Post-Human 5 Book Boxed-Set: (Limited Edition) (Plus Book 6 Preview Chapters)

by David Simpson

  “‘You have no idea how lucky you are, Sherlock,’ Dee told me, and there was something in his tone that made me believe every word—like he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘You’re so close to being dead—just the decision of one man is all that separates you from being less than a memory. Disappeared. Erased.’”

  “I couldn’t respond if I’d wanted to, but I’m kinda glad for it—those guys were not messing around—there was no one to stop them if they wanted me gone. For the first time, I realized they were truly willing to kill me if I didn’t play ball.”

  “Dee watched me on the ground for a little while, just trying to keep breathing, unable to move as I focused my attention on not passing out. He didn’t smile, but it was clear that he savoured my silence. ‘When you’re finished being a candy-ass, get the hell up. The man who saved your life—the only guy who cares if you live or die—and just barely—is waiting to meet you.’”

  16

  “I crawled on my hands and knees over to that Escalade. In my memory, I can still feel the pebbles and stones cutting my knees like it was a minute ago, but I was too woozy to stand and end the pain, and I believed Tweedle Dee when he said I was walking the knife’s edge between living and dying—they meant business.”

  “The blood was dripping rhythmically, little drops like a light rainfall, caking themselves into the dust at the side of the road. I was leaving a trail, but I could hear Tweedle Dee wiping it away with his combat boot behind me, erasing the evidence of any foul play, and the evidence of my existence, one bloody hand print at a time, that pesky tell-all DNA buried under the dust. He was a pro, all right. He was a pro.”

  “I made it to the back car and pulled myself up by grabbing the bumper, leaning against steel that was rapidly cooling in the absence of the sun, and then I limped forward to the back door. I was starting to seriously question whether Tweedle Dee had fractured my femur. I reached for the door-handle.”

  “‘How do you know he’s in there?’ Dee grunted. ‘I didn’t tell you which car he was in.’”

  “I was barely able to turn enough so that one tear-filled eye could lock on him. ‘Y’all are so super secretive, you wouldn’t put the head honcho in the middle car. That’d be too obvious. Y’all are too clever for that right?’”

  “He didn’t like that. His nose curled as his face formed a sneer.”

  “I don’t know why, but I wasn’t done pushing buttons. ‘If you wanted me to get into either of the other two, you could’ve told me–you didn’t—so I used the limitless power of my mind to work it out. I know it’s a faux pas to think for yourself, but, you know, I guess it’s a character flaw I have. It keeps me up some nights. I’m working on it.’”

  “He really didn’t like that. He kicked me in the back of the left thigh, just hard enough to make absorbing it without dropping to the ground impossible.”

  “‘Elementary for a genius like you, I guess?’ he said before he reached with his gloved hand for the handle of the back door and opened it. Then he reached down and grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt, pulled me up with one hand, and forced my face onto the floor of the Escalade.”

  “I rolled over and looked up at him. ‘You’re the worst chauffeur I’ve ever met,’ I said.”

  “‘Don’t hit him again,’ said the head honcho in as disinterested a voice as he could feign—being disinterested was part of his commanding pretence—I saw right through it.”

  “Dee did as he was told, scooped up my ankles like I was a damn wheelbarrow, and dumped my legs into the vehicle.”

  “‘Did you enjoy that?’ the disinterested voice asked. I wasn’t sure who the question was directed at until Dee answered.”

  “‘It’s a start, sir.’ Then I felt him and his over three hundred pounds of body weight and armour get into the vehicle, causing it to dip as he closed the door and positioned himself in a seat near me. ‘Please let me know if you need me to do some permanent damage. I can be bothered.’”

  “A second later, the vehicle pulled hard to the left and accelerated, telling me that it was now racing to the front of the three-Escalade-caravan. The g-forces kept me from even trying to roll over to start the process of getting up."

  “In a matter of just ninety seconds, I’d had my face slashed badly enough to need nine stitches to close the wound, and my legs, though unbroken, had pinched nerves in each of them that would keep me from walking another step under my own power for the next three days. It was clear that the objective was to break me down and humiliate me in front of the king—to make me bow to whoever he was.”

  “‘Violence is a means to an end. You sent your message to him. I’m hopefully we’ll be all done with that now.’ The words were slightly muffled. I heard a Zippo lighter open. A couple of seconds later, I smelt the cigar.”

  “I managed to roll over just enough to see three familiar faces looking down at me.”

  “One was Aisha, no longer smiling—she’d failed in her objective. Hell Hath no Fury like a flunky who was supposed to use her sex appeal to make me roll over and beg for a tummy rub.”

  “The second was Dee, staring at me like a mad dog, dying to maul me some more but being held back on his leash by an unforgiving master.”

  “And the other face—a master’s face—was smiling. He seemed amused—amused by his triumph—amused by the absurdity of my current horizontal configuration—and amused that I was almost literally under his boot. ‘Hello down there, Captain Conrad Paine. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.’”

  “I didn’t reply. The interior of the Escalade had been converted into a conference configuration, with the head honcho and Aisha’s seats facing opposite Dee’s—there was one empty spot beside him that was clearly waiting for me to drag myself up to occupy. With every bit of strength I could muster in my arms, I did a push up and tried to roll back onto my nearly paralyzed legs so that I could crawl onto the seat to oblige, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “‘Help the poor chap, will ya?’ the master said. ‘For Christ’s sake, he’s a serviceman. You should have a dollop of sympathy.’”

  “Dee grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt again and pulled me up and into the seat, and though he was rough, I couldn’t help but appreciate the help—I don’t think I could’ve made it up on my own.”

  “‘Empathy,’ I said weakly.”

  “‘Come again?’ the master asked.”

  “‘If he identifies with me because we’re servicemen, then empathy is more correct than sympathy.’”

  “‘Is that right?’ the master replied—I think he was bemused.”

  “‘He does that,’ Dee grunted, a little bubble of brewing glee behind the words—I think he got excited at the prospect of hitting me again.”

  “‘Yes he does,’ Aisha echoed, clearly tired of me.”

  “I didn’t speak again. I wanted to see how the master would react—I wanted to know if he had the stomach to sit there while an innocent man was beaten in front of him.”

  “He didn’t take the bait. ‘Get something for his face too, dear,” the master commanded Aisha as he pointed to the gash on my cheek. She grabbed a handkerchief from her suit pocket and was about to hand it to me before he stopped her. ‘Soak it in a bit of that whiskey,’ he suggested as he pointed to the bar next to her. While she soaked the rag, the master addressed me. ‘You know who I am?’ He laughed before I could even respond. ‘Of course you do. Who am I talking to? You’re a bright kid. Brightest of the bright they tell me.’”

  “He was right. I didn’t need to confirm it. I’d seen him on television more times than I could remember, even back then. He was a star senator, a ham for the cameras, an obvious future presidential candidate, and a man who was always, always focused on himself. I don’t know if he was as big a fixture—as big a pain in the ass—in your universe as he was in ours, Doc, but Senator Morgan owned the government in our reality, even back then.

  “What?” Old-timer immediately—almost involuntarily—interrupted aft
er fruitless seconds of trying to process what he’d heard. “Did I hear that right? Morgan?”

  “Yeah,” Paine replied. “Heh. Famous throughout the multiverse, is he?”

  “Maybe—if we’re talking about the same guy,” Old-timer replied. “Are you talking about William J. Morgan? Senator from—”

  “That’s the one,” Paine confirmed before Old-timer had time to finish his sentence. “He’s a son-of-bitch in your universe too?”

  “I-I…” Old-timer could barely fathom what he was hearing. “Morgan devoted his life to preventing strong artificial superintelligence,” he thought to himself. This didn’t square. “Yeah. I’m confused. Why did he save your life? What was his angle?”

  Paine took a moment to consider this. Before he could answer, Samantha jumped in and answered for him. “Power. It’s always power with him.”

  Paine nodded, agreeing with her assertion, and then continued with his story, seemingly confirming that Samantha’s explanation was entirely correct, and no further elaboration was necessary.

  “Aisha handed me the handkerchief. I put it to my cheek; the whiskey stung like hell and the handkerchief wasn’t anywhere near enough to stop the bleeding, so I just pushed hard against the wound and let the blood coat my fist like a glove while I tried to refocus my eyes, straining them as I looked across the interior of the Escalade at Morgan—I was badly concussed.”

  “‘Let’s get the obvious point out of the way,’ he said; then he took a second, plastic-wrapped cigar out of a gold case that he returned to his breast pocket before unravelling the plastic of the cigar. ‘You’re the Director of Oversight for the V-SINN project. You won’t turn down the job because you can’t. But for the sake of argument, let’s say, you did try turn us down. This is what will happen: your Rhodes scholarship disappears. That happens with a phone call. A rather damaging phone call, I might add—the kind you can’t come back from. Maybe you lied on your original application to Columbia?’ he suggested, shrugging as he held the half-unfurled from the plastic cigar in his hands while he seemed to come up with ways to ruin my life off of the top of his head—it was like improvisational life destruction. ‘Maybe we strongly suspect you of raping a fellow soldier during your training? Eventually, we’ll find an appropriate victim—someone we can leverage to come forward and relate all the sordid details to the authorities.’”

  “Then he smiled—the son-of-a-bitch smiled at me. As though he was an artist and destroying people was his art form—he should’ve been world-renowned for how easily the muses spoke through him.”

  “‘It doesn’t matter which of the myriad of ways we could do it,’ he told me, ‘just rest assured that we’ll make sure you can’t qualify for any scholarships or any schools for that matter for the rest of your life—those dreams will be gone.’”

  “Then the son-of-a-bitch got really dark. His eyes went from amused to threatening—eyes that only a man who has made good on worse threats before—the eyes of a man who has taken a life—and is daring you with his glare to test his words. ‘It gets even better. If you were to defy me, which you obviously won’t, you’d be in Afghanistan next week. And the best part? Your new job would be to sweep for improvised explosive devices. We’d use your extensive robotics experience, in addition to your newly discovered reprehensible personal conduct, as our cover story to explain how an AirForce Captain is suddenly leading a team of grunts on daily missions to find and deactivate IED’s. If you survived, and that’d be a mighty big if—I saw pictures of the aftermath of an IED that turned an eighteen-wheeled heavily armoured vehicle into junk metal and blew the son-of-a-bitch right into a tree, heh…’ he took a moment, shook his head at the memory before adding with a mock pouting of the lower lip: ‘God bless the poor grunts who were driving it. As I was saying, if you survive, you’ll come back with TBI. Insidious little acronym—insidious little euphemism. Do you know what it stands for, Captain?’”

  “I knew. ‘Traumatic brain injury.’”

  “He smiled. Again. ‘That’s right. Imagine it: repeated concussive blasts tear through your entire body, ripping you to shreds on a microscopic level, dozens of times more violent than what a boxer or even an NFL quarterback would experience—scrambling you irreversibly from the inside. Oh, you might survive that assignment, but you won’t come back you. The trusted roadwork of neurons and the neurotransmitters that use them to power that magnificent brain of yours will never be the same—never so efficient. You’ll forget words, faces, memories, oh and the moods—the anger, fury, depression, oh my. You’ll become so twisted that your closest friends, your own family, even that mother of yours in Ohio who loves you so much and who will no doubt depend on you for many, many years to come when her post-polio syndrome finally overwhelms her, won’t recognize you.’ He leaned forward as he finished unfurling the plastic from the second cigar. ‘And if you tell anyone—try to become a whistleblower—go to the press? We’ll arrest you. We’ll find you guilty of treason. And we’ll put you in a hole and forget where we put the hole.’ Then he leaned forward, and the amused smile vanished. ‘And believe me, if you tried to run, you’d become the intelligence service’s most wanted man. We’d find you, and we’d kill you. The best you could hope for is a few years living a tortured life, suffering from traumatic brain injury somewhere in South America or Southeast Asia, while we paint you as an anti-American villain, all while your poor mother watches it unfold on television.’”

  “Dee chortled at that. I could tell the idea appealed to him on a deep level—it wasn’t healthy.”

  “I sat there in a puddle of my own blood, still suffering from having had my brain scrambled one time too many, and kept my mouth shut. I was trapped. You know me, Doc. I hate being told what to do. I hate having a master. But that son-of-a-bitch owned me. He knew it, I knew it.”

  “Then the darkness in his eyes lifted, an almost cordial light returned and he handed me the cigar. ‘Of course, we both know none of that is going to happen. Here. Take it.’”

  “Like a dog futilely resisting its master’s leash a moment before knowing it would give in, I didn’t take the peace offering. I just stayed frozen, holding the cloth to my bleeding cheek like a fool.”

  “The corner of Morgan’s mouth turned to the side in a smirk. He regarded Dee for a moment, then his eyes darted back to me.”

  “‘You know, once I told them I didn’t want you dead, the conversation inevitably turned to how badly injured they’d be allowed to render you. What you’re experiencing now, is level one,’ he told me as he pointed to the gash on my cheek. ’Level two is breaking your ribs. Of course, I told them I didn’t want your ribs broken, because I wanted to smoke a cigar with you…’ He trailed off and gestured to the cigar again. I didn’t need to look to my side to see Dee—I knew he was breathing down my neck like the animal he was—the threat landed. I took the cigar.”

  “‘There,’ Morgan said with a satisfied lilt in his voice, almost as though he were singing the word. He turned to Aisha and announced, ‘Spirit officially broken. See? Not so hard.’”

  “There was a hint—just a hint—of sympathy when she said to me: ‘It didn’t have to be this unpleasant, you know.’”

  “Heh. I knew. I knew. But even then, I was a son-of-a-bitch. You know how it is—young men want to fight the whole world. I was starting to realize that I needed a new strategy…if I wanted to live.”

  “‘Well,’ Morgan began, ‘the unpleasantness is over now. He’s going to learn he’s our friend. He’s going to be grateful that he just made the best friend he ever could in the world.’ He turned back to me as he adjusted himself to get comfortable, leaning back in the leather of his seat, left arm resting on the top of the seat behind Aisha, while his right hand drew the cigar away from his lips. ‘Now, I’m told you have uncanny powers of perception,’ he said to me. ‘So tell me, considering that I know full well that smoking causes lung cancer, that it prematurely ages the skin, not to mention that the second-hand smoke is r
epugnant to most people, why do I choose to smoke them?’”

  “I didn’t feel like solving a riddle. ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?’”

  “‘No,’ he said. He was being patient, but he was assertive—commanding. I knew I wouldn’t get the chance to refuse a second time. ‘Sorry, you have to indulge me. Remember: I’m your friend.’”

  “I’m your friend. I’d never considered that those words could sound threatening—but I suppose context is everything. I could feel Dee shifting, getting ready to butt-end me with that heavy gun of his somewhere—somewhere that’d be real bad for me—somewhere that would keep me from breathing for a while. Reluctantly, I played the game, though only half-hearted at first. ‘Display of wealth. Status. Powerful. Whatever.’”

  “He shook his head. ‘No, no.’ He pulled his zippo lighter from his pocket and flipped the lid open. ‘Close, as they say, but no…’ he looked down at the cigar, ‘well, you know the rest. Come on now, Conrad, you can do better. Think about it.’”

  “So I did. I did the thing I didn’t know how not to do—the thing that came so naturally to me. It wasn’t like detective work for me—it wasn’t piecing together a puzzle—these powers of perception, as he called them, were part of me the way breathing is a part of me—I couldn’t shut it off if I wanted to. So as much as I didn’t want to play, I looked at him, smoking that cigar, leaning back like the fattest of the fat cats, the smoke floating around him like a protective shroud, and the answer flashed before my eyes. ‘Contemplation.’”

  “His eyes went wide. Then he grinned. I knew I’d given him the answer he wanted, but he wanted more. ‘Elaborate, would you?’”