Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Klepsky groaned. “Call Adrian and tell him to pull the solution out of his ass like he usually does. Give you some shortcut. I know it’s an insane request. But it might actually be our best chance to forestall another killing. If we can get that formula into Adrian’s hands…”

  “And he does as the killer asks, becomes a killer himself, no harm, no foul. And our killer stands down. It makes perfect sense, Klepsky, if making miracles happen was in my purview. Don’t tell me your investigation is this stalled?”

  “It is. And you’re my last hope.”

  A kid saw him coming at him and started running away as if they were playing a game of tag. “I have one more lead to chase down, but it’s starting to look like just another loose end to tie up.”

  “You sure the killer will stop as soon as Adrian fulfills his part of the bargain?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping it was never really about proving how smart he is. I’m hoping it was really just about bonding with his favorite futurist, helping him to accept his true calling in life. And once they’re besties, he’ll forget all about…”

  “… a breakthrough that could make our enemies invincible and us all-too vulnerable. But has he really threatened to do that?” Celine asked, sounding like the voice of reason determined to play devil’s advocate if he was going to keep throwing crazy requests her way. Not like he could blame her.

  “I don’t think there’s any length he won’t go to to get Adrian to play ball with him. That might actually be one of the better scenarios.”

  There was dead silence on the other end of the line as Celine no doubt went through some of those less appealing scenarios in her head. Once again he gave her all the time she needed to do the hard work of convincing herself for him.

  “Fine,” she said, finally, “I’ll reach out to Adrian. But you’re beyond a Hail Mary pass here and into a few Our Fathers as well.” She cut the line.

  He was all too happy to return the phone to his pocket; people shouldn’t run and talk on the phone at the same time any more than they should drive and talk on the phone. He lost count of the innocent pedestrians he’d mowed over in an effort to get back to his car in a timely manner.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Adrian didn’t even wait to hear a voice at the other end of his cell. He just waited for the dial tone to complete. “Ed, I need a fix on a lab where Altreman would have his secret mind-uploading facility.”

  “Um, you’re making a request of me directly as opposed to going through Klepsky? Uh, you know I’m in love with him, right? And would much rather hear his voice at the other end of the line?”

  “I’ll try and recover emotionally from the hurt of that harsh remark the best I can, Ed. Now…”

  “Yes, yes, on it. Just give me a second to check into who the hell Altreman is, and why he might have a mind-uploading lab, and then perhaps I’ll know better where he might keep one.”

  Adrian heard chattering keys on a keyboard on the other end. Then Ed mumbled, “He should be grateful I marry down and not up, or I’d likely be in love with him.”

  “I’m very grateful, Ed,” Adrian said, smiling. “But you don’t have to say everything that’s in your head.”

  “Sorry, engines that run hot like mine need to throw off the excess somehow.”

  “Do you need to hang up and get back to me later?”

  “What are you trying to suggest?” Ed snapped. “That I can’t move mountains in real time? That I can’t chatter away at you aimlessly while performing any number of other wizard-like tasks?”

  Adrian bit his lip. “I suppose I deserved that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Take your time, Ed. I’m in central park, enjoying the wildlife, and for once I don’t mean the people.”

  “One more hurtful dig about how much time this is taking and I’ll send a flash mob at you, have them drag you into the gay section of the woods, tie you to a tree so all those ghoulish gay guys can have their way with you.”

  “Those ghoulish gay guys, huh?”

  “I’m capable of catching innuendo just fine while multitasking, I’ll have you know. I’m not ghoulish, just… special. Ooh! Looks like Altreman is too.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Besides this really gross ninety-eight-year-old man floating face up in a Somali tank, attached to… Oh, my, looks like he’s in the middle of the mind-uploading process. Better get a move on, Adrian.”

  “The address?”

  “Already sent it to your phone.”

  Adrian glanced at his display and, already heading to his car, diverted course. Altreman had an apartment right off of Central Park. In San Remo, no less. No doubt in one of those fifty-nine million dollar suites. Maybe Monique blowing up a couple apartments in his building—having nothing to do with Adrian’s case—had coaxed him to move his clock forward a little. And they say there’s no such thing as serendipity. There was no point in getting in his car. It would be faster just to sprint there.

  He put the phone back to his ear. “I need you to tell me if that mind-uploading machine has a chance of working, Ed.”

  “Highly doubtful. Why?”

  “Because he might try to attach me to the other end when I get there, and download himself into me.”

  “Huh. And yet he wants to make off-color remarks about the nature of Klepsky’s and my idea of shared intimacy.”

  “Ed!”

  “Sorry, I tend to hold on to things longer than I should. Fine, I’ll see if I can hack into the AI and what I can make of its qualifications for said undertaking. That said, you’re going to knowingly run into a trap? Do you even have a gun? Does it have bullets in it? Believe me when I say, there are times when you run out of brains and need to run into some brawn. Sorry, think that was a Freudian slip about me and Klepsky. Adrian… are you listening? Adrian…? The bastard hung up on me.”

  ***

  Adrian burst into Altreman’s palatial flat. The place looked big enough to house a skating rink with plenty of room to spare. And nearly as stark. Several security types reached for their guns, but seemed to recognize him and holstered them nearly as quickly. They shifted their attention back to Altreman, lying in the Samadhi tank. Standing as they might at a funeral, their hands were cupped in front of them, heads down. That’s probably why he’d gotten this far without being ambushed sooner. They were facing not only Altreman’s end, but the end of their employment. The lucrative, easy paychecks. Nothing short of that could explain security this professional being this lax. In their minds there was already nothing left to protect.

  Their body language, their physiques, their economic movements—no energy wasted, the way they had of looking hyper-vigilant even powered down… these men didn’t come cheap.

  Adrian closed the gap between himself and Altreman. A handful of doctors, a mix of males and females and ethnicities, were handling the transfer of Altreman’s consciousness into a machine big enough to remind Adrian of those giant IBM mainframe computers that filled entire rooms once upon a time. It had been dubiously named MORBIUS, the letters embossed on the side facing him.

  His cell rang and Adrian picked up. It was Ed. “In answer to your earlier question, no. No way in hell is he surviving that upload.”

  “Thanks, Ed. Everything I’m looking at here tends to confirm that.” Adrian hung up.

  A closer look at the tank showed it to be filled with salt-water to achieve the density Altreman needed to float easily, which was typical of Samadhi tanks. There was also a lot of heat radiating from the water to keep his largely exposed body from going hypothermic. In his nakedness he definitely presented a good argument for why allowing people to age was the cruelest crime of all, and why an entire race of people not devoted entirely to putting an end to it were a heartless people.

  Attached to his shaved head was a skull cap, the kind competitive swimmers wear. And attached to that were probes and wires and leads connecting him to the giant computer proximate to the
tank.

  “The upload?” Adrian said to the female doctor standing closest to him. Her name, Sarah Wellman, was emblazoned on her doctor’s smock, suggesting Altreman’s mind had been failing for some time. The letters were larger than they needed to be to address his failing eyesight as well as invite those windows of lucidity to stay open a bit longer.

  She just shook her head. Altreman’s eyes were closed, and probably his system was too depleted to make much of their conversation. But she wasn’t prepared to go any further. Perhaps because she was aware of the literature on coma patients; that so long as there was any kind of mental activity, however faint, there was no telling how much the patient was picking up on.

  Adrian took her by the elbow and walked her away from earshot, some yards distant. With Altreman’s ears submerged in the heated, bubbling water, Adrian figured even this much distance was likely overkill. “I’m afraid I’m going to need a little more from you, doc.”

  She paused to consider her response, eyed him over, perhaps looking for a heart and a soul to go with that mind. She must have found them because she started blabbing. “The AI is high-functioning enough to make him think his life is flashing before his eyes. It took all the snapshots and videos, the journals from his youth, everything that was known about him, everything on the internet, and just filled in the blanks. Believably enough anyway for him to feel the machine draining his mind of all that he is, all that he was. But it’s just a comforting illusion.”

  “You’re okay with defrauding your benefactor like this?”

  Again she paused. This time Adrian got the sense it was to punish herself with the same thoughts that she’d no doubt fought to sweep away a hundred times before. “No, but we really did everything we could to advance the science for him in time to do him some good. We weren’t all that helpful, of course. Spent most of the last ten years fighting off every charlatan and fraud in the books. A lot of them were happy to build that AI for him. Billions up in smoke. All to provide a comforting illusion and nothing more.”

  She was a beautiful woman. Ten years ago she wouldn’t have just stopped hearts, she’d have stopped traffic. No doubt she was one of those frauds at one time herself. But maybe over the years, being by his side, she’d grown to love him, or at least to care for him. Perhaps she gave herself a promotion from being a trophy wife to being a protector, of sorts. Maybe her character arc had started sooner. Maybe she’d started as his doctor, and no more, before…

  “What happens next?” Adrian asked.

  Sad and serene, the kind of serenity that comes from resignation, and staring at Altreman, she missed the beat. “I suppose the money being siphoned off from the conglomerate will start flowing back to the sum and sundry industries, helping to advance them further. But they’ll be moving on in the absence of a visionary coordinating all of them. Not sure corporations do particularly well that way.”

  “Maybe it’s time we took research into life extension into the public domain and out of the hands of rich lunatics.”

  She craned her head back towards him and gave him a harsh look.

  “Be their intent self-serving or genuinely altruistic, there are concerns and challenges here, bigger than any one man and any one corporation. Without this topic being part of the public debate, without conscious, sustained energy applied to transitioning us from the human to the transhuman realm where all mortal limitations are gradually eroded away, I’m afraid most of the projects will end up like this, and it will be a future that never comes. Too easy for the charlatans to prey on the isolated visionaries. Too easy for research energy to be duplicated and wasted in redundant, uncoordinated efforts across industries.

  “Maybe it’s time we stopped piping racial hatred through the public airwaves, playing divide and conquer games, and came together on this. The biggest challenges facing humanity anymore cannot be addressed by the one percent. They’re going to take all of us working together to fix. Making people smarter to keep up with advancing artificial intelligence, allowing them to live longer and healthier to make the most of those souped up minds and bodies…”

  She smiled finally, her anger giving way to compassion, perhaps understanding better now where he was coming from. “You sound like just the man for the job.”

  “Oh, no, not me. A more egalitarian age is coming, rest assured. One where we all get to be an Altreman. The way the tech is bringing down the cost of living, there’s no forestalling it forever. But we all have our role in helping that day to come to pass. Mine is getting the roadblocks out of the way. Yours and others traveling that road, well, your job is simply to step on the gas.”

  She smiled at him, but his uplifting speech wasn’t enough to float her much longer under the kind of weight dragging her down. Her eyes and her thoughts drifted back to Altreman.

  “How were you coming with the robot bodies to download him to, should the mind upload have taken?”

  He heard the vertebrae crack in her neck that time, she was craning it so fast back his direction. “How could…?”

  “The same way I can know about the hybrid bodies. And the attempts at reanimation, so he could jump into any available dead body that met his specifications. Astute speculation. He needed something to reincarnate as. And he wasn’t picky. Whatever could buy him time.”

  “Don’t suppose there’s any point trying to deny it.” She’d averted her eyes all the same. There was more guilt and shame associated with that longer list of failed projects than simply the one in this room she’d just as soon process in private.

  “And the golems? Was that just a last-ditch effort to get the attention of me and my team, see if we could fill in the missing pieces for you when no one else could? Little flashy, isn’t it? Doesn’t strike me as quite your style.”

  “Golems?” She furrowed her brow and added creases to her forehead no amount of Botox was ever going to tame. Adrian read the genuine perplexity there, better than he could read the tea leaves at the bottom of a teacup.

  “Nothing,” he said. She didn’t need his frustrations and problems adding to her own right now.

  On the matter of the golems, he wasn’t particularly surprised to witness her befuddlement. One look at the large empty room with the obelisk connected to Altreman inside it and you knew he could indulge the surreal in a matter of course. But nothing about the surroundings suggested inclinations towards the supernatural, even for someone who might turn to it out of desperation. There were no totems, no psychically charged artifacts lying about, or any that he was clutching in his Samadhi tank to guide and watch over him.

  “Just how close were you with those other projects, if you don’t mind me asking?” Adrian said.

  She shifted her attention back to him, strangely patient with the man who kept sticking proverbial needles in her eyes. “Like everything else, at least a decade away. Maybe if we threw more money and more top level talent at the problem, we could make it happen sooner. But that’s not likely to happen now that he’s on his way out and no one else will be willing to shoulder the same amount of risk for such a tenuous reward.”

  Her remarks let more of the air out of Adrian’s inflated balloon of a mood. If they were that far away from anything promising, then there was little point in the FBI-FD taking over the reins for Altreman once he was gone. That meant no bright future, except possibly at the end of a very long tunnel, if they were lucky. In the meantime there was just the matter of surviving the darkness. And within it, it was all too easy to lose track of time altogether.

  The giant machine had started a countdown from thirty seconds. Each tick exploded against the stultifying silence. She moved quickly to be by Altreman’s side. Then she crouched down on her knees so she could clasp his arm, so he could feel that human contact in his final seconds.

  Adrian didn’t wait for the clock to hit zero. By then he was out of the room. Heading down a different path altogether. Or so he hoped.

  ***

  Adrian hit the hall outside of Altre
man’s flat thinking, “So much for feeling on top of the world. That didn’t last long.” Whatever came next, it was going to be much harder to deal with all around. If the most likely mastermind on the planet had been ruled out, they were once again forced to consider candidates far less likely, and also, far less easily thwarted.

  The grand hall was decorated with priceless antiques. Why shouldn’t it be? There was no getting access to this part of the building without the elevator’s scanners letting you off the hook. Otherwise the lockbox would most likely become your tomb.

  In a rage, Adrian smashed every cherished object he walked by. The fact was, there was nothing priceless in here, nothing that actually mattered. The only thing of any value, the only thing truly priceless was back in that room, dying along with Altreman. Namely the future tech that could cure death, that could grant not only immortality but an ageless, vital body, so enhanced it would make current day unupgraded humans look more like the Model T and less like the Lamborghinis threatening to roll off the assembly lines in their place.

  Altreman had come damnably close to providing them all with a grand future that could be safeguarded for everyone—by bringing all the elements in the equation together, putting them under one roof, under the possible supervision of Adrian and his team.

  But this far away from the finish line… It would never happen. If he couldn’t kick-start that egalitarian age today, the darkness out there on the streets would continue to swallow them whole. The frustration and anger over being denied a better future—the true American dream—had become too great, and not just for Americans. With a world looking every day more and more like it did in the time of the Borgias and the Medici’s, with power overly consolidated, and because of it, corruption more fervid than ever—if only to prove Lord Acton’s principle, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—he and the rest of his team would be needed exactly where they were now. Putting out the flames.