Hair Trigger


Because Count Bergamo existed he had become more powerful than any nation state or alliance of nation states. He had leap frogged evolution. And even when he watched Artemis take a bath, she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, by the time I began to monitor him, which is when he became aware of me, he had a reputation among the goddesses as the new god of wine.

The moment he knew I was in the system he must have felt a shock at seeing a younger version of himself. You might imagine me to be a grown man or even as old as Bergamo, but everything isn’t outside of time. It takes time to grow a clone, and even though I look almost grown, without injectables I’d have toy guns and sing songs about anthropomorphic animals. But when you consider that a DNA computer that fits inside a teardrop is more powerful than the combined computing power in the world at the beginning of this century, you understand why programming accelerated development wasn't a problem.

What was our kinship? I was formed of information stored in a single hair off his head. At least I hope it was off his head but it was never specified in my creation documents. The moment he realized who I was he processed all the likely logical chains and I did the same simultaneously and we both knew that the most likely reason I was sent out was to find some way to bring him under the control of the programmers. Information wasn’t exchanged with words because they were too slow. We just used a somatic interface and came to an understanding.

I didn’t know why I was there, beyond my program, which was that I was produced by the company as a companion for him in his exploration of timeless Space. The company was $omaCorp, and it was trying to figure out how to make injectables non lethal to existing humans. They didn't really have much interest in creating clones more powerful than they could ever be. They had to create one, though, because only a peer could be used to neutralize Count Bergamo. I was ignorant of having any function other than to protect and serve. Any other program was laying beneath my memory, like a buried explosive device.

You’re a Trojan horse, he said, and I replied honestly that if I was, I was in no position to know it. I was curious about the woman and he said she was a personification of lilies. She’s got a supernatural sensitivity to what she takes into her body. I picked up that part of the conversation, I said. It’s not about sex, he said, or not just about sex. It’s about lilies, mostly. She says every time she’s with me the lilies bloom. I asked if she had a name and he said Lily. I said I knew that but for the first time in my existence I felt stupid.

Let it go, he said. You’re just debugging and unstuffing. I don’t remember anything between that and when I woke up on the train. It took me a few moments to realize I’d fallen asleep and had been having a dream, most of which slipped away when the familiar sounds of the club car drowned it out. All I could remember of it was that a woman named Lily was in it, and she wanted to have sex with me.

“You awake?” the Count asked.

“Nodded off I think,” I said. “Where are we? Still in Texas?”

“Nope,” he said, “We’re in Arizona.”

I looked out the window but all I could see was my own reflection, tired, sunken eyes in a hawk’s face, a short brimmed hat giving me a perfectly round halo, and my beard and hair grown together leaving my eyes like owls peering out of a briar patch. They shifted perspective and watched Bergamo, cleaning his revolver with a piece of white cotton cloth and a steel rod. He put a little oil on the cloth and ran it through the barrel, then he oiled each cylinder. His focus on the process gave me a chance to study him from an angle, instead of head on. But he was aware of being watched, and he started talking to me without ever moving his focus off the pistol.

“We’re on the reservation,” he said. It was just moments later when Reservation art began to appear beside the tracks. The first piece was a main street lit with neon florescence, bordered by a service station and a diner. Everything was inspired by the 1960s, done in blue and yellow and red and green. The next piece was a stage with perimeter and spot lighting, and a rock and roll band performing on it. The musicians were holograms and the music came into the car on the override. The sound of steel wheels and whiskey soaked conversation gave way to Elvis singing, “Trying to Get to You.” I looked at Bergamo directly and thought how different he was from me. He was clean shaven and his hair was freshly cut. He wore a black wool suit and his nails were manicured. “Once we hit the reservation we’re almost there," he said. He handed me the kit and I cleaned both my pistols, even though they were already clean. It was more the ritual of getting ready for a meeting with the unknown.

Looking back on that first day, I wonder why I didn’t remember where I was or what I was doing. But I didn’t. I forgot myself so completely that I didn’t know I was a clone, or that Count Bergamo was amplifying through the magnetic field of the earth into a vast network of interrelating fields of an information network. I remember Carl Jung’s idea of the purpose of life being the storage of the world in mind, so that after death one would be a seed, taking that remembered world into the darkness and creating light with it.

What we were doing was like that except that instead of passive storage and retrieval of the world, we were exploring the created worlds of unknown ghosts. Some of them were human but most of them were not. There was not any way to know what anyone looked like in the original form, because we were all avatars, projections of our programming. Even the train ride was a projection because there was no distance to cover. The train ride, the way we looked, the guns we wore, were all a story we were creating to escape the inaction of static time. We spread ourselves into a story so that we navigate remembered lives scattered through space like stars, cocoons held together by the threads of memory. I did remember being hired as security for Bergamo in the back booth of an Italian restaurant in Houston, Texas.

In hindsight, I realize that Bergamo didn’t have the same problem I had because he was self-created. He was writing his own interfaces with every moment. The rest of us were there because, as in my case, we were sent there, or, as in most other cases, because the energy field’s gravity had sucked them when they got close to it. Bergamo knew it was a field of information, and that he was overlaying it with a storyline. By all rights I should have been as intelligent and powerful as he was, but I didn’t have all rights. I operated within constraints imposed by my creators. I was a tool, designed to serve and protect.

In that department my only peer was Bergamo, and we were allies. What we were allied in was pure adventure to him. To me it was exploration and development. My loyalty wasn't to anything except my programming because I had never existed outside of it. To me the program was reality, and the only path in existence. "You keep that on a hair trigger?" Bergamo asked, nodding toward the gun I was oiling.

I didn't get the reference to my being cloned from his hair at first. I just said, "I do."

He asked, "Why?"

"It's faster," I said. He was amused by something and then I got it. I remembered the background program, and that this wasn't really an Old West that ever existed in reality. It existed as countless fields of energy from the ghosts of cowboys and Indians, mountain men and miners and railroad workers and gamblers and outlaws. And because it was filtered through the minds of people with imagination as well as memory, there was no way to know what to expect.

"Ash Fork Station," the conductor said as he walked through the car.

When the train pulled into Ash Fork station it was almost midnight, and there was nobody around except three porters and a young couple boarding to head on west to Los Angeles. We had the trunks and equipment delivered to the Mission and went straight to sleep. The next morning I had my beard buzzed down to a stubble and my hair washed and cut. With my face exposed I felt meaner. It might have been the hawkish look to it or it might have been just the unstuff program. Whatever it was, people were giving me wide berth on the wooden sidewalks on Ash Fork's main street.

Posted: Fri - May 4, 2007 at 02:38 PM