Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  “I quit as soon as I saw the ship was on fire. This is Double-Mint. Double your fun. Double your pleasure.”

  They gazed over at the fires erupting around them for no good reason and the crew rushing to put them out. There should have been no atmosphere inside the chamber, as the hole in the ceiling had still not been adequately plugged. No one had the time. It was all hands on deck and ironically that hole was the least of their problems. They had vented their atmosphere into space a long time ago. So Tum must have been tasking the nanites in the smart-metal walls to producing some oxygen to sustain the fires, all to play up the dramatic effect of their meeting the most grisly of fates: death in space.

  “There can’t be fires in here. There’s no atmosphere!” Veronica shouted, more to vent her frustration than to enlighten anyone on the true nature of a vacuum.

  “That Tum. He’s such a drama queen,” Adrian said, cheeking his gum, and speaking into the mike in his face mask, which he’d had to flip up earlier to get the gum in his mouth. Adrian didn’t think Veronica arrived late at making the same observation he did because she was slow on the uptake. In all likelihood, her mind was busy running ideas on how to turn this situation around. She didn’t tend to be as passive in the face of impossible odds as him. Maybe with some more Zen training…

  The ship shuddered. Violently. Adrian found himself sliding across the low-friction floor like a kid enjoying a Slip-N’-Slide on his front lawn in the rain. Veronica hadn’t lost her footing, or her mind, still calculating away, judging from the intensity of the expression on her face.

  Rather than allow herself to be thrown off balance, she went with each reverberation, using it to launch her gymnastics off of the stacked cases in the vicinity, moving around the room like a bouncing superball. And the violent shakes kept coming. If Adrian didn’t know better he’d say they were being pelted by a debris field. More than likely, each blast of sub-atomic particles coming at them from the solar flare was causing the nanites comprising the ship’s shielding to overreact. Not because they had originally been programed that way. But because Tum had screwed with their programing. Of course the fact that the ship’s hull was nanite-infested at all was a matter of pure speculation, his. But he was good at back-of-napkin calculations during End Times scenarios. Probably why he’d been chosen for his job. The one calculation he couldn’t come up with was how the hell to get them out of here.

  “The Ship Maker is coming around,” one of the soldier scientists manning the keyboard said. He’d been hacking away at it for some time with no avail.

  “There’s no way you’re out-hacking Tum,” Adrian said.

  “No, this is something else,” Frantic Keyboard Guy said before denigrating into pure prattling. “Someone is writing a new computer language for the Ship Maker.”

  “Ed,” Adrian mumbled, recognizing one of his familiar calling cards. Adrian felt like Boris Karloff in the 1932 version of The Mummy, stirring to life after eons of quiet repose. His brain finally kicked into high gear.

  He broached the gap between him and the soldier scientists, suddenly keen on seeing what they were observing on their small screen monitors. “A new computer language would slow Tum down,” Adrian said, “but not by much.”

  Another of the soldier scientists manning a different station attached to the Ship Maker interface sounded off. “The nanite-shielding on the sphere enclosing Tum… someone has hacked it. It’s blocking EMF transmissions going in and out. So it’s possible he hasn’t detected the new computer language yet, and can’t get the specs on it fast enough to counterhack it. The data streams are being choked off to him coming and going even as I speak.”

  “David,” Adrian mumbled, recalling his list of aptitudes he’d bothered to peruse when Klepsky drafted him into duty. One of them was: upgrading the hive mind intelligence available to nano swarms. Adrian took the gum out of his mouth. Taking advantage of his upturned faceplate, which was no longer needed in the atmosphere the nanites were providing, he switched back to smoking, lighting up a cigarette. As the smoke trailed upwards, it drifted into a pattern that formed a giant haunting ghoulish rendition of Tum’s face. The face was laughing at them. So the atmosphere was nanite-infested too. Tum was still showing off. Educating them on the fact that he still had a hundred and one ways to kill them.

  “The super-cooled liquid-helium mix in the bubble…” said another of the soldier scientists manning yet a third station on the Ship Maker picked now to speak up. “The chemical makeup has changed slightly. Tum’s mind appears to be slowing down. It’s… It’s as if he’s going to sleep. Actually, according to the EMF waves he’s giving off, this is more like a comatose state.”

  “Biyu,” Adrian mumbled. With his encyclopedic memory, it was easy enough to recall her list of aptitudes. Among them: synthetic biochemistry, built on studies of extremophiles—microbes living in environments once thought to be uninhabitable.

  Adrian gazed out one of the ports. Using Ed’s unhackable computer language, Biyu had gotten the Zephyr to extend an umbilical cord to the sphere, allowing the Zephyr’s energy-to-matter converter to inject the sphere with the microscopic interlopers she’d designed.

  Something took Adrian’s attention away from the port. He glanced up at the ceiling again at the sounds of crinkling metal. Only this time, the buckling effects were reversing.

  Another of the soldier scientists manning a terminal said, “The Ship Builder is upgrading our radiation shielding to ride out the solar flare. She’s got control of the nanites in the smart-metal hull again.

  A good thing, Adrian thought. It would take a while for the full brunt of the solar flare to reach them, but that moment would be soon upon them.

  Adrian glanced up as the ghostly, ghoulish face the size of one of those Macy’s Thanksgiving Day floats screamed at him before dissolving.

  “Get us the hell out of here now!” Adrian barked.

  “But Tum…”

  “Have the Ship Maker calculate a blow and a spin rate that will get the sphere into orbit about one of Mars’s two moons. You can keep an eye on him there, conduct your studies well away from the Martian satellite grid or anything else he might be able to hack—should he find his way back from the dead yet again.” Adrian realized he was still speaking with more force than usual, but then, if there was ever a time to panic it was now. Now it might serve some purpose. There was a high likelihood that even from a semi-comatose state, Tum could hack his way out of the liquid grave they’d made for him—in less time than they needed to pull away from the sphere. And if he was still within reach of the Zephyr’s avionics… they’d be right back where they started. Only with an even more rattled Tum on their hands, less likely to play games, and more likely to kill all life on board and simply put the Ship Maker to serve him without risking the human infestation aboard the Zephyr getting the upper hand again. Hubris had worked in their favor enough times so far. But sooner or later, even an egotist realizes that his ego is being used against him, and it would be best to dial it down, if only in the short-term.

  The soldier scientists didn’t bother to argue with him.

  The well-calculated bump of the sphere had already been accomplished.

  The Zephyr was hightailing it away from Tum.

  “Okay, kill the COMMS back to Earth,” Adrian barked. Again the scientists manning their terminals didn’t hesitate.

  Raycos had picked now to rejoin them, back from whatever mission he was carrying out on the ship. Adrian was glad the COMMS were down, because unlike the other scientists who had been too busily working on the Ship Maker to lower or even de-blacken their face plates, Raycos had his off. In other words, there was no hiding his Martian humanoid status.

  Right now, the Zephyr was going to be hard enough to explain to Ed, David, and Biyu. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Klepsky knowing about the world as it really was: a living museum so one-percenters comprising the intellectual elite could celebrate the odd path they’d taken to get to where they we
re now. Certainly the rest of them at the FBI-FD shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of knowing they were never intended to reach The Promised Land. They had enough on their plate already. Let them all live with their comforting illusions about the nature of reality. It was a small mercy Adrian wished someone had granted him.

  “You got us out of this?” Raycos said testily, glaring at Adrian. The guy obviously wasn’t much on thank you’s. Or, if there was a thank you in there, it was buried under a ton of incredulity.

  “Me and my team,” Adrian said. “Mostly my team.” He wasn’t much on hogging credit. He had enough of a fan club. Let some of his disciples grow their following. So they too could know the “joys” of being stalked.

  “We’re turning the ship around, heading back to Earth to drop you off,” Raycos said. “Easier to explain to the FBI-FD your brief tour of space than your protracted one to Mars.”

  Adrian nodded. “I’m sure we can come up with some cover story they’ll buy into. So long as it sounds like a tantalizing future they’re only too happy to launch themselves towards, they won’t ask too many questions. Maybe I’ll tell them you’re part of a secret alliance known as Earth Shield in case aliens ever come our way with hostile intent.”

  Raycos smiled. “Yes, I have kids of my own. I know this game well. That should work fine.”

  ***

  Adrian and Veronica waved to the Zephyr that was taking off again from the Iceland coast where it had left the twosome behind. The sight was admittedly surreal, even sans the space ship, being as this was Iceland at sunset. The Zephyr had shed much of its bulk again prior to atmospheric reentry. It looked once more much as it did when they first encountered it, as if it might still pass as a dragon from a distance.

  Veronica put through a call to the captain of the US Nautilus nuclear submarine on her sat phone. “You can stand down, commander. Tum has been dealt with. As in, he’s permanently out of commission.”

  “Glad to hear it. Though it seems like a waste of an opportunity to rid the world of all those pacifists.”

  “Next time, Captain. We’ll get ’em next time.” She hung up on him. Honestly, the guy gave her the creeps. Of all the people to put in charge of a nuclear submarine.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Klepsky fished through his brown paper bag for a walnut, retrieved it, rotated it just so in his hand, and then split it in half by making a fist with precisely applied pressure. He fed on the meat of the nut before discarding the shell back into the bag. He did this all absently while his eyes remained on the big screen monitor they’d used earlier at the FBI-FD to watch the Zephyr imploding with Adrian, Veronica, and all hands aboard.

  Now, having miraculously survived that ordeal, Adrian, standing beside Klepsky, looked no less mesmerized by the sight of Tum floating inside that bubble orbiting Phobos, one of Mars’s two moons. The footage had been captured by a satellite too primitive for Tum to do much with even if it were hacked by him, and that was if he ever woke up.

  “Why do you think Tum turned out the way he did?” Klepsky asked.

  Adrian didn’t have to think about it long. “So long as the corporations that create much of this breakthrough tech remain secretive, manipulative, and controlling, and their creations come to life in these environments, so they will inherit our distrust, and our competitiveness with our fellow humans; they’ll see us as threats, something to be gotten over on and gotten around. Why should they treat us any differently when that’s how we treat one another?

  “I’ve been arguing for science going public for a long time, for precisely this reason.”

  “Maybe the coming Space Age will be the cure for all that; it’ll force us to work together on projects that are too big to undertake on our own; maybe the spirit of cooperation will overtake the spirit of competitiveness then, or at least the competitiveness will assume a more playful guise.”

  Adrian grunted. “Strange. Of the two of us, I never figured you for the optimist.”

  Klepsky crushed another walnut in his hand, mumbling, “If you only knew how many skulls, I mean nuts, I have to crack to stay positive.”

  He chewed on the meat of another walnut as he remained pensive on the matter. “You know, Biyu ranted at me about how IA—that’s Intelligence Augmentation—which she argues the average joe so desperately needs to stay in the game, never makes it into the news because the ruling elite maintains control by dumbing people down, not smartening them up. I wonder if all that repression, even more than all the other clandestine corporate conspiracies, leads to things like Tum. If it really doesn’t just make the future happen sooner rather than later, like cranking the handle on a Jack-in-the-box?”

  “I think Newton was right. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more you try to keep people down, the more they revolt. You’re better off finding a way to go with the flow. But until the people we work for learn that, well, let’s just say it’s good job security for us. I expect a lot more Tums in our future before we start seeing a lot more Elon Musks.”

  “At least until we learn our lessons.”

  Adrian snorted. “This guy wasn’t born out of reactionary hate, not this time, though I suppose he could have been. He was born out of secrecy. Which takes me back to my argument that all science should be public domain anymore, done out in the open, like with how they did Unix. Too many locked doors suggest the fruits of those labors were never meant to be shared with the world.”

  “I’ve always been proud to be a student of history. Now I think I’m prouder being a student of the future. And thinking about the best ways to keep it safe.”

  “If you’re a true student of history then you must realize, this time around, Tum was the enemy. But he’s what we’re all evolving into. We just need to grow spiritually, expand our consciousness, so we’re worthy of the vessels when they become available.”

  With that, Adrian recused himself from the ritual of fretting over Tum’s plight, and for that matter, the human condition, and headed for the door.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Veronica came out of the master bathroom in her bedroom stark naked to find Adrian staring out the window. He was absently rubbing his lower back and twisting the cracks out of his spine. She glanced around the flat; the place looked sacked by professional hoodlums. She smiled. She did like things on the athletic side. Finished taking in the devastation, she let her eyes linger on him. “If I lose track of my orgasms, I just have to count how many times I’ve found you staring out the window afterwards.”

  He grunted without looking away from the sight of the city beyond. “The world looks different than it did after I’ve been in your arms awhile.”

  “You need to cuddle up to a psychotic mass murderer to feel better about life?”

  He smiled ruefully, figured she could see it in his reflection in the window. “It’s just that kind of world.”

  “Tell me this last encounter with it didn’t change you a little.”

  He thought about it as he took another puff on his cigarette. “Sure it did. See that book over there?”

  She glanced over at the copy of Brave New World parked on his bedside table. The paperback looked worn. The burnt orange sky on the cover was not too different from the one out the window.

  “Yeah. You’re always complaining I keep the room too hot for you. I see you glancing over at it periodically during sex to cool yourself right back down.”

  He snorted a chuckle that just got abbreviated. “You noticed that, huh? You weren’t supposed to notice.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to notice a lot of things. Like your increasingly thin tether to this world. The fact that you voice your nightmares in your sleep more and more. If you ask me, you’re looking for any excuse to give up the fight.”

  “Is there anybody who doesn’t want to blow up this world anymore? After the one percent took all the money and left the ninety-nine percent homeless or wage slaves for life without anything to show for it… you have to ask your
self, what am I protecting? And who am I protecting it for? Maybe blowing it up is the charitable thing to do. A chance to clear the slate, give us a shot at a much brighter future.”

  “I thought we agreed the money-grubbing bastards who see the world as a zero-sum game, with winners and losers, would die out eventually. Leaving the younger generations who get that if even one person doesn’t feel safe, then no one is safe. The kids voted for Bernie Saunders by an overwhelming eighty-four percent. Trust me, they get it. Out with the pyramid and Ponzi schemes. In with an egalitarian age.”

  He took another drag on his cigarette. “I’d rather not wait. It would be better to build them a Promised Land even if I may never get to walk upon it myself.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. Once upon a time.”

  “Come back to bed. Clearly you need more medicine.”

  “Maybe I do.” He turned around finally, let her walk into his arms, let himself melt into her.

  When he threw her against the bed, he turned the copy of Brave New World face down. Maybe he didn’t need to cool off in the tropical heat of her bedroom. Maybe what he needed was to burn off the last of his angst from a feverish state. One he’d be in soon enough.

  Once the pumping and grinding started, and the fever set in, ironically, he was thinking better. Raycos was right. Adrian had to keep the museum exhibit of “the present” protected long enough for the majority of people to get their minds around a much better future than any of them dare imagine now. One that would be too scary to try and imagine now. One day they would all have upgraded minds connected via mind chips or nanococktails. Then they could build the better future together, the only way it could be built, not by the one percent, but by everyone, their minds telepathically interlinked, dreaming the future together.

  In the meantime, he had to keep the self-professed guardians of tomorrow from leading them down a path that only purported to offer a better future that in reality was anything but.