by Sean Platt
“Maybe Micah is keeping that separate and away from Isaac,” said Kai. “Maybe he wants me for his party, and not Ryan Enterprises.”
“He’d know about the business’s history. The stuff with my father.”
“Which has nothing to do with me.” She felt the need to drive home the point of serving her own needs strictly for the sake of driving it. She wouldn’t do it just for him. Given the circumstances, she simply couldn’t stomach it.
“It sort of does, though. You, me, and Doc. Kate, whatever. What affects one of us affects us all.” He made a twisted mess with all of his fingers, suggesting that their three lives were tied like strands in a braided rope.
“Rachel Ryan would know those things too,” said Kai.
“She’s ancient.”
“That’s rather ageist of you. She wasn’t young once? Maybe she ran the company back in the day. And if anyone has at least your answers, she sounds more likely to me, seeing as it was her father sniffing your daddy’s ass back in the old world.”
“I can’t just go in and see some woman I don’t know and start asking about her family affairs.”
Kai shrugged. “I can’t just go in and see my boss’s brother and ask to swing on his Johnson.”
Nicolai laughed. “That, you definitely can do. I guarantee you Isaac isn’t getting laid. Not in real life, anyway.”
“So I’m supposed to knock him out and rape his brain?”
“You wouldn’t have to. He’d crack like a walnut. You don’t know Isaac, Kai. You know how they tell you that if someone grabs you, you should break out of their grip via the thumb, because it’s the weakest? Well, Isaac is the thumb in this scenario. And that’s true under ordinary circumstances, but he’s especially beaten up now and at an absolute low. He’ll grasp at any lifeline. Now, add the amazing Kai Dreyfus to the equation, and it’s like a sledgehammer versus a grape. Imagine what you, with your unique skills, would be able to get out of him.”
“Maybe you could do the same with Rachel.”
“Come on, Kai. Be serious.”
“I am being serious. Something for something. You want me to go on a reconnaissance mission? Okay, then you do the same. You don’t have to sex her up. I’m guessing it’s like old, preserved documents down there anyway. She’d probably crumble to dust the minute you…”
“Fucking hell.”
“I just mean you should talk to her. And I’ll talk to Isaac.” She emphasized talk to make it clear exactly what was on the table. She watched for Nicolai’s reaction and saw nothing beyond an agreeable nod. Strictly business. It made her want to hit him again.
“Fine,” he said. The way the word came out, she was surprised he didn’t extend his hand so they could shake on it.
She looked at him somewhat sideways. Then, with an edge in her voice, she said, “So if I’m okay with this, you’re sure you don’t mind me doing what needs to be done.”
Nicolai shrugged. “It’s your body.”
“It’s not yours to play with or command,” she said.
“Right.”
She looked again at the bed — neatly made, soft to the touch, and unused despite her hour-plus in his apartment — and wished he’d answered differently.
Rachel Ryan’s thin skin looked like paper. Beneath her frail integument lived a network of blue veins like roads on a map. Her hands were a skeleton’s, her neck all tendons.
By contrast, the old woman’s face seemed noticeably younger and far easier for Nicolai to look at. She’d applied copious amounts of cosmetic powders and paints, and although it should have looked like a macabre artist’s creation, it looked almost natural. Rachel had returned her pale skin to a human tone; she’d given her lips enough color to appear average; she’d somehow smoothed one color into another and left her cheeks with just enough blush to suggest healthy blood flow. Her eyebrows were in place and seemed to be her own. Rather than appearing made up, Nicolai had to admit that her face, taken as a whole, could have been that of any desperately old Directorate woman from the lower end — or certainly one from among the poor Enterprise, where the unenhanced people below the line were lucky to reach one hundred.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rachel said, smiling through very thin lips. “You’re wondering how old I am.”
She slowly crossed her small room in the Alpha Place apartment complex. In concept, the place was a senior center, but in reality it was more like a building populated solely by extremely wealthy older people, all served night and day by well-dressed slaves.
“No, ma’am,” Nicolai answered. He’d been sitting in a chair while a nurse/butler went to retrieve the patient/lady of the house. He stood at her arrival. Nicolai had initiated the gesture as a sign of respect, but it quickly became one of offering assistance. “Can I help you to your chair?”
Rachel stopped and looked Nicolai in the eyes. He took a step back. Her old crone’s smile widened and cracked her lips at their sides.
“I could do a backflip for you right now,” she said. “My bones have been electrochemically replaced with Plasteel and titanium, and most of my muscles swapped with prototype biological motors that my son sends over like baskets of fruit. The problem isn’t me getting to the chair. The danger is what’s left of the real me falling off the frame before I get there.”
Nicolai didn’t know what to say, so he sat back down. Then he watched as slowly, like a person balancing a tray stacked with delicate stemware, Rachel made her way to an antique wood-and-cloth chair and eased herself into it. As she lowered her body using the chair’s padded arms, her limbs didn’t shake. Only her flesh jiggled. Finally, she settled in, rearranged herself with strangely precise, strong movements, and exhaled.
“That’s better.”
“Are you feeling okay, Mrs. Ryan?” It was an awkward sort of question, but Nicolai felt like he had to say something.
“The problem with getting as old as I am,” she said, “is keeping the ghost in the machine. I’ve got something under me that looks like Robocop, but…”
“Robocop?”
The old woman flapped a wrinkled hand. “You’re too young. It was from my day.”
“Oh.”
“I have a frame like a tank, but imagine making a house of cards on top of that frame. It doesn’t matter how sturdy the frame is, see…it can’t make the house of cards any stronger. That’s how it is with me. But you wouldn’t know. What are you, thirty-five?”
“Eighty-seven.”
“Well, that’s how it goes these days,” she said with a sigh that was almost wistful. “About the age of my boys, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but still it’s hard to believe. I looked the way a person is supposed to look at any given age for all of my life. Same as everyone in here, for the most part. What I look like now, there’s no seeming age for it because people aren’t supposed to live this long. I was somewhere around your age before I got my first treatments, but they came too late to turn back my clock. They tell me that nanobots won’t make you young. They can only keep you as young as you already are — or aren’t.”
“They’ll take off a few years,” said Nicolai. But really, that was true of everyone inside the NAU. Whenever Nicolai searched old Internet archives through a Beam emulator, he was always shocked by how old people appeared. Thirty-year-olds looked fifty. People in their sixties looked to be in their eighties. And that was comparing them to the unenhanced poor who hadn’t had any life extension. It was the profusion of ambient nanobots in the air and filtration systems, in-home dust mite scavengers, and fortifications in almost all non-grown foods (and even in plenty of grown foods, thanks to soil engineering) that did it.
“Let’s get this out in the open,” she said. “I was born in 1950. Those were golden years. I grew up with the Beatles and Motown, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. I used to spend my days in malt shops, and my boyfriend had a Ford Fairlane. I watched Friends and Seinfeld when I was older, and by the time the Internet came around, I was already get
ting fed up with kids and their bang-whiz doodads. I thought it didn’t matter. What the hell; who cared if they put a base on the moon? I’d be dead soon.”
Something dry and horrible cracked in her throat, making her catch a long breath.
“Then the chaos hit, and I said it again: Let the world burn; I’ll be dead soon. Eventually, I got cancer. Can you believe that? Goddammit if I didn’t get cancer after cancer had been cured. They said it was too aggressive for treatment and too advanced for the drugs at the time. This was before microsurgery, mind you. But for the third time, I said, ‘Who cares. I’ll be dead soon anyway.’ But then Micah brings me this syringe and says, ‘Ma, this will help you.’ I didn’t care. So the doctors shot me up, and they tell me that those first little buggers went in and assassinated my tumor one cell at a time. It didn’t matter how aggressive or advanced it was. Cancer cells don’t know they should die, and the bots were going in and telling them that they had to. When it was done, the tumor was gone, and then I was the only one left who apparently didn’t know when to die.”
The old woman rearranged herself in the chair, and again Nicolai was struck by her motions. Each shift seemed both easy and painfully uncomfortable at once. He got a mental image of a powerful metal claw attempting to cradle an egg.
“That’s fascinating,” said Nicolai.
Rachel Ryan’s face changed, nostalgic rambling replaced by a harsh, cynical expression.
“Cut the shit,” she snapped. “They told me you were a friend of Micah’s and that you wanted to pay me a visit. That’s absurd. So what the hell are you here for?”
Nicolai watched the woman for a moment, reframing. He’d been lured into thinking he was talking to a delicate old woman who’d lived through plenty and had a tale she wanted to tell. He’d been fooled by the packaging and hadn’t thought to look inside. Now he saw where he was — not sitting in front of a lonely old flower who wished for company and love in her waning days. In truth, he was sitting in front of a spider, its web already spun halfway around him.
“Why is the idea absurd?” he said.
The question was meant to buy him a few seconds. He’d come in with a half-formed idea to tell Rachel that his visit was for medical market research on behalf of Xenia Labs, but he’d never finished the idea for two reasons. One was that he wasn’t medical and didn’t know where to take the scenario if she asked questions. But more dangerously, he now realized he’d made the mistake of assuming she wouldn’t be sharp enough to see right through it.
Rachel gave him a look before answering: “Because Micah doesn’t have any friends.”
Nicolai met her eyes, his story crumbling to dust.
“Micah is a snake, like me,” she said. “If you’re by his side, you’re either a henchman or someone with my son’s knife to his throat.” She gave a cackle and settled back, this time with a motion that seemed filled more with pleasure than pain.
“I just work with him,” said Nicolai.
“A henchman then.”
Nicolai didn’t know what to say next. He didn’t work for Micah yet, but it seemed increasingly likely that he soon would. But as to what his supposed job was, or what errand he was supposedly on? Those questions were blanks. He’d spoken with the house staff as he’d come in and registered as a visitor, and they’d treated him like a dignitary. He’d been thanked no fewer than three times for the visitation. It had quickly begun to feel like an errand of charity first and a reconnaissance mission at an easy, distant second. But all those assumptions had done was to unseat his readiness and make him sloppy.
“It’s not official,” he said. “He just wants me on his side.”
“Obvious. The question is, whether you’re here to help or hinder something he’s doing.”
Something inside Nicolai snapped like a twig. Rachel saw it happen and patted the air with one wrinkled hand.
“Oh, relax. You think I’m going to go running to him? I can take care of myself and make my own decisions. Micah doesn’t run Ryan Enterprises yet.”
“Well, of course, I know that Isaac handles…”
“Isaac’s position is almost honorary. I was talking about me.”
“You?”
“My father started this business,” she said. “It’s mine now. The boys handle the day-to-day, but I’m not giving up my controlling interest before I’m dead. I imagine that will be any time now. It’s okay. I’m ready for Hell.”
Nicolai coughed.
“Not that I believe in Hell. Just in planning for the worst.”
He felt punched, watching the old woman’s slow yet oddly precise movements as she tried to get comfortable. The juxtaposition of frailty and power was disorienting. She looked delicate enough to be undone by a draft or a misstroke of her heart, yet Nicolai found himself walking on egg shells, terrified of blurting something wrong. But then with that thought, something clicked.
My father started this business. It’s mine now.
“Did they tell you my name?” he asked.
“Nicolai,” said Rachel.
“Nicolai Costa,” he finished.
A slow, crawling grin crept across the woman’s ancient features. “Oh. Now I understand. Micah told you, did he?”
“What do you think he might have told me?”
“You’ve watched too many old detective movies,” Rachel said. “I know all the clichés, so here’s another for you: ‘I’ll ask the questions here, mister.’”
“You think he told me about my father,” said Nicolai.
“What else?”
“About his inventions. About how I brought them into the NAU without realizing it.”
Nicolai suddenly realized that he would tell the old woman everything if she didn’t stop him. He’d lost his filter, and his alibi. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up telling her about the trick he and Kai had pulled on her son. A terrible idea because Nicolai was realizing he hadn’t just played the trick on Micah after all. Doc was a threat to Ryan Enterprises, not just Micah. That meant they’d played their trick on Rachel, too.
“My father tried very hard to get those little robots from Salvatore,” she said. “It was a complicated situation. There was only so much he could do because the bots were useless without your father’s knowledge. We didn’t just need the hovertech nanobots. We needed Salvatore, too.”
“We?”
“The company.”
“But you didn’t get him. He was killed.” Nicolai swallowed. “Tell me the truth, Mrs. Ryan. Did your father have him killed?” He felt his heartbeat ramping up at the weight of his request. He’d just implied murder, and he was suggesting very matter-of-factly that her family might have gained its power through violence and duplicity. It wasn’t an indefensible position for Nicolai to hold, seeing as they had.
She shook her head. Nicolai got the impression that she was very deliberately dampening the motors in her neck, so as not to rattle her brain to death inside her reinforced skull.
“No. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Even if it wouldn’t have meant cutting off a source of needed capital — your father’s mind — he wouldn’t have done anything like that. I’m too old for bullshit, young man, so I’ll say it straight: My father built his business through some very lean years using a few sometimes-unsavory tactics. But I can promise you, there is honor among thieves. There must be, or it all falls apart.”
Nicolai’s disbelief must have shown on his face because she followed the pause with more truth.
“You don’t believe me? Think about it then. Your father’s developments were revolutionary, but they were unfinished. We knew about some of the weaponry, but it was only new tricks on an old theme. He could make fancy grenades, but what did it matter? So could our contracts in defense. If Micah hadn’t opened up the north in the ’30s, we’d have found those resources somewhere else. That’s one thing that becomes obvious when you live as long as I have: There is always a way. No, the one thing Salvatore Costa and Allegro Andante had that we couldn’t
replicate were those bots. But not just the bots — it was the way they thought as a group that mattered. That was a model that had been shown to make sense. Just look at what happened in the ’20s with Spooner and his moon project.”
“What about it?” Nicolai knew about the Mare Frigoris moon base, of course. Everyone did. The opening of the base and its dark-side telescope was an international holiday — ironic because the holiday was supposed to celebrate the triumph of worldwide cooperation yet was only celebrated today inside the prosperous NAU. Nicolai had barely been a kid when the base had opened and didn’t see what it had to do with nanobots, the Costas, or the Ryans.
Rachel laughed. “He got the world to do his work for him! Every bolt on that station was designed and architected by someone in a wiki, working for free, from somewhere on Earth. And we thought we understood crowdsourcing before! It was like having a slave force then pocketing the profits and getting everyone to say thank you. Millions of minds tossing their bit into a single, ultra-intelligent brain that was greater than the sum of its parts. Remind you of anything?”
“You mean my father’s nanobots?”
“Them, Crossbrace, The Beam…what doesn’t work like that now?” She put a withered hand to her chest. “My father was a forward thinker, too. He saw what networked intelligence would be able to do in the future. He wanted Salvatore on his side, but Allegro had him locked up. So in the end, if he couldn’t be persuaded to come willingly, Dad had to let him go.” She laughed again. “But you? We didn’t count on you taking Salvatore’s little soldiers through Hell for us. Training them. Forcing them to adapt and grow. By the time you made it to the NAU seven years later, we didn’t need Salvatore to run the nanobots. By then, they were running themselves.”