Deathworld Read online

  “Did the article say anything about what might have caused them?”

  His mother thought for a moment. “Nothing concrete,” she said. “The authors talked briefly about the details of the people who had suicided, but the article didn’t go into a lot of depth. Mostly it was investigating the possibility that this was an `artefactual suicide cluster,’ a situation in which there are an unusually high number of suicides in a given area or set of circumstances, but none of the deaths exhibit any affiliation to the others any identifiable common cause. A statistical fluke, in other words.”

  “You mean the article couldn’t find any linkage among the suicides, except for the fact that they had all been in Deathworld.”

  “That’s right.” His mother shifted in her chair. “But bear in mind, honey, that this was just a short article, and it was thin on detail.”

  Charlie thought about that for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Then tell me something else. Have you ever heard of someone committing suicide because of some kind of implanted suggestion?”

  She looked thoughtfully at him for several seconds before replying. “While such things can be done,” his mom said, “they take a lot of doing. A whole lot. The human mind is committed to keeping itself going, at any cost, even under what looks like intolerable pressure to the outside world. Sometimes it copes by going crazy. Even though that may not seem like a particularly wonderful option to you or me, it satisfies the mind’s basic need-to keep on going. It takes a considerable intervention, a very noticeable level of interference, to subvert a mind sufficiently to make it completely give up that commitment to survive.”

  “Like they used to say that you couldn’t be hypnotized into doing something you wouldn’t normally do.”

  “Nothing important, no.” His mother leaned back in the chair again. “Let’s put it this way. Your whole life is a series of conditioning experiences. Your early life, for example, is about teaching you how to behave in human society, everything from ‘Thou shalt not put thy feet up on the furniture’ to ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ” Charlie hurriedly took his feet off the chair nearest to him. His mother smiled. “And your training, the conditioning you get from your parents, your teachers, your friends, slowly slots everything more or less into ‘order of importance’ in your unconscious, your ID, whatever you want to call the part of your brain that reacts before you really have time to think about it. You learn, ideally, which instructions are really important and which ones aren’t. So someone who hypnotized you might not have too much trouble getting you to put your feet up on a chair. On the scale of ‘important,’ that’s pretty low. But if they tried to tell you to kill yourself?” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t do it. Not unless you had been conditioned all your life to believe your own survival wasn’t particularly important … or unless you were deranged already.”

  “What about subliminal stuff, then?”

  She stretched. “That has some effect, yes … but they’ve been arguing about it for a century now, and no one’s sure how much. Again, the question has to be taken case by case. Some people are more susceptible to subliminals than others … and not necessarily people who are stressed or have psychiatric problems, either. Some environments are more conducive to the administration of subliminals than others, and suggestions which produce strong results in one format or medium will fail completely in another.” She shrugged. “Use of subliminals in public communications is illegal, of course. Not to say there’s not ongoing suspicion that they’re occasionally used. But as for making someone kill themselves?” She shook her head. “I very much doubt it.”

  “What if someone found a new way to do it … more strongly, or in some way that couldn’t be detected?”

  “New things are happening all the time, honey,” Charlie’s mother said. “But what can’t be changed is the principle on which such a technique would have to operate. To be subliminal, a command has to affect a mind without that mind noticing … and a healthy mind tends to notice when something tries to tell it to stop its own function.”

  Charlie sighed. “Okay.”

  “Now are you going to tell me what this is about?” she said. “Somehow I don’t think this is for some report for school. Are you concerned about one of your friends?”

  He hesitated. “Yeah,” he said. “But, Mom, I can’t tell you any more about it yet. I’m not sure I’m not completely off course.”

  She gave him a long, considering look. “Funny,” she said. “Part of me wants to jump on the table and demand that you tell me everything right now. But part of me reminds that other part that if you’re being careful about your conclusions, that’s probably something you picked up from your dad and me over time.” She smiled, and the expression was rather rueful.

  Charlie’s mother put the iced-tea glass down. “Okay,” she said. “You tell me when you’re ready. But, Charlie, if this starts to look like real trouble with your friend, whether you’re ready or not, I want you to tell me then. Right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  She got up and took her glass over to the sink, rinsed it out, and stuck it in the dishwasher. Charlie got up and stretched, too. “I feel silly,” he said.

  “Why, honey?”

  “I feel like I should have known all this stuff. When it’s explained, it sounds like common sense.”

  His mother chuckled. “Your father said the same kind of thing,” she said, “when he and I first started talking about the human mind, all those years ago. No matter how medical schools swear they’re going to pay more attention to the psych side of things, it never really happens. So I married your dad to make sure we would both have plenty of time for me to educate him.”

  Then she grinned. “Of course,” she added, “he thinks the same about me. So I suppose we’re even.” Her smile got more wicked. “But then, doctors always do think they can teach nurses things. Far be it from us to dissuade them. Speaking of which, let me get changed out of this uniform before he gets home… .”

  She headed out of the kitchen.

  Charlie looked at his notes, then gathered them together and went up the stairs to go back online.

  He spent the next three hours or so in his workspace, pulling off the Net every reference to the suicides that he could find. Shortly his space was full of scraps of virtual paper floating in the air, both those copied from his original notes and those sourced elsewhere on the Net. He had little windows screening video clips of police statements, too, and local Net and live-media reporters, and scraps of text burning in the air by themselves; stories chained together by little associational lines of light, and here and there a virtual report or reporter, with a genuine piece of landscape, or a person or persons talking. It was very crowded in Charlie’s workspace, more so even than the time he called in Sir Isaac Newton and the whole Royal Academy to find out why it took them so long to get the Longitude Problem straightened out.

  The images of the suicides were, by and large, not much use to him, and the stories routinely gave him information on everything except what he wanted to know. What caused them … ? No one seemed to have the slightest idea.

  About how they happened, there was more information. One suicide had been in the kid’s own bedroom, another had been in the living room of a kid’s house while the parents were away. The third had been like the most recent one, in a hotel room not so far from the suicide’s home. A fourth had been in a park. A fifth had been in a car in a public parking garage. Maine, New York City, the D. C. area, a suburb of Atlanta … All East Coast, Charlie thought, except this one, in the garage. Colorado. Fort Collins-a college town.

  All of them, actually, were in or near college towns, even the suicide in Maine, in a suburb of Bangor. But that would be Deathworld’s target age, anyway, Charlie thought. Eighteen to twenty-five … And the age spread of the victims varied: nineteen, several eighteen-year-olds, a twenty-one-year-old, another who was sixteen.

  But that matches the stats, Charlie thought. After talking to
his mother, one of the first things he had done online was to pull up stuff on suicide. The age spread of all these suicides generally matched the stats, too. There seemed to be a tendency toward suicide-proneness in the late teens and early twenties, for reasons that none of the authorities seemed able to agree on.

  Charlie walked among the scraps of information hanging in the air around him, peering at them, trying to find a pattern. None was obvious, except for one or two mentions of how the suicides had happened. And maybe there really isn’t a pattern, no matter what I’d like to believe, Charlie thought. The cops must have looked at all this stuff and decided there was no connection.

  But for whatever reason, Charlie couldn’t bring himself to believe this. There was something about all these deaths that bothered him.

  Partly it had to do with what had been said in the two news accounts which were even slightly specific about methods … and what they implied matched uncomfortably to something Nick had mentioned. “Strung out …” From what Charlie could find out from random mentions in the chat groups dedicated to Bane and the Banies, there was a lot of this kind of hanging symbolism in the “lower circles.” Mostly it was seen there as a good way to punish criminals, especially murderers.

  Charlie turned to look at one of the displays, a virtual “snap” taken with a digital handheld sampler-a tabloid picture, obviously taken from a distance, against the law enforcement agency’s wishes, using a heat-assisted imager and looking through a window that had carelessly been left open for a moment. It still raised the small hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. It looked, at first glance, like someone hadn’t really thought things through. You wouldn’t normally think that trying to do yourself in from a coat hook would be all that effective. But in this case it had worked entirely too well. And the face …

  Charlie was not willing to spend too much time looking at it. The face told him very little. But the awkwardly splayed-out body troubled him more. The sight of it made him gulp, and then he was ashamed of himself, embarrassed, even though there was no one to know about his reaction. But it was going to take a long time to get rid of that initial wash of nervousness at seeing someone lying in that position … because when he had been tiny, he remembered seeing people like that in his first home, the home he preferred not to think about anymore. When those scenes surfaced from memory later in his life, when he was old enough to understand, Charlie had realized that those people had all either been stoned, or dead.

  He gulped again. He was going to have to come to terms with the worst of those memories eventually, he knew. But it was hard.

  For the moment Charlie went back to studying the news story that went with the image. It told him little about the cause of death that he didn’t already know. Hanging, obviously. But nothing about the details surrounding the death. No autopsy information. None of the follow-up stories had given anything like that, especially not this virtual tabloid. It was the horror of the death itself that the tab was interested in selling.

  I wonder, though. Are the police purposely having the news services withhold information? Charlie thought. It made sense. They might be waiting for someone to reveal information about the crime that only they knew, that they didn’t want the general public to have access to.

  Good for them. But it doesn’t help me any. And he kept flashing on Nick saying, with glee, “Strung out-”

  Charlie shook his head and looked back at the “window” in which he had the salient details of the deaths set out. There was something that had briefly attracted his attention earlier, and to which he now returned: the dates. The first suicides were in May and July of the year before last. The third and fourth had been in May and October of 2024 … and now here were the’ fifth and sixth, both in May as well. He remembered Winters’s caution about the accidental aspects of this kind of thing. But at the same time-could May mean something in particular to Deathworld people? “What’s Joey Bane’s birthday?” he said to the computer.

  “August 8, 1996.”

  Charlie sighed. “So much for that theory,” he muttered. “Have we got the Encyclopedia Retica capsule on Bane?” “Displaying it now.”

  It spilled out in front of Charlie in two different windows: the text version, with a discography of the man’s music and various analyses of his style by various critics-most of them surprisingly supportive. Clearly Bane was thought by his peers to genuinely be a talent, even if Charlie wasn’t impressed. The other window had a sound-andmotion record consisting of snippets of various concert performances and interviews.

  One of these, which appeared in the capsule only as a soundbyte over some stills-Bane’s voice saying, “My goal is to get Hell to pay me royalties”-caught Charlie’s attention, if only because it was a quote he had heard several times recently, in the brief flow of news following the most recent double suicide, and never in context. He got up, went over to the window, and poked the still then showing with his finger. The computer said, “Holding. What would you like me to do?”

  “Expand that audio clip. Is there imagery to go with it?”

  “Yes. Expanding-”

  Shortly Charlie found himself looking at a full-virtual version of the infamous Josh Billings interview on CCNet. There Joey Bane sat, at ease and dressed all in black, in the well-known and instantly recognizable minimalist set, looking relaxed and amused as the famous interviewer tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to say something self-incriminating. Charlie stood a few feet away, his arms folded, and watched it.

  “Look,” Bane was saying to Billings’s shocked face, “you should stop being so hypocritical about it. There’s not a being on this planet who hasn’t reflected on the cruelty and pain of life, the unfairness of it. Some of the greatest literature of every age has dwelt on the problem. But nowadays, if we give any consideration to it at all, we’re so terrified of confronting the issue directly that we do it in secret. There’s no consensus that it’s all right to think these kind of thoughts anymore. In fact, nowadays if you talk about death or pain, people almost immediately start to think you’re morbid, and if you talk about it frequently, they’re likely to try to have you hospitalized. Is that fair? Is that sensible? These days we raise our kids on fairy tales from two centuries ago, for pity’s sake, and suggest to them during the most impressionable part of their lives that the most they’re going to have to worry about in life is wolves trying to steal their picnic baskets. When they come to you with their real concerns-that people suffer and die unfairly, and that the whole world is essentially cruel and unfair, and living in its hurts, we try to pretend it isn’t so, we get uncomfortable, we turn away and do anything we can to avoid the subject. We don’t have answers. Neither do our kids. If they’re lucky they’ll grow up and find some answers that we haven’t seen … but not telling them the truth about the world, the Bad News, in my opinion predisposes them to the kind of despair that causes people to check out early. In my site, at least, kids get told the truth. Yes, the world stinks! What you do about it, that’s your business. But at least there’s a place for them to express their anger, which is a luxury a lot of them don’t have anymore in our increasingly nicey-nice culture, where expressing an antisocial idea ‘inappropriately,’ or in front of the wrong people, can get you taken away from your parents indefinitely by some meddling social worker. In my place kids can see the truth, see the pain, and also see what happens to those who don’t handle that anger right, who seal it over until it breaks out. You think I condone violence or crime or hatred? No way. But there’s a lot of all those things out there, and pretending they’re not isn’t going to make them go away. I think we help kids by at least preparing them for the idea that the world stinks, so that when their folks finally let them out of the overprotected hothouse environment that the modern home has become, they’re ready for what they’re going to see when they’re on their own when Mommy and Daddy aren’t holding their hands anymore. And that’s where a lot of the resistance to our site is coming from, from outraged mommies a
nd daddies who’re ticked because we’re telling their little darlings the truth they never had the nerve or the brains to tell them themselves… .”

  It went on like that, nearly half an hour during which poor Billings barely had room to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps when he offered Bane the interview time, he hadn’t thought through what it would mean to offer virttime to a man with the aerobic advantages produced by spending hours every night screaming and singing nonstop on stages real or virtual all around the planet. Only once did Bane pause, when Billings managed to say, “And over your gates, where it says ‘Abandon hope …. . isn’t that crime? Plagiarism?”

  “Nope,” Bane said cheerfully. “It was lying around in the public domain, and no one was using it. I trademarked it. My goal is to make Hell pay me royalties.”

  Having come to the soundbyte itself, the image froze on the confident, arrogant face, and Charlie sat there looking at it for a while, thinking.

  The folks accusing this guy of being evil, he thought, are wrong. He’s not, really. Or at least I don’t think he is.

  But still … something’s going on at his site to cause it to act as a ‘core’ for these suicides.

  Now all I want to know is: what?

  Charlie stood there and brooded for a moment. The man himself might not mean anyone any harm, but there was always the possibility that someone in his organization did. That someone was either trying to sabotage Deathworld by causing these suicides … or was running some other agenda, something a lot more obscure.

  After a moment Charlie sighed. If that was the case, the odds of him ever finding out about it were minuscule. Besides, he thought, remember `Occam’s Razor.’ Don’t go introducing possibilities into the equation out of nowhere. Deal with the ones you have evidence for, before starting to make things up.

  Charlie turned away from Joey Bane, frozen there in his chair, and frowned at the polished wood floor of the old operating theater as he walked among the “exhibits.” And evidence is the problem. I don’t have enough to come to any conclusions. For a good diagnosis, you need data clinical data on what happened to these people.