by John Burdett
A certain frisson passes through the group. I guess only the Asset is allowed to use the M word.
“The control thing was our best selling point—now they’re using it against us?”
“Sure,” the Asset says. “We would do the same. Three years ago they nearly clinched a deal with the ministry, until we pointed out how bloodthirsty these guys are. And how ugly. Now they’re turning it around.”
“That mask, though. It worries me a lot more than the unbreakable spine. I haven’t studied it yet, but from what I’ve seen, there can be no doubt they are way ahead in the manipulation and shaping of graphene. You all see the implications, right?”
“If that mask can pass a standard isometric test, which it probably can, and they already know how to fake fingerprints and DNA, which they do, then say goodbye to identity. Sure, they’re ahead of us. We can’t impersonate like that—we wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Face is everything. If someone can steal that, you’re done. As a person and as a society. You produce a spy identical in every way to a spy on the other side, who behaves in every way like that spy, whose wife and kids are even fooled, who in the end actually becomes that other spy—so who in the world is who? You don’t just get social chaos, you get a full-blown psychic winter. People walking around in circles like broken toys.”
“You spent time in L.A. lately? What else is new?”
“Take it off,” the Asset says.
“Take off the mask here? Now?”
“Yes,” the Asset says. “Take it off now.”
The instruction has a strange effect. No one wants to be the one to take off the mask. “It is probably a full hood, including ears and eyes.”
“Including? Oh, man! I was thinking—”
“We saw it on the other example,” the Asset says. “They preserve the ear/eye nerves and cords, extend them and cut off the original organ, use a synthetic replaceable. Looks like they would have no trouble making ears and eyes out of graphene.” He jerks a chin at the team. “I need that information now,” he says. “Pull off the mask. Do it.”
Whatever is under the mask, even a seasoned team like this doesn’t want to see it. The Asset nods. “Amazing, isn’t it? Nobody can bring themselves to look. Only a freak can face a freak, right?”
He bends over the body again then plunges a hand down under the T-shirt at the back of the neck. “I was right, it is a full hood, stops just above the shoulders, I can feel the graphene trellis. Okay, I’m going to pull.”
He manipulates the material between a thumb and forefinger, as you would open a very thin plastic bag, then pinches something and starts to lift. The material is so fine as to be invisible at first, then as the light catches the dust and the Asset lifts farther, I cannot see but have to deduce a transparent sheet so thin it is two-dimensional, rising from the face. It is also very strong. He is holding the amazing material in a fist and pulling until some of the perp’s face has gone, but it is not possible to tell what lies underneath. The mask is stuck. Now I have some idea what to expect, and so do the others. We all move back as the Asset pulls harder. It will not come away, though, because the material is trapped under ears and eye sockets.
“Those will be artificial organs,” one of the team says. “You could probably pull them up with the mask. That graphene isn’t going to break, that’s for sure.”
The Asset pulls still harder, things pop. Now the mask is a tiny crumpled piece of material mixed up with two ears and two eyes embedded in it.
What lies underneath? R, you don’t want to know, really you don’t.
Okay, you do, but it’s hard to describe. If it were simply animal, it would be easier. If I could report to you that the new artificial humans are some godforsaken splicing of ape and man, with an ape head and long hairy arms and a British accent, etcetera, it would be easier for you to deal with. What we have, though, is definitely not animal. And it’s not human either. Neither is it a space alien. With a huge domed fishlike forehead, two high-tech cables for eyes and another two for ears, a thin face, cruel mouth, and a set of teeth like a baboon’s…No, R, I simply cannot do justice to it, because to describe the surface is to miss the point. When you look at it, you experience a feeling deep in your gut that the Neanderthals must have felt when they first set eyes on Homo sapiens: This hideous thing is smarter and more ruthless than us. This thing is taking over. There goes the neighborhood.
I must have started to talk to myself or mumble out of shock, because the rest of the team has stopped to look at me.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Pink says. “I was like that the first time.”
“Our whole species suffers from hubris because we have no experience of creatures mentally superior to ourselves. This is the beginning of payback,” Dr. White says.
“Imagine how a dog feels, having to live in a world full of humans with superior cunning and intellect who keep tricking and fooling and exploiting and tormenting it. Well, that’s how humans are going to feel when this thing takes off. When the artificial intelligence becomes self-evolving and independent of us.”
“Accelerated learning enhancement? ALE has taken off already,” the Asset says, and everyone falls silent. “And by the way, you wouldn’t want me to remove my mask, would you?” He checks his watch. “Three minutes to go.”
Three minutes later the team has rolled the cadaver up and four men are lifting the tarp exactly at the moment a battered black Toyota Carryboy screeches to a halt outside. The six-foot roll is placed carefully in the back, the rear door closed and locked, the car squeals away—and I’m alone at the crime scene, which has been cleaned and tidied. Even the Asset has silently disappeared. I step out onto the marketplace and understand without a shadow of doubt that sometime over the past decade the world changed radically forever—but the event was top secret and may be classified for the next fifty years.
When I take out my phone I see it is three zero-five a.m. There is only one person I know who might just be awake at this time. But I don’t much care if she’s awake or not, I need to call her anyway. I press the autodial button and let it ring. She answers after about three minutes. I tell her what has happened.
“There in ten,” she says and hangs up.
—
The streets are pretty much empty except for a predawn garbage truck and some drunks in an alley with a flashlight. It takes Krom no more than ten minutes, as she promised, and now here she is in her own battered little white two-door. She has pulled on a pair of shorts and T-shirt. Close up in the front passenger seat I become aware of how muscular her legs are. They are elegant enough, but firm, like an athlete’s. She lets a couple of beats pass until we are half a mile away from the market area.
“So, you saw an HZ—a humanzee? I’m jealous.” I stare out of the window, watching the silent city go by, working my jaw. “Is it true that they’re too ugly to look at?”
“Yes,” I say.
“But is that because, you know, we’re just not used to seeing that kind of being?”
“The opposite. We’ve all seen them before, in our worst nightmares—something tells you: this is the future you’ve been running from all your life.”
“Tell me more, tell me everything.”
“You tell me everything,” I say. “It’s time. You know a lot more than me. What is that creature? Who is that creature? How is that creature? Why is that creature? And why did you refer to the Asset as Messiah when you spoke to the FBI?”
“I’ve been promoted. Thanks to you. In the top circle we refer to the Asset that way. It’s the protocol. You’ll see.”
She flashes me a glance while she changes gear at an intersection. The glance resembles the way a woman might take a quick look at a cake baking in an oven, to see if it’s done yet. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. But you must have guessed most of it.”
We have come to a set of red lights. Stopping is optional at this time of night, especially for cops, but she brakes anyway, her hands resting
on the steering wheel. “The new technology is not expected to change the way wars are fought. In the future, security will mean controlling and suppressing the have-nots of a global economic system that has collapsed. For that you need transhumans: THs. According to all the experts, that is the most economic and probably the only way of doing the job. A TH can wait like a sleeper until needed, collecting information on neighbors, friends, and employers, then use his or her special skills in conjunction with conventional security services when revolutions start. A TH has no loyalty to any normal human because a TH is a superior order of life. In a riot one trans could hold off as many as ten rioters indefinitely, but it’s exponential. Ten THs could hold off not a hundred but a thousand, by acting in perfect coordination. The problem all along was how to inject enough ferocity in the product without having a rogue mutant on your hands. It became a problem of personality.” She flashes me a look. “Which is kind of funny, if you think about it.”
“Why?”
“Because from the military point of view, the personality is one of those little vanities that only nonmilitary wimps worry about. That’s what threw them fifty years ago in Vietnam. It’s what drove Goldman crazy and the reason why he teamed up with Dr. Christmas Bride. You’ve guessed that, right?”
“Through a glass darkly.”
“So Goldman took the children of those spaced-out vets who were born at the camp. But he screwed up. That’s one of the things most freaked Richard Helms, who was running the CIA at the time: records of disastrous interventions with children. No wonder he blatantly destroyed the files right in the middle of the inquiry. Dr. Bride’s point was that the human personality is the product of a hundred thousand years of evolution based on archetypes: what our forefathers called gods. Although we like to be cynical about it, those dead deities are actually very important to our functioning, like enzymes in digestion. We simply don’t want to be a part of the world if we can’t dream about transcending it. What he gave to those kids was the transcendent. And it worked. You’ve met the Asset. For many in the transhuman community he is the most accomplished, advanced being on the planet.”
“You really believe he’s Jesus Christ?” I mutter in disbelief. I had not realized how much I had come to rely on her cynicism.
“He is,” Krom says, that incongruous tone of reverence in her voice, the same she used when talking to the FBI. “You just have to see it right, as a historical mandate.”
“He also kills people, scares the shit out of them, plays with their emotions.”
“You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs. Save your judgmentalism. How was he tonight?”
“Functioning perfectly.”
“See? That’s what I’m getting at. In a dangerous fix with an HZ killer who could easily take out a dozen trained men, he functioned perfectly.”
“Maybe you should fill me in on the HZs,” I said.
“Look at it like this: transhumans are the only way to go. Americans and Russians both experimented in the last century, failed, and in the American case caused a huge scandal. Naturally, the experiments continued in the USSR based on Professor Ilya Ivanov’s work with apes, and the Americans continued with vets and volunteers in secret in various locations, mostly in Southeast Asia. Both had breakthroughs at the same time. Both found the funding to be difficult since it was extremely expensive and officially was not happening. The country that most needs to bolster its internal security is China, with a population that soon will reach nearly two billion. China has a minor TH program of its own based on chemicals, but is way behind the other two. The PRC is very interested in breeding transhumans rather than producing them through specially designed drug regimes they already have, most of which were sold to them by Dr. Christmas Bride. They let it be known they would be interested in buying into someone else’s research, which means Russia’s or America’s, but they need reassurance that the assets produced by such a program are stable and reliable. So Russia and America are in competition. The one who succeeds in selling to China will inevitably grow close to the PRC, with all the commercial and economic benefits that implies. They will also receive a massive injection of nonstate funding from sale of the system. Naturally, the U.S. doesn’t want Russia to be close to China, and Russia doesn’t want the U.S. to be close to China, and neither party wants the other to race ahead thanks to an injection of billions of tax-free nonaccountable dollars. There’s more than just commerce at stake.”
“So the competition is fierce and deadly.”
“You saw it tonight. The way the Russians tried to discredit the Asset by making it look as if he is a child molester and killer—just what the Chinese are afraid of with this program. Polonium’s people even knew you are the Asset’s half brother and that you long to find your father—hence the writing on the mirror in a murder in the center of District 8.” She pauses. “But the point is the technology you witnessed. That will get everyone excited, including the Chinese when they are briefed. Nobody knew the Russians had gotten that far. You said one of the scientists thinks they’re further ahead with graphene technology than America? That’s going to get a lot of people’s attention. You see, masks turned out to be key. The human being in its evolution sacrificed almost everything to vanity. Soft beautiful skin instead of protective hair, large seductive and vulnerable eyes, muscles and tendons allowed almost to degenerate for the sake of producing shapely limbs, etcetera. You want to put primate intensity back into the mix, you have to sacrifice aesthetics—big time. This results in a product that is too ugly for anyone to look at; even hardened military men can’t stand to look at a full HZ without its mask on.” She scratches her ear. “Amazing, isn’t it, the one thing nobody thought of: beauty. It tripped them up big time. But graphene masks are the way to go. That’s why you had three world-class specialists there tonight. Some ass is going to get kicked in Virginia soon as they realize they’re so far behind Polonium. It’ll be the space race all over again.”
I grunt.
“What’s the matter, is all this too much for you?”
“I’m just a simple cop.”
She laughs cynically.
“But I am a cop and so are you, and I’m wondering why we’re conveniently ignoring the main point.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is how you know so damn much.”
She lets quite a few beats pass. “Didn’t I tell you I was recruited?” she says simply. Then adds, “Look, why don’t you come back, see how I live, we’ll talk some more?”
35
You work with someone, inevitably you build up a picture of the way they live. So: Krom is a single young dyke who lives in a bedsit somewhere between Ekkamai and On Nut, probably in a modern four-story walk-up on a side street, she is polite but strange with neighbors, she rarely entertains save for one-night stands that take place discreetly so as not to cause outrage; if she has a second bedroom, it is full of cardboard boxes of old clothes and outdated gadgets, on her wall hang posters originating in the lesbian blogosphere, there is a ruthless kind of masculinity in the minimalism, right? Wrong.
To judge from the direction we have taken in her old Toyota, it seems as if she resides in the most expensive part of town, between Ploenchit and Lumpini Park; but not all the land around here has been developed for tall apartment buildings. Throughout the city you still find die-hards, people who like to live in a wooden house on stilts in a generous orchard with plenty of plants, pools, cats and dogs, even monkeys and parrots, while the wall of high-rises rises higher and higher all around.
It is still dark when we arrived at the iron gates. Krom uses a remote handset to open and close them behind us. Safety lights make it possible to discern perhaps a half acre of land with a couple of fish pools, some banyan and frangipani trees, grass that is cut irregularly; a dozen cats’ eyes stare from improbable elevations when we get out of the car. Krom leads me up a wooden stairway and uses an old-style latchkey to enter the house, which is already inhabited and filled
with light. Someone is not merely awake, someone is working at this hour.
“It’s late afternoon on the East Coast of America,” Krom explains. “You’ll see.”
We are standing in a corridor. By my calculation the room at the far end must run the width of the house and offer a fine view of the garden with the pools, trees, and cats. It must be like old Siam in that room. Krom leads me to the door, knocks gently: “Can we come in?”
“Come.”
The woman in the far room is tall for a Chinese; perhaps she owns Manchurian genes, for she is around five eleven and slim, about fifty years old in a comfortable silk housecoat, her black hair tied back in a bun. She leans lightly on a shelf next to her hand, holds her head at an angle, waits expectantly; but it is the shelf that now grabs my attention—actually, all the shelves do. The room is a library of perfume bottles, tens of thousands of them, which cram the shelves in colorful sets six deep, like a paperback library. Meanwhile, discreet and intriguing aromas play games with my head. It’s difficult not to feel a happy kind of high in this room, as if the aromas were proxies for love and money.
“I have brought a visitor,” Krom tells the Chinese woman.
“Yes,” she says, “I can smell him well enough from here.” She smiles. “Krom has told me all about you,” she says. Then, when the Chinese woman decides to move and continues to hold her head in a certain way with eyes apparently focused on the ceiling, I realize she is blind. “I’m afraid I have a call from New York in about two minutes,” she says and dips a hand in the pocket of her housecoat to pull out a smart phone to show us.
“I’m sorry,” Krom says. “Shall we leave you alone?”
“No, it’s only business,” she says. “What is your friend’s name again?”
“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Detective, this is Madame Gloria Ching—but I call her Yai, because she is almost my mother.”
“There’s no almost about motherhood,” Madame Ching says with a smile, still holding her head at an angle, her unfocused eyes pointing at the ceiling. “And Krom is way ahead of me in most things.”