Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Klepsky leaned forward in his chair. “And since he’s such an expert in behavioral conditioning, you’d think he’d use it to help me help this family to come together instead of pulling it apart. Just food for thought,” he said, watching David’s face melt under the heat of the revelations. “Now, what searing insights do you have for me, now that I’ve given you more than a few of my own?”

  David refused to move.

  Then.

  A loud groan.

  Followed by him putting his tee shirt back on.

  Another dramatic sigh. “According to Biyu, Celine’s tweaks to his genome won’t keep him alive much longer. He’ll either need to head back to the freezer or…”

  “He’ll never let himself be locked up like that again,” Klepsky said. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s prisoner psychology.”

  “Then he’ll likely die before he can do anyone much harm. At least that’s Biyu’s determination.”

  Ed came crashing back into the room. All excited. Over-excited. Per his baseline. “Liquid helium!”

  “What?” David and Klepsky said at the same time.

  “We put Tum in a vat of super-cooled liquid helium. A really big one. He can swim around in it like one of those orcas at Sea World, well, like they used to have at Sea World. Less prisony. More free space. We can even stick in some dolphins for him to play with. Cybernetic dolphins, I mean, doubt the real ones could survive the liquid helium.”

  Klepsky snorted coldly and dismissively, but his mind was already warming to the idea. “Maybe if it’s just to buy him and us some time for a more permanent fix. He might go for that. Only…”

  “Yeah, we’ve severed COMMS between us and him,” Ed said. “It’s definitely an issue. But not an insurmountable one.”

  “Whatever you two brainiacs and the others come up with, you better come up with it fast,” Klepsky blurted, returning to his paperwork.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Ed mumbled, then looked over at David, glancing down at his dick. “Let’s hope it’s not true what they say about athletes before a big game.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” David said, and he and Ed headed out of the room to work up a solution to their little problem.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Veronica entered the hangar-sized depot Adrian had found himself in just a short while earlier with her back end leading the way. Her front end was still fending off her attackers. She had gotten hold of a hubcap off a Mars land rover and was using it to deflect the rubber bullets the crewmates were sending her way. With the shield in hand, she was doing far better at taking them out with the ricochets.

  The assailants continued to drop in the doorway until the pile of bodies acted very much like sandbags along a river, damming the flow of other security team members.

  She lowered the shield and turned around, looking for Adrian.

  She found him.

  Attached to the ceiling.

  Or, more properly speaking, he was pancaked against a suitcase that was blocking the bulk of the hole in the vessel from venting the rest of the contents of the hangar into outer space. If the suitcase hadn’t been there he’d be crushed already, and the rest of the atmosphere gone.

  As it was, she could still barely breathe, the air was so thin. And when the last of it was gone, Adrian would have even bigger problems on his hands than the still very real possibility of getting his spine snapped. The suitcase seemed not too long for that hole with all the imploding sounds it was making. If it hadn’t been built to survive a crash from a hyperplane it would have caved already.

  Veronica was already canvassing the cargo bay for something usable that might contribute to his rescue. Fortunately for her, half the cases had been torn open already. Someone else was looking for another kind of bounty. Someone like Tum perhaps.

  There was nothing of any use lying about the floor. That would be true she suspected even if she had enough oxygen going to her brain to think clearly, even, God forbid, imaginatively, under the circumstances.

  She glanced over as the pile of bodies was cleared and the humanoid that had greeted them earlier sheathed his weapon and ushered his men forward. He was keeping an eye on Adrian the entire time. “Holster your weapons!” he barked through the mike on his masked face as several of his team looked intent on shooting Adrian down rather than helping him down. “He’s worth more to us than you are—alive.”

  Without further cuing the soldiers congregated below Adrian, waited for the last of the atmosphere to vent, and caught him as he fell. Others kept the suitcase he had previously been glued to from falling on his head. From the way they were looking at that hole in the ceiling, it was going to stay there awhile; everyone had higher priorities to attend to.

  They outfitted Veronica and Adrian with spare “watches” that with a twist of the dial grew the spacesuits over them that the others had been using earlier. And that they were using again now that there was no atmosphere to facilitate communication or to keep the temperature up. Apparently, with another twist of the dial Adrian and Veronica could see one another, and weren’t hidden behind oil-slick-black-mirror visors. And they could talk via the COMMS in their suits.

  Veronica was rather stunned that self-replicating nanobots—microscopic-sized robots—could not only replicate themselves but differentiate to produce the entire suit in such record time. She knew of things in existence that even Adrian couldn’t dream of, but nothing like that. Did the nanobots live in the watch dial, reprogrammed by it depending on the twisting direction of the dial, and were the food stocks they needed to draw on to produce their wonderworks stored within the watchband? She didn’t have enough time to puzzle out the mystery, and it was hardly germane to their situation right now, in any case.

  “What’s the deal?” the humanoid said who’d spoken to Adrian and Veronica earlier. He was evidently the leader of the group.

  “We never did get your name,” Veronica said.

  “Raycos.”

  “Short for Cosmic Ray.” Adrian grunted. “You people certainly aren’t wanting for self-importance.”

  “What’s become of Tum?” Raycos asked in a tone brooking no further digressions.

  “He’s floating about in space, meditating. He only has a few hours to live,” Adrian said.

  “More like a few minutes.” Raycos’ face was stern and worried. “There’s a solar flare expected any minute now. When it hits…”

  “You’ve gotten that good at your predictions in this off-line future, have you?” Adrian said testily.

  “We have.”

  “Well then, we better hurry to your birthing unit,” Adrian said.

  “Our birthing unit?” Raycos sounded nonplused.

  “The whatever-it-is-you-use that allows this ship to make more of itself. I assume you’re using an energy-to-matter converter based on tapping zero-point energy. The same way your nifty wrist watches make and store your spacesuits for you.”

  Raycos glanced at the others who glanced back at him rather menacingly. Finally, Raycos turned back to Adrian. “That’s correct.”

  “Well, then,” Adrian explained, “we’ve got just a few minutes to create a super-cooled helium-filled sphere for him to live inside with enough room to swim about with some dolphin friends and a couple of toys.”

  “The technology isn’t that advanced. It might be able to fabricate synthetic dolphins that can play the part of the real thing, assuming the AI that oversees the unit can handle the coding in time.” Raycos, who had averted his eyes to finish thinking it through, made eye contact with Adrian again. “Why…?”

  “Just got a communiqué from FBI-FD,” Adrian explained. “They took down COMMS to prevent Tum from taking any more cues from us on how to stay alive and outmaneuver us. Now that we’re taking another approach…”

  Raycos gestured for his people to get a move on.

  They were all running towards the Ship Maker. As it turned out, the computer banks they needed to communicate with it were in the same ware
house hangar, nestled up against one of the walls.

  By the time they got to their keyboards, the soldiers in Raycos’ employ had morphed into scientists. Figures. Everyone would have to do double duty up here. They were already working on reprogramming the Ship Maker.

  “You and your team came up with some workarounds to get past his resistance to the idea of locking himself back up in a freezer,” Raycos said, focusing his attention on Adrian.

  “Let’s hope he takes the bait,” Adrian said. “By now he’d have hacked our COMMS as before, and will know what we’re up to. I guess it’s up to him to decide if buying himself more time will be to his benefit as much as yours.”

  “Ours,” Raycos said.

  “Possibly. But I’ll reserve judgement until all of humanity can weigh in on the best of all possible futures,” Adrian said. “That might well not come until we’re all connected with mind chips and neurococktails as you suggested. It would be nice to think we could be a more prescient species than that, but, as it turns out, we prefer to kill each other so aliens won’t have to.”

  They migrated towards the ports.

  By the way Raycos kept checking his watch, that solar flare was getting damn close to erupting.

  Minutes later, the transparent sphere was almost complete. It looked like a giant shiny marble. The construction had actually stopped so Tum could swim up through the hole, join the dolphins and their play toys, before the hole too was sealed off.

  He drifted in space flailing his arms and kicking his legs as if treading water. His gaze alternated between the sun getting ready to flare up and the world inside the marble.

  Maybe it was Adrian’s remarks earlier that finally convinced him to swim inside.

  The Ship Builder closed the sphere about him and released it to turn gently, orbiting the ship, caught in its artificial gravity well. It would no doubt be dragged back to Mars, possibly to remain in orbit there, if Adrian didn’t miss his guess. No one was going to let that guy down on Mars until they felt a little more confident about whose side he was on and about how to stop him should he change his mind yet again. And that was assuming the satellites in orbit around Mars were sufficiently shielded from his hacking. Otherwise, he might well be dragged to one of the two moons about Mars and allowed to orbit it, a safer distance from the new homeland.

  But Adrian was getting ahead of himself. Figuring out what to do with Tum in the long-run still presupposed that the liquid-helium in that bubble would give him the time he needed to cure his rapid-aging once and for all.

  Raycos gestured to his XO.

  Adrian wasn’t sure what the gesture meant, but he didn’t have long to wait for that mystery to be solved. His COMMS went dead moments later. They were severing Tum’s ties to them.

  “The son of a bitch is finally in a prison that can hold him. One that he deserves,” the XO said.

  “Yes, he is,” Raycos replied with a snort and a smile.

  “What the hell, Raycos?” Adrian admonished.

  “Sorry, I had to mislead you, Adrian. But you and Veronica’s sentiments did seem a bit torn when I came upon you,” Raycos said. “You have to appreciate my position. The only way to create a lifeform that advanced is to have it created by the planetary uber-mind, with everyone enhanced and connected by chip implants or neurococktails. With everyone working on how to create such an advanced next generation life form for the human race to molt into. Without the intel being that disseminated, so there’s no chance of one party or a small band of individuals getting their hands on the patent… well, you can understand how dangerous it would be for the rest of the human race to have to face off against even one of those guys, far less a small army. That very same logic drove your investigation up to the bitter end, until, ironically, you lost your way.”

  Alarms were sounding aboard the ship.

  “The Zephyr is under attack,” Raycos’ XO said.

  “Yes, by Tum,” Adrian replied.

  Both Raycos and the XO turned sharply towards him.

  “Gentlemen,” Adrian explained, “if you were going to drop a bombshell like that, I could have told you to wait until you were out of range. How long did you imagine a super-sentient being would need to hack past your firewalls?”

  “Damn it. He’s right.” Raycos directed his next remarks at his crew. “Get us away from that sphere. And take control of this ship, now!”

  Adrian covered his eyes, though he was well away from the viewports.

  “The solar flare,” Veronica explained. “It’s started.”

  “And now the only one who’s safe from it is Tum,” Adrian replied. “You do have to love this guy’s sense of irony.”

  Several of the soldier scientists were madly working away trying to reconfigure The Ship Builder.

  Others had fled the room to attend to whatever other emergency systems on the Zephyr needed attending to. A lot of those were the soldiers from earlier knocked out by Veronica’s deflected rubber bullets. They were briefed by their peers on the fly, and drafted into action, despite their dazed and disoriented states.

  But it was them up against a mastermind.

  Adrian didn’t care for their odds.

  The really sick joke? Tum could probably exact his revenge without disturbing that calm, meditative state he was seeking to end his life in. He had so many mental processes to spare.

  ***

  Ed, Biyu, David, and Klepsky stared at the big screen monitor. It was an auspicious time. It was the first occasion the “entire family” had gathered together in one place. But it was a standout moment for another reason. The monitor they were gawking at featured Adrian and Veronica dying in the barrens of space. Courtesy of Tum who’d hacked their spaceship’s avionics.

  “This isn’t good,” David said.

  Ed interrupted chewing his fingernails, making sure to keep his fingers close to his lips like a security blanket, to ask, “How is it we’re seeing this?”

  “Duh. We’re looking through Tum’s eyes, of course,” David replied. “He’s been able to transmit and receive data all along, his synthetic brain quite capable of serving as a modem.”

  Tum was playing with one of the dolphins in the transparent sphere with him, tossing a ring back and forth. The group was made to observe the Zephyr, juxtaposed in the distance beyond, slowly imploding, as if being crushed in the hands of an invisible giant, smoldering, all replete with sound effects, which of course was impossible, as “in space, no one can hear you scream.”

  Ed interrupted his fingernail chewing again—there was never less than three fingers in his mouth at a time, as he worked from one finger to the next, apparently trying to economize on time—to say, “I suppose this is some sick joke, forcing us to watch him play with the dolphins while our loved ones fry to ash beneath a solar flare.”

  “Duh,” David said.

  Ed slipped away from the others, power-walked to his computer terminal, and started keying away.

  David said, still staring at the monitor, “The cybernetic dolphins seem to be holding up. That’s a super-cooled liquid-helium environment, kept at near zero degrees Kelvin by the transparent sphere, which probably isn’t transparent at all. It’s probably nano-shielded, the nanites tasked with both projecting an image of what’s inside as if light flowed through them unimpeded, all while keeping any potentially dangerous EMF radiation from entering. Wait, that gives me an idea.” He parted ways with the group. Not that anyone noticed. Everyone was still too focused on what was happening on the monitor.

  That included everybody else in this section of the FBI-FD floor of the federal building. It was a big floor. The junior futurists and their countless experiments were kept further away from the eye of the tornado, which was framed by Klepsky’s office and the rest of the rectangle enclosing the inner courtyard occupied by his top people. Most of the best of the best were standing back just a ways from the front row of spectators staring at the big screen monitor, comprising of Klepsky and “his family.”
>
  Biyu was muttering in Mandarin. Klepsky found it easy enough to tune her out. For all he knew, she could be saying a prayer, or repeating some mantra to help her think.

  Finally, he couldn’t take the suspense anymore and gazed down at the iPhone in his hand, with the latest translation software—only approved for the FBI-FD. She was carrying on about the liquid helium, unable to understand how it was even possible for cybernetic dolphins to swim in temperatures that cold. She expressed the opposite doubts about Tum, afraid he’d find it a little too easy to extract what he needed from the impossibly cold temperatures to sustain consciousness, as opposed to going dormant, like some hibernating frog just trying to get through winter.

  But then the screen on his phone went blank.

  And he realized that her chattering had mysteriously stopped.

  He gazed about him and noticed that his “wife” and “kids” were gone. “I tell you, trying to keep this family together is one high stakes proposition that makes the one on screen look positively tame.” He returned his attention to the big screen monitor.

  ***

  Adrian gazed up at the canopy of the airplane hangar-sized chamber he was in, watching it buckle. It was his guess that Tum had hacked the nanites in the smart-metal, turning them away from fortifying the complex polymer shielding of the ship to compromising it. Nanites may not have amounted to much individually, but collectively, their hive minds could be quite formidable. Even back in his relatively primitive reality, nanobots were being modeled on the hive-mind intelligence of ants and honey bees. One microscopically-sized robot didn’t have much computing power, but billions of them… all working together… now that was a different matter entirely.

  He extended his hand to Veronica who took what he had to offer, only to realize it wasn’t a cigarette. “What happened to the cigarette smoking?”