The Immortality Virus

by Christine Amsden

  “How fresh are the steaks?” Grace asked.

  “Just shipped here today,” the man said. “That’s why the prices are so high. But if you’re on a budget, I have some seasoned steak here that you better eat before the end of the day.”

  He showed Grace a small stack of steaks that had lost much of their redness, but were half the price of the fresh steaks. “I’ll take one,” she said. She had read somewhere that steaks were best just before they spoiled anyway–not that she would tell that to the butcher. He could decide to change the price on her without a moment’s notice.

  Bait and switch was illegal, too. Grace had read that in a book of amusing archaic laws that had never been repealed. It was right alongside burning witches and being drunk in public.

  When Grace took her meat and nutri-bars to the counter to checkout, she spotted a woman trying to get past the security guard. To her amazement, the guard fired a warning shot at the woman.

  “Get out!”

  The woman was filthy and as bony as Grace had ever seen anyone. “Please,” she said, “I just need a job.”

  “Get out,” the security guard said.

  The woman stared at him with dry, dead eyes.

  “She’ll just get shot next door,” a stocker said, putting down his box of nutri-bars and coming over to investigate.

  The guard glared at the stocker. “You hired me to handle this. You stock the shelves.”

  Why didn’t he just shoot her? Grace wondered

  “Why don’t you shoot me?” the woman asked. Grace wouldn’t have believed her capable of such a coherent thought.

  “Do you want to die?” the security guard asked.

  The woman shrugged. “My last surviving child just went off to a farm ‘cuz she had nowhere else to go. Asked me to go too but I’ve heard...” She broke off and shuddered.

  Grace stared down at the nutri-bars in her basket and echoed the woman’s shudder. Once or twice a year, one of the news distributors would do a story about the farms. Often as not, they would call it “Soylent Green” and think they were being clever. Grace wasn’t sure any of them really believed what they wrote. They couldn’t possibly be so flippant if they did.

  Whatever the rumors, the truths about farms were enough to make anyone think twice about picking up a nutri-bar, no matter how hungry they were. Grace had never been out to the countryside, had never ventured outside the city walls, which encompassed enough of the area around Kansas City to keep her from feeling claustrophobic. She never planned to go, either. If life and death in a city was unpredictable, it was nothing to the countryside.

  Grace didn’t know which was worse–that every year hundreds of millions of people were forced to work as slave labor on the farms or that every year millions more traveled out to the countryside hoping for a better life, despite knowing they would probably end up on a farm.

  People like this woman’s daughter. What could have made her decide to leave the city? What was so bad that she chose a farm and her mother chose suicide?

  A bum on a city street or a slave on a farm–Grace knew which she would choose, but maybe since she had never had to make that choice it came easier for her. A cold alleyway, a vacant dumpster, and the smell of human feces sounded far better to her than the lash of an electric whip, back-breaking work for sixteen hours a day, and the fear of spraining a toe and being deemed useless.

  “Those are just rumors,” the stocker said without much certainty in his voice.

  “She’s probably in chains,” the woman said, “Getting raped and beaten until they decide she’s more useful as fertilizer for the plants. They say they’re breeding cross-species of humans.”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” the security guard said, “but I won’t shoot an unarmed woman just asking for a job. You try to steal, then maybe, but if you’re out for suicide try the bank.”

  The woman stared at him with hollow eyes for a moment, then shrugged. “What the hell. I might as well go after my daughter. At least we’ll be together then.” With that, she left the store.

  Grace stared after her for a long time. So long, in fact, that ten customers got ahead of her in line before she checked out. Apparently she wasn’t the only one affected by this display, because a tall man wearing an old-fashioned cowboy hat didn’t move for a long time, either.

  As she left, the security guard handed her a piece of paper. “Call me later, if you get lonely.”

  She took the paper, thinking briefly of Sam and of how nice it would be to have a night of simple fun with no strings attached. Maybe she would call him.

  That’s when she noticed the man in the cowboy hat lingering on the other side of the door, trying to look casual with his hands in his pockets as he waited for something or someone. Grace didn’t know who he was or who he represented, but it was too much to hope he wasn’t there to follow her. Not after what Matt Stanton had told her that morning.

  Chapter 3

  How long had he been following her? Grace tried to remember whether she had seen a man in a cowboy hat anywhere else, and an image floated into her mind: One of a man in a cowboy hat shouting at a fat man to share his food.

  If he had followed her through the transit system, he was good. Shaking him wouldn’t be easy.

  “Are you all right?” the security guard asked.

  “Yeah, I just need…” Grace took a deep breath and searched for a plausible lie, “a bathroom.”

  “There’s one in back for employees only,” the guard said. “Go on, I’ll fix it for you.” He sub-vocalized something into his portable and waved her on.

  The man in the cowboy hat turned to peek in at her just as she began heading for the back of the store. No one stopped her as she headed through a set of double doors marked “employees only.” One man gave her a sideways glance and a half smile, which told her the security guard had delivered his message.

  A short hallway led to a back door. Grace spared a quick glance for a door marked “restroom,” but did not pause in her rush towards the back door. She flung it open and looked both ways into a dark alley, but she did not see a single cowboy hat in the small crowd of people pawing hopefully through the garbage cans out there.

  Grace pushed the door open as hard as she could, causing it to bang loudly enough to startle several nearby vagrants. Then she rushed back down the hall and towards the front of the store.

  If the man had a partner, this would never work.

  The security guard gave her a startled look as she raced by his station and out the front door. She didn’t see the cowboy hat anywhere, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t following her. The nearest rail station was a block away, and she reached it in record time, chose a train at random and pushed herself on board.

  She got off at the next stop and chose another random train, all the while memorizing faces and keeping an eye out for a cowboy hat or another face that seemed to be trying to keep up with her haphazard path.

  Finally, after half an hour of train hopping, she chose one that would take her home. She was as sure as she could be that no one had followed her, which was to say not sure at all.

  The sidewalks near Grace’s apartment in Shawnee were not as crowded with pedestrians as the ones downtown. She usually liked it out here, in the relative peace and quiet, but today she thought she would feel more comfortable with a crowd pressing in around her, keeping her more anonymous.

  Most of the people on the sidewalks in this area lived there. Grace recognized many of them. She knew all of those who lived outside her own building by face and name, though she never spoke to them. She handed out nutri-bars once a day, and for that they did not try to break into her apartment. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

  They began to circle her as she approached with her grocery bag. First came an ageless woman with two teenage sons, then a young girl just shy of puberty. Grace thought she lived on her own, but had never asked. There wasn’t anything she could do for her or any of the rest except han
d out the food. There were twenty in all who counted on her daily charity. She gave a bar to each of them, steadfastly avoiding their eyes, and then cut a path through to her building.

  Up three flights of stairs to her apartment, Grace did not meet any of her neighbors in the hallways. She could hear her next-door neighbors fighting through the wall when she reached her own door, but that was perfectly in order. Grace punched in an electronic code to open the door. Then she was in–home and office, space was too precious to separate the two.

  A red light on the vidphone blinked at her from the wall. “Play messages,” she said.

  “Two new messages,” intoned a mechanical, almost feminine voice. “Message one, 8:45 a.m.”

  “Grace, this is your mom. If you’re there, pick up. Pick up. All right, I guess you’re not there. I just wanted you to know I have a new great-great-great-great-great…How many greats did I just say? Anyway, I have a five-times great grandson. Charity’s excited and disappointed all at the same time. They won’t let her see him yet, or me, for that matter. They said we could come over sometime next month after he was sleeping better. Next month! Can you believe it? Give Charity a call sometime. And me, too. I—” a long beep ended the message before Grace’s mom had a chance to finish. Her mom had been leaving lots of messages lately, which probably meant she was between boyfriends.

  “Message two, 9:02 a.m.”

  “This is Becca Reynolds. I got married again last week and I need you…”

  “Delete,” Grace said before listening to the rest of Becca’s message. The woman was one of Grace’s regular clients, but she never paid her on time and actually, she still owed for the last job. Tracking down a missing husband who had been trying to get away from the controlling bitch.

  The apartment wasn’t much, but it was a giant step up from the one-room place Sam had remembered. This one had a bedroom large enough for a twin bed and wardrobe, a bathroom with a mostly working shower, and a kitchenette with a zapper, small refrigerator/freezer, and small stove/oven. There were even a few cabinets to put dry food and dishes.

  The nicest thing about the apartment was the living room. The large space was neatly divided into a living section and an office section by a convertible sofa. A small holoset hung from the wall, though its 3-D feature was currently broken.

  It would be a nice place if Grace spent any money on new furnishings, but she never took chances with her money. Her business left her with few guarantees, including next month’s rent.

  Grace sat at her desk and activated her console by saying its name, “Sam.”

  “What can I do for you today?” the high, almost birdlike voice, not at all reminiscent of the real Sam, intoned.

  She paused, her mind going back to that morning, when she had seen the real Sam for the first time in so long. Put it in the past where it belongs; where it’s been for sixty years. It wasn’t like she was in love with him anymore. She wasn’t even sure she believed in love. Didn’t love, by definition, last forever? Neither her mother nor her sister had ever managed to make a relationship last for more than a few years.

  “Begin net search. Name: Jordan Lacklin. Date of birth: December 10, 1968. Last known address... hang on...” Grace retrieved the information from her portable. “1212 Printer Street; Overland Park, Kansas. Save results to my password and voice print.”

  “Working,” intoned the voice trapped in the console.

  Grace took the opportunity to get herself a late lunch while the console worked. Actually–she sub-vocalized, “Time”–it would be more of an early dinner. She shoved the nutri-bars she had purchased into the cupboards and pulled out the wonderful looking steak.

  She put it on a zapper plate, but somehow that didn’t look right to her. “Sam,” Grace called. “How do you cook a steak?”

  “Working,” Sam said. “Found two million matching results.”

  “Never mind,” Grace said. “I’ll just put it in the oven for a while.”

  While she waited, Grace unpacked her bag. She spent a long time studying the audio diary she had been given, wondering if she should listen to it now–wondering what it would tell her about the man who had started it all. After a long, lingering look, she decided to save it for later. She put it in a safe hidden under a floorboard in her bedroom.

  A loud bang from next door almost made Grace go for her disruptor, but the subsequent high-pitched screech told her it was just her neighbors, still fighting. They seemed to be going for an all-time record if they were still at it. And she didn’t like the sound of that bang–had they upped the stakes? Usually it was just the yelling.

  A mouth-watering smell from the kitchen prompted Grace to check the steak. It was brown, so she decided it was done. She turned off the oven and put the steak on a plate.

  Another bang, farther away than the earlier noise, rang through the apartment. It sounded like it was coming from the stairwell.

  This time, Grace did pull out her disruptor.

  “Sam,” Grace said. “Pause search. Save results and shut down.”

  “Good bye!” the computer chirped.

  There were footsteps in the hallway. Wild scenes ran through Grace’s mind. It was The Establishment. They’d figured out what she was up to and had come to kill her–or torture her for more information. But then, why would they need her for information when there was obviously a snitch in Matt’s circle of confidantes? No, they would just kill her. Maybe it would be quick.

  Loud pounding on the door. Grace’s fingers tightened on the disruptor, which felt slick in her sweaty palm.

  “Open up! Police!”

  Grace’s heart tried to pound out of her chest. Why would the police come for her? They had been leaving one another alone for a long time now. As she stood there, indecisive, she remembered the last thing her old captain had said to her when she left the force: “If we ever cross paths again, I will have to kill you.”

  Chapter 4

  Grace began working for the Kansas City Police Department as soon as she left college at twenty-five years old. It wasn’t exciting work. Despite her degree in criminology and her eagerness to investigate crimes and help make the world a better place, she spent over thirty years pushing around paperwork in the mail room. She thought the day they first put her on a beat would be the happiest day of her life.

  How naive she had been.

  Bill McMillan was a veteran on the force, well respected by his peers and loved by his superiors. She found it hard to contain her excitement when she slid into the passenger seat of his hovercar on the day they pulled her out of the mail room.

  “Harper, isn’t it?” McMillan asked as he drove the hovercar off the roof of police headquarters downtown. The view of Kansas City from this height was striking and strangely beautiful. The people didn’t look so wretched from up here. They just looked like a million tiny dots forming a strange and abstract portrait.

  “Yes, sir,” Grace said. “It’s an honor to be working with you.”

  McMillan snorted, a sound of disgust that made Grace’s face burn. “This ain’t a glamorous job or an exciting one. It’s a dangerous one, as my former partner can attest.”

  His former partner had been killed in the line of duty the week before. Grace didn’t know the details–they never let those out.

  “Anything’s better than the mail room,” Grace said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. Kid, you’re probably a lot like I was fifty years ago when I first took up the beat–full of ideas about how you’re going to make this city a safer place. Well, that’s not what we do. It’s all we can do to keep the city from falling into anarchy, and frankly, what we got ain’t too far off.”

  Grace remained silent, not quite willing to believe him but afraid he was right. It’s not like she hadn’t wondered before what she could do if everyone else had already failed. But she couldn’t let go that easily, especially not on her first day away from the mail room.

  “All right, here’s our first stop.” McMi
llan pointed out the window, down at a thick section of crowd below them. “You’ll get good at recognizing these things eventually.”

  McMillan slowly brought the hovercar down, right over the heads of the people. For a minute it looked like he planned to land right on top of them, but he maneuvered slowly enough to give everyone time to scatter.

  “Have your sidearm ready at all times,” McMillan said as he shoved open the door, pushing several people out of the way in the process.

  Grace followed suit, a little awkwardly. She still wasn’t sure what they were doing, but as word spread through the crowd that the cops had arrived, people began to scatter in all directions until finally, Grace and McMillan reached the epicenter of the disturbance–a naked man of indeterminate age with what appeared to be a knife wound across his throat. Large amounts of blood pooled in the dirt beneath him.

  “Check him for an ID chip,” McMillan said.

  Grace checked both wrists, but didn’t find the tiny metal button that acted both as tag and as a neural interface for portables. She also did not see any sign that such a chip had been ripped out of his skin by the same people who had stolen his clothing. This man had probably been born on the streets. “Nothing.”

  “Good,” McMillan said. He sub-vocalized an instruction to his portable. It must have opened up a com link because a moment later he said, “Send a cleanup crew to my location beacon...no ID... 10-4.”

  McMillan turned to Grace. “All right, let’s go.”

  “W-wait! Shouldn’t we find out what happened here? Someone murdered this man.”

  McMillan actually laughed, a sound that infuriated Grace. He caught a glimpse of her face and the laughter died immediately. “Just like me. I bet I said all the same things my first day. It ain’t fair, is it?”

  “So you’re just going to accept it? Accept a man being murdered in the middle of a crowd of witnesses? You’re going to accept not knowing his identity and not letting his family know he’s dead?”

  “The cleanup crew will take fingerprints,” McMillan said. “The census gets almost everyone’s fingerprints. If they come up with a contact, they’ll let them know.”