But every one of them was tied to some jacknet, somewhere.
Peter had my FedEx package tucked under his arm and was marching down the hall, sending the hem of his cassock flying up to his knees. I was faster, though, and kept stepping on his heels.
“Brother Peter,” I said, “you do realize, of course, that when I get back to the city, I’m going to put you on report. Not just for demanding this highly irregular removal, but for kidnapping me! This is contract under false pretenses, this is misallocation of processing time, this is wire fraud—”
“Please help him.” He handed me the package and nodded towards a flight of steps leading down into a basement. “Go on.”
“You’re not coming with me?” I asked him. “How can I trust you on any of this? Heck, how can you trust me, I can go down there and lobotomize him.” Peter shrugged and mumbled something again. In headspace, I heard Proios’s own voice chanting, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner.” The ego agent joined in the chant, in Victor Mature’s dusky tones. My Pet Dog howled.
Then I realized that Peter hadn’t been mumbling to himself. He had been reciting the same prayer as George, the same as the six other monks marching down the hall. The homunculus perched on my shoulder and held out a headspace lantern. In the real world, my pupils instantly adjusted to the dark and I walked down the steps.
George Proios looked just like the monk I had seen in the crossthought, and his shadow was splayed against the stone wall of the basement, just like it was in my headspace. His beard was long and matted, held against his chest by his own sweat and grime. He smiled.
(“Jesus forgive me,” the wetnurse muttered, and performed a preliminary diagnosis on our subject).
His lips weren’t moving. I realized then that mine were. That upstairs, Peter’s still were. That every monk was saying a little prayer. They were always saying a little prayer. Now I was too, I was on a new jacknet. Except there was no jack necessary, and no net.
“Have you found God?” George asked.
“I’m here to remove your jack.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he nodded towards a small table. A slice of bread sat there, not doing much. The words “Have you eaten?” came from somewhere—headspace or real world, I didn’t know. He rose up and shuffled towards the table, split the piece in half and offered it to me. I looked down and my face flushed. I held a complete piece of bread in my hand, and George still had a full slice in his hand. “More?” He broke his piece in two again and offered me one of them. It was cold and heavy in my hand. The slice was whole, though, and now I had two pieces of bread. Two whole pieces of bread.
“I would like to remove the jack, and then leave,” I said. I dropped the bread on the floor and took a step forward, My Pet Dog feeding me a conversational thread of icy professionalism designed to engender compliance.
“I have no wish for the jack to be removed,” he said.
“It’s broken. Malfunctioning. You’re experiencing a severe cognitive loop, probably because of a physical defect in the jack’s antenna array. I can’t do a spinal intervention here, but without reception, your problem should alleviate itself,” My Pet Dog said to me and I said to George.
George shrugged. “I do not have a problem. I pray without ceasing, as Scripture demands. I do what my brothers spend their adult lives attempting through privation and contemplation. One begins by praying as often as one can, on the level of the spoken word. All the time, one must begin to pray, muttering, whispering, thinking. Finally, after long years one can literally pray without ceasing. One’s thoughts are always with God, not with sin. I pray from the heart, not from the jack. I am serene.” My Pet Dog opened the package and spread the instruments on the tabletop.
“Look,” George said, grabbing the two pieces of bread from the table. “Look! How do you explain this? Science, no? Somehow? What, with your quantum something-or-other?” He waved his arms and shoved the bread under my nose. Spittle coated his beard, and his arms were as thin as twigs. With a conductor’s flourish, he whipped the sleeves of his robe up to his elbows and threw the bread on the ground. I took a step forward. “Mesmerism, perhaps, no? My jack interfering with yours? Have you thought of sin this morning, my child? Are you at peace? Have you ever even breathed? Jesus have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. Jesus have mercy on you.”
George knelt to the floor, near my feet, his head near the bread. The Jesus Prayer had done it. Two pieces where there used to be one. The dusty crusts, my footprint impressed onto one of them, existed. Without having to buy or sell them, without eleven jobs to pay for them, without a jingle. A miracle, at my feet.
I slapped a patch on George’s neck and he dropped like a few sticks wrapped in a rag. Maybe I could know God after all. No more existential angst, no more rushing from job to job, the fabled free lunch. The bread. I tapped into George’s spine and began to draw the information from him. The inspiration from him. It was like breathing a rainbow, but I could taste bread and wine, flesh and blood, in my mouth.
(“The Lord tells us in Thessalonians 5:17 to ‘Pray without ceasing,’” George explained to Kelly. “Our brothers have spent their lives contemplating their navels, muttering the words to themselves, trying to never lose contact with God. But I couldn’t. The world was too distracting, too earnest. So I had a pirate jack installed, and found a way. And I prayed so well that God allowed others to hear me as well.”
It was world of the Godnet: all the jackless wonders out there with one job, one personality, and one little life each, the whole smelly superstitious lot of them. And now Kelly was jacked in too.)
With George unconscious and his netblock gone, the rest of yesterday’s junkmail finally downloaded and hit my brain. The latest news, spinning into headspace like a shot of a newspaper in an old movie, let me know what I had been missing for the past few hours. War with the Midwest, wethead bias crimes against dryboys on the rise, sumo results, the GM workers’ council calling for a strike, markets down. People had things to buy and sell, important pinhead opinions to howl across my brain. I was needed, necessary, a crucial memebucket for the best the world had to offer, at low low interest rates. No thanks, I thought to myself (to myself, not some nano-neurological stooge!); I quit.
In headspace, I shot My Pet Dog. I shot him dead, and took over my body, once and for all.
Headspace crumbled and a noisy blackness buried me. I think I fell to my knees, or was it on my face? I couldn’t breathe. My lips were clenched shut, but vomit poured into my mouth and through the gaps in my teeth. Then, in headspace, I felt the firm hand of my ego agent on the back of my neck, lifting me above the swirling advertisements, the dizzying dance of thousands of stock prices, and the casual emergencies of work and memos and updated job queues. I coughed up the liquid shit of it all and finally, finally, took a moment. And I breathed, and my breath was a prayer.