"How many levels are there to go?"

"I don't know. Some say a hundred. Some say fifty. Hard to tell. I've never left the forty-seventh myself. No reason to. I have everything I need in this town. Great food, a well-stocked video store, spectacular views. Can I interest you in another IPA?"

"Why not."

Axl Lautenschlager poured Neethan another pilsner gla.s.s of beer. Neethan slurped off the foam. He could stay here, too, he supposed. Buy a cabin on the beach, live off savings, learn a handicraft. Meet a local girl, have babies. He let the fantasy grow to encompa.s.s his whole stream of consciousness. For a while he sat idly sipping his drink, eyes glazed, speculating about a life parallel to this one. Neethan Jordan, school board member. Pillar of the community. Volunteer director of the local theater troupe.

A couple zombies ambled in and settled into a corner booth, putting an end to Neethan's daydream.

"I guess I gotta terminate these m.o.f.os," Neethan said, slapping down a twenty. "Keep the change."

Some zombie kung-fu action went down.

It was bada.s.s.

ABBY.

Abby sat in her bra and underwear, eyes open barely to slits, pupils sucking electrons off the screen, which was presently broadcasting a preview of the next episode of Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin. Her mouth hung open and her breath rose raggedly from her throat. On the coffee table was a miniature village of takeout containers under investigation by a squad of c.o.c.kroaches. In the clip, Skinner pulled a shard of gla.s.s out of his palm with his teeth and spit it aside, right before Stella threw him through the window of a Krispy Kreme, knocking out the neon HOT NOW sign. He landed on a case of just-glazed regular glazeds.

Stella floated over an upended table. "Get up so I can finish you."

"I need to see my son."

Skinner pulled himself up, ducked to avoid an unidentified projectile, ripped the cash register off the counter, and slammed it repeatedly into Stella's head. The machine popped open, gushing currency, as he obliterated the newman's face. She twitched and screeched and sputtered electricity all over the floor. Skinner stuffed a donut into his mouth.

Somebody knocked on Abby's door. Her eyes, with their bloodshot root systems of capillaries, pivoted to her right while the rest of her body remained frozen. She opened her mouth somewhat wider and raised a trembling hand to push her tongue back in, to maybe kick-start it into speech by manipulating it with her fingers, but all that came out was a wheeze. She hoped maybe they would go away. They knocked again. She rose, wobbly, skin bluish gray in televised light, feet shuffling through cardboard boxes of solidified pad thai and mayonnaise-smeared sandwich papers. Standing in front of the door, she willed her visitor to turn away and return to the elevator down the hall. But the knock came again. Okay, so she'd wait it out, stand here until they left. But standing here she instead found herself uncontrollably peeing, the hot urine running down her quivering leg, pooling on the hardwood, spreading into a puddle, the border of which soon crept under the door. Whoever was on the other side was sure to notice it. They knocked again. Abby willed her hand to the k.n.o.b and pulled it open a few inches until the chain went taut. Through the crack she saw two children, both in costumes, standing patiently holding pillow cases.

"Trick or treat!" they said in unison.

One was dressed as a bat, the other as a lamb. Abby guessed the bat was a boy and the lamb was a girl but she couldn't tell through their masks. Somehow she got her tongue to work but her voice sounded as ravaged as a tobacco company executive's.

"I think I have some candy," she said, then pushed the door closed, slid the chain, and let the door creak open. The two children stepped over the puddle of urine and followed her to the kitchen, where more c.o.c.kroaches scampered politely out of the way.

"Trick or treat!" the kids said again.

Abby pushed objects around in the cupboards and came upon a tin of cookies. "I have these. Do you want these?" As she spoke, something stung her calf. She looked down to see the lamb pushing the plunger of a syringe. "Oh Jesuh-" she started, before all control of her body ceased. She collapsed on the floor landing on yogurt containers and potato chip bags. The bat grabbed her under the armpits and the lamb took her legs and with a collective grunt they carried her to the bedroom. They sure seemed stronger than your average trick-or-treaters. In the bedroom they pushed her up onto the unmade bed and climbed up after her. The bat, straddling her midriff, pulled off his mask to reveal a head far too large to belong to a child and eyes twice the size of typical human eyes, s.p.a.ced far apart. Underneath the mask the bat looked like an unnaturally sophisticated embryo with the prelude of a mustache. The lamb removed her mask as well, revealing similar features, though her hair was blonde and in pigtails secured with heart-print ribbons.

"You're going to be all right. You've been injected with a Bionet hack," the bat said. His voice sounded like it had been recorded at double speed for a cartoon. Chipmunky. "We're your friends. We're here to liberate you."

Abby's spine stiffened, as if one by one her vertebrae had begun to fuse together. Talking seemed out of the question. As if antic.i.p.ating this problem, the lamb placed something cold and sticky on Abby's forehead.

"This is a bindi transmitter," the lamb said. "It will allow you to bypa.s.s speech and communicate with us telepathically."

Abby heard a sort of chime in her left ear, followed by a woman's voice. "Hi! Do you accept this connection?"

Abby thought "Yes" three times in a row. Another chime. The aural s.p.a.ce in her head felt echoey, as if her sense of hearing had itself entered an empty concrete room. "Who did this to me?" she asked the s.p.a.ce. "Where is Rocco? How come I can't control myself? Who are you people?"

"We're software developers," the bat said in the s.p.a.ce, his voice trailing into two or three distinct echoes. "My name is Bat and this is Lamb."

"You're monks."

"We were for a time," Lamb said.

Bat said, "We'll help you find Rocco."

"Who did this to me?" Abby asked again.

"Rocco did this to you," Lamb said. "He's a DJ. We can't liberate all the embodiments of Vancouver but we know you can reach him and put an end to his DJing."

"Rocco wouldn't do this."

Lamb said, "Rocco met you at an underground Bionet party. He knew about the police activity and spared you from getting arrested because he thought you looked cute. He took you as a trophy. Then he accidentally fell in love with you, and loves you still. You can take us to him. He is doing to thousands of people what he did to your friend Jadie and what he has done to you."

"He would never have done this to me."

"That is correct," Lamb said, "but he's been away from his dashboard. You're running on autopilot. He didn't want this to happen to you. He had programmed the most exquisite experiences for you. He manually encoded your s.e.xual climaxes. Every happy moment from the time you met happened under his control. Every teardrop, every laugh, all predetermined by the most elegant software."

Bat said, "He sent you away on a tangential trip to the archives of Kylee Asparagus to get you out of the way. He knew the heat was coming down on him. He wanted to protect you."

"Dirk Bickle said I was sent to infiltrate another reality," Abby said.

"Do you want to keep showing up dead?" Bat asked.

"I can't tell I'm even alive," Abby said. Her fingers started tingling.

"We can reverse the hack," Bat said. "We can return you to your state of subservience to your autopilot DJ." The two former monks glanced around the room as if considering what would happen should Abby select this option. The whole apartment was a fetid, domestic catastrophe.

Abby swallowed and thought, I'll go along. Wasn't that what she was good at? Going along? Letting others plot her trajectories? Her throat felt as if she was suffering the worst cold of her life while she simultaneously huffed chemical fumes and swallowed peach pits. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and resisted falling down the sides of her face. Bat patted her chest.

"The hack is almost complete," Bat said. "After this, you will fall asleep. A sleep deeper than any sleep you've had in a long time. We'll leave instructions for you for when you wake up."

Abby's voice came back, barely. "Wait. If it's true. If Rocco really did this to me-what are you going to do to him?"

"We'll recycle him," Lamb said. Upon which curtains fell, blotting out all light, all thought.

Abby's eyelids made an audible noise as they flapped open. From zero to fully conscious within half a second. Her joints squealed and popped as she struggled out of bed. First thing she noticed was how immaculate the apartment looked. Wood floors actually reflective again, the clothes hamper empty, not a trace of dust on the surface of anything. In the kitchen she found a bowl of fresh fruit and the refrigerator stocked with vegetables, new cartons of juice, tubs of yogurt, entrees neatly sealed in containers. Her arms wildly extracted the contents of the fridge, tossing ingredients onto the counter. Fresh pumpernickel bagels with a selection of schmeers. Bananas that preferred the climate of the very very tropical equator. Abby pulled out the blender and began dropping in strawberries and protein powder. She felt like doing yoga! She wanted wheat gra.s.s! She stretched, hopped in place, put some music on. Not a c.o.c.kroach in sight. The s.h.i.tty takeout containers and the trick-or-treating monks seemed but a hallucination. This right here-this vibrantly colored orange-this was the real world, clean and alert, confident and rejoicing. She slipped a seedless grape into her mouth and closed her eyes as her teeth punctured the skin with a snap. She poured a gla.s.s of orange-guava juice and downed it in five gulps. Satiated, she pranced into the bathroom, where she faced her wall of soaps, exfoliants, conditioners, and moisturizers, the balms, muds, glosses, and creams. She cranked the shower up to steamy, stripped out of her pajamas, and proceeded to enjoy a forty-five-minute session under the nozzle. Out of the shower, she dressed in her newly washed favorite jeans and blouse but left her feet bare. Something about bare feet on hardwood with clean clothes and Brazilian music playing while coffee brewed meant civilization, meant purchasing power, meant freedom.

She noticed a manila envelope on the coffee table. Opening it she found one plane ticket, in her name, to New Newark Airport on the Kitsap Peninsula. The flight left in two hours. When she went to the closet for her suitcase, she discovered it had already been packed. Looking once more around the apartment she'd shared with Rocco, Abby pulled on her best flats and wheeled the suitcase to the door. This life, with the sunlight filtered through the shades and every tchotchke in its perfect place, was a way station. Her real life was about to begin. She was going to New York Alki.

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 6.

As blood dripped out of me into the sand, Nick set a one-liter bottle of water a few inches from my face. He said, "I was just supposed to shoot you. They didn't say to kill you. If you're lucky, I didn't hit anything important." Then, without another word, he stood up and walked away. I watched him grow smaller in the waves of desert heat until he was lost in the ripples. I must've pa.s.sed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. I knew enough to put pressure on the wound but that was about the extent of my knowledge of self-administered first aid. I faded in and out and thought I was dying. I laughed, sending pain through my gut. I considered starting a fire with the books. I grabbed one of them, a dirty paperback t.i.tled How to Love People, which I found somewhat ironic. I drank some water. I tried finding constellations. I remembered f.u.c.king Star, the abrasive way her pubic hair felt around my c.o.c.k as I went in and out of her. I scrounged through the backpack for a pen so I could write down what had happened to me. When I couldn't find one, I cried and pounded my fist on the abandoned tire. Animals scurried around my periphery; I sensed them waiting for me to die. The pain was transcendent. I imagined planets being born inside my skull. Sometime in the night there was a meteor shower. I remembered an article I'd read once about a guy who got trapped in an elevator in Manhattan for forty-one hours. I thought about the crucifixion and The Old Man and the Sea. I imagined the faces of my long-dead family and told them how I loved them. Somehow a few grains of sand got into my mouth and terrorized my teeth for hours. Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. I drank the rest of the water and kept one hand pressed to the wadded shirt covering the hole in my gut. I figured the bullet really hadn't hit anything important or else I'd be dead now. But I started fantasizing that maybe I was dead. Maybe this was my afterlife, a wind-raked mesa and a pile of trash. Maybe I was the last man on earth and all of history was my hallucination.

But you didn't die.

I became absolutely certain I was going to. Then I heard a vehicle. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. Finally I saw it, a Hummer, coming straight at me. I pa.s.sed out again for what seemed like hours but when I came to, the Hummer had only come a little closer. Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. He walked up with another bottle of water. As I drank, he crouched beside me and asked how I was. I made a smarta.s.s response, or I'd like to think I did. I probably whispered something meekly. I don't remember. With his elbows resting on his knees, Bickle squinted and looked into the distance. He asked if I was familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's book On Death and Dying. The one about the stages of death. There's denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. He said, "You're probably going through a little of that yourself right now. And you've probably noticed you don't pa.s.s through those stages in a straight line. Thing is, Luke, the human race as a whole is going through those stages. For a long time it was denial, right? The jury's still out on climate change. We can keep consuming at this rate forever. Then in the last few years we've been bargaining. If I just bring my own grocery bags to the store, the ice caps will remain. But what if I were to tell you, Luke, that those of us at the acceptance stage have done the math. We've done the computer modeling. What if I were to say that the only way to fulfill our holy purpose as stewards of life in the universe is to sacrifice ninety-five percent of the human race?"

"You're f.u.c.ked," I think I told him.

"Oh, we're in agreement there," he said, then asked if I wanted to come to the academy.

I laughed, water dribbling out of my mouth. "The academy," I said. "There is no academy. If there's anything, it's a support group for nut jobs that meets in a church bas.e.m.e.nt rehashing bulls.h.i.t theories about paradigm shifts and cybers.p.a.ce."

You didn't actually put it that way.

Probably not. But anyway so Bickle said, "Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?"

I pa.s.sed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.

He said, "You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there's some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there'd have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That's a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn't bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn't pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you'd start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you'd notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you'd start to wonder if somehow it didn't get restocked while you slept. But you'd realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you'd keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you'd begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn't explain it, you'd still need it. And you'd a.s.sume that you simply didn't understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn't place your faith in the hands of some unknowable G.o.d. You'd place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you'd come to realize you'd exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You'd worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You'd make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you'd start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you'd grow so frustrated you'd push it off this cliff."

"Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?" I asked.

After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, "That's the neocortex talking again."

"Am I going to die?" I said.

Bickle replied, "What do you mean, like right now? I have no idea. I'm no doctor. I'm a docent. I show you around the museum and tell you what you're looking at."

At this point my consciousness was flickering like a bug light. I figured I would agree to whatever Bickle wanted then get out of it later if I needed to. So I said yes, I'd accept his offer to join the academy. He wiped his mouth and whistled toward the Hummer. Two guys got out, paramedics in turbans. They immediately went to work on my gunshot wound. One of them had a syringe of something. This time I disappeared for a long time.

I woke up in a hospital in Phoenix, conscious enough to know I was in a hospital and to catch a glimpse of the motorcycle accident victim I was sharing a room with, a black guy with a long beard, before I blacked out again. The world seemed to have been paused. I couldn't hear. I was drugged and dragged into some sort of nothing zone and when I opened my eyes I stood across an operating room watching surgeons who were wrist-deep in my guts.

I left my body behind and walked down the empty hall. The motorcycle victim stood in the hallway talking on a cell phone, his bandages off. He was saying, "Yeah, baby. They want me here for when the dude wakes up. All's I got to do is lay there and look injured."

At the far end of the hall stood a woman who I somehow knew had been waiting for me. As I came closer I saw that she was naked and her skin was blue. Silvery-blue, really, like a fish. Hairless. I understood that I was supposed to follow her. She pointed to a door, which opened on a vast circular s.p.a.ce with a floor that sloped inward, like one of those funnels you toss a coin into then watch roll around and around until it falls into the hole in the center, for charity. I stepped forward and approached the center and started to get scared that I would fall in. The woman stood beside me, then sat in a chair, a regular wood chair, that was pitched forward because of the slope of the floor. I saw there was a chair for me as well, so I took it. We now sat side by side, looking into the hole. I couldn't see the walls of this place, or the ceiling. All was black except for the light beige floor, lit as if under an unseen spotlight. A dull machine roar came from the direction of the hole and I was overcome with panic and awe.

The woman's voice surrounded me. She didn't move her mouth. She said, "I come as an emissary from a steward race. Now is time for revealing. You have been encoded with the prophecy. This prophecy is not something that was to be revealed to you all at once, but over time. You were born encoded, and through your experiences have come to decode the message. Bloodshed and suffering are coming for all. The time for negotiating with this fate has long pa.s.sed. Humans have been under observation throughout their rising by other stewards of life. At times we have intervened in your affairs. Your religions, your greatest achievements of art and science, were guided by our hands. Look within yourself. You know this to be true. Your religions have outlived their usefulness. They have become tools of death. A new path is opening to you, one that creates life and populates the universe with seeds. This is the purpose of your love. After the century of bloodshed and suffering will come a new era. Those few who survive will emerge from where they've hidden and set in motion new life. Still, pockets of the human animal will seek oppression and slavery. In this final struggle these forces must be overcome for new life to blossom."

I asked, "What is my purpose in this?"

"Your purpose is to know these things to be true."

I looked down to find myself drenched in blood. From a crater in my torso came an explosion of tubes, clamps, gauze. Surgeons' hands worked furiously to resolve something inside my body. I caught the eyes of one of them and heard him say, "s.h.i.t, he's conscious. He's conscious!" I wasn't supposed to be seeing this. Someone did something to the intravenous. A biochemical semitruck plowed into my bloodstream and I was out again.

I remember the TV bolted to the wall. The view out the window, to distant hills stubbly with cacti. Blood coming out of my catheter. The black guy in the next bed staring straight ahead, saying nothing.

The cops showed up, wanting to know how I'd gotten shot. I told them I didn't know. After they ran a background check and determined I had no criminal record or outstanding warrants, they lost interest in me. I watched game shows, sedated. The Price Is Right, that faithful companion to the elderly. The sun rose and fell. I sat in my wheelchair in the little park behind the hospital. I tried to speak as little as absolutely necessary. I didn't want to talk to doctors or nurses or police officers or social service idiots about how this had happened or how I was feeling. I didn't want to call anybody, not even Wyatt and Erika. I became an outline where a man had been, like one of those molds they made of people buried in the ruins of Pompeii. I can't tell you what I even thought about. I went about the stupid business of healing.

How long were you in the hospital?

A month and a half? Two? Maybe three? I didn't really keep track. My health insurance was apparently taking care of everything and I had money in the bank if I needed to dip into it. I walked with a lot of pain, taking little more than fifteen or twenty steps before I had to sit down again. I lost twenty pounds and grew a beard. I read People magazine cover to cover. No one came to visit me. I was always polite with everyone and tried to make myself as invisible as possible. Then one afternoon I was watching TV and something caught my eye. It was a shot of the Las Vegas Strip, abandoned, flooded with sand. The casinos were all decrepit, falling apart. A digital billboard flickered with an image of a woman in a bikini. It was an aerial shot, swooping down through the desolation. It took me a while to understand this wasn't news footage. It was the trailer for some new action movie. And I thought, Las Vegas. Of course.

I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn't something that came about all at once. There was no one climactic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane, or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing, bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading "The end is near." The end was a slow but acc.u.mulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors' names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn't make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself-my family, my friends-that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompa.s.s the planet.

Whatever had happened to me after the shooting-first Bickle, then the visitation by the blue woman-had so altered my priorities that I found it impossible to imagine returning to a so-called "normal" life in which I'd have a job, a place to live, friendships. I didn't have any claim to these things anymore. The whole human enterprise-buildings, roads, laws, media, sports, religion, culture, you name it-struck me as a vast, collective dementia. The only pursuit that made any sense to me was the development and spread of new life through the universe. Ridiculously, of all people, I'd been selected to help bring that about.

Soon I was able to walk a loop around the halls. I managed to pee without a catheter. They took out the IV and I could eat more or less normal food. I thought again about calling Wyatt and Erika but the longer I put off calling them, the more I thought they'd be angry or something. It really makes no sense but I equated letting them know where I was with getting in trouble. All my belongings were at the house I owned but I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted to retrieve. The gunshot wound had drawn a line through my life, separating the person I thought I was in San Francisco with this new person, alone in Arizona. Eventually I was released and on my way out the doctor asked me where I was going. I said I didn't know. They pushed me to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I stood up, started walking down the street, and stopped at the first car dealership I found. Happened to be a Volkswagen dealer. I walked in and bought a new Pa.s.sat, then drove to Las Vegas, where the apocalypse was well under way.

Luke, you are so completely full of it.

Apocalyptic visions in the desert? Near-death experiences where you commune with aliens? Really? You really expect me to take this seriously?

What do you think is beyond that door? This isn't a rhetorical question. What's beyond that door?

I-I don't know.

Well, there's a hallway, some offices, a break room with vending machines for soft drinks and snacks, a parking garage where I park my Volvo every morning. Beyond that there's a city, with streets lined with stores like Applebee's, Whole Foods, and Best Buy. There are dry cleaners and gas stations and churches and schools. There are freeways leading to suburbs where there are homes where people live. And in those homes are kitchens where food is prepared, bedrooms where people sleep and dream, garages where they put their cars. People typically get up and go to work five days a week then spend a couple days doing whatever they want. People take vacations, make money, meet partners, have children, get old, get admitted to hospitals, then die. Every year there are a couple new and exciting electronic gadgets that people get excited about. People pay attention to sports scores and who celebrities are sleeping with. They try to get promotions to get more money to spend on stuff for themselves. Some of them go to community gatherings, some get obese, a very few commit criminal acts and get incarcerated. There are addicts, social workers, software developers, bus drivers, attorneys, and teachers. Everyone getting up in the morning, taking showers, listening to the radio on the way to work, catching a movie on the weekend or doing some gardening. That's the world out there, Luke. Not some f.u.c.ked-up postapocalyptic nightmare. So things got a little hotter there for a while thanks to fossil fuels. We've had wars, some instances of genocide. A terrorist attack on occasion. But overall we see problems, we fix them, and we move on.

You're a nihilist. You've given up on the human race. You a.s.sume all will end in a rain of fire and boiling oceans but have the temerity to suggest that somehow a few "good" people will be able to stick it out long enough to propagate life through the universe. You want it both ways.

All I know is- You said it yourself, Luke. I have the transcript right here. Hold on . . . Where is it. Okay, here, ". . . it's flattering to imagine that you're so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate . . ." But you fell for it, too. You let your imagination get the best of you with all this talk of aliens in hospital corridors. Imagining a postapocalyptic future is just a way to cope with your sense of being an outsider. Since you can't fix the disappointments of your real life, you imagine a future life in which you've miraculously survived and are looked to as some sort of prophet. But this is all there is. All we have are roads, buildings, inst.i.tutions, commerce, entertainment, governments, and jobs. This is the real world. There is no other world.

Okay, I didn't mean to fly off the handle like that.

Can I get you something? A juice?

Look- Why is the prophecy so threatening to you?

Threatening?

If what I'm saying is crazy, why have such an emotional reaction to it? Why not just dismiss me? Who's crazy? I know what's happening on the other side of that door. I can get online in this place. I read blogs. We're at the dawn of a horrifying and h.e.l.lish new era.

New era? What's so new about it? When has the world not been f.u.c.ked-up? Wasn't it pretty f.u.c.ked-up for the Jews in Auschwitz? Wasn't it pretty f.u.c.ked-up for the Africans on slave ships?

You have no- Point to any era and I'll show you pestilence, war, slavery, genocide. Even the supposed good times were tinged in darkness. There's no such thing as a new era of f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.t because the s.h.i.t has always been f.u.c.ked-up. f.u.c.ked-up is the nature of the s.h.i.t. And yet somehow we endure it. And little by little life improves. Fewer women die in childbirth. Slavery is abolished. Children don't have to work in factories anymore. Life expectancies increase- Momentary illusions of- Here's a question for you: Why is it that when things were going relatively well for you, when you were making the big bucks in the dot-com bubble or just sort of retired and hanging out, getting stoned with your friends, that you seemed to lose interest in finding Nick, the academy, and Mr. Kirkpatrick? You only started believing in the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t after Nick shot you in Arizona-if, in fact, that's what actually happened. Anytime things were going right for you, the future of the world seemed bright. Anytime they were going wrong, the imminent collapse of civilization was at hand. Can't you see how thoroughly you projected your own subjective vision of reality on the world?

I'm done here.

I'm not trying to get into a fight. But I think we've reached a point in this conversation when we have to change the fundamental question. Instead of asking what kind of world you live in, it's time to ask what kind of world you want.

[crying] [unintelligible] . . . too late for that.

It's not, though, Luke. It's entirely up to you. What kind of world can you imagine? A sick world of suffering? Or one of beauty and light? What's it going to be?

[crying] I can't.

Yes you can.