Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  “It… explains a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  Crandall’s eyes fired in scientific passion. “Nicole provided us with human tissue samples to reverse-engineer. Tissue samples with remarkable properties.”

  “From where?”

  “She wouldn’t say. But the cells were resistant to free radicals. Very long telomere chains. And they had a Hayflick limit which was greater than normal by a factor of three.”

  “Someone translate that, please?” asked Armitage.

  “They’re factors in aging,” I said.

  “We assumed it was gen-enged material, stolen from another company. We never dreamed it could be from a real person. Because that would mean that the person could be—”

  “Hundreds of years old,” whispered Maggie.

  ***

  Maggie, Armitage, Max and I stood with Jonathan in his office at the rear of the sanctuary. It had been a storeroom for Maury’s Deli, but now it housed a couple of gray filing cabinets and a desk salvaged from a defunct insurance company. Since the Shift, life insurance wasn’t what it used to be.

  Max tossed his smartscreen onto the wall. A graphic flashed up, bathing us in blue sheen. “Surazal began as a chemical manufacturing company in 1879 in Germany. The founder, Abel Struldbrug, was a German Jew. The factory was destroyed during Dresden’s firebombing in World War II. Abel’s son Abraham got out of Germany and restarted the business in New York in 1946. He retired in ’83, passing the reigns to son Isodor—Izzy to his friends. By 2005, the company had become a diversified conglomerate. One of the nation’s largest drug companies, it had its fingers in a lot of pies. They had subsidiaries that manufactured weapons and provided private security for contractors in the Gulf wars. Combined with their scientific and pharmaceutical divisions, they were perfectly situated to step in when things went to hell.”

  Max punched a couple keys and the image changed. “Adam Struldbrug took over as CEO from Izzy in 2038. Nicole is Adam’s twin. She’s been a thorn in his side since day one.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Max smiled. “Even with their tight control of information, stories leak out.”

  “Such as?”

  “A couple of her assistants have gone missing. And there was a very public case of sibling rivalry in the Russian Tea Room. Nicole smashed a wine glass into Adam’s face. He needed dermal regeneration.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Do you think Adam knows what’s going on?”

  Max shrugged his shoulders. It was like tectonic plates shifting. “Given Surazal’s size, maybe not.”

  I remembered my chance encounter with the man. His comment about spying on Nicole. I had trouble believing he’d be out of the loop on something this big. But Nicole was as hard to pin down as a rattlesnake.

  “And get this,” said Max. “Dr. Gavin, the Head of R&D? The guy you talked to? He’s MIA. Officially, on vacation.”

  “He’s on vacation, alright,” said Armitage. “In hell.”

  “We’re missing the bigger question,” I said.

  “Okay, soldier,” said Armitage grumpily. “Enlighten us.”

  “Is this mutant DNA hers?” I rubbed my eyes. “If Nicole’s as old as we think, is Adam, also? If so, how can they be Isodor Struldbrug’s children? And how does this all connect to the Shift?”

  “Crandall was supposed to clear things up,” said Maggie. “But all we have are new questions. What now?”

  “First,” Armitage said, “We find out what Jakob knows about the Lifetaker.”

  “And if that doesn’t help, we go to the source,” I said, turning to Armitage. “Have your tactical people draw up a plan.”

  “A plan for what?” he said.

  “Snatching Nicole Struldbrug.”

  That went over real well.

  42

  BRIAN

  Brian noticed the cargo truck for several reasons. First, it was an automated Studebaker Transtar Deluxe. Brian had never seen a two-tone version before. Its owner had taken poor care of it. The chromium was tarnished and there were dings all over the pylon fenders. Not surprising. City residents loathed smarty cargo vehicles. They caused terrible traffic slowdowns since they never exceeded the speed limit, let alone drove aggressively. In this city, lawful driving was just plain unnatural. And because there were no human operators to scream at, drivers vented their frustration by chucking bottles and trash at the Sunday drive-bots.

  Also strange was that the Transtar would arrive at Chambers and North End Avenue this early in the morning… five-thirty, when the Blister glowed pink and the vendor stands were curling back their morphinium carapaces. But Brian was no expert on the church delivery schedules, so he just kept an eye out.

  It was freezing in the dawn light. He missed his union-suit, which had maintained his body temp at a perfect 96.8. Somebody stole the underwear with the rest of his smartclothes. Now all he had was a stinky wool coat that weighed twenty pounds and made his neck itch.

  The truck’s only marking was a blue cross intertwined with a trident-like symbol. Brian remembered it from school. It was a Hindu trishula, a symbol of the three-sided aspect of Shiva—creator, protector, and destroyer. Which meant it was a Temple vehicle, not some vendor.

  The routine was always the same. The truck would turn into the narrow alley, stopping next to the metal doors in the macadam that led to the church’s basement.

  Brian’s mother had told him never to walk across loading doors. He’d dismissed her over-protectiveness, finding the saggy bounce of the metal exciting—

  Emotion surged hotly in his throat. He stamped his feet until slivers of hurt shot up his shins. Fuck! Kid’s stuff. His old life was never coming back.

  Once the loading doors were open, sealed boxes floated on magloaders down into the bowels of the church. But no one was ever there to supervise. Another oddity. Customers still didn’t trust automated loaders enough to leave them unattended. Usually there was some Teamster with his butt crack showing. But not here. Just the steady humming flow of those boxes up and down.

  Come to think of it… There were as many boxes leaving the Temple as arriving. What would a Temple regularly export in such quantity? It couldn’t be garbage. Autocompactors rumbled through the streets twice a week and vacuumed the city’s dumpsters. So, what? Pamphlets, newsletters? But these boxes were covered in official-looking government labels, and they were really long, long enough to…

  Long enough to smuggle people in and out of the building!

  People who didn’t want to be seen.

  Brian smiled.

  That night at check-in, he told Yrko. Yrko told Loretta. And Loretta, after receiving her bundle of godsmack, transmitted the information to Nicole.

  ***

  The complicated events that led a sheltered son of a prominent East Side attorney to report a generic delivery van to his tribe of gangbangers were as ironic as they were unlikely. Brian never realized the part he played in the raid on the Ender Temple and the loss of so many lives, because the next night, Yrko killed him.

  Yrko had taken a strong dislike to the bindlepunk. The brat thought he was better than everybody else because he came from money. Fuckers like that had sneered down their noses at him his whole goddamned life. So late that night, Yrko tried to rape Brian, to teach him a lesson. As he himself had been raped in the tombs of a Rikers VCVC Prison Barge in the East River. Yrko had been violated by six men on that awful boat. A lesson he decided to pass along to Brian. Brian, surprisingly, fought back. Yrko lost his temper and broke his neck.

  It was four days before Brian’s sixteenth birthday.

  His father—had he lived—would’ve been fifteen.

  His mother, having lost her entire family to forces unknown, upped her daily consumption of Xanax and wine and was soon another of the city’s walking dead.

  43

  DONNER

  We were smuggled out of the temple in a polycomposite crate built to ship dark matter. If anyone look
ed close enough, they’d see EMD holostickers plastered across the sides. Which was ludicrous, because if someone was looking close enough to verify approval by the Exotic Materials Directorate, they’d almost certainly be wondering why an Ender Temple would need enough juice to power a suborbital. But the box was the right length and shape, so that’s what we used.

  To me, it was just another coffin.

  Dark matter had the helpful characteristic of being almost undetectable. Which gave the delivery driver an excellent excuse when checkpoint scanners couldn’t get an accurate image of a crate’s contents. And, my God, you couldn’t open the crates, man! You wanna contaminate the neighborhood? So the only thing the Surazal rent-a-cops could do was check the forged ID and motion us on with irritated jerks of the head. It worked well for the Cadre’s little underground railroad. It would keep working until some security ace cross-referenced shipments and discovered that this little church shuffled around twenty times more dark matter than existed on the planet.

  I hated taking this risk, but we didn’t have much choice. Maggie had been unable to convince Jakob to come to us, and it was dangerous to talk by uplink. So here we were, en route to his place disguised as exotic electrons.

  Maggie’s heart rested on my belly. My mind drifted back to the extraordinary sensations of being “inside” her in that lab hallway: the half-coalescent awareness of thoughts and feelings. The intimacy stirred a chiaroscuro of fear and comfort. I knew two things: I’d never be able to tolerate so complete a fusion again. And I would forever be smaller and more alone without it.

  As I was ruminating on this, Maggie materialized in the crate, half-wrapped around me, her leg thrown across my knees, her left arm resting on my chest, like lovers snuggling after an afternoon tryst. “Cozy,” she said.

  “Cramped.” I tried to neutralize my face as I looked into those limpid epicanthic peepers.

  “I had something important to tell you.” She played with a button on my shirt.

  “Something that couldn’t wait until we got there?” I thought about slapping her hand away. For some reason I didn’t.

  “Nope, sorry.”

  She smiled. She had me trapped. Too close to even fidget. “What did you need to tell me?” I asked.

  “Hmm. I forgot.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So. Whatcha thinking about?”

  I hesitated. “Us,” I said.

  She stiffened a little. “Care to fill me in?”

  “Wish I could, Mag. It’s pretty confusing.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. I felt her breath on my cheek. Another mechanical illusion, to simulate humanity?

  I drove the thought away. Down that path lay madness. She lay there, looking into my eyes, all pretense gone, and I suddenly wondered how long I was going to spin my wheels. Who’s really ready for what happens next, anyway?

  Her lips felt the way I knew they would. I crushed her to me, savoring her warmth, the softness of her skin. She was as real as anyone could ever want. I heard her moan against my mouth.

  “Everything okay back there?” said the driver over the intercom. “The temperature just jumped five degrees in your box.”

  Maggie pulled back, her face flushed. “Watch the road.”

  ***

  “You’re being emotional,” Jakob said.

  Maggie’s face fell.

  A mentor was the closest thing to a parent that a smarty had. Because of their rapid maturation, the relationship usually only lasted six to eight months. But Jakob had maintained a fatherly interest in Maggie. And Daddy had just found out his little cupcake was a radical. He wasn’t taking the news well.

  “The Cadre! Of all the groups to get involved with! You know our way,” he said, his voice gruff and judgmental. “We don’t get involved in human affairs.”

  “We’re intimately involved in human affairs every single day.”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  He ran a hand through a tangle of graying, shoulder-length hair. Jakob had chosen the well-trod look of an Ivy League professor, a man too distracted by great thoughts to focus on his appearance. His jaw hid behind a thicket of beard. A cute pot belly jutted from his cardigan. I’d lay money on the fact that he’d been too preoccupied this morning to manifest matching socks.

  The crinkled eyes that peered at us, however, were as unerring as the crosshairs of a plasma rifle. The man had undoubtedly vaporized many a protégé’s rebuttal with that withering stare. The academic impression was further enhanced by his library. We were surrounded on all sides by books. Thousands of volumes, reaching to the ceiling, three stories of stories. Balconies and ladders provided access to the upper reaches. The overflow was stacked in piles across the floors, next to high-backed reading chairs, on broad oak tables or propped up on window ledges.

  The sight and smell of leather and manuscript made me think of my father’s paperbacks. He’d been voracious, tearing through three or four a week. It exasperated my mother because he absolutely refused to part with any of them. Good or bad, pulp escapism or highbrow masterwork, he kept every one. Who knows, maybe to him they were evidence that he had something more going on upstairs than the average civil servant. But up and up they piled, despite my mom’s regular fits of ranting, until they filled our little Brooklyn home.

  Until that day. The day when the world caved in. The day I got my first glimpse of the obsidian void that lurks beneath the sunlight.

  “A smarty anarchist,” Jakob proclaimed, bringing me back to them.

  “I’m not an anarchist, and you know it,” she objected. “There’s a difference.”

  “Not to them,” he said, pointing to the world beyond his library. “All they see is black and white. Order and chaos, fear and security. There are no distinctions beyond that anymore.”

  “Exactly!” she said. “That’s how they get away with it! Remind us how scary and complex the world can be! Intone our need for security! When the latest revelations about corruption or torture or surveillance surfaces, replay the Footage, trot out the Horrible Images! Watch the critics subside into grumbles. They can’t afford to have a backbone, not against all that empty patriotism!”

  “Our existence depends on our neutrality,” he said. “Who are you to risk that?”

  “Who do I have to be, Jakob?” she said. “I won’t be paralyzed by the fear of some terrible, hypothetical future. The present is terrible enough.”

  He threw his hands in the air and turned away. There was a moment where we listened to the metronomic ticks of a case clock in the corner.

  Maggie looked heartbroken. But her eyes still held their mettle. Elise had possessed that same resoluteness of will…

  Elise…

  All at once I was struggling to control surges of guilt that were like trumpet blasts in my head. I cleared my throat, testing the steadiness of my voice. “Can I ask a question?” I said. “Why the books? When you can get everything instantly on the Conch?”

  He pivoted, his eyes lustrous with enthusiasm. His annoyance vanished. Uh-oh. I’d hit upon a pet topic.

  “Instantly, yes. We’re so efficient nowadays, aren’t we? We get from one place to the next so quickly. Information is plucked from the ether, effortless and immediate. But what’s the trade-off? Once, we had to walk. Many roads, many steps, many hills. It took more time and effort. Everything moved slower. But we passed homes and stores, said hello to the shop owners or people on their porches, inquired about their families. Noticed the new buds on the trees. Isn’t that important information, too?”

  I felt myself kindle to the man. I knew where Maggie got her rebellious streak. He was as much a misanthrope as she was.

  “Once we had to read. I mean, really read. Oh, the Conch will give me the words to Oliver Twist. But would I see how the volume was bound? Which typeface the printer had carefully chosen? What about the way the previous owner had loved and cared for the book, or how she’d worn down the edges with frequent readings, or how she’d left a choc
olate fingerprint right at the point when the Artful Dodger lifts the gentleman’s pocketbook?” He picked up the nearest volume. “Would it really be the same if I didn’t feel the weight of it in my hand, the smoothness of the paper? Oh, the glorious, smooth paper! Like the inside of a lover’s thigh. And its weight—that, my boy, critical information! It conveys the labor that went into its creation. The effort of filling each page, word by word, thought by thought.” His face beamed, his cheeks two shiny apples. He lifted a data pebble and rolled it around in his palm. “This piece of gravel contains the complete works of Shakespeare. Doesn’t seem like much of an achievement.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I murmured.

  He smiled. “You’re a reader, Mr. Donner!”

  “Once,” I said. “My job left little time.”

  “But you came from a family of readers?”

  “My father, when he was alive. My parents were killed when I was nine.” That brought a chorus of raised eyebrows. I cleared my throat. “Drunk driver. They were coming to see my basketball game. I was raised in foster care.”

  Shock reverberated from Maggie. Her expression said: Why didn’t you tell me?

  Jakob shook his head sadly. “Terrible, terrible,” he said.

  Their eyes were suddenly intrusive, trying to excavate my pain. I fired back an angry look, in default mode, using the mask-shield of rage I’d forged in all those foster homes. Until age sixteen, that is. When I’d bolted again and Children’s Services, worn down, hadn’t bothered to look for me anymore.

  Bart’s voice echoed in my head: “Do you know what it’s like to lose all your landmarks in a day?” I knew. I knew the gray tension stitched through the fabric of the world. The dread that comes with the night. The noises that turn a child’s young mind into a cornered animal.

  “Were you… well-treated?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. I counted to ten, willing my muscles to uncoil. Maggie and Jakob waited for me, as though they understood. Which they never could.