by Steven James
He shakes his head disparagingly. “The truth can get you into serious trouble, amigo.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
“But”—now he points an admonishing finger at me—“it’s always a lot less trouble than telling a lie.”
“That might be debatable under certain circumstances, but I hear what you’re saying.”
“Buddy, if you’re looking for relationship advice, I’m the wrong guy to come to. You know that.”
Xavier never married but was left standing at the altar once when he was thirty-two, and as far as I know he never got close to proposing again in the two decades since. He rarely speaks about that day, and I know better than to bring it up. I’m not even sure Charlene and Fionna know about that part of his history.
“Well then,” I press him, “maybe a little perspective at least.”
I can tell he’s carefully evaluating what to say. “Someone once told me that you can tell what’s important to a person by looking at three things—his calendar, his checkbook, and his refrigerator door.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s leave your calendar and checkbook out of this for a minute. Just take the fridge door. You still have photos of Rachel and your boys up there. From that trip to Disney World.”
I still study that photo at least once a week, looking for hints of depression on Rachel’s face, or threads of anger, or something, anything, hidden there that might serve as a clue to what she was about to do only two weeks later.
But all I ever see is a loving mother, a caring wife.
“Yeah.” I’m not sure I want to be talking about my dead family right now. “I know.”
“And you still have the picture up there that Andrew drew of your family.”
Of course I know the one he’s talking about: the drawing with stick figures of the four of us in the desert next to a tall cactus. In the picture, we’re all smiling and holding hands. A happy yellow sun shines down from the top right corner of the page. Andrew’s favorite animal was the turtle, and there are two green turtles walking toward us. Even the turtles are smiling in my son’s picture.
“You know what else?” Xavier says. “What else is on your fridge?”
“Photos of you and Fionna’s family and . . .”
Dad. Pictures of my dad . . .
My father and I have never really been close, not since Mom moved out when I was in middle school. Now that he comes to mind, I recall that he’s supposed to be flying down Monday to visit—something that had slipped my mind earlier and just adds to the things on my already full plate.
But I know Xavier isn’t talking about the photos of my dad.
“And of Charlene.”
He nods. “Yeah. What, at least five or six of ’em? Then if I looked at your calendar and checkbook I’d see signs all over the place of how much she means to you. Don’t read too much into this morning, dude. She’s upset, we’re all upset about what happened. She just cares about you. She wants to know you’re thinking about her.”
“I am.”
“But you weren’t. At the cliff.”
“No, but I was trying to catch—”
“I know, I know, I’m just saying. You’re a risk taker by nature, Jev. You leap before you look. It’s who you are. She needs to know that you’re going to look in her direction before you leap next time—that she’s important enough to make you think twice.”
I’m quiet. “That was pretty well put, actually, for someone who’s not good at relationship advice.”
“It’s based on something I read in a fortune cookie one time. A loose translation.”
“Ah.”
We’re close now. Emilio’s house lies just down the street.
“You know, Xav, I’m probably reading way more into this than I should, anyway. I’m sure it’s nothing, just something for us to sort out.”
He doesn’t respond right away. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.”
I park by the curb in front of the house, which is brown, nondescript, and surrounded by scraggly cacti that don’t look like they’re handling the heat very well.
It’s a humble home, unpretentious, and easily forgettable—exactly the kind of place my friend wanted so he could disappear into the fabric of everyday suburban life when he was in Vegas doing shows.
I unpocket the pen as we step out of the car. We start up the driveway, but even before I can get the top of the pen unscrewed to get to the spring, I notice that Emilio’s front door is slightly ajar.
Xavier must see it too, because he pulls out a Taser.
“Since when do you carry a Taser?”
“Betty’s been with me two weeks now.”
“You named your Taser ‘Betty’?”
“Yup. You think we should call the cops?”
“Let’s have a peek inside first.”
We walk to the house.
“Betty, huh?”
“I’ve always liked the name.”
I press lightly against the door and it eases open. “Hello?”
No reply.
“The lock is shattered,” Xavier points out unnecessarily.
“Yeah.”
We both stand there for a moment, unsure what to do. “Well,” he says at last, “it wouldn’t be breaking and entering.”
“Just entering.”
“That’s right.”
“Which is what we were going to do anyway.”
“Good point.”
I put the pen away and he asks, “You scared?”
“Naw. I know TaeKwonDo.”
He smiles. “Well, I know Betty. And she has a black belt in kicking butt.”
“I think you’ve been watching too many Bruce Willis movies.”
“That may be true.”
Honestly, I don’t think there’s much of a chance that I’ll need to do any TaeKwonDo or that Xavier will need to do any butt kicking with Betty. Yes, the door has been jimmied, but the neighborhood is quiet. No dogs barking, nothing out of the ordinary—except for the open door.
I step across the threshold.
The house is silent.
Tired sunlight passes blearily through the curtains, but even without the living room lights on I can see that the room is in terrible disarray.
The magic paraphernalia that normally lines Emilio’s shelves lies scattered and broken throughout the room. The TV and its stand are knocked over.
The couch has been slit open and is spewing its contents onto the carpet. Emilio’s bookshelves have been swept empty, and his collection of magic books is strewn all across the floor. One bookshelf has been pulled loose from the wall and lies sprawled across the books like a mother trying to protect her children from whoever had been in here rifling through everything.
“Hello?” I call again.
Still nothing.
Both of us are silent as we edge forward. I peer into Emilio’s home office and see his computer’s hard drive has been ripped out. The books on his desk have been knocked down, and several of them, The Singularity Is Near, Singularity Rising, and Humanity 2.0, lie flipped open on the floor. From what I can see, they’re heavily highlighted and dog-eared.
A jumble of books on transhumanism, whatever that is, lies nearby. His checkbook and a Visa credit card rest in a clutter bowl on the edge of his desk.
I take it all in.
I’m near the fireplace, glancing up the stairway, when I hear the back door clack shut. It’s impossible to tell if it was from someone entering or leaving.
“Who’s there?” Xavier calls loudly as he flips Betty around in his hand. I’m not sure how to use a Taser, but I assume he’s doing whatever he needs to in order to make sure she’s ready to do her thing.
No reply.
I move toward the door to the patio. Out the window, I can see someone fleeing down the alley behind the house toward a white pickup truck parked near the intersection.
The guy is really moving and I can’t make out much, but whoever it is, it isn’t Tomás A
gcaoili, the snake wrangler. Tomás is Filipino. This guy is Caucasian.
By the time I get outside, he has jumped into the truck, and when I run toward it to get the license plate number, he whips onto the street and tears off toward the intersection before I can read it.
“Get back to my car!” I shout to Xavier, who has emerged from the porch door.
We bolt to the Aston Martin. Jumping in, I fire up the engine and we peel away from the curb. Xavier grabs the armrest as I fly around the corner and accelerate toward the pickup.
“Just so you know.” A shot of adrenaline rushes through me and it feels good. “This is my first car chase.”
“I’ve been in a few.”
“Must have been before my time.”
“A lot happened before your time. Don’t lose him.”
I punch the gas. I’ve taken this car out in the desert a few times to see what she can do, and she can more than hold her own on the open road. I’m not sure how much I want to push her in town, but I also don’t want this guy to slip away like Tomás did.
“Any idea what you’re going to do when we catch up with him?” Xavier asks me.
“Whatever we need to in order to find out if he had anything to do with Emilio’s death.”
“That’ll work.”
I floor the gas pedal and let the DB9 do her thing.
Looking Twice
We gain quickly, and after two more turns, we’re almost close enough to read the pickup’s plates.
“I can make out an L,” Xavier mutters, “and a seven. At least I think it’s a seven.”
“It is.” Xavier eyes aren’t as good as mine and I can read the rest of it. The driver we’re following flares left through a red light. When I reach the intersection I slow to a stop. A moment later the light turns green but I don’t stomp on the gas.
“I got it,” I tell him softly.
“The plates?”
“Yes.” I still don’t pull forward. The pickup is heading toward the highway.
Xavier and I have known each other for a long time, and now when he speaks he reads my mind. “You’re thinking about Charlene this time, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. And what you said earlier, about her wanting to be important enough to make me think twice.”
“To look before you leap.”
“Exactly.”
The pickup is gone.
I take a small breath. “And right now I’m looking.”
“I’m proud of you, bro. You’re teachable after all.”
“Don’t be too proud.” I glide my fingers across the DB9’s console. “I kinda leaped first. At least a little.”
“I won’t mention it.” He has his phone poised in his hand. “So you got the plate number?”
I recite it to him but then hesitate. “I’m not great with make and model, though, so—” A woman putting on lipstick and driving a minivan pulls up behind me and lays on her horn. I roll around the corner and continue up the block. “It was a newish-looking white pickup, that’s about all I know.”
“It was a 2012 Chevy Silverado.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
I look at him quizzically. “That’s pretty specific. I’ve never known you to be a car geek.”
“I’m not. But I know that vehicle all too well.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s what the Cammo dudes drive out at Groom Lake—um, a private security firm. They guard the perimeter. I mean, sometimes they help with stuff on the base, resupplies, that sort of thing, but—well, that’s what we call ’em. The dudes wear camouflage pants, sometimes they’re called cami dudes instead.”
“I get it.”
“Anyway, remember when I mentioned just now that I was in car chases?”
“Yes. You never told me what side of the chases you were on.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But 2012 wasn’t before my time.”
“Neither were all the car chases.”
“I see.” I turn the car around.
The Groom Lake connection might be legit, but I’m not sure where that leaves us right now.
“So,” I ask him, “you think it was a Cammo dude?”
“There’s no way to tell for sure, but it would fit that whoever he was, he’s at least with the same security firm.”
“Well, for right now, we saw a male Caucasian fleeing the scene, we have the make, model, year, and plates of the vehicle. That gives us plenty to tell the cops. But you don’t necessarily have to tell them that we were just in a high-speed chase with the suspect.”
“Right on.” He pulls out his phone again.
I aim the DB9 toward the next intersection, then turn left. “Why don’t you call Fionna too, see what she can pull up on the plates.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to his house. I want to have another look around before the cops get there.”
“It’s a crime scene, we might leave DNA behind on the—wait. We already left DNA behind.”
“Precisely. So what do we have to lose?”
“But Jev, that place was a mess. How’ll you be able to tell what the guy was after?”
“I have a feeling I already know what he was after.”
“What’s that?”
“The USB drive.”
A slight pause. “Gotcha.”
He calls 911 and then phones Fionna while I guide the Aston Martin back toward Emilio’s house.
Colonel Byrne parked in the short-term lot at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport.
After his forty-two-minute flight to Phoenix, he would be picked up by the associates of the person who came up with the idea for tomorrow night’s transfer of merchandise. Perhaps he would be able to find out, at last, his—or her—true identity.
From the car’s trunk, he retrieved the hard-cased suitcase containing the robotic arm and rolled it behind him as he headed for the terminal.
Harsh Mercy
Plyotech Cybernetics Research & Development Facility
Sublevel 4
Heston Dembski, RN, special assistant to Dr. Malhotra, had a problem.
He knew what was going on in the lower levels of Plyotech’s R&D facility, and he was not sure what to do about it. He knew about the primate research, the gene therapy programs, the xenotransplantation initiatives, the neural implants. He had his theories about why things were taken care of in the way they were, but he couldn’t be certain.
It was not his job to ask questions.
It was his job to assist Dr. Malhotra.
To do as he was told.
He’d just been transferred down here to work with the team two weeks ago. The prescreenings, background checks, and psych evals had all been intensive. At least two dozen other applicants who’d been interviewing with Heston hadn’t made it. And so, he’d felt genuinely honored to get the job.
However, almost right away he was faced with a seemingly insurmountable ethical dilemma—assist with something you don’t believe in to accomplish something you do, or betray those you work for just to calm your conscience.
From the start he’d felt a little uncomfortable with what they were doing but had tried to convince himself that it was all in the name of science, that the things he was seeing, the research he was finding himself a part of, were for the greater good. That it was necessary.
But then he came across the tests they were doing on patient 175-4, a man who Heston found out, through his own research, was named Thad Becker and had first volunteered for the program about forty days ago. Apparently, he’d come in as a quadriplegic and was outfitted with the experimental exolimbs, but had not been able to learn to use them yet.
And then, according to the charts, he’d slipped into a coma.
That’s what Heston had been told, but that’s not what he believed. No, if he was right, a coma, even death, would have been a better fate for Mr. Becker; Heston had no doubt about that.
This morning they
were scheduled to do a brain scan on Thad in the specially designed fMRI machine, the one made for incapacitated patients.
Heston passed down the hallway to meet up with Calista Hendrix at the elevator bay.
He wasn’t sure why she was granted access privileges that almost no one else was, but when she was around no one questioned it.
Throughout the rest of the facility, work was being done on reverse engineering the human brain to create smart machines and computers with strong AI, but down here the research focused mainly on direct machine-to-brain interfaces.
All of it was paving the way to using nanotechnology—that is, bioengineering at the molecular level—to scan the human brain and develop more advanced ways of interfacing humans with machines through electrode implants and, eventually, through implanted neural nanobots themselves.
Nanotechnology, bioengineering, and robotics were the three fields that held the most promise to help humans make the next great evolutionary leap—away from the limits of biological intelligence and cellular senescence and toward their destiny of technological immortality.
First, of course, it was essential to create a machine capable of not just recording information or processing at the computational level of the human brain, but also of capturing the essence of personality, dreams, aspirations, memory. In other words, consciousness—which science has shown must simply be an outgrowth of the complexity of an interplay of neural synapses.
So the goal: create machines capable of not just imitating human levels of consciousness, but of encapsulating it, and to eventually upload that consciousness onto a machine.
Colonel Byrne had made it clear that he was going to be the first one to be scanned, and even though Heston wasn’t clear on the colonel’s involvement with Plyotech, everyone in the division assumed he was part of the DARPA contract with Plyotech and they didn’t question his involvement.
Heston found nothing objectionable or unethical about the colonel’s goal, but the process of getting to that point was questionable. Whenever science is forging into new territory, things tend to get a little fuzzy around the moral edges. It’s always been that way.
Heston told himself that over and over as his questions mounted and his reservations grew: it was just the nature of the business, the outgrowth of cutting-edge research. But that didn’t serve well to quiet his questions or his reservations.