I would have laughed, but he had done a pretty good job of it so far.
“Do you know why I have lived for a century and a half and you most likely will not?”
A fistfuck of dollars?
“It is because I am very rich and you are not. Not one of my organs is factory issue except my brain, and even that has been tinkered with. As we speak, my fourth heart is being printed, soon to be nurtured in a nutrient bath and held in stasis until I need it. Most of my bones have been reinforced with polymers to prevent decay. I have nanobiotic antibodies that patrol my blood for any signs of disease or infection.
“I replaced a religion with a philosophy. This philosophy is called Transhumanism. Are you aware of it?”
“No.”
“I'm not surprised. It was an idea ahead of its time, furthered by a man who did not live to see it come true.”
He came back and sat down. I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. Maybe he was finally getting to the point. “Despite the stagnation that has maligned the world over the last hundred years, there have been some remarkable things achieved. But they are only available to the wealthy, and that is a horrible shame. Without great personal wealth, a person has no chance to ever see two centuries.”
He looked at me. Directly in the eyes. For the first time.
“Would you, Miss Das, be interested in some personal wealth of your own?”
I’d settle for getting my bike out of hock, I thought, but I sat up a little straighter in my chair, shaking off the dullness I had sunk into during his speechifying.
“Six weeks ago, my wife of eighty-three years was murdered in front of my eyes,” he said, as coldly and flatly as he could.
The first thing that struck me was the terrifying thought of being with the same person for eighty-five years. But I was pretty sure that wasn’t the important part.
“I am so sorry.”
“Thank you. She was everything to me, my partner in every way. Beautiful. Intelligent. And strong. Stronger than I could ever hope to be. We held the same ideals, the same goals. We had spent a mortal’s lifetime together working to conquer the unnecessary certainty of death with the power of science.”
This was the part when I was supposed to start playing like I knew what I was doing. Asking questions. “Tell me what happened.”
They had been taking a spring passeggiata, a long, slow, near-ritualistic stroll through Roma’s city center. It was something Italians had been doing with their evenings for centuries, and after fifty years the Kennedys no longer thought of themselves as foreigners. The Senator had worn a white silken suit, and his wife, Amelia, donned a powder blue dress that ran down to her ankles, with a yellow scarf around her neck to cut the evening breeze.
When they emerged from their house, they must have been striking: a vigorous hundred and forty-two year old man and his beautiful hundred and nineteen year old wife. Orso had driven their luxury e-cart to the Piazza Navona, where they always began their night walks. As was tradition, Kennedy had walked with his hands behind his back, the fingers of one gently wrapped around the wrist of the other. Her right arm slipped under his left. She had been having a little trouble with one of her synthetic hips, the Senator noted to me, but he hadn’t minded keeping her steady as they strolled.
“She had been doing the same for my heart, for all of me, for the better part of a century,” he said to reinforce his melancholy. I bit my lip and sighed in an attempt to avoid rolling my eyes.
Strolling had become more popular over the previous decades because of the lack of tourists. Everyone out walking was Roman, or at least lived in the city-state, and understood the need to slow down every once and a while, even during the darkest of times.
The oblong plaza had been a racetrack in the old-old days, but that night the people circled it very, very slowly. The Kennedys stopped at one of Navona’s three famous fountains and reminisced about how beautiful it had been when they first arrived in Roma, when the water was flowing to it. The air was crisply biting, so Caden had draped his coat over Amelia’s shoulders. They sauntered west and out of the piazza, towards what was left of the old Italian Senate building. It had been burned during the Civil War, and the rubble was left as a reminder ever since. While they stood alone, they could hear the bustle of Navona behind them.
“I was just about to ask Amelia what she thought the American Capitol, which had been my office for fifty years, looked like now, when I felt her entire body convulse. I felt her… I looked over, and her eyes were wide open in terror, and blood was dripping from her lips like spittle. I didn’t know what to do. I needed her to tell me what to do…
“As she sunk to her knees, I went with her, feeling that if I let her fall it would be the end. She was mumbling as I lowered her to the ground as gently as I could. Her eyes… they… her eyes they rolled back into the back of her head; her whole body was trembling. Shaking. I didn’t know what to… She would have known what…”
“It was only then that I became aware of the man. Maybe three yards from us. Dressed in a blue suit so shiny it reflected the streetlights. Everything else was white. His bow tie. Slacks, jacket, shoes. And he wore a top hat. Also white. A fucking top hat.
“And he was pointing a pistol at me. One of this place’s stupid laser guns. He stepped forward, and I saw that he was trembling and there was sweat dripping from the tip of his bulbous nose. He looked terrified. He took aim, his finger twitched, there was a flash, and I dove into darkness.”
I hadn’t expected that. “But it didn’t take,” I said.
“I couldn’t have been down for more than a minute. When I woke up, he was gone. Amelia and I were lying in the street. No one had seen what had happened, or, if they had, they hadn’t bothered to come to our aid.
“Amelia was quiet and still. I crawled to her.” He vaguely mimicked the motion with his arms, probably not aware that he was doing it. “I wiped the blood from her lips, sure she was just unconscious. I had survived. The weapon hadn’t been lethal. We had been spared.
“But I couldn’t wake her. All of our efforts to conjure ourselves immortal were dashed upon the cobblestones of Piazza Madama. I looked into her eyes, their emerald hue already starting to fade, for a full minute before I closed them. She was… I couldn’t believe… I couldn’t understand why the gun had taken her life but spared mine. In the moment, I wished it hadn't.”
Hacking a commercial weapon to make dead sapped the batpack pretty quickly, but an average retail piece could easily deliver three or four killing stings, unless the mod was shoddy. It seemed that once he had blown his load killing the woman, he only had enough juice left in the stinger to send the Senator down for a quick nap.
I waited a beat to press on, then asked, “Did he take anything?”
“I gave her a necklace the day we left America. Buried inside a platinum sphere was a sample of her DNA suspended in amber. He ripped it from her neck.”
“Anything else? Money?”
“A few thousand yuros. Our mobis. My pockets were turned out, even the ones that were empty to begin with.”
“So it was a robbery?” I asked.
“In every sense. He stole everything from me.” It turned out his ducts were functional. He reached again for the tin of candy, but changed his mind. I was having a hard time finding sympathy for a woman who managed to fend off death for a hundred and twenty years. My father had made it to fifty-nine. And my brother never got to see his tenth birthday. Maybe Amelia’s extra years were supposed to have been theirs.
He looked at me, wanting me to speak. His gaze drifted to my left hand. “What happened to your finger?” I regarded my makeshift splint. Considering what he was hiring me to do, I was sure the story wouldn’t have upset him. But I didn’t feel like telling it.
“You want me to find this man. And kill him.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Three million.”
I tried to keep down the wave of excit
ement pulsing through me. “That’s a lot of denarii.”
“Three million yuros.”
“Oh.” Denarii were worthless outside the walls of Roma. Yuros spent anywhere and were worth twice their Roman counterparts.
“I am told that is a lot. Is it too much?”
I would have done it for a hundred grand, I thought. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“It’s my first time purchasing mortal retribution. I’m afraid I don’t know the market value.”
“Here’s to uneducated guesses.”
“But there is more to it.”
Chodu...
“I’m not hiring you to kill this man. I am hiring you to avenge my Amelia.”
“I’m not sure I get the difference.”
“I am not so blind as to call this justice. That is not what this is. It is revenge, and I want to feel its satisfaction. I want to know what it’s like to pull the trigger, to watch him fall. I want to tell him why he’s dying, explain to him what he’s taken from me. I want him to know that nothing waits for him beyond this world but annihilation. I want him to fear. I want him to cry. I want him to beg.
“But I am an old man, and this is not a task for me. I don’t think my body could take it. I don’t think my heart or mind could either. Which is why I need you.
“In order to help me, my pain must become your pain. My grief must become your grief. My wrath must become your wrath.
“I don’t need a detective, Miss Das. I’m not looking for a bounty hunter.
“I need a proxy.”
Til the Last Candle Flickers
John R. McGuire
D ave Simms wished the world would just end already.
He didn’t care if it swept away in an enormous tidal wave that washed everything from the land. If a meteor struck his very spot in an extinction level event, he wouldn’t have minded. If the dead clawed their way through filth and earth and wooden coffins into the sunlight with a new desire to eat the living’s flesh, he would sigh in relief.
For then, maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have to put up with people like Steven Kingsley anymore.
“The world’s supposed to end this week, right Dave?” The nasal sound of Steven’s voice boomed across the hunting store, causing Dave to gnash his teeth and clench his jaws.
Though, hunting store wasn’t the correct term for this place. Part hunting shop, part grocery store, and part gas station, the Tilly Mill Shoppe sat at the edge of civilization. Old Highway Twenty no longer roared with traffic the way it might have some thirty years earlier. Like most places just outside the suburban beltline, this area was wilderness for most city-folk. The store would be crowded with customers travelling north to the mountains from Atlanta on Friday evening, their trucks towing a boat, or a camper, or just hunting equipment, each of them convinced they were recapturing some primal essence long since lost to them in their weekly routine of desks, emails, and deadlines. This place represented the last stop before complete anarchy. Somewhere the strong ate the weak. So the store would be very busy nearly every weekend. Filled to the brim with patrons trying to reconnect to that lost animal inside.
Those very reasons summed up why Dave only visited during the week. A trick he used so that he only needed to deal with the regulars. Maybe give a few of the old timers a nod as they lived out the last days of their lives, sitting outside, swapping stories, and counting every car which drove past.
That was, of course, as long as they weren’t giving Dave grief.
Three of them had left their perch outside and followed him in, ever curious about his plans. He’d dealt with their type his whole life. In high school, they were the jocks, the cool kids, and he was the nerd who needed to be pointed at and laughed at for being different. Scrawny, glasses wearing, wimp of a kid, they saw him as weak and it was a moral imperative to ensure that they terrorized him throughout his adolescence.
“Big day for you, huh Dave?” When he made no move to acknowledge the comment, Steven cleared his throat and tried again. “This is the week, right?”
Dave looked up quickly, taking care not to lock eyes with Steven before immediately dipping his head downward again. Under his breath he muttered. “Yes, sir. Noon on Saturday.”
Steven grinned, flashing his yellowed teeth back at Rick and Sam. “You hear that, fellas? We best be saying our prayers if ole’ Dave is to be believed.”
Rick decided to join in on the fun. “You ask me, the apocalypse happened a couple of years ago. Whole world’s going to Hell.”
Somewhere, along the shelves in the back, Dave Simms examined his shopping list a little closer. In front of the squirrely man stood the shelf with various dried packaged food, and he didn’t need to grab anything that might not sit well with his nervous stomach. His eyes darted from shelf to paper and then back again before he made his decision. His arm shot out and proceeded to scoop a dozen packets into his basket. A few more passes up the three aisles the small store offered and Dave sifted through the basket once more before grunting his satisfaction at his haul.
Rick chuckled and reached into the front of his shirt pocket to find the dip can waiting. Using two dirty fingers, he pinched a piece and set it between his front lip and gums. “Well I got a question for you, Dave. How is it that about every three months or so you come in here and stock up on all sorts of,” he grabbed one of the pouches from the shelf, “re-hydro-ized vegetables?”
Sam interjected, “That’s not real food. You know that.”
Dave remained silent, waiting for Rick to finish whatever point his feeble brain was trying to make. He kept his hands at his sides, fighting the urge to clench and unclench them with every word spat his way.
“Every three months you think that the world is going to end, and every three months go by and we’re all still here.”
Dave could tell that a reply was required. “That is true.”
Steven broke into a big grin before pointing to the radio sitting on the counter behind him. “I sometimes listen to those late night shows, you know with the crazy callers about aliens and the like. And they talk about the end of the world, too. Ain’t none of them mentioned this particular time though. Why do you think that is?”
Rick poked him in the chest with the pouch. “So how is it that the world hasn’t ended if you’re so sure that this is the time. Last time was the time. And the time before that.”
Dave did his best to keep his expression neutral. “I only have to be right once.”
“What’s that?” Steven cocked his head and for a moment looked more like a confused dog than a man.
Dave spoke the words a little louder, a little clearer. “I only have to be right one time.”
The three men exchanged looks before they each let out a howl of laughter. Dave couldn’t blame them for their reaction. He took their jabs because he knew that it didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
They weren’t wrong about his previous predictions. A quick bit of math told him that he’d made almost thirty-seven different predictions about the end of the world. He was far past crying wolf. Nobody would believe him, and if he were being honest with himself, he no longer believed it either. Yet he continued to make his weekly visit and monthly predictions.
* * *
The first message came to him through the direct service his work employed. A cryptic line that only gave the score of the next weekend’s Falcons’ game: 24-10. Dave didn’t pay it much mind. To be honest, he wasn’t much of a sports guy, knowing just enough about the goings-on with the various ball related sports to contribute one or two lines of dialogue to any conversation which might have the misfortune to spring up around him. It wasn’t until he arrived to work on Monday morning that he thought about the note again and rechecked the final score: 24-10.
The next Friday afternoon he received the scores for every football game on the weekend slate, college and professional. They all matched… every single one of them. By the end of the weekend, he was watching the Sund
ay night game with a measure of both astonishment and disbelief. He cheered as hard as he could against the picked winner. Even if every other game had been right, somehow he just needed one to be incorrect. It wasn’t possible to have that level of accuracy in such things. But when the final whistle blew and he double and then triple checked the scores, they all matched.
He seriously thought about calling in sick that next day.
* * *
“Hey! You three better stop harassing our customers!” Dave hadn’t noticed the woman behind the counter when he came into the store. The nice thing about small town grocers was that things never changed. The bad thing about small town grocers was that things never changed.
Every week it was the same elderly man, Mr. Jacobs, who sat and listened to the police scanner, a spit cup resting alongside him on a little ledge behind the counter… not quite out of sight of the customers. A heavyset man, Mr. Jacobs never said more than a couple of words in his mixed mumble speak, and Dave was never entirely sure if he actually hated the customers or just didn’t care to engage any of them in conversation.
Dave liked that about Mr. Jacobs.
Yet, here she was, someone new, someone he’d never met before.
“Sorry, Stacy.” Steven cast a dirty look Dave’s way, but led his cronies back out the front of the store.
The woman never took her eyes off the little crew until they were outside. Only then did she turn her attention to Dave. “Sorry about that…”
Dave focused on her. Full face, dark hair that had a little too much product in it, long finger nails, some kind of dark red, and the warmest smile he’d seen since he’d relocated to the mountains.
She took his basket from him and began inspecting his haul on the day. “Do you actually eat this stuff or what?”
Most of the conversations Dave had started much the same way. A bit of disdain dripping from their voice as they tried to wrap their brains around whatever freaky lifestyle they thought he was living. He’d been labeled a Prepper, a Doomsdayer, and a bunch of other names not fit for mixed company. A person tends to become immediately defensive regardless of anything else.
Machina Obscurum Page 7