“Aren’t you?” She had been canvassing the area for an opening, waiting for the last of the crew to disburse from the area, as she chatted and having found it, they were on their way, Adrian in tow as per the usual.
“Maybe we should talk about this, Adrian,” she said, stopping at each blind of stacked crates left in the halls to give her time to verbalize her concerns unseen and unheard. “So, aliens mate with an upgraded human and the result is some nextgen species that’s light years ahead of us. Tell me how that’s a bad thing, when I have to help my bank teller to count out change?”
“The bank teller? What an outrage. I’m used to that at Walmart, but hiring people who can’t count to safeguard my money is taking things too far.”
“I’m serious, Adrian!”
“You’re the one pointing the gun. So, yeah, I figured as much.”
“And aren’t you supposed to be protecting the future? You think messing with some alien-human alliance is going to achieve that? For all we know, this little exchange here is what’s protecting the future.”
His response was silence.
“Adrian? You can’t make these questions go away by ignoring them.”
“You’re correct, of course. Perhaps they should have hired a social philosopher and not someone as ambivalent about the future as I am. Then again, philosophers are fairly ambivalent people, so maybe they did hire the right person.”
So far, they were walking normally in between ducking out of harm’s way behind the crates whenever someone walked past an adjoining corridor, so as not to attract attention. Veronica’s gun was small enough to be entirely sheathed by her outstretched hand, which she just had to pivot away from any set of eyes focused on them, depending on the trajectory they were striding along. A curt nod accompanied by silence punctuating their conversation had gotten them past a couple other helmet-wearing people in bodysuits so far.
“How come they’re not dropping like flies,” Adrian said, “the ones getting near us?”
Veronica craned her head up towards the vents which were hissing. A barely visible mix of gases was being added to the air. “I’m guessing that’s not air-freshener.”
“Actually, that’s exactly what it is. Must be neutralizing your kill-all concoction.”
The next alien coming down the hall towards them looked less inclined to be fooled than the ones that let them by with a nod earlier. He stopped and said, “What are you two doing here?”
Then, just for dramatic effect, he turned the dial on his wristwatch device and his body suit retracted, exposing his head and neck, his hands, and his feet. The remaining neoprene-looking suit looked like something a scuba diver might wear.
It was his skin suit that was the real show stopper.
It was alien.
Then, perhaps thinking he still hadn’t blown Adrian’s mind, he ripped off Adrian’s coveralls in one sweep of his hand as if they were made of paper. Did the same with Veronica. “I asked you a question, Adrian.”
Adrian gulped. Finally, he managed, “You’re human?”
“Humanoid. Genetically altered to handle life on Mars.”
“Really? Because that’s one hell of a skin job. You sure had me fooled.” Adrian ran his eyes over him again. He was tall and green and he looked mummified, with a head that was more cavernous indentations than puffy cheeks.
“Explain yourselves,” the humanoid said in a more threatening, or was that a commanding tone, and shifting his focus to Veronica.
“We’re here to kill the unkillable man, sabotage the alien-human alliance, and restore life to normal,” she said deadpan, “if you can call life under the Donald normal.”
The humanoid shifted his attention back to Adrian. “Did anyone explain your job to you?”
“To safeguard the future against any and all possible threats. I’d say you qualify.”
“Adrian, they were referring to pandemics, dirty nukes, bioterrorism, and small-minded people looking to bomb us back into the Stone Age. They weren’t looking to prevent the future from actually happening.”
“But…” Adrian’s best defense so far was to stammer heroically in the total absence of anything valid to say.
“Technology has been moving us forward faster than the public can absorb,” the humanoid explained. “So we keep a lot of it off-book. Wait for movies like I-Robot and The Martian to help popular culture catch up with the truth. Perhaps you’ll notice the preponderance of Marvel Comics superheroes in the movies these days. With us looking to introduce genetic alterations into the public, we thought it best to start preparing their minds from now.”
“You’re talking about the unkillable man,” Adrian said, “about Tum.”
“Tum is generations ahead of anything we’re prepared to expose the public too just yet. Even our soldiers won’t be half as upgraded as he is.”
“But you can’t keep everyone in the dark, or you wouldn’t be able to build the real future, as opposed to the psychotic break you keep the rest of humanity in, to safeguard them from the truth, as you say.” Adrian noticed his tone was tinged with acid.
“That’s correct. The one percent or so whose minds are flexible enough are drafted into reality. The rest stay within their protective bubble back on Earth, allowed to live in any time zone they want, from the backwards-looking Amish to those greedily taking the genetic upgrades we make available, again, according to what the majority of humanity can tolerate, even if they’re not entirely comfortable living among the upgraded ones.”
Adrian took a deep breath. He was racing for something shattering to say, to make the bubble world the humanoid was living in crumble around him instead of the other way around. But the jabs and counterpunches just weren’t coming.
Veronica, bless her heart, had a few piercing remarks of her own. “The ray guns and nextgen shit I strapped to Adrian…”
The humanoid scanned Adrian. He could feel his body tingling under the scanners. The guy merely passed his eyes over him, though a rainbow of colors came out of his eyes. “Interesting. For people living in the past as you are, the tech is impressive.” The humanoid sighed. Who knew aliens could?
“I’m afraid that there are those who should be among us, but like you, Adrian, the future scares them despite their job title. This is the result. Pushing themselves into the future just to make sure they can trap everyone in the past with their superior tech, no matter how enterprising these futurists are. As a consequence, I suspect you have your work cut out for you in the years ahead. This stuff gets out, not even we will be able to protect you, for I fear our focus is elsewhere.”
“Of course it is,” Adrian said bitterly. “The brain trust is with you. The rest of us are just dead weight. Why would you expend the energy micromanaging our fate?”
“You paint us in an unfair light, Adrian. We’re not that condescending. We find much worth preserving.”
“Yes, of course you do. I mean, you’ve allowed earth to turn into a natural history museum with the exhibits tending themselves. So it stands to reason you enjoy looking back from time to time.”
“You have to appreciate our situation,” the humanoid said in response to Adrian’s whining. “The challenges we face out here occupy us; they consume us. They are that much greater than anything you face on Earth. So of course, we’re a bit preoccupied.”
“The future is supposed to need everybody to build it,” Adrian said, “not just the one percent. I’ve seen it. We’re supposed to get mindchips and genetic upgrades and whatever else we need to level the playing field with the rest of the one percent so we can have a say in making the future too.”
“And so you shall,” the humanoid said, his tone tinged with compassion and patience. Adrian couldn’t tell whether it was manufactured or not. “With the mindchips you’ll be able to link to one another’s minds. And in so doing, compassion, empathy, and understanding for one another will grow, and fears will begin to fall away. As your hearts grow bigger, so will your minds, if not i
ndividually, then in the aggregate. The group minds you’ll self-organize into to undertake projects none of you can undertake alone will create a greater sense of community, of being part of a larger whole.
“With the mindchips and the nanococktails, moreover, it will be possible to self-organize into a global mind, the various group minds nested along the inverted pyramid according to how many other group minds they’re interacting with. At the base of this inverted pyramid, where all the group minds are ultimately connected, the planetary uber-mind will undertake problems smaller alliances can’t tackle. By then we will be able to reunite with you once again. We eagerly await such a day. For we fear the problems which face us out here are not enough to tackle on our own. But we know of no better way to let you catch up with us except by your own doing. The alternative is to force the future on you; to force people to evolve before they’re ready is a form of rape. I’m not sure any amount of flexible ethics can make it condonable.”
“What about what the Chinese are doing?” Veronica asked. “Genetically altering children to be geniuses?”
Adrian made a snorting, dismissive sound. “Hell, with CRISPR we’ll be able to make children with 1000 IQs. What will those Chinese babies be then but throwbacks to another age?”
The humanoid actually smiled at them. Who knew they could smile? “I think you’re realizing for yourselves that you won’t be entirely left in the dust. You’ll catch up to us faster than you realize.”
There was a disturbance.
The ground shook beneath their feet.
It sounded as if the ship was blowing up.
The humanoid turned away from them for the first time.
“What is it?” Veronica asked.
“It’s Tum,” Adrian said. “Something tells me he’s not taking to this alternate view of the future any better than I am.”
“We were afraid of this,” the humanoid said. “We have simply got to safeguard the breakthrough he represents. It’s one of a kind. Not even Biyu can replicate Tum again. By all rights, his self-evolving algorithms should never have stretched his synthetic biology to these heights. We have to contain him before he destroys this ship, us, and more importantly, himself.” He turned back to Adrian. “This is a fight you can help us win. The question is, will you?”
“Damn right, we will,” Veronica said, arriving at the finish line ahead of Adrian who was still finding it tough to let go of the secure future he had in mind for all of them. It sure as hell wasn’t this.
But in the final analysis he couldn’t blame the humanoid for doing his best to work with the human condition in the dilapidated state in which he found it. Wasn’t that after all, Adrian’s job description, to make the best of it while protecting the best of all possible futures? This guy’s take on the best of all possible futures didn’t exactly jive with Adrian’s, hence his resistance. But it didn’t exactly contradict it either. Which he figured he was going to have to settle for, being as he had his hands full with the people who just wanted to end humanity altogether, or at the very least, stop time. Which was definitely no way to protect the future. “Yeah, I’ll help,” Adrian finally croaked.
THIRTY-FIVE
The humanoid had disappeared down the halls of the ship without Adrian and Veronica ever getting his name, or any other further assistance from him.
“Why the sudden turnabout in Tum?” Veronica asked.
“Probably as we suspected. He was looking to mate with the aliens to accelerate his evolutionary rate. Only now that there are no aliens…”
“But why would someone of such superior intellect come to the same mistaken conclusions as us?” Veronica grabbed his arm, keeping them both from moving forward. Being on the move, if nothing else, gave him a purpose. Now that he was just standing there waiting for the final eruption to spell his demise, he felt even more impotent.
She ran a scanner over him and showed him the results on the screen. Without actually making any sound, she mouthed, “he’s listening.”
It was one more damning piece of evidence that Tum had been tracking Adrian’s thinking about this case all along. Possibly everyone else at the FBI-FD as well even remotely connected with the investigation. And making no small contribution to the bizarre themselves, the FBI-FD had been influencing Tum’s decision-making; the tail was wagging the dog.
Adrian nodded. Maybe they could make this work for them.
Tum tore through the corridor wall just feet from Adrian and Veronica. He towered over them like the superhuman he was, looking strangely more alien and intimidating than the humanoid from Mars.
Adrian reached for one of the many guns on his person. The rest remained concealed under his trench coat, split up the back so it could be wrapped around his legs when he had to wear the “clean room” coverall earlier. Holding the gun out, his expression was one of “Got ya!”
Tum smiled at them in the most unfriendly of manners. “If one of your shots goes astray, or just right through me, I can survive the lack of atmosphere outside this ship. I can survive the solar radiation. I can’t say as much for you.”
“You say that like it’s a problem for us,” Adrian said. “But you’re the one that will be marooned in space forever without a thought in the world but your own.”
Tum broke eye contact. If the thought had occurred to him already, he certainly wasn’t a hundred percent certain about his course of action. “I’ve learned a lot from you,” he said, returning his eyes to Adrian. “I’ve learned for instance that in a meditative state we can get in touch with our higher self, we can take charge of our own evolution. It will be slow and painful, but better that than surrounded by people who can only hope to bring me down.”
“You sure about that?” Adrian said. “We were mistaken about you and the course of this investigation every step of the way. The best minds in the world conferring with one another, informing one another, debating destiny, and we all got it wrong. Something like all the voices inside your head, I imagine. They could all be wrong too.”
There was the sound of guns firing coming from up the hall. It took Adrian a split second to realize the target. They were stun-guns aimed at Tum to bring him down without killing him. Reaching along his back with the flexibility of a circus acrobat, he pulled the electrical leads attached to the stun guns out of him. As he held out the leads to show Veronica and Adrian, he said, “Somehow I don’t think so.”
He tore through another wall of solid metal as if it were a rice paper door in one of those Japanese homes. “I actually thought that conversation was going quite well,” Adrian said.
“Yeah, right up until we shot him,” Veronica said.
“Technically, we didn’t shoot him. Feel any more enlightened yet? Maybe this is our chance to be part of the one percent.”
“Got you,” she said, catching his innuendo even before he did. “I’ll buy you what time I can, Adrian.” She turned and fired on the ones coming up the hall with a gun she ripped off of Adrian that was part of the arsenal she’d attached to him earlier. The laser was set to stun. That was very generous of her. Adrian had never known her to be so generous. But maybe she liked the one percent better than the rest of humanity—at least this one percent. That or she remained heedful of Tum’s earlier warnings about breeching the ship’s hull.
Adrian tore off after Tum wondering if talk was really going to do it at this point. And if not, what else he was going to use to stop Tum with. Or if Tum would just be so human-hating by now, he’d even pause to listen before vaporizing Adrian.
***
The pocket rocket Veronica had snatched off Adrian fired a pulse of energy invisible to the naked eye. It made a whining sound upon discharge. And the result was to push one of her attackers back hard enough that he flew into a corridor wall a good six or more feet away. It didn’t take her long to realize she could turn this into a game of pocket billiards. She did bank shots with her energy blaster, which functioned in an analogous way to an acoustic weapon. With judicious
aim, it sent her targets into the curving low-friction walls with enough force that they slid until they ran out of kinetic energy and fell forward to unwittingly tackle another security member running up the hall. She did a similar trick with the metal crates sparsely dotting the halls, pushing them into motion on their casters, with the impact of a body flying backward, to knock out the latest troops coming her way. All the while, she continued to back up, not sure whether to retreat down an adjoining hall or to keep going back along the direction she had come.
It didn’t take long for her weapon to deplete. Perhaps because it was fighting its own nature being used on a stun setting, consuming more energy to filter the blasts than it would have to let them fly unimpeded. She discarded the weapon, already calculating a defense out of available found objects.
She was slower on the uptake than usual. Not surprisingly, just like the energy blaster in her gun had depleted prematurely, she was running out of steam fast for the same reason. It took way too much fucking energy to figure out how to hurt people safely than put them down once and for all.
But she and Adrian might damn well need these engineers and scientists to get back home, to pilot the ship, and God forbid, simply to hold it together the second anyone miscalculated with reeling Tum in and put a hole in the ship’s hull. It was a safe bet “security officer” on this ship was just a secondary role. Everyone on a craft this size would have to do double and triple duty, and likely be a scientist first and a warrior second. A fact she felt borne out by their cut-rate soldiering.
On a lark, she went from retreating to advancing. Doing gymnastics off the walls, off the stacked steel canisters, zigzagging her way through them, always coming from a different angle. She could move faster and with greater precision than they could fire. She had decided it was high time to take advantage of their cut-rate marksmanship and reflexes before it worked for them rather than against them. An errant shot or ten or twenty… any one of them could ricochet off another surface only to come back at her with more speed than she could counter. The trick was working, for the most part. A few shots had hit her dead on, but her body suit ably deflected them. She felt like she was being stung by bees thanks to having access to the latest technology. In Kevlar bodysuits of old, the impact of a bullet would still knock you on your ass and likely knock you out even if it didn’t kill you. But her outfit owed more to genetically altered spider’s silk than it did to Kevlar. And her bones, tendons, and muscles had been hardened the same way a Shaolin monk hardens their bodies, by busting her head against cement blocks and driving the tips of their fingers into stone pillars.
Unkillable Page 31