Nadia ignored his weak attempt at humor. “It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated.
“I’m betting Phil disagrees. But we have the kid.” Get up. Everything hurt. He felt like if he stood, his guts might spill out onto the floor. Move, damnit! “Maybe we can pull some small victory out of this yet.”
She put a hand on his chest, silencing him and stopping him from rising. “I thought you were dead.”
They locked eyes. “Me too.”
“I’m glad you’re not,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
“Let’s not do that again, okay? It’d be nice if we had a chance to get to know each other a bit better.”
Griffin grinned. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Now let’s go interrogate this Scan.” Nadia shook her head but he couldn’t tell if it was out of disgust or if she was impressed with his stoic resolve and stiff upper lip. Probably the former.
“It’s a little more complicated,” she said. “The Scan is a 14-year old boy. He grew up in a crèche and has been programmed since he was a little kid. This has to be handled carefully.”
“The kid will crack. Any programming they’ve done we can undo.”
“There’s the question of Scan rights. It’s a gray area. Some people say Scans have no souls and aren’t human. NATU has to be careful what it does here. If we ignore the kid’s rights it sends a clear message.”
“The kid’s a minor on top of all that,” mused Griffin.
“If it goes to court he’ll be tried as an adult. He killed eighteen people in the hotel. How many others has he killed over the years?”
“Yeah, but he’s a Scan. Who knows what sort of messed up virtuality he lives in. He might not have known it was real. The whole thing might have been a game.”
“I can’t believe people do this to kids,” Nadia said. “There’s something wrong with you if you are willing to shuck some child’s body like a husk of corn to make use of their brain.”
Griffin thought back to the Jerseyville crèche, remembered the stacked bodies, the stench and the flies. Lock it down. Put it away. Nadia didn’t need to see him bawling like a baby. “You have no idea.” He swallowed a hard lump of pain. “I never used to believe in evil, thought it was a word used to manipulate idiots into going to war.” He leaned forward in preparation for standing and she reached out to help. He waved away her concern. “I’m fine,” he lied.
“You know,” she said, “about what happened...”
“Oh. Yeah. Look,” He gestured vaguely, unsure what to say. “It doesn’t...”
“It doesn’t?”
“I’m on a bucketful of painkillers,” said Griffin. “And I don’t want to say something stupid and mess this up.”
“So there’s something to mess up?”
“God, I hope so.”
Her eyes searched his. “Hmm. You sure you won’t lie down for a while?”
“Is that an offer?” She swatted his arm. “No. If I lie down now I’ll never get back up.”
“Idiot.”
He watched her make a call to the Dallas NATU office and then scowl at her phone when the call got dropped. She tried several more times, but each time the connection was lost before she completed her report.
“Well then,” she said, putting her phone away. “I’m going to catch a cab to the Dallas office and report in.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
She grabbed his face and pulled him into a long kiss and for a moment he forgot all about his many hurts. When she let go, she turned and left without a word. Griffin watched, wondering if he should say something and not being able to think of anything better than thank-you.
After Nadia left, Griffin examined his hand. No scar. Not even the thinnest hint of a line. That’s disappointing. Some katana wielding psycho assassin kid in a killer combat chassis hacked his off hand and he had nothing to show but a burning itch and an increased respect for swords.
He stood slowly, grunting and clutching his stomach. Stay inside. Stay inside, he said to his innards. It took several minutes to straighten, and a good ten minutes to get dressed. He only whimpered twice and was soaked in sweat by the time he finished.
His knee threatened to give way on his first step. It felt like the doctors epoxied all the shattered bone fragments back into place and the glue hadn’t yet set. His spine made sick grinding noises as he limped down the hall toward the release desk.
The doctors said he wasn’t ready. The new ceramic knee needed weeks of physiotherapy, they said. Bones were still knitting in his wrist and spine, they told him. A considerable length of his greater intestine had been glued back together.
I knew there was glue somewhere.
He told them his nose hurt too, and it throbbed in response. It’s broken, they told him. They wanted to keep him under observation for at least three more days. No way he’d wait three days. It wasn’t going to happen. Stalling was too goddamn expensive. It couldn’t happen again. He didn’t care how much it hurt. He had to get to this assassin child before someone else did.
Arming Griffin with prescription for a bagful of painkillers, they released him with dire warning of what would happen if he exerted himself. Dozens of wounded and sick filled the hospital pharmacy, all clutching little pink scraps of paper. Judging from the lack of movement in the line, it’d be at least an hour before he got hold of his meds.
Someone else will get to the kid first. He’d be too late. Again.
Griffin turned away. Hopefully whatever the doctors had given him would last until he could fill his prescription.
***
The beach stretched forever in each direction. Leisurely dunes of white sand slumped towards the gentle salt-water waves. A breeze, tender and salty and warm, ruffled the dark curls of Abdul’s hair. He reclined in a hammock of coarse twine more comfortable than it had any right to be.
It didn’t matter, it changed nothing.
He’d cranked up the relative speed of the virtuality and the three days of tropical vacation did nothing to take the edge off. Here, the memories were translated into more biological terms. He remembered the blast of heat as the barn collapsed and the stench of charred flesh. He remembered the cold decision to kill, over and over again. He watched himself kill the people in the farmhouse. He machine-gunned the man in the corn in half. He murdered over and over.
Why leave me with feelings at all? Make me a lobotomized killing machine and be done with it. It was his new prayer.
Why did They leave him his guilt but take so much else away?
The polite cough of the cabin boy got Abdul’s attention. The boy’s voice was soft and unobtrusive. “Mister Aziiz-Giordano. Your mother is in the waiting room. Are you ready to see her?”
“Christ, no.”
“Sir? Shall I tell her you are unable to receive visitors?”
Abdul sat up and looked around the beach. Empty Corona bottles were piled under the hammock. What a mess. Seventeen years old, he’d been mature enough to join the army and die, but not have a beer. In virtuality the rules were different.
He imagined his Mom’s reaction to the mess. Dead, and still not wanting to disappoint her?
“No, better show her in. Add another chair. Get rid of the beer empties. Better sober me up as well. And put on some tea.”
The empties vanished. An Aynsley teapot and two fragile paper-thin tea cups appeared as did a small white table with two matching chairs. Abdul smelled the steeping tea and it reminded him of childhood.
His Mom appeared a minute later dressed in faded jeans and an over-sized orange and red tie-dyed t-shirt. She was slim, brown-skinned and long limbed. Her hair showed no sign of graying and Abdul wondered if she dyed it back to its original dark chestnut. Though she was well into her fifties she displayed no wrinkles. There was something about her eyes and the assured way she moved; every act a calm grace, as if she believed all of life a dance. A red pottu of glistening agatized dinosaur bone sat in the center of her forehead.
/> Dark eyes examined Abdul. “You look good,” she said.
“It’s a virtuality, Mom. I could look like a peanut butter sandwich if I wanted. This body is based on the data they had on me a few weeks before I was killed.”
“Don’t be like that. If you’re dead, who am I talking to?”
“A simulacrum.”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
“Mom, I’m a digital copy. I’m not being melodramatic, I’m not the real thing.”
“Hmm. You get defensive the same way he did. Are you seeing anyone?”
“What? Seeing? I’m a Scan. Most of the time I exist as a fucking walking tank—”
“Language.”
“Sorry. A killing machine. I’m a weapon. A device. An appliance, like your fridge.”
“The fridge is easier to get along with. Does that mean you’re not seeing anyone?”
“I’m not human. I’m a piece of software.”
“First you’re a fridge and now you’re software. Which is it? And really, what’s the difference between software and the human brain? If they’re equally complex, what’s the big deal? Only a man would claim he wasn’t human when he so obviously is. Typical.”
A retired physicist, his Mom always kept abreast of the latest in the sciences. She was much smarter than he, and knew far more about Scans.
“It seems like dating would be awkward for a tank,” he said. “We couldn’t exactly catch a movie together.”
She glanced around the virtuality beach pointedly. “This looks pretty nice in here. So you’re not going to go to some crappy movie. Big deal when you have all this at your disposal.” She waved a long arm at the beach, slim fingers drawing graceful arcs in the air. “Surely there is some kind of virtuality meeting place for Scans. You must all be so lonely.”
The idea never occurred to him. Of course there were meeting places for his kind. It made sense. There were millions of virtuality bars and dance halls and sex clubs littered around the world. They were full of regular people, but Scans could go as well and no one would be any the wiser. He’d heard of people having relationships and weddings entirely in virtuality. Realer than real, but not really cheating; the slogan for a popular virtual-resort where people met to fuck their virtual brains out with people they didn’t know and would never meet in reality.
“Okay. I’ll look into it. Maybe I can hook up with a toaster.”
“Make sure it’s a nice toaster. Don’t be bringing home some trashy Smart-Toaster that can’t even do bagels.”
“I’ll do you proud, Mom.”
“Good. Is there a restaurant on this beach somewhere? I need a glass of wine.”
“Sure, I can have one created. But it isn’t real, you know.”
“I remember thinking my parents couldn’t keep up with the fast pace of technology. I wonder if I was as much an ass about it as you are.”
Abdul grinned his first real, heartfelt smile. “Probably.”
An instant later they sat in a crowded French café sipping Italian Barolo. The chairs were comfortable slatted wood contraptions, thick with decades of repainting, and shaded by large pink parasols advertising Castelain and Kronenbourg. The narrow streets were cobbled stone and crowded with tourists and playing children. The hubbub enveloped Abdul and his mother in a bubble of privacy without interfering in their talk. Warm and buttery, the smell of fresh baked croissants wafted past on a gentle breeze. One of the waitresses, all dark eyes and thick black hair, flashed him an inviting look. He felt a stirring in his groin.
She isn’t real. I’m not real.
“I heard about what happened in Wichita Falls,” said his mother.
This was what he came here to avoid. He hoped to escape those memories—if only for a brief while—and yet here was his mother holding them up for examination. Sirens. Burnt bodies. Corpses littered the ground. Blood.
The inquest had been short and brutal. Why had the barn burned? He told them he dropped a high explosive round on a few thousand liters of gas. Intentionally? Abdul asked if it mattered, daring them to punish him.
They talked about pulling him off active duty while further investigations took place, but nothing had happened. Did no one care?
He was a murderer now, no way around that. The children in the barn may have been an accident, but the chassis and the people in the farm house, that was deliberate, coldly intentional.
Could he have done it differently? Should he have done it differently?
A searing pinpoint of white-hot rage he wasn’t yet willing to touch burned at his core. Acknowledging the anger might free it, and an enraged killing machine couldn’t be a good idea. He remembered the barn exploding like a bomb. Sorting through the charred corpses of children. Gut-churning self-loathing in a soulless creature without guts. And yet there it hung, heavy in his belly, the loathing and the fury. Blinding wrath. The kind of anger he thought of as biblical, something with which to smite down from the heavens. He may have killed those children, but someone else put them there.
There will be a reckoning.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about that,” Abdul told his mother.
She touched his hand. “What I’m about to say may seem like cheap philosophy, but think about it, okay?”
Abdul nodded. “Alright.”
“Are you confused?”
“Yes, definitely.”
She smiled her Mom smile. “I’d call that a pretty good definition of what it is to be human.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Saturday, August 4th 3034
Lokner2.0 read the headline a second time. ‘M-Sof Employee Killed Attempting Sabotage.’ Son of a bitch! Could no one do anything right? Must he do everything himself?
He skimmed the article, reading about how a disgruntled maintenance worker snuck in to the M-Sof R&D building only to be slain by security while attempting to damage the company’s computer systems with a wrench. No mention was made of Mark Lokner—other than to note that the company’s stocks seemed to be stabilizing after the founder’s much publicized unscanned death—or of the amount of damage done.
Did the half-wit assassin manage to smash the computer before he was slain?
“Is my brother dead?”
Obviously.
“I mean for real no coming back dead.”
Easy enough to find out.
“It is?”
What would you be doing right now if you were him?
“Playing the market to take advantage of the fact the company is back in the news.” Mark saw it. “Oh. Smart.”
Thanks.
Calling up the multidimensional holographic display on his desk he watched the subtle manipulation of M-Sof and related stocks. No doubt, only one man—well, two, technically—could do that.
The real question is does he know?
That was a good question. If he did, he might already be plotting his revenge. Mark knew it would be a subtle retaliation, as befits a genius. He thought it through.
Lokner1.0 wouldn’t want to harm 5THSUN, the company was worth millions. He’d planned to keep 2.0 as a last ditch line of defense. If the authorities were on to him, he’d have a copy of himself to sacrifice while the real one—no, I’m real too!—made his escape.
Lokner2.0 stared at the holographic display hovering over his desk. That was it!
A snarl twisted his face. A plan. The beautiful genius of it, the pure irony! He’d set up 1.0 to take the fall for some crime. 1.0 would be the patsy. Beautiful! The trick would be to set up 1.0 without drawing attention to himself.
Lokner had never been the type to sit by, waiting for fate and fortune to offer opportunities. Opportunities were made, taken, and stolen. As soon as Miles freed him, Lokner2.0 began building his own nest egg, using the 5THSUN Assessments resources he had access to. He must approach the market and his investment strategy differently than his brother, as he now called 1.0. His brother must never suspect he was free and playing the market.
This need for secrec
y and the drastic change in investment techniques and tactics led him to a discovery he might not otherwise have made.
After a few hours of adjusting and perfecting his new strategy, he discovered another Scan also played the markets. The moves were too flawlessly timed and executed to be carried out by someone who needed to sleep or had a life of any kind. While this new entity didn’t have his skill, flare, or manipulation of people and markets, it was still extremely successful.
The investments came from several front companies in Central America. He recognized these companies as they belonged to his Mafia contacts in the area. They supplied people to run the crèches, and in return he supplied them with scanning hardware and Scan storage facilities.
Mark had known the Mob ran Scans for their own purposes. He even knew they used children from crèches he funded. Business was business. That they used the Scans to compete in the market against him pissed him off. Those are my kids. He paid for them and supplied the technology to make this all possible. He remembered from his biological days, supplying the Mob with a trust fund to guarantee the children’s corpses good Christian burials. Now that he thought about it, it seemed pretty fucking unlikely Riina spent any of that money on burials, Christian or otherwise.
Thinking back to his life left him uncomfortable. Somewhere he’d lost something. What was missing evaded him, a flickering gnat hovering beyond his peripheral vision. Control. It felt like it was slipping away. The vague sense of loss filled him with failure.
Fear of failure; your one phobia. Mark shied from the thought. I am Mark Fucking Lokner. I never fail.
The kids. He’d been thinking about the kids.
He wasn’t a heartless bastard. He wanted what’s best for those kids. He wanted what was best for everybody. None of this was about him, not really. Lokner1.0 was in the way. The man was too dangerous. Once 1.0 was gone, he could get back to the real task of building the future.
But you’ve failed, and in so many ways. It’s all falling apart.
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