SAVIORNET

THE SAVIOR IN THE NET

A Short Story

by Hal Jones

Sometimes he thought about it as he sat staring at the meaningless news pages that scrolled across the computer screen. Sometimes he even heard his wife's voice: "It's just in your genes," she'd said dryly as she left him. "Your father had no ambition, and you don't either."
He wasn't sure about his father's life; he'd died young and they hadn't been close. But he knew his own life wasn't much: a nonfunctioning marriage, a nothing social life, a nowhere job, and lately he was spending way too much time surfing the Internet, as if some salvation could be found on its waves. But then he'd chance upon another chatroom, and for a couple of hours he could be someone among the faceless, nameless beings on the net.
It was one night, well after midnight, as he sat slogging through someone's unpublished fiction, that the first name appeared. He was sure it appeared and hadn't been there when the page first came on screen. It was in bold-faced type and said Arthur C. Shagum, and, what was more remarkable, it moved down the page, crowding its way through the turgid prose, line by line. It took several minutes for it to reach the bottom and disappear. Quickly he scrolled down the page, but the name was nowhere. For a while he searched but finally gave it up as a malfunction or his own exhaustion, switched off, and went to bed with a serious headache.
But two days later, as he was skimming The Herald, his eye caught something in the obituaries. There a distinguished, grey-haired man stared out smugly next to the caption: "Arthur C. Shagum, 79, senior partner, Shagum, Bhaggim, Fleesomb and Wrunn, pioneer in South Florida submerged property sales law". He couldn't be sure, but he thought the name was the one he'd seen the night before last. The brief article listed the time of death as the previous morning.
He wrote it off as coincidence, but the next day another name appeared on screen, just as the first time. He noted it down. A day later the paper confirmed the death. He made some calls and determined the hour of death to be the same as when the person's name had disappeared from the screen.
Now the appearances occurred almost daily. He checked with colleagues and computer geeks. He called the paper, the hospitals and funeral homes, but no one could suggest how such information could pass between computers, especially since he claimed to have known about some of the deaths even before close relatives did. He noticed that the people to whom he described the phenomonon were looking at him strangely. He stopped inquiring, but the names kept coming.
Counting down deaths depressed him, and it terrified him that the name of someone he knew - or his own - might appear on screen. He tried to stay away from the modem, but the addiction was strong. Late one night, for distraction, he ventured into the erotica pages, and there between alt.sex.dogs and alt.sex. kitchen utensils was Myra F. Schwartz in bold face. Frustration gripped him. He moused the little finger over the name and clicked several times. Myra changed colors, but didn't disappear. Worse, her name dropped below alt.sex.nurses. With the name highlighted, he hit the delete button. Nothing happened. He tried the clear command. The name was almost at the bottom of the screen. Furiously he pounded the escape button, and on the tenth punch, the name vanished. He fell back into his chair, vastly relieved, and that night slept soundly for the first time in weeks.
The next day he searched the phonebook for Myra F. Schwartz. When no one answered his call, he went to the address, a condo in Surfside, and inquired of a neighbor who told him that Mrs. Schwartz had suffered a stroke the day before and was rushed to the hospital in grave condition. Miraculously, she had stabilized during the night and was expected to recover.
On the ride home, his excitement almost overwhelmed him. He wondered if he should visit Mrs. Schwartz and suggest his role as her savior, but decided against it. He did take two weeks off from work to explore what he took to be his new mission.
His online bill must be outrageous, he knew, but he now spent hours before the monitor, sometimes falling asleep in its cooling blue glow. If the chance appeared to help another soul escape death, he would be there.
And the chances did come: a young girl's leukemia remitted, the victim of a brick tosser on I-95 was able to come off life support, a city commissioner who'd overdosed on Biscayne Boulevard came out of his coma mumbling about kangaroos, and a couple of other miraculous interventions were made. He didn't know who they were, but he saved them. Then the names stopped.
He waited several days for them to begin again, but they didn't. He couldn't believe that his, well, divine calling had come to so abrupt and inglorious an end.
After many years' absence, he'd started attending church because he felt it was the proper place for people in the savior business to be. As he sat staring at What's Hot on the net, his eye strayed to a church bulletin he'd left on the table. On the back page of the bulletin were mass intentions for the week. He especially noticed the list of the sick. Bringing up a blank screen, he typed the five names across in a straight line. For a while he studied the line, then got out a transparent ruler. One name, Sr. Mary Carty, had dropped slightly below the others. The ruler confirmed it.
He tried different commands to lift the name, but none worked. He highlighted the name against a black background, cut it and pasted it on a higher line, but that wasn't satisfactory. He tried cutting and pasting all the names. Finally he pushed escape several times, and they all disappeared.
That evening he decided to go to mass, but when he arrived the church was locked. A priest was scurrying across the parking lot, clearly agitated, but he paused to answer the man's questions. The church was closed, he said, because an unimaginable tragedy had occurred.
It had begun when Sister Mary Carty, a sweet and godly nun who became ill last week, began to feel slightly worse and was taken to the hospital. There she was resting comfortably when suddenly she began the most fantastic somersaults on the bed. Then - and the priest,two nuns, and several hospital workers had witnessed it - the whole bed turned black for a moment and the dear sister went white as a sheet. Next, she disappeared - disappeared - only to reappear seconds later levitated a good three feet above the bed. The terrified woman crossed herself in every direction and recited Hail Marys at superhuman speed but all to no avail. Minutes later she dropped back to the bed, dead.
But that was not the worst. The four other parishioners who had been mentioned in last Sunday's masses also levitated in their homes at the same moment as Sister Mary and fell dead, too.
The church would remain closed for an indefinite time while the archdiocese and the police investigated. As they spoke, a representative of the Vatican was en route.
Somehow he got home, although through his tears he could barely see to drive. For hours he paced his rooms, disconsolate. At last he seated himself before the monitor and stared into its soft glow almost til dawn. Finally, he wrote his name several times across the screen and pushed escape.
A friend found his body later that morning, collapsed over the keyboard. Paramedics were called, but it was useless. The friend remembered that the man's father had also died of a heart attack at about the same age.
"It's 'em genes, man," said a paramedic. "Ya just can't escape them genes."

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