by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
Brandon: Let me throw out what I’ve got here. So, the thing that they’re feeding on, they say it’s death. It could be the emotion at the moment of death. They call themselves Death. But that utter panic that only a human feels—they have to sometimes feed on people who come back from the brink, because otherwise we would never know about them. And that’s why we have this whole folklore, because it will work for them if you think you’re going to die at that moment, and then you actually don’t, but they’ve still gotten their fix. The answer is he’s going to release the immortality drug. You haven’t said if everyone knows it’s coming out. But they tweak the formula to make it that once you take this, you are just peaceful. He’s drugging the whole population. Everybody’s going to want this stuff. Death can come in. They will commit this genocide, but they will starve anyway, and that’s his solution.
Howard: Yes. That’s horrific.
Dan: The starving aliens are probably going to kill every last one of us in desperation.
Brandon: You could bring up the Black Plague. You say, “This is what we did because we got within an inch of death, and they came and did this.” There’s enough of them to depopulate a country. He’s pulling a “To save the world I’m going to sacrifice this.” But I don’t know which country it’s going to be. I’m not committing the ultimate crime. He is still a noble character, but—
Howard: Yeah, he’s still going to feel like a monster to me.
Mary: What if it actually takes an enormous amount of energy for them to cross over into our world? But it’s a happy accident that our souls release energy through their world. So he realizes that Death is, in fact, bluffing. There’s no way for the entire population to come over and harvest everybody, which is getting rid of the Black Death scenario.
Brandon: I really like the Black Death thing, though. The secret history is great for this.
Mary: Maybe when they manifest over here, they all manifest at the size of fleas.
Dan: Or rats. What is the method of immortality? Is it a drug?
Howard: I hadn’t really made up my mind. Because I’m a sci-fi guy, it’s a mixture of—
Dan: If that itself is a form of energy, like an energy wave he can just disperse across the planet, that could be tweaked to mess up the aliens.
Howard: All right, yeah. I may have to actually sit down and write the story and let it—
Dan: See where it takes you.
Mary: I went and wrote an outline last night.
Dan: If she can do it, why can’t you do it?
FIRST DRAFT: AN HONEST DEATH
HOWARD TAYLER
When the guy dressed as Death showed up in my office I did what any sensible person would do. I punched the “security” button on my comm center and said “eviction, please.” I hadn’t seen how the costumed freak got in, but I was going to watch him leave.
“We must speak privately,” Death-dude said. His voice was deep and musical, but not like Barry White. It was artificial, like somebody was auto-tuning Christopher Lee.
“No, we mustn’t. You’re leaving,” I said. I heard my office’s outer door open.
“Mister McDonald! Are you okay?” Blakely’s voice came from my office foyer, and from the sound of footsteps he’d brought a couple of the heavies.
“I’m just fi—” I stopped mid-word as Death evaporated. I might have screamed at that point, because Blakely came through the door with his weapon out of its holster. His eyes met mine, and then he and his team did a quick left-right sweep of my office. It was reassuring to see them look so competent, but I guess my face didn’t look reassured.
“Sir? Are you okay?” Blakely asked.
“I’m okay. He’s gone.”
“Who’s gone, sir? And . . . um . . . gone where?” Blakely stepped to my window and placed a hand on it.
I considered the next words out of my mouth very, very carefully. My office has no cameras or other recording equipment in it, and it would not do for me to seem even a little bit crazy.
“Blakely, you’ve just earned a raise.” I looked at my watch. “Twenty-six seconds, and the way you came in here you could star in an action movie. One of the good ones, where they get all the details right.”
“This was a test, sir?”
“We’re getting ready to change the world, Blakely. This was a drill.” I’m accustomed to pinpoint prevarication. Though in this case I was going to need to support the fict after the fact. “I’ll take care of things with HR. I’ll also provide a little pad in your budget” I gestured at the two heavies covering my doorway “to additionally compensate your team.”
“Thank you, sir.” Blakely said. He looked me right in the eye the way the vast majority of my employees do not. “If you’re sure you’re all right, we’ll leave you.”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “A little adrenaline is all, Mister Action Movie. You’re good.”
#
I wasn’t lying about changing the world. Our gene-therapy team was ready for public trials of a plasmid that, if our private testing was to be believed, would put an end to old age. It went beyond revolutionary. Treatments would be expensive, at least at first, but human beings were about to start getting a lot older.
Two years ago we acquired a think-tank of sociologists, economists, and anthropologists. For the last twenty-two months they’d been running simulations, trying to figure out how we could make money on immortality without starting the last war humans would ever fight. I’m not a big fan of war. Folks paint us C-level executives as profiteering monsters who’ll ruin a million lives for a few percentage points on their stock options, but that’s not me. Especially not once our think-tank explained how long human memory was about to get. “Be generous now,” they counseled. “Be very generous. We’re not playing the short game anymore.”
What they didn’t say, but what I know, is that the long game is made of a bunch of short games, and you can’t afford to lose too many of those outright, especially not early on.
#
I was musing upon a few of those short games—acquisitions, lobbying for legislation, and some key hires—when Death showed up again. This time I saw how he got in, or at least, I saw when and where he got in. I don’t know the “how” behind his sudden appearance in the center of my office.
“Please do not call security this time, Mr. Macdonald.”
“So . . . I’m either not crazy, or I’m extra-crazy.”
“You are not crazy,” said Death. “I have not shown myself to anyone in quite some time.”
“This must be pretty important to you. What do you want?”
“I want you to sabotage your company’s life extension technology.”
“My stockholders will be very disappointed, and not just because the company won’t survive if this project fails. Some of those folks sit on the board, and expect to live to see the next millennium.”
“I promise you that they will not.”
“Be disappointed?”
“Live to see the next millennium.”
“That sounds a lot like a threat.” I reached for my comm-center, finger hovering over the SECURITY button.
“If you push that button, you, your board, and everyone you know or care about will die in the next seven days.”
“So it is a threat.”
“If you fail to sabotage the life-extenders, then the same thing will happen.”
I waggled my finger over the button. “You ran from security last time.”
“You are supposed to ask me what is in this for you.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What is in it for me?”
The general outline is to have Death be part of a race of people that feed on human souls when humans die. They’re otherwise invisible and immaterial, but when they’re feeding they’re vulnerable and visible. There aren’t many of them, and they can control some of the aspects of their appearance.
I don’t have all the details of the mythos locked in. Souls might survive the feeding, but be in g
reat pain. They might be destroyed. Death-folks’ numbers may have bloomed in the last few centuries, and if life extension takes off they’ll quickly starve.
This is supposed to end in a call to arms to whomever reads the letter. The life extension is going out, and we’re fighting Death wherever they attempt to show up.
SECOND DRAFT: AN HONEST DEATH
HOWARD TAYLER
The chirp in my earbud means that Sinclair Wollreich has pushed the panic button in his office. I slide my sidearm clear of its shoulder-holster and point at the floor in front of me in less than a second. Barry and Mohammed have theirs out and down as well, and the three of us run for the office door. I nod at Barry, who grabs the door handle and pulls the door open, stepping clear as Mo and I sweep straight into the room.
In, and to the left. My side is clear.
“Clear” says Mo, and I reply “clear!”
I can hear Barry swing in behind and between us, a third set of eyes on a room that is empty except for our boss.
Mister Wollreich looks pale, like he’s seen a ghost, or maybe just jumped back onto the curb after being missed by a bus. Other than that he looks fine—middle-aged, and a little soft, but dressed to the nines in a suit that costs more than my car.
“What is it, sir?” I ask.
“It’s . . .” he glances around, still wearing that I-dodged-a-bullet-but-maybe-there’s-another-one-coming look, and then he turns and looks me in the eye, and for only the third time in the eighteen months I’ve worked for him, he lies to me. “It’s nothing, Cole. Just a drill.”
Mo makes that noise that means he’s barely stifling a stream of blasphemy.
“Yes sir,” I say. “Let’s finish like it’s the real thing, then. Mo, take the corners. Barry, window. I’ll check the desk.”
“Cole,” Wollreich addresses me again, “It’s okay. I just wanted to see how quickly you guys could get here. I think you took four seconds.”
Liar. Also, that was seven seconds, at least. I don’t know what he’s hiding, but my brain is already spinning scenarios. Something scared him, something he thought we could protect him from, but by the time we arrived it was gone. Or maybe it had never been here. Maybe Sinclair Wollreich hallucinated something frightening, and is now covering up for that hallucination. That . . . that makes a lot of sense. He doesn’t strike me as the hallucinating type, but he is the head of a pharmaceutical company, so maybe he’s on something.
Regardless, he pushed the panic button, and that means I don’t get to stand down until I’m sure he’s safe. He lied to me, very uncharacteristically, and that means his safety may be in question from an unusual angle.
“Sorry, sir. You’re feigning duress pretty effectively. We have to finish the sweep, and put our eyes on everything.”
Barry looks at me from behind Wollreich, and I nod. Eyes on everything is his cue for some impromptu misdirection. He holsters his weapon, pulls a chair over to the window and steps onto it as if to check the upper frame. He balances poorly—deliberately poorly—on the chair, and begins to fall.
“Oops, watch out!” he says as he corrects and jumps clear of the tipping chair.
Wollreich turns, and also steps clear.
Mo, in the far corner of the room, reaches up and sticks a cam-dot on the spot where the molding joins the ceiling, a position where it can see the entire room while remaining almost invisibly unobtrusive.
Wollreich’s office has no cameras in it by design. I objected to this on general principle a year and a half ago, but backed down. Now it does have a camera in it.
“First day in the new shoes, Barry?” asks Mo.
“Actually, it’s the fourth day, but I’m trying new inserts today and I don’t think I like them.”
“Secure the chatter, guys,” I say, scolding them. Part of the act.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Wollreich. His face has returned to normal. “The way you came through that door, you startled me even though I knew you were coming. You guys looked like you were straight out of an action movie—one of the good ones where they get everything right.”
“They never get everything right, sir,” I say. “But thank you.”
“No, thank you, Cole. It’s apparent that I’m not paying you or your team enough. I think a fifteen-percent raise is in order. I’ll send word to HR.”
That wasn’t a lie. That was him committing to the earlier lie with a bribe, which means, if I’m reading him correctly, that he knows I know he lied, and he wants to talk to me in private about why he really pushed the button.
“Thank you, sir,” I respond.
“Very generous, sir. Sorry about the chair thing,” says Barry.
“I’ll make sure Barry spends his bonus on better inserts,” says Mo.
“We’ll leave you to your business, sir.” And we do.
Out in the anteroom, which does have cameras, I screen Mo as he sits down at the edge of the camera’s field of vision and reaches around and under the chair. The receiver he plants against the wall looks exactly like a wall-plate.
I check my phone’s Bluetooth list, and “GENERIC HEADSET” appears on the list. I select it, punch in my phone number, and it vanishes from the list. Just like it’s supposed to.
#
I’ve been in this business a long time. When I started I was twenty-five, and thought that after a tour of duty with the Marines, facing down the occasional rambunctious citizen would be a piece of cake. I wasn’t sure what I wanted out of life, but being shot at less seemed like a good start.
Ten years later I’d figured out that private security guys do tend to get shot at less than combat zone marines, but they still get shot at, and it’s even harder to tell where the shot is going to come from. I still didn’t know what I wanted out of life, but I’d saved the lives of a few people who did know.
I’m forty-four now, and I guess the fact that I’m still doing this means I’m done looking for meaning in my own life, and have settled for protecting the meaning in others. And Wollreich is the best man I’ve ever worked for.
That afternoon Wollreich calls me into his office.
“Sir?” I ask.
“Take a seat, Cole,” Wollreich says.
I sit, and wait for Wollreich to speak.
“You know that wasn’t just a drill earlier?”
“Yes, sir. Something scared you. What was it?”
“Probably a hallucination. There was somebody in my office. I looked up, sensing movement I guess, and then hit the panic button when I didn’t recognize the intruder. I think he was about to speak, but as soon as I hit the panic button he vanished.”
“Vanished how, sir?”
“Like a screen-wipe.” Wollreich is describing a Power Point transition. I know exactly what that looks like, having been a captive audience for more than a few of them. “Except,” he continues after a moment, “there was some dissolve to it as well. As if, from top to bottom, the interloper was evaporating. Only faster than that.”
He’s not lying to me.
I’m not sure exactly how I know this, but it’s something I’ve been able to do for my entire adult life. Kind of like how some people always know where there’s a speed-trap. There are cues out there to be read, but I’m reading them unconsciously. It’s not a hundred-percent accurate, but once I’ve spent enough time with somebody I’m never wrong.
“I believe you sir.”
“You believe it happened, or you believe that I saw what I’m telling you I saw?”
“I believe your account of the event, sir. You’re not making this up. I suspect you’re also concerned. Concerned for your own sanity, and for your position here with the company.”
He blows out the breath he’d been half-holding.
“There’s more to it than that, Cole. I’m concerned that this may be a side-effect. How much have you been told about our upcoming product lines?”
“We’re approaching the approval phase of a ‘vaccination’ against Alzheimer’s,
we’re in late-stage testing on a Telomerase regulator that promises to prevent a large percentage of cancers, and we’ve just gotten approval for an HIV treatment.”
“Very succinct.”
“That’s a summary of what I’ve been told, sir. I can tell there’s something else going on, and that I’m not supposed to be in on the secret.”
He sits back in his chair, steeples his fingers, and purses his lips.
“Are you? Have you figured it out?”
“No, sir. But if you’re about to let me in on the secret, please keep in mind that if the information is valuable enough, a competitor may be willing to kill to get it. You’re paying me and my team quite well, but if you’re sitting on a billion dollars’ worth of information, my threat assessment will change, we’ll have to hire more people, and everybody will get paid more.”
“So be it. Cole, the drug interaction between these three products is going to extend human lifespan by about an order of magnitude.”
I think about that for a moment. If this is true . . .
“Sir, are you sure this works?”
“Quite sure. We’ve tested it extensively, in secret trials on in-house volunteers. Including me. We were ninety-five percent sure before we started those tests two years ago.”
“Sir, I think this secret is worth way more than just a billion dollars.”
“There’s more. You know that inbound marketing team we created?”
“That happened two months before I was hired, sir. But yes. You acquired a brain-trust and brought all your market research in-house.”
“They’re not doing market research. They’re trying to position the company for the long game. We already know what the short-term future looks like. When the news breaks that this three-drug interaction extends the human lifespan, the entire product line will be nationalized by overwhelming popular demand, probably in a special legislative session. But before the United States does that, half a dozen other countries will already have deployed it within their national health care systems. We won’t own any of it.”