by John Burdett
“Except perfume,” Krom says.
“Yes. Perhaps.” Now her phone rings and she fishes it out of her pocket. “Hello, Gloria Ching speaking.” Her English is perfect, of the kind only taught in expensive Asian private schools.
“She’s the daughter of a PRC cadre,” Krom whispers. “Nothing but the best for her, especially since she was born sightless. Her father was on the Central Committee, he was a kind of minister of defense, but they purged him and he’s been under house arrest for two decades. He still has connections, though, and tons of dough offshore.”
“I’m afraid I’m not so keen, to be honest with you,” Madame Ching is saying to her caller in New York. “He needs to bite the bullet and put in some more skatole for the base notes…No, skatole is civet shit, more precisely, the smell of civet shit…But what it really needs, and I’m generously giving free advice here, is a touch of hyraceum…It’s made from the petrified excrement of the Cape hyrax. It has the power to make perfume intriguing instead of merely pleasant…You see, aroma is like any art, you don’t get anywhere without contrast and depth…I don’t mind the bergamot at all, I think he’s done a fine job with the bright floral theme, and the citrus is very well anchored, it’s just that it lacks intrigue, which is what you need for evening wear…Yes, I’ll talk to him or put it in writing if you like…Well, you want to sell to Asia, you have to do a lot of floral highlights, we’re not so dark and animal as the West, he’s got that right…I’ll have someone send a bill for the consultation before the end of the month…Goodbye.”
Madame Ching closes her phone and clicks in our direction. At first I was not sure I had heard right, or if the middle-aged woman had some eccentricity that caused her to make clicking sounds. It is clear she intends to join us in the sitting area at the other end of the room, and I assumed that Krom would guide her, or she would use a stick. Instead, she keeps up with the hollow-sounding clicks, then walks toward us with perfect assurance. She sits on a chair next to a sofa we are sitting on, smiles in my direction. Krom is staring at me, waiting for a reaction.
“You’ve been enhanced,” I say, because it seemed to be expected. I turn to Krom. I do not say, Gimme the whole story this time or I’ll kill you, I just feel like saying it.
“I was nineteen years old,” Krom says, “and getting ready to die. Look at that picture again.” She goes to a credenza and finds an iPad. “Look at it on the big screen, you’ll see more.” She locates something on the iPad and shows it to me. It is the same portrait as the one she showed me of herself on her phone, but on the iPad it’s huge and easier to study. There is that obvious intelligence in her eyes, but drug abuse of some kind is a given. Another unhappy outsider: lost, utterly lost, and about to fall further into something tragic. There is no direction in that soul, none at all. I look from her to Madame Ching and back.
Krom takes the iPad to examine the photo. “Look at me. Just another third-world girl feeling like a piece of consumer trash waiting to be gobbled up.”
“But you’re not…”
“Not in the same league as the Messiah? No, of course not. Nothing is permanent with us, we need injections every six months.”
“What happened?”
“The PRC learned about Dr. Christmas Bride quite early on, they made contact. In return for a mountain of dough Bride was able to advise them on certain superficial kinds of enhancement that can be acquired in adulthood, without the high risk of implanting circuits in the brain. His research with LSD and its variants enabled him to develop extra sensitivities in certain areas. We call them Apps, like for smart phones. Yai had the olfactory App, didn’t you, Yai?”
“And echolocation. Both changed my life.”
“And it was Yai who they appointed to take care of my initiation, wasn’t it, Yai?”
The Chinese woman sniffs and smiles. “Now you have the Detective’s attention,” she says. “He is emanating aromas of awe. I think he is finally getting it. Don’t stop, whatever you do.”
“It’s just another revolution,” Krom says. “Technology developed in war shocks everyone when it is revealed. Who would have predicted forty years ago that people of the future would spend most of their lives staring at computer screens?”
“But this is different,” I say.
“Yes. This is the big one. We are all supposed to be discreet for the moment, waiting for the tsunami to hit.” She shrugs. “Because that’s what it’s going to be. Quietly, secretly, a few research groups have been working on something that will sweep the world like cell phones, and for the same reason: it’s what we want.”
“Enhanced bodies?”
“For the masses who love to play with themselves. For the elite, something more radical. Enhanced brains, enhanced horizons. New personalities. The most important thing you will ever witness in your life is the transformation of the Asset. He is ready to spread his wings and fly. Bride and Goldman successfully married his human intelligence and his artificial intelligence so that he has reached the moment where his capacity to learn is accelerated way beyond the human. When he told you he was Jesus Christ he was simply stating a truth within the terms of present-day mythology. What was the original Jesus if not an enhanced human? The Bible is full of stories of humans enhanced by God. Change your definition of God…”
The Chinese woman starts to laugh. “Krom is in total awe of Christmas Bride, whom she’s never met. I met him only once, I could smell the devil in him.”
Krom grins. “Yai thinks Bride took revenge on his Catholic mother by turning himself into God. After all, he is the one who produced the Asset, aka the Messiah.”
“Who also happens to be the most efficient killing machine in human form ever produced.”
“No, the HZs are ahead in that.”
“So,” Madame Ching says, “this is a conversation that will take up the whole of this century and the next as well. Are we good or bad, we transhumans?”
“We are inevitable,” Krom says. “End of conversation.” She turns to Madame Ching.
“Transhumans are a highly evolved, creative, and exciting new species with a weakness for sadism,” Gloria Ching says with a smile.
—
The two women filled me in on a few more details. It was dawn before I left them. Madame Ching clicked her way to the door to see me out, and Krom busied herself feeding the cats. All around the garden the gleaming pink walls of giant skyscrapers rose above the quaint old house, but I couldn’t help feeling that this small center of personal enhancement had the edge on the high-rises. The future, surely, was right here. True, nobody knew that yet, but it would not be long. It was hard to take in, as if the world I inhabited was already so out of date as to be irrelevant. Nothing we do today that will not be swept away in a heartbeat, once the story breaks. How do you feel about that yourself, R? Did we miss the yacht, you and I? We are the Old Humans: OHs, already. If we’re lucky, the NHs will find us quaint; otherwise it’s a choice between the reservation and the zoo. Personally, though, I’m kind of drained this merry morning. They are heavy people, those transhumans, very heavy.
36
Apologies to you, R, what with all the action and stress I’ve only just realized I left you hanging after the FBI TH gave me that thumb drive with the hyper-secret recordings that self-destruct after six hours. You remember? I’ll shove it in here, if that’s okay. BTW, is there something wrong with the high-tech brain that causes it to miss the obvious? I played the recording aloud into an old-fashioned tape recorder. The files on the thumb drive self-destructed, but I still have the conversation. It is quite interesting and goes like this:
Goldman [out of breath, slightly hysterical]: I’m scared, Control, I have to admit it. I’m damn scared.
Control [in a neutral tone]: What about, G8? The thing we talked about three days ago?
Goldman: Yeah. The same. Only three days is a long time with the ALE.
Control: He’s threatened you?
Goldman [sighing heavily]: I told y
ou, he doesn’t need to threaten.
Control: Oh, yeah. You know him so well, you can read his mind. And what you read there is an intention to harm you?
Goldman: Are you being sarcastic?
Controller: No, just summing up so we can understand each other. [Pause] So, tell me about it.
Goldman: I’ve been with him so long I can smell when he’s about to kill. Do you understand me? The air around him starts to die, it’s like when there’s too much ozone.
Control: Ozone?
Goldman: I’m trying to give you the feel of it. Fuck you.
Control [sighing again]: Well, you trained him to kill, didn’t you?
Goldman: Yeah, I trained him to kill. With approval and assistance from—
Control: Don’t say it.
Goldman: I didn’t say it. But it’s true.
Control: I wasn’t on the case at the time, G8. I was about seven years old when you started this phase of the project.
Goldman: So, what are you saying, you’re not qualified?
Control: I’m saying this has been going on one hell of a long while and from what I’ve seen of the file you’ve had full operational control all that time. Forty years, G8. Forty fucking years on Ultra II. Actually, more.
Goldman: That’s right, forty years I’ve been serving my country, mostly in the jungle. Now I want some help.
Control: You want help. I want to know what’s suddenly gone so wrong. You’re holding out here. Let me put the possibilities as I see them: you’re having a nervous breakdown because you’re way too old, too clumsy, and too out of date for your own program, which you are losing control of just like any old guy. [Silence. The Control continues] The other is that this Asset is no better than all the others, all of whom died at your hands. That’s what I think, by the way. And you can’t admit it because this Asset is all you’ve got right now. The deal with China goes wrong, you are out, discredited. I hope you put some money away for what’s left of your life. Now, there’s just one thing you can tell me that might, just might, get me on your side. What I want is an explanation as to why the Asset is, in your opinion, going wrong now instead of later or earlier?
Goldman [in an okay, I’ll come clean tone of total despair, as if he is coughing up his own guts]: Bride double-crossed us.
[Silence]
Control [in a tone expressing disgust and disbelief]: Bride? The wizard himself? Do you have any idea how many wonderful, laudatory, praise-my-man memoranda and minutes you—you personally, G8—have placed on record throughout four decades precisely in order to keep that jungle shaman on the case when others were in favor of eliminating him, in the old-fashioned sense of the word?
Goldman: I know. I know that. I also told you he is a genius. And a Brit. The combination produces eccentricity like you wouldn’t believe. He made his Asset an expert on Italian cuisine, classical arts, and the French Revolution—and just about every goddamn religion under the sun. An Asset designed for essentially military operations, yet. And who can tell in advance what direction a man will take thirty, forty, fifty years down the track? Nobody, nobody on this earth thought the thing would take this long.
Control: I’m with you there. Looked at objectively, you could say this program is even older than you. About eighty years since those maniacs Dulles and Gottlieb started on this Frankensteinian extravaganza. [Wearily] So, tell me about your problem with the Brit nut job.
Goldman: I don’t think he has any intention of selling to China. He’s letting the Asset kill the deal.
[Long pause]
Control: How’s that?
Goldman: A truckload of small things, hints.
Control: For Christ’s sake, man.
Goldman: Okay, I can’t prove it and I don’t have the evidence, but I think the Old Man programmed his Asset, as in deep, deep psychic penetration, long before he handed him over to us.
Control: Well, now at least I understand why you’ve been quiet about your doubts up to now. You mean you’ve connived knowingly or unknowingly with a total con, a half-century long, during which time the Company spends untold millions on a project which is preprogrammed to revert to the use of a private person who is not even a U.S. citizen? Is this call a request to take out the Brit?
Goldman: Not specifically. What I need you to think about is this. Like you say, this thing has been going on too long. The Brit is already a billionaire and he’s damned old. He discovered a lot of stuff in the jungle, not just hallucinogenics. I think he can keep himself alive for at least another decade, maybe more. He’s like a Celtic magus—weird but successful.
Control: So?
Goldman: So, why would he content himself with being the midwife to a revolution that will change the way governments govern and control population worldwide?
Control: Why not? Doesn’t sound like a humble role to me.
Goldman: Because his intention is to rule that world himself. I tell you he’s deep and European—he doesn’t think utilitarian or democratic. And he doesn’t need money. Like you said, he’s a billionaire already thanks to the private chemical programs he sold to China.
Control: You’re going vague on me again, G8.
Goldman: He thinks the greatest motivating factor today, and certainly for tomorrow, for the whole of humanity, is a search for meaning.
Control: Search for meaning? What, he’s reverting to his hippie days?
Goldman: You could say he never stopped thinking that way. He was brought up religious. His main point is that what people want is a new god. Culturally and psychologically the global situation is almost identical to that of Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago under the Romans.
Control [bemused]: Yeah?
Goldman: Apparently it was total chaos, with new cults sprouting up all over the place. The search for meaning was universal and a powerful political force in itself. Apparently even a lot of Roman soldiers became Christians, even while he was alive.
Control: Who was alive?
Goldman: Jesus fucking Christ.
Control [sounding interested]: So what if that is true today as it was two thousand years ago, which it might be. What does it have to do with the price of false tits? What does the Brit magus intend to do?
Goldman: Send his only begotten son to take over. The only one left, anyway. Same as last time.
Control [disgusted]: You need a vacation, G8. You need a long vacation.
Goldman: You’re cutting me loose? That’s a death sentence, you know that?
The line is cut.
37
So I’m in the canteen at the station grabbing my evening meal, holding the phone to one ear listening to the Colonel while I’m loading up a plastic plate with pad Thai, and at the same time there’s a bleep that tells me that I’ve just received a message, but I don’t know my phone well enough to risk checking the message while the Chief is talking for fear of cutting him off.
“But that’s Satorn,” I’m saying, “that’s not District 8. I have no authority to investigate.”
“I know. But it’s a special address. I’m not saying more over the phone. Inspector Krom is already there. Let’s say you’re both to give specialist counseling without taking over the case.”
So now I’m forgetting the pad Thai and leaving my plastic plate on the counter, rushing through the swing doors and down the steps to the street trying to decide which would be quicker, a cab or a bike, and thinking Satorn is a long way on a bike but there’s so much traffic on Sukhumvit I could be sitting in the cab for an hour so I decide on the bike and stride to the end of the bike line and tell the jockey where to go and he doesn’t want to go that far because it encroaches on other bikers who are known to protect their patch with ferocity and knives so I have to promise to pay him double as danger money and we’re on our way before I remember the message on the phone:
How can one as talented as I ever consent to be a mere soldier or policeman? I felt degraded in front of you the other night. What
in heaven’s name were they thinking when they tried to bend me that way? Don’t they know by now how negatively I react to such indignities? I put up with it, then when I can’t stand it anymore…
If you don’t know, Sakagorn’s principal residence is off Soi Langsuan, and Bully Boy Goldman’s is on Soi 24, Sukhumvit, which I think you once visited. I have tried to amuse you with a reference or two to Caravaggio: a brute but a genius for whom I have a soft spot. You will see immediately how well I have channeled his Goliath. For the lawyer, though, how could I not reference that propagandist David? (I do so adore teasing you with clues, it’s such fun.) Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.
A lot of the houses on Sakagorn’s soi are of the old-style wedding-cake type, built by millionaires before the local rich learned to imitate the international rich and built super-modern homes designed by hip international architects. Most, though, are large mansions pretty much in the European high-bourgeois style: complex and elegant roofs, gables, five-car garages, plenty of bedrooms, attached guest cottages de rigueur, CCTV everywhere, guards and electronic gates. No prizes for guessing which is Sakagorn’s; the road outside is already blocked with police vehicles and media rats with video and sound equipment. Black cables thick as anacondas lead to humming vans. A female reporter for one of the local channels is talking into one of the cameras, holding a microphone. When she sees me she tells the viewers the “famous detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep has just arrived,” then she calls out. I smile automatically, shake my head and mime, Not my patch. The cop at the gate presses a button. I squeeze past as soon as the gap is wide enough. The cop presses the button again and the gate closes behind me. What is that weird music?
Inside the house, where the music is even louder, there are a half-dozen police from the local station standing around on the marble floor. They see me and jerk their chins at the double staircase. Then they point to their ears and shake their heads and look at me for answers. I shrug, but now I think I know what that music is. I climb up to the master bedroom. Krom is there in her black boiler suit, hands in her pockets. It looks as though she has finished issuing orders and is stumped for the moment. She nods when she sees me.