The Pattern Mafia
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Story So Far… Charli Parker, a victim of London’s very own Nagasaki event, is in an impossible New York with an impossible Skeleton Man under an impossible sky…
Manhattan
The chubby little stall keeper is looking our way warily. Yes I was loud. And from where he is standing it might sound like the start of an industrial grade lovers tiff, because, yes, I am waving my arms around. And yes, that terrifying sky is still mutating and somehow Battery Park is looking less real, as if the resolution is dropping. There is nothing about any of this that is real. I feel like I am in some AI generated hallucination, a looks-real feels-real sim that is stuttering on the edge of collapse.
‘Why me?’
‘You’re a problem, Hollywood. A big fat arsed problem for reality.’
‘I need a fucking drink!’
Vibrant young Ed, slim cool Ed in his immaculate Lewis leather jacket and drainpipe Levi’s nods his head.
‘Yer, that might help.’
And we are back in Joe’s bar just like that. Joe setting up two glasses and pulling a bottle of Jim Beam from the rack. But the room is spinning and I can’t keep my balance, the mahogany surface of the bar at some new angle, the lights describing arcs over my head. Hard hands grab my shoulders, iron hard, digging into my muscle and wrestling me back up.
‘Easy does it, Hollywood. We won’t do that again.’
‘You sure you want another, Miss Wood? You gonna puke on my bar?’
Joe is holding the bottle away from the glasses his red face creased into a frown.
‘She’ll be alright Joe. Had a bit of a day.’
‘It’s on you if she pukes, bud. You clear up the mess,’ Joe grouches, but he pours a proper shot into each glass.
‘It’s night.’
5th Avenue is dark. Building lights and the lights of passing cars flashing past in the two big mirrors over the bar.
‘Thought it might help,’ the Ed the Ted avatar replies, picking up his glass and sniffing the Jimmy Beam. He puts the glass down.
‘Don’t suppose you serve London Pride over here, do you mate?’ he asks Joe.
‘You from Britain, pal?’
‘That’s a bit complicated.’
‘You know the Queen?’
‘That’s simpler. No, do you know Kennedy?’
Joe pulls a sour face, ‘I’m a Republican, pal.’
I put my empty glass back on the bar.
‘Hit me again, Joe.’
Both men give me the look.
‘It’s helping.’
‘Leave the bottle, mate,’ suggests Ed
Joe sets down the bottle and leaves us to serve another customer. I can’t help wondering if it is a real person or just another simulation. It looks real. Grey business suit, SAKs or better, big head, dark hair Brylcreemed flat to the skull, dark eyebrows meeting above a fleshy nose. New Jersey accent. Worker bee having one before the commute home.
‘So,’ I say, looking at mirror world Ed in the bar mirror. ‘Are you going to break it down for me or are we going to fence all night long?’
‘Yeah, I think you’re ready.’ The young Skeleton Man collects his thoughts. ‘When your mob Algebra turned your work into a beacon it caught our attention. Couldn’t be anything else could it, big simple patterns in infinite arrays flashing like a disco strobe. Anyway, we were intrigued and came to have a look at what promised to be a sweet little nano-reality only to find you were about to metastasise into something very nasty.’
‘The cancer is just a metaphor, right?’
The young Ed avatar waggles his hand.
‘Pretty close, really. You see every part of reality evolves, its pattern becomes more complex, richer. It’s a glory to see, we revere pattern, growth, fabulous intricacy. That’s how it should be, it’s the natural state. Only you…’ and young Ed’s face changes, becomes hard. ‘You are not natural at all.’
‘Cancer is runaway cell growth.’
‘No analogy is perfect; but cancer is also a monomaniacal bastard replicating a limited DNA at the expense of the complexity and harmony around it. That’s what your civilisation becomes.’
He means it, this Young Ed, sitting in Joe’s Bar in this fairy-tale Manhattan. Young Ed isn’t here anymore; hard old Skeleton Man has returned with something else, as if Skeleton Man has lost the thin shreds of tar-stained humanity he had kept. There is something deeply wrong with his eyes and I shiver.
‘All your fault, Hollywood, and not your fault at all.’
I can’t help it. I want to run out the door onto Fifth, away to the park, anywhere but here within reach of those eyes. I hate it when I plead. I hate myself for being weak and fuck you for being judgmental if you are, but you are not here and now, in this irreal nightmare, facing this ancient inhuman thing. His face blurs. I wipe my eyes, try to stare back, breath shivering out of control.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘It’s a question of definition. If I define you broadly as part of your civilisational pattern, it’s all your fault. If I narrow the definition to just Charli Parker, well you may be the dumbest genius I have met but it’s no longer your fault.’
I shake my head. Look to Joe for help, but he is leaning on the bar watching, not a flicker of concern.
‘Joe!’
I’m pleading again; it’s embarrassing.
‘Biker here means it ain’t personal, Miss Wood. Like in the war. Nations go to war, but that ain’t the fault of the poor saps in the front line. Right?’
‘Close enough,’ the Ed agrees. He looks at my glass, fills it from the bottle right to the top.
‘We had no idea how fragile your connection to your civilisation’s complete form was, how easily your sense of the whole dissolves. It’s a tragedy really. But, perversely, there is hope in that as well. It means you can isolate, detach from the hypergraph that is your reality. Become an isolated self-contained agency, your own causal tree. It took us a great deal of effort to understand that, but it is part of this nano-realities functionality.’
‘I am all for hope right now. If there is any, I have got to know. Dammit, I demand to know.’
Ed the Ted smiles, ‘Anger is better. And you are going to need a lot more of it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you are going to be on the front line.’
‘What front line? What do you mean?’
“He’s beaten you to it. I thought he would; he is more decisive than you.”
Young Ed watches me, head on one side, the lighting in Joe’s bar making planes and shadows of his young face, hinting at the angular sharpness old age would bring.
“Who, goddamit?”
“Me, the other me, in the other reality, the one we made for him.”
“Skeleton Man? The real one.”
Young Ed laughs, “Yeah, the real one. He got there first; you just weren’t as focused as he was. Nothing you can do about it.”
He looks at my empty glass. ”Maybe ease up a little, that might help”.
“Well, fuck you very much. What damned choice?”
“He’ll explain it to you.”
‘Wait, am I going to see him? I mean, we are supposed to be, you know, dead.”
He laughed at me. “Yeah well, there’s been a slight change of plan.”
Next Week - The Finale
What has Skeleton Man decided?
What will happen to Charli?
And why is this novel called ‘The Pattern Mafia?’
All will be revealed…
Wow can’t believe it’s coming to an end !