by Matt Ruff
“If he was a bad monkey, shouldn’t I have taken care of him?”
“Well, if you’d bothered to check the back of your vehicle for stowaways, we would have had time to discuss that. As it was, it just seemed simpler to handle him myself. Plus I really was feeling pretty cranky. You hungry?”
Besides the printing press and bindery, the building had a full industrial kitchen. I sat at a stainless-steel counter making small talk while Wise cooked me breakfast.
“So how’d you end up a Clown?” I asked him. “I mean, axwork aside, you seem like a normal guy.”
“Don’t let the haircut fool you,” Wise said. “I was originally in intel, but when I came out here to start up the Press, the head of the Scary Clowns made me an offer.”
“Panopticon to Clown seems like a popular career path. Did you know—”
“Gacy?” Wise shook his head. “Before my time.”
“What about a guy named Dixon? You ever cross paths with him?”
“You could say so. I was his Probate officer.”
“You trained Dixon?…So does that mean you were in Malfeasance?”
“No, regular Panopticon. Dixon was too at first, but he was bucking for a Malfie post from day one.”
“Did you like him?”
“He was a good student. A little overzealous, maybe. Why, what’s he to you?”
“He’s running my background check.”
Wise laughed. “I bet that’s fun.”
“Thrilling. Listen, maybe you can explain something to me: when Dixon called me in for an interview, I had to wear this wristband…” I described it to him.
“Sounds like a shibboleth device,” Wise said.
“What’s a shibboleth?”
“It’s from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. The men of Gilead went to war against the men of Ephraim, and the Ephraimites got slaughtered. When the survivors tried to pass themselves off as members of another tribe, their accents gave them away: Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound, so when they said the word ‘Shibboleth,’ it came out ‘Sibboleth.’”
“And a shibboleth device…?”
“Same basic idea. It’s a tool for sorting good monkeys from bad monkeys.”
“By the way they talk?”
“By the way they feel. The device tests for inappropriate emotional responses. Like, someone tells you your mother died, and you’re happy instead of sad. Or someone makes you talk about this shameful thing you did, only you’re not ashamed.” He laughed again. “You look worried. Don’t be. I don’t know what went on between you and Dixon, but if he had any serious doubts about you, you wouldn’t be here. This operation’s too important.”
“What is the operation, anyway?”
He handed me a silver medical bracelet like the kind epileptics wear. On one side was a cluster of Egyptian hieroglyphs over the legend OZYMANDIAS LLC. On the other side was an inscription:
in case of death
keep body cool & call
1-800-EXTROPY
for further instructions
—————————
$50,000 cash reward
“You know what cryogenics is?” Wise asked.
“Sure. It’s where they put you on ice until doctors can invent a cure for whatever killed you. I didn’t know there was a rewards program, though.”
“That’s the deluxe version. The goal is to get the cadaver into cryostasis as quickly as possible, to minimize postmortem decay.”
“Let me guess: this is one of those clever-sounding ideas that turns out not to be.”
“There is a contradiction,” said Wise, “between wanting to live forever, and offering a cash bounty for the discovery of your corpse.” He passed me a stack of what looked like baseball cards. But the pictures were of both men and women, and the stats on the back weren’t sports-related. “These are all the customers of the Ozymandias Corporation who’ve died within the past six months.”
I counted thirteen cards. “How big is their client list?”
“Not that big. Going by the average of previous six-month periods, there should be two cards in that stack at most.”
“So someone’s killing them off for the bounty money…But wouldn’t that be kind of hard to get away with? I mean, you’d think the company would get suspicious when the same person kept claiming all the rewards.”
“The bodies were all discovered by different people,” Wise said, “and there’s no obvious connection between any of the discoverers. But we believe a connection exists.”
“So it’s an organized racket? Murder for profit?”
“Profit, and one other motive.”
“What?”
“Evil. We believe the killers’ ultimate goal—after making as much money as possible—is to attract the attention of the police.”
“Aren’t the police already paying attention?”
“Not yet. But their involvement is inevitable if the deaths continue at this rate—and the first thing they’ll do when they launch their investigation is order an autopsy of all the bodies.”
I thought about it. “Autopsies mean thawing them out…”
“Thawing them out, and cutting them up.”
“So not only are they dead before their time, they lose their shot at resurrection.”
“You find that amusing?”
“Well no, I think it’s horrible, but…come on. The whole cryogenics thing is bullshit anyway, right?”
“Yeah, like organ transplants. Or cloning.”
“OK,” I said, not wanting to argue the point, “OK, back up, I still don’t understand why the police aren’t already investigating this. If thirteen people were murdered—”
“You didn’t look closely enough at the stats.”
I shuffled through the cards again. “Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: heart attack…Cause of death: stroke…Cause of death: heart attack…” I looked up. “Are you guys missing an NC gun?”
“Along with its owner.” He laid one more card on the counter.
“Jacob Carlton.”
“Former Good Samaritan, transferred to Bad Monkeys in 1999. He disappeared last June during an operation in Reno. Originally the thinking was he’d been taken out by the guy he was hunting, but now it looks like there’s another explanation.”
“So how do we find him?”
“We believe Carlton has taken a job inside the Ozymandias Corporation. Panopticon’s been trying to bug their headquarters for weeks, but the surveillance equipment keeps malfunctioning. You and I are going to go in there today, posing as clients.”
The Ozymandias facility was another forty miles out in the desert. “If they’re in such a hurry to freeze people,” I asked, as we drove across the wasteland, “wouldn’t it make more sense to build the place in town?”
“Zoning regulations,” Wise said vaguely.
“They have those in Vegas?”
The first sign we were getting close was a shimmer of color on the horizon. I thought it was a heat mirage, but within another mile the shimmer had resolved itself into a green circle with a white building at its center.
A big cargo helicopter came screaming overhead as we passed through the gardens of Ozymandias to the visitor parking lot. The helicopter touched down just east of the building, and a team of guys in moon suits came running to unload a silver body bag and hustle it inside.
“OK, so what’s our cover?”
“We’re married,” said Wise. He handed me a ring. “Mr. and Mrs. Doe.”
“Jane Doe? Yeah, that’s not suspicious.”
“Don’t worry about it. When we get inside, I’ll be doing the talking. You just nod your head and keep your eyes peeled for Carlton.” He opened the glove compartment and brought out my NC gun. “One more thing, we’d like to get him alive if we can.”
“No problem.” I set the gun’s dial to NS, narcoleptic seizure.
Coming in the building we got hit with a blast of arctic air, l
ike the company wanted to let us know right away it could deliver. We went to the reception desk, where a woman in four layers of wool printed us badges and told us a Dr. Ogilvy would be right with us.
Ogilvy reminded me of Ganesh. There wasn’t much of a physical resemblance—except that he was small, and looked like he’d be easy to beat up—but he had a nervousness about him, and also a sadness, like this wasn’t the career he’d planned on having. Once he’d introduced himself and got his game face on, though, he was pretty peppy. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Doe, thank you so much for coming out here today! Let’s go back to my office and talk about what Ozymandias can do for you!”
Ogilvy’s office had a big bay window that looked out on an acre of fruit trees and flower bushes. The greenbelt was shot through with rainbows from an automated sprinkler system, and if I’d had a tab of acid I could have stared at it all day. But Ogilvy didn’t offer us any drugs, just comfy chairs and tea. Then he got down to business: “I understand you’re interested in purchasing one of our life-extension plans.”
I must have looked like I was going to make a crack, because Wise laid a hand on my arm before answering, “Yes.”
“And will this be for both of you, or…?”
“Neither,” Wise said.
“Neither.” Ogilvy’s eyebrows went up and down a few times. “Is it a gift, then? We do have gift packages, it’s actually fairly common, or well, not common, but…For the friend who has everything, or a valued employee about to retire…”
“It’s for our son.”
“Oh! Oh, I see. Your son…?”
“Philip.”
“I see. And how old is Philip?”
“He’s ten.”
“And is he…ill?”
“He was in an accident. He was playing outside, and his sister was supposed to be watching him, but…Well, you know how kids are. She got distracted.”
“Oh, how terrible.”
“It’s not her fault, really. She should never have been given that responsibility. If anyone’s to blame, it’s my wife and I.”
“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “No, don’t think that way! These things, you know, they just happen sometimes.”
“Anyway, Phil’s in the hospital now, in intensive care, and we’re praying that he’ll pull through, but if he doesn’t…We want to be ready.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“So what we’d like,” Wise concluded, “is to have a look around your facility, here, and maybe meet some of your people…”
“Of course! I’d be happy to give you a tour right now! Let’s—” The phone rang, and Dr. Ogilvy started. “Oh dear! I’m sorry…” Peering closer at the blinking light that accompanied the ringing: “Hmm, line three, I’m sorry, you know I really should take this…Would you mind if—”
“It’s fine,” I said, getting up. “We’ll wait for you outside.”
I practically dragged Wise from the room. As soon as we were out the door, I lit into him: “What the hell was that about?”
“What was what about?”
“Our son Phil? Who had an accident? While his sister was watching him?”
Wise was blank-faced. “I have no idea what’s eating you. Everything I said in there was part of a script. I’m just following it.”
“What script?”
“The one Cost-Benefits gave me for this op. You think I make this stuff up as I go along?”
“Who in Cost-Benefits—”
“All right then!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Are we ready for the tour?”
We headed down the hall towards our first stop, with me still staring daggers at Wise. Meanwhile Ogilvy, either because he’d picked up on the tension or because it was part of his standard sales pitch, launched into a rambling explanation of the company name: “It’s from the poem by Percy Shelley.”
“Ozymandias, King of Kings,” said Wise. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”
“Yes! That’s the one. And of course, ‘my works,’ that’s meant to be ironic, since as the poem goes on to say, there’s actually nothing left of those works, other than the inscription that brags about them. Which, given what we do here, may seem like a strange allusion to be making. But you see, there’s actually a double irony, because it turns out Shelley picked on the wrong king. At the time he was writing, 1817, I believe, Egyptology hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, so one pharaoh was as obscure as any other. Today, though, thanks to science, things are very different. Ozymandias—aka Ramses the Great—is not only one of the most famous rulers in history, but we know, contrary to what Shelley wrote, that a lot of his works did survive.”
“So what’s the point?” I interrupted, not wanting to fall asleep before I had a chance to finish grilling Wise. “Don’t speak too soon?”
“Exactly!” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Exactly. Don’t speak too soon! And we believe a similar caution applies to what we’re doing here. Our industry, Mrs. Doe, perhaps I don’t have to tell you this, but it has its share of skeptics. Some people, I won’t call them ignorant, but some…uninformed people, think cryogenics is, well—”
“A load of crap?”
“—a fantasy. An optimist’s pipe dream…But the same thing has been said about a lot of scientific advances.”
“Like organ transplants,” I said. “Or cloning.”
“Yes! Yes! You do understand. What one generation mocks, the next takes for granted. And I promise you,
Mrs. Doe—we’ll pray for your son, of course we will, and we’ll hope for the best—but even if the worst happens, he won’t be lost forever. I guarantee, we will bring Phil back…And here we are!”
We’d come to a security door marked CRYOSTASIS A. Ogilvy swiped a keycard through a reader on the wall and the door slid open, hitting us with another blast of cold air.
I stepped inside, expecting a morgue-type setup, bodies filed away in lockers along the wall. Instead, Ozymandias’ clients were arranged on freestanding racks, encased in tall metal cylinders like giant thermoses—what Dr. Ogilvy called “cryopods.” There were six pods to a rack. They hung upright, but could swivel to a horizontal position for loading and unloading. At the far end of the room, a team of moon-suit guys—probably the same ones we’d seen on the helicopter pad—had just cranked a pod into the loading position; white vapor boiled out of it as they removed the end cap.
One series of racks held smaller containers, each about a third the size of a normal cryopod. I said: “Please tell me those aren’t babies.”
“Oh no,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Children are kept in Cryostasis B. This is an adults-only chamber. Those are heads. The, uh, budget option,” he explained, wincing a little. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand—once we have the means to reanimate a dead body, growing an entirely new one shouldn’t be much harder. Personally, though, I’d rather not present a revival team with any unnecessary challenges.”
Cryostasis B was almost identical to Cryostasis A, except that the racks were spaced farther apart to make room for padded benches. “For visitors,” Dr. Ogilvy explained. “Friends and loved ones of our adult clients are welcome to visit at any time as well, but for reasons I’m sure you can appreciate, visits here in the nursery are much more common. Incidentally, purchase of a Platinum Lazarus or higher-premium plan entitles you to unlimited shuttle service to and from McCarran Airport…”
Figuring it might blow our cover if I slugged him, I stepped away while Ogilvy continued his pitch. I went over to the nearest rack and pretended to examine one of the pods.
A clanging noise caught my attention. I leaned sideways and looked around the rack to where a maintenance hatch had just opened in the floor. Another moon-suit guy climbed up out of it. As he turned to drop the hatch cover back in place, I saw his face.
Jacob Carlton.
“Mrs. Doe?” Dr. Ogilvy said. “I was just telling your husband something that I think you—”
“Be with you in a minute!” I drew my NC gun and stepped qu
ickly around the rack, but Carlton had vanished.
“Jane?” said Wise. “What is it?”
A loud boom! from beneath the floor shook the pods in their racks. The lights flickered, and the steady hum of air-conditioning and refrigeration units gave way to a sick stutter.
“It’s you-know-who!” I called to Wise. “I think he just sabotaged the electricity!”
“What?” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Oh no, sabotage is impossible here, we have excellent security! And the power system has two backup generators.”
On cue, a second explosion rocked the building. An alarm sounded.
“Oh dear,” said Dr. Ogilvy. “Perhaps we’d better—urk!”
“Wise?” Gun at the ready, I stepped back around the rack and saw the doctor lying facedown on the floor. Wise, who’d dived for cover behind a batch of frozen heads, mouthed the words Over there and pointed.
I made my way from rack to rack towards Carlton’s hiding place. I was nearly there when a third explosion knocked out the last of the power. In the seconds of pitch-blackness that followed, I heard running footsteps.
Battery-operated safety lights came on. I ducked past the last rack in time to see an emergency-exit door swinging closed. I shouted to Wise, “I’m going after him,” but when I reached the door I paused to look back. The room was already noticeably warmer, and wisps of vapor were curling off the cryopods.
I went through the door. A twisting corridor led me back out to the main hallway, where I found two more bodies on the ground, another doctor and a security guard. The guard had gone down swinging, a nightstick still clutched tightly in his fist. Right next to him on the floor, nearly invisible in the amber glow of the safety lights, was an orange pistol.
I tucked Carlton’s NC gun in my waistband and followed the signs to the nearest exit. Carlton was stuck there, his final escape from the building blocked by a set of automatic doors that were no longer automatic. You’re supposed to be able to slide those things open manually, but it helps to have both hands, and Carlton’s right arm hung limp, a casualty of the guard’s nightstick. Now he’d pulled out a club of his own—a monkey wrench—and was using it to bash out the door glass. I snuck up behind him and waited until he’d removed enough of the glass to give me a clear field of fire. Then I put him to sleep.