The Man Who Wouldn't Die

by A. B. Jewell

  “Who?”

  “Early artificial-intelligence program.”

  Heavy, real, I thought. No BS here.

  “So you and Captain Don came up with the Spirit Box. Somehow it keeps the brain alive, or immortal, is that it?”

  “It’s not that hard, see.” I didn’t see but it was almost like he wasn’t talking to me anymore. His eyes had glazed over. “The brain is circuitry, it’s a motherboard, electricity lighting up connections. It’s the Internet, basically. It’s an algorithm. It’s just math!”

  “Who are you trying to convince? Me, or yourself?”

  “Think about this: we can already rebuild the body, parts of it anyway, and now, with the Spirit Box, we aimed to copy and replicate a person’s essence—like giving them a new hard drive. You follow?”

  “I guess I don’t.” I found my thoughts drifting to Terry, the only person who made me feel there wasn’t a single sacrifice too big. I could understand the terror this guy must feel at the loss of his wife.

  “People aren’t that complicated. We are predictable. Unique, maybe, but predictable, that too. It’s why artificial intelligence works. It was what Eliza showed.”

  “That program you were talking about.”

  He nodded. “Human beings can be replicated. We tend to say the same things over and over again. If we can map that program, we can copy it, completely.” Now he looked me dead in the eye. “We were this close. And then . . .”

  I waited for him to finish.

  “Don got sick. He had something or other, wouldn’t say what, exactly. It’s something or other that’s gonna get you eventually, was all he’d say. I guess I didn’t realize the extent of it. He started acting weird, weirder than usual.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He was spending time tinkering with the Spirit Box, said he was onto something.”

  “Tinkering? Like perfecting?”

  No answer.

  “You guys were spending a lot of time together, that’s what his daughter said, Mrs. Donogue.”

  “Yes,” he said absently. He was looking at the fish again. I watched him watch the dolphin swim one direction, then turn and swim the other. Then it swam high to the surface and I could see it jump out of the water and flip.

  Flip.

  Shit, that gave me an idea. Flippers. Where had I seen the name: Flippers?

  Suddenly there was a sound of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the U2 song. Klipper reached to his belt and looked at his phone.

  “Ha,” he said, bemused but distant. “Long after I’m gone, my ringer will still be working.”

  “So do you believe that Captain Don got the Spirit Box working and he’s . . . out there? What does that even mean?”

  From his belt, his phone barked: new voice mail. He pushed a button to ignore the message and he walked over to the table on the wall with the models of the yachts. He seemed to want me to follow him. A second later, we stood by the ships, intricate, extraordinary models.

  “I assume you know how I made my money?”

  “The fast-food thing.”

  “Right, decent idea, but nothing extraordinary. Pictures on cash registers. Anyone could’ve thought of it and maybe some others did before me. I just happened to get the patent. So I get a hundredth of a cent every time someone pushes the french fry picture. Double that on burgers but that’s because the picture turns out to be more complex, depending on the cheese factor, lettuce, tomato, etcetera. And I tossed in shakes for free in the settlement. Anyhow, then I took my winnings and parlayed them into various investments.”

  “Anything else you want to confess?”

  “Yeah. I’m not the brains. Rather, I wasn’t the brains, not of the Spirit Box. Don. He was the one. He could’ve made it so. And now he’s gone. Er, gone-ish.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure. He’s been sending messages, so says his daughter.”

  “Meaning you think he’s . . .” I looked for the word.

  “Maybe he figured it out after all. Maybe he’s . . .” He looked at me. “You know he was smiling when they found him—on the road.”

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  “It was like he’d figured something out and he was taking his last ride.”

  As I chewed on his thought, the Shipper directed his gaze downward, seeming to look hard at a four-foot-long yacht model with tiny words etched on the stern: Infinite Quest. “Guess what this cost?”

  “The model? Fifty grand?”

  “Model? Hell, no. This is no model. This is a genuine yacht. The smallest on the planet. I’m the first guy to go tiny with yachts. Most of those guys, like Epperson and Jango, the new money guys, they tried to best me for the biggest yacht. Let them have it. They can’t touch this for innovation.” He fingered his tiny boat. “It has twenty-seven bedrooms, fifteen plumbed bathrooms, two chef’s kitchens, and does fifty knots.”

  “But no one can use it.”

  “That’s what they said about Snipchap, and it went huge. The bigger problem is keeping it from getting eaten. But we’ll solve that.”

  “When I came in, you said you were expecting me, Mr. Klipper? Why was that? And why did you look around like bad guys might be out there?”

  “Cost me twelve million. I’m more proud of this than I am of Speak Freely or the Lone Shark.”

  “The what?”

  “The world’s most medium-size yacht.” Something came over his face, a return to the moment. “Fitch, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “About what?”

  “Tess Donogue told me you’d come by, told me you’d want to know about the Spirit Box and Don. But I don’t know what to tell you. I was as anxious as the next guy to get it finished and I was pushing Don to do it. But he was, as they say, the captain, and I was, at best, first mate. Yeah, I’m the guy who put the pictures on the fast-food registers, but Don came up with the proverbial Big Mac.”

  “Speak English.”

  “I can’t help you,” he said. He looked so tired, desperately weary. “I’ll see you out.”

  Nineteen

  I HEARD THE DOOR close behind me and I turned and pushed it back open—gently—before it could click locked.

  “You forgot something?” the Shipper asked.

  “The Spirit Box—do you actually have it? Is it a thing?”

  He smiled, almost kindly. “You’re catching on. No, it’s not a physical thing. It’s software, as you might imagine.”

  “But it has to exist on a computer or gadget, right?”

  He smiled again, now a tad on the patronizing side. “I guess I didn’t think about it the way you’re thinking about it. You can see the last version I had. Come on.” He gestured with a neck crane for me to follow him back in, then, again, he looked over my shoulder, casing the surroundings.

  This time we walked to the right, through the dining hall, and past a room where, through an open doorway, I got a glimpse of something jarring: a woman in a recliner watching a giant screen with videos of cats pawing at cash registers. Well, sort of “watching.” Even at a distance and even with a passing glance, I could see that she was glazed over. But she seemed to be amused. This must’ve been Klipper’s demented wife.

  Next stop, two doors down, a spacious office. Big oak desk, and gorgeous built-in bookshelves filled not with books but with what looked to me like computer tablets, one after another. “Library of Congress,” he said, “a complete copy,” but all on e-readers. “The whole of human literary accomplishment, alphabetized.” He walked to an oil painting of a yacht called the Last Dolphin hung behind his desk. He pulled on the right side of the frame and I could see that it was mounted on a hinge . . . and he revealed a safe. He keyed in some numbers, opened it, and pulled out a rectangular object I recognized as a hard drive.

  “The Spirit Box,” he said.

  He held it in his palm, black and shiny, smudged with a few fingerprints.

  “That’s it?”

  “I know
, right? Don used off-the-shelf parts.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Because it’s worthless.”

  “So it doesn’t hold the key to immortality?”

  “I doubt it. It’s most of the way there—the code. But when I hooked it up to a processor and monitor, it just kept sending out an e-mail: this thing is revolutionary!”

  “Sending out an e-mail?”

  “From my own account, to everyone on my contact list.” He looked solemn, sad. “That’s not revolutionary. It’s just an e-mail blast. Revolutionary was the fast-food pictures.” He just looked sad. “Revolutionary was my idea for self-brushing hair. Revolutionary was—”

  He looked up at me and I cut him off. “Do you hear yourself?”

  He took the hard drive and sat down at his desk and used a cord to plug the box into his computer. On the monitor, words materialized: this thing is revolutionary!

  “That’s all it does.” He unplugged it.

  He sighed. “Here.” He handed me the box. “Take it.”

  “The Spirit Box.”

  “I’m done with this. Take it and go. Maybe you can piece it together. I’ve got to sing to Barbara and put her to bed.”

  OUTSIDE, BACK BEYOND the electric fence, I held the hard drive in my hand and I nearly prayed: let this be the thing that sets Terry free.

  But I didn’t believe it would be, not for a second. Would the Shipper give it up this easily? I stuffed it into a saddlebag on the bike and headed down the dirt path.

  A COUPLE OF minutes later, lost in the night air and letting my mind go, I reached the estate of Tess Donogue and Lester Wollop and kept going. Then I saw the MINI. It was behind me, heading the same way I was. I sped up the bike, took two quick turns to give myself some distance from the diminutive car, and made up my mind to act.

  While still riding, I reached back and pulled out the hard drive and put it in my pocket, then, after the next turn, I slammed the brakes, killed the ignition, dropped the bike in the middle of the road, and sprinted for the cover of the trees on the right.

  Fifteen seconds later, the MINI appeared, and as I’d hoped, it stopped. I probed with my hand for a stick or heavy rock as I waited for the Tarantula to appear. The door to the MINI opened and a guy stepped from the driver’s side, cautious, looking around, and then took a few steps from the car to the downed bike.

  And I almost said: What the hell?

  It wasn’t a Tarantula.

  “Freeze!” I shouted. “Or I’ll shoot.”

  I didn’t have a gun but this guy didn’t know that. He froze.

  “Put your hands on your head.”

  “My head? Fitch, is that you?”

  “Walk away from the car.”

  “Absolutely. Fitch, I thought that was you. Can we chat?”

  I walked out of the trees and eyeballed the hapless engineer from Ben’s Bags. The guy who’d helped me find the dead Tarantula. What was he doing here?

  “You don’t answer my calls or texts, Fitch?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I . . . I’m really trying to get a meeting.”

  “Drop the car keys.”

  “They’re still in the car. What happened to your bike? You want to go grab coffee? I realize it’s late, but I know a place that has short-acting caffeine, it’s not GMO-free, obviously, you’ve got to mess with the coffee bean to take the edge off, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices to have late-night, short-term focus.”

  “I’ll ask you again: What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been trying to find you. You said you’d help get me in with the guys at Froom. I’ve got a killer idea on this facial recognition thing. I need backing. You know what I mean.”

  I didn’t know. I didn’t trust this guy. What was he doing in a MINI? I was struck by an idea and I went with it.

  “I saw you leave the Donogue estate,” I said.

  There was just a momentary pause and then he said: “What are you talking about?”

  I hadn’t actually seen him leave the Donogues, but now he’d given himself away. I took three quick strides forward, and without thinking much about it, I gave the guy a quick jab to the right cheek. Not too hard and I tried to avoid direct impact to his nose. I was sending a message, not putting out the lights. He stumbled backward.

  “What the . . .”

  “That’s your last warning, kid.”

  Without looking to see his reaction, I walked to the driver’s side of the MINI and said to him: “Get in.” He walked around the front of the car, rubbing his cheek, and got inside. I flicked on the inside light and glanced at him, and then around. Nothing noteworthy, the car clean.

  “What were you doing at the Donogues?”

  “Looking for you. I’m this close, Fitch. I need a break, man.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You know the story of eHaggle?”

  “I’m only going to ask you one more time.”

  “Just listen, Fitch. EHaggle, the biggest auction site in the world, made billions for its innovators. That’s the official story. And it’s a bunch of bull crud. They weren’t the first with the idea. They weren’t second. They were third. Third! You don’t read about that in Forbes. You sure as heck don’t read about Andrea Pinsky.”

  “Who?”

  “She had the idea first, she wrote incredible code, pure garage start-up genius, and then . . .” He trailed off. Then: “She couldn’t get out of her garage.”

  “What?”

  “The door, it got stuck. She was racing to beat the eHaggle guys to Sand Village, where all the VCs hang their shingles, and her garage door, it got stuck and she couldn’t get out. It’s a problem you don’t hear about very often, but it’s a real problem with these garage start-ups. The door fails, or, worse.”

  “Worse.”

  “The entrepreneurs get stuck in the door, rushing to get out. The guy who came up with the first online dry-cleaning site was in such a hurry that he didn’t see the garage door coming down and his spine was crushed. He still crawled his way to Sand Village, the venture capitalists, but by then ePress was already funded.”

  “Cut the crap. I told you that I wasn’t going to warn you again.”

  “Someone’s going to beat me to this facial recognition thing. I don’t want to get stuck in the proverbial garage door.”

  “Where did you get the MINI?”

  “I knew you’d be attracted to a car like this; you’d think it was a Tarantula. See, it worked. Can you get me in with Danny?”

  I punched him again. This time, a little rabbit smack, right in the rib cage, enough to keep one lung from doing its business. He sucked for air.

  “I thought you weren’t warning me again.”

  “Consider yourself lucky, smartass.” I paused. “Here’s my theory. You’re . . .” I paused again.

  He looked at me, waiting. And maybe he realized what I realized: I didn’t have a theory.

  “You’re in the middle of this,” I said, noncommittal.

  “Of what?”

  “You just figured I’d be at the Donogues’; that’s what you’re selling me?”

  “You said you were looking for the kid.”

  “The kid.” This nerd was a kid himself.

  “Besides, this gave me a chance . . . an excuse to knock on the Donogues’ door. I . . . I don’t know, I thought I’d pitch them on the facial recognition software.”

  “And?”

  “And they wouldn’t let me in. What did I expect?” His head was hung.

  “Where’d you get the money for the MINI?”

  “Money?”

  “For the car.” I flexed my fist so he’d get the idea another warning was on its way.

  He recoiled. “I got a zero-down lease and tossed the sales guy some equity if things pan out. He offered to do biz dev during his off-hours, but no way I’m gonna take on a partner when I’m this close.”

  “Let’s get something straight .
. . what did you say your name was?”

  “Floyd. Floyd Chiansky. It’s half Chinese, half Thai, half Polish.”

  “Three halves, huh.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re a racist?”

  “About a hundred times in the last twenty-four hours. You’re an engineer, right?”

  “I do engineering. I don’t like labels. I think they’re confining.”

  “You do engineering?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Well then, it’s time to prove your loyalties.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t move,” I said by way of a nonanswer. I snagged his car keys from the cup holder in the middle. I got out of the car and uprighted my bike and rolled it off the road and parked it behind a tree. Then I returned to the MINI, started it, and drove about twenty yards until I came to the first turnoff—to the right—just another dirt road leading to just another gargantuan estate. I drove ten yards in, cut the engine, then I turned on the car’s inside light. I reached into my back pocket and I removed the papers that I’d pulled from the book The Selfish Gene—the papers left by Captain Don.

  I unfolded them and looked at what appeared to me to be gibberish.

  “Read this to me,” I said.

  He took a long sip of the pages. He pursed his lips; I could see his brain moving on his face, tics and teeth grits, modest undulation betraying deep thought, or that’s what he wanted me to think. He sighed and looked at the second page. Finally, he looked up at me.

  “Don’t hit me,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “When I tell you what I’m reading here. Don’t hit me.”

  “That is officially not a deal.”

  “Then I’d rather not say.”

  “Not saying won’t spare you.” I wasn’t usually this big of an asshole but I was starting to see this big clock in my head and it was counting down to the Tarantulas putting a bullet into Terry.

  He nodded. “Point taken. Look, the short answer is: I can’t read this to you.”

  “Why not?”