Post: The First Byron Tibor Thriller

by Sean Black

  During one of our long informal chats when I had first joined the program, Muir had shared his moment of epiphany with me. He had been at home watching the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius before the athlete’s fall from grace. Pistorius, whose legs had been amputated below the knee as a child, used carbon-fiber blades to run. It was argued that, rather than being at a disadvantage, technology gave him an unfair advantage. People openly speculated that in time the Olympics and the Paralympics would swap places. Regular humans would compete in the Olympics while the Paralympics would be for people who were faster, stronger and fitter.

  ‘That was when I realized that my whole career I had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope,’ Muir had told me.

  I had asked him what he meant.

  ‘It was so blindingly obvious, Byron. It had been right there in front of us all along. We didn’t need to build a robot or a computer that was smarter than we were. We already had all that. It was God’s gift.’

  That was when I discovered that Muir was religious. As we had walked around the outside of the facility, he had continued to explain his new philosophy. ‘The human body, the human mind, is an unbelievable feat of engineering, Byron. Of course, it has to be, it’s been honed by tens of thousands of years of the beta-testing we call evolution. The building blocks were there. All I needed to do was to take what human beings had developed in terms of all the technology and merge them. We were part of evolution. Our consciousness was God’s blessing. He’d made us capable of changing what we were.’

  I’d guessed that Muir’s epiphany was like that of many who had gone before him. Once he’d explained it, it seemed completely obvious, like gravity, or the Earth being round. Man could re-engineer man and in doing so would create a new species, what Muir and his researchers called a post-sapiens. That was what I was, only I didn’t feel any less human. If anything I felt more human, more alive, more truly in touch with the world and everything that went on around me. I wasn’t religious. I had seen too many tragedies caused by religious fundamentalism to embrace any kind of church. But in the weeks and months of surgery and rehabilitation, I had come to understand what Muir had meant when he’d said he was taking me closer to God.

  Through the crack in the bathroom door, I watched Muir walk into the tiny kitchen. He was hunched over, a man with a lot on his mind. I dug out the gun, slowly opened the bathroom door, and crept silently down the short stub of corridor. I flattened myself against the wall. Muir walked back out of the kitchen. I clamped my hand over his mouth and brought up the gun.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I want to talk. The panic alarm has been disabled. If you make any kind of a move I don’t like, I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?’

  Muir nodded his yellow head. Most of the brain activity was in the center, near his amygdala, the trace of yellow running down from there. His frontal cortex, the rational, thinking part of the brain, remained normal. The pattern told me that Muir had been more startled than terrified by my sudden appearance.

  I took my hand away. ‘Talk quietly. I’ll kill the two men outside as well if I have to.’

  Muir turned. ‘I’m glad you’re alive, Byron. I had a feeling you’d come back. There are a lot of things I didn’t get the chance to explain.’

  ‘I’m sorry about how it went down,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’

  ‘I know. It would be good if you’d come back to the facility with me so I could check you over properly.’ He sounded sincere.

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘I understand. So what do you want to know?’

  ‘There are things I was never told.’

  ‘It wasn’t my decision to withhold information from you,’ said Muir.

  As he said it, I noticed the flash of color in his frontal lobe. ‘I know when you’re lying, remember.’

  ‘Apart from what happened at the facility, how has everything been working?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The facility stuff.’

  ‘You remember it?’ Muir asked me.

  ‘I was back in Afghanistan for a while. That’s who I thought the medical team were. Jihadis. I regret what happened. If there was a way I could bring them back, I would. I’d like to be able to speak to their families too, but that’s not feasible right now. Could you let them know from me that I’m sorry, that I wasn’t in my right mind when I took their lives?’

  Muir sighed. ‘At the start of the project, one of the things we had to decide was what to do about memory formation and retention. Obviously, in order to function you had to be able to remember certain things. The question for us was how much of your long-term memory we allowed you to retain.’

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘You about to tell me that I’m someone else entirely?’

  ‘No, Byron, I’m not. It was my view and that of the team that childhood and other memories, your experiences and how you relate to them over a lifetime, are what makes you human.’

  ‘But I’m not, am I? I’m not human. I’m one step beyond human. I’m post-sapiens.’

  Muir nodded. ‘True. But think about what word means. We wanted this to allow for evolution, not revolution. If we had wanted to create a pure killing machine that would have been a lot easier, believe me. But we didn’t. We wanted someone who was a human being plus. Faster, fitter, stronger, more perceptive in all kinds of ways, but also someone who retained grace under extreme pressure.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘There was a problem with the original amygdala implant. It was designed to filter out certain things. We think it degraded after a time and allowed your most traumatic memory to push out everything else. For you it was what happened on that mission in Afghanistan when the young girl died. For Lewis it was something else. We hoped by updating the implant that we could take you back to where you were.’

  ‘But you never got the chance.’

  ‘It’s not too late, Byron. You could come back with me.’

  ‘I killed four people.’

  ‘A version of you did. Byron 1.0 did. I’m not sure you can be held responsible any more than Lewis could be blamed for taking his own life.’

  ‘There’s something else. What is it?’

  Muir sighed. ‘Byron, if I lied to you, you’d know. We’ve already established that.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were lying, but you’re holding something back.’

  I lasered in on Muir’s skull as his brain lit up.

  ‘There are some things, more than some, I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘Not because I don’t want to but because to tell you would be to place everyone involved, including myself, in danger. You only know the surface, Byron.’

  Without saying anything else, Muir crossed to a small table, pulled a sheet from a pad of paper, scrawled something on it and handed it over. Of course, Muir’s apartment would be rigged, at least for sound if not with video surveillance equipment. I took the paper without looking at it, folded it in two and placed it in my pocket.

  Outside the apartment, I heard a car door being carefully closed. I held up my hand to silence Muir. There were two sets of footsteps outside. They were moving slowly and methodically. I could even pick out the faintest rustle of material as one man raised his arm from his side.

  I got up, walked across the room and killed the light. With six long strides I was in the hallway, my body pressed flat against the wall behind the front door. Less than a second later, a key was pressed into the lock and the door began to open.

  There was a rush of movement as the two guards ran through, going straight past me. Without thinking, I stepped around the door and started to run.

  The apartment light snapped back on. From inside I heard Muir shout, ‘No!’ There was a single shot and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  I was torn. I wanted to go back and confirm that it was Muir who had been shot. The light had gone on first. That meant whoever had pulled the trigger had known what they w
ere doing.

  I ran to the end of the block, and waited. The car was less than twenty meters away. If anyone came out of the apartment I could reach it before they could get a shot off. And I still had the Springfield.

  I peeked round the corner for a split second. There was no one in the guards’ vehicle and no one outside. With the Springfield punched out, I moved toward the door, hugging the wall, and ducking under windows.

  The apartment door was open. I could hear the crackle of radio transmissions. The two guards were inside. Muir wasn’t making any kind of noise. They had called for an ambulance. There was no way of knowing if Muir was clinging on or whether he was already gone. I was already cursing the decisions I’d made. In a standard situation on foreign soil I would have killed the two guards and taken Muir with me so that I could extract the information I needed in a more stable environment without fear of interruption. My weakness had likely cost Muir his life. The morality of killing the two guards shouldn’t have been a factor. They were in the way. Was Muir dead or alive? I had to know.

  I stepped into the hallway. One guard was hunched over the scientist. The other was standing behind, relaying information on his radio. The guard standing over Muir had his weapon, a Glock 9mm, in his right hand.

  I shot him first, firing a single round into the top of his neck. As his partner went to draw his weapon, I shot him in the head, and followed up with a second shot to the throat, which caught him as he fell. The first guard had slumped forward. I grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him back. I shot him one more time in the head for good measure.

  I looked at Muir, bent down and checked his pulse. He was dead. My fingertips began to tingle. Muir must have had an RDF tracker chip too. It was no surprise. Many of the scientists at the facility had hacked their own bodies to test their emerging technologies.

  I ran my hand up to the side of Muir’s skull, working a hunch. Something that Muir had said hadn’t gelled with what I’d seen of the scientist’s brain activity. Not that my ability to interpret brain activity was in any way honed.

  As my fingertips reached Muir’s temple the pulsing increased. There was something inside Muir’s skull. If he’d had a metal plate – say, from an accident – my fingertips would have gone haywire. This was something more delicate. It told me that whatever I was picking up was small and likely in the middle of Muir’s brain.

  Reaching into my pants pocket, I took out my Gerber. Removing the RDF tracker from a dead man was a hell of a lot than easier than taking out my own. I made the incision, blood oozing over my fingers, dug a nail inside the flap of skin and popped it out. I left it where it fell, ran to the bathroom, grabbed a large bath towel and ran back to Muir.

  I crossed to the two dead guards, took their weapons and punched out the clips. The first was full, the second was down a round. Assuming it had been full before, the second guard’s clip looked to have a round missing. He had shot Muir, and meant it.

  Blood was already soaking through the towel as I lifted Muir’s body. With the dead man slung over my shoulder, I jogged back to the car. Lights were on in the other apartments. Faces peeked through curtains, disappearing as soon as they saw me. I felt sure I recognized at least one, a young robotics specialist who worked at the facility. The apartment must have been used as accommodation for more than Muir.

  The trunk popped open. I lowered Muir’s corpse into it. It was a tight fit. I had to adjust his limbs so that he was in a fetal position. I slammed the trunk shut, got into the driver’s seat, making sure to kill the headlights, and gunned the engine.

  FIFTY

  Apart from a green tinge, I could see well enough without headlights. Five miles out from the apartment complex I crested a hill. Half a dozen red rollers were heading toward me. I slowed, spun the wheel and pulled the car off the highway, careful not to tap the brakes and risk being seen. The car bumped along the rough scrub desert, and came to a stop. I killed the engine, waited until the State Police vehicles had sped past, then turned and headed back onto the highway.

  I drove through the night, heading south-west, skirting the Special Activities Program testing area that housed the facility. There were two more close calls. The first was at a roadblock, the second when I passed a military convoy heading north. If they were going to kill me it would be here in this desolate landscape.

  As soon as she had answered, I knew I had made a mistake in calling Julia. The Julia I had spoken to wasn’t the same woman I had left at home. On the surface she had seemed relieved, and happy to hear my voice. The words were there, and arranged in the right order. Everything else, though, from the hesitation, to her tone, the way her voice rose and fell, told a different story. She was scared. Scared of me.

  What should have been sixty seconds that I could use to spur me on had done the opposite. If I wasn’t going home to the woman I loved, someone who would understand the choices I had made and why I had made them, what was I going home for?

  As I drove, I tried to push the negativity from my mind. I did my best to reframe my thoughts. If I could make it back to New York and speak to her alone, I could make her understand.

  You’ve lost her. She’s on their side now.

  As fast as I pushed them out, the bad thoughts returned. Traffic was picking up as I drove across the state border into California. I flicked on the radio and began to search for stations. The numbers on the digital display spun round until I found a news channel.

  ‘Tibor is believed to be armed and extremely dangerous. People are cautioned not to approach him under any circumstances. If they do see him they should contact local law enforcement.’

  So much for the news blackout. The report moved on. I kept punching the button, searching for more news as the cars on the highway driving toward Los Angeles took on a more sinister hue as each second passed. What had been a stream of metal camouflage a few moments ago now seemed more akin to a river of spy drones, each truck, each SUV with the capability to pick me out from the herd. It didn’t take me long to find a talk radio station where I seemed to be the main topic of conversation. They had some supposed military expert in the studio, no doubt a wire-hugger who had last seen action twenty years ago before semi-retiring to push paper around the C-ring of the Pentagon.

  Listening to them discuss me, I began to piece together the spin the agency, and whoever else was involved, had put on recent events. They mentioned a DARPA-funded program based in Nevada, which was aimed at helping veterans and active military personnel overcome combat fatigue and PTSD. Neuroscience featured in the report but it was referenced in the vaguest way. The report moved on to the incident at the facility five days previously in which a participant in the program, a former Army Ranger working for the State Department had launched a pre-planned attack killing four members of staff. He had fled the facility, using his Ranger training to evade capture, before returning several days later to kill the head of the program, whom, the government was claiming, he held responsible for difficulties I continued to have in his personal life.

  The script they were running was standard operating procedure. Other information that might be uncovered, such as the existence of the facility, hinted broadly at the nature of the work, thus explaining the presence of Muir and his team, but airbrushed the specifics out. If pressed to give more details they would cite national security concerns and point to just how open they had already been. Finally, they played the card that I had seen played numerous times before when the government wanted to silence or discredit someone: they told the world the target was crazy. Once that was firmly planted in the public consciousness it wouldn’t matter what I said. I was tagged as a lunatic.

  My mind drifted back to Julia. At least she knew the truth. I hadn’t taken the decision to confide in her lightly. For a long time afterwards, I had wondered if I had done the right thing in telling her why I was the way I was. I hadn’t wanted to start our life together with a lie. That had been my reasoning. But I knew that, in telling her, I had not only breac
hed the sacred covenant of my work, I had potentially placed her in danger. Now, though, in a set of circumstances I had never foreseen, it looked like a good decision. She would be able to corroborate my story.

  I also had Muir’s body, complete with some kind of implant. And I had the piece of paper he had given me before he died. On the paper there had been a name and a location. It might be a trap, of course. It might just as easily lead me to my death as to my salvation. I guessed there was only one way of finding out. I pushed down the indicator and took the exit for Bakersfield.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Graves

  Half an hour to showtime. Graves paced the length of the hotel suite. Down below, on Central Park West, under a low grey sky, yellow cabs and Town Cars swarmed outside the entrance to the Plaza. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, and walked out into the corridor. The two agents there swiveled to check him out as he let the door close behind him. He walked to the next-door room and knocked. Another agent opened it, hand on his service weapon. He recognized Graves and nodded for him to come in.

  Julia Tibor was at the window. She seemed lost in thought.

  ‘Julia, it’s time,’ said Graves. ‘They’re waiting.’

  Finally, she turned to him. ‘You’re sure I’m doing the right thing?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not just the right thing. It’s the only thing. We have three more people dead, including Muir, the man who was trying to help him. We’re out of options, Julia. We have to find Byron, for everyone’s sake.’

  The footage of Byron and the two muggers had sown the seeds of doubt. The incident at Muir’s apartment complex had sealed the deal. Whatever resistance Julia had had was gone. She would do what they needed her to do.