Halo

Halo
A Novel
by Tom Maddox

From Tom Maddox.Net
Halo

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Table of Contents
* Part I
* Part II
* Part III
* Part IV
* Part V
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Dedication
To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen, my friend;
and all our lamented dead, lost in time.

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PART I OF V
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.
Jean Baudrillard, America
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1. Burning, Burning
On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week
ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma,
and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had
become an alien, at home in a distant landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh
torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained
oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the
cold fire. Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, the
fire is in my eyes, in my brain.
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the
hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without
noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the
hallway's end, morning's light through stained glass made abstract
patterns of crimson and buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor
console stood against the far wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing
on its face; in the center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of
chromed steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige
tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark plastic
lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back
into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his
waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled

the shirt over his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes,
stepped out of baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and
stood naked, his pale skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin
felt hot, eyes grainy, stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back
as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to
balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and
pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in the back of his
neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its
edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved toward his crotch, iv needles
toward the crooks of both arms. The egg shut closed on him and liquid
spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply as elation
punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated by drugs,
meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to relive his own
terror, this was what moved him: access to the many-worlds of human
experience--travel through space, time, and probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywhere--virtual vacations, sex, superstardom,
you name it--but compared to the egg, they were just high-res
videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks to simulate
physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled only to a certain
degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were conscious of it, so
sustaining its illusion depended on willing suspension of disbelief.
With the egg, however, you got total involvement through all sensory
modalities--the worlds were so compelling that people waking from
them often seemed lost in the waking world, as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and
injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
----
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in
central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades
earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback,

the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in
the main conference room. The table's work stations, embedded
oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local
SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its
primary information utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel,
and all transactions among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's
reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the home company's passive
auditing programs, and Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look
more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data
structures and their contents, testing