Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  …opened himself to his ka and immediately felt as if he had landed in the eye of a hurricane. All around him he could hear the howl of adrenaline fueled winds of fear and horror battering his body but here, here in this still center…“Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world,” an ancient Greek philosopher had said…Harry reached out from his ka and retook control of his world. He shut off the flow of stress hormones poisoning his body and twisting his mind; he flushed away the chemical overload, triggering misfiring neural receptors; he cut the trip hammer beat of his heart and slowed his breathing. He…

  “SAY GOODBY TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”

  …once again broke the surface and this time nothing could drown him, this time he was in control, this time he sat in the still center of his ka and saw through their illusions and was immune…

  “SAY GOODBY TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”

  …immune to the throbbing subsonics that were tightening his chest in fear, immune to the bloody, subliminal images flickering too fast for his eye to catch, immune to the pheromones of violence permeating the air and the traces of nerve gas boosting his terror, immune to the illusion…For a moment, he saw…

  “SAY GOODBY TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”

  …through the illusion, through the stained green walls to the technicians sitting on the other side, controlling this high-tech horror show. And they were also beginning to get the message through their computers, on their monitors, through all the physiological sensors embedded in the chair Harry sat in.

  Oh yes, they were getting the message loud and clear. He could feel their nervous glances, their frantic attempts to reassert control, or at least, maybe, perhaps salvage a little something…But they were way past too late. There would be no encores, the show was over, Elvis had left the building, and Harry was bringing down the curtain.

  “SAY GOODBY TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”

  He looked over at Chueh, or rather the illusion of Chueh, with the flat, black, stone-dead eyes and the flicker of subliminals, jacking up the illusion of a cold-blooded, sadistic, mass-murdering psycho. “We do still understand each other, don’t we, Harry,” he asked with his lips still crimped in that tight humorless smile.

  “No, I don’t think we do,” Harry said, keeping his voice level but unable and unwilling to rein in his anger. “What do you think you’re trying to do with this tough guy routine? Scare me? You think I need reminding of what a fucking big-shot, bad-ass, Tong Godfather you are?”

  “Wrong answer,” Chueh said and aimed the derringer at Harry’s head. The subliminals were working overtime now, giving it one last shot, flickering tortured, Saint Valentine’s Massacre, bloodbath images on those stone dead eyes.

  “Chueh, I don’t know what kind of a point you’re trying to make with this cheap, side-show, haunted house routine, but there’s no amount of pain or death you can threaten me with that I haven’t seen before. I’ve died fifty-one times and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wish someone would pull my plug at Eternal Life and just let me die for real! So let’s take off the stupid, scary masks and stop playing Halloween!”

  Chueh lowered the gun and sat unmoving his eyes hooded, his face expressionless. Someone had finally pulled the plug on the subliminals. “Well, if that’s the way you want it,” Chueh said at last and got up. He pocketed the derringer and walked over and opened the door. “Good luck, Harry,” he said and walked out.

  The room flickered like broken neon and then all color and definition washed out of the walls, ceiling, and floor, leaving only the gray photographic negative of deactivated holo-screens. The subliminal noisemakers shut down, and the room sank back into its original soundproofed silence. The air no longer packed a chemical punch. Instead, it felt mountain-top clean and thin without its freight of pheromone, positive ions, and traces of nerve gas.

  Harry leaned back and sighed deeply, letting his anger do a slow burn through the sensors buried in the chair. He was back in control, resting in the calm center of his ka, feeding them data, jacking up his emotions and masking his intentions (two could play that game), and making sure they got one message loud and clear: HE WAS PISSED OFF!!

  The steel cell door had disappeared along with the rest of the torture chamber décor. Now, it was just another gray patch on the photographic negative wall. There wasn’t even a door handle to show where it had been. Without warning this section of wall opened again. This time there was no clang of steel or creak of rusty hinges. Instead, the whole panel slid silently aside, into the wall.

  A moment later, Chueh walked back in. “Hi, Helly! How’s tlicks!” he said in his horrible Chink laundry-man parody as if they were still in the Silver Slipper and nothing had happened. He followed this up with his usual, trademark laughing Buddha grin. It lit up his face like an old, wrinkled up jack-o-lantern.

  Harry didn’t buy it, didn’t want any part of it. He stood up and bowed stiffly. It wasn’t much of a bow. You could have measured it with a micrometer. To a Chinese elder and a Tong Godfather, it was just this side of insult. Harry knew it, he had measured it that way. “Mr. Chueh,” he said keeping his voice neutral, his face expressionless, “I am honored.” He gave the end of this ritualistic phrase a slight upward inflection that turned it into a disrespectable half-question. Let’s see what he does with that, he thought.

  Chueh ignored the barb and gave Harry a fractional bow of his own. “The honor is mine,” he said with a knowing smile. Then, he walked over and pulled out the chair across from Harry and sat down.

  When he saw Chueh pull out the chair that was no longer welded to the floor, Harry wondered briefly whether this was just another holographic knockoff or whether he might be talking to real flesh and blood. With Chueh you never knew and at this point it really didn’t matter one way or the other to Harry. “Now that we’ve dispensed with the ritualistic bullshit,” he said pushing the envelope for all it was worth. “Maybe you’d like to tell me what the fuck is going on!”

  “Easy, Harry,” Chueh said raising a warning finger. “You don’t want to say something we’ll both regret.”

  “I already regret coming here and talking to your sideshow doppelganger. Any other regrets I pile up along the way, I’ll just add to the account.” And at least I’ve gotten the satisfaction of wiping that irritating little smile off your face, Harry thought. He knew he was free-wheeling a dangerous high wire act, but he really didn’t care anymore. He didn’t like people playing nasty games with his head, especially people he considered friends.

  He had been completely truthful with Chueh. There was nothing the old gangster could do to him or threaten to do to him that he hadn’t already suffered. Besides, he’d learned to shut off physical pain as easily as a faucet and if they somehow found a way around that one, he could always just shuck this body. He didn’t care one way or the other.

  Chueh shook his head and sighed regretfully. “Doc warned me about this. Maybe I should have listened.”

  Harry didn’t think that deserved a comment so he just continued radiating his own personal brand of toxic waste. He figured the technicians hiding in the walls were picking up the contamination loud and clear and relaying it to Chueh if he was too dense to pick it up himself.

  Chueh leaned back his eyes hooded in thought. “You know, Harry,” he said at last. “You’re a very dangerous man. I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  35

  An Offer He Can’t Refuse

  “On your side!” Harry spluttered in blind-sided surprise. “After what you just pulled. You gotta be dreaming. I wouldn’t…”

  “You don’t want to go there, Harry,” Chueh said and stood up. “Please take my hand,” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  “So you know you’re really talking to me and not just some hologram or eidolon.”

  Harry reluctantly reached over and took Chueh’s outstretched hand. It was warm and dry with a surprising grip of spring steel in the long delicate fingers. It was also vibrantly alive with the signature of
the old man’s ka. There could be no doubt that he was talking to Chueh in the flesh.

  The old man continued to hold Harry’s hand and looked him in the eye. “I deeply regret what happened here today, and I ask you to please accept my most humble apologies,” he said.

  For a stunned second, Harry didn’t know what to say or do. Here was the most powerful crime boss in the empire asking Harry to accept his apology. Of course he had to accept. As they used to say in the old gangster movies, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. In this case it would cause Chueh an unforgivable loss of face and, despite everything, Harry did not need that kind of grief. On the other hand, he wanted an explanation. Any real acceptance was conditional on that.

  “I am most honored,” Harry spoke the ritualistic words of acceptance, but his bow was measured with conditions.

  Once again, Chueh surprised Harry. “The honor is all mine,” he said with a deep bow of unequivocal acquiescence. Then he gave Harry a self-deprecating, little smile. “Now, maybe we can sit down and talk a little.”

  When they were seated, Chueh made a little circular “roll ‘em” motion with his hand and suddenly they were sitting at the edge of the cliff, at the entrance to Chueh’s garden, with the panoramic view of hump-backed, Chinese mountains rising out of the morning mist. A cool breeze blew up from the edge of the cliff, bringing with it the smell of new mown hay.

  Harry turned and looked up at the high snow-capped mountain towering behind him. “Impressive,” he said. “But so was the torture chamber. Do you use that one a lot?”

  “I regret that my business requires the use of such tools every once in a while,” Chueh said smoothly.

  “Like today?” Harry asked.

  “You’re a personal friend of Doc’s,” Chueh said, choosing his words with care. “He sets great personal store in that friendship. He says you’re a man of unusual potential, a man who can be trusted. Up until today, that was all the recommendation I needed.”

  “What happened today?”

  “Today we became partners.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Harry said, keeping everything on hold until he got an explanation.

  “I have to know the caliber of the people I work with. Before today you were only a good customer, a charming acquaintance, and a man of unusual potential, according to Doc.

  “What changed today?”

  “Have you heard of black ice?”

  Harry stiffened, shrugged. “Of course,” he said carefully. “It’s a hallucinogen, highly addictive, very expensive. It’s the latest fashion statement of the rich and famous and a particularly nasty one even for them. What’s that got to do with anything?” He was certain Chueh had seen the Isis holo, but he was willing to play along to see where this was going.

  “What more have you heard?” Chueh persisted.

  “I’ve heard that it’s such a bad trip that the Tongs won’t even touch it.”

  Chueh leaned back, his eyes hooded, regarding Harry like a sleepy snake. “Anything else?” he asked.

  Harry was beginning to feel as if he was in a choreographed, high-stakes poker game. “The stuff is coming in through the Sinks and the Seraphim are distributing it, and they aren’t doing the Tongs any favors,” he said. “You guys have had a monopoly on the drug trade for so long it’s almost an accepted fact of life. You’ve got the government in your pocket, but more important, you’ve got the trust of your average citizen because they know that you provide them with standardized, well-regulated, affordable products. If it wasn’t for the occasional Tong blood bath and some of your other “business ventures”, you guys might almost be respectable.

  “Now, along comes black ice. The Seraphim have brought it in and broken your monopoly, and they’ve done it with a really bad-ass drug. It opens people to a kind of demonic possession that doesn’t always take and when it doesn’t, the host mind can break down under the demonic assault and go completely insane.” He thought of Isis. She was probably back, sitting alone in that glass cage at the top of a black pyramid, fighting demonic possession with only a whiskey bottle to help. The jury was out which way that would go.

  Then for some reason he thought of Roger. The jury had long since given its verdict there. He looked at Chueh. “When they take possession successfully,” he said and could hardly keep the anger out of his voice, “the alien demon thing hides behind a façade of normalcy, pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. Even though the host personality still functions, it’s skewed in a diabolically twisted way by the thing that’s taken possession.”

  Harry stopped. He suddenly remembered Anton Shane and felt as if one of those big cartoon light bulbs had just flashed on in his head. Roger wasn’t the only one, he thought.

  Chueh smiled minimally. “You were saying?” he prompted.

  “I had a run in with a guy today,” he said. “He tried to get me to take black ice.”

  “I heard about it,” Chueh nodded.

  “Heard about it?” Harry asked.

  Chueh smiled. “We like to keep an eye on you,” he said.

  “We?”

  “There was a paparazzi grav-corder across the street, filming the whole thing. Strictly against all privacy laws. The police confiscated it.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  Chueh smiled.

  “So you know what that sick slime ball was talking about,” Harry said. “He loved the stuff, said it turned him into an animal, said it was the best high he ever had, said it changed his life. Just looking at him, I could believe that. I knew him back when I was still doing movies. Back then, he was nothing but a harmless hustler. He isn’t harmless anymore.

  “I think I broke his nose,” Harry said. “Something just snapped inside of me. The next thing I knew the guy was lying on the pavement, and I just turned and walked away.”

  He looked at Chueh. “You understand? For a second there, I was afraid of being just like him. I wanted to let the beast off the leash and pound him into a bloody pulp. Knowing that, I had to walk away.”

  “Then, he hit you with a neural whip,” Chueh said.

  “Big mistake!” Harry said with a ferocious grin, and the old Tong Godfather had no trouble imagining the beast leashed behind that grin.

  “How?” Chueh asked.

  “How, what?” The smile was gone and instead Harry’s eyes had the weary, haunted look of someone who had looked too deeply into his own abyss.

  “How did you do it? No one can resist a neural whip. The pain it induces is unbearable.”

  “I guess there are some things Doc forgot to tell you,” Harry said and left it at that.

  Chueh leaned back and regarded him for a moment, his parchment yellow face unreadable. At last he nodded and smiled. “Doc said you were a man of unusual potential. I begin to see what he meant.”

  “Rumor has it that black ice comes in through the Sinks, but it’s not made there,” Harry prompted.

  “No, it’s not,” Chueh said and picked at the crease in his trousers, straightening an imaginary wrinkle.

  Time to talk straight, Harry thought. “You’ve seen the holos Diana’s sister brought back?” Harry said.

  “Yes.”

  “So you know.”

  “Of course,” Chueh said. He crossed his legs and fastidiously plucked at the knees of his trousers. “When black ice first turned up about a year and a half ago, the Tongs were naturally concerned,” he said. “As you pointed out, we have a very lucrative monopoly and a reputation to protect. We also have, shall we say, a commercial agreement with the Sinks that guarantees this monopoly. They were breaking this agreement. We asked them to stop and they refused.”

  “So that’s what’s behind what people have begun calling, The New Tong Wars.” Harry said.

  Chueh nodded. “At first we tried to stop the flow of black ice into New Hollywood by going into the Sinks and taking out a few staging areas.” Chueh shook his head with sardonic amusement. “It was getting to be like the old War on Drugs, only we wer
e the ones making war. And just like back then, we realized that the only way to stop this was to stop it at its source. Which we discovered was not in the Sinks. They were only middlemen.

  “During the last few months, we’ve managed to track it back up north to the Oregon Quarantine and a group of Norma-genes who bring it down to the coast and sell it to the Seraphim for almost nothing. From what we were able to find out, the drug was not produced anywhere near the coast. It’s brought in from somewhere further inland.”

  “Like the Nevada Quarantine,” Harry said.

  “Do you know the story of Pinocchio?” Chueh asked.

  “You mean the old Walt Disney fairytale? Yeah, why?”

  Chueh leaned back comfortably and stared at the distant mountains that seemed to float over the horizon on a sea of golden fog. “In the story, Pinocchio and all the bad boys are taken to an amusement park,” he said, “where they can smash things to their hearts content, eat themselves silly on sweets, and drink themselves into a stupor from unending streams of beer and wine. While it lasts, it’s every delinquent’s dream of heaven. But then these bad boys began to change. They turned into animals, into donkeys to be exact. When the change was complete, the men who ran the park came in, rounded them up and herded them away to slave labor.”

  Harry thought of Anton Shane and the Wolf Temple and nodded thoughtfully. “I see where you’re going with this,” he said. “The Wolf Temples are like that amusement park, and black ice turns you lose in it to fulfill all the darkest desires of the human beast by becoming one of these black wolves…”

  Harry stopped as he remembered Anton Shane swaggering across the street, like a nuclear meltdown, radiating such deadly danger that people instinctively stepped out of his way.

  Chueh sat patiently, watching him with hooded eyes, waiting for him to put it all together.

  “When they take black ice in the Wolf Temples,” Harry said at last, “they think they become animals, but in reality the animals become them.”

  The old man nodded. “The wolves use black ice in the Wolf Temples to open people up to possession,” he said. “In the beginning they let people ride them. They take them back to their world where people think they are experiencing the purity of their own animal nature but, in reality, they’re experiencing the nature of the wolves they’re riding. As they hunt, kill, feed and copulate, the boundaries between their human ka and the wolf’s are gradually eroded. After a few times of this, when a person comes back, he brings the wolf with him but now, instead of him riding the wolf, the wolf is riding him.