Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  “Okay,” I said, stretching out the last syllable of that word, because it didn’t feel entirely okay. But as he said, I had to trust him. Time was of the essence, now as ever. So I moved on to the next subject: “I need to check in with a couple of my lieutenants, because it’s been a while. Should I call them while Jon’s on the way, and only use audio?”

  “Like I said before,” Terrey answered, “I wouldn’t talk to people other than us on the net unless you really have to.”

  “I thought you would say that, so I came up with an idea. We put the BASS people on the video in the aero, and have Jon wear an earpiece, so it looks like he’s getting reports from other places while he’s talking to them. That would explain it, if they notice him pausing to listen to me.”

  “Ace!” Terrey said. “I like it. I’ll tell you, Michael, this whole thing has just kept coming together, even all the details. Dickensian, like I said.”

  “Except for the woman who died, and the triplet who got fried.”

  “Well, you know what they say about omelets.” Then it was his turn to chuckle. “Speaking of being fried.”

  That was a saying Saul had used, and I briefly wondered if Terrey had ever talked to the old man, or his ghost for that matter. But then I realized that was highly unlikely, and it was a very common phrase. I also wondered, as I had many times before, whether his flippancy was a kind of cover for a heart that did care about what happened to people, at least to some degree.

  “You mentioned assassination methods that we wouldn’t know about,” I said, “because they’ve never been used before.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had a few thoughts, like what I would do if I was Sun. I might try something a little different from the traitor thing, especially if I couldn’t turn anyone, and have a single assassin infiltrate or wait somewhere, for a closeup kill. And I might try some kind of cyber attack, turning security systems against us, something like that. But truth be told, the Trois are so good with that stuff, almost omniscient really, that I don’t think it could work.”

  “Oh, speaking of them seeing everything,” I said. “When I meet with Tara at the castle—I mean when the double does—I want it to be private.”

  Terrey grunted, half playfully but half businesslike. “That’s up to you, if you’re sure she’s safe. It’s your office, and she’s the head of Internal Security, so you can probably keep us out even if we wanted to listen in. But we’ll stay away, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, and after ironing out a few more details with Terrey, I switched the screen and audio to inside the double. He was already dressed in some of my business clothes that I had kept in one of the base residence rooms, and was waiting in the aero bay for his ride to the city. While he was waiting, I started to prep him for the conversations he would be having on the way to the city. He seemed to be genuinely excited about playing the role of an important person, and presumably had abandoned the plan to commit suicide that he was set on just five days before. Whether it was this new adventure, or the large amount of money promised to him if he survived, or both, it was interesting to note how self-destructive thoughts could disappear when a person was given something to live for.

  One of the triplets came over and reminded him about his injection of the Makeover I.S. He nervously apologized that he had always been a forgetful person, muttering something about being a teacher, and pulled one of the little triangles out from a pocket. While he was shooting the chemicals into his bloodstream, I asked him if he knew whether they had eliminated the AIMS virus from his system. He said that they hadn’t, judging from the last test the triplets had done on him, but “they said it looked hopeful.”

  When the time came to leave, Terry and Ni flew out of the bay in one aero, San in a second one by herself, and Jon and Min in the third. Terrey had informed Lynn that he needed Min to go with the double, because the big cyborg would be expected to accompany me to the castle, and because the threat to the double was the highest. But he must have picked up on my wife’s lack of comfort with Korcz, because he stationed him and Stephenson in the garage and on the veranda, respectively. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was another reason why Terrey wanted Korcz to stay at the house that day. Tyra, for her part, was not needed at the castle and was helping with the twins while Lynn tried to figure out where they could go.

  Min was driving the aero, but was very good at double-tasking (and triple-, and quadruple-, etc.), so I told him to call the lieutenants and keep the lighting inside the car minimal, so these rather close associates of mine wouldn’t be seeing the double too clearly in close-up. I wasn’t worried much about it, however, because the Makeover was so impressive. I was a little more concerned about Jon’s ability to seem natural with me talking in his head, so I had him wear the earpiece and press his finger to it from time to time, as I had planned.

  The first person we talked to was Anne Madison, who had been absolutely indispensable in helping me with the financial side of BASS since I became its chief executive officer a year earlier. True to their form, Saul and Paul Rabin had their hands in the money management much more than they should have, and the way it had always functioned at BASS died with them. So I looked for the most knowledgeable and loyal department head I could find, discovered Madison, and tapped her as controller. I had never been good with numbers, so I left the day-to-day supervision to her, and tried to only intervene on bigger picture issues.

  In this brief meeting, she gave me a report on the overall picture and then raised some questions about the $1,500,000 per day that was now being transferred to the overseas account of Protection G. She was asking about budget allocation and tax issues, but I sensed that underneath there was some suspicion about how necessary this expense really was—probably because she repeated the current $6,000,000 total several times in the conversation, and added that “in four days it will be twice that amount.” I wasn’t surprised or bothered by this, because she had no idea the kind of threat I was facing, and for security reasons I couldn’t tell her. So I just assured her that it was indeed necessary and expected her to make it work. That’s how we functioned at BASS—the only way such a top-heavy monster could.

  Jon did very well talking for me during that conversation, and he was an old pro by the end of the second one, which was with my executive peacer Cal James. This man filled the position that belonged to Darien Anthony and me, before D’s death and my promotion to the top of the company. He told me what was happening on the law enforcement side of BASS, which thankfully contained nothing out of the ordinary, and very few decisions for me to make and to communicate through the double. There was no indication at all that Madison or James recognized the switch we had made. In fact, it went so well that I thought of asking James before I hung up if he had noticed anything different about me, and telling him that I got a haircut when he said no. I resisted that temptation, of course, but I was getting excited about the very real possibility that Tara would think she was talking to me at the castle. I was prepared with a contingency plan if she didn’t, but it would be much better if she did.

  I commended Jon for his performance, and left him alone for the rest of the aero ride, so that he could enjoy this unique experience that no one else in the world could have. He watched the inlets of the North Bay below him after passing over the crammed metropolises of Napa and Vallejo, and glanced occasionally at the other two aeros flanking his like a fighter escort. He also commented on how quiet the engine was, and received a long lecture from Min on the facts of how the Sabon technology worked—only the facts that we had decided to make public, however, which were not enough for someone to reproduce it.

  Min was also in tour guide mode when they reached the city, briefly mentioning the repaired Golden Gate Bridge to the right and Alcatraz Island to the left, but then spending a while talking about the castle when the huge thirty-story square building came more into view. This was the second time recently that I seemed to notice a personal pride coming out of the
big Chinese cyborg, as he told the story of how Saul Rabin had transformed the top of Nob Hill, the highest and most central point in the city, to a base of operations for the company that ruled the new city-state of San Francisco. Min even made no apology, as I tended to do, when he pointed out how Saul had repaired the exterior of the gothic Grace Cathedral next to the castle, but transformed the interior and ten levels below ground into a high-tech jail. Nor did he flinch when calling it by its new oxymoronic name, the “Grace Confinement Center,” but continued in stride to describe the system of tunnels that snaked out from below the castle into various parts of the city, allowing the BASS peacers to be ubiquitous by moving freely both under the ground and in the sky above.

  By the time Min’s travelogue was done, they had reached the massive castle and flown into an aero bay on one side of the building, and I was feeling good enough about the double to make his disguise complete.

  “Do you want to wear my guns?” I asked him. “I usually do when I’m working.”

  “I don’t know how to use them,” he said, a little nervously. “I never have.”

  “That’s all right. Just don’t pull them out of the holsters unless you really need to for some reason. And if you do, I’ll tell you what to do. It’s not rocket science.”

  “Where are they?” he said. I told him to sit up a little, press a particular button on the features center, and watch the driver’s seat. Min had landed the vehicle and exited it by now, so Jon could see the two boas and their holster belt, which were embedded in the bottom back of the driver’s seat, slide over to the passenger side. Then I told him to sit back, lift his jacket, and strap the belt on just above his. He then pulled his jacket down to conceal the guns and stepped out of the car, commenting that being armed was already making him feel a lot safer. For some reason a quote from Saul’s ghost came to mind when he said this—something it had said when talking about Saul’s own violent death: “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.”

  If I would have known what was about to happen, I would have made my own translation of that text: “He who lives by the double will die by the double.” But for now Jon was still doing well, moving through the castle with confidence, saying hello in passing to those employees I told him to. He didn’t have to make the rounds right now, because after the meeting with Tara there would be an hour or so that he could do that, before the press conference announcing her promotion to the new BASS position. This was assuming that she accepted the position and its attendant conditions, as I was hoping she would.

  Terrey and one of the triplets went off with some BASS security agents to monitor the whole castle and the city around it, but Min and the other Japanese cyborg accompanied Jon as he made his way to my office. They rode an elevator up several floors, and then a horizontal lift almost the rest of the way, and found Tara waiting in the hallway outside my door.

  Min used his security clearance to open the door, while Jon looked Tara up and down. I could almost hear him thinking “Wow” as he did, and I felt a little embarrassed, even though I was only riding with him and looking through his eyes. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience, of course, because Tara was Tara, but it also wasn’t conducive to what I wanted to accomplish here, so I told Jon to take it easy with the gawking and go into the office. He did, and Min and San stayed outside in the hall. I had noticed that the female cyborg had been studying Tara also, which made me think that the triplets were not sexless after all. But later I found out that San was looking at her clothes, because they were all a color that had not been used in the kaleidocide yet.

  “Did you get the job description I sent to you this morning?” I told Jon to say this as soon as we entered the room, and I also told him to sit down behind my desk, so that it would be between him and Tara.

  “Yes, I read it,” she said as she sat down in a chair on the other side of the desk and crossed her long legs. “But I don’t have any terrific candidates to suggest.”

  “That’s okay,” I and the double said. “You’re the terrific candidate.”

  She was only a little surprised, but she was definitely pleased, as I could tell from the all-too-familiar look on her face. I needed to curb her enthusiasm fast, before she got the wrong impression, so I prompted the double for his longest speech yet.

  “I sent it to you because I want to give you that job,” he said, and she smiled wide again. “But listen, Tara, it’s not what you think. There are some conditions.” Her smile waned immediately, and already I was feeling bad. I thought it would be so much easier to do this through the double, but the conversation had barely started and my usual hesitations had, too. And it didn’t help that Jon’s eyes, and therefore mine, were staring at her beautiful brown face and blue eyes—a devastating hybrid from a handsome black father and a gorgeous white mother. Nor did it help when Jon looked down at her body—he could only imagine what it looked like under her gray business suit, but unfortunately I knew.

  On the other hand, it must have done some good for me to not be in the room with her, because for the first time ever I actually managed to get it out.

  “After I promote you to this position, you’ll be able to get any job you want with companies that are looking for ISec or PR people. The sky will be the limit for you. And you’ll have to take one of those jobs somewhere else. Because that’s part of the deal, Tara. I can’t have us both around BASS like this, and still make it in my marriage. I don’t want to talk about it at all, I just want you to take the job at a press conference that I scheduled here in about an hour, with the understanding that you will put your résumé out and take something else in the next three months.”

  Jon did well at repeating all this, and I didn’t see any indication that Tara wondered about him at all. She obviously was accepting him as me, though she wasn’t happy with what he was saying. But I wasn’t bothered as much by that now, because I was feeling euphoric that I had finally done what I should have done years ago. In fact, it felt so good that I was ready to go even further.

  “It’s been over for a long time for us,” Jon added with the same confidence I had when I spoke it into his head. “So we need to go our separate ways.”

  “Can’t I think about this for a while?” Tara asked.

  “No. There is a window, and this is it. I really want you to do this today.”

  “Well, I guess if you really want me to,” she said, seeming much more vulnerable than usual, and making me wonder if her long-time love for me, and all she said about waiting for me, was about more than just sex and power. Then she added, “How can I not do what you want?”

  I was about to tell the double to quit while we were ahead, end the meeting, and go back outside for his walking tour of the castle. But then I was forced to do that too abruptly, because in the brief silence I could hear a scream from outside my room at the cottage. Angelee was yelling “Help!” repeatedly, and it seemed to be coming from the pool in the back.

  “Jon,” I said to the double as I sprang to my feet. “You’re on your own for now, I have an emergency to deal with. End the meeting and go outside.”

  I didn’t know if he caught my final words, because I was running out of the door as I said them.

  34

  BRAIN DAMAGE

  I darted toward the repeated screams of “Help!” and ended up outside at the pool, where I found Angelee crouched on the ground next to it. Chris’s body was lying limp across her lap, and I feared the worst.

  “What happened?”

  “He must have climbed over the corner into the deep end,” she said, and was crying now that she was done screaming for help. “I was reading a little while I was watching him, and he must have done it quietly at a moment when I was looking down. When I looked up, he was already under the water, I’m not sure how long. I was being careful, ’cause he tried it a few times before…”

  “So no head or neck injury?” I said quickly and forcefully, trying to get her to focus on what mattered right now.
“He was just under the water for a while?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said between sobs. “No head or neck, I don’t think.”

  “Okay, put him down on the ground.” I helped her to do so, because she seemed to be at least partially in shock, and I performed CPR on him after checking his breathing and pulse. Every time I pressed on his little chest, her body jerked and she put her hand to her mouth. Obviously she hadn’t seen this much before, if at all, and she didn’t watch TV, so I had to reassure her between attempts that I was doing this to help her son.

  After a few rounds, he gagged and then gasped when I turned him over and let him spit up. But he remained unconscious, so I carried him inside the house, laid him on the couch, and grabbed a big first-aid kit from the closet in the front hall (a standard piece of equipment anywhere BASS agents were known to stay). I unrolled the medmat on the floor next to the couch, moved Chris onto it so that he was lying flat on his back, and attached the oxygen mask to his face.

  “Vera,” I said to the house, “could you examine the boy, please?”

  “Yes, Michael.”

  Little LED lights flickered on around the outside edges of the medmat, indicating that Vera had turned it on and was now linking with it and calling up her medical programs.

  “Is he okay?” Angelee asked, obviously not knowing that the lack of consciousness was a sign of possible brain damage.

  “I think so,” I lied, but added, “We’ll see” to prepare her for the worst.

  “I don’t see any broken bones or sprains, Michael,” Vera said. “Or head, neck, or spine trauma. Breathing is normal right now, but CO2 and PH levels are high, especially in the brain, so it seems that he was without oxygen. His body is also wet, and there is also some water in his lungs, so it could be that he was almost drowned.”

  “Yes, Vera, that’s what happened. We know that.” I thought for a moment, and almost went to another room to talk with the house privately, but I already felt bad for Angelee and didn’t want to hide more from her. “Is there any reason that it would be unsafe for his mother to drive him to St. Helena hospital?”