Afterparty by Daryl Gregory Read Free Book Online

only marijuana, but a variety of pharmaceuticals. Then he stopped cold.”
    Dr. G said, “Good for you, Luke.”
    “He wasn’t the only one,” Fayza said. “Six other customers, some of them his acquaintances, have stopped purchasing from my dealers. Usually that means they’re dead or in jail, but these people are still in the city. None of them is buying from me.”
    “Six people, that’s not so bad,” I said.
    The boy in the hoodie looked at me in alarm.
    Fayza said, “Don’t tell me my business.”
    “I would never do that,” I said. With sincerity.
    “Luke and the others have moved on to another product.”
    “Which one?”
    “I thought you could tell me,” Fayza said. “You’re the neuroscientist.”
    I froze for a moment, trying to figure out what Bobby had told her. But of course she didn’t need Bobby. Anyone in Fayza’s position would have access to hot and cold running infostream.
    The basics were free to everyone: my entire résumé from elementary school to PhD, the well-documented debacle at Little Sprout, my arrests. I’d been told by a certain paranoid inmate of the NAT that with a little cash, my entire online history could be downloaded as well. Fayza probably knew my every credit transaction, social media post, and geolocation ping going back decades. I normally didn’t trust paranoids, but I made an exception in Ollie’s case.
    “What do they call the drug?” I asked.
    “They don’t call it anything,” she said. “They think it’s the Holy Spirit.”
    “If you just open your heart,” Luke said, “you’d understand.”
    I squinted at him. Was he seeing his own angel right now? Or did his God take the form of, say, a blob of light in his peripheral vision?
    “You ever hear of the Numinous, Luke?”
    He went still, trying to give away nothing, which gave away everything.
    “Yee-up,” Dr. Gloria said.
    “How about Francine Selwig?” I asked.
    “Frannie? Is she okay?” Luke said, genuinely worried.
    “Who is this Francine person?” Fayza asked.
    “Someone else who took a drug like Luke’s,” I said. “She killed herself.”
    “What?” Luke said. His surface calm cracked. “I can’t believe she’d, she’d…”
    “She was in withdrawal,” I said. “She’d been cut off from whatever she was getting at the church.”
    Fayza said, “The Hologram Church.”
    Luke looked hurt. “The Church of the Hologrammatic God is—”
    “The stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” I said. “What were they giving you, Luke?”
    He shook his head. “It’s not a drug. I keep telling you that.”
    “Then what is it?”
    His eyes flicked to the left. Consulting his higher power? Then he looked me in the eye and said, “It’s the word of God.”
    Time for a new tactic. “Tell me about God,” I said. “Is he here now?”
    He frowned at me. “God is everywhere. That’s pretty basic.”
    “But you can see him. What does he look like?”
    That eye flick again. “It’s hard to describe,” he said. “He’s more of a feeling. Watching over me.” He brightened. “I built something to portray my feelings for him. If you come to the church—”
    “Right, and this feeling—it gets stronger after each church service?”
    He hesitated, then said, “Every time.”
    Dr. Gloria said, “This is like a Turing test for religion. So far, everything he’s said would apply to anyone going to a prayer meeting.”
    Except he’d recognized the word “numinous.” I said to Fayza, “We’re not going to get anywhere this way.”
    Fayza nodded. “We’ve been going around and around for hours,” Fayza said. “I can’t tell if he’s a very good liar or simply an idiot who doesn’t know what’s happened to him.”
    “Have you considered that he really did just find God?”
    “I might have considered that, before I heard you were looking for a drug with exactly these symptoms. Before I learned that such a drug had already been invented.”
    The infostream again. No use