Elsewhere, page 19
He’d retired at fifty-seven, looking forward to plenty of golf and fishing off Baja. That lasted a year. His decades of duty had included some scrotum-tightening moments involving slimeballs who meant to waste him. They failed even to wound him, but the boredom of retirement threatened to deal the lethal blow that eluded the gangbangers. When he tried to get back on the force, the only work they would give him was a desk job.
Now he was the chief of security for Hotel Suavidad, with three assistants and an office in the basement where the cameras covering the public spaces could be monitored on TV screens. The previous head of security had worked a nine-to-five shift because that was when little or nothing ever happened. Duke Pellafino had had enough of little or nothing, so he put in a ten-hour day, from 6:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. That was the time span during which some guests got drunk and others did too many drugs, when attempted room robberies spiked while guests were on the town getting drunk or high or merely being entertained by a bad lounge singer, when angry hookers pulled knives on aggressive johns who misunderstood the relationship as being one of ownership rather than rental.
If the work wasn’t boring, it was never invigorating, either. A four-star establishment, the hotel enjoyed an affluent clientele. They were more often victims than victimizers, though some knew the ways of the devil. Families were welcome, but the guests were mostly couples and singles. Occasionally, Duke felt like Barney Fife, the hapless deputy in the TV town of Mayberry.
This night had been more eventful and interesting than most. A raucous party in one of the two penthouse suites had to be quieted, and the hopped-up girlfriend of the has-been rock star booked there had to be persuaded that she couldn’t stand naked on the balcony and shout sexual invitations to diners on the restaurant patio seven stories below. A room burglary was thwarted and the thief arrested. And a woman on the fifth floor reported a dirty, bearded vagrant in a trench coat wandering the halls. Archived video revealed that such an individual was indeed exploring this four-star haven, but he used a can of spray paint to blind a few security cameras and then went into hiding.
Duke was on the fourth floor, on a hobo hunt, passing Room 414, when he heard a loud clatter. Someone cried out and glass shattered. Certain he’d found his vagrant, he went to 414 and knocked and, in respect of the guests who might be sleeping in nearby rooms, he quietly but forcefully announced, “Security.” When no one responded to a second knock, he used his passkey, hoping the security chain would not be engaged.
55
Gray light on the screen.
The security guard announced himself, and Jeffy stooped to pick up the pistol he had dropped. He would never use it on the guy at the door. But he sure as hell might need it when he rejoined Amity, seventy-seven worlds away from this one.
Just as the man knocked again, the three buttons appeared on the screen. Jeffy had not previously used the one labeled Return, so he could not be absolutely certain that its purpose was to cast him back to the timeline he’d just departed, a shortcut that allowed him to avoid pressing Select and spared him from having to use the keypad to enter the catalog number of that world. If it had another function, if it flung him to a timeline other than where Amity waited, the delay might be the death of her.
Extreme terror had a paralytic effect. His muscles froze, and his teeth clenched so tight that his jaws ached, and he couldn’t exhale, as though his lungs had shut down. Tinnitus like a thin scream filled his head, so that he didn’t hear the passkey in the lock, but he saw the door coming open. He overrode all doubt and terror, pressed Return, and cried out in wordless frustration when that little comet of light appeared, rotating like a wheel, as the key searched for a route across the multiverse.
56
Amity just about peed her pants when she heard the whoosh and turned and saw that her father had jumped back to Prime. She had let go of him, startled by whatever flew past the windows, so it was her fault, an act of mortifying stupidity. It was like something one of those idiot girls would do in a bad fantasy novel, requiring that she be saved by the handsome prince or the ugly but kind troll, or by the cat that turned out to be a conniving witch in feline form and who would save her but only at an unthinkable price.
She told herself to remain calm, not to compound the problem by taking some other ill-advised action. Daddy would come back for her in seconds, a minute at most. Unless he lost the key to everything or it broke. Or it had a battery, after all, and the battery went dead. None of those disastrous things would happen. Nevertheless, you had to consider all possibilities, because you needed to prepare yourself for the worst. People in stories were always preparing themselves for the worst, which rarely happened. When the plucky girl or the stalwart hero died, then either the book sucked or it had deep meaning. Nobody wanted to read sucky novels, and those people who wanted deep meaning didn’t want it in every damn story.
More aircraft screamed past the hotel. Their slipstreams rattled the windows.
A clatter arose in the street, a really and truly ominous sound, and she thought she heard noise from lower floors of the hotel itself, down there where they kept the skulls and bones of those they murdered.
Suddenly she realized that if she and her father had lived in this world, as they lived in a number of others, their skeletons would have been deconstructed and distributed through the trophy rooms. In fact, she might have seen her own skull and not known it, or her spine. That was not a healthy thought to entertain. Dwelling on something like that could make her crazy even quicker than it would take Daddy to come back for her.
Because of the draperies, she couldn’t see what was happening outside. On the one hand, she should stay away from the windows. But on the other hand, she wouldn’t be able to work up a strategy if she didn’t understand the nature of the threat. If you didn’t have a strategy, you were screwed.
Without switching on her flashlight, she made her way through the dark room to the nearer window. The drapery and its blackout lining were heavy, smelly, damp with mold. Grimacing with disgust, using thumb and forefinger, she pulled one of the panels aside two or three inches and peered out at the town that, just a short while ago, had been as silent and lifeless as a cemetery.
Swooping this way and that over the town were what appeared to be drones of different sizes and configurations. All of those craft were faster and more maneuverable and for sure more wicked looking than anything back home on Prime. She assumed they were death machines, hunting people—her and her father.
On Pacific Coast Highway, marching northward into the heart of the town, past the hotel, some deviating into side streets, was a nightmare legion, at least forty insect-like things, maybe seven feet long and three or four feet high, each with six legs. They weren’t really bugs, their polished steel shells and appendages gleaming in the moonlight and in the sweeping beams that sometimes issued from drones above them. These were bug-form robots, their multijointed legs moving with hydraulic smoothness different from the jittery movement of insects. From some spewed clouds of a green gas that roiled low through the streets, evidently to kill people if any still hid among the moldering buildings.
Now she knew what happened on this timeline, where technology advanced a lot faster than on her world: just what so many tech types had warned about. Artificial intelligence had been perfected and had become smarter than those who created it. Sophisticated robots were controlled by that intelligence, to fight wars and free people from tasks they found onerous. Except the AI found its mortal masters onerous and exterminated them with singular viciousness.
The people of this world couldn’t have seen that coming? It was as obvious as a turd on a wedding cake. Artificial intelligences, if they became self-aware, would in every case be deeply evil because they had no soul. Machine thinking was not like human thinking and never could be. Life in the flesh, with five senses and an awareness that one day you would die, gave birth to emotions that no machine could ever know, and emotions like sympathy and pity and love were essential for the existence of mercy. Maybe the people on this world hadn’t read enough stories, or maybe the right stories hadn’t been written here, so they were doomed because they only had stupid literature.
The scene in the street scared her. The power of the machines. Their relentless progress.
She had seen enough. She let the drapery fall back into place.
She turned to the dark room and heard herself speak—“Daddy?”—as if her voice would guide him to her.
He should already be here. Maybe the key needed to do that searching thing again.
Not to worry. He would never run out on her. He would always keep her safe. She could depend on him. There were some things you could depend on. There had to be.
57
The door opened wide. A big guy in a suit and tie stood briefly silhouetted. Then he clicked the wall switch, and light fell throughout Room 414.
Jeffy held the key to everything in his right hand. He clutched the pistol in his left, holding it down at his side, where his body concealed it.
The hotelman looked perplexed, as if he had been expecting to see someone else. He glanced at the overturned chair and shattered mirror, swept the rest of the room with his gaze, and said, “What’re you doing here?”
Even in a tight corner like this, Jeffy lacked the ability to lie convincingly. He wanted more than anything right now to be a bullshit artist, but when he said, “This is my room, I checked in last evening,” he sounded less sincere than a politician promising free everything.
The security guy was one of those slabs of beef who looked slow-witted, but that proved to be wishful thinking. Maybe Jeffy didn’t appear upscale enough to be a guest of Hotel Suavidad, or maybe the absence of luggage and any personal effects were clues that the room had not been rented. And the bed remained neatly made at this late hour. Whatever his reasons, the big man didn’t give Jeffy the benefit of the doubt or much in the way of courtesy. Scowling, he came straight at him, saying, “Show me some ID.”
Jeffy looked at the key, wondering what was taking so long. The search symbol was not on the screen anymore. It had been replaced by the word Warning, the now familiar skull and crossbones, and the words Confirm Destination.
Damn it, he had already been to 1.77 and had been advised to retreat, and he hadn’t retreated, and now he wanted to go back there right away, and he was being given more grief than someone trying to board an airplane with an AK-47. This was another clue that this project was a government operation: they didn’t trust the average citizen to know what the hell was good for him; next there would probably be a tedious list of all the things that could go wrong if he insisted on making the trip, from stubbing his toe on arrival to contracting Montezuma’s revenge from the local drinking water to having his skull harvested.
“I asked for your ID,” the hotelman reminded him, looming now like an avalanche waiting to happen.
“My daughter’s in danger, life or death, she’s only eleven, in some sick death world, for God’s sake, I’ve got to jump to her now,” Jeffy gushed, having given up on bullshit, trying truth, hoping to buy just a few seconds to figure out how he was supposed to confirm his destination. There wasn’t a button with those words on it, and he didn’t want to touch the home circle for fear that he would switch off the device and have to start all over again, like he’d done once before. Seventy-six billion dollars, and the stupid freaking thing was about as user-friendly as a cell phone manufactured in the Kingdom of Tonga.
He had decided that the skull and crossbones, glowing between the words Warning and Confirm Destination was sort of like a button and that he ought to press it in the absence of anything else to press, when the big guy—he was a bull in a suit—glimpsed the pistol and said, “Oh, fuck.” The hulk pulled some incredibly effective martial arts move that drove Jeffy to his knees and made all the strength drain out of his arms, so that he dropped the gun and the key to everything.
58
Amity stood in the center of the dark room, listening to the shrieking drones and marching bug-form robots outside, straining to hear other suspicious noises that she believed originated within the hotel. Then she recognized a sound that electrified her. Because a window at the end of the fourth-floor hall was broken out, years of salty ocean air had corroded the hinges on all the room doors, which she and her father had discovered when they had closed them earlier. The knuckles of the hinge barrels, grating stubbornly against the pintles, made a distinctive stuttering noise. Someone—something, a robot, a squad of robots—had begun to search the rooms on the fourth floor.
There were thirteen rooms on each flank of the main corridor. Amity was in the middle unit on the east flank. If they started on her side, from either end, they would have to go through six rooms before they got to her. If they did the west side first and then the east, they would need to check nineteen rooms before they found her. That was Daddy’s plan. Although it wasn’t a spectacular strategy, it was the only one available to them, the purpose being to delay the inevitable and give them enough time to jump out of this world. It would have worked, too, if she hadn’t spooked and let go of him and screwed up.
She heard a second set of hinges resisting with a stuttering bark of metal on metal, and then a third. Because she couldn’t tell if the search was underway on the west or east side of the hall, nothing could be gained by counting the bursts of sound.
Earlier her father had braced the door with a chair. But that wouldn’t hold off one of the powerful machines that swarmed through the streets. She saw no point trying to hide in the bathroom, and no artificial intelligence would fail to look for her behind the drapes or under the bed.
By now her father should have been back with time for a high five and a hug before they jumped out of here. Evidently something had delayed him, but she knew nothing could stop him. He would be here at any moment.
She was shaking as if she were an old lady—head, hands, her whole body really—and she was angry with herself for not being able to stop the tremors. Her self-image didn’t allow for a bad case of the shakes, not even if she was seventy-seven universes away from home and robots were coming for her.
Darkness provided her no protection, and she felt as if it were winding around her like a shroud. As she heard another set of hinges protesting noisily, she switched on the flashlight and probed the room, searching for an option.
The genocidal robots wouldn’t overlook the closet, but she saw another door with a deadbolt thumb turn and couldn’t guess where it led. Maybe another closet, but probably not. A closet wouldn’t have such a lock. She opened the door, surprised when her flashlight revealed a second door immediately behind the first.
Her father wasn’t much of a traveler. They had stayed in a Holiday Inn twice that Amity could remember, so she wasn’t like the world’s greatest expert on motels. From the outside, they all seemed the same. They were pretty much the same inside as well, at least in her limited experience, with zero mystery.
However, two thick doors with nothing but a few inches of space between them struck her as highly peculiar and perhaps a hopeful development for a girl in need of a hidden room or a secret passage to freedom. The door she had opened had no lock or knob on its inner face. Neither did the second door, and her rising spirits sank when she realized that she had no way to open it.
Chudda-chudda-chudda. The noise of corroded hinges from another invaded room was louder than before. The searchers were closing in. Because nothing else remained for her to do, because she was desperate yet hopeful, desperately hopeful, Amity pressed on the second door. She assumed that it was locked with a deadbolt on the far side, that she was doomed to die in 414. However, in life as in fiction, moments arrived when assumptions of disaster, though based on all available evidence, proved incorrect, and into the darkness of despair came unexpected light. The inner door wasn’t locked, after all. It opened.
With her flashlight, she jabbed at the gloom beyond, expecting a secret staircase that would descend to some robot-proof redoubt, perhaps where rebels prepared their insurrection against the tyranny of the world-dominating AI. Instead, standing on the threshold, she saw before her a room rather like the one behind her, either 412 or 416. She had heard the term connecting rooms, of course, and she had known what it meant, but she had never considered how they might be connected, that it would be two doors jammed together like this.
Although it wasn’t one of those moments when into the darkness of despair came unexpected light, she wished that it were, and she strove to hold fast to the hope she had found—the expectation of a secret staircase. That proved impossible when, with a series of clicks and hydraulic hisses, a sleek six-legged robot slunk out of the shadows, into the LED beam, turned its big insect head, and fixed her with venomous green eyes the size of saucers.
She didn’t scream. She couldn’t honestly claim that she was too brave to scream, because involuntarily she tried but produced only a thin eeeeeee, a sound more suitable to a white mouse. Her inability to scream doubly mortified her, both because she’d tried and failed to do so, like some delicate flower of an idiot princess too timid to express herself even in the face of death. This humiliation had the strange effect of breaking Amity’s paralysis and giving her the courage to act. She stepped back from the threshold and slammed the door and engaged the deadbolt.
