The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Six: Enter the Chimp

The Omnicast facility was housed in IC's Financial District office, an early granite skyscraper with noble lines and a drab interior. The set was simple, basically a chair, a few props, and a green screen. Backgrounds and effects were added in some remote digital dungeon, in real-time, as they say. This time the chosen setting was my own apartment. It gave people a special thrill when I invited them into my home.

My customers loved the Omnicasts. We staged them to promote new fads, build brands, spotlight soon-to-be overnight sensations, that kind of thing. They were smoke-free fireside chats, an opportunity for my customers to community through the magic of live media, gathered around PCs in offices, listening during the drive home, watching on flat-screen TVs through appliance store windows.

One of their main purposes, of course, was to promulgate my cult of personality. Integrated Consciousness was a high-touch business and it was crucial for my customers to believe in me as a charismatic figurehead. Accordingly, I showed them a universally appealing version of myself, my words and image calculated to reassure them that they were doing the right thing by turning their lifestyles over to me. Not that it was a tough sale; the promise of a better-ordered, more efficiently gratifying world made it well worth their while

Much of my charm resided in my humility, which derived in turn from being a Hoosier. Midwest origins will take you far in the trust business. There's a reason so many talk show hosts and self-help authors come from the corn belt. People from other parts of the country think of Indiana as a nice, homey place for other people to live. Good, simple folk—the stock that crossed the Appalachians and stopped at the first open field because there was work to be done, their curiosity played out by the time they reached the Ohio River Valley. They stayed behind when the Gold Rush hit, content to read about the Wild West in third-hand magazines left behind by traveling salesmen. People stressed out by modernism—and who isn't?—find the myth of bucolic simplicity dearly compelling as long as they don't have to live that way themselves.

I sat in a worn Queen Anne chair and waited impatiently for five o'clock Pacific Time, avoiding the dull stare of the camera perched on a tripod in the middle of the floor. Jim Feathers scowled at me from the control room. Sally Anderson of the Preen Foundation was the only other member of the Consortium to grace me with her presence. I was a little hurt that Blanston hadn't wanted to be here for the big show.

The production staff busied themselves on the periphery of the set, two shiny-faced guys in Mike Nesmith hats and a dumpy girl with Catwoman glasses. They taped down cables, adjusted lights, relayed messages from Feathers, and generally distracted me. It struck me that this was the stupidest thing I'd ever done, yet I smiled numbly at the sheer magnitude of my impending doom as if enjoying the view from the lip of the waterfall. Finally the studio neared a semblance of order and I looked to see the wall clock winding its way to five o'clock. The cameraman counted down with exaggerated hand motions, then pointed at me when the little red light began to blink.

"Good afternoon folks, thanks for tuning in," I began. "I'm Andy Hunter and I'm here to tell you about something we've cooked up here at IC Central that you're really going to like." It was then that I realized I'd completely neglected to prepare my remarks. It struck me as odd that Blanston hadn't shown more interest, hadn't wanted to put my copy through seventeen rounds of approvals and a last-second rewrite, but that was academic now as I stared through the iridescent black lens into the eyes of twenty-eight million people. "Something we call Integrated Consciousness two point oh. And let me tell you, it's more than twice as great as IC one point oh." I was dying, awash in flop sweat. Where the hell was Lou? I could always cue the infomercial, but the abduction had to go out live—that was the whole point.

As I stammered I heard a crash offstage. Lou burst onto the set. He was wearing a black ski mask, an Irving Street Veterinary Hospital jacket, and bluejeans, and he had a nickel-plated revolver in his hand. He raised his arm, cried "Sic semper tyrannis!" and brought the gun down hard on my head. "Keep shooting, motherfuckers," he snarled at the terrified crew.

I swooned, too stunned to form words, and felt the tip of the gun barrel tugging at my earlobe. My hands opened and closed reflexively, my arms limp. "It's all over now, folks," I heard Lou say from far away. He took the gun from my head and I heard it fire, then felt the searing pain of hot gunmetal on my temple. I was paralyzed with terror.

"Andy Hunter has committed a terrible crime," Lou went on. "Integrated Consciousness is the devil's work. He must pay for his sins. And his evil work must be stopped. Starting with the Release. Release it," the gun traced sadistic curves across my scalp, "and your friend Andy finds how just how slowly it's possible to die." As my head cleared I found myself wondering whether Lou had ever killed anyone.

"What—what do you mean?" asked the cameraman. "What release? Of what?"

"The Release of Integrated Consciousness 2.0," I stammered hastily. "It's what I was just talking about. It automates and sublimates the IC process so that, basically, you live a better life without having to think about it at all. It's the ultimate in lifestyle engineering."

"Dag, that sounds all right. When did you say that was coming out?"

"October tenth, just a couple of weeks from now," I said in spite of myself.

"Silence, you!" Lou barked, and fired again. Cotton batting exploded out of the arm of the Queen Anne chair. "What he means is, it's not coming out at all!"

"Jesus Christ," I moaned, clutching my ringing ear.

"Your messiah can't save you now," Lou sneered. "No one can." With a few quick flips of the wrist he bound my arms to my torso and fashioned a rope handle to steer me with. He kept the gun pointed at my forehead as he backed us around the studio toward the door.

"Oh for heaven's sake," said Feathers, who had emerged from the control room and now stood next to the door with his arm wrapped protectively around Sally Anderson. The other two crew members were crouching half behind him though he was much too slim to have covered even one. "We're not even—"

"That's enough, old man," Lou said.

"I'm only forty-three," Feathers muttered, folding his arms. "Look buddy, you might as well give it up. Every cop in San Francisco is already on the way over here to barricade the street. That's the drawback of committing a crime on live TV." He pointed at the blinking red light. "Two forty-five Sansome, third floor," he said the instant before Lou shot the camera through the lens.

"Crap, he's right," Lou muttered. "Why didn't you think of that?" He brandished the gun around the studio once more for good measure and pulled me backwards out the studio door. We ducked our heads and hustled between the fabric-wrapped cube walls of the accounting department, where the bean counters didn't appear to have noticed the commotion. We slipped unnoticed through the reception area to the service corridor, called a freight elevator, and stalled the car between the second and third floors.

"I don't see how all that was all that necessary," I said hotly, feeling a fresh lump rising on the crown of my skull.

"Had to make it look good," he said, stuffing the gun into the windbreaker's breast pocket. "A little of that's good for you anyway. Gets your blood moving."

"Well it's moving now, so that should be plenty. So what now, Hitchcock?

"We can't go out the door. There's got to be a hundred cops out there. I'd be Swiss cheese."

"We're screwed," I moaned. "Why did I let you talk me into this? We should just give ourselves up. You give yourself up, I mean. I'll tell them you treated me well and showed remorse."

"Now, now," he said. "This is no time for quitter talk. Now think. Is there another way out of the building? Any subway tunnels or sewer lines or anything?"

"There's no subway in this part of town." A thought crossed my mind.

"What? What are you thinking?"

"Nothing. It's ridiculous." I heard another elevator car jerk to life.

"Ridiculous is about all we've got left," Lou said.

Cables danced in the neighboring shaft. "I've heard that this part of town is built on top of old ships."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"From the Gold Rush. People were in such a hurry they just left them in the harbor, and—"

"Tell me later," said Lou. "Lead the way."

I pressed the button for the lowest level of the basement and the battered freight elevator began its slow descent.

When the elevator reached the bottom, we stepped out into the shadows. The floor was littered with dust-covered cardboard boxes and burned out light bulbs and the air reeked of coal and turpentine. We groped blindly into the corners in hopes of finding a doorknob or a window or anything to get us out of there. Behind us the freight elevator began to rise, summoned from above. We moved faster through the darkness.

Suddenly the black was pierced by a beam of light. Its source approached us, swaying low to the ground as if carried by a child or a diminutive adult. When it was a few feet away, it swung upward to illuminate its bearer. Lou gasped at the sight of the leathery face ringed by coarse black hair, the fierce, bulging eyeballs beneath a thick, deeply lined brow, the prominent jaws holding twin rows of sharp white teeth. "Holy shit," I said. "It's Joe Bananas."

The chimpanzee pushed past us and made for a half door that rose crookedly from a sagging corner of a wooden floor. We followed him into a cramped and difficult passageway.

Joe Bananas was a byproduct of our IC 2.0 research and development efforts. We'd needed to make sure the physical brain could handle the electroneural transmission without frying like a moth in a bug light, and like the space program we called on our primate cousins to assist us in the quest for knowledge. The first two, a rhesus monkey named Hieronymous and an orang named Bobo, were complete vegetables after only a few downloads. Joe was more fortunate. Even at a dump a day he showed no adverse effects.

Maybe I was swayed because he was so much handsomer than his predecessors, but there was something in Joe's hairy face that reached me. His black eyes shone with dignity in the face of dismaying circumstances. He did all the usual chimp gags, the gum-baring smile, the oo-oo, the head scratch, but they meant something different when he did it. The hopes and dreams of a thousand people had played in his mind every day for a week. There was no way to know if his simian intelligence could make coherent sense of the abstractions of the human imagination, but perhaps the essence came through, the way a song sung in a foreign language can still make you cry. Now and then I'd slip out of my office and drive down to the lab for a visit. I'd sit on a stool by his cage with an issue of the New Yorker, read him interesting articles, show him the cartoons with animals in them. I didn't tell anyone else about my interest. It wasn't the IC way.

Once, Joe's keeper Henderson hung a banana from the ceiling of the cage and put a few milk crates on the floor. Joe looked up from the corner where he'd been grooming himself. He looked at Henderson, looked up at the banana, and looked back at Henderson. He sighed, stood up on his back hands, cleared his throat, and said "oo-oo" in a stagy voice. We watched while he piled one crate atop another and climbed up to reach the banana. When he got to the top he beat his chest with his fists and shook his head back and forth, his mouth wide but silent. On returning to the floor, he walked over to the bars of his cage, peeled the banana, and handed it to Henderson. Henderson gawked, banana in hand, as Joe went back to the corner and his grooming.

Joe Bananas had disappeared weeks ago. I don't think anyone else had remembered he was around in the first place, but I took it hard. Now here he was, in the flesh.

Joe Bananas led Lou and me down a crazy passageway that threaded the deflated remains of one out-of-commission schooner after another, through portholes and up gangplanks, the low ceiling propped by splintered sections of mast and barnacle-encrusted iron anchors. Joe's flashlight played over ruined crates and coiled ropes as we clambered along. By the time I'd finished filling Lou in on the chimp's story we had come to a small room with a high ceiling—extremely high, fifty feet or more—lit by thick glass panes the circumference of Coke bottles in the sidewalk above. It seemed bright after where we'd just been. There was nothing in the room but a wooden staircase built around its periphery from the floor to a trap door at street level. We ascended quickly. Lou tried the latch with no success. "Great," he said.

Joe pushed tactfully past Lou, pulled out a key, sprang the lock, and pushed open the latch. The key was on a ring of about twenty that I hadn't noticed before and wouldn't see again.

The sidewalks on the way to Lou's car were conveniently empty, the police having apparently cleared people away in case things got ugly with the hostage situation. We hopped onto the Bay Bridge just ahead of the commuter jam, then hung a right down the Central Valley toward the Mojave Desert. A motel in Twenty-nine Palms would be the base for the next phase of our operation: publicizing Lou's demand that IC scotch the Release. I couldn't imagine how Blanston and the Consortium would respond. It was too much to hope they'd fold up their tent without putting up a fight, not with all that money to be made. All I could be sure of is throwing a spanner into the works and buying some time. And just maybe I could beg a few dreamless nights from the seltzer brigade. I was trying to do my best.

Chapter Seven: The Church of the Divine Blackness