The Last Exit

by Michael Kaufman

  Odd vibes coming from Jen, as if she was suddenly off balance.

  “Cool, huh?” Zach said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Just maybe?”

  “It was all, I don’t know …”

  “They’re smart, creative, and work incredibly hard.”

  I caught the pulses zapping back and forth as she formulated a joke in response, but these stopped. It was clear she was feeling uncomfortable, as if Zach was yanking her further into a world she was simultaneously fascinated by and suspicious of.

  Boss, it’s 12:55:03.

  “Got to run.”

  We weren’t back on a scooter for even a minute before she asked me who those people were.

  “Zombies,” I said.

  “Oh, funny.”

  “No, that’s what they named themselves. They love all that dead technology on their walls.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea.”

  Zach had already explained and Jen had already bristled at the weirdness of it. It was a co-operative; members owned it together. They shared work, decision-making, and profits. They were linked up with other co-ops, each with a specialty. Korea and China: screens. Chicago: motherboards. One in the Basque region made nano fans and electrical connectors. Ones in Toronto, Stockholm, and Oakland focused on software. Some co-ops had hundreds of members; the Basque ones had thousands. Many were tiny. They shared and traded among themselves and then sold to the public. Their hardware was always a year behind the international giants, but they bragged their software was equal or superior. No advertising, no bloated salaries, no private jets, no payoffs to shareholders, no lobbying, so their machines sold for half the price.

  “When you buy one,” Zach had said, “they quote you a range of prices for each computer or phone and let you decide how much to pay.”

  “And?” Jen had said.

  “Apparently most people opt for the higher end of the range.”

  “Jesus.”

  She hadn’t asked Zach how much he was going to pay for a reconditioned tablet. I didn’t think she wanted to find out.

  We spent the rest of the day slogging through a ton of paperwork from the previous night’s shooting of Delmar and Odette Johnson. Funny that humans keep expressions like that. Paperwork. Maybe they are all nostalgic, like the Zombies. Or maybe stuck on words. Or maybe lazy, and hadn’t found time to come up with a new one. Anyway, Delmar Junior was downstairs in a cell, cooling his heels and complaining about his bandaged hand. It was fifty–fifty whether the charges would be dropped because of the elder abuse he’d suffered from his parents refusal to exit.

  Right before she left for the day and switched me off, Jen opened the top right drawer of her shared desk. One of the entry cards to the Johnsons’ apartment was tucked inside a plastic bag—not evidence of anything, just kept in case we needed to go back in. I saw the word Eden float into her head before she could block me. She picked up the bag and slowly rubbed the slippery plastic over the card. I knew what she was thinking, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  She didn’t seem to like it much either. A lifetime of obedience kicked in.

  She dropped the plastic bag back into the drawer, pushed it shut with the side of her leg, and headed for the exit, where she turned me off for the night.

  * * *

  At 13:19:05 the next day, Captain Brooks appeared at the squad door and tossed nine words into the room: “Joint briefing with drug squad. Top of the hour.”

  Our unit mate Amanda rolled her eyes at Jen and Les and popped a small bubble of pink gum. As Brooks turned to leave, Hammerhead called to him. “Why we’re meeting them again so soon?”

  Jen tensed.

  Brooks turned slowly around and glared at him. “Because I said we are.”

  Lots of good opportunities for me to learn social graces when I work with these folks.

  The drug squad—officially the Narcotics and Illegal Pharmaceuticals Enforcement Unit, but even Brooks isn’t a big enough dick to say that each time—focused on the usual illegals, plus street metaopioids and other meds. It was the latter two that led to meetings with us twice a year. The Elder Abuse Unit wouldn’t be mistaken for social workers, but busting people for possession of a heart medication wasn’t exactly our thing.

  We settled back into work. My people here: Jen, Les, Hammerhead, Amanda, and their synths. Les, full of caution and a sprinkling of camp humor. Hammerhead on the thick side: big thick fingers and a big thick skull that left little room for intellectual wattage, but he’s as soft as a puppy with the old folks. Amanda had been a star in every high school sport ever invented, even if all that was left of those days was the bubblegum she incessantly smacked away on like a first baseman.

  Oh, yeah, there was Brittany. That is, until she got her test results a month ago and took medical leave. She has rapid onset spongiform encephalitis, which is ripping through fifty-year-olds. No explanation of the cause, but heaps of speculation. The chemical soup humans are bathing in? Wi-Fi pumping from every device into every cell? God’s revenge for whatever God should be revenging? Regardless, ROSE is nasty, fast, and slicing away an astounding sixteen percent of fifty- and sixty-year-olds and three and a half percent of folks in their forties. The ones whose parents didn’t exit and so didn’t get the modified treatment, that is. I hope Brittany will make it back.

  At 13:55:48, I reminded Jen we needed to hoof it downstairs to the meeting room. She told the others. Hammerhead said, “Thanks, Mom.”

  Boyden, Gendra, Murph, and the Card were already there when we showed up. Gendra—whom we all call the Starlet—said, “This your idea to waste our time?” She flicked her head to toss a stream of blonde hair away from her face. The Starlet was always flicking her blonde hair this way and then glancing around to see if a casting director had caught her Hollywood moment.

  Les said, “Nah, I just wanted to score some coke from you for the weekend.”

  The Card cleaned his nails with an evil-looking, black-bladed knife and said, “And what? Pay for it with contraband Depends?”

  Amanda blew a pink bubble that expanded until it popped like a firecracker.

  Murph said to Jen, “How’re you enjoying probation?”

  Jen said, “How’re you enjoying being an asshole?”

  Murph said, “Make nice, Jenny. You wouldn’t want any of us complaining about you, would you now?”

  There’s this thing humans do that reminds me of dogs baring their big yellow teeth at each other to show how fearless they are, and then sniffing each other’s asses to show they’re cool with whatever goes down. Mainly men, but women in places like this are in the game too.

  Brooks came in, tailed by a uniformed woman with lieutenant stripes and hair so flaming red I thought Brooks had set her on fire. Next came two men decked out in suits, one seersucker blue, one gray—the suits, not the men. Gray Suit must have been in his fifties, Seersucker younger.

  Catch that, Jen said. These days, few men seemed ready to sweat it out in a suit jacket, although Seersucker’s had the more ordinary short-sleeve jacket. And ties. Just about never see that.

  They sat down without introducing themselves.

  Captain Brooks tried to sound at the top of his game. He gestured toward the woman. “Lieutenant McNair is from headquarters. Our colleagues here are from the DEA. They want to—”

  Seersucker Suit cut him off. “I wouldn’t quite put it that way.”

  Brooks hadn’t yet put it any way.

  “We’re hoping to have an informal chat,” Seersucker continued. “We’re doing the same with key people like you in all the stations. Uh, I wonder if you folks wouldn’t mind turning off your phones.”

  I’d once met a synth who worked with a guy like this. He was the type who wore fluffy blue mittens with a couple of steel-gray crowbars tucked inside. It never took long before the mittens came off. Seersucker’s aw-shucks request was delivered with a certainty that this wasn’t negotiable. Everyone took out their phones and swit
ched them off.

  “And I understand all of you here have AI.”

  How does this guy know? Jen said to me.

  We all looked at once to Brooks, who seemed equally surprised.

  Brooks said, “Can’t do. They’re punched in. On the job.”

  Lieutenant McNair spoke for the first time. “Then turn off their comm function. Think your boys and girls can handle that, Captain?”

  I’ve never heard a lieutenant put down a captain. A new damn thing every day around here.

  She turned to us and said, “That’s an order from my inspector.” And she shot her gaze back at Captain Brooks. Boss dog had barked.

  Captain Brooks looked away. He ran his thumb over his scar.

  Then Seersucker Suit got all warm and fuzzy again and uttered a few more hush-hush words about what’s said in this room stays in this room—“That sound alright with you?”—and turned to Gray Suit.

  Gray Suit was rather extraordinary. Where Seersucker had the regulation clipped hair and McNair’s had edges that could slice your hand off, Gray’s hair—the same color as the matte-gray gun we’d snatched off this Italian guy thirty-four days ago—was fashioned into a short, intricate braid that reached his suit jacket. His face was completely tattooed with black geometric patterns. He seemed completely at ease. He was a big man, not particularly tall, but about as wide as an industrial refrigerator. He had surprisingly well-kept hands, manicured nails and all. They rested on the table, folded like he was a mortician at a Thanksgiving dinner and ready to lead us in prayer.

  How old? Jen asked me.

  Hard to tell with the tattoos. I studied his eyes, but his irises were so dark and deep it was like trying to spot a black rattlesnake on a moonless night.

  How old? Jen asked again.

  Not sure. Mid-fifties.

  He spoke.

  Where’s he from?

  Maori. New Zealand. South Island. With a whisper of a Swiss-German accent.

  As he talked, his calm gaze rested on each man and woman for one short sentence before moving on to the next, like he was an automatic shooga-shooga-shooga lawn sprinkler that dispensed quiet authority instead of mere water.

  “Thank you for taking time to meet with us.” His eyes moved to the next person. “Something new is hitting the streets.” Next person. “We need to stop it before it gets a foothold. In fact, we need to stop it before any more people hear about it.”

  There was no drama in his delivery. His very presence assured you he was expressing an undebatable truth.

  “It appears that someone is producing a highly restricted pharmaceutical.”

  His calm eyes met those of each woman and each man.

  We waited.

  “We’ve had reports that someone is manufacturing and distributing a counterfeit version of the treatment,” he said.

  Even his calm authority couldn’t stop the room from blowing up. For the Big Pharma consortium that produced it, the longevity treatment in both its original and stripped-down forms was a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It was also enormously complex to produce. This wasn’t a drug you fried up in your basement—a hundred university chemistry labs couldn’t come anywhere close. Knowledge and expertise were compartmentalized among the companies, giants like GPRA and Xeno/Roberts/Chu. Each was responsible for separate compounds and parts of the process. Technical secrets were also compartmentalized, and closely guarded. The steps carried out in the United States or France, China or England, India or Switzerland, were a complete mystery to the other partners. Each batch had an individual protein marker and could be traced. Raw materials, machinery, compounds, and the finished product were handled by a secret and frequently rotated fleet of planes and trucks. Only three clinics in all of the US dispensed the full treatment, and even the modified treatment was administered in heavily guarded clinics. To imagine someone having the knowledge or ability to replicate the treatment was impossible. Even imagining someone busting into the distribution process in anything but a one-off seemed impossible.

  Gray Suit listened to the volley of questions. He didn’t interrupt anyone even as everyone interrupted each other. But when he said, “Let me try to answer,” a hush blanketed the room.

  “No, we have no samples. The rumors point to an abbreviated version of the treatment, like the one that goes with exit, but we cannot be certain. The first report came from Richmond three weeks ago. The second report was from here two weeks ago.

  “We have no leads. So far, nothing has popped up on social media. No telephone echoes. Nothing but rumors.

  “We’re moving quickly. As of last Wednesday, we’ve had an interagency task force. As you can see, I’ve been liaising with DEA—”

  He’s not drug enforcement.

  “—and many others. We mean to stop this.”

  Jen raised her hand like she was a school kid.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve heard stories not really about this, but someplace called Eden. Is there any chance this is connected?” Jen forced herself not to look at the captain, certain he’d be glaring at her.

  Gray Suit said, “We’ve heard those stories too. Anything is possible, but those are fairy tales. This just might be real.”

  He looked around the room, his eyes targeting each person in turn.

  “And please remember, we don’t want you mentioning this to anyone. Not your mother, husband, wife, fellow officer, barber, or priest.”

  The Starlet said, “Why not?” She didn’t even bother flicking her blonde hair away.

  He smiled slyly. “Because I don’t ask questions like that to the person who gave me the order.”

  The Starlet persisted. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. How will we hear anything?”

  Lieutenant McNair spoke. “You will listen. You will watch. You on the drug squad will ask your snitches if they’re hearing about anything new. You abuse people will watch for unusual behavior.”

  She turned to Gray Suit.

  He looked at his watch.

  Meeting over.

  Ten minutes later, Jen and I went upstairs to Captain Brooks’s office, didn’t find him there, and returned to the meeting room. We were just around the corner when we heard the door open. She stopped.

  We heard Gray Suit speaking, his voice not loud, as if he’d turned back into the room. But it was distinct enough to hear.

  “Do we have to worry about the woman?”

  Captain Brooks’s response was louder, as if he was facing the door. “Which one?”

  We couldn’t clearly make out Gray Suit’s reply, but it seemed to be, “Who asked about Eden.”

  Captain Brooks dropped his voice. “Jen Lu? She’s nothing. Absolutely fucking zero.”

  My boss tumbled into a black hole.

  6

  It was nighttime in Washington, DC, and here are some of the things that were happening.

  Zach was leafing through a greenhouse catalog while sketching a garden plan for one of his clients. He pushed his thick hair out of his eyes. His sketch was neat, his work meticulous, in a way that spoke of care rather than obsession. But his mind kept wandering. He set down the catalogue and picked up a bestseller about quantum physics, something he knew nothing about but figured he should learn. It was in German, one of three languages he learned for the hell of it back when he was an undergrad. But focusing on this was even more hopeless than his gardening, for although his eyes followed the text down the page, he took in absolutely nichts. His mind was stuck on his parents.

  * * *

  Raffi and Leah were on their rooftop under a string of glowing white lightbulbs, snuggled side by side on vastly overstuffed cushions, reading and drinking iced tea. Leah said, “This is lovely, isn’t it?”

  Raffi tucked a finger inside his book to hold his page and sat up so he could look at her.

  “I’ll miss this,” she said. Then she laughed. “Except I’ll be dead, so I won’t actually miss anything.” A solitary tear slid down her fa
ce.

  Raffi reached out and took her hand in his.

  She attempted a smile, but it only flickered at the corners of her mouth and came off as a grimace. “To know the day of your death. It isn’t very good, is it?”

  “Would you like to do something? Go somewhere?”

  A whole service industry catered to people like them. Exit trips. Exit ceremonies. Exit parties. Exit counseling.

  “Why?”

  “See something we’ve always wanted to see?”

  “And spend the money Zach will need?”

  “He wouldn’t mind, not one bit.”

  “But we have all this.” She gestured at their rooftop deck and the house below. She waved at the night. “We have each other. Anyhow, what would it matter if we were to finally see the Grand Canyon? We’ll be dead in six months and five days. We have a hundred and eighty-five nights left. We’ll take out the trash twenty-four more times. I might read a couple dozen books. I’m on my final toothbrush. We will never have grandchildren. We—”

  “Leah, don’t. We have our home and we have our son. We have each other. And we have life.”

  “For now.”

  “We can change our minds.”

  “And Zach?”

  “He and Jennifer can live with us. It would be crowded, but there are worse things.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  She meant Zach’s health—so many people in their fifties, dying from ROSE.

  All this was a pretend conversation. They had agonized, they had differed, they had ranted and raved, but they had made their final decision months ago. This time, it was Raffi who pulled them back to reality.

  “Leah, I’ll love you forever.”

  “You’ll love me for a hundred and eighty-five days.”

  “Then that will be our forever.”

  * * *

  A mile or so away and over on 14th, Les and Christopher were watching a movie and eating chocolate chip cookies that Les had just baked. “Slightly overdone,” Les said.

  “No, they’re perfect,” Christopher replied.