The Last Sword Maker

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The Last Sword Maker Page 17

by Brian Nelson


  “Soon, my friend. Very soon.”

  * * *

  “NUB!” Olex said in his usual condescending tone. “I need this regression analysis. Have it for me by 11:00 a.m.”

  This, Eric had quickly learned, was Olex’s idea of teamwork: issuing orders.

  “Fuck you, Olex. I’ll finish it when I finish it.”

  At first, Olex had been taken aback by Eric’s audacity, but soon he was taking it in stride, his conquistador face not flinching. “I suggest you do as a say. I can make your life miserable.”

  “You just walked in and I’m already miserable,” Eric said, “but if you’re insinuating you can get me fired, you tried once and it didn’t work.”

  “Just do the regression analysis, svolota.”

  Eric’s eyes rolled. He decided to counter. “Did you do the sequencing I asked for?”

  To Eric’s amazement, Olex produced an iSheet and laid the results in front of him. It would have taken a normal mortal two days to do that much work. But not Olex. It was annoying how good he was. Eric hated it. The guy was a machine. And as much as Eric didn’t want to admit it, Olex was smarter than he was—in a whole different league of smart. At first, Eric had done his best to debunk him, to find errors in his work. He spent long hours double-checking, looking for holes, salivating at the fantasy of showing him up. Dreaming of the aha moment that he could rub in Olex’s face. He never, ever found it.

  On the other hand, Olex found plenty wrong with Eric’s work. Programming errors, missteps in his designs, even typos in Eric’s emails. That stung worst of all—that a foreign-born Ukrainian had better English grammar than he did. By the end of the first week, it was clear: Hell had descended on Eric Hill, and its earthly name was Olex Velichko.

  He went to Eastman and begged to work alone, but Eastman wouldn’t budge. “How interesting. Olex was here half an hour ago asking me the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told him. Prove that it works or prove that it doesn’t work. Only then will you be free of each other.”

  It was during the third week of Olex purgatory that they began to make progress. Son of a bitch, Eric thought. Eastman had known all along that the rivalry of their wills would make them work harder. Both men wanted to be right; both were obsessed with it. And Olex’s constant questioning and insistence that they test and retest everything was making Eric work harder and more efficiently than he had ever worked before. Olex, too, was determined to prove himself right and was putting in long hours and producing better work. The turning point was when Olex suggested that they recalibrate the mutation factor. He didn’t need to do that. If Olex had kept his mouth shut, Eric might not have caught his own error, and they would have reported to Eastman that forced evolution wouldn’t work. It meant that Olex was beginning to believe.

  By the end of the fourth week, it began to look as though it would really work, and not only with replication, but in at least a dozen areas: the interface, the neural-tube development, energy processing—the list went on. By applying the same concept to each design feature, they could radically improve the efficiency of every system. It was shaping up to be a game changer, an advance that might cut months off the timeline and put them ahead of the Chinese for the first time.

  But right as Eric’s confidence was growing, Olex found a problem—a big one. It was in the base code, the nanosite DNA. Somewhere inside was a radical, like a genetic disease, that was decaying every nanosite they attempted to breed. It was Friday night at almost midnight when Olex found it, and it took the wind out of Eric’s sails. It wasn’t going to work, was it? And he’d thought they were almost there. Now it would be another two weeks of testing, and to find out what? That it all had been a waste of time.

  He went back to his apartment and slept for the next twelve hours. In the morning, he didn’t want to get up. God, he needed a break, to unplug. As he lay there in bed, he felt strangely detached from his fellow man. What movies were people watching? What were the top news stories? What were normal people gossiping about? He had no idea, and he was sure he wouldn’t find out. It was Saturday, a day when most people didn’t work. But he had worked every weekend for the past four months. And he would work again today.

  Grudgingly, he got out of bed, showered, ate a little, and left his apartment. But he couldn’t bring himself to go back to work, so he went to visit Jane instead. He needed someone to talk to, someone to lift his spirits.

  She took a while to come to the door. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again. When she finally opened the door, she had a white towel wrapped under her armpits. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” she said. “Are you going in now? Give me a minute to dress and I’ll go with you.” She went back to her bedroom, and Eric watched her go, hypnotized by her toned legs, watching as her calves balled and flexed. He shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs, gave a long exhalation, and plopped down on the couch.

  “Did you run this morning?” he asked.

  She called from the bedroom. “Yeah, I did six miles. It felt good. Without it, I’d go crazy.”

  Yeah, crazy, he thought. He was jealous of her discipline. He’d stopped working out months ago. He missed the release, as well as the clarity and confidence that came from being fit.

  “Jane, I think I’m losing it,” he called out. “It was all I could do just to get up this morning.” She came in. She had put on baggy jeans and a T-shirt and was rubbing a towel in her thick hair. It was growing back quickly. She had to keep the rest of it short, but you had to look closely now to tell she’d been burned.

  She saw his feet propped up on the sofa, and swatted them off. “Move over.”

  He obeyed. “It’s just not working.” He told her about the problems with Forced Evolution.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know how excited you were about it. Bill, too. Are you sure it won’t work?”

  He told her about the radical. “We’re running out of options.”

  “I know it must be frustrating, but don’t let it get you down. Keep trying and remember that even if it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Yeah, well, it feels like it. It’s just that most of the time, I feel so useless. And with this idea, well, I thought I was finally going to contribute something.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. Try to put all this in perspective.” She motioned at the air, the whole NRL. “We’re trying to do some of the most complicated things that have ever been done. Ever. And not only are they difficult, we’re expected to do them really fast. It’s hardly fair. Think about any other big research institution. They have scientists that go years, even decades, without a single good idea. Some waste their whole lives pursuing things that never work. So don’t beat yourself up if you go a few months without an idea.”

  “I know, and I’ve tried to tell myself that. It’s just … I thought I could make a difference.”

  “Trust me, you’ve made a difference already.”

  “You think?”

  “Of course you have. You fixed the replication errors, and you’ve been an excellent architect. Bill and Jack know that.”

  He looked away skeptically.

  “And you saved my life.”

  “That was just a reaction. I didn’t even think about it.”

  She didn’t answer right away. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and cautious in a way that was very unlike Jane. “That’s exactly why it was so important to me, you idiot. You did it without thinking. Your instinctive reaction was to save me.” She moved closer to him, hesitated, then put her hand on his chest. “It means your heart’s in the right place.” Their eyes locked for a moment. “And I’ll take that over a brilliant theory any day.”

  There was a beat of silence. Eric wanted to kiss her then. To lean in and hold her. It seemed like the right thing to do, and he wanted it more than anything, but something stopped him. Jane and Ryan were t
he closest thing he had to family since his own family had imploded. If there was any chance he was misreading her, he’d screw it all up.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You’re very good to me.”

  Jane smiled and nodded slowly, sensing that the moment had passed. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go.”

  * * *

  Eric went back to his office and started in on the base code “radical” problem. He was glad his pale Ukrainian nemesis wasn’t around. All day, he hoped Olex wouldn’t show his face. And in the end, he didn’t. Eric didn’t see him the next day, either, but on Monday evening around five thirty, he turned in his chair and found Olex standing right behind him.

  Eric jumped. “Jesus! You scared the shit out of me. Where have you been?”

  But Olex said nothing. Eric scooted back a little and had a better look at him. Olex looked, well, like shit. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last Friday, and black stubble was growing around the usually manicured goatee. Had he been working here since Friday night?

  “What is it?” Eric said, his curiosity unable to check his impatience with Olex. “Whatever it is, don’t blame me. It’s probably your own damn fault.”

  “Svolota, why do you waste so many words when you speak? It only exposes that your head is full of shit.”

  But this time, something in Olex’s tone wasn’t so harsh. For the first time, it was no longer the resentful, condescending, you’re-an-idiot glare. Olex lifted an iSheet in one hand and extended it to Eric, offering it like bait to a hungry fish.

  Eric took it and began to read. Okay, Olex had made a series of modifications to the base code. Eric didn’t understand all of it—it was complicated genetics—but he did understand the new projections. All the heuristics were synchronized. Olex had somehow solved the problem with the radicals! There was no decay in the breeding cycle. But that wasn’t all. Olex had kept going. God, he must have been working nonstop since Friday—almost four days without sleep. Now the mutation factor showed the right deviation for selection and variation. That meant … it would work!

  Eric stood up, his body suddenly weightless. He began pacing around the room, his eyes still glued to the iSheet. Was it true? Had Olex really done it? Yes and yes. It would work!

  He looked at Olex, and what he saw startled him.

  Olexander Velichko was smiling. For the first time, Eric saw two rows of coffee-stained teeth. His facial muscles were clearly uncomfortable with the arrangement, but he was definitely smiling.

  “I’d appreciate being mentioned in your footnotes,” he said.

  Eric smiled, shaking his head. “No, Olex, you are gonna be first author on this paper, and I’ll be in the footnotes. I can’t believe you did it!”

  “We did it,” he said. Olex was not one for physical displays. No hugging, shoulder patting, or even handshakes. But he was, at heart, honest and candid. “It’s a brilliant idea,” he said, “and it’s going to change everything, which means there won’t be a paper. It’s too important.”

  Eric shrugged. Olex was right. Curtiss would never let this get out. There might not be a paper, but it still felt as if he had won the lottery and collected the money.

  “Now that we know it will work,” Olex said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Anything,” Eric said.

  Olex nodded slowly, appreciatively. “Don’t come anywhere near me for the next seven days.”

  “Done!”

  For the rest of the day, Eric wore a goofy grin, and by evening his cheeks were sore. It was going to work.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Pill

  November 9, 2025

  Tangshan Military Laboratory, China

  His blood made a steady tap … tap … tap sound as it dripped to the floor.

  His head was pitched forward, his hair hanging over his eyes, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back, through the rungs of the steel chair. He kept his eyes closed. Better not to look.

  Meng had smashed his left testicle with a hammer, and the pulp had swollen to the size of a lemon. It hurt with a relentless, terrible ache that pulsed with his heartbeat.

  “We’ll leave the other one for now,” Meng had whispered in his ear. “But don’t worry, old friend, we’ll get to it eventually.” Meng kept repeating old friend sweetly, over and over.

  It had been more than a day now, trapped in this windowless cinder-block room. Bo Li felt like a side of meat being taken apart at a butcher shop. Meng had started with the webbing between his fingers, then the fingernails. Then the fingers themselves, moving down one knuckle at a time. Meng had held the chunks in front of his eyes, like beige dice, as he went along. Now only the thumb on his right hand remained.

  Bo Li had never felt such pain, never knew that the body could be manipulated to hurt so much.

  He had only one hope: In his shirt, stitched into the seam at the small of his back, was a little capsule. He was desperate to get to it. It meant freedom. Escape. It was so close, touching him. But he couldn’t get to it.

  They had taken the fingers quickly, before they even began questioning him, and that told him, so clearly, so sadly, that he would never leave here. There would be no recovery. At first, his mind had entertained, in the most childish way, the hope that he would survive. If they let me go now, I can still get better. I could still live. His mind wanted to believe it, even though everything said otherwise.

  He had told them much. The pain, combined with the drugs in the IV, was too much. He couldn’t help it. But his confessions were interwoven with things that seemed to confuse Meng. Bo Li kept repeating, “My eyes are cameras. My eyes are cameras.”

  But eventually, Meng had come to understand what it meant, and with it, the magnitude of the treason, and just how much had been given to the Americans. It had spun him into a rage.

  “You thought you could outsmart me? Me! Walking around, telling your jokes, smiling in my face while you stole from me! Who is smarter now? Who?”

  Bo Li made no answer.

  Meng’s rage only grew. “Who is smarter now?” he shouted, and took up a knife—a fisherman’s tool, with a curved serrated blade. With a sudden explosion of savagery, he fell on Bo Li, yanked up his leg, and, with quick sawing motions, he began to remove the skin around the kneecap. Bo Li twisted and struggled. “No, no, please, no!” The two soldiers rushed in and held the leg steady as Meng worked. “No! Stop! Please stop!” Bo Li screamed as Meng worked, flaying his leg.

  “Yes, yes, that’s it. Struggle. Let me hear you scream. We are just beginning, old friend. For you, the língchí. The Thousand Cuts.” Soon he had removed a disk of skin, a pancake of flesh, and tossed it to the floor. Bo Li looked down. The ligaments, muscle, and bone of his knee lay open to the world.

  “Now who is smarter? Say it!”

  “You are. You are smarter,” Bo Li said, weeping, trying not to look at the wound.

  But Meng was not placated. He had lost himself in the rage. His nostrils flaring like an angry bull. “All these months I thought you were helping me find the spy! All these frustrating months! And to find that it was you, you Hàn jiān—you were the one destroying our chances to win the race!”

  He tossed the knife into a corner and picked up a cricket bat—a souvenir from a trip to Hong Kong that Bo Li had kept in his office—and the beating began. First the shins, then the arms, working himself into a fury. He lifted the bat over his head and swung it down like a sledgehammer, but in his fury, he missed Bo Li’s head. Instead, the bat fell into his shoulder, snapping the collarbone with a loud crack.

  Bo Li screamed through his tear-stained face. His body convulsed at the break, and his head sagged oddly toward that shoulder. Meng didn’t care. He swung again, a horizontal blow that hit the side of his head with a sound like splitting wood.

  Then everything went black.

  * * *


  He awoke to the tap … tap … tap of his blood dripping from his forehead down his nose and to the floor. His head felt as if it had a dent in it. It ached terribly. Something was wrong with his neck, too. Meng must have cracked one of his vertebrae, because the whole shoulder and arm were numb.

  He needed to focus. To make the most of this moment of respite. He had to find a way to die quickly. For himself and for them. He had told Meng many things. Yet he had not told him the most important thing: the secret that he himself had discovered only a week ago. For months, he had been finding strange packets of data in the code. Things he could not read, but that he knew didn’t belong there. Last week, he had finally put the pieces together. He wasn’t the only one. As soon as he realized the truth, he wished that he hadn’t. It would have been much better for them. He was no longer strong enough to lie; he knew that. Indeed, the only reason he had not told Meng the secret was simply because Meng had not asked the right question.

  He had to make sure he was dead before that happened.

  The pill. If only he could somehow get it to his mouth, then it would all be over.

  His grandfather had also carried such a pill. Being so close to Mao, it was absolutely necessary, he said, given the madman’s moods. His grandfather had seen it a dozen times. Without the slightest coloring of emotion, Mao could condemn a friend to death, send him and his family into exile, or submit him to struggle—over a rumor or suspicion that wasn’t even true. His grandfather had decided he and his family would never share their fate. So he had made his wife and son carry the pills, too, and would force them to do drills—make them bite into the pill without question or hesitation, never knowing whether it was cyanide or sugar.

  It was terrible, but necessary. His grandfather had realized it, and so had Bo Li. So he had taken up the old trick because it was still the best solution to end a nightmare.

  It was there, so close. But with his left side numb and the fingers of his right hand gone, it seemed a world away. Even if he could remove it from the seam, he had no way to get it to his mouth unless he could get the handcuffs off. He tried to think of a way. He knew they would never let him go to the bathroom. He had defecated when they began cutting off his fingers, but they just hosed him off. He had to think of something else. It seemed hopeless, and a part of him was ready just to let go, just to let Meng have his way. To suffer the língchí.

 

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