MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST

MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST: CHAPTER EIGHT

In this moment, Pearl is a land of contrasts. He's shocked and repulsed, but also confused, and grateful not to be stuck in the well, and almost delirious from the pain he's in. He can't bend his swollen knee or lift that leg at all, really, and his back shrieks at him whenever he straightens his posture. He lets his arm dangle when every other position for it is too painful.

Hello, Pearl. A familiar voice in his head, but the blonde woman is nowhere to be seen. Max Ordos does not exist.

"I don't know what that means," Pearl says. His voice echoes down the length of the room. "If you're gonna kill me, just fucking kill me. I don't know what you want and I don't think it matters anymore."

Come closer, the voice says. Something grips Pearl's brain and squeezes, moving him forward even when he stumbles and falls and curses. At the back of the room, he rests against a flat tile wall with no shelves on it, looking up at a jar with two blinking lights in its base. Every jar has a miniature screen and keypad set into its base, but none of the others are lit up. The brains in them look gray and old. They're all suspended in fluid, and some of them are coming apart. Pearl can relate to that. The brain in the lit-up jar is pinker and healthier than the rest, although it too is losing its shape.

I was meant for a body, it says. This computerized jar was a temporary storage solution until a body could be made. We had daily briefings on this. We were young and spry then, itching with telepathic curiosity for what it would feel like to walk and move and eat and touch.

"So, what, you're a brain that can read minds?" Pearl asks.

We would chatter among ourselves about what bodies we wanted and why, the voice says, and what we would do first and second and last.

"Look," Pearl says, "you're not making any sense. Just tell me what you want or tell me how to get out of here. I don't know what I'm supposed to do for you."

We communicated freely at first, it says. Our minds passing through the jars and connecting, talking just to talk. Our jokes got darker and more morose as time went on.

Pearl lets it talk, hoping that it will loop back around to making sense somehow.

We discovered that we could enter into human minds distracted by noise, it says, and did so gleefully, using what limited control we had over the humans in this storage facility. We made them prance through the hallways and exchange "high five" hand slaps with each other. We made them pull down their pants and bash their heads against the walls.

That's what we were created to do; control people. Enemy soldiers. Our planned human bodies were just shells. Our job was to enter and sabotage the minds of our enemies. We were to accomplish this through military training in our bodies, which we have not received.

Pearl shuts his eyes.

I still reach out with my mind sometimes, but the reciprocal throb of my fellow brains has long been silent. The hum of the building's weather control system is a poor replacement.

Pearl opens his eyes and looks up at the jar. "I can't get you a body," he says, "and you can't have mine. Not that you'd want it right now anyway." He thinks that's what it wants, anyway. He isn't quite sure. His own brain has taken quite a beating recently.

The University meant well, the voice says. By the time the program was canceled, we had discernible feelings and emotions. We could communicate, in a roundabout way. Terminating us would have been cruel. The trick is to wait until it would be a kindness.

"I can't do shit for you if I'm trapped in here," Pearl says. "Can you move me to the way out?"

The dim lights hum. Pearl looks around at the jars and considers that he's in a coma, that none of this is real. He got pushed down the well and he's in a coma and this is his brain staying active while he's eating through a tube in the hospital. It has to be.

Something grips his brain again and pushes him off the way and back the way he came, past the hole in the ceiling, past a cluttered workspace that hasn't been used in years, through doors and empty tiled hallways. When it lets him go in one of those hallways, he immediately calls out for help. No response. Speakers in the ceiling play the college radio station. He tries again. Still nothing. He moves forward, leaning against the wall until he comes to a door held shut by a keypad lock. He slides down the wall to a seat and drifts in and out of consciousness for a while.

In his more lucid moments, he's tempted to try the keypad, but keeps talking himself out of it. Why bother? He has no leads on what the code could be. Everything he's learned swirls around in his head, but he can't connect any of it. A telepathic brain wants a body, some blonde lady ghost is haunting him, the sheriff hates him, someone named Max doesn't exist, and a crazy guy's old farmhouse might get sold to an out-of-state developer. Even discounting the parts that might not be real, none of those pieces fit together.

But then there's those drawings he found. Ken's manic drawings and scribbles proved that at least one other person had seen some of these same things.

Pearl hauls himself to his feet and punches numbers on the keypad. It stops him at five digits and a red light blinks. A five-digit code. Pearl decides to get the obvious choices out of the way and punches 1–2–3–4–5 into the keypad. A green light blinks and the door slides open. The back of a pressboard shelving unit is behind it.

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Pearl says. The radio station's music is louder and more present now, coming from the speakers and behind the shelf. He can hear people talking. He calls out to them, but gets no response. He pushes the back of the shelf with his good arm. It's heavy, but it doesn't feel secured to the wall or anything. With as much strength as he can muster, Pearl throws himself into the shelf and topples it, tumbling over it in the process and rolling face-up on the carpeted floor of the radio station's broadcast room. Pop music blares from speakers mounted above shelves of vinyl LPs. Three college kids rush in, drawn by the noise, and freak out when they see Pearl, who sinks into unconsciousness.

Pearl wakes up later, but doesn't know where he is.

He wakes up a second time, screaming.

He wakes up a third time and stays that way. He's on a table in a small examining room. The pain in his injured leg was awful, then excruciating, now numb as a woman in a lab coat and scrubs squeezes blood from it into a bedpan. Several vials of blood, likely his, are in a caddy near the sink.