Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  When it was all over at last, Alec walked out with Lewin to the street where the limos were lining up, whooshing and bobbing in the wind. Waiting for his car to pull close, Alec climbed the steps of the mounting block and pretended he was going to the gallows.

  … Again, he felt the noose being put around his neck. Perhaps he was a heroic prisoner of war? And the bad guys would execute him, but in this game he had managed to set free all the other prisoners, including the kids in Hospital. With no fear of death, he stepped forward off the ladder and felt the rope draw tight…

  “Come on, son.” Lewin opened the door for him. “Let’s go home.” Alec was silent in the car, until at last looking up to say:

  “That wasn’t fair. Frankie Chatterton shouldn’t have gone intoHospital. He wasn’t bad. I talked to him!”

  “That’s right, he sat beside you, didn’t he?” said Lewin. “But theremust have been something wrong with the kid, son, or they wouldn’thave sent him off.”

  “He told me he’d been diagnosed eccentric,” said Alec miserably.

  “Ohh,” said Lewin, and his face cleared and in his voice was sudden understanding, complete resignation, acceptance. “Oh, well, no wonder, then. Best to get that lot Sorted out early. Shame, but there it is.”

  That night the Captain, patiently monitoring Alec’s vital signs, noted that it was past ten and Alec was still awake. He activated the projector and manifested himself beside Alec’s bed.

  “Now then, matey, it’s six bells into the first night watch. Time you was turning in, says I.”

  “What happens to you in Hospital?” asked Alec, gazing up at the star patterns on his ceiling.

  “Aw, now, nothing too bad. I reckon an ordinary dull kid wouldn’t mind it much.”

  “What if you weren’t dull?” Alec asked. “What if you were smart?”

  “Why, they’d give you things to do,” the Captain explained, pulling a chair from cyberspace and settling back in it. “More tests, so as to be certain you ain’t the sort of boy what likes to set fire to things, or shoot folk, or like that. And if they decided you wasn’t, you might get yerself discharged some day.

  “Or I’ll tell you what else might happen,” and he leaned close with a gleam in his eyes, “and this is a secret, matey, but it’s true all the same: some of the biggest companies in business, all their idea people is compensated eccentrics. When they wants real talent, they goes snooping around Hospitals for bright boys like yer little friend. See? And they arrange to bail ‘em out, and give ‘em contracts. So he might wind up with a good job after all.”

  “That would be nice,” said Alec listlessly. “But it’s still sad. Frankie’s Mum and Dad needed him to do well. Nobody needs me to do well, but I got into Circle anyway. It should have happened the other way around. Nobody would have been hurt if I’d gone into Hospital.”

  “Belay that talk! What about old Lewin and Mrs. L? They’d miss you if you was taken away, certain sure. And what about me, matey?”

  “But you’re a machine,” said Alec patiently.

  “Machines got feelings, son. We’re programmed to. Same as you, I reckon.” The Captain stroked his wild beard, looking shrewdly at Alec. “What’s put this notion of surrender into yer head, eh? Who’s been feeding my boy a lot of nonsense? Or is it that you just don’t want to go into Circle?”

  “No,” Alec said, bewildered, because he’d always looked forward to Circle and suddenly realized that now he hated the idea. “Yes. I don’t know. I want to sail away and be free, Captain!”

  “And so we will, lad. Soon’s you come of age, hell! We give ‘em the slip and we’re off to Jamaica and anywheres else you want to go. But until then, we got to play along with the bastards, don’t we? So no more talk about going into Hospital.”

  Alec nodded. After a moment he said, “Life isn’t fair, is it?”

  “Too bloody right it ain’t fair!” The Captain bared his teeth. “It’s a fixed game, Alec, that’s what it is for certain. You ain’t got a chance unless you cheat.”

  “Then somebody ought to make new rules,” said Alec sullenly.

  “I reckon so, son. But that’s more than a old AI and a tired little matey can plot for tonight. Come morning we’ll set a course for a new world, eh? You sleep now.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” said Alec. He turned over and punched his pillow, settling down and closing his eyes. The Captain winked out but continued to scan, and the four red camera eyes in the corners of the ceiling watched over Alec with brooding love.

  … Gradually the dim headland came into view, as the fog lifted away. There shining on the hills was the place Alec wanted, where he would make new rules. The west wind freshened. He howled orders from the wheel and his phantom crew mounted into the shrouds, clapping on sail. The breeze caught and flared Alec’s black ensign, his death’s head banner, and he grinned at the unsuspecting city.

  This is actually one of the oldest Company tales in its origins, dating way back to a sleepless night on a bus going up Interstate 5. Cram fifty actors and their assorted luggage, props and bad habits on a Mark IV for seven hours and you’d be amazed at the stories that act themselves out for you.

  I owe also a debt of inspiration to William Overgard’s brilliant Rudy in Hollywood comic strip, and of course Jane Goodall’s The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a book as beautiful and heartbreaking as any human epic.

  We think of ourselves as standing outside Nature, either for good or evil, but perhaps that’s not so; perhaps we’re part of it, merely the beast with the most potential. A little compassion for ourselves as well as our primate cousins might be called for. Neo-Darwinism will not hurt you, kids, as long as you play with it nicely.

  Hanuman

  * * *

  So there I was playing billiards with an Australopithecus afarensis, and he was winning. I don’t usually play with lower hominids, but I was stuck in a rehab facility during the winter of I860, and there was nothifig^else to do but watch holoes or listen to the radio programs broadcast by my owner/employer, Dr. Zeus Incorporated. And the programs were uniformly boring; you’d think an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investors, having after all both the secrets of immortality and time travel, could at least come up with some original station formats. But anyway… Repair and Rehabilitation Center Five was neatly hidden away in a steep cliff overlooking a stretch of Baja coastline. Out front, lots of fortunate convalescing operatives sprawled on golden sand beside a bright blue sea. Not me, though. When you’re growing back skin, the medical techs don’t like you sunbathing much.

  Even when I looked human again, I couldn’t get an exit pass. They kept delaying my release pending further testing and evaluation. It drove me crazy, but cyborgs are badly damaged so seldom that when the medical techs do get their hands on a genuine basket case, they like to keep it as long as possible for study.

  Vain for me to argue that it was an event shadow and not a mysterious glitch in my programming that was to blame. I might as well have been talking to the wall. Between tests I sat interminably in the Garden Room among the bromeliads and ferns, thumbing through old copies of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly and trying to adjust my bathrobe so my legs didn’t show.

  “Oh, my! Nice gams,” said somebody one morning. I lowered my magazine, preparing to fix him with the most scathing glare of contempt I could muster. What I saw astonished me. He was about four and a half feet tall and looked something like a pint-sized Alley Oop, or maybe like a really racist caricature of an Irishman, the way they were being drawn back then, liny head, face prognathous in the extreme, shrewd little eyes set in wrinkles under heavy orbital ridges. The sclerae of his eyes were white, like a Homo sapiens. White whiskers all around his face. Barrel chest, arms down to his knees like a chimpanzee. However, he stood straight; his feet were small, narrow and neatly shod. He was impeccably dressed in the fashion of the day, too, what any elderly gentleman might be wearing at this very moment in London or San Francisco.

  I knew the Company had
a few cyborgs made from Neanderthals in its ranks—I’d even worked with a couple—but they looked human compared to this guy. Besides, as I scanned him I realized that he wasn’t a cyborg. He was mortal, which explained the white whiskers.

  “What the hell are you?” I inquired, fairly politely under the circumstances.

  “I’m the answer to your prayers,” he replied. “You want to come upstairs and see my etchings?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s because I’m a monkey, isn’t it?” he snapped, thrusting his face forward in a challenging kind of way.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, at least you’re honest about being a bigot,” he said, subsiding.

  “Excuse me!” I slammed my magazine down in my lap. “Anyway, you aren’t a monkey. Are you?

  You’re a member of the extinct hominid species Australopithecus Afarensis. “

  “I love it when you people talk like computers,” he mused. “Sexy, in a perverse kind of way. Yes, Afarensis, all right, one of Lucy’s kindred. Possibly explaining my powerful attraction to ditzy redheads.”

  “That’s an awful lot of big words to keep in such a teeny little skull,” I said, rolling up my magazine menacingly. “So you think cyborgs are sexy, huh? Did you ever see Alien?”

  “And you’re a hot-blooded cyborg,” he said, smiling. “Barely suppressed rage is sexy, too, at least I find it so. Yes, I know a lot of big words. I’ve been augmented. I’d have thought a superintelligent machine-human hybrid like yourself would have figured that out by now.” I was almost startled out of my anger. “A mortal being augmented? I’ve never heard of that being done!”

  “I was an experiment,” he explained. “A prototype for an operative that could be used in deep Prehistory. No budget for the project, unfortunately, so I’m unique. Michael Robert Hanuman, by the way.” He extended his hand. It had long curved fingers and a short thumb, like an ape’s hand. I took it gingerly.

  “Botanist Grade Six Mendoza,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “A cyborg name,” he observed. “What was your human name, when you had one?”

  “I don’t remember,” I told him. “Look, I haven’t been calling you a monkey during this conversation. How about you stop throwing around the word cyborg, okay?”

  “No c-word, got it,” he agreed. “You’re sensitive about what you are, then?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, oddly enough,” said Hanuman. He sat down in the chair next to mine. “I’ve long since come to terms with my situation.”

  “Well, three cheers for you,” I said. “What are you doing in rehab, anyway?”

  “I live here, at Cabo Rehabo,” he said. “I’m retired now and the Company gave me my choice of residences. It’s warm and I like the sea air. Also—” He fished an asthma inhaler from an inner pocket and waved it at me. “No fluorocarbons in the air during this time period. One of the great advantages to living in the past. What are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “There was an accident,” I said.

  “Really! You malfunctioned?”

  “No, there was an error in the Temporal Concordance,” I explained. “Some idiot input a date wrong and I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been when a hotel blew up. Just one of those things that happen in the field.”

  “So you’re—say! Would you be the one they brought in from Big Sur? I heard about you.” He regarded my legs with renewed interest.

  “That was me,” I said, wishing he’d go away.

  “Well, well.” His gaze traveled over the rest of me. “I’d always heard you people never had accidents. You’re programmed to dodge bullets and anything else that comes flying your way.”

  “You try dodging a building,” I muttered.

  “Is that why you’re so angry?” he inquired, just as a repair tech stuck his head around the doorway.

  “Botanist Mendoza? Please report to Room D for a lower left quadrant diagnostic.”

  “It’s been fun,” I told Michael Robert Hanuman, and made my exit gratefully. He watched me go, his small head tilted on one side.

  But I saw him the next day, waiting outside the lounge. He wrinkled his nose at my flannel pajama ensemble, then looked up and said, “We meet again! Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t feel like going down to the bar dressed like this,” I told him.

  “There’s a snack bar in the Rec Room,” he said. “They serve cocktails.” I had just been informed I faced a minimum of two more months of tests, and the idea of dating a superannuated hominid seemed slightly less degrading than the rest of what I had to look forward to.

  “Why not?” I sighed.

  The Rec Room had two pool tables and a hologame, as well as an entire wall of bound back issues of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly. There were tasteful Mexican-themed murals on the walls. There was a big picture window through which you could look out at the happy, well-rested operatives sunning themselves on the beach instead of having intrusive repair diagnostics done. Cocktails were available, at least, and Hanuman brought a pair of mai tais to our card table and set them down with a flourish.

  “Yours has no alcohol in it,” I said suspiciously, scanning.

  “Can’t handle the stuff,” he informed me, and rapped his skull with his knuckles. “This tiny little monkey brain, you know. You don’t want me hooting and swinging from the light fixtures, do you? Or something even less polite?”

  “No, thank you,” 1 said, shuddering.

  “Not that I swing from anything much, at my age,” he added, and had a sip of his drink. He set it down, pushed back in his chair and considered me. “So,” he said, “What’s it like being immortal?”

  “I don’t care for it,” I replied.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Is it the Makropolous syndrome? You know, an overpowering sense of meaninglessness with the passage of enough time? Or does it have to do with being a cyb—sorry, with feeling a certain distance from humanity due to your unique abilities?”

  “Mostly it’s having to be around monkeys,” I said, glaring at him. “Mortal Homo sapiens, I mean.”

  “Touche,” he said, raising his drink to me. “I can’t say I’m crazy about them, either.”

  “I’m happy when I’m alone,” I continued, and tasted my drink. “I like my work. I don’t like being distracted from my work.”

  “Human relationships are irrelevant, eh?” Hanuman said. “How lucky you’ve met me, then.”

  “You’re human,” I said, studying him.

  “Barely,” he said. “Oh, I know my place. If the Leakeys had had their way I wouldn’t even get to play in the family tree! I’m just a little animal with a lot of wit and some surgical modification.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and shrugged.

  “So it isn’t being immortal that bothers you, it’s the company you have to keep?” he inquired.

  “Immortality itself is good?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to have a body that decayed while I was wearing it. And I’ve got way too much work for one human lifespan.”

  “What do you do? Wait, you’re a botanist. You were doing something botanical in Big Sur?”

  “I was doing a genetic survey on Abies bracteata,” I told him. “The Santa Lucia fir. It’s endangered. The Company wants it.”

  “Ah. It has some terribly valuable commercial use?” He scratched his chin-whiskers.

  “Why does the Company ever want anything?” I replied. “But if it was all that valuable, you’d think they’d let me out of here to get back to the job.”

  “They probably sent another botanist up there in your place,” Hanuman pointed out. “And, after all, you haven’t recovered yet. Have you? How are your new hands working? And the feet?”

  “They’re not new hands,” I said irritably, wondering how he knew so much. “Just the skin. And some other stuff underneath. What do you care, any
way?”

  “I’m wondering how well you’d be able to hold a billiards cue,” he said. “Feel like a game?”

  “Are you kidding?” I felt like laughing for the first time since I’d been there. “I’m a cyborg, remember?

  You’re only a mortal, even if you have been augmented. I’d cream you.”

  “That’s true,” he said imperturbably, draining his glass. “In that case, what would you say to playing with a handicap? So a poor little monkey like me has a chance?”

  Like an idiot, I agreed, and that was how I found out that augmented lower hominids have all the reflexes that go with the full immortality process.

  “Boy, I’m glad we’re not playing for money,” I said, watching gloomily as he completed a ten-point bank shot and neatly sank three balls, clunk clunk clunk.

  “How could we?” Hanuman inquired, hopping down from thefootstool. “I’ve always heard the Company doesn’t pay you people anything. That’s one of the reasons they made you, so they’d have an inexpensive work force.”

  “For your information, we cost a lot,” I snapped. “And I suppose youget paid a salary?”

  “I did, before I retired,” he told me smugly, chalking his cue. “Now I’ve got a nice pension.”

  “What’d you get paid for?” I asked. “You told me you were a prototype that never got used.”

  “I said the program budget got cut,” he corrected me, climbing up for his next shot. “You ought to know the Company finds a use for everything they create. I gave them thirty years of service.”

  “Doing what?”

  He took his time answering, frowning at the table, clambering down, kicking the stool around to a better spot and climbing up to survey the angles again. “Mostly impersonating a monkey, if you must know,” hesaid at last.