Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  I started to speak, but Six jumped up between us instead, facing his father. "Don't talk to him like that, Dad," he said. "Don't you know who this is?"

  "Too damn well," said Five.

  Lexa came back from the kitchen, a glass of water for me trembling in her hand. "Ronan! I'm shocked. He's not only your – ancestor, he's our guest."

  "I know," said Five. "I don't throw out guests. Only family."

  He moved in front of me, looming over me, trying to intimidate me. I wasn't having any of that.

  "My blood must run awfully thin in you, kid," I said.

  He flinched as if I'd stabbed him. I motioned with my chin for him to back up, and he took one step back. I stood up slowly and looked him in the eye. Although he probably didn't realize it, he had Cal's wide forehead and thin nose. Seeing that made me miss my son in a way I hadn't in years. It drained the indignation right out of me.

  "Look," I said, holding out my hands to placate Five. "I don't mean to be any trouble here. Your son came to me and said he'd been kicked out of here. I insisted on bringing him home."

  Five opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. "I can see I'm not welcome here, so I'll be on my way."

  "Good," said Five.

  Six stood up next to his father and me. "You are too welcome here," he said to me. "I brought you in here as my guest."

  He stared at his father, daring him to throw him out along with me.

  Five snarled. "This man is not Ronan Dooley. He's a cheap copy engineered to look like him, act like him, even to think that he is him. But he's nothing more than a bad bootleg. The real Ronan Dooley died from an assassin's bullet back in 2032."

  I got up and walked to the door. It opened before me as I approached it. Before I left, I turned to say my piece.

  "I don't know you," I said to Five. "And no matter what you might think, you don't know me. I just wanted to bring your son home to you."

  "Mission accomplished," he said in a tone colder than a frozen grave. "Now get the hell out."

  Six moved to join me, but I motioned him off. He didn't need to suffer any more because of his affection for me.

  I did what the man said, and I walked out. I could hear them shouting at each other as I stormed down the hall.

  I got back into my hovercar and sat there for a moment. I wanted to head for Obama Interplanetary and grab the first transport into space. A week in a lunar resort would do me good.

  Or maybe I could just ditch it all, quit my job here, and volunteer for one of the Mars settlements. The idea of leaving it all behind and starting over one last life somewhere fresh tempted me so much.

  Then I saw Six racing along the roof toward my hovercar. I knew I couldn't stick around – and I couldn't talk to him again either. I'd just be encouraging him to follow me around. Better to make a clean break.

  I ordered the hovercar to take me to the Washington Mall. It slipped up into the darkening night, leaving Six to dwindle in the distance behind me.

  I used my top-level clearance to allow me to sail in and land in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Most people preferred the other monuments on the Mall. Washington and Lincoln got all the love. Not from me, though. Jefferson was always my man.

  When I got out of the hovercar, Querer was waiting there for me.

  "How long you been following me?" I asked.

  She smirked. "You think you can evade me in a Secret Service pool car?"

  "I could if I'd been trying." I sighed at her as I thought about Five and his family. "Thanks for giving me a little space."

  "More than I probably should have," she said. "I understand how hard it is to stay away from family, but you did just foil an assassination attempt on your life. Maybe out here in the open's not a safe place to be."

  I looked up at the memorial from the bottom of its steps. The interior of the dome glowed with lights filtering out through its Roman pillars, and I could see the bronze statue of Jefferson looking down at us from its center. Still gazing at it, I spoke to Querer.

  "Back when I was a kid, there'd been this thing called Moore's Law. It stated that the power of computers would double roughly every two years. This went on for what seemed like forever, but it ran up against its upper limits in the early part of the twenty-first century.

  "Before that, lots of people – futurologists, they called themselves – had gone on and on about an oncoming technological singularity that would change everything, something so big that predicting what lay past it would be impossible. The robots would finally figure out they were smarter than us and take over. Aliens would realize we were finally mature enough to join the greater galactic community and would either invite us to join them or wipe out the planet. The dead would rise and take over the world."

  "Well, I guess they got that one right," said Querer. "Just maybe not the way they'd expected."

  I looked at her and laughed. Her deep eyes sparkled at me.

  "Tell me," I said. "Why did I pick you for a partner?"

  "Wow, am I really that unlikeable?"

  I jumped forward to stomp on that notion. "Not at all. I just wonder if I ever said anything to you about it."

  "Only that you couldn't stand me."

  "See, that would have been my guess." I stopped when I saw the look of mock horror on her face. "Nothing personal. I just prefer to work alone."

  "Right up until the point you get killed?"

  "Seems that way."

  She wrinkled her brow at me. "Why did you come here?"

  "Just someplace to get away. And I like a lot of what Jefferson had to say. For instance, one of the panels in there says this: 'I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.'"

  "Wow," Querer said. "Did you memorize that?"

  I shook my head. "I had my server look it up."

  "Still, quite a quote from a man who's seen more change than anyone else alive."

  As those words left her lips, the sniper's bullet hit her right between her shoulder blades.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Querer fell forward into my arms, blood blossoming on her blouse. My ballistics layer automatically kicked in and calculated the likely angle from which the shot had been fired. According to the glowing line on my optical display, the shooter was somewhere in the direction of the War On Terror Memorial, which stood just around the edge of the Tidal Basin, right on what used to be the southern edge of the FDR Memorial Park.

  My first instinct was to call for the hovercar and go after the bastards who'd shot Querer. The way she gasped for breath in my arms quelled that, and the blood seeping up out of her mouth sealed it away. I could come back from something like this, but Querer wasn't an amortal. She only had the one life, and I had to do my best to save it.

  I scooped her up in my arms and turned my back to the shooter, shielding her with my body. Then I charged straight up the white marble steps, leaving a spattered trail of her blood behind me as I raced for the shelter of the Jefferson Memorial.

  The few other people roaming around the monument scattered before the sight of the bleeding woman in my arms. I hadn't heard the shot, and I doubted any of them had either, but it didn't take a genius to see that something horrible was happening. They wanted nothing to do with that.

  I juked to the left and right at random as I went, and I heard the telltale zing of bullets ricocheting off the stone steps around me. Whoever was trying to kill me was doing a lousy job of it. A trained sniper should have destroyed a vital organ in me by now. A true professional, of course, never would have hit Querer instead. />
  Unless, of course, that's what he was aiming for.

  I cursed as I darted between the towering white columns and emerged under the monument's massive rotunda. Were these idiots shooting at me or Querer? Or both?

  I called for backup, snapping off a quick note. "Sniper. Agent down." Then I placed Querer on the marble floor and tried to get a better look at her.

  Her face seemed as pale as the monument's marble. I had her blood all over my hands, and what wasn't on me or in her was already forming a pool beneath her.

  "Hold on," I said. "Help is on the way."

  Shaking, she nodded. She was falling into shock. If the EMTs didn't get here right away, she would die within minutes. Even if they raced here as fast as they could, it might already be too late.

  I unholstered my sidearm and hefted it in my hand. It felt tiny and pointless, but it was all I had.

  "I'll be right back," I told Querer.

  She grabbed at my sleeve and tried to pull me back, but her fingers were already too weak. "Don't," she said, her eyes begging more than her lips could manage. "Don't leave."

  I knew she wanted someone there to hold her, to tell her it would be all right, but if she was going to live I needed to put an end to this. If the sniper kept on the pressure, the EMTs might not be able to land and help her in time. And there was no guarantee they'd wait for that to happen. I wanted to believe that no one would be insane enough to fire a rocket into the Jefferson Memorial, but I'd seen enough horrible things in my lives to know better.

  "I'll be right back," I repeated. I left before she could respond.

  I cocked my pistol, stood up into a crouch, then darted for the other side of the rotunda. I figured that the shooter might have his sights trained on the area where I'd disappeared, and I wanted every edge I could find.

  I poked the tip of my pistol out around the corner of the back exit and waited. When nothing shot at me, I dared a peek around, setting my eyes to maximum magnification. The ballistics stripe still ran right from where Querer had been hit to the War On Terror Memorial, stabbing through the air like a permanent tracer trail, but I couldn't see the start point. From where I knelt, it disappeared into a stand of trees just on the other side of the Tidal Pool.

  I flipped my vision to full spectrum, hoping to pick up something else. A number of heat signatures swarmed around the War On Terror Memorial, but most of them seemed like rubberneckers gawking at the commotion around the Jefferson Memorial, unaware that the shooter was likely standing in their midst. I noticed one of the reddish blobs sitting a bit higher than the others, and I realized that the shooter was actually in one of the trees.

  There was no way I could hit the bastard from here, not with my Nuzi. I'd be more likely to hit a civilian with a stray bullet. But at least now I knew where he was.

  Checking on the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, I spied a bright UV laser coming right from where I'd figured the shooter to be. This killer was a professional. Unwilling to risk giving himself away with a colored laser sight, he'd used one invisible to the naked eye and was probably wearing UV goggles to see it – or maybe even had full spectrum lens implants of his own.

  It was then that I noticed another UV targeting sight playing across the wall next to me.

  I spun about to see four Indians in business suits and pale goggles standing behind me. Each of them bore a pair of Yama machine pistols in each hand, and all eight weapons were pointed at me, their UV lasers playing across my face and chest.

  They must have been inside the rotunda the entire time, waiting for the shooter to goad me into here. They might have failed to kill me before, but this time, they seemed determined to do the job right.

  "Do not move, Mr Dooley," one of the Indians said. She was short, with a sharp face that her pulled-back and braided hair accentuated. She bore herself like an athlete, and the point of the laser sight she had trained on my heart did not waver an inch.

  "Shoot me," I said. "Just get it over with and get the hell out of here."

  At that moment, I didn't care if they killed me or not, just as long as we wrapped this up before Querer bled out. I could come back later to take care of them, but she didn't have that option.

  "I'm afraid it's not quite that simple, Mr Dooley," the woman said. "We come to you with a message."

  The others didn't look at her, and they didn't say a word. They just stared straight at me through their goggles. If I tried, I might be able to shoot one of them. On a lucky day, I might get two. I'd never bring down all four.

  "I think you've already made your point," I said.

  The woman shook her head. "Mr Patil wishes to have a conversation with you on his own terms. This time, you shall not deny him his wish."

  "I don't like to chat with people who greet me with bullets."

  The woman removed her goggles, which left circles on her face, and she narrowed her dark, gleaming eyes at me.

  "You will come with us, or we will shoot your partner. Again."

  I glanced at Querer. Her chest heaved and rattled with every breath. She wouldn't last much longer. If these Kalis were still here when the EMTs arrived, she'd never make it.

  "If you refuse us, we will kill you," the woman said. She spoke with no hint of irony, every word a promise as if she were reading it from a stone tablet. "And then we will kill her."

  I had no doubt she was right. I put my gun back in its holster. "All right," I said. "Let's go."

  The woman put out her hand, and one of the men with her stuffed a metallic cap into it. The hat looked like a skier's cap knit out of wire. She tossed it to me.

  "Put it on," she said. "It blocks your connection to the net."

  I did as she asked, and two of the men with her moved forward to grab me by the elbows. The other stood to the side, keeping his pistol trained on my chest. She fixed the cap's strap under my chin, then spun on her heel and strode away.

  The men escorted me down the memorial's front steps, one on each arm and the third following close behind. Sirens wailed in the distance, getting closer with every second. I spotted sets of flashing lights atop a trio of hovercars racing toward us from the north, skirting right over the White House as they zoomed toward the Washington Monument.

  I tried to send out a message telling Patrón what had happened, but the cap on my head worked just as advertised. Nothing was going in or out of my skull until it came off. My nanoserver still worked just fine, but the cap had severed my virtual connection to the world beyond.

  I looked around but didn't see the Kalis' ride. I wondered if they were planning to execute me there on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial and then go down before Homeland Security's assault rifles in a blaze of idiocy. The woman leading the way, at least, didn't seem the suicidal type, but it's hard to know just how far people are willing to go to deliver a message.

  I tried to trip as the men brought me down the stairs, hoping to slow them down, but the two bruisers held me up by my arms and carried me down the last few steps of worn white marble.

  When we reached the shore of the Tidal Pool, the woman stepped to the side. The men holding me did not slow down or even hesitate for an instant. Instead, they gripped me more firmly than ever and charged straight into the pool's cool black waters.

  I had just enough time to hold my breath before we hit the water. The fingers on my arms did not slacken their grip despite the shock of the cold blackness. I tried to wrestle my way free, but the two men pulled me deeper into the water like twin anchors shackled to my arms.

  I opened my eyes and could not see a thing. Then something large and bluish loomed below me in my infrared vision. It grew larger as we drew closer to it. For a moment, I thought it was some sort of structure on the bottom of the pool. Then I realized it was moving toward us.

  I blew all the air out of my lungs and tried to breathe in the water surrounding me. If the Kalis managed to take me alive, they would probably torture me worse than they had the last time they killed me, and I knew
I'd rather not have to endure that again. My next body might not remember it, but this one would have to suffer through it just the same.

  It's harder to drown yourself on purpose than you might think. Sure, people die that way all the time, but a healthy mind knows better than to allow its body to try to breathe water, and you have to override that basic survival instinct to be able to pull it off.

  I managed it though. Knowing that death is only temporary takes the edge off the fear of it. I don't like to die. I don't really know if that's me who will be waking up at the Amortals Project or just some incredibly accurate copy. Maybe it doesn't make a difference to anyone else, but it does to me.

  Still, I was determined to cheat the Kalis of any fun they might want to have with me. I opened my mouth and inhaled as much water as I could. My lungs rebelled at this and tried to cough the water from them, but they only succeeded in expelling the last dregs of air remaining in my body. When I reflexively tried to breathe again, the only material they could bring in was more water.