by Matt Forbeck
"He did a good job of it," I said. "He had me convinced I probably deserved it."
"No one said you didn't."
I had to peer through the darkness to see Querer's barely repressed smile.
"Five planned for this before he died," she said. "He knew the risks. He knew he might never live to see all those years of planning pay off. That's why he set it up to go on without him. Just in case."
"Father G must have been in on this from the start."
"Not really." Querer frowned at that thought. "Five just used the One Resurrectionists as part of his plans. Father G's a true believer. I don't think Five ever revealed his real motives for working with him. Can you imagine? The man would have been preaching about it right outside the White House gates."
"Then why's Father G leading this riot right now?"
"Because I told him to. Five set up a series of messages for me to send to Father G in the event of his death. One of them was prepared to kick-start everything the day we were ready to move. When Patrón brought you in, I knew it had to be now, and Eight confirmed it."
"What was the message?"
"Three words: 'Initiate Project Delta.'"
More Greek letters. Delta meant change, and that's what we seemed headed for. I rubbed my eyes and wondered how we were supposed to make it happen.
The doorman started toward us. I pushed myself to my feet and put out a hand to help Querer up too. She waved me off, managing it herself, only groaning a little.
"Can I help you folks?" the doorman said.
"Just hiding out from the riot for a few minutes," I said.
He grimaced. "One of our security guards on the roof tells me it's getting closer. I'm going to have to lockdown the lobby now. You're welcome to stay, but if you do, I can't let you out until all this is over."
"Thanks," I said, "but that means we need to be on our way."
I escorted Querer to the front door. As we left, the doorman locked the door behind us, working the mechanism by hand. Outside, we turned to the right, heading south again. The Amortals Project building loomed just down the street.
"I remember when that block used to hold Madame Tussauds," I said staring at the nondescript entrance. It had been redesigned to look just like any other facade in the area, decorated in Governmental Boring. The only indication of what the place housed was set in classy lettering on a set of understated brass plates bracketing the entrances. They read: "The Amortals Project." Nothing more.
"Has it changed much?" Querer asked.
"In some ways, very much." I stopped to steel myself for this, thinking of the thousands of clones stored somewhere inside, mindless copies of powerful people walking around somewhere else in the world. "In others, not at all."
When we reached the corner of 10th and G, I stared down G to the west. Five blocks off, the Treasury Building blocked my direct view of the White House, but the sky over the complex beyond Treasury was lit up like a crime scene. Spotlights scanned the stars above, scissoring back and forth across the night.
Closer, on this side of the Treasury Building, I could see people with flashlights, lanterns, and even torches roaming the streets. I wondered if some of them had pitchforks too. There had to be hundreds of them just on G Street, smashing windows, chanting and hollering over the blaring alarms and the dopplering of police hovercar sirens racing up and down the streets, trying to restore order.
The smell of tear gas rolled down G Street toward us. As faint as it was where we stood, it must have enveloped the White House in a thick, white fog. Somewhere in the distance, the chatter of machine-gun fire echoed, braided through with screams of anger, terror, and despair.
"Five sure knew how to plan one hell of a distraction," I said, my voice thick with some mixture of grief and pride.
Querer took my arm and guided me down 10th Street. I let her. My brain felt overloaded, too stuffed with too many details, too many years of spotty memory, too many emotions threatening to pull me over the brink.
I wondered how Father G had managed to get so many people to take to the streets and put their safety on the line to protest against the White House. Then I remembered the gatherings he had going on outside of the place when I had left the rebirthday party there in my honor. He'd been preparing his people for this for weeks, maybe years, getting them riled up and then holding them back until they were not only ready to burst, they were demanding it.
I thought of all the years of pent-up frustration the mortals in this city had to deal with. They'd watched the rich and famous – politicians, actors, athletes, pundits, Wall Street barons – gradually separate themselves from the common folk for years, then decades, and now centuries, with the faces rarely ever changing, the gap growing to the size of an unbridgeable canyon. You might as well have tried to walk to the Lunar Colony from here instead.
I started wondering why more of them hadn't joined in.
Querer reached out and put her hand on the door of the Amortals Project. "We're here."
I stared up at the doorway. I'd been inside this building so many times in my life that I'd long since lost count. I'd come back to life here eight times – that I knew about for sure. I didn't know how well I could trust anything at the moment, most of all myself.
"But what's the plan?" I asked. "Just go on in and shoot things up until they stop working?"
Her wan smile drifted toward me. "Something like that."
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pistol, and handed it to me.
"We have top-level clearance," she said. "We can bring in anything we want."
"My nanoserver's down." I grimaced at this crippling fact. "The security system won't recognize me."
"The building's connection is down too. During a blackout, the system reverts to secondary means of identification."
"Facial recognition," I said, understanding. Five had planned this right.
I put the pistol in my pocket. "We can't bring down the entire project with a couple of guns."
"We don't have to. If we can get access to the clone maintenance system, we can bring the whole thing down from within."
It dawned on me what she meant. Clones were kept stable and growing via a special cocktail of chemicals and gene-therapy viruses. It was a delicate, computerized balance. If we could mess with that, we could kill every clone in the complex in no time at all.
The thought of ending so many lives at once turned my stomach. I'd seen a lot of death in my time – caused quite a bit of it, too – but contemplating the murder of so many innocent souls stopped me cold.
Querer grimaced at my pained look. "It's the only way, Ronan," she said. "We have to stop this."
I blinked, but just for an instant. Then I patted my pistol and nodded at her with only a hint of a shudder.
"Chances are we'll blow it all and wind up dead instead," I said. "Right?"
"You ready to die?" she asked as she pulled open the door.
"Ready?" I said. "I think I'm starting to look forward to it."
"See," she said. "Admitting you have a problem, that's the first step toward beating it."
"Beating what?"
"Your addiction to death."
Just as Querer was about to enter, I put my hand on her shoulder to stop her. "You don't have to do this," I said to her. "I can handle it. Alone."
She narrowed her eyes at me. "You think this isn't my fight too?"
"You're not an amortal." Her eyes grew wide and indignant. "Not officially, anyway. You die, and that's it."
"That's it for you too, Omega."
I winced at the name. "Call me, Ronan. Please."
"Clone or not – amortalization contract or not – I'm an American," she said, her voice as hard as the gun in my pocket. "And I'm a Secret Service agent. I swore to protect my nation from threats of all kinds." She glared into the building. "I've never seen a greater threat."
"I didn't mean to offend you," I said. "I just – I can do this. There's no reason for you to get kil
led too."
At that, she softened a bit around the edges. She let the door shut behind her, then reached out and caressed my cheek. "That was one thing Arwen loved about you," she said. "Or that she loved about the you before Eight, at least. You're so old-fashioned."
I leaned into her hand. "Did they really love each other?"
Querer nodded wordlessly, her eyes brimming with tears she'd never let spill over. "Very much," she said when she could speak.
"And the Amortals Project stole that from me. Destroyed it. Erased it." I gazed into her eyes. "What does that mean for us?"
A wry smile touched her lips. "It means we have to find our own way," she said. "Just like it should be."
I took her hand from my face and held it in mine. Then I leaned in to kiss her. Her lips were soft and full and moist.
"All right," I said as we parted. "Now, I'm ready to die."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Just as Querer had predicted, the security system recognized us and let us right in. A pair of guards stood watch at a desk inside the marble-lined foyer, and they barely looked up at us as we came in. Despite the power being out elsewhere in town, the Amortals Project was running along like nothing had changed. There was some sense of calm, I supposed, that went with having the best automated security system in the nation keeping you protected.
As we walked past the guards' desk, though, one of them turned to me and said, "A pleasure to see you again, Mr Dooley."
The building's internal net must have been working fine. The other guard held out a hand to stop us, and Querer and I hauled up short.
"I know we have standing orders to allow you in for a backup at any time," the second guard said. "With the riot going on right now, though, this may not be a good moment."
"I don't know, boys," I said, forcing a grin onto my face. "It sounds like the perfect time to me."
That earned me a pair of polite laughs.
Querer shook her head. "We're not here for a backup," she said. "We just want to speak with Juwan Winslow."
"He's still here?" I asked Querer, surprised.
"Some days it seems like Dr Winslow lives here," the first guard said. He waved us on. "You'll find him in his lab. I'll let him know you're coming."
I started to say, "No need," but Querer grabbed my arm and pulled me along.
We strode down the hallway with a purpose to our step. I knew the way by heart, but the lack of a colored stripe on the floor leading me to my destination threw me a bit. I wondered if getting my nanoserver fixed was an option or if Eight had done such a number on me that I might never be connected to the net again.
This both dismayed and delighted me. I worried about everything I would miss without my layers to assist me, but at the same time the idea that I was freed from my electronic tether to the rest of the world made me feel light and easy.
When we reached Winslow's lab, the doors opened automatically to admit us, then slipped closed behind us again. The place was just as I'd remembered it from my countless visits here for backups. For most people, those were normally run in another room, but as Winslow's first successful amortal, I received special attention. He often brought me in here to check me out personally and to catch up with each other's lives.
The room was entirely white and lit as brightly as an operating room. Cloning crèches lined the back wall, all of them empty at the moment. Supposedly they were waiting for the news that an amortal had died so that they could be shoved into action, growing a new replacement body. Now, though, I knew that this was just where Winslow would have the already prepared clones moved to in anticipation of waking them up.
Lab equipment of all kinds lined the sets of polished workbenches that occupied the middle of the room. Server arrays churning through computations ran along the wall on the left, and a massive wallscreen took up just about every inch of the right.
Whenever I came here, I half expected to see a Tesla coil or a set of Jacob's ladders surrounding Winslow as he bellowed at the ceiling, "Give my creation life!" The reality was always far less fun.
I'd first met Winslow when I'd woken up in his original lab, which hadn't been nearly so clean and modern as this place. Of course, that had been a hundred and thirty-six years ago. The lack of radical new technology developed over the past century may have slowed progress, but it hadn't frozen it solid.
The Amortals Project had grown from a crackpot's dream into the most vital government program in the world. The amount of money people were willing to pay to live forever was staggering. I often wondered how any of them could then afford more than a cardboard box for a bed.
That day I'd first seen Winslow, he'd been in his early fifties. His dark goatee had gone gray, as had the short-cropped hair on his head. He'd worn glasses in those days – an affectation even then – gold-rimmed circles that caught the light and lent his eyes a redundant sparkle of intelligence. Today, his wrinkles were gone, and his hair and even his brown skin seemed darker and healthier. He'd been killed in a car accident about two months ago and come back fresh and clean, with just as much energy as ever.
Querer and I sauntered in and waited for Winslow to acknowledge us. After a full minute, he finally looked up at us over a phantom pair of spectacles that he did not have on his face. He seemed annoyed at first blush, but when he recognized me he broke into a wide smile that showed all of his teeth.
"Ronan!" He got up and walked around his desk to greet me with a warm handshake. "It's been far too long, my boy." He rolled his eyes up, embarrassed. "Actually, it's not even been a week, has it? How have you been?" He gave me a chuck in the shoulder. "New body holding up all right?"
"Just fine, Juwan." Try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to return his warmth, and he sensed this.
"What is it?" he said. "Come on in and have a seat. We can talk."
He showed me to an oval conference table that sat in front of the wallscreen. He took the chair at the head of the table and motioned Querer and me into ones nearby.
"You haven't introduced me to the lovely Miss Querer." He spoke to me but stuck his hand out to Querer. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"That's Agent Querer, thank you."
He flashed what I'm sure he thought was a charming smile. "Of course, my dear. No harm intended."
She grimaced in reply.
Nonplussed, Winslow sat back in his chair. He was used to being in control – of the conversation, of the Amortals Project, and perhaps, in some sense, of the world. Sensing he was losing that, he made another grasp at it.
"So," he said, "what is it that brings you to me on such a dark and dangerous night? I hear we're having a riot near the White House. I have my machines revved up and ready to go just in case the worst should happen."
"It's about the Brain Trust," I said.
Winslow's warmth drained out of him as if I'd shot him through the heart. He stared at me, concerned, for a moment, then Querer, then back to me.
"Which brain trust is that then? I – I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about."
"The Brain Trust," I said. "The group of people who maintain control over the Amortals Project and the clones you create for it."
"Oh," he said, feigning disinterest. "That. I suppose I've heard some people use that term for our board of directors, although I don't really see the humor in it."
"I don't either, Juwan," I said, "but we're about to break this wide open. I came here to give you a chance to get in front of this."
"Right," Querer said, nodding as she recognized my tactics. "To get your side of the story, sir."
Winslow stared at me, then grimaced and stared at Querer for even longer. Then he glanced up at one of the corners of the room over my shoulder, where I knew a hidden security camera sat.
"Hold on," he said. "I think this conversation requires more than our standard level of privacy."
Querer glanced around the room. I could tell she was identifying the various recording and security devices with her optic l
ayers. After Juwan shut them all off, she nodded at me. "We're clear."
I put a hand out on the table toward Winslow. "So, Juwan. Tell me what's going on."
"How much do you know?" Sweat broke out on his brow.
"Everything," said Querer.
He gave her a sick smirk. "Can you be more specific?"
I took a shot at summing it up. "The Brain Trust usurped the Amortals Project and is using it as a means of controlling the most powerful people in the world."
His smile wavered and disappeared. "There's a lot more to it than that, of course."