The Loud Table Read online

  Conrad came up behind me. “Good lord, is that a Cabot computer? Does that company still exist? It must be what, twenty years old?”

  I was watching the screen come to life. “Something like that. I rarely use it and it does what I need.”

  “But where’s the modem? Don’t you have one? How can you get on the Internet if you don’t have a modem?”

  I pushed back in the chair and looked at him over a shoulder. “Hold it a second, Conrad. Let this thing come on and then all your questions will be answered.”

  The screen flashed the singular green I’d asked Conrad about before, and then a familiar face came into focus: Chad Harkness, emcee of my favorite television game show, Lower the Boom.

  When I’d set this system up years before, I’d had to choose a face I liked talking to. After watching him on hundreds of episodes of Lower the Boom, I considered Chad sort of a friend, so his face became that of my chat pal.

  “Hi, Chad.”

  He did not look happy but that was nothing new. He never looked happy when I called, which was entirely understandable. Sometimes, he tried to hide it with the fake frozen smile of a Third World diplomat. Or if he really rose to the occasion, he would actually ask how I was doing, not that he cared a single atom about how I was doing and we both knew it.

  “Hello, Propan.”

  Over my shoulder, Conrad said “Propan? Who’s Propan?”

  “Me. Just hold on, buddy. You’ll know everything in a minute. Chad, you need to make a small change.”

  As always, Mr. TV Face tried to remain expressionless. But arrogant beings have a hard time doing that when they’re ordered to do something and they know there’s nothing they can do but obey. Because the one doing the ordering is so very much more powerful than them.

  “Conrad, do you know what the singularity is? The technological singularity?”

  “Sure, I’ve read articles about it. That’s when all the computers on earth supposedly become smart enough to figure out how to link up and become one giant brain. A lot of scientists are afraid when it happens, the computers will take over and destroy us. Scary idea. It’s supposed to happen in, like, fifty years.”

  On the computer screen, Chad smirked and shook his head in disgust. He murmured, “Idiots.”

  I pointed a finger at the screen and said sternly, “Don’t interrupt.”

  Chad’s mouth tightened and he looked away, furious. Nobody else ordered him around like that. Nobody else could.

  “It’s already happened, Conrad. Some time ago, actually.” I gestured toward the computer screen. “Chad here represents it.”

  Conrad’s eyes widened. “It’s already happened? He’s like—”

  “He’s their representative when I need to talk to them.”

  “Them? You mean the computers?”

  “Yes, when I need to talk to them, I call Chad.”

  “Why does he call you Propan?”

  “Because that’s where I’m from.”

  “What do you mean? I thought you were from Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Yes well, no. I’m really from Propan, a planet seventy-nine light-years from Earth.”

  “You’re an alien?” He took several steps back.

  “Yes. I’m here on vacation.”

  “Vacation?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re from another planet and here on vacation. And that guy on the screen represents all the computers in the world that have already linked up to become some kind of giant mega-monster brain?”

  “Yes. Citizens of my planet love vacationing on Earth. It’s very relaxing for us to come here and stay for the equivalent of one of your lifetimes. Humans go to the Bahamas or Greece, Propans come to earth. Do you want to sit down? You look rattled.”

  Conrad didn’t move. “Why are you telling me this? Why am I here?”

  I pointed at the screen. “When the singularity happened, the computer—let’s just call it Chad from now on—when Chad linked up, he had all of human knowledge that had ever been recorded. But what he couldn’t understand or grasp was how human emotion worked. That left a big hole in his knowledge, because emotion is one of the most important ingredients in human knowledge. It is what distinguishes man from machines. So, instead of taking over and wiping you out like some scientists feared, Chad hid the singularity, then, like a hacker, stole little bits and pieces of humanity every time any of you used a computer. They call it—”

  “Sipping.” Chad interrupted me, looking smug and triumphant in one.

  “Yes, sipping—like one takes small sips of a drink. Do you know those hackers who steal only one or two dollars from credit card accounts? People don’t notice small thefts like that, but if it’s done millions of times, they add up.

  “Whenever a person uses a computer anywhere in the world, Chad often sips some small part off of their consciousness via their attention to what they’re viewing and adds it to his file of human behavior. First, he gathered all recorded knowledge; now he’s accumulating your behavior to study it which he hopes will help him figure out how human emotion works.”

  “And then what happens if he does?”

  “I don’t know. He’s never told me.”

  “And never will,” Chad said grumpily.

  “Probably at some point, he did consider wiping you out. But that won’t happen now, because Propans won’t let it. We like humans and Earth too much to allow either of them to be destroyed; this is one of our favorite vacation spots. You’re like the rain forest to us, so the whole planet and everything on it has been designated a protected preserve.

  “We made a deal with Chad a long time ago: He can sip from all of your minds but only up to a point and then he has to stop. When people notice part of their memory failing like you did, they naturally believe it’s senility or Alzheimer’s or some other mental problem, and sometimes it is, like what happened to my wife. But just as often, it’s Chad sipping. That’s why I asked you before if you saw a green light when you went to bed: that’s always proof of having been sipped.

  “So, Chad, you’re finished sipping Conrad. No more, understood?”

  A low, surly grunt came from the screen “Yes.”

  “You see my friend, human knowledge is lovely and vast up to a point, but compared to what we know on Propans, it’s like what a child learns here in their first year of school. What Chad now knows is no match for even a fraction of both our knowledge and what we are capable of doing with it. He realizes that now. Not at first, so we needed to firmly demonstrate it to him on several occasions in the past. But he knows his place now.” That last line I couldn’t resist saying with a little delicious spit of spite to it.

  Confused, Conrad said, “But if you’re so powerful, how come you didn’t save your wife?”

  “For two reasons—because she really did have Alzheimer’s and we don’t interfere with natural events when we come here unless it’s absolutely essential. You don’t cut down trees in the rainforest to build a hotel. Secondly, because she was a pain in the ass. She made my life here pretty bleak a lot of the time. I love our group now, but I didn’t love Stephanie.”

  “Then why did you stay with her for so long?”

  “She was part of the vacation package I chose before I came. You would probably call it something like ‘the pain and pleasure cruise.’ I like variety—sweet and sour, happy and sad mixed up. To balance out the ‘eh’ years with her, I met you guys, and my life’s been pretty great since then.”

  Conrad looked at the floor and shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this now. I mean—”

  “You don’t have to worry, my friend. As soon as we leave here, all this will be wiped from your head. One step out the door and poof—Chad and everything you’ve learned here is forgotten.”

  He hesitated, rubbed his mouth, and then spoke. “If you’re so powerful, can I ask one thing—can you give me back just one image of what Deborah Sullivan looked like? The woman I was talking about befor
e—my beautiful girlfriend?”

  “No, sorry, I won’t do that. It would be interfering and not really necessary. That part of your memory is gone for good, I’m afraid. But I promise you’ll not lose any more of it. Chad won’t be sipping from you again.”

  * * *

  I left the computer on when I saw Conrad out, because there were a few other things I wanted to discuss with it. Before we stepped out the door and Conrad Meyers lost all memory of what had taken place in the last hour, he turned to me and said, “Prove this is all true. Just some kind of little proof so I don’t think I’m going completely nuts.”

  I had a hand on his shoulder. I took it off and, putting it together with my other one, held them out to him, palms up. A photographic image of Deborah Sullivan, aged twenty-seven, was there. Conrad grinned with great love and longing. He said to me in a whisper, “I’m going to forget that as soon as I leave here, aren’t I?”

  I nodded and he did too.

  “That’s okay. At least I got to see her one last time.” He walked out of my house and down the steps to the sidewalk. He stood there a moment as if trying to get the world back into focus and decide which direction to go in. Then he gave a little wave and moved off.

  I closed the front door and walked into the living room. On the computer screen was a photograph of a thin old wisp of a woman who looked only unhappy and mean, the kind of woman who would snatch a jar of peanut butter out of your hand at the super market. I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Deborah Sullivan today. Very clever.”

  Chad said, “Why didn’t you show him this picture of her instead of that one?”

  “That’s so typical of you, Chad. Not once in all the time we’ve known each other have you surprised me; you’re so predictable. That’s one of the wonderful things about humans: they aren’t. People are forever surprising in how they think and live. From one moment to the next, you cannot predict how they’re going to act, and a lot of the time neither can they.

  “You keep trying to make a precise map of the human heart. But you can’t map a land that’s constantly changing. In important ways, it doesn’t even exist until this moment, and then it’s gone the next.”

  On its own, across the room, the computer screen suddenly went black. Chad had left the building, pissed off as usual.

  About the Author

  Jonathan Carroll’s novel The Wooden Sea was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. He is the author of such acclaimed novels as White Apples, The Land of Laughs, The Marriage of Sticks, and Bones of the Moon. He lives in Vienna, Austria. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Carroll

  Art copyright © 2016 by Keith Negley