The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “But I’ve only just recommenced echolocation after a five-year lapse.”

  “That’s the point. How quickly you pick it up. That’s what they’re going to be looking for. Do an intro first, off the bat.”

  “Well, here I am,” he says, smiling into the camera. “This is the me show”— another smile—“any questions you have, I’ll be only too happy to answer.” Smile three. “Unless the answer’s classified, of course.” He laughs.

  “Who the hell are you?” one of his minders asks, by way of a prompt.

  “Classified.” He laughs, showing brilliant teeth. “Okay, since you have the clearance, I guess I can tell you I’m first and foremost a military asset whose activities are top secret. I don’t want to sound pompous, but you guys are pretty much the first civilians to get this close.” He pauses, frowns. I don’t think he was listening to a receiver grafted onto his inner ear, he just looked as if he was. “My locations are top secret. This one is temporary, naturally.”

  He smiles, stands straight, tall, flat-stomached, broad-shouldered, beautiful—takes a breath. “First and foremost, let’s avoid the word super, shall we? I’m not made of steel. You pinch me it hurts, you kick me in the genitals I double up in fetal position and howl like a baby—and so far as I know I’m not vulnerable to Kryptonite—ha-ha.” He smiles again. “Anyway, it’s an overused word that sends the wrong message. Enhanced is better, less threatening anyway, but still giving an impression of superiority that alienates ordinary people. To be frank, there was a time when I favored posthuman as a serviceable tag, but it’s been hijacked by the sci-fi community. In the end we at the base have come to favor transhuman, abbreviated to TH—let me ask you, how does that sound? No one here overly disturbed by that? That’s great, I’ll report back. After all, trans something means beyond but not necessarily superior, right? And it’s democratic, too. In our great country, once the technology is in place I personally don’t see any reason why every citizen should not one day acquire at least some of the talents, abilities, and mental enhancement that certain great men have, through a lifetime of effort and sacrifice, made available to the community in the person of, well, myself. There always has to be a first man on the Moon, right? Some may even go beyond what I have achieved. It just isn’t practical or desirable that one person should take every potential all the way. Eidetic memory, speed reading, and calculating—sure, I have some of all that, but you don’t want to get cluttered or unbalanced. I can do ice baths for over an hour, but I can’t compete with Wim Hof, who holds the record of over two hours. I can engage eighty percent of my muscles through brain command, but Dr. Mak Yuree can do ninety-five percent. My team thought long and hard and decided to give the cardiovascular aspect priority, after all we’re talking here about defense of our great country as the original objective. Now, I know it sounds like showing off and I don’t want that, but with sixty percent more red blood cells—well, some of you have seen me fight, right?”

  He pauses and remains silent for a minute, then resumes.

  “Echolocation: listen.” A few beats pass. “Did you hear me clicking? Probably not, we’ve found ways of taking it out of normal human range, although some children can detect it faintly. What else? I have an excellent visual memory, but we agreed to keep me a grade or two below savant level. When it came to sound, though, well, even before I was selected I loved music, and now I can truthfully say without exaggeration that there is not a tune or musical sound, piece of music from pop to classical that I cannot reproduce at will. Computing power? I’m not quite at Shakuntala Devi’s level—she can do the twenty-third root of a two-hundred-and-one digit number, while poor me can’t go beyond the eighteenth of a hundred-and-fifty-digit number. Even so, I get by. I can speak backward, which is useful in intelligence work, and naturally in military training my ability to go without sleep for five days at a stretch is invaluable.”

  “How about sex?” someone in his audience calls out. “Do you fuck? If so, boys or girls?”

  He falls into confusion for a moment, but recovers quickly. “You’re just testing, right? I’m afraid that’s, ah—shall we say another program? One I’m not at liberty to discuss at this time?”

  “Could you click, please?” the provocative voice says. “Beijing wants to hear you click.”

  “Beijing is watching this live? They want me to click? But I thought I’d just made it clear—”

  “They say how can they check echolocation if the clicks are inaudible?”

  “Okay. Okay. Audible clicks are fine for exhibitions. No use in a fight, though.”

  “All you need to do is reduce by an octave or two, bring it into the human range.”

  Confusion again on that pinup face. “Ah, okay, look, I haven’t done audible clicks for maybe five years, the whole training was to take them out of the audible range for humans. We did pool training with dolphins—you can’t always hear them click either.” He frowns. “David’s clicks were especially high—I couldn’t hear them until the fifth enhancement.”

  “David?”

  “He was my friend. We were allowed to play together every Wednesday. I was sad when that particular program came to a satisfactory conclusion.”

  “He is your friend but also a dolphin?”

  “Was,” the Asset says. “I was so depressed, they had to postpone one of the implants.”

  “You have to learn not to press the sentiment button,” a preemptive voice yells. “That’s where they’re going to attack. When you go public everyone is going to want to prove you’re soft and human just like them. Do you want to be just like them?”

  “No.”

  “So, don’t let it happen.”

  “Okay,” the Asset says, nods contritely.

  “Were there any other animals in any of the other programs?”

  “David was not an animal, he was a wonderful, magical being.”

  “Don’t you hate them for destroying him? Was he a threat to the security of the great nation? Did he suffer?”

  Bewildered, the Asset sits down on the chair and closes his eyes. The moment passes, he loads another program and stands again. Smiles. “Naturally there will be those who object to the whole idea of transhumanity, but progress cannot be stopped. No doubt there were those who saw the wheel as an invention of the devil, but we need to maintain a perspective. Artificial enhancement of human beings is not new, although we are the only species that practices it. Already there are so many artificial extensions of our senses: hearing aids, false teeth and breasts, buttock implants, tattoos, the motorcar, spectacles, telescopes and Moon landings, fertilizer and GM foods, everything. It may well be true, although I hate to brag, that I am the leading edge in a new phase of this evolution, but as I believe I have already made clear—”

  Someone yells a word that must mean cut.

  “We’ve lost Beijing,” someone says.

  “You see, isn’t technology wonderful?” the Asset says, triumphant again.

  The movie stops abruptly, people in our audience shift around and whisper in Mandarin, then it starts again. Now the Asset in the movie is onstage blindfolded with a thick black band and using his hands to bat back tennis balls that are thrown gently at him. The camera focuses closely on the balls as they reach the Asset in high lopes and the careful way he bats them back in pretty much the direction they came from. There is also a close-up of the band across his eyes.

  “That’s okay,” a voice says, “that’s pretty damn good, but we would like to hear the clicks. This is science, right, and sport, it’s not magic. People don’t hear the clicks, they’re going to think you’re cheating. That’s just the way the mind works. The miracles have to be explicable, even when they’re not.”

  Suddenly as each ball approaches we hear a series of clicks from the Asset so rapid they are like a single sound. “Great, that’s just great. Is Beijing getting this?”

  “Yep,” a voice says.

  “Okay, so increase the speed. Keep the clicks audib
le. Increase the speed steadily, when he starts to miss do not slow, keep at that speed until he gets his mojo back.”

  There must be a machine hurling the balls at him. The speed increases until he can no longer react fast enough. The cameraman does not need to be told to focus on his face at this point. The struggle there is titanic, filled with rage and madness barely under control. Still the balls keep flying at him, still he keeps missing them. Then little by little he masters his own technology and is able to echolocate each ball at amazing speed. The clicks rise in pitch until they become inaudible, however.

  “Okay, that’s great. Look, you can’t click that fast at audible levels, that’s okay, we’ll use a machine to show you are still actually clicking. But this time we’re going to use smaller, more solid objects going faster. Golf balls. Okay?”

  “Okay, fire away.”

  There is confidence in the tone. He has conquered the new game and is able to accelerate at will. Finally, to show his total mastery, he deflects one of the golf balls back into the audience. “Ouch,” someone says. It is the voice that has been giving the orders. Laughter.

  “Okay, cut,” Goldman says and turns on the lights. “That’s it, timed out. I have to get this back to where I borrowed it before the next security shift. Everybody out. Hope you enjoyed the show. You all know where and how to contact me. Good night.”

  14

  In the cab on the way to Pat Pong with Professor Chu, Chanya and I cannot decide what it was we just saw: a sales pitch, a military demonstration, a game, a home movie show? Somehow the inferior and amateur quality of the video made it convincing. No one does poor photography anymore, we’re all pros these days. It is Krom who sets the tone.

  “So, the Asset is definitely close to escape velocity, if the video tonight was genuine.” She looks at Chu.

  “I think it was genuine,” Chu says. “I’m convinced. Of course, it could have been a mock-up, but I doubt it. The first thing a serious potential buyer will do is test the echolocation for himself, so there isn’t really a chance to cheat.”

  “Goldman must be desperate to break all the rules like that.”

  “I think he has clearance,” Chu says. “I don’t think he really ‘borrowed’ that tape surreptitiously.”

  “How come?”

  “The gap is narrowing,” the Professor says. “The others. The competition.”

  Krom turns to us to explain something important that the Professor already understands: “If that echolocation exercise was the real thing, that demonstrates much more than a capacity to catch balls blindfolded. That pretty much demonstrates accelerated learning capacity no one else has yet reached. Anywhere, ever. It’s the grail of the TH community: ALE. That’s why Goldman was willing to take the risk to show it to that ministry.”

  “Professor Chu’s ministry?” Chanya wants to know.

  “No,” Krom says with an affectionate smile, “another ministry.”

  “The other ministry the cameramen come from?”

  “No,” Krom says, the smile wearing a little. “Yet another.”

  “I don’t get quite why the learning capacity is so important. I mean, on an abstract level, sure, it’s what humans are better at than animals, we learn quicker. But why does it get that kind of respect?”

  “Because it’s not just a demonstration of physical coordination of a high order. For him to learn to catch the balls that fast he had to tap into accelerated evolution. It involves not just physical response mechanisms but the intellect as well—and computing capacity. Personality. Everything, but especially personality. That is not a totally human human anymore.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Is it okay to use the word spiritual?”

  “You mean he’s become like a Buddha?”

  “No. Like a demon. A pre-Christian, pre-Buddhist god. Pagan. Like something out of a Hindu temple, or pre-Roman Europe.” She pauses to think for a moment. “Once you get into this technology all kinds of things start to make sense that didn’t before.”

  “You mean this technology is not totally new?”

  “They’re starting to think all the great ancient societies had it. It’s what we refer to ignorantly as magic. A superior science that led to catastrophic hubris—all the ancient cultures have that folk memory.”

  “So we’re starting back on the road to catastrophe?” Chanya says.

  “Personally, I think we’re at the end, on the brink.”

  “That’s why we all find the Asset so fascinating,” Chu says as we reach the bars.

  “So what is escape velocity in this context?” Chanya asks, too late because we are all distracted getting out of the car. Then we are distracted by Chu. We remember the formerly most intriguing question of the night: which way did he swing?

  —

  The answer was, with hindsight, inevitable: katoeys. I’m afraid the Professor turned quite coy about those bars he most wanted to visit, which led Chanya to put him in her Total Jerk file even before he turned giggly. It was amazing. Krom and I finally decided to try him out in one of the tranny bars after seeing no serious spark of desire generated in the gay or the straight bars. In the Love Me Tender, however, the quality of the surgery together with the unnerving beauty of its products was damned impressive. Chu grew a beam on his face that quickly developed into an attitude of gratitude and generosity toward us for bringing him to paradise. He insisted on paying for round after round of drinks, while round after round of exquisite products of the gender reassignment industry came to pay him close attention. By the time he had settled on three that he wanted to take home, Krom had already disappeared to the lesbian bars on the other side of Surawong. Chanya and I caught a cab.

  —

  “Krom made a pass at me,” she said to the window in a soft mutter.

  “She did? When? In the bathroom at the restaurant?” That was the only time they were alone together, as far as I could remember.

  “Yes. It wasn’t aggressive and I’m not even sure she wanted to do it. I mean, something like that could ruin this little partnership she has with you, couldn’t it?”

  “So why did she do it?”

  “Because she couldn’t help herself.” A pause. “I turned her down, of course.”

  15

  I decide that the evening with Professor Chu definitely constituted work and I am therefore entitled to take the day off. But I have to visit the station that evening to clear the backlog of e-mails, which turn out to be a good few hours’ work. I stroll home and find Chanya still awake and watching an old Thai soap on YouTube.

  “Did you switch your phone off?”

  I check my phone, see it is switched off. “Yes. Shut it when I was trying to clear the e-mails. Forgot to switch it on again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She wrenches her eyes from the movie. Now I see it is not a soap but a comic version of the Nang Mak ghost story, about a Thai woman so devoted to her husband that she manages to return from the Other Side and serve him as a ghost—until he finds out and she has the kind of destructive tantrum only ghosts can do well (half the village dies from her curse in this version). Chanya pauses the movie in order to speak in a gentle voice. I have a feeling we are about to have a serious conversation about me.

  “Sonchai, Krom called earlier.”

  “Ah-ha!”

  “She said she was looking for you, but maybe she was looking for a chance to talk to me.”

  “To chat you up?”

  She scowls. “No, to talk about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “Your mental health.”

  “Really.”

  She turns from the screen to give me her full attention. “We had quite a talk, but it kept coming down to the same thing. I told her what kind of state you are in. Sonchai, now that you’ve at least come out with your father obsession—we both agreed that’s a good sign, so much better than having it festering away inside—surely you’ve got to see your mother about it? About him
?”

  “I will. Soon. A good detective doesn’t question the key witness until he has his ducks in a row.”

  She grabs my chin and turns it until I’m looking at her. “You’re scared, aren’t you? It’s Psychology 101: people are plagued by two opposing drives—the drive to know and the drive not to know.”

  I break away from her to go to the window. On the road all is still under the streetlights. “You spoke to Nong?”

  “Yes, after Krom called.”

  “And?”

  “She said she’d be in her bar tomorrow at about nine in the morning—there’s some inventory she needs to check on. She said you could stop by then, if there’s something you need to say or know.” She lets a couple of beats pass. “Frankly, Sonchai, how likely is it that she doesn’t even know his name?”

  “His name’s Jack,” I say plaintively.

  “C’mon, Sonchai.”

  “Are you sure Krom wasn’t using me as an excuse to get close to you? You’re the one said she made a pass at you at the Heaven’s Gate Tower.”

  “Maybe I was mistaken. It was ambiguous anyway.”

  “Or did you make a pass at her?”

  She slaps her desk and glares at me. “Okay, you win. You don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.” She turns back to her soap. I figure she’s going to watch the movie all through, and I can’t sleep with the light from her screen blazing away, so I decide to smoke a joint—I’m not sure I’m strong enough for more oil just now. I’m pretty mellow when she comes to bed. I assume she is still pissed off with me after our little spat, but instead she curls up beside me and starts to play with my dick.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I say.

  “So why is it getting bigger?”

  “A man lies down to relax, the blood in his head makes its way downwards. Not every erection is a tribute to the love object.”

  “Really?” She jiggles a little more at exactly the right calibration of touch and rhythm. We’ve been together a long time, after all.