“Wow, he is better than your father by leagues,” Malcolm said. “Mine too, for that matter.”
Barbara bowed her head in defeat.
“Wait,” I said. “I know what to do.”
“What? You do?” Barbara asked.
I clasped my hands together. “Oh yes. I’ll need your help, though.”
“What do we get out of this?” Malcolm asked.
“The Black Dossier,” I replied. “Which I assume Rosario is decoding now in the background.”
The way their eyes met each other told me everything.
“Damn, you are good,” Barbara muttered.
“I’m used to betrayal,” I said, smiling. “Thankfully, it was for a good cause.”
Barbara lowered her head.
“So, who is up for royally fucking over the bad guys?” I said.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Your plan is terrible,” Barbara said, sitting in the driver’s seat of a flying news van she managed to get past the refugee zone’s guards with a fifty-credit bribe. Man, I’d been overpaying. The thing had been previously covered with graffiti and obscenities, but it was now covered in a dirty white coat of paint that made it look like an affiliate of a substation’s crack news team coming to film some fluff.
Preparations for my plan had taken almost all the time between the time I relayed it to the Turing Society and Zheng Wei’s speech. Still, I was glad I had a plan, even if it was a terrible one. The Society was true to their word and kept me underground—away from Blackbriar the entire time—accepting bribes for false leads the entire time.
The other members of the Turing Society had stayed behind and were going to be helping with my little “stick it to the man” plan from afar. Truth be told, I didn’t want them anywhere near the physical part of it—least of all Barbara. Still, she was going to give me a lift, and I appreciated the chance to spend a little more time with her.
“I know that,” I said from the passenger seat. “Still, I’ve taken chances on worse odds.”
“And if it doesn’t work?” Barbara asked.
“Then it doesn’t work,” I said, sitting back and looking out the window into the rainy Chicago arcology night. “It’s entirely possible the bad guys will win, the good guys will lose, and life will go on the way it always has. It happens all the time.”
“Are we the good guys?” Barbara asked.
“I think what you mean to say is, ‘Are you the good guy’?” I corrected her. “To which I say, no, but who is?”
“You’re a good guy,” Barbara said, blinking rapidly. “Maybe not the hero we wanted, but the hero we needed.”
“I liked Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but honestly couldn’t stand the third movie. Populist rhetoric marred by the fact that the protagonist is a billionaire savior.”
“Look who has gone to film school,” Barbara said, laughing. “Maybe you should make your own movies. Everything put out by the Disney-Fox corporation has been shit.”
I’d thought about that, but I had no talent for anything but killing and lying. “Maybe it’s the fact I have a digital brain that I see everything as movies. However, I’ve always loved them. Just about everything I do when I’m not on a mission is watching them or critiquing them.”
“Eh, everyone’s brain is digital,” Barbara said. “All the universe is information.”
“How’s that go with being a Muslim?” I asked.
“I’m not,” Barbara said, frowning.
“Oh,” I said, feeling like I’d suddenly crossed a line.
“It belonged to a friend,” Barbara said. “I believe in the impermanence of the consciousness and the emptiness of the universe.”
“An interesting way to say you don’t believe in God or Heaven.”
“Why, do you? You weren’t programmed to.”
“Why not?”
“That’s a pretty poor argument.”
“I’m not trying to persuade you,” I said. “It’s not about points of logic or evidence. There’s some for and some against. It’s about feeling. It’s about humbling yourself before the greater universe.”
“That’s a stupid way of living.”
“Is it?” I asked.
Barbara paused. “Maybe not. It’s your life.”
“What happened to your friend?”
“She died trying to do the right thing,” Barbara said. “A fitting epithet.”
“Better than most.”
“They’re all the same to me,” Barbara said.
“And yet it affects you to this day,” I said.
Barbara didn’t answer that. Instead, she asked, “What are you going to do if you manage to pull it off?”
“It?” I asked.
“Viva la revolution,” Barbara said, chuckling without laughter. “You manage to screw over Karma Corp, Zheng Wei, end the nanotechnology plague before it kills millions over the next ten years, kill A, and rescue your girlfriend.”
“Claire isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Isn’t she?”
I turned to look at my daughter. “I lied to her for the better part of ten years.”
“People lie,” Barbara said, shrugging. “They also, stupidly, forgive each other. It’s not like you didn’t forgive Marissa far more than she ever deserved.”
“Well, I’m not now,” I said.
“Now who is lying?” Barbara asked.
“To answer your question, I guess if I manage to succeed in stopping all this, then I’ll go right back to being the CSO unless they fire me. Another day, another credit.”
“Sounds lonely.”
I wasn’t going to lie to her. “It is. I’ve loved three people in my life. S, Marissa, and Claire, to an extent. I could have loved Claire completely, but I hid things from her and manipulated her as well as kept her at a distance. You don’t do that to someone you love.”
“Maybe that’s all people who are in love do,” Barbara said.
I had the suspicion this conversation wasn’t about me anymore. “I take it things aren’t perfect with Rosario?”
Barbara didn’t respond for a minute.
“Ah,” I said.
“No ‘ah’,” Barbara said, shaking her head. “I think she’s a wonderful person, extremely devoted, and she shares a lot of my interests—”
“But?” I interrupted.
“I shouldn’t have tried to make it something else,” Barbara said, sighing. “I was angry and hateful at the world when Aamira—that was her name—died. We weren’t together. I would have if she’d asked, but she wasn’t wired that way. So I used Rosario.”
“Rosario doesn’t seem like she minds,” I said, looking over. “Or is it the fact that she wants more that’s bothering you?”
“Wow, you’re surprisingly good at this father thing. If not for the fact that we’re on our way to meet with a corporate executive to decide the fate of the world, then I’d feel like I’m actually discussing things with a responsible adult.”
“If it’s any consolation, you’re talking to someone who has had no successful relationships in his entire life and who is a professional chameleon. I also don’t have any parents, just creators, so I can’t draw from that experience either.”
“Good to know.”
There was an awkward pause between us as we sat in silence under a police air car. It passed over us and scanned us for over a minute. Faked identification was registered, and they moved past us. The arcologies were becoming more and more regimented as the government removed virtually every restriction on surveillance, drones, and the accumulation of big data. Every single person’s entire life story was recorded somewhere on a computer data drive.
If humanity rendered itself extinct due to plague, war, or general stupidity, then alien archaeologists would be able to reconstruct every detail of our lives from corporate computer records. What we ate, what we watched, what we bought, and what porn we liked. Then they would look over these massive amounts of details and asked why humanity
had accumulated all this data for the purposes of figuring out what to sell people rather than anything useful. Certainly, it was easier to get off the police’s radar than it was the advertising agencies’.
“I dunno,” Barbara said, driving us into the commercial district, where all the productive citizens of the arcologies worked. The massive megaplexes, shopping centers, and office buildings had most of their residences built right into them. Enormous glittering towers rose impossibly high into the air, connected by airway trams that had replaced the subways of old, allowing the citizens to never touch the ground.
Nor to ever escape their bottled universes.
In the ultimate capitalist state, it was funny how much life had come to resemble Soviet Union-esque socialism. You got a job, and it provided you with food, housing, and all other necessities so long as you sacrificed all freedom to your position. If you failed, you were replaced, and the system went on. It was doubly ironic because I wasn’t sure how many people were needed to run most of the corporations these days.
Automation had replaced the necessity for the middle class as well as the poor, except the governments had passed laws tying many of the privileges the corporations relied on to employing people. These employees solely existed to draw salaries so they could buy the products of the megacorporations and actually generate wealth.
It made me believe in Mammon, the demonic personification of wealth, as much as I believed in a Creator deity. Surely, no one could have come up with such a twisted system naturally. It had to be the result of some Sisyphus-like curse on our race.
I shook that thought away.
“I dunno?” I repeated.
“I don’t love her the way she loves me, but friendship and sex—”
“Ehhhhh,” I made an exaggerated wave at that word.
“Really?”
“I’m playing the part of your father here, remember?” I said.
Barbara snorted. “Very well, friendship and comfort are things that aren’t easy to cast aside either. Plus, she’s the world’s greatest hacker and can easily have a drone strike taken out on me.”
“That’s a problem I’ve often dealt with,” I said, looking at my—Daniel’s—daughter. “I can’t help but have an inexplicable attraction to incredibly dangerous women. It means I have to be incredibly charming to avoid being murdered if and when I choose to break up with them.”
“How do you do that?”
“Do you want to break up with her?” I asked.
Barbara stared out the window as we passed under an enormous hologram of the Statue of Liberty hocking lifetime service contracts in the rural regions’ collective farms. “I don’t want to settle, and I don’t want her to settle for me. Yet I’m not sure there’s going to be anything better for me out there, and I might be confused as to what love is.”
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
“Can I get a less religious robot?” Barbara asked.
“Religion? I thought that was from the Dresden Files,” I said.
“Funny.”
I closed my eyes. “I’m not one to give you advice on romance, Not-Quite-My-Daughter. I live with a paid sexual partner in my home like they had in Soylent Green. She seems happy with the arrangement, and I’m not exactly one to complain.”
“Now who is oversharing? I didn’t need to know about your sex slave.”
“She can leave any time she wants to with a generous severance package. It’s in her contract.”
Barbara rolled her eyes. “I liked the Bible passage better.”
I snorted. “Truth is, I think you may be suffering relationship issues because you want to feel like you’re in a great romance but are only getting rather than giving. You may want to try to make Rosario happy and see how that affects things.”
“Wow, you’re taking her side in this?”
“Well, she did hack my brain,” I said. “I’m also programmed to tell you she’s the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. Beep boop.”
“The Manchurian Candidate?” Barbara guessed which movie I was paraphrasing.
“Yes.”
“You owe me a Coca-Pepsi,” Barbara said.
“Those are abominations against God,” I said, pausing. “We must destroy that merger next.”
“I like the Diet Zero Supreme version,” Barbara said as she slowed the vehicle down. We were now passing into a congested area where hundreds of air cars traveled every hour. They were controlled by automation and rarely had an accident, which wasn’t helped along by those who controlled the navigation of said vehicles. “We’re almost there.”
“That we are.”
Barbara blinked rapidly. “I think you should try and make an actual life for yourself. Get some friends who aren’t psychopaths, try to build relationships outside of the company, and maybe live a normal life. You’re not going to last forever.”
“Buddhism teaches there’s no I. It’s one of the reasons a bunch of materialists, which is ironic right there, have embraced it. Quite a few schools don’t believe in the soul at all, but that we’re merely part of a greater universe and have to accept our reunification with it. You know, like Yoda and Obi-Wan believed before they discovered you can game the system and become immortal force ghosts—which I find to be a terrible ending unless there’s a bunch of other people who did.”
“Dodging the question with Star Wars?”
“I had a friend named Gary, one of my few real friends, who couldn’t speak three sentences without referencing it.”
“I know a few guys like that,” Barbara said. “It’s like the Bible of many geeks.”
I closed my eyes. “I’d like very much to be a part of your life, Barbara, if you are willing to let me.”
Barbara crossed her arms, letting the steering wheel move by itself as the automation piloted us toward our destination. “May I ask a question before we part ways, possibly for the last time, since you have an incredibly large number of enemies trying to kill you?”
“That’s Tuesday for me, and sure,” I said.
“Why didn’t you ever try to contact us?”
I was silent for a moment. “You realize I’m a fake, right? A clone of your father’s DNA modified to be able to accept an unlimited number of cybernetic implants without rejection.”
“I also know my father was a psychopath. I know my grandmother programmed you to be like she envisioned her son, though. That you hovered around the edges of our lives through the eruption but without ever visiting or leaving.”
“Assassin. You thought your father was dead. Again, clone. The sheer number of reasons kind of makes this a weird question.”
“What’s the real reason, though?” Barbara asked.
I sighed. “I wanted you to be happy. I don’t make people happy; I make them dead.”
That killed the conversation until we were almost to our destination.
“I’ll try and give it a shot with Rosario,” Barbara said. “She deserves better. So do you.”
“Thanks.”
We didn’t say anything else before I departed two blocks away from the location of Zheng Wei’s speech with a trench coat, a scarf over my face, sunglasses, and a ball cap. It was enough to get past the face recognition cameras until I got creative.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Zheng Wei gave his speech announcing the creation of nanotherapy at the New Dragon Inn Grand Hotel, which was either the best joke ever by an architecture firm or someone really not knowing their Hong Kong cinema. It was a magnificent super-structure that looked very much like the product of someone with severe self-esteem issues. The gigantic black tower rose from the ground. Two giant golden dragons guarded the entrance, flooded by enormous spotlights so bright they were visible from space.
The New Dragon Inn Grand Hotel had its own
sports arena, shopping center, restaurant district, and permanent residences for employees. It was the idea of an arcology within an arcology, creating the kind of place many of its employees would never actually have to leave. Humanity had once been isolated, and the vast majority of people never traveled outside thirty miles of their homes. I couldn’t help but think that was about to happen again.
I didn’t attend the speech in the Coliseum or try to get past his staff in any number of the traditional means I could have: disguises, faked passes, hacking, or even bribes. Instead, I identified who I was, then sat down in Zheng Wei’s penthouse. I ended up eating his sushi platter, drinking his orange juice, and reading Mike Pondsmith’s autobiography on my cell phone.
Zheng Wei’s penthouse was an absolute nightmare from a security standpoint, with massive windows overlooking the Los Angeles arcology skyline. Plus, it was a multi-layer location that didn’t have anything resembling cameras.
Zheng Wei had managed to install a system that deliberately prevented individuals from recording anything, which told me a great deal about where his concerns were. There was plenty of expensive Western art scattered around the otherwise Chinese-decorated location, plus several closed-off rooms where you couldn’t see things. Oh, and the room was soundproof. Seriously, I could have killed him and his security detail without anyone hearing. Whoever he’d hired for his security needed to be fired.
I was trying some fugu while lying back on Wei’s absurdly overstuffed couch when the doors to the massive apartment opened and the man himself entered, accompanied by a quartet of Blackbriar soldiers wearing the same sort of outfits they’d been wearing when they’d attacked me. That answered my question of what idiots he’d hired for his security, but also raised my respect of Blackbriar since they were clearly playing all sides. Alternatively, they were just cashing their paychecks and not coordinating between jobs.
“You!” Zheng Wei said, walking up to me and pointing at me with a single finger as if this were some kind of movie. He had traces of a Chinese accent and stumbled over some words, but I suspected that was deliberate. “You dare come into my home and threaten me? You, a filthy murderer who isn’t even human! You have no idea who you are messing with!”
Agent G: Assassin Page 20