The whole process had been exhausting. By the ninth hour of interviews, Ian felt as though he’d been hit by a second train. So when the matron had entered the room, expelled the last of the interviewers, and told Ian that it was time to go to bed, he had burrowed into the sheets without complaint. Sometime later he’d been roused by the sound of Rhinnick entering the room. It hadn’t been long before their whispered conversation had turned to the topic of immortality.
“What about drowning?” Ian asked.
“No. You’d just pass out until you washed ashore or someone fished you out.”
“Really? What about cancer, AIDS, bird flu —”
“Bird flu?”
“I don’t know,” said Ian, “some kind of disease.”
“Disease can’t kill you. You’ll get sick, and possibly spend time in the hospital if it’s serious, but you’ll eventually get better. Might take years and years.”
“What about gunshot wounds?” asked Ian. “A point-blank gunshot wound to the head?”
“What part of ‘immortal’ aren’t you getting, chum?” said Rhinnick. “Plants die, animals die, batteries die, people don’t. QED. You can’t die from anything, old man. Not even a bullet to the bean.”
“Stake through the heart? Garlic? Holy water?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How about beheading?”
“Your body grows back.”
“Starvation? Pitchfork through the — wait, what? Your body grows back?” asked Ian, taken aback.
“Absolutely. The old one shrivels up and your head sprouts a new one. It takes a longish while, months, I think. They’ve done studies.”
“Seriously?”
“Do you want to test it? Look, Brown, you’ve got to accept it. You’ve already died. You’ve passed on, gone toes-up, shuffled off the mortal coil, taken the dirt nap, pushed up daisies, crossed over, however you’d like to put it. You’re dead. You’re not going to get any deader. You’re going to have to live with it.”
“All right then,” said Ian, “let’s say that I’m sliced exactly in two.”
“The half with the head regrows the rest.”
“Lengthwise? Half a head each side?”
“Bigger side wins.”
“No, no, hear me out,” said Ian. “Let’s say that I’m cut perfectly in two, say, not right down the middle, but with some kind of, I don’t know, a laser cutter that plots a path along my body. One that allows for differences in density and whatever, so that the two halves of my body are each exactly the same size, weight, mass, volume, everything. And each half has exactly half of my head. What happens then?”
Every teacher in every corner of the universe has had a student who behaves precisely as Ian was behaving now. Such students are the inspiration behind pedagogical innovations such as one-on-one tutorials and anonymous schoolyard beatings. In Ian’s case the question can be forgiven, perhaps, what with the whole a-train-pulverized-my-body-so-now-I’m-a-bit-confused excuse and so forth.
Strangely enough, the particular scenario Ian described had already been the subject of scrutiny in Detroit University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, where faculty members had conducted a battery of increasingly grisly experiments on highly paid research subjects9 for the purpose of testing the boundaries of the body’s recuperative powers. The study yielded a number of vital discoveries. It revealed, for example, that long-term starvation and dehydration can reduce the human body to a barely living, near-skeletal state complicated by the risk of a career in fashion modelling. A second, messier branch of the study showed that a human pushed through a meat grinder will regenerate fairly quickly if you mash the bits together. If you keep the pieces separate, the body regenerates slowly from the largest single piece.10 More importantly, the experiments made it clear that the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue is a skill that can be cultivated with practice — a lost leg, for instance, might take weeks for a first-time amputee to regenerate, while a veteran amputee could regrow a leg in a matter of hours. It wasn’t long after this discovery that Competitive Regeneration became an officially sanctioned sport. The current All-Detroit Champion had set a record by a nose.
Unfortunately, the study of present interest was called to a halt before it yielded a clear answer to the specific question Ian was posing now: despite the faculty’s great enthusiasm for the project, research subjects were (quite selfishly, in the opinion of the architects of the study) not content to be repeatedly sliced, diced, mashed, dissected, disintegrated, and bludgeoned in exchange for standard research-subject wages — not even in the name of progress.11 Their escalating salary demands rapidly exhausted the project’s funds that, somewhat ironically, lacked the capacity to regenerate once expended.
Rhinnick relayed this information to Ian as best he could.
“Unbelievable,” said Ian. And he meant it.
“All right,” said Rhinnick, stifling a yawn and nestling into his thick duvet. “We can carry on tomorrow if you like. It’s been a long day. I don’t know about you, but I’m dead tired.”
Ian didn’t find that funny, either.
* * *
9The position of “medical research subject” is an honourable and well-remunerated position in Detroit for two reasons, namely (1) medical research is important, and (2) cadavers are, for obvious reasons, unavailable.
10The person who asked “what if the pieces are all the same size?” found himself volunteered for the next meat-grinder experiment. It turns out that the body regrows from a seemingly random piece in these circumstances, if you really want to know. And for those of you with particularly grisly imaginations, rest assured that two people passed through a meat grinder and mashed together into a single, bloody mass, will eventually sort things out.
11The last remaining research subjects were drawn from the faculties of economics and law, the only faculties in which it is generally thought that a sum of money can perfectly compensate for amputations and other grievous injuries.
Chapter 6
The mêlée — if “mêlée” is the right word for a barrage of lightning-fast attacks that encounter absolutely no resistance — lasted 6.7 seconds. First the lights went out. Then something in the pitch-black room went “click.” Philly the Rook managed to say “Ummm, guys?” before he was silenced by a mechanical hum caused by what appeared to be a curving filament of white light that arced and whipped about the room. It was followed by a succession of distressing, meaty thumps.
The filament buzzed intermittently as it passed through various members of the Eighth Street Chapter, divesting them of assorted parts of their stricken bodies. An attentive listener might have remarked on the lack of screams. An attentive and prudent listener wouldn’t have bothered, as standing around remarking about the lack of screams would get in the way of fleeing the scene as quickly as possible.
The filament’s first pass took it along a path proceeding directly through Alphonse’s neck, relieving Alphonse of the burden of his head (or his body, depending on one’s point of view). On its return arc it disarmed Kari Slice in a distressingly literal and ironic manner. The wounds were instantly cauterized, if you want the gruesome details. It’d take months to recover from any wound inflicted by this, this —
“Bozo whip!” shrieked Llewellyn Llewellyn.
This was a common mistake among members of the low-end thug fraternity. The weapon was properly called a “boson whip,” so named because of the force-carrying particles that comprised the micron-thick filament that could pass through flesh and bone like a sword through mist. Llewellyn Llewellyn had heard rumours about it. He’d written most of them off as wild exaggeration — the sort of stories you told in pubs when trying to woo the class of woman impressed by scars, mud-flap art, a capacity for beer guzzling, and occasional graphic tales of one-sided beatings.
It was said that bos
on whips were favoured by those meticulous assailants who liked to keep their butchery clean and quiet. The charge that travelled along the filament supposedly shorted out your central nervous system when the boson whip made contact with your person, leaving you mercifully unconscious as the whip initiated divorce proceedings between assorted bits of your body. And it conveniently cauterized the wounds it inflicted while it sliced through your anatomy, minimizing the fastidious assailant’s clean-up time.
Llewellyn Llewellyn had never seen the weapon used. Few people had, and there was a reason. Boson whips will never be classified as user-friendly technology. If there were an international ranking system for boson whip enthusiasts, it would separate users into two discrete classes: the novice and the elite. The elite class would include only those few, intrepid users who, after decades of painful training, were now able to deploy a whip and whirl it about for more than two or three seconds without severing one or more of their own appendages. Novice users — a class comprising roughly 99.44 per cent of all people who ever try to use a boson whip — typically abandon the use of the whip after only a few trial runs, understandably frustrated by their tendency to disarm themselves within the first few seconds of deployment. Or disleg, in the case of more enthusiastic novices.
The boson-whip wielder who currently moved among the Eighth Street Chapter was not a novice. He or she had opened the eight-inch-long, cigar-shaped metal casing that housed the retractable twelve-foot whip, flicked a wrist, and launched the attack. Within seconds Llewellyn Llewellyn was the only intact member of the chapter. He slumped to the floor and curled himself into a ball. He might have prayed for a swift death, if death and prayer had been familiar concepts.
The filament disappeared. The room grew quiet. The sound of meaty thumps continued only in Llewellyn Llewellyn’s imagination, where he astutely predicted they would make nightly appearances for the foreseeable future. Showing the remarkable presence of mind that had earned him the leadership of the Eighth Street Chapter, Llewellyn Llewellyn chose not to scream. Instead, he calmly whispered, “I give up.”
The lights flicked on, revealing a seven-foot-tall figure clad in black body armour topped by a cowl and night-vision goggles. He smelled faintly of hemlock. The figure retracted the boson whip and placed its canister into a forearm-mounted holster. “Smart move,” the figure said.
“S-S-Socrates?” stammered Llewellyn Llewellyn, who had heard descriptions of the legendary assassin. “I thought . . . I thought —”
“I know,” interrupted Socrates, slipping off his goggles and cowl. His face was heavily tanned and weathered, somewhere south of granite and north of hardened leather. He had a closely cropped grey beard and a noticeably lumpy bald head. “You thought I was just a myth,” he said. “It’s better that way, really. It lets me enjoy the look of surprise.”
We’ll return to the narrative structure in a moment.
For now, it’s worth your while to consider the type of person who chooses the career path of an assassin. For starters, he or she can’t be troubled by the notion of killing people for hire. This rules out the lion’s share of the populace, most of whom reserve their killing for sensible reasons such as road rage, fossil fuels, religious disputes, and marital discord. Such people kill out of passion, out of hatred, or out of stupidity. Assassins don’t. They lack the requisite disposition — the bloodthirsty, rage-blinded temperament common to garden-variety killers and Westboro Baptists at a rainbow pride parade. By sharp contradistinction, assassins have a dispassionate, calm, and calculating manner: a manner that permits a conscientious, clinical, and punctilious approach to the killing of strangers in the name of customer service.
It’s not that assassins fail to value human life. Quite the contrary: valuing human life is their bread and butter. A competent assassin can determine a target’s value with barely a glance at current actuarial tables, making appropriate price adjustments for factors ranging from the intended victim’s age, health, wealth, and overall threat level to estimated PDE.12 Only after assessing the target’s value (and adding a modest margin accounting for time, travel, ammunition, disposal, dry-cleaning services, and sundry expenses) is the assassin ready to enter negotiations. No assassin worth a garrotte would even think of accepting a contract without conducting a thorough assessment of the client’s intended victim. It was bad business. As Socrates had once put it, “An unexamined life is not worth taking.”
The valuation of human life is the core of any assassin’s trade. The actual ending of a life is simply the closing of a carefully planned transaction.
By now you’ve spotted a problem with Socrates’ choice of career. Choosing to become an assassin is one thing; choosing to become an assassin in Detroit, where human targets are immortal, is another matter entirely.
It wasn’t the futility of the job that bothered Socrates. He’d sorted out the whole “immortal target” business ages ago. What bothered him was the loneliness. He was the afterlife’s only assassin. There were no gatherings of like-minded killers-for-hire, no murderer conventions, not a single assassin’s symposium. This left Socrates feeling empty. He wanted company. He yearned for dialogue.
For a time he had considered recruiting a protegé, a sort of junior assassin who’d accompany him on dangerous missions, maybe wearing bright-red spandex with a gaudy yellow cape that would draw enemy fire. He’d rejected that idea as unworthy. So he remained a lone dark knight, the only killer in Detroit, the sombre and solitary gatekeeper to the after-afterlife.
The problem of immortality had been a puzzler. That’s what had drawn Socrates to a career in assassination in the first place. He loved unsolvable puzzles. Need a paradox resolved? Want to shake an unshakeable truth? Want a gadfly to undermine the most foundational of foundational assumptions? Socrates is your man. So when the City Solicitor had floated the whole idea of killing immortals — terminating the interminable, inhuming the undying — Socrates had accepted the challenge without batting an eye.
The first step, Socrates reasoned, was to master the art of killing. He’d started with mortal creatures two millennia ago, long before he had even heard of boson whips or night-vision goggles.
There had been difficult kills, of course. He had been gored by a kerrop, stung by a feezil, and clubbed senseless by an irate jabberwocky, but in each case he had recovered, tracked his prey, and taken revenge. His skills had improved throughout the process: he was stealthier than a ninja’s shadow, more agile than an acrobatic squirrel, more dangerous than a hairdryer in the bathtub, and as terrifying as an unexpected audit. And his regenerative powers were unsurpassed. He could regrow a limb in less than an hour and shrug off even the deadliest disease without discomfort. He drank strychnine tea for breakfast. He had become the consummate killer: he was efficient, he was ruthless, he was relentless.
Of course, that hadn’t helped him with the immortality issue. His early attempts at getting around that problem had focused on long-term incapacitation, based on the intuition that, in terms of client satisfaction, “gone” is often as good as “dead.” But cement shoes erode, water recedes, chains rust, soil shifts, and dungeons crumble given time, and Socrates was one of nature’s perfectionists. The idea that the fruit of his labour was fleeting — even if “fleeting” meant that the target might come back in a hundred years — caused significant consternation. But the answer finally came to him one night as he lay awake reading Khuufru’s Big Book of Modern Philosophy. A passage caught his eye. It read as follows:
But what is man, fair Elenchus, but the sum of his thoughts, his store of knowledge, his heart’s callings, and the yearnings of his mind?
“What indeed?” Socrates wondered.
Humans are not, Socrates reasoned, ambulatory sacks of meat. Well, they are, really, but the parts of them that get into trouble, break the law, annoy their neighbours or — not to put too fine a point on it — need killing are their minds. The immortal fleshy vessels
in which the human psyche travels are irrelevant. Kill the mind, kill the person. So Socrates worked to develop a method of destroying human minds. And he succeeded. He named his technique “The Obliteration of Self.” The City Solicitor, who had recognized Socrates’ talents early on and placed him on permanent retainer, preferred to call Socrates’ technique something far less melodramatic. He called it the Socratic Method.
The basic Socratic Method grew from Socrates’ discovery that the neural flows of the Styx could, in certain circumstances, wipe out human memory. This discovery had been used to moderate effect — eons ago — in treating diseases of the mind. Over the centuries, Socrates had discovered a way of distilling certain elements from the river’s neural flows and using them in the brewing of an extremely potent neurotoxin. A single drop of Socrates’ Stygian toxin, introduced into a subject’s nervous system, could destroy a mind almost instantly. It could delete the subject’s memories, wiping out its personality and, in every way that mattered, putting an end to the subject’s life.
Socrates now carried bullets, knives, syringes, punching-daggers, and other assorted hardware bearing “lethal” amounts of his neurotoxin. The physical damage that his weapons caused would heal. The psychic damage they caused was permanent.
And so it was that Socrates donned the lonely mantle of Detroit’s only assassin. He didn’t think of himself as a killer. He preferred to see himself as a seller of worlds. For the appropriate fee he could sell you a world in which your greatest enemy had no memories — no memory of you, no memory of grievances held against you, not even the faintest recollection of who he or she had been before encountering Socrates’ toxin. Socrates remade the universe, one murder at a time.
Beforelife Page 6