by Jeff Edwards
I felt for another of the dermal patches. “It’s a closed cycle,” I said. “You live; then you die. That’s how it works.”
John shook his head violently. He was almost bouncing with excitement, like a little boy who was finally able to tell some secret that was just too delicious to keep bottled up inside.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said. “Not anymore. My chip makes it possible to reload those personalities into human bodies! We can extend life indefinitely. There isn’t an injury or disease, including old age, that can’t be cured by a body swap. This is going to blow the Medical Industry right out of its fucking boots!”
The second patch came loose and went onto the floor. “A body swap? What in the hell do you mean a body swap? You make it sound like changing clothes.”
“Maybe it will go that far some day,” John said. “We might get to the point where we swap bodies for the hell of it. Just like you said, Sarge. Like changing clothes!”
“One question,” I said. “These bodies that you’re swapping about so freely. Where do they come from?”
“Mononuclear reproduction,” John said. “We clone them.”
“You should study up on cloning,” I said. “Clones don’t gestate or develop any faster than natural organisms do. It takes five years to grow a five-year-old child. If one of your body swappers wants a twenty-year-old body, it’ll take twenty years to grow one. That’s why cloned organs have never made it into the organ transplant market.” The third patch stuck to my fingertips and I had to flex my fingers for a few seconds to get it loose.
“That’s true for the moment,” John said. “But technology never stands still. Have you ever heard of Deichstram Bionetics?”
I shook my head and reached for the last patch.
“It’s a Dutch R&D lab. They’re working on something called accelerated cellular mitosis. Force-growing clones. The technology is just around the corner.”
“When, exactly, is just-around-the-corner? A few months? A couple of years? Twenty? What if it doesn’t pan out at all?”
John’s smile retreated. “There are other options,” he said. “Brain-locked criminals, for instance. Their minds are pretty much blank-slates anyway. A lot of them are bound to have nice healthy bodies.”
“That’s the sickest thing I ever heard,” I said. “Every human-rights group and religious faction on the planet will be ready to burn you at the stake. And I’ll be more than willing to hand them the matches.”
“Okay,” John said. “Fine. Forget criminals. What about corpses? When somebody dies, we can salvage the organs, right? What’s to stop us from salvaging the entire body? We figure out the cause of death, repair the body, and reload the personality from a Turing Scion.”
The fourth patch resisted my attempts to peel it up. I dug my fingernails in a little deeper, on the theory that Sonja would be safer with a few superficial scratches than with John’s drugs in her system.
“I was wrong before,” I said. “That’s the sickest thing I ever heard.”
“Goddamn it!” John said. “You’re not seeing the possibilities. You aren’t even trying.”
“You’re right about that,” I said. “I don’t even want to think about what you’re suggesting.”
The last dermal patch came free and joined its brothers on the floor. I felt for the straps that held Sonja’s right arm down. My fingers found the buckle and started to worry it loose.
“Listen to yourself,” John said. “You sound like a Luddite, cowering in your mud hut, pretending that the world is flat. If the technology to make Turing Scions had been around a hundred years ago, don’t you think that Einstein would have taken advantage of it? Imagine what he could have accomplished if he’d had two or three lifetimes to work with.”
I shook my head. “Okay, Saint Francis,” I said. “You’re the greatest thing since the Wright Brothers. You’ve found the cure for everything from death to the common cold. Now, explain to me again how all of this adds up to kidnapping, slavery, and murder.”
John cocked his head to the side. “Slavery?”
“What do you call what you did to Michael Winter and Russell Carlisle? They weren’t some theoretical laboratory-grown clones or the brain-dead criminals whose bodies you’re so hot to preempt. They were just two poor bastards with brain tumors. When they went under the knives of your surgical robots, they had no idea that you were planning to give them a little bonus gift, did they?”
I tightened my grip on the butt of my Blackhart. “And while we’re on the subject of nasty surprises, when do we get to the part where twenty or so little girls get their hearts chopped out of their chests?”
A pencil thin beam of red light glinted for a millisecond, bright even in the well-lit lab.
Pain exploded in my right wrist as the beam of a laser drilled through my flesh. I screamed, and instinctively jerked my wounded arm to my chest. The Blackhart tumbled from my pain-numbed fingers and clattered across the floor.
“Freeze!” It was a woman’s voice.
I stood there in mute agony, staring at the neatly cauterized hole in my wrist, the stench of my own cooked flesh strong in my nostrils.
The voice had come from the open doorway. I turned my head and looked at it dumbly. I’d been so wrapped up in John’s lunatic tale that I’d let my guard down.
The laser came through the door first, followed by her right arm, followed by the rest of her.
She wore tight blue jeans, black boots, and a tan leather jacket. Dark brown hair hung to her shoulders.
I recognized her as the woman from the Lev, the one who’d taken a notch out of my ear with the laser. Apparently she was back to finish the job, laser and all.
The white-hot nova of pain in my wrist made it difficult to think clearly, but there was something about her, a nagging hint of familiarity that went beyond our run-in on the Lev.
Her face was different; I was virtually certain of that. She’d been to the surgical boutiques. I had the vague impression that—whoever she was—her cheekbones were higher now than they had been, and her chin a little less prominent than my memory suggested.
She crossed the floor between us in five or six long strides. I tried to focus on her face through the fog of my pain. Where in the hell did I know her from?
I found myself staring into her wide almond-shaped eyes. They were beautiful: deep brown, lightening to amber near the pupils. Animal eyes. Maggie’s eyes.
Even the pulsing core of pain in my arm couldn’t still the singing in my heart. She was alive! Somehow, I didn’t know how; I didn’t care... Maggie was alive!
My voice wavered and nearly broke. “Maggie?”
She smiled at me, and it was as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds.
“Hello, David.”
CHAPTER 32
I had played this moment out countless times in my dreams. Maggie wasn’t really dead, and the virus in the hospital’s computers hadn’t sold her body off for organ barter... The accident had left her with amnesia, and she’d wandered out of the hospital and into the streets. Or she lay in a coma on some charity ward, and the virus-stricken computer had labeled her as Jane Doe. One day she might wake up and the first word that she’d whisper would be my name.
Suddenly, I had a thousand questions and I couldn’t figure out which one to ask first. What had happened? Where had she been? Why the new face? Why hadn’t anyone told me anything? I was almost afraid to ask any of them, for fear that I would spook her and she’d flit away like a butterfly. The questions would wait. She was alive! All I could think about was taking her into my arms. Everything else would sort itself out.
John walked to a workbench and pulled open a drawer. “Damn it, Maggie,” he said. “You didn’t have to shoot him.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “She walked in and saw a man threatening you with a gun. My back was to the door. She couldn’t recognize me.”
“That’s close,” Maggie said. “Except that I
did recognize you. I shot you because I wanted to. A girl needs to indulge herself every now and then.”
Her voice was calm, emotionless, as if she were discussing whether or not to have another cup of coffee.
“You can’t mean that,” I said.
“Oh, but I do,” Maggie said. “In fact, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.”
John rummaged around in the drawer and pulled out a blue plastic packet about twice the size of his hand. He carried it over to me, stripping open the plastic wrapping as he walked.
“I’m sorry, Sarge,” he said. “I tried to keep you out of this, but you wouldn’t let me.”
The packet contained a gel-pack bandage, a translucent blue-green blob of osmotic jelly, laced with analgesics and disinfectants. John held it out to me; it quivered in his hands like a living creature. “Give me your arm.”
I stared at him, only half comprehending the meaning of his words. My brain was busy playing back what Maggie had said. Surely I had misunderstood. She couldn’t be saying that she’d shot me on purpose, that she’d wanted to shoot me...
“Come on, Sarge,” John said. “Give me your arm. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He reached out for my injured arm and pulled it gently away from my chest.
The pain leapt an octave when John peeled the synlon cuff of my jacket away from the laser burn.
Maggie watched me over John’s shoulder while he wrapped the gel-pack bandage around my burned wrist. She pursed her lips in a fake pout.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I muff my lines? Is this the part where I’m supposed to leap into your arms and tell you how much I love you? How much I’ve missed you?”
Her words slid between my ribs and pierced my heart like a stiletto. The cruel lilt in her voice twisted the blade in the wound. It was as though she hated me. How could that be? How could Maggie hate me?
John pulled the ends of the osmotic jelly together and then kneaded the blue-green blob until it was a continuous band around my wrist. The analgesics in the gel had an immediate cooling effect on the laser burn. John stepped back to admire his work from arm’s length.
The floral scent of the gel-pack played a weird counter tone to the stench of my cooked flesh, and the singed petrochemical stink of the burned synlon jacket.
Maggie’s laser slashed a groove in the tile, a few centimeters from my left foot, laying bare the cement underneath. The floor crackled softly as it cooled, and heat radiated up my leg.
“David, I don’t believe you’re paying attention.” Her laser swung up to point at my chest.
John immediately jumped between us, and pushed the barrel of the laser down. “That’s enough, Maggie. David isn’t going to cause any trouble. Are you, Sarge?”
My gaze seemed to drift up to Maggie’s face of its own accord. Something burned behind her beautiful animal eyes, a spark of madness that reminded me of the look on Michael Winter’s face the second before he’d pulled the trigger.
“Did you enjoy your trip to the warehouse?” she asked. “I go there a lot. Ever since John showed me where it happened.”
She laughed. “How many people do you suppose get to visit the spot where they died?”
John touched the side of Maggie’s face with the backs of his fingers. “Stop it, Maggie,” he said in a near-whisper. “This isn’t about death; it’s about life. You of all people should know that.”
Maggie closed her eyes and stood for a few seconds, feeling the touch of his hand on her cheek, then she nodded once and relaxed her grip on the laser.
In the brief seconds that they touched, I saw something pass between them: an intimacy that went far beyond the casual contact of friends. It was the sort of touch that lovers share in their closest moments, and it hit me far harder than the laser had.
“Good girl,” John whispered. “We don’t need the laser now. Just keep an eye on him.”
John looked at me for a second, and then walked over to a computer console adjacent to the surgical robot. He slid into a form-fitting chair in front of the console and began punching keys. The control panel lit up with an entire grid of colored LEDs. They began to flash on and off in abstract patterns.
Maggie opened her eyes and looked toward John. “Is the implant ready?”
John’s fingers continued to click on the keys. Several of the equipment cabinets woke up and began to hum.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to power up the robot.”
My eyes went to Sonja, still strapped to the powered chair under the arms of the queen-spider robot. Implant?
“I thought you would have already powered up,” Maggie said.
John flipped a row of four or five switches with the palm of his hand, and several cooling fans whispered to life up in the ceiling, somewhere up inside the guts of the robot.
“I would have, but I had to wait for you to show up and take Sarge off my hands. I couldn’t very well prep for surgery while he had a gun on me.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. They were going to do it. They were actually going to implant one of their nasty little chips in Sonja’s brain.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Maggie chose to interpret the question her own way. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You let me die,” she said. “You let me die and you didn’t do anything about it.”
I felt my cheeks flush. “What are you talking about? I nearly died trying to save you. I went into that sewer of a pit two seconds after you did, and I didn’t come out until...”
Maggie cut me off. “Do you know what they did to me, David? They put my body in the freezer like a piece of meat. They carved pieces off of me, do you know that? They cut out my heart, David. One of my kidneys. My hand. Selling me off a slice at a time.”
“Do you think I wouldn’t have stopped it if I could have? Jesus Christ, Maggie, I was unconscious for three days. By the time I came to, it was all over. Your body was gone.”
“You didn’t try very hard to find it, did you? You didn’t actually look for me, did you?”
Her words hit me like a fist. “There was a virus,” I said. “They told me...”
“Who gives a damn what they told you? The question is, what did you do about it? Where the hell were you when your wife’s body was on the carving-block? It was John who tracked down the organ clinic and bought my body back. If it weren’t for him, I’d be walking around as spare parts right now.”
This is not real, I thought. It’s just a dream. Just another one of my crazy nightmares.
I must have spoken some of it aloud, either that, or Maggie read my thoughts.
“Nightmare?” She snorted. “Try living inside a Turing Scion, David. Do you know how long a year is when you’re trapped in a machine that thinks a thousand times as fast as a human brain?”
“No,” I said softly.
“Do the math,” Maggie said. “It’s a thousand years, David. That works out to ten or fifteen lifetimes. You can’t touch anything, because you don’t have any arms. You can’t walk, because you don’t have any legs. You’re an invalid, David, and the worst sort. Too far gone to be helped by surgery. The kind of freak that should have died, but didn’t. The kind that gets locked away in a dark room at the back of the house because the family is ashamed. And you’re awake for every second of it. Waiting for the person you love most in all the world to come to you. Waiting for him to tell you that your arms and legs don’t matter, that it doesn’t matter if your pretty face is gone. But he never comes. And you’re waiting. Thinking. Wanting. Remembering what it was like to be alive, to have a body, to be able to feel. Don’t talk to me about nightmares, David. You don’t even know what a nightmare is.”
John cleared his throat. “You can’t blame David for that, Maggie,” he said. “That was my fault. I shouldn’t have left you plugged into the net. I knew better. And I’m sorry for it, Darling. I’ve told you that a thousand times. I just couldn’t bring myself to let you go.”
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Maggie shook her head. “Don’t apologize for loving me,” she said. “Never apologize for that. You were there for me every day, when my beloved husband was nowhere to be found.”
John reached into an oval recess in the control console and pulled out a small bundle. It was a sim rig, wraparound data-shades and a pair of gray data-gloves studded with sensors, a lot like the setup I had at home, except that John’s was wireless so his gloves and shades weren’t tethered to the computer, giving him the freedom to operate from anywhere in the room.
He slipped his hands into the data-gloves and pulled the shades over his eyes. His hands began to dance in a strange combination of fluid gestures and abrupt motions; he was reading data and manipulating control features that could only be seen through the data-shades.
Maggie stared at me. “If you had loved me, if you had really loved me, you would have figured it out. You would have come to me.”
“The mainframe is slicked,” John said. “We’ll have to purge the virus and reload from the protected data cores later, when the main power is back on. In the meantime, it looks like we have enough power to run the surgical protocols from the local consoles.”
“Get on with it,” Maggie said.
Banks of LEDs flared to life on several of the equipment cabinets. John’s hands continued their dance. He nodded while he worked.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve had to sequence this thing without the AI, but I think we’re just about there.”
Maggie walked over to stand near Sonja. She reached out and brushed a wisp of hair away from Sonja’s cheek.
Sonja was still groggy from the dermal anesthetics, and the forehead strap held her motionless, but she was aware enough to try to twist her face away from Maggie’s touch. Tears collected at the corners of her eyelids and trickled down her temples. Her voice was slow and heavy. “Don’t... you... touch... me...”
“No need to cry,” Maggie whispered. “We won’t touch your heart. I promise.”
Her left hand rose to her chest, as though unconsciously covering her own heart. “That’s where your soul lives,” she said. “My Daddy tried to teach me that when I was a little girl, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe anything he said.”