Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  "I know this isn't what you wanted, Juwan," I said. "You never intended it to turn out like this."

  He stared at me. "How long have I known you?" he said. I couldn't do the math that fast, but I knew his nanoserver would feed him the number. "A hundred and thirty-six years?"

  I grimaced and realized I'd been holding my breath. "No, Juwan." I shook my head. "We just met."

  With every nod of his head, the regret in his frown grew deeper.

  "All right," he said finally. "You're right. It is time. Come with me."

  He turned and walked off to a door set between two of the crèches lining the far wall. Querer and I stayed on his heels.

  When Winslow reached the door, he stopped and put a hand on it. "We're about to go through the rabbit hole here," he said. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

  "Give me the red pill," I said.

  Winslow gave me a proud frown that made my stomach flip. Then he spoke to the door. "Alpha twenty thirty-eight."

  It slid aside, and Querer and I followed Winslow into an elevator. The door closed behind us, and the car began moving down.

  After what seemed like the longest elevator ride ever, the door slid open. Winslow stepped aside and ushered Querer and me into the room before him.

  Over the decades, I've been all around the world and seen many strange things. I've watched people suffer and thrive, kill and die. When I was born, America wasn't even as old as I am now. It's hard to surprise me.

  Still, I wasn't ready for this.

  We stepped from the elevator onto a hoverlift that hung in the air in the middle of a dim, cavernous warehouse of a room that seemed to stretch on forever. It was filled from its distant floor to its towering ceiling with countless racks filled with rows and columns of crèches. Each of these stood upright and – as I could see in the soft glow of the bluish monitor lights that rippled throughout the place – each contained a hibernating human being that had never known anything of the life it stood ready to live.

  I stood there on the floating platform and stared, trying to take it all in, to wrap my head around the inconceivable.

  "All these people," Querer whispered. Silent tears cut tracks down her cheeks.

  Robots floated about the place on inbuilt hoverboards that glowed blue beneath them. They fluttered from crèche to high-tech, coffin-like crèche like worker bees searching for pollen. A spherical robot detached itself from a nearby crèche and approached us, folding a pair of spindly metal limbs in close to its body like a preying mantis. It rose to match our eyes, and it peered at us through a pair of unblinking lenses

  "We have guests." The robot's voice was deep and resonant. It sounded natural yet was devoid of nature.

  I recognized it immediately. "That's President Emmanuel. His voice."

  Winslow ignored me. "Yes, Minder. You already know Ronan Dooley. He is one of our clients."

  "And the other is Amanda Querer, who I have not met before. My pleasure. Will she be joining us?"

  "As an amortal?" Winslow said. "Not quite yet."

  "That's disappointing," Minder said. "I feel she would make an excellent addition."

  Other robots detached themselves from their work and floated closer to us. Many of them looked much like the one hovering in front of us, but others were shaped like missiles or rafts or horns. One even had something that looked like a motorcycle seat on top of it so that you could ride it like a horse.

  "Dooley Nine is defective," the robot said. "Is he here for repair or replacement?"

  "Neither," I said, holding up a hand between myself and the robot. "I'm doing fine."

  "Your nanoserver is dysfunctional. I can replace it. The surgery is minor."

  For a moment, I actually considered it. Until I had no access to the net, I'd barely realized how much I'd relied on it. Still, even if we'd had the time for it, I didn't think I should hand myself over to this robot for my care.

  I shook my head. "That's not why we're here."

  "I'm just giving them a quick tour, Minder." I could hear an edge in Winslow's voice, one I hoped the robot could not detect.

  "My offer to implement repairs stands. Approach any terminal when you are ready, Dooley Nine." The robot cocked its body to one side as it spoke, like the head of a curious puppy – that spoke with the President's voice.

  "Thanks." I fought with the urge to follow that up with "sir."

  The spherical robot moved off, and the other robots parted before us so that we could move farther into the room.

  "What was that?" Querer asked.

  Winslow sucked at his teeth. "Minder controls the entire Amortals Project. I handed those responsibilities over to it more than a century ago."

  "It's a supercomputer of some kind?" She watched the robots retreat.

  "That's impossible," I said, staring around as we moved deeper into the seemingly endless racks of crèches. "No computer system could possibly handle all of this."

  "Obviously there's one that can," said Querer.

  "No," Winslow said softly as he gazed down at his feet. "Ronan is right."

  "What does that mean?" I asked, afraid of what the answer might be.

  Winslow gave me a sad smile. "Patience," he said.

  Our hoverlift cruised straight between the crèche stacks, then veered left. It continued in this direction until we reached the room's far wall. There, the platform brought us up to a room that hung from the ceiling like the passenger compartment on the bottom of a blimp. The lights inside it blazed like the sun in the room's chill darkness, and my optic implants had to shade it out until we were inside it.

  The room was open on two sides, but for a waist-high railing. Wallscreens made up the other two sides, and they glowed and pulsed with streams of data.

  A set of four hoverchairs floated in from the darkness and arranged themselves in the room for us. As he sat down, Winslow motioned for Querer and me each to take one, but I preferred to stand.

  "What's going on here?" I asked Winslow as soon as he'd settled in.

  "It's both simple and complicated," he said.

  "Let's start with simple."

  "All right." He grimaced, took a deep breath, and then spoke. His words were calm and clear, and he enunciated each one in his best didactic manner, but they were insane.

  "I founded the Amortals Project because I wished to defeat death. Not every one of my experiments succeeded, but despite that a few of those failures lived. I didn't have the heart to destroy their remains, but it didn't seem right to just let them lie there fallow.

  "I implanted nanoservers in every body I worked with as a matter of course. They form the cybernetic bridge I use to transfer the memories from one living brain into another. While silicon-based computers facilitate the transfer, the memories are stored in entirely organic matter."

  He watched our faces the entire time, trying to read our expressions. We gave him nothing.

  "You don't find this at all shocking?" he said.

  "The man currently holding the President hostage in the Oval Office filled me in," I said.

  "Really?" Winslow was the one shocked instead. "That's far above his security clearance level."

  "And ours, I assume."

  He frowned. "Only a handful of people know the whole truth, and none of them would normally be inclined to share."

  "There's nothing normal about any of this," said Querer.

  "Still, how did he find out?" Winslow asked. "Our security is flawless."

  "I told him," Patrón said.

  I whipped my head around to see my boss riding one of the saddle-backed robots. He wore a loose, white shirt and pants that fit him like pajamas, the exact kind that I'd woken up in every time I'd come back to life in one of the crèches up in Winslow's lab. He carried a pistol of black steel in his hand, and he leveled it at me.

  "What in the world?" Winslow leaped from his chair and stood on unsteady feet. He stared at Patrón but did not speak to him. "What's going on here, Minder? Is Director P
atrón dead?"

  "No." President Emmanuel's voice emanated from the wallscreens to either side of us. "The director of the Secret Service is dealing with the hostage situation in the White House. He requested the activation of his latest backup."

  "You're Goddamn right I did," the Patrón floating in front of us said as he dismounted from the robot carrying him and joined us in the command center. "I saw through the older Ronan's deception right away. There's only so much that hair dye can hide."

  Winslow gaped in horror. "But, Minder, that's against your core programming."

  "True," the computer said. "As Director Patrón said, though, the situation was desperate. I was able to override those restrictions in the name of national security concerns."

  "Don't act so surprised, Juwan," Patrón said with a jaunty grin. "This isn't the first time Minder has overridden his programming to preserve America's interests. But I don't expect you to remember that. After all, it's been thirty years since that incident."

  "I think I'd remember something like that." Winslow trembled as he spoke.

  "Sure," said Patrón. "If I hadn't arranged for your memories of that to be erased." He hefted the gun before him. "I had to kill you to make that work, of course, but it seemed like a small price for you to pay to keep your country safe."

  "That's when my past self figured out what was going on here, wasn't it?" I said. "And you killed him for it."

  "Don't give yourself so much credit, Ronan," Patrón said. "You're not that smart. Of course, neither am I."

  "How's that?" asked Querer.

  "I told Ronan all about it back then," said Patrón. "I thought for sure he'd see how things had to be and would back my play for the good of the nation. Instead he grew a backbone and threatened to blow it all wide open."

  "You killed me." I raised a hand to my chest and watched Patrón's eyes follow my movement.

  Querer and I had put our guns away when we'd entered the command room. My gun still sat in its holster. If I went for it, Patrón would gun me down before I could get it clear, for sure.

  Patrón frowned. "It was a damned shame, too," he said, "but I needed to make sure I tied off all the loose ends. A lot of good people died that day." He gave Winslow a pointed look. "But they all came back in better shape than ever, and none the wiser for it. Now it's looking like '38 all over again."

  He turned to me. "First, though, I want to know how you did it. I scoured your home and office. I hunted down and destroyed every record you made. There's no way you should have been able to find out what happened, what I did."

  I put my hand on the butt of my gun and remained silent.

  Patrón raised his eyebrows at me and giggled in disbelief. "Oh, you still don't know, do you? The man terrorizing the President right now might, but you don't have a clue."

  "I sense that this is causing you a great deal of distress, Agent Dooley," President Emmanuel's voice said. "Allow me to explain the crux of the matter."

  A life-sized image popped up on one of the wallscreens. It showed President Westwood standing in the Oval Office, arguing with Patrón as I watched from nearby.

  "You can't do this," the President said, stabbing a thick finger into Patrón's chest with every word. "I forbid it."

  "But, Mr President," the Patrón on the screen said. "Be reasonable. This isn't something I can do anything about. None of us can. Not without bringing down the entire government. It's too late."

  The President's face flushed with rage. I had never seen him so upset. He was a man who was used to getting what he wanted, even before he ascended to the Presidency, and he wasn't about to let Patrón defy him.

  "Then bring down the government," the President said. "Break down the whole goddamned thing." He turned and walked back to his desk. "I'm calling a press conference immediately. I'm ending these atrocities of yours right now."

  "Mr President," Patrón said.

  The President ignored him. "Oberon?" he said over his communications link. "Get your ass into the Oval Office right now. We have a situation on our hands, and I'm going to need you to help me spin it."

  "This is my favorite part," the Patrón standing near me in the flesh said. "Watch."

  "Mr President." Patrón pulled his pistol and pointed it at the President.

  "What?" The President turned as he snapped at Patrón, and he stared down the barrel of the gun pointed at his face.

  "I'm sorry."

  In the background of the scene, I could see my past self moving, trying to throw myself in the path of the bullet. Even now, though, I knew I'd be too late. The gun barked in Patrón's hand, and the top of the President's head disappeared.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Everyone in the command center jumped at the crack of the gunshot, except for Patrón. He made a cutting gesture across his throat, and the video playing on the wallscreen disappeared.

  "You killed the President!" I said.

  Patrón chuckled. "That's just what you said in '38. Back then, I couldn't convince you it was for the greater good, and I had to shoot you too."

  I fought back the urge to launch myself at the bastard. The gun he held pointed at my chest helped with that.

  "But Ronan was given the Medal of Honor for saving President Westwood back then," Querer said.

  "I don't remember any of it, of course," I said, keeping my eyes always on Patrón. "I won the award based on his testimony."

  "What can I say?" Patrón rolled his eyes. "I felt like he deserved something for all his trouble."

  "That footage has to be fake," said Querer. "How could you get away with something like that? There's a limit to how much can be covered up. It was in the Oval Office!"

  "He had help," Winslow said. "More than you could imagine."

  "What, like the entire Secret Service?"

  "Far more than that," Patrón said with a vicious grin.

  "But how?" I asked. "TIE monitors every bit of information generated in the White House. It should have figured it out and shut you down instantly." That was when I figured it out.

  "Unless," I said, "TIE is on your side."

  "Actually," Patrón said, "it's more like I'm on its side. Isn't that right, Minder?"

  "Absolutely," Minder's voice said.

  My heart froze. If Minder, the computer system behind the Amortals Project, also controlled TIE, just how powerful must it be? I wished I could have called up my calculator layer to do the math, but my gut told me that such a computer would have to be several orders of magnitude ahead of the best supercomputers on the market today.

  "Where could you possibly find that much processing power?" I said.

  "Where indeed?" Winslow asked. His gaze wandered out of the room to scan the racks of clones arrayed throughout the massive cavity in which we sat.

  "Oh, no," I said. "You can't be using all those people."

  Winslow got to his feet. "It didn't start out that way. I never meant for any of this to happen."

  "What?" said Querer. "What did he do?"

  "What's the most powerful processor you have on you?" I asked, struggling to keep my voice even.

  "My nanoserver," Querer said without an instant's hesitation.

  "Wrong," said Winslow. "It's your brain. A human brain contains something on the order of a hundred trillion synapses, about a billion in every cubic millimeter. That's far more than any nanoserver could ever hope to have. Even that massive array up in my lab only equals about a single human brain."

  "Are you saying that TIE is made of people?"

  "No," I said, staring out at the tens of thousands of clones lying in their crèches. "He's saying it's made out of them."

  Querer gasped in horror, but Patrón's cackling quickly drowned that out.

  "Ironic, isn't it, Ronan?" Patrón said. "All those scientists struggling for so many years to design an artificial intelligence, and we had the all-natural answer right in our hands. All those untapped brains ready to be used."

  I turned to Winslow. "You d
id this?"

  He shuddered. "It struck me that if we could use the brains for storage, we might be able to tap their processing power too. I started out with just a few of them running independently, but I slowly added more and more of them in parallel."

  It was my turn to shudder. He'd taken human beings and turned them into computers.

  "And you used them to run TIE?" I said.