شاهزاده

THE SUICIDE PRINCE

Brady won many victories in Room 217, but necessarily had to keep them to himself. Coming back from the living death of coma; discovering that he could—because of the drug Babineau had administered, or because of some fundamental alteration in his brainwaves, or perhaps due to a combination of the two—move small objects simply by thinking about them; inhabiting Library Al’s brain and creating inside him a secondary personality, Z-Boy. And mustn’t forget getting back at the fat cop who hit him in the balls when he couldn’t defend himself. Yet the best, the absolute best, was nudging Sadie MacDonald into committing suicide. That was power.

He wanted to do it again.

The question that desire raised was a simple one: who next? It would be easy to make Al Brooks jump from a bridge overpass or swallow drain cleaner, but Z-Boy would go with him, and without Z-Boy, Brady would be stuck in Room 217, which was really nothing more than a prison cell with a parking garage view. No, he needed Brooks just where he was. And as he was.

More important was the question of what to do about the bastard responsible for putting him here. Ursula Haber, the Nazi who ran the PT department, said rehab patients needed GTG: goals to grow. Well, he was growing, all right, and revenge against Hodges was a worthy goal, but how to get it? Inducing Hodges to commit suicide wasn’t the answer, even if there was a way to try it. He’d played the suicide game already with Hodges. And lost.

When Freddi Linklatter appeared with the picture of him and his mother, Brady was still over a year and a half from realizing how he could finish his business with Hodges, but seeing Freddi gave him a badly needed jump-start. He would need to be careful, though. Very careful.

A step at a time, he told himself as he lay awake in the small hours of the night. Just one step at a time. I have great obstacles, but I also have extraordinary weapons.

Step one was having Al Brooks remove the remaining Zappits from the hospital library. He took them to his brother’s house, where he lived in an apartment over the garage. That was easy, because no one wanted them, anyway. Brady thought of them as ammo. Eventually he would find a gun that could use it.

Brooks took the Zappits on his own, although operating under commands—thoughtfish—that Brady implanted in the shallow but useful Z-Boy persona. He had become wary of entering Brooks completely and taking him over, because it burned through the old fellow’s brains too fast. He had to ration those times of total immersion, and use them wisely. It was a shame, he enjoyed his vacations outside the hospital, but people were starting to notice that Library Al had become a trifle foggy upstairs. If he became too foggy, he would be forced out of his volunteer job. Worse, Hodges might notice. That would not be good. Let the old Det.-Ret. vacuum up all the rumors about telekinesis he wanted, Brady was fine with that, but he didn’t want Hodges to catch even a whiff of what was really going on.

Despite the risk of mental depletion, Brady took complete command of Brooks in the spring of 2013, because he needed the library computer. Looking at it could be done without total immersion, but using it was another thing. And it was a short visit. All he wanted to do was set up a Google alert, using the keywords Zappit and Fishin’ Hole.

Every two or three days he sent Z-Boy to check the alert and report back. His instructions were to switch to the ESPN site if someone wandered over to see what he was surfing (they rarely did; the library was really not much more than a closet, and the few visitors were usually looking for the chapel next door).

The alerts were interesting and informative. It seemed a great many people had experienced either semi-hypnosis or actual seizure activity after looking at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen for too long. That effect was more powerful than Brady would have believed. There was even an article about it in the New York Times business section, and the company was in trouble because of it.

Trouble it didn’t need, because it was already tottering. You didn’t have to be a genius (which Brady believed he was) to know that Zappit, Inc. would soon either go bankrupt or be swallowed up by a larger company. Brady was betting on bankruptcy. What company would be stupid enough to pick up an outfit making game consoles that were hopelessly out of date and ridiculously expensive, especially when one of the games was dangerously defective?

Meanwhile, there was the problem of how to jigger the ones he had (they were stored in the closet of Z-Boy’s apartment, but Brady considered them his property) so that people would look at them longer. He was stuck on that when Freddi made her visit. When she was gone, her Christian duty done (not that Frederica Bimmel Linklatter was or ever had been a Christian), Brady thought long and hard.

Then, in late August of 2013, after a particularly aggravating visit from the Det.-Ret., he sent Z-Boy to her apartment.

• • •

Freddi counted the money, then studied the old fellow in the green Dickies standing slump-shouldered in the middle of what passed for her living room. The money had come from Al Brooks’s account at Midwest Federal. The first withdrawal from his meager savings, but far from the last.

“Two hundred bucks for a few questions? Yeah, I can do that. But if what you really came for is a blowjob, you need to go somewhere else, old-timer. I’m a dyke.”

“Just questions,” Z-Boy said. He handed her a Zappit and told her to look at the Fishin’ Hole demo screen. “But you shouldn’t look longer than thirty seconds or so. It’s, um, weird.”

“Weird, huh?” She gave him an indulgent smile and turned her attention to the swimming fish. Thirty seconds became forty. That was allowable according to the directives Brady had given him before sending him on this mission (he always called them missions, having discovered that Brooks associated the word with heroism). But after forty-five, he grabbed it back.

Freddi looked up, blinking. “Whoo. It messes with your brain, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. It kinda does.”

“I read in Gamer Programming that the Star Smash arcade game does something like that, but you have to play it for like, half an hour before the effect kicks in. This is a lot faster. Do people know about it?”

Z-Boy ignored the question. “My boss wants to know how you would fix this so people would look at the demo screen longer, and not go right to the game. Which doesn’t have the same effect.”

Freddi adopted her fake Russian accent for the first time. “Who is fearless leader, Z-Boy? You be good fellow and tell Comrade X, da?”

Z-Boy’s brow wrinkled. “Huh?”

Freddi sighed. “Who’s your boss, handsome?”

“Dr. Z.” Brady had anticipated the question—he knew Freddi of old—and this was another directive. Brady had plans for Felix Babineau, but as yet they were vague. He was still feeling his way. Flying on instruments.

“Dr. Z and his sidekick Z-Boy,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “On the path to world domination. My, my. Does that make me Z-Girl?”

This wasn’t part of his directives, so he stayed silent.

“Never mind, I get it,” she said, chuffing out smoke. “Your boss wants an eye-trap. The way to do it is to turn the demo screen itself into a game. Gotta be simple, though. Can’t get bogged down in a lot of complex programming.” She held up the Zappit, now turned off. “This thing is pretty brainless.”

“What kind of game?”

“Don’t ask me, bro. That’s the creative side. Never was my forte. Tell your boss to figure it out. Anyway, once this thing is powered up and getting a good WiFi signal, you need to install a root kit. Want me to write this down?”

“No.” Brady had allocated a bit of Al Brooks’s rapidly diminishing memory storage space for this very task. Besides, when the job needed to be done, Freddi would be the one doing it.

“Once the kit’s in, source code can be downloaded from another computer.” She adopted the Russian accent again. “From secret Base Zero under polar ice-kep.”

“Should I tell him that part?”

“No. Just tell him root kit plus source code. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Brady Hartsfield wants you to come visit him again.”

Freddi’s eyebrows shot up almost to her crewcut. “He talks to you?”

“Yes. It’s hard to understand him at first, but after awhile you can.”

Freddi looked around her living room—dim, cluttered, smelling of last night’s take-out Chinese—as if it interested her. She was finding this conversation increasingly creepy.

“I don’t know, man. I did my good deed, and I was never even a Girl Scout.”

“He’ll pay you,” Z-Boy said. “Not very much, but . . .”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars a visit?”

“Why?”

Z-Boy didn’t know, but in 2013, there was still a fair amount of Al Brooks behind his forehead, and that was the part that understood. “I think . . . because you were a part of his life. You know, when you and him used to go out to fix people’s computers. In the old days.”

• • •

Brady didn’t hate Dr. Babineau with the same intensity that he hated K. William Hodges, but that didn’t mean Dr. B. wasn’t on his shit list. Babineau had used him as a guinea pig, which was bad. He had lost interest in Brady when his experimental drug didn’t seem to be working, which was worse. Worst of all, the shots had resumed once Brady had regained consciousness, and who knew what they were doing? They could kill him, but as a man who had assiduously courted his own death, that wasn’t what kept him awake nights. What did was the possibility that the shots might interfere with his new abilities. Babineau pooh-poohed Brady’s supposed mind-over-­matter powers in public, but he actually believed they might exist, even though Brady had been careful never to exhibit his talent to the doctor, despite Babineau’s repeated urgings. He believed any psychokinetic abilities were also a result of what he called Cerebellin.

The CAT scans and MRIs had also resumed. “You’re the Eighth Wonder of the World,” Babineau told him after one of these—in the fall of 2013, this was. He was walking beside Brady as an orderly wheeled him back to Room 217. Babineau was wearing what Brady thought of as his gloaty face. “The current protocols have done more than halt the destruction of your brain cells; they have stimulated the growth of new ones. More robust ones. Do you have any idea how remarkable that is?”

You bet, asshole, Brady thought. So keep those scans to yourself. If the DA’s office found out, I’d be in trouble.

Babineau was patting Brady’s shoulder in a proprietary way Brady hated. Like he was patting his pet dog. “The human brain is made up of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Those in the Broca’s Area of yours were gravely injured, but they have recovered. In fact, they are creating neurons unlike any I’ve ever seen. One of these days you’re going to be famous not as a person who took lives, but as one responsible for saving them.”

If so, Brady thought, it’s a day you won’t be around to see.

Count on it, dickweed.

• • •

The creative side never was my forte, Freddi told Z-Boy. True enough, but it was always Brady’s, and as 2013 became 2014, he had plenty of time to think of ways the Fishin’ Hole demo screen might be juiced up and turned into what Freddi had called an eye-trap. Yet none of them seemed quite right.

They did not talk about the Zappit effect during her visits; mostly they reminisced (with Freddi necessarily doing most of the talking) about the old days on the Cyber Patrol. All the crazy people they’d met on their outcalls. And Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, their asshole boss. Freddi went on about him constantly, turning things she should have said into things she had, and right to his face! Freddi’s visits were monotonous but comforting. They balanced his desperate nights, when he felt he might spend the rest of his life in Room 217, at the mercy of Dr. Babineau and his “vitamin shots.”

I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.

To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau’s mind, there might not be another.

• • •

The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was “exposing Mr. Hartsfield to external stimuli.”

Mr. Hartsfield didn’t mind the News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff—cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men—was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she’d win.

Brady watched her wide eyes moving from side to side as she studied the screen, and knew he’d found what he was looking for. The pink fish, he thought. They’re the ones that move the fastest, and besides, red is an angry color. Pink is . . . what? What was the word? It came, and he smiled. It was the radiant one that made him look nineteen again.

Pink was soothing.

• • •

Sometimes when Freddi visited, Z-Boy left his library cart in the hall and joined them. On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2014, he handed Freddi an electronic recipe. It had been written on the library computer, and during one of the increasingly rare occasions when Brady did not just give instructions but slid into the driver’s seat and took over completely. He had to, because this had to be just right. There was no room for error.

Freddi scanned it, got interested, and read it more closely. “Say,” she said, “this is pretty clever. And adding subliminal messaging is cool. Nasty, but cool. Did the mysterious Dr. Z think this up?”

“Yeah,” Z-Boy said.

Freddi switched her attention to Brady. “Do you know who this Dr. Z is?”

Brady shook his head slowly back and forth.

“Sure it’s not you? Because this looks like your work.”

Brady only stared at her vacantly until she looked away. He had let her see more of him than Hodges or anyone on the nursing or PT staff, but he had no intention of letting her see into him. Not at this point, at least. Too much chance she might talk. Besides, he still didn’t know exactly what he was doing. They said that the world would beat a path to your door if you built a better mousetrap, but since he did not as yet know if this one would catch mice, it was best to keep quiet. And Dr. Z didn’t exist yet.

But he would.

• • •

On an afternoon not long after Freddi received the electronic recipe explaining just how to jigger the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, Z-Boy visited Felix Babineau in his office. The doctor spent an hour there most days he was in the hospital, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. There was an indoor putting green by the window (no parking garage view for Babineau), where he sometimes practiced his short game. That was where he was when Z-Boy came in without knocking.

Babineau looked at him coldly. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

Z-Boy held out Zappit Zero, which Freddi had upgraded (after buying several new computer components paid for out of Al Brooks’s rapidly shrinking savings account). “Look at this,” he said. “I’ll tell you what to do.”

“You need to leave,” Babineau said. “I don’t know what kind of bee you have in your bonnet, but this is my private space and my private time. Or do you want me to call security?”

“Look at it, or you’ll be seeing yourself on the evening news. ‘Doctor performs experiments with untested South American drug on accused mass murderer Brady Hartsfield.’”

Babineau stared at him with his mouth open, at that moment looking very much as he would after Brady began to whittle away his core consciousness. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about Cerebellin. Years away from FDA approval, if ever. I accessed your file and took two dozen photos with my phone. I also took photos of the brain scans you’ve been keeping to yourself. You broke lots of laws, Doc. Look at the game and it stays between us. Refuse, and your career is over. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.”

Babineau took the game and looked at the swimming fish. The little tune tinkled. Every now and then there was a flash of blue light.

“Start tapping the pink ones, doctor. They’ll turn into numbers. Add them up in your head.”

“How long do I have to do this for?”

“You’ll know.”

“Are you crazy?”

“You lock your office when you’re not here, which is smart, but there are lots of all-access security cards floating around this place. And you left your computer on, which seems kind of crazy to me. Look at the fish. Tap the pink ones. Add up the numbers. That’s all you have to do, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“This is blackmail.”

“No, blackmail is for money. This is just a trade. Look at the fish. I won’t ask you again.”

Babineau looked at the fish. He tapped at a pink one and missed. He tapped again, missed again. Muttered “Fuck!” under his breath. It was quite a bit harder than it looked, and he began to get interested. The blue flashes should have been annoying, but they weren’t. They actually seemed to help him focus. Alarm at what this geezer knew started to fade into the background of his thoughts.

He succeeded in tapping one of the pink fish before it could shoot off the left side of the screen and got a nine. That was good. A good start. He forgot why he was doing this. Catching the pink fish was the important thing.

The tune played.

• • •

One floor up, in Room 217, Brady stared at his own Zappit, and felt his breathing slow. He closed his eyes and looked at a single red dot. That was Z-Boy. He waited . . . waited . . . and then, just as he was beginning to think his target might be immune, a second dot appeared. It was faint at first, but gradually grew bright and clear.

Like watching a rose blossom, Brady thought.

The two dots began to swim playfully back and forth. He settled his concentration on the one that was Babineau. It slowed and became stationary.

Gotcha, Brady thought.

But he had to be careful. This was a stealth mission.

The eyes he opened were Babineau’s. The doctor was still staring at the fish, but he had ceased to tap them. He had become . . . what was the word they used? A gork. He had become a gork.

Brady did not linger on that first occasion, but it didn’t take long to understand the wonders to which he’d gained access. Al Brooks was a piggy bank. Felix Babineau was a vault. Brady had access to his memories, his stored knowledge, his abilities. While in Al, he could have rewired an electrical circuit. In Babineau, he could have performed a craniotomy and rewired a human brain. Further, he had proof of something he had only theorized about and hoped for: he could take possession of ­others at a distance. All it took was that state of Zappit-­induced hypnosis to open them up. The Zappit Freddi had modified made for a very efficient eye-trap, and good God, it worked so fast.

He couldn’t wait to use it on Hodges.

Before leaving, Brady released a few thoughtfish into Babineau’s brain, but only a few. He intended to move very carefully with the doctor. Babineau needed to be thoroughly habituated to the screen—which was now what those specializing in hypnosis called an inducement device—before Brady announced himself. One of that day’s thoughtfish was the idea that the CAT scans on Brady weren’t producing anything of real interest, and ought to cease. The Cerebellin shots should also cease.

Because Brady’s not making sufficient progress. Because I’m a dead end. Also, I might be caught.

“Getting caught would be bad,” Babineau murmured.

“Yes,” Z-Boy said. “Getting caught would be bad for both of us.”

Babineau had dropped his putter. Z-Boy picked it up and put it in his hand.

• • •

As that hot summer morphed into a cold and rainy fall, Brady strengthened his hold on Babineau. He released thoughtfish carefully, like a game warden stocking a pond with trout. Babineau began to feel an urge to get touchy-feely with a few of the younger nurses, risking a sexual harassment complaint. Babineau occasionally stole pain medication from the Bucket’s Pyxis Med Station, using the ID card of a fictional doctor—a fiddle Brady set up via Freddi Linklatter. Babineau did this even though he was bound to be caught if he kept on, and had other, safer ways of getting pills. He stole a Rolex watch from the Neuro lounge one day (although he had one of his own) and put it in the bottom drawer of his office desk, where he promptly forgot it. Little by little, Brady Hartsfield—who could barely walk—took possession of the doctor who had presumed to take possession of him, and put him in a guilt-trap that had many teeth. If he did something foolish, like trying to tell someone what was going on, the trap would snap shut.

At the same time he began sculpting the Dr. Z personality, doing it much more carefully than he had with Library Al. For one thing, he was better at it now. For another, he had finer materials to work with. In October of that year, with hundreds of thoughtfish now swimming in Babineau’s brain, he began assuming control of the doctor’s body as well as his mind, taking it on longer and longer trips. Once he drove all the way to the Ohio state line in Babineau’s BMW, just to see if his hold would weaken with distance. It didn’t. It seemed that once you were in, you were in. And it was a fine trip. He stopped at a roadside restaurant and pigged out on onion rings.

Tasty!

• • •

As the 2014 holiday season approached, Brady found himself in a state he hadn’t known since earliest childhood. It was so foreign to him that the Christmas decorations had been taken down and Valentine’s Day was approaching before he realized what it was.

He felt contented.

Part of him fought this feeling, labeling it a little death, but part of him wanted to accept it. Embrace it, even. And why not? It wasn’t as though he were stuck in Room 217, or even in his own body. He could leave whenever he wanted, either as a passenger or as a driver. He had to be careful not to be in the driver’s seat too much or stay too long, that was all. Core consciousness, it seemed, was a limited resource. When it was gone, it was gone.

Too bad.

If Hodges had continued to make his visits, Brady would have had another of those goals to grow—getting him to look at the Zappit in his drawer, entering him, and planting suicidal thoughtfish. It would have been like using Debbie’s Blue Umbrella all over again, only this time with suggestions that were much more powerful. Not really suggestions at all, but commands.

The only problem with the plan was that Hodges had stopped coming. He had appeared just after Labor Day, spouting all his usual bullshit—I know you’re in there, Brady, I hope you’re suffering, Brady, can you really move things around without touching them, Brady, if you can let me see you do it—but not since. Brady surmised that Hodges’s disappearance from his life was the real source of this unusual and not entirely welcome contentment. Hodges had been a burr under his saddle, infuriating him and making him gallop. Now the burr was gone, and he was free to graze, if he wanted to.

He sort of did.

• • •

With access to Dr. Babineau’s bank account and investment portfolio as well as his mind, Brady went on a computer spending spree. The Babster withdrew the money and made the purchases; Z-Boy delivered the equipment to Freddi Linklatter’s cheesedog of a crib.

She really deserves an apartment upgrade, Brady thought. I ought to do something about that.

Z-Boy also brought her the rest of the Zappits he’d pilfered from the library, and Freddi amped the Fishin’ Hole demos in all of them . . . for a price, of course. And although the price was high, Brady paid it without a qualm. It was the doc’s money, after all, the dough of Babineau. As to what he might do with the juiced-up consoles, Brady had no idea. Eventually he might want another drone or two, he supposed, but he saw no reason to trade up right away. He began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted.

It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow.

• • •

This state of affairs continued until February 13th of 2015, when Brady’s attention was caught by an item on News at Noon. The anchors, who had been laughing it up over the antics of a couple of baby pandas, put on their Oh Shit This Is So Awful faces when the chyron behind them changed from the pandas to a broken-heart logo.

“It’s going to be a sad Valentine’s Day in the suburb of Sewickley,” said the female half of the duo.

“That’s right, Betty,” said the male half. “Two survivors of the City Center Massacre, twenty-six-year-old Krista Countryman and twenty-four-year-old Keith Frias, have committed suicide in the Countryman woman’s home.”

It was Betty’s turn. “Ken, the shocked parents say the couple was hoping to be married in May of this year, but both were badly injured in the attack perpetrated by Brady Hartsfield, and the continuing physical and mental pain was apparently too much for them. Here’s Frank Denton, with more.”

Brady was on high alert now, sitting as close to bolt upright in his chair as he could manage, eyes shining. Could he legitimately claim those two? He believed he could, which meant his City Center score had just gone up from eight to ten. Still shy of a dozen, but hey! Not bad.

Correspondent Frank Denton, also wearing his best Oh Shit expression, went blah-de-blah for awhile, and then the picture switched to the Countryman chick’s pore ole daddy, who read the suicide note the couple had left. He blubbered through most of it, but Brady caught the gist. They’d had a beautiful vision of the afterlife, where their wounds would be healed, the burden of their pain would be lifted, and they could be married in perfect health by their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

“Boy, that’s sad,” the male anchor opined at the end of the story. “So sad.”

“It sure is, Ken,” Betty said. Then the screen behind them flashed a picture showing a bunch of idiots in wedding clothes standing in a swimming pool, and her sad face clicked off and the happy one came back on. “But this should cheer you up—twenty couples decided to get married in a swimming pool in Cleveland, where it’s only twenty degrees!”

“I hope they had a hunka-hunka burning love,” Ken said, showing his perfectly capped teeth in a grin. “Brrrr! Here’s Patty Newfield with the details.”

How many more could I get? Brady wondered. He was on fire. I’ve got nine augmented Zappits, plus the two my drones have and the one in my drawer. Who says I have to be done with those job-hunting assholes?

Who says I can’t run up the score?

• • •

Brady continued to keep track of Zappit, Inc. during his fallow period, sending Z-Boy to check the Google alert once or twice weekly. The chatter about the hypnotic effect of the Fishin’ Hole screen (and the lesser effect of the Whistling Birds demo) died down and was replaced by speculation about just when the company would go under—it was no longer a matter of if. When Sunrise Solutions bought Zappit out, a blogger who called himself Electric Whirlwind wrote, “Wow! This is like a couple of cancer patients with six weeks to live deciding to elope.”

Babineau’s shadow personality was now well established, and it was Dr. Z who began to research the survivors of the City Center Massacre on Brady’s behalf, making a list of the ones most badly injured, and thus most vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. A couple of them, like Daniel Starr and Judith Loma, were still wheelchair bound. Loma might get out of hers; Starr, never. Then there was Martine Stover, paralyzed from the neck down and living with her mother over in Ridgedale.

I’d be doing them a favor, Brady thought. Really I would.

He decided Stover’s mommy would make a good start. His first idea was to have Z-Boy mail her a Zappit (“A Free Gift for You!”), but how could he be sure she wouldn’t just throw it away? He only had nine, and didn’t want to risk wasting one. Juicing them up had cost him (well, Babineau) quite a lot of money. It might be better to send Babineau on a personal mission. In one of his tailored suits, set off by a sober dark tie, he looked a lot more trustworthy than Z-Boy in his rumpled green Dickies, and he was the sort of older guy that chicks like Stover’s mother had a tendency to dig. All Brady had to do was work up a believable story. Something about test marketing, maybe? Possibly a book club? A prize competition?

He was still sifting scenarios—there was no hurry—when his Google alert announced an expected death: Sunrise Solutions had gone bye-bye. This was in early April. A trustee had been appointed to sell off the assets, and a list of so-called “real goods” would soon appear in the usual sell-sites. For those who couldn’t wait, a list of all Sunrise Solutions’ unsaleable crapola could be found in the bankruptcy filing. Brady thought this was interesting, but not interesting enough to have Dr. Z look up the list of assets. There were probably crates of Zappits among them, but he had nine of his own, and surely that would be enough to play with.

A month later he changed his mind about that.

• • •

One of News at Noon’s most popular features was called “Just A Word From Jack.” Jack O’Malley was a fat old dinosaur who had probably started in the biz when TV was still black-and-white, and he bumbled on for five minutes or so at the end of every newscast about whatever was on what remained of his mind. He wore huge black-rimmed glasses, and his jowls quivered like Jell-O when he talked. Ordinarily Brady found him quite entertaining, a bit of comic relief, but there was nothing amusing about that day’s Word From Jack. It opened whole new vistas.

“The families of Krista Countryman and Keith Frias have been flooded with condolences as a result of a story this station ran not long ago,” Jack said in his grouchy Andy Rooney voice. “Their decision to terminate their lives when they could no longer live with unending and unmitigated pain has reignited the debate on the ethics of suicide. It also reminded us—unfortunately—of the coward who caused that unending, unmitigated pain, a monster named Brady Wilson Hartsfield.”

That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they even give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.

“If there is a life after this one,” Jack said (out-of-control Andy Rooney brows drawing together, jowls flapping), “Brady Wilson Hartsfield will pay the full price for his crimes when he gets there. In the meantime, let us consider the silver lining in this dark cloud of woe, because there really is one.

“A year after his cowardly killing spree at City Center, Brady Wilson Hartsfield attempted an even more heinous crime. He smuggled a large quantity of plastic explosive into a concert at Mingo Auditorium, with the intent to murder thousands of teens who were there to have a good time. In this he was thwarted by retired detective William Hodges and a brave woman named Holly Gibney, who smashed the homicidal loser’s skull before he could detonate . . .”

Here Brady lost the thread. Some woman named Holly Gibney had been the one to smash him in the head and almost kill him? Who the fuck was Holly Gibney? And why had no one ever told him this in the five years since she’d turned his lights out and landed him in this room? How was that possible?

Very easily, he decided. When the coverage was fresh, he’d been in a coma. Later on, he thought, I just assumed it was either Hodges or his nigger lawnboy.

He would look Gibney up on the Web when he got a chance, but she wasn’t the important thing. She was part of the past. The future was a splendid idea that had come to him as his best inventions always had: whole and complete, needing only a few modifications along the way to make it perfect.

He powered up his Zappit, found Z-Boy (currently handing out magazines to patients waiting in OB/GYN), and sent him to the library computer. Once he was seated in front of the screen, Brady shoved him out of the driver’s seat and took control, hunched over and squinting at the monitor with Al Brooks’s nearsighted eyes. On a website called Bankruptcy Assets 2015, he found the list of all the stuff Sunrise Solutions had left behind. There was junk from a dozen different companies, listed alphabetically. Zappit was the last, but as far as Brady was concerned, far from least. Heading the list of their assets was 45,872 Zappit Commanders, suggested retail price $189.99. They were being sold in lots of four hundred, eight hundred, and one thousand. Below, in red, was the caveat that part of the shipment was defective, “but most are in perfect working condition.”

Brady’s excitement had Library Al’s old heart laboring. His hands left the keyboard and curled into fists. Getting more of the City Center survivors to commit suicide paled in comparison to the grand idea that now possessed him: finishing what he had tried to do that night at the Mingo. He could see himself writing to Hodges from beneath the Blue Umbrella: You think you stopped me? Think again.

How wonderful that would be!

He was pretty sure Babineau had more than enough money to buy a Zappit console for everyone who had been there that night, but since Brady would have to handle his targets one at a time, it wouldn’t do to go overboard.

He had Z-Boy bring Babineau to him. Babineau didn’t want to come. He was afraid of Brady now, which Brady found delicious.

“You’re going to be buying some goods,” Brady said.

“Buying some goods.” Docile. No longer afraid. Babineau had entered Room 217, but it was now Dr. Z standing slump-­shouldered in front of Brady’s chair.

“Yes. You’ll want to put money in a new account. I think we’ll call it Gamez Unlimited. That’s Gamez with a Z.”

“With a Z. Like me.” The head of the Kiner Neurology Department managed a small, vacuous smile.

“Very good. Let’s say a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You’ll also be setting Freddi Linklatter up in a new and bigger apartment. So she can receive the goods you buy, and then work on them. She’s going to be a busy girl.”

“I’ll be setting her up in a new and bigger apartment so—”

“Just shut up and listen. She’ll be needing some more equipment, too.”

Brady leaned forward. He could see a bright future ahead, one where Brady Wilson Hartsfield was crowned the winner years after the Det.-Ret. thought the game had ended.

“The most important piece of equipment is called a repeater.”