Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  That chilled me. “Frankenstein and his monster, hmm?”

  He stopped eating. “I don’t think it’s quite that drastic,” he said quietly and looked me straight in the eye. “Do I seem like a monster to you?”

  It was my turn not to answer the question. We sat without speaking until the waiter whisked away plates and brought coffee and dessert menus. I avoid sweets, but I ordered a cognac. A double.

  “I’ll have the same,” Halton said, handing his menu to the waiter.

  After he left, I said, “I thought you don’t get drunk. Just drink for the taste. Another side effect from all those minor adjustments in your synthetic brain?”

  “Not… exactly.” The vague little smile was back. “Nanos.”

  I laughed, a nervous explosion of muffled sound. “You’re punked? Jesus Christ, they built you with everything except the goddamned kitchen sink! Tell me you’re not Super Spy.”

  “I’m not Super Spy,” he said, dead serious.

  I stopped laughing. “Then exactly what the hell are you?” I was getting pissed off again.

  “I’m just a fabricant.” The voice was carefully controlled, indifferent. “That’s all.”

  “That’s like saying you’re just an infrafusion bomb, that’s all. Just your ordinary run-of-the-mill little old harmless explosive device sitting around going tick tick tick.”

  Again, I saw that cold something flicker across his eyes, arctic emptiness blowing through a lifeless abyss. Chilly goose bumps rose on the back of my neck.

  The waiter came with the cognacs. “You got any cigars?” I asked him on impulse.

  “Certainly, sir,” he said.

  He brought a wooden tray, hand-rolled brown Havanas in varying sizes nesting in their aromatic cradles. I picked out a Romeo y Julieta, seemed ironic enough of a statement for me.

  “Want one?” I asked Halton.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I retorted, but kept any other pointed remarks to myself. Other ears were listening. The waiter offered me the guillotine to snip the end, then lit the cigar for me. I’d made far too many mistakes today, time to really get down deep into the role I had to play. I puffed white smoke into a halo around my head.

  “Thank you,” I said to the waiter and he went away.

  We sipped, I smoked in silence. Finally, I couldn’t help it. It just came out. “Shit. Nanopunked,” I said. And shook my head in disbelief. “I sure didn’t read that in the Owner’s Manual.”

  “It’s not that unusual,” Halton said. “Humans were modifying themselves with nanos before there were fabricants. Even before nanotechnology, they altered themselves with electronic devices. Nanos are not classified material. You could have nanos tailored for you if you wanted them.”

  His. Voice was as impersonal as always, but it seemed to carry a hint of defensiveness, or maybe an appeal. Or maybe I was just reading things into it which weren’t there.

  “No, thanks,” I said accusingly. “I don’t stick things in my body I can’t get out again if I change my mind later.”

  “Do you have a car?” Halton asked.

  The abrupt change of direction baffled me. “What?”

  “Do you own a motorized vehicle of some sort?”

  I narrowed my eyes, suspicious. “Yeah.”

  “What kind?”

  “A GM Mitsubishi.”

  “Is it AI’ed?”

  I had no idea where this line of questioning was going. “No, it’s an economy car, a Temperance. Map computer, autopilot, that’s about it.”

  “Have you named it?” He had the same flat look, eyes steady.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Many people give their cars pet names. Have you given your car a name?”

  I thought about my first car, a gas-guzzling land whale, one of the last American solo-produced monstrosities, which I bought in lousy secondhand condition for very little money. It was a dented dark blue sedan, practically drove itself even before computerization. I’d called it Miss Violet before the thing upchucked and died for good on me in the middle of rush-hour traffic during final exams. Then I called it “You piece of shit” and had it hauled off to Auto Purgatory.

  “No, I don’t name my cars,” I said. “Why?”

  “Many people do. They give inanimate objects names and expend a great deal of affection and attention on them while knowing intellectually that the object itself is incapable of returning, or even recognizing, the devotion lavished on it.”

  I picked up the gist. “And you’re not an inanimate object, that it?”

  He ignored the question. “Do you have a pet like a dog or a cat?”

  I leaned back, one arm draped over the back of the chair as I puffed on my cigar. “Yes, I had a dog when I was a kid. She was a German shepherd mix I got from the pound. Yes, I gave her a name. Her name was Kooty. Yes, I lavished affection and attention on her, which she recognized and responded to, without any problem.”

  “She had teeth? Was carnivorous? Occasionally aggressive?” The deadpan delivery was grating on my nerves.

  “So what are you getting at?”

  “She had the capability of doing physical damage to you, yet you were never afraid of her? You trusted her?”

  I signaled the waiter for another cognac. The last one wasn’t doing much for me. “Kooty was a dog. You’re not a dog. You’re a very dangerous humanoid biomachine designed and built by the people who brought us orbital laser weapons, great big infrafusion bombs capable of blowing up the moon with a single shot, tiny little smart bullets programmed to kill only the selected target, and God only knows what else. You may be a little young to remember the war in Khuruchabja—” I was startled by his fleeting smile, but failed to see the humor in that bloody conflict. “But I was there. I’ve seen what your bosses’ toys are capable of doing to human beings. You’re their creature, Halton. Your only loyalty is to the Men on the Hill, so don’t try jerking me around, okay?”

  He didn’t even stop to think about it. “There are four hundred seventy-five operational fabricants currently in active use in five different governmental departments,” Halton said quietly. I stared popeyed at him. He waited, scanning my face, his eyes moving back and forth as he studied me.

  That certainly wasn’t part of the “approved for public consumption” literature in the Government information handouts. I sat straighter, stubbed out my half-smoked cigar and paid attention.

  “Each design specialization is broken down into five subsectors, controlled under two main sectors depending on eventual application. Each sub-sector is divided into categories with units of ten identical fabricants, each with fifty more nonactive recombinant embryos in deep-cold storage. My fabricant designation is subcategory Halton, series John. Central Defense and Intelligence has two sub-sectors for its exclusive use, as well as ancillary fabricants on loan to other departments. My sub-sector is part of CDI’s exclusive quota.” The facts were delivered in a precise, cold recitation.

  “This is classified information you’re giving me, Halton. I’m a journalist…”

  “Seven hundred sixteen experimental fabricants were terminated over the original development period of ten years,” he went on, unshakable, “due to defects from natural causes, design flaws and unforeseen or unacceptable progressions in the construction process.”

  Even Congress hadn’t been able to squeeze exact dates and figures out of the mealy-mouthed CDI spooks they’d dragged into the hearings. No one knew how long CDI had been developing their fabricant technology, nor how many there were. It had all been buried under the National Information Security Act. “You’re not supposed to be telling me this,” I said, nearly whispering.

  He didn’t falter. “Over the past seven years, sixty-two successfully completed and functional fabricants have been lost in covert operations while in place and engaged in CDI or other Government-supported actions…”

  “Are you… ?”

  “…thirty-nine fabrican
ts have been terminated by CDI or other Government departments after failing to complete their assigned missions, and seventeen fabricants have successfully completed their assigned missions, then been terminated for reasons of irreparable physiological damage or psychological contamination.”

  “Shut up, Halton.” I was suddenly very afraid, for him, for myself, paranoid that someone was listening. I suppressed the desire to peek under the table. “If they find out you’re shooting your mouth off, what happens then?”

  “I would be immediately terminated,” he said, without hesitating. “Will you trust me now?”

  He was leaning toward me; his dark eyes bored into mine. I swallowed, and sat back. My heart was racing, and I had to pull myself in tight to think.

  “Providing this isn’t more disinformation,” I said slowly. His expression didn’t change. “You could be lying, telling me just what I’m supposed to think, so you—or they, through you—can manipulate me the way they want. That is how they operate, and there’s no way I can corroborate this information, now is there?”

  Halton closed his eyes, holding them shut for the space of several heartbeats, then exhaled and sat back, defeated. “I haven’t lied to you,” he said, almost wearily, “but I concede that there isn’t much I can do to prove it without ending up dead as a result.”

  “Even if it’s true, why tell me? Why hand me a loaded gun?”

  “Because I need you to trust me. I need your help,” he said simply. “I don’t want to end up like other expended fabricants.”

  I watched him as he sipped the last of his cognac, his hands steady, eyes impersonal. The rest of my brandy sat untouched.

  “You proposing some kind of bargain, is that it?” I asked finally. “Are you offering to trade information in exchange for GBN’s help, maybe get you out of CDI?” I thought of old Cold War films, shadowy-eyed men in trench coats and slouch hats hanging around in rain-soaked alleyways. “Do you want to defect?”

  He took so long to answer, I thought he wasn’t going to. He stared into his empty snifter. “Not… exactly.”

  I wasn’t sure I really trusted him, or believed his story. Our coffee cups were empty, cognac gone, the cigar ashes cold. Our waiter began to look impatient; we were cutting into his rate of turnover and another tip. He hovered persistently nearby, and the chances of being overheard increased tenfold. I motioned for the check, which arrived almost instantaneously, and paid it on my GBN corporate card without bothering to look over the charges. I just wanted to get out of there.

  We stepped out into the busy main drag. On a Station, the official time is synchronous with whatever time zone it happens to be in orbit above, but since most everyone arriving is zoned to a different time anyway, Clarke Station was the space city that never slept. Restaurants opened and closed by their own clocks; most ran twenty-four hours a day, willing to serve whatever meal your stomach told you it was time for. Shops were almost all continuously open, it seemed; so were cinemas and “night” clubs. The street outside was as jammed at “midnight” as it was at “noon.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the hotel,” I said, as he fell into step beside me. “Maybe we should talk.”

  He shook his head. “Our rooms are bugged.”

  “Now you tell me.” We strolled up the street, heading for a community park at the center. “Hell, for all I know, you’re bugged, Halton. Maybe they’ve put teeny-tiny nanocameras inside your eyeballs and not even you know about it.”

  I was joking. He took me seriously. I got a chance to verify that his hypothalamus did indeed work at least analogously to mine; he blanched, and looked shaken.

  “If they have,” he said, his voice calmer than he appeared, “I’ll know about it soon enough.”

  Then I believed him.

  FIVE

  * * *

  I’d gotten an idea from the janitor we’d asked directions from on Level Two. As long as we were stuck here for days before the next flight down to Sun City, I figured we should keep busy. After all, we had all this great new GBN equipment we hadn’t even checked out yet. I decided to shoot a feature piece on the Station’s unseen community; my specialty, a “human interest” story. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to resurrect “Kay Bee Sulaiman” with a smaller story first while “Kay Munadi” was on vacation.

  Halton didn’t say much for the first few days as we walked around scouting possibilities. I suspect he was waiting to see if someone would show up on his doorstep and blow his expensively cultured brains out the back of his skull. When they didn’t after a few days, he spent an afternoon searching out and crippling listening devices in both our rooms. But we didn’t talk about much, not even then. Our relationship was uneasy, if cordial enough.

  We found the janitor in the ugly yellow coveralls. I stuck my hand out and grinned. “Hi, Kay Bee Sulaiman, GBN Network News?” Always approach it as a question, never seem too aggressive.

  “Yeah, I ’member you,” the janitor responded. “I mean I watch GBN, all th’time, really, but you were the guys got lost th’other day? That was you, right?”

  This time, I had the field pak part of my PortaNet slung across my shoulders, and Halton was toting the holocamera, with extra slipclips on his belt in case we needed more footage.

  “Yeah, that was us.” I chuckled depreciatingly. “It’s a big Station, easy to get lost in if you don’t know your way around.”

  Yeah, yeah, he was nodding and grinning in complete agreement. He looked back and forth from me to Halton, expectantly. “This’s John Halton, my holo optics man.”

  Halton slipped his shoulder out from under the holocamera rest to shake the janitor’s grimy hand. “Hi, just call me John, how you doin’?” Halton said smoothly, with a casual Californian intonation. Perfect, I thought, with just a twinge of envy.

  I’d run Halton through the usual GBN protocol as if he were just another rookie, which was exactly what he was. None of this “How do you do, ma’am, very fine, thank you, sir” bullshit. Come on too formal and you look like just another uppity rich puke these people are sweeping the floors for.

  Guy’s name was Randy Something; I could look it up. Used to be Stations hired just the cream of the crop, at first only those ultimate astroheads straight out of college, then topline executives and company careerists once it started going more commercial, at least at the South Pole. The North Pole was still reserved for hush-hush shit. Who knows if there were even any live people there to clean up after? Maybe Secret Santa had his double-agent elves do it.

  Once the rich boys and girls came up to play, however, the college sophisticates weren’t the type to be mopping gilded toilets or changing coitus-perfumed silk sheets. There’s always been an underprivileged underbelly keeping things neat and tidy for the rest of us, and eventually, Stations had them, too.

  Randy and the rest of the Service Engineering Department were neither stupid nor uneducated. Service is as necessary as any other work, and the Service people were proud of the job they did. Getting hired on a Station was a relatively prestigious position at any rate, and the pay certainly wasn’t bad. But Randy wasn’t the type to rise in a rags-to-riches story from what was still technically the gutter to the penthouse. He didn’t mix with the affluent business types, just did his job, hung out with his Service peers and stayed invisible.

  We shot a shitload of footage, lots of man-on-the-street-type interviews, lots of background shots of dancers undulating in glittering nightclubs, to cut later with silent footage of Randy riding his little cleanercart down a deserted corridor. The noisy clatter and tinkle of porcelain and silver in exclusive, crowded restaurants, overweight executives spouting corptalk and mergerbabble, contrasting with the quiet lunchroom conversation as Randy and his crew discussed various diets to keep their weight below the required economically viable liftoff/kilo rate. The chaos of high-powered entrepreneurs bustling down the Main Arch, to cut in later with another janitor emptying garbage bins in the hushed solitude of the vast Waste Recy
cling Center.

  “You wanna film me doin’ this?” one of Randy’s fellow Service employees said, her face screwed up in disbelief. “By myself?” She was in charge of the night-shift cleaning crew in the public toilets on Level Four. Halton had the top of his forehead jammed into the hololens cover, the little digital flyeyes projecting from either side of his head like some comic insect.

  The rest of the crew stood behind Halton, grinning and trying to stifle the giggles. We could edit the sound later, but I wanted to keep it down to a minimum.

  “You’re right,” I said quickly. “That wouldn’t look authentic, would it? Need another person in here, give it a genuine feel, you’re absolutely right.” Actually, that wasn’t what she meant at all. She was the boss. She didn’t clean toilets; she told other people to clean toilets. But it was my show and I didn’t want her getting too involved in the directorial end of things. She was still the boss, however, so she got first crack at “Hi, Mom,” but I wanted a shot of somebody pushing a brush around a toilet bowl.

  Dubiously, she picked her backup choice out of the group all going “Me! Me! Aww, c’mon, pick me!” and we got the pictures of two middle-aged, dignified women in immaculate uniforms silently scrubbing out the ladies’ loo.

  The flyeyes followed them as they went from stall to stall. “That’s right, don’t look at the camera,” I said softly. “Just pretend we’re not here… John, swing it around this way, get her reflection in the mirror…”

  As great journalism goes, this wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material. Since it wasn’t hot news, I had to script and cut it myself, before blipping it to Central. A calculated social commentary piece GBN would use as filler on a slow night, I still like to think it was well done, that I hadn’t lost my touch after years of sitting behind a feed-in desk.