Genocidal Organ

by Project Itoh

  I suppressed a grin and stepped out into the street.

  I could tell that adrenaline was starting to pump through my veins, so I adjusted my internal tension to counterbalance its effects.

  One step. Two steps. I could feel the ground beneath my feet clearly, so clearly. My senses were heightened so much that the mere act of walking almost tickled my feet.

  I couldn’t very well just cross the road to our apartment where Williams was currently holed up. That would have been just too funny. So I wondered which way I should go now. After all, I had only used this exit to double back so that Lucia wouldn’t be able to detect our movements while we were watching her …

  I wondered if my tails knew about our stakeout of Lucia’s place. Possibly. They probably knew it existed at least, even if not exactly where it was. I didn’t know if they were John Paul’s men or not, but we’d already factored in the possibility that we would come up against some sort of organized resistance, hence our precautionary measures such as entering the country at different times and avoiding all real-time wireless transmission of data from Lucia’s apartment as proof against interception.

  I scratched the back of my head. My signal to Williams that I was being followed. I decided to take a stroll through the streets of Prague and discover the identity of my tails.

  I arrived at a busy street, and my field of vision went into overdrive. My AR contact lenses were flooded with virtual banners.

  Prague was a tourist hotspot, so its Alternative Reality databank was pretty well developed. Shop after shop, street after street, all had labels, links, a cornucopia of secrets to be revealed. On the film of my contacts, the noble city of a hundred spires was plastered with virtual neon writing and lighting, turning the elegant historic vista into a cross between a neon-soaked Hong Kong night and Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles. The type of store, hours of operation, the number of Michelin Stars a restaurant had—all kinds of landmarks were liberally annotated with virtual neon, creating an alternative reality for the benefit of travelers.

  But what I needed was a plan.

  I looked around for a Touchboard terminal. Prague’s roads were AR-optimized, so there were plenty of terminals scattered about the place. Groups of tourists were huddled in front of giant plastic boards, and each board was illustrated with a picture of a smaller keyboard. I went to stand in front of one of them, staring at the keyboard for three seconds until my contact lenses paired with the Touchboard. I started “typing” on the picture of the keyboard, which functioned every bit as well as a normal keyboard as long as you didn’t need the luxury of spring-loaded keys.

  A while back they actually introduced technology that allowed you to type just by looking at a key—the machine scanned your eye movements—but these visual keyboards died a quick death once it became clear that they were never going to work at any real speed; it turned out that good old-fashioned touch typing was faster than anything the human eye could do.

  I activated a filter that blocked out all tourist information and logged into USA.

  I flicked through the data on Prague’s transportation and infrastructure. Nothing helpful. Damn, I should have done my research beforehand. On the off-chance that someone had something useful, I started a thread requesting a map of Prague with footfall data. I set it up so that I’d be messaged the instant the topic had a reply and sent the link over to Williams for good measure.

  Having done all I could do at that moment, I severed my connection with the Touchboard and set off to find a lonely alleyway somewhere—a dark corner where I could turn the tables on my pursuers without fear of being disturbed.

  I jumped onto a passing streetcar, reflexively stealing a glance behind me as I did. Two men and a woman had also jumped on with me at the last minute. They sat apart from each other. One of the men in particular—a rough-looking youth—was keeping his distance. Were they too far away from me to tail me effectively, or was it a double bluff? Too soon to tell. The streetcar made a few stops, and just as we were approaching central Prague I jumped off. The two men and the woman stayed on the trolley.

  Just in case something was about to happen to me that meant I would never see the light of day again, I picked at a pheromone capsule embedded in one of my fingernails and let a couple of drops fall to the ground. If I vanished, Williams or someone else would be able to follow my scent using tracer dogs. Worst-case scenario, these pheromones would be my epitaph, marking my last stand.

  I started winding my way through the old stone buildings of the city of a hundred spires. This was an old city, even by European standards—it had remained mostly untouched in the great wars of the twentieth century. Neither the Nazis nor the Russians had penetrated the core of the old town. This city was a survivor. And I was determined to use it to help me to survive.

  The ancient, winding alleyways and the looming shadow of Kafka conspired together to transform this town into my own personal labyrinth. Not like the Latin American labyrinths of which Borges wrote, but something distinctly European—a pale, chilling entity against the backdrop of the harsh midnight-blue sky.

  They were still following me.

  I walked among Prague’s spires and churches, past Saint Vitus Cathedral, over her cold stone slabs. After a couple of careful feints and misdirections I managed to get a clearer picture of the people following me. The two men and the woman from the streetcar were here. There was also a youth in standard-issue, minimalist, trendy Pentagon-style gear, and a woman wearing a vintage jersey.

  All of them were young. None of them could have been my age.

  Some sort of youth cult that worshipped John Paul, maybe? My mind spun through the possibilities as I walked around, staking out my pursuers. I could easily have taken any one of them out, but the others were sure to converge on me as I made my move. Was discretion the better part of valor right now? I could always shake them off here, but they’d be back on my tail the next time I showed my face at Lucia’s, no doubt.

  Was I going to have to take an hour-long detour to get home every time I went for my Czech conversation class?

  Fuck that.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a new transmission to my AR contact lenses. Someone had replied to my thread on USA. I headed for the nearest Contact Board and logged in to find that someone had uploaded a detailed, color-coded map with all traffic data for Prague during the last four months. Bingo. They’d only gone and found me an open-source map straight from the Czech Ministry of Transport, complete with mean footfall figures, recorded from an aerial blimp that observed the action from sixty thousand feet.

  I scanned the map and spotted a nearby side alley that was virtually never used.

  Now that John Paul had disappeared, my tails were our biggest lead. A gift, really. I started cricking my shoulders and stretching my arms—a public warm-up for the violent exercise that I was about to engage in. It was the scruffy youth from the streetcar who was following me at that moment, and he stopped for a second, bewildered by my sudden burst of energy. I guess it just didn’t occur to him that he had just gone from predator to prey.

  And so it came to pass that I was able to launch a total surprise attack on this unlucky youth.

  I slipped into the deserted alleyway. He scurried after me, oblivious to the fact that I was waiting and ready to deliver a sucker punch straight to the solar plexus. He went down with a pitiful gurgle. Exactly as I planned. I was almost disappointed at how easy this was.

  “Surprise,” I whispered in his ear and then delivered another powerful blow. For now, my aim was to beat all resistance out of him, no more.

  It was a delicate balance, hurting someone enough that they have absolutely no fight left in them without actually knocking them out cold. Easy to misjudge. This time, though, I seemed to get it right—helped by a few more well-placed punches and kicks to the face.

  “Now then,” I said. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”

  “I’ll never speak,” said the youth, through swol
len lips. I dug the tip of my foot sharply into the prostrate youth’s kidney.

  “Now then,” I said again. “You’re going to tell me who you are.”

  “I’m nobody,” the youth said.

  I brought my weight down on his kidney again. Oops, my foot must have missed, and I must have pressed down on his stomach instead. Warm vomit erupted from his mouth.

  “Who are you? Tell me,” I said for the third time. Except this time I spoke in Czech, using the vocabulary and grammar from the lesson I just had with Lucia. An interrogative sentence or a normal one, the rules are the same in Czech: the phrase you want to emphasize comes first.

  “I’m nobody. Please. Please believe me, sir. I really am nobody.”

  Hmm. It seemed that my Czech lessons weren’t destined to bear fruit so quickly. Well, enough talking. Time to find out what I needed directly from his body. I pried open his swollen eyelids and photographed his bloodshot retinas, and then pressed his fingertips onto my portable reader to get his prints. If we’d been in a better location I could have really tightened the thumbscrews and had him singing in no time, but we were still in the middle of the city, after all, so I decided to call it a day.

  Probably hard to believe after what I’ve just described, but I’m no sadist. I was just fulfilling my professional duties. My job is violence. My job is deciding whether people live or die. Die, mostly.

  My job is this pain, these whimpers, this vomit.

  The guy’s buddies were probably starting to miss him. I figured they’d come looking for him shortly. I slipped away and left the scene behind me.

  After a couple of minutes of browsing through the data I had obtained from the kid, I was overcome by the desire to apologize to him for what I’d done. If I ever came across him again, I’d man up and ask his forgiveness, straight to his face.

  The youth’s fingerprints and retina scans apparently belonged to different people.

  “Man, that was some nasty shit you pulled on that kid, though.” Williams laughed as he chomped down on a jalapeño pepper that he had just picked off the Domino’s Pizza that was apparently available in the Czech Republic too.

  I’m nobody. According to the database, the youth’s words were literally true. It was hard to imagine that either of the so-called identities that his biometric data matched with were actually his.

  “Yeah, well, I guess I am just a nasty shit,” I said, digging into the pizza Williams had secured for us. Lucia Sukrova was having her dinner now too. We glanced occasionally at the monitor that showed the comings and goings of her apartment as we discussed this bizarre ID case.

  Had the youth suffered a finger-losing accident and had a new set transplanted? Unlikely—we might have been living in a world where nanomachines and synthetic flesh were the order of the day, but medical science hadn’t yet nailed the thorny issue of immunologic organ rejection. It would have been one thing to regrow fingers from a person’s own tissue, but transplanting from another person? Technically possible, maybe, but a huge operation. It would, at the very least, have left some sort of paper trail. Yet we could find no record of any such operation.

  Could it have been a simple case of a mistake in the database? Conceivable way back when human error could have caused an entry to be inputted incorrectly. But now the databases containing personal information were managed by giant insurance companies and their subcontracted InfoSec firms. There was basically no margin for error. They had redundancy systems in place to double and triple check every single process. After all, these days it was impossible to do anything or travel anywhere without relying on personal data systems, which meant they had to be failsafe: as accurate as, say, aviation equipment or medical life-support systems.

  In other words, neither scenario was particularly likely.

  I’m nobody.

  The young man had said these words repeatedly through his tears. He hadn’t exactly been crying because he was being forced to talk, of course—it was my well-placed shot to his kidneys that brought forth those tears. But that didn’t necessarily make the words that he managed to force out over his sobs any less true.

  How, though? Shadowy figures able to manipulate the contents of the database at will? After all, “Mr. Bishop,” my assumed identity for this mission, was obviously a fiction. But this was only possible because I was a government agent and because the army had farmed out its own ID systems to an independent contractor rather than one of the standard civilian insurance companies. Even then, there were still lots of hoops for us to jump through, as with any country with a properly developed ID management system; every time the CIA or Special Forces needed a fake identity for one of their agents, they needed to secure explicit permission in advance. The chairman of the Senate Committee on Information Security and at least one other member of the committee needed to sign off on every request.

  In other words, it was highly likely that the youth was some sort of government agent.

  Which country could be acting on behalf of John Paul? Maybe that was the reason why the Pentagon was so keen on expediting John Paul’s elimination—because some other country was now getting involved?

  “Yeah, that’s a possibility. He’s quite the little internationalist, isn’t he, this John Paul?” Williams nodded. So maybe we were being tailed not by John Paul, but by some foreign government agency that thought that we were somehow involved with him? That would fit: we had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started spending a lot of time with Lucia Sukrova after all.

  Damn. Secret agents from another country sure would put a monkey wrench in the works. The mood in the room darkened.

  Anyhow, all of this was just guesswork and speculation. No point in fretting over the hypotheticals. What we had to do now was narrow down the possibilities. This was exactly what we had touched on in my conversation with Lucia: it was the act of narrowing down the possibilities, making logical predictions based on this information, and then surviving, that acted as the catalyst for the development of language and the ego. But spend too much time obsessing over the endless possible variations and you ended up missing your chance to actually do something.

  And that’s why I decided to stop thinking too hard and focus on the facts that were in front of us.

  Our character profile of John Paul was at best like a partially completed crossword puzzle, filling in the blanks one at a time but with the final few entries remaining tantalizingly out of reach. When he was our secondary target on our mission two years ago we had very few blanks filled in. Each mission since then had helped us to fill in some more of the blanks. Now we were almost there.

  Conventional wisdom was that this was a terrible way to gather intelligence. As a basic military strategy, starting off with an insufficient force to achieve your objectives and then gradually increasing your resource allocation trickle by trickle as the war goes on was more or less the textbook way of how not to fight a war. As a tactic, it showed that you severely underestimated your opposition in the planning stages and wasted a significant amount of resources, time, and opportunity at the early stages of your campaign.

  For Intelligence, information was power. It was our only real military resource. For regular forces, information was there to support the battle on the front lines, but to us in Intelligence information was our lifeblood, as powerful as live ammunition, as vital as a supply train. That was why we couldn’t understand, couldn’t stand, the indecisive, secretive attitude of the top brass over this mission. Trickling the information down piece by piece was just as stupid a strategy as slowly increasing your resource allocation bit by bit until you had enough of an edge to win. If only they’d just let us know all the facts up front, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now. On this point, at least, Williams and I were in agreement.

  John Paul lost his wife and only child at Sarajevo.

  John Paul’s wife and daughter, soon to turn six years old, were seeing the sights when they both vanished in a flash of fire as the city around them was turne
d into a giant crater. The beautiful city, its inhabitants, and a large number of visitors and tourists were all vaporized and scattered into the atmosphere along with copious quantities of radioactive debris. A mushroom cloud rose above Europe, marking the end of the post-Hiroshima era.

  According to an ID trace, John Paul was in the apartment of a certain college student, one Lucia Sukrova, when the bomb detonated. Of course, I wouldn’t have known any of this or been allowed to learn of his private life unless it was strictly related to military and Intelligence business. I had no particular feelings about John Paul’s actual affair and made no judgment about his adultery. But I was trained to feel his pain, vividly. He betrayed them—the guilt, the pain, the self-recrimination and self-flagellation. All these feelings I could empathize with in abundance. It was my job.

  A month after the explosion, John Paul had traveled to the camp near the perimeter of what was now called the Sarajevo Crater. Surrounded by NATO troops and an international task force there to guard the perimeter, John Paul waited in silence, patiently, for his turn to be loaned a protective suit to guard him from the nuclear radiation permeating the air of the ruins of Sarajevo. There were so many victims who had “disappeared” that it was impossible to tell with any degree of certainty who had gone missing and who was dead. At the time, genetic markers weren’t in widespread use as personal identification measures, so even when remains were discovered, it was rare that they could be identified as belonging to an individual. Most ended up in a mass grave.

  Three weeks later, John Paul stood on the edge of the Sarajevo Crater, looking down into the abyss. There was no way to tell what this man who had lost his wife and daughter was thinking at that moment, but it was my job to try and imagine it.

  And yet, I thought, what could a man possibly be thinking when confronted with the desolate landscape so typical of his favorite SF novels? When looking at the place that only a short while ago was a city but now had been scorched into a smooth, glassy wasteland surrounding a giant crater? What would the white-radiation-suit-clad figure think as he stood on the edge, looking down at the giant mortar bowl, imagining his family being crushed into paste?