by PJ Manney
“And how did that work out?” asked Tom sardonically.
Ruth was silent, but her eyelids fluttered angrily.
Tom continued, “Do you suspect any colleagues are involved in conspiracies or projects not directly related to your own work at Prometheus or might manipulate your work for other ends?”
She went very still. “Why should I answer stupid questions? You are an idiot.”
He smiled crookedly. “That may well be. But it’s not for lack of trying.”
“My questions now,” demanded Ruth. Tom inclined his head. “Wh-wh-who are you? Why am I here?”
He smiled. “It’s a little complicated. My name is Thomas Paine, and that’s what you’ll call me. But once, you knew me as Peter Bernhardt. And I’m exacting vengeance. For us both.”
Her pasty complexion went green. “Bist meshugeh?”
“No, I’m not crazy.” He loosened one arm from under the straps. Ruth’s hand twitched violently as he gently moved it to his scalp. “I’d show you the keloids, but I had them lasered away. You can still feel the Cortex 2.0 receiver under the scalp if you know where to touch. I know I don’t look or sound like Peter, but I had to change all that. Or I’d really be dead.”
Her fingers felt the small device under the skin, but it was too far a mental leap, and she yanked her hand back. “Es iz nit geshtoygen un nit gefloygen,” she muttered.
“It’s not bullshit. I would show you some great memory tricks, but the processor’s ruined. And anyway, both you and I know the memory tricks aren’t really impressive. Any good magician could do it. But I can tell you all kinds of things about me, like the music I hear and the dreams I’ve had since the surgery, things only a handful of people in the entire world know about Peter, including you. And . . . I can tell you things about you, like . . . how I sat shiva with you in your house after Nick died. How I had to pester a janitor in the experimental physics department to give me a wooden box for you to sit on in the study. How we covered all the mirrors in your house, including the mirror behind your bedroom door, using your astronomy sheets with the constellations on them . . .”
“You know about my house because you kidnapped me!”
“But how would I know about your parents? Like how your mother always complained I was too thin? If she made me eat any more stuffed cabbage, I thought I’d explode. Carter wouldn’t touch it, and Amanda didn’t eat meat. And you know me. Poor boy can’t let food go to waste. And her kreplachs! Jesus, you could crush a toe if you dropped one! Forget about the freshman fifteen, I had the grad twenty. Lucky you forgot to eat, otherwise you’d have been a porker.”
Tears formed in Ruth’s eyes. She searched the strange man’s face for signs of Peter, but couldn’t find him. “Are you a g-g-g-ghost?”
“I thought you and Nick didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“Got in himmel . . .” she gasped. There it was in her eyes: stunned belief. In him. He took off the restraints. Then he handed her Snoopy. She clutched the ragged, graying dog to her breast. It was the only thing he’d ever seen her hug before, except her father.
“You left me . . . You swore you wouldn’t,” she said, rocking side to side with Snoopy. She could never have hugged the man, so she squeezed the stuffing out of the toy.
“I know, Ruthie. I missed you, too.”
“Where did I go?”
“You left a note. First Chang’s death, then mine. You refused to believe we were guilty. You were despondent over our deaths and certain whoever got us was messing with you, too. You didn’t know what to believe anymore, what to do, and you were all alone with no one to talk to and it just wasn’t worth going on.”
“How did you know?” she whispered.
“Because I know you.”
“All except the last part. I would never kill myself.”
“No one else knows that.”
“How did I die?”
“Golden Gate. Neap tide. My friend was hooked to two elastic lines attached to the bridge, set a dozen yards apart hours before. Like double-cord bungee jumping, except at the bottom she unclipped from the drop line to swing across to the ascender line. Then her mercenaries popped the drop line off by remote control. She stripped off your costume in midair, dropped it in a weighted bag into the bay, and came up in exercise clothes. She packed up the ascender, her helpers drove onto the bridge, picked her up, and no one noticed, everyone was so preoccupied with looking at the spot they last saw you.”
“Golden Gate. Such a cliché,” she sighed. “This friend . . . woman . . . she works for the circus?”
Tom smiled. “No, but Talia does have an unusual résumé.”
Ruth frowned. “You . . . have feelings for this Talia?”
Tom cocked an eyebrow. “Ruth . . .”
Ruth tried to purse her lips, but they twitched like a toddler practicing kisses. “Why vengeance for both? Against whom?”
“Carter killed my father and tried to kill me. And he murdered Nick.”
She rocked more strenuously. So he patiently told her everything. All the pieces of the Phoenix Club’s plans to use their technology and Carter’s deceit fit together.
“Carter admitted it. Brant even teased him about it. And given everything I experienced, I understand their motives. Carter joined the club a year before Nick died. And Carter’s first company? That he supposedly self-financed, but was actually cofinanced by the club? It was based on carbon nanotubes for prosthetics connections. It was Nick’s tech for DARPA, the one he wouldn’t let you work on. The club took it, like they took mine. And a favorite method of club assassination is the fake embolism, especially for men of a certain age. That was Nick.”
Ruth rocked vigorously to keep from crying. “No heart disease in his family. He had the Ashkenazi longevity gene. With the CETP W variant. I never believed he died that way. But I had no data to deny it.”
“Genius and longevity weren’t enough to protect him. And then there’s Amanda . . .”
Ruth’s eyes narrowed.
“Amanda and Carter are in love and living together,” continued Tom. “She was in on it, maybe from the beginning.”
Every spasm revealed her madly whirling cogs thinking they could finally be together. Then she spat, “I knew! She was bad news! Paigeren zol sei!”
“They won’t drop dead on their own, Ruthie. I need your help. We have to stop them. Then kill them.”
It was as though he spoke Swahili. If for a moment she thought this strange man was Peter, she had a harder time imagining it now. Her shaking head melded into her spasmodic twitching.
“Why not?” he asked.
“I cannot . . . k-kill. My family. We know what it is. To be hunted. To flee your home. To be hated. Just for your beliefs. That you are wished dead.”
“But you are dead, Ruthie. You’ll have to live underground; you can’t go back to your old life . . .”
This brought tears to her eyes. “Death would be better.”
“But you just said . . .”
“I would never end the life I was leading. As unhappy as I was. But you did. Without permission. I don’t want a new life.”
Tom reached into his breast pocket and pulled out two clamped microscope slides, sandwiching a smear of dried blood. He handed the proof of their covenant to her.
“First, I gave you my work. And then my brain. Now I’m offering my life.”
Her only response was the shaking of the mattress from her whole-body vibrations.
He sighed. “I guess you don’t care if I say ‘intravascular nanowire neural enhancement system’?”
She clutched the slides so hard, he was afraid the glass would shatter. “A broch tzu dir!”
“I’m already cursed, Ruthie. You can’t make it worse.”
Tears flowed as her face twisted in a churlish grin. “P-p-permanent? And biocompatible polymers? You’ll have problems. With increased platelet adhesion. From long-term blood flow turbulence . . .”
He might have destroyed her li
fe, but she couldn’t resist the challenge. And they both knew it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Their new lab was a far cry from Prometheus’s deep-pocket setup, but it sufficed. Contained within only four windowless rooms onboard a docked ship, one room housed the computing power, with multiple server towers and a seawater cooling system. Another contained an operating theater, with the basics that a cardiac or neurosurgeon might need, including a small fMRI. The third was a small nanofabricator. Talia and her gang stole the “nanofabber” that Ruth heard was hidden in a Stanford basement from government confiscation. Since it was contraband, the university would never report it missing for fear of government penalties. They used it to make bespoke parts. Any large-scale fabrication of wires or other standard nanoparts were purchased from Chinese manufacturers with no interest in tipping off the US government, sent through multiple vendors and addresses to different drop sites and picked up by different mercenary messengers. Ruth and Tom could manufacture the rest.
The fourth room was a tiny studio apartment for Ruth, where Tom, Talia, and a staff provided her with three meals a day, plus a fridge full of whatever she wanted, which usually meant her precious G-3 elixir and NutrinoBars. It suited her. She had few interruptions and could concentrate on taking her R&D to the next level. She claimed she was content, as long as she had unlimited encrypted-anonymous wireless access to any intravascular nanowire neural enhancement research she wanted.
In these small rooms, Tom and Ruth would build improved cybernetic implants that would take him far beyond what Peter Bernhardt created at Prometheus Industries and make him truly more than human.
The new-and-improved Cortex 3.0 would miniaturize the memory system further and make it invisible to the naked eye. Everything would be internal to the body, including the computer processor. It would also be completely integrated to his brain, not just a select area, allowing control not only of thought, but also of brain and body processes. And he’d have Wi-Fi. Building it entailed manipulating electrically conductive needles under a scanning tunneling microscope, a Mini Cooper–sized steel-tubed and steel-bolted machine that looked like a gizmo from Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.
Hunched in front of the microscope monitor for hours manipulating nanosoldering guns and poking at nanocircuits, his back ached, but Tom couldn’t wait to finish and plug back in. Since his supposed death, half his brain was missing.
After a few weeks, the circuits were in place, and he hooked up the Cortex 3.0 to the computer for program downloading and diagnostics. Dr. Who found them the world’s greatest cracker, for whom no computer system was inviolate. The cracker broke out all the data and programming from Prometheus under the guise of a scheduled system backup, revealing Prometheus’s progress in their absence. The company’s Cortex 2.0 algorithm development had slowed. Any new ideas initiated by Peter Bernhardt or Ruth, like the bloodstream nanobots, were dead. Carter held the company to his original plan, with no innovations. Tom was consoled by the fact that he and Ruth weren’t as expendable an intellectual resource as the club had hoped.
The cracker broke into IBM and released their Blue Gene brain modeling for Tom and Ruth’s perusal. It was either a demonstration of the cracker’s genius, since IBM was legendarily impenetrable, or her access to a quantum computer capable of running Shor’s algorithm, which supposedly could beat any encryption, except perhaps quantum encryption itself. But that seemed unlikely, since quantum computing was still struggling in its cradle. The third possibility was she, or a compatriot, worked for IBM. Ruth developed an intellectual crush and, puzzling over her identity, named her Fräuline Ethische, meaning “Miss Ethical” or “Miss White Hat”—a good-guy hacker, as opposed to a “Black Hat”—a bad-guy hacker. She was so brilliant, Ruth didn’t care if she was white hat or black hat, but she was sure she was a Russian Jew. No one else could be so smart. And she spoke Russian and Yiddish. And German, English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian. And a smattering of Mandarin.
Tom believed she wasn’t black hat or white. She was Miss Gray Hat. He tolerated the mystery because their digital relationship was so fruitful, but was aware if she was buyable by them, she was buyable by others. Just like Chang.
Then one day, Talia appeared at the clean room’s glass door and pointed at the handsome bald man standing next to her, carrying a doctor’s bag. It was the first time Tom had seen him without a lab coat.
Dr. Steven Carbone shifted nervously opposite Tom at a small dining table in Ruth’s room, transformed into a lounge with her Murphy bed tucked away for the day. Ruth sat on one end of a small sofa, catching her daily dose of Vitamin D under a standing sun lamp. She often stared twitchily at Talia next to her, unable to parse out the code behind her and Tom’s mutual attraction.
Talia trembled almost as much as Ruth, her eyes flicking between the two men who knew her better than anyone else.
The doctor finished hovering over Tom, checking surgery sites, taking vital signs, and asking questions about his pulmonary health, which was weakened from the ARDS. Satisfied his patient had healed remarkably well considering all he’d been through, he sat back in a chair and smiled.
That’s when Tom dropped the bombshell.
“You’re crazy,” said Steve.
Tom motioned toward Ruth. “She says that to me all the time. Sounds more insulting in Yiddish.”
“How could you think I’d just take an indefinite leave of absence to work for you? For . . . enhancement?” Steve spit the last word like a profanity.
“For experimentation,” Tom corrected. “And it’s ten million dollars. In return, you bone up on catheterization, cardiac and brain surgery, and interventional neuroradiology. We can teach you the rest.”
“If you’re here, Steve,” said Talia, “you can make sure Tom doesn’t go too far. What he’s doing is . . . evolutionary, and he needs a balanced, insightful person to gauge just how far the upgrades should go. It’s because you’re not gung ho like them that you’re the right man for the job.”
“I am not g-g-g-gung . . .” insisted Ruth.
“If I cared about money,” interrupted Steve as he jerked his thumb at Talia, “I’d have taken hers long ago. You’re asking me to throw my Hippocratic Oath out the window. Who do you think I am?”
Tom leaned forward. “I think you’re someone who realizes that, sometimes, you need to stop bad people before they destroy more lives. You were a victim when they took the love of your life from you, too. You’ve been marching in Talia’s army for a long time.”
“I might kill you!” said Steve. “Maybe you can forget about ‘Do no harm,’ but I can’t.”
“I’ve worked the stroke problem out,” insisted Tom. “And there aren’t other risks.”
Ruth twitched uncontrollably. “A mentsh tracht und Gott lacht,” she muttered, as her legs shook.
Steve appraised her tremors with a professional eye. “How long have you had that?”
She shrugged as cheek muscles fluttered. Tom shook his head in amusement. “Oh, believe me, she’s fine.”
“What did you say before?” Steve asked her.
“I said,” replied Ruth, “ ‘a m-man plans and God laughs.’ And this man? God’s hysterical.”
“You’re not helping, Ruthie,” Tom sighed.
“Steve, if you just hung around more, you’d see they’ve come up with a great idea,” insisted Talia. “Not only to do what we need it to, but to cure so many people of other problems . . .”
“Talia, you can’t honestly tell me that you think this is necessary . . .” Steve said.
Tom interrupted, “These are some of the smartest, most savvy men in the world. They will be using my brain prosthetics to control the minds of their enemies. And my bots pass the blood-brain barrier. They could use them for brainwashing or killing their enemies on a vast scale. There is no one else but me to stop them—and I’m willing to die trying. The only way to do that is to get inside: join their ranks and become a trusted companion alone on
their turf. As a human ‘army of one,’ I’ll fail. I must take all our compatriots and all available human knowledge in with me, virtually, so I need the maximum amount of communication, data retrieval, and cognitive power available 24/7, instantly and secretly, or I’m dead. And so are all of you if I’m captured.”
“Even if you succeed, which I doubt, then what happens?” His head kept shaking like a metronome. “You know how crazy you sound? Like two comic book characters . . . Brainiac and the Incredible Disappearing Girl. Do the two of you live happily ever after, on your secret island hideout, after you nuke the bad guys?”
Talia’s jaw dropped. “Is that your problem?”
“And he looks just like your father! Why did I let you do that?”
“You didn’t ‘let’ me.” Her eyes flashed in anger. “Maybe you’re not the person for the job . . .”
“Why, because I know you too well?” barked Steve.
Talia prepared for war, but Tom cut her off, right in Steve’s face. “You do an awful lot of favors for Talia. Saving my life was a huge risk. I’m very grateful. You could have turned me in at any time. Or just ignored the situation. But you didn’t.”
“I knew what you both were up against. It wasn’t right . . .” mumbled Steve.
“But you blame yourself for what happened to Talia when you were together, don’t you? Do you think if you had to do it over, you could have stopped her before she self-destructed, before it all fell apart?”
Steve twisted in his chair. “Yes! Well . . . I don’t know.”
“You feel guilty. Wish you had been more of a man of action? Now’s your chance to play that heroic role . . .”
Ruth snorted at Tom. “You should talk . . .”
Tom drove on. “You couldn’t help her before, and you lost the woman you loved.”
Steve looked aghast. But didn’t argue.
Talia squirmed. “Tom, stop it.”
“Don’t believe mein Übermensch,” said Ruth to Steve. “This isn’t nobility of innovation. Or self-sacrifice against evil. T-Tom hates the weak man he once was. He blames himself. He thinks if he is no longer just human, he will overcome his enemies. And his p-past. This will make it all better.”