Marissa didn’t smile—it wouldn’t have been appropriate in this horror show—but she gave a mirthless chuckle. “You might have a point.”
“Do you even think there’s anything left of Doctor Gordon and his research?”
“I don’t think Lucio would allow his golden goose to wander around his palace. Likewise, he was prepared for a lot of things. I think it’s very possible Doctor Gordon and some of his men are safe and secure inside something like a panic room or bomb shelter.”
“You hope so, at least.”
“That would be convenient for us both, anyway.”
“How did you come to work for the NSA?”
Marissa started moving her hands on the side of the wall. “Is now the best time for it?”
“Versus discussing the fact that we’re surrounded by murdered peasants?”
Marissa closed her eyes, genuinely looking remorseful. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. It is a good time to talk about something, anything else.”
“So why did you join? Assuming what you said really was true. It’s a big jump from criminal hacker for Anonymous to working for the man. I thought NSA agents were supposed to become social activists, not the reverse.”
“Only Snowden, and the answer isn’t that far from how I joined the Society. Indeed, it’s how I decided to infiltrate them. I ended up hacking the NSA’s supercomputer but was caught in the process. I learned enough about Black Technology, though, that they decided they could either kill me or hire me.”
“I’m surprised they hired you.”
Marissa paused, moving toward the empty fireplace. It was ironically one of the few spots that didn’t have any soot or ashes on it. “What I learned about Black Technology scared me, G. Cloning, artificial intelligence, cyborgs, androids, transhumanism, and nanotech were just the beginning. Someone had to make sure the stuff didn’t fall into the wrong hands, and when the NSA said they had a whole branch devoted to it, I asked them to sign me up.”
“And you think the government is the right hands?”
“You really hate the United States, don’t you?”
“I hate all governments equally. I’ve been hired by too many presidents and senators to do too much evil shit to ever think otherwise. I know how the world is controlled by lies and information control. Part of the reason I never believed you were completely conditioned, Marissa, is because I think everyone is conditioned to some degree. We’re all voluntarily asleep, and that’s the way the people in charge like it.”
“Where’s this neo-anarchist sentiment coming from?”
“I’m the very definition of a man with no state, ideology, or creed. You can’t blame me because the Letter program worked out exactly the way they wanted it to.”
“You do have a creed, G. It’s the creed of being an asshole to anyone who disagrees with you.”
I paused. “Fair enough.”
“In any case, I do think there are good people in this world, and it falls to people like us to do the bad things necessary to keep them safe. Yeah, it doesn’t work out that way a lot, but as long as the planet is still standing, I think that’s the bare minimum we have to achieve to make things work out all right. The NSA’s Task Force-22 was a group that did that sort of thing with the Army and various contractors. Daniel Gordon was a member. You should be proud of that legacy.”
“I don’t think what they’ve told you about that group is true.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
I wish I knew what happened to Task Force-22. I remembered Daniel Gordon being instructed to kill them, but I didn’t know if he’d obeyed or not. They were his friends, though, and that was the kind of order I hoped he would refuse. Maybe that was the reason he was dead—or he’d just killed them and moved on with the rest of his life like so many other Letters I’d known were capable of. That was another thing I wanted to ask Marcus Gordon about. “I don’t have anyone to protect, Marissa. I don’t think I’m going to find anyone if I help you here, either.”
“I’m sorry for that. I am.”
“I believe you.” I went over to the fireplace and went inside, checking along the interior of the walls. On the interior, I saw a brick that was different from the others. Pressing down on it, a keypad popped open. “Found it.”
“Finally,” Marissa said. “Is it a combination lock?”
“Yep. Looks like Lucio had it separate from his voice command-operated systems.”
“Does it have power?”
“Seems so.”
“Good.” Marissa pulled out a kind of wand-looking device and pressed a button on the other end.
I grabbed my ears as they started ringing. “Ah! Jesus!”
The keypad sparked and bleeped before the fireplace began physically moving out of the wall. Stepping out, I saw what was happening beyond. The stonework opened up to reveal an elevator hidden behind the fireplace. It had a large Karma Corp logo stamped on its front doors and no keypad or controls. The doors automatically opened, revealing the empty circular chamber beyond.
“Open Sesame,” I muttered.
“I guess this is goodbye, at least for the next few minutes,” Marissa said.
“Why?”
“I have orders to bring Doctor Gordon in the moment I see him. If you see him first, then I’m not disobeying.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.”
“I guess there’s still a little rebel inside me,” Marissa said, putting away the wand. “Thank you for coming.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to find what I like down there.”
“You probably won’t. The past is rarely the way we want it to be.”
“I’m starting to like this version of you more than the old one.”
“They’re both me. I’m just more Bond than Bond girl.”
“I dunno, some of them were pretty badass.”
Marissa did something unexpected—walked over to me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I gave her a light kiss on the lips in response. It wasn’t the time or the place for anything else, but I wanted to be with her.
If that made me a fool, so be it.
I turned to head on inside. Marissa pulled out her pistol and handed it over to me before saying, “Try not to kill him?”
“Is that likely?”
Marissa didn’t answer.
“I see.”
I watched as the doors shut on me and the elevator automatically began to descend into the depths of the building below. The act caused my head to spin, and I couldn’t help but start remembering more from my training. It was in the same concrete bunker in which I’d been forced to fight F and S. This time, though, all twenty-six Letters from the home office were gathered in a single group before the balcony where Doctor Gordon was standing. Next to him was Persephone and a United States general I recognized as Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a possible future candidate for president. There were other people present on the balcony, but these were the three that mattered. They were the people who had conceived the Letters program.
This memory was particularly confusing because there were elements of it that couldn’t possibly be true. All of my fellow Letters were the same age as I was, despite the fact I knew some to be decades older or years younger. Some of the faces in the balcony were indistinct, and trying to focus on them, I saw only blank, smooth, mannequin-like surfaces. The shadows were abyssal, seemingly leading to nothingness, and everything had the ominous ambiance of a nightmare. Rebecca, the woman I remembered putting the Memorize on me, was absent, and I somehow knew she was no longer working on the project. It frightened my past self. He missed her.
My past self also knew he was different from the others present. It was a frightening feeling since every single one of us was identical in every way but our looks. We were all dressed in variations of a business suit and sunglasses, which made us look like anonymous government employees. We’d all been given our first assignments, to infil
trate various departments of the United States government or financial districts to kill a subject in some way without being noticed. It was our graduation test. This was our graduation ceremony.
Gordon looked down at us like we were his children. He was wearing a suit this time rather than a lab coat, though he looked more like a college professor than a businessman. It was brown with patches on its elbows and covered a tweed sweater. “Each of you is an individual who has spent your entire lives within this facility. You will not remember this speech nor will you remember the services I have done for you. Instead, you will each wake up in the dozens of home offices scattered across the world where you will take up your positions as the world’s best assassins.”
Wait, other home offices? There was more than one?
“Some of you have already been through this training before. You have undergone recycling and returned from the grave to become weapons, again, for the Society. Know this is a process that may hold the key to human immortality as well as the prospect of a new hope for humanity. You are conditioned not to care about why you do the things you do, but once the drugs in your systems wear off, you will be able to pretend to be regular human beings. I encourage you to never forget you are not regular human beings, though. You are better, and the weapons our organization will wield against its evil. For progress and profit.”
None of us responded to his speech.
“You may cheer now,” Doctor Gordon said.
We did.
Did I hallucinate all of that? I didn’t know anymore. All I knew was that the doors to the elevator in front of me popped open a few seconds later.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The elevators doors opened to Doctor Gordon’s laboratory. The place was, in simple terms, a mess. There were papers everywhere, empty glasses and plates piled up from numerous meals he’d had down here since his capture. There was a single long table in the center of the room with a half-dozen computers sitting on top of it, all of them linked together and running simulations simultaneously.
The walls were made of concrete, but I saw two doorways leading down to long hallways at the other end of the room, glass doors showing a dozen different laboratory spaces. On one of the walls was a flat-screen television set that reminded me of the ones in the home office. There were security cameras on all four corners of the room and I saw similar ones filling the hallway, meaning that this entire place was being monitored—or would be monitored if the security guards upstairs weren’t all dead.
What I didn’t see was Doctor Gordon. Seeing no sign of movement or panicked residents, I couldn’t help but wonder if no one was here. I was disabused by that notion when two young Hispanic men exited one of the hallways carrying A4-machine guns, talking about a woman named Lola. It was a bizarre conversation to be had given the events upstairs, and I guessed they weren’t aware of the massacre that had taken place.
I lifted Marissa’s pistol and shot them both in the head, only one of them seeing me before the second shot was put in his skull. The noise made by the gun was almost imperceptible, sounding like little more than a pfft, closer to a movie silencer than the kind of suppressor usually used by soldiers.
Their bodies hit the ground almost simultaneously.
“That wasn’t necessary, F,” Doctor Gordon’s voice came from the other hallway entrance. “They were just boys.”
Doctor Gordon was wearing a tweed sweater and khaki pants with a painter’s smock over his body, not exactly the sort of thing you wanted to wear while performing sensitive scientific experiments. Then again, I had no idea what he was doing down here and it was possible the Carnevale’s members only had the vaguest idea themselves. I expected some sort of flash of recognition looking into his face, some sort of memory of him either as my father or as the man who trained me.
Instead, there was nothing. He was just another man. A face among thousands.
“I’m not F,” I said, putting down my gun. “I’m G.”
Gordon blinked rapidly, looking suddenly unnerved. “Ah, I see. Is F dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do it?”
“Does it matter?”
Gordon looked away. “I suppose not. Are you here to kill me?”
I raised my gun at his forehead. “I’ve been given orders to extract you or put a bullet in you.” Before Gordon could respond, I put the gun down. “But I’ve chosen a third option. I’m going to let you go if you give me back my memories.”
“What?” Gordon blinked.
It came out of me, a flood of emotions like I’d never expected. Hope, anger, resentment, joy, and remorse. “I’m sick of being someone’s puppet. There’s a woman up there, a woman I love. She sent me down here to become something more than that. I need answers. Who I was, who I am, and where I come from. I want to be more than a tool.”
Gordon’s next words were heartbreaking. “I’m sorry, G, but that’s not possible.”
I knocked over one of the computers with my hand, sending it flying through the air and smashing against one of the walls. It was strange that now, of all times, was when my emotions were finally reaching their peak. This mission had been a nightmare and I was well and truly sick of being jerked around. “Why the fuck not?!”
The conditioning was gone now, or maybe my emotions were so intense it didn’t matter. I was as close to a normal human being as I’d ever been in my life. Scared, angry, exhausted, sick, guilty, hopeful, and a thousand other emotions all at once.
Gordon’s face went through a variety of indescribable emotions but finally settled on pity. “I’ll show you.”
The scientist looked away from the dead bodies on the ground and walked over to one of the computers before typing on it for a few minutes. The flat screen television set proceeded to pop up an image of something I never expected to see.
Fetuses.
In amber fluid-filled tubes.
The footage was time-stamped twelve years ago.
A younger Doctor Gordon walked out, wearing a proper lab coat. “The first viable batch of Project: Cash Crop is ready. We’ve alphabetized them for ease of understanding. I want to reassure our sponsors that these clones are lacking anything but the most rudimentary brain development. In other words, they’re empty vessels for our project rather than humans we’re misusing.” The Doctor Gordon on screen patted a tube marked G. It contained a fetus that looked about nine months old. “Even if they’re adorable.”
The film clip switched to a later scene, showing the tubes’ contents growing older and progressively more adult before my eyes. When they were adults, they were released and brain-shaped machines were surgically put into their skulls. I watched them start to learn things astonishingly fast, from language to fighting. I watched the samples of the nightmarish perversion of childhood Gordon displayed for almost ten minutes.
Too stunned and horrified to look away or react.
It ended when all of this was wiped from the future Letters’ minds.
Doctor Gordon sighed. “Those are your memories, G. I’m sorry. You don’t have a past to return to.”
“I’m a fucking clone?” I said, feeling like I needed to vomit up everything in my stomach.
This wasn’t possible.
This wasn’t happening.
No!
“Everything but your brain is cloned tissue, yes.” Gordon looked at me, then looked to the flat screen. “One of twenty-six models chosen from the best agents of the CIA, Special Forces, FBI, NSA, and Marines. Fourteen men, twelve women. Not perfect clones, though, but altered as to have roughly similar abilities. One of them, your template, is my son with Doctor Rebecca Stonewood.”
I fell to my knees, dropping my gun on the ground. An emotion unlike any other I’d felt in my entire life happened as I stared up at him. It was a cold, bleak emptiness without a shred of hope for the future or belief in my own value. A moment ago, I was a person looking forward to “I… my memories?”
“You were educated via a coll
ection of footage and data-tapes designed to give you all the information a person of your age and build should possess. Rebecca did her best to provide you, perhaps more than she should have.”
“So, the girl and the woman from my dreams…”
“Just family video tapes among other information Rebecca imparted upon you. They accepted Daniel’s death. She didn’t.”
I remembered that moment, but how could I? It was something that had happened to someone else. “So, Reassignment—”
“It’s all a lie, G. You are put through your training after you’re decanted from the tube, then wiped of your memories. When you serve your ten years, they’ll give you a set of false memories with a conditioned family to look after you as your body fails.”
I bolted to my feet and ran at him, grabbing him and slamming him up against the wall. The flat screen behind him smashed against his back. “Fails?! What do you mean, fails?!”
Gordon’s head slammed against the concrete behind him and he looked woozy. I slapped him across the face, an action I immediately regretted.
Gordon just blinked, bleeding from the cut on his mouth I’d created. “Yes, fails. Your bodies are modified to accept Black Technological enhancements. We managed to fix the problem of telomere decay most clones suffer, but the human body isn’t meant to handle the kind of hardware we put inside you. Reassignment allows you to—be monitored for future effects.”
“How long?” I shouted in his face. “HOW LONG?!”
I wished this was all a dream. But everything was sharp, perfect, and clear.
I had my answers.
This was my reality.
“After your ten years of service, two to five years. It depends on the amount of enhancement you’ve received. We’re monitoring the issue, were monitoring the issue to determine how much—”
I interrupted him by throwing him to the ground and picking up a pistol hidden in one of the dead man’s pockets before aiming at the back of his head. “You fucking bastard.”
“Yes,” Gordon said, raising his hands up above his head. “That would be accurate. You were a product for me, a chance to make a fortune from the US military with expendable perfect soldiers without families or friends. The initial experiments were considered monstrous but some people were interested, some people who thought with a little tweaking, the project could be made palatable.”
Agent G: Infiltrator Page 20