Virtual Fire Read online

  I’m too young to dream about the ‘60s.

  But I know my history. Toby made sure of that. He’s the one who told me about all those Vietnam War protests.

  “We did a lot of marching, Melora. Marching, burning draft cards, singing, All we are saying is give peace a chance!”

  But singing didn’t do shit to stop that war.

  Maybe the drugs kept them from finishing the job. For all I know it was the music, or the dancing, or those stupid beads they used to wear. Or maybe it was because they did whatever the fuck their men wanted.

  None of that will stop me.

  Books by Mendy Sobol

  VIRTUAL FIRE

  THE SPEED OF DARKNESS—A Tale of Space, Time,

  and Aliens Who Love to Party!

  FictionFire

  www.mendysobol.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Mendy Sobol.

  Excerpt from The Eternal Blue Sky copyright © 2019 by Mendy Sobol

  Excerpt from THE SPEED OF DARKNESS—A Tale of Space, Time, and Aliens Who Love to Party! copyright © 2015 by Mendy Sobol

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  FictionFire

  http://www.mendysobol.com/

  First Edition: July 2019

  Publisher’s Note: The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Book cover design by Ana Grigoriou-Voicu

  https://www.books-design.com/

  Virtual Fire/ Mendy Sobol. – 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-73370-440-3 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-73370-441-0 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my mother, Betty M. Sobol, M.D., who read

  every word I ever wrote.

  Hold fast to dreams,

  For if dreams die

  Life is a broken-winged bird,

  That cannot fly.

  Langston Hughes

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: MELORA

  PART ONE: DREAMS

  Chapter One: Paul

  Chapter Two: Paul

  Chapter Three: Paul

  Chapter Four: Paul

  Chapter Five: Paul

  Chapter Six: Paul

  Chapter Seven: Paul

  Chapter Eight: Paul

  Chapter Nine: Paul

  PART TWO: NIGHTMARES

  Chapter Ten: Paul

  Chapter Eleven: Paul

  Chapter Twelve: Paul

  PART THREE: MELORA

  Chapter Thirteen: Melora

  Chapter Fourteen: Melora

  Chapter Fifteen: Melora

  Chapter Sixteen: Melora

  Chapter Seventeen: Melora

  Chapter Eighteen: Melora

  Chapter Nineteen: Melora

  PART FOUR: WAR

  Chapter Twenty: Toby

  Chapter Twenty-One: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Toby

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Toby

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Melora

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Melora

  Chapter Thirty: Melora

  Chapter Thirty-One: Melora

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Melora

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Toby

  PART FIVE: MEKONG CLINIC / APPLEWOOD

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Paul

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Paul

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Paul

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Paul

  PART SIX: MEG

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Meg

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Meg

  Chapter Forty: Meg

  Chapter Forty-One: Meg

  Chapter Forty-Two: Meg

  Chapter Forty-Three: Meg

  Chapter Forty-Four: Meg

  Chapter Forty-Five: Meg

  Chapter Forty-Six: Meg

  PART SEVEN: MELORA

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Melora

  PART EIGHT: TOBY

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Toby

  PART NINE: PEACE

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Paul

  Chapter Fifty: Paul

  EXTRAS

  Prologue: Melora

  I’m too young to dream about the ‘60s. But I know my history. Toby made sure of that. He’s the one who told me about all those Vietnam War protests.

  “We did a lot of marching, Melora. Marching, burning draft cards, singing, All we are saying is give peace a chance!”

  But singing didn’t do shit to stop that war.

  Protests aren’t the only things Toby told me about from the ‘60s. He talked a lot about how girls wore their hair long and free. He showed me pictures from Life magazines he’d checked out of the library, pictures of shaggy-haired, denim-jacketed boys marching arm-in-arm with angry girls dressed in jeans and Navy pea coats. “Look,” he said, “it’s like a casting call for Hair!” I didn’t know what Hair was, but I flipped through the old magazines, looking at photos of white girls with rivers of brown, gold, or red flowing over their shoulders and down to their waists, and black girls rocking naturals backlit like angels’ haloes.

  He keeps two framed pictures from those times on his desk. One is blurry, but I can tell it’s Toby, towering over his best friends Tesla and Meg in front of what looks like some ancient Greek temple, all three of them dressed about the same, all three flashing peace signs. The other is crisp and clear—Toby and his pals standing next to a huge black horse. Only Meg’s flashing a peace sign in this one. Flashing a peace sign and a big, sunny smile. From Toby’s bed I can see her clearly. And her hair is long, lush, and beautiful.

  Not like mine.

  But those ‘60s girls didn’t wear Net interfaces riveted to one ear with surgical stainless and looped across to the other by epoxied fiber optic threads. I mostly cut my hair to get it out of the way.

  Sometimes I think Toby wants me to be more like them, all soft curves, smiling eyes, and brushed-shiny hair. I think he loved those women—even though they couldn’t do shit to stop their war.

  Maybe the drugs kept them from finishing the job. For all I know it was the music, or the dancing, or those stupid beads they used to wear. Or maybe it was because they did whatever the fuck their men wanted.

  None of that will stop me.

  PART ONE

  DREAMS

  Chapter One: Paul

  Last night the dream came again. It’s always the same. May 6, 1970. Senior year. A dozen Wellston University students sit in Franklin Hall’s one-armed desk chairs facing each other in a circle. I look up at the arched gothic ceiling, then around the circle at the others, their faces framed by long, shaggy hair, black and brown, copper and gold. Pot smoke and frigid air drift inside as two freshmen pass a joint near the open doorway. I smell the smoke, feel the chill of the cold New England night, button the top of my wool CPO jacket.

  Two days since Kent State. Cambodia invaded, the strike vote passed, Jackson State yet to come. We are cold. We are serious. We are deciding whether to set a fire, commit a crime.

  Then in walks Toby. Toby with the dark hair and bushy beard. Toby with the black beret and red star. Toby wit
h the wizard’s eyes and quick smile. Big as a bear he towers over us. Spotting me on the far side of the circle, he raises his hand in greeting. “Hey, Tesla!” he says, his warm Virginia drawl sounding light, out of place. “What are y’all up to?”

  I’m silent. Everyone’s silent. Then Meg answers, looking angry, looking beautiful, but avoiding Toby’s eyes. “Paul and the rest of us are deciding whether we should burn the ROTC building,” she says, pointedly using my real name, not the nickname, Tesla, given me by my best friend Toby when we were freshmen.

  Toby relaxes his posture, resting back on his heels. He looks around the circle. “Hey, when we want to play, we stay here at Wellston. When we want to burn things down, we go up to Harvard.” And though to outsiders this would sound ridiculous, to most of us, it’s persuasive. Heads nod, and on the strength of two short sentences, Toby carries the day.

  Talk moves on to tomorrow’s peace march. Toby smiles at me, winks at Meg, but her face flushes red and she quickly lowers her eyes. I watch as Toby’s smile fades and he turns away.

  I wake before the dream ends, and I’m glad. Soaked in sweat and shaking, but glad I wake up before the end. Because the end is Toby walking out of Franklin Hall and across Taylor Street. The end is a hit-and-run driver, speeding, swerving, losing control. The end is Toby dead, three days before his twenty-first birthday. And as I pass through the time when the dream is more real than the place I wake, feeling sad and happy and confused all at once, I think, It was good seeing you again, Toby. Even in a dream.

  I’ve had the dream ever since that cold May night. Sometimes a year or more passes without it. Sometimes it comes two nights running. The dream comes more often now because of where my work is leading. I’m so close.

  Toby and I were in the vanguard of those who’d soon become a mighty global force. We were computer nerds, college students spending every spare minute on Wellston’s lone IBM 650 computer, a temperamental behemoth named Bruin. I was the technician, dotting “i’s” and crossing “t’s” in the long programs we wrote using the clumsy, arcane computer languages of the day. Toby was the math genius, the visionary, the first person I ever heard talk of linking computers, not just between two buildings, but around the world.

  That’s what we dreamed of in those days. Computers as small as refrigerators, linked so dozens of people could share their ideas. And Toby’s dreams were much bigger.

  The Vietnam War changed that, as it changed everything.

  Chapter Two: Paul

  Toby and I met on the first day of freshman year in the only place on campus either of us was interested in finding, the Physics Department, home to Bruin. While other freshmen decorated dorm rooms and planned panty raids, we sat glued to Bruin’s keyboards and screens, spellbound by its incredible speed and limitless power.

  Within days we talked our fraternity-pledging roommates into switching rooms, so without seeking official permission we could live together. From our bay window on the top floor of Parker House in the Freshman Quad, we could see all of downtown Butler, the New England mill town where Wellston University first opened its doors in 1770. The old Baptist church where the Wellston family worshiped, the white marble dome of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Courthouse topped by its gold statue of The Spirit of Liberty, the crumbling Amtrak station, and the tall 1950s office tower we called the Superman Building because it looked like the one on the TV show, the one George Reeves leaped “in a single bound.”

  A month into our freshman year we cashed in our cafeteria tickets, taking our meals in the front room of the Beef ‘n’ Bun restaurant on Taylor Street, our recreation at the pinball machines in back. The rest of our time we spent with Bruin.

  I majored in engineering, Toby in physics and applied math, but only because the Computer Science Department didn’t yet exist. We filled our semesters with courses about computing, and in required courses, like Western Civ and English Literature, we talked our professors into letting us evaluate Martin Luther’s impact on Europe and analyze the works of Shelley and Keats using the powerful new technology of Bruin.

  Toby and I quickly became among the most recognizable pairs at Wellston. Toby—dark-haired, full-bearded, blue-eyed, Baptist, a few inches over six feet and more than a few pounds over two-forty. Paul—dirty-blonde, clean-shaven, green-eyed, Jewish, an inch or two under six feet and a pound or two shy of one-fifty. Toby—gruff voice tempered with rhythms of the south. Paul—all north Jersey nasal. Paul’s Old Spice deodorant announcing his arrival before he enters a room, Toby’s lack of deodorant broadcasting his. Straight-haired Toby, bushy-haired Paul. Mets’ capped Paul, black-bereted Toby. Always-joking Toby, always-serious Paul. Always interrupting each other. Always waving our hands for emphasis. Always together. On the surface we seemed like opposites who each lacked something without the other, and first students, then professors took to saying, “There goes Toby Jessup and Paul Simmons, Yin and Yang.”

  One day early in our freshman year while Toby was playing the Fireball machine after our usual cheeseburger lunch, I asked him, “How come you never call me Paul, only ‘Buddy,’ or ‘Guy,’ or ‘Hey You’?”

  Toby’s fingers stayed on the flippers, his eyes on the machine. But as the metal ball bounced from bumper to bumper, clanging, banging, and racking up points, he smiled his quick smile. “ ‘Cuz I’m waitin’ till I think you up a nickname.”

  With one last flick of a flipper and two expert bumps just light enough to avoid a tilt, Fireball’s rotary numerals clicked from 999 990 to 000 000, and the beaten machine sounded the familiar wood-block knock of Toby scoring a free game. Hands dropping to his sides, he watched the ball drain neatly between the flippers. Still smiling, he turned to me. “And I think I’ve got one. How do you like ‘Tesla’?”

  At first, I was stunned. I hadn’t cut my hair since the day before my high school graduation and was beginning to look like I’d stuck my head in the middle of one of Nikola Tesla’s high-voltage experiments. But Toby never made fun of anyone’s looks, and I realized in an instant he chose the nickname from our lunchtime discussion, a discussion we’d had a dozen times since school began. The “Who’s the bigger genius?” argument went like this:

  Toby (smiling as he looks up from his cheeseburger, chewing with his mouth open, changing the subject from whatever we’ve been discussing) “Einstein, definitely Einstein.”

  Me (feigning ignorance) “Is that the name of a new band?”

  Toby (still smiling) “No, buddy. Einstein was definitely the biggest genius of all time.”

  Me (still under control) “Are you talking weight, or height?”

  Toby (patiently, as if speaking to a small child) “No, I’m talkin’ brains.”

  Me (getting irritated) “How can a guy who sat around thinking up theories in his head possibly be a bigger genius than Tesla? Tesla built real things that really worked in the real world!”

  Toby (big smile stretching across his big face) “Oh re-al-ly? Well y’all be sure and tell the Russians ‘The Bomb’ isn’t real!”

  Losing all control, I’d angrily recount every fabulous experiment Tesla conducted, with Toby all the while laughing harder and harder, until I’d start laughing, too.

  Toby knew I loved Tesla, and the power, beauty, and enduring impact of his wild experiments. So he wasn’t calling me Tesla as a put-down. He meant it as a compliment—and a challenge. Besides, I figured he’d forget the nickname in a day or two. I didn’t know Toby very well yet, because the only name he called me from that day on was Tesla.

  With Toby and me it was never a matter of growing closer. We were close from our first afternoon in the Physics Department, our disagreements never more serious than the Einstein / Tesla debate. As time passed, we got to know each other the way only brothers do. We spent our vacations together, at first alternating family visits. When Toby came to my hometown, Applewood, New Jersey, we hung out at WFMH, the pioneering freeform radio station at Hilversum College, tinkering with their transmitter, so
undboards, and speakers, or rode the 88 DeCamp bus into Manhattan for Mets games and free concerts in Central Park. In Stonewall, Virginia, where Toby grew up, we walked the length of “The Old 97’s” railroad trestle, swam in Panther Falls, ate hot dogs and five-alarm chili at the Texas Tavern. But by spring break of our sophomore year, we began staying in Butler over vacations, doing the same things we did when school was in session.

  And we learned we had something else in common—our dreams.

  Toby found a word to describe how we felt about our dreams: ferocious. Night after night, as soon as our dorm room lights went out, a second reality began. Each morning at breakfast we’d relate the epics we’d lived the night before. Frightening tales of alien invaders. Nightlong dramas of beautiful heroines and heroic romance. Transformations into fantastic creatures with supernatural powers. Sometimes we woke at the same moment in the middle of the night, relating our dreams until sunrise.

  And slowly, over time, an amazing thing happened. We began dreaming the same dreams at the same time. Not identical in every detail, but similar in characters and plot.

  The one dream we dreamed most often took place in the future. Everyone had their own computer, with each computer connected to all the others! In our dream, universal communication and creativity were a reality. We loved that dream and knew when we woke, without saying a word, if it had come to us again.

  That’s how we spent our first three years at Wellston. Programming, playing pinball, and dreaming.

  Chapter Three: Paul

  The Vietnam War had always been a part of our lives, in college, in high school, as far back as I could remember. My mother was against it from the beginning, when Eisenhower sent the first U.S. military advisors in 1955. Now she represented draft resisters in her law practice. My father, a World War II veteran, took longer to come around, but by the mid-1960s he agreed with my mother. Friends had been drafted after high school, but so far, all made it home in one piece. Like everyone in college, Toby and I were spared from the draft, at least until after graduation, by student deferments. Like most, we opposed the war. But active protest wasn’t a reality for two computer geeks.