“You called Daniel Gordon a monster.”
“I changed my mind,” Marissa said, softly. “Listen, do you want it or not?”
Okay, that wasn’t suspicious. “I don’t know. More memories would maybe make me more human, but they’re not my memories. They’re the memories of a dead man. I don’t want to become more like someone else. I want to become more like me.”
“We all do,” Marissa said, leaning down to put it away. “We don’t always get the chance, though.”
I wet my lips before stretching my arms out for it. “I don’t intend to die in four years. I’ll find a way to survive. I always do.”
“Case,” Marissa said, giving me the VR equipment.
“What?” I asked, looking down at her.
“You should call yourself Case,” Marissa said, reaching over to put her hand on mine. “It’s a Neuromancer reference.”
I stared at her. “You named me after the basement-dwelling net addict?”
“I thought you hadn’t read those books,” Marissa said.
“My IRD implant allows me vast access to videos, ebooks, and Wikipedia. Apparently, one of my associates is a huge Gibson fan.”
“I see,” Marissa said. “Well, you could—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I like Case. It, unlike G, came from someone I love.”
Marissa looked heartbroken. “Good. Because if you didn’t, I was going for Deckard, and that doesn’t make sense because he was a human.”
“Well, you could have named me Roy,” I said, having a passionate love for Bladerunner. “He was the real hero of that movie.”
“Not this again,” Marissa said, giving a pained chuckle.
“Also, Deckard was a replicant,” I said, smiling. “The cops know they can’t take down Roy Batty’s group, so they reprogram the missing replicant with fake memories and send him off to kill his former fellows.”
“Except that makes no sense. Also, it totally inverts the themes of Roy Batty saving Deckard’s life at… “ Marissa trailed off.
“What?” I asked.
“We’re arguing about a movie on the way to kill our ex-boss,” Marissa said.
“No time like the present,” I said. “We could be discussing what they call a Quarter-Pounder in France.”
“Don’t die on me,” Marissa said.
“Weird you’re focused on that now. After I’m done with this, though, we are talking. At length.” I began the download. “So, Daniel, why don’t you show me how you became the man you were?”
I got more than I bargained for. The first thing to describe was it wasn’t a one-for-one case of me living out Daniel Gordon’s life. No, instead, it was like someone burned a memory into my brain. It also wasn’t actual memories, but a sort of timeline of images that stood out the strongest. I almost ripped the thing off my head, but I found my hands twitching uncontrollably along with the rest of my body. Then I merged with, quite possibly, the evilest son of a bitch who ever lived. Honestly, I didn’t use those words lightly, but the torrent of memories that flooded my brain was a serial killer’s wet dream. Massacres in Iraq. Mass executions in Afghanistan. Torture of prisoners. Rape.
I’d long thought Daniel Gordon had stopped being a scientist in order to pursue a career as a soldier because he wanted to serve his country. Instead, I remembered a bar fight where Daniel had been insulted one too many times and killed the man in the parking lot. That experience had opened his mind to just how much he liked hurting people. Then I remembered his home life. My home life. The two of us becoming one.
Oh shit.
I (Daniel Gordon? Us?) was doing push-ups on the ground while watching Total Recall. The Schwarzenegger one, not the shitty remake with Colin Farrell (Kate Beckinsale’s insane sexpot performance aside). I was in the middle of a beautiful suburban house’s living room with a couch, pictures on the wall of my family, and a Rottweiler sleeping to the side.
Moments later, Barbara Gordon walked in and my thoughts split from Daniel’s. She was a beautiful brown-skinned Indian woman wearing a plaid flannel shirt and a pair of tight blue jeans with no shoes. In her right hand was a white painter’s brush, and there were smudges on her shirt.
To me, Barbara was literally the woman of my dreams. I’d seen her hundreds of times in my false memories, constructed by Rebecca Gordon to make me like her son, and I loved her even though I’d never met her.
To Daniel Gordon, his wife was a convenience and nothing more. A cover for a man who had difficulty fitting into the “normal”, world and which helped distract investigators from believing he was a monstrous psychopath.
“Honey, would you come here and look at the color?” Barbara asked. “I’m not sure this is going to go with the kitchen like I wanted.”
Daniel briefly considered snapping her neck before getting up. Self-control and meticulous planning were the things he’d insisted on in his life. They were the difference between failure and success on the battlefield as well as being a success or a criminal in the normal world.
“Sure,” Daniel said simply. “Though honestly it doesn’t matter to me.”
Barbara rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Daniel, I don’t know what to do with you. You don’t spend that much time here at the house, anyway, so the least you could do is pretend to show an interest in how it looks when you are here.”
Daniel contemplated the best response to make her shut up. “The only thing I care about when I’m here is you and Kathy. Everything else is superfluous.”
In a strange way, Daniel was an even colder fish than I had ever been. I’d been specially created to have a reduced lack of empathy and triggers to things like danger or violence. Being in Daniel’s head, though, was like being dumped into a vat of cold water. Killing people was one of the few things that made him feel anything at all. Everything else, really, was just a measure of pleasure and satisfying basic needs.
To say I was disappointed in finding out this was the man I was patterned after was an understatement. How had he fooled them all for so very long? I could understand Rebecca Gordon, really, as a mother’s love could be blinding, but his wife and child? His father? No, Marcus Gordon hadn’t been fooled. That was why he didn’t care about cloning and resurrecting his son. Hell, that might have been why the old man wanted to atone for his past sins. They had been what had created his son.
“Daddy!” a voice spoke as a little girl with skin similar to her mother ran up and hugged Daniel’s (my?) legs. She was only eight years old, but I recognized her as Kathy Gordon even before I felt her identity. I had dreamed of her every bit as much as I had Barbara and considered her the one good thing I’d done back when I had the illusion of being an amnesiac human. Daniel Gordon’s reaction to her was even more troubling than disgust or hatred to me: indifference.
“Hey, Pumpkin,” Daniel said, using the generic nickname he’d picked out to sound endearing.
Daniel had been interested in the young girl when she’d been born.
She had triggered something inside him for a while, a feeling he didn’t quite understand, but the feeling had eventually passed. Even so, Daniel occasionally pondered running away with her. He didn’t think she’d survive the kind of training he’d have to put her through to make her a real peer. He didn’t feel much, but loneliness was something he grappled with daily: the knowledge that he had met only a few people like him in the military. Some of whom he’d had to kill.
“I’m fine, Dad,” Kathy said, smiling. “We wrote stories today in class.
Do you want to read mine?”
“Sure,” Daniel lied.
The disturbing pantomime of the life I’d always wanted came to a merciful end with the arrival of Colonel Matthews in military fatigues. He was bringing an offer for a special project that would allow him to finally escape this dreadful life. All it would require was him faking his death.
“Gah!” I shouted as Marissa ripped the VR headset off me and I was disconnected from the memories.
�
��G—er, Case—are you all right?” Marissa asked, shaking me.
“Fuck no!” I snapped, choking on my own breath. “Why didn’t somebody tell me that guy was a complete psycho?”
Marissa blinked. “I take it you weren’t dreaming of electric sheep?”
I stared at her. “Not the time.”
“I’m sorry,” Marissa said, blinking. “Maybe we should have tested these memories before you tried to upload them all.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I muttered, feeling infected by the bits and pieces of Daniel Gordon uploaded into my body. In a very real way, he’d been less human than I’d ever been. “You realize he’s not dead, right?”
Marissa hesitated for just a little too long. “He’s not?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “You knew. You’ve always known.”
Marissa didn’t speak.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am,” I said, feeling like laughing. “You really are an amazing liar.”
“Listen—”
That was when the plane started to descend. We were still a couple of hours away from where we were supposed to be, though. Looking over at Marissa, I stood up from my chair and walked to the cockpit. The pilot was slumped over dead, shot in the back of the skull. Autopilot had taken over with the stick moving of its own accord as a droning robotic voice gave instructions.
Immediately, I turned around and walked past Marissa, not pausing to look at the recently fired ARC-7 silencer-equipped pistol hidden behind her chair. Omata Hiroshi was lying slumped over on top of his executive’s toilet, a bullet hole where his forehead used to be.
The sheer randomness of it all overwhelmed me. “I swear to God, is everyone I know actually a psychopath? Am I the good one in this group? If so, we are fucked.”
“There’s a reason for this—” Marissa started to explain.
“Don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t. Just tell me who is waiting for us on the other side.”
Was it the President’s people or the Society’s? I couldn’t say which right now, which said how screwed up my perception of Marissa was.
“Your brother, Daniel,” Marissa said. “He’s the one who sent me the VR unit.”
I stared at her, resisting the urge to state that Daniel was no brother of mine. “You’re kidding.”
She wasn’t.
The jet hit the runway of the private air field we’d been diverted to.
“I’ve just been following a trail of breadcrumbs this entire time, haven’t I?” I asked.
“Not quite,” Marissa said, picking up her pistol and aiming it at me.
“Please come along quietly.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Daniel and his crew were waiting for me outside the plane’s landing zone.
My mouth hung open and my eyes widened as I took in the face of the man I had been created in the image of. There were differences, scars on his cheeks and hands. A smug half-smirk, which I was sure I’d never displayed in my six-year life. His hair was also not dyed blonde, instead being jet black with more than a little gel in it.
He was so distracting with his red shirt, black pants, a leather long coat, and the REM-90 pistol in his hand, a pistol that looked more like a miniature cannon. That was less threatening, though, than the five bulky men in black suits beside him that looked like the Men in Black if they only recruited ex-linebackers. They were armed like it was D-Day in the future with weapons I flat out didn’t recognize.
“Please kindly disarm,” Daniel Gordon said, keeping his gun trained on Marissa rather than me.
Marissa, who had been holding her gun to my back, carefully lowered her weapon before putting it on the ground between us. She wasn’t here willingly, which was an interesting revelation given we’d been on opposite sides of the world from my brother. After she set down her gun, Daniel lowered his own weapon before looking me over. I felt like a prize stallion at a horse show, which was something I remembered Daniel had loved as a child. He’d always been closer to animals than people.
“Hello, G,” Daniel said, smiling. A sincere rather than twisted smile.
“Nice to finally meet you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Illuminati got your tongue?” Daniel asked, chuckling.
“Funny,” I said, faking levity. I knew what kind of man he was and how badly this could go, not that my present situation was all that great. “What’s next, Lizard People? I work for real conspiracies, dammit.”
Daniel raised his pistol. “It’s real, though not so much a conspiracy as simply a law of nature. The rich and powerful will use said riches and power to make themselves more so. You’ve been an enormous pain in the ass for them, getting the International Refugee Society and President Douglas fighting like dogs.”
I shook my head, finding myself wishing I’d been made in the image of anyone else. Did I really sound like this? “I’m sorry, but I haven’t even begun to finish my master plan. I’ve still got to get Russia, China, the European Union, Swiss Bankers, and Majestic-12 involved.”
“Majestic-12 was shut down years ago, they call it Delta Seven now,” Daniel Gordon said. “Strike Force-22 is wasting you, truly. You should come to work for me. You, too, Marissa. It’ll have better job security than working for President Douglas.”
“What, are you going to kill her too?” Marissa said, having a lot more moral outrage in her voice than someone who’d just murdered two innocent men should have. One thing was for sure, though—she wasn’t doing any of this willingly.
“Hardly,” Daniel Gordon said. “Sarah Douglas’ campaign is already doomed, though. Senator Walter Jackson will step down due to a sudden family tragedy, and a third-party candidate will unite the nation. He’s already been vetted and will sweep the polls in an upset victory. President Douglas will end her presidency in disgrace, as leaks of all her corrupt dealings will come out. Not her actual corrupt dealings, but enough.”
“Do I know this candidate?” I asked, not actually all that concerned.
Delphi’s leaks would destroy the power base of whatever conspiracy Daniel was working for.
“Yes,” Daniel Gordon said, smirking. “He was the star of numerous successful movies and runs a hotel chain. Perfect for doing whatever we want.”
I glared at him. “So, what, you’re the agent of the Man?”
“Try not to antagonize him,” Marissa whispered.
“I think you’re past the point of giving me advice,” I said, furious with her. This was her secret? She was working for this psychopath? Son of a bitch.
“I’m sorry, he has my sister,” Marissa said.
I suddenly felt like an enormous dick. “Why should I believe anything you say?”
“Because it’s the truth,” Daniel said, shrugging. “As for who I work for, you know who they are even if you don’t know what they are. All are in the public spotlight, but their influence is impossible to track. I am an agent of the Invisible Hand.”
I snorted. “If you’re going to name a loose collection of billionaires and dictators feeding on society through capitalism, you might as well name it something clever.”
“Precisely,” Daniel said. “The pay is great too. People should do what they love.”
I took a deep breath, wondering how many of the individuals present I could take out before they gunned me down. I was guessing two, assuming I killed Daniel first, which I couldn’t. In a very real way, he was probably the only family I had in the world.
“Your wife and child think you’re dead,” I said, surprised I cared more about that than his promises of a New World Order. “Your mother created me because she was so stricken with grief over your death.”
I didn’t know why I was bothering. Between the two of us, Daniel was the one with bad wiring.
Daniel’s reaction was expected: an indifferent shrug. “My wife and child are better off without me, just like I’m better off without them. They never could understand my taste for the life. Yo
u understand it, though, don’t you? The need to constantly be on the job. The Hand didn’t need much coaxing to get me to fake my own death. I was happy to do it. Hell, most of the time I’m not even in this body. I just broke out this Shell to make sure you recognized me.”
I decided not to indulge the crazy person. “Why do all this? What’s with the theatricality? I would have met with you by myself. I had no idea how much of an asshole you were until I sampled your memories, and I barely skimmed the surface.”
Daniel laughed. “Honestly, I’m here as the cleanup crew. This whole war between the Society and the United States government has been an enormous pain in the ass for my sponsors. Both it and President Douglas failed to remember the first rule: Don’t interrupt the free flow of commerce. I’m going to deal with Nechayev, Matthews, Strike-Force-22, and you. Things will then settle back to normal.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Marissa said, perhaps realizing Daniel had no intention of returning her sister since he’d not even acknowledged having her.
“Oh yes, because you even knew I was alive until a few minutes ago.” Daniel Gordon made a tsk-tsk noise before turning to me. “You were never supposed to get this far, G. No one expected you to do anything but chase after shadows, especially after your big screw-up in killing Marcus Gordon. Thank you for that, by the way. I was never able to bring myself to kill the old man, but his death drove up the price on Black Technology considerably.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, half expecting to be shot any second.
“How did you find out about Matthews, anyway?” Daniel asked. “You were supposed to flail around until the Douglas situation was resolved. Instead, you’ve been hammering the place and making my job of making the International Refugee Society disappear all that much harder. You arriving here is just ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, deciding to lie. “You’ll have to take that up with Persephone and Strike Force-22. They may not know about you, but they know all about the meeting with Matthews. Marissa and I have been coordinating a strike to take you down.”
“Oh, I sincerely doubt that,” Daniel said, pulling out his cellphone with his left hand and showing it to me. A live feed of Japanese television showed that the penthouse had been destroyed.
Agent G: Saboteur Page 16