Blanche turned to Edward and took his head between both of her hands, standing on tiptoe to reach him.
“Now listen to me, Edward. The real world isn’t nice like this. It’s chaos, it’s all out of order, just like my pages were. The whole world has been disbound, Edward, its pages scattered to the wind. It’s your job to put them back in their proper order.”
She put her arms around his neck and whispered, her lips brushing against his ear:
“Now make love to me!”
19
THE NEXT DAY EDWARD took a cab down to the Lower East Side. It let him off on the empty corner of Fifth Street and Avenue C, and he stood there for a minute looking through his pockets for the address Zeph gave him, which he had managed to misplace during the ride over. It was a Friday, midafternoon, and the sunlight was hard and white and bright, but the steel shutter was already down in front of the bodega on the corner. An amputated refrigerator door stood propped up against a parking meter. Rancid rainwater was pooled in the butter compartment.
Edward finally found the address wadded up in his back pocket. The paper it was written on was a cheap, pulpy off-white, already starting to go yellow with age. On the back was a sentence printed in bold type, all caps:
TO SAVE THE EARTH, FIRST HE MUST SAVE ITS FIFTEEN DUPLICATES!!!
A van from a bakery rattled by, and the large technicolor painted loaf on the side reminded him wistfully of the bread the peasants were eating in his wheat field painting. A gust of wind blew up and pushed the dust around in the street. It was warm out, but there was the faintest hint of a chill in the air, so faint that it almost wasn’t there at all. It reminded him that summer was almost over: Tomorrow was the first day of September. Time was passing.
The building was tall and thin and made of brown brick, a turn-of-the-century tenement that leaned visibly out over the street. Alberto Hidalgo’s name appeared next to the topmost doorbell. All the other slots were blank. Edward rang the doorbell and waited.
Standing on the corner, surrounded by shattered crack vials and fluttering Slim Jim wrappers and multicolored dog shit, Edward heard the inaudible but unmistakable sound of his life hitting bottom. What was he doing here? Everything about the whole situation was wrong. Was it worth the effort to come all this way downtown, all the way to the edge of the known universe, just to get help with a computer game? No, it was not. But what else did he have to do? Margaret wasn’t speaking to him. The Duchess was a question mark. The codex was more lost now than it had been before they’d exhausted their only lead in Old Forge. He was cut off from everything that mattered. It was time to go to England. He’d even taken the drastic step of booking himself a flight in a few days, but he knew he couldn’t get on the plane. Not yet, not without the codex. Maybe if he ran as far as he could in the opposite direction he’d run into the codex coming the other way. And why did he know that name, Alberto Hidalgo? He leaned on the buzzer, half hoping that nobody would answer.
After a minute or two Edward noticed a small video camera staring down at him through a grimy pane of glass set in the door. He waved at it, and the lock buzzed.
He pushed his way inside. The staircase was narrow and steep. The ceiling was covered with old sheets of tin stamped with a repeating floral pattern and painted pale green. It was dark and silent as he walked up, his shoes rasping dryly on the worn marble steps. Now that he was inside he saw that the security system had a home-brewed look to it, as if it had been put together from parts ordered out of different catalogs. A pair of wires ran out of the camera, a power cord and an Ethernet cable stapled together into the angle between wall and ceiling, and he followed them up the stairs. They ran all the way up to the sixth and final landing.
One of the doors on the landing stood slightly ajar.
“Come in,” said a high, androgynous voice.
He did. The apartment was cool and dim, with a dropped ceiling. The walls were white. Light filtered in through windows almost completely blocked by tall, unsteady stacks of paperback books that let in only occasional chinks of white light. The floor was covered with cheap shag carpet, pale blue and brand new–looking, littered with crumpled pieces of paper, ballpoint pens, brightly colored hardware catalogs, CD-ROMs, the colorful internal organs of several computers, and many, many empty orange bags of Jax. Alberto Hidalgo had tacked power strips along the walls, just above the floor, so there was an electrical outlet every few feet. Every single one of them was in use. Alberto himself sat at a long white IKEA desk with half a dozen monitors of various shapes and sizes lined up along it. Edward recognized him immediately.
“I know you,” Edward said.
“I know you, too,” the Artiste replied calmly.
It was the tiny man from Zeph’s apartment and the LAN party. He was dressed as neatly as the room was messy, in a gray suit and a neatly knotted pink tie, like a kid dressed up for a bar mitzvah, except that his feet were bare. He was so small that they barely touched the floor.
Edward stood in the doorway, less sure than ever that he wanted to go ahead with this.
“Zeph told me you were coming,” the Artiste said. “Please sit down.”
Edward picked his way over to a broken-down velvet couch against the opposite wall, feeling like a first-time visitor to a psychiatrist’s office.
“Do you have your saved game with you?”
Edward nodded. He took a disc out of his shirt pocket and handed it to him. The Artiste slipped it into a massive, squat PC that sat under his desk giving off an audible hum.
“That’s quite a machine you have there,” Edward said.
“It’s a KryoTech,” the Artiste replied. He seemed perfectly at ease. “They’re faster than most off-the-shelf systems. It’s built around a refrigeration unit that cools the microprocessor to around forty degrees below zero. Reduces the resistance in the silicon. At that temperature even a standard chip can be reliably overclocked to speeds much higher than factory spec. You don’t see a lot of KryoTechs, though—they make a lot of noise, and they use a lot of power. They also weigh a ton. And they’re expensive.”
The disk drive whirred as it read Edward’s disc.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s see where you are.”
His hands hesitated for a moment, poised over the keyboard.
The Artiste typed faster than anybody Edward had ever seen. The individual clickings and clackings of the keys merged together into a single high whine. The massive monitor screen had ten or fifteen windows open on it and after a few seconds Edward’s game appeared in one of them, shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp. The Artiste grabbed a corner of the window with his mouse and dragged it open until it covered most of the screen. He studied it critically.
“Uh-huh,” he said, with precisely the manner of a radiologist examining an X-ray of a crushed spleen. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
He spun the point of view around 360 degrees.
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Well,” he said. “This is certainly a fucked up situation you’ve gotten yourself into.”
A tiny, lopsided smile appeared on his face, then disappeared, then reappeared again—a secret joke. The Artiste suppressed a giggle. Edward got up and walked over to stand behind him. On the screen, large wet snowflakes sifted down out of the blank gray sky.
“What,” Edward said.
“I’m sorry.” The Artiste cleared his throat. “Do you know what’s going on here? You’re trapped in an Easter Egg.”
Edward shook his head. He just wanted to get this over with.
“An Easter Egg. I don’t know what that is.”
The Artiste leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.
“An Easter Egg is something that a programmer will sometimes insert into a program he or she is writing. Did you ever have an Atari 2600 when you were younger?”
Edward blinked.
“I don’t remember. But you’re not the first person who’s asked me that question.”
&nb
sp; “If you had, you would have played a video game called Adventure.”
“Okay.” Whatever.
“The object of Adventure was to find the Holy Grail.” The Artiste pushed himself back from his desk, so that his chair rolled a few feet across the carpet. “However, on your way to get the Holy Grail, you would pass a couple of mysterious walls with no doors. To get through them you had to find the black key, enter the black castle, and kill the red dragon with the sword. Then you went and fetched the purple bridge, brought it into the black castle, into the darkened labyrinth, and used it to enter a wall. Embedded inside the wall was an invisible magic dot.”
Edward sat down on the couch. He wasn’t paying the Artiste for his time, so he might as well let him talk.
“When you brought both the invisible dot and the Holy Grail into a room at the same time, the mysterious walls would disappear, and you could enter a secret room. Inside the secret room was the name of the person who wrote Adventure, spelled out in multicolored flashing letters.”
“That must have been kind of a letdown, after all that work,” Edward said, just to prove he was still paying attention. Three weeks ago, he reflected, he would have found the idea of somebody seriously lecturing him about a video game completely implausible.
“It was somewhat anticlimactic,” the Artiste agreed. “But the point is, that room was an example of what programmers call an Easter Egg: a secret signature, a hidden message within the larger whole, there to be read by those who knew where to look. Most programs have them—but you have to know where to look.”
“Kind of like a steganogram,” said Edward.
“In some respects, yes,” said the Artiste. If he was surprised that Edward knew what a steganogram was, he didn’t show it. “Now you have found an Easter Egg in MOMUS. The entire virtual environment you’re exploring—the cold, the starvation, the wolves—is like that hidden room in Adventure: something secret that most people who play MOMUS never see.”
“But I don’t see how I could have discovered anything secret,” Edward said patiently. “I didn’t do anything special. I barely did anything at all.”
“I can only surmise that you must have stumbled into it by accident. But to me the real question is, why would somebody go through the trouble of building an Easter Egg of such size and complexity in the first place?”
The Artiste paused and coughed once discreetly into his fist. He got up and went into the apartment’s small kitchen, where he removed a disposable paper cup from a sealed plastic package and filled it with tap water. The kitchen faucet was fitted with a large and expensive-looking water filter. Edward hadn’t noticed before that he wore an artsy-craftsy embroidered-leather carpal tunnel brace on his right wrist.
“Was it for his or her own private amusement?” Somewhere beneath his blank exterior the Artiste was obviously enjoying playing the shrewd Sherlock Holmes to Edward’s witless Watson. “Perhaps. But would such private amusement really be worth all the work necessary to create such a detailed virtual environment?” The Artiste’s diction had an overly rhetorical, almost scripted quality, as if he’d learned to talk from listening to TV news anchormen. “Might there have been another motive? Is there a message here, and if so, how can we read it? And how can we get you out of the Easter Egg, so you can go on and finish the game?”
“Right,” Edward said. “All good questions.”
He waited, but the Artiste didn’t respond immediately. His train of thought had evidently veered off into its own private tunnel. He sat glassy-eyed in his desk chair, occasionally taking quick, rabbitlike sips from his paper cup. Edward noticed that one of the windows on his desktop was a Web page with plane reservations to London. Another one showed a grainy real-time view from the security camera in the foyer. It added to the Artiste’s weirdly omniscient quality.
“This is a nice building,” Edward prompted.
“Thank you,” the Artiste replied absently. “I own it. I was employee number seven at Yahoo!”
He put down the cup and gazed up at the image on the monitor, tapping fitfully at one of his keyboards.
“Well,” he said, “you can still win. If you want to. Slow down the flow of time again. Defeat the aliens.”
Edward sat up, surprised.
“I can?”
“Quite easily. Look, I’ll show you.”
One hand began to play over the keyboard while he kept the other on the mouse. It was a fancy wireless model, streamlined and studded with silvery buttons. On top of the monitor rested a pink piece of tissue paper, an invoice, with a tree at the top.
Something clicked in Edward’s mind.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You’re Alberto Hidalgo.”
“Yes. I don’t understand why Zeph uses my name when I prefer to be called ‘the Artiste.’ It may reflect his sense of humor.”
“But you’re the Alberto who used to work for a family called the Wents.”
There was no discernible pause in the rhythm of the Artiste’s keystrokes, and he kept his eyes unwaveringly on the screen. Things were connecting in Edward’s mind, almost against his will, things that had no business connecting with each other.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I work for them now.”
“Oh.”
Edward watched the Artiste carefully.
“They contracted with me to design some custom software for them,” the Artiste volunteered. “A database for a library catalog. I fulfilled my contract to their satisfaction.”
“I know. I’m using it now. They hired me to catalog their library.”
“I see.” The Artiste adjusted a dial on the monitor with exaggerated care. “I hope you’re finding my software to be adequate for your purposes.”
“It’s fine.” Edward’s heart beat deafeningly; he felt like it must be visible through his shirt. The Artiste swung his short legs rapidly as he worked.
“Let me ask you something,” Edward said, trying to keep his voice casual. “Did the Wents ever talk to you about an old codex they were looking for?”
“Codecs,” said the Artiste. “Plural of codec, an abbreviation for ‘compression/decompression,’ which refers to an algorithmic process for reducing file size by eliminating redundancies...”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant a codex, singular. A codex with an x. As in a book.”
“I know what you meant,” the Artiste said quietly.
Edward sensed that suddenly, unbelievably, hidden in this shabby Lower East Side apartment with its eccentric technophile shut-in, he had found something. He didn’t know what it was, except that it was fragile, and that he would have to play things perfectly or lose it forever. The hair was standing up on his forearms—he felt like a man on the verge of being struck by lightning, invisible thunderbolts gathering in the air over his head and massing in the ground beneath his feet.
“But you worked with their library.”
“Yes.”
“With Laura Crowlyk.”
“That’s right.”
“And the Duchess.”
“And the Duchess,” the Artiste agreed. He whacked an arcane key combination using both hands. He’d somehow increased the clock speed in the game so that events inside its tiny world unfolded at a frantically accelerated pace. The tiny figures leaped around spastically like jitterbugging dancers in an old newsreel.
“So—did you get to know her at all?” Edward asked, circling his prey.
“A little. Not much. They say I don’t work well with other people.”
The Artiste stopped typing, and the screen was still again. The disk drive whined and grated as it wrote to the disc, then spat it out.
He took it and turned to Edward.
“You should be all set. I’ve put you in the headquarters of the human resistance movement,” he explained, rapid-fire, “and I’ve activated the emergency generators, so you should be able to get the subways running. Visit Bulgari on Fifth Avenue and take the diamonds that are in the safe. T
he combination is in the clerk’s pocket, though you may have to kill him to get it. Don’t worry, he’s a collaborator. Once you have the diamonds, take the subway to the airport. Use the diamonds to pay a flight crew to repair a plane and fly it to Cape Canaveral in Florida. From there you can ride the space shuttle into orbit. It should be self-explanatory after that.”
The Artiste held out the disc. Edward eyed it warily without taking it. He sensed that the Artiste wanted him to leave. The audience was over.
“That’s it?”
“What more were you expecting?” the Artiste asked reasonably.
“Well, but you still haven’t answered those questions. Like where does all this stuff come from? And who put it there? And why?”
For an instant the Artiste registered something like impatience.
“Why does it matter? I told you how to get out of it.” The Artiste gazed at the screen, his face pale in the monitor’s light. “Though I don’t know why you would want to. The snow. The empty streets. The silence. It’s beautiful in its own way, don’t you think?” For a moment he looked like a beneficent princeling showing off the view from the window of his mansion. “You can see the stars from the middle of Times Square. I doubt anybody has done that in 150 years.”
“I guess.”
“Why let yourself be trapped by conventional notions of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’? Would you really win by repelling the aliens and saving the world? Why not just let it go? Let the humans die out. Give the wolves a shot at running things for a change. And the narwhals—the narwhals are coming south with the cold. Did you see them? You know they’re one of the only whales that lack a dorsal fin? Along with beluga? They would have been here soon. They like the cold vestibulary currents.”
Edward looked at the monitor screen. He saw, to his surprise, that something about the “headquarters” the Artiste mentioned looked familiar. The distinctive molding, the high ceilings, the leather chairs—it looked like the Wents’ apartment. In fact, that’s exactly what it was: a virtual replica of the Wents’ apartment.