Plotkin is surprised to hear himself humming a forgotten old tune by an American rock group from the 1970s and ’80s called Pere Ubu: I don’t need a cure, don’t need a cure, need a final solution…. Just like his recollection of the Pink Floyd song title in the robotaxi during the trip from the train station to the hotel, this intimate knowledge of a song forgotten for decades, clearly stored in his memory, makes him think that at least a small part of his original personality must have been retained in this body. Yet he feels no particular attraction to music, other than perhaps a bit of Russian classical or jazz, or even a little mainstream rock—the same as everyone else. His fundamental personality itself seems to have been altered.
Discovery has left a fiery trail in the sky that he almost wishes would descend to wreak havoc on the Earth. He rereads the phrase from Saint Luke, sent by his unconscious and scrawled on a cellulose sheet attached to the digital network of the wall near the window. He does not remember knowing anything about the Gospels—or if he did, it was very little. Between dwindling Communism, post-Soviet neocapitalism, and the UHU’s early prohibition of “intolerant” religions, and not counting what he knows of his previous activities, it is difficult to explain this unexpected appearance in his brain of a phrase from the Bible.
Something has malfunctioned in the instructional neurosoftware, and it is because something else has taken its place. Something parasitical. Something with an unknown objective.
He has no idea what this might really mean, but it seems very likely that things are not all going to go as planned.
> HUMAN TERMINATION SYSTEM
The first sign is the dream. The terminal dream. The original dream. The one that happened once and has simply continued ever since, all the other times, in all the other dreams. The one that accompanies all his crimes. The monadic dream of his new memory, the one that will, with two or three flashes, illuminate a few sad lengths of the great black labyrinth that occupies his conscience—that is his conscience, his being, whatever that is, or will become. His returning memory might prove to be a disaster. It is naturally disposed to be one. And when the Dream of his first identity comes tonight, assailing his sleep with a reality more real than any false digital universe or implanted memory, the secret memory of his personality, the black box of his past as a killer, he knows the real sense of the word disaster. The dream fills up an entire part of his memory, one meant to confine his existence to what he is. There can be no doubt of that.
And what he is, is this: a Human Termination System. An HTS.
He is an HTS. A T-Excess, in corporate-speak.
He is sitting with a guy named Van Halen, sipping martinis at a tiki bar somewhere in Australia. The bar is shadowed by a carbon antiradiation dome; the sky is too blue not to be dangerous. The sun is unbearable. They wear Hawaiian shirts of Fruit of the Loom cloned antiradiation cotton, Australian army shorts, retro luminous sandals, and anti-UV Ray-Bans. Both men are covered with a disposable, translucent, protective film that has been in use all over the southern hemisphere for the past twenty years. Touristus universalis.
The guy called Van Halen talks to Sergei in Dutch to avoid being understood by the crowd of vacationers around them. Plotkin’s neurolinguistic center, a new technology at the time, works perfectly; it is as if he grew up in Amsterdam. He and Van Halen go over some important details of the plan. How to blow up the room located below the one where the target is staying?
More precisely, how to make sure that the sensors with which the target has filled his suite don’t detect the electronic microimpulse that controls the bomb?
They have already decided on the exact placement of the explosives: in the center of the ceiling. They have determined how they will illegally enter the room for exactly five minutes by the clock. They have chosen the type of explosives they will use—an antitank blasting mine. The modus operandi is set. Death is determinism.
Hidden in the ceiling behind an optical encryption screen, the bomb—made in China—buried beneath the floor of the space above, will unleash its deadly energy vertically. Its lethal contents, a combination of Ultrane aerosol gas and pulverized carbon silica, will be ignited by a second explosive blast. Any organic or inorganic material within forty cubic meters of the bomb when it goes off will be immediately reduced to ashes. After the time switch is activated, the mine will be set off the moment the target passes above it. The optical encryption console attached to the bomb will not only hide it from view, it will also ensure, thanks to a battery of specialized sensors, that it is indeed their target and no one else who trips the switch. It would be unacceptable to set off the device because of a pet, a hotel chambermaid whether human or android, or a hapless passerby. They are looking to blow the target’s head off and no one else’s.
They might have several hours or a handful of minutes to wait before the hit goes down. The neuroencryption system provided for this day by their backers, via a system of microsatellites, is not working too well. Their tests have shown its bandwidth to be quite limited. To make sure the profiling console works correctly, they have been forced to restrict the usage time and quality of the optical invisibility screen. Given his business, the German tourist might very well have an undetectable bio-implanted anticop scanner. They have no way of predicting his haphazard comings and goings. They have not yet figured out how they will get rid of him temporarily; that is one of the things they are discussing now.
It’s the temporarily part that is the problem, actually. Temporarily, or permanently?
Plotkin thinks they should play it cool. No real reason to heap one more crime on the pile; it will be too much extra work to keep ahead of the police and kill the target, who is worth 100,000 Pan-Am dollars—of the time—to each of them.
Of what time? What year is he remembering? The dream truly is a black box of memory. His black box.
Input/Output. And in the shadows, reality.
Here, everything is recorded. He knows it is a few years after the end of the Second American Civil War. They work clandestinely for a secret agency of what is left of the American federal government. All of the thirteen original colonies of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, except for what is now Washington, D.C., are in Islamic hands. They are in Sydney to kill the young president and CEO of a free software company whose sales are skyrocketing across southern Asia and Oceania. The target is an Australian born with the name Sebastian Driscoll, thirty-two years old according to his birth certificate and a convert to Salafist Islam; he now calls himself Abdulaziz Ibrahim. A large part of his personal fortune, via various foundations and smoke-screen companies, finances Islamist groups, particularly those operating in Indonesia and Malaysia, where war with the Philippines, Thailand, and Sri Lanka is raging. He also supports the Islamic Caliphate of America, which emerged from the dissolution of the United States and occupies many territories, counties, and municipalities in what was once the Union.
They are there to kill the son of a bitch. “And I don’t care if we have to knock off that pain-in-the-ass German tourist to do it,” says Van Halen.
The pain-in-the-ass German tourist is a typical German tourist, born in the twentieth century, with at least five or six trans-G rejuvenation cures under his belt. He frequents Turkish baths, massage parlors, and especially the red-light districts, for visits to hookers of any sex. He is staying in the room just below the target’s. The room where they need to put the bomb.
They’ve been following him for days, the stupid Kraut, and neither Plotkin nor Van Halen is about to be carried away by waves of compassion and pity. Plotkin just wants to avoid making a big mistake—like committing another crime. “I had to kill a bastard just like him in Brazil,” Van Halen assures him. “Just before the Second American Civil War. A French pedophile, you know, serial rapist, violent asshole, with a custom-built personal neuroencryption mask and a top-of-the-line genetic depersonalization kit. He never left any identifying marks on his victims when he killed them, and even if he didn’t ki
ll them they couldn’t recognize him. It was the family of one of the little girls he’d killed and mutilated that hired me, through a Chilean detective agency. All I had was a three-shot magnetic dart gun—you know, the little pseudometallic composite Glock Tridents. Undetectable by the cheap security systems at places like the fuckpad Dupont always went to, somewhere in Bahia, full of prepubescent girls. So I went out there. They welcomed me politely; I asked to see the second-floor girls and slapped five hundred dollars on the desk. They showed me upstairs like I was a fucking Saudi prince. There were a bunch of young girls waiting up there, all sitting on chairs around a big circular room with a multiscreen showing porno movies of themselves in action, with the clients’ faces and voices scrambled.
“I told one of the girls I’d take her while I waited for number 13, who was busy sucking off the target, fucking redneck. So this kid and I go to her room, and I hit her right in the throat with a high-speed dart. Then I went into the other one’s room. I killed the fat bastard with one dart in the spinal cord and another in the eye, and then I told the girl I was sorry that I probably wouldn’t be back to fuck her later, and that she’d better shut up if she didn’t want to end up like the other little whore in the room next door. I’d already reloaded the Trident; I just needed her to stay still for a second so I could fire. She opened her mouth when I pointed the gun at her, and a dart hit her right in the jaw. I finished her off with a second dart in the scruff of the neck, and unloaded the last one in the pedophile’s skull. Mission accomplished. So I left. I’d asked a couple of young hackers from the Caracas barrios to break into the fuckpad’s security camera system for half an hour, using a satellite that belonged to my backers. They punched in a few false sequences that made the cameras turn back and forth on a loop. A car was waiting for me on a quiet side street, about ten minutes’walk away. Then on the roof of the hotel there was a vertical-takeoff Chrysler. They had some bucks, my backers. The same night I was on the last flight from São Paulo to Chile; I’d used an ultraquick cosmetic surgery kit on my face during the ride to the airport.”
Plotkin drew in his breath. “Shit, that must have made some noise, even in Brazil. Were the victim’s parents okay with the collateral damage and all the hassle that came with it?”
Van Halen smiles. It is the smile of death at work.
“Those Brazilian fuckers? Not even Brazilian—Honduran, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Colombian, Cuban…you’re talking shit, Plotkin. The family that paid me was old money, from Venezuela. Oil, emeralds, electric energy, communications, civil war. Big money, nasty people; really hard-boiled. They’d been dealing with kidnappings for generations. Their daughter had been kidnapped and raped by that pedophile in Brazil while she was spending a school vacation with one of her friends near Rio, and the prick got the case against him dismissed because there was no concrete proof. No DNA traces, plus an alibi that seemed solid. He’d been hiding in France, and then cut out for parts unknown but influential. He disappeared for a couple of years and then turned up in Ecuador, in Quito, and went back to Brazil after that, with a false ID right out of The Internet Catalogue of Pseudos for Pedos. He found a place to stay; we followed him; we got him. And you know the funniest part?”
“No,” says Plotkin, curious to hear the pearl of humor that would close this story, like the final nail in a coffin lid.
Van Halen. Van Halen’s grimace-smile. The grimace-smile widens, filling the world with a luster that could chase away any divine shadow. “The funniest part is that five or six years later, just after the civil war, cops from the Free Midwestern Confederation found the real killer. The guy was living in Kansas; he’d been keeping a detailed journal of his crimes, and he’d just hung himself to avoid being arrested for murders committed there and in Missouri. I ran into a friend in China; he told me about it without knowing my part in the whole thing.”
Plotkin is silent. He stares at the grimace-smile, which has taken over the universe. He guesses. The whole original-terminal dream knows it; all his being knows it: this ending has a moral. And the moral is this:
“I am sorry for the kids in the brothel, you understand, but they were all infected with AIDS. Not to mention all the new mutable sexually transmitted diseases; more than a thousand of those on the list now. They were doomed, no matter what. Plus, I mean, come on—that was a hot mess; a psychopathic killer settling accounts between gangs. The cops in Bahia really fucked that whole thing up.”
Plotkin knows this moral. It is the moral of all assassins and spies. It is the moral of the World hidden underneath the World.
He also knows, though, that the grimace-smile isn’t saying all there is to say. It is filling the world like a blinding truth—a truth that becomes invisible when brought to light. You need to have eyes used to seeing things in the shadows to bear such unknowable light.
This is the Batavian killer’s moral:
“That French pedophile was a real prick. He was guilty, the bastard. Okay, not of kidnapping the little Venezuelan girl, or of the crimes committed by that asshole in Kansas, but he’d raped hundreds of minors, lined the pockets of human flesh peddlers all over the continent. You know just as well as I do that there are no innocent people in our game. Just guilty ones, actual or potential.”
Plotkin remembers the World-grimace-smile. He remembers choking on the martini with its little fluorescent pink straw. The dream is entirely made of memory. The moment when he decided that he must always carry the plan all the way to the end. Exterminate the target, and kill the fucking German tourist.
Human Termination System.
We live in shadow. We never see the light of day; not even when we go out at dawn to kill a man; not when we drink martinis while planning the death of one or more targets under the burning sun of a southern afternoon, below a vast cracked mouth-dome screaming beneath the vanished ozone layer. Here, men talk in order to hide things. Here, men kill innocent people with the same cold tenacity as they exterminate the guilty. Here, you have to wonder if anyone is really innocent, or really guilty.
The dream takes him into another world now.
This time, it is night.
But it is the electric night of a Japanese metropolis. The interminable daynight of the endless city, looping in on itself all over the island and out into the ocean, where vast urban pseudopods shine their lights across the telluric abyss of the Sea of Japan.
This time he is with a woman, Mrs. Kuziwaki. They are in the offices of Mrs. Kuziwaki’s holding company at the top of a high-security, two-hundred-floor tower belonging to her and her consortium. The top floor, a personal guesthouse reserved for Mrs. Kuziwaki and her guests, is overhung by a roof with programmable translucency; at the moment, despite the four-meter thickness of refractory composite above their heads, they are under what appears to be an open sky.
He negotiates the final terms of the contract with the Japanese woman—the Lady of Osaka, as she is called here. Mrs. Kuziwaki manages an immense network of legal businesses, and a group of illegal ones that is only a bit smaller. She is married to an English lord who fled Great Britain after the Shari’a took over almost 80 percent of British territory during the Franco-European Civil War. She also controls one of the large municipal parties in the region.
She has a rival, another businesswoman and head of a competing political clan, another queen bee. And now “there is no other solution.”
We are the solution when there is no other solution, says one of the Order’s maxims.
That is what he said to this lovely thirtysomething woman who wants to devour the world and anyone who challenges her, starting with that old bitch Mrs. Toshiro.
He said it to close the deal, and to show that his professionalism is not an empty promotional campaign by the Red Star Order, though he is still in the early stages of his promising career. They are at the top of the Lady of Osaka’s tower. They are rising above the clouds of Olympus. They are overlooking a planet of light, stationary and mobile; it sparkles coldly, resem
bling the highly magnified motherboard of a computer.
They are like gods.
It is the definitive meeting of money and crime, Heaven and power, blood and truth. This moment, he knows, was a pivotal one; it made him what he now is. The contract is negotiated, initialed, and signed on the huge table of uncloned acajou that cost as much as a midsize house in Africa. It is a vast rectangle of natural obsidian, blackness marbled with green flecks like the water of an enchanted pond that lures him to the center of the room.
The dream images swim for a moment, then realign themselves like a series of ellipses.
There it is. A luxurious IBM-Chanel gown is half-ruined as it is torn from her body to fly like a black tornado across the room. Two pretty breasts, raised high by a bra of fine, natural silk lace in dark red, darker than the night that surrounds them, are topped by honey-colored nipples, amber points that quiver under his fingernails. Long black hair sways gently, like a vertical grid made of leaf veins, against skin more luminous than the moon, whose light spills gently across the ashy lakes in the blue-orange dark radiance of the city lights. This is what he is seeing, touching, caressing. Marveling at, with the sort of stunned curiosity children experience when their souls are still entirely free.
He takes her savagely on the emerald green table. Her thighs are spread wide; he lifts them high, feeling with his hand the heat and wetness of the dark bush he can barely see. He watches the young woman’s delicate movements, her wrists curving toward the tips of her breasts while he, hypnotized, opens his fingers into a fan to gently rub the dark triangle of curls with its bittersweet drenching of moisture, the invisible aroma of her desire wafting around the two of them.
He tenses. Hard.
Here is your sex, sir.
An erection pointed toward the stars and the purple Osaka night. A tube of flesh so swollen it is nearly scarlet, straining to bury itself in the silver-colored flesh for which everything must be destroyed.
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